Archive for the ‘nations’ Category
Ethnic and national complexities, tragedies and so on
Who would want to be born Jewish in Europe in the 1920s or 1930s, given what we know now? It’s a stupid question, as nobody could have such fore-knowledge, but my recent reading and viewing has brought home to me the terrible luck so many people have suffered from, by being born into particular ethnicities at particular times in particular places. And of course the terrible cruelty humans have inflicted upon each other due simply to conceptions of otherness – as savages, infidels, ragheads, kikes, coons and so on.
I’ve been reading Anna Reid’s fascinating but complex (and painful) book Borderland, which again highlights for me the evanescent and often questionable nature of nationhood, especially in relation to culture. Who are or were the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Swabians, the Galicians, the Assyrians, to name a few? But I should name more – the Romany, the Rohingya, the Kurds, the Uyghurs, the Hazaras, the Basques, the Acadians, the Ainu, truly the list goes on, and on. And they were/are all humans and you and I could’ve been one of them.
Nations seem to me much less real than ethnicities, which give us our language, our rituals, even our expectations. For me it has been easy, born into arguably (or unarguably?) the world’s most dominant language group, at the far western end of Europe, at a time of relative peace and prosperity, in the 1950s. And in fact that peace and prosperity has extended well into the 2020s, both in Britain and Australia, to which I was taken as a child. A prolonged peace and stability that’s been unparalleled throughout human history. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky.
So to Ukraine, and my reading so far has taken me ‘only’ to the horrors of Stalin’s famine of the late 20s and early 30s. It’s hard to read this stuff. A few years ago I was reading a biography of Mao Zedong, but I had to give up on getting to the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and its insane man-made horrors. Have we learned effectively? Will we ever do this, or allow this to be done, again? Is it possible that our much more effective surveillance techniques and our greater international communications have spelt the end of such deliberate inhumanity?
All very grand questions, but my principal purpose in reading this book was to understand more about modern Ukraine, its various ethnicities, its levels of Russification and/or Europeanisation, from the starting perspective of a more or less complete ignoramus. I have of course views on the repulsive Russian dictator and the uselessness of the USA’s ‘position’, if it can be called that, and of the determination of the majority of Ukrainians to be fully independent, but these are simply the general views of a very distant observer.
Ukrainians were more than between a rock and a hard place, in the mid-20th century. The brutalities of the Soviets and the Nazis, really not so long ago, were totalising, and involved millions, young and old, slaughtered for nothing but their supposed otherness. Ukraine and Poland were essentially at the epicentre of this manufactured zealotry and hatred. Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, in Ukrainian, was a massacre I’d heard tell of, but I’d never thought to locate it in space. It took place in a ravine in Kiev, in late September 1941, a machine-gun slaughter of over 33,000 Jews, told to assemble nearby for resettlement. In the aftermath up to 150,000 Jews, Soviets, Roma people and other ‘undesirables’ were murdered.
There are so many other stories. Crimea has long been a contested, messed-up region. My first knowledge of it was likely typical for those of my background – Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, doing her best to save the lives of the victims of – what war, or battle exactly?
The Crimean war of the 1850s was fought between Russia under Tzar Nicholas I, and later his son, Alexander II, and the Ottoman Empire and its allies, including Britain. And what was the point of this war? Well, there were the usual broad issues re the East-West balance of power, with the Ottomans in decline, and Russians’ seemingly interminable desire to extend their borders and influence westwards. But what of the inhabitants of Crimea? This odd-shaped peninsula hangs down from the south of Ukraine into the Black Sea, and was once a Tatar stronghold. Its biggest town is Sevastopol in the south. When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, rather unexpectedly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Crimean population, overwhelmingly Russian, were somewhat nonplussed, it seems. Much has happened since then, of course, including the supposed annexation of the region by Russia under Putin in 2014. Its current position is undecided, pending the outcome of the war.
But let me return to the Tatars – for it seems to me that, for most people, their ethnicity is more important than their nationality – though sometimes these are the same. Who were they? That’s a very long story. Wikipedia begins with this:
Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: qırımtatarlar, къырымтатарлар), or simply Crimeans (qırımlılar, къырымлылар), are an Eastern European Turkic ethnic group and nation indigenous to Crimea.[9] Their ethnogenesis lasted thousands of years in Crimea and the northern regions along the coast of the Black Sea, uniting Mediterranean populations with those of the Eurasian Steppe.
I’ve removed the many links for ease of reading. So clearly they’re ancient inhabitants of the region, predating any notion of Ukraine or even Russia. They were the predominant culture, in fact, for millennia, along the northern coast of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and beyond, until the 20th century.
All of this makes me think of ‘real countries’ versus ‘real ethnicities’. It seems evident enough, at least to me, that countries are a human invention – they’re not real in the sense that cultures are real. We could say, of course, that cultures are human inventions, but nobody ever set out to invent a culture. They are a shared set of practices that people grow up within, just like bonobo culture. Nations, though, are political entities, and the best of them accept that many cultures reside within their borders – borders often born of warfare, colonisation, imperialism and the like. This is important, as cultures are more ‘real’ than nations, and more ancient. Think of Australian Aboriginal culture, or cultures. So, to me, nations – these new-fangled phenomena – need to be aware of and respectful of their history, and the cultures that form them. In Australia’s case it’s not just the ancient Aboriginal culture but the much later ones – British, of course, and then western European, and then south-east Asian, and now, African, Asian, Middle Eastern and so on.
But Australia is unique (as of course are all nations) – we’ve never been a conquering nation – at least not since we took the best land from the earlier inhabitants. And for all sorts of reasons we’re a lucky country – reading about the sad history and the present sufferings of Ukrainians really brings this home to me. Since we became this invented entity called a nation (a very short time ago) we’ve never been invaded, though Japanese air-raids on Darwin in 1942 killed over 200 people. Nowadays I have the occasional Japanese student, and we certainly don’t have to worry about avoiding ‘the war’.
Not sure where I’m going with all this except to note that we didn’t get to choose our culture, heavy or light, ancient or recent, dominant or persecuted. Ukraine is faction-ridden, as are most nations, and there has long been something of an east-west divide, but it’s clearly moving towards the west, for obvious reasons. Putin can’t last much longer, which doesn’t of course mean that things will improve (in Russia) with his absence, and with Trump the USA has sunk further, surely, than it could ever sink again. But the embattled Ukrainians have become global heroes through the course of this invasion, and may need to tough it out until the demise of these dodderers, and then some. I can only wish them well.
References
Anna Reid, Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War
on real countries
”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“
Vladimir Putin
China as it might have been, around 30 BCE
Since retirement I’ve been helping out with English conversation groups and such, helping people from China, Japan, Taiwan, Columbia and even France (my almost-second language is French) to get more of a handle on our language, but recently one Chinese attendee caused a bit of a ruckus when she told a woman from Taiwan, whom I knew well and whose children I’d recently tutored, that ‘Taiwan is not a real country’. Sound familiar?
So there were a few immediate responses, and the Chinese stirrer, who I would guess to be in her mid-twenties (I’m not sure if that’s relevant), pointed out that Taiwan’s nationhood wasn’t recognised by the UN. I piped up with the obvious remark that the UN would be concerned about China’s reaction to such recognition, to which the stirrer responded with a smug grin, saying ‘yes, exactly’, whereupon my co-convenor of the group quickly changed the subject. At the end of the session, the Community Centre’s co-ordinator, aware of the teacup-storm, asked me what could be done to prevent this sort of thing escalating – should this woman be given a bit of what-for? That was some weeks ago, and the young woman hasn’t been seen since.
I found this little contretemps fascinating of course, as well as disturbing. How do countries become ‘real’? Are any countries actually real? Aren’t they all just human inventions? But then so are computers, and they’re surely real, in spite of having no existence 200 years ago, just as countries had no existence 2000 years ago, and most are no more than a few centuries, or decades, old. I’ve been reading God’s War, Christopher Tyerman’s monumental, and sometimes tedious, history of the crusades – sporadic bloody misadventures waged by Christians of all types and all levels of fervour and belief, against ‘heathens’, ‘pagans’, ‘Saracens’ and other others, from the 11th to the 15th centuries. It was bloody hell, but what makes the book tedious is something I can’t really blame Tyerman for. Hundreds of more or less pre-European principalities, bishoprics, duchies, demesnes, fiefdoms and their hereditary or usurped heads, and the eastern sultans, emirs, atabegs and khans, are mentioned in passing or (rarely) in detail, and it’s quite bamboozling from a modern European or Levantine perspective. There’s no France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, etc, and if Tyerman were to go into detail about where all his locations are in respect to modern counterparts, his 900-odd page book would have to be about twice as long (he does provide some maps, but they don’t help much).
The story of the formation of countries is largely one of rape and pillage and ‘might is right’. Thereafter, the victors establish a kind of nationalist pride by presenting to themselves and to the world a more or less distorted view of their history. There are of course other, very different types of nation formation, as is the case with Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and the sub-Saharan African nations, to name a few. Broadly speaking, these are the product of colonisation, a more or less euphemistic term for land-grabbing and more or less successful cultural demolition.
So I thought I might look at one example of the blood-stained formation of nations, and since all this started with the ‘Taiwan isn’t a real country’ woman, China has struck me as the ideal choice.
Chinese culture goes back to a time before the Chinese nation, or indeed any nation, existed. Of course this isn’t surprising, the same can be said of Aboriginal culture here in Australia, the native cultures of the Americas, and of Africa, the Middle East and so forth, and so actually pinpointing when China first became a country or nation – really quite a modern concept – may not even be possible. The difficulties are obvious from Wikipedia’s opening lines on the subject:
The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife.
Note the phrase ‘now considered part of the Chinese world’. Without going into all the pros and cons of that world, the word ‘Chinese’ could be replaced with ‘French’, ‘German’ ‘English’ ‘Spanish’ and more. Consider the Almoravids of al-Andalus, which once covered most of Spain and Portugal, or the Norman conquest of England, and the endless battles for control of north-eastern Europe, long before the existence of Germany, Poland or the Baltic states. And that ‘Chinese world’ was once as multilingual as Europe is today (there are in fact some 300 languages spoken in today’s China, not a fact that its government likes to advertise).
So when exactly did China become a ‘real country’? Chinese language dates back to 3,000 years or more, but countries weren’t a thing back then. Think of an even older language, like 5,000 year-old Sumerian. Sumer, located in and around modern-day Iraq, was no more a country then than was China 2,000 years later. What we had in those early millennia were expanding, contracting and conflicting dynasties, throughout Eurasia. There were of course no borders, there were power centres of varying magnitudes, with the power dissipating as it radiated outwards, and much conflict in the intersections. These power centres were associated with dynasties, such as the Tang and the Song, and the Ming dynasty established by the all-conquering Mongols. Certain cultural and religious beliefs and practices, such as Taoism and Confucianism, connected people of the region covered roughly by modern China, just as Christianity connected much of western Europe from the 12th and 13th centuries.
It wasn’t really until the 20th century that China had anything like the clear borders that it arguably has today. The last dynastic empire was that of the Manchus, the Qing dynasty, which came to an end in 1912. During its 280 year hegemony the territory controlled by the Chinese almost doubled, just another example of power and violent suppression radiating outwards. However, the regime was seriously weakened by the Taiping rebellion (1851-64) in which some 20 million lives were lost. After a military uprising, the ‘Republic of China’ was declared in 1912, with Sun Yat-sen, briefly, as its head. This was far from bringing peace and territorial certainty to the region however, and rebellion, conflict and suppression on its western borders – the 1950 military occupation and annexation of Tibet being a powerful example – continues to this day.
So that’s China, and the story of its ‘territorial integrity’ continues, as is the case with Russia and other power and land-obsessed nations – including today’s USA it seems.
So nowadays, the legitimacy of a nation supposedly, or arguably, depends on the UN, obviously a very recently constructed organisation, the international support for which is varied. But the term has gained its own air of sanctity and power. This is why we nowadays hear of the Sioux nation or the Cherokee nation and the 250 or so Aboriginal nations of Australia. And so it goes, and it’s hard to make sense of it all. What we can be fairly sure of, though, is that when somebody starts going on about X not being a real country, they’re spoiling for a fight.
References
The Han Dynasty of Ancient China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China
Christopher Tyerman, God’s war, 2006
some observations on governments and the people they represent
fighting the conservative wave in Canada
Bonobos don’t have nations, but humans invented this concept, and tried to make something of it, a few centuries ago. Modern nations all have governments, some of which are elected by the soi-disant citizens of those nations. Elected governments belong to a ‘party’ or an alliance of parties that has gained more votes than another competing party or coalition of parties. For a period of time, until the next set election – in three, four or five years – this government gets to deal with the finances of the nation, including how much finance, garnered through taxation, that government gets to play with. Some parties believe in minimal government, and tend to reduce taxation, while others feel that the government should have a larger role in such public benefits as healthcare, education, welfare, infrastructure, and legal and policing systems, requiring a larger tax burden on the populace, based roughly on that much maligned dictum, ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’.
So the burden on citizens would be indexed according to income. Children who have no income, wouldn’t pay tax, and the elderly, no longer able to work, would, depending on their savings and assets, be supported by government pensions. As to the rest, the amount paid, and the manner in which that amount is spent, is subject to endless debate and scrutiny.
So this post will focus solely on democratic nations. It’s interesting that the concept of ‘nation’ has become so reified and so positive that Aboriginal or ‘First Nations’ people, in Australia and the Americas, have happily adopted it. We likely now think of the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, or Genghis Khan’s Mongols, as belonging to a nation, so it’s worth noting that, only a few centuries ago, we could have travelled from the region of Lisbon to that of Vladivostok – nearly 14,000 kilometres – without crossing a border or being asked to produce a passport or a visa. Not that we wouldn’t have been treated with suspicion or hostility along the way!
I remember years ago hearing of people who, rather heroically in my opinion, refused to belong to a nation. They rejected passports, citizenship and all such paraphernalia and designations. They fully accepted, however, that they were human beings. Interestingly, when I look this up on the internet, all I get is stuff about people who are refused citizenship – the Rohingyas of Burma and other discriminated minorities, and of course refugees around the world. These people, of course, greatly outnumber the few who take what they consider a heroic stand against national identity.
So, from the preceding, you’d be right in assuming that I take a somewhat skeptical view of nations and nationalism, possibly because I was born in one nation and transported to another as a child – no free will after all. But given that the human world is divided into nations for the foreseeable, and that nations must be governed, it seems obvious to me that democratic systems, in which the people have some input into how they’re governed, are the best systems available, though the oscillations between limited governments and over-arching ones can be quite frustrating.
It’s also worth noting that, regardless of whether right or left wing governments are in power, some nations have more of a tendency towards collectivism, and others towards individualism. We can see this in national data regarding the role of government in education, welfare and healthcare, amongst other things. For example, most national democratic governments stipulate a minimum wage, though obviously comparisons between nations would be difficult. For example, Austria has no clear minimum wage, and wages appear to be set via collective bargaining by ‘job classification for each industry’, and India has over a thousand minimum wage rates over many different industries and roles. Federalist nations such as the USA and Canada may have many state rates that are higher than the federal rate, and so on. And of course many countries, even democracies, have unregulated ‘under the counter’ labour of all kinds. The USA, with its large contingent of libertarian, anti-government types, would be a prime example.
Given that I’m fully convinced that free will is a myth, I’m no libertarian. In fact it seems obvious to me that we dominate the biosphere, and have developed our complex neural structures and our scientific know-how, due to our hyper-social nature rather than individual liberty. It’s also interesting to note that libertarianism is a predominantly male ideology. Interesting but hardly surprising.
And then there’s communism and socialism. As someone who’s long taught English to Chinese students, young and old, I’ve noted how defensive and proud many of them are about their government, and it seems to me obvious that those who choose to remain in China (though of course many would have no choice) would be even more defensive of the so-called communism that their government claims to provide. What I’ve noticed, typically, is that their government, known as the Politburo – that’s to say the full 24-member body, not its Standing Committee, which currently consists of 7 individuals – is entirely male. There have been only 6 female members in the history of the Politburo, formed by Mao in the 1950s. They’ve mostly been wives of other members, and there has never been a woman on the Standing Committee. Funny that, considering that women tend to be more community-minded, which is what communism is supposed to be all about. But then, if China is a communist country, then it must surely be the case that my arse is another planet.
Other countries, such as Russia and North Korea, no longer pretend to be communist, if they ever did. The official title of one, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is about the sickest joke I’ve ever heard, whereas the other’s former title, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was about nothing if not Empire, and wee Vlady wants it all back, and then some.
Of course, virtually all dictatorships are governed by males, but then, so are virtually all democracies. But it’s beginning to change – obviously too gradually for old codgers like me, but certain outliers – we may call them the ‘quiet countries’, such as New Zealand, the Scandinavian nations, and even Australia and Canada – these are the places where women are tending to come to the fore politically. I compare it to the bonobo world surrounded by a rather more dysfunctional chimpanzeeism. What are the countries that make all the headlines? The dysfunctional ones and the brutal ones. And I’m still shocked to find that people have no knowledge of or interest in bonobos.
Australia is heading for a federal election soon, and the buzz in the air is we’re going to succumb to the current wave of conservatism, along with New Zealand and the USA – as if current ‘liberal’ governments are anywhere near heading in the direction of a bonobo humanity.
I suppose we have to play the long game and keep plugging away….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_wage
on national and other origins, and good leadership
So Mr Pudding was going around saying that Ukraine wasn’t a real country for some time before he decided that he needed to abolish its nationhood once and for all, a decision that he clearly made well before the actual invasion of February 24 2022, as the long build-up on the border told us. The fact that he chose to call it a special operation was also a sign that he’d convinced himself that he was simply clarifying a border or territorial issue.
Well, this issue of real countries and not-so-real countries has exercised me for a while, I suppose ever since I started to read history, which was a long time ago.
How do nations come to be nations? Well, there clearly isn’t any general formula, but it more often than not involves warfare, rape, dispossession, and suppression of militarily weaker language groups and cultures. It rarely makes for fun reading. I could probably close my eyes, spin a globe of the earth around and if my finger stopped it on any piece of land, there would be a tale of horror to tell, in terms of the human history of that land, in, say, the last thousand or two years.
I should also say that nations, or states, have been phenomenally successful in terms of the spread of human nature and human culture. My argument against libertarians who inveigh against their bogeyman, the state, and its taxes and regulations and encroachments on our personal liberties, is to point out that we are the most hypersocial mammalian species on the planet. We didn’t get to be 8 billion people, dominating the biosphere, for better or worse, by virtue of our personal liberties. Those personal liberties didn’t provide us with the language we speak, the basic education we’ve been given, the cities and towns and homes we live in, the roads and the cars and bikes and planes we use to get around, and the jobs we’ve managed to secure over the years. All of us living today have been shaped to a considerable degree by the nation-state we live in, and our place in its various hierarchies.
So you could say that nations have become a necessary evil, what with the crooked timber of humanity and all. But it’s surely an indisputable fact that some nations are better than others. But how do we measure this? And let’s not forget the idea, advanced rather cynically and opportunistically by Mr Pudding, that some nations might be more legitimate than others. Afghanistan, to take an example almost at random, was for centuries a vaguely delineated region of various ethnicities – Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others. Warlords from without and within have brought disintegration upon unification upon disintegration to its ‘nationhood’, while its mostly subsistence-level inhabitants have tried to avoid or ignore the mayhem. It’s likely that most of them don’t consider themselves Afghani at all, but stick to their own ethnicity. The Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan, for example, don’t pay much attention to the border that separates them from their Pashtun neighbours in northern Pakistan, so I’ve heard. And one has to ask oneself – why should they? The Durand line, separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, was created only in the late 19th century – by the British. So, is Afghanistan a real country?
And since I find that Afghanistan has a population of almost 40 million, let me compare it to a nation of similar population. Poland is a north-eastern European nation, inhabiting a region long contested between two expansionist states – Prussia/Germany to the west and Russia to the east. One of the largest countries in Europe, it occupies less than half the area of Afghanistan. It had expansionist ambitions itself a few centuries ago, as the senior partner in the Polish-Lithuanian federation, which dominated the Baltic and often posed a threat to Russia, but in the 20th century it suffered terribly in the second world war, and fell under the domination of the Soviet Union in the aftermath. Of course, if you take the history back to the pre-nation period there were various cultures and tribes, generally warring, with the Polans being the largest. By the Middle Ages, this region had become an established and reasonably sophisticated monarchy, though often struggling to maintain its territory against the Prussians, the Mongols and Kievan Rus. Naturally, its borders expanded and contracted with the fortunes of war. The region, though, reached relative heights of prosperity when, as mentioned, it became the dominant partner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for a time the largest state in Europe. Its fortunes ebbed and flowed in the 16th and 17th centuries, but at the end of the 18th it was partitioned between the ascendent powers in the region, Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Poland was finally reconstituted as a nation after the 1914-18 war, but arguably the worst was yet to come…
So again, one might question – is Poland a real country? As a working-class fellow myself, my sympathies go to the ordinary people who grow up gradually discovering what land they’ve landed up in, and the various vicissitudes that have given it the territory and the borders that it currently has.
This is the central point of this post. People are more important than nations. It’s ridiculous to compare them really. And, without getting too much into the free will issue here, it’s obvious that none of us get to choose our parents, or the place and time of our birth. That old philosophical chestnut of being thrown into this world has always rung true for me, and that’s why I don’t get nationalism, though I understand nations as a social evolutionary development.
I’ve been lucky. I was born in Scotland in the 1950s and was taken, with my siblings, to Australia, on the other side of the world. I’ve never seen warfare. I’ve never lived in a thugocracy, and I don’t know if I’d have been aware of living in a thugocracy, had that been the case – that’s to say, if I’d never experienced an open society, in the Popperian sense. I could’ve been born in the 1950s in Vietnam, In which case I may well have been killed in my village or field during what the locals call the American War, and others call the Indo-Chinese War, in which upwards of 2 million died. Or I could have been born in the Soviet Union, thinking who knows what right now about Putin’s treatment of his own and other countries. And so on. If we could all bear in mind that our circumstances, in large, are not of our own making, we might think in less nationalistic terms and in more humane terms. We might even begin to understand and feel a modicum of sympathy for the hill-top gated-community denizens who have grown up convinced of their natural superiority.
So I think in more personal terms. How well are nations, states, communities, cultures serving their members? Whether we measure this in terms of the human rights universalised after the world wars of the 20th century, or the Aristotelian concept of Eudaimonia as reframed and refined over the centuries, or some other valid criteria, it’s surely obvious that some regions are doing better than others, by all reasonable measures. For the sake of human thriving, we need to sympathetically encourage open societies, as well as to stand up en bloc, against bullying and coercion everywhere. There is, of course, no place – no culture or society – where such behaviour is entirely absent, but it’s worth noting that the world’s most authoritarian states, including all 59 of those classified as such by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index (I prefer the term ‘thugocracy’), are led by men, whereas, of the top ten democracies, as judged by the compilers of that index, more than half are led by women. Now, there’s no doubt a ‘chicken-and-egg’ issue at play here. That’s to say, do inclusive, participatory, diverse and humane democracies encourage female leadership, or vice versa? The effect, I’m sure, is synergistic, and it’s a positive effect that needs to be spruiked around the world by everyone with the power to do so.
a bonobo world 36: there is no bonobo nation
nations, some say
Homo sapiens have been around for between 200 and 300 thousand years, depending on various theories and interpretations. I always like to point out that the ‘first’ H sapiens had parents and grandparents, who wouldn’t have noticed any difference between junior and themselves, so when does a new species actually begin?
Leaving that thorny problem, I’ll turn to another – when did the first nation begin? My uneducated conjecture is that it was an evolving concept, post-dating the evolution of human language, and we have little idea about when that process was completed, at least to the point where we could conceptualise and communicate such ideas. Modern nations, with boundaries, checkpoints, passports and state paraphernalia, are of course ultra-new, with some fresh ones popping up in my lifetime, but I’ve heard Australian Aboriginal language groups described as nations, with the first of these H sapiens arriving here around 65,000 years ago, according to the National Museum of Australia. Of course they wouldn’t have arrived here as nations, however defined, so when did they become such? Bill Gammage, in The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia, makes this point at the outset:
Hundreds of pages try to define Aboriginal social units (tribe, horde, clan, mob, language group, family, kin) without achieving clarity or consensus.
So is this a silly question? Surely not, since the term ‘First Nations’ has gained currency in recent decades. Rather bizarrely, the Wikipedia article on First Nations focuses solely on the early inhabitants of what is now Canada. This is presumably because these people are recognised as such by the Canadian government, at least for statistical reasons. In any case, these early people of North America, Australia and elsewhere mostly didn’t use writing, and their doubtless various self-references might be translated by us, at their bidding, as nations, but it’s clear that using such a term adds a certain gloss borrowed from modern lingo. Gammage does the same thing, perhaps justifiably, in referring to Aboriginal Australia as an estate, a term which I tend to associate with snotty landowners and gated communities. However, it also puts the focus on land, rather than people.
We’ve come to associate nationhood with progress, civilisation and sophistication. No wonder the Kurds, the Basques and other cultural-linguistic groups are striving for it, and in particular for land on which to fix these qualities. The progression appears to go from group – as with chimps, bonobos and no doubt early hominids – to tribe, to settlement, to a collection of settlements or villages, to a centralised, sort of inward-facing region of shared culture, flourishing up to a civilisation of sorts. So it starts, for us, with our common ancestry with our primate cousins.
We know that chimps and gorillas separate into groups that control particular territories, but if these groups are too small or avoid interaction with other groups, inbreeding will become a problem. This problem, which confronts all social species, can be solved by male or female dispersal – that’s to say, by breeding or ready-to-breed young adults flitting from their natal group to a neighbouring one. But moving to a new, unfamiliar neighbourhood might be as fraught, or more so, for non-human species as it is for us. According to an article published by the Royal Society in 2017, when there are limited opportunities for dispersal, many species appear to have a behavioural avoidance pattern to prevent inbreeding. For example, closely related elephants avoid mating altogether. In other species, they manage to mate without producing offspring, or produce healthy offspring even where the chances of inbreeding would seem to be high.
We often make jokes about human inbreeding, especially with island populations (Tasmanians are sometimes targeted), but there are real issues with inward, ultra-nationalist thinking, which can lead to a kind of cultural inbreeding. This can even transcend nations, as with the touting of ‘Asian values’. Considering that millions of Asians have paired up with non-Asians, this might pose a problem for the offspring, if such notions were taken seriously.
Anyway, my own view of nations, for what it’s worth, is that that they’ve become a useful mechanism for divvying up land into states. Land has been an essential feature of human culture – this land is my land, this land is your land, this land is made for you and me. The obsession humans have with the myth of land ownership is something I’ve often found rather comical. I won’t go into the shenanigans around Antarctica, but I’ll relate a couple of illustrative anecdotes.
In my boisterous youth I accompanied a couple of housemates in visiting a nearby tennis court, which I’d previously noticed was surrounded by the usual high, open-wire fencing, but fronted by an unlocked gate. On the far side of the court were the vast sporting fields of St Peter’s College, one of the most exclusive private schools in the city, and beyond that, the imposing buildings of that august institution. I’d persuaded my housemates to take our racquets over for a fun hit out, though there was no net, and we only had two racquets between three. So we’d been at it for about 15 minutes when I spotted a figure marching towards us across the sward. As he closed in, I took note of the tweed jacket, the flapping flag of his woollen scarf, the swept-back, neatly combed blonde hair. I won’t try to mimic his accent or recall his exact words – distance lends a certain enchantment to the view – but there was no forgetting his sense of complete outrage. ‘Excuse me boys, but you must realise that this is PRIVATE PROPERTY!’ Those last two words are the only ones I’m certain of.
I spent the next few weeks daydreaming of hoisting this gentleman by his own petard, but also reflecting on the quasi-religious power of landed property. It was exactly as if we’d abused, or worse, denied, someone’s god.
Another incident was much more recent. An Aboriginal woman complained to me on the street that I – meaning we ‘whites’ – were on her land. I responded to her, perhaps in a frustrated tone, that land was land, it belonged to itself. This wasn’t particularly articulate, but she didn’t have any response. I suppose what I meant was that the Earth’s land, ever changing, shifting and subducting, had been around for billions of years, and for most of human existence we thought no more of land ownership than did the animals we hunted. How things have changed.
Of course, nationalism is not going away any time soon, and I’m prepared to make my peace with it. States have their obvious uses, in binding a smaller proportion of the human population together via laws, economic co-operation and political policies. The Einsteinian dream of a world government is unworkable, and the United Nations still needs a lot of work, though it has been beneficial on balance, especially via its ancillary organisations. The problem of course is ultranationalism, in both its outward expansionist form, and its inward-facing exclusivity and xenophobia. Diversity, or variety, is obviously a good thing, whether in diet, industry, arts or genetics. My own modest experience in teaching students from scores of nations tells me that Homo sapiens, like Pan paniscus, are one people, with similar interests, in laughing, loving, wondering and striving for more. Our strivings and problems are much more global than national – a veritable internet of interests. I hope that this realisation is growing.
References
https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Nations
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160422
Bill Gammage, The biggest estate on Earth: how Aborigines made Australia, 2012.