In preparing the ground for his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote an essay articulating his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. He defended this belief through a highly inaccurate reconstruction of Russian and Ukrainian history, in which language similarity takes center stage.
“Most importantly,” Putin wrote while describing a period of fragmentation in what he imagines as different Russian territories, “people both in the western and eastern Russian lands spoke the same language.” In his view, when “radical nationalist groups” came to power in Ukraine in 2014, what came under attack was “first and foremost, the Russian language.”
Language, as many nationalists before Putin have insisted, has pride of place among the elements that make up a nation. It binds individuals together into peoples in ways that relatively transient political arrangements never could.
But the flaws in this argument are evident from history: Nations sharing a single language had always to be constructed out of a patchwork of different language groups, or at least groups speaking divergent dialects.
At the time of Italy’s unification, driven by nationalist fervor, fewer than 10 percent, and perhaps even fewer than 3 percent of its population spoke Italian. That was still less than a quarter of the population when Benito Mussolini wielded nationalist power in World War II. Italian only became the official language in 2007, over the objections of those demanding recognition for their dialects.
Britain, of course, to this day has speakers of Scots, Irish, Welsh and Cornish, among many other languages. And plenty of countries — from Switzerland to Ghana to Singapore — have managed to fashion national identities from patchworks of language groups.
When Putin suggests that Russian-speakers are really Russian, of course we all know the absurdity of that idea. It is especially evident in any country consisting of many ethnicities with differing racial and cultural features all speaking the same language.
But we know this intellectually. It is one thing to know; another to feel.
People living side by side, under a shared government, can easily — through shared language — come to believe that they have far more in common than they do. A shared language creates the sense of understanding — an eternal unity in the midst of changing chaos — that can easily blind us to reality.
Language gives rise to a deep feeling of intimacy, one shared not with particular individuals, but with anyone who has mastered the language. This allows shared language to feel like the foundation of national identity.
As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union who has lived in the U.S. since childhood, I have experienced this illusion of intimacy, as I suspect most immigrants and frequent travelers abroad have.
In 2005, I was studying in Germany and accepted a Bulgarian friend’s invitation to spend a few weeks with him on the Black Sea in Sozopol. One day he struck up a random conversation with two Russian women on vacation, and somehow convinced them to meet us for a date that evening. He then bailed at the last moment, leaving me to meet them alone. We had little to talk about until I switched to Russian. At that moment their faces lit up and they exclaimed in Russian something that translates roughly to, “You’re ours” or “You’re one of us.”
That was the moment I first realized the power of that simple word: ours. Any romantic aspirations I might have had vanished. As an American living in Germany, I craved that simple ability to speak to someone from my country of birth; and they, who had just arrived in Bulgaria from Russia, seemed to crave it too. Though we lived on different sides of the Atlantic, the simple fact of speaking a single language united us in what, for that moment, seemed like an insoluble bond.
But such bonds give rise too easily to illusions. We established no friendship or lasting correspondence. We talked for an hour and went our separate ways. This was enough, for what mattered was not us, not creating something, but only instantiating that linguistic bond, affirming its reality. The bond seemed eternal while the reality a mere moment made significant in light of that eternity. But what was that bond? It was certainly not a bond of nationality.
We can acknowledge the emotional resonance, the almost mystical bond created by a shared language, without slipping into nationalist fantasies built on that foundation. But we can do so only if we recognize that the feeling of shared identity that a shared language gives us is just that: a feeling.
This is not to deny that a shared language is genuinely important in the hard work of nation-building. But it does so in a more prosaic way: It allows people who live under a shared government to form institutions together, including the myriad official and unofficial institutions that constitute the life of a nation. Here, at the core of what makes a nation — in the tacit agreements to abide by each other’s rules — language functions as an instrument rather than a doorway into some eternal unity.
Roman Altshuler is a professor of philosophy at Kutztown University.
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