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The one thing that the west struggles with when it comes to understanding the fighting in the #MiddleEast and #Caucasus is that ethnic mingling was the norm until the 19th and 20th century when nationalist ideas borrowed from #Europe started to create 1/n
the novel idea that a state = a people. Prior to that, the notion was absurd outside Europe. Ethnicities would dominate a state’s power structure, often elevating a language or cultural influence, but ethnic homogeneity in a geography 2/n
beyond a collection of some villages or a city was simply not normal. Nomads, and multiethnic provinces were normal. What we have seen, starting with the #Armenian #genocide, #Greek expulsions, anti- #Kurdish policies, Arab Sunni extremism, 3/n
Is a century long process to bring to life a foreign nationalism in the middle east. It’s naturally more complex than that, with competing layers of ethnic and confessional identities vying for primacy as the “social organizing logic”, but 4/n
it’s worth appreciating how foreign this still is. #Azerbaijan ‘s desperate search for an ancient ethnic narrative after abandoning the confessional one dominant before, #Armenian desperate race to preserve their history, which itself 5/n
is inextricably mingled with the Turkic peoples, Kurds, and other caucasian natives, and the Syrian’s and Iraqi’s attempts to create a cultural identity based on an artificial border, a process that gave us the Ba’ath party. Even #Israel’s 6/n
near century long attempt to create an ethnic homeland is an import of the European nationalist idea. This isn’t ancient hatreds in the middle east...it is 150 years of confessional and ethnic spasming while trying to digest a poisonous idea #nationalism 7/7
