What's Wrong With This Picture of Nationalism
By Serge Schmemann
Kurds explode in fury across Europe. President Clinton contemplates sending marines into Kosovo or bombing Serbia. Scorched earth and bereaved families -testify to ethnic passions gone haywire in Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia, Chechnya. With or without violence, nation-states proliferate at a dizzying rate, most of them out of the ashes of collapsed Communist states. In 10 years, membership in the United Nations swells from 156 to 185, with former Soviet republics, East European spinoffs and Lilliputian specks like San Marino, Andorra, Marshal Islands or Micronesia taking their places alongside nuclear powers and ancient monarchies. Even in staid and settled Western states like Britain or Canada, ethnic minorities - Scottish, Welsh, Francophone - pursue dreams of a United Nations seat of their very own.
To a world shaking off the accumulated debris of fascism and Communism, there is something startling, ironic and troubling in discovering that nationalism - a force alternatively glorified over the century as a building block of a just world order or reviled wellspring of genocidal hatreds - is militantly bucking the trend toward globalism and transnationalism emerging with a vengeance.
A common wisdom has emerged that the lifting of authoritarian and cold war strictures has released ancient ethnic ambitions and hatreds, potentially Ieading to a world far more complex and dangerous than the familiar bipolar East and West.
But is it so? Could it be that this supposed nationalism is neither so new, so surprising nor so uniformly dangerous? Many students of world affairs who have taken a closer Iook at the nationalisms and conflicts, like those of the wars and the Kurds, have found that most of the and histories long predate the collapse of Communism. What is new, they argue, is not nationalism and ethnicity as such but the world's perception of these in a complex new universe, and the political uses of them in a world of porous borders and interconnected economies.
The rise of globalism, they find, has paradoxically made statehood more necessary for small nations hoping to compete for resources, investment and aid. And if the news media are drawn to ethnic brush fires, there is the less dramatic fact that many regions where ethnic violence was thought probable, like Ukraine or Kazakhstan, have handled their transitions, so far, in peace. And without a superpower conflict to manipulate for their ends, some national movements like the Palestine Liberation Organization have even concluded that peace is a viable option.
"There has been a large effort to track incidents of ethnic conflict, to grasp whether there has been a sudden surge of ethnic conflict," said Rajan Menon, professor of international relations at Lehigh University. "Well, the answer turns out to be no. In the old bipolar world there was a great deal of ethnic conflict, but the cold war was so superimposed on the American psyche that everything else was pushed to the margins. It's something of an optical illusion: the cold war ends, 'ethnic' now becomes the vector of conflict."
No one would deny that the bloodshed in Rwanda, Bosnia or Chechnya has been terrible, or that ethnic conflicts have been fed in some way by the collapse the Communist system. What the experts note, rather that the hatreds behind these conflicts - or the nationalism behind the emergent states - are hardly new. Modern Africa has been riddled with such conflicts since the colonial powers saddled the continent arbitrary borders. The Balkans and Caucasus have been problems for over a century. And in the former Cornmunist world, many of the republics and provinces have now become United Nations members, from Slovenia to Ukraine to Uzbekistan, are less manifestations of any new nationalism than legacies of Soviet nationality policies designed to divide and rule. Stalin deliberately divided his empire into Soviet Socialist Republics, and when they ceased to be a union, Soviet or socialist, what remained were the republics. Russia, the purported ruler of the empire, was among the first to break out of it, leaving the rest little choice but to follow.
What has prompted the proliferation of states and liberation movements, the experts find, is less a flowering of nationalism than the very forces that were expected to make nationalism obsolete. In a world increasingly united by air travel, the Internet, multinational business and international organizations, ethnic minorities have come to see no reason why they should not participate directly. If the Olympics Games during the cold war, for example, were an ersatz competition between two ideologies and superpowers, there is little reason any more why every nation, large and Lilliputian, should not field its own athletes and gather its own laurels.
"We spend hours and hours wondering how to understand this phenomenon," said Roman Szporluk, director of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Center. "My understanding of this modern nationalism is as a rebellion against those political entities that obstructed participation in the life of the world. When I think of the 'secession' of Estonia, or Latvia, or Ukraine, or Georgia, or Russia itself, I feel that those people did not break away from some universalism represented by Moscow but felt that the Soviet system denied them the ability to participate in the affairs of the world. "So what appears to be regionalism is really a way of recognizing the greater interconnectedness of the larger world."
Susan Woodward, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, finds a strong economic component in the new nationalism, as small nationalities, stripped of ideological patrons, conclude that independence is critical in the struggle for international resources. "Nationalism is just an excuse, a part of the political dynamic as conflicts develop between the central government and regional governments over who controls what resources and what money is being drained out of the region," she said. "Globalization leads to fragmentation, as the state becomes more important as a way to catch fewer resources, to get access to international loans, trade agreements."
If globalism and the demise of a bipolar world have been the major factors behind the multiplication of nation-states, the eruption of violence is more difficult to explain. Experts agree, however, that simply lifting the Communist lid off ancient hatreds does not explain why people who have lived peacefully side by side for generations suddenly go for each other's throats. In fact, researchers note that incidents of ethnic violence have declined since a peak in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Communism, in 1991, when 35 of 37 conflicts in the world were deemed ethnic in origin.
Where violence has broken out, moreover, it has often come not as a direct and spontaneous revival of ethnic hatreds, but from some specific breakdown in order that quickly developed its own momentum. In some instances, the catalyst was the holding of democratic elections in states that did not have the democratic institutions or national consensus to support them. Conflicts in Burundi, Yugoslavia, Armenia and Azerbaijan all followed elections that brought to power leaders who, in the absence of established levers of authority, seized on xenophobia a means of consolidating power.
"The institutions of democracy often were simply not there," said Jack L. Snyder, chairman of the political science department at Columbia University. "There were no courts, no police, no press to to make democracy run, so what else is there? Often the other thing is ethnicity." Referring to Yugoslavia's President, who stirred ethnic fears among the Serb Kosovo as early as 1988, Professor Snyder added: "Slobodan Milosevic was not a nationalist in the slightest bit until he saw Yugoslavia breaking up and needed a popular issue. So what he seized on was a national issue, provided by Kosovo. It was same in Burundi. It's what happened in French Revolution, in Germany before World War I."
Even so, the experts argue that there is no such thing as inevitable conflict. For every outbreak of violence, there are less publicized instances of places where violence was initially deemed inevitable but never broke out. Papers were full of doomsday talk about Ukraine several years ago, or of impending anti-Russian "ethnic cleansing" in Kazakhstan. Both lands have so far managed to keep difficult transitions peaceful.
"I'm trying to fight against the notion the only way out of conflict is the monoethnic state, that ethnic diversity is simply incompatible with a civic state," said Professor Menon. "But once ethnic conflicts begin, I'm afraid you can't solve them. You simply try to manage them. Once fathers are killed, or sisters are raped, you have created an uncontrollable dynamic."
