The Undivided Past (14 page)

Yet in the Third World after 1945, as in Europe and the
Middle East after 1919, these instant contrivances of overnight nationality rarely achieved the hoped-for reality of coherent unity or collective identity. Britain’s
Indian empire was brutally partitioned, and this was done largely (and hurriedly) on the basis of
religious differences (which seemed clear) rather than of distinct national solidarities (which were far less apparent). In Africa, the colonial boundaries that subsequently became national
borders had been set by the European powers when they divided up most of the continent during the late nineteenth century. Many of these boundaries were arbitrary and artificial, as they took no heed of historic precedents, local circumstances, or tribal or ethnic or religious groupings. In the case of the
British colony of Kenya, for example, the mix of Lwo, Masai, Kikuyu, and Turkana tribes had no ethnic, linguistic, or historical reason to be regarded as one nation. Nor was this an atypical example. As
Chief Awolowo, one of Nigeria’s leading nationalists, observed in 1945, in words reminiscent of King
Faisal of
Iraq a generation earlier, “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere
geographical expression.” (Indeed, it contained more than two hundred ethnolinguistic groups.) Accordingly, when African colonies became African nations, they typically lacked any shared sense of history,
language, or identity beyond that which had been briefly superimposed by the departing colonial power, and then been taken up by the nationalists themselves as they agitated for
independence, which was often the only issue on which they could agree.
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Not surprisingly, it has often proved exceptionally difficult for those in charge of these new postcolonial countries to establish a common sense of national unity or collective solidarity. Attempts to create instant federations out of former British colonies that were themselves often artificial constructs met with scarcely any success: in Central Africa (Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland), in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika), in Malaysia (Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, and Sarawak), and among
the islands of the Caribbean. In three cases, they failed completely, and even in the partially successful instance of Malaysia, Singapore later withdrew.
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Religion has failed to keep some
nations together, when it might have been expected to do so, and it has also divided others, when it was clearly expected not to do so. Even while sharing the same Muslim faith, and thus an antipathy to the predominantly Hindu
India,
West and
East
Pakistan shared little else (not even a common
language apart from English), and they eventually fell out, the latter becoming the separate nation of Bangladesh in 1971. Nigeria and Sudan have both sundered into a Muslim north and a
Christian south: in Nigeria, the original federal structure quickly disintegrated, with Biafra seceding for a time, while in Sudan, civil war has been rife for decades, and recently the country has formally split in two.
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Meanwhile, tribal and
ethnic divisions have on occasions resulted in protracted civil wars, sometimes culminating in secession and genocide, as in Zaire, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Uganda.

The most recent phase of nation-founding also followed the consequence of the
collapse of an empire, this time the implosion of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, which ended the Warsaw Pact and saw the demise of
Communism. Coming into being since the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, these postimperial successor nations fall into six distinct categories. First are those in eastern Europe already in existence, but under the thumb of Moscow since the end of the
Second World War, and now free and independent again, namely
Poland,
Hungary,
Romania, and
Bulgaria. Second are those born of some significant adjustments and dissolutions: the reconfiguration of East
Germany (reunified with West Germany); the division of
Czechoslovakia (peacefully sundered into the Czech Republic and Slovakia); and the breakup of Yugoslavia (brutally shattered into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia). Third are the former Baltic nations, created in 1918–19 and forcibly annexed by the USSR in 1940, and now independent again, namely Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Fourth are the emancipated Soviet republics bordering eastern Europe and on the Black and the Caspian Seas, namely Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Fifth are the former Soviet republics
of Central Asia, which now became independent, namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. And finally there is the keystone, and now the residuary legatee of the old Soviet Empire, namely
Russia itself.

This was an extraordinarily sudden and rapid transformation, as a new generation of European and Asian leaders sought to mobilize their peoples in mass opposition to the Communist imperium. Yet it would again be a gross oversimplification to describe the motivations, trajectory, and outcomes of these revolutionary movements as the successful realization of national aspirations and identities, let alone functioning national polities. In fact, the cataclysmic events that began in 1989 were in many ways not so much national but transnational, particularly in terms of the complex interactions and coordination of the revolutionary leaders and participants, as in the case of the links between activists in
Poland and Ukraine.
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It is also clear that the causal link between the rise of nationalism and the fall of Communism did not operate in just one direction: the breakdown of Soviet power and will (largely unanticipated by Western analysts) did at least as much to stoke the sudden upsurge of national feeling, solidarity, and identity in subject countries as nationalist sentiment did to topple Soviet Communism. This was certainly the case in the former Central Asian Soviet republics, which had been a construct of Soviet intellectuals in the early 1920s rather than a primordial aspiration of any of those Central Asian peoples, and where nationalist sentiment was the fruit rather than the cause of Soviet collapse.
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To be sure, there were discernible feelings of national solidarity in parts of eastern Europe: this was (and remains) true in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where these identities persisted during the decades of Soviet occupation, and where hostility to the USSR was strongest in 1989.
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In the same way, the failed uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) offered a unifying narrative of national suffering and striving in the minds of those peoples. But few of the countries that regained their independence in 1989 did so within the same
borders as had existed in, say, 1938, and such national aspirations and solidarities as did develop were, as so often, rarely simple or straightforward.
In Poland, they relied heavily on the patronage of the Catholic Church and on the support of the native-born pope,
John Paul II. In the former Soviet republics of Central Asia,
Islam was a more unifying force during the initial stages of disengagement from the USSR than
nationalist sentiment, which only developed later—if at all.
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And among other new countries such as Belarus and Moldova, national identity was notional at best, while the independence of Georgia and Ukraine “was not so much about self-determination as self-preservation.”
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As for the further division of
Czechoslovakia in 1992, and the brutal fragmentation of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999, even the smaller shards of allegedly national communities remained multiethnic, multilingual, and
multireligious—characteristics they shared with most of the new nations in Europe and Asia.
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The contradictions, limitations, and uncertainties lingering around these new countries may also be explained in broader geopolitical terms, for they all came into being at the very moment when the nation-state as the primary unit of sovereign authority, and as a prime focus of collective identity, seemed to be increasingly in doubt and under siege.
Charles Maier identifies such a trend as being discernible from the 1960s onward, and one that has become increasingly pronounced in recent decades as traditional notions of bounded and autonomous territoriality have been significantly eroded.
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The historical and
geographical coincidence of
political power and popular consciousness of affiliation—the conjuncture he believed to have been so fundamental during the heyday of the nation-state and national identities—have been seriously undermined as national sovereignty has been ceded to ever-proliferating supranational agencies and global organizations, ranging from the
United Nations and the European Union to the IMF and the World Bank; as
immigrants move back and forth across national boundaries in ever greater numbers, from
Mexico to the United States and from eastern to western Europe; as media moguls and multinational banks and corporations have put themselves beyond the reach of national jurisdictions or regulation; as worldwide threats such as climate change and
international terrorism demand transnational solutions; as heavy industry has been superseded by the new technologies of
semiconductors and a global economy based on digital data transmission; and as information can cross the world immediately and instantaneously.
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From this perspective, and despite the recent and unprecedented increase in their number to almost two hundred, nationstates and national identities are widely regarded as being among the most threatened species of the still-emerging post-Communist, postcolonial, and globalizing world. As
Benedict Anderson has famously (and provocatively) argued, nations should not be seen as eternal and precisely defined units of
territorial sovereignty and collective solidarity, but rather as “imagined communities”: as transient, provisional, ephemeral, made‑up associations, encompassing a multitude of shifting boundaries and subjective identities—but never for long. By these lights, there was (and is) nothing absolute, uniform, or immutable about the late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century European nation-state, or about those countries that have cropped up across and around the globe in the hundred years since. On the contrary, “the nation” was (and is) merely one temporary and contingent way of organizing, governing, and identifying large numbers of peoples, which rested (and rests) on the uncertain foundations of manufactured myths and invented traditions, and which was (and is) never as homogeneous or as unified as those earlier national
historians (or later scholars such as
Charles Maier) had been inclined to insist.
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From the 1970s onward, many historians, no longer concerned to reinforce national identity in the way that their predecessors had done, have gone about exploding these myths and undermining these traditions. Far from celebrating them as eternal verities, historians are now more likely to describe nations and the identities and loyalties they claim as contested, disaggregated, and disputed phenomena, and by approaching these once-hallowed subjects so skeptically, they are in their own way intensifying the crises of legitimacy and identity through which many countries, nations, and states are passing.
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Taking the long view and a
cosmopolitan perspective, it is clear that in recent times, nation-states and national identities have for the most part appeared, vanished, and reemerged so frequently and so variously as to cast serious doubt on nationality’s
past and present claims to being some sort of platonic ideal of human affiliation or even the preeminent and most enduring form of human solidarity.
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There are multiethnic agglomerations, such as the United States,
China, and
post-Communist
Russia, that are territorial empires presenting themselves as unitary
nations.
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There are “old” and more recent European nations, such as Britain,
France,
Spain,
Germany, and
Italy, but all of them face serious challenges to their identities from separatists or
religious minorities or otherwise unassimilated groups or incomplete reunification (problems sometimes acknowledged bureaucratically, as with the establishment by President
Sarkozy of France of the clumsily but revealingly entitled Ministry of
Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Codevelopment).
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There are the new—or re-created—nations in central and eastern Europe, and in Asia on the borders of Russia, whose cohesiveness and sustainability are far from certain. There are the artificial constructs of the
Middle East, where in one symptomatic case, namely Iraq, identity “remains contested between
Islamists, secularists and the military, and between ethnic Turks and Kurds.”
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There are the no less artificial constructs of Africa, where some nations scarcely hold together at all, and the former colonies in Asia and the older republics in Latin America, which are still struggling to find any shared sense of collective solidarity.
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There are former
imperial dominions such as
Canada,
Australia, and
New Zealand, which have abandoned the traditional paradigm of “from colony to nation” and are now trying to include their native peoples in a new and more inclusive national narrative—with varying degrees of awareness and success. And so on…

As
Eric Hobsbawm noted in 1992, in words even more valid today, we live in “a world in which probably not much more than a dozen states out of some 180 can plausibly claim their citizens coincide in any real sense with a single ethnic or linguistic group.”
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Two conclusions follow. One is that few nations have ever aligned “in any real sense with a single ethnic or linguistic group”: it is too easy to exaggerate the homogeneity of nations and the solidarity of national identities in the decades before 1914, and it is even more mistaken to do so since. One must acknowledge there has never been a golden age
of nation-states and national identities,
even—indeed especially—today when there are more of them than ever before and when more of them are “failing” then ever before.
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A second conclusion is that the appearance of so many new
nations and identities in the
Middle East, Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe has not been a belated “catching up” by the rest of the globe according to the pattern initially established in northern and western Europe before the
First World War. The early twentieth century was not characterized by homologous nation-states and homogeneous national identities across the globe, nor is the early twenty-first century either. As the late
Clifford Geertz rightly noted, “the illusion of a world paved from end to end with repeating units that is produced by the pictorial conventions of our political atlases … is just that—an illusion.”
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Can it, then, be seriously maintained that “the nation” is now (or has ever been?) the preeminent form of collective
human identity?