Nations in the Long View

December 23, 2008

When people come to look back on our time, say from the vantage point of 300 years, it may well appear foremost as an intense period of nation sorting. In 1908 the majority of the world would have had no idea where their allegiance belonged in an assembly of nation states. This was not just a result of European colonization; it was simply the case that other parts of the globe organized themselves politically in quite different ways, whether that be a tribal pattern or the kind of loose political economy of the Islamic world.

The violence of the 20th century can be likened to an ocean tide forced through a rocky pass.. there are destructive currents by the nature of the set up. Much current discussion of the history of our century turns on ideas about evil: Hitler is the ultimate evil, while Mao and Stalin line up behind him as butchers. This version of history makes it seem as if our world has been passing through an unlucky period in which bad men got control.. and maybe we can stop that from happening in the future. But this ignores how neatly these "evil" figures fit into broader historical movements.

My current page-turner is Freedom at Midnight, telling the story of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. I knew the broad outlines of this story, but I had no idea of the incredible slaughter that took place as Hindus and Sikhs in India and Muslims in Pakistan killed and violently expelled their religious minorities. The number of dead varies, but the minimum appears to be 225,000.. and the number of refugees reached 10 and a half million. Both sides were involved in what today we call ethnic cleansing. If there had been a single mastermind for this killing, we would label that person evil, and he might get put into one or another of the levels of the historical inferno where we condemn such leaders. But the events in India and Pakistan were different because the atrocities caught the political leaders (Nehru, Jinnah) by surprise, and they worked to hold back the killing. So we have no evil leader, only a situation.. a tidal flow of violence.

To what force can we attribute this flow of violence? Again, the evil or hatred lurking in human hearts is too easy an answer. If we chose some person to nightly count out $100,000 dollars in cash receipts, and assigned no oversight or checks to this task, then it would be no surprise if before long that person were stealing some of the money. The evil in the human heart is not a helpful explanation for this problem: it is a perverse situation that gives a powerful incentive to steal. We are better off critiquing the system than the character of the individual.

The case of the nation state is similar. A crucial aspect of the nation state is the notion of some level of ethnic/cultural purity within physical borders. The imposition of that system upon regions that were not ethnically or culturally pure led inevitably to efforts at purification. These could be done through peaceful population exchanges (Greece and Turkey) or through mass murder (Germany), but the end result was similar. Some of these national purifications were led by leaders who aided and abetted the process, and others were characterized by local and unorganized mayhem.. but the result was always a modern nation. So instead of evil, we should talk about the perverse incentives associated with nation state building. In essence this process led the entire world to go through the sieve of border and history creation.. and the result is a kind of slow motion violence.

One of the hardest things for us to imagine is the experience of the world before the dominance of the nation state. An important take-away from A Mediterranean Society by S.D. Goitein is that there existed a society organized along quite different lines. Cairo is his main point of reference, but he jumps from there to discuss the broader Mediterranean region. In that region ethnic and cultural identities were allowed to coexist because political power did not define communal identity. The borders of the political state in which a person lived did not define the laws for that person (Goitein is particularly interested in the medieval Jewish community). That form of social organization worked great in its time, but when it ran into the nation state it was confronted with the need to define and purify its identity. The result? 1) The state of Israel and the Middle East largely emptied of Jews, 2) a much slower diminution of the Christian communities of the Middle East, and 3) the regional sorting of Sunni and Shi'a communities and the development of a homogenous "fundamental" version of Islam.

photo by Flickr user Luke Redmond, used under Creative Commons License