non-nations

We consider alternatives to the nation-state.

Some years ago our astronomer was scheduled to go to a meeting in Prague.  His habit, when traveling to a new place, was to find a good book on its history as background, and as a guide to places he might visit on the side.  So he sought a history of the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, or whatever there might be.  He was rather surprised that he couldn’t find one.  Now, Prague is an old city, and the region of Bohemia in which it lies has a history going back to the Dark Ages at least.  But in all those centuries Czechoslovakia has had only a few decades of existence as a nation-state, and histories are written about nations.  He would have had to put together various mentions of the region in something written about the Holy Roman Empire, or the Hapsburg dynasty, or maybe Austria.  (Nowadays with Wikipedia it’s much easier to find something, though maybe not of a quality and depth of a good history book.)

We are accustomed to thinking and working in terms of the modern nation-state.  We are citizens of a specific one, subject to its laws, carrying its passport; and not another.  There are dual-citizenship arrangements, but they are relatively rare; and the plight of a stateless person is serious indeed.  There are international treaties and arrangements, but they are explicitly between nations.  And how one is treated when in another country depends on where one came from.

However, other ways of thinking and acting are possible.  Consider the United Kingdom.  It acts nowadays as a single nation-state.  But Scotland, Wales and England are certainly different countries in many respects, and indeed almost half of the Scots voted for independence a few years ago.  Regions of separate identity exist all across Europe, sometimes quite ignoring international boundaries.  During the twentieth century citizens of what is now Ukraine could have found themselves part of the nation-states of Poland, Austria, Romania or the Russian Empire, depending on where the borders happened to lie at the time.  It was more than a matter of the color of one’s passport; it determined whose army one might be conscripted into, and thus whose side one had to fight on.

A non-national identity can be extremely powerful.  During the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, neighbors who had lived peacefully side by side for decades suddenly and viciously fell to fighting.  Being Serb or Croat erased any shared feeling of citizenship.  There are now several nation-states where there was once one, and even their jagged borders haven’t resolved all the issues.

At the other end of the scale are super-national entities.  Empires are in disrepute now, for good reasons; they were often the instrument of exploitation on a massive scale.  But it’s true that a subject of the Duke of Saxony could also consider himself a member of the Holy Roman Empire, with access to a level of law and other activity outside Saxon borders.

Less comprehensible to modern minds is the dynastic union, where different countries are united by having a common monarch. Somehow what is now Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, much of Germany, Spain and many other pieces of land were all inherited by the emperor Charles V.  It may seem to us an artificial and fragile sort of combination, but it took eighty years of war for the Dutch to finally become independent of Spain.

Least understandable to us now are feudal relationships.  An Edward could be at war with his brother-in-law Charles in their roles as kings of England and France, respectively; at the same time Edward could be accounted a loyal and faithful vassal of Charles in the former’s role as Duke of Gascony.

The nation-state is the way the world works now, for the most part.  But it can be confusing and even dangerous to force everything to fit in that mold.