While we have covered the dangers of Nationalism previously, that discussion centered on how capitalists use national identity as a reactionary movement to uphold their class privilege. There is another type of nationalism which presents itself as a left-wing force, that holds sway in much of the non-Western world. This force is known as Pan-nationalism, or the uniting of several connected nations into one super-national bloc. Pan-Nationalism can be seen as a movement throughout history, often coinciding with either Leftist or Liberal movements within autocratic, ethnically diverse territories with a history of colonial exploitation, such as the Balkans, the Middle East, or Africa. These blocs may enact policies which lay claim to the name of socialism, but they are by no means Communist, or even legitimately socialist. Communism recognizes that the concept of a nation and struggles for national liberation, while potentially progressive within the course of history, cannot lead to true revolutionary change. In fact, even the success of these pan-nationalist forces seems to be easily absorbed by the power and influence of the dominant nations of the capitalist world, leaving the proletariat in these nations no better off than they were before.
Pan-Nationalism manifests in many different ways, oftentimes from the most oppressed ethnic groups in the world. Conceptually, this often lumps together the disparate nations of a larger linguistic or cultural group, such as Pan-Germanism or Pan-Yugoslavism, but can take form in any way that combines multiple nations into one super-region or supposed homeland. The issue with this is that, as with any other form of nationalism, it creates outgroups that have no material difference over the insider group but are still framed as enemies of the nation. This leads to animosity towards the outer groups, solely on the basis of exclusion from the so-called super-national project that pan-nationalism attempts to create. Some of the most common examples of Pan-Nationalism in the contemporary world are Eurasianism, Pan-Africanism, and Ba’athism. Each of these types of Pan-Nationalism are radically different from each other, as they are created out of a synthetic binder, often with elements of a mythological history or some other arbitrary uniting factor. However, none of these pan-nationalist groups represent a meaningful force for progress in the socialist sense.
In the case of Eurasianism, the binder is region and culture, where the Eurasian peoples, whether Indo-European, Tungusic, Uralic, or otherwise are one Eurasian group, as opposed to being either Asian or European. This grouping coincides, quite tellingly, with the Russian national borders, which makes sense, as the main and only proponent of this Ideological melange is the Russian State. This ideology was founded by Lev Gumilev and Aleksandr Dugin, two former soviet so-called academics who tout the idea of a sort of philosophical, existential awakening within the Eurasian people. This awakening, to the Eurasianist, is not distinct to the Eurasian people, but to any culture that reaches a certain point in its existence. This concept is called “Passionarity”, which states that Cultures have a distinct driving force which causes them to directly affect history in a united way. The concept leads to the idea that cultures have golden ages and ages of recession, and that these golden ages coincide with the great pushes that cultures, not states, make to expand, not unlike the concept of Manifest Destiny that held sway in the United States during the 1800s. The Russian state has, for all intents and purposes, taken this concept as fact, and has been actualizing their so-called cultural zenith by devouring the national identity of Ukraine, Belarus, and many of the Central Asian States.
The concept of the Russkiy Mir, or the Russian World, has its origins in the colonization of Siberia by the Russian Empire during the age of colonization. Siberia, the region in Russia spanning roughly from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, was conquered over the course of a century, by the burgeoning Imperial state of Russia, which left very little for the Russian Empire to focus on colonial efforts in other areas of the world such as in Africa. In fact, the only Russian colony in Africa, located in what is now Djibouti, was so weak that the French were able to subsume the colony with a single cannon barrage. This, however, was because the Russian rulers were wholly focused on Siberia, as the Imperial Russian crown desired all the land between the Bering Strait and the Baltic Sea.
Russia has, however, shifted from Gumilev’s original, Pro-Tatar and more expansive Eurasian stance towards a stance of Slavic, or to be more specific, Russian, Supremacy. The Russian State has relied on the national myth of Kievan Rus’ as the foundation of their culture, which is ironic, as Kiev is itself in Ukraine. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the population of the Kievan Rus’ was not Russian or Ukrainian, but Ruthenian, who were the common progenitors of the Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian cultures. A further irony to Russia’s adoption of the Kievan Rus’ is that their Ruthenian language and culture is more closely related to Belarusian, a dwindling language being replaced rapidly by Russian. The languages derived from the Ruthenians constitute a language continuum, as Ukrainian, Russian, and to a lesser extent, Belarusian, are all extremely close in their linguistic divergence, and their speakers’ dialects can be seen as shifting and not concrete. The average Ukrainian in the East of Ukraine, which has been occupied by the Imperialist Russian State, speak a language that is closer to Russian than those who live in Galicia or Zaporozhia, but this language is not explicitly Russian or Ukrainian, as the spoken word there is somewhere in between. This commonality highlights the illusory nature of pan-nationalism: even within its own class-ignorant view of the world, its divisions and borders do not hold up to any real scrutiny.
The Russian state has been systematically destroying the cultures and languages of other slavic groups in the name of its own cultural hegemony, not unlike any other colonial power. Belarusian has been mostly replaced by Russian in day-to-day functions, as the pro-Russian government has put more stock into the idea of a united slavic people over their own independent cultural survival. The Ukrainian language is in a similar situation, where Ukrainian is being replaced by Russian through force of arms in the Russian-Ukrainian War. Ukrainians are going through a cultural and literal genocide, as the Russian Government has enforced pro-Russian policies over Ukrainian under the guise of “Russo-Ukrainian interests”. Particularly disturbing is the treatment of Ukrainian children, an estimated 20,000 of whom have been stolen to Russia, given Russian citizenship, and forcibly adopted into Russian families. Much like the separation of indigenous children in the West from their families, the goal of this Russian effort is to destroy the Ukrainian culture down to its very foundations by removing the cultural memory from the next generation, along with literally destroying it through armed conflict and occupation.
When we discuss Pan-Africanism, we must consider the material realities that have impacted Africans in general; from resource exploitation to open air slave camps that showcase how callous our capitalist world is to the plight of the global south. Pan-Africanism exists as an ideology that seeks to create a unified African identity and nation that can protect the interests of the Black Diaspora from this European capitalist world; the idea being that atrocities committed against the African people will not occur any longer if there was an African “Global Power” to ensure collective safety. From the genocides conducted by the Belgians and Germans to the resource pillaging by the French and English, it is no surprise to see modern-day Russia as the key supporter of anti-capitalist colonial sentiments. While historically the Russian state has been denied access to the resources abundant to Africa which led to its imperialist ventures towards its neighbors, in modern times the Russian State finds itself as a counterweight to French dominance in West Africa. While France struggles in vain to maintain Françafrique, the French sphere of influence over their former colonial subjects, Russia finds willing friends in the militaries of these nations.
Leaders from Maummar Qaddafi to Ibrahim Traoré have used anti-colonial rhetoric to fuel their rise to power, but there is little about them that is revolutionary. They have established states that, on the surface, seem to be Leftist, or at the very least, anti-Western and anti-capitalist, but this does not make one into a communist. The usage of a collective African identity as a uniting factor puts the global, non-African proletariat into the same position as the bourgeoisie that extracts resources and labor from their countries for little reason. The Western proletariat, while benefiting slightly from the relationship their states have with Africa, has no real ability to affect the continent. In the case of Qaddafi, there was the guise of internationalism, with the support of the ETA and the PLO, but to say that this makes his governance communist would be a mistake. Qaddafi was first and foremost a state Capitalist, and was motivated by the desire to divorce his own country’s resource pool from the US Petrol-dollar in favor of the local currency. True communist policy would be the stoppage of all commodity production, which Qaddafi never attempted to do. Qaddafi also systematically tore apart the institutions of Libya to enrich his own family by either destroying or subordinating said institutions, directly to the benefit of his relatives.
Make no mistake, in a vacuum, the efforts of Ibrahim Traoré, the junta leader of Burkina Faso, are not only commendable but inspirational ; for far too long, Western regimes have installed corrupt or weak African governments to allow for their easy exploitation. In reality, however, Traore and those in the Alliance of Sahel States are playing into the hands of their new masters while wearing the costumes of revolutionaries. If there is any proof of this, it is in the deployment of the Wagner Group into West Africa. The Wagner Group, which had been rebranded as Africa Corps in crude allusion towards the German Expeditionary Force of the same name, operates with impunity. These mercenaries, controlled by the Russian State, have committed and continue to commit mass killings of civilians as well as the looting and destruction of villages; acting no differently than the same colonialists that they were replacing. Russia’s aims are solely inspired by pressures it faces on the international stage due to their invasion in Ukraine; acting like friends of the pan-Africanist movement while placing itself as Africa’s newest exploiter.
Ba’athism, or Arab Left-wing nationalism, often plays at being socialist and conservative at once. In particular, whole communities were provided with do-nothing jobs by the Ba’ath party, enabling the proletariat to have a stable and high standard of living. However, their nationalism was itself often reactionary in nature, partially in response to the prior defeat of Arab states by Israel in the Six Day War. This formed a social structure where the proletariat was left economically as well as psychologically dependent on upholding the government, which itself participated in the broader capitalist world. While both parties within this movement have been all but destroyed by the Oil Wars, they were, up until then, extremely powerful counters to Pan-Islamic thought, which advocated religious reactionary action as an opposition to the socially progressive capitalist West.
Ba’athism, at one point, relied heavily on anti-islamic, secular policies, but as the power of Saddam Hussein faltered, the Iraqi movement co-opted a Sunni identity, lionizing Saddam as the “savior of Islam”, further showing how the Ba’athist parties were fundamentally not progressive despite their claims to socialism. In Syria, the Assadist regime, which fell only recently, was much more tied to the secular aspects of the movement, but nevertheless made an outgroup of the entire non-Arab world. While there is precedent materially for this attitude, as the West, and the Ottomans before them, had used the Arab world as a massive glorified oil rig, this fell victim to one of the issues with pan-nationalism-its attempt to frame everything as a struggle based not on material conditions, but between different arbitrary groups of people. But it is self-evident that pan-nationalist attempts have only made capitalist exploitation of poor countries by the wealthy countries easier by no longer requiring them to maintain occupying governments and enforcers within exploited and colonized nations. Rather than lead to the promised society of true socialism, pan-nationalist movements leave the historically exploited nations of the world to exploit themselves from above as willing victims to the capitalist economy.