What Kind of Idea Is Nation State?

I loved Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. It resonated with me strongly, being an immigrant, an exile, as someone uprooted from my tradition. I think the greatest takeaway from the book for me was: “How you act in victory reveals your character.” We see the characters in the book in various situations: where they struggle to survive, and also where they are victorious. The book’s often-repeated refrain, “What kind of idea are you?”, hounds its characters, bringing the reader to reflection on our course of action. Do we bend with the breeze, or do we stand straight at the risk of breaking? This is the question that hounds the characters through the story. The resolution in the book comes from a second question: “How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute, what then?” I think beyond the personal, these questions have something to say about how nations are built.

Watching history (and the constant revision of it) unfold, we see these questions again and again. Do you submit, or do you stand tall? How do you act when you are the supplicant? How do you act when you are the victor? We are indeed going through some pretty interesting times. The norms and the institutions we established to prevent a repeat after the Second World War seem to be in tatters. Meanwhile, some pretty bombastic personalities worldwide are cocksure in they can play brinkmanship without setting the world on fire. I don’t think I am imagining things in seeing an increase in interstate violence couched in self-righteous rhetoric.

Where is this self-righteousness coming from that can justify killing tens of thousands of people without an end in sight? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but lately I remember The Satanic Verses and its second question more and more often. I think the story starts by seeing that national identities are built loosely on history, picking and choosing its moments (revision) to define itself. The self-righteousness comes from what gets forgotten and what gets remembered; what gets downplayed and what gets emphasized.

Nations often build their identities on times they stood straight and overlook all the deal-making and compromises it took to get there. The long periods of living together in peace get forgotten and replaced with bursts of violence, either received—always unjustly—or delivered—always righteously. This creates an eternal victimhood narrative where past injustice justifies today’s injustice. It enables a cynical worldview where what was right was never a concern, and the whole world is out to get us. It creates a siege mentality where anyone that dares criticize our current barbarity was forever against us anyway, and where were they when we were being slaughtered?

I am not a stranger to this kind of thinking. Growing up in a country with the hefty burden of a history of empire, I know how we, and our neighbors, relate to our shared history and what it reveals about us. The story of individuals get sacrificed on the altar of nation-building.

Both sides build narratives that obscure the truth. On our end, we choose to overlook all the color of the empire, the many nations that contributed to whatever good was there in it. We like imagining an idealized version where we were just and fair, and those ungrateful people ruined something for no reason. We overlook all the pain, suffering, and oppression that went into keeping the empire together. Even our own suffering, we ignore. As if the empire was a democracy project that worked not towards the happiness of a few in the capital and towards the enlightenment of all. We forget the oppressive machinery of our empire oppressed lay people without discrimination. On the other end, our comrades in oppression forget the shared suffering. As if their nation was singled out for punishment and everyone else was having a great time at their expense. The idea that an empire is naturally oppressive just slides the consciousness. (Just to be clear, I am not claiming it was equally oppressive to all; I am just saying we could start the conversation from a different place.) People who never felt the bite of a whip stay angry at people who never held one, a hundred years after liberation.

Every national history chooses to remember some people as heroes. Whether it is the statues of Confederate generals in the US or the naming of streets after Talat Pasha in Turkey, the mechanism is identical. When the nation chooses the monsters of another’s stories as their heroes, I know we will be in trouble for a long time to come. Coming from a land with a history of genocide, I know there are other stories in our empire: brave governors that refused to carry out their orders, people who sacrificed their lives in order to protect others. When we name schools after Talat Pasha and not Mehmet Celal Bey, we are teaching the next generation what our nation stands for. We are telling them what kind of idea we are.

And now, we come to what triggered me to write this post. Recently we saw how National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir treated the activists from Global Smud Flotilla. Some European countries acted shocked at the treatment of their citizens, as if this was any surprise. But, when I see the treatment of the activists in the hands of the minister, I can guess what kind of idea those people were brought up with. So yes, watching another genocide unfold at the hands of people who not long ago were victims of another genocide… I get reminded of the second question: “How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute, what then?” The eternal victimhood enables unbounded victimization of the next generation.

Is there an answer to the questions of The Satanic Verses that leads to living together in harmony? A way to break away from this cycle of victimhood and victimization? Hrant Dink was talking about defining yourself against an oppressor creating an eternal story of victimhood in that famous quote about the “poisoned blood of the oppressor.” His argument was that holding all this bile in was poison to the nation; the nation should be defined by what was good about it, more than the injustice they had to suffer. The only way to break the cycle is to stop defining oneself against the oppressor, thereby refusing to play the game of eternal victimhood.

It is hard to stay hopeful in this atmosphere, but I would like to believe that we will again get to a place where human rights will not be seen as a naive idea of another age. Where we will realize the pain and suffering we encounter is not because our principles and values were wrong, but because we took shortcuts in the name of expediency instead of acting on our principles. The norms and the institutions did not fail to protect us from the Third World War. We failed our norms. I would like to believe that we will get to a place where people again will see that hate is not a substitute for reason (and preferably before it’s too late).