Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, once defined our time as "the age of post-national identity". Try to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin of that.
Indeed, the great paradox of the current era of globalization is that the striving for homogeneity is combined with a return to ethnic and religious roots. What Albert Einstein considered a "malignant fantasy" remains a powerful force even in a united Europe, where regional nationalism and xenophobic nativism are far from being eradicated.
In the Balkan wars of the 1990s, communities that had lived together for centuries, and individuals who grew up together and went to the same schools, fought each other murderously. Identity, to use a Freudian term, is reduced to the worship of trivial differences. Nationalism is essentially a modern political creation wrapped in the mantle of shared history and memories. However, a nation has often been a group of people who collectively lie about their distant past, a past that has often - too often - been remade to suit the needs of the present. If Samson was a Jewish hero, then Delilah must have been Palestinian.
Ethnic loyalties did not always correspond to political boundaries. Even after the violent breakup of the multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, none of the newly formed countries can claim to be completely homogeneous. Ethnic minorities in Slovenia and Serbia (even if we exclude Albanian Kosovo) represent between 20 and 30 percent of the total population.
Dictatorships, unlike democracies, are unable to accept ethnic and religious diversity. As we saw in Yugoslavia and in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, multi-ethnic or multi-religious societies combined with an authoritarian regime can be a recipe for state collapse. The collapse of the Soviet Union also had a lot to do with the collapse of the multinational structure. Dozens of ethnic minorities live in China, where Muslim Uyghurs in particular face state-sanctioned repression.
India is a case in itself. The diversity of the Indian nationality with its abundance of different cultures, ethnic and religious affiliations is not immune to ethnic tensions, but it is responsible for the fact that India is the seat of a great world civilization and not just a nation state.
On the other hand, ethnocentric nationalism will disrupt people's relations with the rest of the world. Zionism is a real example of that. The lofty ideology of a people rising from the ashes of history has become a dark force in the hands of a new social and political elite who have perverted this idea.
The European Union, a political community built on democratic consensus, was not founded to end nation states; its purpose was to turn nationalism into a benign force of transnational cooperation. Moreover, democracies have shown that they can reconcile multiethnic and multilingual diversity with general political unity. As long as political groups are willing to abandon the politics of secession and embrace what Habermas called "constitutional patriotism," the political decision-making process can be decentralized.
The recent electoral defeat of secessionists in Quebec should serve as a lesson to separatists across Europe. Decades of constitutional uncertainty forced companies to leave Quebec en masse, destroying Montreal as a corporate center. In the end, the people of Quebec decided to show the separatists that the country they wanted to secede from would not happily serve their interests.
Likewise, the long-term outflow of talent and capital from Scotland could increase if nationalists succeed in convincing a majority of Scots to vote for secession in the autumn. Catalonia faces a similar risk in its quest to become independent from Spain. The central state always has the responsibility for nation building. Putin can manipulate Ukraine not because his claim that the Russian minority faces persecution there is credible, but because the corrupt Ukrainian democracy has failed to build a truly self-sustaining nation.
In contrast to this is the example of the Italian annexation of South Tyrol, a region where the dominant German language is spoken. This decision was made at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I without consulting the local population. However, today South Tyrol enjoys considerable constitutional autonomy, including complete cultural freedom and a fiscal regime whereby 90 percent of tax revenue remains in the region. The bilingual, peaceful coexistence of the inhabitants of this province can serve as a lesson to rigid central authorities and unrealistic secessionist movements in other parts of the world.
For example, an unofficial opinion poll recently found that 89 percent of residents in Italy's northern "Venetian Republic" support independence. And while the desire there to secede from the poorer South may sound familiar to other regions in Europe where taxpayers resent having to fund other, allegedly irresponsible regions, the politics of secession often go to absurd extremes.
Scotland could go to that extreme. Residents of Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles are already demanding the right to decide whether to be part of an independent Scotland. It is not difficult to imagine a situation where the government in Edinburgh opposes these new secessionists, just as Westminster today opposes Scottish independence.
When the historian Ernest Renan dreamed of a European confederation that would surpass the nation-state, he could not have imagined the challenge posed by microstates and parastates. He believed that "man is not a slave to his race, language, religion, river flow, or direction of mountain ranges." Maybe that's true. But we have yet to prove that.
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