History belongs to the victor and for the victor, a nation is a land where all the people are governed by the same government.
The difficulty with this definition is that many peoples comprising history have steadfastly declined to be defined in such a way. 15 November is an apt day to celebrate this delicate tension.
On 15 November 1777 the Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation as a vehicle by which the former colonies and now sovereign states would proceed. The form of the Articles lasted little more than a decade but the spirt of state sovereignty has survived in so many different ways, the memory of the Civil War and the repeated declarations of the since-federated nation’s supreme court providing but two examples.
The Great War of the early 20th century brought forth nations from empires. On 15 November 2017, the new Bolshevik government of Russia promulgated its Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia. It provided:
The united will of this Congresses, The Councils of the People’s Commissars, resolved to base of their activity upon the question of the nationalities of Russia, as expressed in the following principles:
1. The equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia.
2. The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state.
3. The abolition of any and all national and national-religious privileges and disabilities.
4. The free development of national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia.The concrete decrees that follow from these principles will be immediately elaborated after the setting up of a Commission of Nationality Affairs.
In the name of the Russian Republic,
Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars,
V Ulianov (Lenin).
People’s Commissar on Nationality Affairs,
Josef Dzhugashvili (Stalin).
More than a century on, the world remains concerned with self-determination of peoples of the former Russian empire and, ironically, is apt to refer to Stalinism when expressing its concern. By the bye, the autonomous duchy of Finland in fact declared independence from Russia the same day, 15 November 2017, although the Finnish parliament only adopted the declaration in December.
Meanwhile, the end of the Great War saw a Treaty of Versailles and the possibility of a League of Nations. The League first assembled in Geneva on 15 November 1920, the same day the Free City of Danzig came into operation. Article 105 of the Treaty spelt out how one nation was pruned to create a new nation:
On the coming into force of the present Treaty German nationals ordinarily resident in the territory described in Article 100 will ipso facto lose their German nationality in order to become nationals of the Free City of Danzig.
In Europe’s west articles 31 to 39 of the Treaty defined Belgium’s annexation of former Prussian territory. Like many annexations through history, it is both complete and incomplete, with 15 November formally recognised in Belgium not only as the King’s Feast but also as the Day of the German-speaking Community.
A particular irony of the Great War is the fate of the memory of President Wilson, the architect of the post-war world. In the US, he has been woked as an unrepentant confederationist. While the woking is a matter for the US peoples, its manifestation is somewhat odd, in that Princeton’s “Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs” is now “Princeton School of Public and International Affairs”. Whether a rebranding which ousts the name of a racist to in favour of a name sourced to Prince William of Orange, a shareholder in the slave trafficker the Royal African Company, is, one supposes, also a matter for the US peoples. Meanwhile, the Geneva building in which the League first sat remains the Palais Wilson, now with double irony the headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In the decade or so surrounding the US bicentennial celebrations, there were further visitations to the idea of nation.
On 15 November 1976, René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois took office. Although it did not achieve its stated aim of sovereignty for Quebec, its Charter of the French Language has remained a controversial linchpin of modern Canada.
On 15 November 1985, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Just as “confederation” has a very different nuance north and south of north America’s 49th parallel, so to the Anglo-Irish use of “union”. Ireland’s partition – which, it is as well to remember is barely a century old – has created a Northern Ireland. This entity is part of the “United Kingdom” and is supported by “Unionists” while the partition remains opposed by those who support a “United Ireland”.
Cyprus is, diametrically speaking, at the other end of Europe from Ireland. Two years prior to the Agreement, on 15 November 1983, it moved diametrically in the opposite direction with the creation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a state which continues to be recognised only by Turkey. That said, it with Ireland and Malta shares a curious post-colonial and now post-Brexit practice of having drivers follow the English fashion by keeping to the left of the road.
On 15 November 1988, Yassar Arafat’s Palestinian National Council proclaimed an independent State of Palestine. At last count, 138 of the United Nations’ member states recognise it, compared with the 165 who recognise Israel. Since 2012, the UN itself has held Palestine a “non-member observer state”, a status shared only with the Holy See.
A particular feature of 20th century nationalism has been an ideological component. In eastern Europe, this feature came full circle. As we have seen earlier, communism and post-imperial nationalism shared some common ancestry. But by the same 1980s just referred to, the star of communism had waned.
On 15 November 1988, the day the State of Palestine was proclaimed, workers in the Romanian town of Brasov rebelled against the communist regime of President Ceaueșescu. On 15 November 1990, the parliament of neighbouring Bulgaria voted to change the country’s name from the People’s Republic of Bulgaria to the Republic of Bulgaria and to remove the Communist emblem from the national flag.
For Westerners, the central player in the disintegration of a communist Europe was the Polish trade union Solidarity. It was born among the trade unions of the shipyards in Gdansk, the name by which the Free City of Danzig had become known.
On 15 November 1989, the head of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, gave an address to a joint meeting of the US Congress. He is the only Pole and one of the few foreigners who have been afforded the opportunity. Two hundred and twelve years to the day after the Continental Congress had approved the Articles of Confederation of a nascent United States, Walesa opened his address with the words “We the people”.
