Ukraine, Putin and Linguistic Nationalism

President Vladimir Putin’s recognition of breakaway republics in Ukraine’s east has strong and frightening parallels in the West and has widespread precedents in nineteenth and twentieth century actions that forced millions of peoples to relocate. They have been described as separatists but are better described as linguistic nationalists.

The basic idea is that difference in language demands political or national difference and realignment into new unities. This need not be so.

In the West, the nineteenth century and twentieth century saw constant redrawing of boundaries along linguistic lines. All German speaking peoples belong to one state and nation; hence national boundaries will be broken to annex or liberate the German speakers. Others in those regions shall leave. Or, following World War I, Greek speakers shall leave ancestral homes and move elsewhere to ‘the true Greek nation’. All Turkish speakers must leave here and go to Turkey. The Subcontinent must be divided into India and Pakistan.

Linguistic nationalism will always split and try to divide into units of national sameness, or draw same-speakers into one dominant and exclusive national power. It is taken as ‘natural’. But it is an artifice.

No one today thinks that all English speaking peoples belong to one nation, state, or empire and the rise of ‘multiculturalism’ is one attempt to embrace difference within one larger political entity.

In Australia, many languages hang in the meta-peg of ‘speaking english’. Perhaps English still holds India together. This does not begin to make any English speaker a member of the English State.

Canada has survived with a core bilingualism of French and English.

I am reminded of the nineteenth century maxim ‘war is politics by other means’. wars of separation and national purity are also driven by an inability to embrace linguistic and other difference within one political entity.

My thoughts on this topic are driven by close readings of the Iraqi scholar Elie Kedourie and his seminal work Nationalism – etymological, historical, exemplary and wise.