Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 9 – Many analysts in
both Moscow and the West have argued that globalization points to the demise of
the nation state as the most important actor in the international system, but
almost all of them have suggested that they will nonetheless survive by means
of enhanced cooperation among them.
Now, however, and under the impact
of Vladimir Putin’s statements and actions, a Moscow analyst has suggested that
the international system must and will give way to one based on civilizational
divides and new empires reflecting that division, an arrangement that would in
part restore the pre-Versailles world.
In a 3,000-word essay Vardan
Bagdasaryan, the deputy director of Moscow’s Sulakshin Center for Political
Thought and Ideology, reviews theories of ethno-genesis and the critiques of
those theories when they are used instrumentally or otherwise as the basis for
the formation of states (rusrand.ru/analytics/analyticsnatsionalnoe-gosudarstvo-cherez-prizmu-ideologij).
“Today,” the Moscow analyst says,
the failure of the ‘civic nation’ project is becoming ever more obvious,” and
that in turn is highlighting the failure of the concept of “the nation
state.” “For Eastern communities,” he
continues, “not national but clan ties are more important,” and the traditional
state of statehood is built not around the nation but around civilizations.”
“The traditional political form of
the state-civilization is the empire,” Bagdasaryan argues. “If the nation state is ethnically homogeneous,
then the empire-state has a heterogeneous foundation.” It exists as “as a
certain force center, around which are various buffer para-state formations.”
“In principle, this situation is not
distinguished from the one that exists today with numerous quasi-sovereign
states. There is a certain civilization center and there is a civilizational
periphery.” When the former is strong, it absorbs the latter; when it is
weaker, “the illusions of sovereignty arise in the buffer formations.”
The idea of the nation state,
Bagdasryan insists, arose out of “the specific territorial-tribal divisions of
early medieval Europe.” It was thus connected in an “immanent” way with” the
Western civilization context.” This helped the European states to unify, but
when applied outside of that civilizational framework, the nation state
doctrine has been destructive.
This “disintegrative” role is
manifest in the promotion of the right of nation to self-determination,
something that undermines the existence in the east of state civilizations and
empires. That helps the West achieve dominance, but it is generating a backlash
in Russia and elsewhere.
But, he continues, “inspire of the
integration logic of a new imperial construction, the former space of the USSR
has turned out to be disintegrated in a civilizational sense.” That in turn is
leading not to the demise of the state as such but rather to a shift from
failed nation states to a revived “civilization state” in the form of Russia.
Indeed, the Moscow analyst
continues, “the majority of nominal states in the contemporary world lack
subjecthood,” and consequently, they will group “around neo-imperial nucleus of
the civilizational periphery.”
Bagdasaryan
concludes: “The discourse about the prospects of the collapse of the nation
state” applies to Russia in another sense because it raises the questions as to
whether its “people is prepared to repeat the experiment of the
de-statification of the 1990s” and whether Russia will instead change the form
of its state to a civilizational one.
And he observes that French poet Paul
Valery’s words seem to have been specially directed at Russia today. “If the state is powerful, it will squeeze us [but] if the state is weak, we will die.”
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