The New York Times simps for nationalism abroad

So last week I wrote a bit about the printed word and the technological origins of nationalism, remarking that in our hyper-connected, techno-globalized world nationalism is still a dominant ideology. A few days later I came across something in the New York Times that in an unexpected way bolstered this point. Reporters and editors at the Times would be abhorred if anyone accused of them of supporting nationalism domestically. Yet they have no problem projecting the nationalist idea onto the world beyond America’s borders.

Take the essay the paper just published by Oksana Zabuzhko, a Ukrainian novelist and poet, on a topic that’s increasingly bounced around here: the idea that the civilized world needs to break Russia into a million little pieces for lasting peace to prevail. There’s little that’s new in her argument and I’m not gonna critique other historical points of the essay — like why Bill Clinton backed Yeltsin’s war against Chechnya’s independence (hint it wasn’t because Bill was “overwhelmed” by all the different Soviet national republics clamoring for freedom and independence.) What caught my eye was Oksana’s reasoning for why Russia needs to be broken up.

Here’s the relevant bit:

Yet Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. That’s because Russia is not really a nation-state but the same premodern multiethnic empire living on geographic expansion and resource looting as 300 years ago — and is thus doomed to reproduce, again and again, under whatever ideological cover, the same prison-ward-like political structure that alone keeps it together.

You don’t need to read too much between the lines to get her point. She thinks that Russia is illegitimate because it’s multi-ethnic, which to her synonymous with being “premodern” and retrograde. Meanwhile, to be a “nation-state” — a society that consists of a homogenous national/ethnic/cultural group, I guess more closely mirroring those of Europe — is to her progressive, and the only way that a democracy can flourish. Every (fictional) race with its own (real) place. A truly enlightened organizing principle for society!