why these […] elections matter to me.

Last week (7-12 May) India voted for their federal parliament. Today the majority of European Union members vote for the European Parliament. (The elections started on the 22nd. The Netherlands voted on Thursday already, because of our world famous Christian conservatism. For a review of the results over there in English, read this article. Maybe read this one as well).

I don’t have to convince anybody that American elections matter for the entire world population. I would like to advocate here that the Indian and European elections are as important. Not because either the Indian or the European army (please don’t start laughing) even come close to substitute America’s role as global policeman. No. The elections in Europe and India are important, because they shape the future of democracies, worldwide. 

One of the best books I read in the last years was Empire, by Dominic Lieven. As you might know, I studied both social science and history, with a comparative master degree in international relations. Lieven brings it all together. Historians often dislike both comparison and theory, and social scientist tend to forget about history. Moreover, many histories are written from a national perspective. In Empire, Lieven – who is a historian specialized in the Russian Empire - compares the British, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Soviet Empires with the Russian one. As such, he can make some bold statements about the very notion of ‘empire’ – a controversial concept. He convinced me, and after reading his book, I do not think empires are necessarily a bad thing. 

Lieven states that empires are still present. If you define ‘empire’ as a multinational, extremely large state, we might call the USA, the Russian Federation, Indonesia, India and – probably – the European Union as the empires of today. Don’t lose me here: in this definition empires don’t have to be necessarily autocratic, authoritarian and oppressive. Moreover, not every empire needs a dominant nation. Most modern states are, or claim to be, nation states, however.

And what’s my point then? My point is that many people in Europe, and probably more and more, believe that there is a need to go back to a Europe of nation states. I think this is fruitless nostalgia. It is true that many nations were able to emancipate due to the creation of national states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Moreover, the creation of parliamentary democracies might have been impossible without a direct bond between the people and their representatives - created by both shared language and proximity. 

However, today both the challenges and the reality are global – or at least on a supranational scale. India and the EU show: global financial, environmental, security, and immigrant challenges ask for more than national answers. And as states are unable to solve these problems within their national limits, only a more democratic multinational platform can end the paralysis and progress we currently face. This is my firm conviction, even if I’m not telling you which way, ideology, or party is the right one. 

As Lieven shows us, one of the challenges of a multinational state is to prevent the rise of a dominant nation, such as the Russians in both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, or the Britons in the British Empire. America became more democratic, and arguably more successful, when it abandoned the idea that the country should be ruled by WASPs. Along the same lines, Indonesia shouldn’t be dominated by Javanese, China not by Han, and Europe not by Germans, to maintain or reach a bigger assent. 

(Would the Soviet Union have succeeded if not Russian, but Esperanto would have been chosen as its lingua franca? Read The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin). 

On a more personal note, I would like to say something about the region I’ve been studying and living in; Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet space. Nation states emancipated many nations in this part of the world, but as many minorities were oppressed. In the multinational empires of the past Christians thrived in the Middle East, Armenians lived in both Baku and Kars, Minsk was a Jewish city, Prague a German one, and Lviv was a Polish centre. Tbilisi was a Armenian city, and centre of the South Caucasus. National independence ended this, often in a rather violent way. It would be great to see people here living together once again, mixed and intermingled – in the democratic, multinational states they aspire to be.