The war in Ukraine is a confrontation between two systems, one modern, legalistic, decentralized and multicephalous; the other archaic, nationalistic, centralized and monocephalous
( This is a copyright compatible version of my side of a conversation with Laetitia Strauch-Bonart published in the French periodical l’Express.)
This conflict shows a harmful confusion, among the Russians and their supporters, between the state as a nation in the ethnic sense and the state as an administrative entity. A state that wants to base its legitimacy on cultural unity is now doomed to meet the hostility of others. A Francophone Swiss citizen, although culturally linked to his or her language, does not aspire to belong to France, and France does not try to invade French-speaking Switzerland under this pretext. Further, national identities can change quickly: Francophone Belgians have a different identity from French people. France itself went through an operation of internal colonialism to destroy Provençal, Languedoc, Picard, Savoyard, Breton, and other cultures and eradicate their languages under a centralized identity. Nationality is never defined and never fixed; administration is.
Cultural unity can make sense, but only, in my opinion, in the form of something reduced such as a city-state –I would even go…
