--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote: The US is not an organic unity like most Western European countries, but a social Frankenstein hastily put together by various social engineers. In that respect, it looks more like Russia, or Africa, than like Western Europe.
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That is because Russia, like African nations and like the United States, is not a nation-state.
There are many parallels between Russian and US history, e.g., they are both settler countries (if one is talking east of the Urals). However, there is one major detail that makes the US inherently more stable than Russia, and that is that the US government systematically wiped out local peoples, while the Russian Empire co-opted their elites and absorbed them. (So much for the "backwards Russian Empire" vs. "liberal United States" trope, ethically speaking. It was a hell of a lot better to be a serf than a black slave too -- but I digress.) This occured simultaneously with a homogenization of European settlers into the US into "Whites" and African slaves into "Blacks," and then some other waves of immigrants who got equally homogenized, with the result that the US population is divided into "Caucasians," "Blacks," "Latinos," "Asians," "Native Americans" -- am I forgetting anybody? -- and they are not for the most part located in definite regions. Whereas the Russian census contains well over a hundred distinct nationalities, most of which live in distinct geographical areas, and the ethnic Russians acting as the glue that holds the whole thing together. Hence the eloquent but ultimately befuddled "prisonhouse of nations" comment. It's sort of as if the Southwest US had a majority Pueblo Indian population. The potential for ethnic conflict is immense.
Then again, I look at the North/South in the US divide and wonder if maybe at some point in the future being a Southerner or Northerner will trump Americanness (it has before!). Hell, declaring Southerners a distinct nationality qouldn't be much more illogical than saying Ukrainians are. Southern US dialect isn't much further from standard American English than Ukrainian is from Russian. Wasn't it Napoleon who said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy?
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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