Posted on 05/23/2006 8:51:07 AM PDT by A. Pole
Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history.
Sunday's vote in Montenegro, a tiny land of fewer people than the Washington, D.C., this writer grew up in, voted Sunday to secede from Belgrade, establish a nation and seek entry into the European Union.
In 1991, Macedonia peacefully seceded. Slovenia and Croatia fought their way out, and Bosnia broke free after a war marked by the massacre at Srbenica and NATO intervention. Bosnia is itself subdivided into a Serb and a Croat-Muslim sector.
After the 78-day U.S. bombing of Serbia by the United States, and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the province in the wake of the NATO war, Kosovo is 90 percent Muslim and Albanian. Loss of this land that was the cradle of the Serb nation seems an inevitability.
The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations -- many of which had never before existed -- seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written.
The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory.
Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished. The British and French, greatest of the Western Empires, are long gone. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the Irish, though its sons had fought to erect and maintain the Victorian "empire on which the sun never set" -- and defend it in World War I -- fought relentlessly to be free of it. They wanted, and in 1921 won, a small nation of their own, on their own small island.
The Irish preferred it to being part of the British Empire.
The call of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, faith and history pulled apart the greatest of all the ideological empires, the Soviet Empire, and the Soviet Union, that "prison house of nations."
Transnational institutions, the embryonic institutions of a new world government to which the elites of the West and Third World are transferring allegiance and power, include the United Nations, the EU, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Seabed Authority, the Kyoto Protocol, the IMF and the World Bank.
The sub-nations, or ex-nations, struggling to be born or break free include Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain, Corsica, northern Italy and Quebec in the West. Iraq, as we have seen, is a composite of peoples divided by tribe, ethnicity and faith -- as are Iran, Pakistan and India. Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs, with a minority of Bedouins.
Lind argues that not only are nations subdividing, losing their monopolies on the love and loyalty of their peoples, but they are being superseded by "non-state actors" that are challenging the monopoly on warfare enjoyed by the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War.
Among the more familiar non-state actors are the Crips and Bloods, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the racial nationalists of MEChA, the white supremacists of Aryan Nations, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Maoists of Nepal and the Tamil Tigers.
Among the central questions of our time is a central question of any time: Who owns the future?
Of late, the transnational vision has lost its allure. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and most of Latin America reject the NAFTA vision of Bush and Vicente Fox. French and Dutch voted down the EU Constitution, which now appears dead. The Doha round of world trade negotiations is headed for the rocks. Hostility is rising to bringing Turkey into the EU.
Arabs and Turks in Europe identify more and more with the Islamic faith they have in common and the countries whence they came, not the one in which they live and work.
So, too, do millions of illegal aliens in the United States. They march defiantly under Mexican flags in American streets demanding the rights of U.S. citizens -- while an intimidated political class rushes to accommodate and appease them, assuring itself this is but the latest reincarnation of Ellis Island.
As the Old Republic trudges to its death, less and less do we hear that incessant blather about the American Empire, "the world's last superpower" and "our unipolar moment."
Bump
I'm STILL looking for a reason why the nation-state is preferable for Euro-peons to the old Austria-Hungarian and Holy Roman Empires. "Nationalism" was an idea that came to fruition in the Englightenment and may not be ideal for small polities.
Brilliant stuff by Buchanan. The Old Republic is dead and gone, what comes next is a real mystery. The folks from La Raza have their own ideas about the southwest. The greens in the pacific northwest would like their own nation-state that they've named Cascadia. Will the south also rise again?
This is as depressing an article as can be written. Is it possible to say "I give up" any louder without actually saying it?
In other words, the "nation-state" can only die in a world that is dominated by a global empire.
Baby-boomers destroyed the greatest nation in history.
Baby-boomers are the worst thing that ever happened to this nation.
We are now in the devolution phase of that process--the colonies of the Americas were first to bust away, then Africa and Asia. The Soviet Union broke apart and its satellites in Eastern Europe are now free. The same for Yugoslavia. This is a trend that should be encouraged and applauded.
What we are seeing in the world is the fulfillment of the natural desire of people to rule themselves--self-determination. That need is particularly evident in peoples who are ruled by dictatorial or oppressive regimes; we in the USA should in particular understand the right of people to be free and to rule themselves.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Generally I agree with Buchanan on his points of view, but I have to disagree here. He points out about the rise of international/supernational institutions like the European Union as proof of the nation-state's death, but even he admits to how unpopular the EU has become with many European voters.
The real problem is that, at least here in the West, including both Europe and the US, the political leaders have sold their nations down the river to international and corporate interests. Most people want a strong nation to live in and be proud of, but when you feel your own nation has abandoned you, you are naturally going to turn towards ethnically or religiously-based groups to provide you a sense of belonging.
It's easier to portray liberals and conservatives as their extremes - ie, nutjob commies and fascists - but really, you talk to most people and they share the same concerns, many about losing our fundamental rights and freedoms to unchecked governments and corporations from within and, from without, foreign threats that our "leaders" don't seem able or willing to defend us against. The differences between the anti-global activists at one extreme and the anti-immigrant groups on the other may seem worlds apart, but I bet at this point they probably have more in common than the typical American does with his typical "elected leader". Sadly, we seem more concerned with demonizing and defeating each other than actually cleaning up the mess.
Just my .02 cents...
...er, that should read "elected leaderS" there at the end. I've pretty much had it with the whole lot, not just the President (which the singular may have implied).
Like Iraq?
Nice. :)
Would you call that "Returning the favor"?
:D
What we are seeing is the aftermath of the colonial era. And it aint pretty.
The more relevant question: "is USA a nation state"? If not what the slogan "America First" could mean?
Ping!
I can't see what any of them gained.
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