EDITORIAL: The Most Convincing Lie in International Relations
The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.
Flags, powerful symbols of the nation-state, line the Allée des Nations in front of the United Nation’s Palace of Nations in Geneva. (Wikimedia Commons)
Several days into the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan that has claimed hundreds of lives Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), woke darling of Gen-Z liberals, tweeted his take on the violence. “I stand with Armenia and the people of Nagorno-Karabakh,” he wrote, implying that the latter is part of the former by national right.
Thirty years ago, his statement would have been unequivocally false. Before the collapse of the USSR, Nagorno-Karabakh was home to an Armenian majority and a substantial Azeri minority; it was only after the breakup of the USSR that Nagorno-Karabakh undertook an ultimately unsuccessful bid to unite with Armenia, resulting in a violent confrontation that expelled Azeris from Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding areas. Irredentism has defined the now-monoethnic Armenian region, which has been functionally independent since it was drawn within Azerbaijan’s borders in a 1994 ceasefire agreement.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), a progressive stalwart, nonetheless echoed the century-old mantra of national self-determination in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh. (Wikimedia Commons)
Markey’s tweet did not reflect the tragic, complex reality of Nagorno-Karabakh’s historical saga, nor did it acknowledge the conflict’s roots in ethnic violence perpetrated by both national actors. Whether consciously or not, he instead echoed the longstanding U.S. creed of national self-determination. The tweet is dramatic and seemingly democratic, but at its core is the questionable claim that ethnic homogeneity is the one true marker of a state and that these “nation-states” will, somehow, lead to peace.
The term “nation” refers to a constructed entity reliant upon legitimacy drawn from arbitrary bonds, such as a common language or an imagined shared history or culture. The imagined origins of these bonds do not make them less powerful, particularly in their ability to define those who do and do not belong to a nation, but they are often flexible and used for political purposes; histories can be expanded or rewritten, and cultural aspects can be adopted or rejected over time. Thus, the word “nation” in this editorial refers not necessarily to an internationally recognized country, but rather to a group sharing ethnic, cultural, or linguistic ties.
The word “state” in this editorial refers to an internationally recognized government with sovereignty over a demarcated territory. “Nation-state,” then, refers to a country for which internationally-recognized and imagined community borders are coterminous.
An intrinsic feeling of national unity seems like a dubious platform upon which to found a country, yet it has defined the international policy of Western countries—particularly the United States—for a century. Despite theorists’ claims about the dawn of world peace, ethnic cleansing and ultranationalist sentiment are rife among so-called nation-states, presently evident in the EU’s immigration crisis, which is propelled largely by fears of cultural dilution. From its inception, the pursuit of a nation-state has led to disaster both within the West and without—Pakistan’s blood-soaked split from India serves as a prime example. If countries are ever to realize actual democracies, which represent the full breadth of their actual internal diversities, they must first lay their faith in the nation-state ideal to rest for good.
The Invention of Self-Determination
The nation-state, though often treated as an undeniable, essential pillar of the international community, is in fact a relatively recent idea. Self-determination did not truly emerge as a criterion for determining a right to independence until after World War I.
Then-president of the United States Woodrow Wilson envisioned a post-war world of peace and security articulated through his “Fourteen Points,” which he saw as the road to international harmony and prosperity. His points, which he presented to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, included making many states independent on the grounds that they constituted nations. He said in his speech that “self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.”
But, as Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing predicted, self-determination would become a phrase “simply loaded with dynamite.”
Self-determination has not led to the easy division of states by identities, as Wilson envisioned.
A Bayonne, France road sign offers directions in French, Basque, and Occitan. (Wikimedia Commons)
A monolithic nation, encompassing only one single national identity, proves incredibly hard to achieve. Many supposed “nation-states” inevitably result in misrepresentation and conflict. France, for example, still struggles with the underrepresentation of its many regional identities. However, instead of trying to work with and foster those regional identities, the French state has imposed a singular national identity on the country, requiring all individuals and institutions to conduct commercial and professional communications in French. France has also refused to ratify the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, which helps protect small regional languages from extinction, and which 25 other European countries have already ratified.
If at First You Don’t Secede
The attempts to somehow align a nation with a precise swath of territory—and the false Western insistence that states represent a reasonably homogenous population—has contributed to significant civil and global conflicts. The impetus for such conflict generally involves a disputed border or an area home to multiple ethnic groups, all of whom possess a legitimate claim to the territory under the doctrine of national self-determination.
Crimea voted to join Russia by wide margins in 2014 immediately prior to annexation. (Wikimedia Commons)
The international community’s current understanding of sovereignty prevents states from jointly administering a territory without administratively partitioning it between themselves, leading to tensions between adjacent countries. These situations often have no clear solution incorporating both sides’ claims to the region. The West conveniently tends to ignore such instances, waxing poetic about the democratic process while leaving decision-making in the hands of nationalists.
Crimea is one such region. Disputed for centuries, post-USSR border negotiations ascribed the majority-Russian area to Ukraine. In 2014, a vote immediately prior to Russia’s annexation indicated that 93 percent of Crimeans were in favor of secession from Ukraine; Crimea hailed the subsequent annexation as a long-overdue reunion. (Although human rights activists in Russia contested the legitimacy of the referendum, they acknowledged that a substantial majority of Crimeans did, in fact, support joining Russia.) International consensus, however, charges that the annexation of Crimea violated Ukraine’s sovereignty in the name of ethnic homogeneity. This begs the question: When do we honor secessionist claims, and when are they regarded as illegitimate?
Ultimately, there is no real way to differentiate between the legitimacy of territorial claims. International borders created with the intent of pacifying ethno-nationalist assertions lose their seeming neutrality and risk propagating expansionist rhetoric. Determining which claims to respect and which to reject implies judging the value of one claim over another—a decision looming dangerously close to encouraging the very ethnic conflict that border negotiations are trying to prevent in the first place.
Besides, who are we in the West to decide what groups are or aren’t worthy of “nationhood?” The groups we do not yet consider “nations” might become more homogenous in a hundred years. For example, it might be misguided to claim that Iraqis today share no common identity despite the fact that their country was created arbitrarily a hundred years ago. Yet the groups we once did consider “nations” might not want to live next to one another in a hundred years: consider the surprising Catalan independence referendum in 2017.
The Façade of Unity Under Nationalism
Often, the idea of a shared (or not shared) history becomes the dividing line that breaks up previously unified nations. The past 70 years of separation between China and Taiwan, for example, have created two very different states—the former still resides under an authoritarian, one-party system while the latter maintains a thriving democracy. While neither state claims a split in national identity (in fact, Taiwan has arguably better protected ancient Chinese culture as it was not affected by the Cultural Revolution and therefore managed to preserve artifacts and traditions), their divergent political systems make the Taiwanese concerned that, should China push forward with its belief that they should reunite, their democratic way of life would be upended.
A display in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin features pieces of the Berlin Wall, which once divided the city, alongside informational signs detailing the history of the city. (Wikimedia Commons)
Furthermore, while some nations do reunite after years of separation, their unity does not end the troubles that they face, as the example of Germany shows. Divided between East and West Germany at the end of World War II, the reunification that began after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought with it economic difficulty, as economic reintegration policies hobbled the eastern part of the country for years to come. Even as the eastern half of the country reaches as close to economic parity as it has experienced since 1989, the perceived sense of economic disadvantage creates a marked divide along historic lines, marring the sense of unity that the nation sought after its reunification. While the state remains intact, it struggles with a sense of unified identity in the face of divergence in its shared history.
While some states strive to achieve unity through rewriting national narratives and engaging in campaigns to create a renewed sense of identity, other states may pursue more violent paths to create or maintain nation-states, with leaders resorting to genocide and ethnic cleansing to achieve their goals. In the late 1990s, when Bosnia attempted to secede from Serbia, the Serbians launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnian Muslims. Although other factors also influenced and instigated the campaign, the competition for a nation-state of one’s own spurred much of this devastating and disastrous conflict.
One Size Does Not Fit All
In his wide-ranging intellectual history of anti-imperialism, From the Ruins of Empire, Pankaj Mishra makes two major—and fairly unrecognized—criticisms of the nation-state.
First, to the newly decolonized Asian and African countries, the nation-state was the only real governance model available. Its universality was imposed imperialism, never predetermined; its persistence stems from a lack of alternatives and a perceived, but not inherent, superiority.
Second, violence is and has always been endemic to the process of building a nation-state. In Europe, where the nation-state ideal took hundreds of years to develop, the model was “a poor fit,” and culminated in two world wars that took tremendous tolls on religious and ethnic minorities. Yet, to leaders in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this pursuit of nationhood seemed to be their path to modernity. If it meant stomping out unwanted diversity, so be it.
Pankaj Mishra discusses his book, From the Ruins of Empire, focusing on decolonisation and revising history in order to better account for nonwestern perspectives.
For obvious reasons, then, Western countries are much better than their counterparts at being nation-states. They’ve been around longer—and they’ve already moved far past the growing pains of violently snuffing out unwelcome cultural, linguistic, and ethnic heterogeneity.
Western countries never really began punishing each other for their violent nation-building until World War II. (Nobody else could punish them, either.) Yet, today, Western nation-states often team up to condemn, sanction, or halt such atrocities elsewhere. That is more than a little hypocritical: by denouncing violence abroad, Western states are only stopping other leaders from achieving the nation-building that those Western states claim to want of their nonwestern counterparts.
If that logic sounds morally bankrupt, well, it is. Government-sponsored cultural erasure, no matter how violent, is bad—whether it happened 200 years ago in Brittany or today in Xinjiang. Nation-states are not worth these violent growing pains.
Yet there are no striking alternatives—even progressive favorite Ed Markey cannot help but use it as his framework for understanding the world. Maybe it is too soon to ask what ought to come next. But if nation-states are made, then they can be unmade. Making sure our own states can govern without coerced, “national” homogeneity might be the way to start.
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