Kosovo Haunting Israel
By Leonard Fein
Some people - Ariel Sharon reportedly among them - were worried, perhaps still are, that the precedent that's been set in the matter of Kosovo may one day come to haunt Israel. Multinational intervention against a sovereign autonomous state deemed to be in massive violation of human rights? Since when has it become permissible to go beyond boycotts and sanctions and to employ force to effect change? Alright, Serbia and its genocidal behavior make a relatively easy case - but who gets to decide, in the end, whether this or that behavior is in fact genocidal? A consensus of "enlightened" nations? A majority of the United Nations General Assembly? And: Is it really so great a stretch to imagine Israel as the object of general opprobrium, another potential battlefield on the slippery slope we have now embarked upon?
The truth is, of course, that one has to make a whole series of exceedingly tenuous assumptions in order to imagine Israel as the target of a concerted attack a la Serbia. The additional truth is that the recent conflict has illustrated the tripartite collision between nationalism, globalism, and tribalism.
It is useful to be reminded of how recent is the nation-state. On the eve of the First World War, Great Britain controlled twenty-five percent of the world's land surface. Within 30 years or so, the British empire dissolved, more or less peacefully, and the threat of a German imperium was turned back, and 40 some years later, we witnessed the tumbling disintegration of the last great European empire, the Soviet Union.
These empires were the last residue of the idea of monarchy, that time in human history when it was thought natural for kings and czars and kaisers to own not only nations but portfolios of nations, not only to own them but to be entitled to bequeath them to their children. It was the powerful idea of the nation-state, born in the 18th century, struggling towards victory in the 19th, triumphant finally in the 20th, to which kingdoms and empires at last succumbed. And what a liberating idea it was, offering a new principle for the organization of the peoples of our planet, moving from l'etat est moi to we the people, transforming the human being from subject to citizen.
These days, we are so accustomed to seeing the world through the prism of the nation that we cannot imagine it was once otherwise. These days, our personal identity, the way in which we most elementally define ourselves, derives in no small measure from the nation-state wherein we dwell. It is, accordingly, difficult to remember that the idea of nationalism is just 200 years old, the French and American revolutions its first enduring expressions.
But these days, as well, we witness new and destabilizing challenges to the idea of the nation-state. If all the peoples of the world lived on their own undisputed parcels of land, in entirely homogeneous groupings, each might fairly claim the right to self-determination and have no cause to fear a challenge to its claim. But that is not the real world. In the real world, peoples are scattered, and territory is disputed. In the real world, there are an estimated 3500 groups that call themselves nations and have national aspirations. In the real world, there are Kurds in Syria and in Iraq and in Turkey and in Iran, and the number of Kurds in Turkey alone is between 10 and 12 million, and there is no country called Kurdistan nor is there likely soon to be one. In the real world, there is a country called Afghanistan, but there are no Afghans, there are only Turkomans and Pathans and Hazars and Uzbeks and Tajiks and Baluchis. In Kazakhstan, there are 102 different nationality groupings, and it does not stretch the imagination to suppose that all 102 will claim their right to self-determination. In the real world, there are Jews who have a state that claims the very same land that Palestinians without a state lay claim to.
This new riot of claims to self-determination threatens the core assumptions on which any world order is imaginable. Plainly, not every group that thinks itself a nation can have a state. As plainly, we have no easy principle on which to base the decision as to which shall win its prize and which shall be denied it. And, absent a principle, we are left with violence, with violence in India and violence in Turkey and violence in Iran and in Georgia - and, of course, in the former Yugoslavia.
And just as the centrifugal forces of self-determination, of ethnicity and religion demanding their rightful recognition, threaten the nation-state with fragmentation, centripetal forces come to override the boundaries of the nation-state, to join us all in a global village. The multinationals, asserting that national boundaries and national aspirations are irrelevant, and in their wake, the globalization of the media, of finance, of crime, of entertainment, of information. McDonalds in Moscow and gray bureaucrats in Brussels, GATT with rules and regulations that supersede domestic laws, and CNN everywhere. Think EU. Think NATO. Think Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
Pulling together, pulling apart. Prosperity politics versus identity politics. And squeezed from both sides, the nation-state.
Which leaves those nations, Israel among them, that are first seeking to consolidate their status as nations, out of synch with the tide of our times. And that could one day be a very serious problem for the Jewish State.
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