> BTW, though people were talking about the break-up of Russia along ethnic
> lines, "Yugoslavia across 11 time zones" and so forth a few years ago, I
> don't think that's a danger now. Why? Because nobody oytside of extreme
> nationalists wants independence, because everybody who has tried it,
> outside
> the Baltics, has fallen into deep poverty and/or civil war. Who the hell
> wants to wind up like Georgia, let alone Chechnya?
(As an aside, I'm glad to say that just a few streets away from me is possibly the world's last "Yugoslav" organisation --- the Yugal Club, founded by immigrants in the '50s and still attended by Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Slovenes, Gypsies, Hungarians, etc. It even has a portrait of Tito on the wall. Now there was a national leader to be proud of... Of course, there are also separate clubs for each ethnicity, but thank heaven for small mercies.)
In my opinion --- and at the risk of provoking a debate from liberals, neo-Marxists, poststructuralists, et al --- what we have seen in the FSU and ex-Yugoslavia over the last 15 years has been the political rise of nascent capitalist classes. That these classes and sub-classes were organised locally/culturally, instead of along established state lines, parallels what has happened to many cases where the authority of a once strong political order has collapsed. That is to say, this is one thing and perhaps the only thing that that the end of Leninism shared with the "end" of European imperialism: when they disappeared, everything was up for grabs, including national identity. What I'm saying is that these national ideologies were useful tools for those who became the chief local accumulators and wanted to become ruling classes in their own right instead of paying taxes to another new ruling class, often with differing economic goals and based hundreds or thousands of km away.
> Because "continentalism," if you want to call it that, can in theory act
> as
> a force that keeps the various feuding nationalisms from beating the crap
> out of each other. It is better to identify as a "Eurasian" than as a
> "Russian" or a "Tatar," in my opinion.
Maybe. But consider that US nationalism barely existed 230 years ago, and it was _the_ most successful leftist movement in the world, when it took power... And look at what it soon became.