Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard joined the podcast of the U.S. Helsinki Commission at their Washington studios to talk about U.S. survival and how his time in Eastern Europe and the Balkans informs his work
The Helsinki Accords — signed in 1975 by the Soviet Union, U.S., Canada and every country in Europe (save Albania and Andorra) — were a landmark development in the acknowledgement of universal rights belonging to all humans and, as such, played a role in the collapse of the Soviet empire. They also resulted in the creation of Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch), the Organization for Security and Coopefration in Europe, and the U.S. government’s own Helsinki Commission, a bipartisan entity housed in the U.S. Capitol tasked with monitoring human rights compliance in Europe. That latter organzation, also called the U.S. Commission for Security and Coooperation in Euirope, has its own podcast, which Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard joined for an in-studio interview at the end of last year.
The episode, entitled “What Shapes a National Identity?,” published Feb. 10. Woodard discussed the challenges of U.S. nationhood, given it is really a federation of rival regional cultures that can be thought of as stateless nations, and that some of these “nations” have always opposed the universal human rights propositions in the Declaration of Independence, which informed the UN Declaration on Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords.
They fought over, among other things, “whether we are devoted to liberal democratic ideas that are encoded in our Declaration and in the Helsinki process or are we in fact a blood and soil state tied to a select master people who really the continent belongs to,” Woodard told host Bakhti Nishanov at their studios in the U.S. Capitol building. “A battle over these things persists to this day.”
He also discussed how his experiences as a student and foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the collapse of Communism, the transition years, and the wars in Yugoslavia informed his work and the work of Nationhood Lab.
“I saw the Berlin Wall fall, the end of Ceausecsu’s regime, all that stuff,” he recalled. “I spent most of the 1909s and most of my 20s in that part of the world: the collapse of authoritarian regimes, attempts to build liberal democracies where none had existed, battles over historical memory and national identity, ‘who are we as a people, now that we can decide again?'”
The full episode can be heard via Spotify, Apple podcasts, and the Helsinki Commission website.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.
the Human Rights Foundatiom,