Years ago, my son returned from a trip to Russia with several souvenirs, including a set of the famous Russian dolls. I would imagine you know the type: a group of nested wooden ladies in babushkas, designed so that when you opened one, you found a smaller one inside, and so on, until you finally reached the last, smallest one. My two-year-old grandson finds them fascinating, opening them up and putting them back together repeatedly.

I was reminded of those dolls while watching news reports about the current situation in Crimea. Following the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of the Ukraine, areas of that country where ethnic Russians were the majority erupted into violence. In the Crimea, a strategic peninsula jutting into the Black Sea, Russia has maintained military bases ever since the Ukraine won independence from the old Soviet Union. Russian President Putin ordered Russian forces there to take control of the peninsula, and put troops on the borders of the Ukraine on high alert. Then announced there would be a referendum held in Crimea on the question of whether it would join with Russia. The U.S. and its allies threatened dire action if Russia were to forcibly invade the Ukraine, while the Russians claimed they were only acting to protect the rights of ethnic Russians. Yet another international crisis loomed, resulting in, among other things, a sudden jump in the price of oil.

Buried in all this information was a report that the Crimean Tatars, a small remnant of the group that once ruled the Crimea and much of southern Russia, were opposed to the Crimea rejoining Russia, because they feared persecution from the Russian government and ethnic Russians. They have good reason for this fear: following WWII, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin accused the Tatars of collaborating with the Germans, and deported the entire population to Siberia, where an estimated 40 percent of them died of malnutrition and disease.

So we have a situation in which the Ukrainians want freedom from Russia, Russians in the Crimea want freedom from Ukrainians, and Crimean Tatars want freedom from Crimean Russians. On it goes, separating the dolls only to find yet smaller dolls within. I understand a similar situation exists in Quebec. French speakers there wish independence from the English speaking majority in the rest of Canada, but the Anglophone minority in Quebec threatens that if that happens, they will in turn separate from Quebec.

What greater example could there be of the pervasive irrationality of the entire system of independent nation-states? The concept that every single ethnic group should have its own independent state goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson. It works well in theory, but not in the practical world. There are only a handful of nations, such as Iceland, where the entire population consists of a single ethnic group. The vast majority of the world’s nationstates contain multiple ethnic groups and in a great many, such as Indonesia and India, there are a multitude of native languages.

If we were truly to follow the principle of each people having its own state, the number of independent nations would explode, and the world’s borders would have to redrawn into a crazy quilt pattern, because in many areas different groups live intermingled with one another. This became particularly evident during the wars following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. We would soon arrive at a situation in which the nations would be far too small and scattered to be economically or politically viable.

So basically we have arrived at a fall back position, in which those ethnic groups that are militarily powerful enough can proclaim the territory they control to be a nation, and remain so until somebody else (either within or without that territory) becomes powerful enough to dispute that claim. Issues are settled by force, or threat of force, as is happening in the Crimea. In what sense is it just that the Chinese, Russians and Spanish should have independent nation-states, while the Basque, Chechens, and Tibetans do not? Such a state of affairs is not only unfair, but in a nuclear armed world it is not sustainable over the long term.

Clearly we must either accept this chaotic status quo as inevitable, or else be prepared to jettison the entire system in favour of one that makes more sense. In a united world, in which the members of every ethnic group are protected by a universal code of human rights, and in which no single group can dominate another either by military might or by sheer numbers, then there will be no need for groups to seek the ephemeral protection of nation-state status.

Only then will we attain not a complex world of constantly shrinking dolls within dolls, but one where all humans, regardless of what language they speak, what customs they follow, or what collectivity they choose to identify themselves with, live together in harmony and equality.

The article was originally published in United World, CDWG News and Views, Vol.27, n.2, Mar-Apr 2014, pp. 2-4