04 THE NATION

What is beyond doubt is that the [nationalist] doctrine divides humanity into separate and distinct nations, claims that such nations must constitute sovereign states, and asserts that the members of a nation reach freedom and fulfillment by cultivating the peculiar identity of their own nation and by sinking their own persons in the greater whole of the nation.

—E. Kedourie, Nationalism

There seems to have been, from time untold, a universal need for people to feel themselves a part of something larger than themselves, and larger than just the family. Sometimes, in the more distant past, it has been the tribe, or, in other instances, the native valley, or a religious association, or membership in a given caste. In the modern world it is the nation—the country—the social, cultural, and political unit in which one was born and brought up or in which, by the force of circumstances, one has been extensively acclimatized. For most of us, particularly in America, it seems self-evident that the nation is the entity in which all political life should proceed—that it is within the national framework that the process of government should take place.

These assumptions, I repeat, are widely regarded as self-evident. But are they?

What, after all, is a “nation”? On the basis of what criteria do we call a body of people a nation? This question has always defied the lexicographers. For here a number of factors may play a role: among them, history, tradition, geography, religion, and, above all, language. Not all of them are present in any individual case; and even where some of them are, the mix is never quite the same.

Furthermore, things have not always been this way. Nations existed before there was any such thing as the national state, and before people thought of the national framework as the be-all and the end-all of political organization and government.

The Emergence of the National State

A hundred and fifty years ago, things looked very different. The international community was then composed of a few great empires and kingdoms, ruled by emperors and kings who alone were generally entitled to the designation “sovereign”; and then, beyond and under them, a great heterogeneity of smaller and weaker political entities, the very variety of whose titles reflected the wide variety of status they enjoyed in the eyes of the remainder of the world. There were, among others and just to mention a few, principalities, duchies, grand duchies, tributary states, protectorates, confederacies, personal unions, condominiums, paramountcies, suzerainties, sultanates, emirates, palatinates, colonies, and dominions. The only quality these political entities had in common was their subordination in one form or another to one or another of the great imperial or royal sovereigns of the time. In many instances they enjoyed a high level of internal autonomy; but there were certain things, usually taxes and military support, that they owed to the great imperial center, and certain benefits, usually military protection and the privileged access to that center, that they derived from this connection.

In a number of instances these subordinate entities consisted of what we would probably today regard as “nations.” But it was not considered to be normal that all political power should be concentrated within the national context. A great part of it was always exercised by the imperial center, to which in a sense, these “nations” belonged. And it was through the intermediary of that center that they related to the world outside the limits of the empire in question.

While signs of change were becoming evident even prior to the end of the eighteenth century, it was the French Revolution that produced the idea of the concentration of all power within the nation, and the appearance on the world scene of the nation-state as an independent and sovereign entity. And an essential part of that concept, as it emerged from the French Revolution, was the voluntaristic quality of this new sovereign entity—its connection, that is, with the modern concept of self-government and democracy. We are talking, then, of a concept—that of the nation-state—the emergence of which as the normal and prevailing form of independent political organization was roughly coincident with, and not unimportantly influenced by, the establishment of our own independence (which had preceded the revolution in France).

Nationalism

The recognition of the national state in the quality of it that we have just observed, and the sense of belonging to such an entity—of giving it one’s loyalty and indeed of accepting citizenship in it as a part of one’s own identity—these attitudes, in combination, make up the frame of mind that we now refer to as nationalism. It offers a very powerful way of looking at one’s identity, at one’s center of loyalty, and at the source of the governmental discipline one accepts.

In the course of the two centuries that have passed since its emergence, nationalism has developed into the greatest emotional-political force of the age. In the Western world, and in part elsewhere as well, all other forms of collective self-identification, including those based on religion or class or dynastic loyalties, have been swept before it. It has triumphed most decisively, in particular, over the radical Marxism that loomed so large as an emotional-political force for a time in the early decades of this century. And even moderate and humane socialism has been able to come to terms with it only by associating itself with it politically.

But it is a mark of the emotional intensity of nationalist feeling that it has divided people very sharply, largely on the basis of their respective temperaments, in point of their reactions to it. At the cost of a certain amount of oversimplification (because people sometimes vacillate between the two outlooks and there are always the normal individual peculiarities of feeling), one might say that nationalistic reactions fall into two categories, highly different and usually clearly distinguishable one from the other. We could call them two different ways of looking at one’s country and defining one’s relation to it.

The first, which I shall call natural and legitimate nationalism, could also be called patriotism, but only in the best sense of this latter term. An outstanding feature of it is, together with the acceptance of a national framework as the definitive determinant of civic identity, a genuine affection for the country in question.

This is sometimes an amused affection, born of a familiarity with the country’s failings as well as with its virtues. The moderate nationalist knows what to expect of his country; and there is a unique sense of reassurance in the fact of those expectations. He sees its absurdities as well as its strengths. The strengths enlist his pride; the absurdities, his understanding, sometimes his pity. But whatever these feelings are, he relates to the country for what it is—and for what it is to itself, and on its own terms, not for what he would like it to appear to others to be. He is not obsessed with efforts to compare it with other countries. He hopes that others will perceive its virtues together with its faults; but his feelings toward it are as little affected by their admiration as by their contempt. He hopes that his country will bear itself decently and generously in its relations with others. He is proud when it does and saddened when it doesn’t. But the balance of wisdom and folly that he sees in its behavior is only part of a larger picture; and his views do not stand or fall with any of the details. He is not ashamed of belonging to this particular country, but he does not feel himself greatly enlarged in his own eyes, or entitled to enlargement in the eyes of others, by the mere fact of his membership in it. He may view with regret and even sadness his country’s occasional military involvements, seeing in them the culmination of many misconceptions and errors; but if asked by decision of elected public authority or by his own conscience to march with the others, he does not decline to do so, aware that for better or for worse, this being the country he belongs to, he must shoulder the burden of its mistakes as well as of its achievements. What we are talking about, in short, is a brand of national feeling that responds to a natural need, brings harm to no one else, and deserves the adjectives—“natural” and “legitimate”—that I have ventured to apply to it. Let us call it, simply, love of country.

The other of the two possible attitudes of the citizen toward his nation is something decidedly different from what has just been described. It takes its departure from the latter, to be sure, and tries wherever it can to borrow from it something of its legitimacy and respectability; but actually it is a pathological form of it—a mass emotional exaltation to which millions of people, particularly in democratic societies, appear to be highly susceptible. It could be called chauvinism, and this would not be wrong. But that term fails to bring out the full complexity of the state of mind in question. It has sometimes been referred to as romantic nationalism: and for this there is some reason, for it represents the carrying over into the collective national dimension of the self-idealization of the individual that was a striking feature of the philosophy of the romantic cultural movement of Europe in the early nineteenth century. Where the cultural romanticist glorified the individual human personality (glorified it, in fact, to the point of an absurdity which, being himself humorless, he was unable to perceive), the political romanticist performs a similar distortion on the national society, building it up imaginatively into a state of grandiloquence that is usually as ridiculous as it is unreal.

In many ways, this pathological form of nationalism is the exact opposite of the normal one described above. Where the normal nationalist, the proper patriot, sees the absurdities of his society as well as the strengths, the chauvinist sees only the latter. Where the view of the former combines the pride with the pity, the chauvinist experiences only the pride, and this in exaggerated form. Where the normal nationalist sees his country simply for what it is to itself, the chauvinist—always self-conscious, always posing—sees it primarily in its relationship to others, in the competitive and comparative aspect of its qualities. He is in fact extremely sensitive to this aspect of it. It is not enough for him to affirm the superiority of his own nation; others must be brought to acknowledge it. The same sense of insecurity that prevents the individual romanticist from having confidence in himself, and compels him to rely on the outward deference of others to establish his personal self-regard, arises here once more to determine his attitude toward the collectivity; for it is in the membership in this collectivity, and here alone, that he finds reassurance as to his own worth. If his own view of himself is to find enlargement, it can only be, as he sees it, through the enlargement of the collectivity of which he claims to be a part.

Hence many facets of his behavior. Hence the frequent demonstrational quality of his patriotism: the flag-waving, the sententious oratory, the endless reminders of the country’s greatness, the pious incantations of the oath of allegiance, and the hushed, pseudo-religious atmosphere of national ceremony. Hence the self-righteous intolerance toward those who decline to share in these various ritualistic enactments. Hence the extreme national touchiness, the preoccupation with the outward symbols of national honor, the truculent sensitivity to the views of others. Hence, finally, and more serious than all the rest, the fondness for seeing the country’s superiority made manifest and confirmed by military posture or, if possible, on the field of battle. Hence all that goes with that frame of mind in real war or in cold war: the demonization of the real or imaginary opponent; the hysterical search for secret agents of the opponent in one’s own midst; the subordination of all other values to the military ones; and the fatuous dream that at the end of this sacrifice of the cream of one’s own youth—and the enemy’s—there will, or can, be such a thing as a glorious “victory.”

What we are dealing with in this morbid form of nationalism, and have had to deal with periodically over the past century and a half of the development of Western civilization, is a real and terrible disease of the human spirit. The damage it has done is appalling. It was one of the two fundamental causes of the First World War was the other being the failure of statesmen and of educated opinion generally to recognize how modern industry and technology were affecting the usefulness of war as an instrument of national policy). And the First World War was the great formative catastrophe of the European civilization of this century, not only impoverishing in the most serious way the societies of the principal participants but also becoming the true source of the two great totalitarian movements of midcentury—the Soviet Communist and the Nazi. But beyond that, nationalism of this sort has, in combination with the militarism it encourages, eaten deeply, down to the present day, into the spirit and the consciousness of millions of people, distorting their images of external reality and of themselves, sowing a foolish and suicidal destructiveness among peoples—peoples who are now going to require the greatest of their resources of strength to confront successfully, even in the absence of any military effort and sacrifice, the social and environmental dangers by which their civilization is now assailed.

It would be wrong to assert that this diseased form of nationalism is the inevitable product of the modern national state as an institution. But the two are closely connected. It is a disease of the national society, not an essential concomitant of it. But it is an illness to which members of the modern national community are peculiarly and dangerously susceptible. It is comforting to note that in certain of the greater European countries, where a century ago this disease raged in its most virulent form (in France and Germany, in particular), it has markedly declined in the decades since the Second World War. It seems to be the smaller and newer countries of eastern and central Europe, particularly those that have acquired, or are acquiring, their national identity in the present century, that are now most susceptible to it. But even in the larger and older countries, where the spirit of this unhealthy nationalism seems happily to be on the decline, dangerous remnants of it remain in the addiction of their economies to the maintenance of large armed establishments, in the continued cultivation and proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction, and in the truly senseless, vicious, and indefensible massive export of arms to other parts of the world.

The susceptibility of Western societies to this diseased form of the national spirit is not a reason for wishing to abolish the national state entirely; indeed, we have nothing with which to replace it. But it is something to be borne in mind when we consider the future of this central entity in the organization of international life, particularly in the light of the rather unreal theories of total equality and total sovereignty on which the concept of the national state has been allowed to rest. Let us hope that as these exaggerated concepts of national dignity and these excesses of collective self-admiration decline, there will decline with them the dangers that this particular form of political association has carried with it.

The Political Collective

I am aware, in completing these comments on the two kinds of nationalism, that implicit in them is also a comment on two kinds of human reaction: the personal and the collective. In writing of the moderate and realistic form of nationalism, which I have called the normal and the legitimate one and with which I have associated the term “patriot,” I have had clearly in mind the thinking, or at least the possible thinking, of a single person, confronting the problem of his relationship to the nation in the privacy, the autonomy, and the loneliness, if you will, of his own thoughts. And what I have written is conceived as no more than a suggestion of the way many of us, as individuals, approach this problem, realizing that it is in the nature of such personal thinking that no two approaches to it could, or should, be exactly alike.

But when it came to the diseased, chauvinistic form of nationalism, this was different. Here, although here too I ventured to cast the reaction in terms of the outlook of a single individual, I was aware that what I was envisaging was actually a collective reaction—the common emotional compulsion of a great many people—the force of which, as they saw it and felt it, lay precisely in the fact that it was shared among so many of them. This form of nationalism was essentially a mass hysteria; and it was precisely from this quality that it drew its power. That “we” were so many, and that “we” all thought the same thing, was, in the minds of its devotees, adequate evidence that “we” must all be right. And these reflections lead me to certain observations about individual versus collective reaction which do affect such philosophical attitudes as I might be said to possess, and of which this is probably as good a point as any other to take note.

Wherever, as so often occurs and as we have just had occasion to note, the reactions of the mass represent essentially an effort to transfer an individual reaction to the collective dimension, the collective version of it is invariably an oversimplification and a vulgarization—in any case, a distortion—of the individual one. Essentially emotional rather than intellectual, sometimes reflecting generous emotions but never ones well thought through, the mass reaction cannot help embracing all the weaknesses of a least common denominator.1

The mass, the broad public, the people, or whatever you would like to call it, may not be the “great beast” that some have seen it to be; but collective psychology, particularly in its exalted and demonstrational manifestations, is a much more dangerous phenomenon than individual psychology. Humorless, unreflective, anxiously conformist, it sometimes reveals certain of those qualities—self-centeredness, persecution mania, and uncontrollable suspiciousness—that, when encountered in the individual, we would associate with real mental disturbance. But even where these extremisms are lacking, the collective understandings and expressions of any serious social or political ideal are apt to be at best a caricature of the original. I cite this as the basis for my own extreme dislike of all masses of screaming, chanting, flag-waving, and fist-shaking people, regardless of the cause that may have enlisted their enthusiasm. They may not always be entirely wrong in whatever it is that they are trying to bring to expression; but you may be sure that what they are crying out for, in their slogans and banners, is oversimplified and largely devoid of serious merit. So strong is my conviction on this point that if ever a mob of this sort were to be found chanting what purported to be a version of any of my own thinking, I would be appalled, certain that I was being (and that it could not be otherwise) seriously misunderstood and misrepresented.

I mentioned, above, the ballot box. This has, of course, no relation to what I have just been talking about. Here, in the use of that box, people are normally being asked not to try to express collectively a view on a great problem but to choose a representative or, if what is involved is some sort of plebiscite, to give their own personal and individual opinion on a certain question at issue. In either case, they are not acting under the influence of the curious emotional states that overcome people when they are gathered together physically in some public place. In either case, they are being confronted with a specific problem; and none of what I have just said applies to such a means of expression. I readily concede that ordinary people, challenged in this way, occasionally show more good sense than many of the intellectuals who write or speak about the same questions.2 In any case, what they bring to expression at the ballot box is a more useful reaction, and what they are saying is more significant and far less dangerous, than what comes out of them when they link arms with other people and march down the street, trying to impress everyone else with how many of them they are and how violent are their feelings about this or that.3 And nothing, it seems to me, has brought more mobs of this nature out onto the streets in modern times than the dizzy exaltation of the national collectivity. This—the very collective nature of the reaction and the emotional states it produces—is the reason why I view it as a form of contagious hysteria to which certain kinds of people, citizens of the national state, are peculiarly susceptible. This emotional fragility of the national society, and particularly of the new and inexperienced one such as those now breaking out of the Soviet and Yugoslav states, may, if not corrected, turn out to be the greatest danger to which the stability of international life is subjected in the final years of the century.

The International Community

We have taken note, now, of the wide consensus that nationality, more than any other quality, should be taken as the established basis for the organization of political power in separate entities across the globe. We now have to consider the significance of the fact that it is only in this form, in the form of a full-fledged national state, that any body of people can now hope to relate itself independently to the remainder of the world community. For new states, in particular, the path from dependency to independent participation in the world community leads almost exclusively through membership in the United Nations.4 And it is not without significance that the very name, United Nations, implies the quality of that organization as an entity composed exclusively of national states. For any body of people seeking world recognition as an independent state, membership in the United Nations is the only way to go. No other choice is open except continued subordination to the authority of some existing state.

This, obviously, has produced a revolutionary change in the structure of the world community. Things have not always been this way. It was only one and a half centuries ago that the leading actors in that community, as we have just seen, were almost exclusively the great multinational and multilingual empires in which so many of the so-called nations were then incorporated. Little over one hundred years ago these empires began to disintegrate. The Russian empire has only been the last to suffer this disintegration. At every stage in this disintegrative process, the question presented itself as to what should be the status of entities thus liberated from their former subordinate position. Previously, it had been the great imperial chanceries that had spoken for them, in the formal sense, in world affairs. If now they were to speak for themselves, in what capacity were they to do so? They varied greatly in their abilities and in their state of preparedness to accept the responsibilities of complete independence. Some, to be sure, became at least for the time being independent monarchies. For the remainder, various expedients had to be found.

The League of Nations, set up in 1919, attempted to meet this problem by its system of mandates, providing a status that was viewed as something less than complete independence but more than complete subordination to any particular sovereign entity. The League’s successor, the United Nations, made provision for international trusteeships which, it was thought, might serve the same purpose. But little by little, especially in recent decades, these arrangements for intermediate status have gone by the board; and today the world community may be said to consist exclusively, with only insignificant exceptions, of nominally independent states, members of the United Nations.

Now, the first thing to be noted about these developments is that they have increased enormously the number of countries enjoying the status of independent actors on the world scene, and internationally recognized in that capacity. When the League of Nations was set up, only 29 countries were recognized as members; and the international community could not have embraced many more. When the United Nations was established, in 1945, there were 51 original members. That number has now grown to 162; and the process of proliferation is by no means complete. Disintegration is still in progress in the area of the former Soviet Union; the same is true of Yugoslavia. Not only that, but there are several instances in which smaller states, not previously generally regarded as “imperial” or “multinational” ones, are now confronted with demands for independence on the part of one or another of their own constitutent elements. The Canadians have their Quebecois, the Spaniards their Basques, and the Czechs their Slovaks. Even the Swiss have the restless inhabitants of their Jura Mountains. And even some of those entities that are now clamoring for the status of complete independence in Russia and Yugoslavia have minorities within them that are clamoring for the same thing. The Russian Republic alone has several of them. The Georgians have their Abkhazians and their Ossetians. It is hard to say where, if anywhere, this process of fragmentation is going to stop. As we look into the future, we have to reconcile ourselves to living in an international community composed of around 200 formally independent states, as opposed to the 20 or 30 that would have been recognized in that capacity at the outset of this century.

Now, this has various noteworthy connotations. First of all, it places an inordinate burden upon the protocolary and ceremonial customs of international intercourse. These customs, largely codified at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, were designed for a far smaller number of participants; and a far greater flexibility prevailed in the manner in which these participants interacted with one another on the international scene. The effort to adapt these customs to the huge and highly diverse international community of the present day has produced many strains and no small number of absurdities, both for the United Nations and for the individual participating governments.

But more important still, we have peculiar strains and maladjustments connected with the two outstanding qualities that recognition as an independent state, member of the United Nations, is supposed to carry with it. One of these is the quality of absolute sovereignty. The second is that of total equality.

First, about sovereignty. Sovereignty was originally a quality attached to the person of a great ruler, normally an emperor or someone equivalent. It was his person, not the country or the people over whom he ruled, who was “sovereign.” He alone was unlimited in his powers, in the sense that no one else’s word could rival his in authority. All of his subjects owed him submission and obedience. It was this that made him sovereign.

In ancient times, and in part down into the modern era, this concept of sovereignty, the supremacy of a single ruler, was often conceived to have universal significance—to be applicable, that is, to all of the known civilized world. The particular ruler in question laid claim to be superior to any other ruler in authority. His supremacy was expected to be acknowledged by anyone else who had any authority over people anywhere. This was the theory that prevailed in a number of the ancient empires. Each bespoke for its sovereign master preeminence over any other form of authority. Representatives of other rulers who appeared at his court were compelled to come before him in the quality of representatives of an inferior power, respectful of his superior and unlimited authority.5

In the course of time, these pretensions lost their reality, and it came gradually to be accepted that a ruler, while still being “sovereign,” would be sovereign only in the territory traditionally accepted as being under his rule, even if it did not include the entire world. But still, it was he, and not his people or his country, in whom the quality of sovereignty continued to reside. This began to change only with the emergence, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of non-monarchically governed states, such as the United States, where, there being no monarch to whom the quality of sovereignty could be attached, the theory emerged that it was the people themselves who were sovereign, that quality being also enjoyed by their government, as their elected representative. By this time, of course, the universalistic pretensions originally attached to sovereignty had been entirely lost and abandoned. But the quality of complete independence of the sovereign authority, wherever the quality of sovereignty might be said to reside—as an independence that no outside power was at liberty to challenge—remained intact. Theoretically, the sovereign government was supreme on its own recognized territory. There it could do whatever it wanted to do. It could even misgovern its people to its heart’s content; this was, theoretically, no one else’s business. Attempts by others to remonstrate or protest against acts of a government relating to what went on in its own territory were to be indignantly rejected as “interference in its internal affairs.”

A mere glance at the realities of international life will suffice to show that this is not really the way things work today. There are dozens of ways in which actions of a government, even where applicable in the first instance only to its own people and its own territory, affect the interests of other countries. This is true, for example, of its policies in environmental questions; for the planetary environment, as is now widely recognized, is all of one piece, and there are few major internal practices or policies of individual governments in this field the effects of which are not felt, in one way or another, in other countries. It is no less true in the commercial field, where customs duties and subsidies alone can have profound effects on other countries. And it is true particularly in military affairs—in ways that were never present in earlier ages. It is becoming increasingly evident that what countries do about their own defense establishments, in both the designing of them and the deploying of them even in peacetime, can no longer be considered a matter of indifference to their neighbors or to the international community. This involves not only the question, so recently arisen in the case of Iraq, as to how far any country may safely be allowed to go in the creation and cultivation of weapons of mass destruction. Such is now the destructive power even of weapons commonly accepted as conventional that there are points at which the cultivation of them also becomes a legitimate concern of neighbors and others.

The second outstanding quality of membership in the United Nations, as mentioned above, is the principle of equality of the sovereign status—a principle on the basis of which each of these present 160–some states is considered to be the exact equal of every other one in point of sovereignty, stature, dignity, uniqueness, or what you will. Here again, we have a principle that differs greatly from that of earlier ages when, as we have seen, there were many gradations of international status and of the way individual peoples might relate to the remainder of the world. One cannot avoid the conclusion that, in creating this theoretical total equality among many nations, the rulers of this century were, whether consciously or otherwise, attempting to transfer to the international community the drastic egalitarianism they considered suitable in determining the rights and positions of the individuals. But just as it is clear that equality of individuals in the face of the law does not preclude the wildest differences among them in other respects; so the theory of total equality among sovereign states in the formal sense cannot and does not change the fact that there are enormous real inequalities among them in many other aspects of national life. None of these find any recognition in the theory of absolute equality of independent nations. So immense, indeed, are these disparities that it is not too much to say that they make a mockery of these lofty terms—“sovereignty” and “equality”—themselves. To suggest that any of the smaller members of the United Nations—or any of the larger ones either, for that matter—possesses under the term “sovereignty” anything akin to the sovereignty once exercised by the emperors of China or Byzantium is to stretch a point beyond all plausibility. And similarly, to pretend that absolute equality exists between one member of the United Nations and another, even in instances (and there is at least one example of this in the UN Assembly) where the economic potential of one particular entity is more than three thousand times that of another one, is to uphold a similar incongruity. The effect of the formal assignment of these qualities of absolute sovereignty and total equality to 160–some political entities of the most wildly varying capacities is to deprive these terms of every real meaning other than what might be called an honorary one—to make of these terms, that is, a designation of courtesy, like the use of “sir” as a common appellation for men, or “madam” for ladies, even where the implications of these designations have nothing to do with the obvious quality of the individual in question.

Were these artificialities the only anomalies now prevailing with respect to the composition and arrangement of the world community, it could be argued that they would be better left to stand as they are—that any attempt to alter them would be likely to invite more complications than it would remove. And there is much to be said for that argument. In most recent instances of the acquisition of the status of sovereign independence by previously subordinate entities, it was precisely the formal status—the trappings of sovereignty: the national flag, the national anthem, the symbolism of the UN seat, and so on—that loomed largest in the eyes of those who had demanded that status. It is now too late to deprive them of these symbols of prestige. But the enormous gap between theory and substance, between symbol and reality, remains. It deserves more attention than it has received, and would deserve it even were it the sole anomaly in the structure of the international community. But it is not.

In addition to the disintegrative tendencies that recently changed, and are continuing to change, the composition of the world community, there are others of a precisely contrary nature. An example of these is the effort of a number of the more advanced European countries to unite in forming the European Community, and to transfer to that supranational entity portions of what has theretofore been regarded as their sovereign authority. And beyond that, even in instances where the disintegrative tendencies in existing states have been most striking, as in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and have been most extensively appeased and accommodated, questions are now arising as to whether some sort of regional center will not still have to be preserved to continue to exercise at least a small portion of the former powers of the former imperial center. Can the various constituent parts of the former Soviet Union, for example, go their respective ways without retaining some sort of a center to handle certain questions—military, financial, environmental, representational, and the like—which exceed the capabilities of smaller political entities? Can Yeltsin’s intended commonwealth meet these needs? We stand today in the midst of that uncertainty. And this question, in turn, carries one close to the problems of regional collaboration in general, problems that would probably have arisen at this juncture, in any case, but that intersect at many points with the disintegration of larger political entities and with the many new anomalies this creates. And finally, there are also, integrally connected with all of these questions, the problems concerning the rights and treatment of such minority elements as may remain within sovereign states, even within states that only recently regarded themselves as minorities in larger states but are now receiving, or have received, their independence. If, for example, Yugoslavia is to disintegrate entirely, and if the several parts of it are to emerge as sovereign states, as now seems likely, there will remain, and even with heightened significance, questions of the treatment of the Serbian minority in Croatia and vice versa—questions that are almost insoluble in terms of the present structure of the international community.

The Problem

What we are seeing in all these instances is, as it seems to me, that what were once regarded as internal problems of sovereign states are now becoming in increasing measure international ones as well; whereas the older concepts and modalities of international intercourse, based as they are on meanings of the terms “sovereignty” and “equality” that have lost much of their reality, are simply inadequate to the treatment of the problems all this creates. We have at the moment, in short, in this entire area of the relationship of national to international concerns and authorities, a situation of great confusion and instability which has been, as yet, only dimly recognized, and which will, sooner or later, have to be faced head-on. The task is immense. New modalities and institutions for international collaboration will have to be devised to absorb burdens of authority that the emerging nations are unable to bear, and to accept other burdens that some of the older nations are unwilling to continue to bear alone; to relieve the smaller emerging nations of some burdens of total independence that are too much for them; but also to find places for ethnic minorities in larger countries that will do justice to their own thirst for internal autonomy and international dignity, not to mention some control over their own economic resources, without obliging them to accept at once all the burdens and responsibilities that go with the completely independent status.

To find these new approaches will be an immense task, and a highly complex one, particularly because in no two regions and in no two countries does the problem present itself in precisely the same way. There is, therefore, no universal answer to it. And no one who, like this writer, is attempting to look at the problem in its larger aspects can do more than to suggest certain of the principles that might well be held in mind as one approaches it. Even here it must be pointed out that none of these principles can be of absolute applicability; there will always be the exceptional situations to which, whether entirely or in the main, they will not apply.

First: this is a problem that will, by its very nature, be better faced in the regional context than in the universal one. While the United Nations will have an intimate interest in any attempts to find answers to it, and while that organization could and should contribute wherever it can to the study of the problem, the institutions and procedures of the UN, linked as they are to the rigidities of the present international order, unavoidably incline toward uniformity and universality rather than discrimination of approach and thus are not suitable as vehicles for any significant changes along these lines. If ever there was a problem to the answering of which should be applied the injunction “No uniformities; no broad categories; no sweeping arrangements; each case to be treated on its own merits,” it is this.

Second: where the answer is the creation of a new regional organization (as I suspect it will be in most instances), this organization should, on principle, not be centered on the territory, and preferably not even in the capital city, of any great regional power. It is the smaller entity that has the greatest need for such organization; and this need will not be met if there is any formal domination of the grouping, or even any widespread impression of such domination, by any single power overshadowing the others either militarily or economically. To say this is not to hold that the larger power should not belong to, or be in some way associated, with the regional grouping; for its resources and collaboration may be essential to its successful functioning of the association. But the regional association must not become, or appear to be, an agency for great-power authority. A leaf may well be taken, here, from the arrangements of the European Community, based as they are in Brussels and designed to avoid even the appearance of domination by any single power.

These last observations raise, of course, the question as to whether the concerns of any such regional grouping should be confined to the political, economic, and social spheres, or should include military matters as well. Here, again, the answers will depend on the particular circumstances of the situation. But a clear distinction should be kept in mind between intraregional security problems, on the one hand, and universal ones, on the other. These last must, almost of necessity (if only because of the nature of the weapons involved), be left to the great military powers of the entire world, acting in conjunction with the United Nations. But there are important possibilities for regional groupings in assuring the elimination of violence within the respective region. While there is always the possibility that conflicts among members of the regional grouping, or with other countries of the region, will assume such dimensions and intensity as to demand outside intervention, it is better on principle that these conflicts be handled, wherever this is possible, within the grouping itself. Neighbors usually have a better understanding of the issues than do people far away. One has an instructive example of this in the interest now being taken by the various European regional organizations in the Serbian-Croatian hostilities. While this interest (probably wisely in this instance) has not carried so far as actual military intervention in the conflict, it has expressed itself in other ways; and in this sense alone it has represented a significant innovation in regional association, with important possibilities for the future.

But the most significant, if also the most difficult, of the functions the regional association might conceivably perform would be to obviate the choice, for the smaller political entity, between continued existence as a subordinate minority community within the political framework of some larger power, on the one hand, and an unreal and almost meaningless status of equal and sovereign independence as a member of the universal UN community, on the other. It may prove easier to break out of the second of these alternatives than out of the first; for it is not inconceivable that the regional association could provide for the small ethnic entity a better means of interaction with the remainder of the world community, and give it a more effective voice in world affairs, than could its mere status as a member of the United Nations. This possibility is a particularly promising one, because these two forms of participation in international life—one the universal, the other the regional—are not mutually exclusive. The one can exist without elimination of the other. And since this would permit the smaller entity to retain, in any case, all the outward trappings and prestige of acknowledged sovereign independence, no one would be asked to suffer any humiliation.

A harder problem presents itself when we turn to the plight of the small ethnic-linguistic minority in the larger state. We have seen that the immediate transition of such an entity from the completely subordinate position in a larger state to the status of complete sovereign independence and membership in the UN is not always the most suitable and effective answer to its needs. A number of the entities now breaking off, for example, from the former Soviet and Yugoslav states will, I venture to predict, learn this to their unhappiness if they are left with a total theoretical independence as their only alternative. Not only this, but for a mother country the abrupt abandonment of its existing sovereign authority over what has been to date a portion of its own territory, and the sudden acquisition in this manner of a new and untried “sovereign” neighbor (or even enclave), can indeed have, or appear to have, humiliating aspects. Whether this difficulty could be eased for either party if the transition, for the unhappy minority, were to be to a status of complete internal autonomy coupled with participation in a regional association, rather than to full sovereign status on a universal basis, is hard to say. It would probably depend on circumstances. But that there should be some intermediacy of status to ease the relationship of the smaller and weaker entity to the remainder of the world community just seems to me to be evident. And if there is any arrangement that could conceivably play a useful role in providing this intermediate status, it would be the regional association.

This, plainly, is a problem to which very little attention has yet been given. Ultimately it will have to be faced. The artificialities of the present order (which can only be increased if we continue to ignore them) are too apparent, and the tensions over the situation of ethnic-linguistic minorities in the larger state are too intense, for either of these situations to be indefinitely ignored. The answer lies, surely, in the creation of a spectrum of potential political statuses larger than that of the national state but smaller than that of a relatively meaningless universality. And where, if not in the principle of regionality, could this intermediate spectrum be found?

1. Note the view of Reinhold Niebuhr: “. . . collective man always tends to be morally complacent, self-righteous and lacking in a sense of humor.” See The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner’s, 1952), p. 169.

2. There will be occasion, in another section of this work, for me to express the limitations I see in the usefulness of the plebiscite as an institution. I still prefer this mode of expression to the effusions of the street mob.

3. It might be held that the substance of this passage was controverted by the masses of people, many of them young, who came out onto the rainy streets of Moscow in October 1991 to argue with the tank crews and to defend Yeltsin’s “White House.” But things were not quite that way. These people were not marching arm in arm, brandishing fists, and shouting slogans, to impress others with how many they were, and how angry. Theirs was a more serious and businesslike task—to build defensive barricades around the “White House” and to persuade soldiers not to shoot. And this they were doing not out of any hysterical enthusiasm for Yeltsin or any romantic hopes for an early triumph of achievement under his leadership, but because they valued the freedom they had recently acquired to think and speak and act for themselves, and because they recognized that if they did not do as they were doing, the alternatives would in all probability be much worse.

4. In the formal sense, membership in the United Nations is not absolutely essential for recognition as an independent country. Switzerland has remained outside the UN, as have, to date, the two Koreas. And there are four very minor entities which, although admitted by themselves and others to be too small to shoulder even the minimal responsibilities of UN membership, seem nevertheless to be generally recognized as independent states.

5. This led to a great deal of angry bickering and playacting, some of it quite absurd, ranging all the way from demands that the visiting envoy enter the presence of the emperor backwards, and then prostrate himself before the imperial person, to the ridiculous shenanigans that took place in the case of Russia as late as the fifteenth century, when a foreign envoy, arriving at the Russian border and being met by an official representing the Russian tsar was told that he, as the representative of an inferior power, must dismount from his horse before the Russian official dismount from his, whereupon each would pretend to be about to dismount in the hope of inducing the other to dismount before him.