Anarchy in the UK-raine: pondering black lines
Others. That's us to them.
First published 27 June 2022
The others. That’s all of us.
The Welsh. The Walloons. The Gauls. The others. Etymology is a strange area of study. It tells us where a word comes from, how it arose, how it was transformed during the history of its existence and only rarely what it means today. And what it means today even differs depending on who it is that it means it to, so that terms of abuse can even be reappropriated by those against whom they’re directed, and turned into a badge of honour, in defiance of the slight. Wales, Wallonia and Gaul (the classical name for France) are all words that stem from Celtic tongues and, in short, mean “the others”. (Ironically, the Welsh name for Wales, Cymru, means, broadly, “us.”)
While hardly an accolade in and of themselves, they have survived to be proud symbols of national or political identity in our modern world. Their etymological roots are of interest, but irrelevant. The terms portend today what they mean today, to today’s world, as the results of the buffets of history down to the current day. They are what they are.
From the Ukraine to Ukraine
So it is also with the Ukraine, the “borderlands”, known since the break-up of the Soviet Union as “Ukraine”, without a definite article. The country declared its independence from Russia, which had fallen heir to large parts of the Soviet Union, and instituted its path of self-determination by forming a human chain (a prescient demonstration of its citizens’ staunch solidarity), which stretched between the cities of Lviv and Kyiv. After a degree of manoeuvring between Kyiv and Moscow and some slight faltering in international relations with other former Soviet republics, it emerged as an independent state late in 1991. It wasn’t an easy clamber out of the cradle of the Soviet Union and the country still had many difficulties to surmount in the ensuing years but it turned its fortunes around, by hook or by crook. There were quite a few of both.
Now, Russia is showing the great exception it takes to those developments. It was unhappy at the time with the Ukrainian decision not to be part of the new Russia, unhappy that it did not accede formally to the Commonwealth of Independent States (one wonders, en passant, how it ever could have joined the CIS, given the current irredentist claim of one of those states: independent within a commonwealth). Russia was likewise unhappy with overtures by Ukraine to Europe. Unhappy with Ukraine’s prominent position on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Like as not happy with Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament: Russia did not dismantle its own nuclear armaments, however.
One claim by President Putin has echoed more resonantly above all others in the present dispute: that Ukraine is a historical aberration, has no right to exist, is a natural part of the Russian motherland, needs to give up its statehood aspirations and fall within the Russian fold. One voice has been clearer than any other in response to this: that Ukraine is independent, is worthy of its independence, has won its freedom and wants to decide its own fate, economically, geopolitically, militarily and culturally.
The black line as an institution
Ukraine is not the only territory under an “ownership dispute”: Kurdistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Catalonia, Western Sahara, Ulster, even Wales itself, which has striven for devolution and even independence from the United Kingdom, as has Scotland, with some in Wallonia expressing favour for a unification with France. There are territories that succeed in their fight for self-determination, like South Sudan; some are rent apart by strife, like Korea and Vietnam, or Yugoslavia; and some re-unite after strife, like the United States of America, Germany, Poland or Vietnam.
The world map is criss-crossed by thin black lines of demarcation. Sometimes parallel lines with nothing but no-man’s land between, as in Korea, or Cyprus. In Africa and the Americas, many of these lines follow topographical contours, mountain ranges, rivers and seashores. Others are the result of treaties, often, if not always, the outcome of wars or the threat of war.
There is rarely anything natural about a natural border and, where colonialists drew the lines, they frequently disregarded the customary habitats and movements of indigenous peoples who occupied the land before the colonists arrived; those treaties that were signed with first nation peoples were often worth less than the paper they were written on. And yet all these peoples, from Tierra del Fuego to the Inuit, from the Cape to northern Norway, from Sri Lanka to Dikson, from Melbourne to Cairns, and across the Pacific Ocean back to the Americas, all stemmed originally from one place, a place that no longer exists as it then was but which was the cradle of mankind: Gondwana, the continental structure that commenced its break-up toward becoming the present continental map about 180 million years ago. Mankind is thought to have made its emergence as a race about 300,000 years ago; we are now, in our more developed form, to be found spread across the entire face of the globe, but our emergence took place on the continent we now know as Africa.
Recorded history is a thing of comparatively recent date. Anything over 1,000 years ago is already in the mists of time, though we can discern ways of life and ways of thinking dating back perhaps 7,000 years, sometimes more. But, 300,000 years ago – that’s guesswork pure and simple. Geology can tell us about major events like ice ages and times of tropical heat, about movement of the Earth’s crust and occasionally throw up an artefact or tool, but we have no real indication of whether, or, if so, how, the Earth’s surface was divided up in terms of ownership among its human inhabitants. We can, however, be fairly certain that our modern idea of the nation state was not yet in existence, though war and conflict could well have been.
A country’s natural right to exist
The intellectual argument raging, aside from the military engagement, between Russia and Ukraine therefore turns on the natural right of Ukraine to exist, its historical record as an independent nation, the legacy it owes to Russia, and the legacy it has wrought of its own making. The borders of Ukraine, and indeed of Russia, have ebbed and flowed over recorded time, sometimes shifting to the north and at other times to the south, to the west or to the east but, and here is the crux, the importance of these shifts in defining Ukrainian and Russian identities starts to pale into insignificance when viewed on the scale of mankind’s presence on the planet. Whatever Ukraine was called by its inhabitants 300,000 years ago or in 1991, two things are certain: the people who lived there then were the people who lived there then; and the people who live there now are the people who live there now.
If the terra nullius controversy (or theory) has a role to play in the legal apportionment of ownership in countries like Australia, New Zealand and the Polynesian islands, no such discussion arises, at least in law, for the territory that is Ukraine and Russia. Clearly, at one time no human lived there. Today, humans live there. How they came to be there, by what route they came, settled and husbanded the land and its fruits we do not know. That they did so, is known. And here they are today, some to the east, in Russia, and some to the west, in Ukraine. The claim by the one that the other belongs to it, a claim of ownership, is therefore predicated on a supposition that whoever’s it was before the point at which title is said to have vested is a matter of irrelevance.
And yet, that contention is itself tantamount to maintaining that, while no transfer of territory that had at any time switched from being part of one nation state to being part of another or to being a nation state in its own right is definitively valid, any transfer effected in favour of the present irridentist claim is definitive; and, as we all too well know, no such transfer is de facto definitive: territory has, over the course of history, been switched from one state to another for as long as men have drawn black lines on maps, be they on paper or in their own imaginations; and no one map has ever attained the status of definitive, eternal, everlasting, final, unchangeable, immutable or, dare I say, “right”. Because – when push comes to military onslaught – force has proved the ultimate great mover of black lines.
Moving black lines
In peacetime, black lines remain stable by dint of the fact that the interests of populations are best served by their stability. Trade, commerce and happiness thrive in peacetime, and usurpation of black lines results in usurpation of those aspects of living. So black lines stay put. Was there military conflict between humans before the black line made its appearance on the world’s surface? It’s possible that there was, but we cannot be certain, at least not as far as pre-recorded history is concerned. There are, of course, no records to verify the idea. But we know that nation states’ and tribal boundaries have ebbed and flowed over recorded time and they did so at the behest of those who believed their interests were best served by forcing the shift. In the end, the natural migration of mankind from Gondwana to the rest of the globe brought with it the unnatural (nature having ab initio decreed that no one should live there) occupation by, and ownership claims of, the migrants to the lands to which they migrated. So, “unnatural” insofar as the lands they moved to were not “from the outset” theirs to lay claim to; their claims held sway fundamentally on the same basis as applies under the law’s terra nullius principle, so that it is nothing but the right of him who has the greatest force to exert over another that prevails, and this has been true down to the present day.
Since the widespread decolonisation of large parts of the third world, the old and new worlds have tended more to the view that expansion(ism) is fundamentally bad (it’s proscribed under the UN Charter, which they have signed up to since 1948) but have retained a let-out clause of their own definition by which “it can be justified” (and it’s such a let-out clause that Russia is currently, putatively playing). Expansionism is a facet of geopolitics that is, in my view, driven, not by expediency but by principle. If one embraces the principle of non-expansionism, then one forsakes the expediency of a let-out clause. While one cannot bind oneself in contract for ever and a change in circumstances will demand a review, countries that bind themselves under charters and constitutions and which, to all intents and purposes, flout them at will, either misread the grounds, or dream them up as pretexts, under which their commitments “are recast”.
In the times prior to this shift in views (i.e. the development of substantive international law), the fact that land was previously occupied by another came to be viewed as irrelevant when an occupying force, an appropriating force, was able to procure its ownership for itself, despite the objections of those who then occupied it. It’s a principle that underpinned colonial expansion, and it has been reversed in the age of decolonialisation. But not wholesale.
First nation rights have been won back in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the USA. And yet the European settlers in North and South America still hold sway to this day; whereas, in Africa, there has been a more successful reinstatement of native rights, albeit according to national borders for the most part imposed in the colonial era. It could well be that the “first nations” that have won these rights themselves usurped the rights of those who lived in such places before their own arrival there. What matters, therefore, for in all this proselytising, something, ultimately, must matter, is the fact that the first nation people are the only extant vestige of the people that occupied the land before the present usurper – the colonialist – arrived on the scene. For a country like South Africa, they are the tribal nations that formed the territory of the country before the Dutch and British colonialists took control in the 19th century and later were obliged to cede that control; for a country like the USA, the prospects of ceding control fully back to first nations is unthinkable (unless you’re a first nation tribesman). Scotland’s an interest case: the Scots came originally from Ireland and drove out the indigenous inhabitants of that land, the Picts, of whom little is known. Time is a great healer.
International law
The rights and wrongs in such cases are set down in the body of law known as “international public law”. What was in prehistoric times defined, we suppose, by simple movements of peoples, perhaps by conflict and conquest, is now regulated according to a digest of legal principles, manmade rules, called “the law”. And its development has been a product of centuries, if not millennia, of shifting black lines on maps, warfare, covetousness, perhaps envy and even off-handedness and hatred.
But there is a big problem with law, and that is “jurisdiction”. Effective law requires to be regulated, imposed, enforced, executed and acquiesced in. Whilst a group of nation states may have agreement on all of those scores, not once in the history of mankind has there ever been an international public law that was assented to and respected by every last nation state on Earth. And armed conflict has for all recorded time been constantly present somewhere on Earth as a part of mankind’s activity here. Constantly; for all recorded time.
Anarchy v nation statehood
The alternative to a system such as we know it, of nation states, held broadly in agreement by a network of international conventions, albeit with outliers that considered themselves free to do according to their whim, is anarchy. And that’s what the world had until about the year 1000 B.C. or so. One of its biggest problems must have been: there were no dentists.
When, in the 1970s, the group The Sex Pistols issued their single Anarchy in the UK, the title somewhat missed the point of what anarchy is: because, in a condition of anarchy, there is simply no UK in which to have that anarchy.
Anarchy is a system by which each individual takes responsibility for their own existence, their own structure, their own police, defence, education, survival, everything; and the great advantage that the nation state offers over anarchy is a civic structure of organised labour, commerce, protection, defence and all the other trappings that we associate with “being a country”. Anarchy is far more “everyone for himself” and its very idea strikes fear in the hearts of apparatchiks that function and thrive within the structures that are the nation state, as well those ordinary citizens who rely, and have learned to rely, on them for their routine existence. One might advance the view that nation states offer order and organisation; and anarchy is the domain of the satanist, because nation states are founded on the idea of all for one, one for all, and satanism is founded on all for one, and I get to choose. Or, put differently, any nation state, democratic or autocratic, requires acquiescence (even if at the point of a gun) to function, in those aspects that are not to an individual’s liking, whereas satanists develop the, at times limiting, life philosophy that what they want is theirs, and they are never denied what they want.
Insofar, the character Dundee out of the film Crocodile Dundee was no satanist, but a wildsman. It was one of a genre of films in which two codes of existence come into conflict, and the filmmaker endeavoured to illustrate that a world in which survival is the core function of living and a world festooned with social niceties, customs and otherwise seemingly meaningless procedures — “laws”even — can so harshly contrast and conflict with each other. One conclusion emerges graphically from the film: anarchy is not for the faint-hearted.
And, yet, nor is nation statehood, as the Ukraine conflict is showing. Without nation statehood, there would be no Ukraine to invade; no Russia to do the invading; there would likely be no steelworks in Mariupol, no coal mines, no port at Odesa, no apartment blocks to be destroyed, and no tanks to destroy them.
There would probably be wheat fields, and transport to send the grain to parts where other people live, to the others: to Wales, to Wallonia or to Gaul. We would live an existence not dissimilar to that which humans lived for about 290,000 years before the time started into which we can look back through archaeology or geology. It’s a mode of life virtually unrecognisable to us today and it’s a time that mankind could not revert to, unless by virtue of some enormous catastrophe that would in effect obliterate mankind as we know it from the face of the Earth and force a reboot of the race from zero. An invasion falls short of constituting such a catastrophe, but before dismissing the idea totally, we might perhaps ponder these thoughts:
The system of “carve-up” and treaty, coupled with warfare, as a means to distribute ownership of the Earth among the human race is an invention of extremely recent date.
We have tried in no small measure to temper illegitimate claims and confirm legitimate ones by conceiving the very idea of legitimacy at all, and setting in place means and systems to enforce legitimacy, which have sometimes worked, sometimes not worked, and sometimes dissolved into the chaos of global conflict;
The globe has never been known to be at peace: to have any period of zero warfare;
Modern times have sought to condemn military force as a valid ground to appropriate for oneself land occupied by another;
Therefore, having embarked a thousand years ago on the nation state experiment, we have failed in the course of those thousand years to arrive anywhere close to total peace.
Ergo anarchy might actually have some virtue, putting it ahead of the nation state as a concept.
Man’s greatest achievement over and above the animal kingdom was to conceive the idea of legitimacy in terms other than force. It is that that places us above nature and fulfils Rose’s admonition to Charlie in the film The African Queen: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on this Earth to rise above.”
Man’s greatest failure is his inability to make that work comprehensively, lastingly, and universally. His failure to rise above nature.
What if we lived in anarchy now?
Take the following posit: suppose we could now, in this moment, know with certainty what the population of the world would have been if the nation state had never been conceived of as a replacement for tribalism or anarchy. Let us call that “P”. We more or less know what the population of the world is now, around 8 billion. And let us suppose that, of the two figures, 8 billion is the lesser.
Why the lesser? Well, the posit is that, had the nation state never existed, there would at no time have existed any nation state requiring to be defended and there would have been no nation state from which another country needed to be defended. It is likely, however, that we have the nation state to thank for much of the technological and medical advances that have been made over time, but the vast majority of these came in the past 200 years or so, some even arguably in the last 80 years, with Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. It may be argued that those who died in belligerent conflict are offset by those who were preserved by medical advances, but in this posit (and the reasons are ultimately irrelevant, because it’s a posit, not a theory, and whether the posit is right is not the point: it’s what follows), let us suppose that that is not the case, but rather that war has taken a toll on mankind such as to have kept growth in its global population down below what it would otherwise have been, so that P > 8 billion, e.g. 10 billion.
Now, here in our supposed state of anarchy, there comes an overlord, who gathers us all together and says, “I have a good plan. I propose that we organise as nation states. This will bring technological and medical advances, and we will be better off than under anarchy. Except, there is a “but”. The “but” is this: to be in the same position as we would have been in 2022 under the nation state system, we must reduce the population. Our population is 10 billion, so we must ask 2 billion people to undergo voluntary euthanasia in order to get back to the true 2022.”
It’s a ludicrous posit, and could never be real, could it? And yet it is real: because it is precisely that choice that is being presented to the people of Ukraine and conflict zones everywhere: to what extent are they prepared to give up their lives in order to preserve the future prospects of others, of their children, of their fellow human beings?
How many of us would actually volunteer? Would we be clamouring, conscious of the sacrifice made in the name of nation states across the centuries preceding us, in the name of kings and countries? Or would we “volunteer” others, instead? Maybe sell our place in the line to the unsuspecting, or to the suicidal? Dodge the draft?
Hypothetical though the question is, it ultimately asks us how far we view humanity’s existence as a holistic entirety of which we are but part, and how far we view it as a unique privilege for us, ourselves, alone; for which the lives of others are a valid collateral sacrifice, if it comes to the point.
Of course, advocating anarchy as a substitute for the nation state isn’t likely to garner much support, least of all in Ukraine, which is pouring its lifeblood into upholding its claims to just that: nation statehood. But, in the mêlée of posturing that has come forth regarding Ukraine’s historical existence, its “right” to exist and its cultural identity are under the spotlight:
as if that is a right that, needs must, should be conferred by Russia, today’s Russia, as the “natural successor to the Soviet Union”, a state that was itself wrought by force from Imperial Russia, which was a nation itself forged out of the conquest and subjugation of Eurasian peoples across a vast swathe of time;
Ukraine’s language being dismissed as a non-factor in its cultural identity; or is The Netherlands to fear absorption by Germany under some perverse linguistic assimilation of the High and Low German tongues? Germany by Britain? Britain by Saxony?
In all of this, sight is being lost of one simple datum fact: Ukraine has moved on from Soviet times, rejects the arbitrary birth-point of Russia’s claim to it and, by now, doesn’t even like them. This, if consummated, would be no gunshot marriage, but an artillery-barrel marriage, at which the bride wouldn’t even be saying, “I do.”
For, whether its people were previously Soviet citizens, or Russians, or Ukrainians, or the inhabitants of whatever series of “Rus” entities existed prior to the Soviet Union, or of whatever preceded those, or are a people who came to these from Asia, or from Europe, or from Africa, or from Gondwana, they are, when all is said and done, the people who are there.
If black lines are to subsist; if force decides them; and if force is therefore to be proscribed, internationally for ever, little can force home that principle other than force itself.
Let what is politic prevail over politics
It was the incursion of politics into warfare that created black lines on maps in the first place. If we are to keep them there, we must expunge warfare from politics; we must let politics do that which is politic: reset the clock of irredentist claims back to zero as of now (as was attempted in 1948) and, for those who refuse to align, then we must expunge politics from warfare, and unite to rid the world of the usurper.
Is that radical? Extreme? Unworkable? Yes, it’s all of that. Yet the alternative could well be a quite different new world order; could even be anarchy. And we wouldn’t want that, not for all the world.
V.thoughtful. Black lines on maps drawn with no regard to actual people's lives. Yes