Nationalism is Useless

Interesting story by Kathy Lally in the Post about migrants from central Asia living in shanty towns around Moscow:

Moscow, a city of 11.5 million according to last year’s census, has as many as 5 million migrants, more than half of them undocumented. The migrants, many of them from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, exist on the fringes of society, harassed by police, victimized by employers and disliked by Russians, once their fellow Soviet citizens.

Despite the bad treatment, more than a million of Tajikistan's 8 million people work in Russia. They live in all sorts of places, besides shanties in the woods:

In April, police found more than 100 Central Asians living underground, in an abandoned bomb shelter. In February, a settlement was discovered under the sprawling Kievsky train station, where the inhabitants worked as cleaners. In March, about 30 migrants from Tajikistan and Moldova were found living under a sausage factory.

What impresses me about this story is the uselessness of nationalism in human life. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Muslims of central Asia got the independence that some of them had longed for. What good has it done them? Since independence they have been governed by corrupt, incompetent, authoritarian regimes and endured economic ruin. National independence, the great dream of the nineteenth century, is pretty much useless when it comes to providing decent lives. What matters are individual freedom and economic prosperity. In fact the only reason I can think of for ethnic groups to want their own nations is that it is easier to set up a democracy in an ethnically homogenous society. I can't see why it is better to be governed by corrupt autocrats of one's own ethnic background than imperialists. Well, I can see why the racist ideologies of some European empires were offensive to the governed but that wasn't really an issue in the Soviet Union. Soviet man was a multi-ethnic concept.

Tajiks would be better off if their country were still governed from Moscow, and the same goes for many nations that struggled for independence.