I had a conversation with a colleague about something and some subjects related to it. My colleague is from Afghanistan, and is the same age as me, and lived there when America invaded and has offered some interesting insights into the situation there now.
My colleague shared that there is a part of Pakistan–Balochistan–that historically and ethnically has been a part of Afghanistan. Due to the Durand Line established by the British colonial Empire, the region and people were separated. Now Afghanistan has a long standing historical claim on the territory and their ethnic kinsmen, but the people have been there long enough to now identify with Pakistan as their nation.
Both Ethnicity and Nationality represent “family” on some level. I have written a lot about the Sovereign as a paternal influence, being one flesh with his people. This is kind of like Nationality. Ethnicity is a deeper level of kinship, being structured around a personal commonality to another person and even to a sovereign, whereas mere nationality represents a geographic commonality to another person. The first nations were Ethno-nations, and with very good reason: If someone looks like me, talks like me, worships like me, they probably think like me, and I can trust them to support me the way I support them. Mere nations are more common since the colonial era, as political boundaries have been drawn around territory without any real regard for ethnicity. This is why Africa is such a conflict prone continent, and why Balochistan is alienated from Afghanistan and remains a source of tension in Afghan-Pakistan relations.
Where Ethnicity and Nationality overlap–or spill over each other–there is conflict. Ukraine (for example) is Ethnically Slavic but has a distinct national identity. Russia views itself as the father of all slavic peoples, so seeks on the one hand Ethnic unity at the expense of national identity. Ukraine seeks to preserve it’s national identity at the expense of ethnic unity. There will always be conflict on these grounds.
This is part of why America has some cultural instability. There is no ethno-nation upon which the supra-nation was built. All the ethno-nations that compose America must actively choose to accept their national identity and make it a priority. America doesn’t have a unifying culture. There are some cultural elements that are competing to be dominant but nothing central, nothing unifying.
These forces can be in tension in a positive way. The Philippines is composed of many sub-ethnic divisions but there is a common culture to all of the constituent ethnicities, enough to make their National identity strong and prevent ethnic conflict. As I understand it one of the main sources of internal conflict is where that common culture is different–namely, between the Catholic majority and Muslim minority. The Philippines have successfully harnessed their diverse ethnicities and created a national identity from it.
Any kind of nation–be it Ethno- or not–can be stable. But there must be some unifying element to give it stability. Ethnicity is the unifying element. Culture can be the unifying element, It could even be religion. But stability must be intentionally cultivated from the ground up, from the top down. Without an intentional effort at stability, there will be internal conflict which destabilizes the nation until either the various nations split apart from each other or one totally dominates the other.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 