Industrialization, but not Democracy or Nationalism

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by RousseauX

I basically don't really consider destruction of traditional culture necessarily anti-thesis to all types of nationalism. Remember that, the one source of legitimacy the CCP always drew on from 1949 on was Mao's "the Chinese people have stood up" despite whatever policy failures committed by the CCP.

That's primarily because Mao's China pursued aggressive foreign policies without the total military embarrassments that clustered around other Chinese governments. The PRC has never, at any point, pursued Chinese nationalism.

Originally Posted by RousseauX

Federalization of the USSR wasn't Stalin's doing, but in reality federalization was a myth during Stalin's era anyway. Ukraine for instance, was practically a Russian ran colony: something like 90% of its officials were Russian when something like <10% of its population were. While russification was gone, Soviet rule meant Russian rule.

Federalization was not a myth, the Tsarist government had a far less complex structure in this regard than the USSR did. The USSR actually made the most progress of any "Russian" government in establishing a local level of government by means of the SSRs. There are a lot of state governors in the USA who aren't necessarily born in the states they are governors of, does this make those states colonies of the others? The Ukraine tended to be run harshly because the Soviet repression there is better-known there than elsewhere. At one point what the USSR did in the Baltic States and Poland was better-known, and those were the standard Soviet atrocities well-known.

[Maponus]

Originally Posted by RousseauX

Yes it's weird, but remember even Lenin himself called Stalin "the great Russian chauvinist".

Lenin called people a lot of things, most of which he only half-meant. Communists have a tendency to exaggerate their ideological disagreements.

Stalin was a Pan-Slavic Imperialist if anything, not a Russian nationalist. As he told Dijas, "when the Slavs are together, no will be able to move a finger."

[Beedok]

Originally Posted by Maponus

The Great-Russian variety who saw the Soviet state as a continuation of the Russian Empire, of course.

Remember, it easy to forget that he was not a Russian himself, therefore it simply not possible to consider him a Russian Nationalist, as he was directly invalid in the suppression of his own nation, Georgia! Pan-Slavic? Definitely. Manipulated feelings of Patriotism? Certainly. But a Russian Nationalist? Nah.

Wasn't Napoleon considered a bit of a French Nationalist, despite being Corsican?

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by RousseauX

Yes it's weird, but remember even Lenin himself called Stalin "the great Russian chauvinist".

That was rather grossly exaggerated and also extremely ironic, as Stalin was Lenin's Commissar for Nationalities and Lenin had helped Stalin write a paper on the nationalities question. It's also worth noting that here as in other matters the gap between Lenin and Stalin is one of scale and thus degree, not kind.

[RousseauX]

Originally Posted by Maponus

Lenin called people a lot of things, most of which he only half-meant. Communists have a tendency to exaggerate their ideological disagreements.

Exaggerated or not, it's meaning is simple: Stalin was really big on advancing the Russian part of the USSR, and building the USSR as a Russian controlled state.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by Maponus

The Great-Russian variety who saw the Soviet state as a continuation of the Russian Empire, of course.

Remember, it easy to forget that he was not a Russian himself, therefore it simply not possible to consider him a Russian Nationalist, as he was directly invalid in the suppression of his own nation, Georgia! Pan-Slavic? Definitely. Manipulated feelings of Patriotism? Certainly. But a Russian Nationalist? Nah.

He was not a nationalist of any sort. If he had been, his policies would have been very different, as we *saw* what a strictly Russian-nationalist variant of such things looked like in Tsarist-era Russification. That is emphatically not what the Stalin regime did.

[RousseauX]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

That's primarily because Mao's China pursued aggressive foreign policies without the total military embarrassments that clustered around other Chinese governments. The PRC has never, at any point, pursued Chinese nationalism.

This is simply never true, I mean if you only considered Mao's era you might be able to make an argument (ok in your case assertion) for it, but the PRC today's defacto ideology is nationalism.

There are a lot of state governors in the USA who aren't necessarily born in the states they are governors of, does this make those states colonies of the others?

If 90% of that state's administration is ran by people from one large state in the Middle of the country which also happens to contain the majority of the economical-military potential, with all the accompanying atrocities then yes.

The Ukraine tended to be run harshly because the Soviet repression there is better-known there than elsewhere. At one point what the USSR did in the Baltic States and Poland was better-known, and those were the standard Soviet atrocities well-known.

Yeah, no part of the USSR had real federalization

[mowque]

Communism does nicely.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by RousseauX

This is simply never true, I mean if you only considered Mao's era you might be able to make an argument (ok in your case assertion) for it, but the PRC today's defacto ideology is nationalism.

No, the PRC's ideology is making money, lots and lots of money.

Originally Posted by RousseauX

If 90% of that state's administration is ran by people from one large state in the Middle of the country which also happens to contain the majority of the economical-military potential, with all the accompanying atrocities then yes.

Or it could simply be that as the most numerous people in the USSR that ethnic Russians were a majority of Soviet leaders reflecting demography? Without the Baltic states and Poland and Finland Great Russians made up more of the Soviet population than they did the Tsarist state's.

Originally Posted by RousseauX

Yeah, no part of the USSR had real federalization

This had nothing to do with nationalism and everything to do with the reality of totalitarianism.

[Faeelin]

I don't know why people are latching onto Russia. Prior to 1832, a good case can be made that Britian was becoming more repressive as it industrialized.

[loughery111]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

No it did not. The Communists invariably were opposed to nationalism in every single case. The Communist ideology was imperialist, to be sure, but it was a distinctly non-nationalist type of appeal. And if you're going to use Ho Chih Minh as a counterexample he was looking for any patron that would have him, and turned to Leninism solely as a means to create a strongly tied, disciplined revolutionary movement. The contrast between that and the Soviets and Maoists is a rather profound one.

Oh, come now, surely you don't actually BELIEVE this? The USSR was, under each and every single one of its leaders, a repackaged Russian state with a massive emphasis on Russian nationalism, essentially the Russian Empire under new management.

China may have seen a brief exception under Mao (even this is debatable considering the degree to which the Dialectic was translated into/completely and utterly corrupted by the Chinese language and an extensive use of Confucian terminology), but even if I were willing to grant that (not really), that still leaves the entire rest of its history under the CCP.

To be frank, even the suggestion that the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to destroy the entirety of historical Han Chinese culture is simply not supportable based on the evidence; in practice it was little more than a power play to secure Mao's position against dissent WITHIN the CCP itself, dressed up as a fundamental break with the past. It was not honestly directed at the destruction of traditional Chinese culture, but rather at eliminating academia as a source of opposition to Mao. It certainly was not anti-nationalist.

In effect, the two core Communist powers have been based entirely on nationalist sentiment by their dominant ethnic groups. While the ideology in its pure form, especially as espoused by Western Communists, is anti-nationalist, in practice it has never even come close.

[RousseauX]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

No, the PRC's ideology is making money, lots and lots of money.

Not mutually exclusive with nationalism,: trust me, I grew up in the PRC and this should be obvious to anyone with any contact with the country or people from it. I shouldn't even need to start quoting government rhetoric. The simple fact that you are denying something accepted by essentially everyone know knows anything about the PRC today shows you really don't know what you are talking about when it comes to modern day China.

Or it could simply be that as the most numerous people in the USSR that ethnic Russians were a majority of Soviet leaders reflecting demography? Without the Baltic states and Poland and Finland Great Russians made up more of the Soviet population than they did the Tsarist state's.

This had nothing to do with nationalism and everything to do with the reality of totalitarianism.

Hi: please see my comments on proportionality of demography vs proportionality of ethnicity in leadership

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by loughery111

Oh, come now, surely you don't actually BELIEVE this? The USSR was, under each and every single one of its leaders, a repackaged Russian state with a massive emphasis on Russian nationalism, essentially the Russian Empire under new management.

China may have seen a brief exception under Mao (even this is debatable considering the degree to which the Dialectic was translated into/completely and utterly corrupted by the Chinese language and an extensive use of Confucian terminology), but even if I were willing to grant that (not really), that still leaves the entire rest of its history under the CCP.

To be frank, even the suggestion that the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to destroy the entirety of historical Han Chinese culture is simply not supportable based on the evidence; in practice it was little more than a power play to secure Mao's position against dissent WITHIN the CCP itself, dressed up as a fundamental break with the past. It was not honestly directed at the destruction of traditional Chinese culture, but rather at eliminating academia as a source of opposition to Mao. It certainly was not anti-nationalist.

In effect, the two core Communist powers have been based entirely on nationalist sentiment by their dominant ethnic groups. While the ideology in its pure form, especially as espoused by Western Communists, is anti-nationalist, in practice it has never even come close.

I actually do, yes. The Soviet Union did actions directly contrary to a full Russification Policy, such as forming SSRs that had the potential to build their own nationalisms and did. These SSRs, built out of areas which were often tribal and quasi-feudal in Central Asia, or actually quasi-nationalistic in places like Georgia and Armenia, are the direct opposite of a Russification policy that would have been more on the lines of one alternative to the idea *of* a USSR. Great Russians tended to be more numerous in the USSR than they were in the Russian Empire, but then in some ways the USSR was *smaller* than the Russian Empire. The Soviet leadership did not endorse nationalism and its manifestations and instead deliberately sought to suppress and thwart it as a challenge to the CPSU's total monopoly on power.

The PRC also was anything but interested in Chinese nationalism or fostering "Chinese" identities, it sought instead to transplant Stalinism wholesale without *regard* for Chinese nationalism or Chinese identity. It did not succeed in this attempt as it wished, but that's due to the powerful inertia of China's sheer size in terms of population and cities more than from intention.

[loughery111]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

I actually do, yes. The Soviet Union did actions directly contrary to a full Russification Policy, such as forming SSRs that had the potential to build their own nationalisms and did. These SSRs, built out of areas which were often tribal and quasi-feudal in Central Asia, or actually quasi-nationalistic in places like Georgia and Armenia, are the direct opposite of a Russification policy that would have been more on the lines of one alternative to the idea *of* a USSR. Great Russians tended to be more numerous in the USSR than they were in the Russian Empire, but then in some ways the USSR was *smaller* than the Russian Empire. The Soviet leadership did not endorse nationalism and its manifestations and instead deliberately sought to suppress and thwart it as a challenge to the CPSU's total monopoly on power.

The PRC also was anything but interested in Chinese nationalism or fostering "Chinese" identities, it sought instead to transplant Stalinism wholesale without *regard* for Chinese nationalism or Chinese identity. It did not succeed in this attempt as it wished, but that's due to the powerful inertia of China's sheer size in terms of population and cities more than from intention.

I strongly disagree with this, most especially with your views on Chinese communism, which I would characterize as an entirely different animal than Stalinism, Marxism, Leninism, or any combination of the three, but I apologize for my opening line from the last post; it was out of line.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by loughery111

I strongly disagree with this, most especially with your views on Chinese communism, which I would characterize as an entirely different animal than Stalinism, Marxism, Leninism, or any combination of the three, but I apologize for my opening line from the last post; it was out of line.

Eh, no big deal. I think the USSR was definitely imperialistic but it was not any kind of distinctively *Russian* imperialism. The Soviet brand of empire was more complex and it was not a nationalist version in any sense of the word. If it was nationalism much of what it did was counterproductive by nationalist standards.

[Basileus444]

All this discussion on Stalinist Russia gave me an idea for this scenario. Note that this is a very very rough draft.

Suppose an uber version of Revolutionary France (not necessarily in France) arises in this TL, determined to export the Revolution. It's a nastier version of OTL, with mass executions and concentration camps for monarchists and counter-revolutionaries Nazi-style. This state has several brilliant military commanders, making it a massive threat but none of those commanders are able or willing to co-opt the Revolution like Napoleon, so the state remains a militant democracy.

The war between this uber-democracy and the surrounding multi-ethnic monarchies lasts for at least a generation, perhaps more. The monarchies are forced to begin industrializing as a part of the war effort, while the multiple ethnicities are bonded together in their common struggle against their democratic menace, so by the end they don't think of themselves as (for example) Austrians or Hungarians, but as Austrio-Hungarian. When the uber-democracy is defeated, the monarchies are well on their way to industrializing, the ethnicities are loyal to their state (but not the concept of the nation-state), and democracies are seen largely like we see Nazis, while monarchies are viewed as the only way to keep civilization going.

[sarapen]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

No, the PRC's ideology is making money, lots and lots of money.

Then how do you account for the nationalist posturings that China gets into like the dispute over the Spratly Islands, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, China's tiff with Taiwan, the suppression of Tibet and the Uyghur population in Xinjiang?

Most of these disputes are actually unprofitable for China in an economic sense though profitable in the sense that it feeds Chinese nationalism. Yes, you can make an argument about the first being about the potential resources locked up in the Spratlys but I don't see anyone claiming hidden oil reserves hidden under Senkaku. In fact, they look to be pretty much worthless rocks in the middle of nowhere and the dispute over them seem mostly to be about nationalistic concerns about territorial integrity and revanchism.

As for the Taiwan issue, again it seems to be about nationalist concerns over territory. If profit were truly king then it would seem to be far more profitable for China to recognize the situation as it already exists and get on with the business of having Taiwanese investors financing Chinese factories and whatnot.

Finally, the last two issues with Tibet and Xinjiang are straight out of the playbook of classic nationalism: the violent suppression of cultural identities that do not fit with the national majority. When the legitimacy of the nation-state is built on being the will of the nation made manifest, what is a nation-state to do when other nations (referring here to ethnic/linguistic/religious identities) inconveniently exist within its borders? Why, they do everything to make those nations shut their pieholes and act normal, by gum.

In the US it happened with shunting off the Indians into reservations, in Canada with sending the children of those same natives into residential schools with deliberate policies of suppressing native culture, in Israel it happened with the destruction of Yiddish printing presses in favour of Hebrew, in Germany it happened with the general anti-Catholicism in favour of Protestantism in the era of unification, and in every immigrant country in the world it can be found in the pressure to assimilate (leaving aside newfangled notions like multiculturalism). Those aren't, of course, the only examples of nationalist suppression for those countries, just the ones off the top of my head.

[Snake Featherston]

The connection of Communism with imperialism is how I'd explain all of those. Communism in practice is a different, party-state, revolutionary variant of imperialism designed to create a version of the class system of industrial states. The Taiwan issue and both Tibet and Xinjiang all tie into the Marxist-imperialist model in this sense, as does use of settlers as opposed to the more violent variants of settler-colonialism usually used by capitalist societies.

[amphibulous]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

That's primarily because Mao's China pursued aggressive foreign policies without the total military embarrassments that clustered around other Chinese governments. The PRC has never, at any point, pursued Chinese nationalism.

Your must have a ***very*** odd definition of nationalism:

http://www.cfr.org/china/nationalism-china/p16079

According to the most recent relevant book I'm aware of, the hero of Chinese think tanks and their proposed role model for Chinese politicians is Winston Churchill:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Does-Ch...6289937&sr=1-1

[RoyalPsycho]

It's possible to have a conservative monarchial society industrialize I mean Germany did it. To keep democracy down you have to give the nation a reason not to want to overthrow absolutist rule (competent rulers, no crippling military losses etc).
For nationalism an Imperial pan-national identity would be the best bet.