The prospect, therefore, is of new global tension, no longer polarized between two ideological blocs but diffuse and, therefore, even more difficult to control. Moynihan does not see the process of ethnic subdivision and conflict abating in the years ahead, especially in Africa and Asia. And the reason for the gloom is the prevalence of nationalism and racism. Moynihan cites, apparently with approval, Sir Isaiah Berlin to the effect that the 20th century is the “worst century that Europe has ever had” and how glad he (Berlin) is to be as old as he is. The New York Times still seems unable to reconcile itself to the fact that the Soviet Union is no more, playing up every disaster that has befallen the separated republics and ignoring the benefits that sovereignty has brought them.Ī profound pessimism pervades the book. As late as August 1991, days before Ukraine proclaimed its independence, President Bush, echoing Gorbachev, on a visit to Kiev sought to persuade the Ukrainians to find happiness under Russian rule. Whether this refusal to listen stemmed from ignorance, from Russophilia, or from the fear that an agglomeration of ex-Soviet colonies would cause more trouble than a Russian empire, it is hard to tell.
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In the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, whether advising the radio stations that broadcast to the USSR or the Department of State, I found it impossible to convince anyone in authority that the USSR was not a free comity of nations, like the United States, but an empire held together by Russian Communists. At the opening lecture six students turned up, two of whom promptly rose and left, explaining that they had wandered into the wrong classroom. Just as birds chase away other birds that encroach on their nesting and feeding area, and primitive hunters and food gatherers drive out, if they do not kill, trespassers, so do otherwise civilized people assault and murder those whom they perceive as encroaching on their territory.įorty years ago, I offered a course on Soviet nationalities at Harvard-the first of its kind at my university and probably in the country. People identify with their homeland because it nourishes them.
Survival depends on the bounty of nature: among nondomesticated animals totally, among humans in part, depending on the level of economic and scientific development. Mass education further promotes ethnicity because, being geared to a lower level than elite education and having more pragmatic aims, it stresses the local and familiar at the expense of the universal.Īt a deeper level, national conflict is but one expression of the “territorial imperative” that distinguishes the behavior of all creatures, from protozoa to primates. The principle of popular sovereignty in and of itself institutionalizes national differences. The universal franchise has shifted the center of decision-making to the regions, giving rise to local politics which, in areas inhabited by ethnically diverse populations, assume ethnic forms: conflicts which in nationally homogeneous societies express themselves in social terms, here take on an ethnic coloring. One explanation lies in the triumph of democracy and the attendant spread of mass education. For liberals, nationalism was doomed by the operations of an integrating world market for socialists, by the brotherhood of the international proletariat. Marx and Engels had no patience with the claims of the small nationalities inhabiting the great European empires, whose destiny it was, they believed, to assimilate and vanish. Socialists, in particular, regarded nationalism as a by-product of capitalist competition for markets and a weapon which capitalists used to divert the working class from its true international interests. In the 19th century, it was generally expected that the amalgamation of the world’s economies would cause nationalism to subside and ultimately to disappear. Moynihan’s purpose is both to censure the shortsightedness of the world’s leaders for failing to foresee this turmoil and to warn of its abiding dangers.
In Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s latest book, it designates the ethnic turmoil engulfing the world in the 20th century. Pandaemonium, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, is the capital of hell. Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics.
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