Nationalism is such an ubiquitous and powerful ideology, we don't realise that pretty much everyone today is an extreme nationalist.
Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Most today think it's a good-and-fitting thing to defend "one's country". And this impulse is vastly more powerful than defending "democracy".
Who would die to stop a coup? Few. Who would die to stop an "invasion", apparently, many.
What motivates Ukrainians after all?
Quite an extreme ideology, one that puts so many men on the battlefield. But nations were invented, there is nothing "natural" to fight for here; nor anything even clearly moral.
"Democracy", therefore, is clearly a vastly vastly weaker ideology. Nationalism is the most powerful ideology to ever exist.
I don't think Ukraine is a good example of your point, as apart from being a war between two nations, it is clearly also a war between democratic and authoritarian belief systems. That ideological divide is a large part of what sparked it in the first place--the whole thing began with mass pro-democracy demonstrations that ousted an authoritarian leader.
My perception is that Ukrainians know what it's like to live under an authoritarian system and they would rather risk death and the total destruction of the country than go back to it. Nationalism is clearly a factor as well, but it is deeply intertwined with pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian ideals. I don't think you'd see anything close to this level of resistance if victory would mean an authoritarian Ukraine rather than a democratic Ukraine.
> I don't think you'd see anything close to this level of resistance if victory would mean an authoritarian Ukraine rather than a democratic Ukraine.
Ah, well: I do.
I think this has extraordinarily little to do with any "political system", of which Ukraine and Russia were both quite similar.
One Nation invaded another, and in such moments people's nationalism is trigged. One defends' "one's own nation" regardless.
This is a vastly more powerful reaction than any intellectual-sentimental philosophy. This "Nation" is "Ours" and not "Yours".
Indeed, the heart of the matter is that Russia isnt nationalist. They're still operating in a pre-National era of loose ethnicities being "of a common group" and hence do not think these borders matter so much.
What russia hasnt fully understood is that essentially the rest of the world has become nationalist, whilst it still operates under an ethnic-imperial model.
Russia as a polity is very confused on this. Officially, it's civic nationalist - you're supposed to think of yourself as a part of the "Russian nation" regardless of your ethnicity, but it's also defined broadly to allow for incomplete assimilation.
As a side note, it's more difficult to talk about this in (most) languages other than Russian because they don't have the distinction that Russian itself does. The word "русский" ("russky") usually means Russian in an ethnic sense, while the word "российский" ("rossiyskiy" - from the name of the country, which is Rossiya in Russian) means Russian in a sense of pertaining or belonging to the country. Thus you can compare and contrast "russky nationalism" (ethnic) and "rossiyskiy nationalism" (civic).
In practice, the government tolerates and sometimes encourages ethnic Russian nationalism so long as it does not manifest as open political opposition.
I don't think your reading lines up with history. Putin was clearly content to allow Ukraine a large degree of sovereignty and autonomy as long as they remained under an authoritarian system. If nationalism was the only driver, why overthrow Yanukovych, thereby spitting in Putin's face and risking domination by another country?
What wasn't tolerable to Putin was a bourgeoning democracy on Russia's doorstep with similar ethnography and demography to Russia. If it proved to be more successful than Russia's model (which isn't hard), that's a clear threat to his regime.
'I think this has extraordinarily little to do with any "political system", of which Ukraine and Russia were both quite similar.'
It seems like you're simply ignoring what happened in 2014. The stark difference between Ukraine and Russia's political systems (and their future trajectories) after that point is one of the main causes of the war.
The "authoritarian system" in question was russia's ethnic-imperial system of empire. That it was "authoritarian" is far less important than its being Russian, ethnically and culturally.
The offense to russia was first to turn to the west, and hence as Russia sees it, a counter-empire; and the secondly, the suprise and outrage, to believe that it's a Nation.
Both are incomprehensible to Russia -- it has nothing to do with how "authoritarian" anything is.
I see some truth to your point, but it's also very reductive, and you're providing nothing to back up your reductionism.
The "turn to the west" is geopolitical but it's also a turn away from a conservative authoritarian order and toward a liberal democratic order. Is that just a meaningless geopolitical coincidence? No, it's clearly part of the equation, though certainly not the only part.
Well my point is only that a person reading my comments comes to see their "intuitive nationalism" as an explicit feature of their thinking, rather than a natural fact of the world.
My analysis doesnt need to be 100% to show that even the very idea of "invasion" in the modern sense is full of contingencies we don't acknowledge.
What a weird thing, no, in the history of the world that the US invades iraq and wishes for it to govern "itself".
Once you remove the "Nation" from your thinking, various issues become clearer, esp. why so many "countries" appear unstable. Ie., politically they are countries, but havent yet "progressed" to "default nationalism".
Once a region adopts nationalism, it seems there's no going back; and people of that Nation are fundamentally radicalised by that notion. There are "borders", "immigration" and indeed -- how strangely -- "illegal" immigration; there are armies, and you should join one if you're "invaded".
These ideas appear in our thinking as transparent, obvious, facts of the world; and if we feel they are violated, then we feel outraged -- and would act very severely to get redress. This is radicalism, and a certain "liberal nationalism" has deeply radicalised the west.
I think, foremost, we want Ukraine to fight Russia because we believe Ukraine to be a Nation. I think something many of its own people did not think 20 years ago, and now, many die because they believe it.
I actually like the point you tried to develop in this thread, because I feel most people don't question their assumptions often enough. However, you are clearly reducing complex phenomena to a single cause, incorrectly so in my opinion.
Greek city-states fought each other all the time. They definitely had a concept of "Nation", even though they would have a different name for it. All patterns you associate with Nationalism were there, including xenophobia - that's where the goddamn word was created. The rise of what we call Nationalism in modernity has its own peculiarities, including the rise of military-industrial complexes that have every incentive to weaponize it as well. But it is simply wrong to think that, for example, the issue between Ukraine and Russia can be meaningfully reduced to one or the other side "adopting nationalism". Also, it is factually incorrect to say 20 years ago Ukrainians (or inhabitants of that region) would have wanted to be ruled by Putin or Russia in general.
It gets less clear-cut as the war drags on. For example, a rather extreme law on mass media has been passed in Ukraine recently, with the justification that it is necessary to block Russian propaganda.
I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine ends up winning a Pyrrhic victory in a sense that it'll liberate all of its territory, but its internal politics will radicalize in the process, if not to the point of becoming outright non-democratic, then at least becoming more like Hungary or Poland: a democratic majority voting in fully support of a crackdown on all political, ideological, and cultural opposition.
Yes, that is true, though similar erosions of democracy also happen in well-established democracies like the US and UK when there are wars. I think there is clearly still an aspiration towards western-style liberal democracy even if there are many gaps in how it's implemented.
I think this aspiration is the fundamental problem for Putin. He sees it as encouraging things like the ousting of Yanukovych, which he desperately wants to stop from being repeated in other countries within his sphere of influence. He already almost lost Belarus in a similar way.
I'm pretty sure that Putin literally believes all that tripe about "triune people", and I don't think he needed any excuses beyond that. Well, there's also the part where I think he really wants to end up in the history textbooks with the same standing as Ivan III and other famous "gatherers of the land".
So, in a sense, he is also fighting for his country and its nation - it just happens to be an imaginary one: "Greater Russia".
> Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
"Nationalism" had more to do with the relationship between the state and the nation, not the existence of nations. The word "nation" is very old.
Nation comes from the Latin "natio" meaning "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe"[0]. Thus, the essential basis for nationality is familial, a matter of common descent (as all human beings form an extended family, where you draw the line on this blurry map will depend on other factors like culture and language and ultimately the good held in common; note how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians speak basically the same language, it is the religious and therefore cultural differences that separate them). Naturally, people migrate all the time between nations. That is normal to the degree that migration does not harm the common good of the host society. But immigration is effectively a matter of adoption. We can adopt children. We can also adopt nations.
To expand just a bit more, the map is very blurry. Nation states tap into some real and old sentiments, but are not just a translation of those to a modern political language. They are their own new political projects, with a shape that is a result of historical happenstance and personal ambitions of specific people. It is surprisingly malleable – depending on what common enemies appear, what leaders and writers become popular, etc.
You are fighting for who has the “monopoly of violence”, which is the most natural thing ever, that we have those cliques as big as they are might not be though.
Tribes have existed since before written history; not sure if you’re referring to something else, but to me a tribe is essentially same thing, us vs them.
Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Most today think it's a good-and-fitting thing to defend "one's country". And this impulse is vastly more powerful than defending "democracy".
Who would die to stop a coup? Few. Who would die to stop an "invasion", apparently, many.
What motivates Ukrainians after all?
Quite an extreme ideology, one that puts so many men on the battlefield. But nations were invented, there is nothing "natural" to fight for here; nor anything even clearly moral.
"Democracy", therefore, is clearly a vastly vastly weaker ideology. Nationalism is the most powerful ideology to ever exist.