People, States and Borders.

And other dubious ideas.

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I haven’t written anything thus far on the latest crisis in the Middle East, because, whilst I do know the region a bit, I’m not sure that I have anything original to say, and I don’t want to add to the piles of disposable sound-bites and shards of moral indignation lying around everywhere. There’s enough of that already.

But I thought it might be useful, once more to take a step back, and to look at some underlying factors: not the wickedness of individuals or governments, but rather a set of geographical and political conundrums to which there is actually no solution. These are not unique to the Levant, nor even the Middle East: they are general problems arising from the progressive triumph of the nation-state as the default model of political organisation in the world. My thesis is that this was a bad, or at least unfortunate, idea, but there is nothing we can do about it now, and we must recognise that, live with the consequences and try to alleviate them as best we can. This is not a very encouraging thesis, but then if you have no positively good ideas, you can at least stop implementing, bad ones.

It is hard for us to realise today that the nation state is a very modern invention, and that for the vast majority of history, people lived in other forms of polities: empires, kingdoms, principalities, city-states, free cities and just communities, settled or otherwise. The remains of these systems are still visible in certain areas: there are parts of Africa, for example, where distances are so great and the density of population so low, that inhabitants have only the vaguest idea which country they notionally live in.

All political entities are the result of the application of power to the division of space, and usually to its internal organisation as well. Political entities are highly contingent—they don’t just happen—and, as we shall see, the political forces that succeed in structuring physical space do not always do so wisely, and frequently wind up creating problems for the future. Yet since 1945, and even more since the end of the Cold War, the model of the Liberal Nation-State has been invested with the power to sweep all before it. The world has fragmented into smaller and smaller territorial entities, and, more-or-less mathematically, crises have proliferated accordingly. Nothing daunted, however, the international system sees the remedy for these crises as the creation of even more nation-states.

I now want to pause to look at some of the words I have already used (and a few others) and where they come from. An understanding of these words will clarify, I hope, some of the confusion surrounding the division of space into political entities, and also cast light on such formulations as the famous (if unlikely)”two-state solution” to the Jewish-Palestinian problem. As will become clear, words like “nation,” “state” “country” and “people” (to which we might add the anachronistic “race”) are used indiscriminately, sometimes as synonyms, sometimes by mistake for each other, and have been so for hundreds of years. Moreover, whilst the vocabulary in Latin-influenced languages (including English) is relatively consistent, there are wide variations in other languages.

Take the word “nation.” These days, it largely has the same meaning as “country,” and its adjectival form usually describes some collective asset or feature of the country as a whole: thus, national debt, national health service etc. But actually, “nation” comes ultimately from a Latin root to do with “birth,” preserved in such words as “natality” and even “nature” itself. The best guess at the original definition would be something like “people born in the same place,” and additionally in some usages “at the same time” or “under the same circumstances.” The word was applied in French to the various groups of foreign students studying in Paris in the Middle Ages: I once lived just around the corner from the rue des Irlandais, where the “nation” of Irish students was to be found. There are attested uses of the word to describe people carrying out the same profession, especially if they came from, or lived in, the same area. The importance of this is that “nation” was just a collective identifying marker: there was no suggestion that being a member of a “nation” defined you fundamentally or entitled you to anything. The nearest modern equivalent, I suppose, would be “community.” In some cases, membership of a nation meant you could be treated differently by the authorities: the case of the Jews was of course emblematic. So a given political unit would generally consist of more than one nation, because it was constructed on the basis of power over territory alone. Depending on the results of wars and marriages, “nations” might be present in several different and even antagonistic political entities, and nobody thought that was strange. It was just the pre-nation-state organisation of people into the available space. In some cases, also, what we now call “nations” were really just political entities. In many parts of Africa, poor communications encouraged the perpetuation of language and minor cultural distinctions, but the essential differences between “tribes” were political, and sub-groups could and did move from one to the other.

Or take the word “state.” In both English and French this has two quite separate meanings, for reasons we won’t go into here. In some contexts, “state” means the same thing as “country.” Thus, we talk of “states parties” to a treaty, of “rogue states” and “post-colonial states.” But it also refers to the permanent apparatus that governs and administers the state (country). So when people talk about “state failure” or “rolling back the state” it is this they have in mind. To talk of “failed states” or more politely “fragile states” can mean either of these things or both at the same time, depending on who you are talking to: thus the serial failures of the West at “state-building” and “nation-building,” often considered to be the same thing. Thus also the paradox of countries which are further subdivided into “states” with considerable powers, like Belgium, Germany, Brazil and the US, but which as “states” (countries) are parties to treaties administered by the “state” (administration), but to which the “states” (sub-units) are not parties. Thus finally the paradox of western attempts at “state-building” which are supposed to strengthen the state (country) by weakening the state (central administration.) If this sounds insane, it is, and beyond the deserved mockery, it’s actually dangerous because it is one illustration of the hopeless intellectual confusion with which the West seeks to meddle in the rest of the world. And we haven’t even got to the question of the Liberal state yet.

And take the final word “people,” sometimes used in the plural. Now this word actually comes from the Latin populus, which means, well, “people,” and gives us “popular” and “populations” and of course “populism.” One dictionary definition, like most such definitions in the plural, refers to “human beings making up a group or assembly or linked by a common interest,” or in other words essentially the definition of “nation” given above. But as the dictionary notes, there are other meanings as well, equivalent to “population” or just “group,” as in “people who don’t think like me should be banned.” So I have often wondered what the drafters of the UN Charter really meant when they claimed to be speaking for “the peoples of the United Nations,” and if they all meant the same thing.

This is especially the case because, in addition to the havoc caused by differences of understanding in English and French (the two major languages of the international system, after all), there is the small point that most of the crises in recent history have actually taken place in countries where neither language is dominant, and where concepts of nation, state and people—of identity in general in fact—are very different. Indeed, in many cases, it is not even clear that the English or French terms have any value, and may just confuse things. So in the currently topical case, the Palestinians could have once been said to be a “people” since they lived in the same place, and by some definitions a “nation” as well. They were not then a “state”, since there were very few states in the world, but there was a “state” (first Ottoman and then British) nonetheless. Now the Palestinians are no longer described as a “nation” although they still seem to be a “people.” They do not really have a “state” (country) though they have attributes of a “state” (administration), arguably two. So I really don’t know what people who talk about a “Palestinian state” and a “two-state solution” in this context actually mean, and I’m not sure they do either.

Meanwhile, the Jews, for long described as both a “people” and a “nation”, although they had no state in either sense of that term, now have a state in both senses of that term, although non-Jews are citizens of it, and most Jews (of the nation? people?) don’t live there, but in other nations (countries) and among other peoples (populations) , where, however, they often form a politically-powerful group of people.

If this were just a matter of exposing the confusion and frequent ignorance of western and international thinking about people, states and borders, then I still think it would be a valid line of criticism. But a much more fundamental point is that lazy thinking of this kind actually obscures what the fundamental problem is. I would define that problem as the hopeless mismatch between the Liberal concept of the state (country) and the reality of how people have lived, and want to live. Solutions to the Jewish-Palestinian problem, to name only the most visible current one, generally proceed from wrong and inaccurate understandings of how people think about issues of identity, and their loyalty to higher-level structures.

Consider: as I have emphasised, for the vast majority of human history, political communities and structures have excluded the nation-state model. Initial identities were built around kinship and clans, and some of these clans came to dominate others. (The model of weak clans paying tribute to stronger ones lasted a long time in Africa and was taken up in the relationship between African communities and European colonial powers.) In areas of relatively high population density, it proved possible to construct centralised communities (let’s not call them “states” for the moment) based around hereditary monarchies. It was the nature of these communities to expand, especially under capable rulers, and this expansion was usually violent. The result was to bring other communities (where they were not exterminated) under control, with their resources which often made further conquests possible. Thus, the traditional concept of Empire. What is important for our purposes is the position of the various peoples who formed part of such polyglot structures. They were subjects of, and lived in the possessions of, rulers who might be thousands of kilometres away. They might see a representative of this distant power occasionally, but often daily life went on much as it had before. Identity and loyalty would be directed at local communities, at towns and cities and at language and culture. In pre-monotheistic societies, religion was sufficiently flexible that new gods could easily be incorporated into existing pantheons: what counted, after all, was whether the gods were effective.

There were variations, of course. The Arab conquerors of much of the Mediterranean brought a new religion with them at the point of a sword, which did not play well with polytheism, competed with the then-dominant Christianity, and demanded loyalty to a detailed creed. But even then, separate houses and dynasties developed quickly enough. In Europe, with its higher density of population, expansion, war and marriage produced a dizzying political division of space into political units, most of which bore no relationship to the nation states of today beyond the name. Early-modern France, for example, was a hallucinatory patchwork of Duchies, Counties and the possessions of those who would later go on to be Kings of the country when united. The inhabitants of Antwerp were in a certain sense Burgundians for a long time. But with the extinction of the Burgundian line, the territories were taken over by the Spanish Crown, in the person of Charles V, who was also Holy Roman Emperor. Subsequently, the city joined the Protestant side in the rebellion against Spain and was sacked by a Spanish Army in 1576. (To this day, many Belgians trace their heritage back to the Spanish soldiers who fought in the Low Countries for eighty years.) Yet it’s doubtful whether the citizens of Antwerp, then among the richest independent cities in Europe, thought of themselves actually changing allegiances at any point.

This model of distant rulers and local communities lasted for a very long time: in Europe, it was only the fall of the Hapsburg and Romanov Empires that brought it to an end. Franz Kafka, to take a well-known example, was a German-speaking subject of the Hapsburg Empire, born to a Czech-Jewish family in Prague, then the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Empire based in Vienna. This kind of multiple-layered identity and membership of various communities was entirely normal at the time. The reality was that Empires could not really function in any other way. So long as communities behaved themselves and did not seek autonomy or even independence, then they were largely left alone, and indeed the Hapsburgs even experimented with local parliaments. But overt revolts, such as that of Hungary in 1848 were brutally repressed.

I’m not going further into the tangled history of Empires and their fall: what is interesting is the forces that helped bring about the end of Empires, and the structures that arose to replace them. Broadly, we can describe these pressures as originating in Liberal ideology, and the structures as the creation of Liberal nation-states (as was also the case after 1989.) We recall that Liberalism had its origins in the resistance of the urban middle classes to royal power, and the desire to take that power for themselves. Liberalism, keen to sweep away the old hierarchical, deferential system, and replace it with new, rational, scientific systems of government, saw the nation state as a step in this direction. Rather than being the subject of a King or Emperor, the citizen of the nation-state would be an independent utility-maximising individual. For those who had the time and money for politics, and for the part of the population which the Liberals were prepared to allow to vote, politics became an essentially transactional exercise. The (limited) electorate was called upon regularly, rather as at a shareholders’ meeting, to choose between different programmes put forward by different political parties. Thus, reason and logic would replace tradition and superstition.

The prototype of the nation-state was, of course, France. The sheer scale of the modernisation of the country after 1789, and the imposition of Republican ideology, dazzled foreign observers. From the forced imposition of the metric system to the attempted destruction of traditional provincial power-structures through the creation of Departments, numbered according to alphabetically-ordered names, it really did seem as if the future had arrived, and it was the Liberal nation-state. (Needless to say, behind and below all this were important elements of continuity: there always are.)

But what was striking was the universality of the ideology. At the highest level, the “Rights of Man and the Citizen” were declared to be universal, applying to all people at all times, and they effectively undermined all traditional systems of government. Domestically, the loyalty of the Citizen was now not to a sovereign, or for that matter a Church, but to the Republic, which in turn had duties towards the Citizen. And the Republic, and its Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, were not just words:, together with separation of Church and State, they were the foundation of an entire political programme. The key was that the Nation, whose embodiment was the Republic, was not ascriptive; it was voluntary. You could become French if you accepted the Republic and its ideology, irrespective of where you were born. The great French historian Ernest Renan described a nation (he was thinking of France of course) as a plébiscite de tous les jours, roughly, a “never-ending referendum”. In other words, a nation was constituted of those who wished to be part of it, irrespective of origin.

The new Republic was not without its problems and difficulties: through Empire, Restoration and more Empire with democratic interludes, it took until 1870 for the system to finally prevail, and another thirty years to finally get the Church into a subordinate position to the State. (Ironically, the system is now menaced by the ingress of very large numbers of people who don’t believe in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and who want to bring religion back into public life.)

But in some ways this was an easy example. The Revolution had been class-based, and supported by the Liberal middle-classes throughout the country. There was resistance (notably in the Vendée and Brittany,) but on an ideological, rather than identity basis. Attempts to introduce compulsory education, and to impose Parisian French were frequently resisted, but there was never any serious ethnic or regional conflict, and the coming of universal suffrage meant that the French voted on ideological lines.

But most other cases were more difficult. France, after all, was a single country, united within its present borders since the late 17th century. But how transferable was this idea to the Liberal nationalist movements of the Hapsburg or Ottoman Empires? As it turned out, not very. France was not part of an Empire, and its transformation from a kingdom with subjects to a Republic with citizens was therefore relatively straightforward. There were no “ethnic French” populations outside the borders demanding unity, although by contrast there were overseas territories ethnically very different from the Metropole that were part of France. In spite of attempts by parts of the Right to reconfigure the idea of “Frenchness” to be racial, rather than cultural/political (briefly successful during the Vichy parenthesis), racial definitions were kept at bay until resurrected by parts of the Left in the last generation.

But most of Europe and most of the world (to repeat) lived in Empires or similar political systems, where “peoples” were scattered around. Of course, the Empires themselves were conscious of these problems of “nationalities”, or in the case of the Ottomans religions, but for them it was a management issue.  Anyone who has read Musil’s Man Without Qualities will be familiar with the efforts of the Hapsburgs to find ways of appeasing nationalist feelings. Given enough time and a permissive environment, it is possible that these Empires would have come to a peaceful end. But the story of the great Empires—Romanov, Hapsburg, Ottoman—is a sudden and explosive end, followed by conflicts between “peoples”. Come to that, even the end of the (short-lived) British and French empires in Africa sometimes produced the same problems. But why, when different groups had lived in proximity to each other for generations (if not always without tensions) did the end of Empire create such problems?

The first and most obvious reason is the presence of a higher authority or loyalty. It is customary to criticise the British and French for “playing off” the various political forces in the Middle East and Africa against each other, as the Ottomans had once done. But in many ways this was just sensible management, making sure that all the major communities and significant leaders had an interest in stability, with the central power available to enforce that stability if necessary. Local, ethnic and religious identities might be important, but they were subsidiary. A more muscular version of this system was used in the Former Yugoslavia, where nationalism was kept under control through careful balancing and an official Yugoslav identity of brotherhood and unity, with nationalist dissidents sent abroad or to prison depending on how much of a threat they were. In such a situation, what I have described as the primary issue of politics, Who will protect me? is answered by the presence of a higher authority.

The second reason flows from the first. If an imperial  territory becomes, overnight, a sovereign state, then the most basic question is, who controls it? At that point, the ghost of Carl Schmitt shows up, to insist on the importance of his favourite question: Who is my enemy? In an imperial territory or a multiethnic communist state, the fact that your community is a minority one might not matter that much. But if you suddenly become a minority in an independent country, then it may matter a great deal, because the majority community, naturally enough, will see itself entitled to seize the levers of power, democratically or otherwise. In fact, in a democracy, a political party or coalition representing an ethnic or religious majority can, quite legally freeze other communities out of power: this happened for fifty years in Northern Ireland, for example. Thus also the need to become the majority population, a practice which runs from Jewish emigration into Mandate Palestine, to the higher birth-rate among Ulster Catholics making them soon the majority community.

It’s not supposed to happen, of course, because for theorists of Liberal Democracy, politics is just about economic advantage, so there’s no reason why issues such as ethnicity or religion should divide people: they are, after all, relics of the past that no-one takes seriously today. And when it does happen, which it usually does, a mishmash of explanations, from foreign incitement to evil “entrepreneurs of violence” to “ancestral hatreds” is offered. The truth is usually simpler. Take away the apparatus of formal loyalty to an Empire or overarching political system, and the deterrent effect of the power of that system, and people are on their own, and become afraid. At that point, numbers become critical, and control of the levers of power and the security forces, or preventing their control by another community, is essential. When the Sarajevo authorities dismissed non-Muslims from the Police in 1992, it must have seemed an elementary precaution to them. To the other communities, of course, it was a threat.

Indeed, in this kind of situation, it is not the enemy armed forces, but the population itself which is a threat: hence, perhaps Gaza. Following the logic of Schmitt, my enemy is any member of another community, hence my security lies in expelling any members of that community from within my own. The phenomenon of “ethnic cleansing”—so labelled in Bosnia but far older—is therefore not necessarily based on hatred or prejudice: it is a strategic technique to ensure control of territory. If there is a history of animosity and conflict between groups—which there often is—it also becomes a basic method of self-protection.

This is the problem that the world has faced for the last century or so, with the end of the great Empires. Attempts to deal with it have produced results ranging from the dubious to the disastrous: as I will suggest, the problem may not have an answer. The universal panacea for such problems is “the right of peoples to self-determination,” a concept which goes back to the romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century. It was obscure then, and has become essentially meaningless now, especially with the demise of the belief in “racial” differences between peoples, and the increasing scepticism about the very concept of ethnicity. As has often been pointed out, the argument is essentially circular: until you agree on who the “people” are, there can be no self-determination. The trick, therefore, is to identify as “the people” those whom you already know will exercise their determination in a particular way.

The Liberal concept of “people” scarcely goes beyond the idea of a collection of independent economic actors living in a contingent territory. Yet most “peoples” are constructed from a lot more than this, and it is uncommon for borders to coincide neatly with “peoples;” A whole series of terms, from the Germanic Volk to the Slavic Narod, mix together assumptions about culture, language, inheritance and even blood-ties to create a “people” which might be geographically dispersed, but is a “people” nonetheless. If there was “a” cause of World War 2, it was the fact that the German Volk was spread out in various countries and the Nazis wanted to bring them together. But the attitude of mind persists: when Croatia became independent in 1991, international observers were startled that some of the seats in the Croatian parliament were reserved for representatives of ethnic Croats living overseas, most of whom were citizens of other countries. But much of the world regards this as normal.

So the more you think about it, it was the First, not the Second, World War that is at the origin of most of the world’s problems today. By destroying high-level supranational and multi-ethnic structures overnight, it created massive problems. By selecting “self-determination” as the solution, without really thinking through what it meant, it ensured that those problems would be insoluble without brute force, and perhaps not even then. In fact, if you consider where crises and political instability have arisen in the last thirty years, from the Balkans through the Levant to Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, these are all territories of Arab/Ottoman conquest: even Yemen was added to the Empire in 1517. This is not because the Empire of the Ottomans was especially bad—though there is a tendency to romanticise it— but because of its organisation of the population into religious groups, and the speed and nature of its collapse and the vacuum left behind. In a very real sense, we are still dealing with the consequences of the fall of three Empires in 1918.

Now the victorious powers were at least aware that the Ottoman territories couldn’t turn smartly into nation-states overnight. (Indeed, nation-states were quite rare in those days.) The Mandate system of the League of Nations has been much criticised, but it’s hard to see what other options would have avoided endless conflict. If you’ve taught or participated in seminars in the Middle East you’ll be inured to having the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the “carve-up of the Middle East” brandished at you as though you were personally responsible. But in reality the Agreement (which was not implemented in its original form) was essentially about spheres of interest over territories which, one day, might become independent states when the conditions were right. People in those days simply did not think in nation-state terms in the Middle East, any more than they did in Africa, but of the continuation of the same kinds of structures that had ruled over these areas for thousands of years.

This was still the assumption in, say, 1939, and the enormous contribution that the Empires and Mandates made to the fight against Nazism seemed to confirm it. But quite rapidly, the British and French realised that the situation was economically unsustainable, and started looking for ways out. By this stage, the Liberal nation-state was well on the way to what it is now: an unchallengeable preemptive international norm, and never mind the consequences. The fathers of African “independence,” for example, mesmerised by western theory and wanting to copy the White Man, thought in terms of carving out new nation states from parts of imperial territories, in the approved manner. They turned their backs on traditional African methods of political organisation and on various pan-Africanist ideas of the time, and plunged ahead with the idea of creating European-style nation states by edict from the top down. They brought what Basil Davidson described long ago as the “curse of the nation-state” to Africa, where it continues to create havoc. The wiser leaders, like Julius Nyerere the first leader of Tanzania, at least instituted one-party states  because they feared that elections in ethnically diverse countries would be a source of conflict: recent experience suggests they were right.

Now there are certain qualifications here. In Africa, for example, there were a few territories which were effectively already countries (Swaziland, Rwanda and Burundi are classic examples) and there was Rhodesia which was a country of sorts under white control. But most other African countries were simply created: Nigeria and Sudan, for example, could each have become two countries rather than one, and would probably have been more stable as a result. But neither the departing powers, nor the international community, and certainly not the aspirant leaders, were prepared to accept that creating nation states by fiat might bring problems.

Algeria is an emblematic case. Both an African country and previously an Ottoman province, it had been a colony since at least Roman times. There was no country called “Algeria” before 1962: the name itself is just Arabic for “the Islands.” The FLN, led by a group of  western-influenced intellectuals (the neuf historiques) set out to create a nation-state there under its control. Ruthlessly disposing of their rivals, including those who favoured compromise solutions, they launched a bloody war which eventually led to the French handing over power to the FLN, who had set up a provisional government in Cairo. Widespread repression, and lethal conflicts among the FLN leadership, led many Algerians to find exile in France: a process which continues to this day. Yet in fact, it is impossible to say whether the FLN’s vision of a European-style nation-state under their control ever actually commanded majority support.

Indeed, if there is one powerful criticism to be made of the generation of leaders and intellectuals who sought to create nation states under their control from the wreckage of Empires, it is that they did so very largely according to western norms, and in part according to norms of nationalist-marxist revolutionary theory fashionable at the time. (For example, Franz Fanon had a very classic French education at a Lycée in Martinique before joining the Free French forces during the War. Given a bursary to study medicine in France by a grateful government, he also attended philosophy lectures by the Existentialist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and subsequently came under the influence of Sartre.)

One of the key insights of the Scottish philosopher David Hume was that you cannot deduce “ought” from “is.” In other words, whilst the nation-state is worshipped in todays Liberal world as the acme of human achievement and the highest development of human political evolution, its ubiquity and the political power of the idea says nothing about its inherent validity or superiority over other systems. The main effect of the nation-state, after all, has been to divide people from each other. It has created crime on a massive scale through smuggling and trafficking, it has created political instability between states  through disputes over frontiers and trade, and within states through struggles to control territory. Zionism was a fairly standard nineteenth century movement of nation-state “self-determination,” and the tragedies it has given rise to were more-or-less mathematically predictable.

I’ve quoted before the great Egyptian-Lebanese writer Amin Malouf, whose Coptic Christian family were forced to flee Egypt after independence. His father always looked nostalgically back on the 1930s and 1940s in Egypt as a golden age of stability and prosperity. And certainly, compared to today’s fragmented and violent Middle East, it must have seemed so. To take one everyday case, under the Ottomans the region was criss-crossed with railways, which carried on functioning under the Mandates. It was possible to travel from Istanbul to Damascus to Medina for example, with a side-trip to Haifa. (Had it not been for the war, the line would have gone as far as Mecca.) For that matter, Tim Butcher recounts that his attempt to cross Africa by land was inspired by his grandmother’s stories of travelling alone by train as a young girl from Cape Town to Kinshasa.

Of course, we can’t re-establish the Ottoman or the Hapsburg Empires, even if we wanted to, any more than we could revive the Roman Empire. I’ve taken part in too many glum discussions in Africa and the Middle East about the failures of the nation-state which have ended with people saying, Well, fine but that’s what we have, and we must learn to live with it. There were, of course, alternatives and ways not taken. Pan-Africanism in the 1960s might have worked but never really had a chance. In much of the Arab world, meanwhile, there was a strong secularising and modernising trend up to the 1970s (the Iraqi Communist Party was the largest in the world after China and Russia) but a combination of defeats in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel and the 1979 Iranian Revolution put a stop to that.

So it’s not surprising that, after decades of failure of different systems in the Middle East and parts of Africa, Political Islam is often seen as the only thing left to try. It does, after all, finally overcome the problem of the nation-state, much as the neoliberalism of the EU has tried to do, although with the same destructive, even nihilistic approach. In the end, the consequences of the fall of Empires are still the main security problem in today’s world: it’s a shame the nation-state is not the answer.