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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 534
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WCL 534 September 2006
The state they are in!
Chronic confusion exists in the minds of most people about the words 'state and nation'. The confusion predates the use of the mis-named term 'United Nations' but it has become worse since that time. To use it for a large body of sovereign states that are notoriously disunited on almost all of the biggest political issues of the time has never been very sensible. It misleads about the most difficult and crucial world issues - international violence and war and peace.
The members of the UN, by its Charter, are states - legal entities with rights and responsibilities in international law. Nations are nothing of the sort: they are groups of people who have the dreams, aspirations, hopes and fears of their citizens but as such they have, no legal obligations. International law is concerned with states, not with nations. As a consequence, when political discourse and argument misuses the word 'nations' they confuse (sometimes deliberately) the non-expert. They mislead the sort of people who constitute the citizens of our democratic world, who are and trying to make sense of a baffling and dangerous place.
Some examples may make this clearer. The so-called nation of Sudan is apparently engaged upon a campaign of genocide against a section of its population who live in Darfur. The 'United Nations' is trying, rather ineffectively, to do something to prevent that, without either the instruments needed or the whole-hearted will to take action. In fact the state of Sudan is governed from Khartoum by a government that for 30 years waged a war against the southern half of its population which wished either for equal rights or to secede from the state.
The 'nation' of Iraq is bitterly divided, with one third of its people belonging to a non-national people, the Kurds, and the remaining two-thirds shaping up for a civil war. The 'nation' of India, itself a multiplicity of nations, is holding on to a province, Kashmir, which has a majority who would probably prefer to join another state, Pakistan, or set up an independent state of their own. The divisions of religion that spur these last two conflicts make it even more difficult to accommodate the warring parties in a single nation-state.
We are no longer treated to Cold War mentions of 'the Soviet nation' because the Soviet empire has now dumbed down to the Russian state, almost a nation, but including peoples like the Chechens, which remind us that it is still an empire. Empires rule people who generally do not accept themselves as part of the ruling nation. Communist China, of its one billion plus Han Chinese, contains over one hundred million people of other nationalities, i.e. substantially more than almost all but one or two of the 'nations' of the UN have within their borders.
So we should shun the near-universal use of the word 'nation' in most serious political discussion and when in fact we are discussing those political units - sovereign states. That might help us not only to clarify our minds about the arguments, but would also deprive the spin merchants of some of their capacity to bamboozle the reading and listening publics.
John Roberts
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