Hindustan Times, India
June 16 2005
Stateless peoples pose conundrums for great powers
Daniel Schnieder (IANS)
New Delhi, June 16, 2005
There are, in this world, ‘inconvenient nations’. These peoples –
often oppressed and bound by language, culture and sometimes religion
– are the unfinished business of modern history.
When the wave of nationalism swept the world in the 19th and 20th
centuries and the old empires were carved up, these peoples were left
stateless. In some cases they were divided up, thrown in with nations
that not only didn’t share their values or ethnicity but sometimes
also sought their annihilation.
The list of the inconvenient nations is mostly a familiar one – Jews,
Armenians, Kurds and Palestinians in the Middle East. Some are less
celebrated – Tibetans and Chechens – and the Taiwanese are relative
newcomers to the group.
All of these peoples occupy vital pieces of geography. Their
frustrated national ambitions create political tinderboxes that could
trigger war or deepen existing conflicts. Already some of these
conflicts intersect with the global war against Islamic extremism.
Others could complicate the coming contest for power between China
and the US.
Through sheer persistence, some of these peoples have won statehood –
modern Israel and Armenia, with the Palestinians on the verge. Even
then, the boundaries of these states remain contested and their
security at risk.
Granting all of these inconvenient nations statehood poses serious
challenges to the existing order in the world.
For the US, the country most likely to be an ally of change, they
pose a particular conundrum. In recent years, President George W.
Bush’s administration has embraced with great fervour its role as an
agent of transformation through the spread of democracy worldwide.
Invariably, democratic rights have fed the growth of nationalism.
At the same time, the US is the guardian of a status quo that largely
serves its interests. Historically, American administrations have
resisted demands for change in boundaries that challenge the
principle of territorial integrity. Inherently conservative, the US
has been uncomfortable with the radical fervour of nationalists
unwilling to compromise on their aims.
Great powers have always responded schizophrenically to the
inconvenient nations. They have manipulated stateless peoples’
aspirations for self-rule for their own purposes, but then abandoned
them when ambitions for statehood got in the way of larger interests.
In the Middle East, the British, French and others used the desires
for nationhood of Jews, Armenians, Kurds and Palestinians to pick
apart the Ottoman Empire. During and after World War I, in which the
Turks sided with Germany, the allies backed independence for most of
those peoples to encourage anti-Turkish revolts. As soon as the
allies could build their own empires in the region, those promises
were betrayed.
In East Asia, the Central Intelligence Agency fed arms to Tibetans
rebelling in the 1950s against Chinese invasion. But the conquered
Tibetans were largely forgotten when the West turned to wooing China.
The Taiwanese also have been victims of US fickleness. The US
defended Taiwan as a base for the Chinese who lost the struggle
against Chinese communists. But when native Taiwanese used democracy
in the past decade to assert their desire for a separate identity,
Taiwan became an awkward impediment to partnership with Beijing.
To understand the passions and persistence of the inconvenient
nations, look at “the Armenian question,” as it has been known since
the 19th century. The Armenians are an ancient Christian people who
once were spread from the Russian-controlled Caucasus down into the
Ottoman Empire, what is now modern Turkey.
During the latter half of the 19th century, the mistreatment of
Armenians by the Ottoman Turks became a prominent issue in
international politics. Things only got worse when the Young Turks,
the architects of modern Turkey, overthrew the Ottoman rulers during
World War I. They then carried out what is considered by many to be
the first modern genocide, killing and driving out most Armenians
from Turkey.
Still there was hope for a homeland. Amid the chaos after the
Bolshevik revolution, Russian-ruled Armenia, a small part of
historical Armenia, declared its independence and received the
support of President Woodrow Wilson, the champion of national
self-determination. Under a 1920 treaty with the World War I allies,
Turkey was compelled to recognise Armenian independence and to cede
part of what had been its Armenian-populated areas to the new state.
But the Armenians were betrayed when Turkey repudiated the treaty,
seized Armenian cities and then made a deal with the invading Russian
army which brought Armenia back under the control of the Soviet
state.
The Soviets, who also claimed to champion self-determination,
preserved an Armenian republic within their modern empire. But
Stalin, making deals with the Turks, cynically stripped away some
Armenian-inhabited territories and placed them under the
administration of an Azeri Turkish republic within the Soviet Union.
Seven decades later, the Armenians rose to seize back their
independence. In 1988, a movement for the return of the
Armenian-populated territory of Nagorno-Karabakh from the Soviet
republic of Azerbaijan signalled the beginning of the disintegration
of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The struggle intensified when Armenia won its independence from the
Soviet Union and nationalist passions quickly fanned into a white hot
heat, drawing Armenians from their scattered diaspora in places such
as Beirut, Paris and Los Angeles. In a short but fierce war,
Armenians regained control of Karabakh, which they hold tightly to
this day.
Today, the Armenian question simmers quietly. Although Russia and the
US support Armenia, both press for the return of Karabakh to
Azerbaijan and encourage Armenians there to accept autonomy within
Azerbaijan. Although the boundary lines of Karabakh were the product
of Stalin’s pen, the great powers insist that they are now inviolable
international frontiers, never to be altered. The defence of
principle, however, is a convenient cloak for a more basic interest:
access to Azerbaijan’s rich oil fields.
The Kurds next door to the Armenians were also promised statehood out
of the rubble of the Ottoman Empire. They too are an ancient people
whose common identity stretches back more than 2,000 years. Most of
the 20 million Kurds live in a mountainous area straddling Iran, Iraq
and Turkey – countries that have all crushed Kurdish nationhood. In
the modern era, Kurdish nationalism has been encouraged-and
abandoned-by both the US and the Soviet Union.
When Washington needed to topple Saddam Hussein, the Kurds regained
favour, providing a base for operations against his government.
Today, when the US seeks to rebuild Iraq as its own bastion of
influence, Kurdish aspirations for separation and self-rule are again
inopportune.
For the great powers, inconvenient nations are, by their nature,
irritating. They are single-minded, often undeterred by those who
advise caution or patience. Even as clients, they are hard, if not
impossible, to control.
There is some hope these days that globalisation will help diminish
the authority of nation-states – replacing their influence with
multinational corporations and other trans-national entities – and
therefore also diminish the inconvenient nations’ drive for
self-rule.
But nationalism is hardly a diminished force. Witness the spiralling
tensions between Chinese and Japanese in recent months, fighting and
re-fighting issues more than a half-century old. And French and Dutch
voters recently rejected a new constitution that would more
completely merge those states into a unified Europe.
Some in the Bush administration, meanwhile, argued that the spread of
democracy also would cool nationalist flames by giving minorities
such as the peoples of the inconvenient nations more clout in their
current countries.
But to the contrary, the more people are free to express their will,
the more nationalism seems to gain fervour. Kurds in Iraq vote
virtually without exception only for Kurds and are no less determined
to eventually be independent of the Arab state.
More than other great powers, Americans find the idea of a nation
defined by ethnic identity disturbing. As a country built by
immigrants, America explicitly rejects any ethnic definition of
citizenship. The passions of peoples that seek to separate themselves
from others are often seen as irrational, somehow less acceptable
than our patriotism.
Indeed, Americans are remarkably blind to their own bellicose
nationalism, garbed as it is by the assertion of the universality of
American ideals and of self-defence against possible attack.
“Since most Americans don’t realise that they do have a nationalism
and that it is so strong, perhaps it does make it more difficult for
Americans to appreciate and understand the force of other peoples’
nationalism,” said Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong:
An Anatomy of American Nationalism.
History, however, tells us that the inconvenient nations will not go
away. No wave of globalisation can sweep their passions into a dusty
corner forever. And the desire for freedom will not conveniently stop
short of national self-determination.