Centerfield

Multinationalism: Something Else the Civil War Did

It recently occurred to me that one effect of the Civil War was the creation of a new thing here in the US, the multinational republic (there was a source of inspiration involving a civ-style game with a novel government type, the Multinational Republic, and I realized that that's what we have now).

Most historians agree that the U.S. self-view changed after the Civil War. Before, people regarded themselves primarly as Virginians, Marylanders, New Yorkers, Texans, etc., people living in states making up a Union. Sympathies rested with residents of one's own state before residents of the rest of the United States. Afterwards, as now, people started to regard themselves as being "Americans."

So what new mental magic does this represent? Well, it allows people to act as though they lived both in different nationalities and in the same nation. One of several reasons for the Civil War was the tension between Northern and Southern cultures, rather reminiscent of tension between other nations, as it included differences between morals (slavery!) and ways of life, mutual distrust of the other guys' leaders, recriminations on editorial pages, violence, even different dialects. The Civil War decided the answer to how differences between nationalities would be played out. The South's answer was, by calling it splits. Lincoln's winning answer was, along the federalized lines of political and legal conflict laid down by the Constitution and the Federal Government.

Today, anybody who has spent much time in both New York and Texas will see that the U.S. remains a country of vastly different cultures. Surely the differences are about as profound as those between, say France and Belgium. Nobody argues that France and Belgium are really the same nationality. But NY and TX are both part of the same nation. Some magic is present here to reconcile this contradiction (and increasingly similarly present in the EU with respect to France and Belgium).

So what is this magic? Well, we have mentally separated usual nationality and cultural identity ideas from actual nationhood. It was implicit in the Constitution that differences between states and sections will usually be settled through the ballot-box, the courts, and lots of hollering. Custom has long ratified this. But the writers of the Constitution knew rebellions happened, and took that into account in their plans. What has happened since the Civil War is that armed rebellion is out of the plan. A large majority of American citizens have accepted that cultural and ideological conflicts shall not be settled by violence, but by governmental mechanisms and the institutionalized revolution of the ballot box.

Each U.S. culture - what might be a nationality elsewhere - has, by and large, accepted this idea. BBQ vs. a sub sammich ain't worth fightin' over. Unless it's damned fine BBQ, of course.

In fact, with the accession of Puerto Rico to self-government and the huge Latino immigration wave that started in the 50s, the United States is now no longer linguistically united even in the cross-dialect sense that obtains between New York and Texas. This has been only a minor challenge to U.S. self-identity or operation, since the mental structure needed to integrate Latino cultures (or Chinese or Thai or Japanese or...) was laid down back in the Late Southern Nastiness.

Of course, the multinational republic wasn't a complete innovation. The Roman Empire and Ottoman Empires both incorporated subject nationalities with full citizenship (but in empires lacking the vote, so their power was limited to being in the Imperial elites) (in an odd sense, the Greeks won over the Romans in the end). The big novelty was that it was spinning out in a democracy, where citizens of multiple cultures can vote and eventually outvote the original power (like the Southern part of President Bush' coalition).

The Austria-Hungarian Empire is another famous example of an explicitly multinational government. Austria and Hungary were, in the nineteenth century, formally coequals governing over several nationalities, although Austria was more equal than Hungary.

It's probably no coincidence that slavery acquired such burning dimensions just when the telegraph and railroad brought much tighter connectivity. The telegraph brought nationwide next-day distribution of news stories stories by the 1840s, probably making feasible dueling editorials and pamphlets between North and South (See Gotham, by Burrows and Wallace, Ch 39, "Manhattan, Ink."). When the country was founded, getting out of your home state and especially region was difficult and probably relatively rare. News went no faster than people. Northerners heard and saw much less about goings-on down South, and vice versa.

As U.S. Grant said:

The civilized nations of Europe have been stimulated into unusual activity, so that commerce, trade, travel, and thorough acquaintance among people of different nationalities, have become common; whereas, before, it was but the few who had ever had the privilege of going beyond the limits of their own country or who knew anything about other people.

Many nations part of empires acquired their first newspapers around this time as well, allowing a 'native' voice for the first time. This was the seed of multiethnic trouble, explicit multiethnicism in the underlying theories of imperial rule, and eventual widespread rebellion.

So maybe it really is a red nation and a blue nation.... Well, just temporarily - soon it'll settle back down into the more usual quasi-regionalisms. Although, with modern mobility rates and the spread of culture through the Internet, just who belongs to which culture is less and less decided by geography, and more and more by personal experience.