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Language, identity, nationhood and empire, for dummies, by dummies

First of all, a big disclaimer. Plenty of thinkers in the West love contrarianism. Especially those raised in American vassal states have constant dilemmas in peace time, so whenever a real conflict happens, the contrarian’s inner one is also amplified. While what follows may here and there criticise some of the pro-Ukrainian reactions, in the hope to perhaps identify hidden complexities of the underlying issues of this situation, there is no doubt on who is being invaded, and on who started this war. At the time of this writing, it has been going on for almost a month, and while peace talks are happening, the end looks uncertain, as does the aftermath, for Ukraine, for Russia, for Europe.

Kyiv or Kiev?

Nationhood is a complicated matter. Many of the reactions to this conflict have involved two important elements of the Nation State Starter Pack™: a language and a flag. We’ve seen things being painted in blue and yellow, and we’ve seen progressive newspapers switching the spelling of the Ukrainian capital from Kiev to Kyiv.

We can’t ignore the fact that the places where this practice has been spreading are either former colonial powers or their satellite states. Therefore, it is understandable that since Madras has become Chennai, Burma has become Myanmar¹ and Swaziland is now Eswatini, an intellectual born in a former colonial power must make the quick comparison: Kiev is the word used by the colonial overlord, in the Western sense, while Kyiv is the indigenous word, which we should be using now.

One’s morals and ideas, though, are somehow irrelevant and cosmetic as far as this conflict goes. The deeper issue is the actual relationship between Ukrainian and Russian culture, nationhood and identity. Before we get into that, a digression. Maybe useful for context but you can skip it if you have better things to do.

Language conflicts

Many people weren’t aware until recently of the existence of the Ukrainian language as something distinct from the “blob of Slavic languages people sometimes hear in public transport”, but while most of us in the world are easily connected to one identity, one nation, one language, plenty of ordinary people have experience contacts with different ethnic groups within their own country. These relationships are harder to cluster and classify but it’s probably worth going through them.

We’ve explored the colonial master-slave approach, where in order to pay for decades or centuries of subjugation we now grant our former slave the privilege of choosing the English language word of their choice for their country. This isn’t the only approach in the West.

Spain has its own set of issues with the “nations” within the bigger country. The very name “Spain” (España) has been chosen intentionally to bundle the former Roman province of Hispania into one big country. Catalans, as successors of the Crown of Aragon, are not happy, as there is the implicit statement that Spanish being the language of Hispania, Catalans, as citizens of Hispania, are culturally subjected to the central, Castillan, Spanish, dominion. The fact that modern-day Portugal was part of Hispania has been somehow buried under the carpet, but this naming choice has far-reaching consequences which are part of the identity conflict that has been afflicting Spain in a way or another since its transition to democracy. Language is of course part of this, and while there are more or less extreme versions of it, refusing to acknowledge one another, pretending not to understand “a word” even though the two languages are closely related, pretending not to speak the other one, all of this is somehow present in Spain.

Some places in Europe, like France, have been outright banning regional languages from public display until recently. Others, like Italy, have adopted an equally successful condescending approach, labelling all of them as “dialects” and cornering them to a place where they get some dignity as being part of Italy’s plurality, but no rights whatsoever besides, maybe, an additional “welcome to our town” sign. Worth noting that Italy’s brainwashing operation has been so successful that even the authorities that are supposed to empower said “dialects” have given up almost everywhere on any sort of Catalan-style language policy and by all accounts speak the language of the overlord. This is what it takes to claim the Renaissance and the Roman Empire as your own heritage.

Hellenism in every historical moment had little regard for non-Greek speakers, symbolically starting from the word “foreigner” (βάρβαρος). The longest and most united phase of Hellenism, the Eastern Roman Empire, was very far from multicultural within its ranks, unlike the following Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire itself was an autocratic state, albeit one where plurality was somehow regulated, presumably tracing back to Middle Eastern and Central Asian customs, as this was not exceptional behaviour. The Seljuks, the Mongols, most Turkic confederations and Persian states behaved similarly.

Iran and Turkey are interesting places on this regard, as Turkey broke completely from the Ottoman traditions in many ways, and the treatment of language minorities was one of them: de jure Armenians and Greeks are recognised as existing minorities, while Kurds, notably, aren’t², and the numbers and relevance of those two Christian communities speak for themselves as far as their treatment is concerned. In Persia a similar process happened, but even though Reza Khan, the first Pehlavi Shah, contemporaneous of Mustafa Kemal, would have wanted to exterminate the nomads and possibly to “contain” certain non-Persian-speaking groups, he didn’t have his predecessors or himself resort to genocides, and was left with a country that as of this day is still very plural when it comes to language groups. Persian is widely spoken but it’s far from being the first language of the entire population, by European or Turkish standards.

Everyone’s perspective in regards to others is different. Inevitably, we relate to our own experiences. Catalans might be deeply sympathetic with Ukrainians, Spanish or English speakers might not really understand the language issue outside of a master-slave view, Italian speakers probably found out last month that Ukrainian isn’t considered a dialect, while French speakers today are torn between being woke and talking about the language or sticking to what they know and talking about Ukraine’s rule of law and national identity being under attack.

Which Russia?

Russian legacy in itself is complex and in the past couple of centuries it has meant wildly different things. It has been the language of popular poets and composers, it has been the language of the Empire, the Soviet Union, the lingua franca of several nations. Even today, Russian is the official language of a country that in the West is only known as Russia, but it is officially the Russian Federation and Russian-speaking voices call explicitly РФ (Российсцая Федерация, Russian Federation), possibly stressing the Ф in РФ, which is lost to Western sources.

Within the former Soviet Union, including the Baltic states, controversial as Russian might be from a political perspective, many of the average people don’t really care, and conversations in Russian between people of different language groups (e.g. the area of Lithuania close to Belarus) are a matter of practical convenience.

Some countries have chosen different approaches. Kazakhstan still has Russian as a prestige language, with many young Kazakhs speaking better Russian than Kazakh, while Uzbekistan, possibly unconsciously clinging to its Chagatay legacy, is less positive about Russian still being the lingua franca of its people.

Ukraine has a similar situation to the above: Russian is spoken by everyone, even the craziest Azov militant probably speaks perfect Russian, and until 2014 when people started speaking Ukrainian more often as a response to Russian occupation, language struggle wasn’t really an issue. Even after 2014, it wasn’t taboo to speak Russian around the country, and Volodymir Zelensky himself used to deliver most of his speeches in Russian, including a significant part of his inaugural speech³.

Language and ethnicity have very little to do with any of this

While Ramzan Kadyrov from his high horse and manly Prada shoes might sound catchy as Putin’s pet lackey, one can’t help but think: if Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same, and that really is what matters, why is this person still around?

And that would be a sensible observation. Turns out that the Russian Federation has lots of peoples who aren’t exactly culturally aligned with what people in the West think, in their own terms, as a nationalist struggle.

It’s not even worth going through the complicated and intertwined origins that Russian and Ukrainian heritage have – compared to, e.g., modern day Kazakhstan. It’s enough to look at a few examples to see what is going on.

Belarus is in the same situation as Ukraine: same origins, closely-related people. And yet, primarily because of the alignment of the regime, there is no talk of subjugation or Belarus not being a real country, unlike there was about Ukraine. Sure, there isn’t anything to “denazify” there according to the Russian establishment, but one could still argue that if Russia wanted to take over parts of Ukraine, annex those where Russian is primarily spoken, therefore turning this into an ethnic-nationalist conflict, then nobody really is stopping him from doing the same in Belarus.

Not only that, but the two occupied areas of Georgia are not, nominally, Russian-speaking. And definitely neither is the area formerly known as Nagorno-Karabakh, now more known as Artsakh, a conflict initially also fuelled by the Russian Federation.

Imperialism

Russia has a long tradition of autocracy, dating from the Mongols, where one leader brings order over chaos. Loose confederations were centralised under an absolute ruler, and this is what brought those separate tribes together under one flag.

We keep talking about Russia not being a liberal democracy from a comfortable armchair, but the reality is that Russia is not even structured like a European nation state. It’s always been a melting pot of peoples governed by autocratic rule. This is the ideological space where Russian leadership operates these days. There is no wish of recreating the Soviet Union ideologically, perhaps there is some concerning the borders but there is no nostalgia when it comes to the ideas.

Replacing Kiev with Kyiv or giving different statuses to the different languages, “guarantees for Russian being spoken in Donetsk”, none of this really matters. Even if there have been explicit statements about “Ukraine not being a real nation”, and ethnicity being a fundamental issue, for some strange reason the target of this aggression is very specific and not as broad as it should be, if nationhood really mattered. Besides, if that were the real goal, it would be much easier for Russia to behave like China internally, obliterating its own minorities, especially the Muslims, just like they did with the Circassians two centuries ago. Even the past Chechnyan conflict wasn’t ethnic or a Holy War, much as it could have been. It was about territorial loss past the Soviet collapse.

None of this is at the root of the conflict. It’s all tapestry to a more basic desire, that of expansion and subjugation.

Empires are back, bitches.