On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

A free person ranges through the borderland of the unpredictable. But how to do so in our crowded century? Imperial mobility brought to bear some powerful weapons of predictability: superior arms and infectious diseases. Both immunity and technology spread, eventually aiding the victims of colonization. Anti-colonialists, generally victorious against overseas metropoles from the late 1940s, fastened on national sovereignty as the response to empire. National self-determination became the global norm, codified by the new United Nations. The language of national self-determination was borrowed from liberal ideas of individual freedom; the notion of sovereign states, nevertheless, left open the question of how individuals become sovereign. Nationalism was effective as resistance, defining freedom collectively and negatively as the removal of imperial rule. But it provided no formula for the freedom of the individual.