Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at 91, helped create our modern world. His most obvious legacy is the dissolution of the once mighty power he led: the Soviet Union. Just as lasting, however, is the force that the U.S.S.R.’s demise helped to unleash: nationalism.
The Soviet Union rested on the premise that regional and group loyalties could be subsumed under Marxist-Leninist ideology, institutionalized in the Communist Party, which preached that human beings would be united in the glorious future. Nations, religions and classes would fade into irrelevance as communism united the world.
Gorbachev came to power as this system was unraveling. Satellite countries in Eastern Europe yearned to be free from what they regarded as Russian domination. Religion became the font of resistance to Soviet rule in Catholic Poland and Muslim Afghanistan. Communist central planning brought poverty instead of wealth as the Soviet economy was dependent upon selling oil to the West to buy grain it could not produce itself.
Gorbachev gambled that the Soviet promise could be saved if some of the old divisions that Joseph Stalin feared were given some room to breathe. Gorbachev 's economic reforms, known as “perestroika”, were meant to alter collectivist planning enough to give rise to the creativity that made the West wealthy. Political and social freedom, dubbed “glasnost”, were meant to do the same thing. If people could become wealthier and less oppressed under communism, Gorbachev reasoned, the Soviet premise — global unity under one state — might yet be fulfilled.
Reality had other plans. Even tiny grants of freedom gave rise to demands for more. Eastern Europeans wanted free elections and the departure of the Russian occupiers, while the repressed nations inside the U.S.S.R. — such as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — wanted to become independent. By 1991, the Soviet Union had been replaced by a patchwork of independent states. By 1995, Russian troops had left Eastern Europe, leaving those nations free to join the European Union and the West.
Once the totalitarian boot of communism was lifted, people reverted to their nationalist instincts. Woodrow Wilson’s old principle of self-determination, that every nation of people deserved its own state, became once more the organizing principle throughout the old Soviet empire. Resurgent nationalism is Gorbachev’s real legacy for the modern world.
The Soviet Union was not the only multinational state to dissolve under nationalism’s appeal. Czechs and Slovaks peacefully dissolved their union, Czechoslovakia, in 1993. Yugoslavia, an unlikely union of the “South Slavs”, now houses seven distinct nations.
But if freedom for oppressed nations is the positive aspect of Gorbachev’s legacy, war is its downside.
Yugoslavia’s breakup was not peaceful, as Serbia did not relinquish power voluntarily. More than 100,000 people perished in a series of wars in the 1990s, culminating with NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia. National claims, it seems, can often be incompatible, with war an inevitable outcome.
The war in Ukraine, now entering its seventh month, is another chapter in this unraveling. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long reign is essentially an exercise in which Moscow tries to regain its historically dominant role in the former Soviet empire. The fact that Ukrainians, among others, see this as tyranny is merely an inconvenient fact for militaristic nationalists such as Putin.
Western Europe has also not been immune to nationalism’s return. Most E.U. countries now have a strong political party that is explicitly nationalist in tone and suspicious if not hostile toward globalism. Brexit in Britain signaled the strength of this movement; September’s Italian election will likely bring the Brothers of Italy, a party which derives its name from the Italian national anthem, to power. Led by Giorgia Meloni, the Brothers of Italy are likely to be the first explicitly nationalist party to lead a large Western European country and will pose a challenge for the multinational order of the E.U.
Nationalism is plainly roiling U.S. politics, too. The “rules-based, liberal global order” that elites of both parties have long favored is in many ways a looser form of the multinational political organizations that existed elsewhere. Its chief advantage for the United States was that it made it first among purported equals. The fact that many allies resent that dominance and that nations such as China are now actively challenging it shows that nationalism can threaten even largely peaceful orders. The rise of “America First” and Donald Trump is a homegrown echo of the inexorable nationalism that Gorbachev unleashed when he stepped back from the Soviet model.
We should be grateful that Gorbachev failed to save the Soviet Union, as it was truly an evil empire. History, however, did not end when the U.S.S.R. fell. Instead, nationalism reasserted itself, with all the consequences that inevitably follow.
Henry Olsen is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.