Return to normalcy

Back from the madness of nation-states and border lines

Marco Polo didn’t own a passport

We are in a time of fast transition. Also known as the final stages of decadence of a system that lasted for a few centuries. The details of what comes next, of course, are anybody’s guess. However, I think it is safe to predict that whatever comes next will be less odd than what is now breaking down.

That’s how averages work, after all: if you toss a coin, you will have an average of 50% on each side, but it doesn’t mean you will have a head once, a tail once, head once, tail once, forever. You may even have 50 successive heads, but we know it won’t last forever, and infinite coin tosses would be perfectly distributed.

When something is too much of an outlier, there is a strong natural tendency for it to return to the mean. Now, in the organization of human societies — and we are naturally social animals, so we will always have some kind of social organization — the system breaking down now is an absolute outlier. Something completely artificial, that initially developed as an answer to a peculiar European problem that, in itself, was already a symptom of decadence, and was later exported at gunpoint to the rest of the world.

That’s why I think it is quite funny when so many geopolitical experts solemnly state that, for instance, allowing Russia to keep Crimea or Eastern Ukraine would “create instability”, “upend rules”, and so on. It’s understandable, as they earn their bread by paying attention to the real-time interaction between present forces in the geopolitical context, but in historical terms, the short-sightedness of this kind of comment is astonishing. Mutatis mutandis, it’s as if someone would say the appearance of HIV in 1981 was destabilizing “regular” sexual behavior by making it risky. They’d be acting as if the confluence of antibiotics and easy contraception that launched the Sexual Revolution around 1967 was something lost in the mists of time, and “free sex” was an immemorial behavioral standard. Well, the hippies who started the Sexual Revolution were starting to reach their middle age when antibiotic-proof HIV appeared. The very short period during which promiscuous sex appeared to lack any physical consequence was the exception, not the rule. Things reverted to the mean, and just as it has always been, promiscuity had become physically dangerous again.

That’s what is starting to happen now, in terms of how societies and governments are organized. The Russians keeping pieces of what was officially Ukrainian territory, the Chinese grabbing Taiwan, or the US threatening to take Greenland or make Canada their 51st state are not novelties. The novelty was when this kind of thing was not the rule — a very short period, in historical terms.

Continuation bias, the illusion that things will keep going on the way they are now, is a very common mistake. Parents of small kids fail to realize how fast each phase will pass. CIA analysts in charge of the Soviet Union desk didn’t predict its downfall. Aging beauties are often shocked when they “become invisible”. And so on. It’s not their fault; that’s just the way our brains are wired. It helps deal with the short term, but it doesn’t for the long term, and human societal arrangements are always better understood if we look at them as transitory things within a much longer human historical path.

Now, what is this system that is going down? We can trace its origins to the Peace of Westphalia, in the 17th century, which ended the European Wars of Religion, which, in turn, happened because the civilizational unity of Europe was broken by the invention of a new religion by Martin Luther in the 16th century. Until Luther’s revolution, Europe was united by a common moral and religious system, and while local rulers could govern as they saw fit, their actions were constrained by that common moral system. If a ruler exceeded his authority, he could be ostracized or, even worse, punished by Church authorities (who didn’t rule, but acted as interpreters of that moral system) with a personal or territorial interdict.

Luther’s new religion caused the emergence of different moral systems, many of them very different from what had been commonsensical until then. The civilizational unity was broken, and more than a century of war ensued, during which the Protestant sects that couldn’t or wouldn’t ally themselves with powerful rulers were mostly eradicated by those that did, and the latter confronted, in many open wars, the Southern European powers, which had remained loyal to religious tradition.

Westphalia ended the wars, at a very heavy price we are now paying. It allowed each ruler to determine his territory’s religion — therefore its moral guidance system. For the first time in recorded human history, the will of rulers was placed above Divinity. In time, this led to the emergence of non-religious, or even atheist, systems of morality, all of them perpetually vying for temporal power so that each could try its hand at utopia-building. All of them, of course, saw the buildup of increasingly larger territories as their moral duty. After all, if their (newfangled) moral system is perfect, it should aim at ruling all of Earth, or even outer space, right?

Together with the establishment and imposition of moral systems, other impositions from the new power centers occurred. The French Revolution imposed the Parisian dialect on the whole country, for instance, trying to eliminate all “internal” differences within what had until then been a patchwork of related, but diversified, cultures, mores, and dialects. In Great Britain, the Welsh and the Scottish languages were brought to the brink of disappearance. Italian dialects have been largely lost. And now everybody wears blue jeans and t-shirts.

Thus were born the nation-states we (still) have now. They are strong states; so strong, their rulers still have the power to legislate morality. The artificiality of their “national” characters, built at gunpoint over the dead bodies of hundreds or thousands of distinct local cultures and dialects, still makes their central authorities see a need to enforce them at all times. France has a whole bureaucracy dedicated to preventing the adoption of new words in their precious language. The efforts of the present nationalistic rulers of Ukraine to force all its citizens to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian, Hungarian, or Polish are one of the main reasons for the war that is ravaging that long-suffering land. After all, the Russians justify their invasion as a legitimate act of defense of their Russophone brothers.

We just saw, in a very concentrated form, how a bad solution to a European problem led to the formation of a completely artificial system of social organization. What could have been a peculiarly European problem, however, became global when the European Empires, especially in Asia and Africa, were dissolved in the aftermath of World War II.

The decolonization of the Americas, while a very interesting phenomenon, is not central to my argument here, so I will only briefly sketch how the whole process went. The US is a rather peculiar case, as the very formation of the country was a process of settler colonization, with genocide of the native population, managed from an independent bridgehead after its independence from the metropolis. In other words, it was like the standardization of France, but killing the natives (or destroying their cultures while locking them in ever-diminishing “reservations”; same difference) and replacing them with ethnic Europeans instead of forcing them to conform to the standards of the capital. A rather unique process, albeit quite similar to the Canadian one, whose sole important difference was that the latter’s process was still directed from London.

The Spanish colonies, on the other hand, before Spanish domination were rather like what had been Europe before the Protestant Revolution, or like what has always been the rule anywhere, anytime, around the world. Civilizational centers whose peripheries gradually merged, without strict borders, but with very clear cultural and civilizational centers. There were three of them. In South America, the Inca Empire along the Andes, in Central America and Southern Mexico, the sad remains of the once-great Mayan civilization, and in Mexico proper, the Aztec Empire. What is now Brazil, on the other hand, was a vast jungle sparsely populated by hunter-gatherers, with no civilization to speak of, when the Portuguese came.

Spain and Portugal were not much affected by the European Wars of Religion because they had just spent centuries throwing the Muslims out, with the last ones being expelled within the lifetime of Martin Luther. They had to fight for their religion and would hardly be moved by the siren calls of novelty. That is why it never crossed their minds to standardize language and culture in their colonies, much less replace their native populations with “the right one”. They imposed their religion, as it was the most valuable thing they had to offer. Of course, the fact that human sacrifice was a common religious practice in native religions didn’t make deciding about it any harder. As colonial government business was conducted in Spanish, their language also became widespread, even if to this day, native languages are still spoken.

When South American Spanish colonies became independent, the various independence movements were often Modern, influenced by the US, and composed of the local Creole (“whiter”) élite. Their successes were piecemeal, biting territory after territory from the Spanish Empire, with internal political struggles often leading to further separation into smaller countries. It made Spanish America become something much closer to what has always been the rule around the world, i.e., a greater civilizational unit administratively divided into smaller units. Brazil manages to stay united because its independence was proclaimed by the heir of the Portuguese Throne, who became the first Emperor of Brazil. It is worth noticing that there were congressmen during his reign who needed an interpreter, because they couldn’t speak Portuguese, only Nheengatu, the “General Language” put together by the Jesuits to bridge the various Indigenous languages.

Now, for the former Asian and African European colonies (or semi-colonies, as China during their “Century of Humiliation”), the thoroughly artificial drawing of borders effected by the colonial powers created complete aberrations. It’s enough to see the straight lines established by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing the Middle East in a perfectly irrational manner, or the similarly straight lines traced on European desks when they divided Africa among themselves.

As the colonial powers had destroyed the traditional forms of governance and established colonial bureaucracies instead, when colonies became independent, it was frequently easier to keep the borders than to divide the territories again in a way that made sense. Sometimes it got even worse, as the present conflict between India and Pakistan makes clear: The British decided to partition their former colony into a Muslim part and a Hindu part, and the minorities within each side were the immediate object of ethnic (or rather religious) cleansing, and around one million people paid with their lives for that foolishness.

What would have been, at worst, a very local conflict between small princely states for the sparsely populated Kashmir is now a conflict between two nuclear-armed “nation-states”, neither of which is a nation. Both have many linguistic, cultural, and ethnic nations within their territories. For Pakistan, India, or any of the big African countries to become a nation, they would have to undergo the same bloody process that turned France (or the US) into one. They would have to kill people and destroy cultures, impose linguistic and cultural uniformity, and either make it all stop at the border or change the border at gunpoint. Germany and France have been stealing Alsace-Lorraine from one another at gunpoint back and forth for quite some time.

They got there too late for that, though. Becoming an independent “nation-state” in the 20th century while still having to build the nation is like being named local director of the Soviet Communist Party in 1990: an empty honor. One could either use it as a stepping stone to become an oligarch or commit suicide, as the days of ascending the ladder of party positions were essentially over in any meaningful sense.

That’s the main medium- and long-term problem Ukraine and Israel face right now, by the way. Both are places in the periphery of much larger civilizational centers (respectively, Russia and Islam). Both are trying to perform some Modern nation-building within their borders, and both are having problems with their much bigger neighbors. The main difference is that while Europe and the US control the flow of information about the Ukrainian conflict in Western media, and it is still possible to paint the Russians as irrational aggressors who do what they do out of the sheer meanness of their ugly shriveled little hearts, it is increasingly hard to do the same about the actions of the present Israeli government. So much for antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media!

As is usually the case when a system is about to fall down, we have plenty of very strong reactionary efforts trying to prevent change. Modern borders, that is, lines on a map dividing in absolute geographical terms a land, as opposed to traditional cultural borders that are a gradual dégradé from one civilization to another, will probably cause more conflicts now than used to be the case. All kinds of conflict, from the Trumpian militarization of the Southern border of his country against immigration, to disputed territories such as Kashmir or the Indian-Chinese borderlands, to ethnic cleansing such as in Ukraine (a name that literally means “border”!) and Israel.

At the same time, often the same actors will be fomenting change, moved by an ethos that can be said to be in the air. Zeitgeist, the friendly ghost spirit of the age. The same American President who treats the Southern border as sacrosanct talks about eliminating the Northern border, because the consolidation of (or rather the blurring down of artificial divisions within) civilizational spaces — places whose culture is much more similar than different, as Canada and the US, or Iran and Iraq — is in the air, so as to say. The discourse, the narrative employed to sell the militarization of one border, may well be that Modern-style either-or borders, in general, are sacred, but the Post-Modern end to Great Narratives makes it fluid enough to perceive that it makes no sense to trace a line on the ground and say “from here North you’re Canadians, from here South we’re Americans, and it’s not the same thing”. Surprise, surprise: they’re similar enough to live well together, while importing people from a different civilization brings the inner problems of that alien land home.

The tendency is a revertion to the historical mean, erasing the arbitrary either-or lines on the ground and allowing borders to be, once more, composed of gradual cultural changes so minute that someone walking from one civilizational center to another will spend quite a long time seeing less and less of this and more and more of that, until there’s only that and no more this. The vast Muslim Ummah — which to my chagrin may well extend to Scandinavia in a few generations — will slowly give way to Christian and Animist Sub-Saharan Africa to the South, to Orthodox, Cyrillic-writing Slavs to the North, and to various forms of Paganism to the East. Catholic Latin America will slowly change into Protestant North America through Texas and California. The artificial lines dividing the vast area of Confucian civilization will blur, and nobody will care that much about artificial lines atop the Himalayas, dividing this vast civilizational area from the teeming vitality of the Indian subcontinent. After all, come on, if the Himalayas are not high enough as a separating wall, what could possibly be? And so on.

The experts may say it’s instability; I see it as a return to normalcy.