Back to Which Future? Putin and the Nationalist Playbook

Our research shows that these deviations from Gellner’s nationalist congruence principle have shaped patterns of warfare in Europe since 1816. State-nation incongruence itself is a source of both civil and interstate conflict. Relatively large ethnic minorities under alien rule by another group are significantly more likely to start secessionist civil wars. This risk almost doubles for powerless groups divided by state borders. Both conditions apply to the Russian-identifying population in Ukraine which formed the main support base for separatist violence in the Donbas.

Obsessions with History
Yet studying state borders and ethnic group distributions in geographic space is only a first step toward understanding the violent potential of ethnic nationalism. To better predict which state-to-nation mismatches are likely to cause war, we need to comprehend ethnic nationalists’ obsession with history.

In a new study, we find that incongruent borders are more likely to be contested by violent means where nationalist rulers can contrast current division and alien rule with supposedly more unified and independent “golden ages” in the past. Our analyses reveal that European states have been significantly more likely to make territorial claims or fight against neighbors hosting powerless ethnic kin when past state borders incorporated larger parts of territory currently inhabited by the ethnic nation than the contemporary rump state.

Putin has repeatedly lamented Russia’s lost power and unity resulting from the breakup of the Soviet Union and his essays and speeches reveal a motivation to restore Tsarist imperial glory. Putin and many other nationalist leaders go back centuries to unearth medieval kingdoms, early modern territorial states, or empires that allegedly satisfied the nationalist ideals of ethnic unity and home rule.

Going even further back, Israeli nationalists justify their claims to territory inhabited by Palestinians by referring to Jewish settlement patterns in biblical times. Projecting modern notions of national consciousness onto pre-modern populations and constructing lines of continuity across centuries, nationalists blend historical facts and fiction into self-serving narratives aimed at contemporary audiences.

Europe’s Response
Nationalist conflict has become an extremely rare phenomenon in post-1945 Europe. In this sense, Russia’s territorial revisionism in Ukraine does, in fact, throw us back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. But instead of revealing the primacy of security-related grand strategizing and hard national interests over naïve idealism and soft ideas, Russia’s actions pit old-fashioned ethnic nationalism against the norms and institutions devised to contain this quintessentially European ideology.

Against this backdrop, the outcome of the war in Ukraine is crucial for the future world order. Should Russia be seen as a winner, there is a risk that revisionist nationalists elsewhere will take notice. A hollowing out of the territorial integrity norm could pave the way for further destabilizing events. Most ominously, China’s irredentist desire to “reunify” Taiwan increases the risk of major war.

Within Europe, Serbia and Hungary could be expected to more offensively mobilize grievances around ethnic division and lost unity. For these reasons, western support for Ukraine is critical. If, instead, we were to follow naïvely realist analyses of current events, we risk being as surprised by the subversive force of nationalism as was Prince Metternich in 1848 when nationalist turmoil forced him to resign.

For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in International Organization.

Lars-Erik Cederman is a Professor of International Conflict Research at ETH Zürich. Yannick Pengl is a PhD candidate at ETH Zurich’s International Conflict Research Group. Luc Girardin is a Project Leader at ETH Zurich and CTO at Macrofocus, a company specialized in interactive data visualization. Carl Müller-Crepon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The article was originally published in EUROPP – European Politics and Policy — a multidisciplinary academic blog run by the London School of Economics and Political Science. This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics.