If there is one human institution which is responsible for more misery than any other, it just may be the relatively new European concept of the nation-state.
Since we were all born in the 20th century, we of course have no direct knowledge of the world as it existed prior to that century. The century appears "normal" to us because we have no countervailing frame of reference, but it we step back we quickly see that the 20th century was the most unique in human history.
Put simply, more happened in the 20th century than in all of human history to that point. Among the things that happened was that the 20th century was by far the most violent in human history. People killed each other in numbers and for reasons that were simply inconceivable to even their grandparents.
And what was the cause of all this violence? Well, first of all the great majority of this violence took place in Europe. Much of the other violence was perpetrated or facilitated by Europeans throughout the rest of the world.
And most of this violence was the direct result of the new concept of nation-states as the European Empires collapsed at the beginning of the century. The assassination that sparked World War I was perpetrated by a Serbian who wanted Serbs to have their own independent nation-state rather than be a province in a huge multinational empire.
World War I destroyed the empires, in which people had lived in relative peace in communities that were very diverse. As the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, all the disparate groups in them scrambled to carve their own nation-states out of the corpse. The same pattern repeated the fall of the British and French empires after World War II.
As soon as the empires were gone, people became obsessed with purity in their new nation-states, rejecting the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan ideals of the empires. One of these people was Adolf Hitler, who was just the most famous ethnic cleanser of the century, who most aptly embodied this obsession with purity in the new nation states and distrust of "mixing" whereby nation states would lose their purity.
While different "peoples" had always existed, they had never before demanded contiguous stretches of land upon which they and only they could live. This idea, the idea of the nation-state as a home for a people where they could segregate and purify themselves, did not gain full steam in Europe until the late 19th century After Europe adopted this model, they imposed it on the parts of the world it colonized, which just so happens to have been the entire eastern hemisphere of the earth.
By the late 20th century the world consisted not of a handful of empires but of 200 nation-states, splintering into ever smaller and more "pure"entities. Making this denouement even bloodier is the fact that most of the borders of the world's new nations were drawn by Europe.
One of the most violent ironies is that the Middle East was a far more peaceful place before the British and French invented such nation-states as "Lebanon", "Iraq", and "Israel", among others.
When the British governed India as part of their empire, there was relatively little civil violence in India. When the British left the region known as "India", the landmass was divided into 2 nation-states, India and Pakistan. One was to be Hindu, one was to be Muslim.
The problem was that the people who lived there had never defined themselves in this way and, accordingly, lived with and among each other, so the only way to create 2 "pure" nations out of this empire was to do a whole bunch of killing and a whole bunch of ethnic cleansing.
The situation was the same in the Middle East, where Jews and Muslims lived relatively peacefully until it was decided that there should be new nation-states, one which was to be "Jewish", the others of which were to be Arab. Like in India, this new insistence on purity led to mass killing, mass expulsions, and decades of simmering hatred which could still erupt at any moment.
When Yugoslavia broke down in the 1990's, all of that violence was about how many, and what sort, of nation-states to carve out of that corpse. What was once one multi-ethnic mini-empire is now 8 small, weak, violent, but more ethnically "pure" nation-states.
The problem with the concept of the European style nation-state is that it calls for the impossible. Since minorities of some sort will always be prevalent in even the most "homogeneous" group, the quest for a true "nation" leads to endless killing and displacement in the name of the biologically and culturally impossible goal of "purification".
What if Hitler had succeeded in "purifying" Germany of every last Jew and Gypsy? Would he have stopped there? Or would he have continued identifying groups that were still not quite "German" enough?
What if the Pakistanis managed to kick every last Hindu into India? Would Pakistan then be satisfied with its Muslim "purity"? Or would it commence to purify its Muslims of newly-discovered "minorities"?
Imagine if the United States tried to define its nationhood in the European style. How many miniature nations would we have to split into to achieve "purity"? New York City alone would break into about 130 nations of its own, to start.
Europe has given many great gifts to our civilization. But it also, quite recently, spread the most insidious ideology across the world. This ideology held that people are divided into genetically and culturally distinct groups and that these groups can only "preserve" their purity and identity by seizing areas of land and cleansing that area of all "others".
Throughout all of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are "nations" created on this racist and suicidal model. The United States, despite all its flaws, largely avoided this pitfall.
We're so used to thinking of nations as natural and real things that we're sometimes surprised that national borders aren't visible from outer space. Because they don't exist except for in the hearts of men. The good news is that unlike continental drift, these lines can be erased.
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