From The Long Shadow by David Reynolds. Page 5.
Before the Great War, nation-states were mainly found in Western and Northern Europe. The late nineteenth century did, however, see a surge of nationalist feeling in central and eastern Europe, rooted in a heightened sense of ethnicity. Initial stirrings were largely cultural, through music and folk myths (sometimes fused together, as Smetana did for the Czechs, or Sibelius in Finland). Even more important was the process of systematizing a written national language and teaching it in schools. This “national idea” was then picked up as propaganda by small groups of politicized intellectuals and agitators before taking off as a genuine mass movement with political clout. By the 1900s, some nationalists were more “advanced” in this process than others—the Poles, say, compared with the Slovenes—but hopes of full national independence were largely utopian. In 1914 the big empires, though rickety, still seemed in control. It was the demands of total war that eventually brought them down.Consider the example of the Habsburg Empire. This was Europe’s third most populous state, with more than fifty million people, but they included eleven major national groups, several of which harked back to historic states that had been suppressed by the Habsburgs. Allegiance was essentially dynastic, in this case to the phenomenally long-lived Emperor Franz Joseph, who had ruled since 1848. The empire had never recovered from its catastrophic defeat by Bismarck’s Germany in 1866, which obliged Franz Joseph to concede what the British would have called Home Rule to Hungary, the largest kingdom in his empire. Henceforth he ruled over a “dual monarchy,” with separate Austrian and Hungarian parliaments and even separate armies alongside the imperial armed forces. Increasingly, Hungary proved a deadweight on the operations of the empire, reluctant to pay its share of taxes especially for the Army. In the Austrian domains of the empire, the Germans were the ruling elite—with Bohemians, Moravians, and other ethnic groups kept in their place. Within Hungary, Romanians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats—about half the population—were at the mercy of the Magyars, who tried with increasing brutality to impose their own language and culture while resisting demands for universal male suffrage. “The government will never be able to satisfy every national group,” sighed Franz Joseph wearily. “This is why we must rely on those which are strongest . . . that is, the Germans and the Hungarians.”
I am currently reading Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall. In it, when discussing Africa, there is a constant refrain about the eighty year period of European colonization in which national borders were drawn with only some regard to geography and little regard to domestic populations.
I am enjoying Marshall as a pretty well informed writer with broadly good arguments for the opinions he advances. But he seems in this instance to be kowtowing to a common, though ignorant, criticism from academia.
Yes European driven border creation did happen, but to some extent it was unavoidable. Short of an international pact in 1880 for everyone to leave Africa alone in its pre-nation state condition of development, there was little other alternative approach.
Europe spent some 550 years (Hundred Years War 1337-1453 onwards) slowly consolidating dominions, states, Dukedoms, Free Cities, etc. from numbers in the thousands to five hundred in 1800. This shrank further to about 25 at the time of the Berlin Conference (1884-1885) in which Africa was basically divided. Europeans recognized the need for consolidated nations of a critical mass. They had spent half a millennium, tens, if not hundreds, of millions of lives and countless wars sorting out their own borders. And in 1885 they were still not done. They over-consolidated and in the subsequent century, the number of States rose from 25 to 44 today. And the prospects for further splitting remains on the table with the Basque, Catalonia, Scotland, etc.
The point being, what is the alternative approach that critics today would have taken in 1880 (or 1965 at independence) in drawing national borders? Africa is among the most culturally, linguistically, genetically, and ethnically diverse of continents, befitting the most ancient home of all humans.
There are today 54 African nations, most of them with borders which are product of the colonial era. However, there are some 3,000 ethnic groups in Africa. Were the borders drawn based on ethnicity, the accusation would be that Europeans forced Africa back into the equivalence of Europe in 1350. Given our 2022 hindsight, what should have been the approach?
Given the absence of native African governance structures and spheres of trade and cultural commonality, etc. what borders could have been better drawn to minimize cultural and ethnic strife while optimizing opportunities for national development?
I think no one has a good approach or good argument for any particular approach. We know that we would want to circumvent the bloodshed to do with nation building and nation consolidation which Europe experienced. But which approach might accomplish that in 1885 or in 1965? And which would simultaneously optimize the probabilities of beneficial development?
Criticism is cheap and alternate and demonstrably better solutions are virtually non-existent.
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