With the collapse of the Soviet Union, engineered by the Russians themselves under Boris Yeltsin, it became routine to rediscover one’s nation even if, when the collapse occurred, some, such as Uzbekistan, were reluctant to become independent. Once independence was obtained, history books were rewritten reversing the previous ‘consensus’, tracing Uzbek origins to prehistoric times and making Timur (Tamerlane in the West), once a cruel tyrant and responsible for the death of millions, the founding hero of the country. His equestrian statue now graces the spot where Karl Marx’s statue once stood. It is quite common for nationalist feelings to increase after independence is obtained. Nationalism is usually a minority affair until there is a state that continues the nationalists’ work, which is why one can speak of, say, Iraqi or Nigerian nationalism in the late twentieth century. It would be absurd to do so in the nineteenth century since neither existed.
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There are far more states today than in 1860 or even 1880, but before 1800 there were more states than in 1880. There is an ebb and flow in the coming into being and the disappearing of states, which suggests that it is better to avoid any deterministic view as to their future. There may be more. There may be fewer. Catalonia and perhaps Scotland might be sovereign states one day.
Sovereignty of states is another disputed term, one whose meaning has changed in the course of the centuries to such an extent that there can be no all-embracing definition. A state must be sufficiently centralized to ensure that all its constituent parts are ‘united under the same law and the same name’, as Livy put it in Ab urbe condita. This is what most people understand as a sovereign state.37 In more modern times a functioning state should be able to impose its will sufficiently to be able to collect taxes. If it cannot force or persuade its citizens that they should pay up so that their state can function, it is a ‘failed’ state.
Some argue that sovereignty needs to be recognized by others, and this is largely true, but we know that any state able to defend itself is, in fact, a sovereign state whether or not it is recognized by anyone. China, when not recognized by the United States, and Israel, not recognized by most Arab states, are certainly sovereign states.
Sovereignty is something you acquire when you are strong enough and eager for it, or others are weak and unable to stop you. You may lose or fail to acquire sovereignty when you are feeble and vacillating, or others are stronger. This is, more or less, how states have developed since the last decades of the nineteenth century when the number of sovereign states was at its lowest.
The great empires of the nineteenth century, such as the colonial empires of the French, the British, and the Dutch, and the newly formed Belgian Empire, the short-lived Napoleonic Empire, and the pre-existing Russian and Ottoman Empires, left as their fundamental legacy the elimination of thousands of self-governing units, tribal areas, principalities, duchies, bishoprics, and city states (sometimes loosely connected by the decentralized Holy Roman Empire) – an operation we could regard as a gigantic geopolitical tidying-up but that some might see as an unfair removal of self-government. Borders that would become sacrosanct were often defined from a great distance by more powerful countries. Thus, in 1862, the Tsarist regime imposed on the Chinese a border according to topography, rather than ethnicity, thereby dividing peoples such as the Kirghiz and leaving a problem that festered well into the twentieth century.38
Even more momentous was the establishment of the so-called Durand Line in 1893 between the British (Sir Mortimer Durand was a British diplomat) and Abdur Rahman Khan, the ruler of Afghanistan. This effectively cut through the Pashtun tribal areas (as well as those of other tribes), resulting in the Pashtun people being divided between Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan (then part of British India). The Pashtun had lived in the area for centuries, perhaps more. Tribal division was only one of the many problems facing the country, problems that made it almost impossible for Afghanistan to emerge as a modern state: it was not colonized (so no national liberation movement emerged), it was landlocked, isolated, economically backward, and though united by religion it was divided by language.39
Elsewhere state construction was dominated by the interests of the Great Powers. Thus the secret Anglo-French agreement of 1916, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, defined future spheres of influence in the Ottoman Empire, while the Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) resulted in the present, highly contested borders of three states that had never existed before then: Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Parts of what is today Israel were designated as a ‘national home’ for the Jews by the British foreign secretary. A part of the area known as Palestine was subsequently carved up as ‘Israel’ in 1948 by the United Nations and soon enlarged through military activity and the ethnic cleansing of part of the Palestinian population.
In sub-Saharan Africa too, state-building was externally determined. Before the advent of colonialism, there were some 10,000 polities exhibiting as diverse a range of organization as their equivalent in pre-modern Europe: kingdoms, city states, small isolated communities, trading towns, empires. Under colonialism, thousands of self-governing units were wiped away and boundaries drawn across well-established lines of communications. As a result the Maasai were cut in half by the Kenya-Tanzania border; the Bakingo (or Kongo people) found themselves in states called Gabon, Congo, and Angola; the Yoruba (who number over 30 million people, more than most European nations) could be found in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo.40 Nigeria itself, the most populous state in Africa, was the result of the amalgamation of two British protectorates by their governor, Sir Frederick Lugard, into one colony (1912–14). The name had been suggested by the renowned journalist and colonial editor of The Times, Flora Shaw (who married Lugard in 1902), in an article in The Times in which she suggested that ‘the name “Nigeria” … may, without offense to any neighbours, be accepted as co-extensive with the territories over which the Royal Niger Company has extended British influence’.41 Nigeria became independent in 1960 and kept the name invented by Flora Shaw in 1897. Its first national anthem, ‘Nigeria, We Hail Thee’, adopted in 1960, was written by two British women (it was replaced in 1978 by the present anthem, ‘Arise, O Compatriots’).
The forty-nine states formed in the decades after the colonialists vacated sub-Saharan Africa (see Table 2) and whose boundaries were drawn – with some exceptions – by white occupiers became sovereign states with their own flags, national anthems, and football teams. And they have survived, some better than others, into the twenty-first century.
The multiplicity of ethnic groups across borders may not explain the enormity of civil conflicts in Africa after decolonization, since wars between African states (as distinct to civil wars) have not been as pronounced or intense as the intra-European wars of the first half of the twentieth century. One can blame African rulers for all sorts of sins, but it was a wise move when they decided not to revise the borders fixed by the colonialists and thus accept them de jure as well as de facto by signing the Charter of the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union).
Table 2 States in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2019*
Angola Ethiopia Niger
Benin Gabon Nigeria
Botswana Gambia Rwanda
Burkina Faso Ghana Sao Tome and Principe
Burundi Guinea Senegal
Cameroon Guinea-Bissau Seychelles
Cape Verde Kenya Sierra Leone
Central African Republic Lesotho Somalia
Chad Liberia South Africa
Comoros Madagascar South Sudan
Congo (Democratic Republic of) Malawi Sudan
Congo (Republic of) Mali Swaziland
Côte d’Ivoire Mauritania Tanzania
Djibouti Mauritius Togo
Equatorial Guinea Mozambique Uganda
Eritrea Namibia Zambia
Zimbabwe
*African countries not part of sub-Saharan Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, as well as Western Sahara – claimed by Morocco. The UN definition of
sub-Saharan is used here.
The decision to accept the colonial borders has been, on the whole, respected with a precision few other international agreements can claim – though there were important exceptions: the Ethiopia-Somalia war over Ogaden (1977–8), the Tanzania-Uganda war (1978–9), and the civil wars in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and Congo (1998–2003) where other African states (notably Liberia in the case of Sierra Leone) have intervened to help this or that side in the conflict. The acceptance of colonial boundaries, however, has led to the worst conflicts in Africa, but in the form of civil wars rather than interstate wars. This was partly a consequence of the difficulty of creating ‘nations’ out of heterogeneous cultural materials in a relatively short period of time. But this is also true for the world as a whole: in 2001 most conflicts in the world were civil wars.42 Internal conflicts in African countries have included the former Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), the former French Congo (today the Republic of Congo), Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Algeria, Libya, and Mali, and they took an enormous toll in human lives. Most but not all of these conflicts have taken the form of secessionist struggles, such as the Polisario movement in the western Sahara, the Ogaden liberation movement in Ethiopia, and many others. The most serious attempt at secessions were those of Biafra from Nigeria (1967–70) and Katanga (with direct military help from Belgium) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960–63). They were both defeated, at huge human cost. Unlike Europe or Asia, Africa has produced only two new countries since decolonization. The first was Eritrea, independent in 1993, but a country whose independence had been originally curtailed by Ethiopia in 1952 and not by a European power. The second was South Sudan, which achieved statehood in 2011 after a referendum. Both Eritrea and South Sudan are currently in disastrous conditions.
Although not as pulverized as pre-colonial Africa, pre-Napoleonic Europe too was a remarkably fragmented entity consisting of dozens of statelets under the domination, protection or toleration of larger states – some of these tiny entities still survive either as gambling preserves (Monte Carlo), or tax-dodging havens (Monte Carlo again or Lichtenstein), or a dispensary for cheap alcohol (Andorra) or the producer of pretty stamps (San Marino).
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The idea of a nation is constructed out of a mish-mash of myth, legend, history, and wishful thinking. The inhabitants of those self-governing units that prevailed before 1800 were seldom self-conscious members of a nation, but were held together by a sovereign, or a religion or a language or by force of arms or the self-interest of the local elites, or because it was in the interest of foreign powers to let them survive. Central Europe, in particular, was a complex conglomeration of such states and statelets.
Within the boundaries of what today we call Italy, there were at the time of the French Revolution almost twenty such self-governing units. By 1870 all these states and statelets had been amalgamated into a single state: Italy, a state with a history it claimed to be ancient and a language, Italian, only a minority of its inhabitants could speak or spoke habitually. This state joined a system of European states that turned out to be generally stable on its western flank but unstable on the eastern one (the main exceptions to the rule of western stability after 1880 were the birth of the Republic of Ireland in 1922 and the formalization of Norwegian and Icelandic independence – see below). The following tables and maps show how European sovereign states multiplied between 1901 and 2010.
Table 3 European States, 2019 (42 States)
European Union (28) Outside the European Union (14)
Austria* Italy* Albania
Belgium* Latvia* Belarus
Bulgaria Lithuania* Bosnia
Croatia Luxembourg* *Kosovo
Cyprus* Malta* Iceland
Czech Republic The Netherlands* Macedonia
Denmark Poland Moldova
Estonia* Portugal* *Montenegro
Finland* Romania Norway
France* Slovakia* Russia
Germany* Slovenia* Serbia
Greece* Spain* Switzerland
Hungary Sweden Turkey
Ireland* UK** Ukraine
* Using euro currency
** In the referendum of 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU
Note: There were 19 European states in 1900, including the Ottoman Empire
The awesomely complex transition from the twenty or so states of 1880 to the forty-two or so of today is almost entirely due to the collapse of the three great empires of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the First World War: the vast Ottoman Empire, the Tsarist Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Ottoman Empire, whose heartland was Turkey, had long been in decline: in the course of the nineteenth century it ‘lost’ Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Crete and Cyprus, Wallachia and Moldavia, Bulgaria, and most of present-day Serbia, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Serbia, already largely autonomous in 1830, was able to adopt a new constitution in 1869 without interference from the Turks,43 and became completely independent in 1882. In 1866, Romania (itself the result of the union of Wallachia and Moldavia) became, after a plebiscite, an independent principality, though under nominal Turkish suzerainty. Complete independence was declared in 1881.44 Although the Romanian state owes its independence largely to the Congress of Berlin of 1878, its official history attributes a much greater role to Romanians themselves. Likewise the territorial expansion of Greece occurred largely through the actions of external forces rather than of the Greeks themselves. The Aeolian Islands were given to them by Great Britain in 1864, Thessaly was obtained by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, and parts of Macedonia, Crete, and Epirus during the Balkan wars of 1912–13.45
At the Congress of Berlin of 1878 the Great Powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) convened to stabilize Europe after the Ottoman collapse. None of the Balkan countries participated: delegates from Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania were only allowed to attend in silence the session in which their fate was decided.46
The Treaty of Berlin recognized the independence of Serbia and Montenegro. Bulgaria became an autonomous principality and a fully independent kingdom in 1908. Albania achieved independence from the Ottomans after the Balkan War of 1912. Thus, the so-called ‘Balkanization’ of the Balkans pre-1914 was largely due to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and further Balkanization occurred after 1918 with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was limited by the creation of Yugoslavia in 1945. Finally, the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s led to further multiplication of states.
In north Africa, the Ottoman Maghrebi provinces were lost to the French in the course of the nineteenth century and Libya (then known as Tripolitania and Cyrenaica) to the Italians in 1911. Egypt, the jewel in the Ottoman’s crown, had become virtually independent when Ismail Pasha came to power as hereditary ruler of Egypt (1863) with the title of Khedive, a title not granted to other provincial governors, and obtained the right to conclude treaties and raise loans.47 Thus Turkey, whose presence in Europe had extended under Suleiman the Magnificent to the gates of Vienna (1529), and whose expansion had been definitively stopped in 1683, again just outside Vienna, was reduced to a rump state across the Bosphorus straits with a population that was almost completely Muslim.48
While the Ottoman Empire continued to shrink, the Tsarist Empire, whose formal birth had occurred in 1721 when Muscovite Russia became the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, continued the consolidation of its rule in Asia. By the end of the nineteenth century it included Russia, much of what had been Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, the Baltic States and Finland, and also Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, as well as what are today known as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It probably contained more Muslims than the Ottoman Empire.
The immediate successor of the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, did not modify the borders of its predecessors significantly. It lost Poland and Finland (
Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire from 1809 until the end of 1917) as well as the Baltic states (Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, which they reoccupied after the Second World War). The fall of communism, however, brought about an entirely new situation. Countries whose claims to nationhood had been more linguistic and cultural than political (Ukraine and Belarus, for instance, but also Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, as well as the Asian Republics) had to rapidly develop a brand of nationalism relevant to their newly acquired statehood, won without a significant struggle of national liberation. Russia, much reduced in size for the first time, appeared to belong exclusively to Russians. Yet, far from being mono-ethnic, the new Russian Federation is home to a considerable variety of ethnic groups, and, as in the Tsarist Empire, numerous languages (twenty-four officially recognized), and nationalisms. These are either strongly secessionist (such as that of Chechnya) or demand protection from Russia against new threatening nationalisms (such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia) – just as Georgia under King Giorgi XII demanded to be incorporated into the Tsarist Empire in 1801 when it feared neighbouring Muslim nations more than it feared Russian hegemony.49
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which included Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Slovenia, and Croatia, continued to expand right up to 1914, notably at the expense of Turkey with the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. By contrast with the Ottoman and Tsarist Empires, it was itself a somewhat recent creation, formed out of the old Austrian Empire created in 1804 when Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, became the Emperor of Austria with the name Francis I. After its defeat by Germany in 1866 (when it lost Venetia to Italy and hegemony in Germany), the Austrian Empire reconstituted itself by sharing the task of governing what was an increasingly complex multinational state with Hungary. This was the so-called Compromise, or Ausgleich, of 1867.
The Anxious Triumph Page 7