The troubles in and around Georgia have made me think about what are the necessary constitutive elements of a people. I can accept that those with a common culture, background and language might wish to consider themselves to be a people or nation, but is this enough.
Josef Dzhugashvili (aka Stalin) understood the desire of any such group to wish to stay together and to have some form of autonomy or independence, and he also saw that such autonomy or independence, even very relative, could act as a most efficient cause of a desire to stay separate from all others.
His division and subdivision of his Empire was a marvel of cunning and deception, whereby he ensured that no two groups would or could work together with sufficient cohesion to oppose his tyranny.
We are now seeing the intended results of this in his native Caucasus, where Ossetia was divided between Russia and Georgia, giving us the current problem of South Ossetia which has no wish to come within Georgia and wishes to reunite with North Ossetia even if this means falling within Russia.
The people of Abkhazia are also willing to accept any ally to avoid coming under the control of the government of Georgia, which in its turn wishes all inhabitants of its state within its present frontiers to become fervent Georgians. The Abkhazians do not want this, and have said so clearly ever since the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union, and they would like to have a state of their own, or, as a least bad option, they would prefer to come within the Russian Federation.
There is also another smaller autonomous region within the present limits of Georgia, namely Ajaria, which seems for the moment to be succeeding in staying out of the headlines in the hope of being left in peace. Since it does not border directly on Russia it may not benefit from intervention from the North, and appears so far to have remained peaceful, but the mere fact that it has some autonomy bodes ill for the imperial desire of Georgia to retain it within that state.
If the rulers of Georgia could have brought themselves to allow these minorities to be themselves and to run their own affairs without constant supervision, they would probably never have had the troubles which have arisen, but it seems absolutely certain that they adamantly insist on a degree of conformity which must give rise to hostility.
This kind of difficulty where one people has come to rule over another affects many states, and we see it in parts of France, where the state is gradually becoming less insistent on this form of conformity and in Italy which has its French and German speaking regions. The intelligent rulers encourage diversity at the same time as promoting a feeling of national unity without trying to enforce absolute conformity. This explains the success of France in retaining the support of the population in the eastern Region of Alsace and in the adjoining département of the Moselle, despite the long years when those areas were ruled by the Prussian king who thereby became the German emperor.
In a perfect world, each of these peoples would be able to join with others of their own free will and proclaim their specific cultural identity without feeling that they are thereby becoming subject peoples. This should be our aim and we can in the meantime have sympathy for every minority people which has become subject to another, and hope that all the bombast of the recent past will shortly quieten down and allow genuine negotiations to take place to bring peace to the Caucasus and to all other areas suffering from similar problems.
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