Freedom by North-West

The obscurantist nature of East European nationalisms

(I will not provide any citation in this article because it is not academic writing. Furthermore, since the topic is immense and has, from many angles, been written about before, any citation will simply open the question why such authors were cited, and not others. Thus it is merely a personal view—and, as we know, individuals do not matter. )

There are two problems with East European intellectual elites. They are: nationalism and parochialism.

To understand East European elite’s nationalisms (plural) one has to look at the recent history. By “recent” I mean the past two to three centuries. Eastern Europe was the terrain of imperial competition. The empires often successfully absorbed domestic elites, but with increasing literacy, urbanization and greater share of intellectuals in local populations, the elites turned to defining the “nation”. This was part of the pan-European Romantic movement. The intellectual elites began by studying local customs, poetry,  folk dancing, then turned toward codification and standardization of languages, and moved to the claims for national self-determination. Depending on the empire they were part of, the elite’s nationalism was anti-Russian, anti-Ottoman, anti-Austrian and anti-German.  In some cases (like Poland) it was simultaneously directed against all three. Nationalism underwrote all the 19^th century rebellions: Serbian, Greek, and later Bulgarian and Albanian against the Ottomans, Polish against the Russian Empire, Croatian against Hungarians, Hungarian against Austrians.

After the Versailles Peace Treaty, it seemed that the elites’ goals were fulfilled: four imperial powers disintegrated. But it was an illusionary success for nationalist elites whose objective always was to include 100% of its nationality (which itself might have been broadly defined) within its borders even if meant including other peoples who, in their turn, wanted to include 100% of its nationality within its own borders. Thus the end of empires was succeeded by inter-national conflicts in countries that were composed of several nationalities (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia) or contained significant minorities (Poland and Romania); or were left with the feeling of national deprivation precisely because they included within its borders much less than 100% of its nationality (Hungary).

Such elites were ideologically very close to fascism and it is not strange that the support that the Nazis enjoyed in Eastern Europe was significant, and the places where they did not enjoy support were the countries where the Nazis planned to destroy local elites. Hence, the elites had to turn against them.

In all cases, nationalist elites looked for Western support. At times, it was forthcoming as when the principal western powers (UK and France) had an interest in dismembering the empires (from 1916 onward with respect to Austria-Hungary), or when they tried to contain them for ideological reasons (as with the Soviet Union), or for purely military reasons (France with respect to Germany between the two world wars). In other cases, the support was not forthcoming and the countries were trafficked by the great powers in Versailles and Yalta. But that did not stop the elites in their self-understanding to believe they were the defenders of the “Western civilization”. Depending on conditions, they defended (or “defended”) it, against communism, Russia’s Asianism, Turkic Ottomans, or against whoever the nationalist intelligentsia thought was less culturally advanced than themselves and their own nation.

The communist rule that to many countries came with the Soviet Army, made nationalism go underground. Its expressions were no longer tolerated. But it continued to exist, and as communist grip loosened and its economic failure become more obvious, the underground “waters” of nationalism grew into a torrent. That torrent blew everything in front of itself in the revolutions of 1989-90. The revolutions were self-servingly interpreted by the participants and  Western elites as the revolution of liberalism. In reality, they were revolutions of nationalism and self-determination directed against an imperial power, the Soviet Union (identified with Russia). Since the 1989-90 revolutions suddenly commanded widespread popular support, it was easy to proclaim them as revolutions of democracy rather than of nationalism. That was particularly easy in countries without ethnic minorities or “others”. But where it was not the case, it led to violent conflict: in the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Its current, and bloodiest, chapter is now being written in the war between the two most important successor states of the USSR: the conflict that was feared already at the time of the Belovezha Accords, but was hoped to be somehow avoided.

East European nationalisms always define themselves as “emancipatory” and “liberal” when dealing with stronger powers, while, once themselves in power, in regard to those who are weaker or less numerous, they behave imperially, reproducing the very same traits of which they are critical in others.

Nationalism is, not surprisingly, accompanied by parochialism. When East European nationalism in its modern version was born, it was interested only in the European balance of power, because (western) Europe then dominated the world and wrote the rules. During the communist period, interest in, and obeisance to, extended from western Europe to the United States. The US was always more attractive to East European nationalists than the European powers because it was further away and did not historically have any particular interest nor claims on Eastern Europe. For Americans, Eastern Europe existed only as a provider of cheap immigrant labor.  Thus, for the reasons of American historical disinterest, its economic and political heft, and antagonistic role vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, the US became an ideal ally.

This went hand-in-hand with ignorance of the rest of the world. For East European intellectual elites, decolonization, the Vietnam war, Lumumba, Mossadegh, Allende, Mao and the ascent of China, Indian non-alignment, G77, Bandung never happened. The level of disinterest in about two-thirds of the world, and at times arrogance, was in the past thirty years, exacerbated by the membership in the European Union which gave to the elites, that always suffered from a complex of inferiority, the feeling of finally belonging to the West. As in the mock-up maps of the world that The New Yorker Magazine publishes, where the rest of the world, as viewed from Manhattan, shrinks into a microscopic dot, for East European intellectual elites the world exists only North-West of wherever they happen to live.

This particular pattern of elite thinking opens a possibly unsolvable problem for the Russian intellectual elite. It shares, thanks to its anti-communism, and despite its imperial background, many of the features of East European elites. But since the latter are anti-Russian, the two cannot coexist in harmony. The Russian pro-Western elite finds itself in no-man’s land. It cannot find any sympathy among East European elites, nor can it find any sympathy among the Western elites because the latter are supporting Eastern Europe. Since nationalism and the hatred of the other are the principal components of East European elites’ view of the world, the only way for the Russian liberal elite to be accepted as “western” lies in hating somebody more East than themselves, There is no such.

The Russian elite thus finds itself intellectually (and in terms of sympathy) isolated.  They can proffer banal points of liberalism but nobody believes them. Or they can, as many seem to be doing, turn back to imperialism and invent a fiction of Euro-Asianism that gives them a special place in the world in which they do not need the approval of Western and East European elites. In either case, the outcome is dire.