by Michael Zwerin
This piece was originally published in Home! A Bioregional Reader, edited by Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, New Society Publishers, copyright 1990.
Balkanization, until recently an unqualified pejorative meaning the proliferation of many small, uncontrollable States hostile to each other, has become whether we know or like it or not, the tide of our times. The United Nations more than doubled its number in a generation as colonies broke away from empires. Now, nations which consider themselves internal colonies are exercising increasing pressure to escalate the Balkanization process still further.
Documents…I am flooded with documents. I have in front of me, documents claiming that the Peoples Republic of China oppresses its Tibetan minority, Yugoslavia its Croatian minority, Ceylon its Tamils. Soviet Russia is accused of suppressing its Georgian minority. These are all Socialist states.
Then there are documents of outrage against the Spanish occupation of the Basque Country, Norwegian occupation of Lapland, French occupation of Corsica. There is one document praising Greenland for having voted to end Danish occupation. (“Greenlandic” will become the principle language of Greenland.) A northern California back-country press is printing “Alta Libre” posters, calling for autonomy from southern California. There are groups advocating a State of “Superior” to be cut loose from northern Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin; an “Ozarkia” independent of Missouri and Arkansas; a state of “Cascade” free of Oregonian occupation. Welsh and Scottish autonomists call for an end to English occupation. People in power in Quebec want to secede from Canadian occupation. Indian nations call for an end to American occupation. These are not Socialist States.
Why, then, do all these documents shout the same message?
Occupation. Occupation is the imposition of rule by aliens. Occupation can take political, sociological or cultural form. States occupy nations.
Nations should not be confused with States. A Nation is an organic social, economic and geographical unit with common history, language and mores…a clan or a collection of clans. States are artificial political assemblages, constructed, as Charles de Gaulle said of France, “by strokes of the sword.” States have been superimposed over Nations. Nationalism’s triumph was once considered “progress.” However, nationalism is now a reactionary word in dispute. We should find another word to describe the new progressive struggle of nations.
What about “Nationism?”
Look at Europe. There’s a Nationist map under the map of European States. Not too far under, covered but not quite buried. It is not an official map. It has no legal boundaries. On English maps, Wales is only twelve English counties, thirteen if you include Monmouthshire which some do and some don’t. Catalonia exists only as a vaguely defined district of Spain. There is no Basque postal system. There is in legal fact no Basque Country. Brittany is a nation with a proud history, beautiful language and a culture of its own. There is no Breton Minister of Cultural Affairs. Brittany does not exist. Brittany is only five French Departments. The Lapps do not elect their own parliament. Lapland does not show up on maps of Scandinavia. Corsica exists merely as two French Departments. None of these Nations exists. And yet they do exist. How is this possible?
Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet famous for his English poetry, wrote to a friend in 1933, “It’s impossible for me to tell you how much I want to get out of it all. Out of the narrowness and the dirtiness, out of the eternal ugliness of the Welsh people. I am sick. This bloody country is killing me.”
That was before ethnics were “in,” as a cover of Time Magazine proclaimed a few years ago, before cities ceased being unqualified lights of our culture, before they began to choke on their effluents and numbers, before the quality of life we are losing became possible to ignore. We can imagine Thomas today, writing in Welsh perhaps, certainly re-examining his Welshness. History is running backwards. We search for what we once discarded.
The Croatian Liberation Front is right wing. ETA in the Basque Country is Marxist. Catalonian autonomists tend to be anarchists. American Indian autonomists look like hippies. Very confusing. Why do all their documents read the same? The Ethiopian monarchy repressed the Eritrean Liberation Front as being dangerous left-wing “Separatists.” (States take the position: “If you want to separate from us there must be something wrong with you.”) The succeeding Ethiopian left-wing revolutionary government only stepped up the battle against the Eritreans. The reactionary Shah told the Kurds they should become good Iranians and forget about Kurdistan. The revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini tried to tell them the same thing.
The Kurds conducted a war against Iraq in the mid-seventies. The Iraqis, supported by the socialist Soviet Union, said that the Kurds were an outpost of American imperialism supported by the CIA through the reactionary Shah of Iran. The Shah said the Kurds represented progressive nationalism in their valiant struggle against the imperialist Soviet Union and their reactionary outpost, Iraq. The Kurds, ducking, said it was all the same to them.
“That’s right,” we used to say, “and that’s left.” It used to be so easy. Why are all these people on the left and the right doing and saying the same thing?
Contemporary events will become increasingly confusing if we continue to try and classify them as right and left. Left and right as we know them did not exist before the growth of the Nation-State. Left and right is now ceasing to have any meaning whatsoever. We might try and look at the world with another perspective. A horizontal perspective. Big and little.
OPEC, the oil-exporting cartel, is a group of small States working together, working rather well together. By left and right criteria, they ought to be mortal enemies—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Venezuela, Algeria, Indonesia, Nigeria—every hue from white to black, from red to green; Catholics, Protestants and Moslems together having one thing in common. The small weakling who has been beaten up by the big bully down the block ever since he can remember has finally found himself a big gun.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is called a reactionary by the progressive Soviets and a liberal by the reactionary Americans. He supports organized religion and supported the American involvement in Viet Nam. Surely he must be a reactionary. But Solzhenitsyn calls for a return to traditional values, roots, the family, for a new type of nationalism and this is now considered—by Jean-Paul Sartre among other radicals—the progressive struggle. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn should be viewed simply as a little guy who took on the big State and seems to have got away with it.
The North American Indians occupying Wounded Knee some years ago appealed to Finland’s Lapp community for aid. “The Lapp nation will do all it can,” replied a spokesman, “But our situation is so bad that the possibilities for action are limited.”
On the Larzac Plateau in southern France (known as “Occitania” on the map of nations), 100 farmers have been resisting French occupation by refusing to sell their land to the French army, which says it needs more room for maneuvers. Little Feather and a delegation of North American Indians visited the Plateau. A member of the Pit River tribe reacted to the militant atmosphere he found there: “The situation of the Pit River Tribe is identical to that of the people of Larzac, and we ought to be part of the same struggle.” Janet Mat Cloud of the Nisqually tribe said: “I didn’t think that I would find people in France with the same problems as we have, and who want the same things as we do for our children. Our struggle is for our children. It is for them that we fight to get our land back, just like the people of Larzac are fighting to keep their land for their children. Our children are not made for factories.”
What does the Lapp situation have to do with the Indian situation? What do Indians have in common with southern French farmers? Occupation!
(From Devolutionary Notes, San Francisco: Planet Drum Foundation, 1980.)
Michael Zwerin (1930-2010) was a jazz musician, journalist, and author. As a trombonist, he worked with a number of jazz ensembles, including Miles Davis’s nonet in 1948. He served as jazz critic and then European editor for the Village Voice in the 1960s and 1970s, and then continued to work for other publications from his home base of Paris. He is also the author of several books ranging from memoir to jazz-focused history.
