Almost every polity has regional divides (north versus south, east versus west). Imagine if America's East-West differences had gotten as ugly as the North-South ones did in 1860 -- if instead of joking about Valley Girl accents and Manhattanites who wear only black, we had Californian soldiers fighting the Pennsylvania National Guard to the death.
Such is the situation in East Timor, a tiny, impoverished nation that won independence from Indonesia in 1999. The Timorese cause was popular among progressives worldwide largely because of the Indonesian government's brutality. However, another element in the cause's success was the culture of nationalism: Most of us were taught as children that nations should be free of big, bad empires.
And what is a nation? Big issue, which I'll leave for other posts. In any event, however you define it, (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, ideological) a nation is always supposed to make more sense politically than the sprawling empire that contains it. After all, what do the people of East Timor have in common with those of Sumatra, a thousand miles distant, with their different history, culture and language?
Problem is, both similarity and alienness are in the eye of the beholder. These traits are not a collection of facts; they are perceptions that people create by talking to one another. So you might find it easy to see me as an alien if I speak a different language, worship a different God, wear different clothes and eat different foods than you do. But none of that is necessary. People can be persuaded to fight others on any basis. Timor illustrates this. So does Somalia. These are both nations in which people who share culture, ethnicity, language, history and religion have nonetheless found other methods by which to divide themselves homicidally.
Perhaps, then, the homogenous ``nation'' makes no more sense as a way to organize politics than the messy incoherent multi-language superstate. In which case, we can ask if nationalism is worth giving up the superstate's virtues -- for instance, its interest in preventing itself from being sundered by religious, ethnic or culture-based violence.
So today's forbidden question is about all those David-vs.-Goliath independence movements of the past two centuries -- from the Greeks throwing off their Ottoman yoke to the Timorese: Have we been rooting for the wrong side?
Imagine the Middle East with the Ottoman Empire intact: No Iraq, no Syria, no Egypt, no Israel. No Saudi Arabia, either. For that matter, imagine Europe: No Greek revolt to inspire Byron and other poets, OK. But also no Balkan wars in the 1990's.
Or imagine a Europe with Habsburg Empire still doddering along: A giant, messy state in the middle of the continent, too diverse for language, ethnicity or even religion to be the basis of its politics. Lots of drawbacks can be listed there. But ``No Nazis?'' That one goes in the plus column.
Or, to get back to the news: What if the Timorese today were taking part in Indonesia's struggle to become a fair and democratic society? Would that be worse than the current situation?
