Nationalism

V

Nationalism as Culture and Religion

We generally compare nationalism, usually unfavourably, with other political ideologies. However this tells us only half the story. Nationalism is also a form of culture and of religion.

For nationalists, the nation is always a form of public culture. There are two aspects to this formulation. The first is the need to rediscover and educate the members in the national culture. Since for nationalists every culture, to be authentic, must be unique, the aim must be to cultivate national identity through history, language, literature, the arts, and the love of nature, so that the individual will feel in his or her heart the beauty and warmth of the nation. In this way, the members will come to share a common devotion to the nation, and become united in their collective goals. The second aspect concerns the means of such national re-education. It is not a private affair, a concern of the individual or family. As Ernest Gellner insisted, national re-education must be public, standardized, mass-based, and compulsory. It must be systemic, and support mass numeracy and literacy through a hierarchy of specialist personnel. As much was clear already to Rousseau, in his advice to the Poles: “It is the national institutions that form the genius, the character, the tastes and the mores of a people... which inspire in it this burning love of the fatherland'. Hence, public education is always directed at the people, and as such is “popular”, if not vernacular. It is also always political. Public culture is a form of “political culture” in which the nation is politicized and its symbols become political symbols, summoning the members (or citizens, in a national state) to love their nation, obey its laws, and defend its homeland.

Beyond a public form of culture, nationalism may also be grasped as a form of political religion, a surrogate religion, to be sure, one that is secular, in the sense of being in and of this world, but that is at the same time transcendent, because it is trans-historical and cross-cultural. In the eyes of nationalists, the nation, as Benedict Anderson points out, is always “good”; like the clouds hiding the blue heavens above, disfigurements only conceal for a time its essential purity. We can go further. For nationalism, the nation is a sacred category, separated and forbidden: in the terminology of Émile Durkheim, a sacred communion of the people; and nationalism becomes the political religion of that people. It is a religion not only in the functional sense, fulfilling the same needs through similar methods as traditional religions. Nationalisms freely borrow from the arsenal of motifs, symbols, and liturgies of the world religions, even when they rework them for cultural, territorial and political ends foreign to the earlier religions. Similarly, nationalisms reinterpret the soteriological meanings of traditional religions, to locate salvation not in some supra-empirical order or unseen world, but in the longue durée of terrestrial national posterity and its vision of heroic destiny, reserved for the new elect of the chosen nation. To this end, nationalism takes up the earlier beliefs in divine election, as well as the reverence for sacred sites, and attaches them to the nation in its ancestral homeland, investing it with the charismatic qualities formerly reserved for saints and heroes.

The same character of a political religion of the people is revealed in its myths of golden ages and destiny through mass sacrifice. In the myth-memories of the golden age nationalists discern once again the true goodness of the nation; hence the many images of a long-lost glory and beauty, with which the national ideal decks itself out. Even more potent are the monuments and rituals of heroic sacrifice. On one level, this is a vicarious atonement: the hero or heroine lives and dies to absolve the nation of its weakness and failure, and remind its denationalised and hence denatured citizens of their national duty. On another level, the sacrifice is made by each and every individual, for in a crisis the nation may demand mass death. To assuage such colossal grief and suffering, mass sacrifice must be linked to national destiny: through the Glorious Dead, the nation must be enabled to pursue its unique historical destiny, so that the fallen heroes shall not have died in vain nor the survivors be numbed by the horror of oblivion. In the solemn rites of mass remembrance, among the flags and massed bands at the Cenotaph or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the true nature of the sacred communion of the people stands revealed and with it the nation as a community of history and destiny encompassing the dead, the living, and yet unborn.

VI

Origins and Development

There seems to be considerable agreement about the dating of nationalism's emergence. Yet no ideology, let alone religion, emerges full-blown, like Athena from Zeus' head.

Elie Kedourie proposed 1807, the date of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, as nationalism's birth-date; Eric Hobsbawm appeared to favour the later date of 1830, while admitting earlier manifestations; John Breuilly also seems to think in terms of the early 19th century, while conceding an influential role to Herder; whereas Hans Kohn looked back to the Partitions of Poland in the 1770s. If nationalism is regarded as a secular political movement, then its first full-scale expression can be found during the course of the French Revolution, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. There are also important and influential precedents in 17th century Holland and England, though their vibrant nationalisms were couched in fervent religious language and imagery, as have been many latterday “religious nationalisms”, notably in the Islamic world.

On the other side, medievalists like Adrian Hastings argue that defensive nationalisms can be found as far back as the Anglo-Saxons or even the ancient Israelites. He seems to have in mind more “national sentiment” than nationalist ideologies or movements; a theory of nationalism, he claims, is unimportant compared to the power of the mass sentiments of the nation. This may only serve to confuse the issue. We may concede the antiquity of “national sentiment”, but still argue that nationalism, the ideological movement, is both relatively modern and important in its own right, because the theory provides many ethnic communities and nations with a legitimation, guide, and blueprint for their political aspirations.

Later, with Rousseau and Herder, we begin to enter a new world of a widespread concern for authenticity, a return to roots, a preoccupation with unity and identity, as well as a desire for autonomy, which we find only sporadically in earlier centuries. Notwithstanding, there are a few suggestive pre-modern cases which seem to exhibit an organized ideological movement for autonomy, unity, and identity of a “nation”—among the Maccabees and Zealots of ancient Judea, the ancient Greeks in Persae (“The Persians”) and other dramas by Aeschylus, the Armenians in the pages of Elishe and Xorenatsi, perhaps the Scots of the Declaration of Arbroath and the Swiss after the Oath of the Rutli. If so, the idea did not catch on until much later. The turning point appears to come in the 15th and 16th centuries, when a conjunction of factors—the rise of the modern state, competition between nascent bourgeoisies, the rise of vernacular print, humanism and the revival of Greco-Roman political models, and the return to Old Testament theology of ethnic election and sacred territory, spread both national sentiment and national ideals of unity, autonomy, and identity among a wider literate class in Western Europe. Here too we can locate the origins of the characteristic ideas of “national character”, “authenticity”, and “national genius”, which were taken up over a century and a half later by Rousseau and Herder and their followers.

It is undoubtedly the case that many European nationalisms emerged at the beginning of the 19th century—in Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Greece and Serbia—stirred in part by the example and conquests of Napoleon. From this point on, we can trace both emancipatory and unificatory themes, together or in succession. This formulation seems nearer the mark than conventional historical accounts which trace a first period of mass-democratic, “liberal” nationalism to the abortive Revolutions of 1848, followed after 1870 by exclusive small-nation ethno-linguistic nationalisms, which reached their apogee in World War I and World War II—and which for some like Eric Hobsbawm have returned in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union. In fact, divisive ethno-linguistic movements could be found as far back as the Serbian, Greek, and Irish uprisings, while several of the post-War anti-colonial nationalisms have been unifying and emancipatory.

A useful distinction can indeed be made between “ethnic” and “territorial” nationalisms, with the latter facing often major problems of integration, as in Nigeria, Kenya, Angola, India, Burma, and Indonesia, and the former veering between the poles of exclusiveness and absorption by larger neighbours. Similarly, we can usefully follow Hans Kohn and distinguish two ideological variants of nationalism in this period: the one more voluntarist, “civic”, and rationalist, the other more organic, “ethnic”, and authoritarian. Of course, in particular cases, it is always a matter of degree, and nationalisms may well move between these poles in different periods and circumstances. Nevertheless there is an important distinction to be made, analytically, between a nationalism that requires an individual to belong to a specific nation, but leaves to him or her the choice of nation, and a nationalism that prescribes the individual's nation from birth.

The later 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a proliferation of nationalisms of all kinds—conservative, religious, social democratic, communist, and fascist. The relationship between fascism, and especially Nazism, and nationalism has been problematic. For some they represent the logical culmination and denouement of nationalism; for others they are radically different, even opposed, the result of new factors like racism and the violence of World War I. In some cases, like the fascism of Mussolini, the link with expansionist integral nationalism is clear. In Romania, too, the affinity between and transition from a populist and romantic nationalism to the fascist movement of Corneliu Codreanu was plainly visible. In the Nazi case, the picture is more complex: the Nazis displaced the conservative Nationalist party of Alfred Hugenberg, while their themes of “agrarian settlement” in the East derived from Volkisch (or populist) nationalism. These themes were accompanied by a brutal imperialism and the idea of a racial hierarchy that was quite contrary to Herder’s original belief in cultural nationalism and to the whole idea of a world of vertical nations.

The relationship between communism and nationalism has been equally complex. Both reveal profound similarities in the structure of their ideologies; both are profoundly historicist, with revolution hastening overall evolution, with a special place reserved for the historical elect (the proletariat, the nation), and with the “movement” as the main instrument of historical progress and emancipation. Yet, “national communism”, from China and Vietnam to Romania and Yugoslavia, proved to be the undoing of the Comintern. The idea that communism had to be adapted to the situation and traditions of each nation (an idea traceable to Marx) revealed the staying power of nationalism and paved the way for the demise of international communism.

VII

Towards “Post-Nationalism”?

Convinced that the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, and the unprecedented violence unleashed by World War II, would spell the end of nationalism, many scholars and statesmen were surprised and unprepared for the eruption in the 1960s of “neo-nationalist” movements striving for ethnic autonomy in the secure, wealthy, and stable democracies of North America and Western Europe. Québécois, Scots, Welsh, Flemish, Catalans, Basques, Corsicans, as well as Slovenes and Croats, marched and rioted for greater autonomy within the states in which they had been incorporated on unequal terms. These political movements were supported by cultural revivals, in which the quest for roots and authenticity, also expressed in the student, ecology, and feminist movements of the time, provided a nationalist critique of market exploitation and the regimentation of the bureaucratic state. Two decades later, similar grievances could be heard after the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and the experience of glasnost in the Soviet Union. Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians, among others, seized the chance of independence in the name of just those ideals of national identity, unity, autonomy, and authenticity that have resonated across two centuries and in every corner of the globe. Further east, in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, as well as South East Asia, national states and ethnic or ethno-religious communities have often been caught up in intense and protracted conflict, whether between the Kurds and Turkey, Israel and the Palestinians, Sikhs and Hindus, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and the Moro and the Filipinos in the Philippines. Analogous conflicts can also be found in Africa, in Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola, antagonisms that, in several other states, are only contained by a precarious balance of “ethnic arithmetic”.

Despite this unpromising background of ethnic violence and national conflict, many scholars argue that the processes of globalization, such as growing economic interdependence, supranational political association, mass communications, and consumerism, are increasingly rendering national boundaries porous and national states and nationalism obsolete. Thus William McNeill, the eminent world historian, claims that after a brief period of attempted nationalist homogenization, often more mirage than reality, human society is once again reverting to its habitual polyethnic structure, as national elites find that, with the massive effects of globalization and especially mass migration, a viable economy requires an educated and diversified labour force and hence the creation of an ethnically heterogeneous society. In similar vein, Homi Bhabha and other cultural critics argue for the growing “hybridization” of national identities as a result of massive immigration and the rise of multiculturalism in place of received narratives of national traditions.

In this context, many scholars predict the early demise of nationalism, as “post-modern” structural conditions and the spread of sceptical, deconstructive, “post-emotional” attitudes replace the earlier, passionate romanticism and politicized cultures of the nation-state. For Eric Hobsbawm, surveying the scene in the early 1990s, it is disillusion with the failure of socialism, fear of the vast changes induced by globalization, and the influx of immigrants coupled with anxiety over the drying up of family roots, that has thrown people back into the arms of religious fundamentalism and an ethno-linguistic nationalism. Erecting barricades against the pace and scope of change will be of no avail. Nationalism will remain on the political agenda, as a secondary and complicating factor, but no longer can it serve as a major vector of the movement of history.

Much of this analysis extrapolates from the recent experience of the West. Outside this narrow, if dominant, core area, nationalism, as ideology and movement, appears to be on the increase, both in terms of its extent and its intensity, as post-colonial national states are locked in conflict or struggle to accommodate a variety of ethnic movements. In the West, too, nationalism has by no means run its course. Mingling with Christian fundamentalism, the missionary national ardour of the United States has been reinforced by recent threats and wars, fuelling the strong anti-American nationalism of the French, which in turn tends to pit them and their German ally against other national states within the European Union. Besides, the pressures of migration on employment and welfare in Germany, Italy, Belgium, and other Western states have produced strong counter-movements equating national identity with an indigenous national culture that can slide into racism. As we move east and south, the recent wars in Yugoslavia (see Bosnian-Croatian Serbian War), and the ethnic problems in some of the successor states of the former Soviet Union, remind us of the precarious balance of forces reining in nationalist passions.

At the same time, the persistent drive for European integration suggests that in some national states, at least, supranational identification can act as a counterbalance to centripetal ethnic tensions. Though the European Union, aiming for unity in diversity, does not seek to supplant national loyalties (except for a small ultra-federalist wing), it hopes to create a harmonized economic and communicative space on which a viable political community can be built, one that can gradually transfer some of the existing national attachments to the wider Union. If so, that project remains in its early stages. The “democratic deficit” in the institutions of the European Union, coupled with widespread scepticism towards projects of closer constitutional and political union, suggests that, while desirous of the economic benefits of accession to the Union, most people remain wedded to their national states and cultures.

Similar arguments pertain to the idea that a global culture will supersede nations and nationalism. The problem is twofold. On the one hand, a global culture, unless it be a form of Americanised consumer culture, is likely to be a patchwork of motifs and styles from many different cultures, created in a detached, ironic spirit, and inspiring neither passion nor mass commitment. Affectively neutral, memory-less, tied to no time or place, such a pastiche “electronic culture” is the antithesis of the many vivid and distinctive historical cultures that have been shaped by, and have in turn shaped, human experience, and on which nationalists have drawn for their political projects.

On the other hand, contemporary processes work as much for the retention of national cultures and nationalisms as for their transcendence. One can point to the political and cultural pluralism that underpins the international order, that is, the recognition and drive for cultural and political autonomy, and often sovereignty, in the creation and expansion of the inter-state order. Moreover, despite the much heralded decline of the national state, what we are witnessing is not so much a diminution as a shift in its powers and functions—away from economic and military powers and towards internal law and order, health and social welfare, and educational, media, and cultural functions. Equally important is the uneven distribution of ethno-historical cultural resources, the fact that different peoples can draw on very different cultural and historical repertoires, some of them “thick”—rich, deep, multifaceted—and others relatively “thin”—shadowy, and sparse in relics and documentation—differences which, when politicized, create rivalries and antagonisms in and of themselves. Finally, we should note the functions that nationalisms continue to perform in rooting peoples in particular ethnoscapes, authenticating their distinctive cultures, restoring dignity to the downtrodden, and endowing them with a sense of collective history, continuity, and destiny. These are functions that are unlikely to be fulfilled by a truly supranational, let alone a global, culture and association.