The dramatic reversal of 1918—the shock of defeat for the Germans—was tremendous. Then, after they had accepted an armistice on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, laid down their arms, and delivered the High Seas Fleet to Scapa Flow, the Allies proceeded to divide and dismember Germany.
By declaring the kaiser a war criminal, tearing off German provinces, disarming them and leaving them naked to their enemies, making them wage slaves of the victorious powers, forcing Germany to accept sole moral responsibility for causing the war and the damage done, then starving them until their leaders signed the treaty, the Allies stoked the ethnonationalism of Germans more than Bismarck had with his victory over Napoleon III. As all Germans from Prussia to Bavaria had fought and bled together and suffered together on the home front, so all believed that they had been lied to and betrayed by Wilson and the Allies and that the lands and people taken from them must be restored. In his pledge to bring all lost Germans home to the Reich, Hitler had the support of Germans everywhere.
“Nationalism is an infantile disease,” said Einstein. “It is the measles of mankind.”25 But in Germany in 1933, it was a rather more serious malady, from which Dr. Einstein would flee to America.
In 1935, the Saar, severed at Paris but promised a plebiscite to decide whether to remain outside Germany, voted by 90 percent to return. Catholic and socialist, Saarlanders preferred a Nazi regime that crushed unions and persecuted the Church to life apart from their kinsmen. Such is the power of ethnonationalism.
When, in March 1936, German troops marched into the demilitarized Rhineland for the first time since 1918, there was wild rejoicing. Anschluss, the invasion and incorporation of Austria into the Reich, undertaken by Hitler to prevent a plebiscite on the permanent separation of his birth country, was celebrated in both nations. Many Austrians, who shared a culture with Germany, willingly exchanged nationhood and independence for a new life inside the new Reich.
The Czech crisis of 1938 that led to Munich and the Danzig crisis of 1939 that provoked Hitler’s attack on Poland, came out of ethnonational demands.
Hitler, an Austrian who grew up in Linz near the Czech border when Czechs were ruled from Vienna, was determined to bring the Germans of Bohemia and Moravia out from under Prague and back under German rule, where the Sudetenlanders wished to be. At Munich, the British and French acceded to Hitler’s demand.
Poles and Hungarians then seized the Czech lands where their kinfolk lived. Slovaks, too, struggled to break free of Czech rule and create a nation. Ethnonationalism tore Czechoslovakia apart. This caused a panicked British government to extend a war guarantee to Poland, then involved in a dispute with Berlin over return of 350,000 Danzigers to a Fatherland from which they, too, had been severed against their will at Paris. Poland’s refusal to discuss Danzig provoked Hitler into invading the country on September 1, 1939.
Both world wars came out of ethnonational quarrels the great powers created or ignored. World War II is depicted as the Good War in which democracy triumphed over fascism. But the crises that caused the war were rooted in ethnic conflict, not ideology. German, Slovakian, Polish, Hungarian, and Ruthenian ethnonationalism tore Czechoslovakia to pieces in 1938 and 1939. German ethnonationalism in Danzig that Poland refused to address caused Hitler to destroy Poland, not the Polish form of government, to which Hitler had no objection.
THE GREAT TRIBAL WAR
Obsessed with race, Hitler wanted all Jews out of the Reich. But on ideology, he was pragmatic and flexible. While preferring nationalist allies like Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Horthy’s Hungary, Tiso’s Slovakia, and Pilsudski’s Poland, he partnered with Stalin and the Bolsheviks to retrieve what belonged to Germany, and admired the British, democratic at home and imperialist abroad. Britain was to Hitler the ideal ally.
Churchill loved the empire as much as he loathed many of its subjects, especially Indians. Historian Andrew Roberts writes that his views were not only “more profoundly racist than most,” they influenced his conduct as a statesman:
Churchill’s racial assumptions occupied a prime place both in his political philosophy and in his views on international relations. He was a convinced white—not to say Anglo-Saxon—supremacist and thought in terms of race to a degree that was remarkable even by the standards of his own time. He spoke of certain races with a virulent Anglo-Saxon triumphalism which was wholly lacking in other twentieth-century prime ministers, and in a way which even as early as the 1920s shocked some Cabinet colleagues.26
Stalin, born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, put ideology on the shelf when Russia was invaded. He let Orthodox priests and bishops out of prison and called on Russia’s sons to defend the Rodina from rape by Teutonic hordes who were the Mongols of modernity. The Great Patriotic War was a race war. German treatment of Jews and Untermenschen, Russian treatment of Magyar and German women, testify to tribal war. Here is a sampling from Stalin’s propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, when Germans occupied great swaths of Russian soil in 1942. It was titled “Kill.”
Germans are not human beings. Henceforth the word German means to us the most terrible curse. From now on the word German will trigger your rifle. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day.… If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.… Kill the German—this is your old mother’s prayer. Kill the German—this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German—this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.27
Japan’s war in Asia was a race war. In Nanking, Japanese soldiers bayoneted Chinese babies for sport, their mothers and fathers for practice. Korean girls and women were conscripted as sex slaves for Japanese troops. America’s war of revenge against Japan was a race war. Newsreels, movies, magazines, comic books, headlines treated “Japs” as a repulsive race whose extermination would benefit mankind. General Curtis LeMay boasted, of his B-29 saturation bombing of the Japanese capital, “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapour in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”28
Only well after the war was over was it rebranded a war to bring the blessings of democracy to Germany and Japan.
The war brought death to millions but produced a new Europe. After the ethnic cleansing of fifteen million Germans from Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, Moravia, Bohemia, and the Balkans, an exodus two hundred times as large as the Trail of Tears under Andrew Jackson, Europe from Eire to the Elbe consisted of almost all homogeneous states. The Germans were in Germany, the French in France, the Italians in Italy, the Irish in Ireland.
But among the subjects of Europe’s surviving empires came now an explosion of ethnonationalism. The India of Gandhi gained independence in 1947. East and West Pakistan seceded. A religious and ethnic war costing millions of lives followed. In May 1948, the Jews declared independence. Arabs went to war to eradicate the “Zionist entity” while Arab civilians in the war zone fled to UN camps where they would live for generations as a new nation, Palestine, was conceived in their hearts.
In 1946, Vietnamese who had chafed under colonial rule and suffered under Japanese occupation rose up to resist the return of the French. “We have a secret weapon,” said Ho Chi Minh, “it is called Nationalism.”29
Four decades later, when the Berlin Wall fell, ethnonationalism went about its work, tearing apart the Soviet Empire and then the Soviet Union—into fifteen nations. Czechoslovakia split in two as in March 1939. Yugoslavia, born at Paris in 1919, disappeared from the map as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo sprang to life. The secessions of Croatia and Bosnia were fiercely resisted. Thousands died. Kosovo, the cradle of Serbia, was torn loose only after seventy-eight days of U.S. bombing.
“Once the iron fists
of the former Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia had been removed,” said Christopher Meyer, “nationalist and ethnic tensions broke surface with the murderous velocity of the long suppressed.”30
Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Romania, and Cyprus all refuse to establish diplomatic relations with Kosovo. All fear providing an impetus to secession-minded minorities at home.
What the disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia into twenty-two nations reveals is this: absent an authoritarian regime or dominant ethnocultural core, all multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual nations are ever at risk of disintegration. A corollary: as autocracies give way to democracy, new nations will break out of the old, and the more divided and discordant the world will become. A UN that began with 52 member nations now has 193 and counting. Balkanization, that often bloody breakdown and breakup of nations along racial, tribal, religious, and cultural fault lines, may be the defining force of our time.
THE LAST EUROPEAN EMPIRE
What happened to the Soviet Union—that so few foresaw?
Marxism-Leninism, the ideology imposed on the Russian Empire in 1917 that set out to conquer the world, died in the soul of Soviet man. By the later years of the Cold War, few still believed in its tenets or the inevitability of its triumph. The church militant, the party of Lenin and Stalin, built on the now-moribund faith, had come to be seen less as a spear point of revolution to create paradise on earth than as a monolith to preserve the power and privileges of a corrupt nomenklatura.
With the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War, the Soviet state lost its reason for being. And as the party lost the loyalty of the people, the instruments of state security, the Red Army and KGB, were left to hold the USSR together. They no longer had the will. Ethnonationalism outlasted Marxist ideology—and proceeded to tear apart the prison-house of nations. To his eternal credit, Mikhail Gorbachev let it happen. The old nations, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, broke free first. Then came Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova. Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus followed. In Central Asia, five nations were born: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Yet this was but the end of the beginning. Minorities inside the new nations now wanted their place in the sun and the Caucasus would take on the aspect of the early twentieth-century Balkans.
Transnistria fought its way free of Moldova. Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, declared independence, producing war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Chechnya sought to break free of Russia. Moscow would fight two wars to hold on, in which half a million perished and Grozny, the Chechen capital, would be reduced to Berlin 1945. South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke from Georgia. In 2008, a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was swiftly routed by Russia, which has now recognized the breakaway provinces as independent states.
In 2009, Dagestan’s interior minister was assassinated. Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was almost killed by a suicide bomber who swerved into his motorcade with a Toyota Camry loaded with explosives.31 Maksharip Aushev, an opposition leader in Ingushetia, was murdered by assassins who sprayed his vehicle with automatic gunfire.32
By 2010, attacks and assassinations were occurring almost daily in Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya and President Medvedev declared the North Caucasus Russia’s greatest domestic crisis. In March 2010, forty people were killed in twin suicide blasts in the Moscow subway, with one bomb exploding at Lubianka station. The bombers were women reportedly trained and dispatched by Caucasus Emirate, a militant Islamic group that demands secession of the North Caucasus and creation of a caliphate.33 At summer’s end, a suicide car bomber hit the main entrance of a mall in North Ossetia’s capital, killing 16 and wounding 133.34 “Russia’s Muslim North Caucasus,” writes Leon Aron, director of Russian studies at AEI,
is today barely governable, mired in poverty and unemployment, and swept up in relentless fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Nary a day passes, especially in Dagestan and Ingushetia, without an official—a police officer, judge, prosecutor, local functionary—being killed by terrorist attacks.35
In January 2011, a suicide bomber walked into the international arrivals hall of Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport and detonated his explosives, killing 36 and injuring 180. Rebel leader Doku Umarov, in a video, claimed that he ordered the attack as a blow in a “total war” against Russia for an independent Islamist nation in the Caucasus and called on Muslims in the Volga regions of Tartarstan and Bashkortostan to join the insurgency.36 Vladimir Putin pledged, “Revenge is inevitable.”37 Wrote Elena Milashina, of Novaya Gazeta, “The entire North Caucasus region is on fire, and suicide bombers pay a leading role on this gruesome stage.”38
Putin is not a man easily intimidated, as the last Chechen war demonstrated. Still, it is hard to see how Russia, its population shrinking by half a million to a million people a year, can hold on to a region where the disposition to kill and the willingness to die is so deeply rooted. Almost two hundred years ago, Pushkin wrote, “Cossack! Do not sleep.… In the gloomy dark, the Chechen roams beyond the river.”39
Charles King, author of Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence and the End of Eastern Europe, writes that failure to cope with ethnic terror in the Caucasus could lead to a rightist uprising in Russia.
If the Kremlin cannot contain the cycle of attacks and counterattacks, then Russian nationalist groups—many of which spew chauvinistic rhetoric demonizing Russia’s non-Christian minorities—could gain traction in Russian politics. Such groups have already been involved in mob attacks and killings of Muslim migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. The possibility of street violence is very real and potentially destabilizing.40
Adds King, “Muslims make up as much as 15 percent of Russia’s population, with more than two million living in Moscow alone.”
And the mixture is explosive. In December 2010, the killing of a 28-year-old Russian fan of the Spartak soccer team in a midnight brawl with young men from the Caucasus led to a huge demonstration outside Red Square. “Russia for the Russians!” they chanted, “Moscow for the Muscovites!” Many gave the Nazi salute. When the crowd dispersed, mobs assaulted police and the Moscow subway witnessed “a wave of beatings and stabbings of people from the Caucasus or Central Asia.”41
In the southern city of Rostov, where a Russian student was killed by an Ingush classmate, another demonstration was held. There the chants were “Rostov is a Russian town” and “All for one and one for all.”
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, of the Russian Orthodox Church, said if authorities did not act, “massive ethnic clashes may break out.”42 President Medvedev decried the “pogroms,” warning, “Ethnic violence threatens the stability of the state.”43 Wrote the Financial Times:
Russia’s ultra-right has for two decades been little more than a curiosity: fodder for hand-wringing academics writing about “Weimar Russia.” But in the wake of the biggest ethnic riots Russia has seen since the Soviet Union’s fall, this formerly marginal if violent movement has arisen as a fearsome new political power.44
In Kyrgyzstan in 2010, the April overthrow of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev ignited violence that took hundreds of lives and imperiled the U.S. lease on Manas air base outside Bishkek, a vital link to Afghanistan. In June, thousands were killed and wounded in massacres of Uzbeks in the southern cities of Osh and Jalal-Abad. Hundreds of thousands fled into Uzbekistan. An ethnic war that tears Kyrgyzstan apart remains a distinct possibility.45 Time is not on the side of the multinational nation.
TRIBALISM RETURNS TO EUROPE
Lately, the West has witnessed a revival of something it thought it had outgrown: ethnonationalism in Old Europe where it now manifests itself in secessionism. Three hundred years after the Act of Union, Scots seek what their Celt cousins won under Michael Collins: separation and independence. Many English would be happy to see them go.46
Separatism is alive in the Basque country, Catalonia, and Flanders. Turks and Greeks segregate on Cyprus.
The Northern League seeks secession from Rome, Naples, and Sicily. Corsica has sought independence from France. The Srpska Republic may break from Bosnia to join its Serb brethren. Serbs in northern Kosovo are unlikely to remain in an Albanian Muslim nation. What is causing this?
An end to the Days of Hope and Glory has made the subjects of Elizabeth II less proud of being British than of being Scottish, Welsh, English, or Scots-Irish. With the EU evolving into a super-state no one loves, and with nations surrendering their sovereignty to Brussels, people are transferring their love and loyalty back to the homelands whence their people came. And a new factor is fueling secession in Europe’s financial crisis: a sense that one’s own are being exploited by neighbors who do not work as hard. In the small town of Arenys de Mar in October 2009, 96 percent of those who came out for a referendum voted for Catalonia’s secession. “It’s brutal,” said the mayor. The rest of Spain is “bleeding us.… Now it’s not about language and literature.… For the first time in history, the independence movement is coming via the people’s purses.”47
In July 2010, a million Catalans gathered in the streets of Barcelona “to demand greater regional autonomy and to protest a recent court ruling forbidding the prosperous region from calling itself a nation.”48
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