Natural Born Killers: the Curse of Nation-States

Why did Russian Nobles Speak French to Each Other at the Time of Napoleon's Invasion?

Aug 26, 2024

An anti-Napoleonic Neapolitan song of the early 19th century. Among other things, the refrain says, “Morte a li Giacubbine!” “Death to the Jacobins.” Napoleon was trying to create an Europe-wide empire, but the people of Europe mostly perceived it as an attempt to subjugate them to the French state, Failure was unavoidable.

There are small things that keep bothering you until, suddenly, they open up a completely new perception of the world. It happened to me: I was reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” this summer, and a detail remained stuck in my mind. In the novel, you learn that the Russian nobles at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 made a point of speaking to each other in French. How about Russian? No… that’s a dialect for the Mugiki, the unwashed peasants. In another novel, Anna Karenina, Tolstoy tells us about Russian nobles living some 50 years later. They would still speak French to each other, although only occasionally, mainly to make sure that their servants couldn’t understand what they were saying.

Russian nobles speaking French? Weird. Didn’t they have any concern for the Russian people? Were they a bunch of useless parasites? And there comes the flash—the crack in reality from where the light comes in, as Leonard Cohen says. The Russian Empire in the 19th century was a typical multinational empire, including people speaking many different languages. Those Russian nobles were doing exactly what an imperial elite was supposed to do: speak a language that did not link them to any specific ethnic groups. If they wanted to rule, they had to do that. They had to have the support of all the groups, not just one.

The mental flash came to me while reading Aurelien’s blog. Here he goes:

If an imperial territory becomes, overnight, a sovereign state, then the most basic question is, who controls it? At that point, the ghost of Carl Schmitt shows up, to insist on the importance of his favourite question: Who is my enemy? In an imperial territory or a multiethnic communist state, the fact that your community is a minority one might not matter that much. But if you suddenly become a minority in an independent country, then it may matter a great deal, because the majority community, naturally enough, will see itself entitled to seize the levers of power, democratically or otherwise. In fact, in a democracy, a political party or coalition representing an ethnic or religious majority can, quite legally freeze other communities out of power: this happened for fifty years in Northern Ireland, for example.
... Take away the apparatus of formal loyalty to an Empire or overarching political system, and the deterrent effect of the power of that system, and people are on their own, and become afraid. At that point, numbers become critical, and control of the levers of power and the security forces, or preventing their control by another community, is essential.
… Indeed, in this kind of situation, it is not the enemy armed forces, but the population itself which is a threat: hence, perhaps Gaza. Following the logic of Schmitt, my enemy is any member of another community, hence my security lies in expelling any members of that community from within my own.

Read Aurelien’s whole post, if you have time. It is a little long, but very clear. An empire can survive only as long as it can guarantee the survival of its minority groups; something that an independent central power can often do. A nation-state, instead, is a natural born killer of minorities. Simply, it has no mechanisms to protect them from the whims of the majority.

Once the light starts flashing through the crack, you understand many things you never understood before. For instance, why did the Imperial Roman elites in the West start speaking Greek from the 2nd century AD onward? Normally, you hear that they recognized the superiority of the Hellenistic culture over the Latin one. Orchidium! (“bollocks” in Latin). Winners don’t normally appreciate the cultural superiority of losers, why should they? The truth was that the Roman elites found themselves in deep trouble to keep the multi-ethnical Western Empire together, so they switched to a language that nobody spoke in the West to show that they weren’t taking sides. The Emperors were styling themselves as Godkings, acting above and beyond ethnic sympathies.

Back to 19th-century Russia. The Российская Империя, the Rossíyskaya Imperiya, was the result of centuries of aggressive expansion. It was a Russian thing, as the name says. But, like the ancient Roman Empire, it faced the same instability problems. How to keep the Empire together? Who was ruling whom? Who was the enemy?

The Tsars approached the problem by creating a highly centralized, absolute authority centered on the Tsar himself. The idea was to strike a pact with the people of the empire. The Tsar would protect them from external invasions and internal oppression. The Russian Elites played their role by trying to look “international.” Alexander 1st, for instance, the ruling Tsar at the time of Napoleon, was fluent in French. He and Napoleon exchanged letters in French in which they addressed each other as “brother.”

Alas, Napoleon’s invasion and the later European ones forced Russia to become increasingly Russian. One consequence was the breaking of the pact of stability among the Empire's ethnic groups. The massacre and deportation of Circassians of the Caucasus was possibly the largest extermination of the 19th century, and it was a fatal mistake for the Tsars and the Russian elite. It took a century from the Napoleonic invasion for the imperial system to crash, but it had to.

The Soviet Union was an attempt to rebuild a working empire on the ashes of the old one but on a different foundation. It was still dominated by the Russian element, but Communism was used to guarantee the rights of minorities. If you happen to be in Moscow, go see the Выставка достижений народного хозяйства, The “Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy.” It is an impressive attempt to show how Communism generated achievements among the various ethnic groups that composed the Soviet Empire. The idea was that they were all equal, with the same rights and the same privileges. It was mostly theoretical, but it had some substance. Just as an example, Josif Stalin (Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili) was Georgian, not Russian.

The problem was that Communism promised a lot but could maintain very little. The non-Russian communities of the Union felt the pinch of a crumbling economy, and they didn’t want to be “Russified.” Eventually, the Soviet State followed its economy down the Seneca Cliff.

As usual, history goes in cycles. The Russian Federation took over from the failed Soviet Union. Although smaller, it was still a multiethnic state, so it went back to the old imperial idea. The President of Russia is supposed to guarantee the security of all the citizens of the Federation. As long as he does that, the Federation will thrive, as we saw during the reconstruction after the collapse of the 1990s. In recent times, the Federation was stable enough to survive the Western economic sanctions without great problems.

In this light, we can understand recent events, such as the Ukrainian foray into the Kursk Oblast, Russian territory. From a military viewpoint, it makes little sense, but it does in political terms. The idea of the attack is to convince the Russians that their government is unable to defend them. It worked with the Tsars in 1917; it might work again more than a century later. We’ll have to see if the attack on Kursk is an isolated attempt generated by desperation or the first step toward a concerted series of attacks designed to destabilize Russia. History’s wheel keeps rolling, and it doesn’t care much about who gets squashed under it.

Once you have this key mental tool of the contrast between Empires and Nation-States, you can understand what role elites play in supporting governments by adopting different postures: international in empires and nationalistic in nation-states. Empires have no interest in exterminating their subject populations and, normally, won’t do that. Nation-states, instead, work on the principle that the majority takes everything. Minorities are either culturally or physically removed.

From here on, we could examine in detail the cycles of the various empires that rolled and crashed on the sands of history, but that would be too long for this post. Just a few notes:

Modern Germany was never an empire, despite the big boss being called the “Kaiser” (“Caesar”, an imperial title). From the beginning, in 1870, it was a nation-state and aggressively managed as such. The Nazis went further, adopting the idea of the superiority of the German civilization and of the German race. The result was the embodiment in modern times of something that Tacitus said long ago about the Roman Empire: “They made a desert, and they called it ‘peace.’” The Germans embarked on the extermination of all non-German entities within the state borders and, in parallel, their “Ostplan” of 1941-42 planned the extermination of tens of millions (possibly hundreds of millions) of Slavs and other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. Possibly, it was the most evil idea ever conceived in cold blood by human beings. It was not the way to run an empire, and, indeed, it didn’t last for long.
The Italian Empire, 1936-1941, was possibly the shortest-lived empire in history. But even for that short time, the Italian elites faced the problem of keeping together a state that included such different people as Ethiopians and Italians. There doesn’t appear to have ever existed a “Spaghetti-Ostplan” designed to exterminate the Ethiopians; Italy didn’t have the resources that made this kind of policy look at least potentially feasible to Germans. But the problem was there: what to do with a population that was considered racially inferior and yet occupying an area of the Italian Empire? The basic idea was to do what the Romans did, keep the barbarians as slaves. The Italian elites tried to dust off the paraphernalia of the ancient Roman Empire, including togas, fasces, the Roman salute, etcetera. Latin enjoyed a renaissance as a “noble” language for official proclamations. It was a sort of live-action role-playing game, a LARP, except that players were killed for real. It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Fortunately.
The Current European Empire (the EU) is ruled by an opaque elite (the “European Commission”) of people who speak to each other in English, a language that none of the states of the union use as a national language. It is an Imperial-style structure, probably the only possible way to run a multinational entity like the EU. The problem is that no empire has ever been ruled without an army, and the EU has none. So, the European elites are completely powerless against the American ones. That doesn’t reassure European citizens that their rights are protected.
The Current World Empire (the US) is in deep trouble for various reasons. Its main asset was to use democracy as an ideological weapon, just like the Soviet Union used Communism. It was an interesting attempt to hide the fact that the American Empire existed at all. It worked as long as Western citizens believed they were independent and could choose their fate by a democratic process. Not for nothing, the imperial military expansion was called “bringing them democracy.” However, like Communism, liberal democracy promised much more than it could deliver. With the Western economy crumbling, people are discovering that their democracy works like the old Ford T: you could buy it in any color, as long as it was black. In Western democracies, you can vote for any candidate as long as he/she obeys the orders of the US elites. Once people lose their trust in democracy, the American Empire cannot last for long. Unfortunately, in the meantime, there are plenty of possibilities for doing huge damage to everything and everybody with wars and exterminations.
The Gaza disaster is (unfortunately) nothing new in history. We see a nation-state, Israel, in which the majority (the Jews) is muscling out a minority (the Palestinians). It involves the usual hatred, racism, dehumanization, torture, massacres, and all the rest. The culprit is neither the Jews nor the Palestinians. It is the very concept of “Nation State.” Israel is an especially tight kind of state, cemented by strong religious ties, but the point doesn’t change. Nation-states have no mechanism to guarantee the rights, and not even the survival, of ethnical, religious, or cultural minorities. The result is well known. It is happening now.

So, we are in the hands of these natural born killers we call “Nation States,” increasingly more aggressive, and whose psychopathic homicidal leaders have access to more and more destructive weapons, including nuclear ones. How come we found ourselves blocked in this view of what a “state” should be? Hard to say, but political changes often come from technological changes. In this case, Nation States emerged when someone named Gutemberg invented the printing press and movable type. From that, an entity called “dictionary” appeared that crystallized the language of the state. And then, the Nation-State was. Dictionaries were weapons of mass destruction.

Should we welcome Empires back? Or maybe elect an AI as our Tsar? Whatever the Great Wheel of History will bring to us, we’ll have to accept.