This is ostensibly on Russian Independence Day (which is tomorrow), but really on the American Revolution and its effects on American thinking.
Russian Indepence Day is the wierdest excuse for a holiday I have ever heard of. Not only was Russia declaring independence from itself, most Russians view the fall of the USSR as something very, very bad indeed. This is like African Americans creating National Middle Passage week.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------ strana.ru June 11, 2002 12th of June - 4th of July: An American View (The tragic side of national independence. The uses and limits of national days.) By Ira Straus
I wonder, should I send congratulations to my Russian friends on your national independence day, June 12?
It would be officially "correct", but somehow it doesn't feel "right". For one thing, it doesn't seem that many of you view June 12 as a cause for celebration. To the contrary: for a lot of you, June 12 refers to a national tragedy.
Perhaps it would be of some consolation if I were to mention that America's 4th of July is not much better. Americans imagine it to be a day of pure triumph, but we have paid a high price for this fairy tale.
Almost all national days are tragedies as much as triumphs. They are based on revolutions, wars, and tribal schisms. In a schism, the national patrimony of land and population gets torn apart. In a revolution, the national patrimony of thought and spirit gets torn apart. In either case, the event they celebrate is one that served to sever half of the national tradition from the body or mind of the nation.
It doesn't mean that the historic event wasn't necessary. The necessity of it is what makes it a tragedy.
Unfortunately, "national day" celebrations usually make a virtue of necessity. It is wise of Russians to be skeptical of their "national day" on June 12. Americans would do well to learn from Russia on this matter and pay less attention to their 4th of July.
What we should celebrate is the courage of those who faced the necessity of making a tragic choice, not the tragedy itself as if it were a triumph. And we should celebrate the skill of those who made the choice while limiting the damage. For example, in 1991, the role of the Russian leadership in guaranteeing the general peace during the tragic break-up, avoiding a series of major wars such as engulfed Yugoslavia which broke apart in similar circumstances.
What is not helpful is to make a virtue of the necessity - to go on idealizing the old revolutions and separations.
Idealizing revolutions and separations means perpetuating the suppressions and divisions they entailed, long after the time when they were necessary. There was perhaps a time when mental suppressions and sharp lines of political division were needed for making a revolution, but that time has passed. The idealization perpetuates the evil element in the historic events -- not the good element in their outcome, which can perpetuate itself by other means. It takes a continuing price from us: it stands in the way of understanding our real needs and potentialities for the future. It seduces us into following irrelevant paths, gilded with the stuff of myth and the promise of national-patriotic heroism.
It would be much better for all our societies if we could stop idealizing our old revolutions and tribal separations and our ancient conflicts with our nearest neighbors.
Turning November 7 into a Day of National Reconciliation was a stroke of genius on the part of Russia. The same thing might eventually be done with June 12. And the same ought to be done with July 4 in America.
There is a dark side to the 4th of July that most Americans are scarcely aware of. Like November 7, it stands for a revolution. In that revolution, we Americans cut off a huge part of our national tradition. We killed or exiled a valuable part of our society: far more Americans fled, as a percentage of the population, than Frenchmen fled the terror of the French Revolution a few years later. We repressed an entire range of normal moderate thinking, labeling it "Tory", or what today we would call "politically incorrect". We started confining ourselves to a revolutionary ideological framework of discourse, which has led us sometimes to draw some badly misguided conclusions. And meanwhile we cut our empire in half with our Independence, much as you Russians did with June 12.
In the view of America's greatest Founders in 1776 - Washington, Franklin, even Jefferson in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence -- the separation from England was a tragic necessity, not a cause for celebration in itself. Similarly, for Yeltsin and Khasbulatov, the break-up of the Soviet Union was at first viewed as a tragic necessity. It was later that the temptation came to make a virtue of the necessity and stop regretting the cost of the change.
All revolutions do these sorts of things -- truncating traditions, drawing lines of blood, repressing memories and normal ideas, establishing dogmas, narrowing the mind and the body politic. You Russians have suffered far worse from this kind of thing than we Americans. At least the American Revolution didn't do as bad as most revolutions. At least the principles of the Declaration of Independence were fairly good and natural. Even today, they still give America a lot of strength. Yet despite these virtues, the Declaration remains a one-sided statement, incomplete, factional, and at variance with some of the other foundations of America. The main roots of America's freedoms and political institutions lie, not in separation from England, but in the centuries of development of parliamentary representative government and individual liberties in England beginning with the Magna Carta: a fact that is obscured by the celebrations of July 4.
The resolution of Congress on July 2, 1776, which commissioned both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, was much better balanced than the Declaration itself. So was the preamble of the 1787 Constitution. But these documents didn't have any warm persuasive rhetoric. It was the Declaration that ran off with the prize of public recognition. And the Declaration immediately got sealed in blood, always a boost to publicity.
Luckily, America has done well. Yet even our good luck itself has been a source of naivete. Since our Revolution turned out alright and no one in America thinks they are suffering from it, we Americans are more vulnerable than other societies to believing uncritically in our own revolutionary ideology. We genuinely believe in it. Practically no one among us notices its faults or limitations. 225 years after it was issued, the Declaration of Independence is cited as if it were a Biblical text, an indisputable foundation of truth and morality. Its one-sidedness and its costs, which were obvious to its authors, are forgotten.
In our rhetoric every 4th of July, Independence and the Declaration are treated as if they were the entire foundation of America -- the basis of American freedom, the source of political legitimacy, the criterion for distinguishing good from evil, "our" side from the enemy. It obscures the centuries of growth of liberty in Europe and England, the long historical evolution from the Greeks to the Magna Carta to the British parliament, the Glorious Revolution and the Enlightenment, brought over to America and long gestating in the colonial assemblies.
This kind of thing cannot help but have serious consequences. Here are just a few of the consequences for the American mind:
1) equating freedom with Revolution.
2) equating freedom with separation from England and from Europe.
3) equating freedom with local sovereignty and destruction of central government.
These three intellectual consequences have in turn had very serious practical consequences, namely:
1) Romanticization of revolution. Lots of Americans get over-enthusiastic about revolutions all around the world, sympathizing with every kind of radical cause and rebellion, most of which turn out for the worse. It is revealing that we never think of accusing ourselves of this failing, but only of the opposite - of not being revolutionary enough, of betraying our revolutionary heritage by failing to support some far-out revolutionary cause somewhere.
2) Isolationism. Lots of Americans have held to the belief that isolation from Europe is the foundation of their freedom. This led America to stay out of the early stages of the World Wars, until freedom and democracy were on the verge of being defeated worldwide -- and to do this in the name of freedom! Atlanticism did succeed in overcoming isolationism both times, but only very late and after a great risk of losing everything. Even today, we still have a wave of rhetoric every few years about how maybe it's time to pull out and leave our allies to themselves. This makes our allies nervous (and our adversaries hopeful) that maybe we really will do it this time. More damagingly, it leads us to impulsive, arrogant behavior vis-a-vis our partners, and to a unilateralist, take-it-or-leave-it attitude in many of our international relations.
3) Exporting nationalism and independence instead of democracy and federalism. Americans have been torn between three goals: support for international cooperation, support for democracy and human rights, and support for nationalism and independence everywhere. The glorification of Independence has encouraged the last and worst of these three goals. It made us collaborators with Stalin in undermining the British empire, which we viewed as "the evil empire" ever since 1776. Americans believed that they were somehow promoting freedom when they helped liberate the Ugandas and Congos of the world from the British, never mind that these countries fell into the hands of Idi Amins and Mobutus. In the 1990s, the same empty-minded attitude was seen when the US government concentrated on "strengthening of independence" in the new states in the Caucasus and Central Asia from Russia, without regard for the cost to democracy and human rights -- and yet, described this as a policy of supporting democracy and human rights. It was a strange way of promoting democracy and human rights, since, in practice, the most liberal regimes in those regions are the ones that are closest to Russia, while the most oppressive regimes are the ones most insistent on total independence of Russia. The U.S. even initially welcomed the Taliban to power in Afghanistan as a force buttressing the independence of Central Asia. We paid a terrible price for it on September 11.
It was not the first time America paid a terrible price for its idealization of independence. Antifederalism and the U.S. Civil War flowed out of the same mistake.
After 1776, there was deep suspicion in America of central government. The Revolution had destroyed the central government. Every attempt at reconstructing a central government was attacked as Counter-revolution, Restoration, Tyranny. This made it hard to get first the Articles of Confederation and then Constitution agreed to and ratified - a difficulty which risked cutting up America into 13 pieces. The same outlook later enabled the slave-holding states to secede from the Union in 1861 in the name - somehow keeping a straight face! - of resistance to tyranny. Thus the Civil War. It was a terrible price to have paid for an oversimplified rhetoric of pride in independence.
Every 4th of July, the Declaration of Independence is reprinted in the press and read on the radio, treated like a sacred scripture, described as THE foundation of America and of all our freedom - in an endless series of incredibly dull-witted discussions and interviews on the news media. Every time I hear this, I wonder how many more Americans are having their minds short-circuited. How many will end up making harmful political choices as a matter of what they imagine to be their patriotic duty, without even being aware of the possibility that they are doing anything wrong.
Fortunately, there was always an alternative tradition, a kind of High Tradition that has survived all the centuries of politically correct domination. It is the tradition of Federalism and central government, from Alexander Hamilton to Theodore Roosevelt, and from Roosevelt to the Marshall Plan. A tradition that was not based on defending the status quo or looking backward, but was rather always a Project -- the project of putting back together the whole tradition in an innovative way, by looking forward. The Project had its roots in the plans for Benjamin Franklin from 1754-1765 for a Union of the colonies within the British empire and for an Imperial Parliament. It got underway practically in 1781 and 1787 with the Union (or re-Union) of the American colonies with one another. It grew by the 20th century into a project of uniting (or reuniting) the European and Atlantic countries which, having by now come to be free, no longer needed to be defining their freedom in terms of their independence of one another, or in terms of some minor conflict that they had once had against one another centuries ago. The Project has never achieved complete success, but it has had some great achievements along the way: the Constitution, the expansion of the Union in the 1800s, the Anglo-American rapprochement of the 1890s, the Atlantic Alliance of the 20th century, the Marshall Plan, EU and NATO... In the end, this gave back to America an Atlantic layer of its national identity, a layer which had been the basis of America's founding in the 1600s but had been painfully torn away from it in 1776. Even if it gave America back this layer only half-way, still contradicted by the national-patriotic rhetoric that is drummed into the national mind every 4th of July.
The meaning of the Project in this generation is to include Russia in the Euro-Atlantic system of integration. It is Russia's inclusion that is needed to make the Euro-Atlantic world whole.
Russia's inclusion is one of the main elements required for adapting the Euro-Atlantic system to the urgent tasks of global regulation in an era of mass terrorism. It is what is needed to give the Project vitality in the public mind and avoid the dangers of a degeneration into childish national-patriotic moods.
The ending of the Cold War creates an opportunity for completing the internationalist project that had been cherished by both sides of the Cold War, but that until 1991 was kept obstructed at the half-way point by their competition. This obstruction gave rise to despair when the stand-off came to be hardened by nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutual destruction; a philosophy of absurdism - the absurdity of existing power structures, civilizations, and grand projects - spread on both sides. After 1991 the two sides won a chance to overcome the absurdism and complete the internationalist project. This is what is needed to make them morally whole again. Leaving them to their separate national-patriotic mythologies would be a misfortune for both of them.
The true national project on each side, Russia and America, is a project of greatness. In each case, the project of greatness was as a vast extension of Europe, one moving eastward, the other westward. Each of them, as they moved outward a long way from the core of Europe, suffered badly from a temptation of picturing themselves as completely unique and non-European. The national project of greatness was incompatible with the national-patriotic mythology of uniqueness. In the latter mythology, national greatness would flow from what was unique in our countries and different from Europe, rather than what our countries were in a favorable position to build farther on the basis of European foundations.
In face of the vast mythology accumulated around the idea of uniqueness and the political noise made by the national-patriots, it has always been difficult in each of the two countries to focus on the true national project and think freely about the way to move the project forward. One of the virtues of strana.ru is that it makes some effort to do this, to engage the moderate sector of the Russian political class in thinking about this subject, and to wean away from national-patriotic mythology that portion of the nationalist sector which is redeemable; it is one of the reasons why I have begun writing for Strana.ru.
The United States suffers in this period for the lack of a comparable quality of discourse on the true national project at the elite level. This is something on which Russians could help America, by providing the benefit of their experience. And it is something on which Russia and America can help each other, by building the wider union which is the necessary embodiment today of the national project.
The political correctness which obstructs sound discourse in America is ultimately the result of the worship of the revolution of 1776, but it is heightened in the U.S. by the decades of competition of the two Cold War ideologies, each promoting its own variant of revolutionary-left correctness. In its face, there can be little of the open, clear-headed dialogue that is always needed among American elites about the true national project and greatness. America did have such a dialogue in the 1890s and the 1940s, and it was what made possible the Euro-Atlantic construction. But in the 1960s, the practical discrediting of "the establishment" went hand-in-hand with its comprehensive moral subordination to its own rhetoric of correctness. The nuclear stalemate, with its official posture in which nothing could be done but hold to deterrence (threat of mutual annihilation) despite its self-contradictions, and its alternative of an absurdist ideology of existential alienation, reinforced the tendency to rigidity. It created a brittleness in American policy; it removed the space for profound reflection and flexible adaptation on a basis of fundamental purpose. This helps explain the aspect of an "autopilot" or "sleepwalking" character that Russians have noticed in U.S. and Western foreign policy since 1989.
Here, too, Russia can help America - not by offering a cynicism of extreme "incorrectness", but by joining in a moderate dialogue on their fundamental purpose in the world. And by helping to construct the common Project which is the only way that that purpose can be realized. Together each can in some respects find its true self better than separately.
The political overturn in Russia in 1991, with its evolutionary foundations from 1985 or even from the Khrushchev period, enabled Russia to overcome its enforced Soviet "correctness", not with extremism, but with moderation. America, not needing a new revolution, has lacked a comparable opportunity to overcome its political correctness of the late Cold War decades. The main chance for this - for making the American mind whole again - lies in a qualitatively new further development of the common project together with Russia and Europe.
By a coincidence, inclusion of Russia in the Euro-Atlantic system is what is also needed to make Russia whole again after June 12. The negative side of June 12 cannot be overcome by trying simply to reverse the results of June 12, nor by simply being optimistic and trying to believe that the results of June 12 were all good. But the negative results can be overcome nevertheless - by Russia's inclusion in a wider union of the countries of European civilization. No new union in the CIS area alone will ever be strong enough to overcome the disintegrative side of June 12, because any CIS union will always be limited by the contradictory push and pull of the wish for reunion with Russia and the fear of Russian domination. It is only within the wider Euro-Atlantic framework that this contradiction can be escaped and the reunion of the CIS countries can become deep.
Russians justifiably feel a bit melancholy about June 12, with its not entirely happy meaning in Russian history. But they can console themselves with the thought that at least they know that they ought to feel melancholy about it. Americans still celebrate July 4 - a day of declaration of national division and civil war - without reservations, as if it were simply a national triumph. Americans still suffer the consequences of this illusion: it still leads them into mistakes for which they pay dearly. On this matter, Americans need some help from Russia. It is Russia, not America, that has the most experience in the field of putting aside a revolutionary ideology. Russia can teach America some things about how to put a revolution behind itself.