On multiculturalism and empires
As war rages on, food for thought
Russia’s war against Ukraine has been ample opportunity to shed some light on imperial legacies. One of these is the fact that Russia, Ukraine and the Central Asian republics share many of the same ethnic minority populations: Armenians, Greeks (who have a long history in Ukraine), Germans (mainly Volga Germans in Russia), Koreans (Koryo-saram), and Meskhetian Turks (deported by Stalin from Georgia in 1944).
In talking about multiculturalism, empires and nationalism, one can make the striking observation about how population patterns developed in Austria-Hungary, Poland-Lithuania (more a commonwealth than an empire), as well as the Russian and Ottoman empires.
Not many people realise that Finland and Poland have small, loyal and well-integrated communities of Muslim Tatars with a long history. And I feel like talking about this because it is a fascinating subject regarding multiculturalism and national identity in East and West.
Two Wold Wars, the first featuring the Armenian Genocide (along with that of Greeks and Assyrians) and the second featuring the mass killings by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, altered the boundaries of a great deal of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The fact is that multiethnic and multireligious societies were a reality in those countries, and still are today, not least in countries that had been under Austrian, Ottoman or Russian rule. This created patchwork societies whose remnants still exist today.
The seeming paradox is that the outcome of two World Wars and the Cold War was to create more "diverse" societies in the West (by which I mean Western Europe, North America and Australia), and to create less "diverse" societies in Eastern Europe, not least due to the collapse of empires and recalibration of borders resulting from those wars and then the collapse of Communism. Nationalism is seen as anathema in the West, but not in Eastern Europe.
Actually, it is more because of this. From the 60s to the 80s, Western Europe, North America and Australia came to embrace "multiculturalism" as a kind of civic creed. To dissent from it was to be seen as "racist" and "white supremacist". Today's woke cult is not a new development but the logical end game of this.
In reality, the cultural gulf between East and West is not so much a rejection of diversity by the former, but rather a completely different value system coming into being in the West since World War II and especially since the 60s. One which aims to uproot Judeo-Christian foundations of our society and replace it with a new utopian humanity. It is striking that the reembrace of nationalism in Eastern Europe upon the collapse of Communism has only magnified this.
So you see a difference here. A country like Poland, having experienced partition, occupation and then Communism, may be seen as a homogenous Slavic and Catholic nation, but it does have ethnic and religious minorities - in smaller number than Poland once did, of course, but they are still there. The Kashubians, Germans, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians (Lithuania has a Polish minority, and Vilnius was once part of Poland), Russian Old Believers, and the Tatars. But all of them are loyal, integrated, patriotic citizens of Poland.
It is also the case in many places which are still overseas territories of Britain, France, Netherlands and the United States which have complex multiethnic populations, yet characterised by a strong sense of identification with the civic cultural identity, not to mention legal and constitutional norms, of the “colonial” power. Similarly you can find this in societies such as Singapore and Taiwan.
As the war in Russia carries on and we reflect on this history, we would do very well to learn more about these complex regions, peoples and cultures.
I deeply admire the way Eastern European nations have preserved their strong sense of nationalism and tradition. It may well prove to be the catalyst that saves the world from itself by diminishing the power of the elites, such as the WEF and UN, neutering their maniacal obsession with political and economic domination over Europe in particular, and the world at large (both advanced and emerging economies).
You are so right about Western Europe, North America and Australia. This spiritually devoid triumvirate has sold out completely to the cult of wokedom, and the neo-Marxist doctrine of Critical Social Theory and its divisive derivations.