Why Leaders Lie by Mearsheimer John J

Author:Mearsheimer, John J. [Mearsheimer, John J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf

WHEN ELITES ENGAGE IN NATIONALIST MYTHMAKING

Nations continuously purvey their core myths, because most individuals in the group need those stories to make sense of their own identity, and because they foster group solidarity. So, one could say that nationalist mythmaking happens all the time. Of course, those stories have to be updated from time to time, as new information about the past emerges, and fresh myths have to be created to deal with significant new episodes in the nation’s history. Thus, one would expect the telling of nationalist lies to intensify in the wake of wars and other high-profile incidents where there are serious disputes about the behavior of the nation in question, which might even trigger renewed controversy about older disputes which had been quiescent. In such cases, elites will work overtime to portray their nation in the most positive light and rival nations in the harshest possible light.

One would also expect nationalist mythmaking to be especially intense when there are serious disputes about a country’s founding. The legitimacy of a state is bound up in important ways with the circumstances surrounding its birth, and most people do not want to think that their country was “born in sin.” How much lying takes place in such cases is largely a function of two factors: the level of brutality involved in creating the nation-state, and how recently it happened.

Specifically, the more brutal the state-building process is, the more bad behavior there is to hide, and thus the greater the need for elites to lie about what actually happened when the state was created. Self-whitewashing myths, as Van Evera notes, are probably the most common of his three kinds of nationalist lies.9 And the more recent the relevant events, the more likely it is that people on different sides of the conflict will remember and care deeply about them. In short, when the founding of a country was recent and cruel, the elites will have to work overtime to fabricate a story that portrays their side as knights in shining armor and the other side as the devil incarnate.

Consider, for example, the fifteen states that emerged from the wreckage of the former Soviet Union. There was little need for the elites in any of those countries to invent false stories about how they came into being in 1991, largely because the breakup of the Soviet Union was remarkably peaceful. (All of those remnant states, of course, have powerful incentives to lie about other aspects of their long histories, and they do.) Contrast that set of cases with the founding of Israel and the United States, both of which involved serious crimes against the peoples who lived on the lands that were overrun and colonized. Not surprisingly, Israeli and American elites have gone to substantial lengths to whitewash this cruel history. But there is little hand wringing about this issue in the United States today, mainly because the controversial events happened so long ago that it seems like ancient history. Israel’s creation,

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