Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama Page A

the face of simple power politics. The identity question cannot be separated from the territorial question. Ideas can be adjusted in a variety of ways: territorial claims can be scaled back, identity can be shifted from ethnicity or religion to ideology or a more flexible concept of shared culture, or entirely new concepts of identity can be introduced to supersede existent ones. Changing the definition of national identity to fit reality is the least coercive and most promising path to national unity.
    HISTORICAL AMNESIA
    Identity-building projects are extremely contentious because the world never consisted of compact, homogeneous “nations” ready to be turned into political units. As a result of conquest, migration, and trade, all societies were and still are complex mixtures of tribes, ethnicities, classes, religions, and regional identities. Any idea of a nation inevitably implies the conversion or exclusion of individuals deemed to be outside its boundaries, and if they don’t want to do this peacefully, they have to be coerced. This coercion can be accomplished from the top down by states, but it can also take the form of communal violence, as one community kills or drives off its neighbors. The twenty-five or so nations that made up Europe at the middle of the twentieth century were the survivors of the five hundred or more political units that had existed there at the end of the Middle Ages.
    In all of the cases discussed up to now—Germany, Greece, Italy, Britain, and the United States—contemporary outcomes, including high levels of economic development and liberal democracy, were dependent on earlier histories of violence and coercion. I have already touched on this with regard to Germany and Greece, both of which had large diaspora populations interspersed with other ethnicities to their east. The formation of the contemporary German and Greek states began with an act of violence—Bismarck’s wars against Denmark, Austria, and France on the one hand, and the Greek revolution against the Ottomans on the other. That violence continued over the next century as populations were physically moved and borders continually redrawn.
    Ernest Renan, one of the first writers to describe the phenomenon of modern nationalism, speaks of a historical amnesia that accompanied the process of nation building. According to him, “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is essential to the creation of a nation, which is why the advance of historical study often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, brings to light the violent events that are at the source of all political formations, even those whose consequences have been beneficial.” He argues that this amnesia extended all the way back to the barbarian conquests of Europe, in which wifeless warriors, having subdued the decadent remnants of the Roman Empire, married the local women and adopted their customs. Historical amnesia continued through the centuries, as we have forgotten once proud and independent entities like Burgundy, the Grand Duchy of Parma, or Schleswig, all of which now exist only as regions subordinate to larger territorial states. 11
    Britain and the United States are sometimes seen as exemplars of peaceful political development, which managed to avoid the violent upheavals of other societies in establishing their national identities through a process of gradual, piecemeal reform. But this is true only to a certain extent; Renan’s historical amnesia applies in both cases. Britain’s original Celtic Gaelic-speaking inhabitants were repeatedly invaded from across the channel, first by the Romans, then by succeeding waves of Angles, Saxons, and Danes, and finally a French-speaking Norman dynasty. The transformation of England into Britain involved the often violent efforts to incorporate Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the limits of which were reached during Ireland’s Easter Rebellion in