The Case for Social Democracy: Part 2
On Misconceptions Surrounding Nationality, Language and Culture
From the age when children are old enough to learn geography, most people are generally taught that the world is made up of a number of distinct countries, which serve as the most fundamental way to organize people and land. This is usually accompanied by a map to graphically represent the territories over which various state governments claim sovereignty. However, most maps immediately run into an issue, which is that they must include a disclaimer wherever territorial sovereignty is disputed between two or more governments, often indicated using dotted lines where solid lines would otherwise indicate an undisputed border. This illustrates the first misconception that many people unconsciously internalize (unless they have experience studying geopolitics); i.e. that a given country, its associated land area and constituent population correspond exactly and synonymously to a certain state government, the territory over which it exercises sovereignty, and the citizens who are governed by it. But if this were entirely true, then it would be possible to resolve territorial disputes objectively, simply by determining which nation the majority of the residents of a given region “belong to.” The problem, then, is how exactly one goes about doing that, and nationalist movements across the world claim to have a simple solution: by looking at what language they speak.
Take the dispute over Crimea and the Donbas region between Russia and Ukraine. Russia says that this land should be theirs, since a majority of the people there speak Russian as their native language. Ukraine does not want to give this land away, though, because they don’t want to reward what they see as Russia’s imperialist ambitions, and because they see the inhabitants of that land as Ukrainians, regardless of what their native language may be. Moreover, the consensus within un-occupied Ukraine is that their nation has been on the receiving end of attempted colonization and subjugation by Russia for centuries, which has often been justified by Russian leaders using rhetoric asserting that their two peoples are in fact one and the same. It is true that both nations developed from the heritage of the medieval state of Rus, which existed roughly between the years 880–1240, and from which Russia draws its name, but whose capital was in Kyiv, the present-day capital of Ukraine. But present-day Ukrainians, even those who speak Russian as their first language (which even Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky does), do not consider themselves to be Russians, nor do they want to become Russians, so the nationalist criterion to determine to which nation the majority of the residents of a given region belong falls flat. Furthermore, even though a single language was spoken throughout the region during the era of the state of Rus, the languages spoken in what we know today as Ukraine and Russia have since become different enough from each other that monolingual Russian speakers cannot understand Ukrainian (which has historically led Russian authorities to consider Ukrainian to be a broken dialect of Russian), reflecting the emergence of two clearly distinct nations.
However, some people don’t necessarily speak either Russian or Ukrainian as their native language, but something like a blend of the two, commonly referred to as “Surzhyk.” This reflects the reality that for many languages, the development of a “standard form” to be used in official governmental or educational settings, and to be taught to foreigners in textbooks, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When they do develop, they are often greatly influenced by the literary styles most prevalent among the intelligentsia of the speaker population, and therefore don’t necessarily reflect the commoner’s colloquial speech. Many Ukrainians today are making an active effort to learn to speak a more “pure” Ukrainian, but the reality is that even in the most monolingual, conformist society, nobody actually speaks the idealized standard form of their language 100% perfectly, just like there’s no such thing as a perfect circle in nature. Rather, every individual person has what’s called an idiolect, which encompasses the totality of how they express themselves natively, and which is inevitably at least ever-so-slightly different for each individual. We then find it convenient to group people’s idiolects into different categories called “Ukrainian” or “English,” et cetera, based on their common shared and distinctive features.
There are many other noteworthy cases of a mismatch between linguistic and national identity. In China, the official position of the government is that there is a single Chinese language, which exists in a variety of dialects (the most popular one being Mandarin). But linguists consider Chinese to be more akin to a family of languages, given that, for example, Mandarin and Cantonese speakers generally have difficulty understanding each other, despite purportedly speaking two different dialects of the same language. Neither of these dialects/languages are any more or less “Chinese” than the other, though. Similarly, a wealth of dialectal diversity exists across the Arabic-speaking world, such that a Moroccan and an Iraqi would likely not be able to converse in their native idiolects. They could, however, converse in Modern Standard Arabic, which everyone learns across the region in order to listen to news broadcasts or read the Quran, just like how in Austria, standard German holds a place of prestige and is universally understood, but the local shopkeeper will likely greet their customers in Austro-Bavarian, which is generally not understood by German speakers who lack prior exposure to it. Despite this, up until the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, most Austrians did in fact consider themselves German, and offered no resistance when Hitler (who himself was Austrian, but had sought naturalization as a German citizen prior to his rise to power) ordered Austria’s annexation into Germany. It was only after the war that the victorious Allies pushed for the development of an independent Austrian identity, accompanied by a revisionist historical narrative in which Austria had been Germany’s “first victim.” Today, Austrian identity is just as robust and firmly believed in as that of any other national group, and there is no mainstream sentiment in favor of unification with Germany anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, four of the independent states that emerged from the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia—i.e., Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro—consider themselves to have four different national languages, i.e. Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin. But linguists consider these to be no more different from each other than the American and British varieties of English, and generally refer to them collectively with the label “Serbo-Croatian.” The insistence on their status as separate languages is attributable to the region’s history of ethnic animosity, to the point where a self-identified speaker of one of these languages can request a “translator” when appearing in a court being run in a different official language. And of course, the vast majority of the world’s English speakers are not themselves from England. There is also a number of nation-states whose borders do not reflect the ethnic reality on the ground, but encompass a wide diversity of different heritages and cultures; specifically, many of the former European colonies across Africa retained their administrative borders that were drawn by people to whom all Africans were the same. For example, even though someone unfamiliar with the region might assume the existence of a language called “Nigerian,” there is no such language spoken in the country of Nigeria; there is, instead, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, et cetera., each associated with their own speaker community with their own customs. This has been a factor contributing to the chronic instability experienced by various African countries.
There are also many collections of people who would certainly claim nationhood status if they had the opportunity, but you won’t necessarily find them anywhere on a world map. A prime example is the Kurdish community, whose population is split between the internationally-recognized nation-states of Türkiye, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, but who have long entertained aspirations to achieve an independent “Kurdistan” of their own, given their history of marginalization at the hands of what they consider to be foreign governments. One of—if not the most—controversial example today is Israel, which claims to represent the manifestation of the Jewish people’s millennia-old hope to return to the ancestral Hebrew homeland, but which is widely seen as a rogue state engaging in apartheid and colonialism towards the Arabic-speaking Palestinian population (who claim the exact same territory as their ancestral homeland), and which is also not universally supported among Jews worldwide. In the passionate debates that surround the question of where a border should be drawn between an independent state of Israel and an independent state of Palestine, or if a border should be drawn at all rather than found a single state to serve as home for one or both nations, what often gets overlooked is the question of what kind of society people on both sides would want to build for themselves when the vicious fighting of today is in the past. Sometimes, supporters of Palestine get so caught up in their fury at Israeli war crimes, and supporters of Israel get so fixated on decrying Hamas (the leading Palestinian nationalist militia, variously considered a resistance group or a terrorist group), that they turn towards ideologies that would actually hurt members of the population that they perceive themselves to support if they were implemented. Specifically, both Hamas and the Israeli government are dominated by the far-right, and I know that if I were Israeli or Palestinian, I wouldn’t want to live in a far-right society, even if that society claimed to be looking out for my best interests. The most important thing to me would be living under a government that wouldn’t bomb, kidnap, deport or discriminate against my family, and that would provide justice to those who have been through so much; whether that government identified as Israeli, Palestinian or something in-between would be secondary to me. Similarly, if I were Ukrainian, I would support the Ukrainian government not out of ethnic pride, but because it would be less likely to infringe on rights like my right to cultural self-expression than the Russian government. Despite the reality of what Hamas stands for, some leftists support them, because they see the Israeli nation as being unable to exist in the absence of oppressive violence, but the reality is that the pro-Palestinian nationalist movement is still very much a nationalist movement (as is the pro-Israeli nationalist movement), with all of the damaging instincts and norms that come therewith. It’s been said that “I don’t care if the boot on my neck has a swastika or a hammer and sickle on it; I just want it off my neck,” and the next part will explore this further, but in this context, I would say that I don’t care nearly as much about what flag is flying above my government’s capitol building as I care about whether the people in that building have my best interests at heart, and can be held accountable for their actions.
That’s not to say that I’m against people holding a sense of pride in where they come from. As an American, I don’t take pride in the crimes that my government has committed, but I do take pride in the fact that for a time, there was a set of ideals that we claimed to cherish, that served as a beacon to less fortunate people on every continent. I take pride in the fact that for a time, we led the world in science and innovation, from the success of modern-day computing technology to the first men on the Moon. And I hope, sincerely, that what has once been will someday be again, but without the fatal flaws that led to our present moment of disgrace. The United States of America is the closest that the world has come to achieving a post-scarcity society in history, but it was thrown away so that we could stoke hatred and enrich powerful elites instead. And I know that there are good people in all fifty states who are suffering because we as a society made that choice. Yet somehow, I’m the one who’s considered “unpatriotic” by right-wing conservatives, just because I want my home to actually be a good place to live. But that’s unsurprising of course, since conservatism is largely about maintaining the status quo, and it’s easier to be patriotic to what already is than to what could be. During the height of Nazi power in 1941, German actor and communist Ernst Busch penned the following lyrics from under imprisonment, challenging Hitler’s claimed monopoly on German patriotism:
Mit Lug und Betrug, mit Meuchelmord und Blut,
entehrten sie Deutschland vor aller Welt,
sie raubten und plünderten Hab und Gut,
und jagten Millionen ins Feld.
…
Dreh um das Gewehr, betrogener Soldat!
Verbrecher regieren im deutschen Land.
Dem Führer zu folgen ist Hochverrat,
und sinnlos, der Tod am Wolgastrand.
Komm rüber wenn du kein Arbeiterfeind.
Es ist kein Verrat, wenn mit Wille und Tat,
für ein freies Deutschland, das Volk sich eint,
und Schluss macht mit dem Hitlerstaat!
In English, this translates to:
With lies and deceit, with assassination and blood,
[the Nazis] dishonored Germany before the whole world,
they robbed and plundered livelihoods,
and chased millions onto the battlefield.
…
Turn around your weapon, betrayed soldier!
Criminals rule in the German land.
To follow the Führer is high treason,
and the death on the Volga beach is senseless.
Come over if you are no enemy of the workers;
it is no treason, if, with will and deed,
for a free Germany, the people unite
and rid themselves of the Hitler-state!
I find particularly noteworthy the lines about how the Nazis dishonored the country that they claimed to be saving, and how it would not be treason to oppose them. There was a time when Germany had been respected among European nations as a home of great thinkers, artists and statesmen, even before a unified nation-state had been founded for them, but Hitler made everyone forget about that. He showed us that even a “civilized” people can turn into monsters under the wrong conditions, and he deliberately did that to his own nation. And ultimately, I imagine that, although it may not be commonly articulated this way, there are many people in Germany today who are grateful that they did not win that war and succeed in spreading one of history’s most acute cases of institutionalized insanity across a globe-spanning genocidal empire. This is a cautionary tale for America.
Millions of members of my generation, Gen. Z, grew up pledging allegiance to a country “with liberty and justice for all,” but then learned the hard way that that’s not really been what we’re always about. Some countries, like China, are several thousand years into their journey as cohesive nations. America, on the other hand, has barely cracked 250. Assuming that we don’t simply fracture and dissolve like the Roman Empire, we have a lot still to learn. Even if American identity is one day a thing of the past, it is a certainty that at least some of our legacy will continue to inspire for many centuries after.
And just because I’m American, doesn’t mean I can’t be other things too. I’m also in a way European, since that’s where essentially my entire family heritage originates. I’m also a New Yorker, even though I know that that land was once primarily inhabited by the Lenape people. So you may look at my passport and see that it was issued by the U.S. State Department, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Given that the kind of policies that a person living in a democracy may be inclined to vote for are often closely linked to how they identify themself, we have to understand that correlation as progressives if we want our movement to succeed. Look no further than the Cuban-American community in Florida, which one might imagine would be concerned about Trump’s vitriolic anti-Latino rhetoric, but in fact voted for him anyway, because they consider themselves refugees of communism, and don’t trust the Democratic Party not to slide towards the authoritarian left. Alternatively, look at Brexit, where enough citizens of the United Kingdom became convinced that being in the European Union was such an imposition onto their sovereignty that they ignored the warnings from experts about what it would do to their economy if they left. Just because we don’t always like the way that voters make decisions doesn’t mean we can afford to ignore the reasons why they make the decisions that they do. At this point, we have to explore the various factors that can make people hesitant to vote for the left on principle.