Ovi Magazine Issue #24: Nationalism - Published: 2013-01-31

The Incoherences of Nationalism
Let me list a few of the island nations.
Vanuatu, located near Hawaii; San Tomé and
Principe, located very near Nigeria; the Falkland
Islands, very far south along the coast of southern
Argentina, with a population under 3,000; the
Andaman Islands; the Maldives; the Seychelles;
and Malta and Iceland.
Small nations that are perforce very nationalistic
are, among others, all the Scandinavian nations.
Micro states include Vatican City; San Marino;
Liechtenstein and Monaco. This is not a complete
list, nor is it meant to be.
What I mean to convey is the following: all
micro states are subject to pressure from large
states, and many must, in order to forestall
invasion, cooperate with the larger nation. I shall
mention two cases, that of San Tomé and that of
Finland.
At the time when amazingly large deposits of
the purest oil were discovered in Nigeria, some
few decades ago, it was also found in the waters
off San Tomé and Principe. Now, Nigeria is the
most populous nation in Africa, with over 100
million residents. The two islands have a sparse
population and thus the per capita worth of their
o i l
reserves are worth many many
times what Nigeria’s
population would
receive. The
only way to
forestall a
takeover
of their
state
was to
cooperate with its enormous neighbor, since
Nigeria had the power to take over the islands
without difficulty. So they agreed to split the
proceeds with their much larger neighbor, in an
exercise of practical wisdom.
Finland’s case is even better known. In 1940,
with war in the air, Stalin demanded the right to
build a vast naval station on Finland, across the
Bay of Finland. The Finns refused, citing national
sovereignty, but it availed little, since the USSR
was so much larger a nation-state. The Finns
resisted doughtily, but the Soviets won the war
and got their naval station.
In fact, if Stalin had not decapitated the officer
corps of the Soviet Army in the years before this
invasion, the war would have probably gone better
for the Russians.
A similar example could be the wars that the
USA waged against Mexico, the result of which
was not only the expansion to the Pacific all
Americans thought was their right, but also a great
boon to the slaveocracy of the Southern states.
The lesson taught here is that microstates must
hew to a narrower standard of freedom, since
the larger states could, if they wished, conquer
them. Therefore the phrase that claims that we
are “ourselves alone” is not literally true for
microstates under most conditions.
For the balance of this essay I will confine
myself to the relations between dynastic Empires
of the modern age in Europe and their subject
populations and to the break up of Empires in the
20 th century, and the self-determination of formerly
subject populations, such as the “devolution” now
practiced in Scotland, still nominally a member
of the British Empire, but, so far as the average
citizen experiences it, a free nation in all domestic
affairs.
Let me begin with one example: what actually
took place in France between the years between
1789 and 1815.
Having been for a long time the most powerful
state in Europe under powerful monarchs,
revolutionary France found itself breaking out of
traditional boundaries and at war with all the other
European powers, and, under the charismatic
leadership of Napoleon this trend accelerated
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