State vs National peoples

While Jason Stearn’s book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters has its issues, it is nonetheless an illuminating read - not just for the nature of man, but also the contradictions of our species. The mobilization of elements of Rwandan society during the civil war of 1990-1994 was largely on ethno-racial lines, yet there were other ties which bound men in the war in ways seem strange at a glance to we foreigners, yet show a broader social phenomenon when examined more closely. The following passage in particular stands out, part of an interview with the pro-Hutu General Rwarakabije a decade after the genocide (emphasis mine):

When I asked Rwarakabije about these practices, he shook his head. “It is true. We were brainwashed. And there were a lot of extremists there who preyed on people’s fear.” “Did you ever use this kind of language?” I asked. “Yes, but we never did what the tracts said. We needed to scare them. There were extremists who wanted to kill Tutsi, but that was wrong. We had Tutsi with us in the camps! There were officers who had been in the Rwandan army and had fled with us. One of my bodyguards was Tutsi. We had to tell them not to stray too far from the barracks or the population could kill them.” “Did you ever order the killing of civilians?” “No, never.” “But civilians were killed.” Rwarakabije sighed and fidgeted with his loose watch again. “Chain of command . . . I’m not sure you can apply that to our rebellion.” “You didn’t control some of your own commanders?” “My troops, yes. But the civilian ideologues, the extremists, no. Many of the army commanders did not support the genocide. It was something that had been organized by the civilians along with some extremist commanders.” Rwarakabije ducked and weaved, denying responsibility, blaming massacres on others, using ends to justify means. “Where elephants fight,” he said, “the grass is trampled.” It was a convenient metaphor. Almost every commander I met in the region used it when I asked them about abuses against civilians. In his calm serenity, Rwarakabije was a counterpoint to the images of hate-driven killers. According to everyone who knew him, he didn’t have any apparent hatred for Tutsi. One of his battalion commanders in the insurgency was Tutsi, and he was more comfortable being called Kiga than Hutu. Apparently he hadn’t joined and led the so-called Hutu rebellion out of ethnic chauvinism, even if the movement was deeply bigoted. He had joined because this is where he had ended up and what made sense for him to do when the civil war broke out; he could have tried to change it, but it would have been too difficult, too risky. Back to the description of Eichmann’s trial: “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

In spite of years of anti-Tutsi hatred and the open campaign of racial extermination launched by the Hutu-dominated MRND-government of Rwanda, General Rwarakabije testifies to the active participation of Tutsis fighting for a Hutu restoration as late as 2004. While one apparently identifies with another Rwandan ethnic minority, the others, like Rwarakabije himself, chose to fight for what they saw as the legitimate government against Tutsi rebels. Their identity was based on a state, a political entity, rather than a nation - a biological entity.

The vast majority of Tutsis of course sided with the victorious Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. Isaac Bacirongo’s memoir discusses how crypto-Tutsis¹ in the Congo who had been pretending to be other ethnicities for decades immediately rose up to aid their coethnics during the First and Second Congo Wars or spied among the Hutu exile communities.

In spite of Tutsi solidarity, the RPF included a number of Hutus from the beginning. Initially they were mostly opportunists, as time passed more joined to be on the winning side. The RPF’s racism was more implicit than that of the Hutu paramilitaries (although it could be almost as violent) as it was driven by friendship, military, and patronage networks as well as longstanding folkways (Tutsi herders vs Hutu farmers) rather than explicit state-sponsored ideologies. The result was that the triumphant Tutsi ruling class that installed itself in Rwanda incorporated enterprising Hutus into the power structure as individuals rather than as a class while declaring that ethno-racial divisions in Rwanda were a creation of Belgian colonialism. All Rwandans were, per the constitution, equal under the law and forbidden to form racially-exclusive organizations. Tutsi national identity had been suppressed under a Rwandan state identity - for now. Restive Tutsis and Hutus outside of Rwanda still remember who they are, their identities not squashed due to the weak states of neighboring countries.

The complex interaction between and evolution of state and national identities is unique to neither to the lands surrounding Africa’s Great Lakes nor modernity. It is an interaction that occurs at many places and at many times.

Human individuality is a myth. Meet a hundred men, and you’ll confuse several faces, hear the same half-articulated sentiments expressed in accents that hardly differ, and perceive pairs or triplets of identical personalities. Indeed, were men truly individuals, it would be impossible to describe personalities at all. The klutz, the bon vivant, the slacker, the morose artist, and the chad are just a few of the several hundred human characters into which all men can be classified.

Man’s animating spirits and character are usually subsumed in the society in which he dwells - the exceptions are so rare as to be notable. His family, his class, his religion, his language, his nation, his mode of transportation, and his ecology all shape him in both a positive and negative fashion. Positive in that they instill him with values, ideas, and loyalties as well as giving him rights and duties. Negative in that they give him enemies and proclivities to define himself in contrast of.

While man’s passions are often swayed, his higher level loyalties rarely change. His highest level of loyalty is usually to his religion. Second to that is to his country. That country is sometimes understood as a state - a political entity, or a nation - a biological entity. The division is rarely clear cut in history, with states often rooting their legitimacy in biological claims, nations staking their legitimacy on ideological precepts, or states evolving into nations with time. Nonetheless the division is still a useful one - some peoples being national peoples, and others state peoples.

The Germans of Austria were one such state people.

The liberal-nationalist revolutionary wave that swept across Europe in 1848 affected the multi-ethnic Hapsburg monarchy of Austria more than anywhere else. Some of the nations under the Austrian Empire - the Czechs, the Poles, the Italians, and particularly the Hungarians saw the opportunity for national representation if not outright independence from Austria. Others like the Croats and Ukrainians rallied behind the Hapsburg family - seeing themselves and their interests bound by dynastic or state ties, at the very least in shared opposition to their likely successors (the Hungarians and Poles respectively).

The ethnic core of Austria, the Germans, was in an awkward position. Revolutionary Vienna flew German flags and expected to become part of a liberal Greater Germany, yet many Germans in Austria had no desire to become part of a religious minority within a united Germany which would have had a Protestant majority. In addition, national feeling among Germans was not as strong as it would later become. Their affection for the Hapsburg dynasty and Austrian state were stronger than their national identity for the time being.

Germans in Austria saw themselves as a state people whose identity was closely tied to their language and social position within the Austrian Empire. Those Germans who articulated nationalist sentiments saw themselves usually as liberals or centralists, and thus above the petty national grievances of the rural and peripheral peoples. They believed that they had to pursue the interests of the Austrian state and ignore the parochial concerns of their own people and region. The liberals were in that sense the heirs of the previous century’s Emperor Joseph II, who had Germanized the bureaucracy as part of his Enlightenment reforms in an effort to improve the functioning of the state by removing internal linguistic barriers, rather than for national or cultural reasons. As such a claim to German identity in the 19th century (unlike the 16th and 20th centuries) was theoretically independent of blood. One who would speak German and who appreciated German culture could become, and indeed should become German due to its advanced culture. Germanness in Austria was civic rather than national.

The lack of interest among Slavs and others in becoming German in Austria confused centralists. Why would a man or community not desire to join a higher culture? Why were so many attached to the primitive languages which lacked the great writers and musicians of the Germans? Czech national aspirations in particular disturbed the German minority of Bohemia. The development of increasingly militant pan-German organizations as well as German ethnic consciousness in Bohemia had begun as early as 1848 but were politically accelerated by explicit Czech nationalist rallies in the 1860s.

The Austrian and later Austro-Hungarian governments did their best to smooth over national divides. As the state people, Germans were continually willing to grant concessions to the other peoples of the empire - concessions that other peoples were unwilling to make. The institutions that the Germans identified with were state institutions closely tied to the empire and Hapsburg dynasty, while by contrast the institutions that the other peoples identified with were national institutions - usually schools or churches. Their identity and cultures had to be propagated through language and religion - a concern that the Germans, as the politically dominant and culturally prestigious culture didn’t have to worry about as much.

The difference in scale of the institutions which drew national loyalties had immense medium-term effects. The widespread cooperation for school funding (literally thousands of groups across the empire worked together to fund and organize schools) and church funding created a basis for future democracy - at least in Czechoslovakia. Locals banded together for a pro-social cause, they created schooling organizations, which in turn formed small hierarchies which succeeded or failed based on popular support. Those which succeeded in gaining public support were able to connect builders, teachers, and parents in a seed of a future democracy. The teachers and the school financiers would be a source of politicians and political activists. It was not the character of any Czech “Great Man” that ensured democracy, but Czech institutions and the classes tied to them.

By contrast, the German state identity inhibited mass mobilization and social cooperation. Even though the Austrian state made substantial efforts at political decentralization, the state identity of Germans in Austria lent itself more easily to bureaucratization than mass mobilization. Bitter liberals such as Vienna’s mayor Karl Lueger were able to leverage popular displeasure about mass non-German (predominately but not exclusively Slavic) migration to previously German-dominated cities, but were essentially reactionaries despite their liberal ideals. The political system and bureaucracy could be controlled, and the public appealed to, but little of the German population could be politically mobilized. It wasn’t until the collapse of the empire and the shedding of the Slavic and Hungarian lands that the Germans of Austria were able to practice mass political mobilization. Unlike the Czechs who had extensive experience in political mobilization from local institutions that lent itself to democracy, Austrian Germans were ruled by a brittle and bureaucratic state structure. It would be the fascists and socialists who mobilized increasingly large segments of the population into party networks due to theoretical, political, and cultural innovations which they developed in the late 1910s and 1920s.

The first century of Islam after the death of Mohammed the Prophet featured the conquest of much of Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Iran, and North Africa. Islam’s spread among non-Arabs was limited under the Umayyad Caliphate. The Umayyads were not as pious as succeeding caliphates, and largely preferred an infidel population that they could collect a poll tax from rather than tax-free converts.

Governance varied across the Caliphate. Syria, the Umayyad heartland, was administered by a long-standing bureaucracy in the Greek-style but Arabic language. As there was one God in heaven, so there was one ruler in Syria. In far-away Khorasan, the Caliphs maintained their authority by appointing governors from one of three endlessly feuding resident Arab tribes. If a tribe became troublesome in Khorasan, the Caliph could simply grant a governorship to a leader of the other two. While a tribe could be stronger than another, it could never become paramount because the power of the other two tribes would always exceed it.

As such, it was a long time before a force could unite the Moslems of Khorasan. Competition between the Arab tribes there drove cultural, political, and religious innovations that failed to develop in bureaucratic Syria. A tribe which failed to adopt such innovations was soon surpassed by not only its rivals, but also left it vulnerable to the predations of dangerous outsiders such as the Turks. One such cultural innovation was the mawla - a kind of association between non-Arabs with Arab tribes. Such associations provided necessary manpower in a largely Iranian region. In addition, anti-Umayyad secret societies proliferated across Khorasan, fostering a set of ideologies whose synthesis eventually emerged in the 740s.

The cultural turmoil in Khorasan produced the Abbasid Revolution, a movement that swore to overthrow what it saw as the illegitimate Umayyads and restore the true practices and beliefs of Mohammed. After overthrowing the Umayyad governor in Khorasan, the Abbasid forces marched across Iran to Mesopotamia. There they defeated the Umayyads at the Battle of the Zab, then conquered Syria three months later. The Arab supremacy of the Umayyads was overthrown both philosophically and structurally by the Abbasids. The Arab tribal armies which had reigned in Khorasan under the Umayyads were replaced by armies recruited from towns regardless of ethnicity. To the Abbasids, Iranians and Arabs would be equal under true Islam, and peoples from across the Islamic world would be drawn to the Caliphate.

While the Abbasid Caliphs remained Arab, a noticeable part of the Caliphate’s cultural and administrative classes became Iranian over the next two centuries. According to Ibn Khaldun, the long sedentary history of the Iranians as well as the anti-intellectual attitudes of the nomadic Arabs caused the former to prevail over the latter in the bureaucracy, scholarship, and industry even as the military and aristocracy remained Arab. Iranians were aware of their ethnic distinctiveness from the Arabs. While true believers in Islam and supportive of the Caliphate they served, the Iranians naturally resented their structurally (though not morally, ethnically, or philosophically) inferior status to the Arabs. While Islam gave them equality, they remained in an Arab-centered world where non-Arabs were seen (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not) as cultural inferiors whose role in society was entirely a function of their relation to Arabs. The shu’ubiyya movement was the result.

Similar to post-colonial thought of the 20th century, the shu’ubiyya movement served to synthesize the colonial language and civilization with native ethnic identity. The Iranians and other non-Arabs under the Abbasids began to see themselves as truer to Islam than those of Arabs. After all, they had embraced Islam by choice, unlike the Arabs who had been born into the religion. Seemingly paradoxically, the shu’ubiyya movement grew in strength through the 9th century even as Iranians became more powerful in Abbasid society. Its appeal was not because of a sense of inferiority, but a sense of superiority. As Iranians moved upwards through Abbasid society, they needed to morally justify their new position, and there was no easier way of doing it than by embracing shu’ubiyya. For instance, the Iranians sniped at the eating habits of the Arabs, accusing their ancestors of eating lizards, which is forbidden in Islam. Just as in Czechia and Rwanda, class and ethnicity begat consciousness. The Iranian scholar and clerk resented the Arab soldier and herdsman, but publicized his resentment in the framework of the Arab’s own political system and religion.

At an individual social level USians are little different from Arabs, Iranians, Germans, Czechs, and Tutsis (Hutus, like most Bantus, appear to be different enough that social phenomenon emerge quite differently among them). The distributions of nutrition, intelligence, and personality among those peoples vary across time and space; but *as individuals* they are about equally susceptible to the social forces that shape identity. Thus, the history of their institutions and societies can be examined for the forces that drive national and state identities.

The arrival of the Americans on the North American continent in 1607 marked the beginning of the third apocalypse for the surviving Amerindians in the second millennium. Scattered across twenty-five colonies and territories in 1775², the Americans embraced a variety of folkways, political systems, and dialects. Those folkways, political systems and dialects had their roots in the Old World - with the relative stability of the British Isles after the twelfth century preserving and encouraging a substantial amount of heterogeneity that even today hasn’t been fully leveled.

The Thirteen Colonies cooperated together to wage a rebellion against Britain. The War of Independence was crueler and more destructive than now remembered. A thirtieth of the population was expelled from the country. The northern aristocracy fled to Canada, while the treacherous Philadelphia establishment was impoverished and sidelined. Their and other Loyalist threads in the tapestry of America were singed away forever, only dimly remembered by revisionist historians. Other threads which had been woven in favor of the Patriots became more closely entwined, leveling out what had before been substantial differences.

The identities of the people in the Thirteen Colonies were more closely tied to their state than to the resultant United States, so the United States’ founders created a federal system of government which left a great deal of power with the states - no matter how small. Nonetheless, most Americans were united in an independent state, with only a small fraction left under British rule in Canada or the Caribbean.

Not all of those under the new United States were Americans. Hundreds of thousands of Africans had been imported as slaves, and Amerindians lived both in militant anti-American coalitions as well as under American rule. Struggles with both shaped American history, racializing identities and weakening but not obviating sectarian divides. As suffrage spread from property holders to the White masses in the first half of the 19th century, it was taken away from blacks. After all, the Constitution of the United States declared that it was to ourselves and our Posterity - not the posterity of others like blacks and Amerindians.

Sectional divides plagued America for the first two and a half centuries. Initially the main divide was between the east and the west. Transportation by water was one-fifteenth the cost of transportation of land. The result was that while the people settled along the eastern coast of America were bound together by trade, those who lived west of the non-navigable Fall Line drifted apart.

The canal building period in the early 19th century plus the invention of the steamship largely erased the threat of western separatism which hung over the United States for the first forty years of its independence. The west was integrated with the east, and the sectional divide of the future was to be the north vs the south.

While the South had a healthy culture by the standards of the world at the time, the North had one of the healthiest in history. Guided by the wise leadership of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists; the Yankees grew rapidly in number through natural increase. The decentralized nature of US governance as well as the multicentered economy enabled positive social evolution. Groups and ways of life that were healthy grew rapidly and spread, those that didn’t faded into obscurity. The Quakers for instance fell from a third of the American population in the 18th century to become an irrelevant sect by 1860 due to their low birth rates and apostasy.

The triumph of the North over the South in the American Civil War was a victory of the Republican Party over the Democratic Party and the Yankees over the Cavaliers as well. While seven of the first sixteen presidents had been from Virginia, seven of the next sixteen would be from the Yankee stronghold of Ohio. The Republicans would control the Presidency for forty-seven, the Senate for fifty-seven, and the House of Representatives for forty-one of the next sixty-seven years.

Before the war, it was said "the United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an "is."

So spake the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. He was right. While the forces that drove men to identify with the states (plural) survived, they were weakened while the forces that drove men to identify with America (the nation) and the United States (a state) became stronger. Much of the drive was due to the anti-bureaucratic nature of government and society which gave strong incentives for the people who mattered to be deeply integrated into political and social structures.

Since the presidency of Andrew Jackson 1829-1837, government jobs had largely been distributed among a victorious election candidate’s supporters in a spoils system which ensured that the machinery of government was kept, if not in competent hands, then at least loyal ones. The kind of internal intrigues and bureaucratic sabotage which plagued Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump were largely avoided in that manner.

A large part of the health of Yankee society was in its voluntarism. Whether it was organizing schools, sewers, or armies - there were usually organizations that would rise to fill the need. Government would step in to provide funding, relying on the honesty of the volunteers to not squander it. While often successfully swindled by dishonest crooks, the system nonetheless impressed Europeans who saw it in effect.

Such was Republican democracy in the 1870s: volunteers from below working with loyal civil servants appointed by democratically elected politicians from above.

It was the values of the Republican Party that would be the values of America and the United States from 1865 to 1932. The Republican ideal was that of an English-speaking Protestant yeoman farmer or individual proprietor who owned a home. Wage labor and rentiership were viewed dimly, and property rights were viewed as near-absolute. Those who lived up to the Republican ideal were the ethno-socioeconomic core of the Republican Party, and thus because of its victory in the American Civil War, of America too.

While the Republican vision of society was noble, it was starting to be passed by even during the time of Lincoln’s presidency. By the end of the 19th century, the vision that had been progressive in the 1820s was essentially reactionary. Large-scale Catholic immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and farming debts undermined the foundations of Republican ideology. The hierarchal structure of the Catholic Church was alien to the overwhelmingly Protestant Americans, and showed that even Whites with US citizenship did not necessarily have their hearts with America. Industrialization spread wage labor and put artisans out of work, weakening the strongly Republican socioeconomic base of individual proprietors. Urbanization required a larger government to manage essential services such as sanitation and transportation. Unionization undermined the theory of property rights, with corporations seen as parasites by a growing part of the population. Property rights also came under attack on a monetary basis - indebted farmers in the late 19th century loathed the gold standard which protected savers, and preferred a silver standard which would inflate away their debts.

The defections of hundreds of Irishmen during the Mexican-American War, substantial numbers of Irish volunteers born in the United States fighting for the Boers against Britain in the Second Boer War, and election of openly anti-American Irish politicians such as James Curley showed Americans that mere citizenship didn’t remove old loyalties. The arrival of millions of immigrants from other non-Protestant peoples such as Catholic Italians and Ashkenazi Jews solidified that view among Americans as the immigrants turned formerly American cities into melting pots. While not Americans in any sense, those people nonetheless still became US citizens. They were USians - tied to the United States as a state; but not necessarily Americans tied to America by ancestry, religion, or ideology.

The Democrats, grievously defeated in the American Civil War, found themselves forming a coalition of the fringes. They attracted those who were not part of the Yankee Protestant, yeoman or proprietor ethno-socioeconomic core of America as well as eventually the original Progressives who were frustrated by the reactionary and libertarian impulses of the Republicans. By the 1920s, the Democrats were able to amass a coalition of the working poor, the Catholics, the Jews, and the Southerners. The coalition of the ascendant was bolstered by immigration as well as higher birth rates among Catholics and Southerners.

That coalition, which would attain power in 1932 and dominate USA’s politics until 1994, was able to incorporate those with identities separate or even antagonistic to America and the United States. The structure of the Democratic Party had evolved to accommodate factions as diverse as Jewish socialists and Southern White supremacists - a structure that thrives to this day even though the coalition members have changed. The Democrats support an overarching USian state identity as well as the national identities of groups that are part of their coalition (some of which they invented), while rejecting an American national identity as pure evil. Unlike the New Deal coalition of 1932-1994 whose hold was weakened by the post-war Judeo-Christian synthesis weakening sectarian identities as well as the assimilation of White ethnics, the current Democratic coalition of the fringes has successfully altered cultural structures to instill a heterogenous identity based on anti-American sentiment that demands conformity of substance even as it allows for variety of forms into both immigrants and Americans.

By contrast, the Republicans, forged in their era of preeminence after the Civil War, have always been incapable of multiple loyalties. Their tendency to win the support of identity groups is closer to tokenism rather than representation, and the party’s general current demands assimilation towards prevailing cultural and political norms. They see Americans as a state rather than a national people, and as such inevitably identify with actions by the United States in time. Domestic causes that inspired great animus merely twenty years ago such as homosexuality are now widely supported among Republican elites because those causes now animate the state to which their hearts belong. The idea that their country was subverted, or that their nation is under attack occurs to them, but rapidly fades when reminded of the United States’ foreign conflicts.

The experience of the Americans in the South is a good example of that tendency. Under the Democrats the Americans in the South openly embraced White supremacy and were incorporated into the national political system. After changing parties to the Republicans, the political current changed to the Republican ideal of pan-USianism, where all US citizens were viewed equally. The newly Democratic blacks by contrast, kept their separate national identity and were able to maintain exclusive institutions, whose new authority was leveraged into tremendous moral, political, and economic power.

The construction of a successful multinational state digs the grave of the founding nation by its very nature, even if doesn’t necessarily bury it. The organic and local ties which can grow into national institutions are snuffed by expanding state bureaucracies which resent man’s affinity for blood over water. The Tutsis of today are submerging themselves in the Hutu masses of Rwanda, praying that a strong state can prevent a repeat of the catastrophe of 1994. The Germans of Austria watched as all of their efforts came to nought in the First World War, reluctantly shedding their old ideal of a United States of Austria for a united Germany. The Arabs watched as converted Iranians took over their economy and religion, powerless to do anything about it even as they in theory ruled the Caliphate. In time they lost power altogether to national peoples such as the Turks, Armenians, Kurds, and others.

Americans are little different. We too forged a great state in the aftermath of our Civil War, and in time it eroded the implicit ties of blood, association, and friendship which created it. While the other nations in the United States have national representation, we do not, and it is unlikely that we ever will. The state will endure, but the nation will perish - unless Americans can carve out national institutions for ourselves just as we did in the 19th century.

1. In the early 2010s I read a blog by a Hutu immigrant in the United States. He complained at length about crypto-Tutsis, claiming among other things that crypto-Tutsi women were capable of auto-aborting non-Tutsi children, and that they would cuckold Hutu husbands with Tutsi men to keep their race pure. Regrettably I have been unable to find the blog since then.

2. in addition to the famous Thirteen Colonies - the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Leeward Islands, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, West Florida, East Florida, and Rupert’s Land. Quebec was mostly French, so can’t be considered American.