The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism 1412901014, 9781412901017

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Notes on Contributors......Page 10
Introduction......Page 22
Part I: Approaches......Page 26
Chapter 1 - Nationalism and the Historians......Page 28
Chapter 2 - Modernization and Communication as Factors of Nation Formation......Page 42
Chapter 3 - Structural Approaches to Nations and Nationalism......Page 54
Chapter 4 - Nations and Nationalism: Between General Theory and Comparative History......Page 65
Chapter 5 - Cultural Approaches to Nationalism......Page 78
Chapter 6 - The Social Psychology of Hationalism: To Die for the Sake of Strangers......Page 87
Chapter 7 - Nationalism and Direct Rule......Page 105
Chapter 8 - Nationalism and Political Philosophy......Page 115
Chapter 9 - Discourse-analytic and Socio-linguistic Approaches to the Study of Nation(alism)......Page 125
Chapter 10 - Gender Approaches to Nations and Nationalism......Page 139
Chapter 11 - Methodological Nationalism and Its Critique......Page 150
Part II: Themes......Page 162
Chapter 12 - Pre-modern Nationalism: An Oxymoron? The Evidence from England......Page 164
Chapter 13 - Modernity and Nationalism......Page 178
Chapter 14 - Ethnicity and Nationalism......Page 190
Chapter 15 - Nationalism and Religion......Page 203
Chapter 16 - Race and the Nation......Page 213
Chapter 17 - Nation and Commemoration......Page 226
Chapter 18 - Memory, Truth and Victimhood in Post-trauma Societies......Page 235
Chapter 19 - Citizenship, Nationalism and Nation-Building......Page 246
Chapter 20 - Nations and Regions: In or Out of the State?......Page 258
Chapter 21 - Nationalism and Sport......Page 270
Chapter 22 - Nations, Mega-events and International Culture......Page 281
Chapter 23 - Xenophobia and the New Nationalisms......Page 294
Chapter 24 - Nations, Migrants and Transnational Identifications: An Interactive Approach to Nationalism......Page 306
Chapter 25 - Hot and Banal Nationalism: The Nationalization of 'the Masses'......Page 316
Chapter 26 - Nationalism and the Power of Ideology......Page 328
Chapter 27 - Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Nationalism......Page 341
Chapter 28 - Ethnic Exclusion in Nationalizing States......Page 355
Chapter 29 - Nationalism and Liberalism......Page 366
Chapter 30 - Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: The Paradox of Modernity......Page 378
Chapter 31 - Theorizing Nation Formation in the Context of Imperialism and Globalism......Page 390
Part III: Nations and Nationalism in a Global Age......Page 404
Chapter 32 - Supranationalism - Integralism - Nationalism: Schemata for Twenty-first-Century Europe......Page 406
Chapter 33 - Nation and Nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe......Page 420
Chapter 34 - Nation and Nationalism in Russia......Page 431
Chapter 35 - Modernity and Nationalism: Turkey and Iran in Comparative Perspective......Page 446
Chapter 36 - Nation and Nationalism in South Asia......Page 459
Chapter 37 - Nations and Nationalism in Central Asia......Page 471
Chapter 38 - Contending Nationalisms in South-East Asia......Page 482
Chapter 39 - Nation and Nationalism in Contemporary Japan......Page 494
Chapter 40 - China and Chinese Nationalism......Page 509
Chapter 41 - Arab Nationalism......Page 521
Chapter 42 - African Nationalism......Page 534
Chapter 43 - A Nation before Nationalism: The Civic and Ethnic Construction of America......Page 548
Chapter 44 - Nationalism in South and Central America......Page 562
Chapter 45 - Nations and Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand......Page 576
Index......Page 586

Citation preview

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The SAGE Handbook of NATIONS and NATIONALISM

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The SAGE Handbook of NATIONS and NATIONALISM Edited by GERARD DELANTY and KRISHAN KUMAR

SAGE Publications London

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Thousand Oaks

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New Delhi

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© Sage Publications Ltd 2006 Introduction and editorial arrangement © Gerard Delanty and Krishan Kumar 2006 First published 2006 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-10 1 4129 0101 4

ISBN-13 978 1 4129 0101 7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2005936296

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire Printed on paper from sustainable resources

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Contents Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction Gerard Delanty and Krishan Kumar

1

Part 1

5

Approaches

1 Nationalism and the Historians Krishan Kumar 2 Modernization and Communication as Factors of Nation Formation Miroslav Hroch 3 Structural Approaches to Nations and Nationalism John A. Hall 4 Nations and Nationalisms: Between General Theory and Comparative History Johann P. Arnason 5 Cultural Approaches to Nationalism Daniel A. Segal and Richard Handler 6 The Social Psychology of Nationalism: To Die for the Sake of Strangers Lauren Langman

7

21 33

44 57

66

7 Nationalism and Direct Rule Michael Hechter, Tuna Kuyucu and Audrey Sacks

84

8 Nationalism and Political Philosophy Margaret Moore

94

9 Discourse-analytic and Socio-linguistic Approaches to the Study of Nation(alism) Ruth Wodak 10 Gender Approaches to Nations and Nationalism Sylvia Walby

104 118

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vi

CONTENTS

11 Methodological Nationalism and Its Critique Daniel Chernilo

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Part 2

141

Themes

12 Pre-modern Nationalism: An Oxymoron? The evidence from England Philip S. Gorski

143

13 Modernity and Nationalism Liah Greenfeld

157

14 Ethnicity and Nationalism Anthony D. Smith

169

15 Nationalism and Religion Mark Juergensmeyer

182

16 Race and the Nation Steve Fenton

192

17 Nation and Commemoration Charles Turner

205

18 Memory, Truth and Victimhood in Post-trauma Societies John D. Brewer

214

19 Citizenship, Nationalism and Nation-building Bryan S. Turner

225

20 Nations and Regions: In or Out of the State? David McCrone

237

21 Nationalism and Sport Anthony King

249

22 Nations, Mega-events and International Culture Maurice Roche

260

23 Xenophobia and the New Nationalisms Mabel Berezin

273

24 Nations, Migrants and Transnational Identifications: An Interactive Approach to Nationalism Anna Triandafyllidou

285

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CONTENTS

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25 Hot and Banal Nationalism: The Nationalization of ‘the Masses’ John Hutchinson

295

26 Nationalism and the Power of Ideology Siniša Maleševic´

307

27 Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Nationalism Daniele Conversi

320

28 Ethnic Exclusion in Nationalizing States Andreas Wimmer

334

29 Nationalism and Liberalism Mark Haugaard

345

30 Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: The Paradox of Modernity Gerard Delanty

357

31 Theorizing Nation Formation in the Context of Imperialism and Globalism Paul James

369

Part 3

Nations and Nationalism in a Global Age

383

32 Supernationalism–Integralism–Nationalism: Schemata for Twenty-first-Century Europe Douglas R. Holmes

385

33 Nation and Nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe Chris Hann

399

34 Nation and Nationalism in Russia Richard Sakwa

410

35 Modernity and Nationalism: Turkey and Iran in Comparative Perspective E. Fuat Keyman and Suhnaz Yilmaz

425

36 Nation and Nationalism in South Asia T. K. Oommen

438

37 Nations and Nationalism in Central Asia Anatoly M. Khazanov

450

38 Contending Nationalisms in South-East Asia David Brown

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CONTENTS

39 Nation and Nationalism in Contemporary Japan Yoshio Sugimoto

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40 China and Chinese Nationalism Peter Hays Gries

488

41 Arab Nationalism Ilan Pappe

500

42 African Nationalism Benyamin Neuberger

513

43 A Nation before Nationalism: The Civic and Ethnic Construction of America Susan-Mary Grant

527

44 Nationalism in South and Central America José Maurício Domingues

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45 Nations and Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand Peter Beilharz and Lloyd Cox

555

Index

565

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Notes on Contributors

Johann P. Arnason is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and was until recently editor of the journal Thesis Eleven. He has published widely on social theory and historical sociology. Recent publications include: The Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilization (TransPacific Books 2002); Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Brill 2003); (co-edited with Bjorn Wittrock) Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances (Brill 2004); and (co-edited with S. N. Eisenstadt and Bjorn Wittrock) Axial Civilizations and World History (Brill 2005). Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory at La Trobe University, Australia. He is author of Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism (Croom Helm 1987); Labour’s Utopias (Routledge 1992); Postmodern Socialism (Melbourne University Press 1994); Transforming Labour (Cambridge 1994); Imagining the Antipodes (Cambridge 1997); and Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity (Sage 2000); and is editor of fifteen books. He is working on a book on Australia, to be called The Unhappy Country. Mabel Berezin is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. She is a comparative historical sociologist whose work explores the intersection of political and cultural institutions with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Europe. She is the author of Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy (Cornell 1997). In addition to numerous articles, she has edited and designed two collaborative volumes: Democratic Culture: Ethnos and Demos in Global Perspective (with Jeffrey Alexander); and (with Martin Schain) Europe Without Borders: Re-mapping Territory, Citizenship and Identity in a Transnational Age (Johns Hopkins University Press 2003). She is at work on a study of anti-liberal politics in contemporary Europe that is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. John D. Brewer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an Academician in the Academy of Social Sciences and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, St John’s College Oxford, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the Australian National University. He is currently writing a book on the sociology of peace processes. David Brown is Associate Professor in the Politics and International Studies Program, and Fellow of the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Western

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Australia. He has written extensively on ethnic politics and nationalism. His publications include authorship of The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia (Routledge 1994) and Contemporary Nationalism (Routledge 2000). In 2003 he received a Fulbright ‘New Century Scholar’ award. Daniel Chernilo obtained his doctorate, and lectured in Sociology, at the University of Warwick. He currently holds a research fellowship by the Chilean Council for Science and Technology at the University Alberto Hurtado in Santiago and is a fellow of the Warwick Social Theory Centre. His publications include papers on contemporary sociological theory, methodological nationalism, historical sociology and cosmopolitan sociology. He is also the author of A Social Theory of the Nation-State: Beyond Methodological Nationalism (Routledge, forthcoming). Daniele Conversi received his PhD at the London School of Economics. He taught at the Government and History departments at Cornell and Syracuse Universities, as well as at the Central European University, Budapest. He is currently Visiting Academic at LSE and Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. His first book was The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain (Hurst 1997; second paperback edition, Nevada University Press 2000; Catalan translation, 2005). His latest volume, Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World (Routledge 2004, second paperback edition), is a collection of essays by some of the top international scholars entirely devoted to Walker Connor’s seminal contribution. He is currently working on a larger book on theories of nationalism. Lloyd Cox is a research fellow at La Trobe University, writing a book examining transformations in the welfare state and national identity in Australia and New Zealand since the 1980s. He is the author of several conference papers – including Border Lines: Globalization, De-territorialization and the Reconfiguring of National Boundaries (Mobile Boundaries/Rigid Worlds Conference, Macquarie University, 27–28 September 2004) and Globalization and the ‘Wage-Earners’ Welfare State: Australia and New Zealand in Comparative Perspective (The Australian Sociological Association’s Annual Conference, La Trobe University, 8–11 December 2004) – and has entries under ‘Nationalism’, ‘Empire’, ‘Global Politics’ and ‘Socialism’ in G. Ritzer (ed.), Encyclopedia of Sociology (Blackwell 2006, forthcoming). Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology, University of Liverpool, UK and has written on various issues in social theory and general sociology. He is Editor of the European Journal of Social Theory. His publications include Inventing Europe (Macmillan 1995); Social Science (1997; new edition 2005); Social Theory in a Changing World (Polity Press 1998); Modernity and Postmodernity (Sage 2000); Citizenship in a Global Age (Open University Press 2000); Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society (Open University Press 2001); (with Patrick O’Mahony) Nationalism and Social Theory (Sage 2002); Community (Routledge 2003); (edited) Adorno: Modern Masters 4 vols (Sage 2004); (edited with Piet Strydom) Philosophies of Social Science (Open University Press 2003); (with Chris Rumford) Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization

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(Routledge 2005); and (edited) Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory (Routledge 2005). José Maurício Domingues gained his PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Executive Director at Rio de Janeiro Research Institute (IUPERJ) and his publications include Modernity Reconstructed (University of Wales Press 2005); Social Creativity, Collective Subjectivity and Contemporary Modernity (Palgrave/Macmillan 2000); and Sociological Theory and Collective Subjectivity (Palgrave/Macmillan 1995); and, as co-editor with Leonardo Avritzer, Modernidade e teoria social no Brasil (UFMG 2000). Steve Fenton is Professor of Sociology at Bristol University. He has a specialist interest in ethnicity, ethnic conflict and racism, with a particular focus on comparative studies and the politics of ethnicity. In the recent past he has researched in the following areas: ethnic differences in the experience of mental health and illness; higher education and ethnic inequalities; and young adults and labour markets. His recent publications include: ‘Explaining Ethnicity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30 (4) (2004); ‘Beyond Ethnicity: the Global Comparative Analysis of Ethnic Conflict?’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 45 (3/4) (2004); Ethnicity (Polity 2003); (as co-editor) Ethnicity and Economy (Palgrave 2002); (as co-editor) Ethnonational Identities (Palgrave 2002); and Ethnicity: Racism Class and Culture (Palgrave/Macmillan 1999). Philip S. Gorski is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Comparative Research at Yale University. He is the author of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press 2003) and co-editor of Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford University Press 2005). The principal focus of his research is on religion and politics in comparative and historical perspective. He is currently editing a volume entitled ‘Bourdieusian Theory and Historical Analysis’, organizing a conference on religious nationalism and writing a book on secularization and secularism in the US, Germany, France and Sweden. Susan-Mary Grant is Reader in American History at the University of Newcastleupon-Tyne, UK. She is the author of North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (University Press of Kansas 2000), and co-editor of Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press 2003) and The American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations (Longman 2000). She has also written a number of articles on American nationalism and the Civil War, the most recent of which is ‘Patriot Graves: American National Identity and the Civil War Dead,’ in American Nineteenth Century History, 5 (3) (Fall, 2004). A co-founder of the British American Nineteenth Century Historians’ association (BrANCH), she has recently become editor of American Nineteenth Century History, and is currently working on a study of the Civil War’s role in American nationalism.

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Liah Greenfeld is a University Professor, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Director of the Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences at Boston University. She is the author of, amongst other publications, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press 1992) and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press 2001). Peter Hays Gries is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Director of the Sino-American Security Dialogue. He is author of China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy (University of California Press 2004), co-editor of State and Society in 21st-Century China: Crisis, Contention, and Legitimation (Routledge 2004), and has written over a dozen journal articles and book chapters. John A. Hall is James McGill Professor of Sociology at McGill University in Montreal’ and Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth college. He is the author, coauthor or editor of some twenty-two books, including: Powers and Liberties (Blackwell 1985); Liberalism (Paladin 1989); Coercion and Consent (1992); and (coauthored with Charles Lindholm) Is American Breaking Apart? (Princeton 2001). He is currently completing a biography of Ernest Gellner. Richard Handler is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of Critics Against Culture: Anthropological Observers of Mass Society (University of Wisconsin Press 2005) and the editor of the journal-series History of Anthropology. Chris Hann is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. His first major publication was based on his PhD: Tázlár: a Village in Hungary (Cambridge University Press 1980). Subsequent publications arose from fieldwork in Poland – A Village Without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis (Yale University Press 1985) – and Turkey – (with Ildikó Bellér-Hann) Turkish Region: State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast (James Currey 2000). After holding teaching positions in the UK at the universities of Cambridge and Kent (Canterbury), he moved to Germany in 1999 to take up his present position. Recent publications include ‘Not the Horse We Wanted!’ From Postsocialism, Neoliberalism and Eurasia (Lit Verlag 2006), and the edited volume Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (Routledge 2002). Mark Haugaard is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at NUI, Galway. His publications include: The Constitution of Power (Manchester University Press 1997); (as co-editor) Power in Contemporary Politics (Sage 2000); (as editor) Power: A Reader (Manchester University Press 2002) and (as co-editor) Making Sense of Collectivities: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalization (Pluto Press 2002). Michael Hechter is Foundation Professor of Global Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Previously he was on the faculties of the University of Washington, the University of Arizona and the University of Oxford. His recent books include: Principles of Group Solidarity (University of California Press 1987); Containing Nationalism (Oxford University Press 2000); Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (Routledge 1975/1999); (as co-editor) Social Norms (Russell Sage Foundation 2002); and (as co-editor) Theories of Social Order (Stanford University Press 2003). Douglas R. Holmes is Professor of Anthropology at State University of New York at Binghamton. His recent research has focused on the social and cultural dynamics of advanced European integration. His current research examines the relationship between the Deutsche Bundesbank and the European Central Bank as they experiment with the forms and functions of central banking. His published works include: Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton University Press 2000) and Cultural Disenchantment: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy (Princeton University Press 1989). More recently, he has collaborated with George E. Marcus on a series of publications that delineate methodological strategies for investigating contemporary political economy. Miroslav Hroch has been Professor in Modern European History at the Charles University, Prague. In 1993, he founded the Seminar of General and Comparative History, becoming its head until 2000. He has been visiting professor in Freiburg, Saarbrücken, UCLA, Halle, Chemnitz and European Univ. Institute in Florence. He published more than 100 articles on Early and Modern History and several books, many in Western languages: Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegungen bei den kleinen Völkern Europas (Prague, Charles University 1968); Social Preconditions of National Revival (Cambridge University Press 1985, 2nd ed. Columbia Univ. Press 2000); Ecclesia Militans: The Inquisition (with A. Skybova) (Dorset Press 1988); In the National Interest. Demands and Goals of European National Movements of the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective (Prague, Faculty of Art 2000) and Das Europa der Nationen. Die moderne Nationsbildung im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2005). John Hutchinson is Senior Lecturer in Nationalism at the London School of Economics. He is the author or editor of eight books on nationalism and ethnicity, including: The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism (Allen and Unwin 1987); Modern Nationalism (Fontana 1994); and, most recently, Nations as Zones of Conflict (Sage 2004). He is Deputy Editor of Nations and Nationalism and Vice-President of the Association for the study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. Paul James is Director of the Globalism Institute (RMIT), an editor of Arena Journal and on the Council of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. He has received a number of awards including the Japan–Australia Foundation Fellowship, an Australian Research Council Fellowship, and the Crisp Medal by the Australasian Political Studies Association for the best book in the field of political studies. He is author or editor of nine books, including: Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of

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Abstract Community (Sage 1996); (with Tom Nairn) Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terror (Pluto Press 2005); and Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In (Sage 2006). Mark Juergensmeyer is Professor of Sociology and Director of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His main area of research is religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and he has published more than two hundred articles and a dozen books, including: The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press 1993); Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press 2003; revised edition); Gandhi’s Way (University of California Press 2005; updated edition); and (as editor) Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2003). E. Fuat Keyman is Professor of International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul. He is also the director of the Koç University Centre for Research on Globalization and Democratic Governance (GLODEM). He works on democratization, globalization, international relations, Turkish politics and Turkish foreign policy. He has produced many books and articles, both in English and in Turkish, in these areas. He is the author of Globalization, State, Identity/Difference: Towards a Critical Social Theory of International Relations (Humanities Press 1997); Turkey and Radical Democracy (Alfa 2001); Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Modernity and Democratization (Lexington, forthcoming); and a co-editor of Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions and Turkish Experiences (Routledge 2005). Anatoly M. Khazanov is Ernest Gellner Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. An author and editor of sixteen volumes and about 200 articles, his books include Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge University Press 1984) and After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States (University of Wisconsin Press 1995). Anthony King is Reader in Sociology at Exeter University. He has published widely on football and social theory including The European Ritual (Ashgate 2003) and The Structure of Social Theory (Routledge 2004). He is currently researching into the transformation of Europe’s armed forces. Krishan Kumar is the William R. Kenan, Jr, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He was previously Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Bergen, Bristol and Colorado (Boulder), a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, an Invited Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Among his publications are: Prophecy and Progress (Penguin 1978); Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Blackwell 1987); The Rise of Modern Society (Blackwell 1988); Utopianism (University of Minnesota Press 1991); From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society (Blackwell 2005; 2nd edition); 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (University of

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Minnesota Press 2001); and The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press 2003). He is currently researching on empires. Tuna Kuyucu is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Washington. Lauren Langman is a Professor of Sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. He has long worked in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, with an especial interest in the relationships between culture, politics/political movements and the psychosocial. He is past chair of Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological Association and current President of Alienation Research and Theory, Research Committee 36, of the International Sociological Association. He is on the editorial boards of Sociological Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory and Critical Sociology. Recent publications include a special issue of American Behavioral Politics devoted to the presidency in a television age. His forthcoming book (coauthored with Karen Halnon) The Carnivalization of America (Sage Publications and Pine Forge Press), looks at the role of the alienation of youth and their embrace of transgressive life styles, identities and popular culture. David McCrone is Professor of Sociology and director of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Governance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. He is coordinator of the research programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust on Constitutional Change and National Identity (1999–2005). He has written extensively on the sociology and politics of Scotland, and the comparative study of nationalism. His recent books include: Living in Scotland: Social and Economic Change since 1980 (Edinburgh University Press 2004); Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation (Routledge 2001); (as coeditor) New Scotland, New Society? (Polygon at Edinburgh 2001), (as co-author) New Scotland: New Politics? (Polygon at Edinburgh 2001); and The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow’s Ancestors (Routledge 1998). Siniša Maleševic´ is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway. Previously he was a research fellow in the Institute for International Relations (Zagreb), Centre for the Study of Nationalism (Prague) and the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna). His recent publications include: Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism (Palgrave 2006, forthcoming), The Sociology of Ethnicity (Sage 2004); Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State (Frank Cass 2002); and the co-edited volumes Making Sense of Collectivity: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalisation (Pluto 2002) and Ideology after Poststructuralism (Pluto 2002). Margaret Moore is Professor in the Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. She is the author of Foundations of Liberalism (Oxford University Press 1993) and Ethics of Nationalism (Oxford University Press 2001). She has edited National Self-determination and Secession (Oxford University Press 1998) and co-edited (with Allen Buchanan) Nations, States and Borders: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press 2003).

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Benyamin Neuberger is Professor of Political Science and African Studies at the Open University of Israel. From 1972 to 2002 he taught African Politics at Tel-Aviv University. He was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Cape Town and Haverford College. In the years 2003–2005 he was a Senior Associate Member of St Antony’s College at Oxford University. His publications include: National Self-Determination in Postcolonial Africa (Lynne Rienner 1986); ‘National Self-Determination in the Middle East and North Africa’, in M. Maoz and G. Sheffer (eds), Middle Eastern Minorities and Diasporas (Sussex Academic Press 2002); ‘The Arab Minority in Israeli Politics: Between “Ethnic Democracy” and “National Integration”’, in A. Guelke (ed.), Democracy and Ethnic Conflict (Palgrave 2004); and Rwanda 1994: Genocide in the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’ (The Open University of Israel, 2005). T. K. Oommen retired from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in October 2002. He is a past president of the International Sociological Association (1990–4) and he was the Secretary General of the XI World Congress of Sociology held in New Delhi in 1986. He has authored and/or edited eighteen books including: Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity, (Polity Press 1997); Pluralism, Equality and Identity (Oxford University Press 2002); and Nation, Civil Society and Social Movements (Sage 2004). He was visiting Professor/Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute of Advanced Studies, Budapest, and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Uppsala, amongst other places. Ilan Pappe works in the Department of Political Science, University of Haifa, Israel. Recent publications include: (as editor) The Israel/Palestine Question (Routledge 1999); A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press 2003); and The Modern Middle East (Routledge 2005). Maurice Roche is Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on European Social and Cultural Studies (ESCUS) in Sheffield University, and a Reader in Sociology. He has also held sociology posts at the LSE in London and McMaster University, Canada. Since the 1980s his research interests have focused on the sociology of citizenship and the sociology of popular culture, including sport and cultural events, and he has published widely in each of these fields. His recent publications include: Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture (Routledge 2000); (as editor) Sport, Identity and Popular Culture (Meyer & Meyer Verlag 1998); and ‘Cultural Europeanisation and the Cosmopolitan Condition: EU Regulation and European Sport’, in C. Rumford (ed.), Europe and Cosmopolitanism (Liverpool University Press 2005). Audrey Sacks is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Washington. Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. He has published widely on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs.

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Recent books include: Soviet Politics in Perspective (Routledge 1998); Postcommunism (Open University Press 1999); The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 (Routledge 1999); (co-edited, with Bruno Coppieters of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Contextualising Secession: Normative Aspects of Secession Struggles (Oxford University Press 2003); and Putin: Russia’s Choice (Routledge 2004). His current research interests focus on problems of democratic development and the state in Russia, the nature of post-communism, and the global challenges facing the former communist countries. Daniel A. Segal is Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Historical Studies at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. He is the past editor of Cultural Anthropology and, most recently, co-editor (with Sylvia Yanagisako) of Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology (Duke University Press 2005). Anthony D. Smith is Professor Emeritus of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of Economics. His recent publications include: Nationalism and Modernism (Routledge 1998); The Nation in History (University Press of New England 2000); Chosen Peoples (Oxford University Press 2003); and The Antiquity of Nations (Polity 2004). He is President of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, and Chief Editor of Nations and Nationalism. Yoshio Sugimoto is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He was born and raised in Japan, graduated from Kyoto University and obtained a PhD in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh. Since his appointment at La Trobe in 1973, he has written extensively both in English and Japanese and has frequently contributed to the Japanese media. His publications include: An Introduction to Japanese Society (Cambridge University Press 2003, second edition); (with Ross Mouer) Images of Japanese Society (Kegan Paul International 1986); and How to Cease to be Japanese (Chikuma Shobo 1993, in Japanese). Anna Triandafyllidou is Senior Research Fellow at ELIAMEP and Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies, European University Institute in Florence. She teaches as Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and works occasionally as expert for the European Commission. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of Surrey, London School of Economics, CNR in Rome, New York University and European University Institute of Florence. Her recent publications include: Immigrants and National Identity in Europe (Routledge 2001); Negotiating Nationhood in a Changing Europe (Edwin Mellen Press 2002); What is Europe? (Palgrave Macmillan 2007 forthcoming); (co-edited) Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration (Routledge 2003); (co-edited) Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach (Routledge 2005); and (co-edited) Transcultural Europe: Cultural Policy in the Changing Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2006).

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Bryan S. Turner was Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge (1998–2005) and is currently Professor of Sociology in the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is the research leader of the cluster on globalization and religion, and is currently writing a three-volume study of the sociology of religion and editing the Dictionary of Sociology for Cambridge University Press. A book on human rights and vulnerability is to be published in 2006 by Penn State University Press. Recent publications include Classical Sociology (Sage 1999), The New Medical Sociology (W. W. Norton 2004) and (as co-editor with Craig Calhoun and Chris Rojek) The Sage Handbook of Sociology (Sage 2005). With Chris Rojek, he published Society and Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity (Sage 2001) and, with June Edmunds, Generations, Culture and Society (Open University Press 2002). With Engin Isin, he edited the Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Sage 2002). Charles Turner is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Warwick. His recent publications include: ‘Scenographies of Suicide’, Economy and Society, 34 (2) (2005), and ‘Jürgen Habermas: European or German’, European Journal of Political Theory, 3 (3) (2005). Sylvia Walby is Professor at Lancaster University, in the Department of Sociology. She has been Professor of Sociology in the Universities of Leeds and Bristol, Reader at the LSE and was the founding President of the European Sociological Association. Her books include: Gender Transformations (Routledge 1997); Theorizing Patriarchy (Blackwell 1990); Patriarchy at Work (Polity Press 1986); and (co-edited with Boje and Steenbergen) European Societies: Fusion or Fission? (Routledge 1999). Her next book is Complex Social Systems: Theorizations and Comparisons in a Global Era (Sage 2006, forthcoming). Andreas Wimmer is Professor of Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles. He received an MA in 1989 and three years later a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Zurich, where he also habilitated in 1994. His main research interests include social change, ethnic conflict and nationalism, and culture theory. His regional specializations are Iraq, Mexico and Switzerland. Major book publications include Transformationen (Reimer 1995); Die komplexe Gesellschaft (Reimer 1995); Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge University Press 2002); (as editor) Facing Ethnic Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield 2004); Prozessuale Kulturtheorie (Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften); and (as editor) Understanding Change (Palgrave 2005). Ruth Wodak is Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and is also head of the Wittgenstein Research Centre ‘Discourse, Politics, Identity’ at the University of Vienna. Her research interests focus on discourse analysis, gender studies, language and/in politics, identity politics, prejudice and discrimination, and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work. She is a member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies and Language and Politics.

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She has held visiting professorships in Uppsala, Stanford University, University of Minnesota, University of East Anglia and Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Her recent books include A New Agenda in Critical Discourse Analysis (Benjamins, with Paul Chilton, 2005); Re/reading the Past (with Jim Martin, Benjamins, 2003), Discourse and Discrimination (with Martin Reisigl, Routledge 2001) and The Discursive Construction of National Identity (EUP 1999). Suhnaz Yilmaz is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul. She has received her MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton and conducted her post-doctoral studies at Harvard University. Her areas of interest and expertise include foreign policy analysis, Middle Eastern studies, Turkish foreign policy, Mediterranean cooperation and security, and conflict resolution. She has publications in journals such as Middle East Journal, Middle Eastern Studies, O Mundo em Portugues and World Today.

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Introduction GERARD DELANTY AND KRISHAN KUMAR

Nationalism, once thought by many intellectuals of both Left and Right to be a declining or dying force, has seemingly returned with renewed vigour in recent decades. The most spectacular examples have been in the countries of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. But its continuing vitality has been evident in many other parts of the world as well. There have been powerful nationalist movements in the Middle East and in Asia, linked often to new or revived religious currents in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Nationalist passions continue to be strong in Africa, leading to constant movements of secession and more or less endemic civil war in several countries. Even in the West, the original homeland of nationalism and the part of the world once thought to have experienced its steepest decline, nationalism has shown a surprising capacity for survival and adaptation, not least in the societies that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Nationalism, it is clear, is a global phenomenon, demanding treatment in a global perspective. It is happening everywhere; at the same time every expression seems in some sense to feed off expressions elsewhere, leading one to suspect some common source or sources that are fuelling the phenomenon. Nationalism may have had its origin in a particular place and at a particular time – late eighteenth-century Europe, by general agreement. But not only did its ideology then spread across the world, carried as often as not by the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the world itself has become

increasingly unified, so that global structures and processes now play their part in shaping the varieties and vicissitudes of nationalism. In recent years, the study of nationalism has attracted growing attention from scholars in a range of disciplines – sociology, anthropology, history, politics, even literature and philosophy. General works by a number of scholars – Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Smith, John Breuilly, Rogers Brubaker, Walker Connor, Miroslav Hroch – have formed a core of theoretical approaches that has informed much of the work in particular areas. There have been some outstanding studies of specific cases, such as Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) and Linda Colley’s Britons (1992). What we have lacked is a volume that looks at the phenomenon of nationalism in its full global dimensions. This has meant that not only have certain areas of the world been neglected, it has also meant that existing theoretical approaches have not been refined, or new approaches thought out, to fit the many new types of nationalism now encountered on the world stage. Nationalism is both old and new. There is a distinct and recognizable continuity with nineteenth-century European forms and ideologies. At the same time there have been the inevitable mutations, as nationalism has adapted to or been reconstructed by cultures with different traditions from the West. In addition, the world has moved on; nationalism today arises in circumstances very different from those in which it was invented, more than two centuries ago. The emergence of modern nationalism in the period following the French Revolution was on

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the whole connected with the formation of the modern nation-state, on the one side, and on the other with the emergence of industrial society. Most nationalist movements were shaped by one, or very often both, of these developments. While the crystallization of nationalism and nationhood took many different forms it was inextricably connected with statehood and with the centralizing and modernizing tendency towards the homogenization of populations. It would not be an exaggeration to say that nationalism and nationhood were projects of modernity and reflected the particularistic dimension of modernity’s universalism. Nationalism was a product of a world in which the nation-state was the primary societal principle of organization. Today it is a different matter. The nationstate, while far from being in decline, is no longer the only principle of societal organization. Under the conditions of globalization there are many other contenders and challenges to national sovereignty other than the demands of other states. This has had a huge impact on nationalism, the resurgence of which can be linked to the turbulence of the nation-state and the ever-changing global context. Many kinds of nationalism are products of transnationalism. A particularly contemporary example of this is Islamic nationalism. In the countries where it has taken root it has been because of global forces. The political community in question is one shaped by the global imaginary of a trans-civilizational diaspora rather than by a particular aspiration for a bounded territorial state. It is a stateless kind of nationalism and indeed one that is often anti-statist. The implication of this is that nationhood and statehood have become more and more disentangled. Nationalism is taking a wide variety of forms and is more fluid than static. This possibly explains why there has been a global increase in nationalism and why it takes more oppositional forms. Globalized communication and movements facilitate nationalism which is also driven by the relentless concern with meaning and identity that is a feature of the present day. It is both a reaction and a product of globalization. Where earlier

forms of nationalism arose out of the process of modernization – as outlined by Gellner and Deutsch and others – and were often linked to nations that were embarking on imperialism, nationalism today is postmodern and postcolonial. When one looks at the wider global situation it is evident that nationalism derives from the periphery rather than the centre. This is strikingly the case of Europe, where most of the former communist societies have experienced a rise in nationalism along with the recovery of national independence that followed the end of communism. Paradoxically, this has occurred at the same time as the movement towards European integration reached an enhanced momentum. Post-communist countries have found in the European Union a new way to achieve national autonomy. The nationalism of the periphery is often a case of belated modernization, in the terms of Gellner’s analysis. But in such cases and especially so in the developed world nationalism has an anti-statist tendency. Within the Western European states, nationalism has on the whole been anti-statist, as is illustrated by the extreme-right and various populist tendencies. It is difficult not to draw the conclusion that the state and the dominant political elites do not control the discourse of nationhood. The nation has become more and more disengaged by those social actors who in the past had a closer connection to nationalism. The resurgence of nationalism should not lead one to the conclusion that nationalism is some kind of illusion or a dangerous myth to be dispelled by rational scholarship or liberal temperament, as Ernest Gellner probably believed. The political and cultural forms of the nation are multifaceted. Nationhood is part of the condition of modernity and one of the most important expressions of political community. The tremendous appeal of the idea of the nation is undoubtedly due to the fact that it is a social category. In this it is a contrast to the idea of the state, which is a category of political rule and unlike class is by definition inclusive. The idea of the nation encapsulates social issues, such as solidarity and we-feeling, which are often eroded by the general tendency towards the transnationalization of

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the state whereby the state disengages itself from the nation. Again, this is an example of the recalcitrant nature of nationalism. In conditions that are present in both highly developed and less developed societies, the state has become more and more absorbed into transnational processes, on the one side, and on the other there is an increase in social fragmentation. This is entirely different from the period when nationalism arose in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it was linked to a wider societal tendency towards integration and citizenship. The changed nature and function of nationalism today require a new approach to its study. The classical literature did not take account of globalization and was generally concerned with the rise of nationalism with modern society. The study of nationalism today, as is reflected by the chapters in this Handbook, concerns a wider range of social phenomena. One of the conclusions to be drawn from this is that nationalism is present in almost every aspect of political community and social arrangements. It pervades the global and the local dimensions and can even take cosmopolitan forms. If one were to seek the defining feature of nationalism in all its forms, it might be the relation to agency. Nationalism arose with the rise of political subjectivity and with modernity it encapsulated the spirit of freedom which inspired the key doctrine of nationalism, namely the notion of self-determination. Where individualism and liberalism gave expression to one dimension of modernity, and which left its imprint on liberal nationalism, the other romantic face of nationalism, with its characteristic emphasis on peoplehood and collective consciousness, provided a powerful impetus to the other dimension of nationalism. Few movements have been more successful in linking the projects of elites with the masses, who were mobilized by nationalism in a way that cannot be so easily said of the other social movements of the modern era. Moreover, there were relatively few nationalist movements and few official nation-states in the formative period of nation-state building. Mazzini, often considered to be one of the founders of modern European nationalism,

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believed only countries of a certain size could be legitimately deemed nations and a Europe of sovereign nations would have few nations. Today, nationalism is neither liberal nor romantic, and nor is it a movement that is distinct from other social movements. While other social movements – socialism, communism, fascism – accommodated nationalism, which became the basis of the post-war interstate system, nationalism has become normalized, taking ‘banal’ forms as Michael Billig has argued. Nationalism is no longer something that exists as a specific social force but is rather embroiled in the public culture of the democratic state. This makes nationalism particularly more challenging to investigate than was the case in the past when nationalism became a subject of scholarly study. It is evident that nationalism can mean many things – a movement, an ideology or discourse of nationhood – and there are different traditions of scholarship. The way political philosophers treat the subject is very different from the approach of historians. This Handbook aims to fill the existing gap in the literature; to offer, within the compass of a single volume, the most comprehensive view in existence – so far as we are aware – of the phenomenon of nationalism. To this end we have drawn our contributors from many disciplines and from many different parts of the world. The study of nationalism is interdisciplinary, with contributions from history, sociology, anthropology, political science, social psychology and philosophy. The coverage is truly global, incorporating developments on all continents. We are convinced that for both professional scholars and students alike this volume is unique in its scholarly breadth and geographical range. All contributors, moreover, have been encouraged not simply to give an account of the main developments in their specific areas but to state their own positions and to lay out their views on the outstanding problems and future directions for research. This is a handbook, not an encyclopedia. The 45 chapters of the Handbook are organized into three broad sections. Part 1: Approaches examines various concepts and

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theories of nationhood and nationalism. These range from considerations of classic theories, such as those of Ernest Gellner (John Hall) and other modernization theorists (Miroslav Hroch) and the work of historians (Krishan Kumar), to questions of the ethics and justification of nationalism (Margaret Moore) and the problems of comparative analysis (Johann Arnason). There are also chapters on less studied aspects of nationalism, such as psychological (Lauren Langman), socio-linguistic (Ruth Wodak) and gender (Sylvia Walby) approaches. The contributors in this section are throughout sensitive to the shifting and protean forms and meanings of nationalism, and the need to adapt or invent approaches to match its always-contested terms and constantly changing character. Part 2: Themes addresses certain broad themes and topics in the study of nationalism. These include traditional subjects, such as the relation between race (Steve Fenton), ethnicity (Anthony Smith) and nation, and the overlaps and differences between them and their uses. There are also discussions of the relations of nationalism to religion (Mark Juergensmeyer), region (David McCrone) and modernity (Liah Greenfeld) and cosmopolitanism (Gerard Delanty), and of the connections and oppositions of nationalism to ideologies of liberalism (Mark Haugaard) and of the radical Right (Mabel Berezin). But there are also newer stresses on the role of nationhood and nationalism in collective memory (Charles Turner and John Brewer) and in such areas as sport (Anthony

King) and global spectacles (Maurice Roche). There are also contributions that take up the issue of the ‘dark side’ of nationalism, and of its possible relation to genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Andreas Wimmer, Daniele Conversi). Part 3: Nations and Nationalism in a Global Age looks in detail at nationhood and nationalism in all the major countries and regions of the world. But, though necessarily dealing with particular cases, contributors have generally wished to emphasize comparative aspects, to show the similarities and differences between the specific example and other cases elsewhere. If these many examples reveal a common pattern, it is not one of uniformity or homogeneity but more of what one might call Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances’ between cases. A common ideology of nationalism is refracted through the prism of different traditions and different historical experiences. American nationalism, for instance, shows the impress of the early experience of nationhood (Susan-Mary Grant), as compared with ‘late developers’ such as the African nations (Benyamin Neuberger). But – and this is the other main focus of this section – the newer and more intensified forces of globalization may today be stimulating some larger similarities in nationalist responses. Nationalism in the global age, the age of supranational organizations and transnational corporations, is, despite several statements to the contrary, alive and thriving; but it is likely to show a very different face from that of the age of the more or less autonomous nation-state.

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1 Nationalism and the Historians KRISHAN KUMAR

‘Historians’, says Eric Hobsbawm, ‘are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market’ (1996: 255). This calculatedly malicious remark points up the evident link between history, historians and nationalism. A nationalism that does not appeal to history is unthinkable. Whatever the differences of definition, all concepts of the nation include some reference to the past, to history or tradition. A nation is something that is formed in and by time; it ‘presupposes a past’, as Ernest Renan says (1990 [1882]: 19). A social group that does not have, or cannot invent, a past is not and cannot be a nation: ‘nations without a past are contradictions in terms’ (Hobsbawm 1996: 255). It is difficult, of course, to think of any social group other than the most ephemeral that does not have a past. But the past of the nation is not simply deeper and longer than in the case of other social groups; it is virtually constitutive. That is why historians have been central to the task of establishing claims for nationhood, and in the elaboration of nationalist ideologies (Kohn 1960, 1961; Deletant and Hanak 1988; Woolf 1996: 2–8; Hall 1997; Berger et al. 1999; Suny 2001b: 345–8; Breuilly 2002: 84). Think of Karamzin in the case of Russia, Palacky in the case of the Czechs, Hrushevsky for Ukraine, Treitschke for Germany, Michelet for France.

Even in the relatively ‘non-national’ case of England, such definitions of national identity as there are have come predominantly from historians, as in A. E. Freeman’s powerful evocation of the Anglo-Saxon character of English identity (Burrow 1983; Mandler 2002: 36), or Herbert Butterfield’s charting and eventual championing of ‘the Whig interpretation’ of English history as the bedrock of the English political tradition (Butterfield 1945, 1951 [1931]; cf. Breuilly 2002: 56). But historians have also played an equally important role in another way – not as nationalists or the nourishers of nationalism, but as commentators on and critics of nationalism (cf. Smith 1999b; Suny 2001b: 347). This follows, in a sense, from the very idea of the nation as a historically formed community. For if such is the nationalist claim, who but historians are best equipped to assess it? If the French nation, say, is seen by French nationalists as having its birth in the struggle against the English in the Hundred Years War, or – equally and alternatively – as only being formed much later, by the ideas and conflicts of the French Revolution, it becomes a matter for historians qua historians to investigate these assertions and to report on their findings. Whether their findings delight or disconcert French nationalists is not the historians’ affair. Ernest Renan famously said that ‘forgetting,

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I would even go so far as to say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality’ (1990 [1882]: 11). For Hobsbawm this means that ‘no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist’, because ‘nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so’ (1992: 12). Certainly nationalist commitment can get in the way of good history, as has been clear in the critical responses to such works as Fernand Braudel’s L’Identité de la France (e.g. Noiriel 1996: 36–41; Suny 2001b: 357), or the controversies surrounding Pierre Nora’s grand project of nationalist historiography, Les Lieux de mémoire (Englund 1992; Jackson 1999: 242–4). At the same time nationalism has been the spur to some great works of history, as in Jules Michelet’s History of France (1833–67) or Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome (1856). At any rate there can be no doubt that, whether as partisans or critics, the work of historians is central to the idea of the nation and to the evaluation of nationalist claims. There is a third way in which history and historians are crucial to nationalism. This is in the narrative of nationalism itself, in the tracing of the origins of nations and the rise of the ideal or ideology of nationalism. There was a time when, it seems, there was no such thing as nationalism, and perhaps also no such thing as the nation, at least as we have come to understand that term. That, at any rate, has been the claim of a powerful group of ‘modernist’ theorists of nationalism, as against the ‘perennialists’ or ‘primordialists’ who see nations and nationalism as having existed since time immemorial (Smith 1998). Certainly sociologists and other social scientists have weighed in on this question, as shown in the influential contributions of Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith, Tom Nairn, Walker Connor and others. One can even say that it is they, rather than the historians, who have raised the question in the first place. But it is notable the extent to which all of them have had to engage with history in grappling with it. If nationalism is a recent thing, how and why did it come into existence? What

was the state of things before nationalism, to which nationalism is the contrast and against which it can best be measured? Can there be ‘nations before nationalism’, that is, the existence of national consciousness and national identity before the rise of the ideology of nationalism? Clearly, since claims of priority and temporality are involved in these disputes, we are once more in the province of the historian. Hence, one again, the prominence of historians, not this time as nationalists or antinationalists, but as students of nationalism. No discussion of nationalism and its problems could be considered adequate without taking into account the contributions of historians such as Hans Kohn (e.g. 1944), George Mosse (1975), Hugh Seton-Watson (1977), Eric Hobsbawm (1992), John Breuilly (1994) or Miroslav Hroch (2000). These have all considered nationalism in the round, in the grandest, most comprehensive, perspective. To them we would also want to add those historians whose accounts of particular cases or episodes have had a significant impact on theories of nationalism. These would include Eugen Weber’s impressive study Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), with its emphasis on the lateness of French national integration and the key roles played by the school and the army in this process; it would also include such works as Peter Sahlins’s Boundaries (1989), with its Barthian focus on the way in which national boundaries influenced the creation and negotiation of French and Spanish identities in the Pyrenees. Then there is Linda Colley’s Britons (1992), which has sparked a whole industry of reflections on British and English national identity and its problems. Nor can, or should, one ignore the sparkling essays of the great historian Lewis Namier (e.g. 1958, 1964) on the European revolutions of 1848, ‘the springtime of nations’ and a key moment in the evolution of nationalist thought and policies. Creator, commentator/critic, narrator: here are three roles in which historians have shown the importance of history to our understanding and assessment of nationalism. Let us look at these in more detail.

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HISTORIANS DEFINE THE NATION: THE CASE OF FRANCE France affords us as good an example as any of the ways in which historians have shaped the understanding of the nation. One could start with the assertion, one that set off a wideranging historical controversy in eighteenthcentury France, that the French nation was essentially constituted by its nobility, and that this nobility was of direct descent from the original Frankish ‘nation’ of Charlemagne’s empire. Such was the view, buttressed by a host of historical arguments, of Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers, a view enthusiastically endorsed by the aristocratic parlements in their struggles with the crown (Ellis 1988; Bell 2001: 57–9). It was countered first by the royalists, who reiterated the traditional view that the monarchy was the embodiment of the nation; then, more emphatically and more dramatically, by the Abbé Seyès in 1789 with the claim that it was the ‘Third Estate’ – in effect, the common people – that constituted the nation. All sides necessarily resorted to history to support their arguments, such that ‘most political discussions of the nation from this period took the form of … history’ (Bell 2001: 58). The French Revolution staked out what was to become, in the end, the official definition of the French nation as a secular republic of equal citizens. But this took a long time. Not until late in the nineteenth century, during the Third Republic, did it achieve canonical status. Before then, and even for some time afterwards, there were differences aplenty as to the identity of France, and how best to represent the nation (Gildea 1996; Hazareesingh 1994: 124–50). History, once more, was to be the guide and tutor. The historian and statesman François Guizot, in his History of Civilization in Europe (1828), put the case for a French constitutional monarchy on the English model, arguing that it was this – rather than Jacobinism or Bonapartism – that was in the true tradition of European pluralism and individualism (Crossley 1999). The most crushing response to this was Jules Michelet’s monumental and coruscating History of France. Written over a period of more than thirty years (1833–67), Michelet’s history – especially in the separate

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volumes published as the History of the French Revolution – aspired to show that ‘the people’ were and always had been the hero of French history, and that the republic of free and of equal citizens was France’s natural destiny (Mitzman 1990). Another historical work, Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), bravely conceded the point, even though it went against the grain of Tocqueville’s aristocratic temperament and even though he showed that the French monarchy had as much part to play in that outcome as the French people. Cutting across this divide was the current that wished to give due recognition to the Bonapartist strand in French political culture, even if regretting the excesses to which Napoleon himself had pushed the idea. Such was the position of the liberal Adolphe Thiers’s History of the Consulate and Empire (1840–62); while Victor Hugo, in his historical epic Les Misérables (1862), also found it difficult to conceal his admiration for the achievements of the emperor. The French Revolution remained, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the touchstone for national definition. What was the Revolution, and how far did it accord with the deeper historical currents of French life? Was its legacy benign or malign? The answers to these questions were meant to sum up the essence of France, to try to find in its past the elements, for good or bad, that made up its character. For Hippolyte Taine, in his Origins of Contemporary France (1875–94), the verdict was clear: the Revolution had been a disaster for France. Following Edmund Burke, he argued that France had been misled by the abstract and utopian ideas of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Their nemesis was the Terror of the Jacobins and the dictatorship of Napoleon. France had had to live with the consequences, one of which was a spirit of revolution that expressed itself repeatedly in destructive bouts of frenzy, the latest of which had been the Paris Commune of 1871. Taine’s work was enormously influential (Cobban 1968: 47; Jones 1999). Its rebuttal was to come in Ernest Lavisse’s massive enterprise, the 27 volumes of the History of France (1900–12). Lavisse was ‘the evangelist of the

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Republic’, the ‘nation’s teacher’ – teaching by means of history (Nora 1984: 247; see also Nora 1986). Rallying the French after the crushing defeat of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and following on the internal crises of the Third Republic in the 1880s and 1890s (Boulanger’s attempted coup, the Dreyfus affair), Lavisse aimed at a comprehensive rehabilitation of the French republican ideal. The histories written under his editorship became the standard fare in schools and universities, reduced and adapted where necessary in student textbooks. Here was a story that placed the Republic at the centre of French national history. Everything in the past flowed towards it; everything in the future took its point of departure from it. French historians of the twentieth century continued the debate, in works mostly dealing with the French Revolution, its causes and consequences. Left-wing versions – Jean Jaurès, Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre – jostled restatements of the orthodox or ‘bourgeois’ republican positions – Alphonse Aulard and his followers (Cobban 1968; Furet 1981; Lebovics 1992). In all this it was clear to everyone, authors and readers alike, that what was taking place was a struggle for the soul of the French nation. Even when the political passions stilled somewhat, the various histories produced by writers such as Fernand Braudel and Pierre Nora were fundamentally attempts to define the nation, as the controversies surrounding them showed (Lebovics 1992: 1–6; Jackson 1999: 241–4). Further controversies, again involving historians as much as sociologists, were fuelled by the debate over immigration, and the extent to which France could be called a ‘multicultural’ or ‘immigrant’ as opposed to a homogeneous nation (see e.g. Noiriel 1996; Jackson 1999: 244–7). Historians could not avoid taking part in the public debates. Called upon to explain and justify the nation, they willingly responded, even if they could not agree on its nature. THE HISTORIAN AS CRITIC OF NATIONALISM If historians, as public figures, have been central to the making of national consciousness, they

have also been among its sternest critics. An early counterblast – directed partly against his great contemporary John Stuart Mill, who had championed nationality – came from the English historian Lord Acton. Writing in 1862, he proclaimed that ‘the theory of nationality is a retrograde step in history … Nationality does not aim either at liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind’ (Acton 1996 [1862]: 36–7). Such denunciations were unusual at the time, when nationalism was generally regarded, especially in Britain, as a progressive force. But they gained in force in the first half of the twentieth century, in the works of historians such as Arnold Toynbee, Johan Huizinga, Edward Carr and Alfred Cobban (e.g. Carr 1945; Cobban 1945; Huizinga 1959 [1940]). Indeed, for Anthony Smith historians have generally displayed ‘scepticism, even hostility’, to nationalism. They have portrayed it as ‘inherently absurd and destructive’, culminating in the European case in the excesses of fascism and Nazism (Smith 1999b: 45; cf. Breuilly 2002: 62–8). Against this is the view of several historians that, in a certain sense, the opposite is true. The historical profession, they point out, came of age at precisely the time, in the late nineteenth century, that nationalism itself reached its apogee. History as a practice took the nation-state as its natural unit of analysis. Historians have been complicit in diffusing the view that all history is essentially national history, and that the important identities are national identities. In that sense the historians, not only as public intellectuals but as professionals, have been on the side of nationalism (Potter 1962: 924; Tyrell 1991; Woolf 1996: 2–3; Breuilly 2002: 73; Suny 2001b: 337; Sluga 2004). There is no necessary contradiction between these views, of course; the difference may be largely in the evaluation of the morality and ‘progessiveness’ of nationalism. One can admit the reality of the nation and the nation-state

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without admiring their ends. Historians, it might be argued, have to accept the nationstate as the framework for their investigations because that form of organization has been the dominant fact at least of the modern period. That still leaves them free to deplore the consequences of nationalism. On the other hand, one can be highly sceptical of nationalist claims while at the same time arguing for the necessity and functionality of nationalism. Two of the leading theorists of nationalism, Ernest Gellner (1983) and Benedict Anderson (1991), fall into this camp. Nationalism, they would say, does not have to be true in its beliefs to be useful or desirable. The ‘nation-state’ may be a myth, in the sense of resting on a fiction; but it is a necessary fiction. Nevertheless it is true that historians have played a leading role in debunking nationalism, and that whether this is their intention or not they have given much ammunition to those who regard nationalism as an aberration at best and a poison at worst. Particularly effective has been the idea of ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984; see also Hosking and Schöpflin 1997). The view here is that much of what nations and nationalists regard as sacred or essential to their identity are historical myths and fabrications: the implication being that to explode the myth is to undermine the claim to authenticity. Thus Hugh Trevor-Roper (1984) evidently derives great enjoyment from showing that the kilt and the clan tartan, far from being the longestablished emblems of Scottish Highlands tradition that Scots nationalists claim, were in fact thought up by a shrewd English manufacturer at the end of the eighteenth century. David Cannadine (1984) shows how much of the supposedly ancient ritual and mythology of the English monarchy – the coronation ceremony, the royal jubilees, the investiture of the Prince of Wales – was invented in the late Victorian era by a handful of royal publicists. For Germany Alon Confino (1997) traces how a powerful gemeinschaft expression of the traditional local community, the concept of heimat, became the ideological basis of the newly unified Germany in the late nineteenth century so that the new state could preserve the

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illusion of continuity with an idealized past. Paschalis Kitromilides (1989) has analysed the nationalist myth which portrays the Greek nation as surviving virtually unchanged since Homeric times and, suppressed for centuries, finally achieving its liberation in the War of Independence (1821–28). ‘Greece’ was a literary idea, he shows; the reality was a backward region of the Ottoman empire split into semiautonomous mountain communities, ruled by local brigands, divided by scores of different dialects and even different languages, and presided over by an ecumenical Orthodox church that was profoundly hostile to nationalism. Only in the course of the nineteenth century were these disparate elements welded into the semblance of a nation through the homogenizing agencies of a national army and a national educational system (cf. Weber, 1976 on France). As an example of another kind we could take the symbol of the battle of the White Mountain (bílá hora) (1620) in Czech national consciousness (Petran and Petranova 1998). ‘White Mountain … was not a national conflict, but a feudal one’ (Zacek 1994: 174). But it was retrospectively baptized as a great national struggle, and a great national defeat. What in historical reality was simply one of the many battles of the Thirty Years War, involving the defeat of the Czech nobility and their incipient Protestantism by the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor, was in the early nineteenth century turned into a composite populist myth linking the White Mountain, heroic Hussite resistance, the medieval St Wenceslas as the symbol of the Czech people, and the Czech vlast, the Czech homeland or patria as conceived by the Czech nobility. The White Mountain became the messianic symbol of the revival of the Czech nation and the throwingoff of oppressive Habsburg rule. Such a pattern of nationalist ideology, involving the persistence of a defiant nation after a crushing military defeat followed by centuries of rule by a ‘foreign’ power, is to be found in several Central and East European nations, as with the battle of Kosovo (1389) for Serbian mythology and the battle of Mohacs (1526) for the Hungarians. What Armenians call the ‘Genocide of 1915’ by the Turks plays a similar role in the

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collective memory of Armenians (Suny 2001a: 884–5). Out of the catastrophe of defeat will come regeneration and resurrection. Such ‘beatified defeats’ (Petran and Petranova 1998: 160) have often played a key role in the collective memory of nations – Masada (AD 70) for the Jews, Hastings (1066) for the English, Culloden (1746) for the Scots, Jena (1806) for the Germans, Sedan (1870) for the French, Gallipoli (1916) for the Australians. They function as historical markers, announcing some critical turning point, some founding moment in the life of the nation (see Charles Turner, Chapter 17 in this Handbook). Even if, as they often are, they are episodes of extreme anguish and even humiliation, in the narrative of the nation they serve as rallying points. They are constant reminders of what must be avenged, what must still be striven for, what, as a common experience of heroism or suffering, binds the members of the nation together. ‘Suffering in common’, said Renan (1990 [1882]: 19), mindful of the humiliation inflicted on France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, ‘unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.’ ‘Collective memory’ lends itself almost by definition to historical scrutiny and analysis. Sociologists, spurred on by Durkheim and Halbwachs, may, once more, have given the lead in pointing to the phenomenon (Olick 2003), but it is historians who have played the major part in the accounting and interrogation of national memories (see e.g. Teich 1998; Jarausch and Geyer 2003; Confino 2004; Todorova 2004). Here once more they tend to appear in a critical role, testing cherished memories against the cruel facts of history (cf. Nora, 1996). It is important to stress though that historical debunking of this kind is not in every case tantamount to an anti-nationalist stance. It is true that some historians – Marxists especially – have certainly seen their work in this way. Their task, they feel, is to explode or ‘deconstruct’ the nationalist myth, considered often as the source of an obfuscating ‘false consciousness’ that papers over more fundamental divisions and antagonisms. But

to dissect is not the same as to reject. It is quite possible to show the historical inaccuracy of a remembered item or episode without denying the legitimacy and efficacy of such collective memories in the life of a nation. Christopher Hill (1986), for instance, is fully apprised of the amount of invented history in the myth of ‘the Norman yoke’, but that does not stop him from appreciating the enormously energizing force of the myth in the struggles of the ordinary English people over several centuries. In the historical critique of nationalist historiography, historian is pitted against historian. The historian as creator encounters the historian as critic: Sir Edward Coke comes up against Butterfield (1951[1931]), Michelet against Furet (1981), Palacky against Pekar (Zacek 1994: 178–81). But this is not simply a case of the older, ‘uncritical’, historian coming up against the modern ‘scientific’ historian, telling it ‘as it really was’. Often it is simply one version of nationalist historiography offering itself as a truer, more accurate, account than that of its rivals: Butterfield’s ‘Tory’ interpretation of English history, for instance, opposing itself to Coke’s ‘Whig’ one, Pekar’s stress on the ‘aristocratic’ component of Czech culture rebutting Palacky’s ‘people’s history’ of the Czech lands, Furet’s conservative view of the French Revolution and its place in French history setting itself up against Michelet’s populist and radical portrayal. However much historians might like to see themselves as the fearless defenders of historical truth against the fabrications of nationalists, they too very often are players in the same game. The stakes are too high for them to stay out.

NARRATING THE NATION The nation exists in time. That by itself is enough to lend importance to historical study, in the tracing of the evolution of particular nations and the development of national consciousness. This can be done in celebratory mode, especially in the case of those nations – Eastern European, African, Asian – that have lived for centuries under imperial rule. Their

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rise to national consciousness can be portrayed as a story of a nation’s discovery of itself and of its struggle for liberation. Of such a kind are many Third World narratives of the nation, such as Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946) or the historical works on China of Sun Yat-Sen (Prakash 1990; Duara 1996: 159–60; Young 2001: 165–73). Even where the mood is not celebratory, the nation can be elevated to the role of the principal agent of history, its moving force and ultimate telos. The nation, in this account, is always present, even if it does not always recognize itself. The historian’s task is to show the structures beneath the surface, to indicate the often slow process by which nations achieve definition and fulfilment in the nation-state. ‘Nations’, said Hegel,‘may have had a long history before they finally reach their destination – that of forming themselves into states’ (in Gellner 1983: 48). This understanding became the leitmotiv of a powerful school of nineteenthcentury European historiography, led by the great German historian Leopold von Ranke. Its truth was seemingly confirmed by the very thing it took as its premise: the rise and triumph of the nation-state as the most successful and apparently most natural form of political organization (Woolf 1996: 3; Suny 2001b: 344). Here, once more, in their very historiographical principles, historians willingly offered their services as builders of the nation. But there was also a different question, a different kind of narration, that called for the historian’s skill. It was a question, or a series of questions, usually posed by sociologists. Are nations in fact ‘natural’? Have they always been there? Do nations, as Gellner (1998: 90–101) rather mischievously posed it, have navels? Must we concern ourselves with their real as opposed to invented origins? For Renan (1990: 20), ‘nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings and they will end.’ If so, how did nations originate and when and why did the belief in the naturalness of nations arise? Why, in other words, nationalism? And if nations are not natural or eternal, what came before them, and what might succeed them? The sociologists could of course couch their answers to these questions primarily in

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theoretical or general terms. The ‘primordialists’, for instance, could try to point to certain constant biological features of the human condition (e.g. van den Berghe 1981, 1995), the ‘perennialists’ to the simple fact of the antiquity and perhaps ubiquity of the national form (e.g. Armstrong 1982; Grosby 1999), the ‘modernists’ to the special and novel conditions of modernity (e.g. Gellner 1983; Taylor 1998). But even this strategy involved, as many recognized, historical presuppositions – at least for the perennialists and modernists. If, for instance, nations in something like our current understanding of them were shown to be in existence well before the coming of modernity, then modernist theories of nationalism would be put severely in question. It could then be argued that nationalism, perhaps, as an ideology, may be modern, dating from the late eighteenth century; but nationhood and national consciousness must be much older, demanding therefore a different explanation and account from those which attribute them to the requirements of a modern social order (see e.g. Smith 2001: 22). If, on the other hand, attempts to demonstrate the existence of ‘nations before nationalism’ were unconvincing, modernists could feel vindicated at the expense of perennialists and primordialists. Sociologists therefore were forced to turn to history to sustain and test their theories, the result being some impressive comparative inquiries into the history of nations and of the principle of nationality (e.g. Armstrong 1982; Smith 1986, 1999a; Brubaker 1992; Greenfeld 1992; Gorski 2000; Geopolitics 2002; Ichijo and Uzelac 2005; and see also Delanty and O’Mahony 2002: 83–90). It was inevitable that for historians, even more than for sociologists, the question of the antiquity or modernity of nations and nationalism would become the central object of their inquiries. Indeed Anthony Smith has argued that this debate ‘forms the core of historiographical discussion and disagreements’ in the study of nationalism (2000: 4; see also 2001: 14, 2003; Hastings 1997: 9). How could it be otherwise, given the nature of the historical enterprise and the significance of timing and periodization in the dominant theories of nationalism. Here was

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a task that historians could take to with relish, employing all their skills of unearthing and interpreting past phenomena. This is not the place to attempt an assessment of the historians’ contributions on this question, still less to resolve the disputes between ‘perennialists’ and ‘modernists’ (these labels themselves being a clumsy shorthand that hide a great variety of positions). All one can do is to indicate some of the work that has been produced with a more or less conscious intent to stake out a position. Most magisterially there are Eric Hobsbawm (1992, 1996) and John Breuilly (1993, 1996: 149–54, 2002: 76–7) who state regularly and repeatedly that nations and nationalism are modern – i.e. post-eighteenthcentury – phenomena and that they must be distinguished, conceptually and historically, from all manifestations of ethnicity. For Hobsbawm, nationalism is a political programme – ‘in historic terms a fairly recent one’ – that holds that ‘groups defined as “nations” have a right to, and therefore ought to, form territorial states of the kind that have become standard since the French Revolution’. Ethnicity is neither programmatic nor political, though nationalists will where possible appeal to an assumed common ethnicity in pursuit of their political goals. They often, however, recognize that the desired ethnicity is lacking, in which case they are quite prepared to go ahead in the spirit of Massimo d’Azeglio’s famous statement following the unification of Italy in the 1860s: ‘We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians’ (Hobsbawm 1996: 256–7). For Breuilly, what distinguishes ethnicity from nationalism is that ‘pre-modern ethnic identity has little in the way of institutional embodiment beyond the local level. Almost all the major institutions which construct, preserve and transmit national identities … are modern: parliaments, popular literature, courts, schools, labour markets, et cetera.’ The only two premodern institutions which could have played such a role – dynasties and churches – were in principle transnational and in most cases regarded nationalism as a threat to their authority (Breuilly 1996: 154). The relative lateness of nation-building, even in those societies traditionally associated with a strong sense of

national identity, has been vividly chronicled by Eugen Weber (1976) for France. Weber shows that it was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the French state, using the agencies of the school and the army, managed to forge French-men and -women into something like a French nation. In the process it had to overcome a host of obstacles based on linguistic, cultural and historical differences. Such an awareness, of the relatively late period in which a real sense of nationhood can be said to be present in even old European societies, has been growing in recent historical work (see e.g. Schulze 1996; Zimmer 2003). The work of these historians largely goes along with the views of social scientists such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson on the modernity not just of the ideology of nationalism but of the construction of nations. Such a position is stated even more strongly by a historian like Patrick Geary (2002), who in a pioneering analysis of early medieval ethnicities in Europe shows the illusory basis of many of the claims for the ethnic origins of nations – whether among ‘Celts’, ‘Franks’, ‘Gauls, ‘Goths’, ‘Huns’ or ‘Serbs’. None of these groups, he shows, was what we think they are today. In many cases they took even their names from those given to them by Roman observers, mostly hostile. Often loose coalitions of different tribes, their leaders appropriated, for their own purposes, many of the genealogies constructed by Roman writers. The history of European peoples in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is not the story of a primordial moment but of a continuous process. It is the story of political appropriation and manipulation of inherited names and representations of pasts to create a present and a future. It is a history of constant change, of radical discontinuities, and of political and cultural zigzags, masked by the repeated appropriation of old words to define new realities. The Franks ‘born with Clovis’ are not the Franks of Charlemagne or those of the French people Jean Le Pen hoped to rally around his political movement. (Geary 2002: 156–7; cf. Reynolds 1983: 375–9; Schulze 1996: 100)

Such an account would not necessarily be regarded as threatening by those scholars, such as Anthony Smith, who assert the reality of ethnicity and the importance of core ethnies to

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the formation of nations. They have always recognized the role of myth and invention in the evolution of ethnic as much as of national identities. But they, and other prerennialists, are undoubtedly heartened by the work of other historians who have in recent years made bold claims on behalf of the antiquity not simply of ethnicities but of nations. Here too sociologists have led the way. Liah Greenfeld (1992, 2001), for instance, has attempted to show that nationalism was invented by the English in the sixteenth century, after which various Europeans took up the challenge posed by this first powerful assertion of nationhood. Philip Gorski (2000) has made similar claims on behalf of the sixteenth-century Dutch, in their struggle against the Habsburgs at the time of the Dutch Revolt. But the historians have gone even further. Colette Beaune (1991) and Bernard Guenée (1985) have argued for the birth of French nationalism during the Hundred Years War against the English; Bruce Webster (1997) has discerned the stirrings of Scottish nationalism in the struggle, also against the English, of the ‘Wars of Independence’ (1296–1371); while British historians such as Patrick Wormald (1994), John Gillingham (2000) and Rees Davies (2000) have claimed to discover the existence of a vigorous English nationalism at work in the creation of the ‘first English empire’ from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries – if not even earlier, in the time of Bede (see further Kumar 2003: 60–88; 2005). A wide-ranging work by Adrian Hastings (1997) synthesized much of this recent historical research to advance the view that ‘nation-formation and nationalism have in themselves almost nothing to do with modernity’, but are rather the product of ‘a typical medieval and early modern experience of the multiplication of vernacular literatures and of state systems around them, a multiplication largely dependent upon the church, its scriptures and its clergy’ (1997: 205). Echoing the view of the religious historian Steven Grosby (1991, 1999, 2002), Hastings goes further in seeing an even more ancient origin of the concept of nation, one found in biblical times. ‘The Bible … presented in Israel … a developed model of what it means to be a

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nation – a unity of people, language, religion, territory and government … [I]t was … an all too obvious exemplar for Bible readers of what every other nation too might be, a mirror for national self-imagining’ (1997: 18). The belief in the biblical origin of nationhood has always had its adherents (see Smith, 2003), though usually as an idea or ideal waiting to find its proper sociological form. It is certainly difficult to sustain it as in any sense a practicable norm, given the overwhelming preponderance of empires and other forms of dynastic and ‘universal’ states for much of the ancient and early medieval period. Ethnicity, perhaps; but ‘nation’ sounds highly anachronistic. Hence it is not surprising that for most historians concerned to discover an early origin of nations and nationalism, it is the medieval period that has seemed most promising (Stringer 1994: 11–12; Johnson 1995). This has been true for an earlier generation of historians as well as more recent ones (see Tipton 1972; Connor 1994: 211–12). The most influential recent account of this kind has come from Susan Reynolds (1983, 1997). While Reynolds herself is careful not to extrapolate too directly from her findings to modern nationalism, she has lent much ammunition to those who do wish to find nations before nationalism by emphasizing the existence of strong collective identities among medieval peoples. In the medieval kingdoms or ‘regnal communities’ of England, France, Germany and even Italy, she argues, their peoples – gentes, populi, nationes – were normally thought of as social and political communities having high degrees of collective solidarity, backed up by myths of common descent. Medieval peoples did not, as the modernists like to think, live fragmented and localized lives, united only by the wider framework of Christianity. On the contrary medieval solidarities were ‘much more like the different groups and networks to which modern people feel they belong than the sociological stereotypes admit’ (1997: 335). ‘Regnal communities’ were not, however, as Reynolds admits, modern nations. Moreover they were, from the thirteenth century onwards, undermined by new descent myths that

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emphasized the divisions of ranks or ‘estates’ and so destroyed the unity of the regnal community (1983: 390). All this goes to show the extreme complexity of tracing the history of nations and nationalism. Like the grin of the proverbial Cheshire cat, nations appear to come and go. Of course much turns on the definition of nation. A ‘civic’ nation, one constituted by common citizenship, is likely to turn up earlier in the historical record than the ‘ethnic’ nation, where the criterion of belonging is linked to membership of a group with strongly held beliefs about blood ties and common descent. Thus one might argue that there was a British nation (civic) long before the idea of an English (ethnic) nation took root (Colley 1992; Kumar 2003), just as it has been conventional to see ‘old’ (civic) nations in France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands before the rise of ‘new’ ethnic nations such as Greece, Serbia and Germany (see, e.g. Seton-Watson 1977). There is a certain paradox in this. Common citizenship, the citizenship of all classes, arguably did not occur anywhere until the French Revolution or even, in the full sense, until the early twentieth century. Ethnicity, by contrast, is taken as an immemorial feature of groups. But the claim that all states should be based on the ethnic nation was a radically new one – an impossibility, if not an absurdity, before the nineteenth century. Hence the plausibility, at least, of the view that the older states with well-defined territorial boundaries, centralized rule and common systems of law came closer to the national form than was possible in those communities lacking such features. In the European case, this meant that ‘Western’ civic nationalism came before Central and East European ethnic nationalism. If, in the event, the ethnic concept of the nation seemed to win out as the national ideal was diffused throughout the world, this only serves to underline the tortuous, zigzag history of nationalism.

CONCLUSION It is widely held today that the ‘nationalist narrative’ has broken down, at least in the

developed societies of the West (e.g. Maier 2000; Mandler 2002: 94–103). History has lost not just its authority but its ability to knit past, present and future together. History is now mainly ‘heritage’, a tourist pastime to be enjoyed for the pleasure of antique objects and exotic locations. It can no longer give shape or meaning to national life or national identity. If history is at all relevant to identity now it is the new ‘global history’ that attempts to provide an historical framework for a globalizing world. That certainly is not how it appears in other parts of the world. Since the collapse of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union, nations throughout Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, together with many nations in Central Asia, have been busily ransacking their history to provide, or invent where necessary, acceptable genealogies for their new states. History has become a fiercely contested arena of competing claims (Kumar 2001; Suny 2001a). Nor is it only the smaller nations that feel this need. Russia, for long the hegemonic power in the region, has been no less deeply exercised by historical memory in the past decade as it struggles to find a new, post-imperial, identity for itself (see Chapters 34 and 37 by Sakwa and Khazanov respectively in this Handbook). And has it not been a marked feature of recent discussions of the ‘American empire’ to appeal to competing versions of the American past (see e.g. Ferguson 2004; Gaddis 2004)? Throughout the world, as new nationalisms arise and old ones revive, history is the indispensable resource in the construction of identities and the struggles with rivals. ‘Not only the living, but also the dead speak in the national will’, declares the Armenian nationalist Edik Hovhannisian (in Suny 2001a: 886). History has done without nations before, as Renan reminded us, and may well do so again sometime in the future. But nations and nationalism remain central realities of the contemporary world, whatever their future. So long as this is so, the past will remain a vibrant part of the present. Nations may not need navels, in the strict sense of an authentic lineage. But nations without history, real or imagined, are impossible to imagine.

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REFERENCES Acton, J. E. E. Dalberg, First Baron (1996 [1862]) ‘Nationality’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation. London and New York: Verso. pp. 17–38. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. London and New York: Verso. Armstrong, J. A. (1982) Nations before Nationalism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Balakrishnan, G. (ed.) (1996) Mapping the Nation. London and New York: Verso. Beaune, C. (1991) The Birth of an Ideology: Myth and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bell, D. (2001) The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berger, S., Donovan, M. and Passmore, K. (eds) (1999) Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800. London and New York: Routledge. Breuilly, J. (1993) Nationalism and the State, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Breuilly, J. (1996) ‘Approaches to Nationalism’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation. London and New York: Verso. pp. 146–74. Breuilly, J. (2002) ‘Historians and the Nation’, in P. Burke (ed.), History and Historians in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 55–87. Brubaker, R. (1992) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burrow, J. W. (1983) A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butterfield, H. (1945) The Englishman and His History. London: Cambridge University Press. Butterfield, H. (1951 [1931]) The Whig Interpretation of History. London: G. Bell and Sons. Cannadine, D. (1984) ‘The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”’, c. 1820–1977’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 101–64. Carr, E. H. (1945) Nationalism and After. London: Macmillan. Cobban, A. (1945) The Nation-State and National Self-Determination. London: Macmillan. Cobban, A. (1968) ‘Historians and the Causes of the French Revolution’, in Aspects of the French Revolution. New York: George Braziller. pp. 29–67.

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Colley, L. (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven,CT: Yale University Press. Confino, A. (1997) The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Würtemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Confino, A. (2004) ‘Telling About Germany: Narratives of Memory and Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 76: 389–416. Connor, W. (1994) ‘When is a Nation?’, in Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 211–26. Crossley, C. (1999) ‘History as a Principle of Legitimation in France (1820–1848)’, in S. Berger, M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 49–56. Davies, R. R. (2000) The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delanty, G. and O’Mahony, P. (2002) Nationalism and Social Theory: Modernity and the Recalcitrance of the Nation. London: Sage Publications. Deletant, D. and Hanak, H. (eds) (1988) Historians as Nation-Builders: Central and South-East Europe. Houndmills: Macmillan. Duara, P. (1996) ‘Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When’, in G. Eley and R. G. Suny (eds), Becoming National: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 151–77. Ellis, H. A. (1988) Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in Early EighteenthCentury France. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Englund, S. (1992) ‘The Ghost of Nation Past’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (2): 299–320. Ferguson, N. (2004) Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York: The Penguin Press. Furet, F. (1981) Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaddis, J. L. (2004) Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geary, P. J. (2002) The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1998) Nationalism. London: Phoenix. Geopolitics (2002) Special issue, ‘When was the Nation?’, 17 (2). Gildea, R. (1996) The Past in French History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gillingham, J. (2000) The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and

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Ichijo, A. and Uzelac, G. (eds) (2005) When Is the Nation? London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, J. (1999) ‘Historians and the Nation in Contemporary France’, in S. Berger, M. Donovan, and K. Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 239–51. Jarausch, K. H. and Geyer, Michael (2003) Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, L. (1995) ‘Imagining Communities: Medieval and Modern’, in S. Forde, L. Johnson, and A. V. Murray (eds), Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages. Leeds: Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series 14, University of Leeds. pp. 1–19. Jones, S. (1999) ‘Taine and the Nation-State’, in S. Berger, M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 85–96. Kitromilides, P. M. (1989) ‘“Imagined Communities” and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans’, European History Quarterly, 19 (2): 149–94. Kohn, H. (1944) The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background. New York: Macmillan. Kohn, H. (1960) The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Kohn, H. (1961) Prophets and Peoples. New York: Collier. Kumar, K. (2001) ‘History and Identity in the Revolutions of 1989’, in 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 194–214. Kumar, K. (2003) The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kumar, K. (2005) ‘When was the English Nation?’, in A. Ichijo and G. Uzelac (eds), When is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 137–56. Lebovics, H. (1992) True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Maier, C. (2000) ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, American Historical Review, 105 (3): 807–31. Mandler, P. (2002) History and National Life. London: Profile Books. Mitzman, A. (1990) Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century France. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Mosse, G. (1975) The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in

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Van den Berghe, P. (1981) The Ethnic Phenomenon. New York: Elsevier. Van den Berghe, P. (1995) ‘Does Race Matter?’, Nations and Nationalism, 1 (3): 357–68. Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Webster, B. (1997) Medieval Scotland: The Making of an Identity. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Woolf, S. (1996) ‘Introduction’ to Stuart Woolf (ed.), Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 1–39.

Wormald, P. (1994) ‘Engla Lond: The Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 7 (1): 1–24. Young, C. (2001) ‘Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Africa’, in M. Guibernau and J. Hutchinson (eds), Understanding Nationalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 164–81. Zacek, J. F. (1994) ‘Nationalism in Czechoslovakia’, in P. F. Sugar and I. J. Lederer (eds), Nationalism in Eastern Europe, new edn. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. pp. 166–206. Zimmer, O. (2003) Nationalism in Europe, 1890–1940. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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2 Modernization and Communication as Factors of Nation Formation M I R O S L AV H R O C H

By way of introduction, and in the interests of clarifying my position, three preliminary comments on the topic of ‘nation formation’ will be made. First, the following contribution purposely avoids the use of the term ‘nationalism’, since I regard it to be controversial and misleading – whether it is understood as an invariable entity of human thought (‘a state of mind’), or as an erratic sample of human activities. ‘Nationalism’ is typically used both as political label and as scientific term, and in either case it has been defined in such a controversial fashion that it has almost lost its explicative value. Rather then, in keeping with modernizing approaches, I prefer the terms ‘nation formation’, ‘national identity’, ‘national consciousness’, and ‘patriotism’. (This is not to disrespect the terminology of those authors I refer to, who mostly use ‘nationalism’, albeit in different senses from each other.) Secondly, this contribution focuses on the nation-forming process, specifically trying to explain the concepts of ‘modernization’ and ‘communication’ as factors of this formation. Within this perspective, ‘contemporary’ nationalism is only of derived importance, since it is operating in a fully communicating and modernized (if not postmodern) society, and under rather different rules of the game.

Thirdly, this contribution focuses on European history, since the phenomena of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ have to be regarded as specifically European (and North American), having been exported and transplanted from our continent to entirely different social structures, traditions and value systems. In aspiring to comment on modernizing approaches, I am well aware of the fact that nation formation (and ‘nationalism’) cannot be accounted for by way of any monocausal form of explanation. Certainly most authors – even those who have declared ‘the nation’ as a pure and simple cultural construct or illusion – include within their concrete analysis (insofar as one is attempted) several factors, each with a different relevance attached to them. Indeed, it is my claim that the emergence and existence of a nation and/or nationalism can be seriously explained only if we take into account five connections (chains of circumstances): (i) the past – both as a sample of relicts in institutions, buildings and monuments, and as a construct of ‘national history’; (ii) culture – including ethnic, linguistic and religious ties; (iii) modernization and communication; (iv) nationally relevant conflicts of interest – social, professional and political; and (v) agitation – based upon emotional factors, symbols and festivities.

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By concentrating on the ‘modernization and communication’ approach, this contribution intends to examine: • How strongly previous and present research has used various aspects of modernization as a component of their explanatory models. • How far, and under which conditions, these aspects are regarded as relevant in the process of nation formation, that is, in the spread of a consciousness of ‘national belonging’ in a given nation. Amongst these factors of modernization, the most frequently cited are: (i) bureaucratization – or the modernization and rationalization of administration; (ii) political emancipation – including political revolutions and constitutionalism; and (iii) social emancipation – including vertical social mobility, intensification of market relations, horizontal social mobility and the ‘democratization’ of the school system. All these aspects can be regarded, in a general sense, as more or less important constituents of increasing social communication.

THE MODERNIZATION OF STATE AND LOCAL ADMINISTRATION Most authors, when discussing the role of modernization, have overlooked the fact that the process of modern nation formation in Europe has proceeded under two typologically different conditions. (Breuilly’s (1993: 9ff.) sophisticated model of six classes of ‘nationalism’ is a rare exception.) Generally, the most frequently studied of the two sets of conditions is that of a continuous early modern state-nation, such as France, Sweden or England. The other (less researched, but more frequently represented in European historical reality) concerns the circumstances of national movements, in building up from nondominant ethnic groups to fully fledged modern nations and eventually to nation-states. Ignoring the difference between these two basic roads towards the modern nation in Europe can lead to serious misunderstanding. There is no doubt that in the case of Portugal,

Spain, France, England and the Netherlands there was a breakthrough in state-building activities during the eighteenth century, possibly earlier; as a result of bureaucratic absolutism (or established parliamentary rule in England), the state became ever more important. The increasing number of state officials (both civilian and military), bureaucrats and administrators meant that the exercise of power, law-making and institution-building went to the state and became unified within state boundaries. Particular patterns of modernization could thus be introduced in a uniform way and contribute to the process of transformation from state to state-nation. It is from this point of view that the statenation formation has been analysed by many thinkers. Tilly (1975) regards the early modern state, and its centralist and financial politics, as the decisive point of departure on the road towards the nation-state. Rokkan (1975), meanwhile, tries to explain this process by developing a sophisticated model of the relationship between centre and periphery, while Puhle (1994: 13ff.) ascribes the role of bureaucratization above all to long-established states of Western Europe. Breuilly confirms in the preface to the second edition of his 1993 book his earlier claim that it is necessary to study nationalism ‘in close association with the development of the modern state’ (1993: xii). Similarly, Giddens (1985: 83, 93ff.) bases his concept of the ‘nation-state’ on the contrast between traditional and modern states, regarding the absolutist state as a traditional state which at the same time marks the transition to a modern state; this transition is represented by two elements: (i) the centralization and extension of administrative power; and (ii) the enlargement of legal sanctions of the state and the large scale tax system: ‘What makes the nation integral to the nation-state … is not the existence of sentiments of nationalism but the unification of an administrative apparatus over precisely defined territorial bounds’ (1985: 172). Some authors stress the importance of a newly introduced notion of military service and war for the modernization of the nation-state. Smith, for instance, speaks about ‘administrative and military revolution’ (1986: 132f.), while

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Langewiesche (1995: 224f.) points towards ‘war-making’ as a relevant factor in unification. Giddens also (1985: 112) regards state modernization as a process which was accompanied by, or subordinated to, military developments; and Mann stresses the importance of the emergence of ‘professional armed forces’ in the process of nation-state formation (1992: 162). In this conjunction, war is considered to be an almost-decisive factor concerning both: (i) the rise of absolutism; and (ii) in turn, the shift from absolutism to state-nation. From the perspective of these authors, the nation and ‘nationalism’ appear as if they were always a product of the state. I would contend that this is a mistake, however, as it neglects the aforementioned typological dualism of nation formation in Europe. A state-focused generalization could be regarded as possessing some validity, but only in reference to the six European state-nations listed above, and not in the case of the majority of European nationforming processes of the nineteenth century; such an approach makes the all-too-common error of projecting the author’s understanding of ‘nationalism’ onto all nation-forming processes in Europe. Other authors, however, are well aware of the existence of a different path towards the modern nation – that is, of the importance of national movements. Without downplaying the relevance of modernization in the state apparatus and bureaucracy, they distinguish the impact of this process in terms of the perspective from ‘above’ and the perspective from ‘below’. One such writer is Hobsbawm, who, even while regarding the nation as being fully fledged ‘only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state’ (1990: 9), modifies this relation according to ‘perspective’, that is, there was a difference between those national movements operating minus the state (and also, eventually, in opposition to its government) and those arising within already pre-existing statenations. Likewise, the difference between nationalism ‘in a world of nation-states’ and nationalism ‘in a world without nation-states’ is the basic criterion used by Breuilly in his comparative research on the relationship of nationalism and the state. Even though his

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analysis is focused on the political activities of ‘nationalists’, he demonstrates the ambiguity of bureaucratization, which could play both an integrating and disintegrating role, according to the situation; ‘bureaucracy’ was an important instrument in the modernization of the ruling nations, but endangered the position (and provoked the opposition) of national movements without states. Considering the significance of military power and wars, we must also take into account the conception of compulsory military service, which emerged after the French Revolution. Being included within this system meant not only being subject to military training in the narrow sense, but also to a certain brand of education. Horizontal mobility in itself opened new opportunities to young men coming in, in most cases, from closed rural communities. The more the ideology of war shifted in its content from ‘fighting in the interest of the King’ to ‘fighting in the interest of the state (or statenation)’, the greater the level of loyalty, or even ‘patriotism’, that was demanded of the soldier. Nevertheless, in respect of nation formation, the educational impact was two-fold. The military service, under the conditions of a statenation (for instance, France, Sweden, Prussia, England, and so on), where the language of military training did not differ from that of rank and file, prepared the soldier to fight for his fatherland (this defined as ‘nation’), strengthening national sentiments. Conversely, military service under the conditions of a multi-ethnic empire offered descendants from non-dominant ethnic groups a confusing alternative: they had to fight and die for a country, for a state, which they did not regard as ‘their own’; this might especially be the case if the language of training was alien to them. Under such conditions, and given already existent national mass-movements, military service could even become counter-productive, provoking degrees of non-conformist feeling. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EMANCIPATION If we understand the nation as a body of equal citizens, the rights of ‘man’ and sovereignty of

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the people are regarded as some of the basic preconditions for nation formation. There exists a near-consensus in meaning amongst all authors, who accept the understanding of ‘the modern nation’ that is part of the heritage of the French Revolution. This notion features implicitly in Bauer’s (1907) perception of the fifth (capitalist) stage of the development of the nation, and is more explicitly expressed by Shafer (1955: 100ff.), Conze (1964: 11ff.) and later Balibar and Wallerstein (1991), Hobsbawm (1990) and James (1996). Nevertheless, authors differ in their dating of the relationship between political emancipation and ‘nationalism’. Most of them, like Kohn and, more recently, Breuilly (1993), Guibernau (1996: 51ff.) and Hobsbawm (1990: ch. 1), interpret nationally oriented political emancipation as the consequence of political revolutions occurring since the end of the eighteenth century. Other authors, however, prefer a broader conception of political emancipation, locating the road towards civil society as early as the sixteenth century (Dann 1986: 27ff.) or the early modern period (Llobera 1994: 221ff.). Naturally, the timing of this process cannot be regarded as synchronous, as Greenfeld (1992) illustrates in her differentiation of ‘progressive’ nationalism, such as in England where this was conjoined with earlier political modernization. Political emancipation included as its consequence the emergence or spread of the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas 1962), with the more-or-less free exchange of information concerning the political opinions of individuals and institutions. Political emancipation as a part of modernization also included a social component. The social context of national movements should not be neglected, as there are obvious variances in such movements across time and space; indeed, particular social groups and classes played quite distinct roles in the course of nation formation (Coakley 1992: 1ff. Kiernan 1972: 110ff.). In spite of such differences, one regularity in this process should be noted: while political emancipation and democratization chronologically followed political revolutions or early modern reforms, social emancipation usually preceded this shift. Usually, it concerned not so much the urban

sphere, as it did the peasantry. In countries where the peasantry had achieved their personal liberation already during the early modern period (as in England or the Netherlands), this connection is less evident. However, it seems to be of significance that in France the modern nation was declared as being of the highest value immediately after the abolition of feudal duties for the peasantry in August 1789. Most important for nation formation was social emancipation in Central and Eastern Europe, which ran consecutive to the reforms of peasant liberation – from achieving personal freedom (by abolishing serfdom), to eradicating feudal privileges. In relation to national movements, then, some kind of pattern can be observed: national agitation started usually one generation after the first stage of peasant liberation, that is, after the abolition of serfdom, which was usually followed by school reforms and by the intensification of market relations in the countryside. Perhaps this explains some instances of uneven progress in national agitation – that is, in the asynchronous spread of a modern national identity. On the other hand, the absence of serfdom in Western countries did not automatically mean that the national identification of peasants would have occurred at a higher rate of movement. Even though national movements developed their ‘nationalist’ programmes often already under the rule of an oppressive lateabsolutist system, we cannot deny the decisive role of political emancipation in the process of nation formation; this connection can even be expressed as some kind of regularity. Cultural, social and political programmes in Central and Eastern Europe were formulated very early, before political emancipation was fulfilled, but their success (their acceptance by broad masses of the population) never preceded important moves towards civil rights, equality and democracy. In the 1960s, this observation inspired the German historian Schieder (1991: 65ff., 89ff.) to construct three stages of nation formation: the first was connected with revolutionary struggle for emancipation; the second was focused upon national unification and integration; and the third was represented by ‘secessionist’ national movements.

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ECONOMIC MODERNIZATION

The fundamental nature of market relations and industrialization for both the modern nation and the working class became a dilemma in the theoretical discussions led by social democrats – above all those in multiethnic empires such as Russia and AustroHungary. The central political problem concerned how far these two processes (nation and class formation) were compatible. Bauer (1907) attempted to argue in favour of a cohesion of the two processes, using an unambiguous temporal correlation between capitalism and modern nation formation as the decisive criterion for his construct of a capitalist stage in the development of a national community: capitalism created ‘national markets’ as a basis for the modern nation and its ruling class (the bourgeoisie); accompanying this, however, was the very potential for capitalism’s replacement by a socialist nation. This concept corresponded to the political goals of the Austrian social democracy and found a critical epigone and vulgarization in Stalin (‘Marxism and the National Question’), whose historical explanation and definition of the nation – defined by five ‘features’ and decisively formed by the bourgeois struggle for national markets – was written in exile in 1913 and published for the first time in 1914. His view was approved by Lenin, and later, in an even more simplified version, became the official model for Soviet historiography until the 1970s (Kosing 1976: 27ff; Nimni 1991: 90ff.). Nevertheless, it would be an erroneous simplification to regard this ‘national markets’ perspective as specifically a Marxist one. Already in the 1840s the German liberal Friedrich List argued that the creation of a modern (capitalist) national market would be a vital condition for German nation formation (Szporluk 1988). Moreover, one of the most prolific of present theories on nationalism, formulated by Gellner (who regards himself as anti-Marxist), explains the spread of nationalism by the ‘social chasms created by early industrialism’ (1983: 121), that is, by the strengthening impact of industrialization on traditional society.

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In seeking to establish the fruitfulness of the Gellnerian industrialization model, we very quickly find that it does not serve us well as a central tool of interpretation. According to Llobera, Gellner’s theory ‘fails completely to account for nationalist movements in Western Europe’ (2000: 190) – and the same could be said about Eastern Europe. Only in certain cases did industrialization support national mobilization; in others, industrialization could be regarded as being but one amongst many preconditions of successful nation formation, and certainly not as the starting point for the spread of ‘nationalism’. Concerning other cases again, nation formation was only indirectly influenced by industrialization: the Czech-speaking rural population in agrarian regions were, via the exchange of goods with the industrialized (mostly German-speaking) areas of Bohemia and Moravia, drawn into stronger market relations; and the national integration of Belgium was only temporarily influenced by the industrialization of its southern, Francophone part. Furthermore, in contradiction of a unilateral version of events, industrialization in South Wales actually influenced the disintegration of the Welsh national movement. The Gellnerian picture of Ruritanians who were nationally mobilized by the impact of industrialization, then, appears to be of doubtful validity. Nevertheless, such criticisms do not mean that we should deny the significance of economic modernization in the process of nation formation. Rather, what is required is a change in emphasis, with the focus shifted from industrial development to the importance of developing market relations and urbanization for nation formation on the eve of the capitalist era – or ‘the convergent rise of capitalism and the nation-state’ (Giddens 1981: 191). As an aside, Gellner’s view is not as original as it is often supposed to be. We can find an analogical concept of capitalist society in Bauer’s highest stage of nation formation, and, later on, as the basis for Deutsch’s theory of the nation as a product of ‘complementary’ communication; this was formulated already by the beginning of the 1950s (1951, 1953), much earlier than Gellner’s book was published. Deutsch’s approach, and his concept of the

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nation as ‘a community of complementary habits of communication’ (1953b: 81), will be discussed later. At this point, however, it is important to note that Deutsch regards as necessary preconditions for sufficient levels of social communication those processes which are connected with economic and social modernization, such as social mobility, market exchange, urbanization and the uneven division of capital investments. The problem, however, is not as simple as it might seem to be. If we interpret the Gellnerian model not in terms of traditional historiography, but rather those of anthropology, we find that his understanding of industrialization does not necessarily mean the introduction of industrial production with machines, the proletariat and so forth. Instead, it appears he intends changes in production and in the way of life which are usually called ‘proto-industrialization’, the manufacturing period, commercial capitalism and so on, that is, the situation where traditional production and the traditional way of life and values were eroded by intensifying market relations, social mobility, home industry and a profit-oriented, rationalized, but not yet industrial, economy. In this understanding of the term, national movements and the expanding modern national identity seem to be interrelated with this economic and social component of modernization; and the economic background of ‘nationalism’ in this broader sense (without being limited to ‘industrialization’) is used as an interpretative tool in different modifications by authors like Lemberg (1964) and McCrone (1998: 92), amongst others. In this context, Llobera (1994: 220) distinguishes between capitalism (which he regards as irrelevant for nationalism) and modernization (which he regards as relevant). More important than the question of originality is, however, the question of the applicability of this concept of ‘industrialization’ as a tool of historical analysis. From this point of view, the choice of typological perspective is decisive. If we choose the fully fledged nation and its ‘nationalism’ as the main object of our approach, the industrialism model seems to be workable: almost all modern nations in Europe, except the Balkans, established themselves at some point at the territory with one or more

industrial cores; and this could be regarded as the stimulus for intensifying its market relations with less developed peripheries. Nevertheless, if we turn our perspective back towards the origin of nations, and towards the process of nation formations and national movements, we soon see that most national movements in Europe started distinctly earlier than the process of industrialization. There is little doubt that it is difficult to imagine the immediate impact of capitalism upon the spread of national mobilization without ‘mediators’. There were above all three aspects which are usually regarded as the consequence of socio-economic early-capitalist modernization and, simultaneously, as the most important ties between a changing social reality and emerging ‘nationalism’: (i) social mobilization – both migration and social advancements; (ii) social communication; and (iii) nationally relevant conflicts of interest.

SOCIAL COMMUNICATION AND MOBILIZED POPULATIONS The intensification of social communication was first characterized by Deutsch (1953b, 1966) as being the decisive factor in nation formation. In his interpretation, the nation consisted in ‘the ability to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large group than with outsiders’. This ability was conditioned by ‘complementarity of communication habits’ and acquired social and economic preferences. Both these conditions of ‘complementarity’ and ‘social preferences’ expressed the fact that communication involved contact among the potential members of the nation across social and professional barriers (Deutsch 1953b: 71, 74f.). Deutsch understands communication very broadly, as an anthropological notion of culture that integrates a given people (1966: 96f.). To be able to participate in the network of complementary communication, the population had, nevertheless, to be at least partially mobilized. Such factors of mobilization, for Deutsch, included market activities, school

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visits, newspaper reading, having a job outside of agriculture and the forest economy, writing and/or receiving letters, and so forth; and for a person to ‘be mobilized’, they needed to be involved in, or informed by, at least two of these activities (1953b: 100). Unfortunately, Deutsch overemphasizes the importance of social communication, and his belief in the possibility of evaluating the dynamics of national identity by measuring the correlation between the ethnic structure and the growth of social communication and mobility is arguably a failure. Perhaps this is the reason why his concept, influential in the 1960s, was almost ‘forgotten’ during the 1970s, being regarded as ‘unessential’ by relevant authors such as Hobsbawm (1990: 3). During the 1980s, however, the importance of social communication was ‘reinvented’ as an integrating factor of ‘nationalism’ in influential theories, above all by Anderson, who (without any reference to Deutsch) stresses the importance of books and the printed word. Combined with economic modernization (‘print-capitalism’), this is one of the most important factors which helped the individual to imagine his or her community – or the nation (1983: 46, 122). Nevertheless, the one-sided accentuation of book-culture had been criticized already by both Bauer and, in more abstract form, Chartier (1985): the impact of the printed word was limited not only at the level of alphabetization, but also by the degree of political engagement of the population, that is, by political modernization. In this line of argument, a recurring theme is that the role of social communication was circumscribed by the degree of achieved political modernization, and by the emergence of the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas 1962) as an essential component of said modernization. There are also other reasons why the role of social communication cannot be observed as an isolated, all-embracing phenomenon. While the improving standard and number of roads and, later, railways, the perfection of postal connections and the growing number of newspapers were all important for the growth of a capitalist macro-economy and for its representatives, it was not originally relevant for the broad population, including in terms of its

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collective imagination and national identity. The masses were scarcely interested in intellectual journals, in sending letters, or in using expensive railways. The importance of these means of communication for nation formation was not an invariable entity, but rather grew with the progresses of national movements and the intensification of national agitation. Within the context of the mass movement, they were inevitable for successfully mobilizing people for national goals. The centre–periphery communication inside of the national territory appears to be the most important one, but at the same time, the communication network also received its regional ‘sub-national’ spatial dimension. At this point the two types of nation formation should be distinguished again. While the success of national movements depended on the mass acceptance of national identity, in the case of state-nations the transformation of ruling elites and urban middle classes was decisive in the first instance. Understandably, under the conditions of a large state, the acceptance of a national identity by masses of the rural population could be a rather belated development (as Weber (1976) demonstrates in the case of France). Different from numerous statenations, national movements usually operated within much smaller territories, which corresponded to the size of a region at the much larger scale of state-nation territories. The phenomenon of an increasing intensity in social communication cannot, however, be reduced to the appearance of new facilitators of communication, for example, journals, trains or telegraphs. Also, the modern printculture did not enter an ‘empty room’. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the largest volume of information was transmitted by traditional means of communication, which had been established since the early modern period: first, this took the form of the pulpit, and the permanent contact between the priest and community, both on working days and during religious festivities; secondly, there was the informal contact between those who frequented regularly the local markets; and thirdly, there was the contact with local and state administration, due to increasing state

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regulations and tax pressure. Newly emergent sources of information were increasingly represented by social mobility, through personal contact with those members of the village community who frequented new centres of production, transport and trade as qualified or unqualified workers, as students, or even as successful private entrepreneurs. An inevitable factor in strengthening national identity and national imagination lay in meeting ‘the other’ – people who belonged to another ethnic community and used a different language, and therefore could not be integrated into the network of ‘our’ communication. The role of increasing and innovating social communication as a nationally mobilizing factor cannot be neglected, but its importance should not then be overemphasized. It was a conditio sine qua non, but its impact on nation formation, on national integration, was not necessarily positive. In several cases, high levels of social communication did not introduce national mobilization, but on the contrary, supported linguistic assimilation of non-dominant ethnic groups; this occurred, for example, in South Wales, the Basque lands, Eastern Ukraine and Northern Hungary. Within this framework, the linguistic aspect of communication should be mentioned. While in the case of long-established ‘state-national’ cultures, it was obvious that language ‘created unified fields of exchange and communication’ (Anderson 1983: 47), and learning the literary language was one of the conditions for achieving full possession of civic rights (Gellner 1983: 263), the linguistic situation was different in the case of non-dominant ethnic groups. These groups usually did not possess a continuous tradition of the printed word, and if they did, this differed from the official state-national language. This was accepted as self-evident in the pre-modern diglottic situation. Nevertheless, since modernization also opened up the possibility for social advancement for the lower classes, this difference was increasingly perceived as a disadvantage. Sometimes assimilation was used as a ‘way out’ in individual cases; more frequent, however, was another reaction, which corresponded to the group interests of the smaller nationalities – namely, the elaboration

or actualized revival of an alternative printed language. In this sense, the classical Fishman model (1972: 135ff.) has to be modified: beside the H- and L-languages, which corresponded to the situation of a mono-ethnic state, the alternative H-language (or languages) emerged under the conditions of multi-ethnic states. Consequently, a linguistic competition between central H-language and local H-languages began, and, in the case of most national movements, this received a social (and eventually also political) dimension, which has usually been neglected in recent research (Edwards 2000: 169ff.). Since real equality in social chances and civil rights was, as a consequence of modernization, conditioned by equality of languages, the struggle for introducing the ‘subordinated’ language into schools and administration became a part of the struggle for political emancipation and civic society (Hroch 2000: 65ff.).

SCHOOL EDUCATION A newly conceived, and very specific and effective, demonstration of exactly how social communication could operate as a factor in nation formation was through school education. This has been seen as happening upon two simultaneous levels: first, school education was the basic instrument of literacy, which was indirectly a precondition for the acceptance of national agitation; and, secondly, the school potentially offered a space for the spread of nationally relevant information to the masses. At the same time, however, the school was also an instrument of social discipline and moral education, serving in the interests of state integration. In this respect, its role differed between state-nations (where it aimed to strengthen their coherence) and multi-ethnic empires (where it tried to educate the young generation in the spirit of loyalty towards the state and its ruling nation). With regard to literacy, this depended on the speed of introducing obligatory school attendance from the level of theory into everyday life. This important change was not dependent

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on the degree of economic growth: in the more developed Western countries, compulsory attendance at elementary school was introduced later than in Prussia and Austria; thus, during the nineteenth century, the level of alphabetization was highest in Central Europe, lower in Western Europe, and lowest in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The correlation, however, between this phenomenon and regional differences in the timing of nation formation has remained neglected or been reduced to a crude East– West dichotomy. Literacy was not the only task of elementary schools. During the nineteenth century, the central role of religious education was, as a result of political modernization, replaced by civic education and political disciplination. Most authors are well aware of the importance of this factor, but they neglect the fact that intrinsic to this programme was the education of the young in displaying love for their fatherland, which was usually understood as the state. All pupils (and, analogically, also all soldiers) were educated according to state patriotism. This was not problematic in the case of such states as France, Portugal and Sweden, but it was an issue in respect of national movements within the territory of multi-ethnic empires, for example, Austria, Russia and Great Britain. This problem was obviously intensified in those situations where the language of education differed from the mother language of the pupils. Nonetheless, school education, in the context of the secondary school, played a decisive role in national mobilization – not only because its programme usually included subjects related to the nation (such as history, geography and literature), but more generally because of psychological factors. According to modern pedagogical psychology, it is only when children reach the age of 11 or 12 that they are able to understand and use abstract terms like ‘nation’. For this reason, only pupils at secondary school level could assume an ‘operational personality’ (Stokes 1982) – that is, achieve the ability to partake in political activities in the name of abstract values, and to ‘imagine’, in such terms, their own community – their

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nation. Only then did school education become an ‘entrance card’ to participation in the cultural advantages of the nation.

NATIONALLY RELEVANT CONFLICTS OF INTEREST The role of wars in the process of nation formation represents perhaps the most visible case of nationally relevant conflicts. Almost all modern states that have defined themselves as national ones have, against the backdrop of international relations and struggles, developed their arguments ‘in the name of the nation’: the interests of power-oriented politicians and the ruling classes were presented as constituting the interests of all members of the nation; these conflicts were already regarded as an instrument or the result of ‘integral nationalism’ since the time of Carlton Hayes, and can be described as a phenomenon of ‘abused modernization’. This category of conflict in the name of the nation has to be analysed in the context of international relations. Above all, it concerns only the first type of nation formation, as it was limited to the sphere of power-oriented conflicts between statenations. Their peak point was reached in World War I. However, there is another, both more complex and more prevalent, category of nationally relevant conflicts of interest, which cannot be included as a part of international relations, but rather proceeded inside of multiethnic states as an important factor of mobilization in national movements. Under these conditions, a conflict of interest (or tension between groups with different interests), could, perhaps without originally having any connection with nationhood, become part of the national movement in cases when this interest conflict or tension was connected with the ethnic (linguistic, national) differences between the two parties involved. A system of transmission emerged, from the interest conflict to its articulation – its ‘translation’ into national terms. The effective functioning of the system of transmissions was conditioned

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first by some degree of developed national ideas, and secondly by a certain amount of disruption in the stability of the social and/ or political system. People in crisis situations resulting, in general terms, from modernization tended to develop a heightened sensitivity concerning differences and conflicts between social, or even professional, groups (GAP 1987: 90). This again increased the capacity for conflicts of social or political interest to be understood in ideologized and nationalized terms, and eventually took the form of a sharp rise in new needs which, in turn, evoked new interest conflicts (Lemberg 1964: 203f.). Many authors stress that this process has to be observed in connection with several other important impacts of modernization. Most significant amongst these were: (i) the phenomenon of uneven development – both within one country, and without various countries or regions; (ii) the state policy of ‘internal colonialism’; and (iii) distinct social stratification resulting from a new system of labour division. According to Rokkan’s model, the increasing tension between centre and (an ethnically differentiated) periphery strengthened national mobilization, and the more economic conflicts could be used in nationalized form (1975: 564); the periphery ‘must command considerable non-political power resources in order to challenge the political center’ (Hooghe 1992: 32). Motyl (1994: 383f.) limits the immediate impact of economic conflict to national mobilization, pointing out the significance of the ways in which the peripheral population, and above all the elites, perceived their position of disadvantage relative to the centre. Horowitz recommends combining differences in ‘underdevelopment’ with differences in social structure (1985: 229ff.), while Connors indicates that the logical structure of arguments of uneven development ‘is challenged by comparative data’ (1994: 161). Williams (1979: 64) argues that sometimes the communication ties were stronger than interest conflicts, which gradually took off and lost connection with their economic, social and cultural context. The abstract concept of uneven development received a more concrete form in Hechter’s discussion on ‘internal colonialism’, introduced in

his provoking (1975) analysis of increasing internal tensions in Great Britain as a decisive factor in ‘secessionist’ nationalisms in its periphery. Nairn argues at the same time that uneven development plays an important role in nationalist movements, and he also enlarged this concept to include ‘external colonialism’, stressing the importance of external oppression as a mobilizing factor (1975: 6ff.). Using the Catalan and Basque examples, some authors, like Orridge (1982: 181ff.) refuse the generalization of the role of ‘internal colonialism’ and recommend instead the concept of uneven development, according to which national mobilization could result not only from underdevelopment of the periphery, but also, on the contrary, from the speediness of its economic growth. In 1968, I first formulated a hypothesis on the significance of nationally relevant conflicts for the formation of the modern nation, as a critical response to the one-sided emphasis placed by Deutsch on the role of social communication and mobility (Hroch 1968: 170ff.). Much later, the thesis was taken up by Szporluk (1990: 137ff.) and Gellner (1994: 182ff.), who, through selective use of quotes, argue that I explain the nation merely in terms of class struggle. This is a complete misrepresentation of my position: I do not believe nationally relevant conflicts can be reduced to a conflict between the classes, as class conflict is but one of many types of conflict behind the success of nation formation. Even though nationally relevant interest conflicts corresponded to a myriad of changes introduced into society by modernizing processes, the modern nation emerged not only as a part of the modernizing transformation on the road to the civil society, but also, in some respects, as a reaction to these self-same processes. In some cases, the protagonists of national movements rejected the erosion of patriarchal ties in the very social spheres in which their support lay: they took a sceptical view toward industrialization, the rationalization of administration and the homogenization of culture and language – despite their interested connections with these spheres.

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REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. (1991) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London and New York: Verso. Bauer, O. (1907) Die Nationalitätenfrage und Sozialdemokratie. Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung. Breuilly, J. (1993) Nationalism and the State, 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Coakley, J. (1992) The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements: The Contemporary West European Experience. London: Sage. Chartier, R. (1985) ‘Text, Symbol and Frenchness’, Journal of Modern History, 57: 682–95. Connors, W. (1994) Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conze, W. (1964) ‘Nation und Gesellschaft. Zwei Grundbegriffe der revolutionären Epoche’, Historische Zeitschrift, 198: 1–43. Dann, O. (1986) Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit. Munich: Oldenbourg. Deutsch, K. W. (1953a [1951]) ‘The Growth of Nations: Some Recurrent Patterns of Political and Social Integration’, World Politics, 5: 168–85. Deutsch, K. W. (1953b) Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Deutsch, K. W. (1966) The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. New York: The Free Press and London: Collier– Macmillan. Edwards, J. (2000) ‘Language and Nation’, in A. S. Leoussi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nationalism. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers. pp. 169–73. Fishman, J. (1972) Language in Sociocultural Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. GAP (Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry). (1987) Us and them: The Psychology of Ethnonationalism New York. Amer Psychiatric Pub Inc. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1994) ‘An Alternative Vision’, in E. Gellner (ed.), Encounters with Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Giddens, A. (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. I. London: Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1985) The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press (Vol II of Giddens (1981)).

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Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guibernau, M. (1996) Nationalisms: The NationState and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1962) Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand. (English translation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.) Hechter, M. (1975) Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536– 1966. London: Routledge. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooghe, L. (1992) ‘Nationalist Movements and Social Factors: A Theoretical Perspective’, in J. Coakley (ed.), The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements: The Contemporary West European Experience. London: Sage. pp. 21–44. Horowitz, D. L. (1985) Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Hroch, M. (1968) Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegungen bei den kleinen Völkern Europas: Eine vergleichende Analyse zur gesellschaftlichen Schichtung der patriotischen Gruppen. Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philos. Et Hist. XXIV, Praha. Hroch, M. (2000) In the National Interest: Demands and Goals of European National Movements. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University. James, P. (1996) Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community. London: Sage. Kiernan, V. (1972) ‘Nationalist Movements and Social Classes’, in A. Smith (ed.), Nationalist Movements. London: Macmillan. pp. 110–33. Kosing, M. (1976) Nation in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Berlin: Dietz Verl. Langewiesche, D. (1995) ‘Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat: Forschungsstand und Forschungsperspektiven’, Neue politische Literatur, 40: 190–236. Lemberg, E. (1964) Nationalismus I: Psychologie und Geschichte. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowolt. Llobera, J. R. (1994) The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe. Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg. Llobera, J. R. (2000) Modernization Theories of Nationalism, in A. S. Leoussi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nationalism. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers. pp. 184–192. Mann, M. (1992) ‘The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism’, in J. Hall and I. C. Jarvie

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(eds), Transition to Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, M. (1993) The Sources of Social Power II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCrone, D. (1998) The Sociology of Nationalism. London and New York: Routledge. Motyl, A. (1994) ‘How Empires Rise and Fall’, in J. G. Beramendi, R. Maíz and X. M. Núnˇ ez (eds), Nationalism in Europe I. University of Santiago de Compostela. Nairn, T. (1975) ‘Marxism and the Modern Janus’, New Left Review, 94: 6ff. Nimni, E. (1991) Marxism and Nationalism: Theoretical Origins of a Political Crisis. London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press. Orridge, A. W. (1982) ‘Uneven Development and Nationalism’, Political Studies, 29: 181ff. Puhle, H-J. (1994) ‘Nation States, Nations and Nationalisms in Western and Southern Europe’, in J. G. Beramendi, R. Maíz, and X. M. Núnˇ ez (eds), Nationalism in Europe: Past and Present II. University of Santiago de Compostela. Rokkan, S. (1975) ‘Dimensions of State Formation’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 564f.

Shafer, B. C. (1955) Nationalism: Myth and Reality. New York: Harcourt Brace. Schieder, T. (1991) Nationalismus und Nationalstaat. Studien zum nationalen Problem im modernen Europa. Göttingen: Vandenhœck – Ruprecht. Smith, A. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Stokes, G. (1982) ‘Cognitive Style and Nationalism’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 9: 1–14. Szporluk, R. (1988) Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Szporluk, R. (1990) ‘In Search of the Drama of History: or National Roads to Modernity’, East European Politics and Societies, 4: 137. Tilly, C. (ed.) (1975) The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Williams, G. (1979) ‘Language Group Allegiance and Ethnic Interaction’, in H. Giles and B. SaintJacques (eds), Language and Ethnic Relations. Oxford: Pergamon. pp. 57–85.

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3 Structural Approaches to Nations and Nationalism JOHN A. HALL

It is as well to comment immediately upon the character of a structural approach to the study of any element of social reality. Such an approach suggests that life in society involves the ‘hard’ realities that derive from economic and political power relations quite as much as upon ‘softer’ cultural factors. Two separate dangers are seen in culturalist theories by those who stress the importance of structural conditions. On the one hand, scepticism is shown to voluntarism, that is, to the notion that human agents make up the world as they go along. On the other hand, something like dislike is shown towards theories wholly opposite in character, namely those that suggest humans act within the terms of meaning systems, being mere concept fodder of systems of ideas. Structural theorists counter this, on the sensible grounds that changes in material conditions often lead to complete ideological upheaval. Further, structural approaches may well recognize an element of human agency for all that they stress the constraint of various sorts of material conditions. Of course most sociologists are sensible, occupying that middle ground staked out by Marx in which human beings make history but in circumstances they did not choose. Accordingly, many theorists of nationalism have something to

say about social structure. But concentration here is on two theorists, Ernest Gellner and Michael Mann, both of whom privilege social structural factors. One reason for this concentration is obvious: these two thinkers are exceptionally distinguished in intellectual terms. No other structural approaches carry such force. Another reason is that there is something of a progression from one to the other. Differently put, it is quite proper to see Mann as responding to Gellner, both formally and informally. Two elements are worth stressing here. On the one hand, Mann can properly be seen as the heir of Gellner’s view of nationalism at least in respect of the historical record. On the other hand, Mann identifies rather different structural factors at work in European history, and notes that the structuring conditions of contemporary world politics are changing – and in such a way that the character of nationalism may yet be affected. A final preliminary point is in order. This author endorses structural accounts and is sympathetic to the view of nationalism propounded – as a reality in the historical record and, at the least, as a continuing danger within our world. Accordingly, this chapter is not, so to speak, written from the outside; it rather describes a viewpoint, and theoretical developments within it, that is judged to be essentially correct.

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MALIGN FATES Intellectual history is likely to demonstrate the profound impact of Gellner in his early years on later students of nationalism. Those lectures at the London School of Economics in the later 1950s and early 1960s that ended up as the celebrated chapter on nationalism in Thought and Change (1964) were attended by such later luminaries in the field as Benedict Anderson and Tom Nairn. This powerful initial justification for concentrating on Gellner is of course massively reinforced by the best-selling status of his later Nations and Nationalism (1983). But herein lies a problem. Some themes of that book are so well known that its central point has been somewhat forgotten. Gellner’s central vision is, however, of the greatest import, and it can be seen anew by means of a biographical excursus – designed less, it should be stressed, to fully understand the man than to take us to the heart of his understanding of nationalism. The position of Czech Jewry was deeply problematical in the last years of the AustroHungarian Empire (Kieval 1988, 2000). The social dominance of the German minority had been challenged by the Czech majority, driven by industrialization into cities whose character changed once the demographic balance tipped. Many Jews were part of or aspired to belong to the high culture of the imperial centre, and accordingly made sure that their children were educated in German, then distinctively a world language. But the Young Czech movement insisted that Jews learn Czech, not least so as to undermine the salience of the ‘German’ minority. If this was a cross pressure, further ambivalence was added by the fact that the Young Czechs did not really allow them into the heart of the Czech nation. Thus was born the tricultural world of Kafka (and of course of Hans Kohn, one of the great early theorists of nationalism), a world of dispossession which bred varied longings – for inclusion in the German world, for inclusion in the Czech world, for the recovery of simple Jewish roots, and for Zionism more generally, and endless oscillations between them (Spector 2000). The break-up of the empire did not remove all

ambivalence. Loyalty to Germany became ever-more difficult given the rise of Nazism, but complete integration into the Czech community remained problematic. Tomas Masaryk gave special status to the Jewish community, allowing it to identify itself on the census returns by religion rather than by nationality or language; this was in one sense a compliment, but it also indicated a measure of distance. Still, in the inter-war years outmarriage from the Jewish community reached very high levels, with the position of Jews in general being far better than was the case elsewhere in the region. This was the world in which Gellner grew up (Hall 2003, forthcoming). His parents were German speakers of Jewish background, for all that they took the trouble to learn Czech. The family had a German governess and a Czech maid and Gellner grew up bilingual. Loyalty to Masaryk’s republic was intense, not surprisingly given its liberal democratic success and stunning cultural efflorescence. But there was always awareness of other identities. There is evidence of some Zionist leanings in the mother, and certainly in an aunt. The father had had communist links, and began to cultivate ties to England as fears of the Nazis increased. All the same, the family stayed until 1939, and so witnessed the arrival of Hitler’s troops in Prague. Escape to England was difficult. It was also emotionally traumatic: Gellner viscerally missed Prague during his school years. But his return to Prague in 1945 only brought disillusion. The tricultural world of Prague had come to an end: most Jews, including many in his own family, had been killed, whilst he witnessed the vicious if comprehensible ethnic cleansing of the Germans. Convinced that the Czechs would accept communism given their experience at Munich, Gellner left in 1946 to pursue an academic career in England. Two summary points about the experience of this twentieth-century Central European intellectual of Jewish background are obvious. First, modern life forced identity change whether one wanted it or not. Second, welthistorischer forces were destroying diverse and varied identities, and inexorably replacing them with units based on a single culture. Not

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surprisingly, he came to stress rule by one’s co-nationals as one of the basic elements of the modern social contract (1964: ch. 2). Gellner’s thoughts about nationalism were further influenced by personal experience after the seemingly final move to England in 1946. The loss of his early taken-for-granted identity certainly led at an intellectual level to a desire to understand closed and meaningful worlds: this was the emotional force behind Gellner’s desire as anthropologist to work amongst Berber hill tribes of the High Atlas (Gellner 1996: 679–80). The involvement in North Africa occasioned his first forays into the study of nationalism, and they marked the initial theory – above all, in demonstrating the invented quality of modern nationalism (Gellner 1961). But one has the clear impression that the concern with belonging was initially as practical as academic. Gellner’s earliest academic papers show him to have been in part a member of the tribe of the then dominant Oxford style of philosophy (Hall forthcoming), but he was unable to stay within this rather confined world, as did Isaiah Berlin – of whose position Gellner was deeply critical. He was thereafter marked down as an oddity, as Central European rather than British. There is a sense in which he wanted to be let in, but was rejected for failing to follow the customs of the country with sufficient diligence. This created a particular ambivalence within him – at once interested in and attracted to belonging yet concerned that no social organization would ever be able to contain him in such a way as to limit his freedom of thought. In the later years of his life Gellner was forced by the tectonic shifts of world politics into thinking further about nationalism. Visits to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to confirm his view that multinational political systems were doomed by the social pressures released by modernity. But his return to Prague after 1989 made him reconsider matters. For one thing, Prague itself was so utterly homogenized as to be boring – for all that this very condition was what Gellner insisted the forces of modernity demanded. For another, he became very conscious of the huge costs that had been unleashed when the

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Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had collapsed. The resulting power vacuum had encouraged war, which did much to cover the practices – ethnic cleansing, politicide, population transfer and genocide – that sorted European populations into more homogeneous entities. Arguing against himself, Gellner tried to produce prescriptive ideals which would prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union, hoping to see it liberalize and soften, and able to allow sufficient cultural autonomy to retain the passive loyalty of its peoples under a single political roof (Gellner 1991). These hopes very largely came to naught, but without the generalized disaster – Chechnya being the obvious exception – that Gellner had expected. THEORIES OF NATIONALISM These personal experiences meant that Gellner thought about nationalism all his life. Complexity lurks beneath this simple statement. For it is possible and necessary to distinguish three rather separate theories of nationalism in Gellner’s work. Despite the brilliance of Nations and Nationalism, the earliest formulation is the most complete and the most powerful, with the final thoughts being, in the last analysis, of lesser interest. The theory in Thought and Change is essentially simple. A good deal of cultural consensus is needed within political units if they are to prosper in the modern world. State education systems typically choose to privilege one language in the interests of economic and military efficiency. If this is to say that some of the world’s linguistic cultures are too small to survive, nationalism results from the fact that imperial systems are too large for the purposes of modernity. The key explanatory argument that then follows concentrates heavily on the blocked mobility of the native intelligentsia. Empires tend to send rulers to the peripheries from the metropolitan centre, thereby disadvantaging the ambitious locals who had gained cultural capital by studying at the heart of the empires. Second-class citizenship within a large polity – due to skin colour, religion, ethnicity, or

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some other cultural marker – naturally suggested the sense of playing the nationalist card, of becoming a first-class citizen within one’s own state. Gellner’s subtle initial theory suggested a number of sources of support for such intellectuals – mostly sources, it should be noted, present in North Africa. If the working class of newly created cities was an obvious and modern core membership, equally important were traditional groupings – such as the tribes of the High Atlas – irritated by imposition of non-customary law within their domains. Absolutely central to Gellner’s vision was the insistence that nationalists in power were social revolutionaries, creating a nation where none had really existed before. Traditional groupings that had resisted imperial pretensions were doomed to still greater disappointment at the hands of the new, modernizing elite. What strikes one most about Gellner’s second theory of nationalism, expounded in Nations and Nationalism, is that it is written at a much higher level of abstraction. The benefit of this was the introduction of a scheme of philosophic history which did much to justify his claim that nationalism was modern. But there was a negative consequence of this very development. Structural conditions at times came to be seen in purely abstract terms, above all in the insistence that industrial society simply needs nationalism – on the grounds that culturally cohesive community was a precondition of the proper working of a modern economy. This was functionalism at its purest, a world bereft of human agents, and it represented a step backwards from the earlier theory. Care needs to be taken at this point. Nations and Nationalism is a marvelleous book, in which Gellner writes his life as if it were sociology. Accordingly, insights of varied sorts abound. A measure of agency is restored in the long parable about Megalomania and Ruritania which describes the move from cultural awakening to political demand on the part of a national community of the imperial periphery. If job prospects might benefit from secession, there are hints at a rather different psychology – at the feelings of humiliation that come from not being able to operate within one’s own language. Further, Gellner noted

that not every ethnic or national community makes it into the world of modern nationstates. A selection mechanism seems to be at work, but it was not one that Gellner ever theorized. Finally, an ingenious typology of nationalism was worked out, purportedly designed to go beyond Plamenatz’s distinction between Western and Eastern (in effect, civic and ethnic) forms of nationalism – but not in fact much used by Gellner thereafter (Gellner 1983: 99; Plamenatz 1973). The seismic shift of 1989, that is, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the hideous wars of the Balkans, forced Gellner once again to confront the national question. An obvious shift in Gellner’s position has already been mentioned, namely that move from description to prescription that saw him arguing against himself, so to speak forgetting his view that empires were doomed in an effort to support a liberalized Soviet Union so as to avoid the bloodshed likely to follow from secessions. But there were also subtle changes, mostly emphasizing either non-material motives for nationalist mobilization or insisting that industrialism’s ‘need’ for nationalism was put into action by entirely mundane desires of specific actors for power and influence.1 Further, Gellner turned slightly from abstract theorizing towards historical location, producing a scheme mingling geographical zones with developments within the history of European nationalism (Gellner 1997). But these changes are somewhat ad hoc (there being no link, for example, between this historical scheme and the typology of Nations and Nationalism), and they are of interest principally to specialists. There is one constant throughout Gellner’s work on nationalism, namely the insistence that nationalism and industrialism are related, with the former very largely being seen as the child of the latter. This is distinctively a structuralist account, as Gellner emphasized repeatedly. Little attention needed to be paid to nationalist ideas, Gellner argued at all times, given the predominance of causal necessity. This view came naturally to a thinker whose philosophy of social science emphasized cause so much more than meaning (Gellner 1973).

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WHAT IS WRONG WITH GELLNER’S VIEW OF NATIONALISM

An enormous amount of attention has been given to Gellner’s work, most of it focusing on Nations and Nationalism. A measure of agreement has been reached on four major criticisms which can usefully be considered in turn. (Hall 1998 contains a series of papers, especially those by Hall, O’Leary, Laitin and Brubaker, that make the following points.) There is a virtual consensus in the contemporary philosophy of social science to the effect that functionalist reasoning is meretricious. There is a great deal to be said in favour of this view. Consequences should not be taken as causes. Differently put, history has never seen fit to recognize my needs (of which there are many). But two points should be borne in mind to counter any easy rejection of Gellner’s view of nationalism on this count. First, it is not at all clear that Gellner’s work is functionalist. The initial theory most certainly was not, whilst that of Nations and Nationalism can be saved – as Gellner himself stressed (1996: 627–28) – by adding to it agents who homogenize national territories because they believe that this will aid the varied workings of social, economic and political life. Second, a measure of scepticism is due towards the anti-functionalist consensus. Much of life is drift rather than mastery, making the search for agents – for smoking guns in control of events – highly unrealistic. One way of thinking of functionalism is in terms of unintended consequences: this rich seam of social understanding has been sidelined by social theory obsessed with the impact of rational actors. My own hunch is that the social sciences will soon see some revival of functionalism. But this is essentially an aside. Let us imagine that Gellner’s theory is, so to speak, judged to be philosophically sound, and turn to the remaining criticisms. The next two are related, and so can be taken together; they are the most damning. Gellner’s work at all times suggests that there is a link – which must concern both timing and location – between industrialization and the emergence of nationalism. This viewpoint is

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subject to fairly obvious refutation. To begin with, several European nationalist movements unquestionably predated the emergence of industrialization. This is true of the drive for Greek independence, as Gellner himself realized (1996: 629–30), but it is even more strikingly so for much nineteenth-century Balkan nationalism. There is simply no way in which the Balkans can be seen as an area of industrialization until much later in the twentieth century. The same points apply to the rise of nationalist sentiments within pre-existing states. Britain and France gained such sentiments in the eighteenth century, before the onset of industrial organization (Mann 1992). Still, a word of warning is in order here. The language of conjecture and refutation is of course Popperian. It tends to extreme Puritanism: a single refutation means that a theory should be dropped once and for all. One wonders if this attitude is really suitable for social science. It is very rare for any theory to explain anything fully; often we rest content with theories that explain perhaps half of the variation of any particular variable. In the case of nationalism, it is certainly the case that Gellner’s account does not explain everything, and I will argue that an alternative view does rather better. But one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are cases where nationalism is linked to industrialization, albeit these are often intermingled with the more political causes of nationalist mobilization that will be presented shortly. Further light can be cast on this topic slightly later in this chapter. A final point made about Gellner’s viewpoint is that it is dangerous (Abizadeh 2002). To think in terms of homogeneity is, according to this view, to encourage it. This is ridiculous. One can, indeed must, recognize the power of nuclear weapons without thereby being a proponent of their use. Further the attack is purely ad hominem in character, and it can be refuted on similarly personal grounds. Gellner knew, then longed for, and always wished to find ways in which a more plural world could work – stressing on many occasions that a repetition of the European pattern of nationbuilding in Africa would cause disaster. The attempt to understand the world should not be judged harshly, especially since much practical

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damage has been done in world politics through the actions of the naïve, rushing into situations that they do not understand at all. But this is a large issue of great complexity, and it must be dropped immediately, although it is worth discussing on another occasion.

WHAT IS RIGHT ABOUT GELLNER’S VIEW OF NATIONALISM The fundamental insight of Gellner’s theory of nationalism that has been neglected is simple: homogenization processes have been central to the history of nationalism. Quite properly, Gellner himself had ambivalent feelings about this, at once hating the removal of a plural world whilst insisting on the inevitability of a process that would likely bring economic and political efficiency in its tail. The claim to be made here is very simple, namely that Gellner’s key insight has much to recommend it in descriptive terms. Let us consider some cases in turn so as to justify this claim. The Czech case does indeed support Gellner’s position. The tricultural world did collapse in World War II, with further simplification – the secession of the rich Czechs from the poor Slovaks, discrimination against gypsies – taking place in the years after 1989. Crucially, Czechia is part of a larger European pattern. Mark Mazower’s analytic history of Salonica makes this point for a single city (2005). Crucially, the pattern applies throughout the continent. Before 1914 perhaps 60 million people lived in states not ruled by their co-nationals. This figure was much diminished, perhaps to a mere 25 million, by the break-up of empires in 1918 (Mann 1999: 33). Still, the messy intermingling of people within new and fragile states remained a cause of tension in the inter-war years. The practices of Hitler and Stalin (genocide, population transfer, ethnic cleansing and boundary changes, all covered by the fog of war) then created very homogeneous units in most of Central and Eastern Europe. Everyone who reads this book will be able to bear witness to the continuing homogenization of recent years: the break-up of multinational arrangements

in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia – with hideous ethnic cleansing being involved in the latter case. There are rather few cases – Spain above all, with Great Britain currently undergoing change, Switzerland having idiosyncrasies all its own, with Belgium almost having ceased to exist – from Eastern to Western Europe in which one can speak of significant multinationalism. Differently put, most countries are now fully developed nation-states, within which a single ethnicity or culture dominates. There are of course minorities, sometimes expanding, within such states, and there is much talk of multiculturalism. But multiculturalism is not multinationalism, for one thing being much easier to manage politically. Concentration to this point has been on European history, but the mention of multiculturalism suggests turning attention briefly to the United States. It is important to note – whilst remembering at all times the continuing disadvantage and discrimination faced by AfroAmericans – that in crucial respects the United States is, as it always has been, a huge machine for turning people into Americans (Hall and Lindholm 2001). What is noticeable, for example, about the purported rise of ethnic politics is that this is so very general. Claiming an ethnic past is almost an American right, but it remains American in that such ethnicities are symbolic rather than real – not least because outmarriage rates from ethnic groups tend to be so very high. Perhaps the key indicator of the Gellnerian, homogeneous character of the country is that the United States is, and will remain, a monolingual entity. ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ’, a campaigning politician declared, ‘it’s good enough for Texas.’ In a nutshell, a fundamental reason for the success of the United States is its lack of deep diversity. A final general point is worth making. Gellner’s functionalist account of the rise of nationalism does deserve criticism. But this does not detract from the claim that presence of homogeneity has functional benefits. Economic flexibility is often helped by the ability of a homogeneous community to act together – because an external threat is seen as a common problem (Alesina and Spolaore 2004). These generalizations hold true, for instance, for

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Denmark, whose success owes much to the way in which it divested itself of territories and peoples due to its remarkable ability to lose wars (Campbell et al. 2006). An extremely powerful and highly technical paper seeking to explain the manner in which the Danes took over the English butter market from the Irish in the nineteenth century makes the point especially forcefully. Homogeneity allowed the Danes to set up cooperatives and to improve the quality of their butter, for this was where profits lay. In contrast, the main avenue to advancement in Ireland lay in the courts – that is, in claiming land from the English (O’Rourke 2006). Might it be that a background element to recent Irish success (the emergence of the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’) is that of the creation of a homogeneous community in the Republic? Gellner said less about two further functional matters, but each deserves comment. First, welfare spending is certainly related to homogeneity, for the simple reason that people are prepared to be taxed at high rates as long as monies go to people exactly like themselves. Secondly, democratic politics also become easier in circumstances of homogeneity. For one thing, an end to stalemate between competing groups allows decisions to be made; for another, the regulation of differences at the heart of democratic politics is much easier when the differences in question are bounded by shared identity.

CONDITIONS FOR HOMOGENIZATION The processes by which homogeneity was established were often so repulsive that much effort has gone into thinking about ways in which multinational arrangements can be maintained. Though this is morally desirable, it can amount in intellectual terms to replacing analysis with hope. But we must seek to explain what actually happened, not least so as to determine whether the structure of modern politics has now so changed as to allow nationalism to somehow change its colours. The social scientist who helps us most in regard to these questions is Michael Mann. His important The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic

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Cleansing (2005) is the successor to the work of Gellner in taking as the core fact to be explained processes of homogenization. Our immediate task is to examine the conditions for homogenization in European history before then seeing whether structural conditions have changed in ways that allow for hope or necessitate fear. Before turning to Mann’s particular contribution, some general points – taken for granted in his work as much as explicitly spelt out – about European society at the end of the nineteenth century need to be stressed. Crucially, this was a period of intense geopolitical competition. The character of nationalism was massively affected by two elements then taken to constitute the strength of a state, both of which can be illustrated with reference to the political views of Max Weber. First, let us remember that Weber was a Fleet Professor – that is, a member of an elite convinced that imperial possessions were necessary for the well-being of the state. Secure sources of supply mattered quite as much as markets, for geopolitical autonomy depended upon the ability to feed one’s population and to have the raw materials necessary to produce a full complement of weapons. Importantly, there was nothing peculiar about the German elite: all European states patterned their industrialization so as to gain political autonomy, a development which led by the end of the century to massive overproduction of steel (Sen 1984). But there is a second, less well-known side to Weber’s politics. It is neatly summed up in the nickname used by his friends – Polish Max. This referred to his early research project on Polish labour on the East Elbian Junker estates. The attitude that Weber took to such labour (that it would weaken the fabric of the nation) was entirely typical of the time. The leading edge of power seemed to reside in monolingual nation-states, not least as multinationalism was considered likely to undermine military efficiency (Lieven 2000). A general point about nationalism can usefully be made here. Nationalism is best seen in Freudian terms, as a labile force, prone to take colour from its surroundings. In the late nineteenth century nationalism was, as argued,

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closely linked to imperialism: a strong state needed (or, rather, in order to be strong a state felt it needed) both peoples and colonies if it was to survive in a hostile world. It is at this point that a key difference with Gellner’s explanatory framework emerges. His parable of Megalomania and Ruritania is subtly wrong, at least insofar as it sees nationalism in terms of secession – that is, it suggests that the prime mover of nationalism was Ruritania. But social movements characteristically take their character from the states with which they interact. Politically conscious movements tend to arise when states act in an arbitrary manner, whether in terms of taxation, repression, exclusion or conscription (Mann 1993). This most certainly applies to nationalism. What many of the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted was recognition of their historic rights, something which would allow them to protect their own languages and cultures. Masaryk sought such a liberal empire or constitutional monarchy, perhaps even until the onset of World War I. Exit became a fully attractive option only when voice was so denied that loyalties were destroyed (Hirschman 1970). Differently put, secessionist impulses very often resulted from the drives of great powers – the Megalomanias of the time – to homogenize their territories. The emphasis on the social psychology created by state actions has always been at the core of Mann’s sociology, and it is no surprise that it features so much in his view of nationalism (1993: chs 7 and 20). But he adds a set of factors, carefully constructed and skilfully deployed, which are specific to his understanding of ethnic cleansing. Geopolitical conflict matters enormously, for it provides the fuel from which vicious actions can understandably arise. The most dangerous situations arise when rival national movements claiming the same piece of territory are backed by powerful neighbouring states. The fear that help may come to one’s rival from abroad encourages pre-emptive cleansing, not least as those rivals can all too easily be dubbed a fifth column likely to betray the state. In these circumstances democracy can be dangerous, for the people will be seen as belonging to an organic ethnic nation rather than to a liberal polity based on civic inclusiveness and the

presence of institutional checks and balances upon the exercise of power. But another fact, pointing in somewhat the opposite direction, needs also to be noted. Limits to ethnic conflict can often be set by a strong state, able to control communal conflict of one sort or another. It is no accident that the vicious side of nationalism was so very present in inter-war Europe. Defeat in war led to a weakening of social institutions in Germany, whilst newer or newly reconstituted states in Central and Eastern Europe had very limited state capacity. It is as well at this point to highlight similarities and differences between the accounts of nationalism offered by Gellner and Mann. Both stress that processes of homogenization have been central to nationalism, and both insist that this is modern. But their views of modernity differ. Gellner stresses industrialization, and thereby makes homogenization a necessary feature of the modern world. In contrast, Mann concentrates his attention on the entry of the people on to the political stage. It is important to specify what is involved in his claim that democracy has a dark side, for the phrase is one that can easily lead to confusion. An initial claim is that white settler populations behaved with particular viciousness towards the natives they encountered, it being important to emphasize that this had nothing to do with industrialization. More generally, Mann stresses that the moment of political modernization (that is, decompressions, aberturas, and glasnosts) is always dangerous. His account of ethnic cleansing shows how danger leads to disaster when fear is generated by geopolitical uncertainties. This account represents, in my view, clear cognitive advance for it captures motivation and explains timing far better than do the varied theories proposed by Gellner. But it is only fair to note that Gellner had a reply to Mann (1996: 636) in which he stressed that he was merely operating at a higher level of abstraction, but quite prepared to accept centralizing state construction as part of a generic model of modernization. This does not really protect Gellner’s position, but it most certainly does muddy the waters. Accordingly, the availability of another means of distinguishing the two accounts is welcome. Mann is not claiming, as noted, that the people

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always defines itself in organic terms: very much to the contrary, he highlights the capacity for inclusiveness of liberal states, and of their ability to regulate conflict between social classes. This matters greatly. The flexibility of liberal regimes allowed for their political form to remain unchanged despite the impact of industrialization, as deals accommodated classes and even nations.2 However, to a considerable extent this does not challenge Gellner’s metaphysic: these are largely instances in which state came before nation, in which processes of homogenization, from religious unification to complete conquest, had taken place earlier. This is utterly different from the pattern of the Tsarist, Ottoman and Austrian empires in which nations were extant and conscious at the moment states sought to modernize themselves. Nonetheless, there remains at least in potential a fundamental difference between the two thinkers. Gellner offers us a general theory of nationalism in which rule by one’s co-culturals is an unavoidable necessity. Mann at least allows for the possibility that liberal regimes may provide political roofs under which several nations can prosper, especially of course if the structure of world politics diminishes levels of geopolitical conflict. Differently put, Gellner’s view of nationalism may be a product and sociology of European modernity rather than of modernity per se.

OPTIONS AND CONSTRAINTS: OR, FROM DESCRIPTION TO PRESCRIPTION Two cautionary notes should be issued immediately. First, it behoves us to remember that no European empire was able to decompress successfully. The moment of modernization led to the destruction of every multinational entity. Secondly, the spread of liberal political structures in Europe in the twentieth century has a very great deal to do with ethnic cleansing. We are liberal because the national question has been solved by ethnic cleansing, population transfer, border changes and genocide. But the analytic question remains. Might liberalism solve the national question rather than be the happy product of horror?

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It is possible to begin with some good news. The structure of world politics has changed in ways that help contain nationalism. Crucially, in much of the rest of the world the very high level of geopolitical conflict that characterized European history is not present. As a consequence, the link between nationalism and imperialism has to a large extent been broken. Many state leaders wish to join the elite of world politics, to be part of global modernity, rather than to insulate themselves from it. Further, in key areas of the world states have sufficient capacity to control ethnic conflict. This is strikingly true of India, where frequent communal conflicts are brought to an end by the power of the Indian army, the backbone of the state (Mann 2005: ch. 17). The mention of India suggests a final point. National demands can be and are sometimes satisfied by the provision of voice and cultural rights. David Laitin has quite properly made much of this in connection with language (1992). In order to be a complete, fully functioning Indian citizen one needs, he claims, three plus or minus one languages. Two of these languages, Hindi and English, are the languages of the state, the latter still present because so many in the elite resisted its extirpation at the time of independence given that it gave them cultural advantage. A third language is that of one’s state, and a fourth that of a minority within such a state. A situation of three minus one occurs when one is a Hindi speaker within a state in which Hindi is the official language. Of course, this is but an example of the possibilities inherent in federal and consociational arrangements of varied sorts. The presence of such strategies returns us to the consideration raised at the start of this paragraph. The absence of geopolitical conflict allows states to be less unitary. Unfortunately, there is also bad news. The link between nationalism and imperialism is not completely broken: Putin is not cognizant of the certain fact that retention of Chechnya will hinder rather than help the Russian economy. More generally, many of Mann’s variables apply outside Europe (2005: ch. 17). There most certainly are areas in the world in which nations fight over the same territory, as was recently the case in the ertstwhile Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, making murderous homogenizing drives a

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potential reality in a significant number of places. Further, illiberal policies of states towards national minorities exist in some abundance – notably in Tibet, Southern Sudan, Kashmir, Aceh, Chechnya, Kurdistan and Palestine. In these circumstances secessionist nationalism is likely to flourish quite as powerfully as it did within European history. Mann also notes that many federal and consociational schemes have failed, it being something of an open question whether the devolution of power appeases or abets secessionist nationalism. Finally, Mann introduces three new structural elements within world politics that may well reinforce the unpleasant face of nationalism (2005: ch. 17). The neo-liberal economic policies encouraged by the United States since 1989 do nothing to help state construction, and at worst help to deconstruct states that had begun to gain some capacities. In Africa some states have become so weak that they cannot see far outside their capitals. Ethnic mobilization is all too easy in such circumstances, and its suppression well beyond the power of states bereft of bureaucracies and merit-based armies. Secondly, the end of socialism means that a major alternative meaning system to nationalism has gone. Third, the gap left by the decline of socialism has been filled, especially in much of the Middle East, by Islamism. There is a resonance here between Mann and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). If nationalism has changed its character for the better in some places as the link with imperialism has been broken, it may be that it will mutate once again into a lethal brew linked on this occasion to religious fundamentalism. Hideous processes of homogenization may come to haunt the developing world as much as they did the European past. NOTES 1 For details of Gellner’s last views, see Hall (1998: Introduction). 2 This is of course a large area, in which a good deal of caution is needed. The liberal regime of Great Britain did accommodate workers and Scots, but it also expelled Chartists and cleared the Highlands.

REFERENCES Abizadeh, A. (2002) ‘Does Liberal Democracy Presuppose a Cultural Nation: Four Arguments’, American Political Science Review, 96: 495–509. Alesina, A. and Spolaore, E. (2004) The Size of Nations. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J. C., Hall, J. A. and Pedersen, O. (ed.) (2006) National Identity and the Varieties of Capitalism: The Danish Experience. Montreal and Kingston: McGill/Queens University Press. Gellner, E. A. (1961) ‘The Struggle for Morocco’s Past’, Middle East Journal, 15: 37–49. Gellner, E. A. (1964) Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gellner, E. A. (1973) Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gellner E. A. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner. E. A. (1991) ‘Nationalism in the New Central Europe’, New Left Review, 189: 127–36. Gellner, E. A. (1996) ‘Reply to Critics’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds), The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gellner, E. A. (1997) Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hirschman, A. O. (1970) Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, J. A. (ed.) (1998) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Hall, J. A. (2003) ‘Ernest Andre Gellner, 1925–1995’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 120: 151–72. Hall, J. A. (Forthcoming) A Passable Raft: The Life and Thought of Ernest Gellner. London: Verso. Hall, J. A. and Lindholm, C. (2001) Is America Breaking Apart? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kieval, H. (1988) The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kieval, H. (2000) Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Laitin, D. (1992) Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Lieven, D. (2000) Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. London: John Murray.

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Mann, J. M. (1992) ‘The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds), Transition to Modernity: Essays on Power, Wealth and Belief. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Mann, J. M. (1993) The Sources of Social Power. Volume Two: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Mann, J. M. (1999) ‘The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing’, New Left Review, 235: 18–45. Mann, J. M. (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Mazower, M. (2005) Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1450–1950. New York: Norton.

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O’Rourke, K. (2006) ‘Late Nineteenth Century Denmark in an Irish Mirror: Land Tenure, Homogeneity and the Roots of Danish Success’, in J. C. Campbell, A. Hall and O. Pedersen (eds), The State of Denmark: Small States, Corporatism and the Varieties of National Capitalism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill/ Queens University Press. Plamenatz, J. (1973) ‘Two Types of Nationalism’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea. London: Methuen. Sen, G. (1984) The Military Origins of Industrialization and International Trade Rivalry. London: Pinter. Spector, S. (2000) Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin-deSiècle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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4 Nations and Nationalisms: Between General Theory and Comparative History J O H A N N P. A R N A S O N

The case for comparative perspectives on nations and nationalisms can be made at the most basic level. Definitions of nationhood are notoriously disputed, but irrespective of controversies in that regard, it is generally accepted that national identities involve mutual demarcation; the plurality of nations – ultimately a ‘world of nations’ (Bloom 1941) – is a defining feature of the field to be explored, and comparisons of distinctive characteristics, types and trajectories are by the same token essential to any research programme. The reference to nationalisms in the plural – and as a subject of comparative inquiry – may seem less selfevident, but it is easier to justify if a broad definition is adopted. For the purposes of the present discussion, nationalism will be equated with the explicit and affirmative articulation of national identity. In that sense, it is a corollary of nationhood. The connection is clearly envisaged in Max Weber’s comments on the nation as a ‘value-concept’, an institutionalized meaning inseparable from a value-orientation. The same point is made by one of the most prominent contemporary analysts of national movements and formations: ‘There is no nation without national consciousness, i.e. an awareness of

membership in the nation, coupled with a view that this membership is an inherently valuable quality’ (Hroch 2000 [1984]: 12). If nationalism is defined in such terms, it is more akin to broad and adaptable orientations like individualism and collectivism, than to ideological currents like liberalism or socialism. We can thus defuse the problem – frequently noted by writers on the subject – of intellectual underdevelopment and doctrinal poverty. If nationalism is compared to the major ideological alternatives of modern times, it will inevitably appear as a less structured and less theorizable trend; but if the comparative focus is on broader orientations such as those mentioned above, the nationalist substratum of multiple and often rival ideologies can be put in a more balanced perspective. There is no denying that nationalism has in some contexts developed into a more selfcontained ideology than in others, but it never did so without inputs from other sources. Both the superimposed ideological frameworks and the underlying varieties of nationalism call for comparative study. A further dimension of comparative inquiry will open up if we accept that it is legitimate to speak of nations and nationalisms in

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pre-modern contexts. This is one of the most controversial issues in current debates. Some specific arguments will be considered below; at this point, it should only be noted that there is nothing a priori implausible about the suggestion. If it is now widely agreed that premodern forms of democracy and capitalism can be distinguished from modern ones, the view that the same might apply to nations and nationalisms is not to be dismissed out of hand. It does not amount to a denial of novelty: new characteristics and dynamics of national phenomena in the modern world may be related to new forms and contexts of interaction with other historical forces. If this perspective is adopted, contrasts and parallels between different paths to modernity will be seen as a prime theme for further research. OBSTACLES AND PRECONCEPTIONS In view of these considerations, the limited and one-sided role of comparative approaches in scholarly work on nations and nationalism seems all the more striking. The question of obstacles to a logical and prima facie inviting option must be addressed. One obvious reason has to do with uneven geohistorical coverage. Non-European experiences have been neglected, at least by contrast with the vast and diverse literature on European developments, and two parts of that field are especially relevant to the present topic. On the one hand, enough has been written on ‘Asian forms of the nation’ (Tönnesson and Antlöv 1996) to show that more work of that kind would both open up broader horizons and modify the conceptual frame of reference for comparative studies. Apart from the complex, inconclusive and still not very well understood processes of nation formation in China and India, the Japanese case is of crucial importance. Historians of modern Japan, as well as critical analysts of Japanese politics (especially Maruyama 1963) have done much to clarify the distinctive features of Japanese nationalism (from the nineteenthcentury transformation to the post-World War II developmental state), but this work has not been integrated into mainstream debates.

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References to Japan as an early case of imitative or ‘transfer’ nationalism (Wehler 2004 [2001]: 52) are still common; they greatly underestimate the endogenous long-term processes that preceded the encounter with the West and determined its outcome. On the other hand, comparative analysis of nation formation in Europe and the Americas has not progressed very far, and the absence of systematic work has made it easier to draw on American experiences in selective and exaggerated ways. This applies to Anderson’s portrayal of Creole nationalism in Latin America as a forerunner of European trends (Anderson 1991), but also to the much more widely shared vision of the United States as the archetypal civic or trans-ethnic nation. The latter claim links up with interpretations of the European background. If a Eurocentric bias has affected the most influential scholarship on nations and nationalisms, this is not simply a matter of overgeneralizing from specific European cases: rather, the problem is that basic conceptual markers and typological models have been adapted to invidious distinctions rooted in European history. In this way, idealizing conceptions of the modern nation, more or less explicitly identified with specific cases, are built into a general frame of reference. Other aspects of modernity have been transfigured in similar ways, but in this particular field, the projections seem more resistant to criticism. The reference to a broader modern context touches upon a further obstacle to comparative approaches: the lack of an adequate conceptual framework for the analysis of changing interconnections (and the failure to respond to theoretical innovations in related areas). Attempts to theorize modernity can still draw on the insights of classical sociology, but in that context, its grasp of nations and nationalisms was notoriously limited. When later analysts (especially Gellner 1983) recognized the key role of the national factor in the formation of the modern world, they tended to rely on oversimplified theoretical models that had already been left behind by more critical interpretations of modernity. More recently, the unfolding debate on ‘multiple modernities’ has – so far – not had a major impact on the

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study of nations and nationalisms. Theorists involved in this discussion – especially S. N. Eisenstadt – have signalled the need to reopen the question of collective identities and their historical dynamics, but the challenge has not been taken up by those more directly concerned with the themes at issue here. It is not being suggested that closer contact with changing ways of theorizing modernity could help to construct a general theory of nations and nationalism. As the following discussion should show, there are good reasons to agree with Craig Calhoun’s thesis: ‘grasping nationalism in its multiplicity of forms requires multiple theories’ (Calhoun 1997: 8; it seems obvious that the same applies to nationhood). No comprehensive explanatory or interpretive model has withstood criticism, and no plausible grounds for persisting in the search for such master keys can be established. But a theoretical framework, in the more flexible sense of conceptual guidelines for the analysis of multiple constellations, would not impose a uniform pattern. It could serve to focus comparative approaches on the variety of relationships betweeen nations and nationalism on the one hand, patterns of modernity and modernizing processes on the other. Selective views on this problematic – the nation as a functional complement to other modernizing forces, as an integrative counterweight to modern conflicts and tensions, or as a historical obstacle to the long-term globalizing logic of modernity – have proved more conducive to rival simplifications than to productive discussion.

HANS KOHN: IDEAS, TRADITIONS AND TRAJECTORIES In the whole literature on nations and nationalism, it would be hard to find a more seminal work than Hans Kohn’s Idea of Nationalism (1945). Its influence on the approaches and arguments of later scholars in the field has been much greater than is now commonly acknowledged; and even where direct connections are absent or unlikely, it can be argued

that Kohn’s survey of the whole problematic anticipates the themes and directions of later debates in a more comprehensive fashion than any other work on the subject. The following discussion will focus on specific implications for comparative approaches. In that regard, four main analytical dimensions may be distinguished. At the most basic level, Kohn’s assumptions about the role of nations and nationalisms in the making of the modern world gave a particular twist to the tasks of comparative analysis. As noted above, this context is crucial but still undertheorized; both the questions that Kohn singled out for preferential treatment and those that he conspicuously set aside have figured prominently in more recent work and remain as controversial as ever. Moving on to more sustained comparative history, Kohn adopts a typological distinction between two kinds of nationalism, not simply identical with Western and Eastern versions, but easily assimilable to that dichotomy (first defined in an intra-European sense, but adaptable to a global arena). This is perhaps his most salient contribution to the debate on nations and nationalisms; further inquiry into the origins of the distinction is beyond the scope of this chapter, but there can be no doubt that Kohn’s formulation of it is the most paradigmatic and significant – also in the sense that its nuances and ambiguities suggest ways of problematizing the whole argument. The enduring impact of this dichotomizing model will be analysed at some length below. Kohn used it mainly to clarify and contrast divergent paths of modern history, but his more detailed case studies could not but touch upon premodern antecedents that had left their marks on modern identities and destinies. This third aspect of the problematic is marginal to the main line of argument, but it prefigures issues that came to play a much more central role in comparative studies. Finally, the reconstruction of links between modern and pre-modern phases raises questions about the long-term processes of nation formation that encompass both stages. Although this is, in Kohn’s work, the least developed of the themes to be considered here, some highly suggestive statements point to problems that are – as I will argue – of

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decisive importance for further development of comparative approaches. The Idea of Nationalism was written during World War II and completed when the victory of the Western – Soviet alliance was in sight. Kohn’s comprehensive interpretation of modern history, developed through an analysis of nationalism, is therefore comparable to other works of a similarly ambitious character, written in the later stages or the aftermath of the war. As the title of the book suggests, the history of ideas provides the main thread of the narrative; but the ideas in question are of the kind that Max Weber had in mind when he referred to ideas channelling and mobilizing interests. They are, in other words, what French historians have called ‘idées-forces’. This understanding of nationalism as an active world-historical force, rather than a reflection of pre-existing nationhood, foreshadows influential ideas of later authors. But Kohn did not take the extreme ‘constructivist’ view that nationalism creates nations. As he puts it, ‘nationalities are the products of the living forces of history’ (Kohn 1945: 13); this is a first and strong indication of the need to analyse processes of nation formation. ‘Nationality’ is, in this context, synonymous with what later authors would call nationhood or national identity, and definitely not to be understood as something inferior to a nation. As products of history, nations or national identities are everchanging, under-determined and indefinable in strictly objective terms. Nationalism, as a conscious attribution of meaning, gives them the profile and momentum needed for action on a historical scale. For Kohn, the nationalist infusion of meaning into group identities produced by history was one of the three main currents of modern history. The others were democracy and industrialism. The combination of these three irresistible forces had – since the late eighteenth century – transformed Europe and was now transforming the rest of the world along the same lines. But if nationalism is to be analysed as a distinctively modern and revolutionary movement, it is also true that adequate understanding is impossible without tracing its premodern ancestry. As Kohn puts it: ‘Both the idea

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and the form of nationalism were developed before the age of nationalism’ (1945: 19). The idea emerged in two cultures with more pronounced national characteristics than any other peoples of the ancient world, Greece and Israel; the form is the centralized, sovereign state that took shape under dynastic rule in late medieval and early modern Europe. Kohn did not clarify the concepts of idea and form. But the implications of his statements are far-reaching indeed: if the historical foundations of modern nationalism include the cultural and political legacies to which he refers, and if pre-modern developments went far enough for both the ideological content and the structural framework of nationalism to be clearly prefigured, the radical novelty of modern trends becomes much less obvious. Moreover, the very different cultural and political traditions of non-European civilizations could be expected to affect their respective versions of nationalism, even when the ideologies and movements in question drew on European sources. This would open up a vast field for comparative studies. Kohn did not pursue this line of inquiry. His prime theme was the emergence and ascendancy of nationalism as a dominant force of the modern age, and its interaction with other such forces. But when it came to specifics, industrialism was set aside: beyond general references to the mobilization of the masses, the book has next to nothing to say on its relationship to nationalism. The main emphasis is on the interrelations of nationalism and democracy. As Kohn saw it, this was not a matter for general theorizing: it could only be tackled in historical terms. From an overall historical perspective, it seemed clear that the period between the French Revolution and the end of World War II had been an age of nationalism rather than democracy. On the other hand, Kohn thought that the dynamic of triumphant nationalism pointed beyond itself, towards global democratic forms of integration. Some nationalisms were closer in spirit to this future age of democracy than others. The question of different trends and projects during the age of nationalism was therefore critical, and Kohn was particularly interested in divergent patterns that crystallized at relatively early stages. Such

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contrasts are the key subject of his comparative historical analyses. The dichotomy mentioned above is introduced in this context. Some of Kohn’s formulations define it on a strictly analytical level and allow for changing historical mixtures: Two main concepts of nation ... emerged in the intertwining of influences and conditions; conflicting and fusing, they became embodied in currents of thought in all nations and, to a varying degree, in entire nations. The one was basically a rational and universal concept of political liberty and the rights of man [sic.], looking towards the city of the future ... It found its chief support in the political and economic strength of the educated middle classes and, with a shift of emphasis, in the social-democratically organized labor movements. The other was basically founded on history, on monuments and graveyards, even harking back to the mysteries of ancient times and of tribal solidarity. It stressed the past, the diversity and self-sufficiency of nations. It found its support, above all, among the aristocracy and the masses. (1945: 574)

If the two types are to be found everywhere, in different and changing combinations, it would seem advisable to avoid conflation with specific historical cases. Kohn was, however, strongly inclined to equate the conceptual divide with a regional one: Nationalism in the West arose in an effort to build a nation in the political reality and the struggle of the present without too much sentimental regard for the past; nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe created often, out of the myths of the past and the dreams of the future, an ideal fatherland, closely linked with the past, and expected to become sometime a political reality ... While Western nationalism was, in its origin, connected with the concepts of individual liberty and rational cosmopolitanism current in the eighteenth century, the later nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia easily tended towards a contrary background. (1945: 330)

Kohn added that diffusion of nationalist ideas beyond the West tended to combine with resentment against the West, and this aggravated the contrast between the two types. In searching for an archetypal Western moment in the history of nationalism, Kohn seems to have hesitated between alternative accounts. The book begins with a reference to the French Revolution as the first great manifestation of nationalism, but a later chapter claims that English liberal and universal nationalism reached full maturity in the seventeenth century

(1945: 183). An even more perfect embodiment of the English model then appears across the Atlantic, where the American nation, instead of being ‘determined by “natural” factors of blood and soil, nor by common memories of a long history’, is ‘formed by an idea, an universal idea’ (1945: 324). The disturbing presence of Blacks and Indians is barely mentioned. Kohn had no qualms about describing the American experience as a case of nationalism; his initial focus on France is understandable in the context of his overall picture of the age (this was the most spectacular example of democratic aspirations channelled into national mobilization), but when it comes to more detailed analyses, it is the New World that serves as a model for critical judgement on the retrograde Eastern adaptations of the national idea. The journey into the East begins in Germany, where Kohn stresses the enormous importance of the imperial legacy. His account of various strands and junctures in the history of German nationalism is more balanced than other versions of the same approach. But one major oversimplification should be noted: the vastly exaggerated role of Herder’s thought as a link between German and Slavic patterns of national particularism. This claim has been widely and uncritically accepted by many later writers on the subject; historical research has, however, shown that specific responses to and uses of Herder’s ideas varied from case to case, and were always shaped by indigenous experiences and interests (Sundhaussen 1973). Kohn’s analysis of particular countries in East Central and South-Eastern Europe is perfunctory, but not without some insights into different historical backgrounds. His brief analysis of Czech nationalism (with which he was familiar) is significant for the whole argument of the book: this special case alternated between the roles of an ‘eastern outpost of the liberal West’ and a ‘western outpost of the Slav East’ (1945: 560). It might, by the same token, be a privileged starting point for problematizing the dichotomy. Kohn’s dichotomy has had an exceptionally broad and enduring impact on comparative studies of nationalism, and later authors have often reproduced it in simplified form (for the most extreme version, see Plamenatz 1972). Its

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influence, direct or indirect, is evident in recent work, even when Kohn is not mentioned. For example, Liah Greenfeld’s (1992) comparative history of nationalist ‘paths to modernity’ is in all essentials aligned with Kohn’s model, although it makes no reference to his work. In view of this pervasive presence, it seems appropriate to digress and summarize the main objections. The dichotomy is now most frequently stated in terms of Western against Eastern and civic against ethnic conceptions of nationhood; a general de-legitimation of nationalism has led to its being linked, primarily if not exclusively, to the second category of each conceptual pair. The conflation of analytical types with regional ones obscures the historical combinations and changing balances at work in every case. The ‘unification nationalisms’ that triumphed in Germany and Italy had received very significant inputs from liberalism and the Enlightenment, even if they later proved vulnerable to takeovers and reorientations from another side. The vicissitudes and internal disputes of nationalism in East Central and South-Eastern Europe reflect – among other things – the very specific interaction of Enlightenment and Romanticism in these regions. On the Western side, the French version of integral nationalism was strong and radical enough to give rise to the first fully recognizable form of Fascist ideology. The picture is, in short, too complex for the contrast between a forward-looking Western model and a regressive Eastern one to make any sense. But the analytical distinction as such is also open to criticism. The ‘myth of the civic nation’ (Yack 1998), as a more rational, liberal and universalistic alternative to the ethnic one, tends to rely on restrictive definitions of ethnicity: it is equated with an emphasis on descent (always to a large extent imaginary), linguistic particularism, or a mythical past. But the key question concerns the relationship between cultural and political aspects of nationhood. The cultural identities involved in the historical constitution of nations are subject to conflicting interpretations, but they also impose specific frameworks on such conflicts. A convincing case has yet to be made for the project of purely political nationhood. Those

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who credit early modern England with that kind of breakthrough forget the cultural premises (and ethnic sources) of English identity, not least the role of a readapted myth of the chosen people; and those who celebrate the American creation of a civic nation overlook, among other things, the central role of imperial visions during the first formative phase of American nationalism (for a succinct discussion, see Wehler 2004 [2001]: 55–61). The two last topics mentioned above – pre-modern sources and formative processes – were more marginal to Kohn’s concerns, and their conceptual elaboration does not go beyond vague outlines; but asides and allusions at successive stages of the argument hint at unexplored domains of comparative history. Kohn makes no attempt to clarify the divide between the modern nation and its antecedents. He refers, for example, to national characteristics of ancient Greeks and Jews. On the other hand, these two exemplary cases show how complex the issue is: they represent different combinations of innovative ideas and equally new constructions of collective identity. Although Kohn never tries to theorize the latter aspect as such, it reappears in other contexts. Roman and Christian traditions of universalism, both present in the medieval background to modern nationalism, add other combinations of the same kind. At a later stage, when Kohn moves to analyse Eastern variations on nationalist themes, the emphasis on attachment to the past does not translate into closer attention to forms of identity inherited from the past. Kohn does, however, note the differences due to varying impacts of European cultural currents – Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and Romanticism – on historical collectivities in the region. In brief, the upshot of his reflections on the genealogy of nationalism is a clear indication of the multiple factors and sources to which the nationalist turn relates in both positive and negative ways. As for the concrete processes that culminate in the transition to a global age of nationalism, Kohn’s reference to the early modern state as a form is particularly suggestive: it points to processes of state formation as decisive factors in the formation of nations. More generally speaking, if the genesis of

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modern nationalism depends on the coming together of an idea and a form, the different trajectories that lead to this encounter are an obvious topic for comparative analysis; and so are, by implication, the divergences that develop when models derived from the encounter spread to cultural regions where other ideas and forms have been inherited from the past. All these considerations allow us to identify processes of nation formation as one of Kohn’s anticipated but undeveloped themes. THE MODERNIST TURN AND ITS TROUBLES If Kohn’s Idea of Nationalism represents the high point and the most seminal results of scholarship in its field during the first half of the twentieth century, Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) was probably the most challenging and provocative work produced in the second half.1 Among the scholars who reopened the debate on nations and nationalism in the early 1980s, Gellner was – implicitly – closest to Kohn’s problematic, but he developed it in a very different direction. He revived the question of connections between nationalism and industrialism, left unexplored by Kohn, and proposed an answer that strengthened general theory at the expense of comparative history. Gellner’s key thesis is that nationalism, national culture and the nationstate reflect the historical dynamics and fulfil the functional needs of industrial society. A socio-economic regime based on an increasingly complex division of labour and a permanent growth of applicable knowledge also requires high levels of social mobility; for all these reasons, a shared and standardized literate culture based on a common language and an educational infrastructure maintained by a centralized state, is essential to the industrial form of social life. Where political organization is not in line with these structural principles, pressures for realignment will develop. Nationalism is, in the first instance, the demand for a ‘marriage of culture and power’, more specifically a national culture and a centralized state. But in a more general and

fundamental sense, nationalism creates nations, rather than the other way around: it is synonymous with the active (and inevitably selective) adaptation of cultural and political patterns to the objective logic of industrialism. This is the most ambitious general theory of nations and nationalism ever constructed, and it was obviously meant to provide an alternative to more traditional views on the modern world. As Gellner saw it, Marx and Weber had both been mistaken. The decisive world-historical force of the industrial age was neither the class struggle, nor a self-perpetuating rationalizing dynamic: it was nationalism, embodied in nations possessing or demanding a state. With regard to broader historical horizons, it is worth noting that he considered Islam – the most ‘Protestant’ of world religions – likely to become a functional equivalent of nationalism. In the present context, however, his comparative perspectives on nationalism as such are more relevant. His strong and sweeping general theory set strict limits to comparative inquiry, but some notice had to be taken of the changing constellations in which the supposedly universal logic of industrialism manifested itself. In response to that problem, Gellner sketched two different typological schemes. In his most systematic statement on the subject (Gellner 1983), the functional necessity of the centralized state is taken for granted; the variable is the cultural configuration to which it has to be adapted. On this basis, two main types can be distinguished, and Gellner adds a third more specific case to the list. Nineteenth-century Germany and Italy exemplify the first type: a unifying high culture with a common language exists, but political fragmentation and/or foreign domination block the way to national statehood. The second is the well-known Habsburg pattern that pitted national demands for autonomy – radicalized by resistance – against an imperial centre. Diasporic nationalism, represented by the Zionist movement and its successful bid for statehood, is Gellner’s additional case. This typology is limited to European history, and even within that framework, some further restrictions should be noted. The nationalism of states that achieved an early coordination of cultural and political units – as in Western

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Europe – is simply disregarded. Only the conflictual patterns count. In this latter case, Gellner screens out all questions about historical sources of national cultures: nationalisms vary in regard to their pasts and their particular uses of them, but this has no bearing on their self-contained modern dynamics. The lack of interest in legacies and traditions is most evident in Gellner’s treatment of the Habsburg Empire and its national problems. His famous portrait of ‘Ruritania’, the archetypal national community mistaking creation for revival, is a facetious mix of features borrowed from various parts of the imperial domain. The second typology, set out in a posthumously published reconsideration of central problems in the theory of nationalism, takes a major step forward: it treats the state as a variable, and this means taking the historical dynamics and contingencies of state formation into account. Gellner now divides Europe into four zones (there is no explicit move beyond Europe, but the reader is left with the impression of basic affinities between the eastern part of the continent and regions further to the east). The first zone is the Atlantic seaboard, where states developed – as Gellner would have it – in overall if not complete harmony with cultural boundaries. A brief glance at the twists and turns of state formation on the Iberian peninsula is enough to raise questions about this claim. But Gellner’s main point is clear, and it modifies his earlier approach: he wants to argue that a long-term pre-modern pattern of relations between political and cultural formations, no more natural than any other historical trajectory, gives a specific direction to the problematic of nationhood and nationalism. He then moves on to the second zone, an idiosyncratically defined Central Europe (including Italy, but not Germany’s eastern neighbours). Here the analysis comes closest to the first typology: high cultures have reached the stage needed for nation-building, but the corresponding state structures have to be created out of ultra-fragmented political regimes inherited from the past. Since Gellner has taken a general turn towards more comparative history, the failure to reflect on imperial backgrounds (much more directly involved in

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the German case, but far from irrelevant in the Italian one) may be noted as a shortcoming on his own terms. More serious problems emerge when the focus shifts to other parts of Europe. The Nordic region is simply absent from Gellner’s map. Its distinctive record of state and nation formation does not fit any of the patterns which he discusses. Collective identities began to crystallize around medieval monarchies, but these states were absorbed into a late medieval composite state, which later split into two such formations (Danish and Swedish); in due course, they gave way to the contemporary pattern of nation-states. Having bypassed the North, Gellner subsumes the two last zones under a broadly defined notion of Eastern Europe. The difference between them is more historical than geographical: the fourth is identified with Eastern Europe under Soviet imperial rule. For present purposes, the analysis of the pre-1945 zone is more instructive. Its defining feature is the absence of both fully fledged national cultures and states ready to match them. Although Gellner admits in passing that he may have overstated his case, and that high cultures with a national profile did exist, he defends the description of a ‘multi-coloured mixture of cultures and languages’ (Gellner 1997: 96) as at least approximately true, and makes no reference to historical forms of statehood. The main problem with this model is that a diffuse picture of ‘Eastern Europe’ obscures the historical experience of a much more distinctive region, East Central Europe (centred on three historical kingdoms, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, and their successor states), as well as the problems which this case poses for theories of nations and nationalism (for a forceful reminder, see Zernack 1994). In the region, the interplay of states, empires and nations took forms that differed markedly from developments elsewhere in Europe. The substantive content of these typological constructs is slim; but their interest lies in the forced retreat from general theory towards comparative history. This trend continues in critical reassessments of Gellner’s work. Those who try to use it as a guide to problems have found the core of his theory wanting. The idea

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of a functional nexus between industrialism and nationalism is, on this view, too simplistic to throw any light on the multiple and entangled paths of historical nationalisms, but it may have served as a first step to map a field of inquiry: the impact of modernizing processes, including industrial ones, on the interconnected pattern of state formation and ethnocultural stratification (Hall 1998). There is, however, another side to the impact of Gellner’s work and the reactions against it: it was one – perhaps the most influential – of several attempts to establish a consistently modernist view of nations and nationalisms. In this context, specific arguments mattered less than a general affinity: scholars from different backgrounds converged on positions which critics have described as a ‘modernist orthodoxy’. Since this was a late-coming modernism, it lent itself to amalgamations with the postmodernist currents that gained ground at the same time. But apart from concessions to the Zeitgeist, the historical substance of the modernist paradigm was derived from European experience. Together with an a priori downgrading of long-term processes as determinants of nationhood, this reinforced existing obstacles to comparative study. Conversely, critics of the modernist orthodoxy have reopened questions that call for comparative approaches. The most direct challenge to Gellner’s version of modernism came from Anthony Smith, who began with a reconsideration of links between modern forms and premodern sources of nationhood. Gellner had not claimed that nationalism created nations ex nihilo, but he argued that the modern imperatives at work were so uniform and unilaterally decisive that the infinite variety of available raw materials could be disregarded. As Smith observed, modern nations are, at least in the historically crucial cases, recognizable descendants of much older cultural collectivities for which he adopted the term ethnie. They are ‘named units of population with common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity at least among their elites’ (Smith 1995: 57). If the concept of ethnie is defined in this

way, the nation becomes a more special category, adding three further elements: a shared public culture, a common economy and a legal order of rights and duties. Smith thus started from a basic fact of comparative history, left out of account by a theory intent on closure and universal validity: the genealogical connection between ethnies and nations, easily established in crucial cases and therefore plausibly regarded as a model for nation-building on less clear-cut ethnic foundations. On this basis, he was at first inclined to restate the distinction between Western and Eastern developmental paths: ‘It would indeed not exaggerate the matter to say that what distinguishes nations from ethnie are in some sense “Western” features and qualities’ (Smith 1986: 144). The Eastern conception of nationhood (ideological and practical) can then be portrayed as an attempted shortcut: instead of the more balanced and multidimensional development that had occurred in the West, the addition of statehood to ethnicity was to ensure the completion of other transformations. Both sides of Smith’s basic distinction – the ethnie and the nation – have been questioned by critics. The definition of the ethnic community disregards the linguistic factor, its role in forming or reactivating identities even when the factors mentioned are more or less underdeveloped, and the question of conditions that allow other factors to replace it. On the other hand, the criteria used to distinguish the nation seem imprecise. If public spheres can – as comparative studies have shown – develop in specific forms and directions in different socio-cultural settings, it becomes by the same token difficult to maintain a stark contrast between the absence and presence of a shared public culture. The idea of a common economy poses problems of another kind: the modern dynamic of economic integration has a global dimension, and national unity on this level is therefore undermined by the very processes that made it a plausible goal. If the economic criterion is redefined in terms of a unified economic policy, it presupposes the same foundation as the legal order of rights and duties: separate statehood. At this point, Smith’s model invites the objection that it cannot account for the existence of

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nations without a state. In such conditions, statehood may be achieved through a long struggle, gained in a more abrupt manner through geopolitical upheavals, or relinquished as an unrealistic goal. But if these historical outcomes are converted into defining features, the nation becomes effectively synonymous with the nation-state. In Smith’s most recent writings, his position has – partly in response to critics – evolved in a way that seems to expose all conceptual schemes to open questions of comparative history. He now sees it as ‘at least a moot point whether some nations can be found among the many ethnies of premodern epochs’ (Smith 2001: 14); even a limited number of such cases would put paid to the idea of the nation as a Western upgrading of the ethnie. Conversely, the persistence of ethnic identities in the modern and contemporary world – which Smith also notes – suggests that modern transformations need not be internalized in the manner assumed by the original definition of the nation.

NATION FORMATION: FORMATIVE PHASES AND LONG-TERM PROCESSES As I have argued, implicit references to processes of nation formation appear in influential works and in connection with more central themes, but without an adequate grasp of their importance for comparative study. They have been overshadowed by dichotomizing conceptual schemes that discourage closer analysis of historical constellations, trends and transformations – be it the division between an age of ascendant nationalism and a prehistory of its disjointed potential elements, between Western and Eastern archetypes, or between ethnies and nations. It seems clear that the overall state of the field has evolved towards more explicit focus on nation formation and its historical phases, but approaches to this problematic have been fragmented and ways to integrate them have not been discussed at length. The most decisive step to recentre the study of nations and nationalism on historical processes was taken in virtual isolation from

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mainstream Western debates; it preceded the modernist turn discussed above, but was not properly acknowledged by Western scholars until the critique of modernism had made some headway. Miroslav Hroch’s work on modes and phases of national mobilization in Europe (Hroch 2000 [1984]) is based on research done in the late 1960s. His decision to focus on ‘small nations’, more precisely subordinate nations without an indigenous ruling class, was already a move against established stereotypes: this category cuts across the supposed divide between East and West, and it includes a whole range of cases that differ in regard to structures and sequences. A common framework could, as Hroch argued, be based on an obvious distinction between three developmental phases: the rediscovery of cultural legacies and reactivation of languages by patriotic intellectuals; the stage of broader mobilization through ‘national agitation’; and the formation of nationalist mass organizations seeking political power. Hroch’s analysis dealt primarily with the second stage, ‘phase B’, and the social context in which it unfolded. Detailed examination revealed significant variations from case to case. As Hroch saw it, the most salient conclusion was negative: no social group could be credited with a privileged role in the process of ‘national revival’, and there was ‘no “typical” combination of social groups’ (Hroch 2000 [1984]) that could be identified as essential to a successful transition. The record suggests that interest conflicts coinciding with national differences are of decisive importance, but no central conflict emerges as an invariant factor. In contrast to the emphasis on nationalism among Western scholars, Hroch rejected this – in his view – levelling and nebulous category. His main concern was the formation, articulation and diffusion of national consciousness. As noted at the beginning, it may be possible to define nationalism in a way that does not conflate different levels of articulation. But in the present context, this issue is less important than the broader implications of Hroch’s research programme. He explicitly linked the focus on national movements of non-dominant ethnic groups, more precisely on contrasts and

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parallels during key parts of their trajectories, to a multi-level perspective on processes of nation formation. A particularly intensive study of a closely circumscribed process thus served to ground a more general reorientation. The three phases mentioned above add up to a clearly demarcated episode in the longue durée of nation formation. This does not mean that we are dealing with a self-contained story: it is linked to the more comprehensive modern transformation of European societies. Hroch’s conception of this macro-historical transition has evolved far beyond the Marxian framework of his earlier writings, and now allows for the autonomous role of political and cultural forces in shaping the multiple paths from the European ancien régime to a spectrum of divergent but interconnected modernities (see especially Hroch 2004). National movements differ not least because of their varying historical relationships to the overall dynamics of modernization in general and capitalist development in particular. Finally, the long-term process of nation formation can be traced back to pre-modern sources and divided into ‘two distinct stages of unequal length and intensity. The first stage had an extensive character and began during the Middle Ages. The second, which was intensive and decisive, took place during the nineteenth century’ (Hroch 2000 [1984]: XIII). This periodization is obviously tailored to the European record, and does not prejudge the question of comparable long-term processes with different rhythms and chronological divisions in other parts of the world. To conclude, possible connections with other comparative-historical approaches to processes of nation formation should be briefly explored. Analysts of state formation in Europe have, for obvious reasons, often touched upon issues related to the role and place of nations – or their pre-modern antecedents – in that process. Stein Rokkan’s work (posthumously systematized in Flora 1998) dealt with Western European patterns of political development in great detail and took some note of different dynamics at work further to the east. The main emphasis was, however, on links between long-term transformations of political power and modern forms of representative government; within this

frame of reference, nation formation as such can only play a marginal role. Rokkan preferred the term ‘nation-building’, and his most interesting reflections on that topic had to do with the varying relationships between state structures and linguistic communities. Here his work provides a useful corrective to other conceptions of ethnic origins, less attentive to the linguistic factor. The most convincing and decisive work on pre-modern phases of nation formation has been done by medievalists, especially by German and East Central European ones (for a succinct summary, see Seibt 2002; for a seminal programmatic statement, see Schlesinger 1978; Zientara 1997 is one of the most representative works in this vein).2 Their research on medieval forms, developments and conceptions of nationhood has clarified several aspects of the problem. Ways of collective self-identification, the vocabulary used to articulate them and the corresponding modes of demarcation from other collectivities have been studied in detail. These analyses have, at the same time, effectively refuted some frequent objections to the idea of medieval nation formation. The relevant vocabulary is neither identical with the terms of modern discourse, nor a mere prefiguration of their meanings, but it has significant points of contact and reflects historical trends that continued beyond the transition to modernity; in particular, the term natio may have had fluctuating meanings in different contexts, but as has been shown, its medieval uses are more meaningfully related to modern ones than the modernists have wanted to admit. The political dimensions of medieval nationhood are, especially when linked to emerging states and dynastic continuity, too important for a stark distinction between ethnie and nation to be applicable. And as for the most fundamental objection, the contrast commonly drawn between the egalitarian self-definition of the modern nation and the purely elite character of its medieval precursors, it must at least be toned down. Medieval references to political nationhood did not have the same scope as modern ones, but they were not rigidly limited to the social boundaries of ruling elites; even when primarily made on behalf of nobilities,

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they involved some kind of appeal to a broader collective identity, and this could be made more explicit in critical situations (in the late medieval phase, the most far-reaching innovations of that kind occurred during the Hussite revolution in Bohemia). Conversely, the more inclusive character of the modern nation manifests itself in transformative processes that unfold in different ways and at a varying pace. There are epoch-making contrasts between medieval and modern patterns, but they have to do with historical dynamics rather than invariant defining features. On the other hand, the broader civilizational setting of medieval nation formation differed from modern conditions as well as from other parts of the pre-modern world. National identities and collectivities emerged in the context of Western Christendom as a civilization, and more specifically within the socio-cultural space provided by a very distinctive configuration: the presence of two interconnected but inevitably rival embodiments of civilizational unity, the papacy and the empire. National differentiation was one aspect of the structural and cultural pluralism that developed on this basis. The reconstruction of medieval backgrounds is therefore bound to raise questions that call for comparative civilizational approaches. This is a particularly promising field for comparative studies, but very little has so far been done to explore it (for reflections on Christianity and nation formation, not explicitly civilizational but to a certain extent translatable into such terms, see Hastings 1997). Some preliminary distinctions may be suggested. It seems clear that some civilizational patterns and traditions are more favourable to nation formation than others: the European path stands out as a particularly salient case, with implications and consequences no less complex and ambiguous than its other distinctive features. But nonEuropean examples of nation formation as a persistent and dominant trend, beginning with the Japanese experience, are too obvious for the idea of a radical European exceptionalism to be tenable. As the Japanese record also suggests, civilizational contexts may give rise to specific forms of nationhood and nationalism.

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Finally, this problematic should also be considered from the opposite angle: the civilizational dimensions or aspirations that may be built into national identity. In the introduction to their collection on Asian forms of the nation, mentioned at the beginning, Tönnesson and Antlöv (1996) proposed the typological concept of a ‘civilizational nation’, but without any explicit definition or detailed illustration. However, the examples they mention in passing indicate what they have in mind: India and China appear as civilizational nations, at least in the making, whereas Russia and the United States are the major Western cases (Germany is tentatively described as a failed civilizational nation). National identities can, on this view, develop in ways and on levels that involve distinctively civilizational claims or visions. This idea seems to link up with classical sources. Marcel Mauss had, in his seminal but very unsystematic reflections on the notion of civilizations in the plural, noted the possibility of nations ‘singularizing’ themselves within civilizational contexts, and, by implication, through varying ways of appropriating, elaborating and transforming a shared civilizational basis. This line of thought has yet to find adequate outlets in comparative studies.

NOTES 1 It has often been suggested that the debate on nations and nationalism took a fundamentally new turn in the last quarter of the twentieth century. To take a recent example, Wehler (2004 [2001]: 8) argues that earlier analysts worked with an implicit ‘basis – superstructure’ model of the relationship between nation and nationalism, and that this was only overcome by the new approaches of the 1980s. Kohn’s argument is, as the above discussion should have shown, too complex to be subsumed under any version of the basis–superstructure model (in fact, affinities of that kind are much more evident in Gellner’s work); and its thematic structure prefigures much of the later discussion. For present purposes, Kohn’s later work is much less important than The Idea of Nationalism. A planned second book on the same scale, on developments during the global age of nationalism, was never completed. 2 The English-language discussion has largely ignored German scholarship on nations and nationalism. But some noteworthy older contributions have also been neglected by recent German writers on the subject. A striking example is Ziegler 1932: the first systematic attempt to integrate the

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modern idea of national sovereignty into Weber’s unfinished theory of legitimacy, and to adapt Weber’s concepts to this new field. Thanks are due to Andreas Anter for drawing my attention to this forgotten book.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bloom, S. F. (1941) The World of Nations. New York: Oxford University Press. Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Flora, P. (ed., with S. Kuhnle and D. Urwin) (1998) State Formation, Nation Building and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan, Based on His Collected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1997) Nationalism. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press. Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, J. A. (ed.) (1998) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hastings, A. (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hroch, M. (2000 [1984]) Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. New York: Columbia University Press. Hroch, M. (2004) ‘From ethnic group toward the modern nation: The Czech case’; Nations and Nationalism, 10: 1–2, 95–108. Kohn, H. (1945) The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origin and Background. New York: Macmillan.

Maruyama, M. (1963) Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics. London: Oxford University Press. Plamenatz, J. (1972) ‘Two Types of Nationalism’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea. Canberra: The Australian University Press. pp. 22–36. Schlesinger, W. (1978) ‘Die Entstehung der Nationen. Gedanken zu einem Forschungsprogramm’, in H. Beumann and W. Schröder (eds), Aspekte der Nationenbildung im Mittelalter (Nationes, Bd. 1). Sigmaringen: Thorbecke. pp. 11–62. Seibt, F. (2002) ‘Nationalismustheorien und Mediaevistik’, in Deutsche, Tschechen, Sudetendeutsche. Munich: Oldenbourg. pp. 127–38. Smith, A. D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, A. D. (1995) Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smith, A. D. (2001) Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sundhaussen, H. (1973) Der Einfluss der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Völkern der Habsburger Monarchie. Munich: Oldenbourg. Tönnesson, S. and Antlöv, H. (1996) (eds), Asian Forms of the Nation. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Wehler, H. U. (2004 [2001]) Nationalismus: Geschichte – Formen – Folgen. Munich: Beck. Yack, B. (1998) ‘The Myth of the Civic Nation’, in R. Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. pp. 103–18. Zernack, K. (1994) ‘Zum Problem der kollektiven Identität in Ostmitteleuropa’, in H. Berding (ed.), Nationales Bewusstsein und kollektive Identität II. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. pp. 176–88. Ziegler, H. O. (1932) Die moderne Nation. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Zientara, B. (1997) Frühzeit der europäischen Nationen. Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag.

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5 Cultural Approaches to Nationalism DANIEL A. SEGAL AND RICHARD HANDLER

Broadly speaking, one can identify two distinct, even antithetical,‘cultural approaches’ to nationalism. The first is the more established of the two and can be identified as ‘the study of national cultures’ or (in an older phrasing) ‘the study of national character’; the second might best be termed ‘the cultural analysis of nationalism’. The study of national cultures takes the idea of ‘nations’, understood as fundamental groupings within humanity, to be self-evident. Starting from this conceptual foundation, it proceeds to catalog the distinctive properties of each grouping recognized as a ‘nation’ or ‘people’. It is a study of what is French about ‘the French’, Chinese about ‘the Chinese’, Aussie about ‘the Aussies’, Tswana about ‘the Tswana’, and so on. The analysis of the culture of nationalism, by contrast, takes ‘nations’ to be a distinctive cultural form, and it seeks to recognize the contingent principles of this cultural form and to trace their various uses in history. On this second approach, both the parsing of humanity into national units, and the differentiation of those units, are results of what social actors have done with those principles. To study nations and their differences without reference to this – as occurs in the study of national cultures – is to accord nations and their distinctive qualities a misplaced stability and concreteness. The obverse is also true. To

foreground the contingent principles of nationalism requires that our inquiry not be restricted to some specific manifestation of these principles in a particular sort of grouping or institution, as if that grouping or institution were a permanent type within a finite and transhistorical set of human possibilities. We thus cannot limit our inquiry to examples that pass some ‘authenticity’ test for nations, nor even to the larger set of phenomena that have, by various criteria, been designated as a ‘nation’ in various contexts. An important concomitant of the recognition of the contingency of nations is thus the difficult notion that we cannot bound off, or delimit, ‘the nation’ as a discrete social form, but must grapple instead with an untidy range of variants – including some designated as ‘races’ and ‘ethnic’ groups – that are found within a selected swath of human history. As a matter of convenience, one might speak of this larger range of variants as so many forms of ‘identity groupings’. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this larger set is an analytic contrivance, albeit a motivated one, that has been set up to foreground and illumine the contingency of the phenomena within it. Identity groupings should not, in other words, themselves be mistaken for a universal aspect of social life, any more than nations. Indeed, the very concept of

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‘identity’, as it is used in both sociology and psychology, is peculiar to modern Western ideology (Gleason 1983; Handler 1994). So too, it is valuable to emphasize that the swath of history from which we draw a given set of variants is not something dictated or given to us by the phenomena, but is something that must be selected.

NATIONALISM AND THE PRINCIPLE OF SIMILITUDE The contingent principles of nationalism (and of various related phenomena) can be seen as a special case of commonsense tenets, prevalent in modernity, about what constitutes an individual thing or unit. By these commonsense tenets, each thing of any sort is (i) bounded and (ii) defined by a distinct trait, or traitbundle, that is shared by any and all of the components of that thing. On this view, an individual thing does not blur into other things and it has no components that lack a core of sameness with its other components and, ultimately, with the thing itself. That is, each thing ‘has’ an identity; or, in other terms, it is ‘identical to’ itself and distinct from all other things. That ‘all the cells of our body share the same DNA’ fits quite facilely into this everyday philosophy of things. Yet this fit, however canny, should not be taken as proof of this general ontological orientation, for not every formation ‘in nature’ conforms so neatly or readily to it. The mitochondria in our cells, for instance, have their own DNA, distinct from the DNA (we speak of as being) ‘of our body’. Were we to apply the general rule of thing-ness rigorously then, we might even conclude that biological organisms are loci of hybridity, rather than individuated entities. Yet whatever the relationship of the everyday philosophy of things to biology (or other ‘natural’ phenomena), what is important for our purposes is that the cultural principles of nationalism can be recognized as transpositions of these same tenets to the domain of social collectivities. In nationalist thought and practice, each nation is at once bounded and different

from other nations (and from any ‘people’ not accorded the status of a nation) by virtue of a trait, or trait-bundle, possessed by all persons within the nation and yet none outside itself. This is to say, each nation is constituted on the basis of a principle of similitude of its components. It is the (purported) fact of being alike – of ‘sharing’ identity, culture, values, or whatever – that constitutes both membership in and the boundary of the national group or collectivity. From this perspective, ‘like persons’ objectively and self-evidently ‘go together’ and, by virtue of this, constitute a discrete collectivity that is distinguished from all other collectivities in some essential way. In the phrasing of Louis Dumont – who in many ways pioneered the cultural analysis of nationalism – nationalists imagine each nation as both a collection of like individuals and as an individual collectivity (1970). The collectivity is understood to be composed of the individual persons, and all of those persons are understood to partake, without exception, in the identity of the latter. Put otherwise, the collective individual is figured as ‘possessing’ distinct features or traits – variously termed its ‘identity’, ‘culture’, or ‘character’ – and those features are imagined to inhere in and mark each human individual who ‘belongs to’ the collectivity. Something closely akin to this principle of similitude is also a commonplace of social science models of collectivities or groups. True, there are prominent social scientific theories that foreground conflict instead of consensus, hybridity instead of homogeneity. But in most of these theories, the terms contrasting with sameness are nonetheless marked, in the sense that they are seen as challenges to, rather than as the basis of, group formation and even sociality. The primary exception to this generalization is arguably work in the French structuralist tradition that identifies reciprocity or exchange – between two or more differentiated parties – as the very core of sociality (LéviStrauss 1969: ch. 5; Mauss 1967), and it was from the perspective of this paradigmatic tradition that Dumont fashioned his insights into the contingency of the nation as a social form. But most social science and historical studies of nationalism have instead

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operated from, and thereby offered, a nationalist perspective – as we have already indicated for the study of national cultures. In other words, most scholarship on nationalism has taken up, if in highly formalized terms, very much the same questions that nationalists themselves address and has failed to ask questions about the presuppositions, or givens, of nationalism.

THE DISCURSIVE CHALLENGE OF NATIONAL INDIVIDUALITY Both nationalist proponents and their scholarly brethren know that the persons of a given nationality differ in various ways. For one thing, a prevalent view in modernity holds that there is a basic, even an essential, difference between male and female persons, cutting across all national kinds. Yet as a rule, similitude in this particular dimension of personal differentiation (‘sex’, let us call it) is seen as providing a basis only for recurring sociality, and not for functional wholes or social collectivities. Indeed, in modernity, it is sex complementarity, rather than similitude, that is normativized as the proper foundation for ‘the family’, while ‘the family’, in turn, is construed as essential for the moral health of the nation (as evidenced most strikingly by the stubborn persistence of discomfort with ‘gay marriage’). Sex differentiation is thus made so as to fit into, rather than be in tension with, groupings designated as nations. By contrast, what is consistently unsettling to the designation of a social grouping as ‘a nation’ is that modern ideology fetishizes the uniqueness of each individual person, at once in parallel and tension with the nationalist view that each nation is a unique collectivity. Nationalists thus face the discursive challenge of showing just how a particular grouping of persons, replete with their distinctive selves, are nonetheless alike such that they constitute one and only one nation. In general, responses to this challenge take the form of a claim that the individuals of each nation share some ‘common denominator’ of similitude. Such proclamations at once recognize individual differences among

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co-nationals and posit a core set of features that establish the unity and boundedness of the nation, however limited that set may be. What is striking for our purposes is that even when the existence of a nation is least contested, neither outside observers nor the nation’s most patriotic proponents are ever able to reach closure in their attempts to identify what trait, or trait-bundle, defines the shared national identity, or character, of the nation. Nationalist movements are instead engaged in a ceaseless politics of culture – an ongoing effort to identify, create, and maintain the purported common denominator of their national identity (Handler 1988). The approaches taken by nationalist movements to this open-ended project fit two broad types. The common denominator of similitude is identified as either an objective or a subjective phenomenon. When nationalists make objectivist claims, they define national identity in terms of social and cultural traits that, they claim, members of a nation possess regardless of any sentiment, belief, or consciousness of those persons. When nationalists make subjectivist claims, they define national identity in terms of the consciousness of those within a nation, which is said to provide the similitude necessary for collective existence, even if the consciousness has no grounding outside or beyond itself, that is, outside of or beyond the very belief in national unity. In the flow of social life, moreover, we find nationalists both alternating between and combining these two strategies. Proceeding in concert with nationalist discourse, scholarship on nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century spilled endless ink in attempts to trace the objective features that united various sets of persons as a nation. Time and again, however, such attempts foundered in the face of contrary evidence. If one scholar argued that such-andsuch a nation was united by the possession of shared political ideals, folkways, religious beliefs, or whatever, then another scholar would point to the existence of socially significant persons within the same grouping who rejected those ideals, or did not participate in the specified cultural practices, or whatever, but who asserted their right to belong. So too,

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when scholars made general claims about the genre, or type, of features that defined nations – claiming that, say, ‘language’, ‘race’, or something else was crucial for the division of humanity into nations – some other scholar would point to some visibly contrary case, in which that same feature (or bundle of features) was either common to many nations or exhibited diversity within a given nation. Yet these scholarly revelations notwithstanding, the objectivist vision persisted, and indeed persists to this day, in scholarship on nationalism, as well as in nationalist ideologies and much everyday thought in our nationalized world. In the second half of the twentieth century, as the study of ‘the new nations’ of the decolonizing world came to the fore, scholars gave ever-greater weight to the importance of subjective sources of national unity. Again and again, they perceived the political boundaries that emerged in the wake of decolonization to be ‘artificial’ relative to indigenous social categories and boundaries. This artificiality was understood to be a result either of a hypertrophe of heterogeneity in the non-West (‘tribalism’) or of ‘mistakes’ made by colonial functionaries in setting political boundaries. What was unrecognized – because it would have required stepping outside of nationalist discourse – was that the sole reason that the (marginally) older nations of Europe were not also seen to be artificial was because of the success of their nationalist movements in displacing and masking difference, and not because these nations were intrinsically any less artificial or socially fabricated than nations elsewhere (Segal 1988; Handler and Segal 1992). In his highly influential work, for instance, Clifford Geertz promoted an ‘integrative revolution’ for the new nations, that is, he advocated the forging of subjective national sentiments in postcolonial societies in the face of supposedly ‘primordial’ ethnic, religious and cultural diversity (1973: 255–310). Thus, rather than recognizing the inescapable contingency of nations per se, Geertz saw a need for postcolonial states to create – by artifice – the unity and similitude he presumed had preceded, rather than resulted from, nationalist movements in European history.

It was, moreover, Geertz’s fellow Indonesianist, Benedict Anderson (1983), who coined the phrase that has most defined the study of nationalism in the last two decades of the twentieth century: ‘imagined communities’. Anderson’s focus on the ways in which societies could imagine themselves as united decisively moved the debate (at least among scholars) from objectivist to subjectivist conceptions of national unity. Scholars no longer expected to be able to define the objective cultural features that all members of a given nation shared; but they understood that the subjective ‘sense of belonging’ that nation-states fostered in their citizens, coupled with a state-promoted national imaginary (symbols and stories with which people learned to identify), was enough to create and maintain nations. Indeed, in this perspective, there was no other means to do it. We should not, however, draw the boundary too neatly between an earlier scholarship, in which objectivist conceptions of nationhood were expected, and later work more focused on subjective factors. On the one hand, many scholars from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries notably, Ernest Renan (1947 [1882]), wrote about the subjective underpinnings of national identity. And there was plenty of visible ‘nation-building’ in Europe leading up to, and then following, World War I – social turmoil on a grand scale, in which scholars of nationalism saw national cultures, languages and identities forged before their eyes. On the other hand, in the most recent scholarship, Anderson’s notion of the imagined community has all too often been unwittingly subsumed within an objectivist framework. With all the recent enthusiasm for ‘interpretive social science’, ‘symbolic anthropology’ and ‘the sociology of culture’, it has been easy for scholars to celebrate Anderson’s notion of the imagined community, while going on to treat such communities in epistemologically traditional ways – that is, as people who, because they have come to share (subjectively, or intersubjectively) a national imaginary, have constituted themselves (objectively) as a bounded, homogeneous group. Thus, even recent interpretive or symbolic approaches to nationalism, inspired in particular by Anderson, have not broken decisively with

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nationalist epistemology to attain the kind of cultural approach we sketch and advocate here.

NATIONALISM REVEALED BY COMPARISONS WITHIN MODERNITY The most reliable key to recognizing what is otherwise taken for granted – and for seeing the contingency of what is absolutized by virtue of being presuppposed – is comparison (Bakhtin 1981; Sahlins 2004: 4–5; Segal 1999; Todorov 1984). Such comparison can take a variety of forms. Dumont, as we have suggested, gained an important sense of the contingency of nations by seeing their distinctiveness as a social form relative to the idea that the foundation of human sociality was not similitude but exchange between differentiated parties (‘Self’ and ‘Other’). This view had emerged in French social thought in response to studies of such distant ethnographic cases as the potlatch of Northwest North America and the kula trade of the Western Pacific (Mauss 1967). Radical incommensurability thus served to make visible the contingency of the familiar – in this case, of the nation. Taking this social theoretical achievement as a ‘way in’, we can deepen our understanding of ‘the nation’ as a cultural form with additional comparisons. More specifically, situating the nation in relation to other manifestations of the principle of similitude in social life can provide a finer-grained picture of nations and their contingencies. Broadly speaking, the principle of similitude has been used to generate a range of social forms, which have been given such names as ‘races’, ‘ethnic groups’, ‘peoples’ and ‘nations’. These terms have never been used with formal rigor; rather, each term has been used for more than one of these variant forms, just as different ones of these terms have been used in interchangeable and overlapping ways at times. To give a concrete example, there are instances when a given grouping has been called, say, ‘a nation’ but in a fashion that has figured the grouping as ‘a race’, in the sense that the grouping’s core of sameness has been figured as biological and inherited. In addition, the

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very range of such forms has changed over time, as with shifts in notions of inheritability in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, as well as the subsequent emergence of knowledge of ‘genes’. Finally, it is not uncommon that a given grouping has been accorded different forms in different contexts. ‘Jews’, for instance, were often positioned as a distinct race in the first half of the twentieth century, with Germany being only the most remembered instance of this. Yet in the wake of the Third Reich and its horrors, Jews have more often been designated as a distinct ethnic group within a larger ‘white race’ (Brodkin 1998; Jacobson 1998; Segal 2002; and for a comparable discussion of the Irish, see Ignatiev 1995). These three dimensions of complexity mean that there is no stable or objective fact about whether a given grouping really is or is not a nation, a race, an ethnic kind, or yet some other form. Nonetheless, a great deal of socialscientific analysis has lost itself in the mistaken task of making definitive pronouncements about such matters. The correct approach, on our view, is to focus instead on the range of social forms produced by social actors using and transposing the underlying principle of similitude. The more general lesson here is that cultural analysis loses its footing when it seeks to take terms from social life – such as ‘nation’ and ‘race’ – and establish rigorous and fixed definitions for them, in effect treating them as analytic concepts, rather than as terms from social life that must be mapped and analyzed. The job of the cultural analyst is to probe the contingent meanings and uses of such terms, not to fix their meaning. In other words, rather than seeking to adjudicate what a nation or a race or an ethnic kind really is, the cultural analyst should instead ask: what is it that social actors have done when they have constructed a grouping as a nation, rather than a race or an ethnic kind or something else? In addressing such questions, however, we must keep in mind that they are irreducibly historical, which is to say that the meaning of nation-ness at a given historical moment is at once rooted in, but never simply determined by, precedents. Thus, the answers we provide can never pin down the truth or essential core of nation-making,

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race-making, or ethnogenesis (the making of an ethnic kind); rather, we can do no more or less than analyze the precedential uses of these terms, as they inform the present. If we look backward from the present to the late eighteenth century, for instance, we can observe that throughout this period, designations of nationhood have been used to further ‘political independence’ for a given grouping, and more specifically, to further political independence in the form of ‘statehood’. At the same time, the obverse has also been true: designations of the existing population of a state (exclusive of any internal ‘minority’) as ‘a nation’ have been used to further the legitimation of states and their institutions. Statehood, in turn, has entailed a prominent (though never a singular) linkage with the project of ‘development’ or ‘modernization’. This transitive articulation of nationhood with development – through statehood – can be observed as early as the first decades of the eighteenth century, notably in the nationalism of Peter the Great, but it grew in prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century and, even more so, in the second half of the twentieth century, with global decolonization. One marker of the rise in prominence of development as an aspect of the fulfillment of nationhood can be found in another collateral idiom – that of ‘civilization’. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ‘Christian’ was the most common adjective preceding, and thereby identifying the proper form of, civilization; this understanding of civilization did not give prominence to science, technology, or economic growth. By contrast, the early twentieth-century shift to ‘Western’ as the default adjective before civilization registered a vision of civilization defined in terms of technological innovations, scientific progress and sustained economic expansion – which is to say, in terms of development. It also defined the propensity to initiate and pioneer development as a distinctive trait of the societies and peoples of ‘the West’. The constellation of articulations has had at least two important effects. First, the identification of the propensity for development as Western, combined with the identification of development as an ideal of nationhood,

produced judgments that various non-Western peoples were not national in stature – and hence could not be expected to govern themselves. In other words, the ostensible absence of development outside the West has been used to distinguish between national and less than national peoples. This played a particularly important role in legitimating colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. Second, and consistent with this first effect, for all peoples identified as non-Western, claims to nationhood have entailed a contradiction, since their pursuit of development is seen as precisely contrary to the ideal of living in accord with their distinct national character (that is, to being true to one’s own national Self). Japanese modernity, for instance, is often figured as imitative and soulless – as something it borrowed from the West – while the modernity of the United States is registered as a self-evident manifestation of ‘the American spirit’, itself construed as a specific instance of a distinctively Western spirit or tradition. Indeed, the very success of the pursuit of development in Japan since the Meiji era has meant that a talent for ‘mimicry’ has come to be recognized as fundamental to Japanese national character. One does not find, however, a parallel perception that industrialization’s ‘spread’ from England to America was due to an American propensity for mimicry. Precisely because the United States is identified as a component of Western civilization, and for no other reason, industrialization in late nineteenth-century America is registered as ‘American’ and hence authentic, rather than as something borrowed. To note one more illustration of this point, Nobel laureate Vidia Naipaul has famously disparaged postcolonial leaders in Africa and the Caribbean as ‘mimic men’ whose policies of modernization failed precisely because they ‘aped’, without having internalized, the institutions and values of the West (Naipaul 1967). For our purposes, what is significant is that in Naipaul’s formulation, the propensity for development and modernity is figured as the distinctive cultural property of the West and, by extension, its nations. Over this same historical span, designations of various groupings as ‘a race’ have diverged, in their meanings and uses, from designations of

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nationhood in at least two important ways. First, racial designations have much more consistently figured the core of sameness of a given grouping as something biological and inherited. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind, however, that notions of biology and heritability have undergone significant revision and alteration over time, as a result of semi-autonomous processes of change in the history of science. Many nineteenth-century designations of racial status, for instance, did not presume a sharp division of nature and nurture, inherited and acquired traits. Instead, such designations treated racial traits as inherited and subject to alteration by the environment, including by learning, though at some unspecified, if presumably quite slow, rate (Stocking 2001). It is also important to remember that this key dimension of racial designations – that the core of sameness is construed as biological and inherited – was also present in many national designations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. National designations over this span of time exhibit greater variety in terms of how similitude is accounted for than do racial designations, but they include the recourse to biology and inheritability that is characteristic of the latter. Where there has been much greater, though not complete, divergence between national designations and racial designations has been in their social uses, that is, in the projects that they have been made to serve. In the case of national designations, as we noted, the most characteristic project has been to further claims to political independence, and concomitantly, the building of states and the pursuit of development. In the case of racial designations, the most characteristic project has been to place persons into the system of production or, in simple terms, into class positions. Racialized and specifically ‘Africanized’ slavery in the plantation system of the Americas is only the most obvious instance of this. But it is important to recognize that basing the assignment of class positions on racial designations has meant doing something more than distributing a given population of persons into a set of pre-existing or autonomous class positions. Rather, filling such positions by racial designations has played a profound role in the

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making of those positions and, in consequence, in shaping the overall system they compose – that is, in shaping the very system of production itself. Most generally, filling positions in the system of production by racial designations has produced class positions that are naturalized, and this in turn has supported greater stratification, differentiation and separation of class positions than would otherwise be the case (Holt 2000; Segal 1993, 1998). Yet that racialization has amplified class stratification and differentiation – or even that it has amplified class domination – does not mean that racialization is functional for class domination or, say, for the extraction of surplus value by dominant classes. Rather, as the history of slave plantations makes dramatically clear, the amplification of class stratification is often anything but functional, precisely because amplified domination often fuels resistance. In other words, while there are certainly historical moments when racial designations have served class domination, it is also the case that at other moments the very articulation of racial designations with class differentiation has made class domination more, not less, contested – less, not more, stable. So too, it would be a mistake to think that racialized designations are a necessary feature of extreme class stratification and differentiation. Instead, and quite sadly, it appears as if beliefs in natural differences between individuals – in, say, ‘intelligence’ – can well replace racialized designations in supporting quite fantastic degrees of class stratification and differentiation. A close variant of the use of racial designations to assign persons class positions has been their use to keep various social groupings subordinate in status and/or political power. In the context of late nineteenth- and twentiethcentury colonialisms, for instance, racial designations (typically linked to claims about a grouping’s propensity for development) were used to distinguish between peoples who did and did not have a legitimate claim to nationhood and, thus, political independence. In this usage, ‘race’ did not so much differentiate among ‘nations’ as it differentiated between fully ‘national’ peoples and those who were ‘backward’ or merely ‘tribal’.

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We turn, finally, to ‘ethnicity’ as a designation of a form of collectivity. That ethnicity emerged as a distinct designation for social groupings (that is, in contrastive distribution with ‘race’ and ‘nation’) only in the twentieth century is itself an indication that its distinct meanings and uses crystallized in response to prior uses of race and nation. For example, whereas racial designations have most often been used to affix stigmatized groupings to subordinated class and status positions, designations of ethnicity have often been used in attempts to valorize and reposition these very social groupings (Urciuoli 1996: 15–40). At the same time, designations of ethnicity typically differ from those of nationality in that the former are often used to fit diversity into an encompassing nation, rather than to designate a group meriting ‘independence’. The terms in such hyphenated phrases as Irish-American and African-American cannot be interchanged, for the first term specifies a type of the second. In short, a key element of the uses and meaning of ethnicity is that it sub-cedes nationality, thereby providing an important means for nations to contain ‘diversity’. Notwithstanding the distinct meanings and uses of some ethnic designations, many ethnic designations overlap in their meanings and uses with racial and/or national designations. The term ‘ethnic’ operates much like a racial designation when social actors speak of ‘ethnic cleansing’, meaning mass killing; and it operates much like nationalist designations in ‘ethnic separatist movements’. Put otherwise, not everything ‘ethnic’ is a festival. ‘Ethnicity’ is, in sum, the most multivocal and chameleon-like of these three related designations of groupings. It is, in a sense, the repository of the capacious range of variants that, to date, have emerged from uses of the principle of similitude applied to social groupings. Were there no element of tragedy in the meanings and uses accumulated in this term – were there not so many atrocities in the name of ‘ethnic kinds’ – one might even say that the term’s fantastic polysemy was Borges-esque (see, for instance, Borges 1966, famously cited in Foucault 1970). Along with noting the range of variation represented by national, racial and ethnic

designations, it is also fruitful to recognize what these designations have in common, given that all are structured by the principle of similitude. One important effect of all three designations, for instance, is that they have served to allot portions of the past differentially to the living. This in turn has meant that earlier conflicts have become, in retrospect, precedents for highly refractory cycles of violence (Naimark 2001). What is responsible for this outcome is not that the past is remembered, but the particular manner in which it is remembered. More specifically, the linking of subject positions in past traumas to present-day identities typically makes those traumas charters for continued social divisions and struggles, rather than cautionary tales about how easily any of us could become either a victimizer or a victim. A related though more subtle ramification of the propensity of identity designations to allot the past differentially to the living is that representations of the past, when they are organized in terms of contemporary identity terms, serve to differentiate, and project social divisions into, their audiences – as, for example, with representations of African-American slavery at Colonial Williamsburg (Handler and Gable 1997) or public commemorations of Nazi atrocities (Koss 2004). The other side of this same coin is that when the past is not figured in these terms, it is typically received as if it is mere history and not something contiguous with the present. For American undergraduates, for example, a lecture about an early modern massacre of peasants is generally taken as dry fact, until and unless an ethnic or national or racial designation takes the place of ‘peasant’ in the narrative, however anachronistically.

CONCLUSION Our analysis of ‘national’ designations has located them in a messy and open-ended field of variants, variants that have been constructed by social actors working with and transposing the contingent principle of constituting collectivities on the basis of similitude. Our approach has, in effect, dissolved ‘nationalism’ as a distinct

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phenomenon, very much as Lévi-Strauss at an earlier moment dissolved ‘totemism’ as a distinct phenomenon (1963). We have proceeded in this way to resist the widespread practice of trying to refine and clarify the concept of nation for analytic or social scientific uses. That practice, we have argued, masks the contingency of nations and thereby makes it impossible to go beyond the nationalist misrecognition of nations as objective, rather than socially forged, groupings of persons. The best way to understand nations and nationalism, in our view, is to abandon the practice of using these terms to delimit a discrete subject of social scientific inquiry. The analysis of the culture of nationalism thus displaces its very subject matter. REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Borges, J. (1966) ‘The Analytic Language of John Wilkins’, in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Brodkin, K. (1998) How Jews Became White Folks and what that Says about Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dumont, L. (1970) ‘Religion, Politics, and Society in the Individualistic Universe’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 31–45. Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gleason, P. (1983) ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History, 69: 910–31. Handler, R. (1988) Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Handler, R. (1994) ‘Is “Identity” a Useful CrossCultural Concept?’, in J. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Handler, R. and Gable, E. (1997) The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Handler, R. and Segal, D. (1992) ‘How European is Nationalism?’, Social Analysis, 32: 1–15. Holt, T. (2000) The Problem of Race in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ignatiev, N. (1995) How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge. Jacobson, M. (1998) Whiteness of a Different Color. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Koss, J. (2004) ‘Coming to Terms with the Present’, Grey Room, 16: 116–34. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) Totemism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969 [1949]) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mauss, M. (1967) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton. Naimark, N. (2001) Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Naipaul, V. S. (1967) The Mimic Men. London: Deutsch. Renan, E. (1947 [1882]) ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume I. Paris: CalmannLévy. pp. 887–906. Sahlins, M. (2004) Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture, and Vice-Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Segal, D. (1988) ‘Nationalism, Comparatively Speaking’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1: 300–21. Segal, D. (1993) ‘“Race” and “Colour” in PreIndependence Trinidad and Tobago’, in K.Yelvington (ed.), Trinidad Ethnicity. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Segal, D. (1998) ‘The Hyper-Visible and the Masked: Observations of ‘“Race” and “Class” in the Contemporary U.S.’, in C. Greenhouse (ed.), Democracy and Ethnography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Segal, D. (1999) ‘Ethnographic Classics, Ethnographic Examples: Some Thoughts on the New Cultural Studies and an Old Queer Science’, in I. Korneck et al. (eds), Kulturstudien Heute [The Contemporary Study of Culture] I. Turia & Kant. Segal, D. (2002) Review of Brodkin 1998, American Ethnologist, 29 (2): 470–73. Stocking, G. (2001) ‘The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race’, in Delimiting Anthropology. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Todorov, T. (1984) The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New York: Harper and Row. Urciuoli, B. (1996) Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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6 The Social Psychology of Nationalism: To Die for the Sake of Strangers LAUREN LANGMAN

There are many reasons why elites initiate wars: for wealth, power, glory, or perhaps as Homer tells us, for the love of a beautiful woman.1 But how and why do ‘ordinary’ citizens passionately lend support to revolutions against kings or national wars against ‘hated’ enemies for reasons they may little understand and about whom they often know very little – save what they hear from leaders. Nationalism allows modern nations to willingly send, indeed sacrifice, their young in battle, while these young eagerly and proudly kill or die for unknown members of their communities and causes that may be contrary to their class interests, if not their very lives.2 The power of nationalism comes from its power to create an identity based on emotion and the irrational; it is the ruling passion of our age (Guibernau 1996; Kecmanovic 1996). Nationalism, as a loyalty to other members of one’s nation, has been intertwined with subjective factors of self, desire and intense passions that have led citizens to perform noble deeds of self-sacrifice as well as brutal torture and murder of ‘enemies’. Nationalism, as a political sentiment seeking to establish self-determined nation-states, as social mobilizations to realize or defend nations, and as passionate loyalty and devotion to one’s nation, as an identity granting cultural

community, may have been the most important determinant of social and personal life in recent history.3 It has led to a vast expansion of civil and human rights, democracy, brotherhood, freedom and creativity. But the other side of its Janus face has been bloody civil, revolutionary and world wars and mass devastation.4 Technologies of death production annihilated millions of civilians in London, Auschwitz, Warsaw, Nanking, Dresden and Hiroshima. Nationalist follies in Algeria, Vietnam, Cambodia and recently Iraq added more millions. Most social or cultural explanations depend on or allude to social-psychological factors ranging from conceptions of self, identity and Other, to primordial needs for communities, unconscious desires and attachments, passions and emotions. But in most such cases, while the structural, economic, or political ‘determinants’ are evident, the implicit social psychology is more often assumed or invoked than carefully theorized.5 Most ‘explanations’ for the rise of the modern nation-state as an ‘imagined community’ consider the importance of printing, the rise of a bourgeois class, Enlightenment ideas of popular sovereignty, imagined peace between republican nations and/or industrialization (cf. Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991). These

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factors inspired bourgeois challenges to the legitimacy of dynastic elites; they claimed to ‘represent’ heretofore suppressed ‘people’ with inalienable political rights who now clamored for self-determination and control of the state to realize the cultural; the ‘national principle’ held that the ‘people’ would now control the political (Gellner 1983).6 The central claims of nationalism are that: first the ‘people’ in politics are best understood as a defined and bounded group with a common history, language and tradition; and, second, that a ‘nation’ has a unique claim to be considered a legitimate political basis for sovereignty – greater than older bases such as ‘empire’, ‘dynastic right’, ‘theocracy’.7 The triumphant bourgeoisie would rule in the name of the ‘people’, even as they created that ‘people’ whose heretofore ‘submerged’ history, culture, traditions and unique identity now demanded articulation and celebration. The subsequent economic and political power of bourgeois nations inspired fear, ressentiment and subsequent emulation by various aristocrats, colonial elites, Greek students, Finnish scholars and Turkish and Japanese warriors etc.8 Their nationalisms were not always so benign. To understand why people first yearned for the realization of nations, then internalized national citizenship as an identity and subsequently showed passionate loyalty and devotion to their national community, requires considerations of the national subject, understood as a constellation of self-identity, values, motives, desires and feelings typical of members of ‘imagined’ political communities as they are shaped by and in turn impact intergroup relations and political life. A national identity that becomes seen and experienced as an immutable essence within the modern subject, links him/her to the history and destiny of his/her ‘imagined political community’. How and why did that subject emerge and nationalism become its moral imperative (Poole 1999)? PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY Freud (1961 [1930]) wrote on civilization, not nationalism per se. Yet he provided a starting

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point for considering character, underlying desires, emotions and defenses that often kept motives from awareness. The most important desires, sex and aggression, prompted attachments to some people, desires to hurt or destroy Others. Civilization demanded that such sexual or aggressive desires be held in check; people needed internalized controls so that they might get along with each other, sublimate desires into work and build civilization. This occurred through identification, the basic process of character development. Caretakers, as role models, were internalized as templates within the ego and super-ego. The ego was the more conscious, reflexive moment of character that dealt with reality. Such identification was a defense against separation anxiety and primordial fears of abandonment when infants were helpless and powerless to control the world. The self, the reflexive moment of the ego, has its own desires for recognition and esteem, narcissism. The super-ego, internalized social dictates, conscience, emerged as a defense against fear of harm and annihilation (castration). Deeds, or even wishes for the forbidden, evoked guilt – the basis of misery and often self-destructive behavior. While we are motivated by sexual and aggressive desires, we also seek to avoid harm and danger, to allay fear and anxiety and to avoid shame so as to secure pride and self-esteem. Freud offered suggestive insights on internalization and identification, group dynamics, and the lure of charismatic leaders as unconscious parent figures who embodied group values and secured the bonds that held people together. As Freud argued, human desire could attach itself to symbols and enable attachments to abstract entities like nations. Identification with groups like nations provides gratifications and assuages fears. People often exaggerated slight differences with Others to enhance self-esteem through disdain of the Other. Freud did not really concern himself with nationalism per se, save the unlikelihood that socialism would allay aggression and war that he saw were biologically based and inevitable. Yet his insights influenced others, especially with the rise of Fascism when leaders manipulated fear and hatreds to mobilize support for their policies.

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Wilhelm Reich’s (1946) analysis of the ‘mass psychology of fascism’ argued ideology, once internalized, acted as a material force. Capitalism required passive workers, rendered compliant through early sexual repression that fostered a punitive super-ego; and hence an ‘authoritarian personality’, subservient to authorities above, dominating those below, and hatred to ‘Others’ who were different. Such character types, frequent in the lower middle classes, embraced reactionary nationalisms led by ‘powerful men’. Such dynamics led many, including segments of the working classes, to embrace Hitler. The Frankfurt School, incorporating Freud into the ‘immanent critique’ of domination, illuminated the characterological factors that led people to embrace Hitler and National Socialism. Freudian theory offered important insights on character, repression, authoritarianism, leadership, mass media, propaganda and ‘rabble rousers’ disposing fascism. Fromm (1941) suggested that in face of major social changes, when social ties were attenuated and individuals set ‘free’, they faced anxiety, powerlessness and meaninglessness. They sought to ‘escape from freedom’ through social movements demanding submission to powerful, charismatic leaders who promised love in exchange for obedience and compliance. Following the defeat of World War I, burdens of reparations and a depression with millions of people facing unemployment, Hitler’s charismatic demagoguery enthralled vast numbers of Germans. National Socialism, demanding total loyalty and subjugation to the state, promised pride, prosperity, renewed greatness and retribution to those responsible for duress – especially the hated Jews and communists. Fromm suggested that nationalism depended on needs to belong to a group that provided community, pride in membership and a framework of meaning. Positive evaluations of one’s group, ‘social narcissism’, can be benevolent or benign. In face of stress and conflict, it can lead to certain pathologies – depression, anxiety, a collective lack of judgment and reason, and hatred to dehumanized, ‘evil’ Others that justify whatever heinous acts are undertaken. Given the enfeeblement of

the modern ego, people found narcissistic compensations through identifications with valorized and powerful nation-states that were often personified in a particular leader who offered utopian promises for the future and passion contra the rational state that is the dialectal partner of nationalism. These concerns with subjective, emotional, often unconscious aspects of nationalism, suggested how and why modern subjects were constituted and motivated to embrace the most odious forms of nationalism and genocide. Koenigsberg (1977) offered some psychoanalytic insights on the subjective aspects of the nation, in terms of attachments to Father/ Motherlands, narcissism, aggression and selfdefeating behavior such as national death wishes and so on. For Bloom (1990), identification was the critical process linking the individual to the nation. These legacies informed the recent integrations of Kecmanovic (1996), who, like Finlayson (1998), argued that psychoanalytic perspectives still provide valuable insights. Yet there have been very few systematic attempts to develop a social psychology of nationalism that considers the historical and politically based constitution of the subject, for example, self, identity, desire, the role of unconscious motivation and conflict as well as cognitive processes like imagination, categorization and so forth. As will be shown, the historically situated ideological constructions of nations and national identities, seemingly essential and primordial, colonize the individual self to willingly assent to and find emotional gratifications in nationalism from its everyday banalities to its episodic wars.

TOWARD A GENERAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF NATIONALISM The early nationalisms, culminating in democratic nation-states, served the economic, political and cultural interests of the bourgeoisie. Their new authority to rule enhanced their profits, celebrated their ‘modern’ culture and enabled them to disseminate their worldviews. But nations and nationalism served psychological

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interests of elites as well as masses. The very emergence of nationalism rested on socialpsychological factors, the emergence of new kinds of selfhood, national identities and desires.

The rise of political subjectivity Cultures, as values, meanings and ways of life of a community, provide members with an identity, a reflexive sense of self, an interpretation of who one is, a basis for choices and relationships with others. In feudal societies, cultural identity, as a sense of common origins, continuity over time, shared values and difference from others, was fairly fixed by lineage within a class or occupation (Baumeister 1986). In gemeinschaft societies, behavior, manner and demeanor, dress and even selfhood, showed little variation between people of the same status. But in the eleventh century, with the institutionalization of confession, the person was held responsible for his/her own sins or virtues and thus the roots of individualism were planted. At about this time the institutionalization of formal legal training to administer Church property revived debates over ‘natural law’ and inalienable rights. This established the groundwork for juridical individualism and, eventually, the ‘rights of man’. Within a short time, students at then new universities were sorting themselves on the basis of ‘nations.’ Further, we can note the early emergence of a sense of territorial bound communities beyond the manor that while not polities, were surely ‘publics’.9 (See Gorski, Chapter 12 in this Handbook, on pre-modern nationalisms.) As trade with the Levant began to flourish in Italy, the emergent market encouraged a more individualized subject among the merchant classes. Cities and commercial centers, with greater division of labor further encouraged a more individualistic orientation to the world (Durkheim 1984 [1897]; Simmel 1950). Identity, individually or collectively, became problematic. The more successful merchants wished to establish a unique identity to clearly distinguish themselves from the landed nobles or peasants. They would ‘find’ that ‘identity’ as ‘descendants of Rome’ based on the recovery and rebirth of Greco-Roman culture. Renaissance art and

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culture provided them with ‘cultural capital’ that differentiated them from others. Individual artists were recognized and perspectivism (attempts to indicate depth) individualized the viewer. Secular portraiture attempted to valorize the uniqueness of the newly affluent bourgeoisie. This era led to humanism casting the person an as autonomous subject. Moreover, we also began to see the emergence of armed militias of burgher notables loyal to the city, maintaining social order (see Rembrandt’s Night Watch). This was hardly nationalism, but it was a step. As the bourgeoisie grew, the rise of printing encouraged literacy, the explosion of knowledge and multiple perspectives of truth. Some people began to question the teachings and practices of the Church. Eventually, merchant classes found an ‘elective affinity’ with rational, individualistic Protestantism. Meanwhile, as the social structure demanded a more autonomous, self-controlled person, bourgeois childhood eventually became recognized as a clearly demarcated stage in the life cycle, apart from, yet preparatory for adulthood (Ariès 1962). The bourgeoisie, living in more spacious houses with separate bedrooms, fostered a separation of public and private spheres that in turn engendered a private, individuated self (Zaretsky 1976). For Elias (1978), this ‘invention of childhood’ and systematic childrearing were part of a long drawn out ‘civilizing process’ in which manners and etiquette led to progressively greater repression and control over bodily desires and impulsivity. Internalized controls of shame and guilt over ‘dangerous impulses’ were essential factors in fostering the individualized, self-controlled subjectivity and behavior demanded by a ‘civilized modernity’. Child-rearing became a systematic activity to foster a self-controlled, individualistic subject who would ‘defer gratification’ to prepare for an education and subsequent trading career. While elites had been educated by clerics, tutors or in the few universities, with industrialization, public schools educated wide segments of the people. This character pattern, in which impulse control came from within, a growing market economy without, and waning aristocracy, facilitated the rise of nations of self-regulating, selfgoverning citizens with some formal education.

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THE RISE OF NATIONS The growth of Protestantism led to the bloody Eighty and Thirty Years wars that ended with the Westphalia treaty in 1648, recognizing the end of the Holy Roman Empire, territorial sovereignty within fixed borders, and equal rights to Protestants and Catholics. With the growing market economy coupled with demands of the psyche from within, bourgeois merchants became more and more resentful and critical of the often mediocre talents of dynastic rulers and their squandering state fortunes. Given the changing nature of the political economy, changing class relationships, and subjective changes in character, identity and desire, the existing feudal political arrangements did not serve the class interests, nor the political goals, nor the ideological values, nor the emotional interests of the bourgeoisie as the vanguard class of modernization. Political and economic pressures for changes grew; so too did the emergent forms of subjectivities experience increasing emotional frustrations and anger with dynastic rule and hopes for a new kind of polity. As the growing rational market society became more and more incongruent with the existing state of affairs, so too did these existing social relationships frustrate new longings and desires and hence warranted discarding (see Kumar, Chapter 1 in this Handbook.) The bourgeoisie became a receptive audience for the emancipatory ideas of the Enlightenment, its critiques of aristocracy and notions of human rights. Republican ideas were discussed and debated in the newly emergent ‘public spheres’ of civil society, ‘ideal speech’ situations, where shared grievances were aired, alternative imaginaries articulated, agendas formulated and leaders emerged that would lead social movements to realize a new political imaginary, the nation (cf. Habermas 1989 [1968]).10 The progressive ideas of popular sovereignty, democratic nationhood, and even universalism and tolerance envisioned by intellectuals like Kant, Fichte and Herder, became aspects of a shared vision and inspiration promising a peaceful, diverse world encouraging human freedom. The realization of the ‘spirit of the people’, the ‘volk’, a community

based on blood ties with an identity granting common culture, required physical, intellectual and political freedom.11 Soon the ideas of popular sovereignty joined objective political grievances from taxation to poverty to inform the American and French Revolutions with subjective discontents. The image of the political nation as a ‘people’, as citizens with a shared culture, language and in turn identity, served mobilizing functions for the rising bourgeoisie, enlisting allies against dynastic crowns and subsequently securing assent to their rule.12 The bourgeoisie spearheaded the ‘nationalist principle’; they would be the ‘democratically’ elected representatives of the ‘people’ who would control the state to realize the culture. Citizens, sharing a political identity based on national membership, as ‘equals’ in political crowds, ‘equals’ before the law, would ‘equally’ serve in national armies where the ruling classes of citizens would send ruled classes of conscripted citizens to war in order to increase national wealth. Further, citizen identities obscured class-based identities at a time when industrialization fostered class conflicts and challenges from growing populations of urban proletariat led by various socialist and communist parties. When ‘workers’ challenged their conditions, they often faced strikebreakers, police and armies. When however ‘citizens’ accepted membership in the nation, national identities and bourgeois leadership, they received various material benefits, entitlements (unemployment insurance, health care, retirement etc.). And imperialism often meant jobs. Nationalist passions dulled revolutionary fervor. Whether we start with the English Civil War or the American and French revolutions, forces were set in motion that would foster various kinds of nationalisms, bourgeois, military and imperial. The Napoleonic wars attempted to create an integrated, rational, bourgeois French dominated European market, but reactionary forces of God and Throne joined to defeat Napoleon. Nevertheless, the nationalist genie was loose and indeed marshalling armies to fight him fostered the feared secular nationalisms. Once triumphant, the economic, political and indeed military superiority of

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(industrial) nation states led to fears, envy and ressentiment among various sub-elites in traditional states, such as intellectuals, military classes, landed nobles or independenceoriented colonial officials who then initiated their own nationalisms (Calhoun 1997). There was no single course from dynastic states to modern nations. The kinds and directions of nationalist movements were prefigured by objective factors such as the pre-modern class and property relations, contractual relations, the power of agrarian elites and limits, if any, on their power (cf. Moore 1966).13 Early bourgeois, civic nationalisms were based on inclusion, hope and promises of individual freedom.14 Subsequent nation-states varied by democratic-authoritarian rule, inclusion based on language and culture, or exclusion based on blood.15 Many of these later integral, nationalisms, especially those led by traditional military classes, were more typically impelled by ressentiment and/or fear. For example, German and Japanese aristocratic militarists embraced exclusionary, authoritarian ethnonationalisms extolling the state, demanding subjugation of the people. Among the underlying factors shaping the goals and directions of nationalist movements were emotional considerations, often reactions to social circumstances. The Frankfurt School had suggested that strict, indeed punitive socialization disposed authoritarianism, submission to superiors, while demanding submission from those below. This in turn led to preferences for strong leaders with unambiguous policies, who were comfortable with power, harsh on subordinates or deviants, and punitive to out-groups. Lakoff (2002) suggested that families varied along a ‘strict father’, ‘nurturant mother’ polarity that becomes internalized as aspects of political selfhood and identity disposing affinity for either ‘tough leaders’ or nurturant ones. In times of fear, people prefer strong, assertive, if not aggressive leaders to defend them and press for their rights. In times of peace and calm, people prefer more nurturant and caring kinds of generous, tolerant leadership. Feshbach (1987), using attachment theory, suggested that early ties to caretakers influenced a person’s later

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political ideology and the parameters of his/her nationalism and patriotism. Patriotism, as love of one’s nation, tends to be correlated with positive attachments to parents, while nationalism seemed more associated with asserting power and control. Caretakers who valued allocations of social resources to children’s needs, tend to support disarmament and negotiation. Anxious and insecure attachments seemed to foster bullying behavior in childhood and support for the use of force in asserting national rights.

NATIONAL IDENTITIES With the emergence of bourgeois modernity, collective identities became problematic, local family-based identities became fragmented; religion was far too general to provide relevant identities. While elites spearheaded nations, once established, it was not only necessary for the nation to foster the realization of the ‘suppressed culture’ of the ‘people’, but to fashion that culture, create its ‘people’, its narratives of identity, spread their ‘common tongue’ and a universal idiom and ‘high culture’; these converged in the creation of a national identity (cf. Gellner 1983). National elites, with allied intellectuals, created educational institutions to foster mass literacy through common texts teaching the intentionally constructed ‘proper’ form of the national tongue; dialects and argots had limited communication to nearby people (cf. E. Weber 1976). The Israelis resurrected Hebrew as their national language to overcome diverse European roots and create linguistic unity with Jews from the Middle East to Ethiopia. National tongues enable national identities. But how did national identities move from the imaginations of economic and intellectual elites to the banalities of the masses. This has been termed nation-building, fostering identification with and loyalty to the nation. Schooling teaches the ‘invented’ histories, ersatz continuities, legends and traditions of a ‘people’ that inscribe a distinct, national identity linked to a common history, a shared

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culture, common fate and destiny that valorizes uniqueness (cf. Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983). Students learn pledges of allegiance, patriotic songs, anthems and rituals of commemoration that celebrate heroes, leaders, patriots and martyrs whose iconic characteristics exemplify, celebrate and shape the ‘national character’. This involves visits to capitals, ‘hallowed grounds’, tombs, cemeteries and museums. Further, schools teach the nation’s cultural or scientific attainments and appreciation of the distinct art, music, dance and literature of a ‘people’. The well-studied student will not only know his/her nation’s history and geography, but how his/her nation is a little different, and perhaps a lot better than Others, especially those on the border.16 Nationalism, like a religion, is a set of beliefs of common origins, specialness and destiny, and rituals, patriotic pledges, songs, anthems and celebrations that unite a ‘people’ into an identity granting ‘imagined [political] community’ that creates ‘citizens’. Flags and anthems, much like totems, celebrate identities, prompt reverence and awe to a national community, inspire pride in national identities, and loyalty to the nation.17 Indeed, celebrations and rituals create identities and unite heretofore disparate masses (Spillman 1997). National solidarity means fellow nationals feel good around those like themselves, with whom they can see aspects of themselves, and who confirm and ratify each other’s views. Finally, people learn about the rights, rewards and obligations of civil, political and social citizenship.18 As a result of socialization, schooling and mass media, national identities become an internalized part of the self and are experienced as fundamental means of self-expression and communication (Poole 1999). Following Poole (1999), identities exist in frameworks of interpretation and meaning provided by language, cultural symbols and values through which we become aware of ourselves and others. A national identity, as part of the new moral order, accepts certain values and commitments to underline and inform all other identities, and in case of conflict, takes priority over class, gender, race, religion or occupation. Durkheim argued that

society as a moral order could demand the sacrifice of one’s very life – altruistic suicide. Nations too, can and often do demand such sacrifices of their people. Since nations provide meanings, pleasures and rewards beyond those found in individual lives, by dint of socialized character, attachments to brethren citizens and felt moral obligations, people willingly comply with such demands. While ‘print-capitalism’ enabled modern nationalism, today, mass media now plays an extensive role in celebrating national holidays and commemorations. Mass media, often in collusion with political elites, can be used for propaganda purposes. Highly charged negative images and portrayals of impure, dangerous Others with evil intents evoke fear, hatred, loathing and/or anger, mobilize nationalist sentiments and support for elite policies that demand national sacrifice such as war. Governments often justify planned aggression through an ‘invented’ casus belli like the Reichstag fire, the Tonkin Gulf attacks, imminent hardship to medical students in Grenada, or claims of WMD in Iraq.

SELF, IDENTITY, DESIRE AND EMOTION The development and structuring of the individual self, an aspect of the ego, as the locus of reflexivity, marks the intersection between underlying, socialized motivation and consciousness and behavior. The self is initially shaped in the family through both direct socialization and internalization of the parental role model. Identification, as both attachment and internalization, links self to group, whether family or community. In order to find certain emotional gratifications and/or allay suffering, the self assumes a number of identities and locations that link subjectivity and selfawareness to the patterned routines of everyday social life in late modernity (Giddens 1991). With the internalization of a national self-identity, we can talk about a national ‘collective consciousness’.19 A national self-identity is impelled to seek or avoid certain kinds of outcomes and resulting emotional experiences

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by virtue of citizenship. Moreover, as noted, class location and family experiences impact character to dispose political stances regarding nationalism.

Desire as impelling action What motives and feelings foster the embrace of nationalist movements, loyalties to the nation, or the emergence of reactionary nationalisms? Freudian theory was suggestive but not definitive, nor did it consider historical factors and group struggles over the contested terrains of political and cultural power that gave rise to nations in general and particularities of each. Recent sociological approaches to emotion suggest a sociological model of desire based an biologically rooted affects that become subjected to social cues and controls and in turn foster certain social behaviors (Hochschild 1986). If people are universally capable of certain basic affective responses, so too do they have capacities for consciousness, which, as a social product, becomes the means through which affects become socialized, beginning with their evocation through symbolic as well as physical cues. Tompkins (1962) suggested that there are certain universal affective responses, joy, love/acceptance, fear/anxiety/ distress, shame, sadness, disgust, contempt, anger, and interest/anticipation. These basic affects, like primary colors, can be shaded or joined together through socialization. Affects once socialized, nuanced and controlled become a vast array of ‘emotions’ that may or may not be experienced as feelings and/or expressed directly or in actions. Desire can be theorized as what impels seeking certain positive emotional states, or avoiding unpleasant emotions. To understand the longing for and/or devotion to a nation and the emotional basis of a national self-identity, we need to consider how certain desires are linked to emotions; people embrace identities and choose to enact behaviors to gain certain experiences and avoid others. Thus self-identities are not simply conceptions, but are means through which social behavior and interaction from work to play to political participation provide or evade emotional experiences. But

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no matter how we approach individual motivation, it must be institutionally channeled into social behavior. Nationalism is a shared motive, embraced by groups, but for individuals, a collective motive may provide various emotional gratifications. National goals cannot be reduced to individual motivation per se. Thus the pleasures of aggression may explain why individuals disdain, hate or fight each other. But collective interests from national self-determination to geopolitical influence or even war cannot be reduced to individual desires. Individual desires for aggressive responses must be mobilized, channeled and directed by nationalist leaders to gain popular support for collective responses to avenge real or imagined insults. Nationalist leaders intuitively understand their followers and know how to use the language of emotions to mobilize people to willingly bring death, destruction and human misery in the name of a higher principle – the national good.

POSITIVE EMOTIONS Community and engagement vs. loneliness For Aristotle, people as political animals, zoon politicon, sought friendships, connections, relationships and communities. People generally find comfort in being with those who are similar; group membership becomes an antidote to loneliness, nothingness and anxiety, which is ultimately based on fear of death (Becker 1973; Kecmanovic 1996). There is a fundamental need for attachment that is part of normal psychological functioning, starting with ‘attachment behavior’ (Bowlby 1969–73). As feudal society waned, individualism attenuated social bonds while Reason undermined religious-based meanings and understandings. Yet people need ties and meanings. The ground was fertile for the emergence of new forms of community and values. Romanticism promised an ‘authentic’ life and small communities where genuine self-realization stood apart from urban life dominated by the rational

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market. But that response was only available for an elite few. The broader nation-state enabled an integration of romantic resistance to fragmentation and meaninglessness with the rationalization of governance of a ‘national community’ with a shared history, ‘authentic’ identity and ‘special mission’ that linked ‘chosen people’ together and provided ‘ultimate meanings’ in a secular world (cf. A. Smith 2003). Nations thus provided community, identity and meaning. However ‘imaginary’ that community or mediated the ties, nations, as forms of comradeship, served solidarity functions that assuaged anxiety, much as had the Church (cf. Anderson 1991). Other kinds of belonging, such as Church, family or work, do not provide feelings of security, unless these institutions are themselves protected by the nation. Loyalty and belonging to a nation, as a sentiment rather than a rational calculation, provides the safety and security (Ignatieff 1993). This loyalty to one nation makes it possible to hate and brutally kill Others who might threaten its interests.20

lives. This is evident in the earliest moments of infancy when children explore and manipulate their environments. Piaget called these actions ‘intentionality’. With literacy and the empowering values of modernity, people sought to transform the world, yet between ‘estranged labor’, if not rationalized work in ‘iron cages’ and the ‘disciplining of docile bodies’, most people had few spaces for the joys of agency. Thus a national self-identity, linked to a valorized and idealized nation-state, provided the person with a sense of agency and empowerment in realms apart from work, rather than powerlessness and submission. People feel empowered, if not emboldened in crowds, and especially so in patriotic rallies (Kecmanovic 1996). Indeed, as noted, for Fromm (1941), powerlessness, vulnerability to pain, hurt and perhaps exposure to danger, prompted authoritarian submission to powerful leaders and/or nationalist causes that would seemingly overcome powerlessness.

Meaning vs. anomie Recognition/dignity vs. shame For Hegel, the quest for recognition by the Other [Slave] was a fundamental moment for the emergence of self-consciousness. More recent considerations of recognition, in such varied forms as respect, honor, distinction or self-esteem, self-worth, pride or dignity, have informed a variety of sociological discussions (cf. Honneth 1995; Sennett 2002). In a modern society, where status is problematic and ephemeral, especially for those in the lower echelons, membership in and identification with a valued national community, even if ‘imagined’, brings a person enduring pride and dignity through identification with the nation and national qualities or accomplishments – one reason for the ‘narcissism of petty differences’. Agency vs. passivity Humans, able to anticipate consequences of their actions, seek to impact their environments, to have power and control over their

Most people need goals, purposes and values to make their lives meaningful – as well as assuage the fears and anxieties of everyday life. Value systems give life meaning that often extends beyond mortal life. One of the main consequences of modernity qua disenchantment was the erosion of myths, yet people needs myths to give their lives meaning, direction and purpose. For Durkheim, religion was an indirect selfcelebration of the social; nationalism, without gods or spirits, made this celebration direct. As Fromm (1973) put it, people have a fundamental need for a framework of ‘ultimate concerns’, meanings and devotion, to integrate their energy in a single direction and elevate themselves beyond an isolated existence with its doubts and insecurities. Devotion to national goals beyond the isolated ego allows transcendence from egocentricity. Thus the crafting of a national history, replete with mythologies and hagiographies, may well be a lie, as Renan put it. But as noted, a national identity is located in a moral order that is ultimately based on myths of origin, history and destiny.

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People fear death and yearn for immortality. For Becker (1973) human beings create individual character structures and collective meaning systems to deny the ultimate reality of death – the most fundamental human fear. Nationalism, sacralizing the nation that endures beyond the individual’s life, grants a transcendental meaning to the nation whose ‘permanence’ makes it immortal.21 Indeed, some of its prophets, when speaking of the ‘volk’ as the spirit of the ‘people’, gave it a ‘transcendental’ quality. Baumeister (1992) suggested that in order to find life meaningful, people need feelings of efficacy (agency), selfworth (dignity), and value and purpose. From what has been argued, a national self-identity not only provides such gratifications, but further, for many people in modern societies, for whom work is often alienating, religion less salient and social relationships more transient, national identity becomes the primary basis of finding life meaningful and with a purpose that transcends mortality and comforts our awareness of our personal finitude.

Avoiding adverse emotions The nation became an identity granting community of meaning that provided its ‘citizens’ with a number of emotional gratifications. But given how certain events and conditions impact nationhood, members of national communities can experience adverse feelings: (i) fear and anxiety, as responses to impending loss of life, self or community; (ii) ressentiment, envy, shame and humiliation via attacks on the national self that typically evoke anger and rage; and (iii) anger and hatred to those who have or will cause harm or humiliation. Individuals may respond with aggression, but for the polity, aggression has different meanings, asserting a collective interest. More often than not, elite policies that serve geopolitical ends depend on fostering collective emotions to secure legitimacy. The anger, and perhaps shame, following the 9/11 attack was used by the Bush administration to justify a long-planned invasion of Iraq to secure American control over oil and foster ‘democratic governance’ in the Middle East.

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Fear, anxiety and powerlessness Fear, a response to a clear threat, and anxiety, a response to a threat not clearly evident, among the most archaic and powerful emotions, are rooted in the fear of annihilation, death. Thus threats or attacks from within or without typically evoke fear and uncertainty that in turn usually foster greater loyalty and support for the nation. ‘When two groups are in conflict, identification with one’s own nation or group enhances negative feelings to the other group, especially if it is perceived as a source of frustration or as an enemy. Preservation of the group’s resources, or the integrity of its territory, as well as fear for one’s own safety, may be seen as reasons for defense – with attack seen as the best means of defense’ (Hinde, n.d.). While early nationalisms emphasized the politics of belonging and hopes for a better future, today, reactionary nationalisms are more often based on politics of exclusion and fears of demise from without, for example, enemies or immigrants. Thus, for example, many ultranationalist movements in Europe tend toward xenophobia, especially when the immigration of clearly different Others takes place at times of other major social changes.

Ressentiment, envy, shame and humiliation Self-esteem is often fragile; political or economic defeats, reversals or comparisons may evoke intense passions. For Greenfeld (1992), the superior power of nations, fostered ressentiment and compensatory efforts at emulation. Scheff (1994) argued that humiliation, individually or collectively, as a denial of recognition of one’s self and severing social bonds, fosters an unacknowledged alienation and shame which prompts an intense, destructive anger that loathes and denigrates the Other and protects one from facing one’s own shame, inadequacies and insecurities. ‘Hatred is the commonly used word for hidden shame/rage sequences, humiliated fury.’ Following national defeats or insults, people experience national shame and humiliation as personal attacks on

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their self that demand revenge or retribution. This dynamic fosters some of the bloodiest national conflicts. Elites in control of ‘information’ can find, if not create, threats and challenges that mobilize national sentiments and feelings to secure assent to economic or political agendas. German humiliation at Versailles was said to inspire a collective desire for retribution to ‘settle accounts’. Much evidence suggests that the British fire bombings of Dresden and US nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more inspired by revenge rather than military necessity. The US humiliation in Vietnam was an element in mobilizing massive support for Gulf Wars I and II. Anger, hatred and disgust When a person’s goals are blocked or denied, the typical response is anger as the initial stage of aggressive reaction. So too with nations, when national goals are frustrated, or imagined threatened either from within or without, people respond with anger that is often transformed by elites into hatred of the Other who is then constructed as vile and disgusting in character as in deed. As noted, insults to dignity and self-esteem evoke irrational rage and hatred that leads people to wish to hurt or destroy those responsible for current adversities and/or future intents. And leaders often manipulate real or imagined fears and humiliations to mobilize anger and popular support for their agendas.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES22 Early discussions of national social psychology focused on motivation and emotion, legacies of Freudian psychology and attempts to understand reactionary nationalism. But people think, evaluate and communicate through symbols, and they can have powerful emotional attachments to symbolic representations. Therefore we should also consider cognitive functions such as perception, judgment, abstraction and imagination in more general

theorization. An ‘imagined community’ is a cognitive representation (Anderson 1991), yet at the same time implies normative judgments. Moscovici (1993) has argued that ‘social representations’, including ‘collective memories’, are legitimate objects of study for social psychology, recognizing that concern with the nation, as a representation of the ‘people’ and a historically specific form of governance, is a place where sociological and social psychological concerns intersect. For Tajfel and Turner (1986), ‘social identity’, that part of an individual’s self-conception based on group membership, whether gang or nation, mediating social change, as an aspect of group process, has depended on categorization, identification with a group (for both collective and personal identity) and comparison with others. They suggest that people gain a sense of worth and esteem through belonging to a group and favorably comparing their group to Others, especially when that Other is more likely known through derogatory stereotypes. Reicher and Hopkins (2001) have drawn upon this tradition to suggest a cognitively oriented social psychology of an ideologically constructed national selfhood, itself a process in flux, mediating changing structural and contextual factors with individual thoughts, feeling and action.

CATEGORIZATION For Kant, categorization was an a priori dimension of understanding; all people differentiate themselves as an ‘us’ different from ‘them’, Others, whose languages, values, customs and ways of life were different. For Durkheim, categorization began when membership of a clan, a descent group, was designated by a totemic identity linked to a common progenitor that differentiated them from others. Moreover, this self-reflexive narrative of collective identity was celebrated in rituals that dramatized common roots and identities and re-affirmed their social bonds. Durkheim’s analysis yet provides a useful framework for a religion or a nation. Modern nations yet differentiate themselves from

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others in terms of an often-mythical common past or ancestry, whether of Rome, a Teutonic Valhalla or a ‘lost tribe’ of Israel. Attempts to delineate the ‘typical features’ of a category of people can be traced to Herodotus. This categorization and comparison (below) led to ‘national character’ studies, rooted in the ‘culture and personality’ tradition in anthropology. This research attempted to delineate, if not ‘naturalize’, the modal character patterns found among the adults of a society (Inkeles and Levinson 1969). These studies included Americans, Russians, Germans and Japanese. This research ran into many problems, not the least of which were recreating stereotypes, ignoring the distribution of types, changes over time and attempts to link political action to ‘underlying character’ while ignoring cultural processes through which self and identity are shaped and/or mediating processes. Yet it did encourage useful research into how peoples perceive each other. Categorization is essential for defining and policing boundaries of self, parties, movements, as different from Others; the audience of ‘we’ is the core of national politics. For Reicher and Hopkins (2001), national identities, as aspects of categorization, are systematically constructed and make collective behavior possible. Categorization itself depends on context, the kind of audience fosters certain self-presentations. Identities are constantly in flux in relationship to changing circumstances; they are in the process of becoming rather than being, and as such, vary in intensity, saliency and form at different moments. For E. Smith (1993), selfcategorization as a group member means the information relevant to that group has emotional and motivational impact on the individual; differentiation of ‘us’ from ‘them’ becomes a basis for in-group solidarity, for example, strong bonds between members are usually associated with the positive and negative feelings.

IDENTIFICATION People identify with the groups to which they belong that constitute the self-defined category

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of ‘we’, those whom they feel are more or less similar to themselves, and thus feel loyalty and devotion to them. Identity is the fundamental link of nation and self (Bloom 1990). The noted changes in identity, together with growing mass literacy, were crucial aspects of the transformation of selfhood and consciousness that enabled people to envision and identify with a social representation such as a nation, an ‘abstract imaginary’ as a ‘people’ with a history and destiny divorced from the concrete. The magic of the nation has been the capacity of people to identify with a symbolic construct, an idealized ‘imaginary group’ that exists only in their minds, yet that membership provides the person with a variety of gratifications and demands. Members of nations can bask in the ‘reflected glory of the attainments of other group members’ (Tesser 1988). Nevertheless, the existence of the national group was a systematic product of national education systems. But it is also a result of the colonization of the life world by nation-specific objects and qualities (see discussion of ‘banal nationalism’, in the facticity section below).

COMPARISON People in groups compare themselves to others; they typically valorize differences, they see themselves in positive terms and take pride in their group, its qualities and accomplishments, real or mythic, that become the basis of comparison and status competition (Greenfeld 1992; M. Weber 1958 [1946]) Membership in ‘valued’ groups gives a sense of well-being and narcissistic gratification by being superior to similar Others. Disdain to a neighbor serves compensatory functions for an enfeebled ego under threat. How nations construct, regard and compare to the Other is rooted in emotional considerations, beginning with the extent to which self-esteem is based on belonging to a valorized, dignity-granting community, but the corollary is often denigration of the Other. Perceptions of out-group Others, shaped by one’s ingroup, vary by the extent to which

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the parties have similar backgrounds and compatible or conflicting goals and values. The Americans and British see each other as ‘good buddies’ or ‘jolly chaps’. Conflicts over material or social resources or political goals adversely impact the ways the people see each other. The enemy is always seen as vile, despicable and devoid of all humanity deserving only a swift, painful death. And given the behavior of soldiers in war, in which rape, looting and murder have long been ‘perks’, such perceptions have a grain of truth, but on the other hand, such perceptions ignore the humanity of the Other and the wide variations found in any group. The perceptions of out-group ‘stereotypes’ have been studied in terms of how belief systems distort images and filter information of the Other in ways that confirm the constructed images to elevate the status of the prejudiced. Most of this research has been concerned with racial, ethnic and religious prejudices, but the same logic applies to how nations perceive each other. The negative qualities of the Other are emphasized, while ‘admirable’ qualities become either transformed into negatives and/or sources of ressentiment. An important corollary to stereotypy is ‘groupthink’ (Janis 1982), the tendency of cohesive groups to have rigid, shared perceptions of the world that may be inaccurate and systematically exclude dissenting views. No one could tell Hitler that with Jewish soldiers and scientists he would have won the war. Kennedy was under considerable pressure by most of his advisers to attack Cuba and likely start World War III. Nothing could deter George W. Bush from invading Iraq.

FACTICITY Nationalism is not simply an episodic moment of identity at times of celebratory rituals, or a momentary response to a geopolitical event. It is a ‘daily referendum’, part and parcel of the lived environment experienced in everyday life that Billig (1995) has called everyday ‘flagging’ of ‘banal nationalism’, which can be seen as the ideological habits evident in linguistic

practices and/or markers such as dress styles, food preferences and even such things as the daily weather map that uses the contours of the nation. These serve as everyday reminders of a homeland-based national identity found in the embodied habits of everyday life. Leaders and citizens alike often use ‘national’ dress as a marker and link to a national identity, for example, bowlers, berets, sombreros or tengallons, lederhosen or chaps, Doc Marten’s or cowboy boots. This secures a ‘latent’ national identity that can be quickly mobilized by leaders when Others identified as vile and heinous commit acts like claiming unimportant islands in the South Atlantic (Falklands/Malvinas) or possess WMD with nefarious intents.

NATIONALISM TURNS DANGEROUS The early theorists of the nation envisioned progressive, benign civic nationalisms; emancipated ‘peoples’ would create a better, more democratic world. Bourgeois nationalists were the carriers of the emancipatory project of modernity, extolling human rights, liberty, fraternity and equality. They did not envision the irrational, integral populist, reactionary nationalisms and ethnonationalisms of ‘brotherhood within – warlike without’, with ‘justifiable’ hatred of a dehumanized Other whose heinous acts, often many generations ago, demanded revenge and retribution.23 This can render genocide banal (cf. Berezin, Chapter 23 in this Handbook). Adverse social conditions such as economic crises, social displacements, dislocations, competing nationalisms, or military defeats and the like, foster uncertainty and emotional reactions, fears, anxieties and humiliations. Following the military defeats of Imperial Germany, or Tokugawa Japan, militarists embraced integral ethnonationalisms. Such nationalisms were often born of the ressentiment of the greater power of industrial nations after either defeats or fears they might be conquered and humiliated. But so too do character patterns matter; authoritarians, already disposed to anger, hatred and xenophobia, typically embrace

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reactionary nationalisms. Self-serving leaders valorize and mobilize essentialist national identities and promise ‘restoration’ of community, dignity, agency or meaning, and/or assuaging shame and fear through nationalist political agendas of assertion, if not retaliation, that benefit the nation, to the detriment of most ‘supporters’. When typically joined with ‘groupthink’, nationalism becomes impermeable to reason. When former Yugoslavia faced severe fiscal crises, a few years after the death of Tito and the demise of communism, fear, uncertainty, humiliation and anger disposed to compensatory reactionary ethno-religious nationalisms led by charismatic leaders like Tudjman or Milosevic.24 As noted, in many other parts of Europe – France, Holland, Austria, Italy – between rapid social changes and the twin impacts of neo-liberal globalization, economic stagnation and job losses and retrenchments of government mandate welfare state programs, for example, have coincided with immigration of darker visible Others deemed responsible for both job losses and high crime. Irrational fears, if not hatred of scapegoated (Muslim) immigrants, allowed nationalists like Le Pen, Berlusconi or Haider to thrive (Delanty and O’Mahony 2002). Such nationalisms provide stable, valorized identities within cohesive groups with clear-cut values in an unstable, changing world. Similarly, throughout the Islamic world, rapid urbanization has attenuated social cohesion, while economic stagnation and poverty, in contrast to affluent Western nations, have fostered ressentiment to those deemed responsible for that stagnation and support of despots. Such accusations often have foundation. While the West provides little in the way of job-creating economic investments, its hedonistic, narcissistic, erotic popular culture is experienced as an affront to more traditional moralities. These factors dispose to fundamentalisms, much like reactionary nationalisms, and provide cohesive communities and stable identities with virtue-based dignity and a meaningful ideology. Thus radical mosques assuage the pains of modernity. Some groups, often with legitimate grievances toward the

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West for its support of Israel and the recent invasion of Iraq, embrace unrealistic goals to re-establish the Caliphate through resort to terrorism and martyrdom as techniques (see Langman and Morris 2002.) Finally, given the nationalist principle, that the state, the nation and ‘people’ are one, nations, as groups, are often personalized and imbued with individual qualities, the US and the UK are friends, Israel and Iran distrust each other (Bloom 1990). The same ‘psychology’ that we would use to understand nationalism is itself often employed to judgmentally categorize and thereby psychologically denigrate the Other as psychotic, paranoid, sadistic, impulsive or immature. Thus nationalism can falsify, misrepresent the real relationships of groups, distort the intentions of Others and promote a valorized ‘us’ vs. dehumanized, psychopathically dangerous ‘them’ mentality that promotes cohesion and support for leaders. Leaders, especially in control of mass media, often garner support for policies based on such misrepresentations that suggest that the Other is an ‘imminent danger’ to the ‘people’, their well-being, honor and dignity. Such Others deserve death. As has been argued, given the foundational power of national identities and their moral justifications, we have seen centuries of bloody warfare.25 Today, when many nations have nuclear weapons, nationalism is even more dangerous.

CONCLUSION Nations, as communities, consist of agents who are not simply amorphous masses of ‘cultural dopes’, passive vessels of social structure through which social processes operate. But how do we explain the mediating processes between national communities and the thoughts, feelings and actions of individuals and/or their impact on social structures. All too often, explanations of nationalism invoke the social psychological as causal or consequential, but with little concern for carefully defining terms, locating concepts within actual research and/or theoretical frameworks of self,

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identity, motives, desires, and/or cognition. The Frankfurt School initiated social psychological studies of nationalism, especially reactionary forms. They called attention to the dangers of ‘one-dimensional thought’ that would ignore the emotional and irrational aspects of subjectivity – especially tendencies for blind compliance to leaders. More recent social psychological theorizing has focused on identities, cognitive processes and inter-group perceptions and relations. These positions are complementary and suggest a synthesis. Nations consist of political communities of meaning in which historically and structurally constituted reflexive citizen subjects are endowed with cognition, consciousness and imagination, as well as desires, feelings and emotions. The contexts and ways in which citizens are socialized, the social conditions they emotionally experience and the interpretations they make and/or receive from their leaders, can direct nationalism to the loftiest goals of freedom and democracy. But nationalism can also foster death, destruction and devastation. Studies of nationalism that attend to its emotional underpinnings may play some role in the directions it takes.

EPILOGUE: WITHER NATIONALISM? With globalization, integrated world markets, deterritorialized flexible capital, regulation by supranational organizations such as the WTO and IMF, universalized Western (American) mass media and proliferation of ideologies of consumption, many have argued that nationstates no longer play significant roles (see Ohmae 1995; Sklair 2001). National identities have been challenged by consumer-based ‘branded’ identities, cosmopolitanism, fandoms of popular culture ‘stars’ and retreats to ‘lifestyle enclaves’ within gated communities. More recently, various Web-based ‘virtual communities’ provide alternative identities ranging from on-line game players to sex chat lines and social movements devoted to Global Justice (Langman and Morris 2005). Each represents an alternative to nation-based

communities and identities. In the case of cosmopolitanism, perhaps most advanced in Europe, the integration of the EU, common currency and ease of travel enabled the emergence of an identity based on the kinds of ‘cultural capital’ available to the higher educated, often multilingual classes. Certain groups of cultural specialists (performing artists, journalists) capitalist elites, and often academics with memberships in international scientific communities, may participate in ‘art worlds’ or leisure activities (skiing, sailing, cuisine). Professional identities, aesthetic tastes and leisure activities may not only provide them with greater saliency and pride than citizenship, but become ways of differentiating themselves from less sophisticated, often more nationalistic classes such as British soccer hooligans or Yankee cowboys. But this is only half of the story. In many places of the world, nationalism remains a potent force. National identities ameliorate the doubt, uncertainty and fragmentation of rapid social change in the global age (Guibernau 1996). Many former republics of the USSR, Georgia, Ukraine and Chechnya have seen flourishing nationalisms demanding autonomy and self-determination, and a willingness for some to die for their causes. In China, with the demise of Communist internationalism, nationalism emerged as the inclusive ideology. At the time of this writing, the US, fearful, apprehensive and angry after 9/11, supported George W. Bush and a reactionary nationalist agenda that has discarded international agreements and backed a unilateral peremptory invasion of Iraq. While globalization has in some cases attenuated national self-determination and has offered alternatives to citizenship-based identities, in other cases these same conditions have fostered or revived the vilest integral nationalisms. The death of the nation-state and demise of nationalism thus seem a bit premature. Until that happens, there remain many challenges for scholars. A comprehensive social psychology of nationalism remains wanting. Perhaps this chapter can be seen as an invitation for such examinations and suggestions for future research directions.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to express his gratitude to Gerard Delanty for his suggestions and encouragement, to Lyn Spillman for her insightful comments, Meghan Burke for her most thorough research and Andrew Fraker for his editorial assistance.

NOTES 1 Troy commanded very important trade routes. 2 Hobsbawm (1990) said that no one who supports nationalism should study it. So that this author’s position is clear at the start, my approach to nationalism is rooted first in the Frankfurt School, then informed by Gramsci, sees its earliest origins in bourgeois struggles for hegemony, and considers that nationalism became the vehicle for gaining the emotional support of the masses in elite struggles. 3 Kecmanovic (1996) provides an extensive review of definitions of nationalism. NB: nationalism involves one’s identity, patriotism is simply love of one’s nation. 4 Most scholars of nationalism have tried to deal with its individualistic-libertarian forms as well as its collectivist-authoritarian forms. For a review of this debate, see Kecmanovic (1996). 5 See Searle-White (2001), Tyrrell (1996), Finlayson (1998), Kecmanovic (1996) and Bloom (1990). 6 Gellner’s (1983) formulation is fundamentally materialistic, and while a good analysis, he gives little attention to the emotional and more psychological aspects of nationalism. 7 http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1784herdermankind.html We might note, however, that nationalism, more so than many other topics, is filled with exceptions; thus there are multilingual nations like Switzerland or Belgium, nations without states, for example nineteenthcentury Poland etc. 8 Cf. Calhoun (1997). 9 Bloom (1990) argued that, at least in the case of England and France, a ‘consciousness of kind’ beyond the elites was emergent by the late medieval period. Thus with the Magna Carta and Joan of Arc came a shared sensibility, that would eventually become transformed by elites into nations. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the exhortation to ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ (IV.iii.60) foreshadows the nation as brethren. 10 That ‘new’ imaginary, the democratic republic, had origins in Athens and Rome, for ‘free’ affluent males. So too did early, ‘inclusive’ bourgeois nationalisms exclude women, the poor and minorities. 11 The extent to which early nationalists impacted later Fascism has long been debated, but most would argue that the nationalisms of Kant, Fichte and Herder, embracing freedom and democracy, were fundamentally opposed to the authoritarianism and repression of the Nazis.

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12 Cf. Poole (1999). 13 See also Downing (1992) on the role of constitutionalism. 14 Many colonials, coming to Europe for medical, scientific or technical educations, also learned about liberal democracy as well as Marxist revolutionary agendas which shaped independence-minded nationalists as different as Ho Chi Mihn. 15 See Part III for the many trajectories of nationalism. 16 As many have noted between the rise of the EU and an emerging European identity, in which rivalries, if not animosities between Spanish and French, or French and German, wane with the ascent to a post-national, constitutional patriotism, Habermas’s suggested alternative to nationalism. This debate is beyond this chapter. See Delanty (1996). 17 Guibernau (1996) used the Durkheimian trope to illustrate relations of national culture, identity and ritual as much like religion. 18 T. H. Marshall (1950). 19 Cf. Bloom (1990) for an extensive analysis of Freud, Mead, Erikson, Parsons and Habermas on the role of identification mediating national identities. 20 Thus as noted, wars, whether dynastic, modern or for independence of colonies, are based on group interests, that are not reducible to aggression which may, however, impel the individual to support elite agendas. 21 Durkheim suggested that the belief in the immortality of the individual soul reflected its being a force and/or representation of the society that seems immortal, predating us, outlasting us. 22 As noted, such theories focus on individuals rather than the historical nature of nationalism. For an excellent review, see Stephen Gibson http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/ youth/docs/Gibsons_lit_rev.pdf. 23 For a fuller discussion, see Kecmanovic (1996). 24 With Tito as the West’s communist, the Yugoslavians were extended credit and travel visas for workers and Yugoslavia was a popular tourist destination. But following the death of Tito, a charismatic leader who fostered a sense of community between its ethno-religious groups, demise of communism, with the severe economic retrenchments, led to massive dislocations. 25 Bloom (1990) reviewed a number of perspectives of the impact of social psychological factors on international relations.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ariès, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage Books. Baumeister, R. F. (1986) Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Baumeister, R. F. (1992) Meanings of Life. New York: Guilford Press. Becker, E. (1973) Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Bloom, W. (1990) Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowlby, J. (1969–73) Attachment and Loss: Attachment. New York: Basic Books. Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Connor, W. (1993) Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Delanty, G. (1996) ‘Beyond the Nation State: National Identity and Citizenship in a Multicultural Society: A Response to Rex’, Sociological Research Online, 1 (3). Delanty, G. and O’Mahony, G. (2002) Nationalism and Social Theory. London: Sage. Downing, B. (1992) The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, E. (1984 [1897]) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press. Ekman, P. and Schere, K. (eds) (1983) Approaches to Emotion. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Elias, N. (1978) The Civilizing Process. New York: Urisen Books. Feshbach, S. (1987) ‘Individual Aggression, National Attachment, and the Search for Peace’, Aggressive Behavior, 13: 315–25. Finlayson, A. (1998) ‘Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Theories of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 4 (2): 145–62. Freud, S. (1961 [1930]) Civilization and its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton. Fromm, E. (1941) Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Fromm, E. (1973) Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self Identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guibernau, M. (1996) Nationalisms. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1989 [1968]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry

into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hinde, R. (n.d.) Why Are People Willing to Go to War? http://www.preparingforpeace.org/hinde.htm. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hochschild, A. (1986) The Managed Heart. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Ignatieff, M. (1993) Blood and Belonging. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Inkeles, A. and Levinson, D. J. (1969) ‘National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Sociocultural Systems’, in G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (eds), The Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 4. Reading, MA: Addison–Wesley. Janis, I. (1982) Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd edn. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Kecmanovic, D. (1996) The Mass Psychology of Ethnonationalism. New York: Plenum. Koenigsberg, R. A. (1977) The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism. New York: Library of Social Science. Lakoff, G. (2002) Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langman, L. and Morris, D. (2002) ‘Islamic Terrorism: From Retrenchment to Ressentiment and Beyond’, in Kushner, H. (ed.), Essential Readings in Political Terrorism. New York: Gordian Knot Press. Langman, L. and Morris, D. (2005) ‘Virtual Public Spheres and Globalized Social Movements’, Social Theory (in press). Marshall, T. H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, B. (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Moscovici, S. (1993). The Invention of Society: Psychological Explanations for Social Phenomena. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ohmae, K. (1995) The End of the Nation State. New York: Simon and Schuster. Plutchik, R. (1980) ‘A General Psycho-evolutionary Theory of Emotion’, in R. Plutchik and H. Kellerman (eds), Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, Vol. 1: Theories of Emotion. New York: Academic Press. pp. 3–33.

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Poole, R. (1999) Nation and Identity. London: Routledge. Reich, W. (1946) The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reicher, S. and Hopkins, N. (2001) Self and Nation. London: Sage. Scheff, T. A. (n.d.) Theory of Runaway Nationalism: ‘Love’ of Country/Hatred of Others. http://www. soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/36.html. Scheff, T. (1994) Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Searle-White, J. (2001) The Psychology of Nationalism. New York: Palgrave. Sennett, R. (2002) Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. New York: W. W. Norton. Simmel, G. (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: The Free Press. Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Smith, A. (2003) Chosen Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, E. (1993) ‘Social Identity and Social Emotion: Toward a New Conceptualization of Prejudice’, in D. M. Mackie and D. L. Hamilton (eds), Affect, Cognition, and Stereotyping: Interactive Processes in Group Perception. New York: Academic Press. pp. 297–315.

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Spillman, L. (1997) Nation and Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (1994) Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’: An Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. (1986) ‘The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behaviour’, in S. Worschel and W. G. Austin (eds), Psychology of Intergroup Relationships. Chicago, IL: Nelson. pp. 7–24. Tesser, A. (1988) ‘Towards a Self-evaluation Model of Social Behavior’, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21: 181–228. Tompkins, S. (1962) Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. New York: Springer. Tyrrell, I. (1996) ‘Nation-States and States of Mind: Nationalism as Psychology’, in Critical Review, 10 (2). Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weber, M. (1958 [1946]) ‘Class, Status and Power’, in H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (trans. and eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Galaxy Books. Zaretsky, E. (1976) Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life. New York: Harper Colophon.

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7 Nationalism and Direct Rule MICHAEL HECHTER, TUNA KUYUCU AND AUDREY SACKS

The rise of nationalism and the creation of the nation-state have been among the most striking political developments of the past two centuries. Emerging in the late eighteenth century, the nation-state came to supplant both petty, homogeneous principalities and grand multi-ethnic empires in attempting to merge the boundaries of nations and states (Gellner 1983). Making sense of a phenomenon as pervasive and varied as this is far from an easy task: the burgeoning literature on nationalism is rife with conceptual, epistemological and theoretical disputes. Despite this apparent disarray, this chapter argues that a small set of social mechanisms is responsible for the emergence, persistence and evolution of various types of nationalism. Nationalism is collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation, a territorially concentrated and culturally distinctive solidary group, congruent with those of its governance unit, the agency responsible for providing the bulk of public goods within the nation’s territory (Hechter 2000: 7). Since it is all about nations seeking self-determination, any theory of nationalism must begin by first considering mechanisms of group formation and group solidarity (Hechter 1987; Brubaker 2002). Rational individuals form groups to gain access to jointly produced goods that they are unable to provide for themselves. Once formed, however, the

resulting groups will have varying levels of solidarity. The greater the proportion of members’ resources contributed to the group’s ends, the greater its solidarity. Group solidarity increases with members’ dependence on joint goods and on the group’s control capacity (Hechter 1987). The more dependent members are on their group, the greater their willingness to contribute to it. Dependence alone does not guarantee solidarity, however, because no matter how much they value their membership, rational members still may be tempted to profit from it without contributing to the group. This is where control capacity comes in. A group’s control capacity consists of its ability to monitor members’ behavior and levy sanctions in the event of inadequate contributions. Group solidarity is necessary for the development of nationalism, but it is insufficient. Just because a nation is highly solidary, it need not be nationalist. For example, although the Swiss canton of Jura is relatively solidary, at least compared to other cantons, it has no nationalist movement at the present time (see Jenkins 1986 for an account of earlier Jura nationalism). Nationalism only arises when a substantial, but indeterminate, proportion of the members of a nation demands sovereignty. This demand is variable rather than constant.

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Since both individuals and groups prefer to be ruled by themselves rather than by others, why does the demand for sovereignty vary at all? On the one hand, the expression of the demand is affected by a variety of institutions. On the other, the intensity of the demand can be trumped by alternative collective goals. The expression of the demand for self-determination is influenced by several institutional factors. Some factors, like democratic institutions, affect a group’s ability to engage in collective protest; no political demands of any sort are usually voiced in repressive regimes (Scott 1985; Kuran 1996). Other factors, like the electoral system, affect a group’s ability to articulate its distinctive interests. No matter how great a nation’s demand for sovereignty may be, this demand is unlikely to be articulated in a two-party majoritarian electoral system (Zielinski 2002). The intensity of the demand for selfdetermination, however, hinges on the dependence of the nation on its host state (Jenne 2004). The more that the members of distinctive nations profit from their allegiance to the host state, the less the allure of self-determination. Hence, the less dependent a nation is on its host state, the greater the demand for self-determination. As many analysts have argued, nationalism is a modern phenomenon (Tilly 1975, 1990; Hechter 1975, 2000; Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1992; Mann 1993; Brubaker 1996; Marx 2004). The rise of direct rule leads to intense struggles between central and local authorities over the right to govern. This chapter explains how the rise of direct rule led to the emergence of different types of nationalism, beginning in the eighteenth century. This account can also be read as a critique of explanations that assign nations a timeless existence (Smith 1983, 1986; Hutchinson 2000; by contrast, see Ozkirimli 2003). Whereas the national identities that crystallized during the rise of direct rule may have had roots in the distant past, this cannot explain either the timing or the forms of the resulting nationalist movements. The following section discusses the impact of direct rule on the levels and forms of solidarity of local cultural groups. Then we examine how the emergence of direct rule fosters

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both state-building and peripheral types of nationalism. Finally, to illustrate the theory, we apply it to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of Kurdish peripheral nationalism in its aftermath.

WHY INDIRECT RULE THWARTS NATIONALISM Previous to the advent of modern communications technology, central rulers were compelled to rely on indirect rule to control their far-flung territories (Boone 2003). Under indirect rule, the bulk of governance is delegated to local authorities. Indirect rule assuages local authorities by affording the bulk of governance rights in their domain. These authorities usually share a common culture with their subjects (Hechter 2000). Since subjects tend to be ruled by their own kind, their political demands are unlikely to be about sovereignty. Since local authorities in indirect-rule regimes are virtually sovereign they, in turn, have little to gain by seeking greater self-determination – unless the center rapidly increases its demands on them for taxes and other resources. By minimizing the demand for sovereignty among local authorities and their subjects, indirect rule thwarts nationalism in culturally distinct regions. Even if indirect rulers are alien, cultural conflict is unlikely to persist because local authorities, unlike their central counterparts, have high control capacity. Moreover, alien indirect rulers tend to assimilate to their subjects’ culture over time (as did the Old Irish following the Cromwellian Settlement). Once indirect rule is undermined, however, a potential for nationalism exists. The leading causes of the undermining of indirect rule are the rise of direct rule, on the one hand, and the collapse of the center in a multinational state, on the other.

DIRECT RULE AND STATE-BUILDING NATIONALISM Direct rule consolidates power and monopolizes the right to rule in a single center at the

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expense of alternative loci of authority. One of the fundamental determinants of national dependence is direct rule. Direct rule is a variable that consists of two elements: scope and penetration (Hechter 2004). The scope of a state refers to the quantity and quality of the collective goods that it provides. Welfare benefits, government jobs, police, state-sponsored schools and hospitals and a functioning system of justice are examples of such goods. Socialist states have the highest scope; laissez-faire ones have the lowest. Scope induces dependence: where state scope is high, individuals depend primarily on the state for access to collective goods (see Hechter 2004 for a discussion of the preconditions of direct rule). In contrast, penetration refers to the central state’s control capacity – that is, the proportion of laws and policies that are enacted and enforced by central as against regional or local decision-makers. Penetration is at a maximum in police states in which central rulers seek to monitor and control all subjects within their domain. Polities relying on local agents to exercise control (municipal police forces, for example) have lower penetration. Scope and penetration often co-vary, but not necessarily. For example, federal states with similar scope have less penetration than unitary states. Instituting direct rule poses a daunting challenge to central authorities because it can only be attained by destroying the pre-existing social order. Not only do local elites have to be weaned from their own pre-eminent social position, but the loyalty of culturally distinctive groups must also be secured (Hechter 2000: 60; Marx 2004). To this end, direct-rule regimes in multicultural polities must invest substantial resources to transform a diverse population into a culturally homogeneous one. State-building nationalism extends the regime’s scope and penetration via the establishment of centralized taxation, banking, military, welfare and educational systems, among other administrative innovations. The attempt to create a nation out of a multitude of local cultural groups in post-Revolutionary France is the archetypical example of state-building nationalism (Weber 1976). Overall, the directrule state assumes a historically unprecedented

intrusion into the daily lives of its subjects (Foucault 1991; Bourdieu 1994). As the scope and penetration of the nationalizing state (Brubaker 1996) increases, subjects come to focus their political demands on central as against local authorities. Historically, this led to the development of legally circumscribed and institutionally enforced citizenship rights (Lipset 1963; Marshall 1964; Bendix 1966; Tilly 1975). Moreover, those individuals and groups who have been disadvantaged by direct rule will tend to resist it by creating peripheral nationalism (Hechter 2000).

DIRECT RULE AND PERIPHERAL NATIONALISM Peripheral nationalism occurs when residents of a culturally distinctive territory resist incorporation into a centralizing state by attempting to secede (as in Quebec, Scotland, Turkish Kurdistan and Catalonia). It emerges when the institutions of direct rule fail to erase cultural distinctions in a state. Local authorities instigate peripheral nationalist movements to preserve their own privileged positions in the periphery. More puzzling is the motivation of the governed to support nationalist movements that are instigated by local rulers. A common by-product of direct rule is a cultural division of labor (Hechter 1978) which relegates the members of cultural minorities to distinctive – often subordinate – positions in the occupational structure. Because a group’s position in the cultural division of labor affects the life chances of its members, this kind of stratification system affords psychic and political salience to cultural distinctions. If cultural minorities perceive that they are disfavored by the center’s provision of collective goods, they are at heightened risk of mobilization by nationalist entrepreneurs (Hroch 1985). Such nationalist resistance will be greatest in territories where strong patron–client ties and organized community relations allow local authorities to mobilize a dependent populace (Hechter 2000: 67–71). When groups having low rank in a hierarchical cultural division of labor are territorially

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concentrated (as in Quebec or South-East Turkey), this provides optimal conditions for the development of peripheral nationalism. Since both hierarchical and segmental cultural divisions of labor favor the establishment and maintenance of separate social identities, they provide an important social base for the development of nationalism if the relevant groups are territorially concentrated. In contrast, peripheral nationalism is less likely to emerge in the absence of a cultural division of labor, and in societies where culturally distinctive groups are not spatially concentrated. Whereas stable cultural divisions of labor are responsible for the salience of cultural distinctions in a society, rapidly shifting cultural divisions of labor – typically the outcome of conquest or revolution – are often responsible for the outbreak of violent intergroup conflict (Petersen 2002). This theory has straightforward implications for the consequences of the disintegration of multi-ethnic empires in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nationalism was conspicuously absent in multicultural pre-modern empires until their governing structures transformed from the late eighteenth century onward (note, however, Gorski’s [2000] claim that Dutch nationalism arose in the sixteenth century). This points to the inadequacy of primordialist theories of nationalism. To illustrate the theory in greater detail, the chapter analyzes the disintegration of one of the most important of these pre-modern polities, the Ottoman Empire, and identifies the factors responsible for its disintegration along ethnonational lines. It holds that the transition to direct rule – itself a response to the growing economic and military decline of the Empire – paved the way for the emergence of state-building nationalism (in Turkey) and peripheral nationalism (in the Balkans and Arab lands) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE Emerging first as a small principality in northwest Anatolia, the Ottoman Empire expanded

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into a vast world empire during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It ruled over much of today’s Middle East, North Africa and the Balkan peninsula until its demise following World War I and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22. The Ottomans devised a particular form of indirect rule to maintain control over its extensive territories. Under the timar system, central authorities gave to non-hereditary tax-collecting administrators the right to control and exploit the peripheral territories in return for a steady flow of revenues to the center and the provision of troops during military campaigns (Keyder 1987; Inalcik 1995). This gave the timar holders responsibility for the maintenance of social order, collection of taxes and raising of soldiers in their respective domains. So long as the center could control the timar holders, this system functioned efficiently (Keyder 1987: 30). If the timar system enabled the Ottomans to control distant territories, the millet system allowed them to rule over an extremely multicultural population. Under this system, the state granted a degree of self-determination to different confessional units, the millets. The heads of these quasi-independent units (millet bashi) were primarily responsible for maintaining social order in their own communities. The center did not intervene in the internal affairs of the millets: for example, there was no uniform education system in the Empire, and the respective millets had the right to operate their own religious schools. Similarly, each millet had its own unique legal structure; this gave the Empire a legal pluralist structure that would be unthinkable in direct-rule states. As the empire was Islamic, the Muslim millet – consisting of many different ethnic groups – held a privileged position with respect to Christians and Jews. Until the nineteenth century, the millets had no ethnic or national connotations; they were purely based on religious affiliation (Karpat 1982: 141–69). The millets only began to acquire ethnonational consciousness after direct rule began to be implemented in the nineteenth century (Augustinos 1992; Rodrigue 1995). Why did this two-tiered system of indirect rule collapse and spur nationalism among the ethnically diverse millet communities? The

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growing economic and military power of direct-rule Western European states served to limit the Ottomans’ territorial and economic expansion (Karpat 1972; Keyder 1987; Barkey 1997). Since expansion provided the life-blood of the Empire, the center’s decreasing returns provided an opportunity for peripheral notables (the ayans, the primary holders of tax farms) to assume much greater power than had been permitted under the classical timar system (Karpat 1972; Haddad 1977; Keyder 1987; Pamuk 1987; Barkey 1997; Khoury 1997; Toledano 1997; Aksan 1999). Especially in the Balkan territories closest to the European markets, the same process also led to the emergence of merchant groups, new urbanites and an educated middle class. In contrast to the timar-holders, these new groups were far less dependent on the center, and far more dependent on European markets. They all played leading roles in the rise of nationalism because the conditions that had maintained the mutually beneficial coalition between local and central authorities were eroding. Moreover, various European states gave open protection and support to these newly enriched groups, further improving their relative position vis-à-vis the center (Keyder 1987: 33). These local, regional and international dynamics led to the emergence of nationalist movements in the Balkan territories (Karakasidou 1997). As peripheral authorities began to challenge state authority, the Ottomans did not stand idly by. To counter this threat in the westernmost provinces they instituted direct rule. This is principally why nationalism first arose in the Balkans. Serbia was the first Balkan province to develop nationalism. After enjoying considerable autonomy under a benevolent governor of Belgrade, Serbia was besieged by Istanbul’s crack troops, who killed the governor and many village chiefs. Local notables fought back in the first Serbian insurrection in 1804 (MacKenzie 1996: 210). What began as a series of revolts by local leaders against the janissaries soon acquired the larger goal of national independence as local notables sought to secede from the Empire. Independence was only attained after the defeat of the Ottomans

in the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78. Greece was the second Balkan province to become nationalist. As in the Serbian case, the immediate cause of the Greek war of independence (1821–27) was Sultan Mahmud II’s attempt to institute direct rule in the peripheral lands of the empire. After long years of fighting between the Ottoman army and Greek insurgents, an independent Greek state was founded in 1832. The Tanzimat reforms (1839–76) attempted to create a unified nation out of the ethnically and religiously heterogeneous population. To this end, the state implemented legal and administrative reforms to undermine the power of the millet communities and incorporate them into the new Ottoman polity based on a unitary legal system (Berkes 1964: 90–9). Direct rule had varying levels of success in different parts of the empire. Whereas the ayans in most of the Anatolian peninsula and in the Balkan territories closest to Istanbul (such as Thrace) were decisively defeated, the process unfolded in a different way elsewhere. Direct rule spurred a second round of peripheral nationalism in the remaining Balkan provinces under central control. Uprisings and anti-center revolts occurred in many provinces in the Rumelian territories, including Bulgaria and Romania. These hostilities took on a religious-national form as Christian subjects attacked Muslims, attempting to drive them out of their provinces. Rather than dismantling the traditional millet system, the move towards Ottomanism via direct rule was leading to the nationalization of the ethnically heterogeneous millet communities (Karpat 1972). The decisive moment for the final failure of direct rule in the Balkans was the RussoOttoman War (1877–78) and the ensuing Treaty of Berlin (1878) which gave independence to Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania. Direct rule was implemented last of all in the Arab lands. Local Arab notables retained much of their political and economic power (Haddad 1977; Kayali 1997; Khoury 1997; Toledano 1997). The Ottoman state had proved to be adept in its relations with these local power-holders (Toledano 1997: 155–6); as a result, there was no whiff of nationalism in

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any of the Arab territories until the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) came to power in 1908. In order to save the empire from total collapse, the CUP implemented policies that were directed at creating a unified and secular state structure with universal norms of citizenship. Arabs were removed from key provincial posts, and the Turkish language was imposed in government schools, the judicial system and local administration. Naturally, these moves toward direct rule met with strong resistance from local Arab notables. As the CUP switched to even more authoritarian rule in the Arab provinces following territorial losses during the Balkan Wars and World War I, Arab notables (most notably, Sharif Husayn of the Hijaz) decided to ‘pursue opportunities other than those emanating from a close identification with Istanbul that would enhance [their] personal power and prestige’ (Kayali 1997: 172). Thus the emergence of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire was a consequence of direct rule.

STATE-BUILDING NATIONALISM IN TURKEY AND THE EMERGENCE OF KURDISH PERIPHERAL NATIONALISM The Ottoman Empire devolved from an immense multicultural, multinational Empire stretching from Europe to the Middle East into modern-day Turkey. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, the Young Turks and their successors undertook a vigorous course of statebuilding nationalism. Non-Muslim minorities were considered enemies of the Turkish state: the Armenian population was ethnically cleansed, and the Greeks were expelled. By contrast, the non-Turkish Muslim population – comprised predominantly of Kurds – was designated a legitimate part of the new Turkish nation. Turkey’s leaders hoped that Kurdish incorporation would eliminate the nationalist threat responsible for the demise of the Ottoman Empire. To this end, they imposed direct rule in South-East Turkey (Poulton 1997). The Kurdish language was banned; in the 1930s, for example, people who spoke Kurdish

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in public were fined five kurus per word (Barkey and Fuller 1998: 19 fn18). Compulsory education was to be conducted entirely in Turkish, and conscription required Kurdish men to spend at least 550 days of their lives in an allTurkish environment (Kocher 2002: 11). The center passed laws displacing Kurds from their traditional territories to parts of the country where they were in the minority (van Bruinessen 1990: 45; McDowall 1997: 199–201). In response to these measures, sporadic Kurdish revolts broke out during the period from 1924 to 1937. Ankara responded to these by continuing to exile large numbers of Kurds to Turkish cities (McDowall 1997: 194–202). This increase in penetration was not matched by a corresponding extension of state scope, however. Ankara never provided the collective goods required to wrest the Kurds’ dependence from local to central authorities. Most Kurds remained dependent on their tribes. Not coincidentally, they spoke many different sub-dialects and adhered to a number of religions. For a short period following the 1960 coup, Turkey’s political structure opened. The government – the National Unity Committee – enacted one of the most liberal constitutions in Turkey’s history, which allowed for freedom of expression, association and publication (McDowall 1997: 405). For the first time the Kurds were able to express their demands in Parliament. During this period, Kurdish youth began to migrate in large numbers to cities in the west, especially Istanbul and Ankara, in search of increased employment and educational opportunities (Laizer 1996: 102). While economic development transformed Turkish cities in the 1960s and 1970s, living conditions in the Kurdish South-East were steadily declining (Barkey and Fuller 1998: 14). In addition, Kurdish peasants suffered at the hands of exploitive aghas, who collaborated with the State to keep the Kurds in a subordinate position (McDowall 1992: 19). In these western cities Kurdish migrants formed organizations based on regions of origin rather than tribal affiliation. They came to connect their unfavorable position in the cultural division of labor with their Kurdish origins (McDowall

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1997: 423). The PKK was formed in 1977 with the intent of releasing the urban and rural Kurdish proletariat from the fetters of the exploitive aghas, merchants and the ruling establishment (McDowall 1997: 423). The PKK’s mobilization activities were confined to Kurdish migrants in the cities throughout the West. Since they lacked the support of the Kurdish peasants, their uprisings in the late 1970s and early 1980s were easily defeated (Imset 1987–88: 26). Nonetheless, this cycle of violence provoked the state to expand its penetration. Approximately 300,000 soldiers and 95,000 ‘village guards’ – Kurds and Turkish paramilitaries who are financed and armed by the state (cited in Bozarslan 2000: 47) – were sent to the Kurdish lands. This provoked a reactive mobilization. By the early 1990s the PKK was engaged in a guerilla war, now with the participation of a large number of Kurdish peasants. Violence increased apace with the solidarity of the PKK. Human rights violations were committed by soldiers, ‘village guards’, the Islamist group Hizbullah and intelligence services (Laber 1988; Randal 1999: 259; and Bozarslan 2000). PKK fighters killed entire families believed to be serving the state (Gunter 1990: 75; White 2000: 145). By 1990, a super-governor in Diyarbakir was empowered to ban publications and seize Kurdish printing presses, displace civil servants, evacuate villages and deport Kurds at will (Randal 1999: 256). By the end of 1994, the fighting and insecurity had emptied more than 2600 hamlets and villages, sending an estimated two million rural Kurds into cities (Randal 1999: 257). Sheltered in the mountains, the PKK erected a parallel government providing education and food (Ignatieff 1993). The organization compels Kurdish families to pay a monetary fee if their sons fail to report for military service (cited in Kocher 2002: 12). The PKK also provides its members with cultural symbols (i.e. history, language, myths and notions of sacredness) as a means to unify Kurds and challenge the state’s legitimacy. The PKK offered private goods, which increased the Kurds’ dependence on the PKK, and invested in monitoring and sanctioning to

promote its solidarity (Imset 1996: 30). The PKK does not tolerate criticism of party policies and has severely punished dissenters (Gunter 1990: 75; Imset 1992: 83; White 2000: 145). Torture seems to have been widely applied against members accused of betrayal (Bozarslan 2000: 52). Despite this extension of direct rule, however, there was little evidence of Kurdish nationalism in the South-East until the late 1970s. What accounts for this half-century delay? The answer is that Kurds were internally divided. Prior to the twentieth century, few among them regarded the Kurds as a distinct cultural group with common interests (Mardin 1989; van Bruinessen 1992). Individual Kurds were dependent on their tribes, villages, millets, or shaykhs for access to collective goods. Because the Ottomans divided their subjects according to religion, Kurds were among the privileged subjects of the Sultan. Sunni Kurds could and did pursue political careers without shedding their Kurdish identity. Although some Kurdish voluntary associations were established during the Ottoman period, they did not promote Kurdish nationalism (van Bruinessen 1992). Tribal and religious leaders looked upon nationalists with suspicion and hostility. These social divisions continue to hamper the PKK’s mobilization efforts at the present time.

CONCLUSION Nationalism is a complex modern phenomenon that has assumed a variety of forms – from benign to malevolent – across geographic space and time. Since nations are solidary groups whose members perceive that they share a distinctive culture and history, processes of group formation and solidarity are key to explaining variations in the timing, strength and forms of nationalism. This chapter argues that these processes, in turn, are decisively affected by the rise of direct rule, which replaces dependence on local notables with that on central authorities. By enacting culturally exclusive policies, central authorities in direct-rule states provide an impetus for

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nation-formation and nationalist collective action. Although two centuries have passed since the first pillars of the Ottoman Empire began to crumble, its legacy lives on. Perhaps the signal achievement of the long-lived multi-ethnic empires lies in their success in maintaining an often precarious equilibrium between central and local power. Despite the massive social changes of the last three centuries, contemporary policy-makers continue to turn to federalism and other forms of indirect rule to reduce the stakes for nationalist conflict. Today Nigeria, Belgium, Bosnia and Iraq, among other states, are home to on-going experiments in constitutional engineering. Yet as the emperors of yesteryear were so keenly aware, finding the optimal balance between local and central power is no easy task.

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8 Nationalism and Political Philosophy MARGARET MOORE

Prior to 1989, political philosophy largely ignored issues connected with nationalism. Liberals and socialists were primarily interested in issues connected to the production and distribution of economic goods. Socialists argued against the private ownership of the economic resources of society, while liberals accepted private ownership principally as a means to the creation of wealth, which, they argued, could then be subject to some redistribution by the state. Liberals argued that it was possible to justify certain kinds of inequalities, either on the basis of desert, or as a necessary component to the efficient organization of society. Those of a more egalitarian bent, by contrast, argued that inequalities of income and wealth, and the class divisions to which they gave rise, were unjustifiable. In spite of these differences, both types of theories agreed that the fundamental hierarchy was class, and the fundamental questions of social justice revolved around the appropriate modes of producing and distributing goods. Since 1989, there has been a different type of challenge to the contemporary unequal order, variously called ‘the politics of difference’, ‘the politics of identity’, ‘the politics of recognition’ or multiculturalism. Theorists classified under this rubric challenge the status hierarchies of contemporary Western societies – hierarchies of sexual orientation, race, gender, national or

ethnic identity. They tend to question the ways in which contemporary liberal-democratic societies privilege one group over another, the ways in which one group’s experiences are deemed ‘normal’, and therefore as the benchmark according to which state expectations, practices and policies are measured. The philosophical treatment of national identity and nationalism is closely related to this general critique of status hierarchies. At one level, of course, the increased discussion and debate in political philosophy after 1989 can be directly related to the collapse of communism, and the emergence of secessionist struggles and explicit national consciousness throughout the former communist bloc. On this view, philosophical debate about nationalism was a response to developments in the political arena. However, in addition, the arguments that minority nationalists deployed against the state were on all fours with other theories in the multicultural camp, and can be viewed as part of a general concern with the distribution of non-economic goods in society. Minority nationalists’ main argument against the contemporary state focused on the fact that they were disadvantaged and marginalized by the (state’s) nation-building policies, which tend to privilege the majority national community on the territory. In this respect, they pose a challenge to the status hierarchy of their

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societies, and in particular to the way in which the state is infected by the norms and culture of the privileged (usually, majority) national community on the territory. Theorists interested in ‘identity politics’ or the ‘politics of recognition’ are struggling for equality or equal treatment, but this is mainly pursued not through the acquisition of economic resources, but by challenging the assumptions, practices and rules in societies that tend to reinforce these hierarchies. Despite the temptation either to prioritize or reduce class hierarchies to status hierarchies, or vice versa, it is now generally accepted that the two types of hierarchies operate along different dimensions, and not only do not overlap fully but sometimes cut across one another, or even possibly undermine each other. Although women as a whole, for example, do worse than men as a whole, some women do much better than some men; yet a woman may still face some discrimination or disadvantage that her similarly situated male counterparts do not. In some cases, such as that of homosexual men, the group as a whole may be better off in economic terms than heterosexual men as a group, but are worse off in the sense that the rules and practices of the society rest on the assumption of heterosexuality. Homosexual people are still subject to general disapprobation and discrimination in society, and are legally barred from marrying, adopting and other practices open to their heterosexual counterparts in most jurisdictions. Political philosophers dealing with national identity have mainly focused on the questions of what, morally, one should think of national identities and claims to institutional recognition of this identity, either in the form of exemptions to state-wide rules and practices, or a right to secede from the state. This chapter will disaggregate the question of the value of the identity from the questions about the appropriate forms that institutional recognition of the identity might take. The question of what one should think about national identities raises the question of the normative status of identity in general, and national identity in particular. Those who think that there is little value in nations or

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national identities tend to make the point that merely having an identity of a particular type does not constitute a moral argument for institutionalizing it in the state, and they therefore respond negatively to the issue of institutional recognition. Those who argue for the institutional recognition of national identity, by contrast, tend to make the point that national identity is not withering away under the glare of globalizing capitalism, but it is a force to be reckoned with. From this empirical claim, they then tend to raise concerns about the extent to which state policies and practices marginalize or disadvantage members of a minority nation. This can take two forms: the first is for fair treatment by the state, or fair inclusion in the state, and raises concerns about the legitimate limits of the state’s nation-building on behalf of the (majority) national community. The second is the claim that nations have a right to selfdetermination or right to secession. This is frequently raised also in the context of fairness, with the point that the current, over-holding state is identified with a particular national group, and the only fair remedy for the disadvantage that national minorities experience is to have a state of their own. Unfairness is usually associated with the particular policies and practices of the state, but sometimes it is also claimed that, under the current arrangements, some groups are permitted to be collectively self-determining while other, structurally similar groups are not. To some extent, then, these two aspirations to institutional recognition are tied to the two projects that characterize nationalist mobilizations. Nationalists typically have both a nationbuilding project, by which I mean policies aimed at facilitating the creation of a common national identity, and a national self-determination project, by which I mean a political project aimed at securing increased political autonomy or independent statehood for national minorities. Minority nationalists (members of nations without states) tend to seek increased political autonomy (the second project) and majority nationalists (nations with states) tend to be more concerned with how the political authority should exercise its powers and

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authority (the first project). The two projects are, to some extent, complementary in so far as political autonomy is necessary to the implementation of a nation-building project. They are also, of course, potentially conflicting, as when the majority nation seeks to extend its nation-building agenda to a minority national group within its borders. This chapter will discuss the three main debates in political philosophy generated by this new attention to nationalism. The first section deals with the philosophical debate about the value of national identities. The second section deals with legitimate forms of nation-building. Here the central question is whether, and how, the state can create a unified body politic without demeaning or discriminating against certain people within the community – people from a different ethnic or religious community, for example. The third section deals with the aspirations for collective self-determination that are felt by territorially concentrated minority national communities who are encapsulated within a state territory, those nations who do not have states. There has recently been a great deal of work on the ethics of secession, which primarily concerns the conditions under which a national group can justifiably secede to form its own state, although of course self-determination can occur within a state context.

IS NATIONAL IDENTITY AN ACCEPTABLE FORM OF IDENTITY? One recent debate in the philosophical literature on nationalism centres on the question of whether any value should attach to nations, or to the sentiment that people sometimes feel that nations, or their nation, are an important source of value. In the immediate post-war period, nationalism was inextricably linked with the aggressive expansionism and racism of Nazi Germany. Nationalism was regarded almost universally in negative terms, which progressive people should eschew, where possible, in favour of more universalist, cosmopolitan sentiments.

In cases where cosmopolitanism was not an option, the idea was that nationalism was bad, but that patriotism, or fidelity to constitutional principles, was acceptable. Since that time, and especially following the demise of communism, the kind of nationalism that has been defended has been principally minority nationalism, which is justified in defending itself against the homogenizing expansionism of American capitalism and statist coercion. The ‘nation’ is not conceived in racist or strictly ethnic terms by its defenders; rather, it is defined in relatively neutral terms as ‘a community (1) constituted by shared beliefs and mutual commitments, (2) extended in history, (3) active in character, (4) connected to a particular territory, and (5) marked off from other communities by its distinct public culture’ (Miller 1995: 27). Two recent lines of argument have been developed that suggest that value attaches to national communities. Interestingly, neither argument suggests that the value is inherent nor indeed that the sentiment ought to be cultivated in the virtuous person. The question is not the existential question of what constitutes a valuable way of life, or whether nationalism is a sentiment that one ought to cultivate as a component of ‘the good life’. Rather, the attachment that many people feel to their particular nation is viewed as an empirical ‘given’ and the question is how that attachment and that sense of value should be viewed by others. Drawing on the central ideas of the liberalcommunitarian debate, Miller has argued that the nation is a political instantiation of the idea of the community, which unites individuals by a common identity and conception of value. Like more conventional communitarians, Miller emphasizes liberalism’s reliance on communitarian ideas of territory and membership. Specifically, he argues that liberal theories of (redistributive) justice, as a matter of empirical fact, will need the social cement of nationality, so that people are prepared to contribute to their society and have the requisite trust to engage in redistributive practices. In some respects, his argument here echoes J. S. Mill’s argument in Considerations on Representative Government that democracy

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can only flourish where there is a shared national identity. According to Mill, ‘Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the workings of government, cannot exist’ (Mill 1993 [1861]: 394). Although Miller discusses the ‘good’ of democratic governance, his main emphasis is on social justice and the role that shared national identity (in Mill’s terms, ‘fellowfeeling’) plays in facilitating it. Miller’s mainly instrumental argument has been criticized on the grounds that its view of human motivation is too unidimensional. Liberal commitments can be defended in terms of reasoned commitment to social justice, and do not require an emotional commitment to a particular national community. Critics have pointed out that many people are prepared to redistribute as citizens of the world (Jones 1999). An opposite line of criticism accepts Miller’s empirical claim that, in fact, human motivation is limited, but argues that liberal justice should be understood as a corrective to limited altruism or suspect motivations, not grounded in it (Weinstock 1996: 87–100). In fact, however, Miller’s mainly instrumental argument extends the familiar liberal idea of the ‘burdens of commitment’, by which is meant the idea that liberal justice shouldn’t be so burdensome that it would presuppose altruistic or angelic motivations. Miller would deny that this idea is undermined by empirical examples of deviation; indeed, he would probably admit that there are both cosmopolitan universalists and people who hate their own national community. The question he poses is whether liberal redistributive practices are supported or undermined by these relations of trust and identity. The empirical evidence supporting Miller’s claim that shared ties of national identity facilitate social justice is unclear, at best. If we think broadly and comparatively about societies that have strongly felt national identities and try to correlate this with levels of redistribution, it is not at all clear that there is any evidence for this proposition, or, at least, that it is certainly not apparent that any relationship between the two is

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straightforward. On the other hand, Miller’s argument has a certain ring of plausibility and may be defensible in a weakened form. For example, there is some evidence that, when there is no shared identity, as in the case of British sentiments towards Northern Irishmen from the late 1960s, there will be a general desire to dissociate from the territory, in legal, juridical, territorial and public policy terms (Moore 2001: 82–4). This suggests that the instrumental nationalist argument cannot be dismissed, that, where there is a persistent feeling of non-shared identity and substantial one-way redistribution – that is, the relationship cannot be argued for in reciprocal terms, as mutually beneficial – the long-term continuation of a redistributive practice may be in jeopardy, for the political will is not there to discharge these obligations in the long term. A second line of argument deployed by minority nationalists, in defence of national communities, involves linking national identity with both personal autonomy and cultural communities. This is the most common argument deployed by liberal nationalists to reconcile liberalism with (non-aggressive) nationalism. This argument works by stressing the close relation of liberalism with the idea of personal autonomy and then examining the conditions under which individuals can be said to be autonomous. A central move in this argument is the claim that culture provides the context from which individuals’ choices about how to live one’s life can be made. According to Kymlicka (1995: 8), ‘individual choice is dependent on the presence of a societal culture, defined by language and history.’ Miller (1995: 85–6) follows the same line: ‘A common culture … gives its bearers … a background against which meaningful choices can be made.’ Culture provides the options from which the individual chooses, and infuses them with meaning, so that self-forming autonomous beings have some conception of value with which to guide their choices. The next step in the argument is that claim that, since a rich and flourishing culture is an essential condition of the exercise of autonomy, liberals have good reason to adopt measures that would protect culture. At this

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point, the argument has only shown that the existence of a (or some) flourishing cultural structure is necessary to the exercise of autonomy, but not a particular culture. However, liberal nationalists also make the empirical point that ‘most people have a very strong bond to their own culture’ (Kymlicka 1995: 8). This supports liberal nationalists in their conclusion that different national (or societal) cultures should be supported as a context in which personal autonomy is exercised, and this might involve some protections for culture within the state context, or secession from the state to ensure that the group has the jurisdictional authority to protect its own culture. This second argument does not use the language of identity, but it does deploy the idea that people generally, as an empirical fact, identify with their own culture. Sometimes that is combined with the idea that there are serious costs involved in leaving one’s own culture and adopting another, which many people might be prepared to bear (immigrants, for example) but which it might be unfair to force people to bear. It is interesting, though, that there is some ambiguity concerning the empirical claim that there are costs attached to changing cultures. It is unclear whether the costs in question are of the more material sort, the kind involved in learning a language, adopting a new cultural repertoire, and so on, or are related to the difficulties involved in changing identities. The idea here is that many identities are formed relationally, so that part of what it is to have a Scottish identity, say, is to have a non-English identity, or to have a Canadian identity is to be not American. This means that, as an empirical fact, it is difficult to move from one identity to another, as if one were changing hats. It would not be devastatingly dislocating, in a cultural sense, to leave Canada to live in the United States, or to leave Scotland to live in England, and would not involve the traditional costs involved in learning a new language or new symbolic repertoires. But it may be profoundly difficult for the Scot to think of herself as an Englishwoman, or the Canadian to think of himself as an American. Indeed, the very idea of having an identity of a certain kind suggests that it is conceptually not easy to change one’s

identity, and some identities are simply not amenable to being nested in the appropriate way. Interestingly, throughout this argument, there is considerable ambiguity over whether the work is being done by ‘culture’, or cultural difference; or by the fact that people have an identity of one sort or another. Neither the Miller-type instrumental argument nor the cultural-autonomy argument for valuing national identities confers inherent value on those identities. In both cases, they are conceived as valuable either in terms of the support for the goods that the state can produce (like redistributive justice) or as an important component of the autonomous life. Both arguments proceed fairly abstractly, and the first argument would seem to support only those national identities that facilitate just states, and deny any worth to those identities that facilitate vicious or aggressive states. Similarly, in the second argument, the link between autonomy and culture is obviously a contingent one, and one can imagine that in some cases the culture is so autonomyundermining that autonomy liberals could not give it any protection.

IS NATION-BUILDING LEGITIMATE? Another important recent debate in the philosophical literature on nationalism concerns the type of nation-building policies that the state is justified in pursuing. In the nineteenth-century, nation-building typically involved the use of repressive state power to eradicate cultural, ethnic and religious identities. Today, there is almost unanimous assent that policies of coercive assimilation are unacceptable, and increasing recognition that the creation of a unified national community will not occur ‘naturally’ (without the state making any decisions bearing on these issues), simply as a corollary of modernization. Indeed, the burgeoning of identity groups is testimony to the increased mobilization and politicization of a number of minority cultural and other disadvantaged groups within the state. Yet, the state typically seeks to create some kind of shared identity within its territory;

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and, if the argument above is correct – that this facilitates either liberal justice or the exercise of personal autonomy – may well be justified in doing so. National groups that have some institutional instantiation either in the state or in a self-governing unit (e.g. a province) within the state also typically aspire to using the state apparatus to express the cultural life of their particular national community. Part of the philosophical debate on nationalism is centred on the question of the extent to which this is legitimate. The legitimacy of nation-building is raised by two different types of groups within the state. Following the basic distinction between two types of diversity, developed by Will Kymlicka in his book Multicultural Citizenship (1995), these can be classified as (1) multiculturalism and (2) multinationalism. A society is multicultural (in a sociological sense) when it is comprised of various – ethnic, gender, religious, sexual orientation, racial – identity groups. A society is multinational when the state is comprised of different national communities, that is, historical communities on what they perceive to be their ancestral territory, who aspire to be collectively self-governing. Obviously, many societies contain both kinds of diversity, but the distinction is still relevant, since, according to Kymlicka, the two types of groups aspire to different kinds of rights. In much of the literature, this distinction is collapsed into a distinction between immigrant and non-immigrant societies. Immigrant societies are characterized by the first kind of diversity (although obviously women and sexual orientation groups are not the product of immigration). Non-immigrant societies are typically characterized by nationally mobilized communities, ensconced on their own territory, with the demographic basis for selfgovernment, but who are encapsulated within a larger state that is comprised of at least one other national community. There is often a tension between the nationbuilding policies that the state employs to create a single unified national community, on the one hand, and multicultural groups, on the other, who claim that those policies have the effect of disadvantaging or marginalizing them.

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This problem is particularly acute when the majority national group in the state is strongly identified with a particular ‘thick’ culture or religion, and seeks to create unity by extending that cultural expression across the territory. In general, there is no argument for privileging national identity groups over other kinds of identity groups. After all, nationalists (majority and minority varieties) no longer argue that the nation is natural or organic or primordial; their claims are framed in the language of identity, and in the case of minority nationalists, in terms of the unfairness of the policies and practices of the state. This is structurally similar to the claims of other minority groups – gay people, minority religious, ethnic and linguistic communities, as well as women – who have legitimate concerns about how the exercise of political power will affect (disadvantage or marginalize) them. It would be contradictory (unprincipled) to appeal to the norm of fairness in advancing one’s own case (or that of one’s national group) but reject the very same appeal when it is advanced by some other group. At the very least, there would have to be a good argument for doing so. On the other hand, one of the main criticisms of multiculturalism and indeed identity politics of all kinds has emphasized that such policies are divisive and reify difference. According to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, in his book The Disuniting of America (1992: 102): ‘The cult of ethnicity exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges between races and nationalities. The endgame is selfpity and self-ghettoization.’ Brian Barry (2001) argues, from an egalitarian perspective, that equality of results (which is presupposed in the claim to rectify the kinds of marginalization associated with the uniform application of rules) is not attainable. The best we can hope for in our diverse and complex society is equal rights, equality under the law and redistributive justice. Multiculturalism threatens all these, first by arguing for exemptions from the only kind of equality that is attainable, namely, political/ juridical equality; and, second, by distracting us from the real problem, which is poverty or economic disadvantage.

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This line of criticism is greatly exaggerated, but there may be some truth to the claim that the normative limits to cultural (or multicultural) recognition are reached when the policies have the effect of undermining the society’s political framework. There is obviously room for disagreement on whether a particular form of ‘recognition’ simply rectifies an unfair disadvantage or whether it potentially undermines a system of universal results, but it is probably true that there are limits to cultural recognition, dictated by the imperatives of a modern state, capable of being governed justly and democratically. There is no evidence of disagreement on this by either multiculturalists or their critics – for example, Iris Young (1993), one of the most prominent exponents of the politics of recognition, seems to presuppose the existence of a common arena in which differences and commonalities can be recognized and discussed. Nevertheless, she does not address the tension between the two in specific cases. For example, it is undoubtedly the case that speakers of minority languages encounter certain kinds of disadvantage. Yet, at the same time, it is not possible to have a modern state and give equal recognition to every language spoken in the community. Public education, public debate and commercial activity have to be in one or two or three languages – possibly, the upper limit is higher than this – but it is certainly lower than the number of languages typically spoken in a diverse political community. The modern bureaucratic and democratic state, with mass literacy and increasingly standardized modes of interaction, requires for its smooth functioning a limited number of common languages in which different people are able to discuss their differences and commonalities. Significantly, most forms of multiculturalism may talk the language of equal recognition but do not actually propose policies that embrace absolutely equal treatment. Iris Young (1993: 175–81) proposes bilingual education for Hispanics, which, in Patten’s (2000) terminology, is a form of norm-andexemption approach. It assumes some accommodation for non-majority language speakers in dealing with the state (some educational

accommodation, translation services or bilingual agents in dealing with public agencies and so on) but also assumes that this will occur in the context of a public culture operated in a common majority language. The normative goal suggested by the accommodation of these dual concerns – nonoppression of minority groups on the one hand and the viability of a just and democratic political society on the other – suggests the need for a thin, political identity. It suggests forms of political accommodation where it will be possible to think of oneself as both Italian and American, Muslim and British, Jewish and Australian. It suggests forms of accommodation that will enable people to develop various forms of nested identities, and repudiate policies and practices that set these identities in unnecessary opposition. The problem with respect to national groups is somewhat different, since what is at issue is not simply the particular laws or policies of the state, but the very jurisdictional authority of the state itself. This arises because minority national groups typically aspire to be collectively selfdetermining and question the jurisdictional authority of states in which they are encapsulated, whose borders and structure prevent them from being collectively self-governing. In these cases, the only way to be fair to national identities – as distinct from other types of identities that are typically considered under the rubric of ‘multiculturalism’ – is through creating the institutional or political space in which members of the nation can be collectively selfgoverning. In cases where the state is dominated by a majority national group, and political autonomy for the minority national group is both possible (demographically) and desired by the group itself, fair treatment would seem to require political recognition of this aspiration to be collectively self-governing. This does not necessarily mean secession but it does mean the transformation of the state into a genuinely multinational state, a state not associated with a particular national group, but one in which the thin political identity can encompass the different national communities on the territory. The goal here is to ensure that it is possible to be both aboriginal and Australian, Quebecois and

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Canadian, Scottish and British, Catalan and Spanish, Kashmiri and Indian, Kurdish and Iraqi. All of this suggests that justifiable nationbuilding policies are considerably more limited in scope, and more deferential to the identities and commitments and culture of the members, than was ever the case in the past. It is no longer possible to create unity in the same way as nineteenth-century nationalists did; indeed, the only justifiable method of creating a unified political community is by being inclusive of the legitimate diversity of the society.

IS A NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION PROJECT JUSTIFIED? The third area of debate among political philosophers concerns the justifiability of secession. This debate is relevant to nationalism, since collective self-determination is an important – indeed, some argue, central – goal of nationalist movements. Political philosophers interested in the ethics of secession have largely ignored nationalist aspirations, identities and feelings, but focus on the legitimacy of the state, and the conditions under which it would be justifiable for a group to secede (Buchanan 1991). The two main lines of argument are developed from liberal justice theory and liberal democratic theories of legitimacy. These are widely referred to in the literature as just-cause theories of secession and choice theories of secession. On the first line of argument, the question is whether the state is a just one, and the answer to that question requires an assessment of past state behaviour. Has the state engaged in egregious violations of human rights, systematic suppression, ethnic cleansing or genocide of a particular population group? The answers to these questions are relevant to the question of the legitimacy of the state, for if the state has engaged in practices of this kind, it has no right to government, no entitlement to have its territorial integrity protected. This line of argument is developed directly from liberal theory, and particularly from liberal accounts of state legitimacy. One problem with

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this line of argument is the widespread difficulty in distinguishing between the legitimacy of the state and the legitimacy of the government (Buchanan 1999, 2003; Naticchia 1999). Even in cases where there is a proven record of human rights abuses perpetrated by the government or its agents, it is not clear that the correct remedy is secession rather than a change of government, and especially the installation of a legitimate, human rights-protecting government. To make the case for secession as an appropriate remedy, it would seem to require that the state is illegitimate; that the state (and not just the government) is thoroughly infected in its structures and overall design with discriminatory and unjust practices. This is a high bar to set, and seems to presuppose a static view of the role of governments in effecting change, and reforming the state itself. This problem also makes it evident that the liberal case for legitimacy does not map completely on to nationalist disaffection for the state in which the group is encapsulated. Once a group has become mobilized in favour of collective self-determination, it is doubtful that its members will be satisfied with reforms to ensure that the state is respectful of human rights and non-discriminatory. This is so even if the impetus behind the initial nationalist mobilization was the exclusion and marginalization of the group from the state. Yet, this line of argument is able only to deal with the justice or injustice of the current state and/or government. Another line of argument, which, to some extent, deals with this problem, focuses on the democratic legitimacy of the state. This is derived from standard liberal consent theory, but it is modified to suggest that consent is not actually required. Nevertheless, if there is evidence of widespread rebellion and/or lack of consent in the state by a minority population, the legitimacy of the state in governing over these people is brought into question. In both Harry Beran’s (1984) and Daniel Philpott’s (1995) formulations of this basic position, the device of a referendum is proposed to ascertain the preferences of the people living there. The appeal to consent cannot be directly derived from individual consent, since that

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would render the state illegitimate unless it gained unanimous consent (which would make all states in the world today illegitimate). If the consent is that of the community, the question is raised: which community?, and relatedly, over which territory? One problem with this account is that it is not clear how to draw the border within which majority consent is necessary. If the state as a whole is the domain in which (majority) consent is needed, then this fails to fully consider the feelings of the minority population, or to address the problem of minority nationalist disaffection. If only the latter is necessary, this raises the question – which theorists in this camp do not adequately address – of why the national group should have a corporate character of that kind. The problem here arises because appealing to liberal-democratic theory does not map perfectly on to nationalist mobilization and sentiment, which is the impetus behind all secessionist movements. This line of argument tries to justify a right to secede under certain conditions, but does not explain or justify it in nationalist terms. This is understandable, in light of the discussion in the first part of this chapter concerning the morally suspect character of nationalism, but it creates a curious gap between the political philosophy of secession and the dynamics of actual secessionist movements. Both just-cause and choice theories, of course, are normative theories and have an implementation problem in the sense that in large swathes of the world – most of Africa, Asia and the Americas – state elites are very unlikely to agree to anything that might lead to the ‘dismemberment’ of the state. Indeed, most successful secessions are the result of the implosion of the central government – for example, the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia – rather than the voluntary relinquishment of parts of the territory, and groups of people, who have proved indigestible to the modern state. This is not a serious criticism of these theories, for it would be unfair to criticize a justice theory on the grounds that many people continue to be unjust, or a democratic theory for the fact that dictators are not likely to implement it. In some cases, proponents of these theories have argued

that these normative principles should be included in a domestic constitution, to manage the otherwise often violent process of ‘divorce’ (Norman 1998; Weinstock 2001) or in international law, where principles and institutions could be designed to bring these processes under the rule of law (Moore 2001; Buchanan 2003). Others argue that, in the absence of institutional rules, it is still necessary to develop normative principles to help guide us in particular cases about whether or not secession is justifiable (Miller 1998).

CONCLUSION The three areas of debate in political philosophy – concerning the value of national identities, the legitimacy of state nation-building and state break-up (or national self-determination) – fail to take issue with the postmodernist critique of identities as fluid and relational. All are potentially vulnerable to the critique that they ‘essentialize’ nations and national identities. Most proponents of these arguments concede that nations are socially constructed and that it is important to be aware of the political mobilization (or construction) of political identities in designing public policies and institutional arrangements. However, they also argue – contra the postmodernist critique – that the mere fact of being socially constructed does not mean that they are easily deconstructed. Walker Connor, writing in the late twentieth century, has argued that nationalism has become such a powerful source of identity that he can think of no case in the twentieth century where territorially concentrated national minorities, on their own territory, have voluntarily assimilated. Indeed, he claims that assimilationist measures directed at national minorities tend to backfire, and almost always lead to increased consolidation of the minority identity (Connor 1994: 51–5). There are many examples of groups – Crimean Tatars, Kurds – that have struggled to resist assimilation, often at great cost to themselves (McGarry 1998: 613–38). The empirical evidence suggests that once a group has become

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successfully mobilized – by which is meant that the population has generally accepted the description of itself as a separate political community – modernization policies, state nation-building and coercive assimilation are unlikely to work. This is why the three issues above, considered only very recently by political philosophers, are of pressing importance.

REFERENCES Barry, B. (2001) Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beran, H. (1984) ‘A Liberal Theory of Secession’, Political Studies, 32: 21–31. Buchanan, A. (1991) Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Buchanan, A. (1999) ‘Recognitional Legitimacy and the State System’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 28 (1): 46–78. Buchanan, A. (2003) Justice, Legitimacy, and SelfDetermination: Moral Foundations for International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connor, W. (1994) Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jones, C. (1999) Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGarry, J. (1998) ‘Demographic Engineering: The State-Directed Movement of Ethnic Groups as a

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Technique of Conflict-Regulation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21 (4): 613–38. Mill, J. S. (1993 [1861]) ‘Considerations on Representative Government’, in Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. London: Everyman Library. Miller, D. (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, D. (1998) ‘Secession and the Principle of Nationality’, in M. Moore (ed.), National Selfdetermination and Secession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, M. (2001) The Ethics of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naticchia, J. (1999) ‘Recognition and Legitimacy: A Reply to Buchanan’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 28 (3): 242–57. Norman, W. (1998) ‘The Ethics of Secession as the Regulation of Secessionist Politics’, in M. Moore (ed.), National Self-determination and Secession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patten, A. (2000) ‘Political Theory and Language Policy’, paper presented to the American Political Science Association meeting, September. Philpott, D. (1995) ‘In Defence of Self-determination’, Ethics, 105 (2): 352–85. Schlesinger, A. M., Jr (1992) The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton. Weinstock, D. (1996) ‘Is there a Moral case for Nationalism?’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 13 (1): 87–100. Weinstock, D. (2001) ‘Constitutionalizing the Right to Secede’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 9 (2): 182–203. Young, I. (1993) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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9 Discourse-analytic and Socio-linguistic Approaches to the Study of Nation(alism) RUTH WODAK

Vaclav Havel, Czech president, famous poet and hero of the Prague Spring of May 1968, gave a widely acknowledged speech in Germany, on 24 April 1997, in the Deutscher Bundestag, the German National Assembly. This marked a new phase in European integration. Havel started his speech, after some introductory greetings, in the following way: After some initial agonizing I decided not to think about what is expected of me, to set aside all lists of politically appropriate remarks, and not to experience this responsibility as a trauma but to make the most of this opportunity to concentrate on a single theme, one which to my mind is exceptionally significant and topical. This theme is nothing more nor less than our perception of one’s homeland. I have made this choice for two reasons: the first is that the Czech Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany have one important thing in common. In their present form they are very young states that in many ways are still looking for their identity and are consequently redefining what makes them the homeland of their citizens. And yet, paradoxically enough, both our countries have a long tradition of investigating the nature of their national identity and of cultivating or criticizing different forms of their patriotism. The second reason is the ongoing, unprecedented process of European integration, which compels not only you and us but all Europeans to reflect again on what, in this new age, their homeland means or will mean to them, how their patriotism will co-exist with the

phenomenon of a united Europe and, principally, with the phenomenon of Europeanism. To what extent is it still true that our native land means simply the nation-state in the classic sense of the term and patriotism merely love for our nation? (Protokolle des Deutschen Bundestages 1997)

In this speech, taken as a first example for the discursive construction of national identities through persuasive rhetoric in a political speech, Havel alludes to the past, present and future of the two countries and of Europe. The tensions between the traditional nation-state and new supranational entities, like the EU, are mentioned as relevant for such a construction. At the same time, Havel also characterizes the most important components of identity construction: the function of being the same or being different than others (see Ricoeur 1992; Benhabib 1996). Thirdly, the past is talked about, a most difficult past for the joint history of these two countries and the respective past of both states, implicating the Nazi past, the communist past and the attempt of both states to face and confront these memories.1 Fourthly, Havel discusses the tensions between ‘homeland’ and ‘global entities’ which we find manifested in many political texts through ‘globalization rhetoric’ on the one hand,

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‘homeland rhetoric’ on the other hand (see Stråth 2000; Weiss and Wodak 2000). All these topoi which Havel refers to are important in the attempt to construct a new ‘European identity’, along the frontiers of a New Europe. In the attempt to create this New Europe, new borders have been drawn, mainly on an economic level, with other European countries, and we hear the slogan of ‘fortress Europe’ over and over again. Havel’s thoughts recur throughout the EU countries and also scholarly disciplines. Thus, starting off with Benedict Anderson’s (1988) notion of the ‘imagined community’ through to Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘narratives of identity’ (see Hall 1996a, b), the study of a ‘New Europe’ has become mainstream research for many and politically relevant for others. Remi Brague (1992, 1993) distinguishes between several dichotomies that characterize Europe; a Europe, which, as he writes, carries a ‘face full of scars’: dichotomies that are geographical (East–West, North–South), religious (Catholicism and reformism) and finally dichotomies that belong to the past (the roles of the Third Reich and the Allied Forces), and so forth. As Brague summarizes, ‘to retain the memory of such ruptures can avoid confusion’ (1992: 16). Such dichotomies manifest themselves in all discourses on European identities; simultaneously, these dichotomies are also reproduced through discourse, in manifold ways, depending on the specific genre (press releases, printed media, visual media, speeches, policy documents, parliamentary debates, interviews and so forth) (see Muntigl et al. 2000). The quote from Havel’s speech indicates the ‘power of language’ in constructing (national) identities by defining in- and out-groups. The discursive construction of social groups has to be viewed as the fundamental process or macrostrategy to create sameness and difference (between Us and Them) and thus precedes all other textual/visual devices to produce or reproduce national identities. Hence, the explicit analysis of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation (see below) constitutes the first methodological step when investigating discourses of national identities.2 However, not only political elites are involved in this

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discursive process; as Michael Billig suggests in his seminal book Banal Nationalism (1995), ‘the term “banal nationalism” is introduced to cover ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced. It is argued that these habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily, the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’, in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in establishing nations, is the endemic condition’ (Billig 1995: 6). In the following, I discuss relevant concepts used in investigating the discursive construction of national identities within different sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic frameworks, focusing inter alia on the discourse-historical approach in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) developed in the Research Center ‘Discourse, Politics, Identity’ in Vienna (see http:// www.univie.ac.at/discourse-politics-identity). In this chapter I will, however, have to neglect the research on socio-linguistic macro-topics, such as prescriptive/overt language policies and aspects of minority languages as relevant components of the construction of national identities3 as well as the massive literature and on-going debates on terminology (for example, the use of ‘collective/multiple/fragmented/ transported identities’; see Triandafyllidou and Wodak 2003 for an extensive overview). Illustrative examples in this chapter are taken from two genres (focus group discussions and political speeches [see above]) which were conducted in the context of several studies on the discursive construction of national and transnational identities.4 Of course, the examples are always located in a specific national/transnational context (EU, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, and so forth); however, the focus in this chapter is oriented towards the discursive (rhetorical/argumentational/strategic) patterns of language use which can be generalized and applied elsewhere.5 RELATING DISCOURSES AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES: BASIC ASSUMPTIONS6 The first relevant claim for assuming a dialectic relationship between discourses and

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nationalism is that we must understand Benedict Anderson’s (1988) notion of imagined community to mean that national identities are discursively produced and reproduced. The second assumption draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993, 1994) notion of habitus. National identity has its own distinctive habitus which Bourdieu defines as a complex of common but diverse notions or schemata of perception, of related emotional dispositions and attitudes, as well as of behavioural dispositions and conventions – practices – all of which are internalized through socialization. The schemata in question refer to the idea of a ‘homo nationalis’, a common culture, a common history, present and future, as well as to a type of ‘national corpus’ or a national territory. Moreover, the stereotypical images of other nations, groups of ‘the others’ and their culture, their history, are included in such schemata, marking differences and distinctions which allow for constituting the ingroup. A further premise – and this is the third central assumption – is that there is essentially no such thing as one national identity, but rather that different identities are discursively constructed according to context, that is, according to the audience to which narratives or speeches or written genres are addressed, the setting of the discursive act, the topic being discussed, and the functions of the utterances, etc. The fourth claim proposes that constructions of national identities encompass material practices as well as discursive practices. Often enough, tensions and contradictions relate these dimensions to each other (that is, the ideological narratives differ from economic, institutional and legal practices). It should be emphasized that national identities constructed in this way are dynamic, vulnerable and ambivalent. Moreover, systematic relations exist between the models of identity offered by the political elites or the media (the system-world) and ‘everyday discourses’ (the life-world). This is why a multi-genre and multi-methodical approach that considers different corpora and genres from public, semipublic and private areas allows for the in-depth investigation of differing and conflicting narratives of nationhood.

DISCOURSE, TEXT AND CONTEXT According to the underlying theoretical approach, the notion of ‘discourse’ is frequently defined in many different ways. Since the 1970s and 1980s this notion has also been subject to manifold semantic interpretations and is used in an inflationary manner in many disciplines (see Reisigl 2004 for a most recent discussion of various notions of ‘discourse’). These vague meanings have also become part of everyday language use, a fact highlighted by Ehlich (2000), who presents differing definitions of the notion of ‘discourse’ linked to the British, French and German research traditions. For example, in British research, the term ‘discourse’ is used frequently synonymously with ‘text’, that is, meaning authentic, everyday linguistic communication. The French ‘discours’, however, focuses more on the connection between language and thought, for example, meaning ‘creation and societal maintenance of complex knowledge systems’ (Ehlich 2000: 162). In German pragmatics ‘Diskurs’ denotes ‘structured sets of speech acts’. In the analysis of discourse and national identities, the meaning of the notion of discourse is therefore closely linked to the respective research context and theoretical approach. I endorse Lemke’s definition which distinguishes between ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ in the following way (Lemke 1995: 7ff): When I speak about discourse in general, I will usually mean the social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems in some particular kind of situation or setting. … On each occasion when the particular meanings, characteristic of these discourses are being made, a specific text is produced. Discourses, as social actions more or less governed by social habits, produce texts that will in some ways be alike in their meanings. … When we want to focus on the specifics of an event or occasion, we speak of the text; when we want to look at patterns, commonality, relationships that embrace different texts and occasions, we can speak of discourses.

Furthermore, it is important to define the social domains and the textual genres which are relevant when investigating the discursive construction of national identities. For example, the most important domains and related

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Fields of action Formation of public opinion and self-presentation

Law-Making Political Procedure

Party-internal development of an informed opinion

Political advertising marketing and propoganda

Political executive and administration

Political control

• Decisions (approval/ rejections: • Inaugural speeches • Coalition papers, speeches of ministers/ heads • Governmental answers to parliamentary questions

• Declarations of opposition parties • Parliamentary questions • Speeches of MPs • Petitions for a referendum • Press releases of the opposition parties • etc.

Genres • • • •

á

• • • • •

• Party • Press releases • Election programmes, • Press programmes declarations, • Slogans, conferences statements • Interviews speeches • Speeches at • Talkshows in election party • Lectures and campaigns conventions • Annoucements contributions to • etc. conferences • Posters • Articles, books • Election • Commemorative brochures speeches • Direct mailings • Inaugural • Filters etc. speeches • etc.

Laws Bills Amendments Speeches and contributions of MPs Regulations Recommendations Prescriptions Guidelines etc.

co

e urs

Dis

ic1 ic1 ic1 ic1 ic1 ic1 Top Top Top Top Top Top e e e e e s s s s s r r r r r cou cou cou cou cou Dis Dis Dis Dis Dis

Figure 9.1 Selected dimensions of discourse as social practice (see Wodak and Meyer, 2001: 68).

genres in the field of politics can be summarized in Figure 9.1. Furthermore, the co-texts and contexts of utterances have to be taken into account when analysing texts as they fundamentally determine meanings and functions of the respective text. The triangulatory discourse-historical approach distinguishes between four levels of context in a systematic way; the first one is descriptive, while the other three levels are part of theories necessary to understand and explain the respective socio-political, structural and historical contexts: 1 The immediate language or text internal co-text. 2 The intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres and discourses.

3 The extra-linguistic social/sociological variables and institutional frames of a specific ‘context of situation’. 4 The broader socio-political and historical contexts, which the discursive practices are embedded in and related to. Thus, every text is embedded into layers of context which are seen to be analytically distinct from each other but which are, of course, interdependent. SOCIO-LINGUISTIC AND DISCOURSE-ANALYTICAL APPROACHES AND METHODOLOGIES Socio-linguistic and discourse-analytical methodologies of relevance to the analysis of

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national identities fall roughly into three groups, those using ethnomethodological/ conversation analytic approaches to charting identity;7 studies using a discourse-socio-linguistic/ historical approach,8 and those drawing on concepts such as footing, framing and positioning,9 or focusing on pronouns or person deictics.10

Co-constructing and negotiating (national) identities According to the ethnomethodological/conversation analytic perspective, (national) identity is not something static that people are or that they have, but is something that they can orient to and use as a resource in the course of interaction. As Widdicombe (1998: 191) puts it, ‘The important analytic question is not therefore whether someone can be described in a particular way, but to show that and how this identity is made relevant or ascribed to self or others.’ In other words, although a person may be potentially classifiable by gender, ethnicity, class, language, or age, or as a doctor, mother, sister and so on, these particular identities are not automatically relevant in every interaction she or he engages in. A person may invoke any number of identities depending on the contingencies of a particular conversation, or one may be positioned by one’s interlocutors in a particular way. The main point is that rather than using identities as ‘demographic facts, whose relevance to a stretch of interaction can simply be assumed’ (Widdicombe 1998: 194–5), the analyst should ‘focus on whether, when and how identities are used … [C]oncern is with the occasioned relevance of identities here and now, and how they are consequential for this particular interaction and the local projects of speakers’ (Widdicombe 1998: 195). To sum up, national/regional/local/ personal identities are interactively constructed and are resources ‘used in talk.’ (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 1). Example 1, taken from a focus group discussion in Austria (Wodak et al. 1999: 120ff.), illustrates the interactive co-construction of local/ regional/national identities through pronouns, positive self- and negative other-presentation,

specific contextual cues and so forth, in a very detailed and explicit way. EXAMPLE 1 F4:

... [W]ell for the first time I somehow: realized that Austria somehow is something different when I was in France for the first time then I was eighteen – and when I was working in a French family and: they then – / the first question was ‘are you German?’ and I ‘no no I am Austrian’ and the others ‘thank God’ you know? – and then it somehow happened – ‘aha: thank God:’ yes – just like that – see? – so. that / I / I can somehow only describe experiences in this way: umm – so. ‘well so there must be something’ you know? – and umm I now simply think on my part / I mean it is / I live in this country and what now maybe makes me so: consciously Austrian after all is simply this – that I / it’s not only politics and the culture which influence me in this country where I live but that I also try: to stick my oar in the politics and culture of this country and to get critically involved, you know? M0: mhm F4: I don’t know that is – now just a first somehow / I don’t know / theoretical: definition for myself and I also have a lot of that – emotional stuff as well M0: umm – okay F5: My: my name is XXX [name of F5] – now comes the first now I think / yes some say what kind of a Carinthian one is. yes and what kind of Carinthian am I? right? am I: am a Slovenian:-speaking Carinthian? well I would say – Slovenian / I am a Carinthian Slovene, right? – and then:/really a Slovenian-speaking Carinthian – but I also speak German, don’t I? – only, you’re already defining yourself this way M0: why? F5: right? – because – if someone says just Carinthian: one thinks that he can only speak: German ‘only’ in inverted commas now

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M0: mhm [...] F5:

really and as to my being Austrian – umm – I’d say I am / well I like to be Austrian – I have been fed on it – since I was a small child one is taught that in primary school: ‘Austria this is my country dadada’ well: that’s because – really I am Austrian that’s what I like to be it is completely natural for me – – really. [….]

F5:

M1: F5: M1: M0: F5: M1:

M0: M1:

I could add – umm – the idea of delimiting from Germany which: has been mentioned – I’ve never really thought about this problem in this way – well I’d say – the delimitation German not:Germany that for me is further away – well Austria right. – it is interesting the delimitation is only / – it’s / is only arbitrary or that is well well only an arbitrary delimitation: from Germany I’d say yes? – mhm well what I mean now in my mind well – mhm because I myself as: – / well because I see / I see Austria rather – so as a whole it is a political construction – nothing more – because I can’t / for instance if I take the delimitation from Germany I can also: easily: include Bavaria in Austria can’t I? I could also: add South Tyrol to Austria – but only: bec / well because of the: present borders this is not the case – but this doesn’t intrinsically make any sense for me: why a border is in a certain place or if there is no border could one also say that Slovenia for example could also: be added to Austria? yes o / of course and also: I don’t know […]

M3: umm but there you have – you’ll instantly have / umm I think a very big problem that’s the problem of borders: principally the question is also: how did a border come about and how did they

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actually come into existence – I mean if you look at the history of Austria – then it happens like this doesn’t it? Well in one place it separates in another it converges and meanders here and there and at the moment it is where we have it now […] This passage is an extract from a focus group discussion recorded in Carinthia, one of the nine Austrian regions. Two participants explicitly express their perception/definition of Austria. F4 previously talked about the difficulties she had feeling primarily ‘Carinthian’, although ‘rationally being of course … primarily an Austrian’. She defines her Austrian identity in terms of delimitation/distinction from Germany and in terms of political and cultural socialization. She introduces the element of active political participation as a constitutive component of her Austrian identity. Participant 5 starts by clarifying her regional (Carinthian) identity. However, she is not at all sure whether she is primarily ‘Carinthian’ or ‘Slovene’, and finally decides on the order ‘Carinthian Slovene […] and then […] Slovenian-speaking Carinthian’. She argues that bilingualism is an essential factor for her, as ‘just Carinthian’ means that one ‘can only speak German’. Here, the lexical/conceptual differentiation made between differing Carinthian identities such as ‘Carinthian Slovenes’, ‘Slovenian-speaking Carinthians’ and ‘just Carinthians’ is constitutive for the possibility of co-constructing a new self-definition. F5 defines her Austrian identity on the basis of emotional attachment and socialization through school. At the same time she denies that the distinction between Austria and Germany might be a problem for her, if she considered it rationally. M1, taking this up and interpreting it literally, comments on the ostensible arbitrariness of the Austrian–German borders (topoi of history and definition) and claims that both Bavaria and South Tyrol should also be added to Austria. This sequence could be interpreted ironically as well; however, M1 positions himself in contrast to F5. The criteria for defining borders or nation states cover aspects of language use as well as historical roots and cultural characteristics. Finally, M3 generalizes

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the issue of identity as a completely abstract and imposed ‘problem of borders’. This extract illustrates how, in focus group discussions, group members co-construct relevant concepts such as national and ethnic identities. It also shows, however, that potentially controversial positions may be negotiated through group intervention. A potential conflict between the concept of state-based nationalism and a cultural/linguistic nationalism, which, inter alia, is propagated in the shape of regionalism, is prevented by group control. Linguistically, this passage is characterized by frequent use of mitigation strategies and many argumentative frames, such as topoi of definition, authority, history etc. It is also obvious that a co-constructing process is under way, because no explicit ‘we’ occurs in this extract (only M3 uses ‘we’, which once refers to the discussion group and once to the Austrians). This usage points to possibly expected debates and compromises. Zimmerman (1998: 90ff.) makes a useful distinction between three types of identity found in talk: discourse (e.g. speaker, listener, narrator), situated (e.g. shopkeeper, customer) and transportable (e.g. African-American, European, female). The concept of transportable national identities means those that travel with individuals across situations and are potentially relevant in and for any situation and in and for any spate of interaction. They are latent identities that ‘tag along’ with individuals as they move through their daily routines … Thus, a participant may be aware of the fact that a co-interactant is classifiable as a young person or a male without orienting to those identities as being relevant to the instant interaction. (Zimmerman 1998: 90–91)

Among the transportable identities we could imagine as potentially relevant for individuals and social groups is that of nationality, or even supra-nationality, for example a particular European-ness. Following Zimmerman, we could argue that, in the extract above, the transportable identities, such as ‘Slovenian, Carinthian, Austrian’ were being negotiated. However, a caveat should be stated here that the notion of ‘transportable identities’ does not reify or essentialize national identities as holistic or static.

The second example is taken from an interview with a Swedish member of the European Parliament. It illustrates how people ‘carry’ their multiple regional/national/transnational identities with them:11

EXAMPLE 2 MEP10:

First I feel like I come from Västerbotten in the North of Sweden. I feel like a Västerbotten. I don’t live there, but I feel like that. I feel like a Swede. I feel like a Scandinavian. I feel like a European and I feel like a world citizen.

Framing and footing When analysing specific communicative interactions or even speeches such as above, the question arises when and how certain identities are achieved and oriented to, in particular those ‘transportable’ types described above. These can be uncovered by locating changes in participant framing and footing in general and by looking at one specific aspect of footing, person deictics (see Figure 9.2). Footing, as introduced by Goffman (1981) and elaborated by Levinson (1988) and others, refers essentially to instances in talk where ‘participant’s alignment; or set; or stance, or posture, or projected self is somehow at issue’ (Goffman 1981: 128), in other words, any of the variety of roles that an individual may be taking on at a given moment in talk. On the one hand, footing can be an indicator for a particular interactive frame, that is, ‘participants’ sense of what activity is being engaged in’ (Tannen and Wallat [1987] 1993: 60), whether story-telling, joking, giving a professional opinion, etc.; on the other hand, footing signals speakers’ discursive identities (Davies and Harré 1990). The interlocutors develop their story lines or position themselves or others in certain ways, for example as being active agents or passive victims in the stories they tell, or – if one returns to the extract above – as being ‘Carinthian, Austrian or Slovene’ or ‘German’ or ‘Italian’. The way we identify these changes

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in footing that signal interactive frames or positions is by noting patterns in any number of linguistic features, including what Gumperz (1982) refers to as contextualization cues (e.g., changes in prosody, pitch, stress), shifts in register (e.g., formal or casual speech), linguistic code (e.g., dialect or standard variety), change in deictics (e.g., using inclusive use of pronoun ‘we’ to signal solidarity), grammatical position (e.g., as subject of an active verb) and so on. While many changes in footing index changes in discourse identities (e.g., animator, author, principle, as in Goffman 1981), others are more aptly seen as signalling transportable identities. Furthermore, narratives (or personal examples and anecdotes that may or may not follow the ‘canonical’ narrative form, that is, consisting of abstract, orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, coda, as described by Labov (1972; Labov and Waletzky 1967), are particularly fruitful sites for footing changes that are related to transportable identities. A narrative is among other things ‘a tool for instantiating social and personal identities’ (Ochs 1997: 202).12 Schiffrin argues that narratives can provide … a SOCIOLINGUISTIC SELFPORTRAIT: a linguistic lens through which to discover people’s own views of themselves (as situated within both an ongoing interaction and a larger social structure) and their experiences. … these self-portraits can create an interactional arena in which the speaker’s view of self and world can be reinforced or challenged. (Schiffrin 1997: 42; emphasis in original)

Example 3 provides a narrative of a young Turkish woman with Austrian citizenship. In this story, the role of the national language (German) in constituting national identities is focused upon.13 EXAMPLE 3 SCH-F6

one day here in school I went into this room because I had to do some ironing (.) and a girl who was standing vis à vis of us said ahm (.) I was talking to her [F2] (.) hey start speaking German (.) hey that’s none of your business what I am talking (.) I really wanted to kill her (.) it’s none of her business what I am talking

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As some of the migrants stated, without a proper knowledge of German it is almost impossible to acquire a decent job, as well as to get through the Austrian educational system (‘speak as we do, and you will survive’). The bilingualism of migrants is seen as a janusfaced feature which especially depends on the languages concerned. Furthermore, bilingualism is often reflected in an intermixed use of German and the mother tongue which generally is assessed negatively by Austrians (‘speak as we do and you will belong to us’). The language of the majority in European nationstates is perceived as one of the main factors of national identity; across EU-countries, legal provisions of various kinds have been established either to assist or to force migrants to acquire the national language if they want to stay in the respective country and work. In addition to narratives, focused attention on participant deictics, or pronominal reference has been successfully used to unlock the dynamics of a particular interaction. Most relevant to the discursive construction of national identities, Wortham (1996), using the term ‘deictic mapping’, and both Ensink (1997) and de Fina (1995) in the analysis of politicians’ speeches and conference papers, respectively, show how by charting pronouns, their referents and occasionally other contextual information (such as verb tense) in a particular interaction, patterns are revealed that index participants’ footing and, in turn, (a) particular identity or identities achieved in talk. These studies are similar to research by Wilson (1990), who has analysed pronoun distribution in political discourse and found that the broad range of personal pronominal choices were indicative of how the individual politician viewed the world, and how that politician manipulated the meaning of pronouns in order to present a specific ideological perspective (1990: 56). In other words, consistent patterns of pronominal use may be used as markers for both identities instantiated by individuals in particular discourses as well as for particular social/collective/ethnic/national collectives. In this context, the personal pronoun ‘we’ is judged to be the most important and complex

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(a)

I and you (singular)

Partial/whole addressee-inclusive

(b)

I + s/he /

Addressee-exclusive

(c)

I + you (plural)

Addressee-inclusive

(d)

I + they

Addressee-exclusive

(e)

I + you + s/he I + you + they (plural)

Partial/whole addressee-inclusive + ?

(f)

I + they + s/he

Partial/whole addressee-inclusive + ?

(g)

I + you + they

Partial/whole addressee-inclusive + ?

Figure 9.2 The use of the personal pronoun ‘we’ (Wodak et al., 1999: 44)

one. Figure 9.2 lists some of the potential meanings used in the discursive construction of identities. In the linguistic literature, we usually find the distinction between addressee-inclusive and-exclusive ‘we’, and between speakerinclusive or -exclusive. This is not differentiated enough, hence, the cases (e), (f), (g) are included in Figure 9.2 to illustrate that also the second and third persons singular or plural can be referred to by ‘we’. Employing rhetorical tropes, such as metaphors, metonyms, or synecdoches (pars pro toto or totum pro pars) create more meanings and uses of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ which I cannot elaborate in this chapter but which are important linguistic devices for the discursive construction of national identities (see Reisigl 2004; Reisigl and Wodak 2001).

The discourse-historical approach The discourse-historical approach is affiliated with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which perceives both written and spoken ‘discourse’ as a form of social practice (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). It assumes a dialectical relationship between particular discursive events and the situations, institutions and social structures in which they are embedded: on the one hand, the situational, institutional and social contexts shape and affect discourse, on the other, discourses influence social and political reality. In other words, discourse constitutes social practice and is at the same time constituted by it (see Wodak 2004a for an extensive overview of CDA).

Through discourse social actors constitute knowledge, situations and social roles as well as identities and interpersonal relations between various interacting social groups. This means that discourses serve to construct national identities. Second, they might restore or justify a certain social status quo. Third, they are instrumental in perpetuating and reproducing the status quo. Fourth, discursive practices may have an effect on the transformation or even destruction of the status quo. According to these sociological macrofunctions we distinguish between constructive, perpetuating, transformational and destructive macro-strategies of discourse in the study of the discursive construction of national identities (Wodak et al. 1999). Analytically, we distinguish between three interrelated dimensions of discourse and text analysis: (1) contents, (2) strategies, (3) linguistic means and forms of realization. Constructive strategies encompass those linguistic acts which serve to ‘build’ and establish a particular national identity. These are primarily linguistic utterances which constitute a national ‘we-group’ through particular acts of reference, for example by using the pronoun ‘we’ in connection with the toponymical labelling ‘Austrians’, that is, ‘we Austrians’, which, directly or indirectly, appeals to solidarity (see Figure 9.4). Expressions such as ‘to take on something together’, ‘to co-operate and stick together’ frequently occur in these contexts. Components of constructive strategies are all linguistic events, which invite identification and solidarity with the ‘we-group’, which, however, at the

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1

How are persons/groups/collectives named and referred to linguistically?

2

What traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to them?

3

By means of what arguments and argumentation schemes do specific persons or social groups try to justify and legitimize the inclusion/exclusion of groups/individuals?

4

From what perspective or point of view are these labels, attributions and arguments expressed?

5

Are the respective utterances articulated overtly; are they intensified or are they mitigated?

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Figure 9.3 Relevant questions for the analysis of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’

same time imply distancing from and marginalization of ‘others’. Strategies of perpetuation and justification attempt to maintain, support and reproduce a national identity perceived to be under threat – for example, the fact that immigration is experienced as a threat by many Austrians. Justification and legitimization primarily refer to controversial events of the past, which may influence the narratives of national history. They attempt to justify a social status quo ante, as for example Austria’s highly problematic handling of crimes of the Nazi regime. Naturally, political decisions concerning the present and future can also be justified and legitimized in this sense. These strategies are often realized through individual or collective, public or private, narratives or accounts. Strategies of transformation attempt to transform a relatively well-established national identity or parts of it into another. For example, a redefinition of Austrian neutrality, which would integrate the modified geopolitical conditions whereby neutrality would not altogether be lost (see Kovács and Wodak 2003 for an extensive discussion). Finally, destructive strategies serve to demolish existing national identities or elements of them. For example, the possible dismantling of Austria’s neutrality, which was dictated from outside (by the allied occupants) and should therefore be relinquished. Embedded in these macro-strategies, several sub-strategies constitute ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and thus deserve special attention. When analysing texts related to nationalism or national identities, one can orient oneself to five simple,

but not at all randomly selected questions (Figure 9.3). According to these questions, five types of discursive sub-strategies are relevant, which are all involved in positive self- and negative otherpresentation. Through these strategies, the fundamental construction of ingroups and outgroups is achieved, linguistically realized in various ways, according to the specific genre under investigation. These discursive strategies (and also others elaborated in Wodak et al. 1999: 35ff.) serve the justification/legitimization of inclusion/exclusion and the construction of national/regional/local identities (see below for a few examples).14 I would like to illustrate these distinctions (without going into detailed linguistic analysis) with some examples that are frequently employed in the discursive construction of national identities (examples taken from Wodak et al. 1999). Positive self-presentation is achieved through presupposition of, or emphasis on, intra-national sameness or similarity, as, in the following example. EXAMPLE 4 that our mentality is – umm – on the one hand very broad: I think we are quite hard-working: but then on the other hand we also like umm to get together and have a good time in Austria Example 5 illustrates negative other-presentation, with its emphasis on the difference between Austrians and foreign residents and stereotypical prejudice.

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Strategy

Objectives

Devices

Referential/nomination

Construction of in and out-groups

Membership categorization Biological, naturalizing and depersonalizing metaphors and metonymies Synecdoches (pars pro toto, totum pro pars)

Predication

Labelling social actors more or less positively or negatively, deprecatorily or appreciatively

Evaluative attributions of negative or positive traits Implicit and explicit predicates

Argumentation

Justification of positive or negative attributions

Topoi used to justify inclusion or exclusion

Perspectivation, framing or discourse representation

Expressing involvement Positioning speaker’s point of view

Reporting, description, narration or quotation of events and utterances

Intensification, mitigation

Modifying the epistemic status of a proposition

Intensifying or mitigating the illocutionary force of utterances

Figure 9.4 Discursive strategies for positive self- and negative other-representation

EXAMPLE 5 there are really bas … /these basic – umm mentalities and because of the different ways of life I mean this is because – umm – simply because probably people from the South – because of the heat down there are used to during the day – umm taking a siesta and lying around and really only waking up in the evening. Don’t you think? Of course those are differences that: – automatically lead to conflict. The latter example addresses a central problem for Austrians, the problem of feeling distinct from their powerful neighbour, Germany. Both Examples 4 and 5 manifest the use of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in powerful ways. Finally, Example 6 illustrates positive selfpresentation employed for constructive and perpetuating aims. EXAMPLE 6 here simply everything: so – umm uncomplicated is umm much – simpler let’s say easier to

understand – it is / there is not as much – hypocrisy but everything is so somehow – obvious and simple you understand it right away and it’s not as rational – less complicated and so absolutely classified and: categorized, umm – in politics/in politics – or so in – everyday life that you / – that you – can have a certain distance – umm you feel emotionally closer and: you can – understand it more with your heart /so to say mm umm/ more than with your mind. In this example the role of the emotions is emphasized and it is claimed that there is less distance between everyday life and the system compared with elsewhere (this example also illustrates predication and argumentation strategies explicitly, see Figure 9.4). PERSPECTIVES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH Although socio-linguistic and discourseanalytical approaches have been adapted and applied to other cultures and the study of national identities elsewhere,15 more interdisciplinary research is needed that would make

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the historical and contextual specificities of each social group/collective/community under investigation more explicit. Moreover, the interdependence of local, regional, national and global dimensions has to be studied in their vast complexity. Nowadays, the borders between all these – on the one hand – imagined communities have become more fluid, on the other hand the impact of specific political interests, ideologies and economic (material) factors has to be taken into account as well. As can be experienced nowadays and in the last two decades of the twentieth century, such tensions and contradictions have led to the reconstruction of rigid borders and to nationalistic/ chauvinistic ideologies with severe and violent implications. Even though Sheyla Benhabib (1996: 3) states that the division into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ might be viewed as atavistic, the discursive formation of in- and out-groups has not lost its identityconstituting functions. NOTES 1 See Ensink and Sauer (2003), Heer et al. (2003), Martin and Wodak (2003), Dedaic and Nelson (2003), Wodak et al. (1994) and Anthonissen and Blommaert (2006) for discourse-analytical and interdisciplinary studies on ‘the discursive construction of narratives of the past’ in various nation-states (Poland, Hong Kong, Australia, Austria, Germany, Congo, South Africa). 2 See Wilson (1990), Chilton (2004), Chilton and Schäffner (1997), Woodward (1997), van Dijk (1984, 1998) and Reisigl and Wodak (2001), for precise analyses of pronouns, metaphors, contextual cues and social actors constituting the salient distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. 3 See Ricento (2003), de Cillia (2003), De Cillia et al. (2001, 2003) for the most recent theoretical and methodological approaches in this area. 4 See Kovács and Wodak (2003), Weiss (2002), Wodak and Weiss (2004, 2005), Reisigl (2004) and Wodak et al. (1999) for the detailed analyses. 5 See Ricento (2003) and Heller and Labrie (2004) for applications of the methodology to other national contexts, such as the United States and Canada. 6 For detailed argumentations on the complex relationship between discourse and (national) identity, starting out from Anderson (1988), see for example Reisigl (2004), Confino (1997), Martin (1995) and Hall (1996a). 7 See Antaki and Widdicombe (1998), Widdicombe (1998) and Zimmerman (1998). 8 Wodak et al. (1999), De Cillia et al. (1999), Reisigl (2004), Weiss (2002) and Wodak and Weiss (2004, 2005).

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9 See Goffman (1981), Tannen and Wallat (1993 [1987]) and Davies and Harré (1990). 10 See Wilson (1990) and Wortham (1996). 11 The whole set of 28 interviews was collected by Carolyn Straehle and Gilbert Weiss during fieldwork 1998, in Brussels and Strasbourg. See Muntigl et al. (2000), Straehle (2000) and Wodak (2004b). 12 See also Schiffrin (1996, 1997), Linde (1993), Mumby (1993), Ochs (1997) Benke and Wodak (2003), and Jones and Krzyzanowski (2006), Narratives often state the belonging or non-belonging to a certain culture/region/nation in ambivalent and hesitant ways which become manifest in narratives of migrants analysed in the research of the EU project XENOPHOB (Delanty, Jones and Wodak, 2006). 13. A set of seven focus groups in eight EU countries were conducted in the framework of the EU funded project XENOPHOB. The focus groups in Austria were moderated by Michal Krzyzanowski and Fleur Ulsamer. 14 By ‘strategy’ we generally mean a (more or less intentional) plan of practices (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a particular social, political, psychological or linguistic goal. 15 For example, Heller and Labrie (2004), Ricento (2003), Kovács and Wodak (2003), Weiss (2002), Wodak and Weiss (2004, 2005) and Reisigl (2004).

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1988) Die Erfindung der Nation: Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts. Frankfurt/ New York: Campus (translation of 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983). Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. (eds) (1998) Identities in Talk. London: Sage. Anthonissen, C. and Blommaert, J. (eds) (2006) ‘Narratives of the Past’, Special Issue, Journal of Language and Politics. Benke, G. and Wodak, R. (2003) ‘We Are Facing a New Order in Europe: Neutrality versus Nato’, in A. Kovács, and R. Wodak (eds), NATO, Neutrality and National Identity: The Case of Austria and Hungary. Vienna: Böhlau. pp. 281–310. Benhabib, S. (1996) ‘The Democratic Movement and the Problem of Difference’, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 3–18. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1993) Soziologische Fragen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, P. (1994) Die feinen Unterschiede. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Brague, R. (1992) Europe, la voie romaine. Paris: Criterion.

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Brague, R. (1993) Europa: Eine exzentrische Identität. Frankfurt: Campus. Chilton, P. A. (2004) Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Chilton, P. and Schäffner, C. (1997) ‘Discourse and Politics’, in T. A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as a Social Interaction. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Volume 2. London: Sage. pp. 206–31. Confino, A. (1997) The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) ‘Positioning: Conversation and the Production of Selves’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 20 (1): 43–63. de Cillia, R. (2003) ‘Grundlagen und Tendenzen der europäischen Sprachenpolitik’, in M. Mokre, G. Weiss, and R. Bauböck (eds), Europas Identitäten: Mythen, Konflikte, Konstruktionen. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. pp. 231–56. de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (1999) ‘The Discursive Construction of National Identities’, Discourse and Society, 10 (1): 149–73. de Cillia, R., Krumm, H-J. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2001) Kommunikationsverlust im Informationszeitalter (Loss of Communication in the Information Age). Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. de Cillia, R., Krumm, H-J. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2003) Die Kosten der Mehrsprachigkeit: Globalisierung und sprachliche Vielfalt (The Cost of Multilingualism: Globalisation and Linguistic Diversity). Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Dedaic, M. N. and Nelson, D. N. (eds) (2003) At War with Words. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. De Fina, A. (1995) ‘Pronominal Choice, Identity, and Solidarity in Political Discourse’, Text, 15 (3): 379–410. Delanty, G., Jones, P. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2006) Voices of Migrants in Europe. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press. Ehlich, K. (2000) ‘Diskurs’, in H. Glück (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Sprache. Stuttgart: Metzler. pp. 162–63. Ensink, T. (1997) ‘The Footing of a Royal Address: An Analysis of Representativeness in Political Speech, Exemplified in Queen Beatrix’, address to the Knesset on 28 March 1995, in C. Schäffner (ed.), Analysing Political Speeches. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. pp. 5–28. Ensink, T. and Sauer, C. (eds) (2003) The Art of Commemoration. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Fairclough, N. and Wodak, R. (1997) ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, in T. A. van Dijk (ed.),

Discourse as Social Interaction. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. pp. 258–84. Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gumperz, J. (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S. (1996a) ‘Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?’, in S. Hall, and P. Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1–17. Hall, S. (1996b) ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert and K. Thompson (eds), Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 595–634. Heer, H., Manoschek, W., Pollak, A. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2003) Wie Geschichte gemacht wird. Erinnerungen an Wehrmacht und Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vienna: Czernin. Heller, M., and Labrie, N. (2004) Discours et identités. Fernelmont: Editions modulaires européennes. Jones, P. and Krzyzanowski, M. (2006) ‘Identity and Belonging’, in G. Delanty, P. Jones, and R. Wodak (eds), Voices of Migrants in Europe. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press (in press). Kovács, A. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2003) NATO, Neutrality and National Identity: The Case of Austria and Hungary. Vienna: Böhlau. Labov, W. (1972) Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967) ‘Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience’, in J. Helms (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. pp. 12–44. Lemke, J. (1995) Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics. London: Taylor and Francis. Levinson, S. C. (1988) ‘Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman’s Concepts of Participation’, in P. Drew and A. Wootton (eds), Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. pp. 161–227. Linde, C. (1993) Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, D-C. (1995) ‘The Choices of Identity’, Social Identities, 1 (1): 5–20. Martin, J. R. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2003) Re/reading the Past: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Time and Value. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Mumby, D. (1993) Narrative and Social Control. London: Sage. Muntigl, P., Weiss, G. and Wodak, R. (2000) European Union Discourses on Un/employment: An

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Interdisciplinary Approach to Employment Policymaking and Organizational Change. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ochs, E. (1997) ‘Narrative’, in T. A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Structure and Process, Volume 1. London: Sage. pp. 185–207. Protokolle des Deutschen Bundestages, http://dip. bundestag.de/parfors/parfors.htm Reisigl, M. (2004) ‘ Wie man eine Nation herbeiredet. Eine diskursanalytische Untersuchung zur sprachlichen Konstruktion der österreichischen Nation und österreichischen Identität in politischen Fest- und Gedenkreden’. Vienna University, unpublished PhD thesis. Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001) Discourse and Discrimination. London: Routledge. Ricento, T. (2003) ‘The discursive construction of Americanism’, Discourse and Society, 14 (5): 611–37. Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schiffrin, D. (1996) ‘Narrative as Self-Portrait: Sociolinguistic Constructions of Identity’, Language and Society, 25: 167–203. Schiffrin, D. (1997) ‘The Transformation of Experience, Identity, and Context’, in G. Guy, C. Feagin, D. Schiffrin and J. Baugh (eds), Towards a Social Science of Language. Papers in Honor of William Labov, Volume 2: Social Interaction and Discourse Structures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 41–55. Straehle, C. (2000) ‘We Are Not Americans and We Are Not Japanese’: European and Other Identities Oriented to in Interviews with EU Officials’. Unpublished Ms. and Project Report, Research Centre ‘Discourse, Politics, Identity’, University of Vienna. Stråth, B. (ed.) (2000) Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Brussels: Peter Lang. Tannen, D. and Wallat, C. (1993 [1987]) ‘Interactive Frames and Knowledge Schemas in Interaction: Examples from a Medical Examination/Interview’, in D. Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Triandafyllidou, A. and Wodak, R. (2003) ‘Conceptual and Methodological Questions in the Study of Collective Identity: An Introduction’, Journal of Language and Politics, Special Issue: Constructing Identities, 2 (1): 3–15. van Dijk, T. A. (1984) Prejudice in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. van Dijk, T. A. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Study. London: Sage. Weiss, G. (2002) ‘Searching for Europe: The Problem of Legitimization and Representation in Recent

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Political Speeches on Europe’, Journal of Language and Politics, 1 (1): 59–84. Weiss, G. and Wodak, R. (2000) ‘Debating Europe: Globalisation Rhetoric and European Union Employment Policies’, in I. Bellier and T. M. Wilson (eds), An Anthropology of the European Union. Building, Imagining and Experiencing the New Europe. Oxford/New York: Berg. pp. 75–91. Widdicombe, S. (1998) ‘Identity as an Analysts’ and a Participants’ Resource’, in C. Antaki and S. Widdicombe (eds), Identities in Talk. London: Sage. pp. 191–206. Wilson, J. (1990) Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Wodak, R. (2004a) ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, in C. Seale, G. Gobo, J. F. Gubrium and D. Silverman (eds), Qualitative Research Practice. London: Sage. pp. 197–213. Wodak, R. (2004b) ‘National and Trans-national Identities: European and Other Identities Oriented to in Interviews with EU Officials’, in R. Hermann, Th. Risse and M. Brewer (eds), Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 97–128. Wodak, R., Menz, F., Mitten, R. and Stern, F. (1994) Die Sprachen der Vergangenheiten: öffentliches Gedenken in österreichischen und deutschen Medien. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Liebhart, K. (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds) (2001) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. Wodak, R. and Weiss, G. (2005) ‘Analyzing European Union Discourses: Theories and Applications’, in R. Wodak and P. Chilton (eds), New Research Agenda in Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. pp. 121–37. Wodak, R. and Weiss, G. (2004) ‘Visions, Ideologies and Utopias in the Discursive Construction of European Identities: Organizing, Representing and Legitimizing Europe’, in M. Pütz, A. van Neff, G. Aertsaeler, T. A. van Dijk (eds), Communicating Ideologies: Language, Discourse and Social Practice. Frankfurt a. Main: Peter Lang. pp. 225–52. Woodward, K. (ed.) (1997) Identity and Difference. London: Sage. Wortham, S. E. F. (1996) ‘Mapping Participant Deictics: A Technique for Discovering Speakers’ Footing’, Journal of Pragmatics, 25: 331–48. Zimmerman, D. H. (1998) ‘Identity, Context and Interaction’, in C. Antaki and S. Widdicombe (eds), Identities in Talk. London: Sage. pp. 87–106.

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10 Gender Approaches to Nations and Nationalism S Y LV I A WA L B Y

Nations and nationalism are gendered in complex and varied ways. The relationship between gender and nations is a two-way process in which each partly constitutes the other. Nations and nationalism have traditionally been seen as a gender-free zone, a site of the intended unity of the people, who share a common goal and culture (Gellner 1983; Kedourie 1966; Smith 1986). A wave of new scholarship has challenged this position, arguing for the significance of gender for nations and nationalism (Enloe 1989; Jayawardena 1986; Walby 1992; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997). The inclusion of gender means not only noting the existence of gender divisions and the presence of women as actors in national processes, although these are important. It requires, in addition, the identification of the specific forms of gender relations that are at stake. While some writers have implied an almost limitless variety of discursive forms of gender relations, my view is that different patterns of gender relations are constituted within different forms of gender regime. There is not just one form of gender relations, nor do they vary merely as to whether there is greater or lesser gender inequality, but rather there are

a variety of actual and potential forms of gender regime which vary along specific dimensions. A key dimension along which gender regimes vary is that of the extent to which women are contained and valued within the domestic sphere on the one hand and the extent to which they are present and welcomed in the public sphere of employment, politics and education on the other (Walby 1997, forthcoming). Any assumption that gender politics means feminist politics in the conventional sense must be abandoned. Gender politics can include the positive promotion of the domestication of women, with models of motherhood that segregate the appropriate sphere of action of women from that of men. Different nations and nationalisms often have different models of preferred gender relations. This process of the selection of the preferred model of womanhood, of gender regime, can appear to be consensual, but may well be highly contested. These contestations over the development of one preferred model of gender relations or another are entwined with the development of nations and nationalism. The under-reporting of this contestation in analyses of the formation of national ideals is challenged by the new gender literature.

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Recent feminist theory has embraced the analysis of difference in a determined effort to counter any essentializing approach to the conceptualization of gender. The focus is resolutely on the multiplicity rather than singularity of models of gender relations. The intersection of gender relations with other sets of social relations, especially ethnicity and nation, is seen to create new diverse forms of gender relations. Nevertheless, within the literature on gender and nation there is variation in the extent to which there is a focus on a single model of womanhood within a particular national project, or if the text investigates the possible adoption of one of a wide range of forms. However, whichever analytical strategy is chosen, there is a constant background assumption of the socially constructed and malleable nature of gender relations. This understanding is often posited in contrast to the strategy of nationalists, who are often portrayed as trying to sediment one preferred vision of womanhood into their conception of national identity. Contributions to the gendered analysis of nations and nationalism have not infrequently included these forms of difference alongside others, especially those of ethnicity, ‘race’ and religion. Within these analyses the concept of ethnicity is often used alongside that of nation (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992) and may even be used in preference even though others might consider the categories at stake to be those of nation, for example, see Medaglia (2000) on Italian and English ethnicity and Racioppi and O’Sullivan See (2000) on Irish ethnonationalism and ethno-gender regimes. Hence a mapping of the field of ‘gender and nation’ needs also to consider overlaps with the literature on gender and ethnicity. Nations exist in the context of other polities, such as states and organized religions, as well as many other ongoing political projects. Nations may be actively sought, as in nationalist movements, or be ongoing political projects, as well as stabilized with state institutions. The analysis here refers not only to nations and nationalism, but also to national projects. By national project is meant a range of collective strategies oriented towards the perceived needs of a

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nation, which include nationalism, but which may include others as well. The relationship between gender and national projects is mediated by the associations that each has with other phenomena, for example, the association between nationalism and militarism, and that between nationalism and democracy. These associations affect the kind of gender projects that may be compatible with specific national projects. The extent to which there is an affinity or contestation between different models of nationhood and gender regime is a constant theme in the literature. The analysis of the relationship between gender and nation in relation to womanhood as a key symbol of nation depends on an assumed identity of interest between women and men in the same national project. However, this is not necessarily the case; indeed it may seldom be the case. Since women and men typically occupy different social positions, it is likely that their experiences of the world will be different, and hence that their preferences may diverge. Indeed, since gender relations are often unequal, the perceived interests of women and men may be expected to vary. In the context of the construction of a national project, this may mean that women and men, or more accurately, gendered people, will attempt to inflect the project with their own potentially divergent preferences. There may be a struggle to determine what constitutes the national project. Since women typically have less power than men in the political domain, it may mean that any given national project may represent the interests of men more than women. It may also mean that gender affects the degree of commitment and enthusiasm of people to a national project, since where the national project does include women’s interests then women may be more likely to support it. Since nations and national projects are gendered, the contestations between national projects are gendered conflicts. A further set of the literature examines the implications of gender relations for the relations between nations (Enloe 1989; Sylvester 2001) and the implications of the relations between nations for gender relations (Walby 2004).

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VARIETIES OF GENDER AND NATIONALIST IDEALS The creation of a nation often looks backwards towards a myth of common origin (Smith 1986); it is an imagined community (Anderson 1983), which draws on collective memories of perceived common experiences (Gellner 1983) and invented traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). The selective interpretation of the past is a potent method of legitimating present political projects. The choice of the model of gender relations that is included within this cultural assemblage to support national identification and renewal has been subject to much analysis. Out of the range of available gender ideals, which ones are selected and why? Gender relations in the contemporary world are undergoing radical transformations. The domestic gender regime in which women’s primary role was assumed to be in the family caring for others is being transformed into a public gender regime in which women are additionally present in public domains of employment, politics and education (Walby 1990, 1997, forthcoming). The process of transformation takes place unevenly, with many path-dependent variations, though it is often associated with or a little later than industrialization and the development of a capitalist market economy, that is, during the transition to modernity. Developing nationalist movements have a range of models of preferred gender relations from which to select. Those that are backward-looking may be more likely to find affinity with a domesticated version of womanhood (Carbayo-Abengózar 2001). Those that are seeking to speed the process of modernization as part of their national project may be more likely to find affinity with a vision of women as active participants in the public sphere of employment, politics and education (Kandiyoti 1991a). There may be tension between the role of women as co-citizens and as symbols of national heritage (Kandiyoti 1991b). There is often contestation over the appropriate model of gender relations within nationalist movements (Jayawardena 1986; Ward 1995). Much of the rich literature on gender and nation explores these tensions

between different ideals of womanhood and specific national projects.

Womanhood and motherhood as symbols of nation Early writings on gender and nation often focused on the use of women as a symbol of nationhood (Anthias 1989; Anthias and YuvalDavis 1989; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997), and this has remained a continuing theme in the literature (CarbayoAbengózar 2001; Echeverria 2001; Moghadam 1994). Anthias (1989), Anthias and YuvalDavis (1989), Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) and Yuval-Davis (1997) suggest that women are central to the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and to the reproduction of the boundaries essential for ethnic and national differences. For example, women, in their role as mothers, are seen as producers of the nation by having and socializing children (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997). While they also suggest that women are not only a symbol of nation but are also active participants in the construction, reproduction and transformation of ethnic and national categories, the extent to which women are manipulated as symbols rather than controlling the representations and use of their own identity has been subject to some debate. Afshar (1989) and Kandiyoti (1989) argue that women are not passive symbols, but have their own interests, which they promote in national processes. Rather than seeing women as primarily manipulated by others, they suggest that they are active in the protection and development of their own interests. While some nationalisms made women visible as a symbol of nation, other nationalisms make women invisible, prioritizing the role of men in the national project. Echeverria (2001) provides an account of the privileging of masculinity in the social construction of Basque identity through an analysis of education and language. She shows that women’s contributions to Basque culture tend to be erased in the textbooks used to inform young Basque people about their heritage. Further, the

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construction of the Basque language privileges male speakers by its preferred forms. She notes that women have challenged this exclusion, hereby suggesting that they are not willing participants in this masculinization of Basque national identity. When the purity and chastity of womanhood is a key symbol of nation, then this symbol can become a target in wars between nations. The systematic rape of women in national and ethnonational conflicts is the most horrific example of the negative aspects of this symbolism (Seifert 1996). The combination of extreme masculinity in armies, the lack of a state authority and national hatred provides the context in which this can occur. The relative closure of formal politics from women is a further dimension of the exclusion of women from the construction of the national project. The concept of formal politics may be contrasted with that of informal politics, where it is suggested that women may be more likely to cross national divides (Cockburn 1998, 2000, 2004; McWilliams 1995; Racioppi and O’Sullivan See 2000). Racioppi and O’Sullivan See (2000) analyse the exclusion of women from leading positions in the politics of unionism in Northern Ireland. They show not only that Northern Ireland unionist politics can be understood in terms of ethnonationalism, but also that this additionally takes the form of an ethno-gender regime. Women are traditionally seen as being confined to the role of ‘tea-makers’ in these political organizations. Racioppi and O’Sullivan See argue that formal politics are not the only form of politics, and that it is important to consider the role of informal politics, in which women are much more active. These political spaces tend to be slightly less sectarian than those of formal politics. It is suggested that it is in these political spaces that women might make a distinctive contribution to the nationalist-based politics of Northern Ireland, while recognizing that unless these impact on the formal politics, their impact is likely to be limited. Cockburn’s (1998, 2000, 2004) analysis shows the importance, when analysing the relationship between nationalism and feminism, of looking beneath the surface of summary

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representations of each. Cockburn works with women in civil society, in non-governmental organizations, uncovering a world of informal politics with a rich and varied texture. It is within this world that Cockburn finds women who cross the divides between national and ethnic communities, and also cooperation between women who identify with feminism and those who do not. She works in conflict zones where the disputes between national and ethnonational groups are or have recently been hot, including Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Cyprus. While nationalist movements could be seen as having a preferred model of womanhood, the women she interviewed within national projects had a plurality of views about both the nature of the national project and the nature of womanhood. Cockburn refers to their holding of ‘anti-essentialist’ views of each phenomenon and regards this as important in explaining how feminism and nationalism could sometimes be compatible. In this way Cockburn develops in a striking manner the general insight from much of the literature on gender and nation, of the importance of looking at the plural and competing interpretations of womanhood and nation that are ever-present as a counterbalance to the rhetoric of some nationalists who promote the never-achievable purity of nation and womanhood.

Feminism and nationalism Gender struggles over the constitution of the national project have perhaps been most fully documented and analysed in the context of the relationship between feminism and nationalism (Afshar 1989; Jayawardena 1986; Ward 1995; West 1997). Feminism and nationalism are here conceptualized as independent sociopolitical struggles, with the relationship between them being the focus of the analysis. A key work on the significance of feminist actions in the shaping of nationalist projects is that of Jayawardena (1986). She shows how feminists were active in pushing for the inclusion of the emancipation of women within nationalist movements in the Third World at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the

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twentieth centuries. Such nationalist movements included feminist issues as key components of their programmes, with women involved as wings or subsidiaries of male-dominated nationalist groups rather than in separate organizations. Her analysis covers Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. In many of these countries nationalism was forged in opposition to imperialism and colonialism. A key issue in Jayawardena’s analysis is that of the extent to which feminism is seen and best understood as an indigenous phenomenon or as derivative from the West. If it is positioned as Western, then it is likely to be dismissed by nationalist movements; if it is indigenous, it is harder for male elites to reject. Jayawardena’s analysis carefully balances the roots of feminism in the specific experiences and mobilization of women in Third World countries with additional contributions provided by Western political thought, practice and capitalist expansion. There are many examples of case studies conducted in a single country, analysing the productive and destructive tensions between feminism and nationalism. A good example of this genre is the work of Ward (1995), who analyses the struggle of women in Ireland simultaneously for both Irish independence and for the inclusion of women’s preferences within the nationalist movement. She compares three different Irish women’s nationalist organizations in order to assess the implications of different strategies and ways of balancing and integrating women’s and nationalist aims. During the period of nationalist struggle women played important roles; when independence was won, however, women, while legally included as political citizens with the franchise, were excluded from the practical exercise of political power.

Right-wing nationalism and women While traditionally it was assumed that when women mobilized politically it would be around a feminist agenda that promoted women’s independence and greater participation in the public

sphere, women have also been mobilized around a defensive protection of the domestic space for women and against the excesses of gender inequality and degradation in the public sphere. The protection of a domestic form of gender regime can be a woman-led project. But it may also be one that is inflected by or developed in association with other right-wing projects. There are several studies that look at the relationship between right-wing nationalism and a domestic gender politics. Carbayo-Abengózar (2001) provides an account of the development of an image of Spanish femininity in the service of the national project at the time of Franco as one that is domesticated, which describes women as ‘indoor heroines’. The Spanishness of this model of womanhood is drawn in contrast to that of other so-called ‘liberated’ women in Europe, whose practices are experienced through increased tourism to Spain. CarbayoAbengózar argues that this is a manipulative discourse, intended to confine women indoors, at the same time as elevating them to the role of metaphor or symbol of the nation. In this account, nationalist priorities shape gender discourses and are intended to shape gendered practices. Koonz (1987) investigated the relationship of women to Nazi politics in Germany, investigating the range of politics and practices of women during the development of fascism. Some women were part of the Nazi project and supported its promotion of the domestic gender regime alongside its other policies. The domestic gender regime provided some comforts to some women. Koonz draws attention to the inconsistencies in Nazi practices towards gender relations. Although in the early stages of Nazi development women were removed from public positions as part of the re-domestication of women, at the height of the war effort women were pushed into paid work in factories in order to support the war. Maarten (2005) examines the gender rhetoric and practice of two women’s nationalist organizations of the far right in Belgium in the European Fascist period between the wars. While these right-wing nationalist movements appeared to denigrate traditional conceptions

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of women’s rights as individuals, nonetheless they provided spaces for the active participation of women. The women in these right-wing nationalist movements promoted motherhood and married life, while defending their activity in the public world of politics in order to achieve this. Maarten argues that the apparent contradiction between active women’s politics and the far right is bridged by noting that some forms of women’s politics – those that are relational rather than individual (see Offen 1988) – see the family as non-hierarchical and a positive force in society. She also notes the variety rather than singular nature of the discourse on women produced by these women’s organizations. Nonetheless, there remained a tension between the women’s organizations and their male counterparts in the nationalist movement over the promotion of a public role for women. MEDIATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NATION AND GENDER The relationship between gender and national projects can be mediated by their association with other political projects. The relationship varies depending on whether the national project is associated with other projects such as democracy, militarism and specific religions. In the analyses of feminism and nationalism provided by Jayawardena (1986) and Ward (1995), the nationalist project is associated with anti-imperialism and pro-democracy, as was typical of their period. At this time, the demand for an independent nationhood was often articulated through a discourse of democracy-seeking, in that national independence would be the route to democracy for this particular people. In the context of a pro-democratic anti-colonial political environment, the demands for votes for women as well as men were consistent with the dominant political vocabulary. At other times and places, national projects have been associated with militarism. In these contexts the relationship of feminism to nationalism can be more distant, if not hostile, though not uniformly so. Insofar as national

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projects are associated with militarism, then women tend to be less enthusiastic about engagement with national projects and more interested in internationalism. The most widely noted linking of these themes is by Virginia Woolf (1938: 109) in The Three Guineas, where a female pacifist makes the statement: ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’ Woolf linked nationalism and militarism at the time of the rise of Fascism in Europe and the use of military force to push forward national claims by Germany. Women are frequently, though by no means universally, more pacifist and less militaristic than men; they are more likely to support peace movements and to oppose war than men (Oldfield 1989), for example the Greenham Common protest, and to support political parties that oppose military adventurism, such as the Greens in Europe. There is a body of historically informed literature on women’s internationalism in the early twentieth century, during and after World War I (Sinha et al. 1998; Sluga 2000; Rupp 1997; Wiltshire 1985). Sluga (2000) provides a detailed mapping of feminist attempts to intervene in the politics of nationalism, arguing that the historical moment that Hobsbawm (1991) considers to be the ‘apogee of nationalism’ is in fact the time of a key struggle over internationalism in which women played a significant role. The erasure of these women from history produces a misleading account of the history of nationalism and internationalism. Key women’s organizations included the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, the International Council of Women, and the Allied Women’s Suffragists, which fought simultaneously for internationalism, suffrage for women and for women’s right to determine their own nationality. They engaged in ‘high politics’, meeting and petitioning international political leaders; however, they were frequently ignored, marginalized, or excluded. Hence the account is one of considerable feminist activity, but of perhaps limited success. A further mediator of the relationship between national projects and gender is that of

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religion (Inglis 1987; Scannell 1988; Smyth 1992). Organized religions differ in their internal organization from nations and modern states as to the basis of their authority and power. Modern states and nations tend to legitimate their authority over their citizens by appeal to a democratically supported mandate. In the case of religion, authority is usually exercised by a male ‘priesthood’ with reference to divine texts, and not to a democratic order in which women can participate. National projects that are closely linked to religious rather than democratic projects have tended to support a preferred model of womanhood that is associated with a domestic rather than public form of gender regime. The extent to which women are drawn to and support such a national project may depend on the extent to which civil society and the economy have made a transition from a domestic to a public form of gender regime, or not. If the religiously endorsed view and the lifeexperiences of women converge then there is likely to be more support for this project than if civil society has moved and the religion has not. In practice, there may be deep divisions within civil society over such a transition in gender regime and over the preferred model of womanhood. Fundamentalist projects may sometimes be engendered in such circumstances (Moghadam 1994). A national project is forged in relation to many other types of political project. At the turn of the twentieth century a strong international feminist movement engaged in positive relations and much synergy with nationalist movements that were seeking independence from colonial powers using democratization as a key source of legitimation. However, nationalist projects have been associated with many other types of project, whether or not they are sympathetic to conventionally defined feminist claims.

CONTESTED RELATIONS BETWEEN GENDERED NATIONS AND OTHER POLITIES Since nations and national projects are gendered, the relations between nations and national

projects are also gendered. Competition and contestation between nations and other polities is thus often a gendered contestation in that changes in the dominance of one nation or polity over another can have implications for the gender regime in those nations and polities. The preferred gender model of an increasingly powerful nation is likely to have implications for the gender regimes in those nations that are relatively weaker. The implications are diverse, possibly including successful pressure to modernize the domestic gender regime or the generation of a backlash as the weaker nation seeks to defend its preferred values with greater vigour. There are a number of examples of these and other scenarios in the literature. Enloe (1989) examines the hierarchical relationship between an imperial power and a colonized nation through an examination of their gendered cultural forms. She finds that images of women in countries colonized by the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were often constructed in a manner that eroticized and exocitized them, providing a rationale for imperial domination in the name of the protection of ‘Oriental’ women. Civilized protection of such women was a source of legitimation for colonial domination. The changing relations between nations and the European Union (EU) provide a further example of the possible implications of the transformation of national projects for the nature of gender regimes. The integration of the EU has involved the increasing preeminence of the European level over that of member states in a widening range of domains. The preferred gender regime of the EU is more public and more egalitarian than that of many of the member states, with the exception of the Nordic countries. The regulation of employment by the EU in the context of the development of the Single European Market and the European Employment Strategy has involved prioritization of the narrowing of gender gaps in employment and pay. Member states have been obliged to implement the Directives of the EU on the equal treatment of men and women in employment and to revise domestic law in order to do this. Resistance by member states,

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for example, that of the Thatcher government to the deepening of the principle of equal pay from the same work to work of equal value, is usually unsuccessful since the Commission takes the recalcitrant member states to the European Court of Justice. In this way the more public gender regime of the European Union, at least in the area of employment, is becoming increasingly important at the expense of the more domestic gender regimes of member states (Curtin 1989; Hoskyns 1996; Pillinger 1992; Walby 2004; Whyte 1988).

NATION AND STATE FORMATION The inclusion of gender makes a difference to the analysis of nation and state formation. The traditional approach to state formation has suggested that there is a single critical moment at which key institutions are forged, which then remain in place for a considerable period of time. For example, this may be presumed to be the moment at which men win suffrage and political citizenship (Turner 1990). However, in the old industrialized countries of the North, women typically won the vote several decades after men, and minority ethnic groups sometimes later still. For example, Turner suggests that in the United States citizenship and democracy were won in the 1840s, when white men won suffrage. However, women in the US did not gain the franchise until 1920, and African-Americans, in practice, not until after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Given the significance of the creation of a state for a nation, this series of critical moments of winning political citizenship, rather than a singular one, is of some import. The availability for men, but not women, of a formal electoral route for the expression of political preferences during the early stages of nation and state formation when key institutions are being formed has implications for the gendered characteristics of these national institutions. Later rounds of nation-and state-building when women and minority ethnic groups win the suffrage have further gendered impacts on the nature of national institutions.

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This dislocation between the political citizenship of men and women found in the North is less common in the South. This is because political citizenship was often granted simultaneously to men and women at the point of national independence from colonial rule. This applies to those countries that gained independence after 1920 (the date around which women in a group of countries in the North won the vote), especially in Africa and Asia, but not those that gained independence before then, such as in Latin America (data on suffrage dates from Inter-Parliamentary Union, 1995). The granting of simultaneous political citizenship to men and women may be expected to have implications for the development of national institutions, although this must be qualified by the caveat that this depends upon the extent to which effective political representation, especially of women, actually occurs.

GENDER, NATION AND GLOBALIZATION Global processes reposition nations and the key spatial locations and nodes of gender relations (Castells 1997; Peterson 1996). Traditionally, it was thought that women were more likely to access formal political arenas at the local rather than the national level. Evidence for this was seen in the higher proportion of women elected to local councils than to national parliaments. The strength of the development of transnational feminist networks (Moghadam 2000) has led to some reassessment of this view. Feminist politics have drawn strongly on the power of the legitimation of the discourse of universal human rights and have accessed global political spaces, such as UN conferences, with success (Meyer and Prügl 1999; Peters and Wolper 1995; Pietilä 1996;). This has led to a more complex analysis of the relationship of gender to local, national, regional and international politics (Walby 2002). In particular, there is interest in the way in which grassroots feminists access regional (e.g. EU) and global political arenas in order to put pressure back on national-level governments (Keck and Sikkink 1998). This

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suggests that rather than a simple gradient in which the more local the more women and the more international the fewer women, it is the middle level of the nation where it might appear that women’s interests are the least well represented. Global processes have altered the balance of power between social forces so as to lead to some diminution of the capacities of some nations to provide welfare and public services for their citizens. This has usually been considered as a class-led process, but there is a significant gender dimension to this (Peterson and Runyan 1999). In the rich North this process is associated with the election of governments that seek to curtail welfare expenditure and the privatization of provision of services that were previously public. In the South these same processes have more typically been the result of the conditions placed by the International Monetary Fund on loans in the process known as structural adjustment (Sparr 1994). In both cases, these are processes that have a disproportionate effect on women, since women are more often the users and employees in welfare and public services. In this way global processes restructure some of the capacities of nations to deliver gendered welfare and public services (Haxton and Olsson 1999). However, in some instances, such as the European Union, the outcome of the restructuring of nations and polities in the context of rising to the challenge of global pressures has not had such an effect on the circumstances of women, because of the EU commitment to women’s employment (Walby 2004), although this assessment is subject to much debate (Hoskyns 1996; Young 2000).

CONCLUSION One of the major contributions of these analyses of gender to the wider field of nations and nationalism is to draw attention to the variety of social activities and discourses within any given national project. It warns against a too ready homogenization or essentializing of the content of any national project, pointing up the internal divisions and struggles over its meaning and

purpose. National projects are rarely unified, based on a simple consensus, even if they attempt to appear to possess unity. They can often be projects that attempt such a purification of the collectivity, even though this is never fully achieved. The literature on gender, nation and nationalism explores the implications of varied interactions between a range of forms of gender regime and of national projects, interactions mediated by a wide range of political, social and economic contexts. There has been considerable development within gender approaches to nations and nationalism during the past few years. Early literature tended to focus on the congruity of a specific image of womanhood with a specific national project, even while emphasizing the diversity of such images. This approach has been rightly challenged because of the contested nature of preferred models of both womanhood and national projects, with much ensuing work investigating the tensions, struggles, compromise and accommodation between differently gendered visions of national projects. These different visions were linked, but not in a simple way, with interests associated with different positions in gender regimes, not only between women and men, but also according to the type of gender regime, that is, more domestic or public. The contestations between these different visions of a gendered nation draw not only from discursive resources, but also from resources that are economic and political. In early work there seemed to be a view of an almost endless variety of models of gender relations that could potentially be associated with national projects. My view is that rather than infinite variety there is a tendency for these models to tend to cluster along a continuum from domestic and public gender regimes. At one end, there is a cluster around the valorization of women as mothers, and at the other, there is a tendency to welcome a modern emancipated woman into the public sphere. At the heart of modern nations is often a tension between their attempt to be inclusive of all members, which draws on the democratic impulse that is a key legitimation of a contemporary national project, and a desire to purify the group, so that it lives up to the unique and

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singular ideal that is a key source of legitimation of the national project. Debates over the preferred model of gender relations can forcefully articulate this tension. A backward-looking nationalism may draw inspiration from a model of gender relations from an era when a domestic form of the gender regime was typical, while the practical inclusion of women as nationalist activists in the public domain contradicts this ideal. By contrast, other nationalisms have embraced a model of modernity that includes public life for all citizens, including women. The ongoing if uneven transformation of the gender regime from a domestic to a public form in many locations experiencing a national movement produces a variety rather than a uniformity of models of existing gender relations, generating further tensions. Thus the relationship between nation and gender is likely to be uneven, varied and contested, rather than taking a settled form.

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Medaglia, A. (2000) Patriarchal Structures and Ethnicity. Avebury: Ashgate. Meyer, M. K. and Prügl, E. (eds) (1999) Gender Politics in Global Governance. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Moghadam, V. M. (ed.) (1994) Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Moghadam, V. M. (2000) ‘Transnational Feminist networks: Collective Action in an Era of Globalization’, International Sociology, 15 (1): 57–85. Offen, K. (1988) ‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach’, Signs, 14 (1): 119–57. Oldfield, S. (1989) Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989, Oxford: Blackwell. Pietilä, H. (1996) Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations. London: Zed Books. Peters, J. and A. Wolper, (eds) (1995) Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. London: Routledge. Peterson, V. S. (1996) ‘The Politics of Identification in the Context of Globalization’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 19 (1–2): 5–15. Peterson, V. S. and Runyan, A. S. (1999) Global Gender Issues. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Pillinger, J. (1992) Feminising the Market: Women’s Pay and Employment in the European Community. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Racioppi, L. and O’Sullivan See, K. (2000) ‘This We Will Maintain’: Gender, Ethno-nationalism and the Politics of Unionism in Northern Ireland’, Nations and Nationalism, 7 (1): 93-112. Rupp, L. (1997) Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scannell, Y. (1988) ‘The Constitution and the Role of Women’, in B. Farrell (ed.), De Valera’s Constitution and Ours. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. pp. 123–36. Seifert, R. (1996) ‘The Second Front: the Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 19 (1–2): 35–43. Sinha, M., Guy, D. J. and Wollacott, A. (1998) ‘Introduction: Why Feminism and Internationalism?’, Special issue of Gender and History, 10 (3): 345–57. Sluga, G. (2000) ‘Female and National Selfdetermination: a Gender Re-reading of “the Apogee of Nationalism”’, Nations and Nationalism, 6 (4): 495–521. Smith, A. D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smyth, A. (ed.) (1992) The Abortion Papers: Ireland. Dublin: Attic Press.

Sparr, P. (ed.) (1994) Mortgaging Women’s Lives: Feminist Critiques of Structural Adjustment. London: Zed Press. Sylvester, C. (2001) Feminist International Relations (An Unfinished Journey). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, J. (1999) ‘Case X: Irish Reproductive Policy and European influence’, Social Politics, 6 (2): 203–29. Turner, B. (1990) ‘Outline of a theory of citizenship’, Sociology, 24 (2): 189–217. Walby, S. (1990) Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell. Walby, S. (1992) ‘Woman and Nation’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, XXXIII (1–2): 81–100. Walby, S. (1997) Gender Transformations. London: Routledge. Walby, S. (1999) ‘The New Regulatory State: the Social Powers of the European Union’, British Journal of Sociology, 50 (1): 118–40. Walby, S. (2002) ‘Feminism in a global age’, Economy and Society, 31 (4): 533–57. Walby, S. (2003) ‘The Myth of the Nation-state: Theorising Society and Polities in a Global Era’, Sociology, 37 (3): 531–48. Walby, S. (2004) ‘The European Union and gender equality: Emergent varieties of gender regime’, Social Politics, 11 (1): 4–29. Walby, S. (forthcoming) Complex Social Systems: Theorisations and Comparisons in a Global Era. London: Sage. Ward, M. (1995) Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, 2nd edn. London: Pluto Press. West, Lois (ed.) (1997) Feminist Nationalism. New York: Routledge. Whyte, G. (ed.) (1988) Sex Equality, Community Rights and Irish Social Welfare Law: The Impact of the Third Equality Directive. Dublin: The Irish Centre for European Law, Trinity College. Wiltshire, A. (1985) Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War. London: Pandora. Woolf, V. (1938) The Three Guineas. London: Harcourt, Brace and World. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation. London: Sage. Yuval-Davis, N. and Anthias, F. (eds) (1989) Woman–Nation–State. London: Macmillan. Young, B. (2000) ‘Disciplinary Neoliberalism in the European Union and Gender Politics’, New Political Economy, 5 (1): 77–98.

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11 Methodological Nationalism and Its Critique DANIEL CHERNILO

The theoretical, historical, cultural and indeed geographical diversity to which this Handbook bears witness reflects at least some of the complications faced by the social sciences when trying to come to terms with the nationstate. During the past century-and-a-half, the nation-state has been treated as a god and a demon; been declared born and dead many times; been regarded as a modern as well as a primordial form of social and political community; been conceived of as both a rational structure and an imagined/imaginary community; created as much welfare as misery; been equally a source for political democracy, cosmopolitanism and ethnic cleansing; co-existed with empires, colonies, blocs, protectorates, city-states and other forms of socio-political organization; gone through experiences of unification, totalitarian terror, occupation, division and then re-unification; and been legitimized around ethnic, racial, republican, monarchic, liberal, multicultural, federal and even class principles. Yet, despite – or more possibly owing to – all this variation, the nation-state has somehow managed to present itself as a solid, stable and ultimately the necessary form of social and political organization in modernity. Again in this case, the sources of this alleged solidity have proved difficult to

identify: increase in the state’s control over ‘its’ population through nationalization policies such as literacy campaigns, schooling, taxation and military recruitment; the use and abuse of sentiments of belonging to emphasize cultural and/or ethnic differences; the rise of a ‘system of nation-states’ composed of a growing number of at least formally equally sovereign members; the development of a capitalist class structure at the national level and the expansion of capitalism at the global level; the ‘universalistic’ appeal of popular sovereignty and democracy. The nation-state is, in all certainty, one of modernity’s most complicated themes. On the face of this obscurity, then, it is puzzling that the most common argument on how social theory has tried to account for the main features of the nation-state in modernity emphasizes precisely all that is opposite to these doubts and uncertainties. This argument, which has become known as methodological nationalism, can be defined as the all-pervasive equation within the social sciences between the concept of ‘society’ and the nation-state. Methodological nationalism presupposes that the nation-state is the natural and necessary form of society in modernity and that the nation-state becomes the organizing principle around which the whole project of modernity coheres.

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My own view is that methodological nationalism must be rejected because it is unable to grasp the ambiguities that were presented in the introductory paragraph and also because it distorts and misrepresents the history of social theory in relation to the nation-state. This chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of what methodological nationalism actually is and how it can be overcome, so it begins by briefly revisiting some key arguments in the debate on methodological nationalism. It then unfolds some of social theory’s arguments on the history, main features and legacy of the nation-state in order to outline what may be called a ‘social theory of the nation-state beyond methodological nationalism’. My thesis, set out in the three sections that follow, is that, in modernity, the nation-state has been historically opaque, sociologically uncertain and normatively ambivalent.1 For all these three cases I will deploy my arguments with examples taken from classical as well as contemporary social theory and conclude that social theory has not portrayed the nation-state as the necessary final stage of modernity but rather has struggled throughout with trying to grasp the ambivalent position of the nation-state in modernity.

METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM: A DEBATE IN TWO WAVES A first wave of discussion on methodological nationalism commenced in the 1970s. Its main claim was that the social sciences at large would have regarded the nation-state as the necessary container of modern social relations (Martins 1974), conceived the nation-state as the natural representation of the modern ‘society’ (Giddens 1973, 1985) and neglected the role of nationalism as a political force (Smith 1983). The key feature of this early debate was that the historical record seemed to buttress a certain view of a modern world as increasingly organized around nation-states.2 These writers were not preoccupied with whether or not the nation-state was a determining feature of the modern word – it

seemed clear to them that it was – but they were concerned with the ways in which the nation-state was being conceptualized at the time. They saw a problem with the tendency to theorize the nation-state as though it were a monad that evolved and behaved autonomously and, because of that, to regard the international system of nation-states as a mere reflection of the behaviour of its individual members. In fact, the key point of these early critiques of methodological nationalism was the dissatisfaction with a certain internalist emphasis in the explanation of those social forces which contributed to the creation of individual nation-states and, in the long run, of a worldwide nation-state system.3 A second wave of scholarly discussion on methodological nationalism has started at the turn of the new century (Beck 2002, 2004; Wimmer and Schiller 2002). Usually, the reasons given to explain this re-emergence are two-fold. On the one hand, there is the historical thesis that the nation-state can no longer be regarded as though it is the final representation of society in modernity. Indeed, a key historical argument in recent debates on the rise of globalization is precisely that the nationstate was the most relevant actor of previous historical constellations within modernity but that now its time is over.4 It would be precisely this change in historical circumstances that would create a critical space for realizing the problems involved in the equation between society and the nation-state – the view that the nation-state was the natural representation of society in modernity.5 On the other hand, this new wave of discussion on methodological nationalism has been linked with a particularly sociological reaction to the postmodern debate in other social sciences (Shaw 2000: 2–14; Wagner 2001: 75). In this second, more theoretical, argument the key theme is an increasing scepticism towards the permanence of the project of modernity and the use of general or universalist concepts in the social sciences – the idea of society crucially being one of such concepts. There is then a mixture of historical arguments – the rise of globalization and fall of the nation-state – and theoretical arguments – the exhaustion of modernity and futility of

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universalist concepts such as society – which ends up configuring a new scenario of radical epochal and conceptual change. The claim is that the historical references and the theoretical coordinates with which we used to comprehend the world are quickly becoming obsolete. The understanding of the implications of this new debate on methodological nationalism needs to focus on three sets of issues (Chernilo 2006). First, there is the widely shared argument that methodological nationalism must be rejected and transcended. Twenty-first-century social science cannot regard the nation-state as the natural and necessary representation of society in modernity so it needs to move beyond methodological nationalism.6 Secondly, there is the assessment of the extent to which methodological nationalism is in fact a defining feature of the history of the social sciences in general and social theory in particular. The new orthodoxy’s claim here is that these disciplines are so fully impregnated with methodological nationalism that social theory’s methodological nationalism would be responsible for its inability to capture the radical epochal change supposedly brought about by the current globalization process. There is, however, a third proposition in this debate – and this is the one to which I feel closer. The argument here is to accept that methodological nationalism must be rejected and transcended but to argue this from two different standpoints. In relation to social theory, I argue that the thesis of social theory’s immanent methodological nationalism says more about the deficiencies of those who make the claim than it tells us from the canon of social theory itself. More broadly, it is maintained that the use of concepts with a universalist intent, such as ‘society’, does not have to be given up (Archer 2005; Chernilo 2007; Fine 2003; Outhwaite 2006; Smelser 1997; Wagner 2001). In relation to the nation-state, it is claimed that methodological nationalism has never been able to account for its history and main features – neither in previous constellations of modernity nor nowadays (Calhoun 2002; Rosenberg 2000; Webster 2002).7 In other words, even if the claim of a radical epochal change were true, the consequence of social

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theory’s inability to come to terms with this epochal change would still be rejected. In order to substantiate this position, I would now like to introduce the key arguments which I think constitute the outline for a social theory of the nation-state beyond methodological nationalism.

THE HISTORICAL OPACITY OF THE NATION-STATE The question of a concise periodization of the development of the nation-state in modernity has remained elusive for the social sciences at large (see, for instance, Chapter 31 by Paul James in this Handbook). A certain historical opacity of the nation-state has consistently accompanied scholars interested in the field – both within and outside social theory. Take, for instance, the case of Karl Marx’s – certainly sketchy – conceptualization of the nationstate. His reflections on the subject are framed within his thesis that, in capitalism, all forms of social relations ‘become antiquated before they can ossify’: nation-states are being constituted and pulled apart, formed and dissolved, as part of the contradictory dynamic of capitalism (Marx and Engels 1976: 487). In Marx’s analysis, the nation-state is dissolved in the tension between empires, nations and communes, between world capitalism and the internationalism of the proletariat. Marx’s idea of the nation-state is that of a type of social and political organization that emerges from, but cannot deal with, the contradictory character of capitalist social relations.8 Marx (1973: 172–228) realized well that nation-states are always under immense pressures that they can handle only just: the global accumulation of capital, colonialism, internationalist movements are all forces at work that create contradictions that escape from the nation-state’s control. Yet, even if Marx clearly appreciated that the nation-state was not such a solid and stable form of socio-political organization as methodological nationalism would have it, he equally exaggerated the extent and speed of its possible disintegration.

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A social theory of the nation-state does not ask for the birth certificate of the nation-state as a modern form of socio-political organization. For instance, Hannah Arendt (1994 [1958]: 267–302), still under the shock of the events of the Holocaust, could declare the breakdown of the nation-state system by the end of World War I. She understood the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the following decades as a rejection of the nation-state Weltanschauung; totalitarianism represented the empirical and normative collapse of a whole set of social relations which tried to cohere around the nation-state. Empirically, the principle of national selfdetermination proved unable to check the advancement of overseas imperialism, first, and the rise of totalitarianism, later on. Normatively, Arendt regarded the rise of totalitarian regimes as evidence of the dramatic futility of trying to found political democracy and the rule of law on the basis of belonging to a national group. She witnessed and indeed suffered personally with the collapse of the faith in the nationstate’s ability to control and conduct modernization processes peacefully. From a different standpoint, then, Arendt not only advanced further Marx’s thesis of the somewhat ‘premature’ dissolution of the nation-state but equally pioneered, though in soberer fashion, current arguments on the ‘decline of the nation-state’. The fact that Arendt was neither the first nor has been the last commentator to declare the obsolescence of the nation-state is not meant as a criticism of her assessment of the destiny of the European nation-state. Rather, the point is that the nation-state remains elusive when it comes to the question of its decline: we shall not look for death certificates of the nation-state. A certain form of methodological nationalism seems to be inscribed, however, into social theory’s typological constructions such as Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). At least some of the difficulties in grasping the historicity of the nation-state may be explained via this type of dichotomous reasoning, which is found throughout the history of social theory. As we know it, in some classical sociology the concept of Gemeinschaft was used to describe those forms of communal life that would not be mediated by abstract

forms of social coordination. The market and monetary exchanges via money, conversely, were taken as the paradigmatic representations of Gesellschaft; a fully developed nation-state, as both a national market and a national political community, was the closest we could get to that version of Gesellschaft. This mode of thinking is perpetuated in modernist social science in the form of the transition from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. Indeed, these dichotomies have not disappeared from our intellectual landscape although there have been for a long time serious criticisms raised against them (Gusfield 1967). In its newest version, the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft antinomy takes the nation-state, which would be in its final crisis, as the new representation of Gemeinschaft, whereas the new Gesellschaft is now presented with the different names given to the sociopolitical formations that allegedly are coming to replace nation-states: global society, network society, world risk society, among others. The new Gesellschaft is thought to be radically different from the nation-state community, so radical as to make obsolete all previous forms of social theorizing (Fine and Chernilo 2004: 36–7). The difficulty here lies in the thesis that the radical historical break we now seem to experience is presented as something new, whereas in fact that type of claim is at the very core of all types of Gemeinschaft – Gesellschaft formulations. The problem is that of a ‘fallacy of presentism’ (Webster 2002: 275): there is nothing less radical and novel than claiming the ‘newness’ and ‘radicalness’ of social change. The same naivety with which previous social theory looked at Gemeinschaf – E. Gellner’s (1996) ‘romantic fallacy’ of previous types of communal life which allegedly were free of conflict – is now found in the assessment of the nation-state’s current crisis. In paraphrasing Reinhardt Bendix (1967: 320), if classical as well as modernist social theory reconstructed historical transitions ‘by contrasting the liabilities of the present with the assets of the past’, we can now say that the current mainstream echoes this by contrasting the liabilities of past and present – the nation-state – with the assets the future should, hopefully, provide – the new global society.

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Instead of yet another version of this antinomy, I propose we try a different path. I would hold that there are multiple concepts of the nation-state and that this constitutes a key feature of the historical opacity of the nationstate on which this section focuses. The historical record lends supports for the thesis that the meaning of what constitutes a nation-state has proved historically unstable (Cobban 1969). Instead of discussing the historical formation of the nation-states in terms of beginnings and endings – between old communities and new societies – I propose we think on the relationships between the prevailing conceptualization of the nation-state at particular moments in history so that we trace major shifts in the concept of the nation-state from its early Enlightenment formulations, through experiences of imperialism, anti-imperialism, welfare state, to current multicultural, post-national or cosmopolitan formulations. Instead of methodological nationalism, that is, a fixed relationship between social theory, the concept of society and the historical formation of the nation-state, I propose that there is a changing relationship between the nation-state’s selfunderstanding and social theory’s conceptualization of the nation-state. By acknowledging the existence of different conceptualizations of the nation-state we already start disentangling the equation between the nation-state and society and therefore the nation-state stops being the natural and rational form of society in modernity. The first of social theory’s antidotes against methodological nationalism, the recognition of its historical opacity, points in the direction that the nation-state is a modern form of socio-political organization but is not the necessary product of modernity.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL UNCERTAINTY OF THE NATION-STATE The main argument for this section is that there is permanently an important level of uncertainty with regard to the nation-state’s capacity to deal with its continuous crises. The question of the nation-state’s ability to sort out these

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crises creates, for those living traumatic events in the present, a level of anxiety that is usually lost when the crises are normalized as just (more or less important) episodes of the national history. Despite its crises, however, the nation-state has proved particularly successful in presenting its solidity and stability as something as transparent as it is self-evident. The canon of social theory may help us transcend methodological nationalism at this sociological plane as long as we recognize the importance of this ambivalence between solidity and instability in the nation-state’s self-presentation. To take an example from classical sociology, we may remember how Max Weber tried to come to terms with the problems of defining the nation. For Weber (1978: 395), the nation is ‘one of the most vexing, since emotionally charged concepts’ to be found in the sociological lexicon and he was sceptical as to whether the nation could be truly formalized as a concept. He understood well that ‘the people’, language, ethnicity, class and culture all can and have been taken as the nation’s true core and yet none of them was really so. ‘If the concept of “nation” can in any way be defined unambiguously’, he says, it can just refer to ‘a specific sentiment of solidarity’ of a certain group of people ‘in the face of other groups’ (Weber 1970: 172). He was at pains in trying to find an appropriate definition of what a nation is.9 Weber was aware of the fact that nations and states hardly ever coincide in historical reality so the idea of the nation-state was hardly the natural form of politics in modernity. When powerful and strong, states expand beyond the nation’s limits and become multinational Empires. When states are weak and ‘forsake power’, peoples living within these states cannot be conceived of as nations at all (Weber 1978: 395–7). Scholars working within the field of historical sociology have proved that there is an ‘elective affinity’ between class and national politics. According to Michael Mann, both classes and nations were equally able to convey an abstract sense of community in analogously universalistic ways: ‘if the nation was an imagined community, its main ideological competitor, class consciousness, might seem to have

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been even more metaphorical, an “imaginary community” … we shall see that the two imagined or imaginary communities arose together, conjoined, in the same process of modernisation … over matters of political representation and state reform, class and national consciousness developed and fused’ (Mann 1992: 141–2). A nation-state is thus formed when all classes find a way of attaching their identity and interests to the idea of the nation. The core of this ‘co-originality’ between class and nation argument is that it allows us to keep in mind that far from a harmonious and free-ofconflict form of socio-political organization, the nation-state is a conflictive form of socio – political organization whose social, political and symbolic structure is constantly an object of struggle (Fine and Chernilo 2003). For our purposes here, the thesis of the co-originality is important on three different grounds. First, because it demonstrates that the rise of the nation was accompanied with the rise of classes – the nation did not emerge unchallenged as the key form of political or cultural identity in modernity. Secondly, because it sets the tone for the more general argument that the nation is in permanent competition with alternative forms of identity. Thirdly, because it reinforces the argument we introduced at the beginning of this section. The degree of urgency with which the nation felt threatened by class politics at the time of the widening of the franchise is lost when that particular challenge to the nation’s unity is lost. Yet, the nation-state constantly faces new threats. A good example of this is found in Talcott Parsons’s investigation on the rise of Fascism. To Parsons, the idea of the Western society as a ‘democratic nation-state’ was set in negative contrast with the regressive utopia represented by Fascism and totalitarianism (Gerhardt 2002). Parsons compared the nation-state with totalitarian regimes and saw the two as radically different, but equally real, types of society. He did not have to look very far to realize that nation-states shared the world with alternative forms of socio-political organization that have all arisen from within Western civilization. Writing in 1942, Parsons (1993: 203) regarded

Fascism as ‘deeply rooted in the structure of Western society as a whole’. Fascism arose from within the Western society and Parsons (1993: 215) saw its development as a particular combination of institutional structures (rapid urbanization and economic change), ideological definitions (nationalism and mass politics) and patterns of psychological reaction (growing individualism and consumerism). He equally realized that there was no peaceful co-existence between nation-states and totalitarian regimes; in the case of Nazi Germany nation-states had to engage in a total war against it. Parsons was well aware of the uncertainty of the nation-states. His view was that the nation-state could be dissolved from within (Weimar Germany being turned into Nazi Germany), or as a result of war defeat (the Nazis taking over Europe) and he could of course have no certainty on whether the nation-state would at the end prevail. In the same way as he did not see the nation-state as the natural or necessary representation of society in modernity during World War II, by the time of the Cold War period Parsons’s view was that the Western and Communist blocs were as ‘sovereign’ units as individual nationstates.10 Despite problems and shortcomings in his sociology, Parsons’s portrayal of modernity is closer to a critique than to an example of methodological nationalism. More recently, we experienced or at least witnessed all sorts of different reactions on the threats that so-called global terrorism poses to Western life as it is known so far. Indeed, strong reactions on this were found not only among the general public and politicians but they were equally present among some critical intellectuals.11 The point I am trying to make here is not to diminish how strongly people feel about the dangers posed by these threats nor, for that matter, to assess how accurately or insightfully these intellectuals are interpreting the threats to our world and age. Rather, this section on the sociological uncertainty of the nation-state tries to demonstrate that challenges and threats of this sort are a common occurrence throughout the history of the nation-state in modernity.

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A constitutive part of the rhetoric of the nation-state is that of its strength and stability – its ability to impose order and provide welfare. At the same time, however, we have briefly reviewed that the nation-state faces constant crises which threaten to divide the nation and weaken the state. The nation-state is an unfinished project which paradoxically presents itself as an already established form of socio-political organization. The question of why and how this strong image has become so prevalent seems to be related to the fact that nation-states themselves are interested in being portrayed in this solid way and the important extent to which they have succeeded in doing that. If the first of social theory’s antidotes against methodological nationalism was the recognition of its historical opacity, the second is to acknowledge this sociological uncertainty as another of the nation-state’s permanent features. I have hinted in this section that, at all times, the nation-state faces its current crisis as the most urgent threat – almost a death-threat. Yet, it was also noted that these death-threats are only felt as such in the present and it is by no means certain or necessary that the following generations will remember these threats so dramatically (on the nation and commemoration, see Chapter 17 by Charles Turner in this Handbook). This is why the question is one of sociological uncertainty: we neither surrender to the image of solidity, historical continuity and social-cultural homogeneity of the nationstate nor underestimate the strength and capacity with which the nation-state resolves its crises and finds ways of recreating itself.

THE NORMATIVE AMBIVALENCE OF THE NATION-STATE I have already introduced the historical and sociological dimensions on which a social theory of the nation-state beyond methodological nationalism needs to concentrate. In this section I shall add a third normative element to these two and hold that the ambivalent normative legacy of the nation-state in

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modernity results, to a great extent, from the opacity and uncertainty that were described in the previous sections. As the opening paragraph of this chapter makes apparent, the internal normative basis of the nation-state can be and has been based on many different sources. Equally, externally, the understanding of the connections between the nation-state, internationalism and cosmopolitanism remains largely an open question.12 In continuing our references to classical sociologists, some of Emile Durkheim’s reflections on the state and politics are an interesting case in point here. Durkheim supported throughout all his life a substantive idea of humanity although he was convinced that the French Third Republic had become an incarnation of that idea of humanity. Durkheim (1915) considered that Germany’s ‘bellicose spirit’ was the main cause of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 and this made France’s role quite unique; Durkheim took the defence of France’s national identity as a ‘moral duty’ precisely because he regarded it as universal as well as national. The normative tension between both sides is apparent in Durkheim’s (1992: 72) conceptualization that national patriotism and ‘world patriotism’ were ‘equally high-minded kind of sentiments’. He understood that abstract moral ideals such as world patriotism have to be anchored in ‘real’ communities and states – national patriotism.13 Durkheim’s greatest insight is the seriousness of his attempt to combine normative and sociological arguments. Despite all the shortcomings of his anti-German chauvinism and a certain naiveté in his ideas of humanity and moral individualism, Durkheim did not surrender in his effort to make normative and sociological arguments work together. A sound idea of the nation-state requires the firmest possible moral ground, which only cosmopolitanism can provide. The normative ambivalence in which I am interested here is subtly captured by the differences – at least in tone – of some of Jürgen Habermas’s public interventions about recent international events: his cautious but decided defence of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and his open condemnation of the war

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in Iraq in 2003.14 For the former Habermas argues that, despite the fact of the legal gaps in the justification for an international military action in a sovereign state’s internal affairs, the intervention was right; on the one hand, empirically, owing to the urgency of stopping genocide and, on the other, owing to its normative basis, the ‘leap from the classical international law of states to a cosmopolitan law of a global civil society’ (Habermas 1999: 264). Habermas was seriously concerned, however, with the lack of an explicit UN Security Council resolution to back the use of military force but he none the less regarded the situation in Kosovo as so grave that the intervention was justified as an exception: ‘NATO’s self-authorization should not be allowed to become the general rule’ (Habermas 1999: 271). The ambivalent relationships between international law based on the principle of national self-determination and an emerging cosmopolitan legal order led Habermas to the conclusion that the risks of waging a morally justified war on grounds that are not fully legalized were tremendous at all levels. He thus put, hypothetically, the following question ‘What do we say when one day the military alliance of another region – for example, in Asia – pursues the politics of human rights with military means in accordance with a very different interpretation of international law or the UN Charter?’ (Habermas 1999: 270). The problem the world faced in 2003 with the war in Iraq confirmed Habermas’s worst fears. This ‘very different interpretation of international law’ has indeed arisen but from within the West: ‘normative dissent has divided the West itself ’ (Habermas 2003: 366). The war in Iraq marks a change because: ‘For half a century the United States could count as the pacemaker for progress on this cosmopolitan path. With the war in Iraq … the normative authority of the United States of America lies in ruins’ (Habermas 2003: 365). Habermas’s argument is that the novelty in this most recent Anglo-Saxon military campaign lies in its claim that ‘if the regime of international law fails, then the hegemonic imposition of a global liberal order is justified,

even by means that are hostile to international law’ (Habermas 2003: 365). In his view, this signals the reappearance in a new context of deep-seated legal and political traditions in the UK and the US in which the tensions between national and cosmopolitan interests and values are resolved in the form of national liberalism. Habermas (2003: 366) is therefore forced to face the upsetting fact that ‘in hindsight’, even during the Kosovo crisis, Britain and the US ‘satisfied themselves with the normative goal of promulgating their own liberal order, through violence if necessary’, so that what in 1999 could be counted as ‘the undisputed democratic and rule-of-law character of all the members of the acting military coalition’, even if it remains true, it certainly adopts a much less cosmopolitan flavour. More than an assessment of Habermas’s arguments, I am interested here in how the normative ambivalence which is expressed in these two pieces helps us think beyond methodological nationalism. The kind of ‘normative optimism’ that is found in his Kosovo paper seems to have been widely shared at the time and yet, less than five years later, this optimism is severely weakened. Habermas’s normative claims have indeed remained the same but their relationship with historical and sociological facts is now less apparent: his own view of the institutionalization of an embryonic cosmopolitan legal order seems, if anything, more distant in 2003 than it looked in 1999. Had Habermas (1969) applied more consistently some key lessons of his own view of the history of sociology on this particular problem – the progressive and conservative forces that shape modernity are deeply rooted in the history of social theory – he would have realized that neither the principle of national self-determination nor cosmopolitan ideals are naturally or automatically attached to any particular politics. The illusion of methodological nationalism is here that of a nation-state which successfully manages its own affairs internally whilst at the same time it unproblematically finds its place in a neatly divided world composed only of formally equivalent nation-states. There is no clear-cut

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solution to the question of the autonomy and self-determination of the nation-state, on the one hand, and its position within the global and/or cosmopolitan context, on the other. The question for this section, the third antidote against methodological nationalism, is that of normative ambivalence: the problematic internal and external legitimacy on which the idea of the nation-state rests.

CONCLUSION: THE AMBIVALENT POSITION OF THE NATION-STATE IN MODERNITY In his reconstruction of political thought, philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1955) convincingly demonstrated that there is a certain mythical element in all political doctrines. In modernity, these myths do not disappear but rather find in the state a privileged place to hide and re-emerge. Cassirer discusses how natural rights, social contract, popular sovereignty and race, among others, are all sources on which a claim to the state can be made; he reconstructs how these different doctrines were held predominantly at different moments in modern history and demonstrates that these myths are an immanent feature of modern politics. If we see things this way, methodological nationalism becomes the highest – or just another one, if you prefer – of the modern state’s myths. Methodological nationalism must then be rejected because the history and main features of the nation-state are made artificially to coincide with the history and main features of modernity itself. Methodological nationalism needs to be transcended because, rather than allowing us to capture the actual complications of the history of the nation-state in modernity, it turns the nation-state into the natural organizing principle of modernity. As a contribution to moving beyond methodological nationalism, this chapter has attempted to reconstruct some of the main arguments in this debate and then advanced three claims on which a social theory of the nation-state can develop further. Each of these arguments pointed

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in the direction of one particular aspect of the historical, sociological and normative features of the nation-state in modernity. Historically, the opacity of the nation-state shows us that its alleged ‘rise and fall’ is a normal occurrence within modernity. Sociologically, the opacity of the nation-state becomes apparent in the way in which situations of alert or crises seem as much the norm as its alleged normality, solidity and stability. Normatively, the key issue remains – for us as well as in the past – finding the ways to connect the nation-state with cosmopolitan ideals. The tension between internal and external sources of legitimization for the nation-state will surely not fade away. This chapter has thus tried to refute the thesis that the whole edifice of social theory is so contaminated with methodological nationalism that it is this very feature which incapacitates it to make sense of the nation-state beyond methodological nationalism. Social theory’s strengths and weaknesses in understanding the nation-state seem, above all, to reflect the nation-state’s own ambivalent position in modernity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was made possible by financial support from the Chilean Council for Science and Technology (Grant 3040004). I should like to thank Margaret Archer, Craig Calhoun, Robert Fine, Jorge Larraín, Aldo Mascareño, William Outhwaite, Guido Starosta and Marcus Taylor for help, comments and criticisms at different stages of this research. They do not necessarily share all my arguments here, however, so I am solely responsible for any errors contained in this chapter.

NOTES 1 For a detailed account of this ‘social theory of the nation-state beyond methodological nationalism’ see D. Chernilo (forthcoming). 2 See, for instance, A. D. Smith (1979: 191): ‘[T]he study of “society” today is, almost without question, equated with the analysis of nation-states … There are very good

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reasons for proceeding this way … the world nation-state system has become an enduring and stable component of our whole cognitive outlook, quite apart from the psychological satisfactions it confers’ (emphasis added). 3 The term ‘methodological nationalism’ was coined by H. Martins (1974: 276) and was modelled on the idea of methodological individualism: ‘In the last three decades or so the principle of immanent change has largely coincided with a general presumption – supported by a great variety of scholars in the entire spectrum of sociological opinion – that the “total” or “inclusive society”, in effect the nationstate, be deemed to be the standard, optimal or even maximal “isolate” for sociological analysis … a kind of methodological nationalism … imposes itself in practice with national community as the terminal unit and boundary condition for the demarcation of problems and phenomena for social science’ (emphasis added). 4 This is social theory’s new orthodoxy on globalization. See M. Albrow (1996), Z. Bauman (1998), U. Beck (2000), M. Castells (1996), J. Scholte (2000) and J. Urry (2000). 5 In Beck’s formulation (2002: 51–2), the ‘national organization as a structuring principle of societal and political action can no longer serve as a premise for the social science observer perspective. In this sense, social science can only react to the challenge of globalization adequately if it manages to overcome methodological nationalism, and if it manages to raise empirically and theoretically fundamental questions within specialized fields of research and thus elaborate the foundations of a cosmopolitan social and political science’. See Chernilo (2006) on the problems of Beck’s critique of methodological nationalism. 6 See, however, L. Greenfeld’s chapter in this Handbook where she strenuously defends precisely the opposite argument, namely, that nationalism must still be regarded as the very incarnation of modernity. 7 An interesting critique of methodological nationalism is found in Andreas Wimmer’s work (Wimmer 2002; Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). For him, the nation-state is at the centre of modernity and social theory’s methodological nationalism has to do with the fact of having neglected the actual extent to which this has been the case. The subtlety of his critique lies, however, in the fact that he focuses on nationalist exclusion and ethnic conflict so the nation-state incarnates the project of modernity with its lights (democracy) as well as its shadows (ethnic cleansing). 8 In The Civil War in France, Marx argues that the nation-state fails to become the organizing centre of modernity as it was quickly fading behind the struggle between the French Empire and the Commune. His argument was that in opposition to the Empire did not stand any form of nation-state; rather ‘[t]he direct antithesis to empire was the Commune’. For the middle classes, in fact, ‘there was but one alternative – the Commune, or the Empire – under whatever form it might reappear’ (Marx 1978: 636). Marx argued as though the nation-state is being formed and dissolved, constituted and pulled apart, in the same process of capitalist development – as though the nation-state had already passed away in 1871! 9 In Weber’s view nations do not have ‘an economic origin’; they are not ‘identical with the “people of a state’’’

neither are they ‘identical with a community speaking the same language’ and indeed ‘one must not conceive of the “nation” as a “culture community’’’. Furthermore,‘a common anthropological type … is neither sufficient nor a prerequisite to found a nation … “national” affiliation need not be based upon common blood’ so that ‘the sentiment of ethnic solidarity does not by itself make a “nation’’’ (Weber 1970: 171–8). 10 Thus Parsons (1969: 301): ‘Whether by formal contractual agreement or in various other ways, the international system is clearly not simply an aggregate of atomistic sovereign units; rather, these units are organized in complex ways into various kinds of “communities of interests” and the like. The British Commonwealth, the West European combinations … NATO, SEATO, and – by no means least – the Communist bloc, are familiar examples.’ 11 See, for instance, Z. Bauman (2002), U. Beck (2002) and J. Urry (2002) on the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York. 12 On the nation-state’s internal normative difficulties see M. Moore’s and A. Wimmer’s chapters in this Handbook. For accounts of the relationship between nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism see P. Anderson (2002), C. Calhoun (1997: 86–97) and chapter 30 by G. Delanty in this Handbook. 13 In Durkheim’s (1992: 74–5) own words: ‘If each State had as its chief aim, not to expand, or to lengthen its borders, but to set its own house in order and to make the widest appeal to its members for a moral life on a ever higher level, then all discrepancy between national and human morals would be excluded. If the State had no other purpose than making men of its citizens, in the widest sense of the term, the civic duties would be only a particular form of the general obligations of humanity. It is this course that evolution takes, as we have already seen. The more societies concentrate their energies inwards, on the interior life, the more they will be diverted from the disputes that bring a clash between cosmopolitanism – or world patriotism, and patriotism … societies can have their pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being the most just, the best organized and in possessing the best moral constitution.’ 14 See R. Fine and W. Smith (2003) for a discussion of the tensions in Habermas’s conceptualization of the relationships between cosmopolitanism and the nation-state.

REFERENCES Albrow, M. (1996) The Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Anderson, P. (2002) ‘Editorial. Internationalism: a Breviary’, New Left Review, 14 (March/April): 5–25. Archer, M. (2005) ‘Social Integration, System Integration and Global Governance’, in I. Rossi (ed.), Frameworks for Research in Globalization. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Arendt, H. (1994 [1958]) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2002) ‘Reconnaissance Wars of the Planetary Frontierland’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (4): 81–90. Beck, U. (2000) What Is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2002) ‘The Terrorist Threat. World Risk Society Revisited’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (4): 39–55. Beck, U. (2004) ‘Cosmopolitan Realism: On the Distinction between Cosmopolitanism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks, 4 (2): 131–56. Bendix, R. (1967) ‘Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 9 (3): 292–346. Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Calhoun, C. (2002) ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cassirer, E. (1955) The Myth of the State. New York: Anchor Books. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Chernilo, D. (2006) ‘Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (1): 5–22. Chernilo, D. (forthcoming) A Social Theory of the Nation-state: Beyond Methodological Nationalism. London: Routledge. Cobban, A. (1969) The Nation-state and National Self-determination. London: Collins. Durkheim, E. (1915) Germany Above All. Paris: Collin. Durkheim, E. (1992) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fine, R. (2003) ‘Taking the ‘ism’ Out of Cosmopolitanism: an Essay in Reconstruction’, European Journal of Social Theory, 6 (4): 451–70. Fine, R. and Chernilo, D. (2003) ‘Classes and Nations in Recent Historical Sociology’, in G. Delanty and E. Isin (eds), Handbook of Historical Sociology. London: Sage. Fine, R. and Chernilo, D. (2004) ‘Between Past and Future: the Equivocations of the New Cosmopolitanism’, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 31: 25–44.

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Fine, R. and Smith, W. (2003) ‘Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism’, Constellations, 10 (4): 469–87. Gellner, E. (1996) Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals. London: Hamish Hamilton. Gerhardt, U. (2002) Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1973) The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson. Giddens, A. (1985) The Nation-state and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gusfield, J. (1967) ‘Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change’, American Journal of Sociology, 72 (4): 351–62. Habermas, J. (1969) ‘Kritische und konservative Aufgaben der Soziologie’, in J. Habermas, Theorie und Praxis. Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand. Habermas, J. (1999) ‘Bestiality and Humanity: a War on the Border between Legality and Morality’, Constellations, 6 (3): 263–72. Habermas, J. (2003) ‘Interpreting the Fall of a Monument’, Constellations, 10 (3): 364–70. Mann, M. (1992) ‘The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism’, in J. Hall and I. Jarvie (eds), Transition to Modernity: Essays on Power, Wealth and Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martins, H. (1974) ‘Time and Theory in Sociology’, in J. Rex (ed.), Approaches to Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1978 [1871]) ‘The Civil War in France’, in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels Reader. London: W. W. Norton. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works Vol. 6. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Outhwaite, W. (2006) The Future of Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Parsons, T. (1969) ‘Order and Community in the International Social System’, in Politics and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press. Parsons, T. (1993 [1942]) ‘Some Sociological Aspects of the Fascist Movements’, in U. Gerhardt (ed.), Talcott Parsons on National Socialism. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Rosenberg, J. (2000) The Follies of Globalisation Theory. London: Verso. Shaw, M. (2000) Theory of the Global State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scholte, J. (2000) Globalization: A Critical Introduction. London: Palgrave.

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Smelser, N. (1997) Problematics of Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Smith, A. D. (1979) Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Smith, A. D. (1983) ‘Nationalism and Classical Social Theory’, British Journal of Sociology, 34 (1): 19–38. Urry, J. (2000) Sociology beyond Societies. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2002) ‘The Global Complexities of September 11th’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (4): 57–69. Wagner, P. (2001) A History and Theory of the Social Sciences. London: Sage.

Weber, M. (1970) ‘The Nation’, in H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society, Vol. 1. London: University of California Press. Webster, F. (2002) Theories of the Information Society. London: Routledge. Wimmer, A. (2002) Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wimmer, A. and Schiller, N. (2002) ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4): 301–34.

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12 Pre-modern Nationalism: An Oxymoron? The Evidence from England PHILIP S. GORSKI

Until fairly recently, the consensus view among scholars of nationalism was that nationalism was specific to the modern era. Following Anthony Smith, this is often referred to as the ‘modernist’ view. According to the modernists, nationalism was modern not just in the weaker, temporal sense that it happened to be invented after 1750 or so (like the zipper) but in the much stronger, developmental sense that it could not possibly have been invented before 1750 (like the railroad), insofar as it presumed a whole host of other prior developments, such as democratization, secularization, industrialization, the existence of strong, national states, and the emergence of mass, reading publics, to name just a few of the commonly cited prerequisites. The emergence of nationalism, in other words, was part and parcel of the transition from tradition to modernity. Hence, it was not incidentally modern, but inherently so. From this perspective, the phrase ‘pre-modern nationalism’ is an oxymoron. Not everyone would agree. Since the early 1990s, the standard modernist refrains have met with a swelling chorus of criticism. Most of the voices in this chorus belong to European

historians, who claim to find evidence of full-blown nationalism in the pre-modern era. Let us call this group of critics the ‘premodernists’. The premodernists do not agree about when or where nationalism first arose. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they often argue that it initially arose in the countries and periods in which they themselves specialize. Candidates for the birthplace of nationalism include eighteenthcentury England, the early modern Netherlands, medieval France and even the Dark Age kingdoms, to name some of the many contenders. In support of their views, the premodernists point, inter alia, to various source materials, including histories and chronicles of particular peoples or nations; popular pamphlets and other forms of political propaganda that speak of, or appeal to, a nation, or nations; and scholarly discussions of ‘national character’ and its relationship to language, customs and climate that long antedate the French Revolution or German Romanticism. The modernists have not fled the attack. Most (though not all) have stood their ground, arguing that pre-modern nationalism is not genuine nationalism, but something different or lesser: ‘national identity’, ‘national consciousness’,

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‘national sentiment’, or ‘nationalist discourse’ perhaps, but not nationalism in the strict sense. The premodernists counter that pre-modern nationalism is neither different nor lesser and that it meets the very definitional criteria laid out by the modernists themselves. It is not possible to settle the modernist/ premodernist debate in this chapter; that will take more time and more dialogue. Rather, the goal of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the issues raised by the modernists and the evidence advanced by the premodernists. I begin by way of background with a brief summary of the modernist position and its key variants. This will make it easier to understand and assess the premodernists’ evidence, samples of which will be presented in the sections that follow, and in reverse chronological order. Thus, I open the discussion with several recent works on the eighteenth century, then move on through the early modern and medieval periods and conclude with the Dark Ages. I have chosen this somewhat unorthodox format in the hope that it will make it easier for readers to judge for themselves just when it becomes reasonable to speak of nationalism. Another note on the presentation: throughout, the focus will be mainly, if not exclusively, on England. I have chosen this narrower focus for two reasons: first, because it makes for a shorter and more readable essay; and second, because the debate about English nationalism has been particularly pointed and extensive, and raises most of the key theoretical and interpretive issues. While I will suspend my judgement during this presentation, I will not expunge it from the chapter. I find the premodernist critiques fully convincing, and in the conclusion, I will argue for an approach to nationalism that is not so much premodernist as postmodernist, in the dual sense that it rejects the claim that nationalism is inherently modern, and that it is suspicious of all efforts to fix the origins of nationalism in a particular place or time. In my view, scholars of nationalism would be better served by a more genealogical and conjunctural approach that seeks to identify and account for changing types and degrees of nationalism.

THE MODERNIST POSITION: DEVELOPMENT AND DIVERGENCES What is nationalism? Why does it arise? And when does it first arise historically? These are three cardinal questions in the study of nationalism. There is some agreement about the ‘when’ question. All modernists agree that nationalism first arose during the modern era, even if they disagree about exactly when. There is far less agreement about the ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions. The modernists advance many different and competing definitions and explanations of nationalism. This can sometimes make it difficult to follow and evaluate premodernist critiques of the modernist position, which often focus on only one or two modernist authors. Before analysing the modernists’ arguments in greater detail, it may be useful to survey the historical development of the literature on nationalism, and the key variations of the modernist position. Looking back, we can discern (at least) four successive and overlapping waves in twentiethcentury scholarship on nationalism. The first wave began in the 1900s and crested in the 1960s (e.g. Meinecke 1970 [1907], Kohn 1967 [1944]; Kedourie 1994 [1960]; Minogue 1967; Berlin 1980). It was propelled by intellectual historians and political theorists and focused mainly on the works of French philosophes (e.g., J. J. Rousseau and the Abbé Sieyès) and German Romantics (e.g., Fichte and Herder). The second wave began in the 1950s and subsided in the early 1980s (e.g., Deutsch 1953; Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991 [1983]). It was propelled almost exclusively by social scientists and tended to focus on the impact of ‘modernization’ (that is, industrialization, democratization, secularization and kindred processes). The third wave began in the 1970s and has not yet fully subsided. Its driving force was supplied by social historians and historical sociologists (see e.g. Tilly 1975; Brass 1997, 1991; Breuilly 1982; Hroch 1985; Wallerstein 1991; Mann 1993). Its chief inspirations were Marx and Weber. Its focus was on capitalism and states, rather than on nationalism per se. In these accounts, nationalism was usually seen as the consequence of expanding markets and/or

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of centralizing states. The fourth wave began in the early 1990s and is still going strong (see e.g. Brubaker 1996; Laitin 1998; Porter 2000). Politically, it was inspired by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which brought an unexpected resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe and throughout the world. Theoretically, it was informed by the ‘cultural turn’ in history and the social sciences. In contrast to first- and secondwavers, who typically portray culture as consensual (that is, as ‘social norms’ or ‘shared values’), the fourth-wavers usually tend to see it as conflictual (that is, as itself a site and source of struggle). The fourth-wavers’ great shibboleths are thus ‘contestation’ and ‘construction’ – of nations, identities, traditions. As should be clear even from this brief survey, the modernists are a heterogeneous lot. Consider their answers to the ‘what’ question. First-wavers typically defined it as an ‘ideology’, but in the non-evaluative sense of ‘creed’ or ‘doctrine’ (e.g. Kedourie 1994 [1960]: 1). Second-wavers, on the other hand, are more apt to portray it as a form of political community (e.g., Anderson 1991 [1983]: 12). Thirdwavers also speak of nationalism in terms of ideology and integration, but more in the sense of ‘ruling class ideology’ and ‘market integration’ (see e.g. Hroch 1985: 5–9). For them, nationalism usually connotes a social or political movement that seeks to build or capture a state (e.g. Breuilly 1982: 3). Most fourthwavers would accept Breuilly’s definition, but they would emphasize that the nationalists not only argue for the nation, but about the nation – its history, its mission, its members, its borders – and that they not only seek to capture or create states, but to make and remake nations, that is, to actively transform existing identities and communities (e.g. Bell 2003: 3). In sum, modernist scholars generally define nationalism in terms of at least one of the following families of concepts: (1) ideology (alternatively: doctrine, creed or principle); (2) identity (alternatively: consciousness, community or integration); (3) movement (alternatively: party, state or fraction); (4) discourse (alternatively: categories, symbols, narratives, rituals).

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Not surprisingly, the answers modernists give to the ‘why’ question are also quite diverse. However, they can be organized under two general headings: those that emphasize structure, and those that emphasize agency. In more structural accounts, nationalism is seen as a consequence, often unintended, of other processes of large-scale social change, such as secularization, industrialization or state-formation. Secondand third-wave accounts tend to emphasize structure much more than agency. First-wave accounts privilege agency, if only implicitly. They imply that nationalism is the creation of great minds. Fourth-wave accounts also give attention to agency, but in a more explicit and systematic way. They emphasize the role of intellectual strata – including lesser-known publicists and propagandists – as opposed to individual geniuses. This is not to say that fourth-wavers ignore structure. They are aware of how social context – geopolitics, electoral politics, class structure and so on – can constrain or enable would-be nationalists. Nationalist discourses and movements are not constructed ex nihilo. Having briefly surveyed the scholarly literature on nationalism and catalogued the various definitions and explanations that are on offer, let us now turn to the premodern evidence.

SOCIO-CULTURAL RIVALRY OR RELIGIO-POLITICAL UNITY? TWO ARGUMENTS ABOUT EIGHTEENTHCENTURY ENGLAND Until quite recently, the standard view was that England had never experienced nationalism – patriotism perhaps, but not nationalism (Smith 1976; Seton-Watson 1977). The Irish had nationalism, as did the Scots or the Welsh, but not the English; they had imperialism instead (Kumar 2003). The origins of nationalism were to be found across the Channel, in France, or even further east, in Germany. In this section, I discuss two influential and widely read challenges to this view: Gerald Newman’s (1987) The Rise of English Nationalism and Linda Colley’s (1992) Britons. Both locate the birth of English nationalism in the eighteenth century.

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In Newman’s account, the rise of English nationalism begins around 1740. Its roots, he says, are to be found in socio-cultural rivalry between the English aristocracy, which was cosmopolitan and Francophilic in outlook, and an emerging English intelligentsia, which felt marginalized and underappreciated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, argues Newman, the English aristocracy had achieved a position of complete dominance in English society. It not only owned the land, but effectively owned the state and the church as well. It also set the tone, the standards of what was admirable and coarse, sophisticated and ordinary, in short, high and low. This cultural dominance, Newman argues, was not secondary or epiphenomenal; it was primary and fundamental: ‘cosmopolitan taste was to aristocratic power what invisible guy wires are to a trapeze act. The ultimate source of the elite’s authority, protecting its property and privileges, was something immaterial, its “cultural hegemony” – its style’ (Newman 1987: 39). The extreme Francophilia of English ‘Society’ led it to denigrate and ignore its own artists and intellectuals. Hogarth, Fielding, Burke, Wollstonecraft – revered and canonized in our day, they were reviled or belittled in their own. They responded, in part, by constructing a counter-ideal, a vision of English national identity, whose central value was ‘sincerity’. Unlike the French, and their English minions, who were portrayed as ‘dishonest’, ‘debauched’, ‘conformist’ and, in short, insincere, true Englishmen and – women – were ‘frank’, ‘upright’, ‘independent’ and, in sum, everything that the French were not. Artists and intellectuals may have sown the seeds of English nationalism, but it was the Seven Years War that ploughed and fertilized the soil, by stirring up popular ‘patriotism’ and ‘Gallophobia’. The harvest was reaped by political leaders such as Pitt the Elder and John Wilkes, who used popular nationalism as a weapon against aristocratic dominance. By the 1780s, the nationalist genie was out of the historical bottle and there was no putting it back in. For Newman, then, England was not the exception to the nationalist rule; it was a textbook example which closely adhered to the Continental script: nationalism is first enunciated by artists and intellectuals and gradually

gives rise to a mass movement against aristocratic oppression and foreign domination. In Britons, Linda Colley tells quite a different story. First, the protagonist is different: as the title of her book suggests, she is interested in British nationalism rather than English nationalism. Also, the action begins a good deal earlier: Colley argues that British nationalism was ‘forged’ in 1707; this is the year of the Act of Union, that joined Scotland with England and Wales. For Colley, the genesis of British nationalism involves the emergence of a new political community. How, she asks, did the various peoples and classes who inhabited the British Isles come (with the exception of the Irish) to see themselves as (among other things) ‘British’? Her answer essentially boils down to this: common subjective identities and common material interests. At the ‘core’ of their identity, she argues, we find religion and, more specifically, Protestantism. Given the fractured and fractious character of British Protestantism, one might fairly wonder why it acted as a form of ‘social cement’, rather than a kind of social solvent (Black 1999: 59). One reason, certainly the most important in Colley’s telling, is war, specifically the wars against the Catholic French. These wars helped to unite the British, or many of them at least, around a common vision of themselves, as a New Israel, a chosen people, from whom God expected much, and to whom much was granted – liberty, prosperity and true religion. If the cement of religion took hold, this was partly because the clamps of interest were applied as well. It not only felt good to be a Briton, it also paid. Britain’s successes against the French brought new opportunities for its people – as soldiers, traders and administrators. Meanwhile, this very service to Britannia reinforced mass identification with Britain. In Colley’s account, British nationalism was primarily the product of Protestantism, AngloFrench rivalry and overseas empire. What kinds of general, historiographical and theoretical conclusions might we draw from these two studies? On the historiographical side, both studies certainly raise doubts about the uniqueness of French revolutionary nationalism. Indeed, one cannot but be struck

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by the developmental parallels – and cultural connections – between French and English nationalism. These parallels and connections are particularly clear in David Bell’s (2001) book on French revolutionary nationalism, which departs from the received interpretations in two main ways: first, in its emphasis on the religious roots of French nationalism (particularly in Calvinism and Jansenism) and second, in its attention to Anglo-French rivalry, and the role of the English as France’s national other. This is not to deny that there were differences, of course. Certainly, the level of violence and conflict was much greater in France than in England; perhaps for that reason, it was France, rather than England, that became the exemplar and the touchstone for nationalist ideologues and activists. Still, Newman and Colley’s work makes it harder to defend the claim that nationalism was ‘born’ or ‘invented’ during the French Revolution. On the theoretical side, we see that there were multiple definitions and discourses of the nation in play. For some, ‘the nation’ was England (or Scotland or Wales or Ireland); for others it was Britain; and for most, suggests Colley, it was both Britain and England (or Scotland or Wales or even Ireland). After all, she notes: ‘Identities are not like hats. Human beings can and do put on several at a time’ (1992: 6). Similarly, representations of the English nation drew on several different sources: the Bible, the Classics and ambient notions of patriarchy. If these definitions and discourses had originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we could end our analysis here. But they did not, so we now turn back the clock another few centuries.

IN SEARCH OF ENGLISH NATIONALISM: FROM THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION TO THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION While Newman and Colley trace Anglo-British nationalism back to the eighteenth century, other scholars push its birthdate back even further. In this section, I will review several wellknown works by scholars of England, who

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argue that ‘modern’ nationalism can be found in early modern Britain. In an important essay, which previews his forthcoming book, Steven Pincus argues that the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9 was ‘England’s first nationalist revolution’ (Pincus 1998). This interpretation might seem an unlikely one. After all, the Glorious Revolution did not usher in a republican regime, nor did it bring about any fundamental change in class or property relations. Hence, it fails to meet one standard definition of revolution (Skocpol 1979). Nor is it immediately clear in what sense it was nationalist either. After all, the central event of the Glorious Revolution was an invasion by a foreign prince (William III of the Netherlands), and the deposition of the native monarch (James II). So why does Pincus label the Glorious Revolution a ‘nationalist revolution’ instead of, say, a ‘military coup’? The central exhibit in Pincus’s case is the pamphlet literature of the period. The arrival of William III, he shows, was preceded by a vigorous, public debate about the il/legitimacy of James II. James’s opponents portrayed him as a tool of Louis XIV, a man of Catholic sympathies and French connections, who was imposing a foreign brand of Christianity and a foreign style of governance on the people of England. Fears of a French invasion were widespread. Against this background, Pincus shows, many saw William III – a man of Protestant beliefs with an English wife – not as a foreign invader, but as a national saviour, who restored the autonomy and sovereignty of the English people. If we define nationalism as ‘an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential nation’ (Pincus 1998: 78 quoting from Smith 1991: 73), then the Glorious Revolution was indeed a nationalist revolution. Did it also mark the origin of English nationalism? Pincus does not squarely address this question. He does say that an English ‘national identity’ had certainly taken shape by the middle of the sixteenth century. But he does not say whether national identity and nationalism are equivalent. Thus, he rejects the modernist position, without entirely clarifying his own.

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Others are not so hesitant about pushing back the beginnings of English nationhood even further. Some see strong connections between Protestantism, anti-Catholicism and nationalism in the Elizabethan era (e.g. Cressy 1989). Others emphasize the secular discourses of national identity. The best-known work in the latter genre is probably Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992). As the title of his book suggests, Helgerson argues that the transition from a ‘dynastic identity’, centred on the monarchy, to a ‘national identity’, built on other foundations, occurred, or at least began, during the Elizabethan era (1558–1603). Helgerson identifies six men, whom he considers the chief architects of this new identity, some well-known, others less so, and subjects their lives and works to close social and literary readings. In the first chapter, he focuses on Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, and his quest to achieve ‘the kingdome of his own language’ – to create an English-language verse in the Graeco-Roman style and to achieve a place for that literature in a society obsessed with classical and continental literatures. In the second chapter, he turns to Edward Coke, the famed English jurist, and his efforts to define and defend an English tradition of common law distinct from Roman law and its continental adaptations. The subject of the third chapter is a lesser-known figure named Christopher Saxton, the Elizabethan cartographer who prepared the first comprehensive collection of county maps for the English kingdom. Chapter 4 analyses Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, an English contribution to the burgeoning literature of overseas exploration, conquest and colonization. Helgerson argues that Hakluyt’s work is distinctive in two ways: first, insofar as it makes the English nation into the agent of exploration, and second, insofar as it proposes a peaceful form of merchant empire, quite different from the ‘rapacious’ and ‘tyrannical’ empire of the Spanish. Chapter 5 returns the reader to more familiar territory: the history plays of William Shakespeare. While the texts of these plays

might seem to fit squarely into the dynastic form of the chronicle, with its tales of great men and great deeds, the actual performances involved the middle and lower classes, both as actors and auditors, and the audiences were quite inclusive in their composition. A similar tension can be found at the heart of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs – the subject of Chapter 6 – which chronicles the Christian martyrs from Roman through Tudor times. Insofar as it is written in chronicle form, and divides English history by reigns, it is a ‘dynastic’ work. But insofar as it inserts English dynastic history into apocalyptic history, recounts the heroism of ordinary believers, and gives England a special place in the story of salvation, it is also a ‘national’ work. In sum, Helgerson argues that some of the most prominent intellectuals and artists of Elizabethan England were inventing and deploying forms of representation that made it possible to think in national terms – to think of the language, the land, the people, the history and the church of England. The work of Pincus, Helgerson and other like-minded scholars gives a good sense of the kind of evidence that premodernists can muster against the modernists. First, there were both discursive and non-discursive representations of ‘the nation.’ Second, there were both religious and secular ways of conceiving the nation. Third, while these conceptions were generated by intellectuals and artists, broadly understood, they were sometimes directed at, and no doubt consumed by, a broader audience. Fourth, nationalist discourse did contain implicit and explicit aspirations to national autonomy and sovereignty. Fifth, these aspirations did sometimes give rise to political movements and programmes. Thus, while early modern English nationalism was certainly not identical to modern nationalism, of either the civic or ethnic variety, it definitely did have many of the basic features of modern nationalism, including some that are widely believed to be ‘distinctly’ or ‘uniquely’ modern, such as a secular component, a mass following, political content and movement organization.

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MODERN NATIONALISM IN PREMODERN ENGLAND? FROM THE VENERABLE BEDE TO THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR While early modernists have sought to push back the birthdate of English nationalism by a century or two – to 1688/9 or to the 1580s – some historians of medieval and Dark Age England wish to push it back yet further – to at least the fourteenth century. Perhaps the bestknown interpreter of the medieval evidence is R. R. Davies (Davies 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b, 2000). Davies’s central thesis is that the cultural and territorial boundaries between the peoples and polities of the British Isles became more and more sharply drawn during the Middle Ages. By 1400 there were really only four recognized peoples (English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish) and two viable kingdoms (English and Scottish). Within this configuration it was the English people and the English king who were hegemonic. Though he does not use this language, Davies is essentially arguing that medieval England was a nationstate. Few would contest Davies’s claims about English stateness. England has long been seen as a particularly prodigious example of state formation. More controversial, of course, are his arguments about peoplehood and nationness. Davies begins by pointing out, quite correctly, that the term ‘people’ (gens or kind) was quite common in medieval discourse, and that it was used interchangeably with the term ‘nation’ (natio). As their etymology suggests, both terms denoted communities of descent or birth, understood in a biological as well as cultural sense. Medieval writers employed two rhetorical strategies to establish peoplehood, one historical, the other ethnographic. The historical strategy involved a collective genealogy based on biblical and classical sources. One variant was to trace the lineage back to Noah. Another was to link it to the Trojans. And still another to the writings of Roman authors. Often these three discourses of descent – the Noachic, the Trojan and the Roman – were combined in clever, if implausible, ways. All three discourses can be found throughout the British Isles (and, for that matter, throughout

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Continental Europe as well). The ethnographic strategy involved catalogues of cultural peculiarities. Relevant peculiarities included ‘language, law, life-style, dress, personal appearance …, agricultural practices, codes of social values and what can only be described as national character and national temperament’ (Davies 1995a: 11). The real question for Davies, then, is not how the various peoples of the British Isles came to conceive of themselves as peoples, bur rather how it is that they came to be divided into the four peoples we know today instead of some other number and/or nomenclature. Why, he asks, did the people of the British Isles come to think of themselves as English (or Welsh, Scottish, or Irish) rather than as, say, Saxons (or Britons, Picts, or Féni)? Davies’s writings suggest a number of possible answers. One is state formation. As the kings of England and Scotland expanded and consolidated their rule over the British Isles, they invented and propagated national categories and boundaries that coincided with the state. Another explanation is geopolitical competition. Rivalry and warfare within the British Isles and, even more, between the English and the French, brought a decline in the use of French and identification with the Normans at court and a heightened emphasis on, and identification with, English and English-ness. The third explanation is ideological rivalry among intellectuals. For this project of Anglicization was anticipated and abetted by men of letters. During the first half of the twelfth century, for example, a group of historians rewrote the history of the British Isles as a history of the English monarchy, insisting on the antiquity of the English nation and state, the distinctiveness of the English law and the barbarity of the non-English peoples. Their work can be seen as a riposte to contemporaries whose narratives were built around different categories like ‘British’ or ‘Saxon’. The question remains, however, as to why the category ‘English’ won out over these and other alternatives. Here, Davies actually points back to the Dark Ages and cites the work of Patrick Wormald (Davies 1995b: 7 and n. 25). In essence, Wormald argues that an English

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national identity had already crystallized by the tenth century and in a form that would later find imitators throughout Europe, namely, as a claim to be a ‘chosen people’ or ‘elect nation’, the true, historical successor to the Ancient Israelites (Wormald 1983, 1992, 1994). The causal mechanisms that drive Wormald’s account are the same ones that underlie Davies’s: intellectual rivalry, stateformation and warfare, in that order. The intellectual rivalry in question was between Christians and pagans. The Christianization of the British Isles had begun in the second century during Roman rule. Following the collapse of Roman Britain and the subsequent invasion of the Anglo-Saxons, the British peoples reverted to Germanic religion. The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons began in the late sixth century, during the papacy of St Gregory I (the Great). Gregory’s accounts referred to the Christianization of the ‘English people’ (gens anglorum) – not the ‘Saxon’ or ‘British’ people (though these would have been plausible alternatives). A century later, Gregory’s language was adopted and immortalized in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, published 731). Bede, himself, was an Angle. More importantly, he was a scholar of the Old Testament. His history begins with a geographical survey of the British Isles that likens them to a land of milk and honey. It then turns to the arrival of the Angles, whom he portrays as a ‘chosen people’, whose Exodus leads them to Britannia, whose native people, the Britons, had turned their eyes from God, and fallen into idolatry. Hence, God took their lands away and gave them to the Angles. Some two centuries later, Bede’s text was translated, and his narrative reactivated, by King Alfred the Great, one of the line of Wessex rulers who repelled would-be invaders from Denmark during the late ninth and early tenth centuries and gradually and forcefully created the kingdom of England. Alfred was a pious man, something of an intellectual, originally destined for an ecclesiastical career. Though himself a Saxon, he sought to propagate an English identity and the English language, both within his court and, insofar as possible, beyond it as

well. In this, he received considerable aid from the churchmen of Canterbury. The story which they jointly told of England picked up where Bede’s left off. It was the story of a chosen people whose sins had provoked divine vengeance in the form of invading armies and whose salvation lay in a renewed covenant with God. While Wormald himself does not address the question of whether this constituted nationalism in the modernists’ sense, Sarah Foote does – and answers in the affirmative. Citing Ernest Gellner, she further argues that Alfred’s wars were also nationalist wars, aimed at assembling the English people into an English state (1996: 33). Later, citing Benedict Anderson, she argues that Alfred’s translation of Bede, along with his other efforts to promote the English language and English selfunderstanding, were part of a concerted effort, not simply to Anglicize the court, but to invent an English political community, if not by means of ‘print-capitalism’, then at least by means of the written word (1996: 36–7). By her lights, then, the phrase ‘Dark Age nationalism’ is not an oxymoron, at least not in England. The work of Davies, Wormald and Foote demonstrates that the kinds of evidence uncovered by the early modernists can also be found before the early modern era, if not in printed form, or in the same abundance. There are discursive representations of ‘peoples’ and ‘nations’. The examples we have are mainly religious, but not exclusively so. The terms themselves are used in ways that are quite recognizable to modern eyes. And they were occasioned by and deployed in cultural and political struggles of various kinds. What is less clear is the social scope of nationalist discourse and conflict. That it touched the elites, we can be certain. Whether it reached the common people is hard to say, because there are so few source materials that could shed light on this problem. There is some evidence of popular nationalism during the Hundred Years War and the Middle Ages more generally, though it is scarce indeed. It is even scarcer for the Dark Ages. But we must be careful about drawing bold conclusions from the mere absence of sources. There was an oral culture in Dark Age England, and oral cultures can be remarkably

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vibrant. It is hard to make a compelling case for Dark Age nationalism. But it is also hard to make a compelling case against it. In the end, we can only speculate.

HOW SPECIAL WAS ENGLAND? Could it be that England was the exception that proves the rule, an isolated case of precocious nationalism that diverged from the normal trajectory of political modernization? Certainly, the English case has been exceptionally well researched. Whether it was otherwise exceptional may well be doubted. For example, my own research on Dutch nationalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Gorski 2000) reveals striking parallels with the English case. There, too, political pamphlets and other sources provide rich evidence of pre-modern nationalism, with repeated eruptions of debate and contention about membership and mission. The sources of collective representation are also remarkably similar. First, there is a Hebraic discourse, in which the Dutch are portrayed as a ‘chosen people’ or ‘New Israel’ bound to God by a sacred covenant. Then, there is a classical discourse, in which the people of Holland and Zeeland, and sometimes of the Netherlands as a whole, are treated as the lineal descendants of the ancient Batavians, a proud and warlike people who defended their liberty against the Romans. Third, there is a patriarchal discourse that likens the Dutch to a family, with the Princes of Orange cast in the role of benevolent fathers. Though separable in theory, these representations could be combined in practice. Thus, during the Dutch Revolt, it was not uncommon for the ‘father of the fatherland’, William of Orange, to be likened to Moses, with the King of Spain cast in the role of Pharaoh. However, these representations could also be used against one another, and once the independence of the Republic appeared secure, they often were. The chief carriers of the Hebraic discourse were the orthodox Calvinists, who advocated a strong central government, reconquest of the Southern Netherlands (present-day Belgium), which remained under Spanish

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control, a strong and autonomous system of ecclesiastical discipline, and the imposition of a strict moral code within Dutch society. Their arch-enemies were the ‘libertine’ regents of Holland, who advocated a federal system of government (which Holland could dominate), continued separation from the South (which might have threatened Holland’s economic preeminence), an ‘erastian’ system of church governance, in which the state governed the church, and a laxer moral code, at least as regards their own conduct. The libertines were the main carriers of the classical discourse about the Ancient Batavians. By arguing that Batavia was more or less co-terminous with Holland, and that its chief heritage was liberty, they aimed to fend off the Calvinists’ programme of state-building, national re-unification and moral regeneration. The House of Orange tended to ally with the Calvinists, at least in times of political crisis, and its monarchical aspirations can be seen in a shift from Mosaic to Davidic and Solomonic forms of self-representation. This constellation of ideologies and alliances remained relatively stable until the late eighteenth century, when populist patriots laid claim to the Batavian mythology, and used it against its progenitors: the regents of Holland. The battle between these three discourses and their carriers was not a battle between nationalists and anti-nationalists, as has sometimes been supposed, but a battle to define the nation, whose victor would win both material and symbolic spoils. Evidence of nationalism can also be found in other times and places. Consider medieval France. There, too, we find examples of the three discursive formations that I identified in the early modern Netherlands: Hebraic, classical and patriarchal. In the early fourteenth century, for example, Guillaume de Sauquerville argued that ‘God chose the kingdom of France before all people’ (cited in Beaune 1991: 176). As for the classical discourse, genealogies linking the French to the Franks, and the Franks to the Trojans were ‘everywhere in medieval French literature’ (Beaune 1991: 226). Nor was the patriarchal discourse absent. In France, and elsewhere, ‘kings were kings of peoples not of regions … [and] [k]ingship was like kinship, primarily personal …’ (Strayer 1970: 300). And

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what shall we make of the following extract from the Salic Law, written in the fifth century, which speaks of the Franks as ‘the nation that with strength and bravery has shaken off the hard yoke of the Romans, and after its acceptance of Christianity has enshrined in buildings decked with gold and precious stones the bodies of the holy martyrs burnt, beheaded and thrown to the wild beasts by the Romans’ (quoted from Huizinga 1972: 15–16)? Does this not anticipate both the classical and Hebraic discourses in important ways?

MODERNIST DEFENCES AND PREMODERNIST REJOINDERS Having surveyed some of the evidence advanced by the premodernists, let us now review the counterarguments developed by the modernists. There are at least four, common lines of defence. The first and oldest focuses on sociological and/or geographical scope. While there was certainly a premodern discourse about the nation, so this argument goes, it was confined to certain elite strata, usually urban intellectuals, and never really touched the rural masses. And an elite, urban discourse does not a social and political movement make. Of course, this line of defence is of little use for modernists who define nationalism as an ideology. They usually emphasize discursive or ideological content. Eric Hobsbawm offers a good example. He proposes the following litmus test: the equation ‘nation = people = state’. In other words, where claims to state sovereignty are made in the name of the nation, and the nation is defined as a territorially bounded community of descent, there you have nationalism (1992: 16–18, 46–7, 73). A third line of defence emphasizes the discursive purity of nationalist discourse and/or the categorical exclusivity of national identity. In Nationalism and the State, for example, John Breuilly argues that the Dutch Revolt against Spain and the English Civil War were ‘movements of national opposition’, rather than nationalist movements, because ‘the idea of the nation … was subordinated to religious and monarchical

principles’ (1982: 45). Of course, this defence is tenable only for those who define nationalism as a discourse. Those who understand it as a form of identity or community usually insist that ‘true nationalism’ is exclusive nationalism. In genuine nationalism, in other words, national identity trumps all other identities. By these standards, there was no such thing as pre-modern nationalism. But does modern nationalism actually fulfil these criteria? Let us examine the evidence, beginning with the scope criteria. Take the French Revolution, usually considered the fons et origo of modern nationalism. There is no denying that the French Revolution sparked a fierce debate about the French nation and about nations more generally, which extended well beyond the Parisian intelligentsia to the provinces and the popular classes (Hyslop 1934; Bell 2001: 12). Nonetheless, there was much ignorance and indifference, especially on the periphery and within the peasantry, who were often more interested in securing municipal autonomy or strengthening property rights than in defending the Republic or building the nation (Agulhon 1970; Karnoouh 1973; Jones 1985: 186–95; Sahlins 1989: 169–76). It must also be remembered that there was a great deal of resistance to the national project. In northwestern France, resistance escalated into rebellion in the events of the Vendée and the guerilla attacks of the Chouannerie. Not that there is anything surprising about this. Nationalist mobilization never lives up to the hopes of nationalist ideologues. This brings us to the second test: the existence of a nationalist movement. Here, the modernists might appear to be on somewhat safer ground. For the modern era is replete with nationalist movements advancing a nationalist agenda and seeking nationalist goals. But there were certainly nationalistic movements in early modern England and Holland, and probably in other places and earlier times as well. This is why modernist scholars who are more knowledgeable about the early modern era, such as Breuilly, usually introduce other tests of ‘genuine’ nationalism. Which brings us to the third and last test: discursive purity. Genuine nationalism, it

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is argued, must be wholly secular and/or democratic; it cannot be contaminated with religious or non-democratic elements. Once again, it is easy to show that pre-modern movements fall short of this criteria. Unfortunately, few, if any, examples of modern nationalism meet it either. Take Poland: during the nineteenth century, Polish intellectuals articulated a vision of Poland as ‘the Christ of nations’ and the ‘bulwark of Christendom’ (Porter 2000). One might imagine that this vision of the nation would have been erased by four decades of Communist rule and a decade and a half of liberal capitalism; not so. Even today, the ‘most common and pervasive’ understanding of Polish national identity is Poland as ‘the Christ of nations, martyred for the sins of the world, resurrected for the world’s salvation; a nation whose identity is conserved and guarded by its defender, the Catholic Church …; a nation which has given the world a Pope and rid the Western world of communism’ (Zubrzycki 2004: 43). Now consider the example of German nationalism (see e.g. Hermand and Holub 1999; Stambolis 2000). During the early nineteenth century, nationalist thinkers contrasted a Christian German nation with a godless French one. During the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially during the Kulturkampf, Prussian nationalists on both left and right advanced a Protestant vision of the German nation, designed to delegitimate their Austrian rivals and relegate their Catholic subjects to second-class status. Then, in the early twentieth century, some radical nationalists, the forebears of the Nazis, espoused a preChristian and pan-German Volksreligion. Thus, German nationalist discourse was ‘contaminated’ with religious discourse throughout the modern era. Even modern French nationalism, the very paradigm of secular nationalism, was contaminated to some degree (see e.g. Ozouf 1989). During the early years of the Revolution, before the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, some argued that nationalism and Catholicism could go hand in hand, and many parish clergymen supported the Revolution. Later, after the Revolution had taken its anti-Catholic turn, the revolutionaries sought to install a

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civic religion of some sort, first the Cult of Reason and then the Cult of the Supreme Being, each replete with its own rituals, festivals and other observances.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A POSTMODERNIST THEORY Modernists argue that nationalism was born after 1750 and perhaps as late as the 1870s. Premodernists working on England argue that English nationalism was born before 1750 and perhaps as early as the 600s. Who is right? The modernists? Or the premodernists? Perhaps neither. Modernists have tried to paint a clear and sharp line between modern nationalism and pre-modern national ‘sentiments’, ‘identities’ and ‘discourses’. In doing so, they have painted themselves into a corner. The nationalist tests that they have constructed are so stringent that even modern nationalisms do not pass them. In true nationalism, they imply, loyalty to the nation is universal and supreme, and the ideology of the nation is pure and unadulterated. This is probably a fair description of what radical nationalists aspire to, but it is not a fair test for the existence of nationalism. It makes the dreams of nationalist ideologues into the criteria for the reality of nationalist politics. Given the strength of the evidence for premodern nationalism, much of it long known, one wonders why so many scholars of nationalism have clung so fiercely to the modernist thesis. One possible explanation is a desire (possibly conscious) to discredit nationalist ideology. If nations could be shown to be recent rather than ancient, constructed rather than primordial, cultural or political, instead of natural or biological, then perhaps nationalism would lose some of its legitimacy and appeal. The problem, of course, is that these are false dichotomies. For example, while the current self-understandings of a particular nation – France, for example – may be relatively modern, the general idea of the French nation may still be quite old, and the underlying category of the nation older still. A second and

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somewhat more subtle explanation might be a commitment to modernity as a distinct age and a political project. If the modern age really does involve a fundamental break with everything that went before it, then it must bring a fundamentally new kind of politics into being, a politics, it might be hoped, that is more rational and secular than whatever went before it. This would not only explain why scholars of nationalism have so stubbornly defended the modernist thesis, but why they have worked so hard to distinguish ‘good’ nationalism (secular and rational) from ‘bad’ nationalism (religious and traditionalist), often to the point of caricaturing reality, whether by insisting that some nations were never nationalist (e.g. England), or by arguing that some nationalisms were purely secular and rational and therefore wholly good (e.g. French nationalism). All of this is not to say that scholars of nationalism should not reflect on whether nationalism is a good or a bad thing, or whether some types of nationalism are more defensible than others, only that they should be clear and explicit about the boundaries between scholarly analysis and political intervention. While I am generally more convinced by the premodernists’ arguments, this does not mean that I agree with them in toto. Too often, premodernists simply substitute an early point of origin for a later one. As we have seen for England, however, it is very difficult to fix such a point of origin, both because the evidence goes so far back in time and because it becomes thinner the farther back we go. Perhaps the debate could be resolved if there were a widely accepted definition of nationalism. But this seems unlikely, not only because scholars of nationalism are a contentious lot, but because nationalism is a multi-levelled and multidimensional phenomenon. In a sense, it all boils down to this: what do we mean by ‘-ism’? Does national-ism exist when people use the national category, when they feel part of some such category, when they make this category into a political programme, or when they organize a movement around this programme? All four views are reasonable, all four views have supporters, and

there is no reason to expect that there will be convergence around one view. So how shall we move forward? I would suggest that we spend less time fighting over definitions and searching for origins and more time constructing conceptual typologies which can be used to analyse historical dynamics. We might begin with a very general definition such as the following: ‘nationalism is any form of political practice that deploys “the nation” or equivalent categories’. We might also add that Western nationalisms, and the non-Western nationalisms they inspire, generally involve one or more of the following ideas: (1) the world is divided up into nations or peoples; (2) each nation or people has a special mission and/or a territory or homeland; (3) each nation or people deserves respect and/or autonomy; (4) these aims are best achieved when a people has its own state and/or is ruled by its own people. (No doubt, others could be added.) Having laid down these general parameters, which are broad enough to encompass all the rival definitions, we could turn to the task of describing and explaining the forms and degrees of nationalism. The forms can be understood in terms of discourses – the symbols and stories through which the nation is constructed and experienced. In this chapter, I have distinguished three such discourses: the Hebraic, the classical and the patriarchal. (No doubt, there are others as well.) While these various discourses can be distinguished in theory, they are often combined in practice. A particular nationalism can be described in terms of which discourses it draws on, and how it appropriates and combines them. A focus on discourses also gives us some leverage on transformations: transformations involve the emergence of new discourses and/or novel combinations of existing ones. For example, one could argue that the French Revolution helped transform Western nationalism by crystallizing a new, civic discourse or, more precisely, by disentangling it from the Hebraic and patriarchal discourses. The degrees of nationalism can be understood in terms of mobilization. For example, we could distinguish the scope (geographic and

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social) and the degree of mobilization (weak or strong). In this framework, a very low degree of nationalism would involve, say, discourse about a nation’s history or culture within a loose and small network of people, while a very high degree of nationalism might entail an explicit programme for national renewal advanced by a large and well-organized political party. From this perspective, the potential for nationalism is not unique to the modern era, but endemic throughout Western history. What has changed, I would submit, is the scope and perhaps also the probability of nationalism. This is not because we now live in an ‘age of nationalism’ in which the nation has supplanted or subordinated all other forms of identification or sources of mobilization. Rather, it is because we now live in an age of mass communications and mass organizations which allow information to travel further and mobilization to occur faster. Of course, these same factors affect the spread of other ‘isms’ as well, including religious and secular forms of universalism (for example, otherworldly salvation religions such as Islam and Christianity as well as this-worldly ones such as economic liberalism and Marxism– Leninism) but also sub-national forms of identity and community (such as religious sectarianism or amoral familism). REFERENCES Agulhon, M. (1970) La République au village; les populations du Var de la Révolution à la Seconde République. Paris Plon. Anderson, B. (1991 [1983]) Imagined Communities, 2nd rev. edn. London: Verso. Beaune, C. (1991) The Birth of an Ideology, trans. S. R. Huston. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bell, D. A. (2001) The Cult of the Nation in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berlin, I. (1980) Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking Press. Black, J. (1999) ‘Confessional State or Elect Nation? Religion and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England’, in T. Claydon and I. McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 99–129.

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Brass, P. (1991) Ethnicity and Nationalism. New Delhi: Sage. Brass, P. (1997) Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Breuilly, J. (1982) Nationalism and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Reframed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Colley, L. (1992) Britons. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cressy, D. (1989) Bonfires and Bells. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Davies, R. R. (1995a) ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: I. Identities’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (4): 1–20. Davies, R. R. (1995b) ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: II. Names, Boundaries and Regnal Solidarities’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (5): 1–20. Davies, R. R. (1996a) ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: III. Laws and Customs’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (6): 1–23. Davies, R. R. (1996b) ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: IV. Language and Historical Mythology’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (7): 1–24. Davies, R. R. (2000) The First English Empire. New York: Oxford University Press. Deutsch, K. (1953) Nationalism and Social Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foote, S. (1996) ‘The Making of Anglecynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (6): 25–49. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gorski, P. (2000) ‘The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism’, American Journal of Sociology, 105 (5): 1428–68. Helgerson, R. (1992) Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hermand, J. and Holub, R. C. (eds) (1999) Heinrich Heine’s Contested Identities: Politics, Religion, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. New York: P. Lang. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1992) Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hroch, M. (1985) Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, trans. B. Fowkes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Huizinga, J. (1972) ‘Nationalism in the Middle Ages’, in C. L. Tipton (ed.), Nationalism in the Middle Ages. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. pp. 14–24. Hyslop, B. (1934) French Nationalism in 1789 according to the General Cahiers. New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, P. M. (1985) Politics and Rural Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karnoouh, C. (1973) ‘La démocratie impossible: parenté et politique dans un village lorrain’, Etudes Rurales, 52: 24–56. Kedourie, E. (1994 [1960]) Nationalism, 4th exp. edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Kohn, H. (1967 [1944]) The Idea of Nationalism. New York: Collier. Kumar, K. (2003) The Making of English Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laitin, D. D. (1998) Identity in Formation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mann, M. (1993) The Social Sources of Power, Vol. II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meinecke, F. (1970 [1907]) Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans. Robert B. Kimber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Minogue, K. R. (1967) Nationalism. London: Batsford. Newman, G. (1987) The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830. New York: St Martin’s. Ozouf, M. (1989) ‘Revolutionary Religion’, in F. Furet and M. Ozouf (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. A. Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. pp. 560–70. Pincus, S. (1998) ‘‘‘To Protect English Liberties”: the English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–9’, in T. Claydon and I. McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 75–103. Porter, B. (2000) When Nationalism Began to Hate. New York: Oxford University Press. Sahlins, P. (1989) Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Seton-Watson, H. (1977) Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, CO: Westview. Skocpol, T. (1979) States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. D. (ed.) (1976) Nationalist Movements. London: Macmillan. Smith, A. D. (1991) National Identity. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Stambolis, B. (2000) ‘Religiöse Symbolik und Programmatik in der Nationalbewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld konfessioneller Gegensätze’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 82 (1): 157–89. Strayer, J. (1970) On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C (ed.) (1975) The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1991) ‘The Construction of Peoplehood: Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity’, in I. Wallerstein and E. Balibard (eds), Race, Nation, Class. London: Verso. pp. 71–85. Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wormald, P. (1983) ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, in P. Wormald, D. Bullough and R. Collins (eds), Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 99–129. Wormald, P. (1992) ‘The Venerable Bede and the “Church of the English’’’, in G. Rowell (ed.), The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. pp. 13–32. Wormald, P. (1994) ‘Engla Lond: the Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 7 (1): 1–24. Zubrzycki, G. (2004) Auschwitz With or Without the Cross? Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland. Unpublished book ms (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press as The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland).

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13 Modernity and Nationalism LIAH GREENFELD

THE NATIONALISM DEBATE The year 2004 marked an important landmark for the academic community dedicated to the study of nationalism. It was the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Gellner Memorial Lecture on Nationalism at the London School of Economics, itself home to the first organization devoted to the research and teaching on the subject, ASEN – the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, founded 15 years ago by Anthony D. Smith and his students. Anthony Smith was a student of Ernest Gellner; Ernest Gellner was one of the two scholars who inaugurated the new era in the study of nationalism in 1983, when Gellner’s book Nations and Nationalism appeared simultaneously with Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. When Smith’s The Ethnic Origins of Nations was published in 1986, the conceptual framework which was to characterize this new era was in place. In this framework the question of the relationship between nationalism and modernity occupied the central place. In his 1986 book, Smith charted the map of the emerging field. The terrain was divided between the dominant ‘modernist’ position, represented paradigmatically by Gellner and Anderson, and the opposing ‘primordialist’ one, represented, with some reservations, by

Smith himself. According to the ‘modernists’, nations and nationalism were by-products of various, usually economic, processes of modernization. The ‘primordialists’, in distinction, held that they were always with us, phenomena of the primary order and forms of association and sentiment natural to men. In the first paragraph of the first chapter, raising the crucial question and fittingly entitled ‘Are nations modern?’, Smith stated the logical possibilities. ‘Why are men and women willing to die for their countries?’ he asked. ‘Why do they identify so strongly with their nations? Is national character and nationalism universal? Or is the “nation” a purely modern phenomenon and a product of strictly modern social conditions? And what, in any case, do we mean by the concepts of the “nation” and “national identity”?’ (Smith 1986: 6). These possibilities were, therefore, only two: either ‘national character and nationalism were universal’, or ‘the “nation” was a purely modern phenomenon and a product of strictly modern social conditions.’ The theme of the ASEN convention in April 2004, held in conjunction with the tenth Gellner Memorial Lecture, on the one hand, and the celebration of Anthony Smith’s career on the occasion of his retirement, was ‘The Nationalism Debate’, and the debate was the one between ‘modernists’ and ‘primordialists’. The latter, in the years that passed, changed

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their name to ‘ethno-symbolists’, but did not modify their position. The question of relationship between modernity and nationalism has remained the central theoretical question in the field. Scholars who studied nationalism in the new era came from most of the social science disciplines. Though there was hardly any interest in the subject among them before the early 1980s, the field soon became very fashionable. The specific reason for that was the political turmoil in, and then the dissolution of, the Soviet Union, followed naturally by the disappearance of the ‘discipline’ of Sovietology. Since Sovietologists were quite numerous, especially among political scientists, and especially in the United States, this academic disaster robbed many a PhD of an expertise and left them without a disciplinary home. Since nationalism emerged as a factor of dramatic importance in the political transformation of the Soviet Union, many ex-Soviet specialists, who previously disregarded it, turned to the study of nationalism. A new association was formed among the members of the dissolved academic community – the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), which would meet at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University in New York. At first it focused exclusively on the former Soviet nationalities, but later has expanded into other areas. The programme of its ninth annual meeting, in April 2004,1 one week before the ASEN convention in London, ran to 64 pages; it must have brought together hundreds of people. It also for the first time devoted several sessions, prominently advertised in the programme, to theoretical issues. Though, because of the historical circumstances in which the field was shaped, the majority of the scholars engaged in the study of nationalism by this time were Americans, the conceptual framework in which they worked was the British one of ‘the nationalism debate’ revolving around Smith’s question ‘Are nations modern?’. Indeed, the central theoretical session at the meetings was devoted precisely to this debate between ‘modernists’ (who, in the American context, were renamed ‘constructivists’) and ‘primordialists’ (who retained their original name). Their

positions were identical to those of their respective counterparts in London, and, in fact, the same scholar, Walker Connor, was both the eminent elder ‘primordialist’ in New York and the eminent elder ‘ethno-symbolist’ in London.2 The traditional juxtaposition of the ‘modernist’ and ‘primordialist’ answers to the question ‘Are nations modern?’ may create the impression that one is dealing with two different theories of nationalism, modernity and social reality in general. Such an impression would be wrong: a profound agreement exists between the two camps in regard to the nature of these phenomena. Despite obvious differences in emphases, which lead to certain differences in terminology, both ‘modernists’ and ‘primordialists’ (that is, ‘constructivists’ and ‘ethno-symbolists’) subscribe to the structuralist – materialist paradigm of human society, essentially viewing humanity as a product of biological evolution, and modernity and nationalism, in particular, as products of later stages of this evolutionary process, conceptualized as an interaction between various ‘social’ (higher biological) forces. The biologistic assumptions behind this view are rarely stated explicitly (although they are by such radical ‘primordialists’ as Pierre van der Berghe (1967, 1987), who identify as ‘sociobiologists’; the foundational text of the structuralist – materialist paradigm, The German Ideology by Karl Marx , is also rather explicit), but a close reading inevitably reveals them. The general argument runs like this: the specifically human evolution, at the beginning of which ‘man’ emerges with all his/her productive (inborn) capacities, proceeds by predetermined (presumably biologically) stages – for instance, feudal and bourgeois, or agrarian and industrial – each of which corresponds to the development of a particular capacity – for instance, tool-making. Such development necessarily modifies the physical environment and, therefore, its constraints on the organism, which, in turn, prompts the development of another capacity, and so on and so forth, until we reach the stage of capitalism, that is, modernity. Everything significant occurs on the level of the group: the individual has no

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influence on the process. The group is a natural (that is, biological) formation, and in the later stages of human evolution groups become increasingly complex. The nature of the group is reflected in such superstructural (causally secondary) formations as one’s culture, consciousness and identity; alternatively, belonging to a group gives one a culture, a consciousness and an identity. A nation is a group, corresponding to a late stage of human evolution; national identity, national consciousness, nationalism are cultural forms corresponding to this group. (For an analysis of the quasibiological reasoning behind the dominant social science paradigm and, specifically, the work of Gellner and Anderson on nationalism, see Greenfeld 2005a). It is in regard to this point that differences between the ‘modernist’ and ‘primordialist’ positions on the relationship between modernity and nationalism arise. ‘Modernists’, while admitting that ethnic groups represent the natural source out of which nations grow, claim that the cause of this growth lies within the ‘structures of modernity’ (free markets, bureaucratic state, print media, highly evolved means of communication), themselves reflective of the very late – capitalist or industrial – stage of human development. As a result, nations and national identities have to be explained in their own (modern) context, and deep explorations of their antecedents are unnecessary. ‘Primordialists’, in distinction, insist that, while triggered by the ‘structures of modernity’, the growth of nations out of ethnic groupings is a natural process, realizing the potential and unveiling the essence of ethnicity itself, and that, therefore, only the study of ethnic groups and identities can result in an adequate understanding of nations and nationalism. The question ‘Are nations modern?’ therefore should read: ‘Are nations essentially modern?’ – that is, ‘Are they modern in their causes as well as in their age?’ – because everyone agrees that nations are a rather recent historical phenomenon. But, since the structuralist– materialist paradigm denies the fundamental historicity of human phenomena (its absolute dependence on the context), this point of agreement seems to lack significance. The

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denial of a causal role to history, however, implies the denial of precisely those qualities of humanity that distinguish it from the rest of the living world, making it a reality sui generis: the essentially symbolic (that is, not material) or cultural character of this reality, and the essential autonomy of human individuals. The recognition of the distinctiveness of human reality from the rest of the (biological) reality of life makes it immediately possible to perceive a third logical possibility alongside the two listed by Smith, namely that ‘national character and nationalism are universal’ and that ‘the “nation” is a purely modern phenomenon and a product of strictly modern social conditions’. And this possibility is that the nation is a modern phenomenon, but it is not a product of modern conditions, but instead is the very cause of modernity. The claim that ‘nationalism is the constitutive element of modernity’ was a central proposition in the book I published in 1992. This book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, was based on a view of human reality which presupposed exactly what the structuralist– materialist paradigm denied: namely, that human reality is essentially cultural; that it is essentially historical; and that the agent in it is the individual. In other words, it belonged to the tradition of Durkheim, Weber and Bloch, which, because of its focus on the mind and ‘mental’ phenomena, I later named ‘mentalism’.3 In the intervening years I had several occasions to spell out the argument regarding the relationship between nationalism and modernity, which may be summarized as follows (see, amongst other publications, Greenfeld 1992, 1996b, 2001, 2005c).

MODERNITY AND NATIONALISM What is modernity? The equation of the ‘modern’ with the ‘contemporary’ must be rejected at the outset as meaningless, since what was contemporary yesterday is no longer so today. This means we cannot say that modern society (or politics, or economy) is society as it exists in our time and have to go

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beyond pure description. We must realize that there may be societies today, which are not modern, despite the fact that they may have certain descriptive characteristics of modernity. This, in turn, leads to the rejection of the concept of ‘modernization’ – that is, of the assumption that modernity is achieved gradually as a result of an incremental addition of such descriptive characteristics, and that there are, consequently, at any point in time more modern and less modern societies. Instead, we have to assume that modernity is akin to pregnancy (one is either pregnant or not; one cannot be more or less pregnant), or to being human (one is either human or not; one cannot be more or less human). As such, it is a state of being, rather than a stage of development – it is a specific form, or type, of society, and we must look for the organizing principle which creates this type (something analogous to the conception or the mutation that produces the human species) – a principle behind its descriptive characteristics. Nevertheless, one cannot, and by no means should, avoid description altogether. There are certain features, certain structures and processes, which one implicitly recognizes as modern; one should look for what connects them together. For instance, there is the modern stratification structure – the class structure. In distinction to other stratification systems, such as the estate or the caste ones, it is fluid; its compartments are permeable; it allows for, in fact encourages, constant mobility; its unit is the individual, rather than the family; status in it is based on achievement, rather than ascription, and social positions are distributed in accordance with resources that easily transfer from family to family, such as education and wealth, instead of being determined by birth. Then there is the modern form of government – the state. It is distinguished from other forms of government, such as the medieval European kingship, royal absolutism, or the bakufu in Japan, by its impersonal character. There is also the modern economy. It differs from the economies of other social formations primarily in that the economic process, instead of taking on the shape of cycles of growth and decline, assumes the

linear pattern of sustained growth (expressed, among other things, in the increasingly rapid change in the nature of economic activity with commerce replacing agriculture as the leading sector, industry replacing commerce, information technology replacing heavy industry, and so on). A similar pattern of development characterizes scientific knowledge, a product of the dominant modern epistemological approach – the rational and empirical science, and a central expression of the modern (secular) consciousness. These features are invariably included in the check-list of characteristics, which, when full, is believed to constitute the modern package within the framework of modernization theory (see Anderson 1974; Bendix 1978; Berger et al. 1973; Black 1966; Eisenstadt 1985; Inkeles 1983; Tilly 1990; Wallerstein 1974); the names under which they are commonly presented are: social mobility; modern state, bureaucratization and centralization; industrialization or capitalism; and secularization. The currently dominant, modernist/primordialist, theory of nationalism, as I mentioned above, similarly to earlier sociological attempts to conceptualize nationalism within this framework (Deutsch 1953), views nationalism as a cultural and psychological function of the process of modernization, a superstructural product of the basic ‘objective’ structures. The emergence of nationalism is seen as tightly connected to the modern phenomenon of state-formation and as related to the trend of the secularization of culture. But almost invariably the factor truly responsible for its rise (as well as for the development of the state and secularization) is believed to be economic: nationalism is explained as a functional prerequisite or product of industrialization and capitalism. And yet historically nationalism (the emergence of national identities and ideologies of nationalism) preceded industrialization and institutionalization of capitalism as well as the development of the state and secularization of culture. Thus, unless we resort to teleological reasoning, nationalism cannot be considered the effect of these later developments. It is far more logical to suppose that it was one of their

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causes. Moreover, the modernist/primordialist theory of nationalism, as well as the modernization theory more generally, is rather vague as to how the economic, political and cultural features of modernity are connected among themselves: for instance, it is unclear why capitalism or the state would require secularization (which is assumed to be a condition for nationalism). If the direction of causation is reversed, it becomes quite obvious that these central components of modernity should be related. The considerations behind the mentalist position on the subject – thus the reversal of the direction of causation – are the following. Human social reality is culturally constructed. Consequently, a transformation in the conception of social order is necessary for the development of new forms of economic and political organization. For example, both modern economy and modern science as social institutions could only emerge in a society conceived as fundamentally egalitarian, and, therefore, one in which transition from one stratum or sector to another (social mobility) would be not only possible, but legitimate. (It is true that both capitalism and industrialization require a flexible stratification system, but they cannot call such a system into being in some mysterious way, as is assumed by many theories that view industrialization as the basic element of modernity; a flexible system of stratification emerges independently from industrialization and capitalism and makes the development of the latter possible.) A society conceived in the form of a hierarchical structure composed of hermetically closed compartments, as was the society of orders, could import capitalism and science but would not be able to produce them in the first place. Similarly, the state, which is distinguished from other, non-modern forms of political authority by its impersonal character, would not be possible unless sovereignty was separated from the person (and/or lineage) of the sovereign (or prince) and became an attribute of the community. Both of these conditions, the egalitarian conception of the social order and, related to this, collectivization of authority, were accomplished by nationalism. Nationalism was a response of

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individuals affected by dysfunctions of the society of orders – the traditional structure modern society replaced – to the sense of disorder they created. Many other responses were possible; the choice of nationalism was not inevitable, but contingent. Neither, certainly not in the form it took or the pace it proceeded, was the dissolution of the old society. Instead, it was to a large extent due to the nationalist response to its dysfunction. Once chosen, nationalism accelerated the process of change, limited the possibilities of future development, and became a major factor in it. It thus both reflected and realized the grand transformation from the old order to modernity. Nationalism, in short, is the modern culture. It is the symbolic blueprint of modern reality, the way we see, and thereby construct, the world around us, the specifically modern consciousness. The core of this consciousness is a specific image of the meaningful reality. In 2004 I asked participants at an international seminar on federalism4 – 55 people from 32 countries on five continents – to draw me a pictogram of how they imagined their reality; they all drew the globe with people on it. These pictograms, obviously, could express only the most salient outward features of the image; nevertheless, they captured its essence. This image of meaningful reality is secular – it is limited to this, experiential, world, thereby making it, the mundane, the source of its own meaning, or ultimately meaningful; while within this world the most significant element is the people who populate it. This image is not only secular, it is fundamentally humanistic. (For a detailed discussion of the position of religion in the modern world, see Greenfeld 1996a.) Why is this worldview called ‘nationalism’? For purely accidental, historically contingent reasons, specifically the use of the word ‘nation’ – at the time meaning a small group embodying an authority in a conciliar, ecclesiastical setting, or an elite – to connote the entire population, the people, of England. This momentous linguistic event, which occurred in the early sixteenth century, helped the members of the new Henrician aristocracy to rationalize their experience of upward mobility which made no sense in the terms of, and in fact contradicted,

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the traditional, feudal and religious image of reality. By the same token, it symbolically elevated the mass of the population to the dignity of an elite and redefined the community of the people as both sovereign – the embodiment of supreme authority – and as a community of interchangeable individuals, each with a generalized capacity to occupy any social position, or, in other words, as fundamentally a community of equals. The word ‘nation’, therefore, acquired its modern meaning of a sovereign people consisting of fundamentally equal individuals, while the community defined as a nation inevitably began to be restructured as such a people. It was the definition of an earthly community as sovereign which focused attention on this world and on humanity, exiling God beyond its confines and creating an essentially secular consciousness. In its turn, the secularization of the worldview reinforced the effects of the principles of popular sovereignty and egalitarianism which between them define the modern concept of ‘nation’. To sum up: nationalism is a fundamentally secular and humanistic consciousness based on the principles of popular sovereignty and egalitarianism. These three characteristics (secularism, egalitarianism and popular sovereignty) are present in every specific case of nationalism. Modern culture, more generally, is essentially nationalistic in the sense that it has at its core the nationalist worldview and that it projects this worldview on every sphere of cultural/social activity.

STRUCTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONALISM To claim that nationalism is the modern culture is tantamount to saying that it represents the cultural foundation of modern social structure, economics, politics, international relations, education, art, science, family relations, and so on and so forth. I shall mention just the most salient of its implications for the character of modernity in the ascending order of importance, starting with modern economy.

Modern economy, contrary to a widespread belief, to put it bluntly, is a product of nationalism, for it is this vision of social reality which provided economic activity with the motivation that reoriented it from subsistence to sustained growth (see Greenfeld 2001). The economic effects of nationalism are mainly the result of the egalitarian principle at its core. To begin with, the definition of the entire population, the people, as a nation, that is, as an elite (given the previous meaning of the word ‘nation’ in its ecclesiastical context) symbolically elevates the lower classes and ennobles their activities. Economic activities in general, engaging the overwhelming majority of the people and traditionally denigrated in pre-national societies precisely for this reason, gain status and, with it, a hold on the talented people who, under different circumstances, having achieved a certain level of financial independence, would choose to leave the economic sphere. Arguably of even greater moment is the fact that the symbolic ennoblement of the populace in nationalism makes membership in the nation, that is, nationality itself, an honourable elevated status, thereby tying one’s sense of dignity and self-respect to one’s national identity. This ensures one’s commitment to the national community and, in particular, one’s investment in the nation’s collective dignity, or prestige. Prestige is a relative good: one nation’s having more of it implies that another has less. Therefore, investment in national prestige necessarily gives rise to an endless international competition, for no matter how much prestige one may have gained at a certain moment, one can be outdone in the next. Unlike other types of societies, then, nations are inherently competitive. This competition goes on in all the spheres of collective endeavour: moral (the nation’s record on human rights, for instance), pertaining to cultural creativity (scientific, literary, musical, etc.), military, political. Any particular nation chooses those spheres of competition where it has a chance to end on, or near, the top, and disregards those in which it is likely to be shamefully out-competed. For instance, Russia has always chosen to compete in the cultural and military arenas, and has never been interested in economic competition.

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Where economic competition is included among the areas of national engagement, however, the inherent competitiveness of nationalism gives rise to the economies of sustained, endless, growth – that is, to what are recognized as modern economies. Since not all nations include the economy among the spheres of international competition in which they are willing to engage, not all nations develop the specifically ‘economic nationalism’, that is, an economic interpretation of nationalism, and therefore a reconstruction of the economic activity on the basis of the nationalist image of reality. Thus, while economies of sustained growth (modern economies) cannot exist without nationalism, nationalism can exist without spawning economies of sustained growth or economic modernization. In distinction, nationalism cannot fail to affect politics, as it does not simply encourage, but logically implies the reconstruction of political structures and processes in accordance with its fundamental principles. The essential secularism and the two principles of nationalism’s image of the social world define this form of consciousness as such, and though its specific expressions, or particular nationalisms, are distinguished by numerous other qualities, it is these three general characteristics which explain the central political features of every modern society. The first of these central features to be listed is the democratization or universality of political action: the striking fact that in modern societies it may be found on any rung of the social ladder and in any corner of the national territory. It is this, dramatic by comparison to other types of societies, level of political participation which the term ‘civil society’ as a rule describes. Indeed, it would be absurd to talk of ‘civil society’ or ‘political action’ in the framework of the European feudal society or Indian caste society, to mention the two perhaps best-known non-modern types. The forms of consciousness prevailing in them did not allow for the existence of such political phenomena, which still appear unimaginable to us, being logically incongruent with the two cultural frameworks. The focus of nationalism on this world as ultimately meaningful and the principle of

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popular sovereignty combine to render social reality changeable and place the responsibility for its shape in the hands of the earthly living community – the nation. The focus on the life in this world dramatically increases the value of this life to the individual and inevitably leads to the insistence on a good life, however defined. One is no longer expected to submit to suffering or deprivation, unless one has special reasons to do so, for the general reasons for such submission – the expectation of rewards in the beyond, transmutation and migration of the soul, the duty to witness to the glory of God wherever one is called, or the sheer impossibility to change one’s condition – no longer apply. Moreover, in a self-sufficient world, changeable and shaped by people, suffering is generally believed to be man-made. Even natural disasters are likely to be so interpreted: a famine, an earthquake, or an epidemic are as often as not attributed to some human agent’s withholding of the needed but available resources or negligence; personal misfortunes, such as debilitating, life-threatening and incurable illnesses are blamed on artificially-created environmental conditions (second-hand smoke, lead paint, etc.) or on doctors’ incompetence. None of these natural disasters, it is said, ‘have to happen’: they are no longer believed to be in the nature of things. Of course, the right to a life free of suffering is most clearly asserted when suffering is caused – as it is mostly in modern societies – by social evils: war, economic or political conditions, competition for precedence, and so forth. Humiliation, rejection, thwarted ambition are felt as unjust – as contrary to expectations and thus resulting from illegitimate intervention of malicious others. As one’s precious time on earth is limited, the change in the conditions preventing the realization of one’s right to a life of contentment, free of suffering, is experienced as urgent, and since those responsible for their creation are only human, any naturally active and temperamental individual, who is not particularly timid, easily gets engaged in whatever form the political process around him or her takes.

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As a result, involvement in political action (or participation in civil society) under nationalism is a function not of the social position – as it was, let us say, in feudal and absolutist Europe or in Tokugawa Japan – but of character and personality. Since temperament changes with age, and young people, for instance, are more likely to be impetuous and unthinkingly brave, it is also a function of age: it is noteworthy that all revolutionary movements of the past 300 years, from the French Revolution to the student movement of the 1960s, were movements of adolescents and people in their twenties and to a lesser extent thirties. It is even more significant that in the past 300 years – but never before – there were revolutionary movements, that is, explicit attempts at social change, movements oriented towards reshaping the world by human design. All forms of consciousness allow for revolts and rebellions, spontaneous eruptions of frustration and rage, essentially expressive collective actions, aimless – perhaps vaguely oriented to the righting of some tremendous, but ill-defined, wrongs – with goals and demands thought through, if at all, only after the fact. But revolutions are a modern form of political action: at their root always lies nationalism (see Greenfeld 1995). The central political institution of our age, the state, is also a product of nationalism. Specifically, it is an implication of the principle of popular sovereignty. The state is not to be confused with government in general; it is only a form of government, and this form is characteristically modern and necessarily bureaucratic.5 The concept of ‘state’ as a form of government appeared in the English language of the sixteenth century – about 50 years after the entrenchment of the idea of the ‘nation’ and well into the development of the nationalist discourse. It obviously reflected a new reality, as it did later in other countries when the term migrated there in translation. This new reality was the new form of government, called forth by the new form of consciousness, which presented a new image of what a government should be. As nationalism first developed in Western Europe, this image contrasted most sharply with the then existing Western

European ideal of government – the medieval ideal of kingship. The distinguishing characteristic of kingship was its personality: the government was inseparable from a particular person, a person born at a certain time to a certain family, who needed no other qualifications in addition to this accident of birth (of course, never regarded as an accident and at a later stage explicitly reaffirmed as divine appointment) to assume power. In contrast, the distinguishing characteristic of the state became its impersonality. Since supreme authority, in the framework of nationalism, resides in the body of the nation in accordance with the principle of popular sovereignty, the authority of the state is necessarily delegated, representative (in the sense that it only represents the authority of the people) and, insofar as it is subject to recall, limited. Sovereignty is delegated to the office, not to any particular person, and any person exercises authority only as a holder of the office. The state is a government by officers, that is, a bureaucracy. In this sense, Adolf Hitler, the Führer who ardently believed that he represented the will of the German people, was but a bureaucrat, as was Josef Stalin, the appositely referred to General Secretary, who did not believe in any such thing but made sure that everyone else did. Finally, the principle of the equality of national membership lies at the root of the open recruitment to state offices, which obviously also exerts a most profound influence on the nature of politics in modern society. It is through the principle of equality of membership – its core social principle – that nationalism affects the social structure most directly, because in modern society the system of social stratification – the nodal social structure, in which all social systems meet and connect – is based on this principle. In this case, too, the modern, or national, system of social stratification represents the very opposite of the stratification system characteristic of the European feudal society, which it replaced. In place of a rigid structure, sharply distinguishing between strata of which it was composed and, except by special dispensation, allowing no movement between them, we now have an open system with loosely and only theoretically defined compartments, in practice virtually indistinguishable and seamlessly

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flowing one into another via the numerous channels of social mobility. One no longer has a social position and function, clearly defined by birth, which is supposed to serve one (or, rather, which one is supposed to serve) all of one’s lifetime; instead, one is supposed to choose a function and to achieve a social position (which presupposes specifically upward mobility), moving from one social position to higher and higher ones as one grows older, ‘bettering oneself’, or ‘getting ahead’. In modern societies one does not talk of ‘usurpers’, ‘parvenus’, or, however great the temptation, ‘nouveaux riches’: one is expected, even encouraged, to strive, to have ambitions, to be a proficient social climber. And so there is nothing strange in a poor seminarist from Georgia becoming the all-powerful ruler of the great Soviet Union; a son of elderly underpaid Leningrad parents rising through the ranks of foreign espionage to the presidency of only slightly less great Russia; a daughter of a modest greengrocer gaining recognition as the premier of the United Kingdom; and a child of a single mother, unhappily remarried to a garage mechanic from Arkansas, twice being elected to head the United States of America. Our form of consciousness, nationalism, makes this kind of mountaineering normal, respectable, in fact, necessary. The combination of the principles of popular sovereignty and fundamental equality of membership implies democracy: government of the people by the people; therefore, political recruitment must be open to any member of the nation. The process of recruitment in the democratic, national, or modern societies differs drastically from those based on forms of consciousness different from nationalism, for, whatever the differences between nationalisms (which, as I have argued elsewhere may be very significant), it is in all nations essentially, rather than accidentally, a process of self-recruitment, always dependent on (though not inevitably determined by) individual initiative, the nature of one’s ambition and talent, while in other societies it follows strictly charted paths from certain initial social positions to specified political functions, which only extraordinary circumstances allow one to circumvent. The egalitarian presupposition of nationalism’s image of society, which necessitates an

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open and fluid system of social stratification, that is, the class system, characterized by social mobility, makes the individual the historical agent and bases the social position, or status, on transferable goods of wealth and education. When the culture of nationalism is imported into a traditional society, it necessarily undermines the characteristic rigid stratification (such as that of the society of orders, a legal estate- or a religious caste-system), with its status based on birth; the family, rather than the individual, as the historical agent; and, as a consequence, the illegitimacy of social mobility. Since the system of stratification is the nodal social structure, in which all the others criss-cross and influence each other; it does not exist separately but only through the others. It is, therefore, clear that a dramatic reconstruction of the social stratification, such as is presupposed by the emergence or importation of nationalism, will change the very nature of the existential experience, of one’s desires and aspirations, frustrations and fears, the very nature of one’s passions, and with them, both of happiness and of suffering. In the modern world, defined by nationalism, one can, nay, is supposed to, make oneself; the open system of stratification allows and encourages ambition; one is free to move and is invited to shape one’s destiny. Only in nations are children asked what they want to be when they grow up. This question is inconceivable, more than that, subversive in a traditional society where one’s future is determined by birth. The countless children who declare they want to become an American president, or a British prime minister, or whatever is regarded as the preeminent leadership position in Russia at the moment, are not checked as precocious arrivistes, they are praised for the healthy vigour of their aspirations. And this freedom is not limited to the political or even generally occupational sphere. One can dream to become a great scholar or a multimillionaire or a heroic firefighter, or one can think not in terms of greatness at all, rather seeking self-realization as a gardener or fulfilment in love. All these are modern desires, made possible by the egalitarianism of nationalism and the system of stratification it creates. Who thought of

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marital happiness when marriage was a contract concluded between two families, rather than a free union between two individuals, and when being a wife or a husband was a job and an office?

THE PRICE WE PAY: ANOMIE But the advantages of modernity come with a heavy price-tag. The greater is the choice one is given in forming one’s destiny, the heavier is the burden of responsibility for making the right choice. The more opportunities one is offered to ‘find oneself ’, the harder it is to decide where to look. Life has never been so exciting and so frustrating; we have never been so empowered and so helpless. Modern societies, produced by nationalism, because of their very secularism, openness and the elevation of the individual, are necessarily anomic. As was recognized already by Durkheim, anomie is the fundamental structural problem of modernity (1964 [1893]; 1966 [1897]). Anomie, commonly translated as ‘normlessness’, refers to a condition of cultural insufficiency, a systemic problem which reflects inconsistency, or the lack of coordination, between various institutional structures, as a result of which they are likely to send contradictory messages to individuals within them. On the psychological level anomie produces a sense of disorientation, of uncertainty as to one’s place in society, and therefore as to one’s identity: of what one is expected to do under circumstances of one sort or another, of the limits to one’s possible achievement (that is, aspirations that would be frustrated) on the social, political, economic and personal planes. In acute cases such a sense of disorientation and uncertainty leads to depression, deviant behaviour, even to suicide. On the social level, pervasive anomie necessarily increases the rates of depression, deviance and suicide. Indeed, Durkheim’s classic discussion of the phenomenon occurs in his study of the rates of suicide. Anomie may occur in all types of societies, but in modern society it is a built-in feature. One cannot have modernity, one cannot have nationalism, without anomie.

Anomie is, in fact, the ultimate cause of cultural change. It both breaks the old cultural routine and encourages the formation of a new one. The general pattern of human history can be imagined as an alternation between relatively brief and rare periods of widespread (though culturally localized) anomie and cultural routine. Widespread anomie, most commonly implying gross inconsistencies between elements of culture impinging on individual identities, specifically inconsistencies within the system of social stratification which defines a person’s position in the social world in general and vis-à-vis particular others, affects large groups of individuals and expresses itself in social turmoil. A readjustment of the stratification system in the course of such turmoil eliminates these inconsistencies, that is, resolves anomie, again making possible unhindered development of identity and routine functioning of both the individual and the surrounding culture. But modern culture (and, as a result, modern history) does not fit this pattern. Nationalism, the novel vision of reality, which was the formula sixteenthcentury Englishmen used – quite successfully, so far as they were concerned – to resolve their particular anomic situation, turned out to be anomic, and anomie-generic, vision. Thus it has produced a culture (meaning a society, a polity, an economy – the entire organization of human life, in short), in which anomie is built-in. In modern culture, in other words, the cultural routine itself is anomic. We live in a constant condition of anomie. As much as the open class structure, the state and civil society, and the modern economy characterized by sustained growth (in nations that choose to compete in the economic arena), anomie is an implication of the nationalist image of reality. Among other things, this explains the amount of strife in and among modern societies, providing an answer to Anthony Smith’s questions ‘Why are men and women [indeed, in record numbers] willing to die for their countries? Why do they identify so strongly with their nations?’. We are now in a position also to answer definitively Anthony Smith’s central question, ‘Are nations modern?’, and perhaps end the nationalism debate. The understanding of the link between nationalism

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and modernity is indeed of central importance, and for much more than the field of nationalism studies alone. Yes, nations are modern: as a historical form of social organization they belong to the modern period. Of far greater significance, however, is that modernity is nationalistic: it is defined and shaped by nationalism.

NOTES 1 9th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, 2004, April 15-17. 2 Walker Connor is known primarily as the author of Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (1993), which followed his 1987 essay on the subject in M. Weiner and M. Huntington (eds), Understanding Political Development. In 2002, a collection of essays on his contribution to the nationalism debate was published by Routledge (Conversi 2002). 3 This term was first introduced at the conference marking the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, June 2004) in a paper ‘Communing with the Spirit of Max Weber: Nationalism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, which will appear in Max Weber Studies, July 2005: 311–37. 4 A part of the Summer University at the Institute of Federalism of the Law Faculty at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, August–September, 2004. 5 The state, it should be recognized, is a form, or type, of government, and it is this which makes possible its definition regardless of ‘the particular content of social action’ (Weber 1978: 901) with which it is associated in any particular case. In modern society, the state is ubiquitous and, for this reason, often identified with government or political community as such (Anderson 1974; Evans et al., 1985; Gellner 1983; Mann 1988; Tilly 1990). We tend to project our experiences onto the past and see all governments and political communities as states, in the same way as we tend to ascribe to the people of the past national identities. Social reality is hardly conceivable for us without states and nations. Even Weber, who recognized the recency of the concept of ‘state’, and therefore defined it in accordance with the characteristics of modern governments, as a legalrational institution, often used the term in reference to pre-modern structures of authority. But institutions for which we lack concepts do not exist, for the simple reason that conceptualization is the first necessary step in institutionalization. Weber’s usage of the term contradicts his sophisticated discussion of the ‘rational institution of the state’, which he defines as ‘an abstract bearer of sovereign prerogatives and the creator of legal norms’. The specificity of this institution, he insists, lies in that it does not possess the ‘personalistic character’ traditional ethics attributed to

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power relations in the economic and political spheres, in that it was separated ‘from all personal authority of individuals’ (Weber 1978: 600, 998). Given this definition, a ‘patrimonial state’, for instance, is obviously a contradiction in terms, which one should attribute to a concession to the conventional language. The abstract, impersonal character is indeed what distinguishes the modern form of government – the state – from the various pre-modern forms. This impersonality is a quality of the ideal type, in reality it is a variable. In some cases (for example, those of Hitler, Stalin), the state is personalized in a certain individual statesman, but, conceptually, it remains primary even then, and in principle, it is only represented by individuals. ‘These conceptual distinctions [between the state and the personal authority of individuals],’ Weber justly argues, ‘are necessarily remote from the nature of pre-bureaucratic, especially from patrimonial and feudal, structures of authority’ (1978: 998) (see Greenfeld 1996b: 20–1).

REFERENCES Anderson, P. (1974) Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bendix, R. (1978) Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Berger, P. L., Berger, B. and Kellner, H. (1973) The Homeless Mind. New York: Random House. Black, C. E. (1966) The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History. New York: Harper and Row. Connor, W. (1987) ‘Ethnonationalism’, in M. Weiner and M. Huntington (eds), Understanding Political Development. New York: HarperCollins. Connor, W. (1993) Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conversi, D. (ed.) (2002) Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism. London: Routledge. Deutsch, K. (1953) Nationalism and Social Communications: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. New York: Wiley. Durkheim, E. (1964 [1893]) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1966 [1897]) Suicide. New York: The Free Press. Eisenstadt, S. N. (1985) ‘Macro-Societal Analysis – Background, Development and Indications’, in S. N. Eisenstadt and H. J. Helle (eds), Sociological Theory, Vol. 1. London: Sage.

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Evans, P., Rueschemeyer, D. and Skocpol, T. (1985) Bringing the State Back In. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenfeld, L. (1995) ‘Russian Nationalism as a Medium of Revolution: an Exercise in Historical Sociology’, Qualitative Sociology, 18 (2): 189–210. Greenfeld, L. (1996a) ‘The Modern Religion?’, Critical Review, 10 (2): 169–92. Greenfeld, L. (1996b) ‘Nationalism and Modernity’, Social Research, 63 (1): 3–40. Greenfeld, L. (2001) The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenfeld, L. (2005a) ‘The Trouble with Social Science: Reflections a propos Some New Work on Nationalism’, Critical Review, Summer 2005: 100 –16. Greenfeld, L. (2005b) ‘Communing with the Spirit of Max Weber: Nationalism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, Max Weber Studies, July 2005: 311–37.

Greenfeld, L. (2005c) ‘Nationalism and the Mind’, Nations and Nationalism, July 2005: 325–41 (originally given as a paper at the 2004 Gellner Memorial Lecture, LSE). Inkeles, A. (1983) Exploring Individual Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Mann, M. (1988) State, War and Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Marx, K. (1978) ‘The German Ideology: Part I’, in R. C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels Reader. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. 146–200; esp. 156–58. Smith, A. D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1990) Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. van der Berghe, P. (1967) Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective. New York: Wiley. van der Berghe, P. (1987) The Ethnic Phenomenon. Westport, CT: Praeger. Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press. Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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14 Ethnicity and Nationalism ANTHONY D. SMITH

In the study of nationalism, we find two contradictory tendencies. The first of these tendencies is associated with the ‘modernists’, those who hold that nations as well as nationalisms are recent and novel phenomena, the products of the processes of modernization from the late eighteenth century onwards. For theorists like Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, John Breuilly and Benedict Anderson, ethnicity plays at best a minor role in their accounts of the rise and spread of nations: ethnic ties, in Anderson’s case linguistic bonds, are assumed as background factors, but they play no part in the unfolding of those processes that engender nations and nationalisms. In the eyes of modernists, nations are products of modernization in its many forms, be it the rise of capitalism and industrialism, the emergence of the professionalized bureaucratic state, the spread of literacy and secular education, or the political outgrowths of Enlightenment rationalism and its reactive twin, Romanticism (see Gellner 1983; Kedourie 1960; Breuilly 1993; Anderson 1991; cf. A. D. Smith 1998, Part I). Even where modernists introduce an ‘ethnic factor’, it is to downgrade it. In this vein, Michael Mann argues for the greater predictive power of politics over ethnicity in explaining the rise of particular European nations, while for his part Eric Hobsbawm is intent on dismissing or disparaging the claims of language

and ‘ethnicity’ in the construction of the ‘divisive’, fissiparous nations of late nineteenthcentury Eastern Europe. In these accounts, nations and nationalism are, in principle, opposed to ethnic communities and ethnicity: the more the former take hold in an area or population, the more attenuated become the ties of ethnicity, and the less does descent, actual or fictive, matter. Ethnic ties, like every localized collectivity and sentiment, diminish and ultimately dissolve in the inclusive mass culture of modern ‘civic’ nations (Mann 1995; Hobsbawm 1990; see also Deutsch 1966). In contrast, the second tendency regards nations as specialized developments of ethnic ties and ethnicity, and as a result it claims that we cannot hope to comprehend the powerful appeal of the nation without addressing its relationship with ethnic ties and sentiments. In this view, nations are formed on the basis of prior ethnic ties and networks, which provide nationalists with cultural resources for their projects of ‘nation-building’. Without such resources, the task of forging new nations becomes an uphill struggle against disunity and fragmentation. In Walker Connor’s succinct formulation, nations are self-aware ethnic groups: they are the largest group based on a conviction of ancestral relatedness, and come into being when the majority of their members feel they belong to, and participate in, the

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nation. In more extreme versions, the nation is simply an ‘awakened’ and politicized version of ethnic community, a view espoused by early German Romantic nationalists and late nineteenth-century French ‘integral’ nationalists (Connor 1994, ch. 8; also Berlin 1976). Underlying these tendencies is a strong normative impulse. In many ways, the fashionable distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ conceptions of nationhood mirrors these tendencies. The conception of nationhood that modernists have in mind is essentially ‘civic’. The nation is a territorially bounded, sovereign legal-political community, a constituent of an international society of nations legitimated by nationalist ideology, whose members are citizens participating in a mass public national culture and obeying standardized national laws. The nationalism that underpins this conception is voluntaristic, rational and activist: it regards the nation as an association of willing citizens residing in a given territory and obeying the nation’s laws, and while it asserts the need for every individual to belong to a nation, it leaves the choice of nation open (see Kohn 1967; Brubaker 1992). In sharp contrast, the ‘ethnic’ conception of nationhood is tied to myths of ancestry and kinship. The notion of nationhood here is a community of history and culture, whose members are linked by genealogical ties, native traditions of ‘ethno-history’ (the tales told by members of the community to each other), vernacular language, customs and religion, and traditions of popular mobilization. The accompanying kind of nationalism tends to be ‘organic’: as a natural phenomenon, the nation follows the same rhythms as other organisms in nature, from rudimentary origins to efflorescence, decay and renewal. Such organic nationalism holds that not only must every individual belong to a nation, it is the nation of birth that stamps the individual for life and determines his or her destiny (Kohn 1967; also A. D. Smith 2001: ch. 2). These are, of course, pure types, to which few nations conform. In the great majority of cases, we find elements of both types mixed in varying degrees. Nevertheless, both tendencies noted at the outset, shorn of their ideological

freight, are vital for our understanding of nations and nationalism, and their relationships with ethnicity. In what follows, I aim to combine the insights of both tendencies in order to form a more rounded picture of the relationships between ethnicity and nationalism, both conceptual and historical. I start with ethnicity.

ETHNIE AND ETHNICITY The term ‘ethnicity’ is of fairly recent vintage. It became common in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States to signify the quality of belonging to an ethnic group within a larger national state and territory. Ethnicity, in other words, always denoted minorities; majorities were ‘nations’, even if this was only a tacit assumption, the ‘nation’ being a civic and territorial political community, transcending ethnicity and ethnic ties. In contrast, the European sociological tradition, while still wedded to the idea of a waning of ethnic ties in the modern epoch, does not focus exclusively on minorities. Ethnicity is a quality that can pertain as much to large and dominant groups like the French or Poles as to small minorities like the Frisians and Pomaks. This makes for a more confusing terminological situation, but it reflects the complex history of Europe and its Middle Eastern and Mediterranean heritage. Thus the ancient Greek term ethnos covered everything from a small band to a large nation, much like the cognate term genos. The Romans, it is true, distinguished between populus Romanus and distant, usually barbarous nationes, but these were not necessarily minorities incorporated in larger territorial states. And if the Jews made a distinction between their own am and the surrounding idolatrous goyim, the terminology was by no means consistent, the two words often being used to refer to identical phenomena. Finally, remaining in late antiquity, we may note the Church Fathers’ references to ta ethne, for all peoples except Christians and Jews (see Hertz 1944; Tonkin et al. 1989: Introduction; Geary 2002: ch. 2).

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This disjunction between words and ‘things’ continued into the medieval era. Certainly, geographical-cultural groups of students in universities and of clerics at Church Councils were referred to as nationes, but the same word was also used of whole peoples, as when Henry II referred to the ‘troublesome’ Welsh nation. How far the word ‘nacion’ (‘nacioun’) bore a meaning in the fourteenth century similar to ‘ethnic community’ rather than to the territorial-political meaning of ‘nation’ that it bears today is the subject of vigorous debate. What seems to command greater assent is the recognition of the ubiquity of ethnicity and of the perceptions of ethnic ties in all periods (see Hastings 1997: ch. 1; Hertz 1944; Zernatto 1944.) But this recognition is accompanied by another: that of the fluidity and even malleability of ethnicity. Durability and evanescence appear to define the paradoxical character of ethnic ties; the more distant from ethnic groups, the greater the appearance of solidity, the closer, the more fluid and fissiparous the bonds that hold the members together. In recent years, the latter aspect has commanded more attention. Reacting against essentialism and the nationalist ‘naturalization’ of ethnicity, many writers, influenced by the ‘postmodern turn’, have stressed the overlapping nature of ethnic cultures and their internal conflicts and kaleidoscopic mutations. Some have followed Fredrik Barth in emphasizing the importance of the social boundary between ethnic groups over the changing cultural stuff that the boundary encloses. Others, reacting against earlier cultural determinisms, have developed the theme of ‘situational ethnicity’ and the idea of an individual’s multiple, overlapping identities, seeing in ethnicity a construct of individuals, an instrument of power and control for elites, and a means of labelling and classification (Barth 1969; Brass 1991; Eriksen 1993). Such approaches serve a useful corrective function. But in stressing one side, they elide the paradox of ethnicity: its simultaneous fluidity and persistence, which has been the source of both its power and of its divisiveness for those seeking to use it to forge nations. While recognizing the shifting nature of ethnic clusters of

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perceptions, attitudes and sentiments, John Armstrong has given due weight to the persistent quality of many ethnic groups, and to the importance of boundary mechanisms such as myths, symbols and codes of communication which serve to ‘guard the border’ and preserve ethnic ties over la longue durée. He uses this framework to demonstrate how various longterm factors, from nomadic and sedentary ways of life, religious civilizations, imperial administrations and mythomoteurs, to ecclesiastical organization and language cleavages, have helped to shape and change ethnic boundaries, cultures and perceptions (Armstrong 1982). Armstrong titled his book Nations before Nationalism, but he was only concerned with medieval Christendom and Islam, not with the modern era of nationalism, and in the body of the book, he speaks of ethnic ties and persistence, not of nations. Besides, his concluding matrix of factors suggests a long history of ethnic ties leading up to the emergence of (modern) nations. But how then is it possible for clusters of shifting attitudes, perceptions and sentiments to provide the bases for forging nations? We need to look more closely at what we mean by ‘ethnic ties’. Anthropologists have differentiated between different ‘levels’ of ethnicity. At the lowest (most undeveloped) level, we encounter a myriad ethnic categories: groupings of individuals classified as such by outsiders who endow them with a name, and discover some common cultural characteristics (a dialect or customs) and perhaps a link to some location. At this level, the members are aware of who they are not, but have very little idea of themselves as a distinct cultural group with a common relationship, as, for example, with Slovak and Ukrainian communities before the eighteenth century. It is only at the next levels, those of ethnic networks and associations, that common activities and purposes endow these groupings with a sense of collective selfhood, at least among elites. At this point, oral traditions evolve, and often reveal shared myths of common ancestry and ties of presumed descent. Finally, at the most developed level, that of ethnic community or ethnie, a clear conception of not only ‘who’ but ‘where’ and ‘when’ we are, together with an ethno-history, is

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articulated, often in chronicles and epics; and with it a sense of solidarity, at least among the elites. Hence we may define an ethnie as a named and self-defined human population sharing a myth of common ancestry, historical memories and elements of culture (often including a link with a territory) and a measure of solidarity. This is a definition that can also encompass diaspora ethnies like the Armenians, Greeks and Jews, who retained a symbolic link with their ancestral homelands (Eriksen 1993; A. D. Smith 1986: ch. 2).

ETHNICITY IN HISTORY There is, of course, nothing fixed or static about ethnies, or other forms of ethnicity. Like nations, ethnies ‘have their beginning and will have their end’, to transpose Renan. Indeed, ethno-genesis takes place in every period and continent, requiring as it does the interplay of culture with politics and a sense of common ancestry. Factors that have played a particularly important role in the origins and development of ethnic consciousness include prolonged warfare between states, the role and conflicts of organized religion, and the rise of codes of communication among populations sharing some common elements of culture. Factors that have helped to sustain ethnic identity and community include collective beliefs about origins and election, shared attachments to landscapes and the skills of specialist elites, notably priests, scribes and merchants – factors that, as we shall see, also contribute to the persistence of national identity (Renan 1882; Smith 1986). Generally speaking, pre-modern epochs have been characterized by a plethora of ethnic categories, networks and communities, standing in various relationships to polities – whether empires, kingdoms, tribal confederations or city-states. From sources that range from Herodotus and the Bible to inscriptions and place and family names, the record is filled with ethnic perceptions and sentiments, as well as ethnic myths, symbols and traditions, all of which attest to the importance of ethnicity in structuring the social and cultural life of

populations across the globe. At times, too, ethnic attachments and perceptions influenced political action, as, for example, in ancient Greece, where the distinction between Ionians and Dorians affected the political perceptions and actions of Athenians and Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, and were used by their leaders for political purposes. The politics of ethnicity can also be traced in the visual record, for example, in the Assyrian palace reliefs of wars and foreign captives, and the Persian reliefs on the staircase of the Apadana in Persepolis showing the various subject peoples of their empire bringing gifts to mark the Persian New Year (Alty 1982; Cook 1983: ch. l5; Reade 1983). In the modern period, too, ethnicity has left a profound mark, and not only in respect of nation formation. The various movements of the so-called ethnic revival in the West in the 1960s clearly had nationalist undertones, but for the most part these were autonomist movements of ethnic minorities who had in pre-modern epochs been unequally incorporated by dominant ethnies into the Western states, and were seeking to redress the balance. Though some, like the Catalans, Scots and Quebecois, saw themselves as stateless nations, others, like the Frisians, Alsatians, Welsh and Bretons, were more intent on improving their economic and political status while protecting their distinctive cultural heritages. In Africa, too, while some movements such as the Ibo and Somali undoubtedly had nationalist goals, many others have been more concerned with strengthening their collective bargaining power and maximizing their ethnic share of the benefits of modernization. More generally, ethnic conflicts from Northern Ireland to Iraq, and from Kashmir to Indonesia, have fed widespread aspirations for greater autonomy, unity and identity, the hallmarks of nationalism (see Esman 1977; Heracleides 1992; Horowitz 1985.)

PARADIGMS OF THE NATION What is the relation of ethnicity to nations and nationalism? We have seen that the terms

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‘natio’ and ‘nation’ have a long history, revealing once again a disjunction between words and things, and a paradoxical combination of antiquity and modernity. For many an earlier scholar, the nation constituted an ‘ancient’ and ‘perennial’ form of political community, for some even a ‘primordial’ one. As a form of human association, the nation appeared to be continuous, even immemorial, from the earliest historical records. For most latterday scholars, who are largely ‘modernist’ in their approach, nations are recent forms of community, products of modernity, and anything resembling the nation before the modern period is purely fortuitous. Yet, as we shall see, the modern nation does also have elements that hark back to earlier times; and there are some ancient forms of community and identity that approximate quite closely to the ideal type of the nation. In this paradox, ethnicity plays a key role (Gellner 1983: ch. 2; Grosby 2002; Horowitz 2002). To some extent, the modernist understanding and definition of the term ‘nation’ obscures this paradox. For modernists, the nation is characterized by: • A clearly demarcated territory with a centre and recognized borders • A legal-political community, with a single, standardized legal system • Mass participation, including civil and political rights, for all members or citizens • A mass, public culture disseminated to all members through a standardized, mass public education system • The political status of sovereignty in an ‘inter-national’ system of sovereign national states • Legitimation in terms of nationalist ideologies. That these are the characteristics of the modern Western nation, legitimated by a civic-territorial nationalism, is not in doubt. But these characteristics are the product of a particular social and cultural location, and we cannot, and should not, derive the generic concept of ‘nation’ from so specific a milieu as late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe. For this inevitably produces a partial

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definition, one which mistakes the part for the whole and thereby prevents us from discerning that whole. There are several objections to ‘Western’ civic definitions. The obvious one is its ethnocentrism which, applied as a yardstick for non-Western cases, soon runs into difficulties. The usual strategy at this juncture is to make a sharp differentiation – indeed, a dichotomy – between Western ‘civic-territorial’ nations and non-Western (‘Eastern’, according to Hans Kohn, that is, east of the Rhine) ‘ethnic’ nations. There is some justification for such a strategy. A recent study of Arab national identity and the Arabic language demonstrates how unsatisfactory Western ‘civic’ definitions of the Arab nation are bound to be, and locates the basis of that nation in history and culture, particularly language, rather than in law, territory and mass politics. Similar problems appear in the attempt to apply modernist definitions to Asian forms of the nation (Kohn 1967; Tönnesson and Antlöv 1996; Suleiman 2002). The general point here is that ‘ethnic’ nations like the Arab, the Polish or the Burman, emphasize rather different attributes. These include: • Genealogical ties, myths of presumed common descent from a (usually fictive) ancestor(s) • Vernacular culture, notably distinctive and indigenous languages, customs and folk culture • ‘Ethno-history’ – narratives of the communal past as retold down the generations by the members themselves • Popular mobilization – the appeal to ‘the people’ as the repository of the authentic spirit of the nation. Of course, ‘ethnic’ nations and their ‘genealogical’ nationalisms are equally interested in the ancestral homeland – a ‘place of our own’ – and in citizenship and popular sovereignty of the common folk, even if they come to these so-called ‘Western’ ideas from a rather different route. One should not exaggerate the differences. The point is rather to underline the inadequacy of a partial ‘Western’ reading of the concept of the nation, and to try to remedy this

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situation. In practice, as we saw, ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ attributes are interwoven in the history of particular nations, and their prominence waxes and wanes in certain periods and among specific social groups – as a glance at the oscillations in nationalist ideology and practice in the modern history of France, that most ‘civic’ of nations in its own (official) eyes, testifies (Brubaker 1992; Gildea 1994). A second objection to the ‘Western’ civic definition of the nation turns on its insistence on ‘mass participation’, a point most forcefully argued by Walker Connor. For Connor, both the nation and nationalism are ‘mass phenomena’. This means that if the nation is, as he claims, a self-aware ethnic group, the majority of its members must be aware of belonging to it and must participate in its social and political life. So, in a democracy, we cannot really speak of a ‘nation’, until the majority of its population is enfranchised; and from this, Connor concludes that we have to be sceptical of any claims to nationhood before the late nineteenth century (Connor 1994, 2004). There are several objections to such a radical modernism. The first is that it appears to confuse the definition of democracy with that of the ‘nation’. Connor has stated the necessary conditions for a democratic nation, not for the nation per se. He himself recognizes, in passing, the possibility of non-democratic nations, but he does not elaborate. There is also the related problem of ‘numbers’: at what point does the Marxist law of transformation of quantity into quality come into operation? When do the majority, including women, get the vote? There is something rather arbitrary in a procedure that rules out, in advance, the possibility of elite, or middle-class, nations. Finally, there is the historical problem. Connor, like so many others, stresses that nations are formed in stages. Yet, he is only prepared to call a community a ‘nation’ in the final stages of its development. Again, there is something arbitrary in refusing to call the community in question a ‘nation’ in the earlier stages. Besides, how are we to conceptualize and term the community which is to become a nation and which regards itself as a ‘nation’ in those earlier stages? If England was a ‘nation’ only from the

1900s, how should we (and its members) conceive of it in the sixteenth, the eighteenth or even the nineteenth centuries? (see A. D. Smith 2004; cf. Kumar 2003.) This historical problem leads into a third objection to the ‘Western’ conception, which I have touched on before, namely, the antiquity of terms like ethnos and natio, and the problem this raises for our understanding of premodern ‘nations’. Here I can only note that historians, following the main historiographical paradigms in the field, are sharply divided over the applicability of the concept of the nation to different periods of history and to specific ‘peoples’, and over the relevance and significance of such ethnographic usages for politics (Geary 2002; Scales 2000; Smith 2000). There is a fourth, related, objection: namely, that the modernist definition exaggerates the significance of political dimensions. Few scholars would deny some importance to politics in defining nationhood. The question is how far the latter should be tied to the state and especially to sovereignty, given that even in the modern epoch we find acknowledged stateless nations like the Catalans, Scots and Quebecois. This insistence on sovereignty may well derive from modernist preoccupations with centralized, bureaucratic states and with mass political mobilizations. The latter are undoubtedly crucial for what John Breuilly terms ‘oppositional nationalisms’; but he also reminds us that there are different forms of nationalism, and that mobilizations may occur within the framework of already established nations, and, we may add, even before the advent of nationalist ideology, as in Holland and England (see Breuilly 1993; Guibernau 1999; Mann 1995.) Given the many objections to the specific ‘modern Western’ definition of the nation, a broader approach is required. Here Max Weber’s methodology of the ideal type may be useful. However, constructing an ideal type of the nation faces the problem that, on the one hand, it is necessary to create an ideal standard to which given cases of nations approximate, while, on the other hand, recognizing that the concept also represents a ‘moving target’ for its members, especially the nationalists, and is best

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analysed as a combination of processes. In the light of this, we may define the pure type of a nation as a named and self-defined human community sharing common myths, memories and symbols, residing in and attached to a historic territory, and united by common codes of communication, and a distinctive public culture, and common customs and laws. The patterns of change to which these elements of the ideal type refer are the wellknown processes of:

Adoption of this broader ideal-type of the nation may help us to include non-Western, and possibly pre-modern, cases more easily. Moreover, it locates the formation of nations in the combination of processes that usually develop separately; this in turn may help us to chart the emergence of different nations, and gauge the degree of their approximation to the ideal type at different periods.

• Self-definition: the increasing selfdefinition, and self-naming, of a human community, and the creation of a symbolic boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. • Myth-and-memory cultivation: the creation and dissemination of a fund of myths, memories, symbols and traditions by members of the community peculiar to ‘its’ past and future. • Territorialization: the settlement and residence by the majority of the members of a human community in a territory felt to be ‘historic’, and the growth among them of collective attachments to that territory. • Codes of communication: the emergence and dissemination to the members of a community of shared codes of communication, by formal or informal means. • Public culture: the creation and dissemination to the members of a community of a distinctive public culture of symbols, values, customs, laws and rituals. (See Smith 2002).

NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

As a type of community, the ideal type of the nation is closely aligned with that of the ethnie, or ethnic community (as opposed to the state). However, there are key differences between the two concepts. While both are self-defined communities, and both have myths of common origins (however fictive) and shared memories, the ideal type of the nation features shared codes of communication and public culture, including laws and customs, whereas that of the ethnie refers only to one or more elements of culture. And while ethnies usually possess at least a symbolic (remembered) link with a specific territory, the nation features majority residence in and attachment to a historic territory (see Smith 2001: ch. 1).

So far, I have focused on nations. What of nationalism? Nationalism may be defined as an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’. (In this sense, one can, and does, have nationalism without nations, just as more rarely we can speak about nations without nationalism.) As an ideological movement, nationalism emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, finding its first full-blown expression during the French Revolution and in the aftermath of the American Revolution, with their cults of classical antiquity and their belief in popular autonomy. But, nationalism is in practice closely related to the cognate concepts of national sentiment, collective sentiments for the strength and welfare of the nation, and national identity, defined as the reproduction and reinterpretation of the pattern of symbols, myths, memories, values and traditions that form the heritage of the nation, and the identification of its members with that heritage. Hence it is possible to detect key elements of the ideology of nationalism in earlier periods, notably in early seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands, along with a growing sense of national identity among their elites and middle classes; and perhaps even in nuce in earlier ‘Western’ cases (Gorski 2000; Greenfeld 1992: ch. 1; Smith 1991: ch. 4; cf. Kumar 2003: chs. 5–6). The reason for this precocious Western development must be sought in certain sacred traditions closely related to some of the more

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general processes outlined above. The most important of these is the succession of myths of ethnic election, the conviction that ‘we’ constitute a chosen people entrusted by God with a task or mission, or bound by a covenant with God to fulfil and be witness to a divinely ordained dispensation, which requires that ‘our’ community be separated from others. Deriving from the ancient covenant with the Israelites on Mount Sinai, this tradition spawned a series of myths of divine election which, from the medieval period onwards, became attached to kingdoms and peoples in a Christian Europe that had come to see the Church (and later particular ethnic and provincial churches, states and peoples) as the true successor to ancient Israel (verus Israel). Along with myths of origin, the belief in ethnic election became the most dynamic of the many myths and memories that were to generate a sense of national identity, especially after the Reformation and its return to Old Testament Hebraism (Akenson 1992; O’Brien 1988; Smith 2003: chs. 3–5). There were other sacred traditions. The most ancient and widespread sprang from aspects of territorialization, in particular collective attachments to sacred sites. Starting with the last resting places of ‘our ancestors’, they took in tombs of saints which became places of pilgrimage, as well as burial places of kings and heroes. Other ‘sacred sites’ included fields of battle and ancient assembly-places, temples, mosques, churches and monasteries, as well as sacred rivers, mountains and fields, forming a landscape filled with hallowed memories. Of course, these did not of themselves define a bounded sacred homeland, but they delineated a sacred territorial zone patrolled by ethnic guardians (usually priests and scribes) and often by ethnic confederations and kingdoms. In some cases, a whole territory was demarcated as a ‘promised land’ and dedicated to a particular deity and his or her cult, and it came to signify a sacred symbolic centre, even when the ethnic inhabitants were exiled from it, as was the case with the Armenians and Jews (Grosby 2002). Equally important, if not quite so ubiquitous, is the myth-memory of the golden age

(or ages). Already in the ancient world we encounter a nostalgia for past ages held to be of superior worth to the present, and to embody the inner or ‘true’ virtues of the community, now sadly undermined or forgotten. We can find it in the so-called neo-Sumerian civilization of Ur, which recalled the earlier dynastic period of Sumer before Sargon of Akkad’s usurpation and much later in Asshurbani-pal’s Assyria in its decline (seventh century BC), as the king looked back to Babylonian culture; and again in late Sasanid Iran under Chosroes II in the sixth century AD. It is particularly marked in certain historians and poets of the Latin Silver Age in the early Roman Empire, in the work of Tacitus and Juvenal, who looked back to the alleged virtues of the early Republic. It reappears in medieval times, for example, in the myth-memory of Arthur and his knights, and the opposed golden age of supposed Anglo-Saxon liberties. But, it is really much later, in antiquarian circles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and again among the nationalists of the nineteenth, that the ideal of the golden age comes into its own, and feeds political ideals of restoration and regeneration as the model of the sacred ‘authentic nation’ – as could be seen, for example, among the Slavophiles in Russia and the Pharaonicists of early twentiethcentury Egypt (Roux 1964: ch. 10; Frye 1966: ch. 6; MacDougall 1982; Smith 2003: chs. 7–8). For nationalists, the ideal of a canonical golden age was a summons to emulation and action, and it pointed the way to a further tradition of individual and collective struggle and sacrifice on behalf of the nation. Once again, there were ancient and medieval examples, indeed a whole tradition of heroic sacrifice, from the Homeric and biblical heroes up to William Wallace, William Tell, Joan of Arc and Alexander Nevsky. That these exemplars were rarely, in any sense of the term, national and sometimes of doubtful historicity, was of little import to later generations; they had fought (and in some cases died) on behalf of a named community and its sacred cause. To follow their example and be prepared to sacrifice life itself for the sacred cause of the people, came to be seen from the eighteenth century as the

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highest, most valued human goal, one that applied not just to exceptional heroic individuals, but to the youth and courage of all the (usually male) members of the nation. Hence, the efflorescence of ‘history painting’ and the growing cult of the patriotic war dead, with its rites and ceremonies and its vast cemeteries and monuments for the millions who lost their lives in the two World Wars. Through these means, the survivors sought to make some sense of their immense loss and bind together in one sacred communion of the people the dead, the living and the yet unborn; and thereby fulfil the sacred destiny of the nation (Mosse 1990; Smith 2003: ch. 9; Winter 1995: esp. ch. 4). Only in the age of nationalism were these sacred traditions brought together for a single political end, the ‘rebirth’ and ‘regeneration’ of the nation, under the influence of the newly politicized ideals of popular sovereignty and cultural authenticity. But most of these traditions were much older, and their very sanctity made them available for use as cultural resources for communities which, for limited periods in pre-modern epochs, approximated to the ideal type of the nation. These traditions provided a measure of continuity with past ethnic communities, though the importance of such links and the degree of their continuity varies considerably.

NATIONS IN HISTORY Continuity is one thing, but identity is quite another. Just as we should not confuse words and things, so we should not equate ethnic communities with nations, because we can point to some links between them. This point can be illustrated by considering some examples of what used to be termed ‘old–new nations’. Take the case of Egypt. Even if we were to concede that ancient Egypt at certain periods constituted a ‘nation’ in the sense of a named and self-defined, territorially compact community with shared codes of communication, a fund of myths, memories and symbols, and a

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distinctive public culture, and that some sense of self-definition survived the Macedonian, Roman and Arab conquests, and the introduction of first Christianity and then Islam, it would be an impossible, if not misguided task to attempt to demonstrate links between such an early approximation to the ideal type of the nation and the nation of modern Egypt. The same might be said of any continuities between ancient, Byzantine and modern Greece, of the kind propounded by the nineteenth-century Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, in view of the predominantly cultural rather than political unity of ancient Hellas and the huge impact of the subsequent Slav and Albanian invasions (see Kitromilides 1989; Trigger et al. 1983). What of other ‘old–new nations’, like the Armenians and the Jews? Granted that here the cultural continuities of their codes of communication, aspects of their public religious culture and their heritage of myths, memories and symbols, are much greater, because they were carried by an enduring institution; and that consequently the sense of an Armenian and Jewish ethnic community persisted to a far greater degree, stimulated by diaspora exile and periodic persecution. But, even if we are prepared to speak of more or less continuous, if scattered, Armenian and Jewish ‘peoples’ (ethnies) in the medieval epoch, the question remains to what extent they can be termed ‘nations’ before the modern period. Perhaps, as Steven Grosby argues, both communities approximated to the ideal-type of the nation, say, in Second Temple and Mishnaic Judea, or fifth-century Armenia. But, after their dispersion, both Armenians and Jews, losing their historic lands and aspects of their public cultures as a result of their far-flung diasporas, are better viewed as ethnies, their sense of collective unity having been eroded by varying degrees of acculturation in their host societies (see Grosby 2002; Neusner 1981; Redgate 2000.) These are matters of historical judgement measured against the touchstone of the ideal type and its constituent processes. They illustrate the fact that we are dealing with variable processes, and these probably need to be broken down further into more specific elements. But,

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at least, this procedure can move us beyond doctrinaire paradigms, whether perennialist or modernist, and direct our attention to the multiplicity of variables involved in the formation of nations and the different forms they take in different historical contexts (Uzelac 2002). On the whole, it is true to say that in Near Eastern and classical antiquity, ethnic categories, networks and communities predominated, alongside empires and city-states. We rarely encounter ‘nations’ even in the broader idealtypical sense I have been proposing. The same can be said of the early medieval period with its barbarian regna, although there are clear intimations of nationhood among, say, the fifteenth-century English, Scots and Swiss, certainly among their elites. Whether we can therefore speak of elite nations in this period is a moot point, but it does point to a definite change in the developments of the key processes of nationhood (Reynolds 1984: ch. 8). From the late sixteenth century, however, the turn to Old Testament Hebraism and covenantal theology in the Reformation, disseminated by translations of the Bible and Prayer Book, printed tracts and regular sermons, ‘democratized’ the old tradition of chosenness which had been previously applied to kingdoms (and more rarely to peoples), and provided a dynamic ideology of popular rule in the name of an original national-Christian community. At the same time we encounter new myth-memories of golden ages, growing territorial attachments (often as a result of wars), and a cult of martyrs which, though Protestant in origin, became increasingly national in form. All of these traditions build on the confluence of processes of increasing self-definition, myth-and-memory cultivation, residence in an historic territory, shared codes of communication and the dissemination of a public culture. As both Gorski and Schama document, the most obvious example was the Netherlands, but among English and Scots Puritans, too, a sense of Protestant popular nationhood emerged at this time, providing important models for later nations (Kohn 1940; Schama 1987: ch. 2; Greenfeld 1992: ch. 1; Gorski 2000; cf. Kumar 2003: ch. 5).

By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the language of nationhood – national character, the genius of the nation, patriotism – had become widespread in Europe. The subsequent rise of nationalism – the ideological movement – on its back provided an accessible ideological blueprint for aspirant ethnies to claim autonomy or sovereign statehood. The confluence of classical and Hebraic traditions, and of ethnic cultures with the cult of authenticity and the quest for popular sovereignty, imparted a new dynamic to the national ideal; and the success of the Anglo-French model helped to ensure its global reach. However, the ethnically based nations have by all accounts been much more successful than post-colonial ‘state-nations’ based on more or less artificial boundaries, which have found it difficult to create a deep sense of the collective self, because they lacked a fund of shared ethnic myths, memories, symbols and traditions, and/or strong territorial attachments. This suggests that political will, in the absence of the necessary general processes of nation formation, not to mention the more specific sacred traditions, cannot suffice to sustain nations. Territory and the claim for popular sovereignty within its borders may have wrested statehood from alien hands, but the forging of nations requires deeper and more pervasive cultural commonalities (Kemilainen 1964; Colley 1992; Bell 2001). The success of nationalism, as well as its limitations, has therefore much to do with the conjunction of the more recent ideals of popular sovereignty and cultural authenticity with antecedent, and often much older, ethnic ties and communities. That it was the West that led the way was largely due to the interplay of three sets of factors: a complex mosaic of ethnic communities and ethnic polities in Europe, the rapidity of large-scale social and political change from the sixteenth century on, and Christianity’s, particularly Protestantism’s, recovery of biblical Hebraism and ‘Mosaic theology’ with its emphasis on ethnic election, covenant and mission. But, once the model of the ethnically based nation was firmly established, it became possible to conceive of polyethnic nations like

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Nigeria, Eritrea and Tanzania, despite the obvious difficulties of implementing such a project in the absence of one or more of the key processes. This ‘civic’ model of nationhood has become increasingly attractive, partly because of a general revulsion against the atrocities committed by radical ethnonationalists bent on achieving congruence between a single nation and ‘its’ state, and partly because of the scale and nature of recent waves of immigration. In some cases, notably immigrant societies like Canada, Australia and the United States, the new kind of ‘plural’ nationhood with its commitment to multiculturalism has scored considerable success. In others, particularly in Europe, the appeal to a more ‘civic’ kind of nationalism has barely concealed the historic ethnic basis of the nation and of its cultural ties and ethos. This is especially true of cases where constituent and long-resident ethnies, such as the Catalans, Basques, Corsicans, Bretons, Scots and Welsh (not to mention the French, English and Castilians) had successfully claimed the status of nationhood within an overarching national state. In this respect, there has been little change: the post-Cold War era remains one of both widespread ethnic communities and of nations and national states based in varying degrees on a complex nexus of ethnic ties, with competing, but intertwined, conceptions of the nation – ethnic, civic and multicultural (see Smith 1995: ch. 4.)

CONCLUSION The current picture presented by the state of ethnicity and nationalism is a complex one. On the surface, we are witnessing the proliferation and in some cases intensification of ethnic and national conflicts, but also a concerted effort in certain areas, notably Europe, to create supranational institutions that appear to undermine the bases of national identity in some existing states. At a deeper level, our received traditions, even our ideas, of national identity in the West are being transformed, as some of the sacred foundations on which they rest are weakened; while at the same time Western-style

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‘sober’ secular national identities are being challenged, sometimes thrust aside, by national-religious ideals that draw inspiration from radical readings of scriptures and populist mobilizations (see Juergensmeyer 1993; on Europe, Delanty 1995.) But these conflicting trends still operate within the field of ‘a world of nations’, and the general processes that underpin nationhood – self-definition, myth-memory cultivation, territorialization and the like – remain operative, even when, and perhaps because, they encounter opposing globalizing and localizing trends. Even the fashionable Western insistence on multiculturalism and the polyethnic nation, and the associated transfer of powers upward and downwards by the national state in a socalled post-national order, has not so far undermined the political and cultural pluralism of the sovereign national states of the ‘international’ community. Neither, within those national states, has it dissolved the centrality of dominant or core ethnies, whose culture, myths, mores and memories continue to define the national state and frame the ideals and conduct of its members, even those of relatively recent origin (see Smith 2001: ch. 6). Even when the ‘sacred foundations’ of national identity are undermined, and its underlying cultural resources are neglected, the power of competition between national states with their uneven distribution of ethnohistorical cultures, their unequal geopolitical and economic resources, the differential nature and rates of their immigration, and the varied impact of their religious traditions, continues to preserve and extend the global community of nations and to excite the national aspirations of ethnic communities across the world. In an age of globalization, the position of ethnicity and nationalism is paradoxical. The national state loses many of its erstwhile functions, its borders become porous, consumerism penetrates all cultures, and ethnies are revitalized. Yet, the national state extends its reach in ever-new directions and the sense of national identity, however much ‘contested’, continually resurfaces as the expression of a powerful social solidarity and a sacred communion of the people.

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15 Nationalism and Religion MARK JUERGENSMEYER

Nationalism and religion have had an ambivalent relationship. Secular nationalism – the body of ideas legitimating the nation-state that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe and America and that by the mid-twentieth century had swept through the modern world – has usually rejected religion. But the nation-state has sometimes relied upon religious images and identities to buttress its power. Likewise, although supporters of religion often reject politics, including nationalism, increasingly religious identities and ideologies have become the basis for strident new forms of nationalism and transnationalism in a globalized, postmodern world.

AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS RELIGION When modern secular nationalism emerged in the eighteenth century as a product of the European Enlightenment’s political values it did so with a distinctly anti-religious, or at least anti-clerical, posture. The creation of a new mercantile society of presumably equal citizens required an ideological justification that was different than the religious sanction for a political order characterized by monarchy and hierarchy. The ideas of John Locke about the origins of a civil community, and the ‘social contract’

theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, required very little commitment to religious belief. Although they allowed for a divine order that made the rights of humans possible, their ideas had the effect of taking religion – at least Church religion – out of public life. At the time, religious enemies of the Enlightenment protested religion’s public demise, but their views were submerged in a wave of approval for a new view of social order in which secular nationalism was thought to be virtually a natural law, universally applicable and morally right. Yet at the same time that religion was becoming less political, the secular political world was adopting a religiosity of its own. In the early nineteenth century nationalism became clothed in romantic and xenophobic images that would have startled its Enlightenment forbears. The French Revolution, the model for much of the nationalist fervor that developed in the nineteenth century, infused a religious zeal into revolutionary democracy, taking on the trappings of Church religion in the priestly power meted out to its demagogic leaders, and in the slavish devotion to what it called ‘the temple of reason’. According to Alexis de Tocqueville, the French Revolution ‘assumed many of the aspects of a religious revolution’. The American Revolution also had a religious side: many of its leaders had been influenced by eighteenth-century Deism, a religion of science and natural law. As in

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France, American nationalism developed its own religious characteristics, blending the ideals of secular nationalism and the symbols of Christianity into what has been called a ‘civil religion.’ The latter part of the nineteenth century fulfilled de Tocqueville’s prophecy that the ‘strange religion’ of secular nationalism would, ‘like Islam, overrun the whole world with its apostles, militants, and martyrs’. It was spread throughout the world with an almost missionary zeal, and nationalism was shipped to the newly colonized areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America as part of the ideological freight of colonialism. Secular nationalism reached its zenith in the mid-twentieth century following the end of World War II as colonial empires crumbled and new nations proliferated in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. As the formerly-colonial governments turned their political and economic infrastructures from territories into nation-states, the ideology of secular nationalism infused the efforts to create public loyalty and a sense of legitimacy for public institutions in processes that came to be known as ‘modernization’ and ‘nation-building’. Leaders such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser symbolized the modern and Westernized nationalist who had little tolerance for what was perceived to be the irrationality of religion’s customs and the divisiveness of its loyalties. Yet though the masses in new countries such as India and Egypt expressed a great deal of nationalist pride, their acceptance of a secular basis for national identity was not extensive. In developing countries in the late twentieth century, secular nationalism and religion were seen as competitors – just as they were in the modern West in previous centuries. Secular nationalism in the formerly-colonized countries in the late twentieth century came to represent one side of a great encounter between two vastly different ways of perceiving the socio-political order and the relationship of the individual to the state: one informed by the notion of a secular compact, the other by the authority and community conveyed through traditional religion. Given the fundamental character of the division, and the intensity of

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the loyalties to each side, it is no wonder that in the last decades of the twentieth century the encounter was so violent.

CRITICISMS OF SECULAR NATIONALISM Religious criticisms of secular nationalism emerged in the late twentieth century in areas of the Middle East and Asia where nationbuilding was being attempted along blatantly European and American models. At the same time religious activists in other parts of the world – including industrialized countries – also began to criticize the tenets of secular nationalism, albeit for somewhat different reasons. Both kinds of criticisms followed one or more of these three lines of reasoning: • Secular nationalism is a Western intrusion. The charge that secular nationalism is by its nature Western – and therefore inappropriately applied to other parts of the world – was levelled by the Ayatollah Khomeini against the policies of the Shah during Iran’s successful religious nationalist revolution in 1979. Though Iran had never been colonized, the Ayatollah claimed that America and Europe’s economic control and cultural influence amounted to colonization all the same, and he decried what he referred to as the Shah’s ‘Westtoxification’, an inebriation over things American and European. In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front took a similar position during the 1991 elections, claiming that the secular nationalism promulgated by Algeria’s military leaders was an extension of French colonial rule. Religious nationalism is also seen as the unfinished business of anti-colonialism in Egypt, India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. • Secular nationalism is intolerant of religion. The claim that secular nationalism is hostile to any political identity or ideology related to religion was a major theme of Christian groups in the United States, Jewish movements in Israel and many of the religious nationalist movements that erupted in

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Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Chechnya in the 1990s. In many of the nations formerly associated with the USSR, religious activists saw the ideology of communism as a foil for an irredentist Russian nationalism, which barred religion not only for Marxist ideological reasons but also to keep national identities associated with religion from rising in the USSR-dominated states. Following the USSR’s demise in 1992, many in these nations saw their religion as a new locus of national identity and loyalty. • Secular nationalism promotes a unified world order. Some of the most extreme movements for religious nationalism have criticized secular nationalism for its universalist tendencies. According to these critics, the global ideology of secular nationalism sets the stage for the establishment of a new world order, one that promotes a single central political authority and a unified world society and culture. The al-Qa’eda movement has developed a transnational community of Muslims based on the fear that the US military and cultural sphere of influence will lead to a form of global domination that will destroy Muslim societies. In the 1990s the Christian Identity and Christian Reconstruction movements in the United States fostered similar fears over the global aspirations of US political leaders, anxieties that were shared by such extremist movements as Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, a breakaway Buddhist group involved in a nerve gas attack on Tokyo’s subways in 1995. In the views of these groups it was religion that protected national interests against the internationalism that they thought was secular nationalism’s ultimate goal.

ETHNIC AND IDEOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM Religious nationalism has often been associated with ethnic religious communities as well as political-religious ideologies. In some movements the ethnic aspects have been primary, in some the ideological issues have been

paramount, and in others both aspects have been equally important. The struggle of the Irish – both Protestant and Catholic – to claim political authority over their land is an example of ethnic nationalism. In the former Yugoslavia three groups of ethnic religious nationalists were pitted against one another: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians. The most confrontational movements of religious nationalism in the late twentieth century, however, have been ideological. Though quite different in other respects, Messianic Zionist movements for Jewish nationalism in Israel and radical forms of Muslim nationalism have both aimed at establishing a political order based on religious law. So have the Christian Identity and Christian Reconstruction movements associated with militia organizations in the United States. Movements that have been both ethnic and ideological in character have had double sets of enemies: their ethnic rivals and the secular leaders of their own people. The Hamas movement in Palestine, for example, simultaneously waged a war of independence against Israel while sparring with the secular Palestinian Authority.

RELIGIOUS NATIONALIST MOVEMENTS By the first decade of the twenty-first century virtually every religious tradition in the world had provided justification for some form of religious nationalism: Muslim concepts and movements The theoretical constructs of modern Islamic nationalism were linked to the writings of Pakistan’s Maulana Abu al-Ala Mawdudi, who founded the Jamaat-i-Islami (Islamic Association) in 1941 in British India before Pakistan was created; and Egypt’s Hassan alBanna, who established the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) in 1928. These thinkers identified Western imperialism as an enemy of Islamic society and called for political organization to overthrow Western influences, if

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necessary by force, in order to establish a political order based on Islamic law. In Egypt, successors of al-Banna included Muslim Brotherhood leaders Sayyid Qutb and Abd Al-Salam Faraj, both of whom were executed by the Egyptian government – Qutb in 1965 and Faraj in 1982, after he was accused of taking part in the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Faraj had argued that Muslims had a ‘neglected duty’ to undertake a jihad (sacred struggle) against the secular forces that threatened Islam, and he was associated with an extreme faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jamaat al-Jihad. Another radical movement at the fringe of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was the Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) led by Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman. The movement was implicated in the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center and a string of bombings in Egypt, including an assault on a group of tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor in 1997. The aim of these movements was to discredit American and other international support for Egypt’s secular nationalism. In nearby Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine, these Egyptian groups and the writings of Mawdudi, al-Banna, Qutb and Faraj influenced a growing Muslim movement of Palestinian nationalism that eventually rivaled the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) headed by Yasser Arafat until his death in 2004. This Muslim movement was founded by Sheik Ahmed Yassin and other religious activists in 1987 and was named Hamas, a word that means ‘zeal’ and serves as an acronym for the phrase Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’. Soon after it was founded, Hamas supported the intifada, the grassroots Palestinian resistance movement, and rebelled against Arafat and the PLO after the secular Palestinian leader signed a peace agreement with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. Infamous for its reliance upon suicide bombers in the Palestinian struggle for independence from Israel, Hamas continued to play an important role on the extreme right wing of Palestinian politics well into the twenty-first century. The movement suffered a significant blow to its leadership after the Israeli assassinations of Sheik

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Yassin and the political head of the movement, Abdul Aziz Rantisi, in 2004, but Hamas thundered back to victory in the Palestinian elections in 2006. In other Arab regions the power of Islamic political movements has also made an impact. In Syria, Islamic activists have attempted to unseat the secular Ba’ath Party, and in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other Gulf Emirates, where an official Islamic culture prevails and Islamic law is honored, rebel Islamic nationalists are also feared. In Jordan, in elections held after the Gulf War in 1991, members of the Muslim Brotherhood became the largest single bloc in the Jordanian parliament. In Iraq after the US-led ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003, religion became a major factor in resurgent nationalist movements among both Shi’a activists in the South and Sunni Arab Muslims in Baghdad and Western Iraq. Political parties were established along religious lines, including the Sunni Iraq Islamic Party, the Shi’a Da’awa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. At the same time many of the Sunni insurgents who opposed the US invasion and occupation of Iraq favored a transnational religious and political allegiance. Some of these, including the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had ties to the al-Qa’eda movement headed by Osama bin Laden. In Iran, the ideology of Islamic nationalism that emerged during and after the 1979 revolution was propounded by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his chief theorist, Ali Shari’ati. Shari’ati employed socialist notions of revolution in formulating a Shi’ite Islamic political philosophy not unlike the Liberation Theology of Latin American Christianity. These ideas and Iran’s example of a successful Islamic revolution encouraged leaders of Shi’ite Islamic movements elsewhere, including the Hizbullah and Amal organizations based in Lebanon that targeted both American and Israeli military units in the 1980s. Iranian ideas about religious politics have also been influential in the Shi’ite political movements in Iraq in the postSaddam period from 2003. In Afghanistan, anti-communist Muslim groups supported by the United States led a

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decade-long liberation struggle against a Soviet-backed government during the 1980s. In 1996 an extremely conservative political group, the Taliban, succeeded in establishing military control over most of the country, including the capital, Kabul. Led by members of the Pathan ethnic community, who were former students of Islamic schools, these religious revolutionaries established an autocratic state with strict adherence to traditional Islamic codes of behavior. The Taliban allowed Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa’eda movement to establish their international headquarters and terrorist training camps in the country. As a result, the Taliban regime was toppled by a US military invasion following the al-Qa’eda’s September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Taliban movement continued to play a formidable role in resistance movements against the new secular government, especially in areas of Afghanistan dominated by ethnic Pathans. In Pakistan, conservative Muslims who helped to oust Benazir Bhutto from office in 1990 and again in 1997 supported legislation that made the tenets of the Qur’an the supreme law of the land. Tension between religious and secular nationalists were exacerbated by the support given by religious activists to the Taliban and bin Laden’s al-Qa’eda movement, and by the complicity of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf to the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Pakistan has also been accused by some Indian leaders of supporting Muslim separatists in Kashmir who engaged in sporadic clashes with the Indian army in the last decade of the twentieth century, which have continued into the first decade of the twenty-first. In Indonesia, an extremist Muslim political movement described as Jemaah Islamiah (‘the Islamic Group’) ignited a series of bombs in Bali nightclubs in 2002, killing more than 200 people, including scores of young Australians and other visitors enjoying the popular tourist resort. A radical Muslim cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir, was arrested in connection with the bombing, but other attacks continued, including a 2003 suicide bombing at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Part of the motivation of the activists was to purify Indonesian

society of foreign cultural and economic influences. Elsewhere in Indonesia, Islamic activists have led a separatist movement in the Aceh region, where they instituted strict Islamic moral codes and engaged in a violent struggle with the army. Islamic activists in the Maluku Islands in Indonesia attacked members of the Christian community in 1998 in a wave of violence that continued for several years in an attempted purge of Christians on the island of Ambon. Malaysia has also experienced outbursts of radical Muslim activism in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in Southern Thailand there have been conflicts between the Muslim and Buddhist communities over political control. For some decades the Philippines government has battled with Muslim separatist groups, including the Moro Liberation Front, in the southern Philippines islands of Mindanao and Sulu. In Algeria, protests mounted by the Islamic Salvation Front led to enormous electoral successes in December 1991. The movement, in soundly defeating the party that had ruled Algeria since its independence from the French in 1956, promised to give the former colony what its leader called ‘an Islamic state’. Scarcely a month later, however, the army annulled the elections and established a secular military junta, outlawing the Islamic Front. The violent resistance to the junta’s actions that followed included the 1992 assassination of Boudiaf, the head of Algeria’s Council of State, and a series of bombings in Paris subways in the mid 1990s in protest against what was perceived to be France’s support for the secular military leaders. In neighboring Tunisia, the outlawed Islamic Renaissance Party organized an opposition to the secular Tunisian government. In Morocco, an Islamic political party, the Justice and Charity Party, gained a significant electoral following at the turn of the century. In 2003 a series of suicide bombings in Casablanca were linked to Islamic groups that were critical of what was alleged to be the Moroccan government’s secularism, immorality and undemocratic policies. Among the targets were the Belgian consulate, a Jewish community center, and a Spanish restaurant.

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Muslim activists from Morocco were also linked to a series of bombings in Spain in 2004 that targeted trains at Madrid stations, causing 191 deaths. Although the motives of the activists were unclear, the perpetrators were said to be concerned about Spain’s support for US policies in Iraq and for the establishment of secular nationalism in what had been a Muslim nation in Spain some five hundred years ago. In Sudan, Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir established one of the world’s most influential Islamic regimes in 1989, masterminded by Hassan Abdullah Turabi. The Sudan was alleged to have been a training ground for Islamic activists world-wide, and during the 1990s the articulate, urbane Turabi became an international spokesman for Islamic nationalism. In northern Nigeria, Islam has fused with ethnic tribal politics. In Turkey, the Islamic-oriented Welfare Party briefly came to power in 1996. Its leader, Necmettin Erbakan, was forced to resign in 1997 and the party was banned in 1998, but Muslim politics continued to be a significant factor in Turkey in elections in following years. Islam has also been linked to the rise of ethnic Muslim politics in Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia; Serbia’s Kosovo province adjoining Albania; Xinjiang, Ningxia, Gansu and Yunnan in China; and Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Islamic regions of central and southern Russia – particularly Chechnya – in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Jewish concepts and movements Concepts of Jewish nationalism have been tied to the creation of an independent state of Israel in 1948. Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak ha-Kohen Kuk, the Chief Rabbi of pre-Israeli Palestine, and his son and successor, Z. Y. Kuk, maintained that the secular state of Israel was religiously useful and that its purification could help precipitate the return of the Messiah. After the 1967 war in which Israel gained land from adjacent Arab states, some Jewish nationalists thought that the time had come for the

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biblical nation of Israel to be recreated. Rabbi Moshe Levinger and others established the Gush Emunim, an organization that encouraged Jews to establish settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan River to recover what was regarded as biblical lands from Palestinians. An even more extreme form of Jewish nationalism was articulated by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who immigrated to Israel from the United States in 1971 and founded the Kach (‘Thus’) Party dedicated to the creation of an Israeli nation based on the Torah (biblical law) rather than secular principles. Kahane advocated a catastrophic form of Messianic Zionism that urged confrontation with Arabs, secular Jews and others perceived to be enemies of a Jewish religious state. Although Kahane was assassinated in New York City in 1990 by Muslims associated with the Egyptian Gamaa al-Islamiya, his movement continued to advocate violent encounters. One of his followers, Dr Baruch Goldstein, killed Muslim worshippers at the Shrine of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994. Yigal Amir, propelled by ideas similar to Kahane’s, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Supporters of this extreme Israeli Messianic nationalism resist any concession of territory to Palestinians and have been at the forefront of resistance to the Israeli government’s withdrawal of settlements from Gaza and the West Bank.

Christian concepts and movements Christianity has been associated with political power since it was embraced by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, and has had a history of clerical influence on political authority ever since. Recent Christian nationalists have traced their ideas to the sixteenthcentury Protestant reformer John Calvin, who advocated a Christian religious basis for political order and established Geneva as a Christian city-state. Some modern-day Protestant activists have adopted Calvin as their role model, including the Rev. Ian Paisley, a fiery supporter of Protestant political power in Northern Ireland.

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In the 1980s religious activists in the United States adopted Calvin’s thinking in a movement that they called Christian Reconstruction. This movement advocated the reconstruction of America’s economic system and legal order along Christian principles. A similar strand of revolutionary religious activism, the Christian Identity movement, has been associated with militia movements and has provided the ideological basis for such religious communes as the Freeman Compound in Montana and Elohim City in Oklahoma. In the 1990s, followers of both Christian Reconstruction and Christian Identity were involved in the bombing of abortion clinics and in violent encounters with the US government, which they regarded as their ideological enemy. Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for his role in bombing the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995 – the largest act of terrorism on American soil prior to the September 2001 attacks – was motivated by an ideology designated by his favorite novelist, William Pierce, as ‘cosmotheism’. Like many Christian Identity activists, McVeigh and Pierce expected racial struggle and guerilla war in the liberation of the United States from what they imagined to be its anti-religious secular despotism. Another Christian Identity militant, Eric Robert Rudolph, was implicated in a bombing attack on Olympic Village in Atlanta in 1996; he hid out in the Appalachian mountains for years until his arrest in 2003.

Hindu and Sikh movements India’s nationalist movement has had a religious side since the early twentieth century, when political activists such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Aurobindo Ghose added a specifically Hindu spiritual dimension to India’s emerging movement for independence. In 1925 the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), ‘National Volunteer Organization’, which based its ideas on the writings of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, advocated the political preservation of what Savarkar called ‘hindutva’, a national identity based on Hindu culture. During the 1980s members of the RSS formed a new political

party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ‘Indian People’s Party’, based on Savarkar’s ideas. A critical moment in the resurgence of Hindu activism was the riot that led to the destruction of an old mosque on the site of what was reputed to be the birthplace of the Hindu God Rama in the North Indian town of Ayodhya in 1992. In riots between Muslims and Hindus that followed this event over two thousand people were killed. The momentum of Hindu activism brought the BJP to successful victories in state level elections, and in 1998 was able to establish a coalition national government. It was led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, one of the BJP’s more moderate leaders, who ruled until 2004 when the BJP was replaced by a revived secular Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Behind many of the clashes between religious communities in India the central issue has been the very idea of a multicultural state – whether India will be dominated by one tradition or incorporate a diversity of cultures. In other cases the very unity of India has been at stake: in these incidents religion has been fused with political separatism. The independence struggle in Kashmir is one example of religious separatism in India. For many years, however, the prime example of this kind of violent religious activism was the Khalistan movement of militant Sikhs. The movement was a strident form of religious nationalism that arose in India’s Punjab state in the 1980s. The movement, led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed in the Indian army’s assault on the Sikh’s Golden Temple in 1984, aimed at creating ‘Khalistan’ – a new nation to be created in the Punjab and based on Sikh religious principles. During its heyday, from 1981 to 1994, thousands of young men and perhaps a few hundred women joined the Sikh movement. They were initiated into the secret fraternities of various rival radical organizations. These included the Babbar Khalsa, the Khalistan Commando Force, the Khalistan Liberation Force, the Bhindranwale Tiger Force of Khalistan, and extremist factions of the All-India Sikh Students Federation. Their enemies were secular political leaders, heads of police units, some

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Hindu journalists, and other community leaders. The most spectacular victim was India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Over time the distinctions between valid and inappropriate targets became blurred, and virtually anyone could be a recipient of the militants’ wrath. By January 1988, more than a hundred people a month were being killed; 1991 was the bloodiest year, with over three thousand people killed in the Punjab’s triangular battle among the police, the radicals and the populace. One of the more spectacular incidents in 1991 was the attack by Sikh extremists on the Indian ambassador to Romania in Bucharest. The Romanian government helped to capture the Sikhs. They were killed, and later that year militant Sikhs kidnapped a Romanian diplomat in Delhi in retaliation. Behind the violence was an attempt to assert the traditional role of religion within Sikhism as a guide to both political and spiritual life. Even within the movement, however, opinion was divided over the viability of a separate Sikh nation-state.

Buddhist concepts and movements The Theravada Buddhist tradition has had a long history of political interaction and religious warfare. In Thailand, kings are expected to have had training as monks, and members of monastic orders have played a role in twentieth-century political reforms. In Sri Lanka, Buddhist dynasties have ruled that island kingdom since the time of Mahinda in the third century BC. Buddhist monks were at the forefront of Sri Lanka’s independence movement in 1948, and in 1953 an influential pamphlet, The Revolt in the Temple, began a religious critique of secular nationalism and the claim that ‘Buddhism had been betrayed’ by secular leaders. The demand for a Buddhist state came to a head in the 1980s when thousands of monks joined the revolutionary Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), ‘the People’s Liberation Front’. In Myanmar (Burma), Buddhist monks supported the unsuccessful democracy movement in 1988. In the twenty-first century the

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influence of Buddhist clergy and ideology in Sri Lanka’s political life continues to complicate the efforts to maintain peace with the Tamil separatist movement in the northern portion of the island nation, a movement that consists largely of Hindus and Christians. In Thailand the perception that Buddhist ideology and leadership are privileged has spurred a violent response from Muslim activists in the country’s southern peninsula. In China, the rule of the Emperor has traditionally been thought to have been given divine sanction. Religion has also played a role in movements of political protest. Mahayana Buddhist and traditional Chinese ideas fused with Protestant Christian millenarianism in the ideology of the Taiping Rebellion (1848–65), and were aimed at establishing a religiously based dynasty. In more recent years the communist government has tried to control religion, both through suppression and state-sponsored official religious administrative units. In 1999 the government banned the popular religious movement Falun Gong under the pretence that it was a potentially dangerous cult. In Japan, Buddhism and Shinto concepts also supported state power. They were employed in support of Japanese nationalism during World War II and in movements of neonationalism in the 1980s and 1990s. New religious movements in the 1990s sometimes espoused new expressions of nationalism and political transnationalism. The Aum Shinrikyo movement was implicated in a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subways in 1995, perpetrated in part to warn the Japanese people of what it imagined to be an impending apocalyptical war. The leader of the movement, Shoko Asahara, derived his ideas from a variety of Buddhist, Hindu and Christian sources and aimed at the religious purification of the Japanese nation. Tibet has traditionally been something of a theocracy, in that Buddhist clergy have dominated both the politics and religious life of the society. The national liberation of the country following Chinese control and the departure of the Dalai Lama in 1959 is both a religious and political cause. In Mongolia, the revival of

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Tibetan Buddhism as the national culture following the end of communist rule led in 1992 to the establishment of a Mongolian Buddhist Party which aims to make Buddhism the leading political ideology of the postcommunist Mongolian state.

CRITICISMS OF RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM The world-wide rise of religious nationalism in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first can be attributed, in part, to the forces of globalization. European and American political ideologies were no longer seen as universally applicable. At the same time, the social and economic coherence of national societies was eroded by such forces of globalization as the global market, global media and popular culture, and the easy mobility of populations. These forces led in some cases to an attempt to reclaim national identity along the traditional lines of ethnicity and religion. At the same time, the rise of religious nationalism has had its critics, both inside and outside religious quarters. These criticisms were often successful in generating new movements of opposition to religious nationalist ideologies and leaders: • Religion is an insufficient basis for political unity and national development. This criticism implies the rejection of religion as a basis for national unity and a return of secularism as a political force. Significant gains that were made by religious parties in Turkey and in India were effectively countered by a resurgence of secular parties in those countries that were able to point out the inadequacies of religious-based politics for dealing with modern problems. • Politics is harmful to religion. This criticism has emerged from within religious communities. It asserts that the political activism of religious leaders has been harmful to the spirituality and purity necessary for a religious life. Some of the most conservative Jewish religious leaders, for instance, have refused for religious reasons

to be involved in Israeli politics. Some Muslims have accused their religious activists of making Islam into a political ideology, and thereby reducing it to the terms of modern politics. In Iran, a leading Muslim theologian, Abdolkarim Soroush, claimed in the mid-1990s that the political involvement of Islam in his country corrupted the purity of religion. A decade later, however, religious conservatives again seized the reins of power in Iran. • Religious politics should be transnational rather than national. Some of the most harsh criticisms of religious nationalism are from even more radical religious positions that aim at a religious transnational rule. In Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, some Muslim clerics have accused their fellow religious activists of being nationalistic and not appreciative of the transnational character of Islam. Part of the popular appeal of Osama bin Laden in many Middle Eastern Muslim societies is his rejection of the national boundaries created after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The future of religious nationalism is therefore uncertain. Although some movements will continue to assert that religion is a viable option to the ideology and identity provided by secular expressions of ideology, other movements may founder. They may be rejected by a new acceptance of multicultural states united in a secular ideology, or they may be overwhelmed by religious politics that aim at transnational ties and the emergence of alternative forms of globalization based on religious ideologies, identities and networks of support. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gotlieb, G. (1993) Nations Against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline

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of Sovereignty. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Juergensmeyer, M. (1993) The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Juergensmeyer, M. (2003) Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd edn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kotkin, J. (1992) Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy. New York: Random House.

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Lie, J. (2004) Modern Peoplehood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McMahon, D. (2001) Enemies of Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Rudolph, S. H. and Piscatori, J. (eds) (1997) Transnational Religion and Fading States. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. van der Veer, P. (1994) Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Westerlund, D. (ed.) (1996) Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics. London: Hurst and Company.

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16 Race and the Nation STEVE FENTON

The concept of race was mobilized throughout much of the nineteenth century and at least the first half of the twentieth century1 as an analytical tool within a science of races and a racial theory of civilizations. Since its demise as an analytical term both in biology and the social sciences (Gould 1981), it has lived on in the popular imagination of difference qua racialized difference (Essed 1991; Tyler 2004). It continues to be found as a discursive category in public spheres and in everyday language and in a sociology of ‘race and racism’. In the latter the bio-meaning of race is denied but the social referent ‘race’ is constituted as an ideological and social formation (Omi and Winant 1986). Since both nation and race have moved through significant periodic shifts in meaning, tracing the relations between them involves tracking the positions of two moving ‘objects’. Equally, at any given historical moment, each of the categories ‘race’ and ‘nation’ bears contradictory ideas. Thus nation carries its universalistic (or civic) meaning as well as a particularistic (or ethnic) meaning (Brubaker 1996; Eriksen 2004); race is universal as a science of the world’s peoples and civilizations (Balibar 1991), and is particular as racialized difference and communalism. In what follows we shall trace out three formulations: race as nation, races within nations and race as civilization. Race as nation reflects

the fact that theoretically, historically and ideologically, race and nation have occupied the same terrain. Races within nations shows that ‘races’ (plural) have been seen as constituting divisions within a given social formation. Race as civilization indicates that race has borne both a national and transnational sense. Thus British or French or American national interests, identities and cultures are transmuted into bearers of something beyond their national boundaries – civilization. Nationally and transnationally, race has usually been a language of domination. In the transnational civilizational frame, race–nations have been the dominant (that is, imperial) nations which have posed as bringing civilization to the dominated. This relationship of domination has been stripped of its racist language, but continues under the language of civilization – for which read freedom and democracy. Historically, the idea of a racial foundation of civilization was probably at its height in the latter part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries. The idea of America or Britain as the bearers, on a global scale, of AngloSaxon Christian civilization was to be found both in theory and in practice. Parallel with this was the fear of the degradation of white European societies in consequence of the ‘rising tide of color’ (Stoddard 1923).2 By contrast, in the 1980s and up to the present Europe has been

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the site of a series of racialized nationalisms3 in which there is a fusion of the imagery of race and nation.

UNIVERSALISM, CIVIC IDEALS AND THE NATION-STATE State-level universalism expresses the idea that states are capable of being primary bearers of a civic morality which bestows rights and dignity on all individuals, irrespective of particularities, such as class or gender. One of the sources of this optimistic view of the modern state can be found in the political sociology of Emile Durkheim (1898; cf. Fenton 1980; Lukes 1973), wherein he argued that France and its civic institutions embodied and protected civic rights. Durkheim’s well-known attacks on German nationalism (Qui a voulu la guerre?, 1915) indicate that he distinguished his own civic love of country from imperial and chauvinistic nationalisms. If internal racism persisted, it was a symptom of social malaise. Race was not a proper category for politics, nor was it a proper category for sociology, in which it could only function as biological reductionism (Fenton 1980). At the beginning of the twenty-first century the problem of state and nation would be stated much more acutely and critically: we cannot now expect to make an unproblematic defence of state-based universalism. This is not only because so many states are a threat to their citizens rather than a protector of them. It is also because, as long as the state-nation continues to embrace the idea of its citizens as valuable, it is frequently drawn to view its own citizens as more valuable than the citizens of other states, or to view ‘others’ as having no value at all. These doubts about the nation-state are raised as questioning of the state and the nation. Wallerstein has described the nation-state as ‘a geo-cultural value’, constituted by the belief that ‘Every state should be a nation. This is what we mean by citizenship … turning on the myth of the primacy and legitimacy of popular sovereignty within each state’ (1994: 9). He goes on to argue that the ‘liberal reformism’ expressed by the sovereign

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state is dead and that people must find their solutions elsewhere:‘Races, cultures, peoples have therefore a new … acute political resonance … no longer contained by a belief in the centrality of the state’ (1994: 9).4 Wallerstein’s critique is directed primarily at the state as no longer capable of leading a universalist reforming programme. Others have directed their critiques at the nation, viewing the liberal universalism of the nation-state as masking the particularism of the category ‘nation’ (Silverman 1992, Soysal 1995; Castles and Davidson 2000). It is possible, thus, to argue that an attachment to nation, as a value to be preserved, necessarily sees other nations and peoples as less valuable. If my people are very important people then ipso facto other people are less important. Hence we find the contradiction that the state is the bearer of a civic universalism whilst simultaneously being founded on a particularism (Balibar 1991). Nowhere is this more starkly demonstrated than in the reporting of wars, accidents and disasters. The dead of one’s own country (or ‘side’) are counted as the war dead, enemy dead sometimes neither counted nor reported. In the 2003 Iraq war an American general was reported as saying that the United States would not be carrying out ‘body counts’ of the enemy. This was in a war in which over a thousand coalition soldiers were killed and reported, as against, on one estimate,5 a possible 100,000 Iraqis (Roberts et al. 2004) unreported. Accidents are only reported fully if they are near enough to home, and in both accidents and natural disasters there are usually two figures (for example, ‘Four Britons were among the thousand dead’). Nations may not have navels (Gellner 1996) but they certainly have histories and construct histories for themselves. Somewhere in the life of a nation we tell a national story about ‘our’ distinctiveness, our excellence, fair-mindedness, bravery, and our ‘genius for democracy’; for others their shared travails form the oft-told stories, as is found in the victim state-nations of Serbia and Afrikaanerdom (Bennet 1995; Adam and Gilliome 1979). The national story, it has been argued, has all the potential of functioning in a manner parallel to racial exclusiveness (Parekh 2000). We can distinguish nation and

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race, and thus nationalism and racism (Mosse 1995), but we have to accept that the contemporary world, as well as much of the twentieth century, offers many examples of racismnationalism fusions. The New Right movements of Britain (the British National Party) and continental Europe, in France (The National Front), the Netherlands and Austria, express racial ideas but tactically fly under a ‘nationalist’ banner, bowing to the utter unacceptability of avowed racialist politics (Miles 1993). In Belgium the Bloc Flams could be declared unlawful if it is found to be racist, thus requiring the party to re-shape (and re-name) itself as a populist party or a freedom party. If these are viewed as extremisms, and being the ‘extreme right’, at the point where excessive nationalism becomes racism, then these racist nationalisms are viewed as deviations from ‘good’ (that is, civic) nationalisms. They are distortions of a benign social form. There is, however, a quite opposite view: that (extreme) nationalisms are not deviations (Billig 1995). Rather the racist core is wrapped inside the national message; the concept of nation is seen to function qua race. A traversing of the history of race, and its connections to and departures from ‘nation’, will help to unravel this problem.

RACES AND NATIONS: CLASSES OF PEOPLE AND THINGS In the earliest English language usages of the concept race, in a period which undoubtedly is pre-racist, it equates not only to nation but also to any class of people, animals6 or even things in a metaphorical sense: hence famously, and often cited, Robert Burns was able to write of the haggis as belonging to ‘the pudding race’. We could under this dispensation also write of the race of Scots, meaning little more than the Scottish ‘people’. The Oxford English Dictionary (1993) offers an early meaning of race as ‘tribe, nation, or people regarded as of common stock’, citing a description of ‘Llewelyn ap Gruffith’ as ‘the last Prince of Wales of the Brittish race’, in a quote dated as 1600. A mid-eighteenth-century use refers to ‘a race of sheep in this country

with four horns’ (1745) and at much the same time we find ‘the race of learned men still at their books’ (1748). Two other shades of meaning do not appear till the latter part of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth. One is of a ‘group of several tribes’ seen as being of ‘distinct ethnical stock’; and the second, ‘one of the great divisions of mankind’, which share physical characteristics. This last, which the Dictionary describes as a ‘disputed meaning’, is the one closest to the science of races. With the exception of poetic usage and in the classification of animals, the modern use of race is almost exclusively with reference to populations and peoples. Between its earliest seemingly benign descriptive meaning and the present, the word race has come to be connected with a biologized theory of the unequal qualities of the world’s peoples and populations. In the present day the association of the word ‘race’ with a world hierarchy of peoples and types is so compelling and so recent that it can no longer – in the human sphere – have a neutral or purely descriptive meaning. Race and nation have, at different points in their volatile histories, occupied some of the same terrain. Cited uses of the words provide evidence of this sharedness, indicated by the fact that one is used to define the other. We have (above) seen race defined as ‘nation or tribe’ of common stock. Similarly a core definition of nation, with examples from the fourteenth century, is given as, ‘an extensive aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language or history as to form a distinct race of people, usually organized as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory’ (Oxford English Dictionary 1993). In these references ‘nation’ is called upon to assist in the definition of race, whilst ‘race’ is called upon to assist in the definition of nation. In Latin ‘natio’ has the general sense of breed, stock, kind, species, race as well as a more specific sense of ‘a race of people, a nation, people’. It is related to a root meaning of birth, being a noun akin to the verb nasci, to be born. Nation and race have both had, and to some extent retain, this sense of ‘breed’ or people united by common descent. (Fenton 2003a).

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Walker Connor has remarked that the language of ethnonationalism is the language of ‘blood, family, brothers, sisters, mothers, forefathers, home’ and cites Ho Chi Minh as asking Vietnamese people to remember that ‘we have the same ancestors, we are of the same family, we are all brothers and sisters, … noone can divide the children of the same family’ (Connor 1993: 379).7 Connor has indeed sought to restrict the use of the term nation to peoples who form an ethnonational community in the strong sense of a real or fictive claim to common ancestry, coupled with a powerful sentiment of belonging. In this way a ‘civic nation’ (connected to a state) is difficult to accommodate in Connor’s thinking, except in the limiting case where the people of a state also form an ethnonation. For others, the idea of nation as the citizens or ‘people’ of a (multi-ethnic) state is also a powerful one, co-existing in a kind of continuous tension with the idea of an ethnonational community. The closer the concept of nation approximates to a concept of an ethnonational community, the closer it comes to some uses of race. Balibar speaks of the schema of genealogy as the centre of the race idea, a schema transferable to the idea of nation: ‘The nation form is articulated to the modern idea of race … The idea of a racial community makes its appearance when the frontiers of kinship … are imaginarily transferred to the threshold of nationality’ (Balibar 1991: 100).

CLASSIFICATORY RACE, ANTHROPOLOGICAL RACES: A VICTORIAN HIERARCHY Michael Banton has done more than any other modern writer8 to define and illustrate the shades of meaning which have been implied in or attached to the word race, of which race as lineage, race as type and race as sub-species are among the most important (Banton 1998). In race as lineage, sections of humanity may ‘trace their histories back genealogically through the links in the ancestral chain’ (Banton 1998: 17). Descent from common ancestors becomes one

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element of the race idea, and uses of this kind can be traced among some of the earliest English language uses of the word race. A turning point was reached with the publication of the work of the great classifiers of the plant and animal and (subsequently) human worlds, 1800 marking the date when Cuvier began his work of exploration and science. Cuvier divided Homo sapiens into three subspecies, Caucasian, Mongolian and Ethiopian, and described ‘certaines conformations héréditaires que constituent ce qu’on nomme des races’ (cited in Banton 1998: 45). Cuvier himself defined some subsets of these grand types, and for more than a century subsequently, anthropologists would vie for creating the proper classificatory system which best accorded with physical anthropological observations. Race as descent is not the same thing as race as type, that is, as a ‘group defined by shared classificatory criteria’. But, as Banton (1998) observes, it is not difficult to understand why the two became confused, that is, that similarity of appearance is attributed to common descent. The third great departure in nineteenth-century ideas of race, race as subspecies, stemmed from Charles Darwin, whose work effectively undermined the idea of fixed and permanent types by being essentially a theory of adaptation and change. The idea of natural selection was popularized in many fields. But the meanings associated with race as lineage, type and subspecies were not always successfully distinguished by practitioners using the word ‘race’; they could and did use the word in varying senses. Banton reaches a quite stunning conclusion: In retrospect it can be seen that the years from 1859 to 1930 were a dead period for physical anthropology as a generalising science. No progress could be made in solving the central problems until work in other fields – mainly in genetics but also in the study of human development – had reached the point where they could bear effectively on questions about variations in the shape of skulls, and so on. (Banton 1998: 90)

This ‘dead period’ did not prevent anthropologists, more social than physical, drawing far-reaching conclusions about society, the institutional order, and beyond these the world order, from what they believed to be the lessons learned from the study of races.

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Indeed, the period described above – the second half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century – may have been a dead period for physical anthropology, but it was an extremely lively period for the racialization of society, politics and the world order. Diverse but connected events and trends in this period attest to the strength of the idea of race, and to the forms of super- and subordination within which concepts of higher and lower races were expressed. Most observers of the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, for example, suggest a very considerable hardening of racially hostile attitudes (Lorimer 1978; Hall 2000), some of these attitudes stemming from the intense public debates about the Indian mutiny and the quelling of the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica; thus the attitude shift began at roughly the mid-point of Victorian England: ‘In the mid-nineteenth century, a new vigorous racist ideology challenged the humanist traditions of the anti-slavery movement and preached a new doctrine of racial supremacy’ (Lorimer 1978: 14). This new doctrine became part of the orthodoxy of the age. In Lorimer’s words ‘belief in the superiority of one race over another was a consistent part of mid-Victorian attitudes toward man and society in general’ (1978: 203). Lorimer contended that this harshness in racial attitudes and ideas reflected a harshness in the search for confirmation of social status in an era when old statuses were losing ground and new men sought to confirm their own position: A change in attitude occurred when the quest for gentle status within English society intensified, and the aspirants for gentility became more concerned about excluding those of questionable status. Blacks were identified by their race and history with servitude and savagery. (1978: 203)

This makes Lorimer’s thesis an exact example of what Michael Banton (1998) was later to call ‘race as status’. Racial hierarchy was a matter both of ideology and political domination: with respect to race, the Victorians practised what they preached. At this point we reach something like the apogee of the British empire (Schama 2002). On the other side of the Atlantic Americans were guided by a sense of manifest

destiny (Gossett 1965; Horsman 1981), a destiny seen as the fate of a vigorous Anglo-Saxon people, towards new worlds of domination in central America and the Pacific, following their internal mastery of the American west. In internal race matters in the United States, the end of the period of reconstruction following the civil war had been superseded by a period of intensified racial exclusion in practice and in theory. The intensification of racial antagonism in Britain was more than matched by the post-reconstruction developments in the United States.9 RACES WITHIN SOCIETIES AND NATIONS: RACE STRUGGLE AND CLASS STRUGGLE We are most familiar with race as a formulation of internal social divisions in the modern period, where, for example, the United States as a post-slavery society, and many European nation-states as post-imperial societies, take on a multiracial character. This formation of racial differences broadly matches lines of social inequality and class position. Thus, the postslavery African-Americans once constituted a racially demarcated segment of a rural poor and sharecropping class in the American South, and now make up a wholly disproportionate element of the urban poor (Massey and Denton 1993; Wilson 1999). Less familiar to us is a much older history of a kind of racial view of internal divisions in emerging European states, of which France and England form two prominent examples. In this respect at least, the concept of race has been closer to the concept of class than to the concept of nation; put another way, struggles between (class-based) races form part of the history of emerging European nations. Indeed Foucault (2003 [1976]) has argued that class war, having once been discursively constituted as race war, gave way to ‘races as nations’ when new nation-states adopted a race discourse to express their nationhood. The French case, as an instance of class divisions being racially represented, is well documented (Barzun 1937), with the aristocracy portrayed as Frankish and the common people

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as Gallo-Roman. In Banton’s words, ‘the nobility claimed to be descendants of the Franks and derived their claim of privilege from the right of conquest’ (1977: 16). Banton suggests that it had been shown earlier (in Barzun 1937) how an ‘opposition between Teuton and Latin ran through much French historical writing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century’ (1977: 16).10 The English case takes on a similar form, with a conquering race, the Normans, forming an aristocratic class over and above the common Anglo-Saxon folk. ‘The ruling class is pictured as the descendants of an alien oppressing race, who have no right to be in the country and no claim to the obedience of Englishmen’ (Banton 1977: 17). This kind of thinking could be described as Anglo-Saxonism, as seeing English virtues as ‘derived from their AngloSaxon forebears’, a view reproduced not just in political histories but also in Walter Scott’s romance Ivanhoe (Banton 1977: 20). The theme of class rule or class war as race war constitutes a central thread in a set of lectures (1976–77) by Michel Foucault.11 In the lecture for 28 January he quotes a letter to Engels in which Marx writes: ‘You know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle’ (Foucault 2003: 79). In other words, ethnonations (Gauls, Franks) are represented as races and as opposing classes. Both Michael Banton and Michel Foucault, remarkably, writing at much the same time (1976–77), pick up the threads of the links between Marx, the French historians such as Thierry and the romantic novelist Scott, the last of whom was undoubtedly read by Marx.12 Foucault however gives the ideas of race, nation and class one further speculative twist. If ‘race war’ had constituted a discourse for class war and revolutionary struggle, then the translation of races plural into race singular signals the matching of race with nation and its transformation into a counter-revolutionary tool. Race war was class war and as such was an idea with revolutionary potential, much approved by Foucault. Such an understanding would fit the case of the Anglo-Saxon common folk fighting to throw off the Norman yoke.

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The discourse of Saxonism against the Norman state is what Foucault refers to as a counterhistory of a revolutionary type. This idea of historical struggle comes to be replaced by a ‘biologico-medical’ discourse in which the purity and survival of the ‘living body of society’ is the central theme: The theme of the binary society which is divided into two races or groups with different languages, laws and so on will be replaced by that of a society that is, in contrast, biologically monist. It is (however) threatened by … heterogeneous elements (Foucault 2003: 80)

The state therefore ‘takes over’ the discourse of race struggle and makes it its own by re-framing it as the struggle for racial purity. Thus a race (class) war in which one race is identified as the superior power over another race-class is replaced by a racist state in pursuit of race purity: The state is no longer an instrument that one race uses against another; the state is the protector of the integrity, the superiority, and the purity of the race … racism is born at the point when the theme of racial purity replaces that of race struggle, and when counterhistory begins to be transformed into a biological racism (2003: 81)

Foucault signals that this transformation, which he also refers to as the emergence of state racism, took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the Nazi regime and the Soviet regimes were to give this state racism two further twists. The Nazis partially turned state racism, the preservation of state-race purity, back towards the idea of race struggle by identifying the race enemies of the ‘Germanic race’ as the European powers, the Slavs and so on. Soviet state racism, having eliminated the class enemy, then turns upon ‘the sick, the deviant, the madman’ so that the ‘medical police eliminates class enemies as though they were racial enemies’ (2003: 83). It is clear that these Foucauldian speculations about ‘state racism’, only recently circulating in English translation (cf. Stoler 1995; Kelly 2004), are closely linked to his betterknown ideas of bio-politics and the state. Central to his arguments is the assumption by the state of the ‘right to kill’, discursively represented in the state’s punitive criminology and control over the body. This is matched by

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the state’s concern for physical reproduction and the health of the population. In this framework it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish the categories of ‘society’, ‘nation’ and ‘race’. Nation is in part represented as a discursive myth about the historical origins of the people, as opposed races or as a single race, or as a dominant race; it is in part represented as ‘the population’ which is the subject of biopolitics, that is, it must be preserved, ‘defended’, purified and maintained in a healthy condition. Once the state takes on the race myth, then ‘nation’, ‘people’ and ‘population’ are subsumed within this discourse. For our purposes we find in Foucault an elision of these discursive categories. Similarly, in Balibar’s account, society is ‘nationalized’, that is, represented as a nation. And, crucially, the nation is racialized, or ‘ethnicized’: The symbolic kernel of the idea of race is the schema of genealogy … the idea that the filiation of individuals transmits from generation to generation a substance both biological and spiritual, and thereby inscribes them in a temporal community known as kinship. As soon as national ideology enunciates the proposition that individuals belonging to the same people are interrelated we are in the presence of this second mode of ethnicization. (Balibar 1991: 100)

What Balibar terms ethnicization is the process of representing the nation-state as a community. He asks himself how ethnicity can be produced and appear natural. His answer is that ‘there are two competing routes … language and race’ of which ‘race’ is the second mode of ethnicization described above.

TACIT MAJORITIES AND MULTI-ETHNICITY In the period identified as the high point of racist thought, the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth, mono-racial discourses were pre-eminent in societies such as the United States, Germany and Britain. Despite the multiracial character of the United States, the category constituted the tacit majority which was taken to represent the American people. As Jacobson (2001) has admirably demonstrated, successive waves of European immigrants to the United States in

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were initially categorized in some racial, national or religious grouping which marked their social inferiority and class position. Anglo-Saxon was a preferred category of ‘race’ as was Protestant of religion. If ‘the American people’ was not precisely conceived as monoracial or mono-ethnic, White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant stood for a norm from which others were a deviation. This was a code of race, ethnicity and culture as described just before the mid-twentieth century by Lloyd Warner (Fenton 2003a). Race and nation coincided to the extent that the white Anglo-Saxon model was the dominant norm. Constituted within this white nationhood we find a system of racial subjugation, with the subordinated black Americans confined to an inferior status. There is, in all such cases, an acknowledgement of a multiracial population, coupled with an equation of a dominant population with ‘the nation’. This dominance is not wholly phrased within a language of racial purity, and after international revulsion at the genocides of the German Nazi regime, the explicit discourse of ‘race’ has receded. Hence we have the concept of dominant ethnicity to signify the way in which a particular ethno-racial and cultural category is imagined as the nation.13 On the face of things, the concepts of race and racial difference – and certainly ‘racial purity’ – are much less negotiable than the concept of culture, although it has been argued by some that a ‘new racism’ predicated on an exclusivist cultural imagination functions in much the same way as an ‘old racism’ (Balibar 1991). One of the most important sites for the efflorescence of the nationalisms of new nations was the dismantling of the empires of the European powers in the three decades subsequent upon the end of World War II. In many of these cases, nationalisms had been anti-imperial, and, in the post-independence phase, nation-building. Two circumstances impeded a thoroughgoing ethno-cultural or ethno-racial as against ‘territorial’ (cf. Brubaker 1996) nationalism in many of these instances. Frequently, as Brubaker observes, the inheritance of competitive European imperialisms had been that ethno-cultural regions

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did not match the territorial boundaries of the new states, especially in Africa. In other cases, the demand for labour in colonies had often led to the importation of labouring populations whose descendants formed the ethnoracial plurality of the postcolonial states. In the British empire these were usually Indian labourers imported into labour-intensive (plantation, mining, railroad building) works in colonies outside India; such was the case in Fiji, Malaysia, East Africa and countries of the Caribbean. Both colonially and postcolonially there was a certain matching of class and the division of labour with ethno-racial group. In Fiji and Malaysia the relative exclusion of the ‘native’ population from the modernizing economic sector became the basis of a postcolonial fear of losing ground ‘in our own country’. In Fiji the taukei movement as an expression of indigenous Fijianism is a persistent obstacle to bi-ethnic or non-ethnic Fijian nationhood. In Malaysia the concept of Bangsa Melayu (the Malay people) has been mobilized as the foundation of Malaysian nationality, but has partly given way to Bangsa Malasia, the concept of a post-ethnic Malaysian citizenship.14

TRANSNATIONAL HIERARCHIES: RACE AS CIVILIZATION In much of what has preceded in this chapter we have examined the fit of race with nation, or the racialization of nationhood; we have also looked at ‘races within nations’, where class divisions are expressed in a racial language, within a framework of a dominant ethno-race. At several points in this debate we have hinted at a transnational dimension of a racial hierarchy, in particular in the colonial relationship, of racial dominance being expressed across societies, peoples and states. The concluding task is to make explicit this transnational dimension of race. For it is clear that in the case of all the (European) imperial nations, and including in the present age, the United States, internal class-race hierarchies have been matched by a nation-over-nations hierarchy. This internation or people-over-people inequality has

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historically been expressed in a language of race and civilization. This was quite explicitly the case at the height of the racial age. The same anthropologists who tried to establish world racial classifications and apply them to internal differences, also saw racial difference as a key to explaining levels of civilization. In 1873 in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, the paper read by J. G. Avery was recorded in minute form. His main message was that ‘racial characteristics are not the result of accident, habit, climate … but are physical, material, and indelible’ (1873: 63). He goes on to classify races in three divisions: civilized, semi-civilized and savage. Thence he sets himself three questions, all of which will subsequently be answered in the negative: Has any race now civilized descended from savages or any savage race become civilized? Has any civilized race degenerated into partial or total barbarism? Has any partially or wholly civilized race exchanged its civilization for another? (Avery 1873: 63)

Others present questioned what Avery had argued. Were not the ancestors of the modern British as ‘savage as any uncultivated races of the present day’? Avery remained unconvinced and ended by arguing that the failure of progress of the uncivilized must cast doubt on Darwinian theory: If it cannot be shown that any race of men have emerged from barbarism to civilization, it will be very difficult to prove that according to Darwinian theory, they have risen from the state of monkeys to that of men. (Avery 1873: 67)

Only a few years later, at a conference on the Native Races of Australia, James Bonwick (1887) read a paper, the meeting (held in June 1886) being chaired by Francis Galton. The opening remarks show how physical the geographical and anthropological interest was – Avery above had spoken of race as ‘physical, material, and indelible’. Bonwick begins by a description of the aborigines’ colour, height and strength, ‘which is reputed below that of the English’. Furthermore ‘an odour, somewhat resembling that emitted by a goat, has been detected’ and ‘the breast of the female is

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pendulous in early motherhood’ (Bonwick 1887: 201). Hair, chin, thick skull, nose and teeth all receive attention but the comments on the shape of head are remarkable for their specificity: ‘A pyramidal shape of the head has been compared to that in old Gaulish reindeerhunters and the boat-headed Brochmen of ancient north-east Scotland’ (Bonwick 1887: 202). Like many commentators on the position of native peoples at this period, Bonwick believed that the Australian aborigines were on the verge of extinction. Paucity of birth was one sign of decadence, he reports. Decadence – and degradation, degeneracy, decay – were characteristic and crucial terms of this commentary. ‘The end is approaching’, he concludes. Bonwick, like Avery, suggests that, for a time and in small measure, the native people acquire some attributes of ‘civilization’, only for it, under pressure, to be extinguished. So, Bonwick reports: Civilization and religion have advanced for a time. But the ploughman tires, and takes to the hunt again. The scholar becomes a drunkard, or enters the Native Police. The convert lapses, or dies. The race, as a race, is not rising. All surroundings are too much for the man. The weight of our civilization crushes him. (Bonwick 1887: 207)

By contrast with Avery, Bonwick does express some expectation that the Australian natives are ‘improvable’ and acknowledges that the decline of the race may be partly on account of the denial of their rights and lands. Anthropological views, and the political prescriptions taken from them, were not uniform, but the central tendency was to identify ‘lower races’ with lack of civilization. J. W. Powell in the American Anthropologist of 1888 again asks whether it is possible for peoples to ‘acquire culture and lose it – and become degraded’. He, like others, routinely refers to ‘civilised travelers among the lower races of mankind’ (1888: 99). In 1919 George S. Painter writing on ‘The Future of the American Negro’ advises us that: ‘the hothouse plant may bring more immediate and brilliant results, because of forced and abnormal conditions, but at the expense of hardiness and vitality. It is proverbially true that primitive peoples cannot stand an enforced civilization’ (Painter 1919: 410).

Holmes (1910) similarly writes of the ‘Problems of the American Race’ and predicts the ‘complete absorption or blotting out of the red race’ leading to a final reduction of all peoples to a common race type. He continues, ominously: ‘if peaceful amalgamation fails, extinction of the weaker by less gentle means will do the work … The final battle of the races for possession of the world is already on’ (Holmes 1910: 161) Both Painter and Holmes are concerned about America and the ‘American Negro’ and ‘red race’ but the belief that ‘weaker peoples’ would fall to the stronger more advanced races, was a universal one, applicable across all continents. Holmes concludes his comments by referring to ‘the battle for possession of the world’, race struggle on a global scale. The anthropological views recorded above were concentrated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. They carry an academic tone, notable for their confident scientific attitude. A fine example comes in a review of a book on the ‘races of Europe’ by the Librarian of the Musée d’histoire in Paris, M. Deniker. Largely agreeing with Deniker, the reviewer (Ripley 1899) nonetheless points to the author’s failure to emphasize ‘the extremely brachycephalous spot at the mouth of the Scheldt’ and notes a difference of three and a half points between Deniker’s (77) cephalic index for Denmark and Beddoes’s published index (80.5). If Deniker were right this would make for an index that was ‘strongly Teutonic’. What confidence in the miracle of the cephalic index! If they were aware of them, Deniker and Beddoes may have been alarmed by Lapouge’s earlier comments: I am convinced that in the next century millions will cut each others’ throats because of one or two degrees more or less of cephalic index. This is the sign by which people will recognise one another as belonging to the same nationalities and by which the most sentimental will assist in the wholesale slaughter of peoples. (1887, cited in Banton 1998: 91)

But as well as the scientific method there were countless examples of the uses of race science for political prescription. We referred earlier to the debates surrounding the Indian

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Mutiny and the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, which triggered bitter disputes, laced with racial attitudes. Even earlier than this, Thomas Carlyle had published his vituperative attack on philanthropists and ‘negrophiles’ for their failure to recognize the indolence of the Negro and the threat he represented to white civilization. (His essay was first published in 1849 (in Fraser’s magazine) as ‘The Negro Question’ and reprinted in 1853 with the word ‘nigger’ replacing negro.) The language of Carlyle’s essay (1971) is astonishingly crude. He was, it seems, obsessed by pumpkins, so frequently does he refer to the ‘jaws of Quashee’ eating them. His racial views could be applied to national questions and racial purity at home, or could be applied internationally. This was truly a world perspective in which his conviction of the racial superiority of whites could be read into his views on white degeneracy at home (the Irish), the plight of planters in the Caribbean (bedevilled by the Demerara Nigger), or the impending conflict (that is, the coming civil war ) in the United States. In the early twentieth century, just after the Great War, two books appeared which proclaimed the superiority of the Nordic white European peoples, and trajected their views beyond nations and onto civilization and the global condition. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race had appeared in the United States in 1918, pronouncing that ‘race was everything’. Similar in style and import was Lorthrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, published in New York in 1923: ‘All over the civilized world racial values are diminishing, and the logical end of this disgenic process is racial bankruptcy and the collapse of civilization’ (Stoddard 1923: 303).

CONCLUSIONS: NATIONALIZING RACE, GLOBALIZING RACE The pre-modern meanings (that is, prior to the biologizing of race) of race and nation converged on the sense of ‘a people’. These ‘peoples’ may on the one hand form a nation

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and may on the other hand represent divisions in a society, as instanced in the distinction between Gauls and Franks in France, and between Saxons and Normans in England. In the modern period the meaning of race as a unitary body of people, physically and culturally, is nationalized, that is incorporated into the concept of nation. Peoples which are self-evidently multiracial (like the United States) nonetheless adopt ‘a dominant race’ framework within which others are inferiorized. These inferiorized groups are also overwhelmingly associated with low status and class position, and with social disorder, failure and deficiency. In the social theorizing of nation and race, the universalist (civic) paradigm of nation departs from the equation of race and nation and attempts to replace race-nation exclusiveness with a multiethnic inclusiveness. But as, in different ways, Foucault and Balibar argue, there is a constant pressure towards racializing (or particularizing) nation, both in its internal representations, and in the control of borders and inter-state relations. Thus both historically and theoretically it is possible to discern race as nation, and races within nations, as divisions within them. Finally, we have suggested, the theory of races becomes a global paradigm of the dominance of a particular civilization seen as civilization itself. Not uncommonly, this civilization is seen to be in peril, by decay from within, or threat from without. The theme of race as civilization, or indeed civilization as race, was to be found in scholarly and popular works in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, from which many of our examples have been drawn. In the twenty-first century, in a de-racialized form, the language of civilization, survival and threat is repeatedly evoked in international relations. The United States, from its position of global economic, military and cultural domination, continues to speak of Western civilization, civilization itself and the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ which are being defended by military means. Nation and civilization are stripped of biological language but live on as key terms in a tacit politico-cultural hierarchy. It would require another chapter to discuss one crucial manifestation of ‘racial solidarity’,

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that is race as resistance, where suppressed or inferiorized groups build an oppositional sense of peoplehood, in a fight for equality and liberation. This raises two questions which can only be hinted at here. First, is the language of race capable of being transformed into a message of liberation without replicating the race chauvinism which it opposes? Second, is the de-racialization of the language of state, inter-state and global-civilizational politics a real or pyrrhic victory? Wallerstein (1994) has argued that the ‘universalist’ response to multiculturalism (as a progressive force) masks a deep conservatism. But does Wallerstein really believe that multicultural politics poses any real threat to the world capitalist order at the centre of his own analysis (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999)? On the second issue, the argument that de-racialization has been a limited gain does appear to be a deeply pessimistic view. However, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that future generations might look back on the contemporary ideologies of freedom and democracy (as civilizational politics) in much the same way that we now look back on the language of race.

NOTES 1 Eric R. Wolf (1994) ‘Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture and people’, in Current Anthropology, 35 (1): 1–12: ‘in the United States … the old physical anthropology remained in place until the mid-1950s’. 2 See also Chamberlain (1911) and Grant (1924). 3 See Husbands (1991), Rattansi (1994) and Fetzer (2000). 4 See also Wallerstein (1997). 5 Much disputed by the British government. 6 Interestingly, the Greek word ethnos (people, nation) could also mean a mere class or group. 7 See discussion in Fenton (1999). 8 But see also Curtin (1964), Fredrickson (2003), Malik (1996), Stepan (1982) and Biddiss (1979). 9 Wilson (1980), Vann Woodward (1974) and Camejo (1976). 10 Note Banton’s comment (1977: 16) on race not having biological connotations at this time. 11 These lectures have recently been published (2003) as Society Must be Defended, having been prepared as lectures in 1976. 12 See reference to this in Society Must be Defended.

13 See Kaufmann (2004) and Wimmer (2004). 14 On Fiji see Lawson (1991), Premdas (2004), Carens (2000), Gladney (1998), Kaufmann (2004) and on Malaysia see Hirschmann (1986), Fenton (2003a, 2003b) and Milne and Mauzy (1999).

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17 Nation and Commemoration CHARLES TURNER

Whether or not they have geographical extension, all human collectivities have a relationship to time. Whatever else they do, the actions of their members contribute to the creation, maintenance, alteration or destruction of that relationship. Regardless of the purpose for which a collectivity exists, part of what it means to belong to such a collectivity, to share a life in common, is defined by the manner in which the collectivity’s relationship to time is shaped. And while all collectivities have a relationship to past, present and future, students of social time may distinguish between them according to which temporal dimension is the most important. Thus at one extreme, collectivities such as the family, the school or churches may be dedicated to the transmission of an already-existing tradition of practices or belief, so that in their relationship to time the past predominates. At the other, companies or business corporations or groups of scientists are oriented primarily towards the achievement of some future goal. At some point between these extremes, political parties or interest groups may be oriented primarily towards the achievement of immediate, pragmatically defined goals or to the contingent needs or opportunities of the moment (Gurvitch 1963). If there is a politics of time it is because the temporal logic of one type of collectivity may be imposed upon the life of another with a different temporal

logic. Educational institutions, for instance, geared to the transmission of an existing body of knowledge, may come under pressure to adopt a temporal orientation appropriate to businesses or bureaucracies. One of the peculiarities of the collectivity we call the nation is that it appears from the start to obey more than one temporal logic simultaneously, that is, to face towards the past and the future in equal measure. A politics of time is a necessary rather than a contingent feature of it. This peculiarity is reflected in the scholarly literature, which is able to see the nation as both the product of forward-looking, futureoriented, modern states (Gellner 1983) and as the repository of long-lasting or primordial longings and ineradicable memories (Smith 1986). This temporal ambivalence – the nation is both modern and pre-modern – partly explains why the question ‘What is a nation?’ has continued to puzzle social scientists in a way that the questions ‘What is a family?’ or ‘What is a school?’ or ‘What is a trade union?’ have not. Indeed, at times this can appear more as an insoluble metaphysical problem, rephrased by Ernest Gellner as the unanswerable question ‘Do nations have navels?’ (Gellner 1997). An increasingly prevalent response has been to pay lip service to this question but to take seriously de Tocqueville’s remark that while all nations bear the mark of

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their origin, ‘the spirit of analysis has come upon nations only as they matured, by which time their origins have been obscured by time’ (Tocqueville 1945: 28). Once this is accepted, attention turns towards the more localized and detailed study of the devices through which individual nations make sense of, represent and perform their own temporal identity, and towards the variation in the extent to which nations have available to them a repository of genuinely original historical resources on which to base it. Of the means through which this temporal self-definition occurs, few have received as much recent scholarly attention as that of commemoration. The term ‘commemoration’ refers to all those devices through which a nation recalls, marks, embodies, discusses or argues about its past, and to all those devices which are intended to create or sustain a sense of belonging or ‘we feeling’ in the individuals who belong to it, a sense of belonging which may or may not provide for a means of addressing future tasks and possibilities. Commemoration, then, includes public rituals of remembrance and individual acts of recollection, the building of monuments and dedication of places of memory, the construction of museums and the naming of streets, the visiting of such places, public debates over the meaning and significance of historical events, and the unspoken or gestural ways through which nationality is not so much represented as incorporated in the practices of everyday life. The construction of a repertoire of such devices allows the student of nationhood to gain comparative knowledge of the relationship between nation and commemoration, and to appreciate the considerable variation in the significance attached to different types of historical event, in the relationship between commemorative devices designed for domestic consumption and those directed at an international audience, and in the relationship between explicit and implicit modes of commemoration. The banal nationalism (Billig 1995) which feeds off the latter, it may be observed, is a feature of nations with settled and relatively continuous internal political histories, while spectacular public controversies over explicit acts of commemoration are a feature of nations with a less settled or more

violent political past. Renan’s remark that forgetting is as important to nationhood as remembering covers both of these cases. On the one hand, nationhood may be rooted in customary ways of behaving which need no explicit articulation (the most extreme version of this is the English seventeenth-century claim about an ancient constitution which had existed since ‘time immemorial’, that is, beyond any definable and necessarily contingent beginning which would require marking (Pocock 1957)). On the other, where something is explicitly remembered something else is implicitly or explicitly forgotten.

HISTORICAL EVENTS AND PERIODS Nowhere is the thesis about the selective character of commemoration more apposite than in the commemoration of historical events. While it may be true that the weight and resonance which historical events are able to acquire varies between nations, there is no nation which does not have at least one day on which events deemed significant are marked. Proponents of the thesis of invented traditions emphasize the delay – possibly of centuries – between the event and the decision to mark it and the manipulative or hegemonic relationship between actors who make the decision and those expected to agree to participate in its marking. But the ubiquity of the practice makes it difficult to dismiss as artificial. An important task for students of nationhood is to establish correlations between type of nation and the type of event commemorated. Here some necessarily general relationships can be suggested. First, it is not uncommon for older nations which have a history of belonging to larger geopolitical entities in late feudal or early modern Europe in which their political identity was precarious, and whose experience of modernity was accompanied by a struggle to acquire a measure of political autonomy, to attach importance to acts of heroic resistance in the face of overwhelming odds. Whether or not they are explicitly marked, dates such as September 11th for

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Catalonia (siege of Barcelona 1714), or June 28th for Serbia (battle of Kosovo Polye 1389), April 16th for Scotland (battle of Culloden 1746) or August 19th for Romania (battle of the Ma˘ra˘ s¸es¸ti, 1917) are part of those nations’ memorial calendar. The case of modern Israel is a notable variation on this theme, the defeat at the battle of Masada in AD70 and other examples of heroic military action having acquired, for a state which sees itself as under constant siege, a memorial significance equal to that of the Holocaust (Zerubavel 1995). Note that the heroism is more important than the fact of defeat, and that the events concerned are distant enough in time to be readily discussed but sufficiently well documented – they are history rather than myth – to have contemporary resonance. Secondly, we may observe that nations which have achieved a definitive political autonomy may mark the fact by making independence day a national holiday, and by marking historic victories rather than defeats. Poland, for instance, whose history is replete with heroic defeats – the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 being the most recent – nonetheless gives prominence to November 11th (independence day in 1918), May 3rd (the constitution of 1793) and the battles of Grunwald (defeat of the Teutonic Knights by Polish and Lithuanian forces in 1414) and Monte Cassino (defeat of the Germans in 1944). This suggests that, even if one accepts Gellner’s thesis that nations are the product of processes of rationalization and modernization which generated modern states, the events which modern states choose as markers of identity do not need to be those that define their internal political character. In the United States, for instance, whose formal political character has altered little since its inception, and whose citizens are conscious of and knowledgeable about their constitution, the primary object of collective commemoration is July 4th, the issuing of the Declaration of Independence, and not the framing of the constitution or decisive battles of the Civil War. In France, July 14th focuses the nation’s attention on a relatively insignificant historical event, the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris. In England, the one peculiarly English secular festival which is widely observed, Guy Fawkes

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night on November 5th, commemorates the foiling of a (Catholic!) plot to destroy the English parliament in 1605, whereas events of greater long-term political significance – such as 1688 – are ignored. The choice of these events which did not definitively shape the life of a nation may perhaps be explained in functional terms. The United States constitution may be an agreed upon framework and the heart of American political identity, but it can also provide a resource for opposing sides in social conflict (over abortion or the right to bear arms). The political history of France since 1789 is one of considerable political discontinuity, the legacy of the revolution too ambivalent for the commemoration of its founding to refer to the most decisive events associated with it (Arendt 1960; Furet 1996). The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 may have set the seal on Britain’s character as a constitutional monarchy, but to commemorate it officially would be to presume a measure of agreement about the desirability of this form of government which does not exist. Instead, attention is focused upon events known in common and capable of suspending or neutralizing political or social discord. This does not, of course, rule out the possibility of an appeal to counter-memories even on these occasions, as Spillman has shown for the 1976 bicentennial celebrations in the United States (Spillman 1997). But we may still speak of a process of condensation and displacement in which politically less significant or less controversial events are the focus for or catalyst of expressions of national belonging. If we take a shared language to be central to a nation’s identity, together with the growth of mass literacy (Anderson 1981), then we may note a parallel to this in the role played by the anniversaries of the births and deaths of a national literature’s finest exponents, events whose marking serves to draw our attention to the role played by his or her writings in the nation’s awareness of itself. We may, in addition, identify a third class of nations, largely but not exclusively those which have undergone a period of totalitarian or authoritarian rule under modern conditions, whose political history is either too painful or

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too complex or both for controversy-generating events which are within living memory to be suppressed, so that these come to occupy a place in a nation’s memorial landscape and its memorial calendar alongside and equal in importance to those which might provide a shared sense of belonging and inter-generational solidarity. The most notable example is the role played by the commemoration of the Holocaust in post-war Germany, but we may also add such events as the Kielce and Jedwabne pogroms and the Vistula Action of 1947 (in which Ukrainian and Lemki minorities were ethnically cleansed) in Poland, the Vietnam War in the United States, the Srebrenica massacre (which Dutch peace-keepers failed to prevent) in both Bosnia and the Netherlands, the mass disappearances under the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1947, the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Hungarian uprising of 1956. It is a common feature of such events that, unlike those associated with the regular conduct of war, their commemoration and the manner of it are a matter of both internal political and international controversy (Herf 1997; Steinlauf 1997). However, here too the events commemorated in many cases stand for a larger, more complex and ambiguous set of events making up a decisive period in a nation’s history. It is noteworthy here that since 1990 a reunited Germany commemorates the period of the destruction of European Jewry on November 8th (Kristallnacht in 1938) and January 27th (arrival of Soviet troops at Auschwitz in 1945), anniversaries of its beginning and end. Moreover, marking these dates – which frame only the second half of the Third Reich – is a means of recalling the entire period from 1933 to 1945. Similarly, the events marked in postcommunist societies are often a shorthand for commemorative energies directed at the entire period (40 or 70 years) of communist rule. If we agree that a nation’s commemorative practices create, sustain, alter or destroy its relationship to its own temporality, we may note here an important difference between Germany’s response to fascism and the responses of Eastern

European nations to communism. The post-war division of Germany can be said to have suspended nationhood, with the commemoration of the past being subordinate to the futureoriented projects of economic renewal in the West and ‘building socialism’ in the East. By contrast, the circumstance of post-communism in Eastern Europe is such that commemoration is not a mere adjunct to nation-building but central to it. That circumstance is a postcolonial one in which commemorative activity directed at events of national significance (activity which was forbidden by regimes which deployed their own commemorative practices governed, in many cases, by a rhetoric of international solidarity rather than national pride) becomes a source as well as a symbol of national belonging. It is also one in which post-communism implies a ‘return to Europe’ and to the values associated with it, and here there is a significant difference between post-fascist Germany and post-communist Eastern Europe. In the latter, commemorative activity may be directed not only towards the period of communist rule but towards a preceding period in which, it is claimed, the nation embodied – albeit briefly – the values it seeks to aspire to today. Communism, then, instead of being an ineradicable burden, can be seen as a historical parenthesis. This hermeneutics, in which a liberal and/or democratic tradition is recovered from within a largely non-liberal or non-democratic political history, itself has a tradition among liberal intellectuals in Eastern Europe (Mishkova 2004). By contrast, this aspect of national commemoration, in which a historical period preceding that of totalitarianism is called upon to act as a focus of shared national sentiment, appeared to be unavailable to a reunited Germany. Karl-Heinz Bohrer’s liberal-conservative argument ‘Why we are not a nation and why we should become one’ (Bohrer 1991), in which a national tradition predating national socialism is held to be recoverable, is forced to exist alongside the widespread popularity within Germany of theses concerning the rootedness of national socialism in long-term developments in preexisting German culture, and the consequent unavoidability of a presentist and futuredirected temporal orientation (Eley 2000).

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The variety of types of event which can secure a nation’s identity, in particular the availability of both uncontroversial and controversial events as foci of national attention, reminds us that what we call a national tradition – regardless of the extent to which we can say that it is invented – may consist in an extended argument that a nation conducts with itself about the goods internal to that tradition (MacIntyre 1981) or in extreme cases about whether there is such a tradition at all. Indeed, it is rare that a nation may be said to construct a past for itself in accordance with an already-existing agreement about what those goods consist in.

DEVICES If all nations mark significant events in their past, they all draw upon a repertoire of memorial devices through which to do so. There is some connection between type of event and type of device, although the empirical variety of the devices suggests caution. The device chosen may reflect the internal life of the nation, its current international status, and its prevailing political aesthetic as much as the nature of the event itself, a fact testified to by the considerable historical variation in choice of memorial device: the monument, the museum, the cemetery, the history textbook, the ceremonial may all be markers of the same event. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of monuments to political violence. In the case of war memorials, it is an oft-noted fact that in Western and Central Europe before World War I, memorials to previous conflicts would have had a predominantly figurative, heroic and/or religious character (the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig erected in 1913 on the centenary of Napoleon’s defeat there is a fine example), and that while officers might be mentioned by name, regular soldiers would not be. World War I saw a change in this practice, the names of the dead appearing side by side regardless of rank (Lacqueur 1994; Koselleck 1979) and memorials being erected in small communities and taking on a less

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military character, either through the use of non-military motifs (such as the mother and child in the villages of northern France) or through the adoption of abstract rather than figurative modes of representation. Here the Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall is the most obvious example (Homberger 1976; Winter 1995). The tombs of the unknown – and unranked – soldier in the capital cities of major combatant countries should also be mentioned here. These examples have been interpreted as evidence of a democratization of European political culture and a hesitancy about linking warfare and heroism, just as the use of heroic and gargantuan statuary in the Soviet memorials to World War II may be said to have reflected the survival of a militaristic ethos within a non-democratic political culture. Yet while this may be true, we may also extend the thesis that more contingent factors influence choice of memorial object and observe that in northern France after World War I abstract designs – in particular the obelisk – were often chosen not because they expressed a particular political hermeneutics but because they were the cheapest option from a repertoire of standard designs for local communities operating under financial constraint. Monuments – and, we may add, street names – are among a nation’s most tangible and enduring means for focusing its members’ attention on matters of historical significance. However, it may be noted that if a nation’s relationship with its past is a matter of interpretation and is therefore mediated through devices such as monuments, then its relationship with those monuments themselves is mediated through human action. Monuments provide occasions for national reflection both before and after they are erected, and more importantly, become recognized sites for organized or spontaneous memorial performances. Yet the relationship between these two forms of mediation presents one of the more intractable problems for students of nation and commemoration. On the one hand, it may be suggested that the ceremonial performances which are repeated annually and which populate a nation’s calendar are more significant to the nation’s temporal orientation than the sites

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at which they occur, that nationality enacted is more robust than nationality represented. For the monument, which is a permanent physical reminder of a nation’s past and which can foster a community of the living and the dead, can also become a mundane feature of the urban scene: ‘there is nothing as invisible as a monument’ (Musil 1990). On the other hand, while ritual memorial performances which take place at such monuments may generate more intense communal sentiments than the monument in its muteness can, they, unlike the monument, may evaporate once the performance is over. From a technical point of view this indifference of both the monument – permanent but unnoticed – and the ritual performance – intense but then forgotten – suggests a number of things. First, it suggests that central to the effectiveness of commemorative performance is its regular and repetitious character: the power of commemoration then consists less in the effectiveness of the ritual actions which support it, than in their place on a calendar; secondly, it makes all the more notable monuments that can command sustained attention throughout the year – Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in Washington is the most notable example here – and commemorative acts which, though they take place only once, are themselves subsequently remembered. Examples here include the burial or, more spectacularly, reburial of a nation’s political or literary figures (such as Stalin in 1953, Churchill in 1965, the reburial of Sikorski in Poland in 1993 and of Imre Nagy in Hungary in 1991, the funeral of Sartre in 1979); the marking of centennials or bicentennials of a nation’s founding, (Spillman 1997) or ceremonies of international reconciliation (Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984; Kohl and Ronald Reagan at Bitburg in 1985). Thirdly, there are spontaneous gestures which break with ritual expectations, such as German Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters in 1970, a commemorative gesture which was itself commemorated in the photograph which continues to be reproduced in numerous works on German nationhood and the Holocaust.

However, if we accept the thesis that nationality enacted is as robust as nationality represented, then we may push this claim further and suggest that officially sanctioned commemoration may be no more important as a marker of national identity than the myriad forms of non-political practice, both formal and informal, which make up a national life. Examples of non-political ritual with an overtly commemorative character include the visiting of graveyards on All Souls Day in some Catholic countries (such as Poland or Mexico), an observance which generates almost universal national participation. But such practices need not be directed towards specific events in the past for us to call them commemorative: the Tour de France in France or the Grand National in England; St George’s Day in Catalonia, on which everyone is expected to give a book and a rose, are examples. The reason for this is that as well as speaking of representational memory operating at the level of overt national symbolism and ceremonial practice, we may also speak of embodied memory operating at the level of inherited or implicitly transmitted ways of acting (Bergson 1988; Connerton 1989). Whether or not we refer to it as ‘collective amnesia’ (Billig 1995: 38), there is as much a memory of how to do something and continue doing it, as a memory of what happened in the past, and we may observe that those marks of national distinction which remain most peculiar to an individual nation may be those which are most opaque to outsiders, and reside not so much in the visible building blocks of national identity – the ceremonial which is now readily observable by visitors and which on occasion is driven by the logic of tourism, the national museum, the showpiece cemetery, the names of streets – but in its interstices, in its seen but unnoticed features such as the rhythms of everyday speech (Milosz 1968) or in the nuances of bodily gesture (Mauss 1979 [1930]; Connerton 1989; Scarry 1985). And we may add that a nation’s identity, its temporal continuity, becomes looser when it forgets how to carry out these routine practices or when they fall into neglect.

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ORGANIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF COMMEMORATION This important observation about the tacit or habitual forms of commemoration has proved difficult to translate into sound generalizations about, say, nationally specific modes of bodily comportment, and it remains a matter of marginal or speculative concern in the scholarly literature, which tends to focus on the more spectacular or overt forms of commemorative practice. Yet even here there is often a reluctance to acknowledge the fact that whether it generates common sentiment or social discord, explicit commemoration is something which does not happen without an accompanying agent or agents. It is always organized in some way, and not always by public or official bodies. Particularly in cases of individual monuments or new museums, or anniversary celebrations, we may speak of a commemorative entrepreneurialism in which an organizational nucleus of actors drives a memorial project forward and seeks to draw peripheral actors in. Robert Musil gave a memorable account of a doomed version of such a project in his comic masterpiece The Man Without Qualities (Musil 1995 [1940]); a more cynical account of such projects can be found in Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (Finkelstein 2003). But these extreme cases only serve to remind us of the importance of the more mundane fact that many of a nation’s more potent symbols, particularly those directed at its origins, may have been established long after such origins could be said to have occurred, and that they are, moreover, the product of complex relationships between central government, regional authorities, civil society associations, business people and intellectuals, an organizational network or ‘cultural centre’ in which there may be only a marginal place for political actors (Spillman 1997). Such an organizational perspective provides an important methodological counterweight to the view that sees invented traditions as merely a modern version of bread and circuses, the product of a hegemonic strategy on the part of the rulers of modern nation-states keen to provide collective compensation for the socially divisive effects of modernization.

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FROM HISTORY TO MEMORY The fact that the selection of examples of memorial practice we have passed in review here is by no means comprehensive – we have said nothing for example about commemoration in the ancient or medieval world or in non-literate societies (Coleman 1992; Vansina 1965), in all of which commemorative activity played a central role in the maintenance of temporal coherence – may tempt us to believe in a universal human need for memory, such that, for instance, the commemoration of events of significance to modern nations may be seen as the secular functional equivalent of practices with a religious character. However, such a thesis sits uneasily with the geographical and historical variation in those practices, and with the more important fact that modern secular forms of commemoration presuppose the past’s pastness in a way in which religious forms of commemoration do not. The event which is commemorated in secular modern nations belongs to history and the commemoration of it both presupposes this pastness and can exist alongside the construction of an historical argument about it. Regardless of the extent to which those nations may seek to define themselves in terms of a specific religious confession, particularly where church and state are not separated, and regardless of clerical involvement in secular commemorative practice, the practice itself remains secular. By contrast, the historical veracity of the events of, say, the last supper or of Christ’s passion remains beyond discussion for adherents of the Christian faith. In religious commemorative acts – such as the liturgy – past and present are not first separate and then ‘brought together’. Modern secular, as opposed to ancient or medieval memories, are enacted in societies which have history – and the irrevocable sundering of past and present – at their centre. If we put the matter like this we can make sense of the upsurge which has occurred in the past two decades of both popular and scholarly interest in commemoration, an interest which suggests something about the changing character of modern industrial societies in

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which nationhood now resides. This approach is exemplified by Nora’s ‘realms of memory’ project in France (Nora 1996 [1984]), begun in the late 1970s, in which the historicalcum-progressive character of modern societies necessarily generates radical discontinuities between past and present, and militates against the unproblematic, quasi-natural transmission of a national memory. ‘Realms’ or ‘Places’ of memory then refers to all those aspects of French national life which act as anchors of identity in the face of a history that constantly threatens to erode or transform it. We may suggest, however, an extension of this thesis, based on Max Weber’s thesis of the ineradicability of the human search for meaning, and say that in the twentieth century modern societies have been shaped by a temporality defined not merely by history, but by historical progress, in which history is not only a matter of collective fate or inescapable change but something to be made. History is linked with an improvement of the human condition, and has meaning as well as direction. This type of historicism was subscribed to by both liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by Leninism in the twentieth, and the Cold War which ended in 1991 may be interpreted as a struggle over the meaning which history could have. In the 1970s in the West doubts had already set in about the steering capacities of modern states and about their capacity to derive political legitimacy from history-making; simultaneously in the communist bloc, the growth of dissident movements called into question historicism in its Leninist version. The melancholia which followed the collapse of communism has been accompanied in the West by a readiness to explore sources of meaning unconnected with the pursuit of future prosperity. In Eastern Europe, the partially imported character of capitalism and democracy means that they contribute only partially to the rebirth of post-communist nations. Those nations’ identities are grounded not only in economic or political achievement, but in the practices through which views of the national past are either corrected or made a matter of public controversy.

CONCLUSION While the flood of individual studies of nation and commemoration shows no sign of abating, methodological questions of the sort hinted at here remain. Students of history, for instance, have often found it difficult to combine an interest in empirical historical truth and a sensitivity to issues in the philosophy of history. It may be that the field of commemoration, which has attracted historians as much as if not more than sociologists, and in which the material itself provides a direct stimulation to reflection on history’s shape and meaning, provides an opportunity to transcend this distinction or to render it less stark. Yet frequently in studies of memory and the politics of memory, the lure of the archive remains. This has produced many thorough pieces of work about individual cases, but there is still work to be done in order to connect this material with the longstanding and sophisticated literature on cultural transmission, ritual, tradition and the philosophy of history, in order that the broader significance of commemoration for contemporary societies remains in focus. In addition, while intellectuals and scholars, wary of references to ‘national character’ focus upon the more overt and welldocumented relationships between nation and commemoration, there is a need less for the synopsis of controversies and debates surrounding the efforts of some nations to come to terms with the past, than for a critical hermeneutics of commemoration as part of a broader ethnography of nationhood. Such a hermeneutics would accord due weight to the aesthetics of public commemoration, an aesthetics in which embodied and habitual memory was given its place alongside that of representational memory. REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1981) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Arendt, H. (1960) On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bergson, H. (1988) Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

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Bohrer, K-H. (1991) ‘Why We are Not a Nation and Why We Should Become One’, New German Critique, No. 52. Coleman, J. (1992) Ancient and Medieval Memories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eley, G. (2000) The Goldhagen Effect. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Finkelstein, N. (2003) The Holocaust Industry. London: Verso. Furet, F. (1996) [1984]) ‘The Ancien Régime and the Revolution’, in P. Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1997) Nationalism. London: Phoenix. Gurvitch, G. (1963) ‘Social Structure and the Multiplicity of Times’, in E. Tiryakian (ed.), Sociological Theory, Values and Sociocultural Change. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Herf, J. (1997) Divided Memory. London: Harvard University Press. Homberger, E. (1976) ‘The Story of the Cenotaph’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 3, 896, (12 November). Koselleck, R. (1979) ‘Kriegerdenkmale als Identitätsstiftungen der Überlebenden’, in O. Marquard (ed.), Identität. Munich: Fink. Lacqueur, T. (1994) ‘Memory and naming in the Great War, in J. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue. Aldershot: Duckworth. Mauss, M. (1979 [1930]) ‘Body Techniques’, in Sociology and Psychology: Essays by Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Milosz, C. (1968) ‘Russia’, in Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mishkova, D. (2004) ‘The Uses of National Identity in the Balkans’, in M. Todorova (ed.), Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory. London: Hurst and Co. Musil, R. (1990) Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Musil, R. (1995 [1940]) The Man Without Qualities. London: Picador. Nora, P. (1996 [1984]) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1957) The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, A. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Spillman, L. (1997) Nation and Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinlauf, M. (1997) Bondage to the Dead. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Tocqueville, A. de (1945) Democracy in America. New York: The Free Press. Vansina, J. (1965) Oral Tradition. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Winter, J. (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zerubavel, E. (1981) Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, Y. (1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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18 Memory, Truth and Victimhood in Post-trauma Societies JOHN D. BREWER

The intensification of organized violence with globalization has created new wars (Kaldor 1999) and transformed old ones (Moore 2000) to fundamentally alter the focus in social science on genocidal nationalism (Shaw 2003). The new interest in social science with memory, truth and suffering (on the latter see Wilkinson 2004) can be attributed to the negative impact that several cases of genocidal nationalism have had on our notion of late modernity as enlightened and progressive (Bauman 1989). The discovery of memory in social science is really the return of genocide to contemporary experience. Theories of nationalism have always been sensitive to the link between nation, violence and memory, but we now need to recast their relationship in order to understand the new problems faced by posttrauma nations. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the pivotal role of memory in national and communal conflicts, but primarily to shift focus on to the post-violence setting in order to assess the role of memory as a peace strategy. This involves attention to subsidiary issues like truth recovery and victimhood as new features of social science and their potential as strategies for healing in post-trauma societies. Remembrance and commemoration are

difficult peace-making strategies and memories of the conflict can be obstacles to successful post-violence adjustments, nonetheless memory must become an object of public policy after communal violence. Before we look at how memory is implicated in war and peace, it is worthwhile drawing attention to the particular way that memory is conceptualized as a sociological process in these arguments.

UNDERSTANDING MEMORY Sociology understands memory as having individual and social dimensions. Remembrance is something we all do as individuals all the time, and we all have our own personal set of memories, unique in its constellation to us. What goes on in people’s heads in the formation and use of individual memories is a question about individual remembrance. We might call this personal memory. What goes on in society in the formation and use of collective memory is a question of social remembrance. The realization that societies remember as much as individuals has received renewed attention (Connerton 1989; Misztal 2003) as societies nowadays seem to be more conflict-ridden, vulnerable and

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subject to risk, and as evocations of supposedly golden ages dominate collective memory. Sociologists in the past recognized the power of collective memory, but the new term ‘social memory’ now dominates the field. There is a good reason for this change in nomenclature. Collective memories are understood as group memories, shared by a community, that help to bind that community together. Nations have collective memories as part of their narrative of nationhood, so may ethnic groups and other communities. Collective memories are thus shared images and representations of the past that assist in constructing social solidarity. Social memory as a term includes this dimension, but it also incorporates the claim that individual remembrance or personal memory is itself social. Personal memory is clearly not collective but it is still social. There are several reasons why memory is social: • People have personal and collective memories at the same time, the latter being those representations that are commonly shared by all. • Personal memories exist in relation to the social processes that occasion and shape them, such as language, nationalism, cultural and political symbols and the like. • Individual remembering takes place in a social context and memories can be occasioned by the context in which people live. • Remembering serves social purposes at the personal and public levels, being sociologically functional for individuals and societies. • Memories can affect the social behaviour of people and groups. • Memories supply individual and social sense-making processes, giving ways of understanding and comprehending the world and a set of values and beliefs about the world. • Memories help in the construction of collective identities and boundaries, whether these are national, cultural, ethnic, religious or otherwise. • Social processes like culture, nationhood and ethnicity are in part constituted by memory.

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• Memory is constructed by various social practices that encourage or discourage the remembrance and commemoration of particular things. • Forgetting is as social as remembrance and the denial or recasting of particular memories serves social purposes. • Memories are selective and therefore always open to change and can be affected by social change, changes that reinforce certain memories or encourage collective amnesia. Social memory is more than just the social benefits or social aspects of personal memory, and social memory does not just work through people’s personal memory as a set of consequences at the societal level deriving from individual remembrances. Social memory is this, but it is also a set of specific public remembrances that are manipulated and constructed by various social practices. The ways in which social memory has been manufactured and manipulated for the purposes of nationalism and nation-building are obvious examples.

NATIONHOOD, IDENTITY AND MEMORY Nations and memory are indivisible. Misztal refers to ‘communities of memory’ (2003: 155), in that memories help to mark social boundaries and define collective identity. These groups – families, ethnic, racial or religious communities, whole nations or global diaspora networks – are in part constituted by memory – that is, they are made up as units in part from the sense of shared past and common journeying that memories furnish – but these communities also help to constitute memory, in that they socialize us into what should be remembered and what forgotten. It is for this reason that there is such a strong link between memory and nationalism. There are several dimensions to this relationship. Social memories are often linked to features of nationhood, to the physical and symbolic places, landscapes, cultural and historical sites and events that constitute the

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nation. We have personal memories of places and landscapes that link us collectively to the nation. Nations need a narrative by which to construct a sense of nationhood – a historical narrative of the past, a sense of the travails and triumphs on the journey to nationhood, a sense of collective identity and solidarity and so on – all of which memories help to supply. Nations require a sense of their past for reasons of social cohesion, memories of which are embodied in acts of public commemoration and in public memorials, in public images, texts, photographs and rituals that socialize us in what to remember. Nationhood also requires us to forget. Deliberate collective amnesia or denial helps in nation-building since it excludes from the national narrative items that in the present here-and-now are problematic. These items might be anything that prevents the construction of the nation as an imagined community and which blurs the social boundaries that mark the nation or disrupts the formation of a common identity. They might also be any items that suggest that the members of the nation do not share a common destiny. Nations need to forget things from the past that dispute a common journeying to nationhood amongst its peoples and things that suggest a parting of the ways in the future. So closely allied are social memory and nationalism that it is no surprise that in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century hey-days of nationalism in Europe, we saw the greatest expansion in building large public memorials that now adorn civic centres and in the development of national traditions and emblems that served as national memories. The link between memory and communal violence is clear from this summary (for a fuller account, see Ray 2000). Social memory is one of the processes that people go to war about and memories of the violence can keep the enmity going. A comment on each is appropriate. Memory is often deeply embedded in the conflict precisely because memory defines the boundaries between the included and excluded groups, it shapes the identity of one’s own group and that of the marginalized other. The state or the powerful dominant community can manipulate memories – and

history generally – to create an enemy and justify violence against them. Memories help to construct racial separateness; they can divide people into separate and distinct imagined communities. Public acts of remembrance or rituals of commemoration of past wars, usually done in honour of the victors who get to write history from their point of view, can keep alive old divisions and continually reinforce the cultural inferiority of the vanquished and maintain some ethnic group as despised; and the vanquished can have their own ‘sad celebrations’ to keep alive their servitude and defeat. These acts of remembrance can be ‘official’, developed by the state, but also ‘unofficial’, in which members of the victorious group hammer home their dominance in more aggressive acts of remembrance: contrast the celebrations of 1690 in Northern Ireland by Loyalist gangs compared to the state. Memories can also be used to develop a sense of vengeful justice, as Ray puts it (1999), in which some group feels ‘good cause’ to attack another to avenge some supposed or real historical affront. Ray explores how senses of the past were used in the Balkans as part of the genocide that befell the collapse of Yugoslavia because some groups had a distorted notion of themselves as having ethnically pure homelands in the past, which they wished to recreate. This analysis has much broader application. Notions of ‘historic homelands’ often lead to contested borders (Robin and Strath 2003) and thus to violence in the name of justice, revenge, loss or restoration. For these and many other reasons, memory is implicated in war. It is also implicated in peace because memories of the communal violence hamper peace processes. They can do so in innumerable ways. Divided memories can lead to renewed outbreaks of violence, perpetuate senses of grievance amongst victim groups that increase the risk of such violence locally, distort perceptions of the fairness of the settlement and discourage tolerance toward the former enemy. When the new regime that emerges from the peace settlement is weak, its legitimation crisis may encourage the perpetuation of selective social memories and unofficial practices of remembrance that reproduce the old divisions

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and perpetuate the conflict locally. There is also the problem of how to commemorate the victims in such a way as not to keep them locked in the wounds of war. There is a problem for peace processes in how to remember the conflict, honour people’s sacrifices, while simultaneously moving people on to a non-violent future. There are two sociological issues around public memory in peace processes: what it is that is publicly remembered and forgotten; and what social practices need to be adopted to culturally reproduce these selective public memories. There is no easy policy solution to these issues. However, social memory is implicated in peace in a second way because, despite the close connection between memory and genocidal nationalism, social memory can be used as a peace strategy. Indeed, it is precisely because social memory is socially constructed, subject to manipulation and change – albeit slow – and affected by social context and social change, that various social practices that occasion and shape memory and remembrance can be devised to garner peace, if not also reconciliation.

MEMORY AND PEACE Social memory can be reconstructed to become a peace strategy and to help the maintenance of the peace process by revisiting, and where appropriate reconstituting, the past for the purpose of peace. There are a number of dimensions to this: • Forgetting to remember that which is divisive or inconvenient to the peace agreement. • Correction of the distortions of the past that once fuelled divided memories. • Historical re-envisioning of the conflict itself so that the way it is remembered changes. • Recovery of memories, perhaps formerly denied or avoided, that illustrate unity or peaceable co-existence in the past rather than enmity. • Developing new narratives of nationhood and symbolic structures that legitimize the new post-violence regime.

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• Developing new forms of commemoration that celebrate peace and cultural diversity, which point towards the future. • Developing a pluralist approach to memory to incorporate other groups’ memories. • Continually remembering to forget what needs to be discarded socially and to recollect what needs to be remembered. Collective amnesia appears the oddest of the above notions. Amnesia is here meant as a conscious decision to forget. Amnesia has been part of the nation-building project in many post-violence societies in the past, such as post-Franco Spain and post-war Germany (on which see Frei 2002). In ancient Greece, there was an annual ritual in the temple in which worshippers were reminded to continue to forget a defeat in war. Mandela was famous for saying in South Africa that people needed to forget the past. This was not literal. What he meant was that society should forget. People’s personal memories may well continue for a long time to be full of the violence, sacrifice and suffering. Victims often have no choice but to remember – memories furnish them with daily tortures and living nightmares. The question is not one of individual remembrances, however, but of social remembrances; how post-violence societies should structure public remembrances and commemorations so as to assist individuals in managing their personal memories. In other words, post-trauma societies should address social memory and thus only indirectly what is inside people’s heads. Social memory cannot do all this in isolation from managing issues of truth and victimhood, all of which are intricately related, as we shall shortly emphasize, or in isolation from managing the emotions caused by violence (on which see Brewer 2006). But at this point, it is worth focusing on some social practices by which social memory can be recast as a peace strategy in order to achieve some of the dimensions noted above. It is first necessary to identify the different roles memory performs in peace processes in order to understand the practices and policies that are relevant to each. There are four roles, some of which are primarily to do with personal

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memory, although indirectly social; others are directly social memory: • Memory as restoration for perpetrators/ collaborators. This may be achieved through acknowledgement of perpetrators’ culpability through personal memory work with them. It might take the form of truth commissions or other truth recovery processes, restorative justice policies and ex-offender programmes. • Memory as healing for victims. This may be achieved through the therapeutic effects that follow from remembering traumatic events and builds on work in cognitive psychology about the healing effects of releasing autobiographical memory. It might take the form of story-telling and other collations of personal narratives of suffering, such as oral history projects, as well as trauma counselling. • Memory as reconciling for interpersonal relations. This can be addressed by sharing each other’s memories, coming to learn of each other’s experiences and views of history and of the conflict. It might take the form of cross-community work on issues around identity, history and memory and other inter-community interaction programmes. The intended outcome would be respect for others’ memories and the development of a pluralist approach to memory. • Memory as social transformation. This may be achieved through change in social memory at the societal level. I want to mention in more detail the last role. Psychological healing and relationship building have direct social benefits but social memory also needs to become an object of policy management in its own right and be addressed through various social practices that assist in the reconstruction of social memory. Civil society, which is a key agent of social change and foundational to peace processes, can be mobilized to achieve these policy objectives, so that there is not a sole reliance on the new state. Indeed, some of the social practices are best dealt with by community processes rather than national or governmental strategies. Four strategies seem useful:

• Atonement strategies, such as the ‘sorry day’ in Australia, earmarked as a special Day of Atonement or Day of Reflection, the development of ‘narratives of mourning’ that help deal with the loss and grief (such as texts, images, photographs, exhibitions and story-telling that capture a society’s cultural mourning), programmes to facilitate reflexivity amongst communities, institutions and organizations about the conflict, the provision of mechanisms for making public apologies, like formal truth commissions, concerted campaigns, perhaps through religious and para-church organizations, to address the issue of forgiveness. • Citizenship education programmes, which assist people to develop the citizenship skills for living with their former ‘enemies’ in the new post-violence setting. This involves civil society and the state developing programmes that help people acquire the knowledge and learn the skills for tolerance (peace activists in Northern Ireland refer to this quaintly as the public practice of manners), such as education programmes, teaching tolerance, civic responsibility and cultural diversity in schools, the establishment of bridge-building forums and the like. Post-conflict wish fulfilment does not have to re-fight the war (films like Rambo) but can be oriented to establish the peace. • Re-remembering strategies, such as mechanisms to capture hidden memories that are functional to peace, re-visiting the distorted memories of the past, various storytelling procedures and truth-recovery projects, changes to the history curriculum and to history textbooks and to the mass media’s cultural mediation of history, public mechanisms to garner and support new frames of meaning and sense-making through re-remembering. Public memories can be recast and reconstructed by means of historical re-envisioning of the conflict (in which, for example, it might be denuded of its ethnic origins, blamed on third parties – normally colonizers – or shown to have affected all groups equally rather than one victim group alone), as

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happened in Rwanda where Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities have become recognized as nineteenth-century inventions of the Belgians. There are even cases where memories have been publicly recovered (and people’s personal memories now publicly acknowledged) when they pertain to a preconflict past or become convenient as part of the reconciliation of social divisions (as in the new public recognition of Tamil contributions to Sinhalese culture in Sri Lanka, or Irish Catholics who served in the British armed forces in two world wars or in the colonial Royal Irish Constabulary). • Re-memorializing strategies, such as museums, exhibitions, memorials that celebrate peace, either through a focus on the pain of the past enmity (Robben Island/Holocaust museums) or which point toward a new future, the development of new symbols of commemoration, such as flags, public rituals, national holidays and new sites for memorializing such as Centres for Remembrance or Reconciliation (buildings, places, heritage centres, even forests or parks devoted to peace). These strategies are likely to be more effective in conjunction with policies that address truth recovery and victimization.

MEMORY, TRUTH RECOVERY AND VICTIMHOOD Truth and victimhood seem strangely coupled, but there are good reasons for linking the two together with memory. Some of the demand for truth commissions and truth recovery processes comes from combatants, in that the search for truth feeds into the issue of amnesty and speeds social reintegration of ex-combatants. The ANC was in favour of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on these grounds, as were some former members of the South African Police. Security force personnel in Guatemala who have been ‘born again’ in their conversion to conservative evangelicalism, have been keen to reinforce this wiping away of their past by also participating in truth recovery (see

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Kaur 2003). Governments can desire truth recovery too, in order to try to give an official version of events. Most of the demand for truth, however, comes from victims. In the transition to post-violence there is a desperate need by victims to know the ‘truth’. It is for this reason that truth commissions proliferate, or take different forms as judicial inquiries, recovered memory projects or commemoration projects through the collation of people’s narratives. This wish for the ‘truth’ is widely recognized as part of victims’ healing and is a necessary element of reconciliation, so truth recovery has formed a part of most post-violence adjustments. A lot of the demand for truth recovery comes from victims groups who want an opportunity for their suffering to be publicly acknowledged as well as to discover those responsible for their pain and expose the general atrocities of the perpetrators. One might use the common alliteration of the three ‘R’s’ to understand this: victims approach truth recovery procedures from the point of recognition (of their victimhood), responsibility (discovering who is to blame) and retribution (exposing the perpetrators). Whether or not we add a fourth ‘R’ to the alliteration – reconciliation – depends upon whether the victimhood experience becomes psychologically healing and sociologically functional. I will explain below what is meant by sociologically functional victimhood. Recognition, responsibility and retribution are motivations that easily resonate with the experience of victimhood. The three ‘R’s’ can dominate even the ambiguous groups and communities that were both victims and perpetrators simultaneously. Republicans in Northern Ireland, for example, are in favour of truth recovery procedures as a way of exposing the role of the British state, even though they run the risk of exposing their own culpability; likewise Loyalists want to expose the military background of Sinn Fein politicians but try to continue to conceal the role of the security forces. It may well be that their respective support for a Northern Irish Truth and Reconciliation Commission will wane once they realize that they cannot control what truths the process discloses (on truth recovery in Northern Ireland see Lundy and McGovern 2001; Smyth 2003). But

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their wish to use so-called truth to batter their opponents illustrates the general problem with truth recovery in all post-violence societies. The idea of truth is problematic; hence the universal complaints that truth commissions only disclose partial truths. Analysts know that ‘truth’ tends to be relative, truth-from-a-perspective and is subjective, but common sense renders the idea of truth as objective, unaffected by partisan standpoints (Shapin 1994). Not unnaturally therefore, victims often wish to know what happened and who was responsible and tend to believe that there is but one objective course of events and decisions in the past that represents this ‘true’ account. They want to know whose hands are dirty and bloodstained and believe such identification is unproblematic and non-partisan. Thus, while ‘truth’ is therapeutic and part of the healing process, it can re-open wounds and hinder or slow the process of reconciliation because the ‘truth’ may be used from one standpoint to damn a particular group. People’s perception of the peace process may be negatively affected by the ‘truth’ behind the former violent acts of negotiators, peace activists or politicians, or by feelings of anger, shock or rage at finally ‘proving’ the identity of the culpable. In short, ‘truth’ can be incompatible with ‘reconciliation’ (Rotberg and Thompson 2000). Peace processes therefore need to manage two problems: finding the balance between the need to know what happened in the past and moving forward, and encouraging victims to see the truth from someone else’s standpoint. Such balance allows victims to know about the past in such a way as not to keep them locked there. It is for this reason that the fourth ‘R’, reconciliation, does not automatically form part of the alliteration. If it is to do so it needs to become the objective of policy management, which requires that victimhood is policy managed in such a way as to make it sociologically functional to the new society.

WHY TRUTH IS IMPORTANT Truth Commissions have been used for a long time (see Hayner 1994, 2001), particularly in

Latin America, and the universalization of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has made the demand for one part of the rhetoric of several peace negotiations since. It is easy to see why; there are at least four reasons that make ‘truth’ important: • Recognition of victimhood via truth recovery, particularly of unacknowledged suffering, is therapeutic for victims. • Assigning responsibility for incidents can be healing for victims and their relatives, as well as restorative for perpetrators. • Truth recovery is a way of managing the emotional dynamics of post-violence adjustments and dealing with the problem of memory. • Truth recovery offers procedures for making ‘shame apologies’. For my purposes here, however, I want to focus on the negative case in order to illustrate that truth recovery is not a simple panacea. There have been many different complaints made about the specific truth recovery processes deployed in the past, but these essentially break down into three sorts of problem: problems around how the claims to ‘truth’ are received in the recovery process; concern around the partiality of the truths disclosed by the process; and anxieties over the selective use to which truths are put. Let me look briefly at each in turn. What matters for the effectiveness of truth recovery is how the claims to truth are received. They have to be heard as accurate descriptions of events. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up an investigation unit to test the veracity of truth claims, only to discover that most things could not be proved unless the perpetrator claimed responsibility – as most did not. The readiness to hear what is disclosed as somehow ‘true’ is diminished when what is disclosed does not fit with what the victim or relatives expected or wanted. Uncomfortable truths are often explained away as inadequate or, indeed, as untrue, especially if the truth recovery process that disclosed it lacks community legitimacy. Judicial or governmental enquiries as specific truth recovery procedures often lack legitimacy because of poor community

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involvement. Afrikaners saw the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a witchhunt against them and mostly refused to participate. Even where shame apologies are made as part of truth recovery as combatants acknowledge culpability, apologies have to be heard by the former enemy to be meant, the key to which, according to the restorative justice paradigm, is hearing the shame-guilt as genuine. Elsewhere I have discussed some of the problems around shame-guilt as emotions, and some of the difficulties in eliciting shameguilt apologies (Brewer 2006). The failure of Ulster Protestants to hear what they consider amounts to an apology from Sinn Fein has been used by anti-Agreement Unionists as one of the grounds to suspend the Belfast Agreement. This bears witness to the difficulties some perpetrators have in saying precisely what victims want and to the doubts victims have about accepting what is actually said. The partial nature of the truths disclosed is both cause and effect of the problems around how truth claims are received, resulting in ‘truth’ being partisan. Some people can simply refuse to participate in the recovery process, as happened in South Africa, ensuring a onesided or selective recovery of truth. There can be vested interests trying to limit what is disclosed. Truth recovery processes have sometimes been designed by states, governments or political groups to disguise their own culpability or partisanly expose that of their opponents. This is most likely to happen in post-violence settings where the former regime retains some capacity to dictate the disclosure of its activities and thus in those peace accords where there has not been an outright winner. The terms of reference of the truth recovery process can sometimes be under the control of powerful groups who limit the range of activities to be addressed. The South African Commission focused on ‘gross violations of human rights’ between March 1960 and May 1994. This was impressive enough but it addressed actual incidents and events in this time frame and thus excluded what we might call the silent oppression of the apartheid regime itself. It has been noted, for example,

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that since women bore the brunt of that oppression, through forced removals, the pass laws, domestic violence and broken families, women were not recognized as a special category of victim beyond specific incidents of murder or abuse that involved them (Wilson 2001). But other truth commissions have been less generous than South Africa’s. The Chilean Commission, for example, focused only on the disappearances and not on Chilean human rights abuses, although the El Salvadorian commission had a very broad mandate to address ‘serious acts of violence’ (for a comparison of the two, see Ensalaco, 1994). The Northern Irish Victims Commission, not strictly a truth recovery process but which was set up as part of the peace accord, published a Report entitled We Will Remember Them, which completely excluded victims of state violence (for an account from the Chair of the Commission, see Bloomfield 1998). One response to control on the truth recovery process from above is to have communitybased processes. However, these are mostly localized and focus on truth recovery in a particular neighbourhood or group, and thus tend to be quite deliberately partisan. One notable exception to this was Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification, better known as the Recovery of the Historical Memory Project (1999). This was set up by the grassroots and civil society in Guatemala under the aegis of the Catholic Church as a popular response to the weakness of the state’s own truth commission. The Report was launched in 1998 to great controversy – the coordinator of the project was assassinated two days later. The project addressed country-wide cases of murder and managed to be popularly acclaimed by local communities, demonstrating the viability of democratic and grassroots approaches to truth recovery, but even so, it took only six months to address 36 years of violence and lacked legal powers to compel participation. Information collected could not be used in prosecutions, and it lacked resources. If truth recovery mostly discloses only partial truths, it is hardly surprising that what it discloses can be selectively used. Indeed, people often have pre-determined preferences in the

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way they intend to use so-called truths, which limit their capacity to receive as genuine whatever the recovery process reveals. ‘Truth’ may merely be a bludgeon with which to beat the other side, to criticize their position as elected representatives or dispute their place in parliament. Disclosures and revelations can be used to continue the war not end it, inflaming not assuaging emotions. ‘Truth’ in these settings may lead to revenge killings rather than emotional recovery. This is especially the case under two conditions: where victimhood is widely dispersed throughout the society so that most people can claim status as victim and perpetrator at the same time; and where the peace accord is fragile so that truth recovery is used intentionally to continue the conflict or to oppose a settlement. It is reasonable to argue on the basis of all this evidence that truth recovery works best, if at all, as part of a successful settlement that has already stopped the killing, not as a mechanism itself to end the violence. But if not by means of truth recovery, what is the best way to manage the experience of victimhood?

MEMORY AND VICTIMHOOD In earlier work (Brewer 2003), I have alluded to the psychological costs of peace for victims in Northern Ireland and South Africa, and the special problems they face in adjusting to their ‘identity dilemma’: victims have defined their identity for so long in terms of ‘the enemy’ and suddenly find in peace processes that they have to reshape their sense of who they are. What makes adjustment worse for victims is that victimhood is highly politicized, for it encapsulates the moral virtues of the groups involved in the conflict and addresses their separate claims to moral justification for the war. What is victimhood and who gets to define it are thus key questions in truth recovery and peace processes generally. Victim groups tend to dominate the debate about victimhood and to affect our perception of who the victims are and what experiences victims suffered. Yet in a sense everyone who has lived amidst communal conflict is a victim irrespective of whether they or others significant

to them experience direct suffering and harm. While some victim groups recognize that everyone shares the experience of victimhood in different ways, others operate a hierarchy of suffering and attach to themselves and their kind a special victimhood. There are also individuals with profound feelings of harm and suffering who are not in victim groups and are thus ignored inasmuch as victim groups attribute to themselves the moral claim to have suffered or suffered the worst. Victimhood is a more general experience than victim groups imply or accept and needs to become recognized as a moral claim everyone can reasonably invoke. We also need to recognize that society as a whole is a victim not just individuals living in it, in that a whole society can be impacted by the conflict, not just people directly wrapped up in it. These forms of victim experience tend not to form part of the mobilization done by victim groups. However, victim groups serve several functions, not all of which are negative for the peace process. Victim groups provide support structures, from counselling through to shared storytelling. They can act as campaigners on behalf of victims, mobilizing for material resources and public attention. Many voluntary groups, charities and social movements in civil society similarly work in this positive way for their client groups. Another function is more negative. Namely, where the victim groups act as forms of political mobilization, either as political alternatives to conventional groups, or more likely, as surrogates on behalf of political parties. This is negative irrespective of whether the mobilization is done to undermine or undergird the peace accord. Victim groups that ally themselves with anti-peace groups use their suffering as a brake on the negotiated settlement by accusations that their suffering is being neglected or undervalued. It is hard to respond to such claims. It is more defensible to discourage all politicization of victim experiences. Politicization is difficult to reverse once set in train; some political parties who formerly embraced victim groups as part of their contestation of the peace accord can find victim groups an embarrassment as the party’s political agenda changes. Victimhood can thus remain divisive in peace processes. In Northern Ireland’s case, for example,

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victimhood was experienced differently between Catholics and Protestants and contested notions of culpability for the violence tend to reproduce the old divisions because there is either a reluctance to accept the others’ victimhood or a wish to impose an artificial hierarchy of victimhood in which one’s own ‘side’ suffered the worst. Equality of victimhood is denied, so that victimhood is not a uniting experience amongst people who shared the same emotional and physical suffering. Victim groups in these circumstances thus tend to cohere around the lines of division and differentiation involved in the former violence, easily reproducing the old dysfunctional passions. In Northern Ireland, there are ex-combatant groups (security forces, Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries), giving recognition to their particular partisan set of experiences and suffering. There are survivor groups (‘survivor’ here includes relatives and family members of the dead) who act as champion on their own or their loved one’s behalf as people with shared experiences. Sometimes survivor groups are based around a high-profile incident of atrocity in which they or their significant other were involved; sometimes, amongst types of survivor, such as those based on neighbourhood, religion or type of suffering, injury and harm. There are also political victim groups, who have either been hijacked by the political parties for broader political ends or are themselves political groupings only masquerading as victim groups. These groups tend not even to talk to one another. Even though victimhood is politicized and manipulated, post-violence societies cannot afford to neglect victims. Victimhood can cause feelings that constitute a psychological disorder for the sufferer from grief upward to known psychiatric conditions. These have to be managed if the person is to become a normal functioning member of the new society. A pathway to psychological healing for the individual forms part of post-violence adjustments, for victimhood is a psychological state. It is also a sociological process. That is to say, victimhood has ramifications at the level of society rather than just the person. It can distort society by introducing what has been called ‘bad civil society’ (Chambers and Kopstein 2001), that is, voluntary and

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community groups whose practice and effects, unintended or otherwise, destabilize the social structure, perpetuate ancient hatreds and reproduce the conflict. Victimhood at the social level keeps vivid the emotional dynamics associated with the former society, requiring policies by which society manages the continued emotional impact of past communal violence. Victimhood provides a ready source of political mobilization that can impact negatively on the peace accord, made especially difficult since such politicization is emotion-based rather than reasoned, thus inhibiting the transformation from emotion/ identity politics to democratic/issue politics. A post-violence society thus needs to find pathways to healing for the society as well as for the individual. Victimhood can be made sociologically functional for peace processes as a result of public policies that address it at the societal level. The following seem relevant policies, although they are hardly comprehensive: • Society needs to find ways in which victimhood can be honoured as an experience in public ways (in acts of remembrance and commemoration, sites of memorial, recovered memory projects, truth recovery projects and the like); • Victim groups need to be recast as ‘healing groups’, in which victims are encouraged to release themselves from the past and look to the future, by which victim groups maintain their positive functions (support structures and resource campaigners) but shed their political ones, a transformation that society reinforces both materially and symbolically. • Society should materially and symbolically discourage burdens of grief for the individual being used by victims and victim groups to prevent the rest of society moving on in terms of the victims’ attitudes toward social and political change. • Forums of public accountability need to be developed in which victims and victim groups are required to take responsibility, along with the rest of society, for the future rather than just commiserate in their suffering.

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• Financial and material resources should be deployed by the state to manage the practice and functions of victim groups. • A pluralist attitude toward victimhood should be facilitated and supported in which the victimhood of everyone is morally upheld and hierarchies of victimhood challenged. • Cultural adjustments in the long term should stress the unity of victimhood as an experience across the divide, something reinforced in the short term by citizenship education programmes, adjustments to school curricula, publicity campaigns and acts of public remembrance and commemoration and in sites of memorial. • Special sites of healing should be developed in parallel to sites of remembrance, being those places, events, moments or experiences that bring together victims from across the divide. Not only is this form of victimhood healing for society generally, many of these policy initiatives seem relevant also for psychological healing of individual victims. CONCLUSION Memory, nationalism and communal violence can be an unholy trinity. However, the sociological nature of memory permits memory to become an object of public policy, in which various social practices are deployed to make memory functional to post-violence societies. Subsidiary issues like truth recovery and victimhood are dealt with in the process, making memory pivotal to peace. REFERENCES Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloomfield, K. (1998) ‘How Should We Remember?’, in B. Hamber (ed.), Past Imperfect. Derry: INCORE. Brewer, J. D. (2003) C. Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence. London: Palgrave.

Brewer, J. D. (2006) ‘Dealing with Emotions in Peacemaking’, in S. Karstedt, I. Loader and H. Strang (eds), Law and Emotions. Oxford: Hart. Chambers, S. and Kopstein, J. (2001) ‘Bad Civil Society’, Political Theory, 29: 837–65. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ensalaco, M. (1994) ‘Truth Commissions for Chile and El Salvador’, Human Rights Quarterly, 16: 656–75. Frei, N. (2002) Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Hayner, P. (1994) ‘Fifteen Truth Commissions’, Human Rights Quarterly, 16: 597–655. Hayner, P. (2001) Unspeakable Truths. London: Routledge. Kaldor, M. (1999) New and Old Wars. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kaur, K. (2003) ‘Guatemala’, in M. A. Cejka and T. Bamat (eds), Artisans of Peace. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Lundy, P. and McGovern, M. (2001) ‘The Politics of Memory in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland’, Peace Review, 13: 27–34. Misztal, B. (2003) Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University. Moore, B. (2000) Moral Purity and Persecution in History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ray, L. (1999) ‘Memory, Trauma and Genocidal Nationalism’, Sociological Research Online, 4 (2) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/ 4/2/ray.html. Ray, L. (2000) ‘Memory, Violence and Identity’, in J. Eldridge, J. MacInnes, S. Scott, C. Warhurst and A. Witz (eds), For Sociology. York: Sociologypress. Recovery of Historical Memory Project (1999) Guatemala: Never Again. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Robin, R. and Strath, B. (2003) Homelands. Brussels: Lang. Rotberg, R. and Thompson, D. (2000) Truth Versus Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shapin, S. (1994) A Social History of Truth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shaw, M. (2003) War and Genocide. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smyth, M. (2003) ‘Truth, Partial Truth and Irreconcilable Truths’, Smith College Studies in Social Work, 73: 205–20. Wilkinson, I. (2004) Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wilson, R. (2001) The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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19 Citizenship, Nationalism and Nation-Building B R YA N S . T U R N E R

My thesis is simple. The growth of citizenship is associated with democratization, because the civil and political rights of citizenship play an important part in underpinning democratic institutions. The democratic participation of the masses in the polity and civil society has become an important foundation of nationbuilding in creating an identification of citizens with the nation-state. In addition, the growth of civil institutions and community groups is an essential aspect of the Tocquevillian model of Western democracy. To a large extent, these assumptions are valid. It would be difficult to imagine a flourishing democracy in which the social rights of citizenship were underdeveloped, and in this sense citizenship is an inclusionary mechanism that sustains civil society. However, the development of citizenship is also a project of nation-building in which the creation of the national citizen is the primary project of the nation-state. From the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to the First World War, the rise of modern citizenship was coterminous with the development of nation-states and nationalism as a secular ideology of the state. Nation-building involved the production of a uniform and integrated society of loyal, well-trained and healthy (male) citizens, if possible speaking the same language and believing

in the same religion. We might argue that faith became a private matter for the citizen and religion came to express the national culture of the state. This division came to be embraced in the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant when he, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone ([1793] 1960), distinguished between an inner, moralizing faith and the external, institutional cultus of religion. There is a difference between the Westphalian, liberal model of the citizen as the carrier of the civil liberties and the twentieth-century social model of the citizen as the bearer of social rights that are institutionalized in a welfare state. In this sense, citizenship became an exclusionary mechanism in which the contributory rights, that are characteristic of welfare states, form the basis of an associational democracy with clear territorial boundaries. An associational democracy is not unlike a large club in that members pay their dues in return for privileges, that are often jealously guarded against outsiders and intruders. This difference in turn relates to the tensions between the democratic and liberal side of citizenship, and its nationalist and occasionally authoritarian dimension. Nineteenth-century nationalism was the ideological framework for the creation of citizenship as a form of ‘national manhood’ (Nelson 1998).

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British national identity is a late historical development, and to some extent the unintended consequence of colonialism and immigration. By treating British national citizenship as a late manifestation of nationalism, I am in some respects following Krishan Kumar’s argument in The Making of English National Identity (2003). British nationalism was forged in response to outsiders, especially to immigration in the twentieth century. When in Shakespeare’s Henry V we confront apparently distinctive notions of English, Welsh or Scottish identity, we must also remember that the social division between aristocracy and peasantry ruled out any easy identification of an emerging English nationalism in Shakespeare’s historical dramas. There was no dominant ideology capable of uniting elite and mass, despite the fact that in Elizabethan England the division between Protestant and Catholic meant the internationalism of the Catholic Church no longer bound England to Catholic Europe (Abercrombie et al. 1980). Protestantism and the Virgin Queen rather than ‘English nationalism’ provided some common cause against an impending Catholic invasion. While one might have disputes about the historical origin of Englishness, British identity and British citizenship are the products of the growth of social citizenship and welfare entitlements some three centuries later. The rise of nation-states required the production of national citizenship, and this historical development is captured by Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ in which the state becomes increasingly an administrative state whose task is to make populations socially and economically productive (Foucault 1991). Citizenship overcomes, but never entirely successfully, the divisions of social class, and renders the working class productive and efficient through the creation of welfare and social security. Class conflict is partly contained by the spread of social rights and partly as a result of the solidaristic functions of national ideology. There are, however, important variations between nation-states, to which we need to attend. There were obviously important differences between the United States, on the one hand, and Bismarckian Germany on the other. There were

also important differences between European nation-states and white-settler societies. Colonial Australia was created on the basis of the doctrine of an empty land (terra nullius) and the lands of North America were colonized on the basis of Lockean theories of private property in which, because native peoples did not recognize property rights, their lands were, strictly speaking, not settled or occupied. The universal rights of the French Revolution were not extended to the Kanaks of New Caledonia, because theirs was not a culture of possessive individualism, and the absence of Kanak property rights meant that French colonialism could proceed apace (Bullard 2000). Hence white-settler societies have typically institutionalized citizenship as a form of national inclusion, while continuing to exclude aboriginal communities. In the nineteenth century, national citizenship typically presupposed a Fordist capitalist economy, in which men went to work and women serviced their men. As a social status, citizenship was based primarily on the contributions of men through work and war service in return for pensions and health care. In the contemporary period, the necessary and close relationship between national citizenship and the nation-state is becoming unravelled. Globalization, the rise of post-industrial society, the influence of human rights and the erosion of social citizenship with the decline of social Keynesianism have also resulted in important changes to the nation-state (Turner 2001). Notions about global governance and cosmopolitan identity also require rethinking the meaning of ‘the citizen’ and ‘the nation’. This chapter explores the modern history of citizenship as a project for creating national identities that were intended to be homogeneous and which as a result suppressed public manifestations of cultural difference and diversity. The growth of global migration, diasporic communities and cultural hybridity challenges the historic project of national citizenship. This historically significant change is signalled by the increasing importance of human rights since 1948 over national manifestations of citizenship. The tension between national citizenship and human rights is indicative of the intellectual and legal contradictions

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between social rights and human rights. The challenge to nationalism and the nation-state in the twenty-first century is to sustain multiculturalism and a commitment to the nationstate in such a way that the cultural rights of difference do not eventually erode the conditions for common citizenship. The political community to which human rights are attached (such as humanity or the globe) is vague and indefinite; the political community to which citizenship is attached (the nation-state) is subject to corrosive forces.

THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF CITIZENSHIP There is a conventional argument that citizenship had its origins in ancient Greek and Roman societies. Historians have recognized the ancient growth of democratic participation, but noted its restriction by birth to men, the exclusion of women, the presence of class divisions and dependence on slavery (Finlay 1991). Manpower shortages in ancient Athens forced the Athenians to accept intermarriage and to recognize the citizenship rights of their offspring (Sinclair 1988). With the rise of Christianity, the sharp separation of religion and politics in St Augustine’s City of God is also often thought to be important in the evolution of Western notions of civility and citizenship. Max Weber in The City (1958) emphasized the importance of Christian universalism in which faith rather than blood was recognized as the basis of community. ‘Citizen’ is derived from cité as in the Anglo-French citeseyn, citezein or sithezein. From the thirteenth century, a citizen was simply a member or denizen (deinsein) of a city or borough. Caxton in his Chronicles of England referred in 1480 to ‘The cytezeyns of London’ and Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew in 1596 describes Pisa as ‘renowned for grave Citizens’. The term citizen came eventually to refer to a member of the bourgeois class, who lives in a city and enjoys the legal privileges of an autonomous urban community, as in Dutch burgermaatschappij or German Staatsbürgerschaft. Citizens

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evolved as civilized members of urban society in contrast to uncouth and vulgar country folk. A citizen was a burgess (bourgeois) or freeman, and citizenship was associated with bourgeois not aristocratic culture. Citizens were members of civil society and carriers of bourgeois civility. Citizenship is therefore associated in continental Europe with the rise of the bourgeoisie – a citizen is a member of a burgh. This historical connection provided Karl Marx with one foundation for his criticism of bourgeois rights as elements of liberal capitalism that separated politics and economics. The real economic subordination of the worker could not be resolved merely by the growth of civil liberties, and required a radical change in the social and economic conditions of society as a whole. It is important to note that citizenship is characterized by an ambiguity: it is a conduit of individual rights but also reflects the growth of state power over civil society. Pre-modern forms of citizenship were associated with the city, not with the nation. While we can find words to describe the citizen from the fifteenth century, modern citizenship is a political product of major revolutions, specifically the English Civil War, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. These revolutions were important because they destroyed the system of estates and created both modern nationalism and citizenship. The French Revolution was especially significant in that it pulverized the ancient hierarchical arrangement of status and privilege between the three estates. The creation of European nation-states from the seventeenth century necessarily involved the creation of imaginary nationalistic communities, which asserted and partly created ethnically uniform, homogeneous populations, which were held together, against the social pressures of class, culture and community, by nationalist ideologies. The Treaty of Westphalia was the origin of the modern world system of nation-states, and state formation involved the creation of nationalist identities on the basis of a double colonization, both internal and external. Anti-Semitism provided the pretext in many European states for earlier versions of ethnic cleansing in order to create homogeneous populations, but in a less violent form one can find various political

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and social pressures to create civil societies on the basis of common languages, common religions and a single, ethnic, identity. This process was the cultural basis for the creation of national forms of citizenship. Citizenship was crucial to nation-building (Bendix 1964), because it weakens class identity and binds individuals to nation-state projects through the creation of a minimum set of social rights. These processes in Europe converted peasants into citizens.

NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP AND WELFARE STATES Following the influential theory of EspingAndersen (1990) in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, we can distinguish three contrasted models of the relationship between states, citizenship and welfare. First, there is the liberal or Anglo-Saxon model of the welfare state in which there is a predominance of means-tested assistance and universal transfers are modest. Welfare reforms are limited by the emphasis on individual responsibility and the work ethic. Social entitlements are limited by bureaucratic assessment and welfare recipients are stigmatized. Liberal welfare regimes were typical of Australia, Canada and the United States. In these societies, citizenship entitlements were contributory rights, being dependent on certain key contributions to society. Taxation and military service were fundamental aspects of citizenship in nation-states based on a liberalwelfare model. Systematic avoidance of personal taxation can as a result be used as a useful measure of the effectiveness of citizenship as a form of solidarity. Secondly, there is the corporatist legacy of Austria, France, Germany and Italy. In this continental and corporatist model, the liberal emphasis on efficiency and commodification was never wholly dominant, and the granting of social rights was not an issue. Private insurance and occupational fringe benefits were marginal. The Catholic Church was influential in shaping the corporatist model, and hence the welfare

system was designed to support the traditional family and motherhood, and therefore day care and family services to support working mothers were underdeveloped. Finally, there is the social democratic welfare regime, which rejected the duality of market and state, and pursued policies to achieve both equality of outcome and high service standards. The social democratic model aims to maximize social solidarity by an inclusionary system of benefits, but this model has to address issues related to both the family and the market. Given the state’s role in creating solidarity and achieving egalitarianism, there was no significant entry of charitable or voluntary associations into welfare delivery, and the social democratic societies have been reluctant to embrace liberal policies that emphasize the mix of charitable, voluntary and governmental agencies in welfare. The social democratic regime of the Scandinavian societies has to support the enormous economic cost of a universalistic, solidaristic and de-commodified welfare system, and achieve high levels of economic growth with full employment and extensive income redistribution, fairness and transparency. The incorporation of Sweden into the global economic market has, for example, made it difficult to achieve these objectives in a neo-liberal economic climate. Three different types of citizenship correspond to these three models of welfare: liberal citizenship as a set of political and civil rights in liberal capitalism; social citizenship in social democratic societies on the basis of active participation in the economy; and social rights without extensive democratic rights in corporatist states. Although we can identify different models of citizenship that are based on different welfare strategies, the formation of citizenship in these systems was fundamental to nationalism and the nation-state. These different models represent different strategies (liberal, corporatist and social democratic) for the incorporation of the working class into civil society, and hence they were important as strategies to bind the worker to the nation. The vision of socialist internationalism was constantly challenged by the welfare state, the

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contributory rights of the citizen and the nationalist project. These alternatives came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The principal notion behind the institution of liberal citizenship is that the democratic state is a political association, where membership and its rewards are ultimately dependent on individual contributions to the public good. These contributions are the principal underpinnings of the rights and duties of members of a nation-state community, and citizenship is in principle an effective juridical status conferring a specific socio-political identity. It is difficult in a system of contributory rights to secure the entitlements of people with physical or mental impairment, and more generally incapacity to work results in stigmatization. In material terms, citizenship plays a significant part in determining the redistribution of economic resources within society through taxation and welfare benefits. In this sense, citizenship is an important aspect of distributive justice, because with the contributory principle there must be some long-term balance between individual contributions, typically through work, military service and parenting, and rewards such as welfare, health and education. In this context, citizenship was a mechanism for civilizing the working class in order for them to become acceptable members of civil society. In the language of T. H. Marshall, citizenship provides rights ‘to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society’ (1950: 72). In Britain, welfare institutions expanded partly in response to working-class pressure on the state to protect workers from unemployment and sickness. However, mass warfare and post-war reconstruction were especially important in building modern citizenship as a mechanism for the consolidation of the nation. Nineteenth-century imperial wars often served to illustrate the poor health of the British working class, and evidence from medical examinations of army recruits demonstrated a significant amount of disability. Public health statistics were important in the development of the national efficiency

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movement that promoted discipline and health through physical training, temperance and military discipline. The Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements, the development in prisons and the army of rational dietary schemes based on calorific measurement, the introduction of school meals, the pedagogical evolution of domestic science for girls, the adoption of gymnastics and sport into the school curriculum, and regular medical and dental inspections for children are evidence of public concern to improve the nation’s health, economic efficiency and military capability. Social citizenship in British society was primarily the product of wartime mobilization and strategies to rebuild post-war society after both world wars. Political pressure from the trade union movement for industrial reform and the desire of the Labour Party for social reform probably played only a secondary role. In the United States, there was historically greater dependence on voluntary associations and local community efforts to provide services and security for citizens. Citizenship in the United States is probably best explained in terms of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic view in 1835 of democracy and equality in the foundation of American society in Democracy in America (2003). American society relied primarily on the liberal market to absorb the shock of the working class, and trade unions were absorbed as organized interest groups rather than as representatives of the working class. Unions were organized by locality, patronage and ethnicity. There was little development of social citizenship, and individuals were expected to insure themselves against adversity. A buoyant economy provided sufficient rewards and social mobility to absorb workers into capitalist society, lending credibility to the ‘rags to riches’ ideology of expanding American capitalism. The United States does not conform to the Marshall model, partly because the emphasis on civil and political rights was not matched by social rights. Furthermore, nation-building in America required the absorption and assimilation of waves of migrants and the eventual granting of equality to its black population after the civil war and the end of slavery rather than

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the inclusion of a well-established or ‘mature’ working class. In the absolutist monarchies, monarch, nobility and Church resisted universal citizenship, but they also recognized that their longterm survival depended on some compromise with the bourgeoisie and working class, and some degree of modernization of both society and politics (Mann 1986, 1987). In Germany, Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm were reluctant founders of the modern welfare state, and social citizenship was developed with few concessions to civil and political rights. This system was in place up to the opening of the First World War, and some authors have claimed that elements of German statism survived well into the late twentieth century (Kvistad 1999). In other absolutist systems, nationalism and national identity were created by modernizing states, which fostered citizenship as a feature of national ideology and institution-building. In Japan, the Meiji Revolution used the emperor system as a legitimating principle in its strategy of conservative modernization. In 1890 the Emperor issued the Imperial Rescript on Education and employed the word shinmin to denote loyal and obedient officials or citizens who followed their orders obediently (Bix 2000). Japanese nationalism and the powerful identification with the Emperor as a symbol of unity were effective in creating the illusion of ethnic and cultural homogeneity (Weiner 1997). By contrast, the Russian imperial system was not consistently successful in developing a strategy to retain power and modernize the regime. It favoured political repression and exclusion, followed by periods of ineffective social reform. Austria was the least successful, and was confounded by class conflicts, nationalist struggles and a failure to develop a corporate strategy. Long-term political success required maintaining the corporate coherence of the ancien régime and a partial incorporation of the bourgeoisie. These regimes, with the possible exception of Germany, did not develop welfare citizenship, and civil rights were often undercut by arbitrary political interventions. Despite these structural limitations, the absolute monarchies were relatively successful in their industrialization (especially in Germany and

Japan) and working-class opposition to capitalist exploitation remained weak, given the relatively small size of the urban working class.

BRITISH NATIONAL IDENTITY AND POSTCOLONIALISM The gradual loss of the Commonwealth as a significant international force in the post-war period has been an important defining process in the modern evolution of British national identity. Britain’s withdrawal from Asia, specifically from Hong Kong, provides an interesting case study in the evolution of Britishness (Turner 2004). The political history of Hong Kong and its juridical relationship to successive British governments illustrate the pragmatic attitude to what we might call conditional or provisional citizenship. In 1843 Hong Kong became a Crown Colony and was, like Singapore, primarily a safe harbour and trading centre to support British commercial and military interests. Within Hong Kong, citizenship was never intended to be a nation-building exercise, and successive British administrations continued to deny basic rights in the colony. It was not until the final stages of the transfer of sovereignty back to mainland China that the conditions for citizenship became a pressing political issue. The British government did not offer the Chinese majority in Hong Kong opportunities for effective democratic participation. The development of political rights was initially a reaction to the riots of 1966–7, and the formation of the Mutual Aid Committee eventually provided a training ground for practical citizenship. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, made it clear that the British government did not intend to extend its administration beyond the end of the lease in 1997 and in return the Chinese government agreed to designate Hong Kong a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic with considerable autonomy, except in defence and foreign affairs. The first draft of the Basic Law made it clear that Beijing would have sovereign power over the common law courts of Hong Kong, but the events in Tiananmen Square and the

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subsequent democratic crisis of the following year produced massive protests against the authoritarian response of the Chinese Communist Party and triggered a brain drain of professional and business people out of Hong Kong. After 1997 all Hong Kong residents holding British Dependent Territories passports would in practice have dual citizenship outside China, but this privilege would not be extended to individuals born in Hong Kong after the termination of the lease. Furthermore, holders of these passports were not initially deemed eligible for residence in the United Kingdom. In 1990 immigration policy was modified to grant British citizenship to a limited number of Hong Kong residents, and a nationality bill granted the right of abode to around 50,000 Hong Kong residents who were to be selected on restrictive criteria of education, occupational status and age. Mrs Thatcher defended this elitist bill on the grounds that it would stem the tide of people leaving Hong Kong. The emphasis was on the economic contribution which a limited number of Hong Kong Chinese would make in Britain, and hence the nationality bill effectively constituted the Hong Kong Chinese as economic citizens. Official indifference to the status of Hong Kong citizens, despite periodic attempts to force the People’s Republic to respect the special legal status of the city of Hong Kong, was combined with political realism. Mrs Thatcher might forcefully compel Argentina to hand back the Falklands, but confronting China presented formidable political and military risks. Political pragmatism and indifference towards the ultimate fate of the Hong Kong Chinese reflected official attitudes towards foreigners that have their modern origin in the 1901 Aliens Act. Official reluctance to grant full citizenship to outsiders has to be understood against the general background of immigration to Britain in the twentieth century. As a liberal society committed to the laissez-faire doctrine of a free market, the British elite should, on rational economic grounds, welcome immigration, but these raw economic interests have been shaped and constrained by a political culture that has

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remained sceptical about the ability or willingness of foreigners to assimilate. The periodic protests of British politicians that naturalized foreigners have not become fully British by, for example, supporting the national cricket team are the more pathetic manifestations of this attitude of suspicion. The official view of the government has been to accept migrants under the legal compulsion of international agreements such as human rights, and to assume or hope that economic migrants will eventually return to their native homeland. Likewise, Victorian liberals did not actively oppose exiles; they merely entertained the hope that the inclement weather would eventually drive them away (Porter 1979). These attitudes of benign indifference, political apathy and racial superiority were possible in a context of relatively insignificant flows of immigration and asylum seekers. In Victorian Britain there were virtually no laws regulating refugees. However, between 1880 and 1905, 120,000 Russian Jews came to Britain, triggering a process of juridical restriction and regulation. The 1905 Aliens Act became the foundation of immigration law until 1971. Because Britain only accepted those who could prove they were self-sufficient, there were by 1938 only 8,000 refugees in Britain, of whom 80 per cent were Jewish. By 1939 there were 56,000 refugees. Post-war migration was largely driven by economic interests and the majority of immigrants were from the Commonwealth. The Nationality Act of 1948 recognized the right of Commonwealth citizens freely to enter and work in Britain. The Act was in retrospect generous, partly because it mistakenly assumed an outflow, not influx of Commonwealth citizens to Britain. By 1971 there were 300,000 Caribbean migrants who, for Conservatives like Enoch Powell, created a racial crisis. Powell’s 1968 Birmingham speech alluding to the ‘River Tiber foaming with much blood’ proved to be popular and he claimed subsequently to have received 100,000 letters in support of his controversial position. The 1971 Immigration Act, which introduced work permits without a right of residency, was seen to be inspired by Powellite political convictions. However, Powellism as a racial ideology

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did not gain long-term support. Powell never held an influential government office, and the pragmatic reluctance of post-war British governments to become involved in aggressive colonial wars after the Suez crisis of 1956 meant that overtly racist politics were unpopular. In any case, Harold Macmillan’s radical ‘winds of change’ speech in 1960 in Cape Town made Powellite visions of a white-dominated Commonwealth unrealistic and anachronistic. The British political elite has, since the defeat of the Powellite Tories, successfully excluded race from parliamentary politics on the pragmatic grounds that race is a powerfully divisive electoral strategy. Subsequent legislation has attempted to restrict the generous but mistaken provisions of the Nationality Act. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962), Immigration Act (1971), Nationality Act (1981), Immigration (Carriers’ Liability) Act (1987) and Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act (1993) constituted a battery of legislation that has restricted entry, reduced access to citizenship status and constrained labour migration. The 1981 British Nationality Act created three categories of citizenship: British citizens, British Dependent Territories citizens, and British Overseas citizens. The Act restricted real British membership to the first category, removed residential criteria for citizenship status, and effectively excluded Asian Commonwealth people from British identity. Forced migrants are covered by the 1993 Asylum and Migration Appeals, 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act and the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act. The legislation created four categories: refugees (quota and spontaneous), people with Exceptional Leave to Remain (ELR), temporary protection status, and asylum seekers, namely somebody seeking asylum on the basis of a claim to be a refugee. The ELR category refers to people who have been denied refugee status but are given leave to remain on humanitarian grounds. In 1990 ELRs represented 60 per cent of asylum decisions, refugee status represented 23 per cent and refusals were 17 per cent. In 2000, these figures were 16 per cent (ELR), 15 per cent (refugee status granted) and 69 per cent (refusals). These

Acts were important stages in the definition of British national identity as an exclusionary claim on citizenship rights. They were culturally significant in attempting to define ‘otherness’ and were located within a wider debate about Englishness and Britishness in response to membership in the European Union (Münch 2001). Before European involvement in Kosovo and the security crisis following 9/11, racial conflicts in Britain, such as the Notting Hill riots of 1958, had been primarily around two separate migratory waves, namely the post-war migration of Afro-Caribbean people from the West Indies and Pakistan-Bangladesh migrants. While the stereotype of Pakistani migrants in Britain was initially that of reclusive, family-centred Muslims who were law-abiding, the policing of Caribbean communities involved stereotypes in which young black men were assumed to be drug dependent, lazy and aggressive. The policing of migrant communities involved neither security activities nor the intelligence services. Black crime was characterized by low level offences such as cannabis use, pimping and auto-theft. The issue of law and order in relation to black youth came to prominence as a result of the Brixton riots and the Scarman Report (1981). Police relationships with the black community were transformed by the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the launch of the National Civil Rights Movement and the Macpherson report (1999). Black crime remained an important problem in London, with Mayor Ken Livingstone complaining of a free trade zone in drugs and guns, but the ‘war on terror’ has fuelled racial conflict with Muslim youth. While negative stereotypes about Islam have intensified since 9/11, migration as such has in the past decade ceased to be a political or economic issue, partly because labour migration from the Commonwealth has come to an end. Popular concern has been instead directed against asylum seekers entering Britain, for example from France, often through sleepy fishing villages in Suffolk. By the 1980s less than 5 per cent of Britain’s 55 million population were immigrants from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan as compared

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with Germany’s 7 per cent. Germany is often criticized for its low level of naturalization when compared with France, because the German emphasis on jus sanguinis has given a privileged status to ‘ethnic Germans’ from Eastern Europe and Russia over Turkish guest workers. However, Germany’s intake of refugees is far greater than Britain’s, while British government anxiety shifted in the 1990s from migration to asylum seeking, and asylum seekers from former Yugoslavia, Albania, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan have coloured public attitudes against immigration. Throughout the 1990s, Eurobarometer Surveys of British attitudes showed that 63 per cent thought Britain had too many immigrants and 78 per cent, too many refugees. In fact both the media and parliamentary debates consistently fail to distinguish between three categories: migrant, refugee and asylum seeker. After 9/11 and the Istanbul bombings, the Labour government became increasingly intolerant of asylum seekers and increasingly subservient to American foreign policy objectives in the struggle against terrorism. Political ambiguity about the possible entry of Turkey into the European Community further illustrates the implicit status of the European Union as a Christian association. The influx of Asian and Caribbean migrants in the second half of the twentieth century produced a protracted debate about identity that has been further complicated by devolution for Scotland and Wales, uncertain and reluctant entry into the European Union, and the ongoing political difficulties in Northern Ireland. While British identity became an acceptable self-definition for second-generation youth who are ‘Black British’, ‘Englishness’ has become a confused, and poorly defined cultural label. While the flag of St George proliferates in the English countryside, nobody is entirely certain what it stands for. If British identity is national, Englishness refers to a complex cultural tradition that is difficult to define and impossible to acquire simply by possession of a British passport. The traditional institutional glue of the United Kingdom (monarchy, religion, parliament, the ancient universities, afternoon tea, the

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Mothers Union, the Queen’s English, ‘bumps’ on the Cam, and the BBC) has been declining through this period, further eroding the cultural framework of both Englishness and British citizenship identity (Nairn 1994). The complex and protracted legal process in Parliament to ban fox hunting is not simply a failure of the Labour government to understand the countryside; it also reflects uncertainty about the nature of Englishness. What could be more English than the sound of hunting horns in English open fields? While Dunkirk united the nation, the post-war period has been one of growing cultural diversity, internal devolution and uncertainty about the place of Britain internationally, and of periodic bouts of right-wing nationalism in the shape of the National Front. We might argue therefore that Britain had become a multicultural society not as a result of any principled commitment to multiculturalism, but as the unintended consequence of its colonial, or more precisely its postcolonial history. British national identity and British nationalism remain unresolved issues of national politics. What can we learn from this case study of Britain? There are at least two, somewhat contradictory lessons. The first is that we can usefully distinguish between ideologically driven colonialism and accidental or unintended colonialism. Generally speaking, British colonialism was not driven by a consistent or strong sense of colonial endeavour; it had no lasting religious or racial underpinnings. There was of course the legacy of Kipling, the missionary societies and the development of a muscular and manly evangelical Christianity in Selwyn College Cambridge, the taken-forgranted racial superiority, and the Victorian sense of a Commonwealth, but these elements did not amount to a systematic and coherent ideology of empire or an imperial mission. There is an important contrast to be made between the attitude of Dutch Protestants to South Africa or Japanese imperial visions and British pragmatism. There is some merit to the argument that Britain acquired an empire as the unintended consequence of economic conquest. Singapore, Hong Kong and Gibraltar

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were important naval ports to sustain British economic ambition rather than aspects of a political mission backed up by a definite ideology. The proof of this argument is the ease with which Britain abandoned these outposts once their profitability in relation to military expenditure was in doubt. The contrast between France in relation to Algeria, or Portugal in relation to Mozambique and Britain in relation to Kenya, Nigeria or Rhodesia is telling. This is not to say that British troops could behave badly in Aden or Malaya, but simply to say that it was a pragmatic colonialism. The consequence of this attitude was a certain indifference to access to citizenship, and also the late development of a distinctive view of what constitutes British citizenship as a form of national identity. This pragmatic view of citizenship has collapsed quickly in the face of the perception of a widespread terrorist threat following 9/11 and the Madrid and London bombings. While migration is no longer a political issue, asylum seeking is, mainly because political borders are seen to be too porous. There is popular support for British Home Secretaries to get tough with asylum seekers, and considerable nervousness about East European migration as a result of an expanding European Union. The issue of asylum seeking and terror is now the most important contradiction between the nation-state and economic globalization. While one justification for economic globalization is the economic benefits that are derived from flexible labour markets and the free flow of goods and services, this openness is seen to create security problems that have, at present, very few solutions. As a result, liberal governments in capitalist societies, with Britain and the United States being clear examples, have made access to citizenship more stringent, closed off avenues to asylum, scrutinized the claims of political refugees more thoroughly and challenged many of the civil liberties that were the hallmark of Western democracy. The result is that in contemporary politics individual human rights appear to be often more prominent in the defence of the rights of citizens.

CONCLUSION: HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE EROSION OF NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP The tensions and contradictions between states, citizens and human rights constitute much of the content of international dispute and conflict, and yet theories of human rights have often failed to consider the relationship between citizenship and human rights. Statements about human rights and state sovereignty, which is the basis of citizenship, are often contradictory. For example, the declaration of the National Assembly of France in 1789 claimed that ‘the natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ were ‘liberty, property, security and resistance of oppression’, but it went on to assert that ‘the nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty’ and that no ‘individual or body of men’ could be entitled to ‘any authority which is not expressly derived from it’. While human rights are said to be innate, social rights are created by states. These two contrasted ideas – the imprescriptible rights of human beings and the exclusive sovereignty of the nation state – have remained an important dilemma of any justification of rights. The protection offered by national citizenship is declining, and yet the state remains important for the enforcement of social and human rights. To understand the nature of citizenship in relation to nationalism, we should reflect upon the differences between the social rights of citizenship and the individual rights of the human rights movement. Briefly, social rights are entitlements enjoyed by citizens and are enforced by courts within the national framework of a sovereign state. These social rights, which are typically related to corresponding duties, are contributory rights, because effective claims are associated with contributions that citizens have made to society through work, war (or a similar public duty), or parenting (Turner 2001). By contrast, human rights are rights enjoyed by individuals by virtue of being human, and as a consequence of a shared vulnerability. Human rights are not necessarily connected to duties and they are not contributory. There is no declaration of human duties as opposed to the many

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declarations and conventions on human rights. While states enforce social rights, there is no sovereign power uniformly to enforce rights at a global level. While the social rights of citizens tend to be national, human rights are universal, but it is often said that these human rights are not justiciable and they have no ‘correlativity’ with duties. This distinction between citizenship and human rights is important because it raises the question of the relationship between the enforcement of rights by nation states that are sovereign, and by global institutions that have legitimacy by virtue of international agreements and hence are an aspect of global governance. Although many theorists of human rights appear to welcome the erosion of national sovereignty, any historical overview of human rights in international and national politics brings us to the conclusion that effective human rights regimes actually require nation-state stability. Because human rights abuse is characteristically a product of ‘new wars’ (Münkler 2005) and state failure is illustrated by genocide, ethnic cleansing and anarchy, viable states appear to be important as a foundation for rights per se. There is a valid argument therefore that the liberties of citizens and their social rights are better protected by their own national institutions than by external legal or political intervention. The often chaotic outcome of human rights interventions in East Timor and Kosovo, or of human rights wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, might force us to the conclusion that any national government that can provide its citizens with security but with weak democracy is to be preferred over no government at all. From a Hobbesian perspective, a strong state is required to enforce agreements between conflicting social groups. Another way of expressing this idea is to argue that we need to maintain a distinction between the social rights of citizens that are enforced by states, and the human rights of persons that are protected, but frequently and inadequately enforced, by international conventions. The tension between these different types of rights reflects the growing tension in the modern

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world between nations and nationalism, on the one hand, and human rights, global governance and cosmopolitanism, on the other.

REFERENCES Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B. S. (1980) The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: Allen & Unwin. Bendix, R. (1964) Nation-Building and Citizenship. New York: Wiley. Bix, H. P. (2000) Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. New York: HarperCollins. Bullard, A. (2000) ‘Paris 1871/New Caledonia 1878: Human Rights and the Managerial State’, in J. F. Wasserstrom, L. Hunt and M. B. Young (eds), Human Rights and Revolutions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 99–112. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Finlay, M. (1991) Politics in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Canto. Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester. pp. 87–104. Kant, I. ([1793] 1960) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. New York: Harper & Row. Kumar, K. (2003) The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kvistad, G. (1999) The Rise and Demise of German Statism. Loyalty and Political Membership. Providence RI: Berghahn Books. Macpherson of Cluny, Sir William. (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny. London: The Stationery Office. Mann, M. (1986) The Social Sources of Power, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, M. (1987) ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 2: 339–54. Marshall, T. H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Münkler, H. (2005) The New Wars. Cambridge: Polity Press. Münch, R. (2001) Nation and Citizenship in the Global Age: From National to Transnational Ties and Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nairn, T. (1994) The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy. London: Vintage.

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Nelson, D. D. (1998) National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Porter, B. (1979) The Refugee Question in MidVictorian Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scarman, Lord. (1981) The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981. Report of an Inquiry by the Rt Hon. The Lord Scarman. OBE. London: HMSO. Sinclair, R. K. (1988) Democracy and Participation in Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tocqueville, A. de (2003) Democracy in America. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Turner, B. S. (2001) ‘The Erosion of Citizenship’, British Journal of Sociology, 52 (2): 189–209. Turner, B. S. (2004) ‘Making and Unmaking Citizenship in Neo-liberal Times’, A. S. Ku and N. Pun (eds), Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation and the Global City. London: Routledge. pp. xiv-xxiii. Weber, M. (1958) The City. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Weiner, M. (ed.) (1997) Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. London: Routledge.

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20 Nations and Regions: In or Out of the State? D AV I D M CC R O N E

Mainstream social science literature largely fails to distinguish between key concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’. Anthony Giddens, for example, defines the nation as a ‘bordered powercontainer’ which exists ‘when a state has a unified administrative reach over the territory over which its sovereignty is claimed’ (1985: 120). Giddens is not alone in redefining the nation in purely political terms, and in the process losing its cultural significance. He defines the nationstate as ‘a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries, its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence’ (Giddens 1981: 90). What is remarkable about this definition is that it is really a definition of the state, making no mention of the nation as such. The whole point of the hyphenated term ‘nation-state’ is that it aligns the strictly political realm of state with the cultural one of nation, thereby fusing two analytically distinct spheres. Anyone who inhabits what have been called ‘stateless nations’ will know only too well that they are not the same thing; there are nations – imagined communities, in Benedict Anderson’s famous term – which are not formally independent states, and political entities – states – in which different territorial cultural groupings – nations – are present.

Walker Connor (1990) once observed that fewer than 10 per cent of actual states are genuine nation-states in which nation-ness and state-ness coincide, that is, in which there is ethnic or cultural homogeneity within the boundaries of the state. In truth, there are states which are ethnically homogeneous, with possibly Iceland being the only one in Western Europe. ‘Ethnics’ are often spread across a variety of states. Brubaker uses the term ‘homeland nationalism’ (Brubaker 1996) to refer to significant populations of self-defining ‘nationals’ living outside the ‘national’ territory (obvious examples are in central Europe notably Hungary, Romania etc., but the same might be said of the minority community in Northern Ireland). Such work as there is on ‘nationstates’ sensitizes us to Eurocentric understandings of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ insofar as by and large West European territorial arrangements are far less complex than those in geopolitical fault-lines of the world, such as East and Central Europe. In short, we need to treat the concept of ‘nation-state’ as not only a statistically unusual formation, but one which belongs to nineteenthcentury European thinking about state-building (revealingly, often referred to as ‘nationbuilding’–classically, Deutsch (1953)). We also need to appreciate what Anderson referred to

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as the ‘crisis of the hyphen’ in the modern world, the disarticulation of nation and state in the twenty-first century world, a world in which states come under pressure from above and below to cede power and authority, reflecting the fact that the modern state is no longer able to be the complete ‘bordered powercontainer’ it once was. That is not to imply that the state has ceased to matter. It remains the key territorial arena for much decision-making and resource allocation (Mann 1997). The second definitional puzzle concerns the terms ‘nation’ and ‘region’. The latter in particular is used in diverse ways: to refer to supra-state territorial entities (‘the Balkans region’, for example), as well as to sub-state and even subnational, entities. Thus, North-East England, Cornwall etc. are spoken of as ‘regions’ of England, as sub-state administrative territories which may or may not have a degree of selfgovernment1). Similar exist within Scotland (and Wales), where the language of ‘regions’ has been used to describe local authority areas (such as Highland, Lothian, Strathclyde and so on). When it comes to Scotland and Wales as a whole, on the other hand, there is dubiety. On the one hand, they are treated as ‘economic regions’ of the UK for purposes of distributional analysis (so treated in the UK government statistical publication Regional Trends). On the other hand, they are spoken of as ‘nations’ with high degrees of institutional distinctiveness and ‘national’ identity. This is not a uniquely British phenomenon; Spain recognizes its national territories (Catalonia, Basque country, Galicia, as well as its autonomous regions); Quebec makes the claim to be a Canadian province primus inter pares on account of its claim to nationhood, at odds with a Canadian nation-building project. Indeed, in many West European states there are territories which lay claim to ‘national’ distinctiveness rather than settling for mere status as administrative regions. Simply to refer to sub-state territorial entities as ‘regions’ is not especially helpful. The problem is further compounded by matters of political ideology: the ‘ism’ question, in this case nationalism vis-à-vis regionalism. Both imply a sense of territorial identity, but the former implies that it is a higher order, of

degree and/or kind, than the latter. Thus, in everyday terms, identifying with Yorkshire does not imply that one is not English; nor that coming from the Highlands, one is not Scottish. The first identity is regional, and it is nested in the second – national, which in turn might imply that they are nested within ‘state’ – British – identity. The literature on nations and nationalism is not especially good on nationalism vis-à-vis regionalism. To simplify, there is a tendency to think that ‘nationalism’ is equivalent to separatism and secession. Anything less than that is treated as sub-nationalism, or regionalism. There is something of a teleological argument here: nations exist when they are states, either as political fact or as aspiration. Where they do not, then they aren’t really nations at all, but something less than the real thing. However, simply defining nationalism in terms of its constitutional outcomes is not adequate. We need to know a lot more about the conditions under which territorial entities, whether we call them nations or regions, develop an overtly political-constitutional project for great selfgovernment, but we should not assume the pursuit of greater self-government is itself the defining feature of ‘nationhood’. There is a related issue which often comes up in the course of the argument. Put simply, there is the question of ethnic versus civic, which has bedevilled writings on nationalism at least since Kohn’s Encyclopedia Britannica entry of 1945 (Kohn 1945). Nationalism is deemed to be about ‘ethnic’ feelings; not to be confused a priori with civic institutions and practices (most obviously featuring in and through the state). The vocabulary of nationalism frequently involves comparison between civic/territorial forms and ethnic/cultural forms. In Jonathan Hearn’s words: ‘It has been common to make a distinction between “ethnic” and “civic” forms of nationalism, the former involving beliefs in biological and cultural essentialisms, and the latter involving commitments to ideas of citizenship and the rule of law’ (2000: 7). The problem with the distinction between ethnic and civic is that it is normative rather than analytic, the former ‘bad’ and the latter ‘good’. As ideal types they might

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help us get a handle on issues of culture versus territory, but it is a distinction of limited analytical value. Hearn comments: The difference between a useful distinction and a misleading dichotomy can be difficult to discern, and this is so for both civic versus ethnic, and liberal versus communitarian constructions of reality. Minimally, we should bear in mind that what these conceptual pairs ultimately define is opposing styles of arguments about what nations are and how social values are created, rather than actual types of nations or societies. (2000: 194)

The distinction is not simply a matter of political rhetoric, but of academic analysis. Thus, Rogers Brubaker (1992) has employed the distinction between ‘ius soli’ – literally, the law of the soil, a territorial jurisdiction, and a community of descent, ‘ius sanguinis’ – the law of blood, roughly corresponding to ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ respectively. When all these ideas are put together, confusion usually arises: ethnic/civic; nation/region; state/nation. Consider the following observation: ‘Scottish nationalism is an example of an ethno-regional nationalism, and, like many of its kind, it is divided between secessionism and moderate devolutionism’ (Delanty and O’Mahony 2002: 129). The point is two-fold. On the one hand, it implies that because Scotland has not seceded from the British Union, and the Scottish National Party has not achieved its goal of an Independent Scotland, then it falls short of full-blown ‘nationalism’, that is, ‘secessionism’, and instead pursues ‘devolutionism’. On the other hand, the authors are using the term ‘ethno-regional nationalism’ to distinguish it from ‘ethno-linguistic nationalism’ (in Quebec, Wales, Flanders, for example). By any reading, nationalism in Scotland is not ‘about’ language, thus it must, by implication, have some other motor, in this case political-territorial, that is ‘regional’. Such a set of distinctions, ethnic/civic, linguistic/regionalist (territorial), may actually muddy more waters than it clarifies.

NATIONS WITHOUT STATES Let us explore the regionalist/nationalist distinction with regard to that set of territories often referred to as ‘nations without states’.

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These seem especially significant in the light of debates about nations and regions in the modern world. What has emerged in recent years is the ‘re-invention of territory’, a new territorialism (Keating 2001). Much of this is attributed to ‘globalization’, in particular the destabilizing effects of economic, political and cultural change on state formations which were formed in the nineteenth century, such that key social processes were no longer quite as aligned as they once were with state boundaries. Keating observes: ‘In some cases, this has focused on places with a strong historic identity, but the new regionalisms [sic] do not so much hark back to pre-modern forms of territorial identity, as reinvent the notion of territory in ways consistent with contemporary experience. Place becomes an important link between global developments and individual experience, and an arena for new forms of politics’ (1996: 54). Space is important here not simply in and of itself, as mere topography, but as ‘place’, relatively coherent and cohesive territories which shape and interpret social forces. Keating cites John Agnew’s useful distinction between three elements of place: locale – the settings in which social relations are constituted; location – the geographical area encompassing the settings for social interaction; and sense of place – the local ‘structure of feeling’ (Keating 1996: 62). We begin to see something of a continuum of place, along which we can place nations/ regions. On the one hand, in some territories there will be a greater density of social interaction and institutional activity than in others. This will be most obviously expressed in levels of governance (not simply government, narrowly defined), networks of social organization and civil society which set the parameters for how social life is organized. There is a tendency for these to be relatively self-contained and self-sustaining such that they reinforce shared commonalities between people. It is impossible to know which comes first, the sense of social cohesion or the density of networks, though in practice it does not matter, as each reinforces the other. Often these territories are culturally distinctive: they are differentiated from their neighbours by aspects

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of language, religion, customs and practices, and ultimately senses of identity. Much of this is akin to debates about the nature of ‘nations’, the search, fairly fruitless, to find the key identifiers which all nations have in common. Nowadays, the literature has largely given up the search for the cultural marker(s) which define all nations, in large part because the sense of nationality, or at least sense of place, can be generated by all sorts of markers, and even none except insofar as people choose to identify themselves as having something in common. Thus, we know that language is frequently a cultural marker which defines a nation to itself, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient in this respect. For example, ‘English’ (language) is no longer the preserve of ‘the English’ (people) – Americans do not define themselves as English, nor do Scots or Australians for that matter. Indeed, the Scottish case is especially interesting in this regard. Benedict Anderson once tried to explain the Union of 1707 on the grounds that the Scots were insufficiently distinct from their southern neighbours in terms of cultural habits and practices to remain independent. The problem with that as an explanation of fusion (becoming British) is that it does not account for the progressive process of fission from the final quarter of the twentieth century (becoming less British). Language undoubtedly has the capacity to be a key marker of difference, and in places like Quebec, Catalonia and Flanders it is difficult to imagine processes of identity generation without it. That is not to imply that language ‘causes’ national distinctiveness any more than religion does. Rather, they are two obvious cultural frames through which differences are imagined, and that is the key. Benedict Anderson’s term ‘imagined community’ has become part of the lexicon of nations not because it is ‘imaginary’, but because, in his words: • ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion Anderson (1996: 6).’

• ‘The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations (1996: 7).’ • ‘It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained hierarchical dynastic realm (1996: 7).’ • ‘ … it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship (1996: 7).’ His point of departure is: that nationality, or as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. (1996: 4)

To start with this approach to ‘nation’ helps to distinguish it from a purely administrative region. It reinforces the point that there is cultural content without implying that it precedes the sense of ‘nationality’, or that it is its cause. Indeed, cultural distinctiveness may well arise from administrative practices undertaken over a long historical period. Thus, Scotland is relatively light in terms of cultural distinctiveness from, say, Wales, where language has played a much more central part in defining what it is to be Welsh. Having Gaelic as its oldest known language has not prevented it being driven back to the fringes of Scotland, spoken by around 2 per cent of its population. If anything, the sense of nationality in Scotland is stronger than it is in Wales as measured by various social and cultural attitudes, and by the fact that political nationalism (as evidenced by support for the Scottish National Party compared with its Welsh equivalent, Plaid Cymru is stronger in Scotland than it is in Wales). What this suggests is that language may (or may not) become the vehicle for expressing difference, which in turn may (or may not) take a political turn if and when conditions allow. In other

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words, we should not mistake the carrier for the cause, important though it may be as a cultural-political vehicle. The Scottish case is an interesting one because it is, in conventional terms, culture-light. A strong sense of nationality is not only not tied to issues of language (English-speaking); or historically to religion (species Presbyterian of the genus Protestant); but it is modern, in the sense that for much of the post-1707 Union history, it was ‘British’ in aspiration and affiliation. It was also one of the most industrialized ‘regions’ of the UK, on a par with similar in England, therefore its developing nationalism was not the result of catch-up economic development, still less a desire to overthrow foreign oppression. There was no process of ‘internal colonialism’ in Scotland, given that its economic and social history was far more ‘British’ in its structure than many regions of England (McCrone 1992). History mattered in the sense that Scotland had a memory of political independence, but memory alone was insufficient to sustain a sense of separateness, at least until that memory itself became grist to a political mill in the late twentieth century. In other words, it was not history per se which mattered; rather, it was the way it was mobilized as cultural-political ideology when conditions were judged to be right. To reiterate the point: we search in vain for the ‘right’ set of cultural markers which are common to self-defining ‘nations’ because these are the means of collective self-assertion, not their cause. Does this mean that no such cultural markers are necessary? Strictly, yes, though to have a cultural-free content in favour of simply shared territorial identity is hard to imagine. At the state level, some, such as Jürgen Habermas (1996), have argued for the pursuit of ‘constitutional patriotism’ as a way of protecting civil society from the ravages of ethnic nationalism, but it is hard to imagine a content-free form that is purely civic. One is hard pushed to build shared nationality without a modicum of cultural straw. As Dominique Schnapper observed: ‘Would a purely civic society, founded on abstract principles, have the strength to control passions born from allegiance to ethnic and religious groups?’

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(1997: 211). In practice, some measure of ethnicity, however invented, seems necessary to the endeavour of shared national awareness. ‘No bricks without cultural straw’ is also relevant to the distinction between nations and regions. In broad terms, the latter lack the kind of cultural substance which might give them a strong(er) sense of identity. That is not to say that over time this might not evolve, even if based simply on shared experiences which are then fed through a prism of meaning to explain why social and political relations in a territory are distinctive. One might ask: are nations and regions different only in degree, or in kind? Are we talking about quite different phenomena, or not? At one important level, it does not matter, insofar as territories may develop (or not) a sense of difference on the basis of relatively little, but that sense is magnified by political circumstances. Manifestly it ‘helps’ if there are obvious cultural markers – language, religion, ethnicity – which act as rallying points for political action. The point about these markers is not that they somehow stack up, as if the more one has, the more ‘national’ a territory is. Let us turn the puzzle around. The point is that markers of this sort only ‘matter’ when they are vested with the power to make a difference. They are the rallying points, the moments of difference, around which identities form and coalesce. It is not their presence or absence per se which matters so much as their power to mobilize, and the range across which they do so. It is manifestly limiting if, for example, not everyone shares the marker, or if it differentiates people such that some are included and others excluded. Issues of language can have as much power to divide as unite; if, for example, you are considered more of a Ruritanian if you speak the language of Ruritania; if your claim is recognized by others around you to be a valid one. Issues of birth, lineage, modes of dress may also matter as much as language or religion, but we cannot draw any a priori conclusions about the primacy or otherwise of such markers. Much depends on the social and cultural situations in which they are mobilized, and manifestly these may change over time. It also helps if there are alternative ways of doing, and ways of seeing. Thus, the fact that

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Scotland had been an independent state for more than 700 years before its Union with England provides an alternative imagining as and when the conditions arose for grievances to be newly politicized in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Territories (like Wales?) which had never been ‘independent’ in the modern sense of the term found it much harder to envision a constitutional model other than attachment to a bigger neighbour, even where the raw materials of ‘nationhood’ (language) were stronger. It is not simply ‘history’ which matters, however invented that is. Ways of seeing may depend as much on the medium as the message. Thus, the media – print and broadcasting – matter, because they have the power not only to reproduce but to set the agenda for what is worth reproducing. Benedict Anderson’s observations about the role of the print media in the rise of nationalism are well-known, but it is their ongoing capacity to set the framework for debate which matters. Where there is a ‘language press’ then there are advantages to be had, although it is not possible to stop people reading ‘foreign’ material in liberal democracies. Nevertheless, it is something of an advantage to have an indigenous press and media even if the linguistic medium is not distinct. Thus, Scotland has national press insofar as the vast majority of its newspapers are Scottish, and even where the media are not strictly Scottish (like the BBC) there is sufficient attention to its agenda to be virtually indigenous. The BBC has ceased to speak of Scotland (and Wales) as a ‘national region’, and in the 1990s issued to its staff a set of norms and guidelines reflecting the fact that terms could mean quite different things in different parts of the kingdom. Tellingly, even the word ‘nation’ became fraught as it had the capacity to refer to the state (the UK) as well as its component (national) parts (England, Scotland, Wales, and even Northern Ireland, though no one has as yet come up with a suitable descriptor for that divided province). We should not make the mistake of focusing only on those territories in which there is manifest political action for self-government of whatever variety as evidence of ‘national’ feeling. It is analytically valid, and even more

interesting perhaps, to look too at territories that do not show much evidence of secession. Bavaria, for example, would on the face of it appear to have a number of important markers – history, institutions and not least a political system, even political parties – that do not conform to the rest of Germany. There is, as yet, no sign of territorial secession, but one would be unwise to rule it out forever should political and social conditions change at some future point. To be different is not tantamount to separation, and we look in vain for the factor or factors which make a difference. Rather, it is the broader context which matters, which turns manifest difference into political opportunity. After all, if one were to compare the nonEnglish territories of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, one would not really have predicted in the mid-nineteenth century that the first would be partitioned and most of it independent, and that Scotland would have a devolved lawmaking parliament, and Wales something less than that, but a fair degree of self-government. Are such developments inevitable? No. Context, in many ways, is all. In the late nineteenth century, for example, there was at least a reasonable chance that Ireland would have ‘home rule’, and that this would be a prelude to ‘home rule all round’, such that the UK might well have become a federated state. That this did not happen is not the result of some iron law of constitutional development, but of circumstances and events. There was no inevitable outcome involved; merely a set of serendipities which generated outcomes that few expected, though once in existence demanded a priori explanation. In truth, many of the large moments in history – one thinks of the birth of Soviet communism in 1917 as well as its demise in 1989 – were unforeseen until they actually happened, at which point a veritable academic industry grew up seeking to explain their inevitability. That is perhaps to stretch a point, for a purely serendipitous account of history does not get us very far, and explaining ex post facto is better than no explanation at all. Are nations without states, then, sustainable? There are usually two conventional options: either one argues that they are ‘not really’ nations – mere ‘regions’ – in which case

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they do not seek statehood; or sooner or later they will emerge into statehood which is the natural end-game once the conditions have been met. It is not so simple. Perhaps academics have been too bound to nineteenth-century visions of statehood and ‘nation-building’ to recognize that the socio-political world is a much more complex and changed place in the twenty-first. Even the term ‘nations without states’ (or ‘stateless nations’) is something of a misnomer. By and large, these are not territories which are completely stateless, that is, without much in the way of institutional self-government. Rather, they tend to have long pedigrees of systems of governance, public bureaucracies, even legislatures. The European Union, for example, has a committee of legislative regions (REG LEG) which describes itself as follows: Currently, regions with legislative powers are part of eight of the fifteen EU member states: Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Finland and the United Kingdom. Regions with legislative power have their own Government and Parliament. They have often similar responsibilities as the member State within their areas of competence in the three domains of government: legislative, executive and judiciary. (http://www. regleg.org/)

The likes of Scotland, Flanders, Catalunya, Euzkadi, Bavaria and the German Länder have considerable legislative powers as well as high degrees of territorial identification. They tend to have strong civil societies, levels of associational and institutional networking, systems of law, media, education, cultural products, which frame political and social understandings. They do not, on the face of it, suffer from some kind of arrested development towards full and formal independence, but rather, their political aims are geared to maximizing autonomy in a much more open-ended fashion. In short, they are understated nations, but only in the sense that they are not nations with an army and a navy.2 Much is made of the impact of ‘globalization’ on territorial-constitutional arrangements in the modern world, that the conventional nation-state finds itself pulled in two directions, upwards by global economic forces and supra-state institutions (such as the European Union), and downwards to the

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sub-state level by territories which sense that the hyphenated nation-state has had its day. This is captured by Benedict Anderson’s comment about the crisis of the hyphen (1996) between nation and state; by suggestions that fully fledged nation-states were always something of a trompe l’oeil, involving claims to, rather than the reality of, genuinely national statehood (Held 1988; Tilly 1992; Tamir 1993). Another version of the hyphen’s crisis was expressed in Daniel Bell’s wry observation that the nation-state is too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life (cited in McGrew 1992). One does not, of course, have to buy into the globalization thesis to accept that various processes in the modern world do not come naturally and inevitably to rest on the platform of the national state (Tilly’s preferred term). Where there is a density of institutional arrangements, there is no reason why different territorial levels cannot become the ‘natural’ arena in which to do politics, deliver services and thereby earn the loyalty and identification of the citizenry. Where these arenas are most developed (most obviously in terms of ‘legislative regions’) but also where there are long histories of alternative cultural frames, then it is not surprising that they offer the most obvious challenges to existing politicalconstitutional arrangements.

NEO-NATIONALISM IN UNDERSTATED NATIONS It is important to recognize that such developed ‘regions’ are not the incubi of fear and loathing, driven by a deep reactive dislike for the modern world, building a ‘back to the future’ mentality. Over 25 years ago, Tom Nairn (1977) coined the term ‘neo-nationalism’ to describe the emergence of a new kind of territorial politics in Western states. Such forms of neo-nationalism owe more to the pocket-book than the prayerbook. They are led by parties and associations not of poets and prelates but of bankers and bureaucrats. They are not, on the whole, designed to stop the world in order to get off,

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but to shape it in a way more conducive to the business of alternative territorial formations. The Catalan economy has long been regarded as relatively ‘over-developed’ compared with the rest of Spain, just as Quebec has shifted from its historically agricultural economy to one which services large parts of the North American trade area. In Michael Keating’s words: ‘Deregulation, neo-liberalism and free trade have not destroyed the Quebec model of development but they have transformed it. It is geared now to the interests of large corporations, based in Quebec but increasingly continental or global in their scale of operations’ (1996: 6). The internationalizing of the economy occurs within a new geometry of power, most obviously framed by supra-state institutions and practices. The most obvious, in the case of Scotland and Catalonia, is the European Union such that there is a complex and variable speed geometry involving the national, the state and the supra-state levels. In the Quebec case, it is NAFTA which provides the critical third level, and while lacking the political and institutional framework of the EU, it lays down a new sphere of economic interaction which, possibly with time, will require new structures of governance. In sum, we tend to find neo-nationalist movements in territories which have outgrown their historic relationships with their core states. Just as Scotland developed its union with England as a ‘marriage of convenience’ within the imperial context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so a new set of economic and political circumstances in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries has required a recasting of this relationship in the light of supra-state and global arrangements (McCrone 2001). Having a European strategy, for example, to relate to the new power geometries is somewhat easier for ‘stateless nations’ than it is for their central states which have a more constrained institutional legacy to contend with. The development, then, of niche-nationalism is reflected in the ability of political movements to shift around the spectrum; for example, from right to left, corporatist/neo-liberal/ social democratic. Thus, the Scottish National Party has shifted its position from right to left

to compete for the largest block of left-of-centre Labour votes. The Parti Quebecois positions itself as a leftist party while retaining strong links with the local business elite. The nationalists in Catalonia, who formed a longstanding coalition until 2003, are closely allied with local, essentially small, capital, yet have a strong appeal to manual working-class voters in autonomous elections. The trick is to play the system so as to capitalize to maximum advantage, mixing and matching ideology, strategy and voter appeal. Compared with more traditional forms of nationalism that seek to defend and maintain social and cultural values, neonationalist movements are more promiscuous in their appeal, learning to live with, and even love, the global market in a social democratic or liberal way. Not all forms of neo-nationalism are leftist in ideological character. The Lega Nord in Italy, for example, has allied itself firmly with the right, in arguing that northern and southern Italy represent two distinct, non-converging societies which should be free to go their own ways (Bull 1999). Its leader, Umberto Bossi, has argued that Lombardy and Trentino have far more in common with the Sud-Tirol and Bavaria than with Calabria or Campania. The Lega has benefited from two processes: first, the collapse of the Italian party system, notably the demise of the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, and the emergence of rightist coalitions led by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia; and second, the mobilization of concerns with migration into the affluent north, first from the poor Italian south, and latterly from outwith the EU. Turkey’s overtures to join the EU, for example, are opposed by the Lega as a ‘muslim invasion’, that ‘Turkey’s entry into Europe is a very high risk, a real Trojan horse in the heart of the West (EU Business, 19 December 2004). Important though presenting political opportunities are, the Lega Nord recognizes that they are not enough in and of themselves to create a social movement. It has attempted to forge a cultural-territorial construction in the north of Italy which it calls Padania, to give it symbolic underpinnings which it judges key to its separatist cause (Sciatino 1999). It remains to be seen whether

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constructing nationalist bricks with a minimum of cultural straw in this case is feasible in the longer term. In many respects, neo-nationalism grows organically out of a cohesive and coherent civil society. The communicative space marked out by institutional autonomy helps to generate a sense of national identity, which can then feed through, as and when appropriate, to political forms of nationalism. Indeed, without institutional distinctiveness, it would be much more difficult to imagine oneself as, for example, ‘Scottish’. Feeling Scottish is not the result of some ill-remembered set of historical emotions, but derived from the institutional framework of social governance. Similarly, all political parties, from Right to Left, accept that Scotland is a ‘nation’ with its own historical and institutional distinctiveness, and thus are all ‘nationalists’ in the lower case sense of the term. Where they differ, of course, is in their assessment of the constitutional politics which derive from that. For ‘unionists’, Scotland’s national distinctiveness is best served by remaining part of the United Kingdom, albeit in devolved form, whereas for ‘separatists’, only an independent legislature can achieve that satisfactorily.

THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY It is institutional autonomy which builds a civic rather than simply an ethnic sense of being Scottish. If it were the case that being Scottish was simply an ethnic, cultural, identity as some have claimed, then it could more easily be accommodated by being incorporated into a wider political Union. In other words, the ‘nesting’ of Scotland within the United Kingdom would have been much easier. It is precisely the challenge to governing state structures which is provided by ‘civil society’. For as long as social institutions have freedom of manoeuvre, then there is little call for a distinctive political legislature. Once, however, this freedom is constrained, it is almost inevitable that the social and the political are reconnected. Thus it was that it took until the

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second half of the twentieth century before formal political nationalism became a serious force in Scottish politics, reflecting the growing power of the British state, first, through welfarism, and later, in a more overtly ideological form, in the challenge of Thatcherism. It would be wrong, however, to jump to the conclusion that the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ must be reconnected in modern societies. One important aspect of that is how people articulate their sense of national identity. Thus, Scots are also British, the Catalans are Spanish, and Quebecois Canadian, when it suits them to be. This plural identity is a political resource which is played in appropriate circumstances, rather than a fixed characteristic. While it is true that people in Scotland are more than six times more likely to emphasize their Scottishness over their Britishness, it remains the case that just as many claim to be British in some form or another. This is not the result of some socio-psychological inability to make up one’s mind, the result of a ‘deformed’ culture. There is no inconsistency in this, for it is a matter of having different identity cards to hand as and when they need to be played. In short, there is something quite calculative about national identity which shifts according to the political circumstances. It is far less a matter of sentiment than it is of political practice. It reflects the need for multiple political identities in the modern world, for just as sovereignty is layered and shared (Scottish, British, European), so people appear quite content to attach identities, and political commitment, to these levels as and when necessary. The issue, in other words, is not which one you are, but which you choose to be according to circumstance and purpose. The ambiguity of identity is also reflected in ambiguity in the political project. Is neonationalism about independence or not? It depends what one means. It is true that the Scottish National Party is a separatist party in that it seeks an independent Scotland, but this is ‘independence in Europe’, which strictly speaking is an autonomous position, namely, conditional independence. In similar fashion, the Parti Quebecois adopts a ‘sovereignist’ goal, but one which is contingent on maintaining

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close links with the rest of Canada. On the other hand, the main nationalist bloc in Catalonia, CiU, currently supports ‘autonomisme’ rather than full independence, while its smaller but older rival, Esquerra Republicana (ERC), aims for an independent Catalonia. Whereas a majority of ERC supporters wish Catalonia to be independent, only a minority of CiU supporters do so.3 The leader of CiU, Jordi Pujol, established its philosophy in 1984 as follows: Catalonia is a nation and has the right to be recognised as such in the area of culture and language, politics and institutions. I reiterate my desire that this is to be done within the [Spanish] Constitution, so that Catalonia continues to be a factor for the stability and progress for the whole of Spain, and I especially emphasise my determination that all that is done through dialogue and understanding, both within and outwith Catalonia, hence my conviction that citizens’ ‘convivencia’ has to be our most important preoccupation, that we explicitly recognise in nationalism. (Caminal and Matas 1998: 21)

In short, these are nationalist movements whose goals turn out to be less than clear-cut. Home Rule, Autonomisme, Sovereignty-Association do not sound like full-blown and traditional independence. In truth, the issue is more how to adapt in order to maximize political independence in an increasingly interdependent world. The contingent nature of neo-nationalism is also reflected in support for the relevant political party. Voters are adept at voting differently at different elections, notably supporting the nationalist parties more heavily at ‘autonomous’ elections than at elections for the central state government. It is also noticeable that the political parties of neo-nationalism are of relatively recent origin. They date, by and large, from the second half of the twentieth century, although they have grown out of previous political movements. The Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci commented: The ethno-national question must be seen … as containing a plurality of meanings that cannot be reduced to a single core. It contains ethnic identity, which is a weapon of revenge against centuries of discrimination and new forms of exploitation; it serves as an instrument for applying pressure in the political market; and it is a response to needs for personal and collective identity in highly complex societies. (1989: 90)

Thus, we can see that nationalism combines three key aspects: the sociological (‘a weapon of revenge …’; the political (‘an instrument … in the political market’), and the psychological (‘needs for personal and collective identity’). That is why nationalism is such a potent force in the twenty-first century, at a time when conventional state structures struggle to maintain their claim to absolute sovereignty in the modern world. Nationalist movements can encapsulate cultural defence, the pursuit of political resources, as well as being vehicles for social identity in periods of rapid social change. We should not be surprised that nationalism is a catch-all movement, lending itself to versions of ecological or green politics, as well as seeking out new forms of self-determination and selfmanagement. It has a chameleon-like quality in ideological terms of presenting itself as a movement that moves across the Right–Left spectrum as circumstances require. This is not a reflection of weakness but of strength in the politics of the twenty-first century. Above all, neo-nationalism, as it operates within advanced capitalist states, pinpoints the shifts that have taken place in the nature of states themselves. It is too facile to claim that, in a globalized world, the age of the state is dead, although it is now much harder to sustain the argument that the state is all-powerful. Rather, there are new tensions and pressures on systems of governance such that nation and state have become disarticulated. Instead, we are confronted with a messier world in which degrees of state-ness, and even degrees of nation-ness become more imaginable and plausible. The very fact that the ‘nation-state’ has become a contested concept reflects the new social and political forces at work. What these generate is a much more complex system of governance than textbooks allow, as well as a more nuanced and sophisticated sense of cultural distinctiveness. The fall of communism in 1989 did not create this state of affairs so much as remove the rationale for big bloc politics whereby any threat to state supremacy was considered a threat to the geo-political division of labour. In this context, the conundrum – that neonationalist movements are emerging just at the point at which the ‘nation-state’ is in decay – is

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more apparent than real. On the one hand, neonationalism represents a challenge to the zerosum orthodoxy that sovereignty is all, for this is a debate about the degrees of self-government rather than whether territories should have any at all. On the other hand, while the soidisant nation-state is in decay in the sense that it was always, in its strict sense, a chimera, there is little doubt that states themselves matter, and will continue so to do. Just as it is facile to proclaim the death of politics in a global world, so predicting the end of the state, let alone history, represents false prophecy. The political realm remains the arena for debate about the public good, and government remains the key mechanism for redistributing resources among its citizens. It may be recognizing the limits of its actions, but that is a far cry from predicting its incapacity and demise. Political movements like neo-nationalism, then, are based on accepting limited and shared sovereignty in an interdependent world. The political movements which emerge around these issues are not inadequate reactions to the state of that world, unable to make up their minds as to whether they are ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the state, but quite rational responses to the more complex world of the twenty-first century. Understated nations flourish not because states are collapsing, but because of the variable geometry of power, layered and shared, in the modern world. There is no forward march to full independence, any more than a back-to-the-future trek to the world as it was imagined to be. The task of the social scientist is to understand that world rather than to measure it against the models of political development we inherited from the nineteenth century. If it is a more complex and messy one than our theories give credit to, then so be it. The task is to understand the world, and then, just possibly, to change it.

NOTES 1 The rejection of a devolved assembly for North-East England by a majority of 4 to 1 in a referendum in November 2004 reinforces the argument in this chapter that ‘regions’ (such as North-East England) have far less

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cultural capital available to them than the ‘nations’ of Scotland and Wales in which successful referendums were held in 1997 to set up devolved institutions. 2 The allusion here is to the aphorism ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’, in other words, that cultural differences frequently have to be backed up by state force to be taken seriously. 3 In 1996 data, 62 per cent of ERC supporters preferred independent status for Catalonia, compared with 23 per cent of CiU supporters. I am indebted to John MacInnes for bringing this and the following quotation to my attention.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1996) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. London: Verso. Bull, A. (1999) ‘Regionalism in Italy’, in P. Wagstaff (ed.), Regionalism in the European Union. Exeter: Intellect. Brubaker, R. (1992) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caminal, M. and Matas, J. (eds) (1998) El Sistema Politic de Catalunya. Barcelona: Tecnos. Connor, W. (1990) ‘When Is a Nation?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 13: 92–103. Delanty, G. and O’Mahony, P. (2002) Nationalism and Social Theory. London: Sage. Deutsch, K. (1953) Nationalism and Social Communication. London: Chapman and Hall. Giddens, A. (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. I: Power, Property and the State. London: Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1985) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. II: The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1996) ‘The European Nation-State – Its Achievements and Limits’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation. London: Verso Books. Hearn, J. (2000) Claiming Scotland: National identity and Liberal Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Held, D. (1988) ‘Farewell to the Nation State’, Marxism Today, December. Keating, M. (1996) Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Keating, M. (2001) Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-sovereignty Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kohn, H. (1945) The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Its Origins and Background. London: Macmillan (extract reprinted as ‘Western and Eastern Nationalisms’, in J. Hutchinson and A. D. Smith (eds) (1994) Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press). McCrone, D. (1992) Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. London: Routledge. McCrone, D. (2001) Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. McGrew, A. (1992) ‘A Global Society?’, in S. Hall, D. Heald and T. Mc Grew. (eds), Modernity and its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mann, M. (1997) ‘Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-State?’, Review of International Political Economy, 4 (3): 472–96.

Melucci, A. (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. London: Hutchinson Radius. Nairn, T. (1977) The Break-Up of Britain. London: New Left Books. Schnapper, D. (1997) ‘The European Debate on Citizenship’, Daedalus, 126 (3): 199–222. Sciatino, G. (1999) ‘Just Before the Fall: the Northern League and the Cultural Construction of a Secessionist Claim’, International Sociology, 14 (3): 321–36. Tamir, Y. (1993) Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C. (1992) Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992. Oxford: Blackwell.

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21 Nationalism and Sport ANTHONY KING

In June 2004, the football European Championships were played in Portugal. England had qualified for the competition earlier in the year and popular hopes were extremely high that England could win this tournament, its first such victory since the World Cup of 1966. As anticipation for the tournament gathered in May, small Cross of St George flags, flying from plastic attachments, started to appear on car roofs. The flags fluttered patriotically as the fans inside drove proudly across England. Their numbers swelled to reach a climax during the tournament itself – and England’s disappointing performance in it. By June, it was impossible to undertake a journey of any length in England without seeing the Cross of St George waving furiously from a passing car. Perhaps symbolically, the plastic attachments which held the flags onto the cars broke regularly and, during the tournament, England’s roads were littered with white and red flags, muddied and ripped as they were routinely run over by the wheels of other passing cars. Even after the end of the tournament throughout July and into August, the odd tattered and faded flag could still be seen flying hopefully. For those brief summer months, these flags were a powerful statement of national pride and solidarity. These car-borne flags symbolized the England team and affirmed the pride which was embodied by the three lions on the England

team shirt. Interestingly, they were not limited to the masculine fans from the fragmented working class, which had been football’s central audience up to the 1990s, but were affixed to the cars of professional groups, including those of women. In every city – and in every area of every city – the flags were ubiquitous. This intense public interest in the England team was particularly noticeable given the nature of the tournament. Although the World Cup had routinely attracted the interest of those who did not follow the club game, and England’s victory in 1966 had been the spark of national celebration, the European Championship was a tournament which had attracted only limited public interest in England. Indeed, even the European Championship of 1996 (hosted by England) inspired more circumscribed public interest. The car flags of 2004 demonstrated the new position of football in English social life. In England, football has become a shared public ritual which is central to popular imagination across the social hierarchy. Even a tournament of traditionally moderate attraction now inspires an intense expression of national sentiment. Yet, just as football now attracts a different kind of audience than had previously been the case, the nationalism which this audience espouses had also changed. The England flags which fluttered from cars throughout June 2004 may have been trivial gestures of enthusiasm

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but they marked out a reformed national community in response to the new flows of transnational capital. These flags denoted the outline of a new form of nationalism in England. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the way that the transformation of English nationalism can be plotted through the activities of football fans. England and, indeed, the summer months of 2004 are the exclusive focus of attention. Although the peculiarities of English nationalism must be recognized, there are manifest advantages in concentrating on a single case when considering nationalism. A detailed, ideographic approach illuminates the precise social processes by which social groups imagine themselves as national communities. These communities emerge, after all, out of face-to-face interactions. Consequently, a grounded, ethnographic approach ultimately provides a more adequate theoretical account of nationalism than sweeping abstractions. Moreover, once the precise processes are identified in relation to English nationalism, they can be mapped onto other national communities and the way fans in those countries express themselves through sport. In this way, the differentiated responses of national communities and the alternative forms which they have adopted in the face of new conditions can be identified. At the same time, the underlying processes of change can also be recognized. Thus, the national communities which are imagined by football fans across the world are also changing. Like England, these imagined communities are undergoing a dual process of change: they are becoming simultaneously more local and more transnational. This chapter hints only briefly at how other national communities are changing but the example of England may provide a model for tracking these wider changes. It is important to recognize that national identity is a collective concept which is mobilized situationally. In changing circumstances, different kinds of groupings will appeal to different concepts of nationality to unify themselves. Consequently, although the transformation of national identity may be evident in the ritual of sport, it does not automatically follow that this identity will be reflected in all other spheres of social activity. No direct transposition can be

assumed. Nevertheless, while football fans constitute one social group in a specific circumstance, it seems highly likely that changes in national identity in this sphere of activity will be paralleled, in admittedly differentiated ways, in other areas of social practice.

THEORIZING THE NATION In his now seminal work on nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1990) argued that nations were ‘imagined communities’. By this he did not mean that nations were mythical or false communities which did not really exist. On the contrary, nations are among the most real and powerful forms of social group in the modern world. For Anderson, the concept of ‘imagined community’ pointed to the process by which a nation – and indeed any social group – comes into being. In order for a nation to exist, its members must recognize their common bond to each other. They must understand that they share a special relationship which gives them certain shared interests on the basis of which they will commit themselves to common courses of action. They must imagine a special duty to each other on the basis of which they subsequently act. The act of creating a nation is then an act of understanding – or imagination – but once humans recognize their membership of a special national community, this group is real. It is important to recognize that, while human imagination or understanding is critical to the creation of national communities, imagination alone is not enough. In order for national communities to emerge, the members of these communities need to interact with each other on a regular basis. More particularly, they need to interact with each other as a specifically national community. Although Anderson cites neither, his argument accords almost exactly with the claims of Weber and Durkheim. Weber (1968) famously claimed that in order for a social group to come into being, its members had to engage in exclusive social interaction with no extrinsic purpose. To form a group, individuals had to gather in exclusive moments to affirm their special

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relationship to each other. Durkheim’s analysis (1964) of aboriginal religion made a parallel argument. For aboriginal clans to exist, the members of these tribes had to gather periodically and affirm their special bond of unity to each other ecstatically. The recognition of the group requires actual practices and, above all, powerful and exclusive social interaction between the members of a group. Although less dramatic, Anderson identifies a daily ritual as an exclusive period of interaction which has been critical to the creation of imagined national communities. Each morning the members of a nation have opened the same newspapers over their breakfast and this geographically diverse ritual has unified the nation around the key issues which confront it. The newspaper has created common understandings and shared interests which have unified members of a national community even though they have never nor will ever meet. Of course, although the majority of individuals in a national community will never meet, each is embedded in a web of social relations interlocked with others, all employing the newspaper as a shared resource and all discussing the newspaper with each other during the day to confirm communal understandings of it. The newspaper becomes a common symbol employed across a nexus of interlocking interactions which unify individuals within particular groups. Each group is, in turn, interconnected with others into broad social networks; families and neighbours are simultaneously embedded in professional groups or groups unified around forms of leisure activity. Consequently, by means of these interconnections, the newspaper becomes a shared resource across a very wide social network as individuals interact with others in other groups who in turn interact with others. Eventually, a broad set of understandings is established across an entire nation and continually re-established every day through a myriad of apparently trivial interactions. ‘Interaction rituals’ are, in fact, the basis of imagined communities. Apparently trivial everyday, face-to-face encounters are critical to the creation and maintenance of national communities. Only insofar as these webs of relations continue to affirm a sense of common destiny does the nation

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persist. Members of a nation must be continually – albeit briefly – reminded of their special relationship to one another. Sport is sociologically important to nationalism because it constitutes a charged interaction ritual out of which imagined national communities arise (King 1998; 2003). Certainly, sport is not the only, nor the most important, ritual which affirms the networks that constitute a nation, but it is among the most striking in contemporary society. The England flags which appeared on cars before and during the European Championships of 2004 become socially significant in the light of Anderson’s discussion of nationalism. These flags constituted an important interaction ritual which expressed and affirmed the idea of England as a national community in the twenty-first century. In placing a flag on their car, English people announced their support of the English team but this statement was not individualistic, aimed at expressing merely personal pride. It was directed in the first instance at other, mostly anonymous, people past whom these flag-bearers drove and was aimed at communicating a sense of solidarity with them. Those who put a flag on their car knew that others would understand the meaning of this symbol and respond to it in the appropriate way. This flag focused communal attention on the English football team and expressed the shared hopes which the English had for them. In the weeks before and during the tournament, a previously meaningless encounter with another car driver became a shared act of solidarity; it became an interaction ritual. The mundane reality of traffic was transformed into a sacred, though brief, communion. As cars drove past each other, eyes would turn to the others’ flag and each person would be communally oriented to a single idea – England. Like Anderson’s newspaper reader, the unconscionable myriad of trivial flag-encounters germinated a fluid and complex network; a recognizable social community, involving millions of individuals, who understood themselves to be English and were all communally oriented to the same end. In the current era, as the flows of global capital subvert national boundaries, promoting

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uneven development, and transforming even the most intimate relations, new social groups are emerging while other long established groups are having to re-negotiate themselves. Nations are currently being re-invented and re-imagined in the face of the new economic pressures to which social groups are being submitted. In his work on changing forms of identity, Appadurai has emphasized the increasing significance of the locale. The locale – the local city or region – has become a means by which corporate capital has disguised its increasingly anonymous and globalized operations. Appadurai overstates the deterritorialization of capital but his argument about the growing importance of the locale is relevant to contemporary discussions about nationalism. Nationalism is changing in the face of global pressures and is, perhaps ironically, becoming more local in response to these external pressures. Under the uneven pressure of globalization, formerly unified national identities have been increasingly fissured by new regionalized nationalities (Keating 1998; Jenkins and Sofos 1996). In Europe today, the transition of national communities is particularly obvious in the appearance of new forms of national groupings in Central and Eastern Europe as states fail, most obviously in the former Yugoslavia (Kaldor 1999). However, it is an error to believe that national communities are undergoing change only in those areas where there has been a radical collapse of the state. The same forces of globalization which led to the collapse of Yugoslavia are also transforming apparently stable nations. Nations that centralized during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like Italy and Spain are beginning to decentralize once again and even a nation like Britain, which has been unified since 1707, is undergoing a degree of fragmentation. New forms of solidarities – new ‘national’ communities – are emerging in Europe, especially in those dynamic regions which have been constrained by backward or exploiting nation-states such as north-western Italy (see Mingione 1993), Catalonia or Scotland. The rise of these new communities is propelled by a national system of regulation which jeopardizes their participation in the global economy (Sheridan 1995; Sznajder 1995). As global forces are channelled towards different

regions, former national solidarities begin to have less importance in certain contexts as new collective interests, mobilizing around re-invented notions of the nation, have come to the fore. In this historic moment, it has been relatively easy for those disadvantaged regions to construct a new identity for themselves. Emergent national communities like Scotland and Wales constitute themselves in opposition to an oppressive and colonizing England. They draw on the history of their resistance to the centralizing authority of the English monarchy and state. For the English, it is more difficult to define themselves in this era (Nairn 1981). England’s identity was based specifically on the Union which the English created through military conquest. English identity was consequently indivisible from British identity. The English defined themselves precisely by being British and dominating an island empire, comprising Scotland, Wales and Ireland. As Britain is breaking up under the force of global markets into its constituent and re-emergent national communities, England’s national identity has become deeply problematic for, unlike Scotland, Wales and Ireland, there is no obvious identity which the English should adopt. Historically, English national identity was ironically defined by not being English; it was a pride in Britain. Now thrown back on itself, it is difficult for the English to establish an identity for themselves since their history up to this point has always been a story of their role in the creation of Britain. In his great novel, A Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1995) noted that on the eve of the First World War, Austria faced the same dilemma. Austria was defined by being the ruler of the AustroHungarian empire. It was therefore defined ironically by not being itself but in consisting of other nations. Its identity was hollow, consisting only of otherness which it could not claim as its own. Musil exposes this crisis of identity with the parody of the Parallel Campaign. The Campaign was intended to organize celebrations for the 70th anniversary of Emperor Josef in 1918, in response to Germany’s plans to have a jubilee to celebrate Emperor Wilhelm II’s 30th jubilee. However,

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although the committee was initially inspired by ‘the Great Idea’, it was unable to identify a single characteristic that defined Austrian identity. Its celebration of Austria was entirely vacuous. This sense of the Austro-Hungarian states was so oddly put together that it must seem almost hopeless to explain it to anyone who has not experienced it himself. It did not consist of an Austrian part and a Hungarian part that, as one might expect, complemented each other, but of a whole and a part; that is, of a Hungarian and an Austro-Hungarian sense of statehood, the latter to be found in Austria, which in a sense left the Austrian sense of statehood with no country of its own. (Musil 1995: 180)

The current search for English identity (Kumar 2003; Paxman 1999; Scruton 2000) resonates with Musil’s parody – albeit less amusingly. Like Austria, England must re-invent itself as its historic conflation with Britain is becoming increasingly problematic. English identity must be defined against Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity when it was once defined precisely as the domination and incorporation of these communities. The concept of Britain has become a problematic solidarity in the 1990s. Britain is not an irrelevance at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but the conflation of England, Scotland, Wales and (more problematically) Northern Ireland is now a matter of dispute. The novel use of England flags during the 2004 European Championships constitutes a new interaction ritual in which English people strive to constitute themselves as a distinctive national community at a deeply ambiguous moment. Global forces are promoting the development of new kinds of national communities. New kinds of social solidarities are appearing across the world under the name of nationalism. Although geographically differentiated, these new nationalisms involve two fundamental processes. National communities are becoming more local. The nations which were established from the end of the nineteenth century are contracting, as regions within them devolve from centralized state authority. They are concentrating onto a more geographically circumscribed, core group. Simultaneously, emergent national communities are becoming more transnational. These contracted national

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groupings – or the new nations based on once-repressed ethnic groups and regions – employ much wider criteria of membership; the nation is expanding globally across its own borders which are themselves increasingly penetrated by economic traffic and population movements. Many people are now included in the new localized national communities who once did not qualify as nationals. In the globalized world, the nation is becoming more local and more transnational. It is ironically both contracting and concentrating while also expanding and diversifying. These processes of localization and transnationalization are evident in the attempts of the English to constitute themselves as a new national community in the face of new global pressures. The European Championships of 2004 provide a convenient focus through which the re-invention of English nationalism can be observed.

THE NEW LOCALISM Before the 1990s, travelling England fans preferred the Union Jack (a red, white and blue flag comprising the crosses of England, Scotland and Ireland) for display within the stadium. Union flags, often with the name of the local club imprinted horizontally, were draped over hoardings, barriers and fences in support of the national team. At the now famous World Cup semi-final against Germany in Turin in 1990, in which England was eventually eliminated on penalties, television broadcasts showed the England fans chiefly waving the Union Jack, with only a few St George’s flags in evidence. In the course of the 1990s, however, England fans have increasingly preferred to use the red and white Cross of St George. This flag denotes a specifically English identity. The St George’s Cross fuses with the Scottish Cross of St Andrew and the Irish Cross of St Patrick to create the Union Jack, but alone it stands exclusively for England – a national community without its own state. The use of the Cross of St George for the car flags in the summer of 2004 reflects

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the increasing weight which is being attached exclusively to England. It is interesting that English football strips have also reflected this growth of distinctive English identity. Since the first England international match against Scotland in 1872, England football teams have traditionally played in white with blue shorts and white socks. The choice of white seems to have been a direct response to the fact that Scotland chose dark blue – the background colour of the Cross of St Andrew – as their shirt colour. Scotland wore white shorts and blue socks. England, therefore, seemed to have selected white on the basis that it was the matching opposite of Scotland’s colours. In the 1930s, a red away strip was introduced and red has remained England’s usual alternative colour. The World Cup winning team of 1966 famously played in red because opponents West Germany also played in white. Red and white have continued as the favoured colours for England up to the present. However, there has been a significant change in the design of the shirt in the past decade, particularly with regard to the secondary shirt colours. From 1974 until 1980s, English football strips, produced by a company called Admiral, were predominantly white but the subordinate colourings, around the shoulder and chest, were blue and red. Alternatively, on the red England shirt of the early 1980s, the trimming was white and blue. In this way, the football shirt referenced the red, white and blue Union Jack as a common symbol. The strips made an important symbolic point. They represented a conflation of English and British identity which was unproblematic at the time; for the English, England and Britain were synonymous and English national identity was founded on an idea of Britain as a unified state. The England strip corresponded with the Union flags which the fans waved from the terraces. In 1984 the sports manufacturer Umbro won the contract for the England strip, which it retains to this day. Reflecting the Admiral design, Umbro shirts were white, with only a small blue and sometimes blue and red collar, referencing the Union Jack – but only minimally. Significantly, from 1997, the Umbro

design changed. Although red and blue stripes were inserted on the flanks, a small but prominent Cross of St George flag appeared on the trim at the neck-opening of the shirt, near the middle of the player’s chest.1 In later shirts the Cross of St George has become an even more central motif. For instance, in 2001 Umbro launched their new England strip on St George’s Day itself and the shirt made an explicit reference to the English saint with a bold red line running down the left-hand side of the shirt (over the player’s heart). From 2003 a new England white strip was introduced and the Cross of St George theme persisted. The red line, representing the Cross, now runs across the shoulders. Similarly, the new red away strip introduced in 2004 repeats the earlier design. A Cross of St George flag was prominently displayed on each shoulder while a third cross was sewn into the lining of the shirt just below the neck so it was visible when the shirt was not being worn. In these new England Umbro designs the white shorts have similarly referenced the Cross of St George by featuring a red stripe. The strip symbolizes the transformation of English national identity in the era of globalization. England players no longer play in the Union Jack as they did in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the exclusively English Cross of St George. Significantly, the use of the St George Cross seems to accord with public self-understandings and identities. The Umbro shirt design has been very successful as sales indicate. For instance, the new red away strip, released in March 2002, was bought by four times as many fans in three months as the previous away shirt in its entire two-year life span. It also outsold the England home shirt launched in April 2001.2 The St George Cross design is manifestly attractive to England fans, reflecting their own sense of identity and the way they understand themselves as England fans. The new England shirt design symbolizes changes in national affiliation, but Umbro’s marketing strategy also usefully illustrates how the processes of globalization encourage the formation of new national communities. In his work on globalization and identity, Appadurai (1996) identifies an important

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process. The operations of increasingly transnational companies do not mean the end of the locale. On the contrary, the competitive global market promotes and supports increasing mobilization and identification at the level of the locale. The England football team represents exactly this process. Since the 1980s, sport has become an essential commodity for the media and other sponsoring interests to expand their markets and sustain their profits in an increasingly competitive global economy. In the case of England, the expression of a new national identity which attracts fans is directly in the interests of these corporations. Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB television network, The Times and the Sun newspapers (which are part of his News International conglomerate) have been central to this process. BSkyB was the product of a merger in 1990 between Murdoch’s Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting and BSkyB’s rise to national and increasingly transnational dominance is primarily due to its monopoly of the rights to Premier League football from the first contract in 1993 to the current date (see Chippendale and Franks 1992; King 1998). Murdoch’s media corporations have promoted English football to a position of cultural dominance which it has never experienced before. As Murdoch has himself emphasized: ‘Sport absolutely overpowers film and everything else in the entertainment genre [and] football, of all sports, is number one’ (Rupert Murdoch, cited in Guest and Law 1997: 24). Sport is then, to use Murdoch’s term, a ‘battering ram’ by which commercial interests can break into and indeed create new markets (Harveson 1996). In England, the global competition between emergent transnational corporations like Murdoch’s News International has promoted football and stimulated the development of re-invented local and national communities around this transformed ritual. The promotion of new national identities by multinational corporations is recognized explicitly by these companies themselves. Martin Prothero, Head of Marketing and International at UMBRO International, conveniently demonstrated the point when he discussed the success of the new red England shirt during the World Cup in June 2002. ‘A combination of a fantastic

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product design and value for money pricing, allied to England’s success on the field, has led to vast numbers of fans wanting to show their support by wearing our England products. Let’s hope the team can keep going in the World Cup and generate even more excitement and support around the country!’.3 England success – and the nationalist solidarity which that success stimulates – is directly in the interests of Umbro. The competitive global economy does not mean the end of nationalism. On the contrary, as they develop their markets, multinationals actively promote national solidarities and identities in new localized forms. Umbro’s new England shirts symbolize the transformation of English national identity in the era of globalization. As Great Britain has been compromised by global economic pressures, English people have mobilized themselves around the concept of a new localized national identity. Yet, this is only one side of the current process. Emergent social groups are not only promoted by globalization – they are also threatened by these forces. New social groups emerge as a means of collectively resisting the uneven development initiated by globalization. Appadurai has called this resistance, which often takes the form of violence, the ‘ugly face’ of globalization (Appadurai 1996: 42). There is an ugly side to new English nationalism which attempts to resist the threat posed by the new power of commercial forces. In England, this resistance to and resentment of global forces has been consistently focused on a single football player: David Beckham. He is seen to represent the very commercial forces which have both brought the new English community into existence but have also threatened its world status. For much of his time as a Manchester United player, David Beckham was subjected to barracking and verbal abuse by opposition fans, focusing specifically on his – and his wife’s – financial status. He was explicitly seen as a product of threatening corporate forces. The barracking was not limited to club fixtures but was also a common occurrence at England games, when he was supposedly representing the nation. Certainly his dismissal against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup increased this abuse, but that dismissal was

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itself invested with decisive significance because Beckham had already been identified as a problematic figure. Thus, in the important qualifying game against Finland on 24 March 2001, which was played at Anfield (Liverpool), a significant portion of the previews of the game focused on the issue of whether Beckham, as captain, would be barracked by England fans. In 2002, when Beckham ensured England’s qualification for the World Cup almost single-handedly, the abuse against him declined. However, his move to Real Madrid in 2003 and his decline in playing form for England has once again stimulated increasing antipathy towards him by England fans. Once again, the accusations against him highlight his commercial corruption: his poor form is not explained in sporting terms, it is not the product of injury or fatigue, it is seen as specifically a result of his lack of pride in England. He has played poorly for England, so the accusation goes, because he is more concerned with money, sponsorship and the rankly venal Real Madrid than with his nation. He is seen as a representative of global corporate forces and is, therefore, a danger to national integrity. Illustrating his corrupting commercial influence, a story was circulated among (and deplored by) England fans that David Beckham had asked that England wear the allwhite strip (the colours of his new club, Real Madrid), in his first match in England after his transfer from Manchester United, and, so it was alleged, the Football Association had acceded to his request.4 It is unclear whether this story is true, but it demonstrates that fans believe that Beckham represents a corrupting commercial presence. It is instructive to compare Beckham’s treatment by England fans with that of Kevin Keegan in the late 1970s. As a player, Keegan was at least as successful an international star as Beckham and he also benefited commercially from football. He became extremely wealthy and like Beckham he made a high profile move abroad – to SV Hamburg – on a lucrative contract. There is little doubt that Keegan was as interested in financial remuneration as Beckham. Nevertheless, his loyalty to England was never questioned and, especially in an era of very poor England team

performances, he was supported by the fans as a figurehead. In the current globalized era, Beckham, in contrast, as the abuse he receives demonstrates, is widely looked upon with suspicion even though there is no evidence that he is any less committed to England on the field. In this globalized context, certain players, like Beckham, represent precisely the commercial forces that threaten localized national communities, and they become figures of hate. In the face of new global forces, localized national identities are emerging in new kinds of public rituals. Through these new localized identities, groups are collectively mobilizing themselves to exploit the opportunities of globalization while they also resist the threats it poses. Localism has two sides.

TRANSNATIONALISM In the ritual of football, the localization of national identity is evident. However, this localization involves a further element. As nations concentrate, they simultaneously expand globally, seeking support and members from populations in other parts of the world. These localized nations consist paradoxically of increasingly diverse population groupings. This dialectic is reflected in sport, in general, and in football, in particular. In 1966, England won the World Cup with a team which was socially homogeneous. It consisted of white players all of whom came from urban, working-class backgrounds, and all of whom played exclusively for English professional clubs: Banks (Leicester), Cohen (Fulham), Wilson (Everton), Stiles (Manchester United), Jack Charlton (Leeds), Moore (West Ham), Peters (West Ham), Ball (Blackpool), Hunt (Liverpool), Bobby Charlton (Manchester United), and Hurst (West Ham). They were from England and played in England. Since that time the demographic basis of the national team has changed, reflecting in particular widespread immigration into Britain from the 1950s. The England team which lost to Portugal in the semi-final of Euro 2004 featured four black players (James, Campbell,

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Cole and Vassell). In addition, although England football professionals migrate less than their European counterparts, the defeated Euro 2004 side included two notable émigrés: David Beckham and Owen Hargreaves who played for Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, respectively, though Michael Owen and Jonathon Woodgate also transferred to Real Madrid in the summer after Euro 2004. Owen Hargreaves is especially interesting because he has never played in England and is Canadian by birth and, therefore, he would not have qualified to play for England in the past. He represents transnationalization at its extreme; he has virtually no concrete connection to England. There is further evidence of this process of transnationalization. Until 1999, England had always been managed by an Englishman and, indeed, it would have been regarded as inappropriate for the national team to be managed by anyone other than a national. In the face of increased international competition, these nationalist principles have been compromised. As a result of poor performances under a series of English managers throughout the 1990s, culminating with Kevin Keegan, the Football Association prioritized results over national purity, and appointed the Swede Sven Goran Eriksson in January 2001. Interestingly, Eriksson had never even coached an English club side but came to the attention of the FA due to his success over a 15-year period in international club football, including a League Championship (Scuddetto) with the Italian club, Lazio. Significantly, there was initially intense opposition from some fans and from certain elements of the press. On his arrival at FA headquarters in London, for instance, a Union Jack-clad individual protested with a banner which read ‘FA – Hang your heads in shame’ (Winter 2001). It was significant that the fan wore a Union Jack. He represented an increasingly outmoded British nationalism whose exclusiveness undermined national competitiveness in a globalized era. The appointment of Eriksson as a manager represented a transnationalization of the England team. In the face of new pressures, the Football Association sought to exploit the potential of

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the global market to promote the national team, seeking new alliances irrespective of traditional solidarities and cultural boundaries. Under the managers of the 1990s, and Kevin Keegan in particular, England employed crude tactics which reflected the insular national style of fast and aggressive rather than skilful football. Keegan also favoured older players, most of whom had become professionals in the 1980s before the deregulation and globalization of the game. These players were educated in increasingly anachronistic styles of English professionalism. Although Eriksson’s period as England manager has not been without its problems and England still fail to reach the level of the best international teams, Eriksson has employed young players and has greatly improved the tactics of the England team. They are now a more professional and more tactically astute team than they were throughout the 1990s and have begun to adopt a style of play which accords more closely with that employed by other international sides. England has thus become a more transnational team both in terms of players and style of play. The process of transnationalization is demonstrated by other national sides. Indeed, other teams have transnationalized more radically and far more successfully than England. While the French national league is extremely weak due to now obsolete business structures, the national team was very successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s. France’s victory in Euro 2000 and their earlier success in the World Cup Final in 1998 was substantially due to the transnationalization of the national team. A notable feature of the French team was how many players were drawn from France’s former colonies, including one of the world’s greatest players, Zinedine Zidane, who is of Algerian descent. While Jean Marie Le Pen’s French National Front rejected the national team for its ethnically diverse composition, the team was celebrated in France as a symbol of social diversity, representing a multicultural nation. The definition of who is part of a nation has broadened to include individuals who would once not have been considered as genuine French nationals. The French team is also dispersed geographically, with few players having any tie to a French

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club. Of the 22 players in France’s squad for the World Cup of 1998, 15 played in leagues outside France and the proportion of the squad playing outside France increased even further by 2000 (Mignon 2000: 232). Other national football teams have also exploited the pool of players once considered ineligible. This is a strategy particularly popular with weaker footballing nations. Thus, under Jack Charlton, the English 1966 World Cup winner selected to manage the Republic of Ireland team on the same competitive grounds that Eriksson was later chosen as English manager, the Irish side fielded players who tenuously qualified for the team by the possession of a single grandparent of Irish birth, such as Andy Townshend and Tony Cascarino. National teams have effectively transnationalized to include individuals who were not once part of the nation. Echoing the Football Association’s decision to employ Eriksson, there has been a developing trend in world football for national teams to be coached by foreign managers. Scotland temporarily and unsuccessfully hired German coach Berti Vogts, while South Korea employed the Dutch coach Guus Hiddink for the 2002 World Cup, who led them to the semi-finals of that competition. The European Championships of 2004 were won by outsiders Greece, coached by a German, Otto Rehagel.5 The economic pressures of globalization are forcing national institutions to develop new strategies which drive them beyond established national borders. National institutions expand their operations in the face of increased global competition and they draw upon new transnational connections to maximize their competitiveness.

CONCLUSION Like the nation-state, nationalism is changing not dying. Globalization engenders uneven development within national communities so that there are increasing disparities of economic wealth and interest between cities and regions that were regulated in the past by an overarching state. Certainly, in the twentieth century, state regulation did not destroy all

regional inequality but through programmes of macro-economic management, welfare and subsidy, it limited the worst of the effects of this unevenness. In the light of global economic forces, nation-states have been unable to mitigate against the effects of uneven development and the nation-state is being compromised internally and externally. Externally, the borders of the nation-state are becoming more porous as new flows of immigrants and capital subvert national boundaries and as states draw into ever-closer intergovernmental alliances with other states, pooling and sharing sovereignty. Internally, nations are fissuring in the face of economic pressure that promotes the independence of cities and regions. The state remains a critical political institution and nations remain primary social communities. Yet, both state and nation are undergoing profound transformation. In particular, although the nation appeals to an unbroken past and therefore appears as a primordial solidarity which has never changed, national communities are, in fact, undergoing radical transformation as they respond to new pressures and threats. Nations are becoming new kinds of solidarities, concentrating on core communities which include those who were once not part of the nation. In the name of putatively timeless nationalism, new national communities, like the English, the Scottish, the Welsh, the Catalan or the Lombardian, are emerging. Nations are localizing and transnationalizing. The transformation of the nation-state and nationalism can be traced through almost any social activity. Not unreasonably, it has been traditional to trace these changes through formal political activities and institutions. Yet, the transformation of the nation today can be equally well identified through informal social activities and above all through an activity like sport, even though sport appears otiose to the grand sweep of human history. Yet, in the ritual of sport, humans create and sustain the social groups of which they are part and consequently in this ritual the contours of national communities are thrown into relief. The recent and continuing transformation of sport and of European football, in particular, is especially striking in this regard for, there, in

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microcosm, the outlines of new kinds of national communities can begin to be seen. European football today demonstrates the enduring importance of the nation as a basis of social solidarity and mobilization but it also reveals quite radical changes to the nation as a community. Nations are localizing under the pressure of globalization which is also simultaneously forcing them to transnationalize. In the world of sport, the new solidarities to which fans appeal provide a rich and pre-emptive insight into the new geography of nations and nationalism.

NOTES 1 England team strip (or uniform) from 1872 to 2006 can be viewed at http://www.englandfootballonline.com/ TeamUnif/Unif.html. 2 http://www.umbro.com/corporate/130602.htm. 3 http://www.umbro.com/corporate/130602.htm (accessed September 2004). 4 http://www.englandfootballonline.com/TeamUnif/ unif.html (accessed 25 September 2004). 5 The process is not confined to football. Britain’s Olympic rowing team employed Jürgen Grobbler who had coached the East German rowing team to successive Olympic gold medals since 1972. The English cricket team is coached by an Australian, Duncan Fletcher. In other sports, very broad definitions of national identity have been applied to determine whether an athlete has qualified for national selection. The British Olympic athletics team included an American, Maliki David, who was part of the men’s relay team which eventually beat the American team to the gold medal in the 2004 Olympics. Similarly, the tennis player, Greg Rusedski, and the world champion boxer, Lennox Lewis, are both Canadians who have sought to exploit their tenuous familial links to Britain into order to maximize their market potential.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1990) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Chippendale, P. and Franks, S. (1992) Dished: The Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting. London: Simon and Schuster. Durkheim, E. (1964) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: George Allen and Unwin. Guest, L. and Law, P. (1997) ‘The Television Revolution: Part 2’, World Soccer, February, pp. 24–5. Harveson, P. (1996) ‘It’s a New Ball Game as Takeover Talk Hits Fever Pitch’, Financial Times, 16 October. Jenkins, B and Sofos, S. (eds) (1996) Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe. London: Routledge. Kaldor, M. (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in the Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Keating, M. (1998) The New Regionalism in Western Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. King, A. (1998) The End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s. London: Leicester University Press. King, A. (2003) The European Ritual. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kumar, K. (2003) The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mignon, P. (2000) ‘French Football after the 1998 World Cup: the State and Modernity of Football’, in G. Finn and R. Giulianotti (eds), Football Culture. London: Frank Cass. Mingeone, E. (1993) ‘Italy: the Resurgence of Regionalism’, International Affairs, 69 (2): 305–18. Musil, R. (1995) A Man Without Qualities (trans. S. Wilkins and B. Pike). London: Picador. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-up of Britain. London: New Left Books. Paxman, J. (1999) The English. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sheridan, M. (1995) ‘Political Theatre’, The Times Literary Supplement. No. 4788, 6 January, pp. 27–8. Scruton, R. (2000) England: An Elegy. London: Pimlico. Sznajder, M. (1995) ‘Italy’s Right-Wing Government: Legitimacy and Criticism’, International Affairs, 71 (1): 83–102. Weber, M. (1968) Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Winter, H. (2001) ‘Waiting is Over as Eriksson Closes his Italian Chapter’, Daily Telegraph, 9 January, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main. jhtml? xml=/sport/2001/01/09/sfnwin10.xml (retrieved 14 September 2004).

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22 Nations, Mega-events and International Culture MAURICE ROCHE

‘Mega-events’ are specially constructed and staged large-scale international cultural and sport events. They are short-term events with often significant long-term pre-event and post-event impacts on the host nation across a range of dimensions of national society, particularly cultural but also political and economic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, when they first made their appearance, the two main mega-event genres have been expos and great international sport events. The paradigm of the latter has been the Olympic Games, but in the post-war period this was joined by the football World Cup international championship event. The historical, social and political landscape of nations and of international relations in which mega-events have occurred since their first appearance has evidently undergone seismic shifts and transformations over time. Nevertheless, although they are relatively fragile and have been periodically vulnerable to ideological forces, mega-events seem to have established an enduring presence, popularity and memorability in modern society. The interest of national and international publics in mega-events and of nation-states in staging them appears to be even greater now at the beginning of the twenty-first century than

it was at the beginning of the twentieth, as we observe later in the chapter. For instance the ‘Millennium’ year of 2000 saw the staging of a highly successful Olympic Games in Sydney, an Expo in Hanover and the controversial subexpo-type national ‘Millennium Experience’ exhibition in London. In addition, around the Millennium year highly popular football World Cup events were held in France in 1998 and, uniquely jointly, in Japan and Korea in 2002.1 Nations’ continuing interests in the twenty-first century in attempting to use mega-events to provide an international or global media platform for projecting positive images are evident in such phenomena as the continuing intensity of the bidding competitions to win the right to the host the Olympic Games and the football World Cup. It is also evident in, on the one hand, the political troubles the Greek nation went through as a result of preparing for the 2004 Athens Olympics and, on the other hand, the scale of the economic effort China is putting into preparing Beijing and its 2008 Olympics to operate both as a ‘global village’ for the event and also as a ‘world stage’ for the Chinese state and nation. The main aim of this chapter is to introduce and map some of the general relationships between nations and mega-events. The

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discussion proceeds in three stages. The first section outlines some of the framework and concepts needed to address the relationship between international mega-events and nations. These include concepts of nation-states, of mega-events and of the main periods of development in modernity since the mid-nineteenth century which provide the social context for both phenomena. The second section focuses on the key mega-event genre of the Olympic Games, and with particular reference to the ‘short twentieth century’ period, that is, starting from the end of World War I, through to the late twentieth century. In this period particularly important in understanding the role of megaevents is not only nationalism but also the connection between the latter on the one hand and both idealistic and aggressive (‘super-nationalist’) versions of internationalism on the other. Aggressive ‘super-nationalism’ was particularly exemplified in fascist and communist states and their nationalist and internationalist ideologies, and the Olympic Games mega-event came to be seen as a useful if transient international ‘theatre’ for the display of both super-nationalist as well as peaceful internationalist ideals and ideologies. The third section addresses the contemporary period of ‘late modernity’ and considers recent and current relationships between nations and mega-events. The staging of multiple international mega-events, or the aspiration to do so, has now become a common strategy for many nations and their major cities around the world. This is illustrated with particular reference to the new South Africa’s use of mega-events in its contemporary nation-building.

UNDERSTANDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEGA-EVENTS AND NATIONS IN MODERNITY To explore the relation between mega-events and nations over time some of their basic relevant features need to be indicated in this section, together with a sketch of the main stages of societal development in modernity (for fuller conceptualization of mega-events and national history see Roche 2000 and 2006,

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respectively). The periodization is applied to a review of the national and international role of international sports mega-events, in particular the Olympics, over the course of the twentieth century, in the rest of the chapter. Mega-events are directly or indirectly the product of nation-states which can be said to host them and which often use them to promote nationalism. However, even from a national perspective states are not the only actors to be considered. National ‘civil societies’ and ‘publics’ can also be relevant actors in campaigns for megaevents, in the success or otherwise of their staging, and in their long-term impacts. In addition there is the distinction between ‘states’ and ‘nations’ which may or may not be institutionalized in states. For instance, it might be argued that the Catalans and Quebecois are ‘stateless nations’ incorporated within the states of Spain and Canada, and that this distinction is relevant to understanding the nature of mega-events such as the 1976 and 1992 Olympic Games megaevents, which were staged in Montreal and Barcelona respectively. Mega-events are at the same time both national and also international social phenomena. From a sociological perspective international mega-events are the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of an ecology of events and event sites which typically characterize nation-states, their national cultures and collective cultural identities. Many of these events may be popular ‘heritage’ events such as traditional festivals and/or religious rituals which derive from pre-modern periods. No doubt many are sustained currently to serve nations’ touristic images and industries. However, they may also be reproduced and participated in to affirm something particular about both a society’s sense of its ‘roots’ in time and place, and also the inter-generational linkages and solidarities in which its collective identity is formed (Sabate et al. 2004). More important for our purposes, though, are the self-consciously ‘modern’ (‘post-traditional’) and ‘official’ statederived cultural events and institutions ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm 1992) by nationalist and state elites during important phases of nation-building, particularly the late nineteenth century. These events symbolize and legitimate the modern nation-state, and help to simplify

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and amplify, construct and propagate, the particularities of its national narrative and identity. They include, for instance, public rituals surrounding the investiture or death of political leaders, the collective memorializations of key founding figures, revolutions or wars, and the special places and architectures in relation to which these events occur (Smith 1998; Roche 2001a; Jones 2003). They also include the ‘inventions’ of the cultural institutions, calendars and movements concerned with the national exhibitions and the national sports and their urban heritages, sites and architectures, which were developed in many different nations, but particularly in France, Britain and the United States, from the late nineteenth century.2 The international megaevent genres we discuss in this chapter derive from, and can be said to sit astride, these latter ‘modern’ cultural innovations at the nationstate level and which contribute to what we can refer to as the social ecology of public events within nation-state societies. It is worth noting, then, that to focus on mega-events in relation to nations as we do in this chapter has its limits. Mega-events have certainly been significant for nations in modernity, and they continue to be so. But they are only one dimension of the broader and deeper social phenomenon of cultural events (together with their related cultural politics and policy-making, not least in terms of the spaces and times of their occurrence) which has helped to structure the cultural, communicative and reflective life of publics in modern nation-state societies.3 To adequately contextualize both nationstates and mega-events and to provide a basis for understanding the connections between them a view needs to be taken about ‘modernity’ and historical periods. The history of mega-events runs from the first international exposition, the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851, through to the present. From the perspective of many of the most influential sociologists and historians of nationalism this is coterminous with the construction and development of nationstates.4 From the perspective of much sociology more generally, this is effectively coterminous with ‘modernity’, since the midnineteenth century was when industrialization

began to transform modern societies across Europe and in the United States into ‘industrial societies’. These involved historically distinctive configurations of classes based on industrial and urban capitalism. We can refer to this as a ‘mainstream modernization’ perspective. As containers of this structural revolution the modernization process also involved the development and institutionalization of nationstate systems. States committed themselves to promoting economic growth and to controlling and ameliorating class conflict, processes which would ultimately provide conditions for the evolution of nation-states as educational and ‘welfare states’, particularly in Europe. So the main developmental background for exploring the relation between mega-events and nations concerns the stages of development that need to be identified within this modernization process from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. However, the whole concept of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ and also of the development of nation-states has often been contested terrain both between historians and sociologists, and also within the disciplines between differing theoretical and normative perspectives. Recent alternatives to the ‘mainstream modernization’ perspective are concerned with perceived problems, among other things, with the ‘pre-modern’ on the one hand, and the ‘post-modern’ on the other – that is, around each ‘end’ of the mainstream modernist version of historical development. At the ‘pre-modern’ ‘origins’ end of the continuum, medieval historians and historical sociologists declare that ‘modernity’ and/or the nation-state originated far earlier than either the nineteenth century industrial revolution or the eighteenth century Enlightenment precursor period.5 Guided by this recent analysis, the perspective taken in this chapter is that while we should recognize the potentially very deep pre-modern historical origins of modernity and its ‘nations’, we particularly need to give a renewed significance to the ‘early modern’ period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is, economic, cultural and national institutions identifiable as recognizably ‘modern’ first substantially developed as aspects of a

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state-integrated complex in leading European societies like France and England from the sixteenth century. The most important great ‘events’ for nation-states in this period were not cultural but military, namely wars (albeit wars for cultural (religious) reasons, which then became the subject of national events of ritual memorialization), as in Europe’s ‘civil wars’ of the Reformation period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the European nation-state system began to be consolidated (Kennedy 1988; Tilly 1992). To take account of the realities of this ‘early modernity’, and to differentiate it from the ‘mainstream modernity’ period, this chapter focuses on the period from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century which can be referred to as that of ‘mature modernity’. However, within this periodization it is important to recognize the massive and complex impact on nations and on the international system of various major transformations, notably World War I. So it is useful to discriminate between a first and a second stage of mature modernity, the first focusing on the late nineteenth century and pre-war period, and the second running through from the inter-war and post-World War II periods. The history of the modern Olympics is bound up with the adaptation of nation-states to the transformation of intra-societal and international environments, particularly those in the second stage of mature modernity. At the ‘contemporary’ end of the historical continuum of modernity there is the perspective that perhaps ‘modernity’ is over, and we are now into a new era.6 Without conceding the argument to such a ‘post-modern’ analysis, it is nonetheless possible to acknowledge that phenomena like post-industrialism and globalization suggest that there has been a further qualitative evolution of society beyond the second stage of ‘mature modernity’. We can refer to this period as one of ‘late modernity’, and see it as running from the mid-1970s to the present. The next section focuses on the relationship between mega-events and nations in the period of the second stage of ‘mature modernity’, and then we turn to consider this relationship in the contemporary period of ‘late modernity’.

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THE OLYMPICS IN MATURE MODERNITY: NATIONALISM, SUPER-NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM This section outlines some key elements of the relationship of the Olympic mega-event movement and its games mega-event with nations and politics over the course of the ‘short twentieth century’, from the end of World War I to the mid-1970s, the second stage of mature modernity. Since the politics of much of this period was characterized by the neo-imperialistic ideologies of fascism and communism, it is necessary to consider what might be referred to as ‘super-nationalism’ as a factor in the staging of Olympic Games. As part of this discussion, we also look briefly at the association of the Olympics with ideals of internationalism in this period. The Olympics and nationalism in the twentieth century Nineteenth-century European nationalisms and elite national cultures, particularly those of Britain, France and Germany, elaborated particularistic myths of ethnic origin in medieval ‘gothic’ pasts, and this can be seen most visibly in the ‘neo-gothic’ architecture of some of the new public buildings constructed in the period, particularly in Britain. However, at the very same time, national elites also were able to build on the discoveries of the new discipline of archaeology and associate themselves with the roots of European civilization in ancient Greece and Rome. This also can be readily seen in the ‘neoclassical’ style of new public buildings constructed in this period in many nations (Jones 2003). The interest of the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin and his associates in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in producing a modern version of the ancient Olympic Games was thus part of the long wave of interest by otherwise modernizing European elites in the Hellenic world. In addition, de Coubertin was also influenced by the internationalism of the late nineteenth-century French expos which he had been enthralled with in his youth. Indeed the expo genre helped give birth to the Olympic

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movement as three of the first four Games events were held in association with expos (namely, 1900 Paris, 1904 St Louis, 1908 London; see MacAloon 1981; Roche 2000: ch. 3). The Olympic movement built on the midand late nineteenth-century ‘invention’ of formalized sports by British elite groups, energizing and articulating the sport movement by adding an idealistic international and ‘civilizational’ set of meanings and values to it. International Olympic Games were organized on a regular four-year calendar from the beginning in 1896, as were football World Cup events after they broke away from the Olympics in 1930 (Sugden and Tomlinson 1998; Lanfranchi et al. 2004). These regular and irregular mega-event cycles provided a significant intra- and inter-generational structuring of the international cultural calendar for the mass publics and the mass press and media of Europe and North America, and also for elite groups around the world, throughout the first and second stages of mature modernity. Host nations have traditionally used, and continue to use, the Olympic Games for a variety of nationalistic reasons, including such things as the promotion of nationalistic ideology, marking a new stage in nation-building, expressing particular national (multinational) complexities. All host nations seek to use the Olympic Games to promote their nationalistic ideology and this is an underlying and pervasive theme of most occurrences of Games events since their recreation in the modern period. In 1896, at the first of the modern Olympic Games, the Greek nationalist hosts tried to get the Olympic event based permanently in Athens, on the model of the permanent siting of the ancient Olympic Games in Olympia. However, the IOC had already decided that the event should rotate between nations (even between continents), and they successfully resisted this pressure. In 2004 Greece once again hosted the Games. Although the event was in many respects a success at the time, there is no doubt that the real costs and opportunity costs involved in both the preparation and longterm impact of the event imposed heavy economic and political burdens on the Greek

state and society. Given their 2004 experience, Greeks might be relieved that their forebears failed to win the argument back in 1896. Nations may also use the Games to mark a new stage in their development involving a new national identity and image. There are a number of examples of this sort of use. They include Spain’s use in 1992 of the Olympics in Barcelona and also the Expo in Seville, to mark a new post-Franco and new-EUmember status (Spa et al. 1995; Harvey 1996; Hargreaves 2000). They also include Australia’s use of the 2000 Sydney Olympics to attempt to mark a new phase in its national narrative in its decision to use the opening ceremony to symbolize its commitment to the challenging idea/l of multicultural nationhood (although the connection of this cultural gesture with the reality of its policies towards its native peoples and also to its subsequent immigration policy is perhaps open to question). In terms of nation-building and modernization (including in the sense of ‘Westernization’) some of the main examples of Olympic events marking this in the post-war period have been staged by East Asian countries, namely Japan (Tokyo 1964) and South Korea (Seoul 1988). China seems to be preparing to use the 2008 Beijing Games in the same sort of way. Given the practically unavoidable interconnection of the Games with the nationalism of the host state it is rare that more complex messages are conveyed, for instance in terms of the sub-nationalism of stateless nations incorporated within multi-national states. However, in the games of Montreal (1976) and Barcelona (1992) attempts were made to use the events to express the Quebec and Catalan sub-nationalist identities of the host cities alongside of the Canadian and Spanish national identities of the host nations. On equally rare occasions the organization and ritual of Games events can be disrupted by largely unrelated political movements interested in using the events’ extensive media coverage to bring particular political issues to the attention of the international public. The main illustrations of this are the case of the ‘Black Power’ protest by American athletes at a medal ceremony in the Mexico City

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Olympics 1968 and the bloody intervention by a Palestinian nationalist group in the 1972 Munich Olympics, which involved the taking of Israeli athletes as hostages and ended tragically with the killing of both the hostages and the hostage-takers.7 These examples indicate both the general usability of the Olympic mega-event for host nations’ nationalist purposes, but also the relative openness of the events as ‘texts’ in relation to particular political ‘readings’, interpretations and interventions.

The Olympics and super-nationalism from the inter-war period Super-nationalism refers to the neo-imperial strategies of nation-states which aspire to being hegemonic in relation to other nations either in a world-region or world-wide. The main forms of super-nationalism which concern us here in the early and mid-twentieth-century development of the Olympic Games are those evidenced in Nazi Germany and the USSR (e.g. Roche 2000: ch. 4 and 2001a respectively). These forms of super-nationalism were both causes and effects of the two ‘world wars’. These two periods of mass slaughter and destruction in the supposedly ‘progressive’ and ‘advanced’ civilization of Europe left impacts on the mega-events of the period, both positive and negative. Supernationalism influenced these public cultural events substantively by attempting to use them and take them over for propaganda purposes and also by providing them with models of address to mass publics. They influenced these public cultural events negatively by providing processes and arenas for the expression of political and cultural conflict. They might be said to have influenced them positively by making the pursuit and achievement of peaceful international communication through cultural events a matter of historic consequence for the future of modernity and of enduring concern and interest, both for elites and for mass publics (see the ‘internationalism’ theme below). The super-nationalist theme and its association with the Olympic Games event was most clearly and floridly developed in the neo-imperialism of inter-war totalitarianism, on the one hand

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that of Stalinist Russia (neo-imperial in relation to the numerous other ‘soviet republics’ which made up the ‘union’ in the 1930s and the Eastern European communist states in much of the post-war period), and on the other hand Fascist countries, particularly Nazi Germany in the 1930s (explicitly committed to aggressively expansionist neo-imperialism). The growth of twentieth-century super-nationalist politics in general involved an address to mass publics, the use and promotion of the charismatic, emotionality and aestheticization in politics and culture, involving a heavy emphasis on symbols and myths, and on the cultural forms of mass collective rituals, theatre and festival. The dramatic theatricalization and ritualization of politics and of events in the super-nationalist period both had a direct impact on, and also provided a model for, the development of the sport movement in general and the Olympics in particular. Mass sport spectacles came of age in this period in the West, in fascist Europe and also in the Olympic-like ‘Spartakiads’ of the USSR. Olympic symbols and rituals were developed and institutionalized in both the pre-1914 and also the inter-war periods. The Olympic movement was directly influenced by inter-war super-nationalism and by the threat that the latter posed to its independence and integrity as an international cultural movement and institution. Olympism was influenced to invest much further than it had previously done in creating a distinctive and identifiable set of ideals, symbols and rituals. These needed to be trans-national as well as inter-national, not least in order to act as a counterweight to super-national influences. The alternative was to risk being taken over, used and abused by super-nationalist powers and their versions of nationalism and internationalism. This risk undoubtedly threatened the Olympic movement in the 1930s in relation to Nazi Germany. Evidently the Olympics could be used to promote ‘super-nationalist’ ideologies; and this has been a feature not only of the mature modernity period, but it also runs through into the late modernity period. As we have indicated, in terms of ‘super-nationalism’ and the regime ideologies promoted by aspirant or

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de facto ‘super-power’ nations, probably the most notorious Olympic Games in this respect was the 1936 ‘Nazi’ Olympics in Berlin. However, other post-war examples in the history of the Olympics Games, particularly the games of Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984, indicate that the super-nationalist theme continued to permeate the movement and its events until at least the end of the Cold War. The two ‘Cold War’ Olympics blatantly promoted the worldviews and ideologies of Soviet Communism and American liberal capitalism respectively, and in response to this each event also generated international political debate and was the target of international boycott campaigns.

The Olympics and internationalism in the twentieth century The Olympic movement and its mega-events, from de Coubertin onwards, are strongly associated with the normative principles of liberal internationalism. Throughout the twentieth century, and in spite of the periodic vulnerability of the Olympic movement to political ideologies and to problems of corruption, they provided publicly engaging spectacles in which these principles have been and continue to be expressed, symbolized and dramatized (Roche 2000: ch. 7, 2002a; Barney et al. 2002). In the 1970s the IOC and the Olympic movement played a leading role in the sport boycott movement which helped to isolate and delegitimize the racist ‘apartheid’ regime in South Africa (e.g. Hill 1996: ch. 10). More recently the IOC has become a visible cultural actor in the field of international governance and politics through its association with the United Nations organization. It has attempted to associate the movement with the promotion of universalistic human rights and also it has promoted development in underdeveloped nations by means of a sport aid programme. Less credibly it has attempted to promote peace in the international arena by means of the concept of an ‘Olympic Truce’. This draws from the 1000-year tradition in the ancient Games of safe passage for athletes from all

city-states and nations in the Hellenic world to compete in the Games. Since the 1990s the IOC has influenced the United Nations to accept and declare Olympic truces in the cycle of Olympic Games. However, apart from a brief ceasefire in the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 this process has not yet been notably successful. Perhaps a more tangible way to conceive of the Olympic movement’s internationalism and its use in symbolizing peace between nations is its record in relation to the world wars of the twentieth century. It might be argued that the Games’ capacity to symbolically mark postwar reconstruction after the two World Wars has been among their more substantial internationalist achievements. Beyond the formal peace treaties which concluded the World Wars, Olympic Games events not only marked but began to celebrate peace, reconstruction and a return to humanity and normality in national affairs and international relations. In relation to World War I the 1920 Antwerp Games enabled nations to gather in what had been ‘the killing fields’ of Flanders in a spirit of peace and cultural community. The 1948 London Olympics performed the same sort of function in relation to World War II in a city still marked at the time by the destruction of the ‘blitz’. Post-war reconstruction in relation to both World Wars was a long-term process for European nation-states. In relation to World War I it is possible to see the Olympics of Paris in 1924 and Amsterdam in 1928 as continuing the work of Antwerp and as having something of this character. Comparably, in relation to World War II it is possible to see the Olympics of Helsinki in 1952 and Rome in 1960 (not to mention also the Brussels Expo of 1958) in this light. Beyond Europe something similar could be said about the Olympics of Melbourne in 1956 and even possibly also of Tokyo in 1964 and Munich in 1972. Also, as long aftermaths of the Korean War, the fact that South Korea staged an Olympics in 1988, and that North and South Korea made a decision to march together at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics (2000), can be noted in this context. At the time the latter action was regarded, at the very least, as a notable diplomatic gesture and movement

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towards a possible future of peace and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula.

MEGA-EVENTS AND NATIONS IN LATE MODERNITY The same set of nationalistic and nation-state reasons that drove states’ interests in staging mega-events in general and the Olympics in particular in the period of ‘mature modernity’ continue to do so in the contemporary ‘late modern period’. States have traditionally used mega-events to add to their national status and identity, and also to their national narratives, for both internal and international publics. Evidently, however, these national interests in the contemporary period are played out against a changed and changing international context, in terms of their geopolitical situation, their stage of economic development and the available technologies and resources. This changed context includes decisive and irreversible shifts towards ‘post-industrial’ national economies based on services and new information and communications technologies in the context of an integrating and globalizing international economy. The potential role and significance of sport mega-events in particular for nations in this period have, if anything, increased. On the one hand international mega-events and their organizations, in particular the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the international soccer governing body, FIFA, have been significantly empowered as international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) vis-à-vis nation-states in the contemporary international and global cultural system, such as it is. This is because of their ability to organize synergies between, and derive significant income streams from, such key developments characteristic of late modernity as the advent and cultural dominance of global satellite television, of mass international tourism and of globally distributed, marketed and branded consumer commodities together with the jungle of multinational companies organizing their circulation.

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On the other hand, the most significant political developments in this period have increased the interest of nations in symbolizing themselves both to their own national publics and also in the eyes of the community of nations and global publics. These developments include the fall of communism and also the rise of world regions as international political arenas (whether for aspirant continental federations following the model of the European Union or for aspirant superpowers such as initially Japan, and subsequently China). Each of these processes has stimulated the renewal of national identities, nationalism and nation-state formation, in various ways, even though in one case this is a product of the disintegration of a transnational system and in the other a product of the progressive integration of such a system. The fall of communism in the early 1990s inaugurated a new and ongoing wave of nationalist ideologies and nation-building from the disintegration of the former USSR and its sphere of influence. In addition, the EU integration process has also generated renewals of nationalism among its member states. Thus both of these political developments in late modernity have stimulated an interest in symbolizing and communicating messages about national images and identities in general, and nations’ interests in using mega-events to do so in particular. In summary then, in ‘late modernity’, the era of ‘globalization’, such factors such as the rise of global television and consumer culture, the fall of communism and the growth of world regional multinational economic agreements, provide stimuli and opportunities not only for a maintenance but also for an increase in nation-states’ interests in staging mega-events over the course of the period. The rise of global television is particularly important in offering host nations real, albeit transient, ‘live’ access to substantial proportions of the planet’s populations in most of the planet’s nations. For instance, the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Games was watched by an estimated 3.5 billion people world-wide. These events provide some rare substance to the idea of ‘the global village’, and it is understandable that

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contemporary nation-states are interested in gaining the status and opportunities offered by hosting them.8 In late modernity there has been a notable increase in cities and their sponsoring nations entering the cycle of global competitions to stage such international sport mega-events as the Summer and Winter Olympic Games and the World Cup football championship. This has occurred particularly since the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. This event showed that sport mega-events could generate large revenues from the sale of television rights and from commercial sponsorship. Thus, at least in principle, they might even make surpluses, or at least they might not need large public subsidies. In practice, the enthusiasm of states to host these events is indicated by the fact that they have continued to provide large subsidies and expenditures for mega-events. These finances have been particularly to provide such less visible but absolutely necessary elements of mega-events as up-to-date urban transport and communications infrastructures capable of managing the unprecedented inflows of international visitors and the outflows of televisual images such events unavoidably generate. The interest of states in mega-events in late modernity can be seen particularly in the fact that many leading nations can be said to have pursued multiple mega-event strategies. The extent of this contemporary phenomenon can now be indicated, and the intensity of nations’ commitments to these strategies can be illustrated in the case of the new South Africa.

Nations and ‘multiple mega-event’ strategies in late modernity At the beginning of this chapter the longevity and continued importance of the main megaevent genres in national and international culture in the modern period in general were noted. This is clear in the contemporary late modern period, from the mid-1970s to the present, which has seen the impact of global mediatization on mega-events, a shift from expo to sport events, and within the dominant sport events a near equalization of status and role

between the Olympics and World Cup football events. Among both the advanced Western nations and also among developing and newly industrialized nations and their leading cities there has continued to be a strong interest in aiming to stage international popular cultural mega-events, often (and preferably) more than one such event to extend and maximize their positive impacts. These can be seen as effectively constituting long-term national multiple mega-event strategies, and as giving a new status and profile to culture as a vehicle and tool in the repertoire of contemporary nationstates’ domestic public policies and their foreign and diplomatic policies. The range of nations which can be said to have pursued multiple mega-event strategies in recent decades includes most of the major nations in the North American, European and East Asian world regions. European nations have had an advantage in terms of staging mega-events since the late nineteenth century, since the major event genres were invented in Europe, Europe remains the leading world region for soccer, is an important location for international sport governing bodies, and is one of the leading world regions for most of the Olympic sports. Most of the major European nations have either staged a number of mega-events in the late modern period, or have bid to do so, and this can be briefly illustrated in the case of Spain. Spanish cultural policy has been distinctly marked by the staging of mega-events in the contemporary period. Spain hosted the 1982 FIFA World Cup, the 1992 Summer Olympics (Barcelona), the 1992 Expo (Seville) and Madrid put in a bid to host the 2012 Olympics (subsequently awarded to London). The 1992 events were used to mark the nation’s historic emergence from Francoist authoritarianism and also its entry into the European Union. Mega-events and multiple event strategies are perceived to be just as relevant, arguably even more so, for new and developing nation-states in the contemporary period, and this can be illustrated in the case of post-apartheid South Africa. New South Africa has sought to build its national identity – both its internal solidarity and national consciousness, and also its

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external image and standing in the eyes of the international community – through the staging of international sport mega-events and through national achievements in the global culture of world sport. No doubt factors such as South Africa’s status as both an African continental nation and also as a relatively poor and developing nation have added to the unusual commitment and persistence the governing African National Congress party has brought to the mega-event strand of its nation-building strategy. In 1995, soon after the defeat of the apartheid regime, it staged the Rugby Union World Cup and in addition managed to win it. In 1996 it staged the African Nations soccer cup and managed to win this also. In the 1994–97 period the South African government encouraged Cape Town’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign to win the right to stage the 2004 Olympics. In the period 1996–2000 it similarly backed the national football association’s campaign to stage the 2006 FIFA World Cup football championship, with the same negative result. In the meantime it also campaigned successfully for and staged the 1999 All-Africa athletics event and the 2003 Cricket World Cup. In this period also it was finally successful with FIFA and won the right to host the 2010 World Cup. For good or ill this consequential achievement will, no doubt, increasingly dominate the public expenditure plans of the national government and the public discourse of South African politics as the event deadline inexorably approaches over the coming few years.

CONCLUSION In each of the main stages in the development of modernity outlined in this chapter factors have pushed states to take an interest in mega-events. The emergence of multiple event strategies in many states in the contemporary period testifies to the fact that these push factors, and nations’ willingness to respond to them, if anything, seem to have increased over time. Overall it might be suggested that national governments’ generally positive interests in responding to the pressures to bid for and to stage international

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mega-events in the contemporary period are connected with their assumptions about the predictability of the mass popularity of these events, both internationally and domestically. This predictable mass popularity no doubt is in part a product of the varied competences of the ideologists and ‘imagineers’, the organizers, communicators and participants who produce the spectacle of the events. Thus to a certain extent it continues to remain open to attempted use and abuse by nation-states for reasons of national interest in the pursuit of ideological and hegemonic projects of various kinds. Aspects of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in China are likely to be interesting from this perspective. This chapter has reviewed the changing nature and role of mega-events and their relevance for nations from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, using the concepts and rough periodization of ‘mature modernity’ and its two main stages, together with ‘late modernity’, as a framework. Mega-events and their associated organizations and movements have been shown to be relatively fragile and vulnerable to influences. Nevertheless, the main mega-event genres have retained a significant position over the long term in international culture, international cultural politics and also in the cultures of the succession of host nations. Mega-events can be seen to offer the promise of concrete, if transient, versions and visions of symbolic, participatory and celebratory national and international community. In an era in which nations mourn the ‘loss of community’ and governments powerlessly observe the alienation of citizenries from national politics, this promise is likely to continue to be hard for nation-states to ignore.

NOTES 1 On the Sydney Olympics see Sinclair and Wilson (eds, 2000); on the London Millennium Expo see Edensor (2002) and Jones (2003) on France’s World Cup see Dauncey and Hare (1999); on the Japan/Korea World Cup see Horne and Manzenreiter (2002). 2 On the history, development and politico-cultural role of expos see studies by Roche (2000 passim; also 1999, 2001a, 2003a), Rydell (1984, 1993), Rydell and Gwinn (eds) (1994) and Greenhalgh (1988). For studies of

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particular expos both historical and contemporary see Ley and Olds (1988), Pred (1991), Harvey (1996), Spillman (1997) and Hendry (2000). For alternative views on the influence of an ‘exhibitionary complex’ in late nineteenthcentury Britain which its expos can be claimed to attest to see Bennett (1988) and Roche (1999). 3 On the general relationship between public cultural events and national culture see Connerton (1989), Jarman (1997), Spillman (1997), Smith (1998), Handelman (1998), Roche (2001a) and Jones (2003). On relationships between the event-rich popular culture of sport and national culture and identity see Roche (1998, 1998 (ed.), 2006); Smith and Porter (2004). On the Olympic megaevent genre and the development of national and international publics see MacAloon (1981, 1984), Hill (1996), Senn (1999), Roche (2000: ch. 3, 4 and Part 2 passim, 2001b, 2002a,b, 2003b). 4 On the mainstream sociology of nationalism, see Gellner (1983, 1997), Smith (1998) and Hobsbawm (1990, 1992). 5 On the history of nation-states and nationalism, and also of ‘modernity’, historians who emphasize the role of the medieval period in general include Abu-Lughod (1989), Hastings (1997), Geary (2002) and Le Goff (2005). Historical sociologists who emphasize the ‘early modern’ (c. sixteenthcentury) origins of capitalist modernity and the nation-state include, classically, Max Weber (1970 [1904–51]), and more recently Wallerstein (1974), Mann (1988), Tilly (1992) and Smith (2004); also see Kennedy (1988). 6 For positive discussion and applications of ‘postmodern’ perspectives to popular culture and expos see Featherstone (1991) and Harvey (1996) respectively. For a general and critical appraisal of ‘post-modernism’ see Harvey (1989). For alternative versions of ‘late modernity’ see Castells (1996) (on ‘network society’) and Held et al. (1999) (on late modern society as subject to ‘global transformations’). On the meaning and uses of the globalization interpretation of late modernity for sport and the Olympics see Maguire (1999) and Roche (2002a, 2002b, 2003b). 7 For histories of national and international politics in relation to the Olympic Games see Hill (1996) and Senn (1999); also Houlihan (1994). For accounts of the politics of recent particular Olympics see Larson and Park (1993) on Seoul 1988, and Hargreaves (2000) on Barcelona 1992, Sinclair and Wilson (2000) on Sydney 2000. On the national and international cultural and collective identity implications of the marriage between television and sport see Maguire (1999: ch. 7), Boyle and Haynes (2000), Rowe (2004), Roche (2000: ch. 6, 2005) and Roche and Harrison (1992); on the televising of the Olympics as a global media event providing an international platform for nations and their images see Larson and Park (1993), Spa et al. (1995) and Roche (2002b, 2003b). 8 Nations that can be argued to have pursued multiple mega-event strategies in the contemporary period include the following in three world regions: (a) North America: USA: 1984 Summer Olympics (Los Angeles), 1994 FIFA World Cup, 1996 Summer Olympics (Atlanta), 2002 Winter Olympics (Salt Lake City); Canada: 1976 Summer Olympics (Montreal), 1988 Winter Olympics (Calgary), and (forthcoming) Winter Olympics in Whistler 2010.

(b) Europe: Italy: 1990 FIFA World Cup and (forthcoming) 2006 Winter Olympics (Turin); France 1992 Winter Olympics (Albertville), 1998 FIFA World Cup, and the unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics. West Germany: 1972 Summer Olympics (Munich) and the 1974 FIFA World Cup; re-unified Germany: 2000 Expo (Hanover), and also the forthcoming 2006 FIFA World Cup; Portugal: Expo in Lisbon in 1998 and the UEFA European Nations soccer championships in 2004. (c) East Asia: South Korea: Olympics in Seoul in 1988 and, (with Japan), the ELFA World Cup in 2002. China: (forthcoming) the Summer Olympics (Beijing) in 2008 and an Expo (Shanghai) in 2010.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barney, E., Wenn, S. and Martyn, S. (2002) Selling the Five Rings: The IOC and the Rise of Olympic Commercialism. Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press. Bennett, T. (1988) ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations, pp. 73–102. Boyle, R. and Haynes, R. (2000) Power Play: Sport, the Media and Popular Culture. Harlow: Longman. Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age. Vol. I – The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dauncey, H. and Hare, G. (eds) (1999) France and the 1998 World Cup. London: Frank Cass. Edensor, T. (2002) National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Geary, P. (2002) The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1997) Nationalism. London: Phoenix/ Orion. Greenhalgh, P. (1988) Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Handelman, D. (1998) Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hargreaves, J. (2000) Freedom for Catalonia?: Catalan Nationalism, Spanish Identity and the Barcelona Olympic Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Post-Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, P. (1996) Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition. London: Routledge. Hastings, A. (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hendry, J. (2000) The Orient Strikes Back: A Global View of Cultural Display. Oxford: Berg. Hill, C. (1996) Olympic Politics: Athens to Atlanta, 1896–1996. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1992) ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Canto/Cambridge University Press. Horne, J. and Manzenreiter, W. (2002) Japan, Korea and the 2002 World Cup. London: Routledge. Houlihan, B. (1994) Sport and International Politics. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Jarman, N. (1997) Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Berg. Jones, P. (2003) ‘Contested Discourses: National Identity and Architecture’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool. Kennedy, P. (1988) The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500–2000. London: Fontana Press. Lanfranchi, P., Eisenberg, C., Mason, T. and Wahl, A. (2004) 100 Years of Football: The FIFA Centennial Book. London: Weidenfeld Nicolson. Larson, J. and Park, H-S. (1993) Global Television and the Politics of the Seoul Olympics. Oxford: Westview Press. Le Goff, J. (2005) The Birth of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. Ley, D. and Olds, K. (1988) ‘Landscape as Spectacle: World’s Fairs and the Culture of Heroic Consumption’, Environment and Planning D: Space and Society, 6: 191–212. MacAloon, J. (1981) The Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacAloon, J. (1984) ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’, in J. MacAloon (ed.), Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle. Philadelphia: The Institute of Human Issues.

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Maguire, J. (1999) Global Sport: Identities, Societies, Civilizations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mann, M. (1988) States, War and Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Pred, A. (1991) ‘Spectacular Articulations of Modernity: the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897’, Geograiska Annaler, 73, B1: 45–84. Roche, M. (1998) ‘Sport, Popular Culture and Identity’, in M. Roche (ed.), Sport, Popular Culture and Identity. Aachen: Meyer and Meyer Verla. 1–20. Roche, M. (ed.) (1998) Sport, Popular Culture and Identity. Aachen: Meyer and Meyer Verla. Roche, M. (1999) ‘Mega-Events, Culture and Modernity: Expos and the Origins of Public Culture’, Cultural Policy, 5 (1): 1–31. Roche, M. (2000) Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London: Routledge. Roche, M. (2001a) ‘Modernity, Cultural Events and the Construction of Charisma: Mass Cultural Events in the USSR in the Interwar Period’, Cultural Policy, 7 (3): 493–520. Roche, M. (2001b) ‘Olympic Games as Performance and Public Event’, Culture, Sport and Society, 4 (3): 113–16. Roche, M. (2002a) ‘The Olympics and “Global Citizenship’’’, Citizenship Studies, 6 (1): 165–81. Roche, M. (2002b) ‘Olympic and Sport Mega-Events as Media-Events: On the Globalization Paradigm’, in K. Wamsley, R. Barney and S. Martyn (eds), The Global Nexus Engaged: Past, Present, Future Interdisciplinary Olympic Studies. London, Ontario: University of Western Ontario, pp. 1–12. Roche, M. (2003a) ‘Mega-Events, Time and Modernity’, Time and Society, 12 (1): 99–126. Roche, M. (2003b) ‘The Olympics and the Development of “global society’’’, in M. Moragas, C. Kennett and N. Puig (eds), The Legacy of the Olympic Games, 1984–2000. Lausanne: IOC, pp. 289–306. Roche, M. (2006) (forthcoming) ‘Europe, “the Cosmopolitan Condition” and International Sport’, in C. Rumford (ed.), Cosmopolitanism and Europe. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Roche, M. and Harrison, J. (2002) ‘Europeanisation through Regulation: the Case of Media-Sport’, unpublished paper, IAMCR, annual conference, Barcelona. Rowe, D. (ed.) (2004) Critical Readings: Sport, Culture and the Media. Buckingham: Open University Press. Rydell, R. (1984) All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Rydell, R. (1993) World of Fairs: The Century-ofProgress Expositions. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rydell, R. and Gwinn, N. (1994) ‘Introduction: Fair Representations – World’s Fairs and the Modern World’, in R. Rydell and N. Gwinn (eds), Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Rydell, R. and Gwinn, N. (eds) (1994) Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Sabate, J., Frenchman, D. and Schuster, M. (eds) (2004) Event Places. Barcelona: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. Senn, A. (1999) Power, Politics and the Olympic Games. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Sinclair, J. and Wilson, H. (eds) (2000) The Olympics: Media, Myth and Madness. Sydney: Griffith University/Media International Australia. Smith, A. (1998) Nationalism and Modernism. London: Routledge.

Smith. A. (2004) The Antiquity of Nations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smith, A. and Porter, D. (eds) (2004) Sport and National Identity in the Post-War World. London: Routledge. Spa, M de M., Rivenburgh, N. and Larson, J. (1995) Television in the Olympics. Luton: John Libbey Media. Spillman, L. (1997) Nation and Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sugden, J. and Tomlinson, A. (1998) FIFA and the Contest for World Football. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1992) Coercion, Capital and European States: A.D. 990–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press. Weber, M. (1970 [1904–5]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Unwin University Books.

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23 Xenophobia and the New Nationalisms MABEL BEREZIN

Xenophobia is the fear of difference embodied in persons or groups. Transgression is constitutive of xenophobia. Xenophobia transcends time and space – history and culture. Territoriality and territory, a bounded physical space with rules and norms of access, is the procrustean political bed upon which xenophobia operates (Berezin 2003: 4–14). Since the late eighteenth century, the modern nation-state has been the locus of modern territoriality and fertile terrain for outbreaks of xenophobia. The social science literature on the formation of national states and national welfare systems is voluminous. Scholars agree to some degree on the following summary points. Whereas war-making defined the political and territorial boundaries of the state, citizenship and nationality laws defined the cultural boundaries of the nation. Citizenship and nationality laws articulate strangeness by establishing the rules of membership (Brubaker 1992).1 When politics and society were local, social welfare, as well as government, was local and strangers were not an issue (Somers 1993). Walzer, in Spheres of Justice (1983: 38), argues that localism, by necessity, closed the doors to outsiders. The larger territorial scale of the national state opens doors and makes hospitality in the form of social welfare a normative and political issue. Members of the modern

nation-state must ask themselves whether the state should provide social welfare only for those who are citizens, or to provide to all in need as Christian charity demands. Walzer’s later work, On Toleration (1997), further develops the point that he began in Spheres of Justice. He argues that toleration is not simply an attitude expressed towards individuals who are different but something that is built into the structure of diverse forms of political arrangements from nationstates to empires. Episodes of xenophobia may occur anywhere on the globe. Since the mid-1980s, xenophobia has become a salient feature of political reality and discourse in the former Western Europe. Acts of violence and vandalism against Jews and first and second generation immigrants from Africa and the Middle East coupled with the rise of ultra-nationalist populist parties suggest that contemporary Europe is intolerant at best and racist at worst. To meet the growing threat of xenophobia, the Council of Europe established the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in June 1997 as a research and prevention organization (Council of Europe, 1997). In addition to monitoring anti-semitic activities in Europe, the EUMC has recently turned its attention to hate speech on the Internet (EUMC 2004). Continuing acts of violence and intolerance are clearly a cause for

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concern. Ethnic, racial and religious violence generates popular and social science assumptions that require exploration and elaboration. Prominent among these assumptions is the claim that xenophobia is directly responsible for the resurgence of nationalism in contemporary Europe. This chapter uncouples neo-nationalism from xenophobia. Taking Europe as its principal location, this chapter first discusses xenophobia as a social category and a historical phenomenon. It then proceeds to discuss the relationship between xenophobia and immigration in contemporary Europe. It then explores two facets of contemporary nationalism: first, ultra-nationalism as embodied in the electoral successes of right-wing political parties and second, the reassertion of nationhood in European nation-states confronted by both immigration and European integration.

XENOPHOBIA AS A SOCIAL FORM Difference is constitutive of modernity. When social life was local, strangeness was not part of the environment. In pre-industrial societies, strangers were strange in the sense that they were odd, not usual. The pre-industrial vocabulary of difference focused on uniqueness. As society became more modern, more industrial, more differentiated, strangeness and the stranger became a customary social phenomenon as well as a political problem. The categories, industrial, pre-industrial as well as global and postmodern, are ideal types that point to composite features of social reality at various historical conjunctures. As composites they have utility for describing social aggregates. Empirical reality is more variegated. Pre-industrial social structures may coexist with modern forms of social and political structures within contemporary societies. Social philosopher Georg Simmel (1971 [1908]), in his classic essay The Stranger, points out that there were no strangers when social and political life was purely local. According to Simmel, the merchant trader, a social product of the development of markets, is the first

‘stranger’ who comes into a territory and forces the locals to define themselves. The locals must decide how they differ from the stranger and whether or not they should allow the stranger to live on their territory. In short, they must deal with the issue of trust in the face of difference. Simmel points to the European Jew as the classic social archetype of the stranger. European Jews were typically traders who owned no land and had no stake in the community. Their control of money and credit permitted the Jews to engage in financial markets and to profit off the established economic positions within society. Strangeness demands the need for incorporation and definition of the social and political space. But, as Simmel points out, the condition of being a stranger involves a paradox. Groups perceive strangers in their midst as both ‘near and far at the same time’ (Simmel 1971 [1908]: 148). Simmel argues: Between these two factors of nearness and distance, however, a peculiar tension arises, since the consciousness of having only the absolutely general in common has exactly the effect of putting a special emphasis on that which is not common. For a stranger to the country the city, the race … what is stressed is again nothing individual, but alien origin, a quality which he has or could have in common with many other strangers. For this reason strangers are not really perceived as individuals, but as strangers of a certain type. Their remoteness is no less general than their nearness. (p. 148)

The Jews in Frankfurt serve as Simmel’s illustrative example of this point. The city of Frankfurt taxed the Jews as a religious group and always at the same rate simply because they were different, whereas other members of the Frankfurt community were taxed on their income and properties. The Frankfurt Jews were taxed as part of a social category and in the end paid more taxes – so they were members of the community and exploited by the community. Gotman, in Le Sens de l’hospitalité (2001), a theoretical treatise on, and a social history of, hospitality, takes up the issue of the stranger and the relationship between welcoming and owing responsibility to the stranger. France’s recent amendment to its immigration law, the Debre law of 1997, is among the empirical cases upon which she draws. The French left

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dubbed the Debre law the ‘law of inhospitality’. The law established that no one could host a foreign national unless they provided temporary lodging documents for them. Gotman points out that while the French right viewed strangers as outsiders who are to be kept outside, the left took the position that strangeness is a universal condition. According to the French left, the phrase ‘we are all immigrants’ best approximates the human condition (Gotman 2001: 37–45).

XENOPHOBIA AS A HISTORICAL PHENOMENON: FROM THE DREYFUS AFFAIR TO WORLD WAR II The term xenophobia came into the vernacular in 1901 in France with the publication of Anatole France’s novel Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (Wicker 2001). Xenophobia was listed in the French Nouveau Larousse illustre for the first time in 1906. The Dreyfus affair fueled the development of the term. Anti-semitism and the Nazi genocide of the Jews are paradigmatic in discussions of race hatred and xenophobia in Europe. Naimark (2001) underscores this point in his comparative historical study of genocide and ethnic cleansing by demonstrating that the Jews were the first but not the unique victims of organized hate. Despite the now acknowledged horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, anti-semitism is never far from the surface of European political discourse, as when Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, said the ‘gas chambers were merely a detail of the history of the second world war’. 2 Hannah Arendt’s essay on anti-semitism (1973 [1951]) in the Origins of Totalitarianism underscores the importance of insider versus outsider status – a theme that recurs frequently in discussions of xenophobia. She emphasizes the connection between statelessness and the vulnerability of the Jewish people. The Jews, without a national territory to claim as their own, were constantly the victims of discrimination and persecution. Arendt makes the point that the Jews were allowed to be in the

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territory but not of the territory in European nation-states in the nineteenth century. Their positions as traders made them useful to the development of European capitalism and some strata of European Jews acquired great wealth. In the twentieth century capitalism and finance became intimately connected with the state because private assets were insufficient to ensure its continued wealth. At that point, the Jews became politically and socially vulnerable – with only money, they were perfect victims. Believing that they could survive as outsiders, European Jews had confused monetary power with social and political power. Brustein (2003) provides empirical elaboration of anti-semitism in Europe in the period before the Holocaust. In Roots of Hate, Brustein conducts an exhaustive study of newspapers in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Romania to document either anti-semitic acts or remarks unfavorable to Jews. He argues that anti-semitism is a special type of xenophobia because it contains elements of political and economic prejudice as well as racial stereotyping. There was a prevailing view that Jews were either political leftists and hence socially destabilizing or excessively rich. A surprising finding is that when he examined newspaper accounts of gypsies, Roma, for the same period, he found that they suffered from more negative reporting than the Jews. Despite popular and, to some extent, scholarly perceptions, the Jews were not the only objects of racism in inter-war Europe. Schor (1985) demonstrates that France was not particularly welcoming to the Armenians, Poles and Italians who flocked into the country between 1919 and 1939.

XENOPHOBIA AND IMMIGRATION: THE POST-WAR PERIOD There is a tendency to speak of racism and xenophobia as though they were the same phenomenon. Taguieff (2001: 43–67) draws the important distinction between racism of extermination and racism of exclusion. Contemporary xenophobia and accompanying

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acts of violence in the former Western Europe reflect a desire to exclude and control the stranger, not to exterminate him. Frederickson (2002), in his history of racism, elegantly argues that contemporary racism is about the slow pain of exclusion and denial of resources rather than outright murder. Acts of antisemitism in the early 1980s arguably began the current wave of xenophobia. In August 1982, six people were killed and 26 wounded in an attack on a Jewish restaurant on the rue des Rosiers in the Jewish quarter in Paris. Much of the contemporary European discussion of xenophobia centers on Muslim immigrants. In an unfortunate reversal, Muslims are now beginning to attack Jews as they blame them for the current crisis in the Middle East. A recent New York Times article cites one Jewish youth living in an Arab Muslim neighborhood saying, ‘You have to carry an umbrella to protect yourself from the stones that fly’. 3 While Europe has always been a country of movement, the characteristics of immigration dramatically changed in the 1980s (Moch 2003 [1992]: 177–97 and Massey et al. 1998: 108–33 provide an overview). In the period between the two world wars, parts of Europe were political asylums. In the post World War II period, there were a variety of migrants. In the late 1940s and 1950s, refugees and guest workers dominated the body of immigrants – as well as colonials migrating to the mother country. In the 1980s, in contrast, people began to migrate in large numbers for work and without the guest worker arrangements that characterized the 1950s and 1960s. The origin of the new migrants varied by nation-state. In Germany and France, Turks dominated (Kastoryano 2002). They were foreign in two senses: first, they were foreign with respect to country of origin, and second they were foreign with respect to religion. The new immigrants were predominantly Muslim in nominally Christian Europe. Structural differences in the forms of immigration coupled with the religious ‘otherness’ of the migrants fueled a mixture of xenophobia and racism that became apparent as early as the first years of the 1990s in Europe. Beginning in the early 1980s in France and followed in the

early 1990s in Germany there was a stunning series of events that constituted violence against Muslim immigrants. German social scientists were able to document 276 acts of antisemitic and extreme right violence in Germany between 1989 and 1994 (Erb and Kurthen 1997). A recent study of right-wing violence in Germany (Koopmans and Olzak 2004) reported that acts of xenophobic violence were correlated with public discourse about ‘problems’ with immigrants, particularly asylum seekers, and not with the number of immigrants or the unemployment rates in a site of violence. The study found a steady state of violence directed against immigrants to Germany in the years between 1990 and 1999. However, violence peaked in the years of 1991 and 1992 when asylum seekers were on the public agenda. In the fall of 1983, after a series of Muslim youths were killed in incidents with police in the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris, SOS-Racisme, an association to prevent racism, constituted itself in response. Throughout the 1980s, the group organized demonstrations against racism. In June 1985, SOS-Racisme mobilized 300,000 people for a rock concert in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. They spread their motto, ‘Don’t touch my buddy’, on a badge that they distributed widely in Paris (Veugelers and Lamont 1991: 143–9). Despite the immediate mobilization against racism in France, incidents have continued to occur. Prominent among these incidents were the murder of a Muslim teenager in Marseilles and the killing of an immigrant youth and the dumping of his body in the Seine (Ardagh 1999: 219–43; Birnbaum 2001 [1998]: 246–7).4 Anthropologists have begun to turn their attention to sites of ethnic conflict and violence (Banton 1996; Hervik 2004; Holmes 2000). To date, journalists rather than social scientists have provided more vivid narratives. In 1992, skinheads on the loose in northern German towns burned down an immigrant Muslim apartment complex. Jane Kramer chronicled these events for the New Yorker Magazine. Kramer’s articles were later published in a volume on the Politics of Memory

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(1996). She describes the life of a skinhead who is on probation for ‘sidewalk cracking’, which is finding Turkish immigrants, knocking them down and kicking them in the head. Kramer’s subject is marginally literate and employed and spends his spare time listening to Oi music and describing the ‘chaos in the head’ that he experiences. The Turkish immigrant in Kramer’s narrative thinks he has had a good day if he has not experienced any random acts of verbal abuse – despite the fact that the grocery store, in which he had invested his hopes and dreams, was burned to the ground by local skinheads. Against this backdrop of dramatic events that captured the attention of the national and international media, social scientists began to demarcate the boundaries of xenophobia in Europe. French sociologist Michel Wieviorka (1992, 1994) conducted a series of comparative studies of racism and xenophobia in Europe. Wieviorka (1994: 9–25) argues that there are three crises that face contemporary Europeans and immigration only partially fuels them. These crises are structural, social and cultural. First, European labor markets are changing. Industrial jobs are disappearing and with them the political influence and power of trade unions. A graphic symbol of this change is a map of mobilization routes that appeared in the French left newspaper Le Monde on May Day 2002. Record numbers of French citizens turned out to march against Jean Marie Le Pen’s second place in the first round of the Presidential elections. Le Pen’s supporters marched on their traditional route to the Place de l’Opera; the mass of protesters marched through central Paris. The CFTC, a French trade union, chose to march between the two other groups on a much less central route symbolically underscoring the marginality of organized labor in contemporary French politics.5 The second crisis is social. De-industrialization signaled the breakdown of the post-war European social settlement in which labor and business supported some version of a national welfare state. This breakdown, coupled with increasing unemployment rates (France has some of the highest rates in Europe), has led to ghettofication and hopelessness among the

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urban working class. The housing projects outside of Paris, the banlieue, are cauldrons of class and racial conflict, as the hit French film L’Haine (Hate) depicts. According to Wieviorka’s analysis, there is a paradox within the European welfare state. The public functions of the post-war state lead to inadvertent ‘positive discrimination’ because that state was designed to draw boundaries between insiders and outsiders. The European state heavily regulates and subsidizes many public functions that the United States leaves to the market sphere. The third crisis is cultural. Immigrants seem to pose a crisis of national identities. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that long-term secular forces such as European integration and globalization are the source of these identity crises – and not the presence of immigrants. American social science turned its attention to xenophobia in Europe as it was in the process of emerging. Pettigrew (1998) relied on Eurobarometer data coupled with a review of secondary literature to examine prejudice towards minorities in contemporary Europe. Using theory informed by social psychology, he developed an index of what he describes as ‘subtle prejudice’ and ‘blatant prejudice’. Pettigrew reviewed polling data on attitudes towards the extension of citizenship rights to immigrants and the deportation of illegal foreign nationals. He found that the more ‘blatant’ your level of prejudice, the less likely you were to favor extension of rights to immigrants and the more elastic rights were with respect to legality the less likely you were to be willing to grant them. Quillian (1995) focused on the evolution of prejudice in contemporary Europe and used Eurobarometer survey data to document that it is the perception of the threat (that is, of the out-group) to the group (that is, the ingroup), not the absolute number of out-group members (that is, immigrants in a country) that accounts for prejudice and xenophobia in a country. This accounts for his finding that the perceived threat is higher in Ireland and Belgium, countries that are not particularly noted for their immigrant populations. Given Quillian’s logic, we would expect xenophobia to be strongest in ethnically cohesive

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societies. The emergence of ethnic conflict in the Scandinavian countries supports his findings (Hervik 2004). Sweden provides a provocative example. Sweden has not had a war since 1814 and has a generous welfare state with an egalitarian vision. It also has had until recently an open immigration policy. Swedish citizenship initiation policies include language training and other mechanisms of social and cultural integration. What is often overlooked in discussions of Sweden is that the renowned welfare state was about generosity among people who were ethnically and culturally the same. The Swedes have a history of being concerned about purifying the race that is often overlooked in discussions of social democracy. Alva Myrdal argued in Nation and Family, published in English in 1940, for a state population policy that weeded out undesirables (Spektorowski 2004). Given this history, anthropologist Alan Pred, in his study of racism entitled Even in Sweden (2000), should not express the surprise that his title suggests. The curious feature of Swedish openness to immigrants is that Sweden, a large, cold and dark country in the winter, with most of its population in the south and the big cities, makes them re-locate to the rural and frozen, less-populated North.

THE EUROPEAN RIGHT AND THE NEW NATIONALISM As recently as 1988, when the journal West European Politics published a theme issue on ‘Right Wing Extremism in Western Europe’, contributors appeared to dredge up the past rather than describe an emerging phenomenon. For example, the article on Italy (Caciagli 1988) analyzed the MSI, the right-wing party with direct links to the Italian Fascist party. By 1994, this party was disbanded and Gianfranco Fini founded the National Alliance. While immigrants were on the radar screen of contributors to this volume, European integration as a driving force in European politics was conspicuously absent – even four years before Maastricht. In his introduction to the volume, Von Beyme

(1988: 5) identifies acts of anti-semitism as a measure of right-wing tendencies. The political science literature, as well as the popular press, routinely attribute the resurgence of ultra-nationalism in the established nation-states of Europe to xenophobia. The electoral success of right-wing political parties in European nation-states (for a summary description of these parties see Hossay 2002) is one empirical indicator of the new nationalism. In the past ten years, political parties that analysts had viewed as fringe have become part intermittently of legally constituted national governing coalitions. In March 1994, Gianfranco Fini’s ‘post-fascist’ National Alliance became part of the Italian government. In March 1998, Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front swept the French regional elections and in April 2002 Le Pen came in second in the first round of the French presidential election; in 2000, Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party became part of the Austrian government. In addition, fringe parties have threatened to achieve significant parliamentary seats in Switzerland, Belgium and Denmark. In 1994, right-wing populist parties appeared to be fissures in their national political landscape. From the vantage point of 2004, they appear more as fixtures on the political scene. Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France was the first neo-nationalist party to breakthrough electorally, in 1983 in the city of Dreux (Schain 1987; Mitra 1988). Since that election, the National Front has served as the benchmark in discussion of the new right. The relation between xenophobia and immigration policy has dominated studies of the European right (for example, Schain 1996; Lafont 2001; Karapin 2002). Increased numbers of immigrants in the former Western Europe presents a social problem; there is no necessary reason why xenophobia has to be the response. Whether the emergence of the right is a cause or effect of xenophobic reactions to immigrants is empirically under-specified in the literature. From the early emergence of the right in France, analysts have been puzzled by the fact that the right is often strong in areas in which there are no immigrants (Schain et al. 2002: 11–12).

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The literature on the right in Europe is voluminous and growing exponentially.6 In addition to immigration, social scientists have examined the logic of party coalitions and changes in the class structure of post-industrial society to structure explanations of the rise of the right (Betz 1994; Ignazi 1994; Kitschelt 1995). Among these studies, Kitschelt’s (1995) political economy model of right-wing success argues that the new occupational structure of post-industrial society has pushed traditional left/right parties towards an undifferentiated center and left an ideological void that ‘extremists’ fill. The social science literature in the main has not gone far beyond the initial focus on immigration despite the fact that immigration has been considerably fixed for at least ten years in Europe (Withol de Wenden 2004) and there was never a strong correlation between absolute numbers of immigrants in a given locale and support for the National Front. In the years since 1983 and its initial breakthrough in Dreux, the fortunes of the National Front have risen and fallen and the issues that they have chosen to address have changed. By the early 1990s, the Front appeared to be a nuisance and an embarrassment to French politics and society. In the regional elections of March 1998, the Front increased its presence to 15.27 per cent of the vote and held a bargaining position in 19 of France’s 22 regions. The Front’s ‘victory’ in 1998 stunned the French political and intellectual establishment (Perrineau and Reynie 1999). In 1999, the National Front split into two factions and suffered a defeat in the European Parliamentary elections. The Front appeared to have lost political consequence in France. In April 2002, Jean Marie Le Pen finished second in the first round of the French presidential election. Although this ‘victory’ was due more to certain structural oddities in the French electoral system than to a genuine increase of support for the National Front, Le Pen’s second place did at least temporarily end the political career of the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (Mayer 2003). The Front failed to achieve any major electoral gains in the regional elections of spring 2004. The trajectory of the French National Front is

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typical of the fortunes of other right-wing parties. Haider has been in and out of Austrian politics since spring 2000. Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch right-wing candidate, was assassinated before he could see his party achieve a victory in the April 2002 elections (Bruff 2003). Anti-immigrant sentiment in contemporary Italy is the analytic focus of Sniderman and his collaborators in The Outsider (2000). These authors rely on their own primary data collected from a carefully designed telephone survey of Italian households to support their conclusions. By combining insights garnered from social psychology as well as macrosociology, The Outsider provides the foundation for a generalizable and non-reductionist account of contemporary European right-wing politics. The Sniderman research team was interested in studying how race intensified prejudice. Despite a recent trend to analyze prejudice as a function of a human propensity to categorize drawn from the work of cognitive psychologist Henri Tajfel and others, Sniderman and his colleagues initially reasoned that race would be the most salient dimension of prejudice. Drawing upon their knowledge of the United States, they hypothesized that the color of a person’s skin, that is, darkness, would most likely make him or her the object of prejudice – even when tested cross-culturally. Armed with this hypothesis, the researchers turned to Italy as the site of a ‘natural experiment’. Italy until just recently was a country of out-migration; and it had a legacy of internal prejudice – north vs. south, which Italians viewed in color terms, that is, white vs. black. Prejudice articulated in the color of one’s skin was a long-standing cultural idiom in Italy – even if that prejudice was directed against those who were nominally fellow Italians and by all modern classificatory schema white. Within the past 15 years, Italy has become a country of immigration with a corresponding increase in violent actions against immigrants and in antiimmigrant sentiment mobilized by the political right. The contemporary wave of immigration to Italy divides into two distinct groups – persons of color, mostly but not exclusively from sub-Saharan Africa, and ‘white’ refugees from the turmoil of the former Eastern Europe.

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As a terrain new to immigration but not to color prejudice, Italy was the ideal research venue to develop an ‘integrated’ account of why groups become prejudiced against other groups. The results of their experiment surprised the researchers and forced them to re-think their analysis. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, race did not seem to matter in the Italian case. Bluntly put, Italians disliked Eastern Europeans more than blacks. The initial findings suggested prejudice was more a perception than a fact of difference. How could they account for this? To interpret results that were at first puzzling, Sniderman and his collaborators developed what they label a ‘Two Flavors Model’ of prejudice. The first ‘flavor’ drew upon psychological accounts of prejudice that were long out of favor in studies of race and ethnicity. These accounts described prejudice as an individual response to difference generated by childhood socialization. The focus on social psychology, Sniderman argued, needed to be refined, rather than abandoned. This refinement required a ‘second flavor’ with a more rational taste. Prejudice would reflect an instrumental group struggle over scarce societal resources, that is, we dislike immigrants because they take our jobs. Both ‘flavors’ rely on categorization – who is like us and who is not – but with an important caveat. At any given historical moment there is more or less difference and more or less scarcity in a society. The task before the researchers was to identify the social mechanism that triggered the propensity not only to view others as different but also to actively dislike them because of that difference. Identifying this mechanism would permit the researchers to develop a theory of prejudice that blended both flavors – the social psychological and the instrumental. The ‘Right Shock model’ that incorporated politics in the study of prejudice was the result. The authors argue that differences of race, ethnicity, nationality, or whatever are always more or less present in a modern society. It is only under certain circumstances that the propensity to categorize others as different in negative ways emerges. Exogenous shocks to the social, economic and political system such

as recessions or, as in the case of Italy in 1994, the collapse of the political party system, transform difference from a social fact to a social exacerbation. This transformation of the social weight of difference has the potential (as it has done in contemporary Europe) to contribute to the parliamentary success of right-wing parties that mobilize around it. The ‘Right Shock’ model suggests a purely structural analysis. However, Sniderman’s data allow more subtle and novel analyses. Due to the research team’s interest in the ‘two flavors’ model, they constructed an ‘authority’ variable – that measured individual level commitment to discipline, stability and order. The data showed that ordinary constituents of the left and right parties may espouse different ideological positions but they share a common commitment to authority. When exogenous threats to the system occur, most people, independently of the ideological labels they espouse, are likely to retreat to ‘authority’, or more colloquially put, pleas for law and order. The political party that exploits that commitment, whether left or right, is likely to garner electoral support. This analysis suggests that the tendency to categorize others as different, as agents of disorder, is likely to increase, not decrease, in a contemporary Europe that is awash with exogenous shocks – the least of which is immigration.

REAFFIRMING NATIONHOOD The variable fortunes of right-wing parties within European nation-states suggest that social scientists should look to long-term political developments and macro-structural change when trying to account for xenophobia and neo-nationalism in established nationstates. Much of what falls under the label of nationalism in discussions of xenophobia and ultra-nationalism is what students of nationalism have labeled ethnic nationalism – the notion of a community of memory based on primordial ties.7 The legacies of the nationbuilding activities of the nineteenth century in Western Europe suggest that ethnic

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nationalism, particularly in France and Northern Europe, does not resonate with the political community. Nationhood, the basis of civic nationalism, does have resonating cultural, political and moral claims.8 Much of the empirical evidence suggests that at the core of extremist politics is a reaffirmation of nationhood in the face of a range of external threats to the nation-state. For example, De Master and Le Ro (2000) demonstrated a positive relation between xenophobia and level of support for European integration within individual member states. Low support for continuing integration correlates with high feelings of xenophobia. This finding suggests: first, that immigration may pose a stronger threat than immigrants to European citizens; and second, that untangling the mechanisms through which xenophobia and European integration interact is a worthwhile enterprise. Recent empirical work on Europe and national identities suggests the reaffirmation of national identities among groups that are not particularly right-wing: for example, Lamont’s (2000) interviews with native and immigrant French working-class men which revealed that they framed their identities in terms of nationness and in a manner that was not particularly xenophobic. Both groups looked to Republicanism as a political practice and ideal that made the French nation-state a just society for all. If immigrants became French, then they became part of the normal body of the nation and were not a security threat. DiezMedrano (2003) studied how ordinary Europeans conceive of Europe and how those conceptions influence their support for accelerating European integration. Diez-Medrano deployed an arsenal of qualitative and quantitative data in his study. His overriding conclusion was that citizens’ relation to their own national histories and identities was a strong predictor of how they would feel about increasing the pace of European integration. The trajectory of political events suggests that the reaffirmation of nationhood, not ultra-nationalism, is on the rise. The aftermath of Le Pen’s successes in France, as with his his ideological compatriots in other nationstates, has been a shift towards a conservative

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nation-ness. Sniderman et al.’s (2000) data support this position, as does Chirac’s overriding victory in April 2002. Electoral politics, however, is not the only terrain on which this new nation-ness is affirming itself. Religion is emerging as the new area of contestation in the realm of nation-ness. In the process of nation-state building, every European country came to institutional terms with the issue of religion (Marx 2003). While complicated and the result of long-term political processes, adjudicating the issue of religion was less fraught when Protestantism or Catholicism were the only candidates for official status. The recent influx of immigrants from Islamic countries to Europe, coupled with their requirements to build mosques and engage in religious practices, have once more made official religion an issue. The recent ruling in France on the wearing of the headscarf by young Muslim women in public school is an example of this reaffirmation. The headscarf affair first emerged in France in 1989 when two young women were expelled from school for wearing the veil. France is committed to laicité, the ideological position legalized in a 1905 law that requires that church and state be strictly separated. In 1989, after much public debate from all sides of the political spectrum, the issue was basically left unresolved and the young girls were allowed to return to school and wear their headscarves if they wished.9 In the aftermath of 9/11 and the war in Iraq and the presence of a more radicalized Muslim community in France, the headscarf became an issue once more. This time, the French government convened an official commission, and in December 2003, the commission delivered its report. The Stassi commission suggested that a law be passed that would ban the wearing of religious symbols in all state institutions (that is, schools, military). The logic of the decision was that laicité was the cornerstone of French Republicanism, which defined the French nation. Chirac accepted the commission’s recommendations and in February 2004 the French parliament passed the law with an overwhelming majority.

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The forgoing analysis of xenophobia as both a formal category and historical entity suggests that it is a volatile political and social phenomenon. It tends to emerge as a response to challenges to territorially bounded geographical space. In the modern nation-state, immigration has posed one such challenge but arguably so has the accelerated process of European integration. The paradox of xenophobia might lie in the fact that while ultra-nationalism and a closing of borders may be the first response, the second and more pragmatic response is an affirmation of nationhood and an accommodation to the stranger. Affirmation and accommodation are occurring in France and arguably in the rest of Europe. Affirmation and accommodation underlie historical cycles of xenophobia and the cultural and political processes by which strangers become familiar. NOTES I wish to acknowledge the careful reading and helpful suggestions of Gerard Delanty, Krishan Kumar and Riva Kastoryano and the research assistance of Anna Karwowska. 1 Hansen and Weil (2001: 1–23) summarize the development of nationality law in Europe. 2 Birnbaum (1993) provides the best history of racism in France. 3 Elaine Sciolino, ‘Attacks by Arabs on Jews in France Revive Old Fears’, New York Times, 3 December 2003. 4 Bleich (2003) documents state response to race in Britain and France. 5 ‘Un des plus grands defiles parisiens depuis la Liberation’, Le Monde, 2 May 2002. 6 Eatwell (2003) summarizes the state of the art. 7 Suny (2001) provides a compelling account of primordialism. 8 Calhoun (1997: 6) provides an account of these distinctions. 9 There is a large scholarly discussion of the first headscarf affair. For succinct summaries in English, see Berriss (1990), Feldblum (1999) and Benhabib (2002).

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Somers, M. R. (1993) ‘Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy’, American Sociological Review, 58 (October): 587–620. Spektorowski, A. (2004) ‘The Eugenic Temptation in Socialism: Sweden, Germany, and the Soviet Union’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46 (1): 84–106. Suny, R. G. (2001) ‘Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations’, Journal of Modern History, 73: 862–96. Taguieff, P-A. (2001) The Force of Prejudice, trans. and ed. H. Melehy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Veugelers, J. and Lamont, M. (1991) ‘France: Alternative Locations for Public Debate’, in R. Wuthnow (ed.), Between States and Markets: The Voluntary Sector in Comparative Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 125–56.

Von Beyme, K. (1988) ‘Right-Wing Extremism in Post-War Europe’, West European Politics, 11 (2): 1–18. Walzer, M. (1997) On Toleration. New Haven, CT: Yale. Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books. Wicker, H. R. (2001) ‘Xenophobia’, in N. J. Smelser and P. B. Baltes (eds), International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 16649–652. Wieviorka, M. (ed.) (1992) La France raciste. Paris: Seuil. Wieviorka, M. (ed.) (1994) Racisme et Xenophobie en Europe. Paris: Decouvert. Withol de Wenden, C. (2004) ‘Admissions Policies in Europe’, in D. S. Massey and J. E. Taylor (eds), International Migration. New York: Oxford. pp. 285–94.

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24 Nations, Migrants and Transnational Identifications: An Interactive Approach to Nationalism ANNA TRIANDAFYLLIDOU

This chapter proposes an interactive approach for the study of nations and nationalism. In this approach, attention is paid to the development, consolidation or transformation of national identity through interaction with Others. Nations are formed through a double process of internal identification, based on pre-existing cultural, political, historical and territorial features that bind a collectivity together, and of external definition that is activated through interaction with outsiders. The notion of Significant Others is introduced as a useful analytical tool for studying real or ‘imagined’ interaction between the nation and Others. While the notion of a Significant Other may apply to different groups, both internal and external to the national community, this chapter concentrates on the role that immigrant groups as a particular type of Significant Other play in the formation and development of national identity and nationalism. The relationship between the national in-group and a given immigrant outgroup is influenced by their historical links and present situation. It is my contention that immigrant Others are characterized by their subordinate position in the host1 society,

constructed and reproduced through the use of racial, ethnic, cultural or religious markers. In the following section, I shall discuss how the use of these different types of markers and, in particular, the discourse of racialization and that of cultural difference, are functional to the consolidation of the national majority identity. The relationship between Self and Significant Other is an interactive one. Not only is the host nation influenced by immigrants as threatening Significant Others, the national identity of the immigrant community is developed and transformed through its interaction – both real and symbolic – with its mother-nation and also with the national majority in the country of settlement. Immigrant communities have a positive relationship with their ‘mother-nation’. Their relationship with the national majority in the receiving country is, by contrast, ambivalent. The third section of this chapter discusses the ways in which interaction and ties between the immigrant minority and the country of origin, on one hand, and the immigrant minority and the host nation, on the other, shape the national identity of the immigrant group. In this context, I also

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question the validity of classical approaches to national identity, that overlook the complex, dynamic and multifaceted nature of national identities today, especially in multi-national and multi-ethnic contexts.

NATIONAL IDENTITY AS A JANUS-FACED PROCESS Nationalist activists as well as scholars of nationalism tend to consider national identity as an absolute entity, constructed from within by reference to a set of common characteristics that members of the nation have in common. In my view, this is only part of the picture (see also Triandafyllidou 2001, 2002). National identity expresses a feeling of belonging that has a relative value: it expresses a bond with fellow nationals by contrast to the feelings that members of the nation have towards foreigners. Fellow nationals are not simply very close or close enough to one another, they are closer to one another than they are to outsiders. In this relational approach, national identity is conceived as a double-edged relationship. On one hand, it is inward looking, it involves a certain degree of commonality within the group. It is thus based on a set of common features that bind the members of the nation together. These features include a historic territory, shared myths and memories, a common public culture and common laws and customs (Smith 2002: 15) but also often a common economy and common rights and duties for all members of the nation (Smith 1991: 14). On the other hand, national identity implies difference. It involves both self-awareness of the group but also awareness of Others from whom the nation seeks to differentiate itself. The interaction between nations and their Others can best be analysed through the notion of the Significant Other (Triandafyllidou 2001). The history of nations is marked by the presence of Significant Others; other groups that have influenced the development of a nation by means of their inspiring or threatening presence. The notion of a Significant Other refers to another nation or ethnic group that is usually

territorially close to, or indeed within, the national community. Significant Others are characterized by their peculiar relationship to the in-group: they represent what the in-group is not. They condition the national in-group, either because they are a source of inspiration for it, an example to follow for achieving national grandeur, or because they threaten (or are perceived to threaten) its presumed ethnic or cultural purity and/or its independence. A nation may develop its own identity features in ways that differentiate it and distance it from a specific Significant Other or it may seek to adopt some characteristics of an inspiring Other that are highly valued by the in-group too. Throughout the history of a nation more than one nation or ethnic group become salient out-groups, namely Significant Others, and even at any one time more than one group may be identified, against which the nation seeks to assert itself and which in turn influences its identity. A Significant Other need not be a stronger or larger nation or a community with more resources than the in-group. The feature that makes some other group a Significant Other is its close relationship with the nation’s sense of identity and uniqueness. Social psychological research has shown that a given group will engage in comparisons only with relevant out-groups. According to Tajfel and Turner (1979: 41), factors such as similarity, proximity and situational salience may influence the comparability between two groups and the higher the comparability the greater will be the pressure for confirming in-group superiority through comparison with that particular out-group. In fact, dissimilar out-groups are already distinctive from the in-group, hence there is little need to differentiate from them. In contrast, those that share a set of common features with the in-group pose a threat to its distinctiveness and uniqueness (Johnston and Hewstone 1990: 188–9). Thus, Significant Others are by definition groups that share with the nation some common features, be they cultural, ethnic or territorial. Because of their close relationship with the nation, Significant Others pose a challenge to it. This challenge may be of a positive and peaceful nature, when the out-group is perceived as

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an object of admiration and esteem, an exemplary case to be imitated, a higher ground to be reached by the nation, in brief, an inspiring Significant Other. This challenge, however, may also take the character of a threat; the Significant Other may be seen as an enemy to fight against, an out-group to be destroyed, if necessary, an Other that represents all that the nation rejects and despises: a threatening Significant Other.

IMMIGRANTS AS OTHERS In this chapter, I am particularly interested in the case of immigrant communities that are perceived by the receiving nation as Significant Others. Indeed, the different language, religion or customs of immigrant populations are sometimes seen by the receiving societies as threatening to the latter’s presumed cultural and/or ethnic purity. The national majority is then likely to engage in a process of reaffirmation of its identity, seeking to redefine it so as to differentiate itself from the newcomers. There is virtually no record of an immigrant population that is perceived by the host nation as an inspiring Significant Other. The negative and threatening representation of the immigrant seems to be an intrinsic feature of the host–immigrant relationship, deriving, among other things, from the fact that the immigrant’s presence defies the social and political order of the nation. Of course, other factors play a role in the development of xenophobic or racist attitudes towards immigrant minorities, including race, religion, lack of communication between the two groups, the poverty of immigrants and their marginal position within the host society. Othering the immigrant is functional to the development of national identity and to achieving or enhancing national cohesion. The immigrant is a potential threatening Other because s/he crosses the national boundaries, thus challenging the in-group identification with a specific culture, territory or ethnic origin as well as the overall categorization of people into nationals and Others. In other words, the

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immigrant poses a challenge to the in-group’s presumed unity and authenticity, which it threatens to ‘contaminate’. Immigration by definition requires that members of one nation or nation-state emigrate to a host country of which they are not nationals. As Sayad (1991) argues, the phenomenon of emigration–immigration involves an absence–presence that is against the national order: the immigrant is absent from the country of which s/he is a national, while s/he is present in a different country, to which s/he does not belong. In a world organized into nations and national states, this absence from the country of origin and presence in a foreign one lead to the exclusion of the immigrant from either society. The relationship between the immigrant and the host nation and, more particularly, the immigrant’s transformation from a potential to an actual threatening Other are related to the preservation of the host nation’s identity and/or to its overcoming a period of crisis. A thorough understanding of the immigrant’s role as a Significant Other involves the study of this double dynamic: on the one hand, the immigrant as a contradiction within the national order and, on the other, the functions that the Othering of the immigrant have for the in-group and the host society.

Immigrants and Nations in Europe today In the post-1989 period, when the traditional post-war alliances between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Socialism’ have been reorganized and the geo-political boundaries of Europe re-shuffled, immigrant – and in particular Muslim – populations have become new Others by contrast to whom the identity and cohesion of European nations are reinforced. This tendency has become particularly strong after the events of 9 September 2001 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course not all host societies have reacted in the same way but there is a common dynamic in many countries. Most European states conceive of themselves as national states, where the state is the

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political expression of the dominant nation. This idea implies a static view of culture and ethnic descent: these are seen as homogeneous and unique. Their presumed purity and authenticity has to be protected from the intrusions of foreigners. Thus, pluralism is accepted only (and not always) to the extent that a nation or ethnic minority is a constitutive element of the country, namely made part of the state from its very moment of creation and is in some way integrated into the national narrative. Even in those cases, of course, the potential for conflict between the dominant nation and minorities is high. A plurality of identities and cultures is not easily accommodated within national states. In some countries immigrant communities are integrated into the national history, and the cultural, territorial, civic and genealogical links between these populations and the nation are officially recognized. Thus, as happens in France and the UK, the links between the ‘mother-country’ and its former colonies are deemed to justify, under certain conditions, the conferral of citizenship on people of immigrant origin. Nonetheless, often the status of citizenship does not suffice to guarantee the social integration of these people. In fact, it is not unusual for individuals of immigrant origin, who have acquired by birth or residence the citizenship of the ‘host’ country, to continue to be discriminated against in practice. Discriminatory behaviour or practices are related to race, namely skin complexion and phenotypic characteristics, culture or a combination of these. Even where having access to the status of permanent resident or, indeed, with the citizenship of that country constitutes a major step towards immigrant integration, a study of the process of Othering the immigrant must pay particular attention to more subtle mechanisms of discrimination and ingroup–out-group construction. Not all immigrants are perceived as Significant Others and, in particular, as threatening Significant Others. With regard to the European Union, for instance, citizens of fellow member states are endowed with the same rights and duties as the host country nationals, because they are citizens of the Union. Moreover,

these people do not generally suffer from discrimination in the social sphere. Similarly, North Americans and citizens from other industrialized countries may be foreigners in Europe but do not form part of the negative stereotype usually associated with immigration. In other words, the process of Othering the immigrant is activated towards specific groups. The common feature that characterizes such out-groups is their subordinate position in society2 and the existence of ethnic, cultural, religious or racial markers that distinguish them from the dominant group. Such markers are not the reason for which these groups are perceived as threatening out-groups. On the contrary, difference is context-bound: in one case, religious markers may be prevalent (for instance, anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK), while in another situation ethnic categorization may be emphasized (for example, prejudice against Albanians in Greece). Often also the two categorizations are intertwined, enhancing or mitigating the difference effect. Hence, Bulgarians or Russian immigrants in Greece, who are Christian Orthodox, are seen as less threatening than Muslim Albanians or Turkish Muslims. On the other hand, Muslims in Britain may be perceived as threatening Others because of their religious beliefs, but discrimination against them was until recently recognized only if it referred to race or ethnicity (Modood 2005). The Othering of specific immigrant groups serves the interests and identity of the dominant nation. Immigrants become the negative Other in contrast to whom a positive in-group identity is constructed and/or reinforced. Moreover, they provide for flexible and disenfranchised labour in an increasingly globalized post-industrial economy. Their construction as Significant threatening Others legitimizes their social and political exclusion from the host society.

Race and cultural difference There are two types of discourse that characterize the process of constructing the threatening immigrant Other. On the one hand, there

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is an overtly biologizing, racist language, which, although condemned by the social and political norms of Western societies, is often involved in the process of excluding, socially and politically, the immigrant communities from the host country. On the other hand, discriminatory practices are supported by a cultural differentialist discourse, according to which there are irreducible differences between certain cultures that prevent the integration of specific immigrant populations into the host society (van Dijk 1997). The relationship between power or privilege and racism or cultural prejudice has been explored from different perspectives – economic, sociological, linguistic and ideological – by a large number of researchers. It has been shown that racial or ethnic prejudice and discriminatory discourse or behaviour are related to the power structure of society and serve to maintain the privilege of one group over another (Essed 1991; Riggins 1997; van Dijk 1993; Wellman 1993 [1997]). Exploring further this line of inquiry, however, goes beyond the scope of this chapter. My interest is to explore the features of race or culture that make them suitable as markers for differentiating and subordinating the immigrant out-group. The notion of race includes a variety of features such as parental lineage, phenotype (skin colour, stature and genetic traits) as well as the combination of physical attributes with cultural characteristics. Racism is not necessarily linked to ethnicity or nationalism. As Silverman observes (1991: 74), in nineteenthcentury England and France the concept of race referred to social difference: the poor were distinguished from the aristocratic ‘race’. What is common to the various definitions of the concept is that it is associated with natural difference: it implies shared characteristics, be they phenotypic, cultural or other, that cannot be chosen or shed (Manzo 1996: 19). This does not mean that racial difference is indeed natural but rather that it has been socially constructed as such. It is perceived as irreducible and, hence, threatening for the nation and/or nation-state. Clearly, one should not equate a socio-political situation that allows for the perpetuation

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of latent racism with one in which the perpetration of racist behaviour, the organization of racist movements and the acceptance of institutionalized racism are integrated into the system. This, however, does not mean that ‘subtle’ or ‘symbolic’ racism (Dovidio and Gaertner 1986) is harmless. It still treats difference as permanent because it is natural, and inherently negative, or threatening, a problem to be solved. The discourse of cultural difference has some similarity with that of biological racism because it links culture to nature. Cultural difference is seen as irreducible, because it is dependent upon ethnic descent, a presumed psychological predisposition, environmental factors or a specific genetic make-up. Thus, Others are constructed as alien, unfamiliar and less developed. In fact, nationalism brings with it the seed of discrimination against minorities. The notion of ‘authenticity’ of the national culture, language or traditions, intrinsic to civic and not only ethnic nationalism, implies that cultural difference is undesirable. The underlying idea is that ‘someone else’s roots are growing in the national/ethnic soil, distorting the particular form of human nature that ought to be sprouting there’ (Manzo 1996: 23). Hence, the national order has to be restored by means of excluding the Other both physically and symbolically from Our society. It has been argued that the effects of culturalist or differentialist discourses differ little from biological racism: they are racist even if their arguments are not explicitly racial (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 12–13). Of course, cultural difference provides scope for fluidity and change in social patterns and allegiances: members of minority groups may make conscious decisions to abandon some but hold on to other attributes of the minority culture, as they see it. Or, minority groups may themselves strive to maintain cultural distinctiveness alongside full social and political integration. Race, in contrast, cuts across a population without the possibility of nuancing or changing one’s skin colour. Nonetheless, Silverman (1991: 79–80) points out that the two types of discourse are conceptually and historically interrelated. The key to understanding the importance of race and culture and

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their role in the relationship between the nation and the immigrant is the fact that they can both be defined as transcendental notions, linked to nature rather than nurture and, hence, irreducible. They, thus, justify the Othering of the immigrant in moral and identity terms and allow for the process of creating a threatening Significant Other in contrast to which the nation asserts and delineates its identity. Moreover, these naturalizing and moralizing arguments legitimize the status quo and the distribution of power within the national state.

IMMIGRANTS AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTIFICATIONS The approach I have presented concentrates on national majority identity. In the previous sections I have concentrated on the construction of the immigrant Other and on the ways in which the immigrant Other contributes to the demarcation of the boundaries and the strengthening of the in-group identity. In this section, I would like to discuss how the national identity of immigrant minorities is transformed through their interaction with the receiving society. Immigrant communities usually have close symbolic and material ties with their ‘mother nations’. Diaspora nationalism theories not only emphasize the importance of these ties for ethnic and national identity in both the homeland and among the diaspora population, but also see the relationship between the immigrant community and the receiving country’s majority as one of limited integration, if not alienation. The immigrant community and the host society are conceived as separate entities forced to live together mainly for economic reasons. They are both assumed to be longing for national and cultural ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ that could be achieved only through the return of the minority to the home country. Although links between the country of origin and the diaspora community are important in explaining migration phenomena (Vertovec 2003) and processes of ethnic segregation and/or alienation between immigrant populations and receiving societies, they fall

short of explaining the identity transformation among second- and third-generation migrants. A large part of the diaspora nationalism literature takes its point of reference in the post-war migration flows which were related to the Fordist system of production. These theories, however, fail to account for the new features of migratory flows within Europe and globally. Today’s immigrants often move without proper travel and identity documents, are employed in the tertiary sector, frequently without proper work status, or welfare contributions. They may move back and forth between the sending and receiving country or may have multiple destinations. Moreover, their motivations may be economic but not solely. They often experience migration as a life project that contributes to their overall personal development (Jordan and Vogel 1997; Kosic and Triandafyllidou 2003, 2004; Romaniszyn 2003). Diaspora nationalism approaches, with their focus on the diaspora–homeland relationship on the one hand, and, on the other, on the presumed alienation (or lack of integration) of the minority into the receiving country, tend to neglect the interaction between the immigrant group and the host nation and the emerging transnational identities among immigrant minorities. Contemporary migrations are characterized by complex relationships between hosts, migrants and their communities of origin within which ethnic and cultural boundaries are negotiated and redefined. It would be misleading to analyse such processes through the lens of national identities understood as stable and cohesive. Recent studies have highlighted the dual nature of national identity among immigrant diasporas, its status of neither here nor there and its double point of reference: in the country of settlement, usually experienced as actual ‘home’, and the country of origin, often imagined as ‘home’ too but also as often experienced as an ‘alien’ culture and place (Christou 2006). Such ethnographic accounts of diasporic identity that highlight the complexity of dual or multiple identifications reveal a different identity dynamic that transcends more ‘classical’ understandings of national identity and of the

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relationship between the nation and the immigrant Other. These transnational identity formations, largely the result of the interaction between a majority national identity and several ethnic minority cultures all subscribing within a new context of intensive communications and socioeconomic globalization, are better analysed by cosmopolitanism theories. The cosmopolitan approach pays more attention to the overall processes of social transformation in the ‘late modern’ period. It emphasizes the features of post-industrial societies, such as highly improved communications across the globe, better, quicker and cheaper means of long-distance transports, media that select and cover events worldwide, the resulting compression of time and space: geographical distance becomes less important while people in disparate parts of the world are constantly ‘connected’ through new technologies. These changes greatly enhance our global interconnectedness (Held et al. 1999), not least that of immigrants as they enable them to maintain frequent and intense ties and communication with their countries of origin. Theorists of late or post- modernity have argued that individuals can be seen as free floating agents picking and choosing from different cultural repertoires the features that suit them best and hence able to create their own very individualized identities. Even though many agree that members of transnational networks and communities ‘need political stability, economic prosperity and social well-being in their places of residence, just like anybody else’ (Castles 2002), they argue that transmigrants living in a mobile world of culturally open societies adapt to multiple social settings, develop cross-cultural competences and no longer have a sense of primary national identity. Rather they negotiate choices with regard to their participation in the place of settlement, in their homeland and in relation to their co-ethnics in either. The cosmopolitan perspective is a useful tool in analysing how migrants adapt their national and ethnic identity to the host society environment, negotiating multiple cultural and emotive attachments and developing transnational identities. However, these approaches tend to neglect the fact that the use of new

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technologies may also lead to polarization between global cultural patterns – usually concentrating around issues of consumption (both material and cultural) and youth cultures – and increasingly ethnicized behaviours developing in reaction to such global cultural homogeneity within ethnic enclaves of inner city areas. New technologies may as well enable the preservation of immigrant identities and cultures as closed containers with direct ties between the country/region of origin and that of settlement. One important question that is also open to investigation is the extent to which new technologies have fostered new, qualitatively different, transnational attitudes and practices leading to the development of hybrid cultures and multiple identifications that are personalized and fluid. Or whether new technologies have simply intensified and widened the scope of phenomena that existed before without making a qualitative difference. To put it simply, migrants have always led transnational lives to the extent that they moved from their place of origin to the country of settlement and to a lesser or greater degree maintained economic, cultural and emotive links with both. Have the new technologies led to the development of cosmopolitan transnational attitudes and practices or have they simply reinforced a neo-communitarian perspective in which immigrant minority cultures are transposed into the country of settlement, while remaining relatively isolated from both the host society context and from wider transnational cultural currents? There is a further facet to this which can work against cosmopolitan practices amongst migrants. Second generations are sometimes ghettoized by the very policies and social attitudes in their countries of settlement which thus prevent them from either assimilating or becoming cosmopolitan: they are trapped in the external categorization attributed to them even if they personally identify with different groups and views. I have analysed in the previous section the exclusionary dynamics shaping the relationship between the national in-group and the immigrant minority. We should also not neglect the question of class. Not all migrants have equal access to new technologies and cosmopolitan lives.

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Unavoidably migrants with greater average economic resources, higher education and better social skills will have more access to the necessary infrastructure, thus engaging more intensively with such transnational activities and networks. It is likely that those less affluent and less skilled may, at the same time, remain attached to their places of origin and to the ‘myth of return’ (Bhachu 1995: 224; Portes et al. 1999: 222). This is not to say that migrants become diasporic by definition, in that a singular national or ethnic identity is retained, or replaced by a narrowly defined dual identification with two home countries. This is rather a plea for caution when assuming that the availability of new technologies leads to transnational identifications. In my view, multiple identities are constructed out of a whole range of possibilities made available by the cultural diversity in countries of origin as well as of settlement which – as was shown above – cannot be retained within narrow conceptions of national identities and cultures. In this sense, multicultural repertoires are a reality, and especially so in large city environments. But the context in which migrants move very often includes kinship and ethnic networks which continue to confirm the significance of national identity and ‘homeland’ connections. Thus, rather than assuming the transcendence of nations and nationalism as we have known them in the past couple of centuries, we should investigate the new forms of national and transnational identifications emerging today. In these, the power of individual agency in negotiating personal identities, national culture and globalized economic realities is not to be neglected (Ong 1999). National identity and nationalism still retain a strong command over people’s sense of who they are and to whom they are related. Moreover, nationalism is still an important factor in domestic and international politics.

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have proposed an interactive perspective from which to study nations and nationalism. I have introduced the notion

of Significant Others as a useful tool for the analysis of the relationship between national majority in-groups and immigrant minority out-groups. I have also analysed the ways in which migrants are functional to the development, transformation and consolidation of national identity. However, in order to better understand contemporary nationalism as well as contemporary migration realities, one needs also to consider the transformation of national identity among migrant populations in relation to both their countries of origin and the societies of settlement. I have briefly reviewed here the diaspora nationalism and cosmopolitanism perspectives and the ways in which they consider national identity among immigrant minorities. The former concentrate on the strong identity, cultural, economic and political ties between the immigrant community and the mother-nation. They assume that these ties tend to orient the immigrant population more towards its country of origin and believed point of return once the migratory project objectives are achieved. They therefore emphasize the interdependence between the mother-nation and the immigrant minority – each is a positive Significant Other for the other – and to a certain extent assume that the national identity of origin is maintained and even reinforced within the immigrant communities. The latter, by contrast, emphasize fluidity and change. They point to the multiple identifications experienced by second- and third-generation migrants and to the globalization of cultural and economic flows. They thus consider the society of settlement as the most important Significant Other for the immigrant population and emphasize the multi-polarity of identities today. In my view, it is important to use different perspectives in order to catch the complexity of national identity dynamics and to account for their multifaceted nature in immigration societies in particular. Diaspora nationalism and cosmopolitanism theories cast light on different faces of the immigration phenomenon and the identity dynamics involved in it. Their diverging interpretations differ in the priority and strength that they attribute to national identity and/or transnational identifications. My interactive

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perspective seeks to abridge the different views by drawing attention to the interactive nature of national identity and to the ways in which threatening and inspiring Significant Others shape the development and transformation of the national in-group identity. It would be misleading to consider national identity among immigrant diasporas as shaped only by their ties with the sending nation. However, it would be equally wrong to consider only the interaction between immigrant diasporas and their societies of settlement. I propose the National Self– Immigrant Other dynamic as a key mechanism that lies behind national identity transformation generally, and suggest that in particular today globalization trends open the possibility of more complex, diversified and individualized identity repertoires. Without neglecting the presence of such repertoires, we should however remain cautious about their nature, as socio-cultural (race or religion), economic (class) and demographic (age, gender) factors condition the range of the repertoires that individuals can develop and organize national and ethnic identities from within. NOTES 1 The term ‘host’ is used here in a euphemistic sense to distinguish the country of residence from the country of origin. Often the so-called host society/country is often ‘their country’ because they were born and/or have lived there most of their lives. 2 For a broader discussion of the concept of race, recism and the racialization of boundaries which informs my analysis here, see Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992), Chapter 1 in particular.

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Castles, S. (2002) ‘Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalisation’, International Migration Review, 36 (4): 1142–68. Christou, A. (2006) ‘American Dreams and European Nightmares: Experiences and Polemics of Second Generation Greek American Returning Migrants’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, forthcoming. Dovidio, J. and Gaertner, S. (eds) (1986) Prejudice, Discrimination and Racism. New York: Academic Press. Essed, P. (1991) Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Johnston, L. and Hewstone, M. (1990) ‘Intergroup Contact: Social Identity and Social Cognition’, in D. Abrams and M. Hogg (eds), Social Identity Theory: Constructive and Critical Advances. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. pp. 185–211. Jordan, B. and Vogel, D. (1997) ‘Which Policies Influence Migration Decisions? A Comparative Analysis of Interviews with Undocumented Brazilian Immigrants in London and Berlin’, Arbeitspapier, No. 14/97. Bremen University. Kosic, A. and Triandafyllidou, A. (2003) ‘Albanian Immigrants in Italy: Policy Implementation, Coping Strategies and Identity Issues’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 29 (6): 997–1014. Kosic, A. and Triandafyllidou, A. (2004) ‘The MicroProcesses of Migration: Immigration Policy, Practices of Implementation and Immigrant Survival Strategies in Italy’, International Migration Review, 38 (4): 1413–46. Manzo, K. (1996) Creating Boundaries: The Politics of Race and Nation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Modood, T. (2005) ‘British Muslims and the Politics of Multiculturalism’, in T. Modood, A. Triandafyllidou and R. Zapata Barrero (eds), Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach. London: Routledge. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L. and Landolt, P. (1999) ‘The Study of Transnational Communities: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2): 217–37. Riggins, S. (ed.) (1997) The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Romaniszyn, K. (2003) ‘Migration, Cultural Diversification and Europeanisation’, in W. Spohn

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and A. Triandafyllidou (eds), Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration. London: Routledge. pp. 99–120. Sayad, A. (1991) L’Immigration ou les paradoxes de l’alterité. Brussels: De Boek. Silverman, M. (1991) ‘Citizenship and the Nationstate in France’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 14 (3): 333–49. Smith, A. D. (1991) National Identity. London: Penguin Books. Smith, A. D. (2002) ‘When Is a Nation?’, Geopolitics, 7 (2): 5–32. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. (1979) ‘An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict’, in W. Austin and S. Worchel (eds), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. pp. 33–48. Triandafyllidou, A. (2001) Immigrants and National Identity in Europe. London: Routledge.

Triandafyllidou, A. (2002) Negotiating Nationhood in a Changing Europe: Views from the Press. Ceredigion, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press. van Dijk, A. T. (1993) Elite Discourse and Racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. van Dijk, A. T. (1997) ‘Political Discourse and Racism: Describing Others in Western Parliaments’, in S. Riggins (ed.), The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. pp. 31–64. Vertovec, S. (2003) ‘Migration and Other Modes of Transnationalism: Towards Conceptual CrossFertilization’, International Migration Review, 37 (3): 641–66. Wellman, D. (1993 [1977]) Portraits of White Racism 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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25 Hot and Banal Nationalism: The Nationalization of ‘the Masses’ JOHN HUTCHINSON

This chapter examines nation-formation as a dynamic and potentially reversible process. Scholars tend to view national-formation as a teleological development in which there is first a romantic nationalism of intellectuals that gives way to the routinized ‘banal’ identities of sovereign national states as rival class, regional and religious formations are incorporated by political and economic processes into solidary nations. In this view the national state was a late nineteenth-century institution, constructed from above by the progressive integration of the masses into a national society that is unitary and sovereign. I shall reject such accounts as mythical. Throughout the modern period nations and national states have been beset by class, regional and religious conflicts, and national states have never been sovereign actors. Although nations have increasingly taken on a mass character in European countries, national identities arise from civil society rather than state, co-exist with other identities, and vary in salience between countries and over times. I suggest the co-formation of two types of nationalism: a ‘hot’ transformational movement produced by a sense of crisis and a ‘banal nationalism’ that people consume as part of giving meaning to the experiences of everyday life. In seeking to explain fluctuations in the

salience of national identities, I will identify unpredictable factors such as warfare, famines and large-scale migrations of populations in triggering movements from below for and against the nation and national state.

THE RISE OF THE MASS NATION For many scholars a shift from elite to mass nationalisms derives from industrializing states struggling for survival within a competitive inter-state system. The rise of the modern national state was a consequence of ideological, administrative, economic and military transformations. First, the secular Enlightenment legitimized politics rather than religion as the means of human salvation. As a political consciousness spread, excluded social classes organized to demand citizenship and thereby participate in the state. The extension of citizenship in its various forms, civil, social and political, bound broader sections of the population to the state. Andreas Wimmer (2002: ch. 3) argues that the provision of social welfare (social citizenship) nationalized the working classes, driving them to construct boundaries against foreign migrants who threatened to dilute their new rights.

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Secondly, the administrative reach of the state over its territory and population was intensified by revolutions in communications that enabled regular censuses and surveys, improved monitoring, taxing, policing and the provision of social welfare. As state and society became intermeshed so the former required the psychological bond supplied by nationalism (Giddens 1985: 116–21). The national state is, in Anthony Giddens’s words, ‘a bounded power container’. Thirdly, the state was an enabler of industrial capitalism through its legal protection of property, regulation of internal and external trade, supervision of the money supply, tax structures and later macro-economic policies to facilitate ‘full employment’. The rise of territorial currencies in Europe, North America and Japan from the mid-nineteenth century, made possible by new industrial techniques to produce standardized currencies (notes and coins) in mass quantities, increased the capacity of states to create national collectives (Helleiner 2003: chs 3, 5). State currencies and common interest rates harmonized populations into a single economic cycle (Helleiner 2003: 11). Finally, military revolutions encouraged the rise of large, efficient and homogeneous national states able to maintain standing armies and mobilize their populations in defence of the territory. Charles Tilly (1995: 196–7) argues that the European states, faced with intensified military competition from their neighbours, needed to extract ever greater resources from reluctant populations. This led to policies of circumscription (the control over contiguous and sharply defined boundaries) and centralization as rulers substituted direct top-tobottom government for the indirect rule of tribute-bearing intermediaries, allying with the middle classes to develop a national solidarity and promoting cultural homogenization through the educational system. Most date the mass nation in Western Europe to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Connor 1990; Hobsbawm 1990). Eugene Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) examines the formation of the exemplary modern nation. Even in 1870 much of France was regional rather than national in its consciousness,

speaking local patois rather than French. A French nation formed only after the humiliating defeat by the Prussian-led German Confederation, when the Third Republic, from 1871 to 1914, instituted a secondary education that inculcated a patriotic historical consciousness, military conscription and a network of communications connecting the regions to the centre and forming a territory-wide economy. The nation as mass phenomenon came late, and for much of Europe formed during World War I, which mobilized the whole population. There are problems with these arguments. Statist pressures cannot explain by themselves why populations come to identify with a given polity as a national state. During the period 1870–1914 nationalism among European minorities intensified against a state homogenization that was perceived to be driven by the interests of dominant nationalities. Tilly admits that such pressures produced not just state-led but state-seeking nationalisms of minorities. This highlights the neglect of ethnicity as an active factor in the formation of mass national identities, particularly in multi-ethnic states. Ethnic considerations shaped state military recruitment policies. Conscription did not necessarily mould populations into a common nationality, and was often viewed as a last resort by military planners, who mobilized the most costly and least reliable last and released them first. Russian Imperial armies in the nineteenth century tended to be drafted from Slavs in the west and only rarely from Asia (Enloe 1980: 65). Conscription could result in national differentiation rather than national state unity, when minorities would join up in the (false) expectation that their participation in war would give them greater political rights. The rise of state-territorial currencies and the bringing together of populations into a common economic space do not necessarily establish social solidarities. Economic policies, as we shall see, have always impacted unevenly on regions and where disparities are long term and are overlaid on ethnic differences, they can excite nationalist resentments. But what of the state-led nationalisms of the dominant nationalities? Here again, when we are supposed to witness the formation of the

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solidary mass nation, we find many states subject to intense resistance from anti-imperial, religious, regional and class interests. The German national state, unified from above by war in 1871, was hobbled from the start by Bismarck’s attempt to use nationalism to preserve from social revolution an Imperial Prussian, aristocratic and Lutheran ascendancy in a rapidly industrializing country. A cultural war developed with the Catholic minority in the southern German states. A hostile Marxian social democratic subculture formed amongst the German working class, unchecked by the combination of government repression of socialist activities and the introduction of welfare policies (Roberts 1967: 73, 203–7). In the French Third Republic the secular republican onslaught on the Church and the Dreyfus affair pitched republicans against royalists, Catholics and the army. On the left, anti-regime socialist ideologies took root among the urban working class, including the Second International and Syndicalist movements. The nationalizing drive of republican centralists fanned regionalist resistance in Alsace, Brittany, French Flanders, Provence and Languedoc (Gildea 1994: 177–211). If the idea of the unified mass nation is questionable, so too is that of the national state as sovereign power container, capable of circumscribing its populations and militarily autonomous against external foes. During the nineteenth century national states clearly lacked sovereignty according to many benchmarks. National state formation coincided with the expansion of transnational capitalism, and the permeability of state frontiers to the movement of goods, capital and people in the period 1870–1914 was not surpassed until after World War II (Milward 1997: 11). There was a shrinking of agricultural sectors in many countries, a loss of self-sufficiency in food production, and rural depopulation. The era of national states was marked by the largest emigration in European history (of some 40 million people between 1851 and 1920) (Woodruff 1973: 700–1). In military affairs, accelerating great power competition forced into alliances Britain and France and Imperial Russia, and Germany and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.

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Although the European peoples rallied to the defence of the homeland at the outbreak of World War I, all countries were bedevilled by social unrest, and hardship and impending defeat led to the socialist November revolution of 1919 in Germany that overthrew the Kaiser. After the war all participant states were haunted by fears that the social order would be swept away by an international communist revolution inspired by the Bolshevik coup in 1917, fears intensified by the Depression. In short, the rise of a unitary and sovereign national society during the period 1870–1919 is something of a myth.

NATIONALISM FROM BELOW Yet, in spite of social divisions, national sentiment intensified during the nineteenth century in many European countries. In the late nineteenth century an English cultural nationalism formed in defence of the shire against a London cosmopolitanism and materialism. Conservatives found there the country houses that bred the officers and gentry and yeomen who formed the core of the Empire; liberals and radicals, the fount of ancient English democratic liberties; and socialists, like William Morris, a model for the future communitarian socialist ideal (Wiener 1981: 59–60). In the German postunification state a new wave of movements struggled to create a stronger emotional bond with the nation, and, in some cases, nationalize the Imperial state. They included Wandervogel, a pacific middle-class youth movement, and the Heimatschutz, whose goal was the historical preservation of homelands, nature conservation, ‘life reform’ and industrial design against the pressures of commercial development (Koshar 1998: 20–64). This suggests that state activism does not so much construct homogeneous national identities as provoke countervailing romantic conceptions of community as a site of multiple diversities. Nonetheless, these communitarian nationalist revivals were minority projects. What is interesting is that national symbols and genres were eagerly consumed by an

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educated public so that they pervaded public and domestic life. As a new secular urban civil society formed oriented to consumption, so its public buildings, housing and leisure activities assumed a national character. In England national emblems were of long standing. The greenwoods and their outlaws had long been a defiant symbol of English liberties against Norman despotism, represented in the legend of Robin Hood (Schama 1995: ch. 3). This national consciousness had broadened by the mid-eighteenth century to a middle-class cult of native landscape, particularly the Lake District, formed by guide books and better road communications, and was also expressed by the Gothic revival. Gothic styles pervaded the public and private architecture of the Victorians, including the rebuilt Houses of Parliament and Manchester Town Hall, shops and public houses. During the late nineteenth century a broader revival of English vernacular styles inspired new middle-class garden suburbs such as Bedford Park and Hampstead, and public housing estates in the 1930s period reflected a medieval nostalgia (Wiener 1981: 29–66). Everything from suburban gardens to domestic wallpaper was given an English vernacular character. In Ireland the national revival of the early nineteenth century expanded the stock of national symbols as the round tower, Celtic cross, Hiberno-Romanesque styles of architecture, the illustrative manuscripts of the Book of Kells and historic monastic sites were added to the traditional symbols of shamrock, harp and wolfhound. Several leading Irish nationalists were topographical artists, and picturesque scenes in numerous guidebooks fed a tourist industry, sustained by improvements in literacy and in communications (Sheehy 1980: ch. 5). Hiberno-Romanesque styles were deployed from the 1840s by Protestant and Catholic churches as they competed to claim succession from St Patrick. Round towers appeared on the facades of public houses. Furniture establishments produced artefacts for the drawing room and boudoir with Celtic iconography, as did makers of porcelain and glass (Sheehy 1980: ch. 5). In Germany too a national past was eagerly consumed by aspirant middle classes in the

form of tourism, photography, and post cards (Koshar 1998: 20–64). Among the cherished monuments were medieval castles and churches and residential structures. After World War I, the sense of loss generated new democratic rituals and organizations similar to those in Britain and France: Germans saturated public buildings with crosses, plaques and insignia on church bells. Germans journeyed not just to war graves, but also, in response to the extreme political instabilities, travelled in unprecedented numbers to historic sites, especially in the Rhineland (Koshar 1998: 138–41). If national myths and symbols were promoted by elites and used instrumentally by states, they were also appropriated and consumed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by many social groups. This suggests that there are two types of nationalism at work in national identity formation. One is the ‘hot’ didactic nationalism that instils the idea of the nation as a sacred and transcendent object of worship and sacrifice. This emerges in waves as a project that is self-conscious, systematic and prescriptive, providing exemplary forms of conduct in order to unify all the components (of class, region, religion and gender) of the nation. Revivalists find allies (and rivals) in political ideologues who use cultural nationalism to construct political communities, demarcated from others by multiple boundaries. The other is the informal or ‘banal’ nationalism of populations who ‘consume’ nationalism in a relatively unself-conscious manner as a guide to the conduct of everyday life as expressed in popular songs, political posters, stamps, banknotes, coinage and brand names of staple products. This seems to be a continuous phenomenon in the modern period. This raises three issues. First, is a collective national consciousness a channeller or a product of political mobilisation? Secondly, what are the factors that trigger these waves of nationalist mobilisation? Thirdly, what is the relationship between ‘hot’ and ‘banal’ nationalism, and how is the emergence of national civil society compatible with the persistence of religious, class and regional identities?

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PATTERNS OF MASS IDENTIFICATION WITH THE NATION How do we explain the rise of mass nations? One has to understand the appeal of nationalism as a constructor of meaning that was able to trump attachments of family, class, region and religion. National identities were not constructed from above but consumed from below by an emerging civil society. Underlying nationalism was a secular revolution that eroded hegemonic religious ideologies and enabled nationalists to present the nation as the necessary base of an innovative modern culture. State modernization and economic development engendered a crisis of identity as newly educated middle and later working classes entered a society in transformation from rural to urban, religious to secular, and oral to literate. Aspiring educated groups found in nationalism an integrative vision of life that, combining a notion of human progress with a sense of rootedness, equipped them to engage with a world in transformation and conflict. They attempted both to preserve links with an ancient past (castles, medieval churches, village and city squares) being eroded by modern development and also to invest with authenticity a novel public and private life by pervading it with ‘ancient national symbols’. A national repertoire was adopted across the political and class spectrum as education and aspirations spread. The capacity of national identities to suborn other loyalties depended on nationalists’ capacity to build on earlier ethno-cultural heritages that regulated identities of family, class and religion. National identities also varied according to whether they were oriented towards or against the culture and rituals of the state. In the case of England and France there was a strong identification with the state and its long-established ethnohistorical core that for centuries were targets of aspiring individuals. Official England was based in the southern region of London (centre of the royal court and Parliament), Canterbury (historic centre of the Church of England) and the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Paris and its hinterland of cathedral cities, such as Reims, was still more important, from the thirteenth century dominating by virtue of its

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administration, universities, law courts and later royal court that defined the language and culture (Grillo 1989: ch. 8). These centres were not unchallenged by the other regions. Nonetheless, London and Paris prevailed because historically they were the foci of aspiring individuals, and in the modern period their power increased as they became the centres of higher education, the mass media, government bureaucracies, the professions and business. When new classes from the provinces entered this environment, they were drawn to established symbols of identity. The new metropolitan-dominated print culture of newspapers, novels and self-help literature of all kinds can be seen as conduct manuals, instructing insecure individuals in national norms regulating large areas of life, from proper speech, required reading, sense of dress, the taking of holidays or leisure to national sites, sports and the organization of the suburban garden (see Mercer 1992). Class incorporation into the nation was also shaped by ethnicity. The political and social struggles of modernity were articulated and legitimized by reference to older idioms, in some cases local and religious, but in others ethnonational. In France the struggle between the French bourgeoisie and the nobility was expressed in ethnic terms as a battle between Gauls and Franks. In England the drive for class power in the era of nationalism was articulated and legitimized through older ethnic traditions. The campaign of non-conformist middle classes for representation was justified by an AngloSaxonist Gallophobia focused on the national ‘betrayal’ by a Gallic Whig aristocracy at a time when the nation engaged in a long series of wars against France. Similarly, radical journalists such as William Cobbett activated English workers into a separate class consciousness, citing ideas of the rights of free-born Englishmen under the ‘ancient constitution’ to demand parliamentary reform (Thompson 1968: ch. 4). FLUCTUATING IDENTITIES This might suggest that nation-formation is an evolutionary process, but nationalism as an

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ideological movement is episodic, triggered by a periodic sense of crisis that the nation is in danger. Under such circumstances, nationalists seek to expand (and sometimes totalize) the sectors of life regulated by national norms as a means of redirecting all energies to the defence of the collectivity and insulating it from pollution and destruction. These resurgences are triggered by sudden threats to those primary goals identified by Smith, namely the autonomy, identity and territorial integrity of the nation (Smith 1991: 74). The rise and subsidence cannot be charted in linear terms because such threats are unpredictable. The nation is a process, and a non-linear one, that is reversible (Connor 1990). An identification with the nation is separable from an orientation to the national state. Although states are important protectors of nations in a world of competing states, they can be denationalizing since, in the pursuit of economic and social efficiency, they adopt the successful strategies of rival polities, intervening to restructure social institutions and exposing their populations to transnational tastes and perspectives. As national identities become blurred with the interests of state, they lose the capacity to energize populations in practice of their daily life. Economic success tends to make national ossification the norm. Mass nationalist mobilization depends on a sense of crisis. What then are relevant catalysts? We find a clue in the connection, observed above, between a nationalization of emerging classes’ foreign threat and a sense of betrayal by a class establishment. Nations with or without states are regularly challenged by shifting military balances, new technologies, religious movements and changes in demography and migration. In short, nations are far from being autonomous and when these challenges cannot be managed, they have stimulated a mass mobilization to nationalize the social world. The effects are not always one way: national identities may be attenuated by these experiences or profoundly modified as a consequence. Warfare Warfare has required a continuous redefinition of populations with respect to each other. An

ethnic nationalism has been stimulated by the invasion, overthrow and rise of states, the shifting of states into new geopolitical spaces, the turning of dominant groups into national minorities and vice versa, and large-scale transfers of population. Many scholars (Howard 1976; McNeill 1984; Mann 1993; Tilly 1995) have examined how state mobilization produced pressures that led to the extension of citizenship to formerly low status groups such as the working classes, women and ethnic minorities. But citizenship by itself is not a gauge of national identities, since ethnic minorities can use it to organize against the territorial state. What is central is the relationship between warfare and the perception of the nation as a community of sacrifice. George Mosse (1990) relates the rise of nationalism to the quasireligious cult of the fallen soldier from the time of the French Revolution, as celebrated in heroic poetry, monuments, commemorative ceremonies and military cemeteries (see also Smith 2003: ch. 9). This cult was linked to the idea of the soldier as ‘volunteer-citizen’ rather than peasant conscript and of a willed sacrifice for the nation. The resistance in German territories to Napoleon mythologized by such (initially middle-class) cults was directed against the existing German state structures. Arguably, such guerrilla wars of liberation rather than inter-state wars have been more community-forming. These, although usually conducted by small minorities, are dependent on grassroots social support, giving them a demotic character that results in a greater penetration of nationalist sentiments – example being, the Vietnamese liberation struggle against the French and the Irish war of independence against the British. Such memories deeply institutionalized in popular culture are even more the possession of communities, out of reach of the state and difficult to change. This is not to discount the nationalizing effects of the statist wars in early nineteenthcentury Europe, the Franco-Prussian war and the twentieth-century’s World Wars. Michael Howard (1976: ch. 6) observes that by the time of the Franco-Prussian war national identifications were undoubtedly heightened and

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extended by the scale of modern warfare and the rise of the mass media that enabled the ‘home front’ to know and identify more directly with the fate of the fighting men. During the total wars of the twentieth century the whole population became in turn the target of military planners through blockades and bombing, and states regulated every aspect of life for national purposes. Nonetheless, the diffusion of such identities was not so much a result of conscriptive processes but arose from populations turning to ethnic and national identities and often in reaction to state failure. The endurance of national states depended on their maintaining collective morale in adversity. Popular fervour was inspired by ethnic stereotypes: older images of France as the Catholic enemy of England were deployed in the wars against the revolution and Napoleon! In turn, the legends and heroes of these wars (Nelson and Napoleon) added to the deposit of national memories. Whereas victory enhances the status of the national state, defeat focuses more attention on regenerating the nation, especially if it is accompanied by the loss of territories. The classic example of the former is Wilhelmine Germany created from above by the Prussian state victorious in war yet identified with an Imperial junker elite, and hence undermined by defeat in 1918. In contrast, Denmark’s traumatic loss of Schleswig–Holstein to Prussia in 1865 triggered the slogan ‘What has been lost externally will be regained internally’ and a programme of land reclamation and intensive cultivation (Yahil 1992). Warfare does not necessarily enhance the mass internalization of national identities. It can produce a return to religious identities in the face of individual and collective destruction. Disillusion with the economic and social performance of a secular Arab elite combined with defeat in the Six Day War and the loss of holy places to Israel supported a radical Muslim critique of secular nationalism as a Western ideology, contrasting it with the glories of the older and authentic Islamic past (Hutchinson 1994: ch. 3). Protracted warfare can create a popular disillusionment with national identities. The

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association between nationalism and war in the twentieth century combined with the threat of scientific warfare to the physical and social survival of peoples has resulted in a periodic weakening of identification with the national state. In much of Europe such disillusion was reflected after World War I in pacifist literature, memoirs and films and after 1945 in the rise of the European Union. This disillusionment, however, was more directed against the national state elites than the nation. As Mosse (1990: ch. 4) has argued, the need of individuals to find meaning in their terrible experiences produced its own transforming myths (of the comradeship of the trenches). After the World Wars, the annual commemorations and the large-scale pilgrimages to the shrines to the dead, although expressing a horror of mass death, reinforced the nation by commemorating the nobility of the sacrifice. The memory of sacrifice was carried into peacetime by permanent social institutions such as Returned Servicemen’s Leagues. When members of the nations claim a commitment or mission to broader civilizational values, collusion in war crimes can, even more than defeat, delegitimize national identities. Since 1945 neither Germans nor Japanese have been able to sustain a ‘normal’ national state and have altered their constitution to forbid foreign military involvement. The aftermaths of warfare have been a factor in the (re-)nationalization of populations. The Versailles Treaty consigned sections of formerly dominant groups to newly independent nations, determined thoroughly to nationalize their state and wreak revenge for previous injustices. A dynamic triangular pattern of interaction formed in which new nationalizing states, the politicized ethnic minorities within them, and the ‘homeland’ states of these minorities had to redefine the nature and scope of their nationality claims (Brubaker 1996: ch. 3). The resentments of once dominant minorities such as Germans in new states such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, and Hungarians, one-third of whom found themselves outside their national state in Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine, generated an irredentist nationalism that contributed to the outbreak of war in 1939 (Sharp 1996).

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Economic dislocations

‘Natural disturbances’

Economic revolutions have periodically instigated nationalist resurgences, particularly when they re-ignite older ethnic antagonisms. The feature of economic innovation is that it is uneven, emerging strongly in particular centres, and it has caused large-scale migrations from the countryside into the cities (Gellner 1964). In much of Eastern Europe cities were ‘alien’ citadels of the imperial (German) nationality which dominated business and the professions and were disproportionately Jewish. Such population movements, therefore, created intense competition on ethnic lines (Pearson 1983: 31–6). In late nineteenth-century Europe international financial speculations contributed to a crisis of traditional economic sectors and provoked a racial anti-semitic nationalism that blamed Jews, prominent in banking and traditional ethnic scapegoats. Commodity prices collapsed with the emerging world agrarian market, made possible by speedier communications, and shook the European landed order, symbolically central to national identity, and caused mass migration from the country to the cities. A flight of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe into cities such as Vienna fanned a racial nationalism of both the right and the left. In 1911 two-thirds of German voters in the Austrian elections voted for anti-semitic parties (Roberts 1967: 67). Because industrial progress became integral to military strength, changes in economic performance upset the power of states vis-à-vis each other and hence the nations they ‘protected’. German leadership of the ‘second industrial revolution’ of iron and steel intensified nationalist rivalries in the early twentieth century with France and also with Britain, which felt its traditional naval superiority threatened by Tirpitz’s development of an armoured battleship fleet. Economic depressions, notably the Great Depression of the 1930s, encouraged both nationalist protectionism and the spread of internationalist socialist ideologies among the working classes, for whom the world nature of the capitalist crises demonstrated the irrelevance of national solutions.

Unexpected natural changes – shifts in population balances, famines, diseases and ecological disturbances, largely beyond the control of states – have destabilized relations between populations, heightening national tensions and conflict. In Eastern Europe a century-long population explosion had by the late nineteenth century led to unprecedented competition for land (McNeill 1984: 310–12). Demographic growth was highest amongst less developed nations, causing the nationalist mobilization of the more developed Poles, Magyars and Czechs to claim territory and independence before they were overhauled by their minorities (Pearson 1983: 28). Changes in birth rates relative to ‘significant others’ have regularly created anxieties about the future of the nation and heightened tensions between rival states (between France and Germany during the inter-war period) and between ethnic populations within states (between Russians and the Central Asian peoples in the former USSR). Famine and disease may shatter for a time ‘primordial’ attachments to the homeland and lead to an inner religious retreat. In Ireland, to many contemporaries, the Great Famine was a judgement of God, and the very land seemed ‘cursed’ leading to continuous large-scale emigration. Constitutional nationalist organizations collapsed and a powerful religious revival led by the Catholic Church followed, but in the long term nationalist interpretations of the famine as a genocidal British conspiracy powerfully reinforced Irish nationalism (Beckett 1966: 344). The devastating earthquake in Armenia of 1988 heightened the disillusion of Armenians with the Soviet state. Climatic changes, including those from the greenhouse effect, are likely to increase tensions between states already locked in conflict over such natural resources as water, a major issue between Israel and Jordan and between India and Bangladesh. Ideological threats Competing ideological movements arising from the heritage of the Enlightenment and

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religious counter-challenges, transmitted through transnational institutions such as churches, revolutionary internationals, diaspora groups and printed media, have fed nationalist antagonisms. Many ethnic and national identities defined themselves as custodians of distinctive religious principles, differentiating themselves against infidel neighbours. A popular English national Protestantism had long viewed Catholic France as the threatening other, and this interpreted the radical republicanism of the French revolution as just another attempt to subvert national values, leading to the powerful nationalist evangelical revival focused on the crown (Colley 1992: 216–20). Papal ‘ultramontane’ rejection of secular nationalist principles, culminating in the Syllabus of Errors (1863) and the declaration of the Doctrine of Infallibility (1870), caused Protestant nationalist reactions in England and Germany and mobilized secular nationalists in France and Italy. The Bolshevik revolution created a nationalist panic in Western and Eastern Europe among conservative middle-class groups, fearful not just of a large external enemy but also an internal enemy in the form of an internationalist working class. Pilsudski sought to provide the new Polish state with a national mission, reviving its heritage as an antemurale Christianitas, this time not against Russian orthodoxy but against godless Communism. The Russian Revolution provoked a xenophobic response in the USA, since the Bolsheviks in claiming to represent the vanguard of history, threatened to usurp America’s universal democratic mission (Pfaff 1993: 185). The growing power of the USA after 1945 and particularly since the Cold War has in turn provoked a culture war with France, as possessor of its own universal mission and protector of European civilization against American cultural imperialism (Cauthen 2004). Outside Europe, the onslaught of Christian missions on native religions has stimulated indigenous nationalisms. Arab nationalists viewed first European expansion into the Middle East, then the establishment of Israel, as a continuation of the Christian crusades against Islam, and their leaders from Nasser to Arafat have assumed the mantle of Saladin.

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The legacy of ideological nationalism All this illustrates the episodic nature of the modern challenges that result in the periodic expansion and contraction of national identities, both in terms of the spheres they regulate and also the social classes they penetrate. From time to time national loyalties are challenged by religious, class or familial loyalties; and at other times are reinforced by them. The reactions to these episodic challenges are shaped in part by older ethnic memories and images that are triggered into life. These periods of nationalist mobilization, sometimes prolonged, in turn deposit further layers of ‘experience’ into collective memory. Warfare has left a legacy of inspirational leaders and military heroes, villainous others, climatic battles and memories of collective endurance, sacred sites in the mass war graves, and institutions such as the commemorative ceremonies and returned servicemen’s leagues. Economic mobilization has created myths of group discrimination by ethnic others, images of cheap foreign competition and swamping immigrants, subcultures of conspiracy myths (notably anti-semitic), many of which have been institutionalized in trade union and labour organizations as well as the conservative right. Demographic pressures have also re-inforced group antagonisms, fears of national decline in emigrant nations, and famines and natural disasters generated myths of the cruel indifference or malignity of others. Ideological struggles have sustained a sense of ethnic election as custodians of religious or secular values, as well as images of enemies within, and these have been institutionalized by churches and popular culture. All this thickens the texture of a national culture, providing reference points both inspiring and shameful that orient the members of the nation in their everyday life.

BANAL NATIONALISM Does this not suggest after all the emergence of an enveloping national identity which is able to

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incorporate all sectors of the population? Is this not the picture of the settled national state so well described by Michael Billig (1995) in which a national identity is so deeply institutionalized in the rhetoric of politicians, the editorials and organization of newspapers, and marketing brands that we are scarcely aware of it all? Only with qualifications. A nationalist mobilization may have denationalizing consequences (in the case of the Germans). It may result in class stigmatizations (of disloyal workers or aristocrats). Although in wartime crises nationalists may be able to organize the national members into rigidly bounded societies, after the crisis fades the demobilized individuals return to their multiple and competing loyalties of family, class, religion and region. Moreover, the myth of the nation as a unitary and autonomous society remains just that, a myth. For much of the time, this gap between myth and reality is not a problem. Taking the nation for granted as a category means that there is little questioning of its meaning and coherence. Individuals, when times are stable, are normatively and socially integrated by their membership of the many other social institutions and usually have no need for overarching appeals to the nation (Mann 1975: 280). There is no incongruity felt by most members of the nation in being national and in pursuing sectional interests. The use by most social groups of national symbols implies that a national identity is the ground on which other loyalties rest. This is not to maintain that nations are fluid categories of self-ascription that are maintained by marking boundaries with ‘others’. Banal nationalists will become ‘hot’ in defending such elements as cultural distinctiveness, homeland integrity, economic power and political autonomy. But in most circumstances all nationalists are selective in interpreting what in practice is crucial to achievement of these goals, and this will differ from case to case. Nations vary considerably in the social niches they wish to regulate and in that their salience fluctuates for individuals. Banton (1994) reasons that a switch from avowedly national to international class loyalties (for example industrial action against a co-national employer in support of foreign workers) may

not indicate changes in the values attributed to national affiliations, but rather a changing conception of what relationships should be governed by national norms. An adherence to the nation may not fluctuate much despite apparent changes in behaviour. Here Banton is speaking at the level of individuals. At the collective level national states, although focused on certain objectives, make strategic choices about how best to achieve them. National states have never been the autonomous actors sometimes portrayed and have always acknowledged the limitations of their sovereignty and pursued different strategies so as to achieve their national objectives. A successful state such as nineteenth-century Britain remained a world power in part because of its skill in mustering coalitions of states against the dominant great power on the European subcontinent. Periods of ‘splendid isolation’ when Britain would enjoy a relative autonomy as a global power have alternated with a pooling of sovereignty in the two World Wars. In the economic sphere states have employed different means to compete in transnational economic markets, depending on their relative strengths and the degree of ‘opennness’ of the world market itself. As the pioneering industrial society, Britain saw it as in its national interest to promote free trade, though it had to shift to protectionism after World War I destroyed the ‘golden age’ of liberal internationalism. By contrast, ‘latecomer’ Germany rejected liberal markets to pursue more protectionist policies that shifted into a territorial mercantilism by 1900 (Mann 1993: 298–301). It is when these pragmatic arrangements to secure the primary goals of the nation fail that we see the resurgence of nationalist movements to develop new strategies, harness new energies and redraw boundaries.

CONCLUDING REMARKS There are at least two types of nationalism at work in national identity formation. One is the ‘hot’ didactic and transformative nationalism

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that aims to instil the idea of the nation as a sacred and transcendent object of worship for which people must sacrifice. This is an episodic phenomenon that is self-conscious, systematic and prescriptive, providing exemplary forms of conduct in order to unify all the components (of class, region, religion and gender) of the purported nation. This nationalism engaged in an intensive and extensive regulation of social boundaries. Of long-term significance was the appropriation of national myths, images and symbols by an increasingly educated public for whom they provided meaning, status and direction in the practice of everyday life. This is the informal or ‘banal’ nationalism of populations who ‘consume’ nationalism in a relatively unself-conscious manner in decorating their homes, constructing their gardens, expressing their allegiances in international sporting contests. Although there is a tendency to view them in linear terms, they operate together in an interactive relationship to form the identities of the mass nation; indeed, the latter may have preceded the era of ideological nationalism. This interaction continues into the contemporary period.

NOTE This is a condensed version of J. Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict, London: Sage (2004), ch. 4.

REFERENCES Banton, M. (1994) ‘Modeling Ethnic and National Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17 (1): 1–29. Beckett, J. C. (1966) The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923. London: Faber. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cauthen, B. (2004) ‘Covenant and Continuity: Ethnosymbolism and the Myth of Divine Election’, Nations and Nationalism, 10 (1–2): 19–34. Colley, L. (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Connor, W. (1990) ‘When Is a Nation?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 13 (1): 92–103.

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Enloe, C. (1980) Ethnic Soldiers. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gellner, E. (1964) Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Giddens, A. (1985) The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gildea, R. (1994) The Past in French History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Grillo, R. D. (1989) Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helleiner, E. (2003) The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, M. (1976) War in European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, J. (1994) Modern Nationalism. London: Fontana Press. Koshar, R. (1998) Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina. Mann, M. (1975) ‘The Ideology of Intellectuals and Other People in the Development of Capitalism’, in A. Lindberg et al. (eds), Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism. London: Heath. Mann, M. (1993) The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNeill, W. H. (1984) The Pursuit of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mercer, C. (1992) ‘Regular Imaginings: the Newspaper and the Nation’, in T. Bennett et al. (eds), A Critical Study of Australia’s Bicentenary. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Milward, A. (1997) ‘The Springs of Integration’, in P. Gowan and P. Anderson (eds), The Question of Europe. London: Verso. Mosse, G. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pearson, R. (1983) National Minorities in Eastern Europe 1848–1945. London: Macmillan. Pfaff, W. (1993) The Wrath of Nations. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roberts, M. (1967) Europe 1880–1945. London: Longmans. Schama, S. (1995) Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana. Sharp, A. (1996) ‘The Genie that Would Not Go Back into the Bottle: National Determination and the Legacy of the First World War and the Peace Settlement’, in S. Deane and T. G. Fraser (eds), Europe and Ethnicity. London: Routledge.

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Sheehy, J. (1980) The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival (1830–1930). London: Thames and Hudson. Smith, A. D. (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Smith, A. D. (2003) Chosen Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1968) The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tilly, C. (1995) ‘States and Nationalism in Europe, 1492–1992’, in J. L. Comaroff and P. C. Stern (eds), Perspectives on Nationalism. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breacg Science publishers. Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (1870–1914). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Wiener, M. J. (1981) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wimmer, A. (2002) Nationalism and Its Exclusions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodruff, W. (1973) ‘The Emergence of an International Economy, 1700–1914’, in C. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Emergence of Industrial Societies, Part 2. London: Collins. Yahil, L. (1992) ‘National Pride and Defeat: A Comparison of Danish and German Nationalism’, in J. Reinharz and G. Mosse (eds), The Impact of Western Nationalisms. London: Sage.

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26 Nationalism and the Power of Ideology S I N I Š A M A L E Š E V I C´

Since the publication of the Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980) by Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, it has become a commonplace to accept the view that there is not, and never has been, such a thing as ‘the dominant ideology’. Their well-documented study was taken as proof that ideological unity did not exist in the past, nor was it essential to the smooth operation of contemporary societies. While one can easily accept many of the criticisms levelled against traditional Marxist and functionalist accounts of the dominant ideology thesis it would be too hasty to completely discard the notion of dominant ideology from the sociological vocabulary. In this chapter I argue that the concept remains sociologically indispensable when attempting to deal with the dominant ideological narrative of modernity – nationalism. The chapter is organized around the argument that nationalism, in all its diverse forms, remains an essential source and the principal glue of state legitimacy. However, to fully comprehend its ideological power one needs to dissect a given society’s ideological make-up at the two main levels – normative and operative. The potency of nationalism comes from its ability to adapt and metamorphose so as to dovetail with distinct and often contradictory official doctrines. In other words, while normative ideologies may be transient and ephemeral, and may change or

proliferate in different directions, operative ideologies, in the age of modernity, tend to remain stable and endure couched in the dominant narrative of nationalism. To substantiate this argument the chapter conducts a comparative analysis of three very diverse cases – post-revolutionary Iran, Cold War Yugoslavia and contemporary Britain. By looking at the form and content of dominant ideologies in these three societies it aims to demonstrate that despite their mutually exclusive official doctrines all three cases show a great deal of similarity at the operative level where differently articulated nationalism remains a dominant ideology.

NATIONALISM, IDEOLOGY AND MODERNITY As most macro-sociologists and socially minded historians now agree, nationalism is a modern phenomenon (Gellner 1983; Smith 1991; Breuilly 1993). The pre-modern world was politically, economically and most of all socially too hierarchical and too stratified to allow for any significant degree of congruence between polity and culture. Before the era of Enlightenment and the French Revolution the social realm was clearly divided between a

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small nobility concerned with status and prone to warfare, and the masses of illiterate agricultural producers who were both socially and geographically immobile. This separated the world of ‘high’ Latin-speaking culture, concerned with recovering the glory of the Roman Empire under the guise of Christianity, from the ocean of ‘low’ oral cultures of the peasant populations, who communicated through thousands of unstandardized and often mutually incomprehensible vernaculars. This was also the world of empires, fiefdoms and citystates all underpinned by a shared belief in the monarch’s right to rule on the basis of blood and ‘divine origins’. Although there existed notions of France, England or Russia, very few among the general population would conceive of themselves as French, English or Russian, identifying instead with a particular family, clan, religious group or village. In other words, for nations to happen it was necessary that an overwhelming majority of the population become transformed ‘from peasants into Frenchmen’ (Weber 1976). So the individual sense of nationhood goes hand in hand with dramatic structural transformations – the birth of the modern bureaucratic rationalistic state, the introduction and expansion of mass public education conducted through a single standardized vernacular, the corresponding growth of literacy rates and the democratization and secularization of the public space. Nationalism is born in and expands with modernity: initially the preserve of political and cultural elites, excluded intelligentsia, disappointed revolutionaries and a few literate others, through the nineteenth century it gradually captured the hearts and minds of the middle classes in Europe and America (Mann 1988). With the extension of the franchise and other citizenship rights to manual workers, peasants, women and minorities after the two World Wars, nationalism has cemented itself as the dominant ideology in the northern hemisphere. The steady erosion of colonial rule from the 1950s and the establishment of new independent states worldwide further extended nationalism, from a largely European or Northern phenomenon into a truly global and dominant ideology of modernity.

Since its power and mass appeal have expanded simultaneously with the proliferation of modern bureaucratic state structures and its corresponding mechanisms of integration such as civil, political and social rights (Marshal 1992 [1948]; Mann 1988), welfare provisions, economic growth and coercive apparatuses, the development of nationalism and of the modern state is a deeply intertwined process. Breuilly (1993) and Mann (1995) have both argued convincingly, as well as demonstrated empirically, that one of the key reasons why nationalism and the modern state became so entangled lies in the big rupture caused by the arrival of modernity, or the relation between the newly emerging arenas of the civil society and the sovereign state. The expansion of ruthless capitalism, the development of a centralizing administrative apparatus under the authority of a territorially bound and often war-prone state, the secularization of society and increasing literacy rates among the general population, have all created a fundamental tension between the public, rational and often absolutist state on the one hand and the expanding private sphere of civil society on the other. All modern ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and conservatism emerged in this period, all offering a coherent, plausible and relatively certain answer on how to reconcile the conflict between the (often dehumanizing) realm of the public and the (emotional) realm of the private. However, despite the obvious successes of socialism, conservatism and liberalism, it is nationalism in its many guises that proved to be the most potent and popular ideology of modernity. Both historically and geographically one finds nationalist movements and doctrines spreading with equal vigour on the right, center and left of the political spectrum – from the Flemish Block and BJP, to Kuomitang and Peronism, to Sinn Feinn or the Socialist Party of Serbia. Nationalism comes to prominence in times of economic crisis just as in times of unprecedented economic boom (Connor 1994). The ascendancy and vigour of nationalist discourse is to be found today in the most globalized areas of the world, such as North America or Europe, as much as in the most isolated and

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sanction-ridden states such as North Korea or Myanmar (Burma). Whether acute or dormant, or to use Billig’s (1995) terminology, whether hot or cold/banal, nationalism remains the most potent ideology of modernity. More than any other ideology, nationalism was able to articulate a narrative bent on reconciling the public and the private, the institutional and the communal, the political and the cultural, utilizing the most egalitarian and democratic expression – ‘we the nation’. As Gellner (1997: 74) succinctly phrases it: ‘nationalism is a phenomenon of Gesellschaft using the idiom of Gemeinschaft: a mobile anonymous society simulating a closed cosy community’. The success of nationalist narrative has a lot to do with its ability to offer a solution to the problem of personal oblivion in a secular age, thus providing a modern equivalent of religious belief (Kedourie 1960; Smith 2003). It also owes much to the ability of political elites to ‘invent traditions’ in times of dramatic social change as well as to the changing nature of geopolitics and wars fought in the post-feudal period (Mann 1988; Giddens 1985). We now have some answers as to why nationalism has become such a prevalent discourse in modern times but we still know very little about the workings of nationalist ideology. We know that in the modern age the two main pillars of political legitimacy are the ability to generate economic growth and nationalism (Gellner 1997: 25), but we lack a coherent account of the machinery of nationalism – its inner workings and logics. To do that one has to look more closely at the structure, form and content of the various modalities that nationalist ideology can take. As I have argued elsewhere (Maleševic´ 2002a, 2002b), it is fruitful to analyse conceptual segments of ideological narratives such as the statements and practices relating to the prospective organization of a particular society (economy, politics, culture and the image of the nation), dominant actors as depicted in the narratives, type of language used, as well as the portrayal of principal counterideologies. But to understand the potency of ideological appeal it is essential to dissect the two principal layers through which political ideologies operate, that is, the realm of the normative and that of the operative.

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The domain of the normative is articulated in ideal-typical terms. It is built around principles outlining fundamental goals and values as well as providing a blueprint for the realization of these goals. The normative realm contains a strong kernel of utopian thinking as conceptualized by Mannheim (1936), a set of ideas that ‘transcend the present’ and are geared towards the future. This realm is formulated to espouse key tenets of a particular weltanschauung, providing well elaborated statements and diagnoses regarding the structure and organization of the past, the present and the future of an entire society. It is in the normative domain where ideas concerning actual and possible relationships between individuals and groups are clearly spelled out and the assessment of their present or future direction is provided. More than anything, the normative realm presents a relatively clear and uncompromising set of ethical prescriptions which are in large part derived from concrete knowledge claims or ‘given’ moral absolutes. In this respect the normative realm is articulated in a way that is predominantly universalist. It may explicitly or implicitly address humanity as a whole by speaking with the voice of moral or cognitive (or both) authority. Its focus can be on individuals or a specific group (that is, workers, women, citizens, etc.) but its message generally remains within the confines of rationality, ethical universality or the combination of both. Even when aimed at a very particular collectivity it still operates through a logic and language that resonate beyond the borders of that particular community. The realm of the normative defines itself through reason and ethics and is most likely to challenge other weltanschauungen by pinpointing faults in their ethics and reasoning. The normative layer of ideology is most often deduced from authoritative texts and scriptures such as religious ‘holy books’ (Bible, Qur’an, Talmud, Vedas, etc.), the influential publications of mystics, philosophers, prophets, scientists, or documents with powerful legal, ethical or semi-sacred status (Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Magna Charta, Geneva Convention, etc.), the constitutions of sovereign states, political and party manifestos, and so on.

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The operative realm functions rather differently. It is an arena of everyday life with all its complexities, contingencies and ideational flux. The concepts, ideas, values and practices present in this realm can never be ultimate, final or uncompromising. This is a domain of existential ambiguity and a constant value dynamism where different images of the world and different diagnoses of reality compete for the ‘souls’ of each and all. The operative realm is expressed in institutional as well as extrainstitutional arenas of individual and social life. It is the way that ideas and values, often evident in socio-cultural practices and rituals, operate in the routine circumstances of daily life in any given society. The dominant beliefs and values in this domain can be composed of different concepts and ideas, some of which can be intentionally formulated with the aim of justifying a particular course of action (or inaction), or to legitimize or de-legitimize particular policies. The realm of the operative is the realm of the mundane. However, unlike in Durkheim’s (1964 [1937]) understanding, the mundane does not always equal the profane. On the contrary, the operative realm can be articulated and visualized by majorities as the area of the sacred, just as much, if not more, as the normative realm can be. Since the operative realm has to address, in one or another way the majority of the population in any given society, it is bound to rely on simplified concepts, language and images with popular appeal. It is also more likely to use emotional and instrumental discourse when making an appeal to the public. The general message, and in particular the key principles and ideas employed in this realm are more likely to be personalized in the image of concrete individuals so as to be recognizable and acceptable to the mass public. Most of all, the operative layer of ideology is more likely to address individuals and groups as members of very specific interest and emotion bound groups using a narrow particularist discourse. The language of the operative realm is most often the language of affect and individual or collective selfinterest. To dissect the dominant operative ideas and values of a particular collectivity or society one can analyse such sources as school

textbooks, tabloid newspapers, mainstream news programmes on the TV, specific Internet websites, political or commercial adverts, speeches of political leaders, and so on. The relationship between the normative and operative realms, that is, between the two layers of ideology, is always a question of empirical evidence. They can overlap, express similar or even identical values and ideas but more often than not they tend to be composed of differently articulated concepts. For example, analysing dominant normative and operative layers of ideology in the cases of communist Yugoslavia and post-communist Serbia and Croatia, I have attempted to demonstrate how, despite sharp differences on the normative level, all three cases exhibit a great deal of similarity on the level of operative ideology. Whereas normative ideology may be as different as self-management and reformed democratic socialism or Christian democracy, in all three cases the operative ideology was found to be staunchly nationalist (Maleševic´ 2002a). The subtle analysis of the inner workings of normative and operative layers of ideology can bring us much closer to understanding the complexities of nationalist appeal. To achieve this it is essential to recognize that nationalism is not only a dominant ideology of modernity (as seen from the West or North), as rightly argued by Gellner, Mann, Smith and other leading historical sociologists, but more precisely that it is a dominant operative ideology of modern times. Whether democratic or authoritarian, left-wing or right-wing, religious or secularist, radical or moderate, at the end of the day modern political orders tend predominantly to legitimize their rule or to delegitimize the rule of others in nationalist terms. In other words, the rulers of any modern nation-state may formulate their official doctrine or normative ideology as liberal, socialist, Islamist, or environmentalist, but their operative ideologies are more likely to supplement those normative ideals with an extensive dose of nationalism. Regardless of the official pronouncements made by various governments and oppositional groups representing or attempting to represent a particular nation-state, which are regularly couched in

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universalist terms, it is nationalism, in all its forms, which remains the dominant operative ideology of the modern age. To illustrate this argument I provide a brief analysis of three very diverse case studies often considered to be the epitome of ideological difference: Islamic Iran, communist Yugoslavia and the liberal democratic UK. The argument is that despite sharp and irreconcilable differences in their normative ideologies there is a great deal of congruence between their respective operative ideologies, with all three articulated in strict nationalist terms. The analysis of the normative level of ideology will focus on the state constitutions as they most succinctly articulate the dominant official doctrine of any modern nation-state. The operative ideology will be decoded from key speeches of the respective leaders, as well as from school textbooks as they most effectively reflect the dominant values of the operative realm.

THE LAYERS OF IDEOLOGY: NATIONALISM IN PRACTICE Islamic Iran The contours of the dominant normative ideology in the Iranian case can be extracted from the 1979 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (CIRI). This document states that Shia Islam of the Twelver Ja’fari sect is the state’s official religion and ideology. According to the Constitution this view is sanctioned ‘by the people of Iran on the basis of their longstanding belief in the sovereignty of truth and Qur’anic justice’ (CIRI 1979: Article 1). This revolutionary republican Shia doctrine is grounded in a belief ‘in One God (as stated in the phrase “There is no god except Allah”), His exclusive sovereignty and the right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His commands’ (CIRI, 1979: Article 2.1). In other words, absolute sovereignty over the world and man belongs to God and not to the people. The Constitution stipulates that all laws in the state have to be ‘based on Islamic criteria’ (CIRI 1979: Article 4). One of the central ethical goals

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of the Republic is fostering the conditions ‘for the growth of moral virtues based on faith and piety and the struggle against all forms of vice and corruption’ (CIRI 1979: Article 3.1). This is clearly a normative realm formulated as a set of uncompromising and universalistic moral prescriptions. The Constitution also explains that the economic system is divided between the state, co-operative and private sectors but all three are ‘to be based on systematic and sound planning’. The system has to be ‘self-sufficient’, ‘correct and just’, cannot go ‘beyond the bounds of Islamic law’, while the state itself reserves the right to administer and control ‘all large-scale and mother industries’ (CIRI 1979: Articles 3, 43, 44). The family is seen as ‘the fundamental unit of Islamic society’ (CIRI 1979: Article 10) and it is stated that ‘government must ensure the rights of women in all respects, in conformity with Islamic criteria’ (CIRI 1979: Article 21). Following specific verses from the Qur’an, the constitution specifies that ‘all Muslims form a single nation’, which implies that the state ‘has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples’; is committed to ‘the defence of the rights of all Muslims’; and ‘must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world’ (CIRI 1979: Articles 3.16, 11, 152). The message given in the normative ideology is clearly a universalist one, making an appeal to the superior knowledge and the moral absolutes as formulated in a specific book – the Qur’an. The focus is on universal principles and ideas which go beyond the particularity of any single state, nation or political order. When the concept of nation is invoked it does not refer so much to Iran but rather to ‘all Muslims’, which potentially can include any human being. The normative ideology legitimizes itself by invoking the discourse of morality and reason. It calls upon what is considered to be the ultimate form of ethics (Qur’anic justice) and the most rational and advanced form of social organization (an Islamic republic). The operative level of ideology as discernible from school textbooks published in the

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post-revolutionary period, and the key speeches of the ‘founding father of the Republic’, Ayatollah Khomeini, give us a very different picture of reality. While here too Islamic principles are emphasized in culture, politics, economy and the social sphere, there is a particular twist to it, that is, they are largely couched in nationalist terms. So reading Khomeini’s speeches one encounters numerous references to ‘the noble Iranian nation’, ‘our beloved country’, ‘dear nation’, ‘beloved Iran’ and so on (Khomeini 1985: 243–4). Instead of deriving legitimacy from the unquestionable doctrines of the Qur’an and the clergy’s exclusive ability to access these ultimate truths as stated in the constitution, in the speeches their superiority comes principally from loyalty to the nation. Hence one can read how ‘the noble Iranian nation, by supporting the genuine and committed Iranian clergy, who have always been the guardians and protectors of this country, will remit their debts to Islam and will cut off the hands of all of history’s oppressors of their country’ (Khomeini 1985: 247). The speaker rarely discusses the complexity of theological arguments but rather refers to the need to ‘defend your dignity and honour’ since ‘our dignity has been trampled underfoot; the dignity of Iran has been destroyed’ (Khomeini 1985: 243, 181). Instead of a universalistic appeal to brotherhood among all underprivileged people, and especially the unity of all Muslims around the world, the speeches devote far more attention to the glorification of the Iranian nation. Thus one finds references to the ‘noble Iranian Armed Forces’, as Khomeini (1985: 244, 176) explains that ‘we know that the commanders of the great Iranian army … share our aims and are ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the dignity of Iran’. One also learns how corrupt and servile rulers ‘have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog’, how ‘government has sold our independence, reduced us to the level of a colony’ (Khomeini 1985: 182). The focus of the speeches is again less on the universality of the moral message of Islam than on the particularist values of nationhood couched in terms of collective self-interest and emotions.

So the problem with the enemy is not so much that they stray from the true religion, but rather that the enemy constitutes a physical and tangible threat: Israel is ‘assaulting us, and assaulting you, the nation; it wishes to seize your economy, to destroy your trade and agriculture, to appropriate your wealth’ (Khomeini 1985: 177). The enemy is not only threatening in a material sense, it also assaults the nation’s dignity: Iranian nation! Those among you who are thirty or forty years of age or more will remember how three foreign countries attacked us during WWII. The Soviet Union, Britain, and America invaded Iran and occupied our country. The property of the people was exposed to danger and their honour was imperilled. (Khomeini 1985: 179)

Those who do not oppose foreign influence are not only branded un-Islamic as in the constitution, but as un-Iranian and treacherous. So Iran under the despised Shah regime ‘has sold itself to obtain dollars’ since when ‘you take the dollars and use them … we become slaves’, and in this way the former leaders are said to ‘have committed treason against this country’ (Khomeini 1985: 187). The school textbooks give us a very similar picture. Here too Islamic principles are regularly couched in nationalist terms. The Iranian nation is depicted in a primordialist sense as an ancient phenomenon emanating a sense of eternity, existing before and often beyond Islam. So one can read how ‘the people of our country ... have been involved in sports since times immemorial. At the very same time the Greeks inaugurated the Olympic games, the ancient Iranians taught their children horseriding, archery and the game of polo’ (Ram 2000: 79). The Iranian nation is glorified by the heroes and martyrs who regularly made sacrifices for their country. The Mongol invasion was stopped only because Iranians were in possession of these noble qualities: ‘in this barbarous attack the valiant people of Iran did not disdain from any display of manliness and sacrifice. Men, women, the old and the young … excelled in the defence of the country, not accepting the disgrace of foreign rule’ (Ram 2000: 81). It is Iran and not Islam that elicits the special emotions of devotion

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and uniqueness, as in the following excerpt from a poem which is given prominence in the school textbooks: O Iran, O my splendours house! I love you. The laughter of your children, the clamour of your youth, the [battle] cries of your men, I love them all. O splendours house. I hold dear your pure soil, which is coloured with the blood of the martyrs.(Ram 2000: 85)

Unlike the normative level of ideology which speaks principally in the voice of universality, rationality and superior ethics, that is in the name of Universal Islam, the operative layer of ideology is for the most part particularistic and appeals to affect and group self-interest among a specific and exceptional social entity – the Iranian nation.

Communist Yugoslavia The 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (CSFRY) provides the skeleton of a dominant normative ideology often referred to as socialist selfmanagement. Its first article defines the state as a federal voluntary association ‘based on the power of and self-management by the working class and all working people’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 1). The central focus of the Constitution is work relations, workers and the economic system and it is emphasized that the state is based ‘on freely associated labour and sociallyowned means of production, and on selfmanagement by the working people’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 10). In such a system the means of production are the property of the society and ‘no one may gain any material or other benefits, directly or indirectly, by exploiting the labour of others’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 11). The document also refers to the authority of science (including economics) in planning the social development of society as a whole. So one is informed that ‘workers in basic and other organisations of associated labour … shall have the right and duty, by relying on scientific achievements … and by taking into account economic laws, independently to adopt working and development plans and programmes for their organisations and communities …’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 69). Social planning is seen as an essential normative

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principle both in the economic and the social spheres: ‘workers in organisations of associated labour and working people in other selfmanaging organisations and communities … shall be responsible for the fulfilment of the working and development plans of their organisations and communities’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 74). Hence, as in the case of Iranian normative ideology, the central principles are derived from a realm of superior knowledge (Marxist science with rational social planning) and universal ethics (the equality of all working people and the gradual disappearance of classes). The political system is also founded on the principle of devolving a decisive role to workers: ‘power and management of social affairs shall be vested in the working class and all working people’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 88). To fully participate in decision-making ‘working people’ were to organize themselves ‘on a self-management basis in organisations of associated labour, local communities, [and] self-managing communities of interest’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 90). As a multi-ethnic federal state Yugoslavia was devised as a state where all its ‘nations and nationalities ... shall have equal rights’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 245). These rights are defined in terms of ‘the freedoms, rights and duties of man and the citizen’ which are to be ‘realised through solidarity among people and through the fulfilment of duties and responsibilities of everyone towards all and of all towards everyone’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 153). In addition to standard citizenship rights (freedom of thought and opinion, freedom of the press, profession of religion, freedom of movement, etc.), the Constitution also invokes the right to self-management where ‘each individual shall be responsible for self-management decision-making and the implementation of decisions’ (CSFRY 1974: Article 155). All the ideas expressed in the normative realm refer either to the authority of science (as the most efficient and most rational course of action), or to the authority of universal ethical principles (invoking a sense of justice for all). Again, similar to the Iranian case, though this time cast in the image of the socialist worker rather than the pious universal

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Muslim, normative ideology appeals to general values of relevance to humanity as a whole. Socialism is presented as the most progressive and most virtuous doctrine, which is open to all human beings. There is little reference to particularistic identities or closed group memberships. This is a transcendental realm of fundamental values and ethical absolutes. However, when one examines the articulation of this at the level of operative ideology it is possible to see, just as in the case of Iran, a certain synergy of socialist self-management rhetoric with explicit reliance on nationalist discourse. One can discern this by examining excerpts from the Yugoslav leader Tito’s speeches and the content of school textbooks. Tito, as with Khomeini, addresses his public in nationalist (albeit state nationalist) rather than socialist terms. The authority of scientific central planning and ethical universality is displaced by the argument that ‘We have spilt an ocean of blood for fraternity and unity of our peoples – and we shall not allow anyone to touch this or destroy it from inside, to break this fraternity and unity ...’ (Tito 1975: 2). There is less by way of reference to proletarians and workers of the world than to our ‘Croatian mothers’, ‘brothers and sisters’, to Croatian ‘sons and sisters who fought together with Serbs, Slovenes, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Macedonians to clear your Croatian name’, or to injustices that ‘were washed with the blood of the best sons of all peoples of Yugoslavia’ (Tito 1945a: 1). Instead of socialist selfmanagement of the workers the speaker invokes the idea of ‘brotherhood and unity of peoples of Yugoslavia who fought against superior enemy force in terrible conditions and won’ (Tito 1945a: 1). Instead of appealing to the Soviet Union as a fellow socialist state sharing the goal of emancipating labour and establishing proletarian internationalism, one encounters reference to ‘our big Slavic brother’ whose cooperation with ‘us’ was ‘signed by the blood of our best sons’ (Tito 1945b: 1). Even the defeated enemy is not delegitimized on the grounds of inferior or unethical political ideology (i.e. Nazism) but rather by reference to ethno-national origins: ‘we are entering a historical moment of unification of Slavs in the

Balkans and if internally divided by quarrels we can easily become a booty of the greatest enemy of all Slavs – German conquerors’ (Tito 1945a: 1). Thus what is emphasized as essential in the process of creating a new socialist Yugoslavia is less economic equality or worker solidarity, but rather the mythical and sacred experience of fighting and dying together for the new state. This precious state, argues Tito, ‘was liberated with the blood and lives of the sons of all peoples of Yugoslavia’ (Tito 1945a: 1). That is why this new state is our ‘shared house’ built on the human sacrifices by ‘spilling a sea of blood’. And most of all it is made clear that ‘these sacrifices are holy, they will be remembered by our descendants for thousands of years’ (Tito 1975: 2). As such, ‘they have to be preserved as a pupil of one’s eye’ (Tito 1966: 1). School textbooks exhibit a similar discourse. The focus is less on socio-economic issues than on the idea of Yugoslav ‘brotherhood and unity’ which are continually defined and legitimized in relation to a common struggle against a common enemy. So one is informed that ‘the brotherhood and unity of Serbs and Croats has been built by the struggle’ and that ‘the struggle of our peoples against a superior enemy was difficult and bloody’. (Teodosic´ et al. 1946: 97). Here again, while making explicit reference to countries of the socialist bloc and to the USSR in particular, there is an appeal to Slavic unity instead of universal socialism. So the Soviet Union is described as our Slavic brother, ‘our hope and tower of light’ and its army as a ‘mighty brotherly Red Army’ (Cˇ ulinovic´ 1959: 54; Teodosic´ et al. 1946: 62). The leadership of the Communist party of Yugoslavia is not legitimized through its capacity to bring about socialist revolution but almost exclusively as liberators of the nation: when fascist conquerors enslaved our country in 1941, they started to destroy, rob and kill our people. Peoples of Yugoslavia have raised the uprising under the leadership of the Communist party and its spearhead comrade Tito against German, Italian and Hungarian fascists and their collaborators. (Teodosic et al. 1946: 62)

The ideological enemies are rarely depicted as espousing different ‘recipes’ of social development (i.e. liberalism, monarchism, etc.) but

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again are delegitimized in nationalist terms as traitors who are ‘rotten’, who have ‘openly collaborated with occupiers’, and who have ‘poured poison and acid between the peoples of Yugoslavia’ and are now ‘whispering from [their] holes’ (Cˇ ulinovic´ 1959: 57–81). Thus, one finds here a very similar pattern to the one identified in the Iranian case. The lofty normative message of progress and justice for all, or the appeal to humanity as a whole, has been largely transformed into an emotional and ethnocentric battle cry within the operative realm, aimed not at the world proletariat and ‘the wretched of the world’, but at a very specific and ideologically privileged group of people – the Yugoslavs.

Liberal democratic United Kingdom Although the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland does not have a formal Constitution as such, it has a number of legal documents such as the Acts of Government, the Bill of Rights (1689), Common Law and the Human Rights Act 1998 that clearly spell out key ideas and principles that constitute the dominant normative ideology of the state. This social and political order is termed liberal democracy and is defined as ‘a system of representative and responsible government in which voters elect the members of a representative institution, the House of Commons, and the government is accountable to the House and ultimately to the electorate’ (Turpin 2002: 20). The system is underpinned by the notion of parliamentary sovereignty, which establishes the legislative supremacy of the Parliament. This is historically ‘assured by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which established the primacy of statute over prerogative’ so as that the ‘statutes enacted by Parliament must be enforced, and must be given priority over rules of common law, [and] international law’ (Turpin 2002: 23). The state is built on the principle of a separation of powers, so that the relation between the legislative, executive and judiciary establishes a set of checks and balances that guarantee the rule of law. Again, as with the other two cases, the realm of

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normative ideology is articulated by principles that transcend the particular. In this case legitimacy comes from the legislative supremacy of a system of government which is founded on reason and grounded in the tripartite division of powers thus providing the most righteous system for the organization of social life. The ultimate principle invoked is one of parliamentary sovereignty which codifies the universal principle that all individuals are of equal moral worth and equal before the law. This is underlined in the Human Rights Act of 1998 which guarantees citizens the following rights: right to life, freedom from torture and slavery, right to liberty and security, fair trial, freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression and information, assembly, association, freedom from discrimination, free elections and the peaceful enjoyment of possessions (Turpin 2002: 142). Although this particular document is recent, the idiom of universal human rights is understood as giving expression to the original Bill of Rights (1689), a document which not only established Parliament as the ultimate ruling body of the state by limiting royal powers, but it also asserted a number of mechanisms to secure democracy such as the freedom of speech and debate, a right to petition the sovereign and the free parliamentary elections. In other words the emphasis is on the universality of human rights, justice and equality before the law. While these principles and statutes make special provisions for the royal family, for example that it be referred to as the ‘Crown’ instead of the state, and that the members of government are nominally ‘servants of the Crown’, the powers of the monarch are nonetheless limited to the symbolic realm. Although clearly different in terms of content, the form which normative ideology takes in the British case corresponds to the Yugoslav and Iranian cases in the sense that it too speaks through the voice of higher reason and advanced ethics. While it discusses ideal-typical conditions in one concrete society, it also addresses humanity in its entirety by relying on a single and uncompromising value – the principle of human rights. When turning to the level of operative ideology as formulated in school textbooks and

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speeches of leaders one again finds a shift from the universal message of liberal democratic values to more restricted and particularist expressions of dominant values grounded in the discourse of state-centred nationalism. Hence Tony Blair regularly addresses the public in state nationalist and even ethnocentric terms rather than solely in liberal democratic terms, declaring himself to be a British patriot who is ‘proud of my country and proud of the British people’ (Blair 1999a: 1). According to the British Prime Minister, one has to be proud of being British because Britain has produced, and continues to produce ‘some of the world’s finest scientists, authors, composers, artists, sports people, designers’. But more than this is the unique British national character which constitutes a horizon of pride – ‘what makes us different is our character: hard working, tolerant, understated, creative, courageous, generous’ (Blair 1999a: 1). And this is complemented by ‘our humour, our integrity, or what people know as basic British decency’ (Blair 1999a: 1). These unique British characteristics are ‘deep in the British character’ and are something that one should be ‘immensely proud’ of because ‘so much that is good in the world bears the stamp of Britain’ (Blair 1999a: 2). Blair’s speeches often make reference to historical events such as wars and other collective tragedies where Britain and the British people are depicted as heroic martyrs who sacrifice themselves for the greater cause of the nation. So he argues: ‘ I don’t believe there was a finer episode in this often glorious history than in the Second World War when Britain led the world in a crusade against dictatorship and barbarity’ (Blair 2000: 1). This was seen as a magnificent ‘victory over tyranny’ and again the people are instructed to ‘take pride’ in such emblems of ‘our country’s remarkable history and achievements’ (Blair 2000: 2). There is also a need to reflect that such victories were built on enormous ‘sacrifice and selflessness’ on the part of ordinary British men and women, and according to the prime minister, there is a moral obligation to ‘properly remember the efforts of all who ensured freedom and decency triumphed more than fifty years ago’

since ‘we have reaped the full rewards of this selfless sacrifice’ (Blair 2000: 2). In linking the experience of World War II to the more recent Kosovo war, Blair appeals to the unique British qualities: ‘the poor defenceless people [of Kosovo] are begging us to show strength and determination; we would have shown unpardonable weakness and dereliction. This is not the tradition of Britain’ (Blair 1999b: 2). For Blair the unity of British people is essential and he envisages ‘a one nation Britain coming together’ as people continue a ‘patriotic alliance that puts country before Party’ (Blair 1999a: 2, 1999c: 1). A similar nation-centred discourse is also evident in school textbooks. As many analysts of British history and geography textbooks have documented (Crawford 2000; Hopkin 2001; Doyle 2002) most textbooks espouse direct or indirect ethnocentrism which conflicts with the official commitment to pluralism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. The contents of the great majority of textbooks are focused on the positive portrayal of ‘British people’ and Britain (Robson 1993), glorifying its imperial past and overlooking the contributions of others. When discussing wars and other major historical events the narrative tends to represent the British nation as a unified actor which, standing alone and against impossible odds, achieves glorious victory through heroic sacrifice (Kallis 1999; Crawford 2000, 2001). For example, the events of World War II and especially the 1941 Blitz and the withdrawal of British troops from Dunkirk are discussed in many history textbooks in terms of the unique sacrifice and bravery of ‘British people’: ‘by June [1940] Britain stood completely alone’ and the Blitz ‘brought out the best in people’ (Lancaster and Lancaster 1995: 560, 67). The textbooks invoke and construct a ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ – ‘the feeling that even though Britain was alone, it would fight on until victory was done’ (Grey and Little 1997: 69). The unwavering unity and commitment to the national cause is selfevident given the fact that German air raids on the UK killed tens of thousands and destroyed millions of homes but ‘did not break the will of the people’ (Lancaster and Lancaster 1995: 83). What was essential in achieving such a glorious

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victory was the sense of national equality: ‘during the war, everyone was equal and there was a community spirit’ (Lancaster and Lancaster 1995: 69). The layer of operative ideology again differs in many respects from its normative counterpart. Instead of universal human rights, the rule of law and the other general liberal democratic values articulated on the normative level, operative ideology resembles that of the other two cases. Again one notices a dramatic slip into particularism expressed in the selfadoration, instrumentality of collective egoism and intense emotional appeals. In place of the liberal, democratic and cosmopolitan citoyen one finds a chosen people with a unique and exceptional character – the British.

THE IDEOLOGICAL POWER OF NATIONALISM The argument that nationalism is the dominant operative ideology of modernity does not imply some unquestionable and uniform sense of societal cohesion as functionalists would have it. Ideological unity is never fully accomplished. Rather it is a messy, contested and unending struggle – a process which is shaped by social, political and historical contingencies. While this process is highly dependent on asymmetrical power relations, these are not reducible to the capitalist mode of production; they do not necessarily entail the ideological assimilation of one stratum by another, and nor are they always beneficial to the rulers. This much is true of Abercrombie et al.’s (1980) criticism of the dominant ideology thesis. However, one cannot underestimate the simple fact that nearly all contemporary sociopolitical orders, whether described as liberal democratic, state socialist, Islamist, Buddhist, authoritarian or bureaucratic, have one thing in common – they all tend to legitimize their existence in nationalist terms. This is not to say that nationalist discourse is the only one present in the rhetoric of state leaders, school textbooks or tabloid newspapers. That is clearly

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not the case. What is argued here is that for normative principles to be acceptable and to resonate with the desires, projects and aspirations of the general public, it is necessary that they be articulated in a nation-centric way. The success of a particular normative doctrine lies in the process of its ‘translation’ into its operative counterpart. The world of abstract principles, complex and distant ideas, and grand vistas has to be transformed and concretized into accessible images, familiar personality traits, stark metaphors and the general language of everyday life. This can entail a conscious attempt at manipulation on the part of political entrepreneurs always happy to aid such an endeavour, but in most cases it is more a matter of habit and daily routine, as certain practices, beliefs, values and modes of conduct are simply taken for granted and often reproduced in a quite mechanical way. As Billig (1995: 37) rightly indicates, it is not easy to pinpoint and analyse these discursive practices because they seem so obvious, normal and natural: ‘One cannot step outside the world of nations, nor rid oneself of the assumptions and common-sense habits which come from living within that world’. And this is precisely how every successful ideological project operates. It does not lie, for that would be amateurish and in the long term counterproductive. Instead, as Barthes (1993: 143) explains, it makes things seem innocent, natural, clear and apparent. The modern nation-state as a ‘bordered power-container’ (Giddens 1985) by its very design, largely created and institutionalized in the past two hundred years, provides clearly demarcated and delineated contours within which any successful attempt at selflegitimization has to be made. No serious power-seeker can dramatically amend these rules. Even a potential revolutionary cannot build the world from scratch, and every successful revolution since World War II ‘has defined itself in national terms’ (Anderson 1983: 12). Hence the dominance of the nationalist content of operative ideology may have less to do with the aims and actions of concrete individual power-holders but much more with the existing mechanisms, institutionalized routines and geopolitical arrangements that

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are already in place. One does not have to be particularly nationalistic when in power, one just has to implicitly or explicitly draw on and reproduce what is already there. In this sense the modern state is like a game of chess: there are thousands of combinations one can play (as a ruler), one can even at some point exchange a pawn for a queen, but one is extremely limited in altering the existing moves of the figures on the chessboard, or in changing the structure of the board. The striking similarities between the three operative ideologies in the case studies discussed here illustrate this point. In the case of Iran, the former Yugoslavia and the UK, one encounters three extremely different and in many respects incommensurable normative ideologies, which is perhaps unsurprising given that they are drawn from three radically different cultural and geographical environments. Yet on the level of operative ideology all three cases exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity, invoking nearly identical images and metaphors of kinship and group solidarity. Unlike its normative counterpart, the operative domain is predominantly instrumental and emotional in its appeal, but more importantly the central principles of normative ideology are also transformed. Thus in all three cases the central values such as Islam, socialism or human rights do not stand on their own in operative ideology as the key principles around which society is/to be built, but rather become submerged and deduced from the central idea of the operative ideology which is the nation. In other words, while at the normative level all particularistic attachments are downplayed or subordinated to grand ethical or epistemic vistas, on the operative level it is the other way around where human rights, Islam or socialism are seen as valuable only insofar as they help to consolidate or contribute to the cause of the particular nation. So despite Abercrombie et al.’s authoritative attempt to demonstrate otherwise, there is something called dominant ideology. For the past two hundred years nationalism has been and continues to be a dominant operative ideology of the modern age.

REFERENCES Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B. S. (1980) The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: Allen & Unwin. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Barthes, R. (1993) Mythologies. London: Vintage. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Blair, T. (1999a) ‘The Pride of Britain Awards’, 20 May, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/news.asp. Blair, T. (1999b) ‘Broadcast to the Nation on Kosovo’, 26 March, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/ news.asp. Blair, T. (1999c) ‘Britain in Europe’, 14 October, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/news.asp. Blair, T. (2000) ‘Celebrating the Angels’ Heroism’, 2 March, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/news.asp. Breuilly, J. (1993) Nationalism and the State. Manchester: Manchester University Press. CIRI (1979) The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. http://www.salamiran.org/IranInfo/State/ Constitution/. Connor, W. (1994) Ethnonationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crawford, K. (2000) ‘History Textbooks and the Construction of National Memory: A Comparative Analysis of Teaching the Second World War’, Curriculum, 21 (1): 26–39. Crawford, K. (2001) ‘Constructing National Memory: The 1940/41 Blitz in British History Textbooks, in Internationale Schulbuchforchung. Hanover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung. CSFRY (1974) The Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Belgrade: DDU. Cˇ ulinovic´, F. (1959) Stvaranje nove Jugoslavenske drzˇave. Zagreb: Grafic´ki Zavod Hrvatske. Doyle, A. (2002) ‘Ethnocentrism and History Textbooks: Representation of the Irish Famine 1984–49 in History Textbooks in English Secondary Schools’, Intercultural Education, 13 (3): 315–30. Durkheim, E. (1964 [1937]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Macmillan. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1997) Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Giddens, A. (1985) Nation-Sate and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grey, P. and Little, R. (1997) Germany 1918–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkin, J. (2001) ‘The World According to Geography Textbooks: Interpretations of the English National

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Curriculum’, International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 10 (1): 46–67. Kallis, A. (1999) ‘Coping with the Uncomfortable Past: A Comparative Analysis of the Teaching of World War II and the Role of Historical Education in the Construction of a “European” identity’, in A. Ross (ed.), Young Citizens in Europe. London: CICE. Kedourie, E. (1960) Nationalism. London: Hutchinson. Khomeini, I. (1985) Islam and Revolution. London: KPI. Lancaster, S. and Lancaster, T. (1995) Britain and the World. London: CPL. Maleševic´, S. (2002a) Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State. London: Frank Cass. Maleševic´, S. (2002b) ‘Rehabilitating Ideology after Poststructuralism’, in S. Malesevic and I. Mackenzie (eds), Ideology after Poststructuralism. London: Pluto. Mann, M. (1988) States, War and Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Mann, M. (1995) ‘A Political Theory of Nationalism and its Excesses’, in S. Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism. Budapest: CEU Press. Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marshal, T. H. (1992 [1948]) Citizenship and Social Class. London: Pluto.

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Ram, H. (2000) ‘The Immemorial Iranian Nation? School Textbooks and Historical Memory in Post-Revolutionary Iran’, Nations and Nationalism, 6 (1): 67–90. Robson, W. (1993) Britain 1750–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, A. (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Smith, A. (2003) Chosen Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Teodosic, R., Stanojevic, M., Bujalica, M. and Vukovic, R. (1946) Zemljopis za III razred osnovne skole. Belgrade: Prosveta. Tito, J. B. (1945a)‘Govor Marsala Jugoslavije Josipa Broza –Tita u Zagrebu’, Borba, 23 May, 124 (10): 1–2. Tito, J. B. (1945b) ‘Marsal Tito govorio je u Sarajevu na velikom zboru kome je prisustvovalo 80 hiljada ljudi’, in Borba, 6 November, 269 (10): 1–2. Tito, J. B. (1966) ‘On fraternity and unity’, http://www.titoville.com/sound/govor9.htm.I Tito, J. B. (1975) ‘Titovi govori’, http://www. leksikon-yu-mitologije.net/read.php?id=618. Turpin, C. (2002) British Government and the Constitution: Text, Cases and Materials. London: Butterworths. Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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27 Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Nationalism DANIELE CONVERSI

Genocide and nationalism share common etymological roots: genocide derives from the ancient Greek genos (stirp, race, kind, category, overlapping with class, tribe and people), subsequently leading to the Latin gens.1 Nationalism comes from the Latin verb nascor, nasci, natus sum (to be born), later leading to the substantive natio, nationis. The suffix-cide, from the Latin caedo, caedere, cecidi, caesus (to cut (down) or kill), has been added onto the Greek root.2 The world itself was coined in 1944 by the Polish-born US jurist Raphael Lemkin (1944: 19). A new term was indeed needed as humanity emerged from a crime without historical antecedents, the Holocaust (in Hebrew, Shoah). Since the combination of genocide and nationalism characterized the darkest era of human history and occurred during the past century, both are often associated with modernity and rapidly modernizing societies. Moreover, both relate to a third set of terms also describing common descent and membership in a single ‘extended family’: ethnicity, ‘ethnie’ and ethnic group. In its original Greek connotation, ethnos was already associated with the idea of shared descent and lineage.3 The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ has various origins, but its contemporary popular usage is a verbatim translation of the Serbian

etnicko ciscenje, which began to be used widely in the global media in the 1990s. Initially, it was a more ‘benign’ way to describe the same unspeakable event, genocide. The exaltation of a dominant nation as superior to all others, particularly subaltern groups, inevitably leads to a series of discriminatory acts against competing nations, ranging from assimilation and marginalization to genocide. The role of central governments and the military appears to be crucial in most instances of genocide, together with media censorship and popular misinformation. Since they developed often simultaneously, a crucial question arises: how intense is the relationship between nationalism and genocide? Nationalism is the doctrine that ‘the rulers should belong to the same ethnic (that is, national) group as the ruled’ (Gellner 1983: 1). The doctrine assumes that a ruler belonging to an alien nationality or ethnic group is illegitimate (Connor 2004). However, the inverse formula is a sure recipe for ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation, mass deportation and genocide: to claim that the inhabitants of a specific constituency must share the same ethnic lineage of its leaders is to give carte blanche to mass expulsion and the drastic re-drawing of boundaries to suit the

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group’s pedigree. Nationalism also holds that ‘nation and political power should be congruent’ (Gellner 1983: 1). This longing for congruence, or ethnopolitical purity, is the historical hallmark of most nationalist attempts to erase ethnic distinctiveness by homogenizing entire populations. Nationalism was generally accompanied by assimilationism which, in turn, entailed an effort to absorb or eliminate cultural minorities. The very intolerant nature of the assimilationist modern state has created the preconditions for turning its unprecedented powers against hapless minorities (van den Berghe 1990, 1992). This was made easier by the fact that nationalist mobilizations were either ushered in or accompanied by state militarism. Hence ethnopolitical, ideological and religious opposition was marginalized and reconceived within a ‘discipline and punish’ framework (Foucault 1991). Probably, the earliest avatar of this tragic trend was the Armenian genocide (Melson 1996). Large pogroms had already occurred in 1894–96, when Westernizing nationalism emerged as an influential force, first in the Balkans, then among Turkish elites. But the 1914–16 mass extermination campaigns were unprecedented by any humanly acceptable and recognizable standard. This was a direct consequence of rapidly modernizing state structures emulating Western models and the ensuing collapse of empire (see also Mazower 1999, 2001; McCarthy 1996).4 In other words, the Ottoman Empire was then living under the simultaneous impact of massive Westernization accompanied by territorial losses. Turkish nationalism developed amongst the returning diaspora, particularly refugees from the Balkans and Russia. These refugees often mimicked ‘modernizing’ nationalism, particularly in the latter case (Lieven 2000: 134). Westernization materialized also in the form of victorious secessionist movements mobilizing their peoples behind ethnic banners and attacking the empire from within – although they were most often supported from abroad. Young Turk army officials fought against successful nationalist uprisings in the Balkans and ended up imitating them – while forging links

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with German and other Western nationalists. So the Young Turks movement was inspired by, and mimicked, its post-1789 Western archetypes. Paradoxically, the main victims of Turkey’s secular and anti-Islamic nationalism were non-Muslim minorities which had previously enjoyed protection and prosperity under the more liberal ‘consociational’ laws of the Ottoman Empire (Mann 2005: 62, 114–19; Nimni 2005: 10, 79).

MODERNITY, GENOCIDE AND THE NATION-STATE The twentieth century has been widely recognized as the century of nationalism and genocide. Most historians and social scientists are in concordance on this grim assessment of the past century (see Carmichael 2005; Hobsbawm 1995; Kuper 1981; Levene 2000, 2005b; Melson 1996; Shaw 2003): Never before has mass killing been carried out on such a vast scale and in such a short span of time. Nationalism has become a truly ‘global’ political movement and the dominant ideology of modernity. From its European core, it has slowly shifted and mutated, adapting its chameleonic shape according to geography and history. Thus, the modern itinerary of genocide follows the trail of nationalism and Westernizing modernity. The connection between Westernization, modernity, war and genocide has become relatively established in academia. These historical developments are strictly related to state formation in an age of militarized nationalism. Thus, many Holocaust scholars describe genocide as an entirely modern and Western event with its unprecedented systematicity and technobureaucratic dimension (Bauman 1989). The French historian Léon Poliakov (1974) argued that the Holocaust was legitimized as a triumph of Western civilization, the latter being conceived in terms of racial superiority against spurious Oriental, non-Western influences which could imperil civilization from within and lead to its fatal decadence. Genocide is therefore intensively related to European inter-state

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rivalry, government expansion, imperialism and the state’s intrusion into the private realm via the consolidation of central power. Patriotism and nationalism provided its ideological glue and emotional underpinning. The correlation between nationalism and modernity largely depends on how the latter is defined. Whether we identify modernity entirely within the philosophical (Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment), the political (French Revolution), the economic (ascent of the bourgeoisie), the scientific (Darwinism) or the technological (Industrial Revolution) sphere, we can find each of them well represented within radical nationalism, particularly Nazism. The latter was indeed inconceivable without, or outside, modernity as intended in any of the above senses: it can be associated with the spread of Jacobin-inspired centralism and state idolatry, the protection of bourgeois interests, the diffusion of ‘only-the-fittest-survive’ logic, and, finally, massive industrialization. This brings us to the role of the modern state and its bureaucratic-military machine. Basically, two trends have confronted each other in genocide studies: the ‘strong-state’ thesis (Rummel 1994, 2003; Harff 1986; Harff and Gurr 1988; Horowitz 1980) and the ‘weakstate’ thesis (Bloxham 2003; Mann 2005; Mommsen 1997). The former, often identified as the intentionalist explanation, argues that genocide is rooted in the absolute concentration of power into the hands of tiny elites. The latter, or functionalist explanation, diagnoses its emergence in the collapse of empire, state disintegration, political chaos and other forms of state ‘weakness’. One view concentrates on the intention to kill, the other on the chain of circumstances as they unfold independently from full governmental control. The structure– agency debate remains in fact a substantial cleavage in the literature. However, it should be noted that the two approaches are not incompatible. What matters is the subjective perception of weakness experienced by state elites, rather than any actual ‘weakness’ to be objectively measured. For instance, ‘paranoid’ leaders, such as Saddam Hussein, Stalin and the Young Turks, tended to radicalize their oppressive policies out of sheer

fear of armed mutinies and defenestration. To engage rogue elements of the army and the party in mounting spirals of massacres and counter-massacres provided a vital ‘safety valve’ for the continuity and survival of these leaders. Even the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution could be seen as a sign of state weakness or paranoid leadership. Yet, the sheer power of the state’s bureaucratic machine contributed to mass murder on an unprecedented scale, such as the Vendée massacre (1793–94). French historians have debated whether this can be defined as the first modern genocide or ‘populicide’ (Lebrun 1985). State power was indeed further emboldened by nationalist fervour at the very peak of its ‘weakness’, leading to the first levée en masse (August 1793). The impact of state-led nationalist terror on ordinary people was in fact devastating. Hence, it is not the state’s alleged ‘strength’ or ‘weakness’ which matters, but the perception of personal threat experienced by state elites. Yet, in all of the documented cases of genocide, the power of even the ‘weakest’ states was unmatched in comparison with the inadequate, futile means of self-defence available to isolated rural communities and other hapless targets of genocidal practices. Although most interpretations of genocide tend to be modernist or state-centred, it is essential to look briefly at the major alternative explanation linking genocide to the overseas expansion of Western empires. Colonial genocides are therefore to be conceptually distinguished from modern genocides.5

ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE AND IMPERIALISM Historically, genocide occurred in the wake of both imperial expansion and disintegration. Even before the conquest of the Americas, the fate of the indigenous Guanches of the ‘Fortunate’ Islands (present-day Canaries) anticipates a pattern of European expansion leading to cultural destruction, environmental collapse and physical extermination (Crosby 1986).

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Pre-modern genocides are often linked to ecological disaster, rather than modern statebuilding ideologies consciously aiming at the eradication of cultural differences. The worst instances occurred among settlers over which the imperial government had scarcely any control – and eventually lost control after they declared independence. Thus, the newly independent states emerging from the decolonization of the Spanish Empire pursued their genocidal campaign with even greater fervour. Some areas, like southern Argentina, had been completely ‘cleansed’ of their indigenous elements, while others, like Chile, nearly succeeded in the same goal, bar for surviving exceptions like the Mapuches. Not by chance, these countries were situated at the antipodes of Europe, at the further reaches from Madrid. Likewise, the complete annihilation of Tasmania’s aborigines could more easily take place in an area most removed from direct British rule. This interpretation has been advanced with particular sharpness by Michael Mann (2005: 70–110), who expands the modernist approach by incorporating the fate of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. An important trend in genocide studies is now devoted to the study of what David Stannard (1992) has famously described as the ‘American Holocaust’ (see also Churchill 1997). Mike Davis (2001) has observed how British rule was marked by cyclical regular ‘holocausts’, during which the settlers and the imperial core saw an opportunity to weaken the colonial peasantry and increase their dependence on empire.6 This was the era of liberal dogmas justified by a blind belief in Adam Smith’s (1723–90) ‘invisible hand of the market’ as a self-regulatory mechanism of supply and demand. We can therefore discern implications for contemporary globalizing trends, which Davis specifically links to environmental degradation and climate change. It was not only expanding or pre-modern empires which spawned genocide. Downsizing semi-authoritarian states or contracting autocratic empires, such as the French in Algeria during the 1950s or the Ottoman in its death throws, occasionally display genocidal behaviour (Melson 1992, 1996). Before withdrawing

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from Kenya, Britain committed massive atrocities, establishing its own ‘gulag’ system to control the natives, ritually engaging in torture and mass murder of children, elderly, disabled, women and men alike (Elkins 2005). As late as 1968, the entire population of the ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’ of Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands was secretly deported to leave space for a US air base (Curtis 2003: 414–30). However, the end of empire can hardly compare with its opposite and competing development, the advent of the modern state. Even more than with erstwhile empires, the key legitimizing ideology of the new centralizing state was one of ‘unlimited progress’ and, in its totalitarian version, the promise of a new society and a ‘new man’. This radical shift could only befall with modernity. Indeed, the more rapidly modernization was imposed, the more genocidal it tended to become, independently from its association with nationalism.

RAPID DEVELOPMENT, SOCIAL CHANGE AND GENOCIDE The obsession with industrial-economic development and Westernization has been a recurrent feature in most genocides. The concept of ‘developmentalism’ can be useful in this context: it can be defined as the ruling elites’ attempt to enforce rapid modernization upon largely defenceless, disconnected, disorganized and mainly rural populations. The adjective ‘developmentalist’, with its ideological implications, should be distinguished from the more widespread term ‘developmental’, which may not refer to hastily implemented development, but to a variety of other possible applications. In most countries affected by developmentalism, peasants and workers have been systematically uprooted. The peak of the tragedy was of course reached under totalitarian regimes, which turned citizens and peasants into pliable ‘masses’ through their overwhelming control over the state and justified this in the name of ‘progress’ and economic development. Extreme developmentalism, or the obsession with ‘catching up’ with the West irrespective of its human

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costs, was already visible in the ‘desperately modernizing’ drive of the Russian military well before the Bolshevik revolution (Mann 2005: 99), as well as in the Ottoman Empire before its collapse (Mann 2005: 114–19). In the twentieth century, Taylorism became a key influence as a method of maximizing industrial efficiency and serializing mass production. This was essential in shaping the Soviet Union’s NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921–1928) since 1928. Lenin ‘saw Taylorism’s “scientific” methods as a means of discipline that could remould the worker and society along more controllable and regularized lines … Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylor and of another great American industrialist, Henry Ford, inventor of the egalitarian Model “T”, which flourished throughout Russia at this time: even remote villagers knew the name of Henry Ford (some of them believed he was a sort of god who organized the work of Lenin and Trotsky)’ (Figes 2002: 463). This cult for discipline and work became part of a wider militarization of society which reached its apex under Stalin. Some radical Taylorists envisaged indeed ‘the mechanization of virtually every aspect of life in Soviet Russia, from methods of production to the thinking patterns of the common man’ (Figes 2002: 463). Taylorism’s weight upon Hitler’s plans was even more substantial.7 Only recently, the mutual admiration between the Führer and Henry Ford has begun to attract scholarly attention (Baldwin 2003; Gray 2003; Silverstein 2002; Wallace 2003). By 1938, the more than 2000 km Autobahn network began to surpass in extension the United States’ highway system, while Hitler’s idea of a Volkswagen (car of the people) dated back as early as 1933, owing much to Ford’s Model T. Henry Ford’s extreme antisemitic views also found a fertile reception in Hitler’s Germany (Baldwin 2003). In fact, at least in its organizational and technological sphere, the US model was posited as the ‘correct’ path to progress throughout the world well before the Cold War (Shaw 1994: 11). The concept of ‘developmental dictatorship’ has been applied to the cases of Italy’s fascism (Gregor 1979) and Spain’s francoism (Saz 2004). Further East, Stalin’s attempt to compete with the West has often been interpreted in the

light of his anti-Western rhetoric. However, the dictator and his entourage were avid devourers of cowboy movies and other US consumerist items (Sebag-Montefiore 2004: 167–9, 262). As in Turkey’s case, modernization was to be achieved by Westernizing terror. Rapid mass industrialization led to the annihilation of Russian and Ukrainian kulaks and peasant classes by either direct or indirect methods. Stalin’s extermination campaigns have produced a voluminous body of literature. Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1959–1962) led to similar results. Over China’s long history, the worst ever mass famine was a direct consequence of Mao’s top-down industrialization, costing between 20 and 40 million Chinese lives (Mann 2005: 15–16, 334, 336; Shaw 2003: 158, 166, 178). Mao’s rapid development plan turned into the largest single case of mass death in the whole twentieth century (Becker 1997).8 China’s entire countryside was devastated as ‘a direct and foreseeable consequence of Mao’s attempt to subordinate the peasantry to his will. The Great Leap Forward was a policy of do-it-yourself industrialisation and agricultural change forced on the peasant class to destroy their traditional way of life’ (Shaw 2003: 39, emphasis added). Shaw argues that similar forms of extreme developmentalism are still visible in China’s current rush to ‘modernize’ (that is, Westernize) and its obsession with economic ‘progress’. Many projects adopted by ruling elites in developing countries, such as Turkey and India, have led to massive human dislocations, for instance to clear space for the building of huge dams. Saddam Hussein annihilated the millennial livelihood of the Marsh Arabs after drying out their wetland environment under a 15-year reign of terror. Particularly affected are indigenous peoples in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil, with the destruction of rainforests for commercial goals (Shaw 2003). Even the one which, at least on the surface, appeared to be the least ‘industrializing’ of these regimes, that of the Parisian-born Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, promoted the goal of remaking a totally new society, completely detached from tradition and permeated

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by a collectivist ethos dedicated to the total extirpation of all traces of religion (particularly Buddhism). The goal of the penal labour camps in which millions perished was rapid development. The agricultural surplus produced by forced collectivization was expected to generate the income needed for heavy industrialization by import–export (Chandler 1993, 1999). The term ‘auto-genocide’ (selfgenocide) has hence been used to distinguish the extreme distortion of nationhood by dictators such as Pol Pot and Atatürk through a deep-reaching subversion of history. Exterminating one’s own people and culture apparently does not contrast with the restoration of ancient monuments like Angkor Vat (the largest temple in the world). The most problematic case was, of course, that of Kemal Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal Pasha), who could only conceive development as utter, remorseless and complete Westernization (Atabaki and Zürcher 2004). This led him to the extreme paroxysm of banning key elements of popular Turkish culture, such as the fez or tarboosh, a hat common to most Ottoman Mediterranean lands, which he replaced with Western, particularly British, hats and suits – to the great benefit of Western textile industries.9 Rummel (1997: 233–6) calculates that 264,000 Greeks, 440,000 Armenians, as well as other minorities and countless Turks perished under his ‘reign of terror’. Another important factor pointing to the relationship between developmentalism and genocide is the use of new technology by disproportionately powerful state elites. With new technology, increasing channels of communication and the potency of weapons, the ability to kill large numbers of people in very short periods of time and with minimal planning can only become greater. Some authors like Bauman (1989) relate the modern capacity of destruction not only to technology, but to the rise of the post-Westphalian bureaucratic state.10 Hannah Arendt (1958) has similarly related the Holocaust to the advent of modernity as massive human dislocation leading to the arbitrary removal of individuals from their localities, positions, jobs. For Arendt, this process resulted in the creation of an uprooted,

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highly manipulable mob which inevitably opened the gateway to totalitarianism. In short, nearly all of the genocidal regimes in history obeyed to a strong developmental logic and Westernizing impetus. On the other hand, there is an area which finds scholars in even greater agreement: the relationship between war and genocide.

WAR AND GENOCIDE War situations typically lead to states of emergency wrapped up in ‘securitization’ discourses. In these circumstances, even democratically elected governments can silence public opinion, not dissimilarly from authoritarian-born regimes. In times of war, patriotism can be invoked by both dictatorships and democracies to target internal ‘enemies’, terrorists, deviants, outsiders and ‘security threats’, hence proceeding to their elimination. War can be used as a cover to destroy opposition and engineer ‘final solutions’. It is significant that the Holocaust’ s intensity increased as German borders expanded eastward. Its quantum leap occurred on nonGerman soil, in the newly occupied lands of an expansionist Third Reich. The relationship between war and genocide has been explored particularly well by Melson and Shaw. Both argue that genocide is actually ‘war carried out by other means’. For Melson (1992) it was the chaos brought by revolution, following war and empire meltdown which led to genocidal massacres. Genocides tend to occur in the midst of war, as in the Armenian case (1915–16). For Shaw (2003), genocide is a form of war directed against civilian populations, while the boundary between genocide and ‘degenerate war’ (aerial bombing, mass destruction of civilian populations as carried out by the Allies during World War II) is too thin to be firmly established. In all cases, it is the state which can more easily harnesses patriotism in order to prop up political, economic and military elites (Horowitz 1980). The introduction of illiberal laws under the pretext of protecting ‘national security’ is a first indicator of radical centralization attempts

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that may result in the persecution of minorities and their culture. Mann (2004) argues that the Nazis married extreme statism with extreme nationalism, hence Fascism can be defined as extreme ‘nation-statism’. Holocaust scholars have long debated whether the war was a triggering effect of the Shoah during Germany’s eastward expansion. Some identify it as the major catalyst (Fettweis 2003). The same argument has been applied to the case of Turkey, where a ‘cumulative radicalization’ effect has been diagnosed as the main trigger of the Armenian genocide (Bloxham 2003), although the root causes may be searched for in the Young Turks’ ideology. Other scholars have analysed the causality of war by comparing genocide across continents and timespans (Bartrop 2002).11 Civil wars, as conceptually distinguished from inter-state wars, can also lead to genocidal outcomes. In both instances the long-term devastation inflicted on the civilian population tends to outlast various generations, even exceeding the numbers of people directly killed by war (Ghobarah et al. 2003). This was certainly the case with Russia’s potentially genocidal war on Afghanistan and its daunting legacy of massive loss of human life and destruction of the local economy, mostly due to millions of land-mines.

FORMS OF GENOCIDE Fenton (2003: 8) remarks that ‘one of the notable things about Yugoslavia is that the press (in English) always referred to ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing. But conflicts in the United States which bear some similarities (without being full scale civil war) are described as racial conflict and racial segregation’ (see also Churchill 1997). He argues that different countries share different discourses, so in the United States ‘the idiom of race is the mainstream one, elsewhere it is the idiom of ethnicity, to which one may eventually associate the idiom of nationality’ (see also Conversi 2004a, 2004c; Banton 2004). Physical atrocities and murder are often seen as the key criteria for establishing genocide.

Alternative terms, such as ‘cultural genocide’, connote that wanton acts of cultural annihilation occur in the wake of, even independently from, genocide. On the other hand, cultural genocide may encompass a physical dimension of murder, like the elimination of intellectuals and professional cadres. This took place under many Third World dictatorships, like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Major Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Ethiopia, General Abacha’s Nigeria, and Turkey in the 1980s with the elimination of moderate Kurdish and Islamist leaders. Most important, cultural genocide is often carried out in tandem with physical genocide, and is hence an intrinsic part of it. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia was supplemented by attacks on cultural heritage and symbols, the blowing up of churches, mosques and libraries, the forcible change of names, and various assimilationist policies (Carmichael 2002; Cigar 1995; Gallagher 2003). The term ‘ethnocide’ has in the past been used as a replacement for cultural genocide (Palmer 1992; Smith 1991: 30–3), with the obvious risk of confusing ethnicity and culture. Man-made environmental disaster has often resulted in actual genocide. Historians of empire have studied the destruction of both self-sustainable eco-systems and local economies (Crosby 1986; Davis 2001). The term ‘ecocide’ has been applied to a variety of man-made disasters leading to massive human loss, particularly in the former Soviet Union (Ehrlich 1971; Feshbach and Friendly 1993) and the United States (Churchill 1997, 2003). Finally, the devastation of home and habitat (‘domicide’ for Porteous and Smith 2001) acquires cogent meanings for its relationship with nationhood, given the ensuing destruction of security and community. In other words, restricting the definition of genocide only to acts involving death fails to reflect real patterns of genocide. In Bosnia, for example, while concentration camps were used as genocidal tools, parallel ‘acts’ included systematic mass rape and the destruction of Croatian and Muslim cultural icons (that is, architecture, religious symbols, books) (Carmichael 2002; Gallagher 2003). These acts do not necessarily involve death, but constitute

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an ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national/ethnic group’.12 For instance, genocidal rape has served to traumatize and destroy the reproductive capacity of entire groups, while the offspring from such acts are seen as supplanting the group in its ethnic continuity.13 Another problem lies in the forms of mass killing subsumed under the heading ‘genocide’. Shaw (2003: 35–7) has argued that, because the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was laid down by the victors of World War II, it was a curious melange of Stalinist and Allied selfapologies. The Convention’s definition of genocide clearly circumscribed it to the deliberate destruction of entire groups. It drew a sharp line between genocide and other forms of mass killing or degenerate forms of war. It did not encompass the annihilation of civilians for strategic calculations, a practice followed by Anglo-American forces during World War II. Thus, Treblinka was genocide, but the annihilation of Hiroshima and Dresden were not to be classified as such. Moreover, a pro-Soviet bias was also present in the Convention’s excision of any reference to the mass murder of class and ideological enemies, thus condoning Stalin’s elimination of class and political opponents, like the kulaks (Shaw 2003). For this purpose, the terms politicide and democide have posteriorly been introduced. ‘Politicide’ can be defined as the mass murder of political opponents on the part of a government because of their political beliefs and activities (Harff and Gurr 1988).14 ‘Democide’ is instead the broader umbrella term used to describe ‘the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder’ (Rummel 1997: 1–2; 1997: 36, 2003). In both instances, the state or government is the main perpetrator.

HOMOGENIZATION AND GENOCIDE Most nationalist-led mass murders are directed against minorities which are fully integrated, un-differentiated and assimilated

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into the mainstream culture. The victims and targets are frequently indistinguishable, similar-looking groups, often sharing the same language, outlook and customs. The Tutsis in Rwanda, the Croats and Muslims in Bosnia and the Jews in Nazi Germany were fully integrated into their societies and assimilated into the mainstream culture of their time and place. Why does genocide so often involve groups which are indistinguishable from the surrounding majority? Why do victims and perpetrators appear to be alike and identical to each other, sharing the same outlook – at least to the external observer? Probably one of the most important linkages is the one existing between homogeneity and genocide, yet this is a question still left largely unexplored (see Conversi 1999), although there is abundant literature inquiring into the linkages between genocide and state-led programmes of homogenization and assimilation. Modern ethnically driven genocides do not normally occur in the incipient stages of homogenization or during colonial expansion, but rather during the final stages of the assimilation process, when inter-group differences and peculiar traits have all but disappeared, yet group consciousness persists. The main counter-case is the Porrajmos or Roma Holocaust (Burleigh and Wippermann 1991: 113–35; Hancock 1996; Huttenbach 1991). The Roma were typically seen as borderless, and hence as incompatible with the nationalist concept of an homogeneous, territorially bounded and self-contained nation-state. In general, it was a matter of ‘border-making’ and population control.15 In short, cultural differences are never in themselves a cause of genocide or any other forms of political murder (Conversi 1999). Modern genocides and inter-ethnic wars are rarely, if ever, directed against wholly differentiated groups. The opposite pattern can instead be discerned, with largely assimilated, un-hyphenated (yet self-conscious) ethnies providing the usual targets. In other words, genocide tends to take place more readily when groups share many characteristics. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, murdered King Duncan’s son Donalbain preciently utters:

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‘There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood, The nearer bloody’.16 It is debatable whether we tend to sympathize with people who look visibly and openly ‘other’ from us. When the Yugoslav army attacked Slovenia and Croatia, perhaps the most ‘Europeanized’ of the Yugoslav republics, Europe did not come to their rescue (Ramet 1999, 2004). European imagination was certainly struck by the wanton destruction of treasured cities like Vukovar and, most of all, Dubrovnik. However, a compassionate sense of human solidarity was more widely felt when the victims of the plight became ordinary Kosovars (with all their baggage of differences, including dress and lineaments/traditions). Throughout Europe grassroots charity initiatives and other forms of mobilization spontaneously sprang up in their aid. Two other possible factors should be explored, one active, the other passive. First, there may arise a sense of potential rivalry among ‘similar’ groups. This may lead to a series of active measures, even without radicalization. Secondly, we often find widespread ignorance about a nation’s valuable cultural heritage, the latter easily leading to indifference. While active hatred is insufficient as a catalyst, much more determinant is the role of apathy and insensitivity. These often go along with conformism, obedience and widespread states of denial (Cohen 2001). The ‘bystander’s’ role is hence a crucial angle through which to explore genocide. This particularly affects global ‘audiences’ or spectators, as genocides can unfold due to international apathy and heedlessness (Power 2003). Indifference towards collective rights and dignity can feed the machine of mass destruction. Indeed, Hanna Arendt (1994) famously explained how the key element of genocide is not inter-ethnic hatred, as commonly assumed, but simple indifference towards fellow human beings. She described the perpetrators as ordinary, order-obeying citizens with unremarkable lives and no hint in their CVs that one day they would later become mass murderers. In 1915 Antonio Gramsci (1980) wrote a few touching pages about Europe’s fateful indifference to the Armenian genocide.

A similar argument about passive conformism as complicity can be applied to international diplomacy: it is hardly conceivable that the existence of the Nazi gas chambers was unknown by Western elites, despite Hitler’s ruthless censorship attempts.17 The fate of East Timor was deliberately kept secret by international media, because the Indonesian government was classified as a Cold War ally by the United States (Cribb 2001; Hitchens 2001). Saddam Hussein’s extermination of 100,000 Kurds in the Arbil/Anfal campaign (1988) could be safely ignored by the media when the Ba’athist regime was a key Western and Soviet ally in the war against revolutionary Iran (Makiya 1998). In all these cases, international public opinion was kept in the dark about ongoing events, often deliberately. On the other hand, the war in Bosnia has been defined as the first case of ‘simultaneously broadcasted’, ‘instant’ genocide (Baudrillard 1996; Cushman and Mestrovic 1996). Passivity and indifference make up the ‘raw material’ of genocide. British initial appeasement of Hitler’s Germany and Milosevic’s Serbia was essential in safeguarding these regimes during their incipient destructive undertakings (Simms 1996, 2001). The French government and media massively concealed the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda (Uvin 1998). And the British media was being swamped with news from South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections, just as genocide in Rwanda was unfolding.

CONCLUSIONS We have seen how genocide and nationalism are clearly related, although most nationalist movements have never developed genocidal trends, while the worst forms of mass murder occurred under officially ‘non-nationalist’ (Socialist) totalitarian regimes. During the Cold War, the two superpowers competed in support of genocidal regimes. Noam Chomsky (1993) argues that the crimes committed by the United States in places like Nicaragua, Guatemala and Indonesia have been of a genocidal nature.18 If advanced

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Western democracies can be held indirectly responsible for genocide, the United States and Britain may stand out as the most ‘genocidal’ international power players of the post-Cold War era, given their simultaneous record of direct backing of genocidal regimes (Curtis 2003, 2005; Hitchens 2001) and comfortable non-intervention when genocide was actually occurring (Cushman 1998, 2004; Gallagher 2003; Kent 2005; Melvern 2000; Power 2003; Simms 2001).19 From a Native American perspective, the United States can be identified as the most genocidal state that has ever existed in human history (Churchill 1997, 2003). Globalization provides a third, still unexplored, element in the triangular relationship including nationalism and genocide. Will globalization lead to new holocausts? Mark Davis (2001) argues that the twisted logic emanating from contemporary free market ideology is a replica of the unchallenged dogmas prevailing in the Victorian era. Then, the results were decades of economic sabotage culminating in the genocidal famines and the deaths of up to 32 million people in India, China and Brazil (1876–1900) under the impact of direct or indirect colonial rule. Davis skilfully relates this to the contemporary trend towards climate change (see also Levene 2004, 2005b). Like nationalism, globalization is destroying whole lifestyles and communities, exerting unprecedented homogenizing pressures (Barber 1995; Chua 2003). However, not only is this occurring on a larger scale and at a quicker pace than ever before, but it is also accompanied by unprecedented ecological degradation and environmental disaster. A strong state endorsing a developmental ideology may be redundant nowadays, simply because neoliberal development has taken an unrestrained course of its own. It would be tempting to extrapolate from this that the age of genocide is far from being left behind.

NOTES 1 In ancient Rome, gens (gen. gentis) referred to both tribe and clan and was sometimes translated as ‘race’ and ‘nation’, from genus (pl. genera), referring to ‘race, stock,

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kind’. The latter was cognate with the Greek genos (‘race, kind’) and gonos (birth, offspring, stock). 2 This was inferred from words such as ‘homicide’ (killing of a human being), and, more political, ‘tyrannicide’ (killing of a tyrant). 3 Classical authors used ethnos to refer to contiguous peoples, while the Oxford English Dictionary renders it as ‘nation’. A fourth more malleable term, phylon, was also used to describe race, class, tribe or nation (Fenton 2003: 15–16). The concept of patriotism also shares family-like connotations, coming from the Latin pater (father, as in patria). 4 Although Justin McCarthy has produced excellent work on the fate of Muslim minorities in the Balkans, he is not a reliable source on Armenian genocide, to the point of being regarded as a ‘genocide denier’ by most Armenian scholars. 5 Palmer (1998) reformulates this distinction as one between ‘societal’ and ‘state’ genocides. Two other interpretations of genocide should be briefly considered here. The ‘primordialist’ one, shared by many nationalists who see genocides as recurring patterns of ever-lasting persecution. Many Armenian historians share this view. And the ‘barbaric hordes’ one, describing episodes of wanton destruction during barbarian invasions as genocidal acts, such as the occasional burning of entire villages and the massacres of harmless people. The most commonly adduced cases are Attila’s Huns and the Mongols under Genghis Khan. 6 Mike Davis (2001) asks how British rulers could be so immune to the sufferings of the multitudes they ruled. One can find answers not simply in classical racism, but in the very supercilious aristocratic Victorian attitudes which characterized the upwardly mobile, rapidly enriching classes vis-à-vis Britain’s sub-human lumpenproletariat. Paradoxically, it is this very lumpenproletariat which remains the unquestionable and loyal reservoir of manpower in times of war and colonial expansion through the British-specific ideology of imperial patriotism or ‘missionary nationalism’ (Kumar 2003). 7 Gottfried Feder’s (1883–1941) cult of technocracy closely resembled Taylor’s idea of a society ruled by engineers, as did Fritz Todt’s (1891–1942) ideology of road building as key to German economic strength. 8 It should be pointed out that, although it is impossible to calculate the exact number of dead, Becker’s estimate of 40 million victims might be slightly inflated. 9 There are parallels here with the Khmer Rouge’s banning of all forms of traditional Cambodian music and dance and its replacement with military hymns, revolutionary chants and other form of radically Westernizing cultural manipulation, often inspired by China’s even more devastating ‘cultural revolution’ (Shapiro-Phim 2002). 10 More recently, Bauman (2005) has extended this critique to neo-liberal globalization. 11 The ‘cumulative’ approach has also been applied to indigenous people: Madley’s (2004) comparative study of ‘frontier genocides’ among Tasmanians (Australia), Yuki (California) and Herero (Namibia) has revealed common patterns developing in three phases: (1) invasion and destruction of the local economy; (2) aboriginal response

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and retaliation; and (3) the settlers and the central government’s slow drive towards ‘final solutions’ passing through several sub-phases such as deportation, mass incarceration, ecological destruction and ‘domicide’ (Porteous and Smith 2001). 12 Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948, entry into force 12 January 1951, available at http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text. htm. See also Cushman and Mestrovic (1996), Appendix 2, pp. 360–2. 13 The term ‘gendercide’ has appropriately been created, while new ones, such as ‘homocaust’ or ‘queer-cide’ have known mixed fortunes (Stein 2002). 14 Occasionally, ‘politicide’ has assumed different connotations. For instance, Baruch Kimmerling uses the term to indicate ‘a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity’ (Kimmerling 2003: 3). 15 Governments, especially authoritarian and totalitarian ones, are typically obsessed with controlling their populations in times of rapid social change. Nomadic peoples, reluctant to sedentarize, faced particular pressures in adapting to the extreme modernizing environment spearheaded by industrialization and state-building. Being particularly vulnerable, they also find it hard to organize their selfdefence via pressure groups. Some of the most ruthless sedentarization programmes have been carried out under forms of extreme nationalism allied with ‘developmental socialism’. In the case of Somalia, this led to a futile war with Ethiopia and to the final collapse of the Somali social structure. On the other hand, sedentarization programmes were mimicked by Ethiopia once ‘developmental socialism’ became the country’s dominant ideology under Menghistu’s dictatorship. 16 Macbeth (II. iii. 146–7). My thanks to Krishan Kumar for this perceptive insight. 17 Many US corporate leaders were certainly conscious of the fate of the Jews. We have already discussed Henry Ford’s close relationship with Hitler. According to Black (2001), America’s top corporation, IBM, directly supplied the Nazi regime with technical know-how in the full knowledge of its use. 18 For instance, he describes East Timor as a classic instance of imperialist genocide committed via the interposta persona of the US-backed Suharto regime (see also Jardine 2003). 19 The only approximate calculation of the combined casualties of both direct British military intervention and indirect support for democidal regimes is provided by Curtis (2005). He gives a very broad estimate of 8–13 million deaths. This includes Britain’s support for Iraq’s Ba’athist regime between 1963 and 1991, and, perhaps more disputably, the support for the Idi Amin (Uganda 1971) and Pinochet (Chile 1973) coups, but does not include the Tory government’s less direct (that is, purely political, but not military) support for Milosevic between 1987 and 1997 (Gallagher 2003; Kent 2005; Simms 2001).

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Cushman, T. and Mestrovic, S. (eds) (1996) This Time We Knew: Western Responses to the War in Bosnia. New York: New York University Press. Davis, M. (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. Ehrlich, P. (1971) ‘Eco-catastrophe’, in M. E. Adelstein and J. G. Pival (eds), Ecocide and Population. New York: St Martin’s Press. Elkins, C. (2005) Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. London: Pimlico. Fenton, S. (2003) Ethnicity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Feshbach, M. and Friendly, A. Jr (1993) Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege. New York: Basic Books. Fettweis, C. J. (2003) ‘War as Catalyst: Moving World War II to the Center of Holocaust Scholarship’, Journal of Genocide Research, 5 (2): 225–36. Figes, O. (2002) Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books. Gallagher, T. (2003) The Balkans After the Cold War: From Tyranny to Tragedy. London/New York: Routledge. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell/Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ghobarah, H. A., Huth, P. and Russett, B. (2003) ‘Civil Wars Kill and Maim People – Long After the Shooting Stops’, American Political Science Review, 97 (2): 189–202. Gramsci, A. (1980) Cronache torinesi, 1913–1917. Torino: Einaudi. Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern. London: Faber and Faber. Gregor, A. J. (1979) Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hancock, I. F. (1996) ‘Responses to the Porrajmos (the Romani Holocaust)’ in A. S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique? Boulder, CO: Westview Press. pp. 39–64. Harff, B. (1986) ‘Genocide as State Terrorism’, in M. Stohl and G. A. Lopez (eds), Government Violence and Repression: An Agenda for Research. New York: Greenwood Press. pp. 165–87. Harff, B. and Gurr, T. R. (1988) ‘Toward Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides: Identification and Measurement of Cases since 1945’, International Studies Quarterly, 32: 359–71. Hitchens, C. (2001) The Trial of Henry Kissinger. London: Verso. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1995) The Age of Extremes. London: Abacus.

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Horowitz, I. L. (1980) Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Huttenbach, H. (1991) ‘The Romani Porajmos: The Nazi Genocide of Europe’s Gypsies’, Nationalities Papers, 19: 373–94. Jardine, M. (2003) East Timor: Genocide in Paradise. London: Pluto Press. Kent, G. (2005) Framing War and Genocide: British Policy and News Media Reaction to the War in Bosnia. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Kimmerling, B. (2003) Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians. London: Verso Books. Kumar, K. (2003) The Making of English National Identity: Englishness and Britishness in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuper, L. (1981) Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lebrun, F. (1985) ‘La guerre de Vendée: massacre ou génocide?, L’Histoire, 78: 93–9. Lemkin, R. (1944) Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Levene, M. (2000) ‘Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?’, Journal of World History, 11 (2): 305–36. Levene, M. (2004) ‘A Dissenting Voice: or How Current Assumptions of Deterring and Preventing Genocide May Be Looking at the Problem through the Wrong End of the Telescope’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6 (2: Part I): 153–66. Levene, M. (2005) Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. London: I.B. Tauris. Lieven, D. (2000) Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Madley, B. (2004) ‘Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6 (2): 167–92. Makiya, K. (1998) Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mann, M. (2004) Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, M. (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazower, M. (1999) Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. Harmandsworth: Penguin Books. Mazower, M. (2001) ‘The G-Word’, London Review of Books, 23 (3): 1–5.

McCarthy, J. (1995) Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press. Melson, R. (1992) Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melson, R. (1996) ‘The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth Century Genocide,’ in A. S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique? Boulder, CO: Westview Press. pp. 87–100. Melvern, L. (2000) A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide. London: Zed Books. Mommsen, H. (1997) ‘Cumulative Radicalization and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the Nazi Dictatorship’, in I. Kershaw and M. Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 75–87. Nimni, E. (ed.) (2005) National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics. London: Routledge. Palmer, A. (1992) ‘Ethnocide’, in M. N. Dobkowski and I. Walliman (eds), Genocide in Our Time: An Annotated Bibliography with Analytical Introductions. Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian Press. Palmer, A. (1998) ‘Colonial and Modern Genocide: Explanations and Categories’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21 (1): 89–115. Poliakov, L. (1974) The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe. London: Chatto & Windus Heinemann for Sussex University Press/New York: Basic Books. Porteous, J. D. and Smith, S. E. (2001) Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill– Queen’s University Press. Power, S. (2001) ‘Bystanders to Genocide’, The Atlantic Monthly, 288 (2): 84–108. Power, S. (2003) A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. London: Harper Collins [2nd ed.]. Ramet, S. P. (1999) Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Insurrection in Kosovo, 2nd edn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ramet, S. P. (2004) ‘Explaining the Yugoslav Meltdown’, Nationalities Papers, 32 (4): 731–63. Rummel, R. J. (1994) Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. Oxford/New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers. Rummel, R. J. (2003) Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence. Oxford/ New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers. Sartori, G. (1997) Homo Videns: Televisione e PostPensiero. Roma-Bari: Laterza.

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Knew: Western Responses to the War in Bosnia. New York: New York University Press. Simms, B. (2001) Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press [1st ed.]. Smith, A. D. (1991) National Identity. London: Penguin Books. Stannard, D. (1992) American Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stein, S. (2002) ‘Geno- and Other cides: a Cautionary Note on Knowledge Accumulation’, Journal of Genocide Research, 4 (1): 39–63. Uvin, P. (1998) Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Van den Berghe, Pierre (ed.) (1990) State, Violence and Ethnicity. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado. Van der Berghe, Pierre (1992) ‘The Modern State: Nation Builder or Nation Killer?’, International Journal of Group Tensions, 22 (3): 191–208. Wallace, M. (2003) The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St Martin’s Press.

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28 Ethnic Exclusion in Nationalizing States ANDREAS WIMMER

The most prominent theories of nationalism disagree on a number of crucial questions: whether nations are modern inventions or rather rest on pre-modern ethnic foundations; whether state modernization and warfare are the cause or the consequence of nationalism; whether nationalism flourishes exclusively on the soil of industrial capitalism or everywhere where the model of the nation-state has been implanted; if nationalism has indeed already passed its greatest moment and we thus find ourselves at the threshold of a post-national age. All these major debates rest, however, on an underlying consensus. Nationalism and nationhood are portrayed as integrative political and social forces transforming older, exclusionary and hierarchical societies. Nationalism and the nation-state provided the basis for the democratic inclusion of large sections of the population that were hitherto held at arm’s length from the centres of power. Nationalism also changed the power relations in the cultural domain by raising the status of the despised culture and language of the lower classes. The terms in which the integrative power of the national community is conceived vary from author to author. For Karl Deutsch, a nation was constituted by a shared communicative space, enhanced by similar cultural

codes (not necessarily a language) and dynamized by the uprooting and mobility that urbanization and modernization had brought about. The state is notably absent from this picture and seems to play no role in shaping communicative spaces, assimilating minorities or enforcing legal discrimination against them (Deutsch 1953). This improved with Ernest Gellner’s account. He emphasized the role of the educational system of nation-states in bringing about cultural and especially linguistic homogeneity. The state played the role of a servant to an industrial capitalism in need of flexible, mobile workers who can quickly assume new roles in an ever-changing division of labour (Gellner 1983). He did observe that being governed by bureaucrats of foreign language and culture may stimulate national awakenings and conflicts, such as in the Czech example (his ‘Ruritania’) used to illustrate the industrialization argument. And he did consider the durable inequalities that groups may suffer if their culture or physical appearance made assimilation into the nation difficult – having in mind the Jewish and African American experience. But such domination and exclusion did not, in his view, represent a major feature of the new world order of national states but rather one of its rare and deplorable pathological permutations.

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According to Benedict Anderson, imagining the national community was made possible by the delegitimation of dynastic rule, the disenchantment of universal religions and the rise of vernacular languages through the combined influence of Protestantism, the modernization of absolutist state administrations and the development of a market for printed materials (Anderson 1991). The national community was held together by common language or the experience of restricted social mobility within the territory of a colonial province. It was imagined as a community of shared origin and history that would live through all the historical changes and secular developments that the newly discovered emptiness of time made it possible to think of. While Anderson noted, en passant, that the nationalist leaders of Latin America, including Simon de Bolivar, were not prepared to count the black population of Venezuela or the Indian peasants of Colombia in the national ‘we’, he did not draw any consequences from this observation. In general, there is little room for the more conflictive, warlike aspects in his analysis of the rise of nationalism as the Zivilreligion of the modern world. Anthony Smith goes furthest in blinding out the struggles for and against domination that accompany the establishment of national states. Although he is aware that the solidarity of ethnic and national communities is often the result of conflict and war (Smith 1981), his main intellectual project went in an entirely different direction: to challenge the modernist account of his former teacher Ernest Gellner by pointing to the continuity between modern nationalism (and nation-states) and pre-modern ethnic communities (and ethnically defined polities). Nationalism thus reframes already existing ethnic myths, historical memories and symbols of identity (Smith 1986). In a neo-Herderian fashion, then, history breathes through the body of immortal ethnic groups that grow to full blossom in the age of nationalism. From this perspective, nations appear as historically stable communities of solidarity which provide human beings with dignity, cultural meaning and a sense of belonging. Finally, authors like Michael Mann or Charles Tilly emphasized the role of warfare between competing absolutist states in the

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generation of nationalism – which is seen as the response of an emerging civil society against the increasing pressures of taxation and conscription. But they did not look at the new forms of exclusion along ethnic lines that the nation-state brought about, emphasizing instead its capacity to create solidarity and loyalty and thus to mobilize the population for external conflict (Tilly 1975; Mann 1995). It is only in the work of those authors most critical to the ideology of nationalism – not accidentally the first authors to write book-long essays on the subject – that the exclusionary character of nationalism and the nation-state are discussed more systematically. The conservative historian Eddie Kedourie wrote a book (Kedourie 1960), against which much of Ernest Gellner’s writing was implicitly directed, that portrayed nationalism as an ill-guided modern ideology, born out of German Romanticism and prone to bring destruction and violence to historically grown multicultural societies such as those of Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Hans Kohn deplored the totalitarian character of nationalism when it was combined with East European traditions of authoritarian rule (Kohn 1944) – swiftly overlooking the history of nationalist wars, forced assimilation and ‘religious cleansings’ that characterized the development of nation-states in the democratic, ‘civil’ West. Hanna Arendt decried the fate – which included her own – of those who fell between the grids of a world order of states that defined citizenship in national terms (Arendt 1951). However, these remained marginal voices in a scholarly choir that praised the inclusionary character of nationalism and the nation-state. Little attention was given to the making of the boundaries of this egalitarian and inclusive community: the struggles over who belongs to the nation and thus should enjoy equal rights before the law, be called upon to participate in politics and be granted the privilege of having one’s own culture and language valued and legitimated by school and state. Thus, the fate of those who end up on the other side of the boundary went almost unnoticed: those not treated as equals before the law but as aliens or second-class citizens; who’s political voice will be disregarded as that of ‘minorities’; who’s

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culture will be excluded from the national sanctuary of museums and school curricula; who’s language will not be understood by administrators, university professors, policemen or judges. The horizontal inequality between the estates of agrarian empires, so vividly portrayed by Ernest Gellner, is replaced by a vertical inequality. The privileged access to the modern state that some ethnic groups – turned into nations – enjoy is mirrored in the exclusion of those who are being declared aliens, ethnic minorities, or immigrants with no such privileged relationship to the state. There are three reasons for the orthodox focus on the process of inclusion within rather than the exclusion at the borders of the national community. First, most authors take it for granted that nationalism leads eventually to the establishment of ethnonationally more or less homogeneous states, such as the French, German or Italian proto-types. This obscures that fact that most nation-states in the contemporary world are ethnically much more heterogeneous. Accordingly, questions of dominance and subordination along ethnic lines play a crucial role in most modern nationstates, especially in the postcolonial world. With the partial exception of Anderson and Michael Mann, however, most of the wellknown authors took the ideal envisioned by nationalists – the congruence of nation and citizenry – as the average case to be explained by a theory of nationalism and the nationstate. Secondly, the warlike process of achieving this ideal state is, more often than not, taken as a by-product of specific, accidental historical developments and not given an analytically central place in the portrait of nationalism and the rise of the nation-state. Whatever the traumatic and deplorable historical circumstances, what matters, according to the orthodox account, is that the historical train arrives at the final station, the homogeneous nation-state. Finally, the analytical horizon is often reduced to what happens within the borders of a would-be national state, thus obscuring the process of boundary-making and its exclusionary nature. All three mechanisms – confounding the ideal for the average, the teleological reasoning and the caging of the

analytical perspective – establish and support what has been termed ‘methodological nationalism’, a characteristic of much social science thinking in the post-war period (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).

THE BOUNDARY-MAKING PERSPECTIVE There is, however, a respectable tradition of research which looks at the interplay between national inclusion and exclusion along ethnic lines, between democratic participation of conationals and the authoritarian domination of ethnic others (Young 1976; Williams 1989; Verdery 1994; Grillo 1998; Wimmer 2002; Kaufman 2004a; Mann 2005). This tradition aims to understand how the imagining of a national community is intertwined with the creation of ethnic or immigrant minorities and how these boundaries are reinforced and reproduced subsequently. The emphasis lies less on explaining the rise of the nation-state in the West, as in most of the classic accounts referred to above, than on the consequences that the spread of the nation-state had outside the area of its original development – thus building on a perspective that had been established by Kohn, Kedourie, Anderson and Meyer (Meyer 1997). Once a state apparatus has been taken over by a nationalist movement, a process of nationalizing its basic principles of exclusion and inclusion is set in motion. This politics of ethnic boundary-making by nationalizing state elites can take on different forms, depending on power relationships, the nature of the ethnic mosaic on the territory of a new state and the relationship with the nation-building projects of neighbouring states who may host similar ethnic populations on their territory. Across all these variations, however, we can discern a common pattern: the new elites try to establish a distinction between a dominant ethnonational core, ‘the people’ considered to represent the legitimate foundation of the new state, and those who are seen as not belonging to that core and thus to the legitimate ‘owners’ of the state. Why should the modern state be propelled to distinguish between national core and

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ethnic outsiders? Why does it try to nationalize criteria of access and membership? We should first mention its heightened capacity, compared to pre-modern governments, to exercise control over the population – through a unified administration, an integrated school system, a coordinated and centralized military and judiciary apparatus – and enforce its rules even in remote parts of the state’s territory (Hechter 2000: chs 3 and 4; Mann 1995). The modern state uses this technical power to enforce certain ethnic-national boundaries because it derives its legitimacy from the nationalist doctrine according to which it represents the will of ‘the people’ (Wimmer 2002: ch. 3). Defining the ethnic boundaries of this people is of utmost political importance because these boundaries now also determine who will and who will not be included by the legal, political, welfare and military institutions of the state. According to the nationalist doctrine, only full members of the nation have the right to be treated equally before the law, to participate in national politics, to be taken care of in case of illness or old age, to be defended against outside aggressors. However, it would be exaggerating to maintain that pre-modern, non-national states were not interested in ethnic boundaries at all. Many of them were, in at least three ways. Some premodern states were based on some, albeit comparatively loose notion of ethnic homogeneity (for examples see Smith 1986: Part I). Secondly, the hierarchical strata of agrarian empires were, contrary to what Gellner assumed (Gellner 1983), sometimes defined in ethnic terms. The Spanish empire, to give an example, distinguished between peninsulares (Spanish-born settlers and administrators), criollos (New World-born individuals of Spanish descent), indios and negros. Thirdly, the early modern principle of cuius regio eius religio led to the first systematic attempts at homogenizing a population in religious terms – as seen in the expulsion of Jews from Spain under Isabella and Ferdinand, of Huguenots from France through the Edict of Nantes and the countless similar episodes after the principle had been adopted by the Treaty of Westphalia. The change from empires to modern nationstates, however, implied three fundamental

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differences in the politics of ethnic boundarymaking. First, the principle of ethnonational homogeneity and of the ethnic-national representativity of the ruling elite became de rigueur for the legitimization of authority. Thus, state elites now attempted to systematically homogenize their subjects in cultural and ethnic terms, usually by declaring their own ethnic background, culture and language as the ‘national’ core into which everyone else should aspire to melt. Secondly, stratifying ethnicity, dividing rulers from ruled, privileged groups from less privileged ones, was replaced by a vertical ethnic boundary that separated foreigners from nationals, national majority from ethnic minority. The trans-ethnic, universal principles of imperial rule – in the name of Allah, of the spread of civilization, of revolutionary progress – had to give way to the particularist ideal of national self-rule. Third, for all these reasons, the state apparatus now embarked upon an active politics of diversity management that pre-modern empires were neither interested in nor capable of. Several variants of this politics of diversity management have been studied (Young 1976; McGarry and O’Leary 1993; Young 1994; Esman 2004; Mann 2005), of which I will discuss only two: the creation of national communities through the policies of assimilation of ethnic others who are seen as potential members of the nation; and the enforcement of boundaries between national majorities and ethnic minorities in cases where assimilation is not seen as an option.

Nation-building: from assimilation to ethnic cleansing Many new state elites have embarked upon a project of nation-building – or ‘nationdestroying’ if seen through the eyes of the objects of such policies (Connor 1972). Even fervent nationalists were often conscious of the limited reach of their own vision of the world. Massimo D’Azeglio, Cavour’s predecessor as prime minister of Piedmont, famously suggested, in the first meeting of the parliament of the newly united Italian kingdom, that

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‘Italy is made. We still have to make Italians’ … the same held true for Arabs, Turks, Germans, Nigerians, Mongolians and Frenchmen. Not only peasants were turned into Frenchman by the nationalizing state, to paraphrase a famous book title (Weber 1979), but also Aquitanians, Provençales, Occitanians and other linguistic groups that had maintained, at least to a certain degree, a sense of regional identity, sometimes based on or connected to histories of previous political independence, such as in the case of Savoy. In Poland around 1919, the state asked its population about their national background – an eminently political question in this region of disputed boundaries. In the East, which was later annexed by Russia, threequarters of a million people answered by identifying as tutejsi, which roughly translates as ‘locals’. They spoke white-Russian dialects and adhered to the Orthodox faith, but did not see themselves as Russians or white-Russians. They certainly do today (Hroch 1985: 166). Other examples abound: the various Slavic and Albanian groups in the Peloponnese became Greeks; Wendish peasants in Eastern Germany, Germans; Copt-speaking communities, Arabspeaking Egyptians (Deutsch 1953: 94). To be sure, not all attempts at nation-building were successful. In Somalia, the idea of a Somali nation as a community of political destiny has not had much success in overarching and erasing clan and regional identities (Rothchild 1995). The failed nationalizing projects of Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia (Sekulic et al. 1994) are other examples. The unsuccessful attempt by the Kemalist state to declare Kurdishspeakers ‘mountain Turks’ adds to this list. Nation-builders may employ various strategies to overcome existing ethnic divisions (cf. the similar typology of McGarry and O’Leary 1993). They may simply push them aside and propagate the new idea of a national community of solidarity, using the classical tools of school, army and administration to teach and propagate this vision. ‘Invented’ traditions, flags, symbols, anthems may help in achieving this end, as an enormous literature in the wake of the seminal volume edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger has shown (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).

Secondly, a nationalizing state may actively encourage ‘mixture’ and ‘amalgamation’ of various ethnic groups and their cultures into the melting pot of the grand nation. Mexico’s ideology of mestizaje, which was supposed to create, in the words of Mexican philosopher and longtime minister of education José Vasconcelos, a ‘cosmic race’, is one variant of this strategy (cf. Wimmer 2002: ch. 6); the Brazilian state’s ideology of ‘whitening’ to deepen Brazil’s ‘racial democracy’ is another (Skidmore 1993 [1974]). Thirdly, forced assimilation may be the means of transforming the mosaic of local ethnic and religious identities into the national picture of a homogeneous population – from a Kokoschka to a Mondrian, to play with a gellnerian metaphor. The Bulgarization of Turkish names in the 1980s may serve as a rather dramatic recent example. Another is the successful absorption and total assimilation of a large group of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent that had fled to Holland after the archipelago gained independence. Despite a ‘racial’ difference, the policies of cultural assimilation through special education, dispersed settlement all over the country and controlled absorption into the labour market resulted in the disappearance of the group and the corresponding boundary – a formidable demonstration of the power of nation-building (Willems et al. 1990). Other examples are the sedentarization of gypsies and the forced adoption of their children by majority parents, framed as policies of re-educating the deviant and degenerated race of the itinerants, a common practice throughout Europe. In Switzerland, a statesponsored programme that forced gypsy children into foster families and asylums ran from 1926 to 1972. The Australian state, committed to its ‘white Australia’ policy, aimed at annihilating the aborigine population by a forced adoption programme which lasted from World War II to 1967 (Wolfe 2001: 872–3). Fourthly, we may describe the various forms of ethnic cleansing as a strategy of homogenization. Ethnic cleansing by nationalizing states can be traced back to the two Balkan wars and from there to the ‘population exchange’ between Greece and Turkey, the extermination of large sections of the indigenous population of

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El Salvador during la matanza, the Holocaust, the mass massacres and evictions during the partition of India and straight up to the recent events in Bosnia and Darfur. Such ‘final solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of ethnic heterogeneity are a typically modern phenomenon pursued by a state apparatus that is dedicated to realize the ideal of ethnonational homogeneity by means of force and violence. The ethnic heterophobia of nationalizing states is, together with other more precise contextual factors that Michael Mann (2005) has identified, responsible for these moral nadirs of modern history – whether liberal nationalists like it or not (cf. O’Leary 1998). More specifically, state terror and violence against minorities often serve the aim, as Appadurai (1998) has argued, of making clear, in a complex situation of overlapping membership, where the boundaries to the dangerous enemies lie. Violence thus cuts the tumour from the flesh of the nation’s body, to paraphrase language often used by the intellectual fathers and organizational masterminds of genocides. Gathering ‘Jews’ into the camps and ghettos of Nazi Europe, driving ‘Armenians’ onto the mountain roads of Anatolia, forcing ‘Tutsis’ into the churches and schoolhouses of the land of a Thousand Hills makes unambiguously clear who ‘Jews’, ‘Armenians’ and ‘Tutsis’ are where intermarriage, assimilation and conversion have previously blurred boundaries.

The creation and management of ethnic minorities Not all ethnic minorities are singled out, however, for a policy of assimilation or expulsion and not all such policies succeed in erasing all marks of ethnic difference from the landscape of identities. In many cases, minorities are meant to remain permanently outside of the sphere of national imagination but inside the state’s territory. Whether or not an ethnic group is envisioned as being a potential member of the national family depends on the structure of political alliance in the crucial early phases of nation-state formation, as recent research has

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shown. Anthony Marx explains how different constellations of political conflict and alliance led to inclusion of the black population into Brazil’s nation-building project and to their exclusion and domination in the United States and South Africa (Marx 1999). Similarly, I have tried to show that it depends on the reach of elite political networks which groups will be considered part of a nation to be. Thus, the trans-ethnic character of political networks in Switzerland explains the exceptional history of multi-ethnic nation-building. Those networks were limited to a Creole-mestizo elite in newly independent Mexico, which accounts for the exclusion of the vast majority of the indigenous populations from their nation-building project up to the Mexican revolution. The segregation of political networks along ethno-religious lines in pre-independent Iraq inhibited an Iraqi nationalism from emerging as a politically dominant force once the country was released from the colonial leash (Wimmer 2002). What happens to those who remain outside of the national community, who are not meant to assimilate into it and are not driven from the territory through forced expulsion or relocation? We can postulate a certain pattern of how nationalizing states deal with permanent minorities on their territory. The first step often consists in creating or re-arranging ethnic categories to describe and administer those local groups that are perceived as not fitting into the national picture. Various local communities, peasant villages and urban communities organized along lines of neighbourhoods, local churches, or guilds, are grouped into larger ethnic entities. This helps to administer them more easily and to exercise some form of control over them by naming ‘representatives’ for these newly forged entities and co-opting them into the bureaucratic-administrative system. Over time, these newly created categories become inscribed into the administrative routines of the state. A recent example of such ethno-genesis is the emergence of the ethnic group of the Comanche (Hagan 1976: 133) out of a variety of bands of different ethnic origin. A major technique for minority creation is the census. A small literature on the politics of boundary-making through national censuses

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has emerged (Alonso and Starr 1987; Nobles 2000; Arel 2002). Recent examples from the United States are the creation and growing acceptance of the categories of ‘hispanic’ (Padilla 1986) or ‘Asians’ (Espiritu 1992; Okamoto 2003), which originally made little sense from the point of view of those that were designated as such. Much earlier, the boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’ was imposed by state agencies on a more diverse and complex system of classifications that had previously been recognised in the South (Lee 1999). However, attempts at imposing new ethnoymes by modern nation-states may also fail. The authorities of the homeland of Ciskei in Apartheid South Africa created the ethnonation of the ‘Ciskeians’ but remained the only ones to find the new category meaningful (Anonymous 1989). The creation of ethnic categories is a first step in the process of singling out and ‘managing the problem’ of ethnic minorities – ‘die jüdische Frage’, ‘the Negro problem’, ‘la cuestión indígena’, and so on. It is often followed by enforcement of the distinction between national majority and ethnic minority through the three related strategies of segregation, legalization and discrimination (see also, with regard to racialized groups, Wacquant 1997). By tying the distribution of life chances to membership in ethnic categories, segregation, legalization and discrimination powerfully affect the way individuals define themselves and are formidable tools to enforce the distinction between national majority and ethnic minority (Forsyth 1999). Strategies of segregation aim at reducing the interaction between members of different ethnic categories. This greatly supports the plausibility of the categorization, since it creates or reinforces group boundaries and closure and thus makes the division of the social world appear natural and self-evident. Examples are the residential segregation rules imposed on minorities, the paradigmatic case being the creation of Jewish ghettos in early modern Europe – albeit this is an example of a medieval policy of community segregation rather than of modern minority management – and of black ghettos in North America after the First World War (Massey and Denton

1994). Another example is the marriage rules such as those prohibiting ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ marriages in the United States; the first laws were passed in 1661 in Maryland (Frankenberg 1993) and the last corresponding constitutional provisions were abolished in Alabama more than three hundred years later. As this last example indicates, law represents a powerful mechanism for enforcing ethnic boundaries and the different statuses ascribed to the various ethnonational categories. The most important tool in the legal arsenal of boundary enforcement is citizenship laws (Brubaker 1992; Wimmer 2002: ch. 3). They tie universal human rights to a specific ethnonational community, as Hannah Arendt was the first to remark (Arendt 1951). And they made membership in such communities a matter of birth and inheritance. Once acquired, one’s citizenship becomes a permanent, ‘deep-seated’ characteristic to be transmitted to the next generation – born from ‘French’ parents, one would be and remain ‘French’ even if one had never set foot on the Hexagon. In contrast, ethnic minorities that were not considered part of the national majority were often relegated to the status of secondclass citizens – such as African Americans in the South or Jews in pre-war Eastern Europe – or sometimes even completely deprived of all citizenship rights. Examples of the latter include the so-called Faili Kurds in Iraq, who in the 1970s were deprived of Iraqi citizenship and then driven over the border to Iran (McDowall 1996: 30), or of the Banyarwanda in Zaire, who were denaturalized in 1980 following a retroactive nationality law (Lemarchand 2004). The struggles over the citizenship status of Russians in the newly independent Baltic states are well known. A final strategy of ethnic boundary enforcement is institutionalized discrimination: the unequal treatment of persons of different ethno-racial background in the dayto- day workings of the state administration – even when no restrictions are placed on formal citizenship rights. One of the most dramatic examples of negative discrimination is again provided by the American South before the civil rights movement. Discrimination by state authorities against ethnic minorities is widely

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reported from the newly independent Soviet successor states (Grodeland et al. 2000) and the developing world (Horowitz 1985: 194; Hyden and Williams 1994). Positive discrimination may also reinforce and institutionalize ethnic boundaries between a national majority and ‘underrepresented’ or, to the contrary, ‘overachieving’ ethnic minorities, the most prominent examples being the minority quotas in the US educational system (Bowen and Bok 2000), in the Soviet bureaucracy (Vujacic and Zaslavsky 1991; Martin 2001), and in Malaysia, Nigeria, India and Sri Lanka (a critical view on these policies is provided by Sowell 2004; for other examples, see Horowitz 1985: 655f.). Once the distinction between national majority and ethnic minority is established and enforced, members of the dominant ethnic group with a privileged relationship to the nationalizing state share a common interest in controlling the boundary (Rothschild 1981: ch. 5). Various strategies are known from the literature. One is establishing a ‘moving cultural target’ for assimilating groups, thus recreating a boundary with new diacritical markers when previous assimilation by minority groups has threatened to make it permeable or fuzzy. Examples such as the assimilating Jews in nineteenth-century Europe or Sanskritizing caste-less groups in India are discussed by David Laitin (Laitin 1995). Other authors have observed that in Guatemala and highland Mexico, the ethnic boundary persists despite considerable cultural assimilation, mostly due to the boundary policing strategies of ladinos and mestizos (Tax and Hinshaw 1970; Colby and van den Berghe 1969: 173; Smith 1975: 228; Reina 1966: 31f.). Tellingly enough, those fully assimilated may be rejected as indios revestidos (‘disguised Indios’) or, in South America, as cholos (Aguirre Beltrán 1967: 301–11). In Northern Ireland Catholics were recognized by their gestures, body language and idiosyncrasies of grammar (Easthope 1976, cited in Banton 1983: 180; Burton 1978, cited in Jenkins 1997). In all OECD countries, citizens with ‘foreign’ names are confronted with very substantial forms of discrimination on the housing and labour markets, as a series of studies using the ILO

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methodology has shown (Taran et al. 2004). More imposing markers of identity to ensure non-ambiguity of boundaries include the star of Davis in Nazi Germany, the ethnic labels in Rwandan identity documents (Longman 2001), or the percentage of Indian ‘blood’ certified by government agencies in the United States (Meyer 1999). They are all formidable instruments to police the boundary and prevent its blurring through strategies of assimilation and passing.

VARIATIONS Obviously enough, the degree to which nationalizing states enforce ethnic boundaries and discriminate between national majority and ethnic minorities varies from one state to another and from one historical period to another. Along a continuum from more inclusive to more exclusive constellations, we find, at one end, extreme cases of ethnocratic domination, such as Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which was effectively controlled by the members of his own clan and tribe (Baram 1997). Shi’as and Kurds were systematically excluded from higher ranks in the bureaucracy, party and the army, which did not hesitate to declare war against the civilian populations of the Kurdish North (Wimmer 2002: ch. 6). At the other end of the spectrum, we find the contemporary United States, which has officially abandoned the exclusive ethnocracy of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and embarked upon a remarkable programme of multi-ethnic nation-building through the official recognition (albeit not social inclusion) of an ever-greater number of ethnic and racial minorities (Kaufman 2004b). However widely the boundaries of the national community are imagined, however, it remains a bounded community, with the large majority of the world’s population on the outside. The institution of citizenship is the legal tool to enforce social closure along national lines even in cases where the doors of assimilation or of recognition as minorities are held widely open. In some highly integrative nation-states, such as Switzerland, which managed to build

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up a multi-ethnic, multi-religious national community and where ethnic domination between citizens is largely unknown, one-fifth of the resident population are systematically and legally discriminated against as foreign nationals – and thus denied the right to vote, the right to choose one’s profession and place of residence freely and the right to be taken care of by the welfare state in case of lifelong dependency (Wimmer 2002: ch. 8). Characteristically, whenever the legal discrimination between citizens and non-citizens was reduced, access to the national territory for immigrants became more selective and restrictive. The more the nation opens its gates for established immigrants, the more it closes its borders to those left on the outside (cf. also Lucassen 1995). We should therefore be careful in taking the recent decline in legal discrimination of immigrants as a sign that the inclusive logic of the modern nationstate has finally won over its more shadowy, exclusionary sides (for such a view, see for example Joppke 2004). In less domestically inclusive nation-states, we find many of the same mechanisms of exclusion between different ethnic segments of the state’s citizens rather than between the latter and immigrants. Where the political networks of the nationalizing state elite did exclude large sections of the population, an overarching, inclusive mode of imagining the nation à la Suisse could not develop. The new state classes then use ethnicity as a basis for mobilizing a political following and in turn favour their co-ethnics when it comes to deciding who gets a government job, where to build a hospital or a bridge, whom to give justice to in a trial or whom to admit to the newly founded universities. The state administration, the school system, the army are thus compartmentalized along ethnic lines and ethnic discrimination and favouritism flourish. Depending on power relationships and the waxing and waning of political alliances, larger or smaller groups may gain control of the state apparatus and successfully drive others from the sources of power. In extreme cases such as Syria, Iraq or Burundi, a demographic minority may be in total control of the state and its repressive apparatus and thinly veil the authoritarian ethnocracy with a nationalist discourse appealing to all citizens of the country.

Wherever a society is situated on this continuum of variations – and other dimensions could easily be added – they are characterized by some form of closure and exclusion along ethnonational lines. These shadowy sides of the modern nation-state have remained largely unexplored by the classic works that have shaped the historical sociology of nationalism. Whether or not such exclusion can be defended on normative grounds, as the political philosophy of liberal nationalism maintains (Miller 1995), is an entirely different matter – as is the more general question of whether the exclusionary features of the nation-state highlighted in this chapter will fade away as the universalizing logic of the rule of law further unfolds. It may suffice to note here that the ‘de-nationalization’ of the modern state that many social scientists have noted during the 1990s and some have interpreted as signs the coming of a ‘post-national’ age (e.g. Soysal 1994) has been reversed in some noticeable cases – from the United States to the Netherlands.

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Joppke, C. (2004) ‘Ethnic Diversity and the State’, British Journal of Sociology, 55: 451–63. Kaufman, E. (ed.) (2004a) Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kaufman, E. (2004b) The Rise and Fall of AngloAmerica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kedourie, E. (1960) Nationalism. New York: Praeger. Kohn, H. (1944) The Idea of Nationalism. New York: Collier. Laitin, D. (1995) ‘Marginality: A Microperspective’, Rationality and Society, 7: 31–57. Lee, S. H. (1999) ‘Racial classifications in the US census: 1800–1990’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16: 75–94. Lemarchand, R. (2004) ‘The Road to Hell in the Great Lakes Region’, in A. Wimmer, D. Horowitz, R. Goldstone, U. Joras and C. Schetter (eds), Facing Ethnic Conflicts: Toward a New Realism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Longman, T. (2001) ‘Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-perception, and Genocide in Rwanda’, in J. Caplan and J. Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lucassen, L. (1995) ‘The Great War and the End of Free Migration in Western Europe and the United States (1880–1920)’, in Workshop on ‘Regulation of Migration’. Nijmengen University. Makiya, K. (1998) Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mann, M. (1995) ‘A Political Theory of Nationalism and Its Excesses’, in S. Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism. Budapest: Central European University. Mann, M. (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, T. D. (2001) An Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marx, A. W. (1999) Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massey, O. S. and Denton A. N. (1994) American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mcdowall, D. (1996) A Modern History of the Kurds. London: I. B. Tauris. McGarry, J. and O’Leary, B. (1993) ‘Introduction: The Macro-political Regulation of Ethnic Conflict’, in J. McGarry and B. O’Leary (eds), The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation: Case Studies in Protracted Ethnic Conflicts. London: Routledge.

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Meyer, J. E. A. (1997) ‘World Society and the NationState’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 144–81. Meyer, M. (1999) ‘American Indian Blood Quantum Requirements: Blood is Thicker than Family’, in V. Matsumoto and B. Allmendinger (eds), Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Miller, D. (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nobles, M. (2000) Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Okamoto, D. G. (2003) ‘Toward a Theory of Panethnicity: Explaining Asian American Collective Action’, American Sociological Review, 68: 811–42. O’Leary, B. (1998) ‘Ernest Gellner’s Diagnoses of Nationalism: A Critical Overview, or, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Ernest Gellner’s Philosophy of Nationalism?’, in J. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Geller and the Theory of Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Padilla, F. (1986) ‘Latino Ethnicity in the city of Chicago’, in S. Olzak and J. Nagel (eds), Competitive Ethnic Relations. New York: Academic Press. Reina, R. (1966) The Law of the Saints: A Pocomam Pueblo and its Community Culture. Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill. Rothchild, D. (1995) ‘Ethnic Bargaining and State Breakdown in Africa’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 1: 54–72. Rothschild, J. (1981) Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework. New York: Columbia. Sekulic, D., Massey, G. and Hodson, R. (1994) ‘Who Were the Yugoslavs? Failed Sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia’, American Sociological Review, 59: 83–97. Skidmore, T. E. (1993 [1974]) Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, A. D. (1981) ‘War and Ethnicity: the Role of Warfare in the Formation, Self-images and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4: 375–97. Smith, A. D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, W. R. (1975) ‘Beyond the Plural Society: Economics and Ethnicity in Middle American Towns’, Ethnology, 14: 225–44. Sowell, T. (2004) Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. Yale, CT: Yale University Press. Soysal, Y. N. (1994) Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taran, P., Zegers De Beijl, R. and Mcclure, I. (2004) ‘Challenging Discrimination in Employment: a Summary of Research and a Typology of Measures’, in International Migration Paper No. 68. Geneva: ILO. Tax, S. and Hinshaw, R. (1970) ‘Panajachel a Generation Later’, in W. Goldschmidt and H. Hoijer (eds), The Social Anthropology of Latin America: Essays in Honor of Ralph Leon Beals. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (1975) ‘Western State-making and Theories of Political Transformation’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Den Berghe, P. L. (ed.) (1990) State Violence and Ethnicity. Niwot: University Press of Colorado. Verdery, K. (1994) ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Statemaking’, in H. Vermeulen and C. Govers (eds), The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries’. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Vujacic, V. and Zaslavsky, V. (1991) ‘The Causes of Disintegration in the USSR and Yugoslavia’, Telos, 88: 120–40. Wacquant, L. (1997) ‘Towards an Analytic of Racial Domination’, Political Power and Social Theory, 11: 221–34. Weber, E. (1979) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France, 1870–1914. London: Chatto and Windus. Willems, W., Cottaar, A. and Van Aken, D. (1990) ‘Indische Nederlanders: Van marginale groep tot succescolle migranten?’, in D. Van Arkel (ed.), Van Ost naar West. Racisme als Mondiaal Verschijnsel. Baarn: Ambo. Williams, B. F. (1989) ‘A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 18: 401–44. Wimmer, A. (2002) Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. (2002) ‘Methodological Nationalism and the Study of Migration’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 53: 217–40. Wolfe, P. (2001) ‘Land, Labour, and Difference: the Elementary Structures of Race’, American Historical Review, 106: 866–905. Young, C. (1976) The Politics of Cultural Pluralism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Young, C. (1994) Ethnic Diversity and Public Policy: An Overview. Geneva: UNRISD.

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29 Nationalism and Liberalism MARK HAUGAARD

INTRODUCTION Arguably nationalism and liberalism are two of the most successful ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the others include socialism and conservatism) and both are associated with the rise of modernity in the eighteenth century. While they share their origins in modernity, only liberalism’s success was widely predicted and perceived to be the logical outcome of modernization. In contrast, nationalism was seen as a temporary aberration. Modernity presupposes atomized individuals, fitted for industrial production, who reject any forms of essentialism, which is seen as a hangover from feudalism. Modernity is also premised upon the march of reason, which should dispel sources of the self based upon metaphysical notions of community, especially those that lay claim to primordial roots. By and large, liberals do not find the recent emergence of liberalism in the least perturbing but interpret this fact as a confirmation of the sophistication of their ideology – a manifestation of the growth of reason. In contrast, nationalists frequently dispute the view that nationalism is a phenomenon of historically recent date, tending to see it as a ‘natural condition’ of humankind. Consequently, nationalists rarely develop complex philosophical arguments to justify their position. In Imagined Communities, Anderson

argues that nationalism is not an ideology but more a form of sentiment and, in support of this he observes that liberals frequently refer to political theorists, whereas nationalists rarely do so (Anderson 1983: 5). While liberals expend greater intellectual energy theorizing, nationalists are more willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their ideological cause. Or, at the very least, nationalists are more likely than liberals to make reference to, and celebrate, those who have died in their cause. The celebrated tomb of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ commemorates a soldier who died for the cause of nationalism (Anderson 1983: 9–12). There is no liberal conceptual equivalent to this, nor do liberals appear to feel the need for it – there are no annual pilgrimages to the tombs of dead liberals. These contrasts tell us that, while both are consequences of modernity, nationalism and liberalism are sociologically different phenomena. While I would not go as far as Anderson, arguing that nationalism is not an ideology, it is a mistake to compare them as though they were normative political theories where disagreement is over some philosophical point, as is the case, for instance, in contemporary debates between liberals and communitarians. Hence, I would argue that attempts by thinkers such as Tamir (1993), Miller (1995) and Moore (2001) to bring nationalism and liberalism

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together purely within the traditions of contemporary political philosophy miss an important aspect of what distinguishes nationalism from liberalism. In this article I shall use a sociological understanding of how these very different ideologies were the outcome of modernity and, from these premises, analyse the normative compatibility of the two ideologies. However, it is essential to begin with a few words concerning nationalism and liberalism as concepts.

THE CONCEPTS Nationalism and liberalism are concepts that do not have stable uncontested definitions. Part of the reason is that both are what Wittgenstein (1967) has termed ‘family resemblance’ concepts. These are concepts which do not have a single core essence that defines them but are rather like the members of a family, who resemble one another by a criss-crossing of characteristics – eyes, complexion, stature and so on. The differences in form taken by liberalism are largely a reflection of theoretical traditions of thought and premises. The two dominant traditions are utilitarianism and contractarianism, while the most frequently used premises are either toleration or autonomy. Within the liberal perspective the basic unit of analysis is the individual. The latter maximizes autonomy and considers the pursuit of toleration essential for legitimacy. In contrast, any definition of nationalism is largely a reflection of historical circumstance. It used to be taken for granted that all nationalists desired full sovereignty in the form of a state of their own (for instance, Gellner 1983: 1), but, as many commentators have pointed out (for instance, Keating 1996), only some nationalists wish for full sovereignty, while others are content with local autonomy. Nationalism varies according to what is considered central to constituting the nation, which can be language, religion, perceived racial difference or identity. The central unit of analysis of nationalism is not ‘the individual’ but the ‘nation’, which is a communally constituted entity. Of course, it is individuals who are nationalists but these social agents are perceived

as ‘incomplete’ without national membership. The autonomous individual of liberalism is preoccupied with community as a constraint upon freedom, while the nationalist considers community a condition of self-realization. Nineteenth-century nationalist rhetoric used the concept of autonomy, which sounds superficially like liberalism, but for nationalists the autonomy of the individual derives from the autonomy of the nations and is consequently subservient to it. Like all political ideologies, both liberalism and nationalism are essentially theories stipulating the conditions under which state power structures are legitimate. Because both are family resemblance concepts, any definition will not cover all instances. Most liberals hold that the state is legitimate insofar as it is based upon one of the following: toleration, neutrality, rights, justice as fairness, freedom or autonomy. In contrast, nationalists believe that the state is legitimate insofar as there is congruence between sovereign state and nation, or sufficient state power delegated to the nation for it to flourish. Within this the nation can be defined linguistically, religiously, culturally or in terms of identity. Nationalism and liberalism should be considered as scalar, rather than absolute concepts. Absolute concepts are like apples and oranges: something is either an apple or an orange, not more or less so. In contrast, as scalar concepts nationalism and liberalism are both held with differing levels of intensity. At one end of the scale there are nationalists and liberals who, for instance, are willing to give their lives either for the nation or freedom of speech while at the other end are those who, in everyday life, express some mild pleasure in seeing ‘their’ national team win a sporting event or express mild dismay at the passing of some law which violates ‘their liberties’. While individuals occur at the extremes of both liberal and nationalist scales, it is arguably the case that the intense end of the scale is more significant to nationalists than to liberals. The scalar nature of nationalism and liberalism points to another aspect of these ideologies. As characterized by Giddens (1984), an actor’s knowledge of social life can be divided into two

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parts: discursive consciousness knowledge, which is knowledge that actors can readily put into words, and practical consciousness knowledge – what Bourdieu called habitus. Practical consciousness knowledge is much greater in its extent than discursive consciousness knowledge and is essential to the everyday social competence of social actors. It is an interpretative horizon, constituted of conceptual categories, upon which we routinely draw in making sense of the world – we see tables and chairs as ‘natural occurrences’. While there is a continual flow between practical and discursive consciousness, there are some concepts that tend, by their nature, to be more discursive than practical. Knowledge of tables and chairs tends to be practical consciousness, while obscure empirical facts, such as ‘black holes’, tend to be discursive in nature. By and large, liberalism tends to be more discursive consciousness than nationalism. Liberalism is more akin to black holes, while nationalism tends to be like tables and chairs. The average social actor does not believe that they need to resort to theoretical physics in order to understand tables and chairs, while they do for black holes. They believe that political theory is necessary for the justification of liberalism, not for nationalism. Hence, liberalism tends to be associated with political philosophy while nationalism is seen primarily as a social phenomenon and academic writing on liberalism tends to be from the perspective of political theory, whereas nationalism is treated sociologically. There are no ‘Andersons’ or ‘Gellners’ of liberalism because, like theoretical physics, liberalism is not considered to be a social phenomenon – it is the march of ‘socially unencumbered reason’. Of course, both these claims are false: liberalism is a social product in the same way as nationalism is and a proper understanding of nationalism presupposes some fairly complex discursive normative theory.

THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM AND LIBERALISM Nationalism and liberalism are inextricably bound up with a change of practical consciousness

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associated with modernity. This fact is not altered by the existence of great liberal and nationalist thinkers – Hobbes, Locke, Herder and Fichte. To be successful even the most highly discursively ideology ‘floats’ in a sea of practical consciousness. While there may have been instances of liberalism or nationalism in the feudal or Classical world, these ideas could not constitute a socially influential ideology without a shift in general practical consciousness knowledge. In the medieval world the language of liberalism and nationalism could not have been generalized. Social actors were neither the autonomous individuals of liberalism nor primarily members of nations, as in nationalism. People were members of local communities, families, status groups and religious faiths, all of which created obligations which made liberal individual autonomy a conceptual impossibility and membership of a nation, if existent at all, just one among many obligations. The decline of teleology was central to the change. In a teleological system objects move or change because of some essence within them. As argued by Aristotle, what makes an acorn become an oak is the essence of ‘oakness’ within the acorn. The ultimate end or telos is the prime cause of change. The world of teleology was one of essences realizing themselves. Planets did not move according to laws of physics, which are indifferent to purpose, but because of telos. The revolution which Galileo and Newton brought about in physics was the replacement of a purposeful teleological cosmos with an essentially purposeless universe driven by laws that are expressed mathematically. In politics the teleological world manifested itself in a complex hierarchy of political institutions that reflected particular essences. The ‘Great Chain of Being’ manifested divine purpose whereby aristocrats embodied a different essence from feudal serfs. In social practice this entailed a great cultural difference, which reinforced and legitimized the hierarchy of the feudal world. As described by Elias (2000), the local aristocracy deliberately lived and behaved differently from peasants. They dressed differently (as expressed in sartorial laws), ate differently (using knives and forks while peasants used their hands) and, frequently, even spoke a

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different language. There is a medieval Danish saying which encapsulates this: ‘An aristocrat speaks Latin to scholars, French to his peers, German to the peasants and Danish to his dogs.’ The adoption of particular forms of behaviour made classes different in their predispositions in much the same way as peoples from disparate cultures are different in today’s world. The legitimacy of the system was rooted in this cultural difference, which created the illusion of deeper essential difference between classes. The manners of the elites were not perceived as a manifestation of ‘arbitrary’ social practices but were considered to reflect essential differences ranging on a continuous scale from the humblest plant, through human society, to God. Any attempt at violating this hierarchy was ‘un-natural’ because it represented violation of essence and was likely to bring divine retribution – witness Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The vision of the Enlightenment was a continuous one, in which reason was expected to expand indefinitely and everything was reducible to rational laws. Kant defined enlightenment as the courage to think purely according to reason, while authority and tradition are sources of error (Kant 1970 [1784]). This continuity entailed that there was a conceptual move from the physical world to that of politics. Beginning from the premise of a ‘state of nature’, which precludes tradition and authority, Hobbes (1914 [1651]) argued that he was constructing politics that ‘mirrored’ the natural world and likened it to building a clock – a machine that moves according to the laws of mechanical physics. Since people along the Great Chain of Being had different essences, it was considered natural that the law to which they were subject should reflect this – different laws for different people. In physics the laws of gravity apply equally and, so too, in liberalism all individuals are subject to the same law, regardless of life plan. Consequently, the different cultures of the hierarchy of the feudal world become quaint arbitrary irrelevancies. The liberal view of the self is paradigmatically represented by Rawls’s description of the ‘original position’, which he considers the premise for all considerations of justice. In the

original position social actors are behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ whereby ‘no-one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like …’ (Rawls 1971: 12). This view of justice entails that legitimate political institutions must bracket precisely the characteristics which were essential to feudal legitimacy. The liberal selves are ‘unencumbered’ (Sandel 1982), or indifferent to specificity, and the state must be ‘neutral’ in order to be legitimate. It is not that telos disappears entirely from the liberal interpretative horizon but becomes separated from the public realm. As observed by Hayek (1960), we must distinguish between political systems (composed of anonymous individuals thrown together by chance) and organizations, which are deliberately created for specific purposes. Telos becomes confined to the private realm of organizations. This fundamental social change of interpretative horizon reflects (and legitimizes) the rise of the bourgeoisie. The private world of commerce works according to laws of economics which, like gravity, know no exceptions. As argued by Weber, it is a world that functions best when it conforms to principles of calculated rationality, one in which precise calculability of profit makes reinvestment possible. Of course profits were made in the feudal world, but they were not derived from this form of precise instrumental rationality – from fortuna, not double entry book-keeping. In feudalism what could be bought and sold was frequently tied to status, while in capitalism all that counts is the ability to pay. This indifference to the identity applies to the internal structure of the firm, which works according to bureaucratic instrumental rationality. The good bureaucrat applies means–ends rationality to all things and people irrespective of ‘irrelevant considerations’. People are like things that, in principle, are interchangeable (numbers in a file) and are the conceptual equivalents of the unencumbered selves of liberalism. As has been argued by Spruyt (1994), an essential element in the triumph of the bourgeoisie was the emergence of the sovereign

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territorial state, which made the world of commerce easier. The interests of the early bourgeoisie were fundamentally at odds with the confused hierarchies of the pre-modern world. They wanted one legal system where goods could not arbitrarily be seized or taxed based upon ancient feudal privilege and desired one monetary system and single set of weights and measures. The emergence of a centralized state is essential to liberalism. Hobbes (1914 [1651]) is regarded as one of the founders of modern liberalism (although he believed in absolute sovereignty) because he argued that all authority should be vested in a centralized state, in contrast with the diffused power structures of feudalism. The reason that the liberal state claims a monopoly on violence is that it is also the sole source of political authority. While the unencumbered self of liberalism is inherently rational, it has to be created through socialization. The world of interchangeable individuals presupposes that they are relatively similar. While the feudal world presupposed socialization that made classes dissimilar, in contrast, large contiguous industrialized territorial states are premised upon a relatively homogeneous people. As Gellner has argued (1983), the only method of achieving this outcome is by moving socialization from the home to the state. In essence, a common educational system functions as a form of mass state-controlled socialization. When an employee is hired, their personal biography, lineage and descent become irrelevant. A common education ensures that their social practices are relatively predictable in accordance with established norms (‘lateness’, ‘negligence’ and ‘disobedience’ etc. should have been eradicated: Foucault 1979: 178) and their educational qualifications can tell you exactly what the person is capable of. However, this mass socialization through education makes culture a political issue. For instance, a local dialect or language has to be chosen as ‘standard’. While the Danish peasant was content to speak Danish at home and the local lords to converse in French, suddenly everyone had to speak Danish and, of course, this raises the question, whose Danish or which dialect? The

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answer was, unsurprisingly, Danish as spoken by the bourgeoisie of Copenhagen. Dictionaries were compiled, grammars written, which became the basis for ‘school’ Danish. Slowly Danish dialects were eradicated, except in Norway where it was decided to standardize different dialects and call the result Norwegian. Similarly, in all the major European sovereign territorial states (Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Britain) a single dialect becomes standardized as the language of the nation. The language that you speak, or your children are compulsorily socialized into, becomes a political issue and nationalism is born. State control over education is not only functional to capitalism but reflects both the liberal view of individuals as essentially equivalent and the nationalist perception of a people or nation who share common socialization. Common education is also central to legitimating capitalism. Individuals who share common state-monitored education are the essential starting point for meritocracy. In theory (although frequently not in practice), effort should be rewarded and educational qualifications reflect this. The fact that theory and practice do not always correspond results in temporary localized perceptions of illegitimacy but even this failure leads to renewed efforts to use education as a tool of meritocracy, which is central to liberalism. Individuals come into the world unencumbered and, entirely by their own efforts, succeed. For this reason so much of A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) is devoted to this subject. Nationalists do not present the standardization of a particular local culture as a form of homogenization but as a return to traditional community. This dual aspect of nationalism led Gellner to argue that there is an essential deception at the core of nationalism whereby it is really ‘the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals …’ which presents itself as a return to the peasant virtues of the volk (Gellner 1983: 57). In essence it is a Gesellschaft presenting itself as a Gemeinschaft (Gellner 1997: 74). However, as has been argued by Delanty and O’Mahony (2002: 73), this type of false consciousness argument is

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theoretically unsatisfactory because it reduces social agents to dupes who are mistaken about their beliefs. The founders of modern sociology (Marx, Durkheim and Weber) shared the common Enlightenment misconception that modernity was a move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from traditional communities to societies governed by abstract reason. In all probability, this influenced Gellner into believing that, as a modernizing force, nationalism had to be a Gesellschaft, irrespective of what nationalists believe. However, I would argue that in the transition to modernity Gemeinschaft does not disappear, or is not overcome, but becomes transformed, even if it appears counter-intuitive that the disenchanted, individualistic and deessentialized modern world could be fertile soil for a nationalist Gemeinschaft. Following Beck (1992) and Giddens (1990), modernity entails an increase in levels of reflexivity. In traditional societies social structures are taken as given and tradition confers sanctity upon them. In contrast, in a reflexive society actors are constantly expected to justify social structures, which, I would argue (unlike Beck and Giddens), is deeply problematic (Haugaard 2002: 122–37). The reproduction of structure by individual social agents, or structuration (Giddens 1984), presupposes knowledge of social life which, when tacit, is unproblematic. However, if it is reflexive, it is no longer routine. If actors are called upon reflexively to justify everyday social practices, this entails a massive transfer of takenfor-granted knowledge into discursive consciousness. However, while such a transfer may be critically liberating, it can lead to massive ontological insecurity, whereby actors feel ill at ease with their being-in-the-world. Competent social agency entails viewing social convention with a ‘natural attitude’, whereby social life remains as a given. This is not simply because the complexity of social life demands that most social knowledge remains practical consciousness but because there is a real danger that the structures of social life dissolve once converted into discursive reason, as they are largely arbitrary social constructions that cannot be justified through reason.

Giddens observes that modern reflexivity entails that your life history is of your own making (1991), while in traditional societies, careers, sexual orientation, gender and so on were largely predetermined. While Giddens views this reflexivity as inherently empowering, I would argue that this invitation to construct your own history has the potential to be quite the opposite: an invitation to meaninglessness. Constructing self, coupled with the realization that social structures are an arbitrary convention, results in ontological insecurity. While most social actors are forced to choose careers within the industrial system of modernity, they do not have a desire to choose their identity in its entirety, especially in the knowledge that such a choice is between arbitrary conventions. Hence, they may embrace the idea that while being a carpenter or high court judge is not predetermined by family lineage, there are other aspects of identity that should remain foreclosed – you simply are Irish, Japanese or Norwegian. Which is why we may ask a child of a carpenter if they wish to become a firefighter or judge but it would be most unusual to enquire of an English child if they wished to become Japanese or Norwegian. In the minds of most people nationality is part of their inherent being-in-the-world. Of course, people can change nationality but this is often viewed as suspect. As has been argued by Bauman (1989: 52–6), the Nazis felt more threatened by Jews who were indistinguishable from other Germans than they did by Orthodox Jews. The point is that the former demonstrated, through their social competence, that ‘German-ness’ was a social construction, which they could choose to adopt. Consequently, they became an essential reminder of the arbitrariness of nations, one that had to be eliminated. Nationalism entails that identity is a given and, as a form of Gemeinschaft, it means that there is something beyond the self securing the structures of social life from degeneration into arbitrary conventionality. Following Durkheim’s Suicide (1952), Gemeinschaft, or what he termed ‘mechanical solidarity’ (I am subsuming the two), entails that the self depends for its existence upon an external whole in which community is

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more than the sum of its parts. This totality is not seen as an arbitrary construct but is reified; consequently everything that is embodied by the nation becomes more than mere convention. As nationalism embodies the socialization of a people, this entails that the entire way of life of a people becomes deconventionalized and, thus, saved from the inherently deconstructive tendencies of modern rationalism. The reifications used are complex and varied. The doctrine that the nation is created by God is a relatively common one. It is most obviously manifest in the doctrine of ‘God’s chosen people’, which is central to Zionism but also found in the nationalism of Dutch settlers in South Africa, Ulster Protestantism (Akenson 1991), American and Basque nationalism. Nature has traditionally always been considered beyond convention. So, nations are frequently naturalized and it is claimed that belonging to nations is some kind of natural inclination, which is common to all humankind. Primordialism affirms the naturalness of nations by indefinite extension into the past. A diluted version of the primordialist thesis, which nonetheless preserves this form of reification, is the doctrine that nations are essentially equivalent to the tribes of traditional societies. Science is another way of reifying nationalism. Biological genetic theories of race are the most obvious and enjoyed a vogue in the nineteenth century but generally have fallen out of favour since 1945. A different mode of making nationalism scientific is Darwinian evolutionary theories, which claim that nationalism is a manifestation of needs that are essential for the survival of the species. For instance, van de Berghe (1981) argues that the nation is a natural extension of the family. The nation can be reified by claiming that it has a unique civilizing role. As a ‘higher civilization’, a national culture is not some arbitrary form of social convention but a unique achievement, which transcends convention in some deeply metaphysical way – for example, French, English, Italian, Japanese and Norwegian nationalism. A variant on this is the claim that, even though the national culture is not uniquely civilized at the moment, there was a past

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‘Golden Age’. Decline was forced upon the nation but national awakening contains the promise of a return – for example, Irish nationalism. The Hegelian notion of the nation representing the march of reason would be another variant on claiming a unique civilization. What all these claims have in common is the reification of the nation as something other than arbitrary convention. The ontological security that this provides is coupled with an attempt to render the nation sacred through ritual. The flag becomes iconic and the yearly calendar punctuated by collective rituals, such as the national day, and more routine and everyday rituals, which include diplomatic and sporting events – banal nationalism (Billig 1995). These share more with religious belief than they do with instrumental disenchanted logic. Large crowds come together and chant encouragement at ‘their’ national team, while they wave the national flag, which serves a similar function to a sacred totem in primitive religions. Supporters frequently consume large quantities of alcohol, which has the effect of intensifying feelings of excitement and consequent enchantment (Durkheim 1995: 228). In essence what is being argued is that while liberalism is consonant with Enlightenment rationality, the latter threatens the ontological security of everyday life by showing cultural practices and identity as part of essentially arbitrary cultural conventions, which become disenchanted. In contrast, the appeal of nationalism is precisely that it does the opposite. The practical consciousness of the nation becomes other than arbitrary convention, which can be cherished by the state and, when placed in the context of banal rituals, becomes enchanted. The functionality of nationalism to modernity stems from its homogenizing effects while it appeals to social actors because it provides ontological security and enchantment in a social world where reflexivity tends to undermine it. This explains why nationalists find constructivist accounts of nationalism threatening. It is not that they do not understand that social constructivists take ‘the social’ seriously (Gellner 1997) or that ‘imagined’ means ‘imaginary’ – Anderson – but they intuit that the appeal of nationalism lies in its

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capacity to overcome the ontological insecurity entailed by constructivism. If ontological security is rooted in practical consciousness knowledge, it is logical that nationalism should be a less discursive ideology than liberalism. Nationalism is part of the practical knowledge of competent social agency and the reifications, which make nations non-conventional and sacred, entail that the nation does not require intellectualization. The nation just ‘is’ and to theorize it in the language of sociology is irrelevant and smacks of profanation. The perception of the nation as nonconventional and sacred gives externality to the social actor which renders their identity enduring. For the liberal self, the autonomous self has no meaning outside itself, hence it makes no sense for the self to be sacrificed for a collective social construction that is arbitrary convention. In contrast, for the nationalist the nation is what gives meaning to the self as a socialized being. Socialization makes them part of the nation, which is made real by the belief that it is beyond convention and part of the enchanted world. To such an actor the ultimate self-sacrifice, dying for the flag, represents a union between the self and the real. As Durkheim argued (1952), such self-sacrifice is not self-annihilation but self-realization. The dead soldier or suicide bomber lives on through their fusion with the nation. Dead liberals no longer count, but dead nationalists are still real as long as the nation lives on. To nationalists, betraying their dead is both a betrayal of the nation and a betrayal of the self. In negotiations with Sinn Fein/IRA it is noticeable that the views of all those who died for Ireland are considered particularly significant. Within this the views of those who died on hunger-strike in 1983 are given particular weight. Suicide for the cause renders these members ‘real’ through ‘fusion’ with the history of the nation. If the hypothesis is correct that nationalism is essentially a modern Gemeinschaft, while liberalism is a Gesellschaft, the question has to be raised: how is it possible that modern social actors subscribe to both ideologies? The easy, although sociologically unsatisfactory, answer

might be that they represent different people – liberal moderns and nationalist moderns. However, I would argue that the majority of social actors are nationalists and liberals simultaneously. In modernity there is a latent promise of a great fusion and singularity of interpretative horizon – once reason develops, all knowledge will become integrated. Yet, the reality is that modernity has frequently resulted in fragmentation (Delanty 1999). Indeed, fragmentation is central to competent social agency in the modern world. Consider Weber’s characterization of the modern bureaucrat with the capacity to switch between instrumental purposive rationality at work, to affective rationality at home. Of course, there are moments of conflict (for example, when a much-loved relation is the number on a file), but the routine functioning of a bureaucratic machine is premised upon the ability of social agents to switch interpretative horizon. In Goffman (1969), the competent social agent can switch from ‘backstage’ to ‘frontstage’ monitoring of their behaviour. Similarly, modern social agents have both a liberal and nationalist interpretative horizon, which alternate as circumstances demand. Modernization theory predicted the advance of scientific rationality would result in the demise of religious belief but, contrary to expectations, many social actors find it possible to be both technically competent and religious. It is not that some consistency between science and religion has been discovered, rather that social actors switch, depending upon circumstances, between scientific and religious interpretative horizons. I am not claiming that this discontinuity does not create moments of internal conflict when it is not clear which interpretative horizon is appropriate to the circumstances. In Sartre’s famous conundrum: in a state of war, should a son take care of his sick mother or defend the nation? The irresolvable conflict is caused by the fact that the question can be answered either through a nationalist or an affective interpretative viewpoint. Similar conundrums are raised between nationalism and liberalism: in a state of war, should the state do everything in the interests of defending the nation, including curbing freedom of

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speech? However, both are scalar concepts and when there is a conflict between these ideologies, degrees of intensity are crucial to determining which ideology wins.

NORMATIVE CONSIDERATIONS While nationalism and liberalism are functionally compatible with modernity, I would argue that they are normatively theoretically incommensurable. The basic premise of liberalism is the singular individual who, in considerations of politics, has the capacity methodologically to bracket their particularities. In contrast, the basic unit of nationalism is a self who realizes themselves through a collectivity which embodies significant aspects of ‘their’ socialization. For the liberal, the ultimate good is the autonomy of self, while for the nationalist the ultimate end is the autonomy of the nation. For the liberal the legitimate state is a neutral one, while for the nationalist the legitimate state has a telos – the flourishing of the nation. The liberal individual critically subjects their beliefs to discursive examination, while the nationalist believes that the nation is a natural entity and practical consciousness. This is not to argue that a liberal nationalist theory cannot be constructed, which may be internally consistent, but at the expense of the very characteristics which are central to the success of nationalism. For instance, Tamir (1993) attempts such a fusion by premising her liberal nationalism on the liberal self. Tamir’s self is an autonomous chooser who chooses nations in the same way as they select a career which, of course, misses precisely the attraction of nationalism in a uncertain world, that is, part of your identity is not subject to radical reflexivity. Miller (1995) also begins from liberal premises but his nationalism is of a weak variety, which amounts to little more than a slight preference for co-nationals over non-nationals in regard to welfare provisions. Moore (2001) is unique among these attempted fusions in working from nationalist premises to liberalism – a nationalist liberalism. Her opening premises are: first, that

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national identification is a legitimate constitutive part of the self and, secondly, that in practice liberal states are never entirely neutral. When these elements are placed together it appears that legitimacy demands that the nationality of the self and the state be congruent. After all, if the state represents one particular nation, it is an injustice if that state has jurisdiction over a different (minority) nation. In those circumstances secession becomes legitimate – either full or partial depending upon the practicalities. However, her second premise, concerning the neutrality of the state, is flawed because she treats liberalism in absolute terms, not as a scalar concept. Of course it is correct that no state can be entirely neutral but this is not the same as arguing that there is not a significant difference between a state that aims at neutrality as an ideal and one that considers its legitimacy inherently linked to its ability to promote the will of the nation. Liberal states are not liberal by virtue of their ability to be entirely neutral; rather they are more and less neutral. To take an instance, in the 1937 Irish constitution, the Catholic Church was given a special status that reflected the (supposed) views of the majority nation, although other churches were allowed to continue to practise. In 1972 this clause was removed and there began the slow process of separating church and state – a process that is still ongoing. In this case we would argue that the Irish state became more liberal with the removal of the clause privileging the Catholic Church. This is a meaningful statement even though it was not entirely illiberal prior to the removal of the constitutional clause: after all, other religions were allowed freedom of worship. Given that it is possible for the state to be more or less neutral, the fact that it is impossible for a state to be entirely neutral (in every respect) does not entail that claims to state neutrality are bogus, even if they are relative. A state with high levels of impartiality may, in practice, be substantially more just with reference to competing ethnic claims than secession into avowedly nationalist states – especially if we take account of the fact that these states will have jurisdiction over minorities of ‘the other nation’, other cultures and, indeed, individuals

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who may not wish to be defined in nationalist terms. While a fusion of nationalism and liberalism into one ideology can be achieved only at the expense of removing what is central to the ideological success of nationalism, this does not lead to the conclusion that one is to be jettisoned at the expense of the other. I would argue that the ability to switch between interpretative horizons for different conceptual problems is intrinsic to modernity. This parallels Mouffe’s (2000) argument concerning democracy. What we call democracy is actually made up of two elements, which are frequently in conflict with each other. On the one hand there is the liberal tradition that emphasizes the rights of the individual and, on the other, the democratic participatory perspective with emphasis upon collective decision-making. The answer to a conflict between the two is not to try to subsume one into the other but to view this as a constructive agonistic tension, which is central to democratic debate. Similarly, I would argue that the conflict between nationalism and liberalism is a constructive force. Even if Tamir, Miller and Moore do not succeed in constructing a single ideology, part of the initial plausibility of their argument derives from the fact that, in practice, liberalism leans heavily upon nationalism. For instance, developed to their logical outcome, the premises of liberalism lead to international cosmopolitanism. Yet, all liberal states exclude some people from the citizen body. Nationalism provides a ready-made solution to ‘who are the people?’ However, such a solution can never be made consistent with liberalism. Instead of attempting to reconcile these ideas, we should view them as in constructive tension. The liberal state is less liberal because of this exclusion but, as it is a scalar concept, this does not entail that it is entirely illiberal. The result of living with this kind of constructive tension is similar to Walzer’s (1983) description of spheres of justice. Walzer argues, for instance, that some issues are decided by principles of the market while others are decided by meritocratic principles or principles of need. A doctor is appointed on meritocratic principles and we consider it wrong that such a position could be bought or given to the

person based upon need. In contrast, we think it correct that medicine be distributed upon principles of need. Of course, not all issues come with a ready-made decision as to which interpretative horizon is appropriate but this ambiguity is constitutive of democratic debate. When we define citizenship, there may well be a creative tension between applying liberal principles and wider or narrower definitions of the nation. Viewing the tension between liberalism and nationalism as agonistic and seeing both as scalar concepts, allows us to accept that the workings of liberal societies presuppose some nationalist premises. However, recognizing the tension, in place of opting for one over the other, allows us to avoid certain liberal and nationalist excesses. There are four principle issue areas in which liberal practice presupposes nationalism. The first is relatively self-explanatory, nationalism answers the question: ‘Who are the people?’ Secondly, as argued by Miller, nationalism both limits the numbers of welfare recipients of the liberal welfare state to practical levels and facilitates redistributive justice (1995: 92–4). Without nationalism, liberal welfare states would find it difficult to justify giving welfare to co-nationals over those in greater need in distant places. How could the Swedes ever justify their welfare state when people in Ethiopia are in so much greater need? Nationalism also makes redistribution easier. The idea of the nation as a community, which is ‘ours’, entails that any redistributive welfare taxation is giving from ‘me’ to ‘us’. Even if this is reprehensible to a committed liberal, the belief that welfare is going to one of ‘us’ may be necessary for the welfare state to function. It is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one – it does not follow that nationalist states are invariably generous in their welfare provisions. Thirdly, nationalism contributes to liberal practice by providing sufficient common culture for the effective functioning of the type of reflexive debate central to liberalism. On its own, liberal debate is premised upon a kind of Kantian pure rationality. However, as has been argued by Fichte (1922), our ability to reason is not simply an unencumbered abstract one.

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Reasoning without meaning is a conceptual impossibility. This is not simply J. S. Mills’s practical observation that democracies function better with a common language (Mill 1972 [1861]: 359–66) but the more profound point that the ability to reach consensus through disputation presupposes convergence of interpretative horizons. When Rawls wrote A Theory of Justice (1971), he argued that his liberal principles were based upon universal premises, but with Political Liberalism (1993), he had come to see that an ‘overlapping consensus’ was necessary for liberalism. I would argue that part of this ‘overlapping consensus’ is not only a certain civic spirit (following de Tocqueville) but also a certain commonality in systems of meaning. While I would agree with Habermas that liberalism presupposes something like an ideal speech situation, in which the most convincing argument wins on its own merits, like Ackerman (1980), I would argue that this ideal is only possible between actors who share certain fundamental ways of seeing the world, presupposing a substantive degree of shared culture. Consequently, while the homogenizing task of ‘nation-building’ would be anathema to any serious liberal, the outcome of such a process is a community that shares sufficient cultural similarity to allow persuasion by the force of better argument. Fourthly, nationalism provides the conditions for liberalism by providing the state with citizens who are willing to undergo significant sacrifice in its defence. An entirely rational liberal is unlikely to put their life at stake for the sake of the state, while the altruistic Gemeinschaft nationalist is willing to die for the flag. In all these instances, in which nationalism creates the conditions for liberal states, it is the case that these contributions come from a nationalist interpretative horizon that, in many respects, is antithetical to liberalism. Defining ‘we the people’ in strongly nationalist terms can lead to xenophobia in citizenship and welfare policies. Nation-building can result in illiberal enforced assimilation of minority cultures and the nationalist desire of self-sacrifice can lead to belligerence and ‘suicide bombing’. However, I would argue that this is less likely to take place if we recognize the essential

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tension that exists between nationalism and liberalism, rather than blind our critical faculties through some kind of enforced fusion which, in any case, will not become a popular ideology since it has lost the Gemeinschaft characteristics that have made nationalism an ideologically successful outcome of the conditions of modernity.

REFERENCES Ackerman, B. A. (1980) Social Justice in a Liberal State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Akenson, D. H. (1991) God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society. London: Sage. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Delanty, G. (1999) Social Theory in a Changing World: Conceptions of Modernity. London: Sage. Delanty, G. and O’Mahony, P. (2002) Nationalism and Social Theory. London: Sage. Durkheim, E. (1952) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell. Fichte, J. G. (1922) Address to the German Nation. Chicago: Open Court. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1997) Nationalism. London: Phoenix. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, E. (1969) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Haugaard, M. (2002) ‘Nationalism and Modernity’, in S. Malesevic and M. Haugaard (eds), Making Sense of Collectivity: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalization. London: Pluto.

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Hayek, F. A. (1960) The Constitution of Liberty. London: Routledge. Hobbes, T. (1914 [1651]) Leviathan. London: J. M. Dent. Kant, I. (1970 [1784]) ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?’’’ in Kant’s Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keating, M. (1996) Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mill, J. S. (1972 [1861]) Considerations on Representative Government. London: J. M. Dent. Miller, D. (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, M. (2001) The Ethics of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox. Verso: London.

Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandel, M. (1982) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spruyt, H. (1994) The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tamir, T. (1993) Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van den Berghe, P. L. (1981) The Ethnic Phenomenon. New York: Elsevier. Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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30 Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: The Paradox of Modernity GERARD DELANTY

Two striking features of the present day are an apparent rise in nationalism and, on the other side, the increasing impact of global forces. This paradox of nationalism and globalization has been widely commented on and a variety of explanations is given to account for this. Globalization can be seen as creating the conditions for new nationalisms, which arise as defensive responses to global forces, or it can be seen as a response by powerful nations to the nationalism of the periphery. Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Iraq where a transnational Islamic nationalist movement has arisen as a result of a global military campaign and much of the Middle East has been caught in a revival of nationalism under the conditions of globalization. In the United States itself the global context of alleged terrorism has driven a new wave of nationalism which has gained momentum since 2001. In an increasingly globally oriented China, nationalism has stepped into the ideological space created by the passing of the communist ideology (see Gries, Chapter 40 in this Handbook). On a less vociferous note, nationalist movements have been on the rise throughout Europe, especially in the former communist countries (see Chapters 32 and 33 by Holmes and Hann respectively in this Handbook). In all of these

cases the transnational context has been central in bringing about changing centre– periphery relations (see James, Chapter 31 in this Handbook). No account of nationalism in its relation to the global context can neglect a second dynamic, namely the emergence of postnationalism, that is a movement both within and beyond nationalism and which may be related to cosmopolitanism. Although there has been an undeniable expansion in nationalism worldwide since the early 1990s, a feature of the current situation, and one closely connected with globalization, is cosmopolitanism. Indeed, it is possible to speak of a revival of cosmopolitanism, which is an older tradition to that of the nation and gives expression to a different dimension of belonging to that of nationalism. For the purposes of this chapter, cosmopolitanism is a condition distinct from nationalism and from globalization. By cosmopolitanism is meant the consciousness of globality and of postnational ties; it is a critical and reflexive consciousness of heterogeneity as opposed to the quintessentially modernist spirit of an homogeneous vision of sovereign statehood. But it is too, despite its ancient origins, a modern creation and expresses the embracing of otherness and plurality. As with

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much of nationalism today, globalization is the context for cosmopolitanism, but the latter is also defined in terms of a tension with nationalism and makes sense only in relation to nationalism. So nationalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism are characteristic features of the present day. What then is the nature of the relation and what are the implications of cosmopolitanism for the very idea of the nation? Can the nation escape nationalism and define itself by reference to cosmopolitanism? It would be a mistake to see cosmopolitanism and nationalism as opposed to each other and fundamentally different. Although this is a view that many critics take, the contention of this chapter is that nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which exist in a relation of tension, can be seen as complementary and it is possible to speak, with Julia Kristeva, of the idea of ‘nations without nationalism’ (Kristeva 1993). It is clearly the case that the nation is not disappearing from the world and, moreover, the nation will survive nationalism, in the sense of nationalism as a movement based on the principle that every nation must be defined in terms of an ethnicity and have a state. Nationalism in this conventional sense of the term has been a pervasive feature of the modern world and may even be the dominant feature of modernity, as Wimmer (2002) argues; however, it has also been notoriously a failure in the sense that its very success in achieving its goal has been the cause of some of the major disasters of the previous century. The nation, on the other hand, predates nationalism and while having been claimed by nationalism its continued appeal is something that cannot be denied, as critics such as Anthony Smith have argued (Smith 1995). Part of the appeal of the idea of the nation is its integral connection with a vision of human community that is seen as under threat from many forces, including from nationalism and global forces. There is considerable evidence to indicate that there are national traditions in the world which exist separately from nationalism and which have, it will be argued, a relation to cosmopolitanism. In this context some pertinent examples are Latin American traditions of the nation, the federalist notion of the nation as in Canada,

German constitutional patriotism, and the emergence of postnationalism in the European Union. In these cases there is some evidence to suggest that postnationalism is a significant force in the world and the basis of a really existing cosmopolitanism as opposed to a utopian idea or a purely administrative international order (see Beck and Grande 2004). More generally, the trend towards cosmopolitanism can be related to developments that have occurred within the nation-state. In place of the hyphen that has linked the nation to the state are now multiple points of connectivity. The cross-fertilization of all nations as a result of the many dimensions of globalization – ranging from migration, multiculturalism, global information and communication technologies, and Americanization – has loosened the links that have tied the nation to the state, a process that has led to the release of the nation from the state. This situation, which has often been characterized as a post-sovereign world, is the context in which new nationalisms emerge and also the context in which cosmopolitanism takes root. This chapter is concerned with the relation of nationhood to cosmopolitanism under the conditions of globalization. The main thesis of the chapter is that the ideas of cosmopolitanism and nationalism have been linked and the current situation points to a notion of the nation without nationalism. The first section looks at the rise of the cosmopolitan idea in the context of the emergence of liberal nationalism in the wake of the Enlightenment. The second section discusses the decline of the cosmopolitan ideal and its transformation into xenophobic nationalism. The third section is concerned with the contemporary revivial of cosmopolitanism along with the wider transformation of nationalism.

NATIONALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The origins of cosmopolitanism, it has been remarked, go back earlier than nationalism and are associated with the ancient consciousness of the world. The Greek conception of human

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belonging referred to the world of the polis and the cosmic order of the Gods. By means of the concept of kosmopolites, a cosmopolitan notion of belonging emerged in which the universal and particular were combined in a non-contradictory relation. The idea of cosmopolitanism developed with Stoicism towards the end of the classical Athenian period. Although it was an earlier Greek philosopher, Diogenes, who coined the term, it was the Stoics who gave it a wider meaning. Where for Diogenes it meant simply individual liberty, for the Stoics it entailed a more universalistic concept of belonging. Zeno, for instance, advocated the notion of an ideal cosmopolitan city based on membership of a wider human society. This was the sense of cosmopolitanism that influenced modern thought (Nussbaum 1997). Cosmopolitanism was reflected too in the idea of the oikoumene, meaning ‘the whole world’ or ‘the inhabited world’ and designated an identity with a broader vision of human community beyond the immediate context (see Inglis and Robertson 2005). Thus from its inception, cosmopolitanism is an orientation that challenges a narrow and exclusivist patriotism, but it is also opposed to the view that political community must reflect a disembodied globalism, such as a predetermined universal ‘natural’ order which can only be discovered and legislated for by science or by political elites. In this sense then from the beginning cosmopolitanism asserts the entanglement of the local in the global but does not prioritize one over the other. This reading of ancient cosmopolitanism suggests a view of cosmopolitanism as a dimension that mediates between the national or local and global; it is not one, but the reflexive relation of both. The cosmopolitan is someone whose roots are not for once and for all settled. Cosmopolitanism entails the positive recognition of difference and signals a conception of belonging as open. As a critical sensibility, then, it is opposed to closure and particularism. Cosmopolitanism did not play a significant role in medieval thought and it was not until the Enlightenment that it emerged to become a central part of the imagination of the modern era. For the Greeks, cosmopolitanism was primarily a moral condition that did not have a

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strong political or legal significance. Moreover, for the Greeks, cosmopolitanism was largely a disposition associated with individuals who identified themselves as citizens of the world. In this respect it differs from nationalism in lacking a collective identity. However, there is one clear strand linking the ancient and the modern conception of cosmopolitanism and it is in this too that the link with nationalism is most forcibly evident: cosmopolitanism was above all an expression of the belief in freedom. As a philosophy of freedom it had tremendous appeal for Enlightenment intellectuals and for nationalist leaders alike. Both nationalism and cosmopolitanism were based on the idea of freedom, be it the freedom of movement or the right of the nation to be free of tyranny. The emergence of the modern notion of the selflegislating subject, which lies at the heart of modern philosophical thought, gave to both nationalism and cosmopolitanism the basic animus of freedom as a political and personal goal and ideal to be pursued. Cosmopolitanism had a resonance in three major strands of Enlightenment thought which had an abiding influence on the nineteenth century and beyond: republicanism, liberal nationalism and Kantian cosmopolitanism. Like cosmopolitanism, republicanism is an older movement than nationalism and with ancient origins but differs from cosmopolitanism in its conception of peoplehood in terms of a territorial community of self-legislating subjects. Although having numerous forms, republicanism in particular in the American tradition tended towards particularism in its view of the political community as a community of fate. But much of that tradition – including the Jeffersonian tradition – was open to the cosmopolitan orientation to the world and to the principle of human freedom. The most famous example of republicanism and cosmopolitanism as co-existing was the French Revolution. The principles of the revolution were held to be universal and applicable to all nations fighting injustice and tyranny. In this sense the spread of the French Revolution and the ideas to which it gave rise across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century reflected the cosmopolitanism of the idea of a

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human republic based on freedom. Tom Paine wrote: ‘The true idea of a great nation is that which extends and promotes the principles of universal society; whose mind arises above the atmosphere of local thought, and considers mankind of whatever nation or profession they may be as the work of the Creator’ (cited in Schlereth 1977: 106). La Patrie signified a belief in equality, justice, tolerance and freedom for the Enlightenment. Thomas Schlereth, in his study of Enlightenment cosmopolitan thought, refers to this kind of cosmopolitanism as humanitarian nationalism and a contrast to an unchecked nationalism (Schlereth 1977: 109). But of course it is evident that this mixture of republicanism and cosmopolitanism can equally be seen in terms of nationalism, since it was the nationalism of the French republic that promoted this kind of cosmopolitanism. In time, with the transition from the republican nation to the centralized French republican state, the subordination of nationalism to cosmopolitanism is precisely what happened: cosmopolitanism became associated with the French aspiration to be a world power. If republican cosmopolitanism was a national project and one closely associated with the patriotism of the French republican state, the other face of cosmopolitanism reflected minority nationalism. Liberal nationalism was the dominant nationalist movement of the early nineteenth century and can be contrasted to the state patriotism of the established nation-state; it emerged from the 1820s – along with the Greek national cause – and, although like all nationalist movements of the age, it was elitist in leadership, unlike republicanism, which had become a state patriotism, it embodied a populism that was to prove enduring. The cosmopolitan dimension of this nationalism consists of a view that had gained widespread support in the nineteenth century that nations of a certain size had a right to become independent from the major powers. The famous examples of this are the Greek, Bulgarian, Italian and Irish nationalist movements, which gained the support of liberals, most notably from the 1870s the Liberal Party in Britain under the leadership of William Gladstone. Liberal nationalism within a broad

cosmopolitanism found a major expression in Giuseppe Mazzine’s Young Europe League, founded in Berne in 1834, which promoted the idea of self-determination as the principle by which the political map of Europe should be drawn. The movement led to several other such leagues, such as Young Poland, Young Italy and Young Ireland, which all pursued this goal. For this movement there was no contradiction between a European cosmopolitanism and the creation of sovereign republican nations. Kok-Chor Tan (2004) has argued that there is no fundamental contradiction between the principle of self-determination that is the basis of liberal nationalism and cosmopolitan political aspirations. Indeed, nationalism itself is a demonstration of the cosmopolitan principle that people can image a political community beyond the context of their immediate world. Moreover, cosmopolitanism requires an acknowledgement of national forms of attachment. The third strand in nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism is the Kantian internationalist one. In his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose in 1784 Kant recognized the limits of the existing international arena in which nations were not bound to international norms. Where international law is based only on conventions and treaties, a cosmopolitan order would be based on a legal order that sets normative standards for what states can do both within their domestic jurisdiction and beyond. In this sense, cosmopolitanism goes beyond the limits of internationalism to a view of the world as fundamentally connected. He believed history was leading to the creation of a cosmopolitan republican order which would replace a world of national republican nations. In a later essay in 1775, Towards Perpetual Peace, he modified this somewhat utopian position with a more realistic argument that a cosmopolitan law would limit the actions of states. In this view, cosmopolitanism would slowly emerge out of a process of enlightenment in which states would recognize the need for a new normative international order. According to Robert Fine, this was not just an abstract idea in the head of a philosopher but a reality. Referring to Hegel’s reworking of Kant, he argues this was a social fact of the modern

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age and a very real part of the social world, manifest not only in new international laws but also in new moral frameworks (Fine 2003a). This Enlightenment conception of cosmopolitanism was influential throughout the nineteenth century. It influenced republican political thought and liberal nationalism, but it also created a distinctive tradition which has been expressed in federalism and in the European idea as well as in various internationalist movements (see Bohman and LutzBachmann 1997). It can, of course, be noted that both cosmopolitanism and nationalism are territorial concepts. One resting on a belief in the territorial basis of belonging and the other based on freedom from a specific territory. Although it is not the defining tenet of cosmopolitanism, it has been closely related to a belief that the individual can transcend and move beyond and between the territories of nations. The entwinement of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the nationalist movements and political thought of the nineteenth century also confirms the argument made earlier, namely that most, if not all, nations in the modern world, and in particular those that were created in the nineteenth century, contain within their national imaginaries a cosmopolitan strand. Nowhere is this more evident than in the much debated relation between nationality and citizenship (Habermas 1992). Cosmopolitanism, with republicanism, shares a basic belief in the centrality of citizenship in the sense of a conception of the person and their rights as defined by birth as opposed to inherited privilege. While today we may no longer accept this definition of citizenship, in its time it was part of a progressive movement towards democratization and the recognition of the autonomy of the individual against the received values of the past such as the view that all people are part of a natural order in which some are signalled out by rank or class to social privilege. It was only with the descent into xenophobic nationalism from the early twentieth century that this consciousness was lost. Cosmopolitanism expresses the universalistic dimension of the nation and is in tension with particularistic tendencies. It may be suggested that cosmopolitanism

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as a movement towards openness resists the drive to closure that is a feature of the nationstate. The revival of cosmopolitanism today is symptomatic of the crisis of the nation-state in much the same way as the earlier emergence of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism was an expression of the ancien regime. But the utopianism of a new age of nation-states within a cosmopolitan order lost its utopianism by the early twentieth century.

FROM COSMOPOLITANISM TO NATIONALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Few works capture the decline of the cosmopolitanism idea better than Frederich Meinecke’s famous work Cosmopolitanism and the National State, originally published in German in 1907. Meinecke was struck by the gradual demise of the cosmopolitanism of the nineteenth century and the concomitant rise of the national state. For Meinecke, a German liberal nationalist, this was a positive development and reflected a broadly liberal view of nationalism as the inheritor of the cosmopolitan project.1 It was Meinecke’s view that ‘the true, the best German national feeling also includes the cosmopolitan ideal of a humanity beyond nationality and that it is “unGerman to be merely German” (Meinecke 1970: 21). Meinecke, who introduced the now familiar distinction between the ‘cultural nation’ and the ‘political nation’, argued the German Enlightenment notion of the cultural nation had been cosmopolitan but in resting on an intellectual universalism it was too weak to be politically effective since it lacked a clear focus on the state. The political nation needed more than lofty ideals, he argued. Clearly this was a position that had not been informed by the two world wars that were to follow and it is not impossible to imagine that Meinecke and other liberal patriots of the age, such as Max Weber, who held similar uncritical views, might have been less enthusiastic about the rise of the national state had they been writing at a later period. But until 1914 it was

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possible for German liberals to be hopeful about the promise of the nation-state. This was, after all, a country that had only recently been unified and a country where the intellectuals and professional class were highly cosmopolitan, having, as Liah Greenfeld remarks, only lately discovered nationalism (Greenfeld 1992). However, it was obvious to everyone that cosmopolitanism alone was not going to solve the problems of the age. The Germans were enthusiastic cosmopolitans, but became even more enthusiastic about nationalism, which quickly overshadowed cosmopolitanism. Two developments are noteworthy concerning the fate of cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century: the demise of cosmopolitanism into a xenophobic fear of diversity, on the one hand, and on the other, the decline of an international normative order. For most of the first half of that century the notion of cosmopolitanism was associated with the outsider and indicated a fundamentally pejorative condition of deracination. The cosmopolitan was epitomized by the Jew and came to signify the outsider within. The xenophobic and racist climate that developed in Europe from World War I onwards represented not merely a turning away from the cosmopolitanism of the nineteenth century, in Meinecke’s terms, but the reversal of it. Gone was the idea of the national community as the embodiment of cosmopolitan ideas; instead was a view of the cosmopolitan as an other to be excluded from the national polity. With this too came a shift in many countries from citizenship in terms of birth to a national citizenship based on descent. Towards the end of the nineteenth century population increase as a result of urbanization and industrialization led to greater and more mixed cities. In an age of empire-building the increasing mix and flow of peoples led to a shift in the meaning of cosmopolitanism in the direction of a fear of otherness. Nationalism lost its liberal underpinnings and with scientific racism on the rise, fear and otherness combined to forge xenophobia. The cosmopolitan is associated with the socially uprooted and with the decadence of the cosmopolitan city to which the national state had

an ambivalent relation. As pointed out by Eleanor Kofman, migrants, outcasts and refugees were the new cosmopolitans, but the terms came more and more to be defined with respect to the city and its inhabitants rather than to individuals (Kofman 2005). Indeed, the great cosmopolitan cities were often colonial trading outposts – Shanghai, Tangiers – where peripheral and imperial peoples settled. The resulting multiple identifications that such metropolitan centres tended to nurture did not fit easily with the national project towards uniformity and single identities. This is equally true of the Soviet Union. Although the antithesis to the Western democracies, the expression cosmopolitan was a pejorative term to equate the critical intellectual with bourgeois culture and Western decadence. The cosmopolitan city is a product of forces that the national state does not control and which it is unable to homogenize. Intellectuals, artists, political refugees and déclassé individuals of the various kinds that the late nineteenth century produced represented a cosmopolitanism that was perceived to be a threat, since these groups were separated from the elites but not directly under political or class power in the way the working class were. Cosmopolitanism thus signifies rootlessness with which goes, allegedly, a lack of loyalty to the nation. It is in the figure of the Jew that this suspicion of cosmopolitanism is most evident since with the Jew rootlessness is combined with otherness. The Jew was the cosmopolitan who as outsider embodied the vision of modernity as a relation of self and alterity (see Cheyette and Marcus 1998). Vienna was the melting pot of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. According to Ernst Gellner: The influx of nationalities into the expanding imperial capital meant that by the end of the nineteenth century almost everyone went over to a Völkisch-national position. The only liberals, or very nearly, were those of Jewish background or with Jewish links, i.e. the cosmopolitans. They could choose, in their public persona, to be proud of their universalistic liberalism and spurn the ethnic totem poles as shameful atavisms. (Gellner 1998: 138)

Here again we have an example of cosmopolitanism as part of the dark imaginary of

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nationalism and without which it would not have been able to define itself. It will of course be noted that many of these cosmopolitan cities – Paris, Vienna, Berlin – were national capitals and were, especially in Central Europe, multi-ethnic. The national project, on the one hand, sought to domesticate this cosmopolitanism by giving it a universalistic form and, on the other hand, it sought to suppress cosmopolitanism. The condition of cosmopolitanism was nationalism. As with national capitals, universalistic projects such as world exhibitions and monumental architecture were intended to make the nation part of a universalistic Western civilization. In this centralizing mission cosmopolitanism was absorbed into the universalism of the national state, without its critical and ambivalent relation to fixed reference points. But the figure of otherness and rootlessness could not easily be domesticated. In terms of a wider conception of modernity, it could be suggested that nationalism and cosmopolitanism reflected different aspects of modernity: the homogenizing project of the modern state and the pluralization of modern culture and social relations. Ernest Gellner, in his final book, described this in graphic terms as a struggle between atavistic and closed nationalism and a liberal cosmopolitan nationalism open to the world. Many primordialist nationalist movements, he argued, defended their völkisch cause against ‘bloodless’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ (Gellner 1998). It is evident, then, that by the twentieth century cosmopolitanism has given way to nationalism. The polyethnicity, which William McNeil believed was a feature of history prior to the arrival of the modern nation-state, disappeared and was replaced by a national citizenry (McNeil 1986). Finally mention can be made of the other fate of twentieth-century cosmopolitanism, namely internationalism. To the extent to which the Kantian notion of a cosmopolitan order of republican states survived the first half of the twentieth century it was as an international order based on sovereign nation-states. From the ill-fated League of Nations to the United Nations and the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, an international normative order had come into existence, but one based

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on sovereign nation-states and which could be seen as reinforcing, not undermining, the nation-state. This was also the fate of the international socialist movement, which since the Third International, developed on national trajectories and eventually became absorbed into national political parties. There were some exceptions, notably the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and, possibly, the case of the resistance movement to German occupation during World War II. In one of the best-known studies of internationalism, Hedley Bull, in The Anarchical Society, detected a move in the direction of what he called ‘international society’, with the suggestion that something like a new normative order was coming into existence (Bull 1977). An earlier indication of this was Karl Jaspers’s claim in 1945 in The Question of German Guilt that the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’ marks the birth of a new cosmopolitan order (Jaspers 1961; see also Fine 2000). At this point we can speak of the revival of cosmopolitanism.

THE REVIVAL OF COSMOPOLITANISM It is possible to speak of a revival of cosmopolitanism, which has been the subject of a wide range of recent publications (see Breckenridge et al. 2002; Fine 2003b; Vertovec and Cohen 2002). The details of this burgeoning field will not be examined here, rather the discussion will be confined to one issue, namely the relation of cosmopolitanism to the nation. On this question, roughly speaking, three positions can be identified. First, the universalistic position taken variously by Habermas, Held and Nussbaum, who argue for the inherent superiority of cosmopolitanism as a condition fundamentally different from nationalism. Second, the liberal argument represented by Kymlicka that cosmopolitan trends can be articulated by a liberal conception of the nation. Third, the postcolonial notion associated with Bhabha that the national and transnational are mutually implicated in hybrid identities.

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The universalistic argument takes different forms, ranging from moral cosmopolitanism to cosmopolitan democratic governance. A leading representative of moral cosmopolitanism is Martha Nussbaum, for whom, in a widely cited and discussed essay, patriotism is fundamentally wrong and cannot be a basis of the good society (Nussbaum in Cohen 1996). The nation-state, she argues, is unable to solve the problems facing it, especially those related to environment, food supply and population control. In place of patriotism, she argues, cosmopolitanism, as loyalty to the world community, is a real condition and has epistemological and cognitive dimensions. For instance, self-knowledge comes only through knowledge and identification with others and, moreover, it is a fact of our time that democracy cannot be constrained by territory. Nussbaum is uncompromising in her rejection of nationalism, which, in her view, allows no room for cosmopolitanism. What this position appears to exclude is the possibility of multiple forms of identification and also excludes what is surely an important feature of cosmopolitanism, the pluralism of co-existing forms of life and overlapping identities. Nussbaum would presumably argue that patriotism by definition is antithetical to such cosmopolitanism, based as it is on a unitary and exclusivist conception of belonging. While establishing convincing arguments in favour of cosmopolitanism, this stance on the whole results in a dualism of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In a related position, David Held and others have advocated a stronger political and legal theory of cosmopolitanism, which goes beyond Nussbaum’s essentially moral conception of cosmopolitanism and which has strong Kantian origins (Held 1995). This version of cosmopolitanism is based on a theory of global governance which is conceived in opposition to national forms of democracy. The thesis is that the nation-state is unable to realize democracy because it is both too big and too small to solve what are global problems. As a result, and briefly put, the nation-state is unable to realize democracy in terms of three principles: individual autonomy, political

legitimacy and democratic law. Although Held does not entirely reject the nation-state, which he acknowledges will not disappear as some of the more extreme positions suggest and may even have a place in a wider cosmopolitan order, he sees it in highly normative terms as not the primary site of democracy. At best the nation-state will co-exist with cosmopolitan forms of governance, as represented by international non-governmental actors and transnational organizations such as the United Nations. The difficulty with this argument is that it makes too strong a claim for cosmopolitanism and neglects that some of the most important political achievements have in fact been made by nation-states, such as social justice and local forms of democracy (see Brennan 1997; Zolo 1997). In addition, there is the problem of the cultural foundations of what, in effect, is a world polity. It is difficult to see how these problems can be resolved without taking into account cosmopolitan developments on the level of the national community. Habermas’s version of cosmopolitanism can be seen as one located midway between the moral universalism of Nussbaum and the political universalism of Held. The limited universalism of modern societies, which have created a democratic constitutional political culture based on reasoned argumentation, is tendentially cosmopolitan in that the cultural and political horizons of the political community cannot be contained by the nation-state. In terms of a theory of cosmopolitanism Habermas makes two major claims (Habermas 1996, 1998). The first is that political communication, like all human communication, is based on universalistic norms and structures which are the normative and cognitive basis of political legitimation in democratic societies. What is universalizable, then, is not a specific political or cultural value or belief specific to a particular society, but the discursive form of communication itself, as in the contestability of justifications and rules for inclusion in the discursive space of communication. Second is the argument that the communicative space has progressively expanded in modern societies in both formal and informal spheres. In his earlier work Habermas emphasized the role

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of radical social movements in expanding the discursive space of modern societies in which public debate became the focal point for democracy. Although the nation-state was the main container of universalizable political communication, this has now expanded beyond the nation-state. Most of Habermas’s reflections on the cosmopolitan political order refer to the European Union, which he sees as the main embodiment of the universalistic project of modernity (Habermas 2001, 2003). The European Union is the main chance for Europe to overcome the divisions of its history to create a genuinely democratic order. The central feature of this cosmopolitan European democracy is a ‘constitutional patriotism’, that is an identification with the principles of the constitution rather than with a particular set of national characteristics or culturally defined values. Habermas’s writings have been much discussed and it will suffice to mention here one problem. Habermas’s entire conception of cosmopolitanism demonstrates the limits of traditional kinds of nationalism, but presupposes the idea of the nation-state. This is because his idea of Europe is based on the constitutional form of national democracy bolstered by social rights and a framework of citizenship based on a common definition of peoplehood. Even if this self-understanding is largely civic in kind, and Habermas argues it must necessarily be so, the question remains how this can be transferred to a transnational order. There are complex issues at stake here but the point of the present analysis is simply to demonstrate the futility of disconnecting cosmopolitanism from the national level. It is not surprising therefore that Habermas’s very theory appears to presuppose the constitutional and normative framework of the nation-state. The following two positions can be seen as a modification of the implicit dualism in the universalistic position. The second approach to cosmopolitanism differs from the universalistic ones discussed in the foregoing in that they are based on a liberal conception of the nation (see Moore, Chapter 8 in this Handbook, for a further discussion of liberal nationalism). The best-known liberal theorist of nationalism is Will Kymlicka, who

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takes as his point of departure group rights and multicultural politics (Kymlicka 1995; Kymlicka and Straehle 1999). His question can be posed as this: what are the conditions under which a political community must recognize the rights of minorities, including the demands of minority nationalism? His main argument is that minority claims need not be seen as a threat to nation-states and the satisfaction of such demands is often essential to the survival and stability of democratic polities. Although this kind of liberal nationalism is not necessarily opposed to cosmopolitan governance as in Held (Kymlicka recognizes the role of transnational democracy) or Habermas’s constitutional republicanism (to which it is closer), it is a version of cosmopolitanism that does not set up a basic tension with the category of the nation. The disadvantage with this approach, however, is that it tends to reduce cosmopolitanism to relatively specific issues, such as the claims to autonomy or special rights particular groups may have. Indeed, Kymlicka is quite explicit on the limits to cosmopolitan claims, which is why his approach is simply a modification of standard liberalism. Habermas excludes most cultural problems from the sphere of cosmopolitanism, leading Thomas McCarthy to argue for the reconciliation of national and cosmopolitan perspectives in terms of a concern with cultural issues (McCarthy 2001). The postcolonial notion of the nation as put forward by Homi Bhabha is one of the most relevant examples of a cosmopolitan conception of the nation. According to Bhabha, nations are not unified or homogeneous but contain within their imaginaries alterity (Bhabha 1990). The nation is formed in a narrative of transgression and negotiation with otherness; it is, as a result, a fundamentally hybrid category. By means of the concept of narration, Bhabha aims to capture the negotiation of identity in a continuous movement. Nations are built upon narratives which are incomplete and perspectival; they are stories that people tell about their collective existence and in which the past is constantly redefined. This is more true today than in the past when marginal groups of people are coming to play

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a greater role in defining national identity: women, immigrants, colonial peoples are less ‘outside’ the nation than within it. Related to this is a shift in the narrative construction of the nation from the centre to the peripheries and from a male worldview to a female one. The result of this shift to the margin is more and more different narratives of nationhood. As a hybrid and multivocal category the nation is thus already cosmopolitan (see also Cheah and Robbins 1998). In other approaches the emphasis is on mobility. For instance, Ong sees a new cosmopolitanism in transnational migration and diasporic movements (Ong 1997; see also Hannerz 1996). The kind of cosmopolitanism that is referred to here is different from the Enlightenment’s model of cosmopolitanism, which was often Eurocentric and individualistic, based as it was on a notion of the citizen of the world; it is rather one that is represented by movements from the periphery and whose carriers are diasporic nations. In this view cosmopolitanism is itself a new kind of patriotism, a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (Appiah 1998, 2004). The postcolonial notion of the nation as containing within itself a relation to cosmopolitanism has the obvious merit of avoiding some of the dualistic assumptions of the universalistic position and offers a broader vision of the nation than in liberal nationalism. The main objection to it is that cosmopolitanism is too easily reduced to the condition of hybridity, on the one hand, and on the other to a postcolonial conception of the nation, which becomes difficult to apply to nations not essentially formed out of colonialism. Yet, important gains have been made in overcoming the tendential dualism in the Enlightenment-influenced models of cosmopolitanism. Although not advocating a postcolonial position as such, Ulrich Beck has outlined the foundations of a more comprehensive cosmopolitan social theory which echoes similar ideas (Beck 2000, 2002, 2006; Beck and Grande 2006). He is more critical of the notion of hybridity, stressing instead the recognition of difference as opposed to the simple fact of cultural mixing. In addition, cosmopolitanism requires the adoption of an approach that

replaces national–national relation with national–global and global–global relations. Cosmopolitan refers to the end of the ‘closed society’ of the nation-state but it does not spell the end of nation. Beck thus speaks of a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ to refer to what is a really existing cosmopolitanism in the world today and which corresponds to multiple attachments and forms of belonging that are reflexively constituted. Just as there is a ‘banal nationalism’, so too there is a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’, as in the multiculturalism of many societies and in forms of consumption.

CONCLUSION The conclusion we can draw from this chapter is that the category of the nation does not exist in a pure form any longer and, moreover, a critical examination of the nation in history will reveal that it was not fundamentally in tension with cosmopolitanism. Moreover, cosmopolitanism does not exist as a supranationalism, beyond and above the nation. Cosmopolitanism can itself lead to new expressions of national identity, as Aihwa Ong and Yasamin Soysal argue (Ong 1997; Soysal 1994; see also Triandafyllidou, Chapter 24 in this Handbook). Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are mutually implicated. Cosmopolitanism is no longer an individualistic disposition but has been incorporated into the cultural horizon of modernity and into the imaginaries of many nations. It is thus possible to see the nation as a vehicle for cosmopolitanism which is not disembodied and rootless. As a politically oriented movement, it is also a form of resistance against both globalization and the new nationalists, who, like the new global elites, also transnationally mobilized. As argued by Mary Kaldor, a genuinely democratic cosmopolitanism must give voice to the grievances of the great many people excluded from the benefits of globalization (Kaldor 1996). This ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ can be related to forms of solidarity that go beyond traditional nationalism and which are also different from transnational and supranational networks. It may be suggested in conclusion that cosmopolitanism

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refers to a notion of peoplehood as defined by neither nation nor state but by the encounter with difference, both difference within the self and beyond the self. NOTE 1 The German term Meinecke used was Weltbürgertum, which has a more restrictive meaning than the term cosmopolitanism and more specifically means ‘world citizenship’.

REFERENCES Appiah, K. A. (1998) ‘Cosmopolitan patriots’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Appiah, K. A. (2004) The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beck, U. (2000) ‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity’, British Journal of Sociology, 51 (1): 79–105. Beck, U. (2002) ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19 (1–2): 17–44. Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. and Grande, E. (2006) Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bhabha, H. (1990) Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Bohman, J. and Lutz-Bachmann, M. (eds) (1997) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Breckenridge, C. A., Pollock, S., Bhabha, H. and Chakrabarty, D. (eds) (2002) Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brennan, T. (1997) At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society. London: Macmillan. Cheah, P. and Robbins, B. (eds) (1996) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Cheyette, B. and Marcus, L. (eds) (1998) Modernity, Culture and the ‘The Jew’. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cohen, J. (ed.) (1996) For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Fine, R. (2000) ‘Crimes Against Humanity: Hannah Arendt and the Nuremberg Debates’, European Journal of Social Theory, 3 (3): 293–311. Fine, R. (2003a) ‘Kant’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism and Hegel’s Critique’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 29 (6): 609–30. Fine, R. (2003b) ‘Taking the “ism” out of Cosmopolitanism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 6 (4): 451–70. Gellner, E. (1998) Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1992) ‘Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe’, Praxis International, 12 (1): 1–19. Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2001) The Postnational Constellation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (2003) ‘Toward a Cosmopolitan Europe’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (4): 86–100. Hannerz, U. (1996) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, in his Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Inglis, D. and Robertson, R. (2005) ‘The Ecumenical Analytic: “Globalization”, Reflexivity and the Revolution in Greek Historiography’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8 (4): 99–122. Jaspers, K. (1961) The Question of German Guilt. New York: Capricorn Books. Kaldor, M. (1996) ‘Cosmopolitanism versus Nationalism: the New Divide?’, in R. Caplan and J. Feffer (eds), Europe’s New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kofman, E. (2005) ‘Figures of the Cosmopolitan: Privileged Nationals and National Outsiders’, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 18 (1): 83–97. Kristeva, J. (1993) Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kymlicka, W. and Straehle, C. (1999) ‘Cosmopolitanism, Nation-States, and Minority Nationalism: A Critical Review of Recent Literature’, European Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1): 65–88. McCarthy, T. (2001) ‘On Reconciling Cosmopolitan Unity and National Diversity’, in D. P. Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McNeil, W. (1986) Poly-Ethnicity in World History. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Meinecke, F. (1970 [1907]) Cosmopolitanism and the National State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1997) ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 1: 1–25. Ong, A. (1997) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Schlereth, T. (1977) The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought. Southbend, IN: University of Notre Dame. Smith, A. (1995) Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Soysal, Y. (1994) The Limits of Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tan, K.-C. (2004) Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (eds) (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimmer, A. (2002) Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zolo, D. (1997) Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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31 Theorizing Nation Formation in the Context of Imperialism and Globalism PA U L J A M E S

Just as the nation-state did not die at the end of the twentieth century – despite claims of its imminent demise – its emergence as a social form in the nineteenth century was neither a creation ex nihilo nor a specifiable moment of birth. In that period we saw for the first time the uneven merging of national communities and state polities to form nation-states, but ‘the nation’ as a social form has a much longer history. In other words, nations and states can only be understood in the long run of uneven and changing global history. This chapter suggests that understanding the matrix of nationalism, the nation and the nation-state requires as one line of enquiry a recognition that different kinds of nation formation have emerged across world history in the context of the dominance of different ways of living and being: traditionalism, modernism and postmodernism. Traditional nations – the medieval natio, for example – arose in the context of communities of persons lifted out of place and thrown together in contexts such as universities, courts, monasteries and barracks that brought them face to face with people from other cultures. Traditional nations cannot be understood by simply reading backwards from

our understanding of modern nations. As I will argue, modern nations are much more abstract communities and are formed in the context of globalizing practices of production, exchange, communication and enquiry, practices that change the nature of how people live in time and space. Postmodern nations have yet to emerge as such, but in the present, we are seeing continuing structures of modernism increasingly overlayed by practices and subjectivities of postmodernism, including postmodern nationalism. This is evidenced, for example, in the ideology that the extension of the national interest has no spatial limits and a particular nation can be exemplary for all. This discontinuous but long-term history makes theorizing nation formation an incredibly complex process. It also suggests a second line of enquiry that treats nation formation and globalization as interconnected rather than simply antithetical. Modern nation formation, in particular, can only be understood in the context of historically and ontologically changing patterns of imperialism and globalization. In other words, the formation of the modern nation-state and the burgeoning of modern globalization, were bound up with each other.

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In their modern form, they burgeoned across the same period of the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth. This argument seems counterintuitive in the context of the current tensions as processes associated with contemporary globalization contribute to the reconstitution of the framework of state sovereignty. However, in conjunction with the argument about the changing form of both globalization and nation formation, this begins to make sense. These two lines of narrative – the changing nature of nation formation and the changing context of globalization – weave through the present chapter. The underlying premises of the discussion thus run as follows: Proposition 1 Just as the nation-state is not about to disappear, it did not suddenly appear in history. There is no first nation-state and there is no date that marks the beginning of the nation-state as a social formation. The best that we can say is that a motley collection of modern republics and constitutional monarchies emerged as a globalizing system of nation-states in the mid-nineteenth century and that this had begun to consolidate by the beginning of the twentieth as the dominant global system of polity-communities. In other words, the nation-state system is a globalizing phenomenon. The development of this system coincided with a particular expression of a globalizing mode of organization called ‘rationalizing bureaucracy’ – namely the modern state – as it came to surpass all other institutional forms for organizing political power. Proposition 2 Across the globe, nation formation as we know it developed with the changing modes of practice associated with the dominance of modernism. However, though modern nations are modern constructions (note the apparent tautology), they are not simply so. Nation formation involves both deep continuities and radical discontinuities with traditional (including sacredly conceived) ways of life. There were traditional nations or natio long before the rise of modern nations; at the same time most modern nations have no continuous relationship to those earlier traditional nations. Proposition 3 Nation-states – as distinct from the much older phenomenon of nations – first

emerged during the period of heightening modern globalization. In other words, modern nation formation and modern global formation were born during the same period out of the same processes – that is, through the same abstracting modes of practice: capitalist production, print communication, commodity exchange, bureaucratic organization and rationalized analytic enquiry. This simple historical reality should at least give pause to those who would argue that globalization is in essential opposition to the nation-state. Proposition 4 It is the galloping and overt dominance of these very processes of abstract structuring – experienced as global flows of capital and culture – that, ironically, is giving rise to the sense that the nation-state faces an impending crisis, and that the social whole is collapsing into fragments. However, this does not mean that the nation as a form of community is about to disappear. In fact, national identity is being vigorously reasserted, whether it is in the classically modern form of a million soldiers massing on the India–Pakistan border or as autonomous individuals walking the postmodern streets of a Hip Hop Nation. Nations, like other post-tribal territorial communities, are changing fundamentally – with the placements and relationships between persons at the level of the face-to-face becoming more contingent and fragmented. However, rather than becoming anachronistic vestiges of a passing world, nations are becoming more contradictorily stretched between traditional, modern and postmodern ways of living. In short the contemporary nation is layered in contradiction. The contemporary nation – secularized, horizontal, currently dominated by modernist practices and concerns – contradictorily grounds its subjectivities in the very categories that, at another level, have been substantially reconstituted. Three such grounding categories are particularly relevant here: relations of embodied connection, times of sacred recollection and places of enduring nature. The use of the concept of grounding here is intentional. It marks a clear distinction from the prominent modernist theorists of nationalism such as Ernest Gellner (1998), Anthony Giddens (1985), and even Benedict

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Anderson (1983), who tend to treat these categorical elements as the mere traditional content, re-fabricated for a modern context. By contrast, I am suggesting that these things still have categorical meaning as part of the contradictory form of the nation-state in a globalizing world. This continuity–discontinuity has become clearer as the modern connection between nation and state has become increasingly problematized. At the same time, the argument presented here is also very different from that presented by historians such as Leah Greenfield or Adrian Hastings. Greenfield (1993) traces what she claims are continuities in the rise of the nation back to early sixteenth-century England. She bases her argument tenuously on a ‘semantic transformation’ that drew the word ‘nation’ together with ‘people’, supposedly signalling ‘the emergence of the first nation in the world, in the sense in which the word is understood today’ (1993: 6). Hastings (1997) pushes this claim back further to the Saxon times at the end of the tenth century, again based on language, particularly as it was regularized as a specific vernacular for the translation of the Bible.1 By contrast, this chapter argues that modern nations are lived communities that emerged in the globalizing generalization of modes of practice that came to affect everyone across the world, however unevenly. In this argument, the development of a vernacular literary language or a changed definition of the concept of ‘nation’ expresses only the abstraction of a few before their time as they worked in the abstracting medium of writing – in particular, groupings of intellectuals and clerics.

ACROSS THE TRADITIONAL– MODERN DIVIDE The question of different forms of nationhood takes us directly into a debate that continues to dominate the nationalism literature: the traditionalism–modernism question. There has been little theoretical progress in this area beyond the debates over deep ethnic origins versus fabricated modern structurings. The most

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revealing example of this debate was that between Ernest Gellner (1996) and Anthony Smith (1996) in the pages of Nations and Nationalism, but in the end it was left hanging. On the one hand, the radical modernists overplay the break between traditional and modern societies. When Ernest Gellner says that nationalism was possible only through the changes wrought by modern industrialism, the evidence suggests that his theory is more applicable to the nation-state than to the nation as a long-run, but fundamentally changing, form of community. On the other hand, the ethno-symbolists tend to give a descriptive and factorial account of the continuities, without providing us with a way of theorizing the discontinuities. When Anthony Smith says that the basis of the modern nation is usually a long-run ethnic community, the genealogical accuracy of his position depends upon treating the national recovery of a unified ethnic past as a one-dimensional matter of retrieving symbolic content. It misses out on the matter of subjectivity being unevenly reconstituted in the context of changing social form. When Benedict Anderson says that the nation has to be understood in terms of the faltering grip of the great religious communities upon people’s imagination, what he is describing is the rise of a subjectivity of modern national reflexivity – not the full sense of nation formation as it simultaneously carries forward and reworks traditionally located subjectivities. Hence, the sixth summarizing argument of the chapter can be expressed as follows: Proposition 5 Rather than replacing traditionalism in a revolutionary and epochal shift, modernism emerged unevenly and across a long period of change and upheaval as the dominant ontological formation. These practices and subjectivities of modernism have come to interconnect the globe at one level, but they have not changed everything or completely swept earlier formations aside. As any area-specialist would understand, there is a deep and contradictory relationship between traditionalism and modernism, both in the past and in all contemporary national societies. The current ‘revival’ of nationalistic Islam in Aceh, for example, carries all these tensions. The 1976 Achehnese Declaration of

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Independence carries an archetypical modernist claim for a primordial past: We, the people of Acheh, Sumatra, exercising our right of self-determination, and protecting our historic right of eminent domain to our fatherland, do hereby declare ourselves free and independent from all political control of the foreign regime of Jakarta and the alien people of the Island of Java. Our fatherland Acheh, Sumatra, had always been a free and independent sovereign State since the world began. (Cited in Knapman 2001)

There you have it: a modernist argument for an essentialism of identity ‘since the world began’. It is an argument that contradictorily cuts straight across the rational interpretative relativism of the modernist mode of inquiry. Modernist claims for the deep continuity of nations are rarely now made in such stark primordialist terms, nevertheless even when historical/primordial claims come mediated by more rationalized inquiry they still tend to look back to a pre-modern continuous past. For example, for their rendition of the Acehnese chronology showing that their nation began before the colonial incursion, the writers for the atjehtimes.com website draw upon the Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta Encyclopedia. Without a notion of levels – that is, an understanding of overlaying levels of tribalism, traditionalism, modernism, and most recently postmodernism – the problems of explaining this intersecting set of contradictory claims to knowledge remain intractable, including why they feel it necessary to project claims about their nation on the World Wide Web, and why they felt it legitimate to draw upon a populist global text such as Encarta Encyclopedia. The contemporary nation as an abstract community of strangers stretched across stateadministered abstracted territory, is both projected globally and calls back upon the embodied subjectivities of more traditional forms of community, including traditional ‘ethnic’ community (or ethnie in Anthony Smith’s (1996) terms). However, as a dominant formation it only comes into being under conditions of the emerging dominance of globalizing modernism. In these terms, Ernest Gellner would, for example, rightly say that it is rare for nations to be seen as objectively connected by a verifiable genealogy linking the

whole society – the act of census data-collection just documents an already-existent civil nation and incorporates ethnicity as one marker of modern nationality. This is true; however, it is not the point. No communities beyond the immediacies of family are ever formed along one-to-one bloodlines. A complicated example comes from Somalia, where according to Islamic tradition the whole of the nation is linked by one intricate genealogical tree. The tree from which the ancestor-king descends is both mythological and doubly abstracted. It is abstracted as an icon – the sacred tree, sycamore – and as the genealogical tree that can be memorized graphically or drawn as lines on paper: an abstract but lived tableau. Moreover, it is the representation of a community that will never all meet together. In this way, the modern nation can leave genealogical placement behind or carry traditional genealogical placement to a further level of abstraction – and carry it, it most often does. National genealogy can thus bear two forms of truth: old and new, traditional and modern. However, when Abdalla Omar Mansur (1995) sets out to interrogate the authenticity of such a claim by looking at its epistemological logic he completely misunderstands the nature of this mythology. It doesn’t matter that different tribal groupings have different narrative versions of the creation story of the stranger coming down from the sacred tree, or that the Qurianic version links the motif of the man in the tree to Moses whereas others do not. What we have here is an intersection of tribal forms (including the Daarood and Ajuuran clans) and traditional forms of inquiry and knowledge (the Islamic religion), together with modern nation formation (the Somali nation), all interpreted through a globalizing postmodern ideology – the nation as ‘invention’. Contrary to the ‘invention of nations’ thesis, persons can believe as practical consciousness that the mythology is, in the tribal or traditional sense, true, and at the same time, if pressed, accept as reflexive consciousness that nations are not literally held together as a single documentable tree of blood-by-birth. Moreover, even at a reflexive level the categories of life and death continue to inhere in

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the modern nation. They do so not as the putatively kinship-based idea of a single founding family 2 but as the ideas of living in the territorial place of one’s forebears and at times of crisis self-actively putting one’s life on the line for one’s nation. The verities of blood and soil become the metaphors of the modern nation, and these metaphors, though not so directly expressed as under Adolf Hitler’s Germany, continue to permeate the language of even the most civic of nation-states. A tragic contemporary example is found in the discourses of the martyrs/suicide bombers of Palestine as they confront the modern militarized state of Israel. Anthony Smith (1996) would thus say that this shows that ethnic embodiment is often important to the sense of nationhood. And of course in many cases – though not including Indonesia or Singapore or Australia or the United States of America – he would also be right. However, it tells us little about the structural changes, objective and subjective, that make ethnicity a symbolic marker, drawn upon across the globe in proclaiming the formations of nations. By contrast, I have been pressing to have these themes of traditionalism and modernism understood in terms of an argument about ontological formations as unevenly layered across each other, rather than as epochal replacements of prior formations. The themes of extended genealogy and abstract bloodline point to the continuities and discontinuities of social formation across different ontological formations, and it suggests that a ‘levels’ argument thus provides a way out of the ‘ethnic roots/modern structures’ dilemma. There are methodological traps here for the unwary. The most obvious trap is to treat the constitutive foundations of tribalism and traditionalism as the basis of the modern (contradictory) nation. This, in other words, entails forgetting a primary insight of comparative social theory: nations are not tribes, even if tribes can become nations.3 By the same argument, ethnicity is not the basis of the modern nation. Moreover, ‘ethnicity’ is itself a modern phenomenon, not a pre-modern expression of genealogical connection. That is why Anthony Smith (1996) has to use the French term ethnie rather than ‘ethnic community’. ‘Ethnicity’, in

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the argument of this chapter, is the modern name given to one way of subjectively embedding the more abstract relations of the modern nation in more concrete ontological categories of embodiment, temporality and spatiality. Ethnicity is important and relates to subject/ objective relations of embodiment, but it is not so important that it warrants lifting above other ontological categories such as tradition and future common fate (temporality) or place and territory-in-common (spatiality). Modern empire-nations as diverse as Indonesia and the United States are cases where issues of temporality and spatiality have been officially emphasized over and above questions of ethnicity. This relates to a further major issue on which this chapter departs from the mainstream writings, the question of the relationship between ethnicity and territory. Proposition 6 The distinction between territoriality and ethnicity is useful, but the distinction between ‘territorial nation’ (Western) and ‘ethnic nation’ (Eastern) collapses into a heap of qualifications. Nations in both the East and the West were formed through interwoven processes that drew them into relation to each other. In particular, they were formed in the context of relations of imperial expansion and the clash of empires, East and West. There is a tendency, following a long tradition from Hans Kohn onwards, to treat the analytic distinction between ‘territorial nations’ and ‘ethnic nations’ as the basis of two distinct models of nation formation. This leads to a tortured narrative about the sequence of nation formation. In this story, first came the ‘territorial nations’ in the West. Supposedly, for some unspecified time, territoriality formed the only concept of the nation. Then, those European states found that it only worked if they also developed a shared culture of myths and symbols. Alongside this development, but more gradually and as a separate process, there emerged ethnic nations on the basis of pre-existing ethnic ties: Germany, which was also a bit territorial; and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, more prominently ethnic. Later, when the political elites of Asia and Africa decided to create nations they first tried

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the Western model, but were then compelled by the ‘logic of the situation’ to form new myths and symbols. Who were these first ‘territorial nations’ that could take their ethnic elements for granted? First, it should be said, they were territorial states or empires, not territorial nations. Secondly, these states could take ethnicity for granted before the nineteenth century because ethnicity as distinct from blood ties (genealogy) was not for anyone at that time an active category of self-identification. The ‘ethnic revival’ and the positive use of the concept of ‘ethnicity’ occurred in these states as they became nationstates. If we take one of the oft-used examples, the French, we find an amalgam of cultures and regions (ethnies if you like, but only as a retrospective appellation) brought together through changing modes of practice across the nineteenth century. Nation formation was evidenced in such apparently banal processes as military conscription (beginning in the late eighteenth century), railways (from the 1850s), compulsory and secular education (from the early 1880s) and the generalization of print distribution and radio broadcasting from the end of the century. These were all developments that were occurring in different places around the world. In this case an empire-state was extending its territorial hold and naming itself as a nation. However, even despite the self-conscious territorial organization of the nation-state, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that this could be taken for granted. Even then we can list the continuing ethnicterritorial cultures that could have become nation-states: (1) the Burgundians in eastern France, a people of Scandinavian origin whose language had died out since their incorporation into the French state at the end of the fifteenth century, but who have carried forth a regional identity to the present day; (2) the Basques from the south-west border of France and Spain who have asserted for themselves the national legitimacy of a government of Euskadi; (3) the Bretons, from the north-west peninsular of France, who revived the Breton language at the end of the nineteenth century as a response to Francification, not the other way round; (4) the Provençales, who still use

the language of Occitan or langue d’oc, though as a private rather than public language, and sustain a sense of cultural difference through folk revivals and tourism; (5) the Corsicans, who from the late 1960s have sponsored strong movements for regional autonomy or semiautonomy; and (6) the Catalans, from the south-east border of France and Spain (including Andorra), who still feel a strong cultural, though not political, nationalism drawing upon the distinct and old language of Catalan. This tendency to treat patchwork Western territorial states such as France as if they were already territorial nations is related to a tendency to treat the features of being a nation as intrinsically Western. This is simply a category mistake. There is nothing about the notions of ‘territoriality’ or ‘political culture’ or ‘legal codes’, for example, that makes them ‘Western’. Certainly the dominant Western mode of organization involves a certain form of abstract territoriality and sovereignty over the landscape, however the absolutist states (or what some writers too easily call ‘the nations’) of England and France did this by virtue of their transition to modern forms of juridical framing – not by virtue of being ‘Western’. We only have to compare these to the approaches to territory and culture in the ‘Eastern’ state of Japan to see how shaky the categories become (Anderson 2000/1). Japan, like China, had long been a territorial state with established legal codes and conceptions of sovereignty. The Tokugawa modernizing revolution of the late nineteenth century was certainly influenced in part by Western-educated intellectuals, but it also restored the traditional emperor as the essence of the national polity, or kokutai. This carries through our theme of the contradiction of traditionalism and modernism. Proposition 7 European imperial expansion, in the context of fundamental shifts in the modes of practice, was fundamental to nation formation, but this does not mean that Europe provided the blueprint for nation-state formation. Imperial expansion provided the context for a globalizing relation that saw nation-states formed across the world in relation to each other. Each nation-state was ‘unique’, but only made sense in relation to other nation-states.

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When some writers argue that the earliest cases of territorial nations were in the West – England, France, Spain, the Netherlands and later Russia – there is a further question of analytical anachronism here that needs to be addressed. So far I have argued that though these polities were certainly long-run territorial entities that later became nations, it does not make them continuous nations, or at least it does not make them nations back then. It should however be said that there were ‘nations’ prior to the nineteenth century, but they were not nation-states, and they were not ‘territorial nations’. As a short-hand response to the existence of nations prior to the nationstate, the different ‘stages’ in the history of nations, nationalism and nation-states can be set out as a series of moments. Woven into these moments are practices of imperialism and globalization. The concept of natio existed in the medieval period and earlier, but it meant something completely different from the modern sense of the word ‘nation’: first, in archaic definitions the concept of natio was used as co-extensive with that of ‘tribe’, or what have been referred to as ethnie. Secondly, it referred to traditional communities of erstwhile strangers who found common purpose with each other under conditions of being lifted out of their locales into new settings of face-to-face interaction. This occurred in places such as monasteries, universities and military barracks, places that institutionally marked the traditional imperial extension of states and churches. The only commonality in this second case with the modern nation is that these communities – groups that we can call traditional nations, assuming all the unusual ontological weight that the adjective ‘traditional’ has to carry in this context – were abstracted communities forced to examine basic issues of embodiment, temporality and spatiality. They were communities of fate, but they were not territorial nations. From the sixteenth century in England, but also in other places such as the Netherlands, the concept of the ‘nation’ went through a stage of politicization. However, it was associated with the genealogically connected aristocratic

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ruling classes or the emergent groupings of persons of learning, the new intellectually trained of a country or region, rather than with the general population of the realm. Despite the language of ‘nation’-ness, the predominant political structure remained from the top firmly that of traditional kingdom or empire, and from the bottom, village or parish. The unwashed masses did not care to be part of any putative nation, nor were they invited to be so. In this third manifestation of traditional communities of common fate, traditional nations were only territorial to the extent that they were co-extensive sometimes with kingdoms, sometimes counties and sometimes empires. This was the period of early-modern globalization as European states in competition with others extended their power in the New Worlds. It was, in short, the period of the emergence of globalizing capitalism (Wolf 1982). From the late eighteenth century we started to get intellectual and political creeds about ‘nationalism’ as European philosophers, theologians, composers and poets ‘discovered’ the concept. However, as I have been implicitly arguing, naming the thing does mean that the thing is exclusive to the places that first name it. Nevertheless, this period marked the rise of modern nationalism as a self-conscious European philosophy. It is the period that Roland Robertson (1992) calls the ‘incipient stage’ of globalization, when we saw the crystallization of conceptions of formalized international relations. The late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of explicitly nationalist movements in the Americas, Europe and parts of Asia. These movements rose before most of the old absolutist states, kingdoms and empires began to see themselves as territorial nations.4 This simple fact is an important challenge to the idea of pre-nineteenth century, pre-nationalist territorial nation-states. Across the nineteenth century, public spheres developed in different places across the globe that broadened the sense of the ‘public’ beyond the court or town square. This development occurred in association with ideologies of public sovereignty, democracy and national citizenship, and was an important ideological

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backdrop to the still emerging nation-state system. They depended upon a changing mode of communication that drew a reading public into political consequence, but also began to globalize communications. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the uneasy conjunction of national citizenry and abstract state really became established, forming in some cases what can be now called the classical modern nation-states. It is important to remember that the old empires carried through into the next century as viable polities, but also that the first wave of nationstates was formed in the context of classical imperialism, including what has been called the ‘Scramble for Africa’. This was the period that Roland Robertson (1992) calls the ‘takeoff ’ phase of modern globalization or Robbie Robertson (2003) calls the Second Wave of Globalization. The short twentieth century featured the ‘great wars’ of territorial nationalism, and the liberation movements of modern tribalism and neo-traditionalism. During this period new nation-states emerged in the Third World, but they also formed in the West, including Yugoslavia, and its subsequent breakaways. The late twentieth century and early twentyfirst century saw the rise of a new subjectivity of nationalism – postmodern nationalism – where the emphasis moved to an aesthetic of choice. While there may still be no postmodern nations as such, during this period, particularly in the West, postmodern subjectivities of ephemeral intensity came to overlay the continuing modern foundations of the contemporary nation. The first point to draw from this series of moments is that the history of nation formation is one of continuity and discontinuity. Traditional national sentiment is qualitatively different in many fundamental respects from the modern nationalism of horizontal and generalized compatriotism. Nevertheless, despite this difference, it is a subjectivity that demands a broader explanation of nation formation than the modernist theorists currently allow. In the sense in which I am using these terms, modern nationalism is associated with a self-conscious politicization of the relation

between community and polity, usually with the desire for a state for one’s nation, whereas traditional national sentiment has no such associations. On the other hand, modern and traditional national subjectivities are related in that they both entail a process through which persons are, at one level, lifted out of the integral connections of face-to-face community, and abstracted from messianic time and sacred place. It is this process that enables certain persons still living within the ontological formation of traditionalism – namely intellectuals, clerics, poets – to name territorialized places or genealogically connected peoples as distinct and demarcated entities, bounded in territorial space and historical time, and separable from other such similar entities. The second point is that this chapter parts company with any implicit argument in the mainstream literature that Europe provided the blueprint for modern nation formation, except in regard to being contextually crucial as the dominant globalizer of practices and ideas, including philosophical naming of the idea of nationalism. One step in this revision is to qualify fundamentally any implication that Europe is the birthplace of the nation-state. Certainly, as has already been acknowledged, Europe was central to the emergent system of capitalist production and exchange relations that through imperial expansion affected fundamental changes in the societies of the ‘periphery’. These changes became the context for the first wave of emergent nationstates in the nineteenth century.5 However, even in relation to the last wave of Third World nation-states we have to be careful, for example, of too-quickly agreeing with Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on the export of the idea of nationalism when he draws attention to the surface phenomenon that ‘twentieth century nationalisms have a profoundly modular character’ (1991: 135). In one sense it is true. However, questions remain. Why, and in what way, was the blueprint of the civil nation-state taken up? (I will come back to this question shortly.) Moreover, we need to ask whether in fact it is the case that the Western European nation-states simply came first as a model to copy. Examples that qualify the focus on Europe as the proximate source of the nation-state are not

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hard to find. As I wrote in Nation Formation (1996), profoundly influenced by Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the nations of the New World, the Thirteen States in North America had instituted the internal pacification of its indigenous inhabitants; they had fought a war of independence against a European power which brandished absolutist doctrines of the indivisibility of sovereignty (1775–81); they had worked out a system for parcelling, commodifying and administering the ‘empty’ frontier territories; and, in the name of the People of the United States, had ratified a unifying constitution (1789) – all before the August Days of 1789 saw Louis XVI’s ancien régime brought to an end by his erstwhile royal subjects. If we travel south to the colonies of Spanish America, Anderson asks: ‘why was it precisely creole communities that developed so early conceptions of their nationness – well before most of Europe?’ (1991: 50) The apparent anachronism cannot be explained through a straightforward diffusionist or modular argument. Rather the gradual and uneven consolidation in Europe, and elsewhere, of developments that framed the transition from the imperial or monarchical state to the abstract state, also contributed to a changed and globalizing world-time, a changed constitutive setting in which across the globe, and bearing back upon Europe, states and peoples began to assert their political and cultural identity. In short, nation-states were formed in the over-determined and uneven context of modern globalization. This was a basis of the formation of nation-states, both in Europe and elsewhere. Even the nation-states that were formed during the second wave of decolonization after the late 1950s could not simply copy the Western blueprint. The decolonizing communities may have been pressed to take up what was by then a global model, but the more important issue was a globalizing pressure of social change that was integrated and accommodated from within. In other words, as the nature of the dominant layer of their internal societies changed, modern nationstate status was contradictorily naturalized: at one level as an expression of a traditional continuity, and at another as an expression of modern progress and complete discontinuity.

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IN THE CONTEXT OF IMPERIAL GLOBALIZATION A further step in distancing the present argument from the idea of a Western blueprint or ‘modular export’ approach involves examining the process of how the colonies responded to the imposition of a modernizing administration. In explaining how the development of nationalism in Spanish America could arise earlier than in the heartlands of Europe, Benedict Anderson describes a manifold process that helps us to qualify his own ‘modular’ argument. In the first place, Creole administrators, clerically trained men (women were excluded) who were often white but born in the Americas, found themselves as administrators on common ‘journeys’ that took them across time, status and place. In the language of the present chapter, through a new rationalizing mode of organization they were abstracted from relations of traditional embodied temporality and spatiality. Moreover, unlike European and East Asian feudal nobles, who ascended genealogically, or absolutist ‘men of learning’ and Confucian functionaries, who climbed through talent, the Creole functionaries of the New World climbed to a certain level only to find themselves barred vertically and horizontally. They shared the embodied cultural marks of trans-Atlantic birth, bound within the geographical limit of their particular colony, but were unable to be masters of it. Finally, in the context of a changed mode of communication in intersection with capitalist trade relations, they began to imagine themselves as a horizontal community. Though my condensed description of the process may not be immediately clear, Anderson presents it with a brilliantly lucid word-picture: Early gazettes contained – aside from news about the metropole – commercial news (when ships would arrive and depart, what prices were current for what commodities in what ports), as well as colonial political appointments, marriages of the wealthy, and so forth. In other words, what brought together on the same page, this marriage with that ship, this price with that bishop, was the structure of the colonial administration and market-system itself. In this way, the newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices belong. (1991: 62)

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This description provides us with the means of qualifying Anderson’s own claim about modularity. However, I want to emphasize that it is only a qualifying and a resetting of the argument, not a rejection. I say this because the theorist whose work I intend to use to carry my argument a step further – Partha Chatterjee – is more critical of Anderson than is warranted. Chatterjee rightly describes Anderson as problematically setting up three distinct and chronologically ordered models of nationalism: (1) Creole nationalism in the Americas; (2) linguistic or so-called ‘popular’ nationalism in Europe; and (3) official nationalism in Europe. It is from the third variant that nationalism develops a modular quality that in the twentieth century can be drawn on by the Third World. Chatterjee concludes that, instead of pursuing the varied, and often contradictory, political possibilities inherent in this process, Anderson seals up his theme with a sociological determinism ... What, if we look closely, are the substantive differences between Anderson and Gellner on twentieth century nationalism? None ... In the end both see in third-world nationalisms a profoundly ‘modular’ character. They are invariably shaped according to the contours outlined by given historical models: ‘objective, inescapable, imperative’. (1986: 21)

Here Chatterjee has overstated his objection to Anderson, particularly given our earlier discussion about the importance of his work on endogenous structural processes such as the journeys of the Creole elites. Nevertheless, Chatterjee’s critique of most modernist theory, including that of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner, is telling. On political grounds it challenges the liberal modernist approach as treating Third World colonial resistance and postcolonial politics as predetermined by a universalizing modern West. And on factual grounds he criticizes the approach for misreading the nature and timing of nationalism as it developed in Africa and Asia. For example, during the second half of the nineteenth century a new elite-driven education system was developed across Bengal (not too dissimilar to the examples of Japan and Germany in the 1870s). Thus the beginning of modern and public-political Indian nationalism was marked symbolically by the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress. At this point he adds

a subtle and unexpected twist. We might have expected him to say that the mainstream position forgets that the process parallels the timing in much of Europe when it argues that Indian nationalism is said to have emerged after the period of modernization and ‘social reform’ from the 1820s to 1870s. On this he would have been right, but he sets out to establish a much more difficult and important point, one that allows us to illustrate the ‘levels’ argument left hanging a couple of paragraphs ago. Chatterjee’s argument (1993) becomes that ‘anti-colonial nationalism’ develops culturally long before its overt political manifestations. It does so by dividing social life into two domains: first, the (traditional) spiritual or the ‘inner’ domain of deep cultural identity – language, religion, family. It is at this level that we see the earliest resistance to the intervention of the colonial state, and later the reinterpretation of the nature of the traditional spiritual domain in national terms: subaltern politics becomes more than ‘numerous fragmented resistances’. The second domain is the ‘outside’ (modern) domain of economy, state and science. For the indigenous intellectually trained groupings this involved study and imitation of the acknowledged Western ‘superiority’, including ‘its’ notions of Rule of Law and State. Later, drawing upon the resources of Western Enlightenment universalism, they challenged colonialism and its differentiation between the outsiders as rulers and indigenous peoples as ruled, thus completing the project of the modern state. These two domains, or what I would call the two ‘ontological formations’ of traditionalism and modernism, were in a contradictory relationship, though with mutual historicities and interwoven practices. In the histories of the late nineteenth century written by Bengali scholars, the narrative style located in ‘homogeneous empty time’ was interwoven with mythic and sacred time. Concurrently, the bilingual intelligentsia embarked upon a cultural project to make Bengali a standardized language outside the influence of the state, and in doing so they wove together two versions: a formal and standardized prose influenced by European syntax, and a poetic idiom self-consciously drawing

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upon ‘rustic’ Indian preachers and philosophers. Thus, says Chatterjee (1996: 217): In fact here nationalism launches its most powerful, creative and historically significant project: to fashion a ‘modern’ national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being. In this its true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power.

Much more could be done to draw out the implications of both Anderson’s and Chatterjee’s work for the argument being developed here, however enough has been said to indicate that the emphasis of the present chapter is as much on social form as it is on social content. This takes us back to where we started – Anthony Smith’s attempt to find an intermediate position between the two problematic positions of theoretical modernism and primordialism. However, as this chapter has been concerned to argue, the trouble with this intermediation is that it has significant costs. Smith effectively gives up on the possibility of a broad theory of nation formation and emphasizes what he calls the driving force of mythomoteur with specifically ‘ethnic’ content. This takes away from the deeply materialist sense of the basis of identity formation and puts the emphasis primarily on ideas that can be dredged up from the past. CONCLUSION Despite obvious differences there were patterned and materially based similarities in the formation of nations, Western and Eastern, First World and Third World. This suggests that an overall theory is possible. First, nation formation involved a predominant even if uneven shift in the nature of each society based upon changes in the dominant modes of practice – production, exchange, communication, organization and inquiry – not just the taking up of an imported idea. This is not to suggest that change was homogenizing, that it involved the reconstitution of all those modes of practice, or that it permeated all the way down to the day-to-day life of all people in a way that completely remade their lives. Whether we are talking about Portugal or Indonesia, older

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modes of practice continue(d) long after nation-state status was declared. Secondly, it involved an abstraction from traditional social relations through such processes as cultural upheaval, geographical mobility and education. Thus the difference of emphasis between different theorists on different actors – Anderson on the importance of local ‘creoles’, Nairn on ‘intellectuals’ and Gellner on ‘clerks’ – can be understood in this common framework where the process of forming abstract communities can take many pathways on the same map. Thirdly, nation formation is rarely based upon an homogeneous or genealogically connected population, even if mythologies of common ethnic connection are forged. This has the effect of qualifying rather than rejecting Smith’s argument. Still, it is important to remember that whether we are talking about France, the United States, East Timor or West Papua, nations were, and are, being quilted together out of patchworks of culturally distinct peoples. Fourthly, nation formation is rarely consensual, even if it does over a couple of generations become deeply constitutive of social identity. In this, Rwanda and India, Britain and the United States, have much in common, even if the violence had different expressions, different adversaries and different ideological rationales. The modern nation came into being across the globe through the overdetermination of changing dominant modes of practice, integration and being – modes associated with the upheavals of modernity in the context of extended global confrontations, imperial and otherwise. However, though the modern nation was made possible by these patterned changes, it had to be made by people acting politically. We can say that as a consequence of this process of change, not as a cause, the formation of nationstates came in late modernity to be experienced as natural. That is, to the extent that they thought about it, most of the population came to assume that nation-statehood, whether consensual or striven by blood sacrifice, is the normal form of community-polity. From the bottom, some individuals and peoples may have thought they wanted to live under a different nation-state, but usually this meant wanting

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a state for their own self-proclaimed subordinate nation. Throughout this chapter, I have being arguing about the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. Reading through the flickering screen of the contemporary globalizing and postmodernizing nation-states of the West with all their contradictions, it is hard to see any of the continuities-of-form here. The continuities at most appear as surface content, and even then only as points of reference: a Jewish Bible, a Christian cross, a Stone of Destiny, a slab of engraved marble, or a coloured piece of calico. However, the postmodern/late modern nation has all the ontological vulnerabilities of the prior dominant forms of polity – from traditional kingdom and absolutist state to the classical modern nation-state. Despite unprecedented technical power, it still has to legitimize itself, at one level, through basic categories of human existence such as embodiment, placement and the temporal transcendence – the transcendence of the community-polity despite the assured mortality of all who live within it. And communities will continue to do so, for good and evil, so long as we remain embodied persons living with others. NOTES Sections of this chapter recontextualize and rework material initially developed in James (2003). I would like to thank Damian Kingsbury for his critical responses, and to acknowledge my colleagues at Arena Journal for their ongoing critical contextualization of all my writing. 1 See by comparision the much more qualified arguments of medievalists who write of the discontinuous nature of the developments: e.g. Geary (2002), Forde et al. (1995). 2 It is actually the projection back upon originating social formation from (different) positions of abstraction within (different dominant ontological formations). Compare the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve and the Freudian creation story of the totem and taboo: the first is sacred truth, the second is metaphorical truth. 3 For an examples of a work that forgets this insight see Marvin and Ingle (1999). 4 ‘England’ might be one counter-example, but prior to the nineteenth century I would still call it a traditional nation (genealogically extended but bound by class-based delimitations) rather than a modern nation. 5 This is the thesis put forward by Tom Nairn in The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (1981 [1973]). It also bore back on the empires themselves. For an elegant exposition of the case of England see Kumar (2003).

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Kumar, K. (2003) The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mansur, A. O. (1995) ‘The Nature of the Somali Clan System’, in A. J. Ahmed (ed.), The Invention of Somalia. Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press. Marvin, C. and Ingle, D. W. (1999) Blood Sacrifice and the Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, P. (1967) Nature’s Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nairn, T. (1981 [1973]) The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2nd edn. London: Verso. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage.

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Robertson, R. (2003) The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing Global Consciousness. London: Zed Books. Slouka, M. (2002) ‘A Year Later: Notes on America’s Intimations of Mortality’, in Harper’s Magazine, September. Smith, A. D. (1996) ‘Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 2 (3): 371–88. Wills, G. (1979) Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. New York: Vintage Books. Wolf, E. R. (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Part 3 Nations and Nationalism in a Global Age

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32 Supranationalism – Integralism – Nationalism: Schemata for Twenty-first-Century Europe DOUGLAS R. HOLMES

Foreigners, in the lexicon of the whites-only British National Party (BNP), are not welcome here. … But for some foreigners, the BNP puts its xenophobia on hold and tries to be nice. This week it invited Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the BNP’s much more successful French counterpart, the National Front, to lend support, if not respectability, for their effort to secure a seat in the European Parliamentary elections in June 2004. (The Economist, 1 May 2004: 58)

The author of this small insert in The Economist, with a picture of Le Pen surrounded by beefy BNP bodyguards, is clearly repelled by this encounter while drawing attention to the ludicrous character of the fêting of the French nationalist by his British counterparts who are inclined to define themselves in opposition to just about everything imaginable that is French. Yet even in this truncated journalistic account there is an acute observation; though meant no doubt sarcastically, the incident is described as evidence of an ‘international alliance of xenophobes’. The curious encounter between these leaders hints at an important and rather paradoxical shift in the communicative space of European politics engineered in the last decade of the twentieth century allowing traditional cultural forms – typically glossed as ‘nationalism’ – to be

communicated in new ways to an expanding audience. The leaders of these groups understand viscerally that as the era of the nationstate is eclipsed their ideas and values can be communicated in innovative ways to a new European public. In this chapter I will examine how the complex sensibilities that have historically enlivened the idea of nationalism in Europe are being recast by those forces encompassed by advanced European integration. My aim here is to outline an analytical framework for examining this decisive transformation in the political character of phenomena conventionally coded as ‘nationalism’ by linking it to ‘supranationalism’ via a third term, ‘integralism’ (Holmes 2000). I will argue that integralism mediates between nationalism and supranationalism as spheres of theory, analysis and practice. To navigate analytically among these three terms I will review some well-known and not so well-known intellectual lineages that tie together the lives and works of an unusual group of theorists and practitioners: John Maynard Keynes, Jean Monnet and, most significantly, Jean-Marie Le Pen. I will demonstrate how Le Pen, drawing on the ideas and practices that animate integralism,

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broached the intricate architecture of supranationalism, inspired by Keynes and Monnet, translating its arcane technocratic language of market integration into a radical politics of contemporary Europe.1

‘NEW ORDER’ The communicative space of supranationalism coalesced in the 1940s out of the diplomatic agreements ushering in the current era of globalization. Created through a series of ongoing projects of market integration, this communicative space is predicated on a common and rather precise agreement by which Language, contractual obligation, institutional relation, money, accounting, property, and hence deeper matters like the past, the future, the individual, and the exercise of the will, must be understood in similar ways … As a result, this communicative space has become the frame of reference for those who care about money or the things money buys, and, more broadly, for those who care about politics, and more broadly still, those who care about the efforts to make sense of our time that we call culture, art, literature, religion and such. (Westbrook 2004: 1)

Communicative action in the contemporary – the ways we collectively think, act and experience the world – is increasingly constituted in relation to supranational markets. How and why this has happened are the key questions of our time; questions that demand a comprehensive reorientation of our scholarship and our intellectual practices. John Maynard Keynes and Jean Monnet, while seeking to resolve the most fundamental questions of the nation-state – war, trade and debt – arrived at solutions that yielded two radically subversive and interrelated projects: the Bretton Woods Institutions and the European institutions. Both Monnet and Keynes experienced World War II from within the bureaucracies and ministries that managed, supplied and financed the war efforts. They were aware of one another’s work; Keynes is reputed to have credited Monnet’s skill in orchestrating the Allies’ logistical efforts with shortening the duration of the war by a year. Both men understood the inner operations of the Leviathan; they knew

how to manage the Wealth of Nations. Both were in fundamental ways economic nationalists and liberal internationalists and, to say the least, they both had a subtle understanding of the workings of capital markets. What they sought, however, was a deployment of markets to achieve a profound historical transformation. In the designs of the European and Bretton Woods institutions markets are recast as political tools to eviscerate the nation-state of its economic sovereignty and hence what Monnet and Keynes understood to be its most rapacious proclivities, as personified by Adolf Hitler, to organize its industrial apparatus for total war (Westbrook 2003). In its place they created a politics of a distinctive sort, a supranational politics that for very intriguing reasons defied expression as a wide-ranging political rhetoric; rather it operated as an obscure technocratic discourse that transformed the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Their veiled efforts were aimed at achieving, in Keynes’s words, ‘a new order,’‘a realizable utopia’ (Skidelsky 2000: 208). The birth of the ‘new order’ emerged from a technical problem Keynes faced in 1941, a dilemma posed by a troublesome provision of the Lend Lease Agreement with the United States. The famous agreement is known for allowing the Roosevelt administration to provide aid to the British in the form of 50 surplus warships, against the backdrop of American isolationism prior to Pearl Harbor. Inserted in the agreement was a provision, Article VII, which the British found profoundly irksome and which bound the parties to an agenda that would define the future status of international trade in the post-war world. Article VII became part of a wide-ranging debate within the British Treasury and the Bank of England, already under way in 1941, on planning for the post-war British economy and, more broadly, the structure of international trade within and beyond the empire. Keynes played a pivotal role in these discussions, particularly in the debate on the relative merits for postwar Britain of planned trade, based on the illiberal Schachtian system of bi-lateral managed trade relations developed by Hitler’s banker and Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht and Walther Funk, who succeeded Schacht as Economics Minister, and the laissez-faire

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approach of ‘non-discrimination in trade’ or ‘Hullism’, espoused by the American Secretary of State Cordell Hull (Skidelsky 2000: 179–232). The former arrangement would, at least in theory, have perpetuated the ‘imperial preferences’ of the Commonwealth; the latter would have decisively ended the political economy of empire. Over a long weekend in September 1941 Keynes drafted two papers as rejoinders to Article VII, ‘Post War Currency Policy’ and ‘Proposal for International Currency Union’, which Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer, described as ‘the most important he ever wrote in terms of their direct influence on events’ (2000: 208). In many respects these were incomplete and rather messy documents, yet together they constituted a major ‘fragment of a Grand Design’ that was to be fully realized in the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1946. At the center of this technical design were the mechanisms of an ‘International Central Bank’ (ICB) that would, as Keynes fatefully put it, ‘make a beginning at the construction of the future government of the world’ (quoted in Skidelsky 2000: 223). The negotiations over this plan, first within the British government and then crucially in response to the plan drafted by Harry Dexter White, a New Deal-appointed assistant to US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgentheau, yielded the now famous tripartite Bretton Woods institutional arrangement for global economic integration. What is most significant for our purposes is how these complex negotiations defined the space of technocratic intervention predicated on monetary issues. At stake in these negotiations were issues of highest national concern to the two parties, inspiring potentially divisive political confrontation in the midst of war. Yet the translation of these fraught political issues into technical terms opened the way to Keynes’s ‘realizable utopia’. What this translation entailed was a conceptualization of ‘the supranational’ as a sphere of theory, analysis and intervention. The creation of a supranational institutional framework also defined the role of a new class of actors, who Robert Reich (1992) describes as ‘symbolic analysts’, specialists whose interests were no longer fully aligned with or reducible

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to those vested interests that defined the nation-state. These actors, Keynes being one of the first, were no longer constrained by its theories, methods and histories; indeed, by virtue of their institutional projects they sought to render the intellectual apparatus underwriting the nation-state increasingly irrelevant. What emerged from their labor was a discursive field of politics that operated increasingly through the idioms of capital markets and international finance and largely outside the realm of conventional political discourse and hence public scrutiny. Within a decade (9 May 1950) Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman had engineered in a remarkably similar fashion the founding of the European institutions.

INVISIBLE POLITICS Jean Monnet made a decisive discovery about the communicative possibilities (and limitations) constituted by supranationalism, a discovery that he relentlessly exploited and built into the fabric of the European project. Commenting on the journalists covering the announcement of the Schuman Declaration, Monnet notes their bafflement: ‘They were still uncertain about the significance of the proposal, whose technical aspects at first sight masked its political meaning’ (Monnet 1978: 304). It is precisely this bafflement that allowed one of the most important political projects of the twentieth century to develop in plain sight with little, if any, serious public scrutiny. In other words, the inscrutability of the European project and, for that matter, the Bretton Woods project was not merely the outcome of public inattention, but a consequence of how these projects displaced fundamental historical realities that endowed events with coherence. Inspired by Conrad Adenauer, first post-war chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, drafted by Robert Schuman, French Prime Minister, and Jean Monnet with a small group of aides, the founding document of the European Union explicitly aimed to end the possibility of war in Europe via comprehensive and wideranging market integration starting with the

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production of coal and steel. Monnet was struck at the press conference announcing the Schuman plan that the journalists failed to grasp its significance; the elite French intellectual community lacked a framework and language to understand what the document represented. Monnet expresses in his memoir initial disappointment with this tepid response to this remarkable declaration, but then, one guesses, he realized what a remarkable asset this pubic indifference could be: he could build Europe in plain sight without serious public scrutiny. He was free to pursue this staggering project because the journalists, the intellectuals, the political elites of France and Europe would be unperturbed, they operated within a cognitive purview and critical political agendas that were seamlessly tied to histories and theories from which his supranational ambitions were largely inscrutable (Rabinow 1999). Like Keynes, he had discovered the tightly defined communicative character of supranationalism: its technical language, and its goal of market integration. Monnet, one of the shrewdest minds of the twentieth century, recognized almost instantaneously that with the Schuman Declaration a vast political space was created that was virtually invisible and inaccessible from the standpoint of conventional political ideology and practice.2 An explicit ethos and practice, designed by Monnet, was embraced by the founders of the European Union and could be used to fill this technocratic space of Europe. At its philosophical core were a comprehensive rejection of the nation-state as an instrument for managing human affairs and the development of an expert method – an administrative science of the supranational – that would impel the political integration of Europe. The founders of the EU were emphatic that their goal was to escape the blighted history of the European nation-state (Adenauer 1966; Haas 1964, 1968; Herzfeld 1993; Lipgens 1985; Zorgbibe 1993).3

AN EVER-CLOSER UNION David Westbrook has analyzed acutely how a particular appropriation of the market mechanism

as a constitutional instrument yielded a new type of polity, of which the European Union is a decisive manifestation. He terms this polity created by the interleaving of European and Bretton Woods institutions, the ‘City of Gold’. By shifting our theoretical preoccupations about capital markets from conceptualizing them in relationship to those commercial transactions organizing production, distribution and consumption to conceptualizing markets as constitutional devices, he provides analytical purchase on the forces giving social form and cultural content to the contemporary world. [T]o understand the way we now live rests therefore on a restatement of politics as it appears in the context of supranational capital, legitimated through our faith in the institutions of money and property, as opposed to the modern nation state, legitimized through the familiar mechanisms of the liberal republic … The communicative space formed by financial markets is the object of political thought in our time, as the nation state was for most political thought during the time we still regard as modern … (Westbrook 2004: 12)

These constitutional innovations were embraced unevenly in Europe until the 1980s, when two projects rekindled the agenda for integration: the ‘single market’ programme was established by the treaty known as the Single European Act (1986) followed by the project of European Monetary Union (EMU) codified in the Maastricht Treaty (1992). In 2002 the latter initiative culminated in a new common currency, the euro, initially adopted by 12 member states and the establishment of the European Central Bank to manage monetary policy within the newly established euro-zone. The creation of the single market and the pursuit of monetary union have been driving forces underwriting advanced European integration for the past two decades; they literally encompass the principles integrating a supranational polity that now embraces 25 member states and 450 million citizens (Connolly 1995; Delors 1989; Milward 1999; Moravcsik 1998). What is poorly understood about this monumental project is how it redefines the fundamental nature of political discourse and how it recasts the way ideas of and about collectivity are communicated. In other words, European integration poses basic questions about how we

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confer meaning on social life generating in turn unusual possibilities for political innovation. The predicament of integration through markets yields a distinctive problem of meaning. The market’s grammar, the dialectic between property and money, does not express many things important to being human. Capitalism is therefore radically impoverished as a system of politics. Insofar as we long for community, we necessarily experience life in capitalism as a sort of exile … The construction of markets – the creation and alienation of property rights – involves the destruction of meaning, and in longing for that meaning, we complain not only about the market before us, but about the arrangement of social affairs through markets per se. (Westbrook 2003: 164)

This abstract predicament was, in the early 1990s, given a radical interpretation by a very unlikely figure working within one of Jean Monnet’s supranational institutions, the European Parliament. The conundrum of community and meaning was forcefully diagnosed by Le Pen and from that analysis he sought to establish a strategic set of social and cultural issues as a key axis of struggle defining politics in Europe at the opening of the twenty-first century. Le Pen diagnosed how ‘society’ was being transformed simultaneously under the sway of the supranational market and by the eclipsing of the nation-state as the dominant institutional framework defining life in the new Europe (Berezin and Shain 2004; Holmes 2000; Wright 1998).

THE PARADOX OF JEAN-MARIE LE PEN The presence of Le Pen and his associates at the European Parliament itself poses important questions. The cynical view – which I held initially – was that the parliament provided the Front National, Le Pen’s party, with a forum within which to articulate its resolutely French political agenda. Lacking the electoral strength to secure seats in the National Assembly, the Front National took advantage of the European Parliament’s different electoral rules and the propensity of the French electorate to view European elections as an opportunity to register protest votes, to win seats in the European Parliament and thereby gain a measure of

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political legitimacy. This is, no doubt, a correct assessment. However, circumstances conspired to make Le Pen a far more consequential figure in European politics. One formulation was decisive in this transformation: by linking key elements of nationalism to the emergence of a multicultural and multiracial Europe, Le Pen and his associates defined acutely the terms of political contestation that have broad relevance across Europe. Indeed, their inventory of political imperatives has moved from the margins to the center of political struggle in Western Europe. Le Pen, from his vantage point within the European institutions, discovered that his message, designed to address a tiny conservative, if not reactionary, French public could be re-crafted to give it wide currency that could inspire radical forms of activism beyond the borders of France (Simmons 1996; Stoler 2002; Taguieff 1988, 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1994). This newly crafted political framework, that broached the discursive field of supranationalism, I have termed integralism. As Le Pen’s integralist agenda evolved during the early 1990s it was gradually adopted by his colleagues representing similar small regionalist and nationalist groupings within the European Parliament and then, later in the decade, by a wide range of new or reconstituted political movements across the EU. Thus, by the opening of the twenty-first century Le Pen had crafted a model of political engagement which has entered the political discourse across the 25 member states of the EU; it is a model for activism that, despite its often cloying appeals to nostalgia, is emphatically about the fundamental nature of contemporary European society (Holmes 1993; Holmes and Marcus 2005; MacDonald 1996; Smith 1992; Stolcke 1995). In the remainder of this chapter I will describe the insurgent character of integralism and its relationship to advanced European integration. The focus will continue on Le Pen, who created a conceptual architecture for integralism that allows critical interpretation of society undergoing fundamental transformation. He and his associates have made a series of decisive – though largely implicit – theoretical innovations that disrupt the categories by which we appraise modern political phenomena.

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My aim here is to render this theory explicit by tracing its intellectual lineage and contemporary expression. I use integralism as a theory of society that, among other things, translates between nationalist and supranationalist idioms, thereby providing analytical purchase on the shifting nature of collective life, transformations of the public sphere, and realignments of human intimacy. In the next section, I examine how integralism can serve as a framework to analyze how mundane forms of collective practice can be linked to sublime political yearning, how varied and contradictory political ambitions can be synthesized within an overarching integralist agenda, and how integralism can draw on a specific European intellectual tradition for its form and substance (Boyer and Lomnitz 2005; Hertzfeld 1987). Integralism is often cloaked in the rhetoric of ‘nation’, but when integralist agendas are scrutinized it becomes clear that they encompass far more than just fidelity to the idea of nation, rather they draw authority from a wide range of collective practices that implicate family, town and country, language groups, religious communities, occupational statuses, social classes, and so on (Alter 1994; Boyer and Lomnitz 2005; Handler 1988; Holmes 1989). At the opening of the twenty-first century these collective practices and the sensibilities that infuse them are being re-aggregated. In other words, the ideas, sentiments and values that have historically animated various expressions of European nationalism are now enlivening not merely elements of national collectivities, but other collective groupings, aligning them in complex fashion to the supranational imperatives of European integration. These new alignments attaining articulations within this supranational communicative space reveal the unsettling potential of integralism to join, fuse, merge and synthesize what might appear to be incompatible elements imparting a distinctive and volatile power to this kind of politics. In the following sections I will briefly describe the historical character of integralism and how integralism gained articulation as a modern social,

cultural, aesthetic and political phenomenon. My purpose is to provide insights on how and why contemporary expressions of integralism appear both profoundly familiar and distinctly alien. Isaiah Berlin (1976) sets out ‘three cardinal ideas’ that he draws from the work of Johann Gottfried Herder that have historically endowed integralism with social form and cultural content. Populism, expressionism and pluralism provide both the basic conceptual structure of integralism and locate its roots in European intellectual history. Populism is ‘the belief in the value of belonging to a group or a culture …’ (1976: 153). Berlin draws from Herder’s distinctive orientation to the vicissitudes of human association, an orientation that envisions patterns of association crosscut by the possibility of loss and estrangement. The stranger, the exile, the alien and the dispossessed haunt the margins of this populism. ‘[Herder’s] notion of what it is to belong to a family, a sect, a place, a period, a style is the foundation of his populism, and of all the later conscious programmes for self-integration or re-integration among men who felt scattered, exiled or alienated’ (1976: 196–7). Though Berlin acknowledges that Herderian populism embraces views of collectivity that are not necessarily political and ideas of solidarity that need not be forged through social struggle, he is clear that populism, by taking dispersed human practices and beliefs and by conferring on them collective significance, creates singular political possibilities. Expressionism encompasses all aspects of human creativity orienting analysis of society towards ‘inner truths’ and ‘inner ideals’. [H]uman activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do so. Still more specifically, expressionism claims that all the works of men are above all voices speaking, are not objects detached from their makers, are part of a living process of communication between persons and not independently existing entities … This is connected with the further notions that every form of human self-expression is in some sense artistic, and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings … (1976: 153)

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Expressionism thus encompasses virtually the entire compendium of collective practices, the varied fabrications of culture, from rustic cuisine to high religion (Holmes 1989). Herder posits an inner logic and internally derived integrity to these creative enterprises and thus a unifying dynamic. Pluralism is for Berlin ‘the belief not merely in the multiplicity, but in the incommensurability, of the values of different cultures and societies, and in addition, in the incompatibility of equally valid ideals, together with the implied revolutionary corollary that the classical notions of an ideal man and of an ideal society are intrinsically incoherent and meaningless’ (1976: 153). Significantly, Berlin’s rendering of pluralism can yield tolerance of difference among discrete groups with their own enduring traditions and territorial attachments. However, when cast against a ‘cosmopolitan’ agenda based on universal values and ‘rootless’ styles of life, it is a ‘pluralism’ that can provoke fierce intolerance. In its embrace of ‘incommensurability’, it creates a potentially invidious doctrine of difference, which holds that cultural distinctions must be preserved among an enduring plurality of groups and provides, thereby, a discriminatory rationale for practices of inclusion and exclusion (Anderson 1992). There is one more concept that Berlin also derives from Herder, which has relevance for the articulation of integralism, the concept of alienation. Berlin notes that it ‘is not simply a lament for the material and moral miseries of exile, but is based on the view that to cut men off from the “living center” – from the texture to which they naturally belong – or to force them to sit by the rivers of some remote Babylon, … [is] to degrade, dehumanize, [and] destroy them’ (1976: 197). This is a view of alienation that emphasizes cultural estrangement over and above socio-economic oppression. Crucially, estrangement can also be figurative; it can be instilled by the ‘emptiness of cosmopolitanism’ without entailing any physical dislocation (pp. 198–9). These ideas delineated by Berlin are postulates about the essence of human nature and the character of cultural affinity and difference

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that can potentially imbue fervent political yearnings and foreshadow a distinctive political economy. Taken together they constitute the basis of a distinctive intellectual and cultural movement in European history, which assumed its most sophisticated manifestation within the humanistic triumphs of Romanticism and most malevolent expression in the politics of fascism.4 The enduring significance of these concepts is that they reveal how, under the guise of ‘tradition’, new cultural forms and social distinctions can proliferate and, as we know too well, how these distinctions can yield tainted and incendiary discriminations of human difference (Stoler 1995, 1997a, 1997b). Fundamentally, these postulates formulated by Berlin represent a theory of society, a distinctive project of human collectivity. What is most significant about integralism and easily overlooked is its potential to take what might appear to be nostalgic cultural configurations and continually refine and recast them as futureoriented collective ideals demarcating a formidable societal milieu in which human creative potentials impart a distinctive dynamic of change and transformation. Indeed, it is the way that integralism has become virtually inextricable from the progressive dynamism of the modern world that demands scrutiny.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM A tiny dissident movement emerged in France at the close of the nineteenth century that translated the key assumptions of integralism into a modern theory of industrial society. The collective ideals of populism, expressionism and pluralism were recast and interleaved as ‘nationalism’ and ‘socialism’ yielding a political movement that devastated Europe and became the rationale for European integration. In the following section I review this decisive historical episode whereby integralism became a vertiginous politics. Conceived by George Sorel and developed by his followers within groups like the Cercle

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Proudhon, the movement pursued this translation through an implausible, if not bizarre, revision of virtually all the basic tenets of Marxism.5 Indeed, ‘revisionism’ hardly captures the thorough evisceration of Marxist doctrine accomplished by the Sorelians.6 What started as revisionism, in fact, opened up an entirely new ideological path upon which a virulent synthesis of socialism and nationalism took form. This synthesis jettisoned virtually the entire intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment and circumscribed a wholly novel terrain for modern political radicalism. In the process it liberated ‘new’ forces to propel political insurgency: the power of the irrational, the unconscious and the intuitive.7 Two radical ‘alterations’ of Marxist theory, formulated on or about 1910, were crucial in casting a new revolutionary politics that ultimately set the course to fascism. On the one hand, the economics of capitalism were superseded in the Sorelian scheme by the psychology of myth as the driving force of class struggle and the catalyst for revolutionary action. On the other, the ‘proletariat’ as agent of revolution was supplanted by the ‘nation’, unified across classes, as the moral framework for radical action. This section touches briefly on the innovations represented by the Sorelian and fascist legacies as a way to introduce the politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen is neither a Sorelian nor is he a fascist, but in the late twentieth century he and those leaders who have modeled themselves on his activism drew on these two traditions to define an integralist politics for Europe (Rémond 1982; Weber 1962, 1964, 1986). Sorel’s faith in the working class was disclaimed abruptly in the face of what he and his followers believed to be a monumental historical impasse, an impasse that led them to repudiate the proletariat as the agent of revolution. The proletariat of the great industrial centers of western Europe corresponded to the portrait [Gustave] Le Bon had painted of it: it too was only a crowd, and a crowd is conservative … This proletariat was no longer and would never again be, an agent of antibourgeois revolution. One had therefore either to follow it into its retirement or find an alternate revolutionary force capable of destroying liberal democracy and rescuing the world from decadence … [T]he ineffective proletariat would

be replaced by the great rising force of the modern world, born of modernization, wars of independence, and cultural integration – that is, the nation. The nation with all its classes [was thus] joined together in the great fight against bourgeois and democratic decadence. (Sternhell 1994: 26–7)

During the first decade of the twentieth century Sorelian socialism migrated toward the nationalism of Charles Maurras and his followers affiliated with Action française. These activists sought a socialism with a national character drawing its inspiration from ‘the old French socialism of Fourier and Saint-Simon, Considerant and Louis Blac, Lamennais, and George Sand and Eugène Sue – not from German intoxicants like those produced by Marx and Engels’ (Weber 1991: 266). The social order imparted by this socialism became, under the sway of nationalism, anti-materialist, illiberal and resolutely authoritarian. ‘Where Charles Maurras differed from the Socialists was not in matters of social concern, but in matters of social order – denouncing their egalitarian myths and their belief that authority stems from the masses when, to him, authority is clearly established only by the natural hierarchy of competence and birth. Maurras, then, opposes socialist democracy; he also opposed socialist internationalism’ (Weber 1991: 264). This of course implies a radical inversion of the Durkheimian telos of modern society, it is a ‘socialism’ founded on an ersatz ‘mechanical solidarity’ and predicated on renewed sentiments of rootedness as revolutionary principles (Noiriel 1996). Through the intellectual work and activism of Maurice Barrès, George Valois, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Marcel Déat and Robert Brasillach an incendiary course was set in the direction of a ‘national revolution’ that culminated in Vichy. Thus, it was quite natural that a synthesis would arise between this new socialism, which discovered the nation as a revolutionary agent, and the nationalist movement, which also rebelled against the old world of conservatives, against the aristocrats and the bourgeois, and against social injustices and which believed that the nation would never be complete until it had integrated the proletariat. A socialism

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for the whole collectivity and a nationalism that, severed from conservatism, proclaimed itself as being by definition the messenger of unity and unanimity thus came together to form an unprecedented weapon of war against the bourgeois order and liberal democracy (Sternhell 1994: 27–8). The advocates of this national socialist synthesis addressed forcefully, if not obsessively, solidarity and the nature of human collectivities. They did not, however, focus their radical interventions solely on social or economic structures, but rather they emphasized the potential of a cultural assemblage – orchestrated around populism, expressionism and pluralism – to serve as the basis of collectivity. Their socialism, unified across classes, dissolved ‘society’ into the ‘nation’, thus creating a nationalism that could become, not just an idiom of solidarity, but a vehicle for social justice. They sought to formulate a politics that could circumvent a disintegrating ‘bourgeois public sphere’, and engage directly the human substance of integral lifeworlds. These are the dissident maneuvers that connect JeanMarie Le Pen to the Sorelian legacy and the fascist synthesis. Fascism wished to rectify the most disastrous consequences of modernization of the European continent and to provide a solution to the atomization of society, its fragmentation into antagonistic groups, and the alienation of the individual in a free market economy. Fascism rebelled against the dehumanization that modernization had introduced into human relationships, but it was also very eager to retain the benefits of progress and never advocated a return to a hypothetical golden age … Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing [bourgeois] political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology. It was to take place within the framework of the industrial society, fully exploiting that power that was in it. (Sternhell 1994: 6–7)

Sternhell further notes, ‘fascism was only an extreme manifestation of a much broader and more comprehensive phenomenon … an integral part of the history of European culture’ (1994: 3). It is this broader phenomenon, deeply rooted in European experiences of modernity – collective experiences of modernity that are no longer fully encompassed by

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notions of nation and state – that I seek to capture with the idea of integralism.

CULTURAL PHYSICIAN Le Pen discovered how the discursive field of supranationalism as something other than a technical discourse could be broached. He made a fundamental translation of the arcane technocratic language of market integration into a contemporary political idiom. By so doing he solved the central conundrum, the core riddle of advanced European integration. He asserted that the European Union, which presents itself, as an immense economic undertaking, is in fact a radical social and cultural project, a project aimed at creating a vast multiracial and multicultural Europe. Moreover, the project as he understood it was unfolding unmarked, unrecognized and unnarrated. He had assumed for himself the task of giving voice to this process, giving the project of European integration a language and thereby a new political reality. Le Pen’s ambition in the early 1990s was to define the discourse on the emergence of a multiracial and multicultural society by eviscerating its moral and intellectual foundations. He thereby escaped the tightly sequestered world of right-wing French nationalism and established the premises of a supranational politics of Europe, a politics emphatically opposed to integration. Indeed, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Le Pen was the first to elaborate what could be construed as a new political articulation, a rancorous articulation, of what is at stake in advanced European integration. In this final section I will outline how the projects engineered by Keynes and Monnet provided a framework for the alignment and the configuration of communicative action to coalesce and to circulate beyond the institutional ambit of the nation-state: antagonistic to or unconstrained by its regulatory conventions and its intellectual traditions. I will continue to personify these innovations in terms of Le Pen because, as I have argued above, he

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has been largely responsible for discovering this space and refining the techniques for entering and exploiting it politically. That said, there are now numerous agile political leaders across Europe who have explicitly or implicitly modeled their practices on Le Pen’s and are now pursuing his conceptual and tactical strategies with equal if not greater zeal. Hence, I am using ‘Le Pen’ figuratively to stand for a series of political innovations that Le Pen, the person, initially worked out, but which now operate beyond his control as an inchoate politics of Europe (Holmes and Marcus 2005). 1 Le Pen asserts that as society framed by the bourgeois nation-state is eclipsed a space is created for a radical politics that draws on latent cultural idioms for the conceptualization of collectivities. He narrates the usurpation of the nation-state and its significance not just for those traditional political constituencies displaced and estranged by this process – most notably the working class – but for all Europeans. He has conjured a complex emotional landscape for a supranational Europe upon which sublime longings and desires are crosscut by acute fears and anxieties. He recognized that integration is paradoxically creating new domains of alienation and estrangement in which radical formation of meaning can establish the terms of struggle over multiracial and multicultural society (Holmes 2000). 2 Le Pen’s theatricality is renowned, his performances are widely acknowledged to be masterful and compelling despite (or because of) their extremist character. He prides himself on the texture, the subtlety and the range of his emotional message. What others consider distasteful about his performance, Le Pen claims as the distinctive means by which he engages the intimate struggles that circumscribe the lives of his public (Herzfeld 1997). Underpinning the theatrical and emotional dimensions of his political practice is the formidable intellectual tradition of the ‘Counter Enlightenment’ from which Le Pen distils what he believes to be the essence of human nature and the character of cultural affinity and difference, ideas that imbue ardent political activism and foreshadow an exclusionary political economy (Stoler 2002). Le Pen’s outlook

exceeds what is conventionally understood as ‘politics’, rather he conjured a complex sociology and metaphysics that tether the new political economy of the EU to emerging existential struggles taking shape in the lives of virtually every European (Stoler 1997b: Taguieff 1989). 3 Le Pen’s decisive insight is that the communicative space of supranationalism renders the bourgeois public sphere largely irrelevant permitting new forms of communicative action. In this space he substitutes the authority of ‘experience’, shared experience, as the basis of legitimacy, credibility and truth (Stoler 1997a). He recognizes that a particular kind of message – an integralist message – can be communicated in ways that are not susceptible to the forms of rational scrutiny and intellectual mediation that characterized the era of the nation-state, but can enter the lifeworlds of a new European public and be accepted, as it were, on ‘faith’ (Eley 1994: 298; Habermas 1987, 1991). 4 Le Pen frames his political practice to embrace far more than fidelity to the idea of ‘nation’, rather it draws authority from a wide range of collective ideas, that implicate family, town and country, language groups, religious communities, occupational statuses, social classes and so on. He understands that this kind of dynamic pluralism can be cast in opposition to the supranational imperatives of European integration revealing the potential of integralism to join, fuse, merge and synthesize what might appear to be incompatible principles of association within a common political movement or insurgency. Simple distinctions between left and right no longer serve as reliable guides within this communicative space where ‘socialism’ can be constituted in relation to illiberal assumptions and values of collectivity (Boyer and Lomnitz 2005; Holmes 2000).

PLURALIST DYNAMIC I will conclude with two brief paradigmatic representations of how integralist ideas circulate across a newly contoured Europe: how

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populism, expressionism, pluralism and intensifying forms of estrangement are inciting ideas that can be communicated politically to a newly defined European public. The initial trajectory of this hypothetical communicative action is, in the case of Le Pen, from his headquarters in Paris to the homes, bars, workplaces, sports clubs and so forth of French and now European citizens, where his narratives move in countless informal conversations, in press accounts and in the shop-talk of local politicians. These political narratives are interpreted and endowed with diverse meaning in these local contexts depending on whether they are configured across the borderlands of Ireland or Poland or within the working-class neighborhoods of Marseilles or Vilnius. In these varied sites Le Pen’s narratives are translated into ‘indigenous’ idioms to address human predicaments conferring on them a fraught conceptual and emotional substance. These volatile narratives can be refracted back to the political precincts of Paris, or Stockholm, Warsaw, Belfast, or Madrid, to the offices of all those who seek to emulate or to oppose Le Pen, where they can be re-calibrated and re-communicated aligning a complex discursive field, the communicative space of a supranational Europe. If early in the twenty-first century one were to attend a public rally for Le Pen in France, or for one of the many political figures who model themselves on Le Pen elsewhere in Europe, and walk through the crowd one would see the embodiment of integralism, particularly its pluralist dynamic. As one surveys the audience, whether on the outskirts of Budapest, Antwerp, Lisbon or Prague, one can identify by vestments, demeanor, dialect or other overt characteristics the distinct groups that make up this notional audience. One would likely find: farmers, conservative Catholics, pensioners and military veterans, school teachers and other low- and mid-level government employees, factory workers, owners of small shops and businesses, university students and members of other often religiously sponsored youth organizations, a coterie of skinheads and, at the margins, the

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police, who alternately participate as security contingent and as attentive listeners. The speaker typically acknowledges these groupings and addresses them on their terms: the audience need not divest themselves of their idiosyncratic identities, on the contrary, the only way their participation makes sense is from the standpoint of their own particular sensibilities and consciousness. Neither are they addressed as abstract citizens of a nation-state nor as citizens of a European Union and they certainly are not addressed as ‘consumers’ to be sold a political message. These groupings are equally hostile to the rule of the market and to the logic of technocracy. For them, political meaning can only be socially mediated through idioms of family, town and country, ethnic and linguistic assemblages, religious communities, occupational statuses, social classes and so on. Their faith and loyalty reside in experience reconciled through these collective entities, and thus through forms of solidarity that are simultaneously prosaic and radical. Again, the acute irony, that Le Pen so carefully configured, is that only from the perspective of these collective groupings is the ‘true’ meaning of Europe revealed, only from these vantage points can the supranational project be critically appraised and its ‘ominous’ meaning apprehended. What members of these groups share is a profound sense of encroaching estrangement that threatens the integrity of their diverse communities providing the common thread that weaves their pluralist agendas together. These are the manifold human predicaments gaining political articulation as integralism, an integralism that resonates across a supranational Europe and beyond. The ‘alliance of xenophobes’, alluded to at the outset of this chapter, is thus far more consequential than a ludicrous charade performed by ‘brutes in suits’. Rather, as I have argued above, it is a manifestation of an expanding insurgency: an insurgency predicated on ideas about human affinity and difference that not only have deep roots in European intellectual history, but also represent a keen understanding of contemporary European political economy. Initially coalescing among a tiny group of activists, the ideas that animate this movement

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have relentlessly made their way into mainstream political discourse shaping the consciousness of an ever-wider community of adherents and sympathizers. These people no longer perceive the discriminatory values they embrace as extremist, but articulate them as a matter of fact.

NOTES 1 I have sought to emphasize the role of particular kinds of actors, ‘technocrats’, ‘social modernists’ and ‘symbolic analysts’, who have engineered, as it were, the transformations that I am discussing in this chapter (Boyer and Lomnitz 2005; Holmes 2000; Rabinow 1999; Reich 1992). 2 There is one group, Catholic intellectuals (Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman were Christian Democrats) that understands the supranational project both as metaphysics and as practice, they give it an entirely modern political cast drawing on Aquinas and the writing of neoThomists. If anything, however, these communicative practices further occlude the discourse on Europe and prevent it from entering public debate (Holmes 2000: 47–50). 3 The nation-state remains a significant institutional reality in Europe. What has changed is that the economic, social, political and cultural forces transforming the lives of Europeans are increasingly supranational in form and content and largely beyond the control of the political, judicial and technocratic apparatus of the nation-state. For extended ethnographic treatment of integralism see Holmes (2000) and for a discussion of the methodological issues at stake in analyzing integralism see Holmes and Marcus (2005). 4 The theme of the Counter-Enlightenment runs through Berlin’s entire distinguished oeuvre and serves as one of the central unifying themes of his scholarship. See Eric R. Wolf ’s (1999) concise summary of the CounterEnlightenment tradition (pp. 26–30) and Perry Anderson’s (1992) review of Berlin’s intellectual commitments. 5 Sternhell notes: ‘The aim of the Cercle Proudhon, wrote [George] Valois, was to provide “a common platform for nationalists and leftist antidemocrats”’ (1996: 11). Valois went on to found Le Faisceau in 1925. Eugen Weber comments on the analytical unease this marriage provokes: ‘The connection of socialism and nationalism has existed for a long time; it is like one of those common-law unions which practice and habit render commonplace and extremely unremarkable. Less so, if only because theoretical discussion has insisted upon the incompatibility, is the ideological alliance of the two, an alliance … that has never lacked supporters in France since the days of Barrès’ (1991: 262–3). 6 ‘[Sorel] regarded Marxism as a whole, including Marx’s own works and the codification of Marxism by Engels, Kautsky and Bernstein, as a kind of receptacle that could be voided of its original contents and filled with another substance. This principle applied not only to the means but also to the end of revolutionary action …’ (Sternhell 1994: 22).

7 Again, Zeev Sternhell notes: ‘Marxism was a system of ideas still deeply rooted in the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Sorelian revisionism replaced the rationalist, Hegelian foundations of Marxism with Le Bon’s new vision of human nature, with the anti-Cartesianism of Bergson, with the Nietzschean cult of revolt, and with Pareto’s recent discoveries [regarding the role of elites] in political sociology. The Sorelian voluntarist, vitalist and antimaterialist form of socialism used Bergsonism as an instrument against scientism and did not hesitate to attack reason. It was a philosophy of action based on intuition, the cult of energy and élan vital’ (1994: 24)

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Haas, E. (1964) ‘Technocracy, Pluralism and the New Europe’, in S. R. Graubard (ed.), A New Europe? Boston: Houghton Mifflin. pp. 62–88. Handler, R. (1988) Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Herzfeld, M. (1987) Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzfeld, M. (1993) The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzfeld, M. (1997) Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. London: Routledge. Holmes, D. R. (1989) Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Holmes, D. R. (1993) ‘Illicit discourse’, in G. Marcus (ed.), Perilous States: Conversations on Culture, Politics, and Nation (Late Editions, No. 1). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 255–81. Holmes, D. R. (2000) Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Holmes, D. R. and Marcus, G. E. (2005) ‘Refunctioning ethnography: the challenge of an anthropology of the contemporary’, in N. Denizen and Y. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. pp. 1087–1101. Lipgens, W. (1985) Documents on the History of European Integration. Vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939–1945. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. MacDonald, M. (1996) ‘‘‘Unity in Diversity:” Some Tensions in the Construction of Europe’, Social Anthropology, 4: 47–60. Milward, A. (1999) The European Rescue of the Nation-State. London: Routledge. Monnet, J. (1978) Jean Monnet: Memoirs. London: Collins. Moravcsik, A. (1998) The Choices for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Noiriel, G. (1996) The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (trans. G. de Laforcade). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rabinow, P. (1999) French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reich, R. (1992) The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for Twenty-First Century Capitalism. New York: Vintage.

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33 Nation and Nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe CHRIS HANN

In an age strongly marked by both the rhetoric and realities of Europeanization, primarily in the context of the expansion of the European Union, it is easy to forget that Europe is a construction. The idea that the western section of the world’s largest landmass comprises a continent, separate from Africa to the south and from Asia to the east, illustrates only the extent to which we are still in thrall to the symbolic constructions of the Ancient Greeks. Central and Eastern Europe is also a construct, but of much more recent origin (see Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, 2004). It is itself a product of the era of modern nationalism, and it has a distinctive place in the nationalism literature. The term Mitteleuropa underwent a curious revitalization in the last decade of socialism, when groups of intellectuals in Budapest and Prague sought to convince the world that it was a mistake to classify their countries, or rather their nations, in a binary schema which subordinated them to the jurisdiction of Moscow (Schöpflin and Wood 1989). The rediscovery of this German term was no accident, since German was the dominant political language in a vast zone of largely Slavic settlement until well after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. Even today, scholarship in Germany and Austria makes (rather

imprecise) use of the term Ostmitteleuropa. The Balkans are usually excluded from its remit. For the purposes of this chapter, Central and Eastern Europe includes the Balkans, but the discussion will focus on those regions which formerly belonged to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The pragmatic justification for this focus is that the core territories of the other major imperial powers of Eastern Europe in the era that preceded the domination of the nation-state are the subject of separate entries in this Handbook. Germany belongs here, as do peripheral zones of German expansion such as the eastern Baltic; but the latter regions, and all those East Slavs who did not come under Habsburg influence, will not be considered in any detail. We shall concentrate on populations which, though considered eastern in the nationalism literature, nonetheless fall within the boundary of western Christianity, considered by some scholars to be a civilizational boundary (Huntington 1996). We shall return to this ambiguity below. In any case the purpose is not to pinpoint geographical or cultural boundaries but rather to question them, by emphasizing their contingent, constructed character. We shall see that, contrary to some simplifying stereotypes, Central and Eastern Europe has been a home to many quite different

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forms of nationalism and ethnicity; some continue to flourish there, even as the region is gradually incorporated into the European Union.

GENERAL HISTORICAL OVERVIEW This chapter will be divided into three parts. This first section provides a historical overview. It will be convenient to follow this with a detailed presentation of the work of some of the most celebrated theoreticians of ethnicity and nationalism, whose roots are in Central and Eastern Europe. Prague alone is home to some of the greatest contributors to twentiethcentury debates, among them Hans Kohn, Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch. In the final section I shall review contemporary developments and assess the extent to which nationalism and ethnicity remain important political and sociological factors in contemporary Ostmitteleuropa. The locus classicus for an intellectual declaration of an ‘eastern’ model of nationalism is the oeuvre of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). In his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784) and elsewhere he elaborated the idea that each and every ‘nation’ or Volk possessed its unique Geist or spirit. Each nation was not merely analogous to an organism but an element in God’s historical design. Herder is deservedly viewed as a precursor of what came later to be known as cultural relativism in anthropology. The contemporary message of the Sturm und Drang movement was that Germans should celebrate their own language and literature, and give up their attempts to emulate the French philosophes. Herder countered the individualist–universalist rationalism of Enlightenment France by asserting the importance of a collective identity given by cultural endowments. According to him, the spirit or soul of the nation is expressed above all in its language. Herder was more humanist cosmopolitan than political nationalist. He extolled the folksongs of the Slavs and his work was held in high esteem by Eastern European nationalists throughout the nineteenth century.

Germany itself remained politically fragmented until unification was achieved by Bismarck in 1871, but the idea of a unified German Volk gained ground steadily after Herder’s death. Eloquently set out in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1807–8), it came to suffuse every realm of culture, from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers to the music of Richard Wagner and the sociology of Max Weber. Among the political consequences of German nationalism were the two World Wars of the twentieth century. Whether German understandings of the nation and the ‘blood’ basis of national identity changed significantly after the catastrophe of National Socialism is a question to which we shall return. The other leading power of Ostmitteleuropa throughout the nineteenth century was the Habsburg Empire, with its capital in Vienna. After withstanding the revolutions of 1848, the empire was restructured as a Dual Monarchy after the 1867 ‘Compromise’ with Hungary. This political entity differed sharply from the case of Germany, even if the dominant language was the same. In Germany, no matter how great the local variation, for example, in terms of religion or dialect, it could be maintained that all citizens could acknowledge a common Hochkultur. But the Habsburgs were a dynasty which had, since the early sixteenth century, ruled over millions of Slavs (of very different types), not to mention Magyars, Romanians and many other smaller minorities and splinter groups. The structural conditions were utterly different from those prevailing in Germany, not only in terms of political and administrative machinery but also in terms of socio-economic development. The Vielvölkerstaat could boast extraordinary creativity in almost every realm of culture; but this culture could not possibly be reduced to a national culture, nor could it be incorporated into a grossdeutsch union with Germany. The plaintive statement of Gustav Mahler, son of a village tavern keeper, exemplifies the predicament to which this situation led by the turn of the twentieth century: ‘I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.’ A closer inspection reveals significant differences in policy in the later nineteenth century

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in the two halves of the empire. Budapest controlled a territory in which ethnic Hungarians amounted to less than half the population. The Magyar elites set out to raise this proportion through policies, mainly through the privileging of Hungarians in the educational and administrative systems, which created strong incentives for non-Magyars (especially Jews) to assimilate. The populations administered from Vienna in the later nineteenth century were still more diverse, from the Western Slavs of Bohemia to the East Slavs of Galicia and the South Slavs of Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (in the latter case including large numbers of Muslims); some of these groups were perceived in the capital to be more ‘Oriental’ than European. The subjects of the Emperor were all expected to be patriotic Austrians at one level; but below this they were allowed to cultivate their separate national identities. In some cases, notably that of the Ruthenians (who by the end of the nineteenth century were beginning to adopt the new designation Ukrainian), considerations of imperial ‘divide and rule’ led the centre to support the consolidation of a national movement (in order to counter the power of the Poles in the province of Galicia). In the last decades of the Empire, group identity was increasingly ‘ethnicized’. The various Völker of Emperor Franz Josef became increasingly conscious of their distinctive national cultures. Their demand for a political entity congruent with the cultural identity was partially met when the Empire collapsed at the end of World War I. Ostensibly the Vielvölkerstaat was now replaced by the nation-state, epitomized in Woodrow Wilson’s principle of ‘self-determination for nations’. The practical outcomes were inevitably still fuzzy. While Vienna and Budapest now became the capital cities of radically truncated states, populated overwhelmingly by German and Hungarian speakers respectively, the violent aftermath of the post-war settlement at Trianon left the new Polish state with a population of which approximately one-third was not ethnically Polish. The new federal entity of Czechoslovakia in fact comprised three ethnoterritorial entities, once it was decided to attach Subcarpathian Ruthenia to the new state. Of

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course the Czech, Slovak and Ruthenian lands all contained substantial minority groups, notably the Germans of the Sudetenland and the Hungarians of southern Slovakia, not to mention more dispersed groups such as Roma and Jews. The settlement of Trianon proved short-lived and much more radical moves towards the ideal of the nation-state were accomplished during and immediately following the Second World War. The Holocaust removed from Central and Eastern Europe the great majority of those whose continued existence was inconsistent with nationalist frenzy. The redrawing of borders and forced population movements of the type later to be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ brought state and nation into greater harmony than ever before. Poland, for example, became as a People’s Democracy one of the most homogeneous states of the region, thanks not only to the new borders imposed by Stalin but also to massive expulsions of Germans and East Slavs. Many cities that had been multicultural for centuries, such as Vilnius, Prague or Bratislava, lost that diversity. It was replaced by a new monoculture, primarily the product of socialist urbanization and industrialization. Germany itself, by contrast, was now divided. Czechoslovakia survived, but Subcarpathian Ruthenia was detached and allocated to the Soviet Ukraine, where it became the Transcarpathian Oblast. The ultimate triumph of nationalism throughout this region was ushered in with the collapse of socialist power in 1989–90. Whether nationalist sentiments contributed significantly to the making of these revolutions is debatable; but it seems clear that the nation was for many the only secure identity available to them in the turmoil of the post-socialist years. Within a few years not only was Germany miraculously united but the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav federal states were replaced by new entities based on the national principle. While Czechoslovakia experienced a ‘velvet divorce’, ethnic violence plagued the western Balkans for approximately a decade. Only the interventions of the ‘international community’ have established a fragile peace in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. In the eastern Baltic region Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania regained their independence as nation-states, as did Ukraine

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(with its Transcarpathian Oblast). We shall address some of the factors which continue to complicate this apparently tidy picture later in the chapter. First, let us turn to consider some of the theories which influential intellectuals have put forward in accounting for the phenomena of ethnicity and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe over the past two centuries.

LOCAL THEORETICAL MODELS It surely cannot be a coincidence that numerous pathbreaking attempts to provide general explanations of nations and nationalism (we shall focus on these terms and neglect ethnicity, because the latter is not prominent in the work we shall be discussing) have been made by scholars whose roots lie in Mitteleuropa. Of course the work of each individual scholar is influenced by personal biographical details as well as the wider social and intellectual context within which he worked. Lack of space prevents a comprehensive analysis of these factors here. Hans Kohn (1891–1971), whose early publications in his native Prague were influenced by Zionism, devoted much of his later distinguished career in the United States to the study of nationalism. For Kohn, nations were the given basic units of history, as they were for Herder (Kohn 1944). He traced the idea of nationalism back as far as the ancient Hebrews, but he also developed a distinction, which is still highly influential, between two variants of modern nationalism within Europe. Whereas the western variant was rational and emancipatory, the eastern variant of nationalism, rooted in Herder’s notion of the Volksgeist, emphasized cultural (ethnic) identity over civic identity. This was politically problematic, as exemplified in the aggressive imperialism developed by German nationalists, some of whom perceived the entire zone of Slavic settlement as a German Kulturraum, at least potentially. The dichotomy between western and eastern forms of nationalism, popularized by Kohn, has had considerable influence on later authors (see, for example, Sugar and

Lederer 1969; Brubaker 1992). Only recently, in the post-communist era, have scholars begun to draw attention to the extent to which it misrepresents nations and nationalism in both East and West (Kuzio 2002). Karl Deutsch (1912–1992) was also born in Prague, where he grew up as a member of the large German (Sudeten) minority before following Kohn’s path to the United States. Like Kohn, he too was a Jew, at least by the criteria of the Nuremberg laws, but his upbringing was entirely secular. Unlike most Germans and Jews in Bohemia, Deutsch was fully at home in Czechoslovakia and taught briefly at the Charles University. Whereas Kohn worked primarily as a historian, Deutsch found his main disciplinary base in political science and influenced work in several other branches of the social sciences. His major work on nationalism approached it not in terms of a civic versus ethnic dichotomy but in terms of a general theory of ‘social communication’ relevant in principle to all modern states (Deutsch 1953). He was among the first scholars to address the role of the media in modern states, which made possible new forms of centre–periphery relations and ‘social mobilization’. Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) came from a similar Prague background. He developed his theory of nationalism on a similar foundation of Enlightenment universalism in the course of an academic career pursued primarily in Britain in the disciplines of philosophy, sociology and social anthropology. Gellner insisted that nations were not the given antecedents of national movements, waiting to be ‘awakened’; they were rather the product of such movements. His most influential work (Gellner 1983) provides a strong ‘constructivist’ view of the nation, vividly demonstrated with an ideal-type description of ‘Ruritania’, an imaginary territory somewhere in the eastern realms of an entity he calls ‘Megalomania’. Gellner injects an element of political economy into this caricature of the Habsburg Empire by emphasizing uneven economic development, rather than the dissemination of a political doctrine per se. We can expect a national movement to emerge when the elites of a zone such as Ruritania conclude that they stand to gain more from the creation of a new

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political unit under their domination than from attempting to assimilate into the elites of the imperial centre. Gellner preferred schematic models to close-up historical analysis. He accepted Kohn’s basic dichotomy between East and West, and he offered a more suggestive materialist explanation than Deutsch to explain the process of nation-building. According to this view, East European nationalisms developed as a result of the exogenous stimulus of industrialization in regions lacking both a long history of statehood (on the model of France and Britain) and a language-based high culture to serve as a foundation for political unification (on the model of Germany and Italy). In an essay published posthumously (1997), Gellner replaced the Kohn dichotomy with four ‘time zones’ in Europe: he first distinguishes the German path from that followed further west (zones 1 and 2); this is followed by the typical East European plasticity of ‘Ruritania’ (zone 3); the fourth zone is comprised of entities formed only under Soviet rule. Although Gellner’s insistence on material conditions was an important correction to the idealism of earlier theories and although his theories have proved extraordinarily fruitful in international discussion (see Hall 1998), neither he nor his predecessors offer typologies and tools that furnish a comprehensive explanation of national phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe. Poland, for example, with its long history of statehood in the pre-industrial period, bears a closer resemblance to the Atlantic seaboard cases of Gellner’s ‘zone 1’ than to its Ruritanian neighbours. Moreover, when one looks more carefully at Ruritaniacandidates, that is, ‘nations without history’ such as (sub-Carpathian) Ruthenians, Galician Ukrainians or Slovaks, it seems clear that the growth of national movements in the nineteenth century preceded the impact of industrialization and can hardly be attributed to its dissemination. It might be possible to salvage Gellner’s functional model by substituting a more diffuse notion of modernization for industrialization, which would take account of changes introduced by the Habsburgs in provincial administration and education.

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But as a descriptive model of this region Gellner’s model is simply too far removed from the realities on the ground: for example, it cannot help us to explain why such different policies were pursued in the two halves of the Empire after 1867. Unlike the three Prague émigrés considered so far, the fourth scholar I wish to discuss, the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch, did not need to migrate to the West to achieve fame as a theoretician of nationalism. Since the publication of his key works in German and English (Hroch 1985) he has been deservedly regarded as one of the most influential contemporary scholars of ‘nationalist movements’, as he himself prefers to term his principal subject. Hroch’s perspective is in some respects more rigorously materialist than that of Gellner: reflecting the ideological currents of the socialist republic, he offered an account of the spread of nationalism that drew explicitly on the historical materialism of Marx (always anathema to Gellner); he was open to the possibility that, in certain circumstances, a class identity could be more significant than a national identity. Yet he was never satisfied by dogmatic assertions that attributed the rise of nationalism to the emergence of a bourgeoisie. Hroch’s typology of national movements begins with a Phase A, in which small numbers of intellectuals, many of them priests, the largest literate social grouping, begin to discover the distinctiveness of ‘the national culture’, to collect folk songs, and to standardize the language. In Phase B, the phase to which Hroch himself paid most detailed attention, these intellectuals are either joined or pushed aside by larger numbers of secular activists, for example, journalists, who spread the nationalist message through new media, notably the press. Phase C is that of mass mobilization: intellectual midwives must now give way to a new political class and, through the education system, eventually even the populations of isolated rural districts will internalize the conviction of possessing a national identity. Hroch’s typology of the main phases of national movements and their critical agents is designed for application in Central and Eastern Europe, where it works rather well for

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peoples such as the Slovaks and the Ruthenians (Ukrainians). It has also proved useful in analysing ethnonational movements in other parts of the world and in this sense it has general analytic value. Compared to the models of Kohn, Deutsch and Gellner, Hroch offers a helpful set of tools with which to explore concrete cases. Unlike Kohn and Gellner, he is not concerned to argue for a geographically distinctive eastern or Ruritanian type. He does not claim that his model can be applied in the same way to all the movements of the region: on the contrary, we can expect significant differences in the case of ‘historic’ nations such as Hungary and Poland, and the Czech case is evidently quite different from the Slovak. In sum, Hroch’s work teaches us that Central and Eastern Europe is a rich laboratory for the study of nations and nationalism – but not because it features phenomena not found elsewhere. Rather, this region is characterized by great diversity. Let us now turn to consider some examples of how this diversity is playing itself out in the early twenty-first century.

CONTEMPORARY PATTERNS The recent history of Central and Eastern Europe has been decisively influenced on the one hand by the end of the Cold War and on the other by the eastwards expansion of the European Union, which by 2004 included all countries in the sphere of Western Christianity, with the exception of Croatia. Whereas the collapse of socialism led to an increase in the number of sovereign states, EU expansion involves new forms of supranational integration. The tensions between these contradictory trends render this a highly instructive region in which to observe a wide range of beliefs and behaviour pertaining to nationalism and ethnicity. The unification of Germany in 1990 appears to have resolved ‘the German Question’ once and for all: the Oder-Neiße boundary with Poland is no longer questioned by any significant political forces in Germany. The question of the strength of German national identity remains, however,

complex. The unique legacies of this population have been illustrated in the controversies that have surrounded the decision to transfer the federal capital to Berlin, in painful discussions about how best to commemorate the Jewish component of German history – and even in recurring debate over the national holiday. It seemed self-evident in 1990 that Germany, like every other nation, should have such a holiday. The night on which the Berlin Wall was breached, November 9th, seemed the most obvious candidate. But there was a problem: this was also the date of the Kristallnacht in 1938, a decisive moment in the trajectory which culminated in the gas chambers. Eventually it was decided to celebrate the nation on October 3rd, but this holiday has not been accompanied by much ceremony or symbolic investment. It seems not to have ‘caught on’, leading some to suggest that Germany is now definitively ‘post-nationalist’. Yet when the government brought forward proposals in 2004 to save money by holding the holiday not on a working day but always on the first Sunday of October, there was an immediate public outcry, by no means confined to the conservative parties. In 2005 the election of Joseph Ratzinger as pope was not celebrated as Karol Wojtyla’s election had unified and mobilized the vast majority of Poles a quarter of a century earlier, but national pride was expressed at every level (including the tabloid newspaper that proclaimed simply ‘We Are the Pope’). This suggests that the arguments of Jürgen Habermas, probably the country’s most influential intellectual, on behalf of Verfassungspatriotismus, that is, a ‘constitutional patriotism’, in which the citizens celebrate their loyalty to a political structure rather than to an ethnic identity, do not grasp the actual strength of German patriotism today. Recently the German government has introduced new laws to make it easier for millions of non-ethnic Germans to become citizens, but the social integration of some groups remains problematic, especially Muslims. The political potential of the appeal to the historic forms of nationalism is regularly exploited by conservative political parties (for example, in widespread opposition to the admission of Turkey to the European Union, a sentiment asserted strongly even by some left-leaning intellectuals).

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It seems indeed that some of the energies which once fuelled German nationalism have been transferred to the European level: Europe is conceived as a unique value-based community (Wertegemeinschaft), but it is das Abendland (the West) in the sense of Weber, and not the continent as a whole; the territories shaped historically by Islam and Orthodoxy are excluded (a special case is made to permit the inclusion of Greece). At the same time, populist rhetoric invoking older national ideals has by no means disappeared entirely. Support for extremist ‘neoNazi’ parties has been conspicuous in parts of the former German Democratic Republic; it is especially strong among young people, including unemployed casualties of the economic dislocation brought about by unification. Of course similar political expressions of right-wing nationalism can be found in many other parts of Europe. The most notorious politician to base his appeal on such sentiments is Austria’s Jörg Haider, whose Freedom Party rose to share power in the splendid ministries with which the Habsburgs endowed Vienna when it was still their imperial capital. Then as now, Vienna was a city unable to reproduce itself endogenously. Many immigrants in Habsburg days also tried to preserve their religions and cultural identities in the new metropolis, and in this sense there is nothing new in contemporary multiculturalism. Yet somehow the presence of large numbers of Muslims seems to activate more sensitivities than Hungarians and Slavs generated in the past, and these sentiments have been exploited by the populist right (Pelinka and Wodak 2002). Socialist rule ensured that the impact of new forms of multiculturalism in Budapest and other central European cities was long delayed. The confrontation with a ‘Chinatown’ (which actually began in the 1980s in the last years of socialism) came as a shock for most Hungarians, though it has not inhibited them from patronizing the new markets, shops and restaurants in which these immigrants specialize. Hungarian national identity continues to pose some distinctive issues, if only because of the distinctiveness of the Finno-Ugric language. Herder did not expect the Magyars to be able to hold on to their main cultural characteristics, but

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later developments in the nineteenth century proved him wrong. The large Hungarian minorities created at Trianon are still there today, outside the borders of the Hungarian state, and this continues to have a strong bearing on policy-making in Budapest. With only small numbers of indigenous minorities as a result of assimilation pressures in the past, Hungary has introduced a generous system of local councils and minority educational provisions for all ethnic minorities, including Roma. Hungarian politicians then insist on similarly liberal measures for the much larger, compact groups of Magyars in neighbouring states. They assert that it is their duty to represent the interests of ethnic Magyars wherever they happen to reside. Their efforts to grant privileges to co-ethnics who were citizens of Romania led to much controversy in the years when Hungary was negotiating to join the EU and, economically as well as politically, adjusting much more successfully than its neighbours to the challenges of post-socialism. The emotions raised by the ‘status law’ suggest that, at least among elites, the card of nationalism is still highly significant in electoral politics (Stewart 2003). Yet a referendum on the issue in Hungary failed due to low turnout, and in many mundane contexts it is clear that the extent of solidarity with co-ethnics is limited. Some Hungarian citizens are openly critical of the large numbers of seasonal immigrants who pour in from Transylvania, irrespective of their ethnic identity. Transylvania is one of the areas of mixed population in central and eastern Europe where the impact of the ethnic cleansings of the twentieth century was less dramatic. The large-scale disappearance of Saxons, Jews and other smaller groups can be attributed to protracted processes of cultural repression. Yet, in spite of large-scale Romanian immigration into the region, cities such as Cluj (KolozsvárKlausenburg) have maintained a large Hungarian minority. Apart from a burst of unrest in 1990, this region has remained stable, in sharp contrast to the western Balkans. It seems that an accommodation has been reached between the elites that allows Hungarians a very high degree of autonomy, for example, in the

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organization of their own cultural life, political party and even universities. Although there is little ethnic segregation in terms of settlement patterns in large cities like Cluj, for some sections of the population one can almost speak of parallel societies. Yet the further away one moves from the national elites, the less important national (ethnic) identity seems to be in shaping everyday interaction (Feischmidt 2003). More generally, it is clear that international concern to protect ethnic and cultural minorities has had considerable impact on postcommunist states wishing to ‘join Europe’. In both Romania and Bulgaria, expected to join the European Union in 2007, but also in Slovakia, which was admitted in 2004, the political parties representing the most numerous national minorities have played an active role in government coalitions – indeed, their political influence has been disproportional to their electoral support, and it seems likely that this has been a major factor in mitigating conflict. In the more homogeneous case of contemporary Polish society, the internationalization of minority rights has been conducive to more generous recognition of groups with whom Poles had very troubled relations in the past, including Germans, Ukrainians and Jews. However, even the most liberal legislation is insufficient to guarantee the practical take-up of rights in the case of those minorities which lack a powerful state to support diaspora rights: Poland’s Belorussian minority is a case in point (Fleming 2002). The discussion so far has focused on nationalities whose name is linked to a state. In spite of globalization, Europeanization, the supermarket revolution etc., it is evident in this region that states remain effective agents in the buttressing of national identities. This seems to hold as true for ‘historic’ states with large populations such as Poland as for much younger and smaller entities such as the Baltic states and Slovenia. However, former Yugoslavia presents several cases in which the nation-state model has failed; at the time of writing in 2005, no long-term solutions to the problems of BosniaHerzegovina, Kosovo and Macedonia are in sight. Among the causes, religious differences

are undoubtedly important; yet religion cannot be the only key factor. After all, Bulgaria too has a significant Muslim minority, yet despite severe economic dislocation this state has remained stable and peaceful. Nor can memories of interethnic violence in previous generations be the decisive factor: if they were, then we should expect similar eruptions of violence in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, yet this region, despite being a ‘civilizational fault line’ in the sense of Huntington (1996), has remained stable. Rather than supporting simplistic theories of ‘primordial hatreds’ and monocausal explanations, the evidence from the Balkans suggests that we need to see nationalism as a modern phenomenon, the forms of which depend on highly complex local conditions (Carmichael 2002). It is not a question of ‘the’ modern sense of national identity being still unevenly disseminated throughout the region; we must recognize that, in some places, such a model of identity is unlikely ever to approximate the realities; thus, while Bosnia may now have its own national flag and football team, the meaning of national identity in such places is bound to differ from the content of national identity in established nation-states. To close this survey, I turn to consider two further ‘awkward’ cases, in which a cultural and linguistic identity lacks the frame which the state-endowed groups can take for granted. Although they have been present in Central and Eastern Europe for centuries, the visibility of Roma and other gypsy peoples has increased following the forced population transfers that reduced the significance of other minorities in the course of the twentieth century. Always ‘on the margins’ of society, gypsies occupied specific niches in the social division of labour and, like the Jews (whom they in some ways resemble in their structural predicament), they seldom married outside their group. One difference from the Jews was the fact that the vast majority were visibly different from the majority population in terms of skin pigmentations, thereby making assimilation into gadze (nongypsy) society more difficult if not impossible. Under socialism determined efforts were made in exactly this direction: gypsies were supposed to give up their old lifestyles and join the

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international proletariat, enjoying in return all the securities, including modern housing, enjoyed by other members of the ruling working classes. The contradictions and ultimate failure of this attempt to eradicate gypsy cultural distinctiveness have been carefully documented in the Hungarian case by Michael Stewart (1997). Stewart takes an optimistic view of the options open to this group in postsocialist conditions: he sees potential in their history of pragmatic adaptations, which should make it easier for them than for other, less flexible actors, to adapt to the new market conditions (2002). Others are less sanguine: there is abundant evidence that the gypsies are more marginalized than ever before, with very high rates of unemployment and illiteracy and residentially highly segregated. In short, they fulfil the criteria for a classical ‘underclass’ (Szelényi and Emigh 2001). For our last example let us return to Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a territory which approximates as well as any other Ernest Gellner’s fictitious Ruritania. The homeland of the ‘Rusyns’ (the most common of the local selfdescriptions) is nowadays divided between four states, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and Romania, while additional scattered groups are found in Hungary and Serbia. The history and current controversies over the ‘real’ identity of these East Slavs exemplify the plasticity of ethnic and national identities generally. As the historian Paul Robert Magocsi (1978) showed in his study of Subcarpathian Ruthenia between 1848 and 1948, many options were potentially available, some more attractive than others in different epochs. At the time Magocsi wrote, it seemed that the incorporation of this territory into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after World War II had sealed the long-term affiliation of this population to a Ukrainian national identity. Thanks to the collapse of the USSR, it turns out that other options for the Ruthenians can once again be freely explored under the exhilarating conditions of post-socialism. Magocsi himself has been an active participant in the World Congress of Rusyns, supporting a kind of cultural nationalism which calls for recognition of the Rusyns/Ruthenians as a

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distinct East Slavic people (see Magocsi 1999). No longer a distant scholar of Ruthenian history, Magocsi visits the homeland regularly and, for all practical purposes, plays the role of an ‘awakener’, even a ‘mobilizer’. A significant step was achieved in 1995 when agreement was reached on the standardization of Rusyn (in its eastern Slovakian dialect) as a fourth East Slavic literary language. Is it possible to replicate the nineteenthcentury model for nation-building at the beginning of the twenty-first? The Rusyn activists do not aspire to create a new state in their mountainous homeland, but they hope that Europeanization, for example in the form of ‘Euroregion’ initiatives to promote crossborder contacts, will enable at least a greater measure of cultural recognition than has so far been accorded by the nation-states of the region. Further successes have been chalked up; in the most recent Slovak census the number of Rusyns has risen significantly, apparently at the expense of Ukrainians. In Ukraine itself, however, where the great majority of potential group members live, there is little sign of mobilization. We see rather a pattern similar to that already identified in Transylvania. The activists’ cultivation of a distinctive language and organization of folklore festivals represent the most attractive side of nationalism – the celebration of human cultural distinctiveness. But the evidence seems to suggest that the great majority of those who attend the festivals (including those who come from North America) have, in Gellner’s terms, been well integrated into the states that issue their passports. As in Transylvania, it would seem that, for the large majority of ‘ordinary citizens’, questions of national identity are no longer of burning significance; if indeed they ever were.

CONCLUSION This chapter has questioned the most common stereotypical representations of Central and Eastern Europe in the literature on nations and nationalism. Many authors, both natives of the region and outsiders, have held this region to

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exemplify the illiberal face of the nationalist Janus, which envisages ethnicity rather than citizenship as the sole criterion of national belonging. The cases of ‘historic’ multi-ethnic states such as Poland and Hungary suffice, however, to show that this diagnosis is much too simple. Gellner’s model of ‘time-zones’ is a variant of a common tendency to view Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century as a prototype for certain patterns of nation-building and state formation in other parts of the world in the twentieth century. Such ahistorical comparisons are potentially misleading, especially when they rest upon exoticized constructions of the East (notably of ‘the Balkans’) and no less idealized models of a benign liberal nationalism predominating in Western Europe and North America. Closer inspection reveals that the national movements considered to be quintessentially Eastern European emerged in very similar forms elsewhere in Europe, in some cases at the very same time. Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe exhibits great diversity in the strength and forms taken by national and ethnic minority identities; even when the focus is restricted to the formerly socialist countries, there is little nowadays to distinguish these countries from phenomena found in other parts of the world. This critique does not, however, invalidate all attempts to identify general patterns in the history of this fuzzy region, such as those resulting from structural similarities of political economy and empire in the pre-nationalist era, and those which created more homogeneous populations by means of ‘ethnic cleansing’ at various times in the twentieth century. Nor does the critique undermine the heuristic value of models such as that of Gellner for the analysis of nations and nationalism. I have adapted his vocabulary in arguing that, while nineteenthcentury ‘Ruritanias’ such as Slovakia and Ukraine have recently succeeded in carving out their own states, Subcarpathian Ruthenia seems unlikely to succeed at this level. The reasons are complex: they include the mountainous location, the absence of cities and of scope to consolidate an infrastructure facilitating industrial development and communications. Failure, if

indeed the Rusyn movement eventually fails, should not be attributed to size alone; after all, the populations of the Baltic states are no larger, let alone Luxembourg. This Rusyn/Ruthenian case thus illustrates the ultimate plasticity of group identities and the historical contingency of their forms.

REFERENCES Brubaker, R. (1992) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carmichael, C. (2002) Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition. London: Routledge. Cornis-Pope, M. and Neubauer, J. (2004) ‘Introduction’, in M. Cornis-Pope and J. Neubauer (eds), History of the Literary Cultures of East–Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Vol. 1. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Deutsch, K. (1953) Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality. New York: MIT Press. Feischmidt, M. (2003) Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung. Symbolstreit und Alltagskultur im siebenbürgischen Cluj. Münster: LIT Verlag. Fleming, M. (2002) ‘The New Minority Rights Regime in Poland: the Experience of the German, Belarussian and Jewish Minorities since 1989’, Nations and Nationalism, 8 (4): 531–48. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1997) Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hall, J. A. (ed.) (1998) The State of the Nation; Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herder, J. G. (1966 [1784]) Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. New York: Bergman. Hroch, M. (1985) Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: a Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, S. P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kohn, H. (1944) The Idea of Nationalism: a Study of Its Origins and Background. New York: Macmillan.

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Kuzio, T. (2002) ‘The Myth of the Civic State: a Critical Survey of Hans Kohn’s Framework for Understanding Nationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25 (1): 20–39. Magocsi, P. R. (1978) The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848–1948. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Magocsi, P. R. (1999) Of the Making of Nationalities There is No End. East European Monographs, No. DXL, 2 volumes. New York: Columbia University Press. Pelinka, A. and Wodak, R. (2002) The Haider Phenomenon in Austria. New Brunswick, NJ/London: Transaction Books. Stewart, M. (1997) The Time of the Gypsies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Stewart, M. (2002) ‘Deprivation, the Roma and “the Underclass’’’, in C. M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge. pp. 133–55. Stewart, M. (2003) ‘The Hungarian Status Law: A New European Form of Transnational Politics?’, Diaspora, 12 (1): 67–101. Sugar, P. F. and Lederer, I. J. (eds) (1969) Nationalism in Eastern Europe. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Schöpflin, G. and Wood, N. (eds) (1989) In Search of Central Europe. Cambridge: Polity. Szelényi, I. and Emigh, R. J. (2001) Poverty, Ethnicity, and Gender in Eastern Europe during the Market Transition. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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34 Nation and Nationalism in Russia RICHARD SAKWA

Russian nationalism is as exiguous and protean as its English counterpart (Anderson 1983: 12). Both were subsumed into larger entities; English nationalism into the larger idea of Britain (Colley 1992); and Russia became the core of an imperial project (Hosking 1997). Russia was at the heart of the tsarist empire and then the Soviet Union. Only at the end of the twentieth century did the English and Russian nations emerge from the detritus of the dissolution of the larger imperial missions and take on autonomous forms. In Russia, however, the traditional emphasis on the state rather than the nation or a democratic polity undermined the development of both. Nation-building traditionally took second place to territorial expansion, and the very idea of a democratic and sovereign Russian nation remains ambiguous. Four concerns will be at the centre of our account of Russian nationalism: the tension between imperial and national identities; the process of national identity formation; the relevance and applicability of the concept of nationalism to Russia; and the tension between nation, state and polity-building projects. HISTORICAL CONTEXT The success of the early modern tsars in unifying the various principalities around Muscovy meant

that by the sixteenth century Russia had become one of the most cohesive and strongest European states. The ‘gathering of the lands’ across ever-larger expanses, however, dissipated the ‘national’ element and the tsarist system increasingly operated on a supranational basis. Imperial Russia from Peter the Great’s time was no longer a nation-state but subsumed numerous ethnic identities in a system focused on the person of the monarch. According to one scholar, ‘the defining characteristic of Russian statehood was the absence of ethnocentrism based on the coincidence of national and political borders’ (Agadzhanov 1993). The underdevelopment of national consciousness only reinforced the concept of statehood (gosudarstvennost) while at the same time exalting its great power status (derzhavnost). NATIONAL IDENTITY AND NATIONISM Throughout the modern period Russia has faced the challenge of what it was, and its people in turn had to decide who they were. The failure of the romantic but doomed attempt to assert some sort of popular sovereignty in the Decembrist uprising of 1825 placed the question of democracy and constitutionalism firmly on the agenda, but at the same time endowed them with the patina of failure. For the Russian intelligentsia the

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question ‘What is Russia?’ became an obsessive theme. The notion of an intelligentsia, of course, is a peculiarly Russian phenomenon, defined ‘as a body of educated people who felt responsible for their country’s future – a group not unanimous in its views but united by the common ethos of a struggle against reaction’ (Walicki 1979: xv). The notion of an intelligentsia, used in this sense, is an ethical category, one that took on political features when defined as an opposition to the government. As Andrzej Walicki puts it: The questions Russians were asking themselves at this time were all concerned with their national identity: ‘Who are we?’ ‘Where do we come from and where are we going?’ ‘What is the common contribution we can make to humanity?’ ‘What can we do in order to carry out the mission entrusted to us?. (Walicki 1979: xv–xvi)

The problem remains as acute in the first decade of the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth (Billington 2003). The debate continues to this day over the concept of the nation and nationalism, with three major differences. The messianism of the past, the view that Russia could use the ‘privilege of backwardness’ to chart an alternative path of development that would show the more developed world how it should really be done, has weakened, although not entirely disappeared (Duncan 2000). Russia’s tragic twentieth century has demonstrated, after all the sacrifices, enthusiasm and mountain of corpses, precisely What is Not to be Done, as Lenin did not quite put it. After the fall of Soviet communism the question became ‘What is to be Undone?’; and the answer in the 1990s appeared to be almost everything. At the basic level it was long assumed that Leninism had at least resolved the problem of the state in Russia, but the events of 1991 demonstrated that it had failed to do so at every conceivable level – internal governance, external borders and national identities. The second difference is the dissolution of the intelligentsia itself. The intelligentsia as a distinct caste had emerged in the reign of Catherine the Great in the second half of the eighteenth century, where the question of Russia’s future development took hold of educated society. It was under Catherine that we

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see a growing divergence between the elites of power and the elites of the mind; or, as Foucault would put it, between knowledge and power. Thereafter the Russian intelligentsia considered itself a source of political authority in its own right, a third force between the government and the propertied elite, the opposition that the government would not allow to take political form. Today the picture is very different. Post-communism has achieved what 74 years of communism was unable to do – to destroy the status of critical thinking and the ethics of the intellectual and the word as the conscience of the nation. In a peculiar way communism, of course, by its very persecution of free thought and association, elevated and granted them a status that long ago had eroded in the West. The critical role of the intelligentsia was perpetuated by the Soviet system’s peculiar blend of modernity and tradition. ‘Normality’ has now returned to Russia, and the struggle for resources and survival has undermined any residual claims of the intelligentsia to a critical ethical status. This is one reason why the eternal ‘What is Russia?’ question is today conducted in such a diffuse manner, and with the exception of some marginal groups is not at the centre of popular concerns. Finally, the remaking of Russia as a nationstate is taking place at a time when what we might call ‘classical nationalism’ is itself, while apparently triumphant after the disintegration of the colonial empires and the dissolution of communist internationalism, being hollowed out by liberal globalization. Marxist and liberal predictions that nationalism would gradually die out appear finally to be coming to pass where states have entered broader communities, such as the European Union. A profound commitment to what has been called neonationalism (we shall call this nationism), however, remains prevalent in these countries, demonstrating that nationalism, even and perhaps especially in postmodern supranational contexts, is part of the larger question of ‘identity’. In the post-Cold War era the politics of ideology have now given way to the politics of identity in which the sense of the nation is a cardinal element (Smith 1986, 1991). Identity is – like the nationalism that it selectively

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reflects – part of a larger set of shifting relationships (Rajchman 1995). National identity provides the cultural matrix and symbols for nationalism, which represents the politicization of a community’s culture, typically in the form of a programme for group development (Schopflin 1991). In Russia the cultural question of national identity predominates over any more focused classical nationalistic project. This is why it is useful to call the former ‘nationism’, to describe the ideological penumbra around the nation-state, the defence of its existence and attempts to understand its civilizational identity, while leaving the term nationalism to describe projects that seek to extend the nation’s power and glory. Russian nationism is not synonymous with ethnicity, and indeed embraces the cultural specificity of the many peoples that constitute the country. It is more than the civic attempt to extend equal citizenship to diverse communities, but it is less than an ethnically-defined characterization of the dominant community. The Russian nation is like a sponge, drawing in many peoples, with unclear borders across Eurasia, and constantly changing its shape but always remaining recognizably the same (Bassin and Aksenov 2003).

FROM SOVIET ETHNO-FEDERALISM TO RUSSIAN NATION-STATE Although expounding an internationalist ideology, once securely in power the Bolsheviks were forced to recognize the strength of national feelings. Communism was a cosmopolitan and internationalist ideology, but it had come to power in one specific country and was compelled to acknowledge the persistence of national identities despite the ideology’s stance that internationalist class principles would take priority (Suny 2002). Rather than being resolved, the nationalities problem in the USSR was managed, and when that failed, suppressed. The elaborate ethno-federal system imposed by the regime, granting certain titular nationalities the trappings of statehood, gave formal expression to nationalism

but deprived it of any real power. Bolshevik policies sustained national identities, as in their insistence in Point 5 of the Soviet passport for each citizen to register their nationality, and thus undermined the goal of creating a new nationality, the Soviet people. The creation of ethno-federal units in the Soviet Union was a concession to a part of the population identified by its ethnic characteristics, introducing an ingredient into the process of Soviet state-building that would ultimately destroy it. Article 15 of the 1936 Soviet constitution stated that the union republics were ‘sovereign’ with the right of secession from the Union. Early drafts of the 1977 constitution deleted references to sovereignty, but it was restored precisely to differentiate them from Russia’s autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts and national districts. Article 76.1 stated: ‘A union republic is a sovereign Soviet socialist republic that has united with other Soviet republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.’ The Russian word soyuz here means ‘alliance’ rather than the English meaning of ‘union’. The USSR was in theory an alliance of sovereign states – but Russia’s own sovereignty was institutionally less developed than in the other 14 republics, lacking its own party organization, academy of sciences, KGB and other bodies that were to be found elsewhere. Russia was a superfluous link between the regions and the union centre and deliberately kept weak. During perestroika the belief that Russia had been exploited by the centre came to the fore, and Boris Yeltsin used these perceptions to fuel his bid for power. Russians were the largest single national group in the USSR, with a population in 1989 of 149 million, representing 51 per cent of the Soviet population. A declining birth rate from 1960 made Russians an ever-smaller proportion of the total Soviet population. By 1979 the ethnic Russian part of the population was less than half, if the number of mixed marriages and children opting to have Russian as the nationality placed into their passports is taken into consideration. This represented a major psychological turning point and emphasized even more clearly the multinational character of the Soviet Union. In 1989 Ukrainians

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comprised the second largest group, with 52 million (17.8 per cent), and, together with the Belorussians at 10.3 million (3.5 per cent), Slavs made up nearly three-quarters of the total population. The differentiation of Russian nationism from a broader East Slav one is still far from complete. Russian nationalism in the Soviet era took many forms and ranged from the officially acceptable to the unorthodox. The extreme right stressed the racial purity of the Slavs in a language couched in anti-semitic allusions and imbued with militaristic patriotism. They were particularly harsh in warning against the Chinese threat. Less extreme but still on the right was a tendency called National Bolshevism, derived from Nikolai Ustryalov, who in 1920 reversed what was to become the official slogan and argued that the new regime was ‘socialist in form, nationalist in content’ (Agursky 1987). Stalinism became imbued with a sense of Russian-centred Soviet nationalism (Brandenberger 2002), but Mussolini was mistaken when he argued that Bolshevism had disappeared in Russia and in its place a Slav form of fascism had emerged. Soviet nationalism on the whole had little in common with the fascist type since it was not based on the militant projection of one ethnic group at the expense of others – in fact, quite the opposite (Martin 2001). The Russianization that did occur was largely part of the modernization process, although there were features glorifying Russia (Russification). Latter-day national Bolsheviks praised the Soviet regime for having recreated the Russian empire and restored Russia to great power status. Soviet nationalism certainly projected its Russian credentials, but any Russian patriotism that deviated from the Soviet path was persecuted as much as any other national deviancy. In certain respects expression of Russian nationalism was the least tolerated since the other nationalities had their own republican party leaderships to shelter behind whereas Russia, as noted, lacked its own communist party and other attributes of statehood (Barghoorn 1976; Allensworth 1980; Brudny 1999). Expressions of the Russian national idea in the Soviet period were as fragmented as today. The conservative nationalists, like the group

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around the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house of the Komsomol organization, can be characterized as Russites and neo-Slavophiles. They worked within the establishment and were shielded by Politburo member Dmitry Polyansky and allegedly by the KGB, since they served as a counter-weight to unorthodox Russian nationalists, who focused on religious or human rights issues. The two tendencies are labelled ‘cultural Russian nationalism’ and ‘dissident Russian messianism’ by Duncan (2000). The semi-fascist and anti-semitic features of some elements in this tendency represented morbid symptoms of the stifling immobility of the later Brezhnev years. In the November 1972 issue of Literaturnaya gazeta Alexander Yakovlev, then acting head of the Propaganda Department of the CPSU’s Central Committee, in an article entitled ‘On Antihistoricism’, condemned the anti-Leninist stance adopted by nationalists and neo-Stalinists in some official publications, and denounced the awakening of Russian selfconsciousness as ‘patriarchal mentality, nationalism and chauvinism’ (Yakovlev 1972). In response, in 1973 he was dismissed from his post and sent into ‘exile’ in Canada to serve as Soviet ambassador. Recalled by Mikhail Gorbachev, he was made a member of the Politburo and developed the increasingly liberal ideology of perestroika in the second half of the 1980s – for which he earned the hatred of the Soviet Russophiles. During perestroika a number of ‘historicalpatriotic’ groups among ethnic Russians emerged, such as Pamyat (Memory), Otechestvo (Fatherland) and Spasenie (Salvation). These groups found their support among intellectuals and, perhaps surprisingly, among scientists, but gained little support among the mass of Russians when they placed themselves to the test of the ballot box. Alexander Yanov argued that the alleged erosion of Marxist-Leninism ideology would give way not to the triumph of Western rationalist or liberal ideas but instead cleared the way for a variety of nationalist ideas while permitting a revival of the Slavophile versus Westernizers debate of the nineteenth century over the role and path of Russian development. He argued that a so-called Russian party, the fusion of unofficial and official Russian nationalism, would come together as the basis of an

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authoritarian but ‘sanitized’ (that is, non Marxist–Leninist) new ruling ideology (Yanov, 1978). In the event, the Soviet Russophile trend remained marginal, although it was given formal expression later in Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The moderate orthodox nationalists were represented by the ‘village school’ of Russian writers such as Vladimir Soloukhin, the author of Vladimir Back Roads, and Valentin Rasputin, who actively campaigned over ecological issues (above all to preserve the purity of the world’s largest fresh-water environmental treasure, Lake Baikal), joined by the painter Il’ya Glazunov. They criticized the excessive pace of industrialization, which caused great damage to the environment and Russian village life. The Moscow Headquarters of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (VOOPIK) was familiarly known as the ‘Russian club’ for its exposition of Russian nationalist sentiments. On certain issues this tendency mobilized as a powerful lobby, notably to protest against the building of a cellulose plant on Lake Baikal. Similarly, the widespread anxiety provoked by the scheme to divert the flow of the Siberian rivers from North to South were acknowledged by Gorbachev to have contributed towards the plan’s cancellation in August 1986. Major cultural figures like Academician Dmitry Likhachev gained official approval to start a fund to preserve Russian cultural artefacts. Russian nationalism was coloured by the paradox that while the Soviet state ensured Russian political pre-eminence, in economic terms Russia was far from being the most prosperous. Unorthodox Russian nationalists condemned the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, the excessive internationalism whose burden fell disproportionately on Russian shoulders, the distortion of Russian history and the imposition of socialist realism in place of Russian romanticism. National Bolshevism was condemned by more religious nationalists for espousing a Russian patriotism without a Christian foundation, based purely on the great power status of the Russian part of the Soviet Union – communism with a national face. Religious patriots stressed that

Soviet nationalism was in fact antithetical to genuine Russian traditions; the Russian patriotism incorporated into Soviet nationalism, they insisted, served to buttress the power system but had little to do with genuine national traditions (Dunlop 1976, 1983, 1985). Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia should be permitted to pursue its destiny freed from the burden of empire. Liberal patriots like him argued for the conversion of Russia from a military superpower to a spiritual great power, which they insisted would pose no threat to non-Russians or the outside world. Russian patriots of this sort (labelled pochvenniki, part of the soil-bound tradition associated with Dostoevsky) were contemptuous of Western democracy but merciless in their condemnation of Soviet totalitarianism (Solzhenitsyn (ed.) 1974). The authoritarian implications of such views derive from their sense of moral absolutism; the attempt once again to remove politics from society and instead impose an organic theocratic government of justice and order. The All-Russian Social Christian Union for the Liberation of the People (VSKhSON) of the 1960s tried to sustain a uniquely Russian path, not democratic but benignly authoritarian, and endowed with a theocratic vision of Russian uniqueness. These themes were taken up by the journal Veche, edited by Vladimir Osipov, which between 1971 and 1974 proclaimed itself the voice of the ‘loyal opposition’. It was marked by a liberal nationalism which condemned ‘the bureaucracy’ and was concerned with the regeneration of Russia based on the Church and village traditions and focused on Siberia as the rampart of a reborn nation from which the threats from China and the West could be rebuffed. All of these tendencies played their part in the post-communist context, joined by new tendencies that sought to respond to the challenges posed by the fall of the USSR. In his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, Solzhenitsyn (1974) pointed out that the Soviet Union was an empire ruled not by a nation (a role usually considered to have been fulfilled by the Russians) but by a political party, the CPSU. There appeared to be no way out of the realm of ideology for the

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Soviet Union since there was no nation (unlike China) which could ‘nationalize’ the revolution. As part of the broader attempt to revive the state under Gorbachev the trappings of national statehood came to life in the 15 union republics (and in some autonomous republics such as Chechnya and Tatarstan), and the Soviet state found itself surplus to requirements. However, it was not nationalism as such that was responsible for the disintegration of the USSR: the failure was above all political, the inability to transform the ‘sixteenth republic’ (the Soviet state) into a viable polity rooted in a national community (Beissinger 2002). Only in the wake of the disintegration did the various republics seek to root their (sometimes enforced) state-building in a national (but not necessarily nationalist) discourse. Indigenous elites, typically former party functionaries, grasped at the symbolic power of nationalism to consolidate their own regimes and then proceeded to ‘nationalize’ their states (Brubaker 1996). In Russia the ‘nationalizing’ agenda has at best been weak. FROM EMPIRE TO FEDERATION Russia did not have an empire; it was an empire – although towards the end it became more classically a colonial power both in internal and external aspects. The USSR had been an empirestate, like the Bismarckian Second Reich and the Habsburg empire, based not on the colonial model of subjugated peoples but rather on a system in which all came under the tutelage of an abstract principle, in this case incarnated in the form of the collective emperor, the Communist Party (Lieven 2003). Neither the Russian empire nor the USSR had been nationstates in the conventional sense, but neither were they, according to the patriots, empires in the colonialist sense. Beissinger stresses the ambiguity in the distinction between states and empires, with the tsarist empire in particular representing ‘a confused mix of empire and state-building’ (Beissinger 1995: 158). While Russians were over-represented in all-union institutions, giving the Soviet Union the appearance of a Russian empire, the ethno-federal system had, as it were, become increasingly

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ethnicized but not federalized by the advancement of national elites to positions of power in their respective republics. In the post-Stalin era it was not clear whether protest against the system used the language of nationalism, or whether nationalist movements in the old regime had no other option but to become movements against the system itself. In the last years of perestroika nationalism was used as a battering ram against the communist system and what increasingly became characterized as the imperial Soviet state as well (Suny 1993).

THE END OF EMPIRE The debate over whether the USSR was an empire or not continues to this day. For the subjugated peoples of the Baltic, Western Ukraine and some other places there is little to discuss: the Soviet regime perpetuated (and indeed intensified) Russian imperial dominance. For the rest, however, the question is not so clear; while repressing overt forms of nationalism, the Soviet ethno-federal system sustained, and in some cases engendered, nationhood. The USSR certainly differed from the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman or even the British empires, which were based on very different dynamics. A geographically compact ‘empire’ such as the Soviet Union, with a high proportion of the core ethnic group living in the other territorial units, is usually called a multiethnic country (Hough 1997: 373). As Simonia argues, ‘Soviet imperialism was a rather unusual phenomenon … . The new, rather specific “metropolitan country” finally took shape as a central bureaucratic party and state machinery (establishment), with the militaryindustrial complex (MIC) as its mainstay. All the republics, including the Russian Republic, found themselves in the position of one big colony exploited by this metropolitan country’ (Simonia 1995: 20–21). This is the theory of the Soviet party-state as a hypothetical sixteenth republic, the empire of ideology, lacking national roots or a national identity but subjugating all the other republics equally – albeit in different ways. Although Soviet leaders ‘had long identified themselves with Russian nationalism, it was a

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superpower nationalism and not an ethnically centred one’ (Hough 1997: 238). Russians retained an ‘all-union’ concept of territory. As the Soviet ethnographer Yurii Arutiuniyan put it, ‘Wherever they lived they actively used their own language and almost always clung to their own culture’ (Arutiuniyan 1991: 21). In most parts of the USSR Russians behaved as if they were at home and failed to learn the local language, assuming that the local peoples should learn Russian, whereas most other peoples remained loyal to a distinct homeland. It was this generalized ‘imperial’ attitude that made it more difficult for Russians after 1991 to identify with the Russian Federation as a separate homeland. The challenge now was for them to become Rossiyane (inhabitants of the Russian republic) more than Russkie (ethnic Russians). In recognition of the multinational character of the country Yeltsin promoted a civic Rossiiskii (supranational) identity (Tolz 1998, 2001). The passage from empire to nation-state entails not only the institutionalization of a new political form but also the recasting of fundamental political categories. In his proposals for the post-Soviet order presented in 1990 Solzhenitsyn called for a Russian Union comprised of Great Russians, Little Russians and White Russians. Solzhenitsyn (1991: 15) argued that, ‘The time has come for an uncompromising choice between an empire of which we ourselves are the primary victims, and the spiritual and physical salvation of our own people’. Khazanov (1994: 164) notes that ‘Many Russians conceive the nation as an ontological category and/or confuse nation with ethnicity’. In Russian, he notes, the word ‘nation’ (natsiya) means ‘ethnic group’, a ‘people’, ‘but not an aggregate of all citizens of a given state’. The notion of Russia as a nation emerged slowly and is to a large degree a product of the geopolitical realities that emerged in 1991.

RUSSIAN ETHNO-FEDERALISM AND THE THREAT OF DISINTEGRATION The tension between sub-national ethnic identification and the state continues into the

post-Soviet epoch. Ethno-federalism remains a potent force for the disintegration of the Russian Federation, seen most notably in Chechnya. Russia is a multinational nation state, but in the 1990s it increasingly became a multi-state state, with areas like Tatarstan and the Chechen Republic retaining only a tenuous unity with the rest of Russia. A multi-state state is a precarious invention, and the leadership under Vladimir Putin from 2000 recognized that the future lay either in the establishment of a more ordered federation regulated by the rule of a single law and constitution, or the path of confederalization and possibly disintegration (Kahn 2002). Russia remains a federation consisting of a number of different units: 21 republics, 57 ordinary regions (oblasts and krais plus two cities, Moscow and St Petersburg, with the rights of oblasts), eight autonomous okrugs and the Jewish autonomous oblast, a total of 89 socalled ‘subjects of the federation’. The Federation Treaty of 31 March 1992 sought to regulate relations between the various units and the centre, but it was only with the adoption of the new constitution in December 1993 that, formally at least, all the subjects of federation became equal in status. The new constitution did not recognize the various declarations of sovereignty adopted by some republics, yet the signing of bilateral treaties between the federal authorities and the subjects of federation, beginning with the one signed with Tatarstan in February 1994, formalized ‘asymmetry’ in Russian federal relations. This period of federalism à la carte came to an end under Putin as he sought to establish a more uniform system, with the unimpeded priority of the writ of the constitution across the country. As part of this most regions ‘voluntarily’ renounced their bilateral treaties (by the time he came to power 46 had been signed with 42 regions). The price paid by Yeltsin to keep the country together was regional segmentation. A rich variety of regional regimes emerged as subjects of the political process in their own right, rather than as actors in a national political process. Yeltsin’s approach can be defended as a realistic response in conditions of minimal

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state infrastructural capacity, and the disastrous attempt to exert the state’s despotic capacity is evident in Chechnya. Yeltsin’s neo-Brezhnevite bargain between regional elites and the centre encouraged a dynamic of sovereignty dispersal that undermined the integrity of the state. The segmentation of sovereignty only superficially took federal forms; rather, federalism was used to legitimate the aggrandisement of regional powers. State-building became fragmented, and in the regions the very idea of the centre became something alien. In his study of Russian national identity on the basis of extensive elite and popular interviews, Bo Petersson (2001) stresses the way that ‘otherness’, one of the key elements in national identity formation, in Russia is directed as much towards ‘the centre’ as it is towards outsiders. Path dependency suggests that earlier institutional choices limit and define later choices. This is nowhere more true than in the area of nationality relations, where the development of a distinctive form of ethno-federalism circumscribes post-communist Russia’s institutional choices. Russian federalism, like the USSR earlier, institutionalizes ethnicity in the form of ethnofederal units, and despite the urgings of Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, to re-establish a unitary state on tsarist lines (the guberniya model where ethnicity lacks institutional representation), such a move is effectively precluded today. Nations in Russia remain defined in both political (ethno-federal) and ethno-cultural forms. It was the tension between the two that provoked the disintegration of the USSR, yet the Russian Federation in the immediate term is unlikely to suffer the same fate on a global scale. While a republic like Chechnya at one time looked as if it would be successful in its bid to secede, its tragic example means that few others are likely to follow (Hale and Taagepera 2002; see also Hale 2004). The predominance of ethnic Russians, at 81 per cent of the population, moreover, entails a different dynamic to that in the USSR. Post-communist Russia has become an entire borderland, the distinguishing feature of post-imperial identities. The very existence of Russia as a state has been questioned.

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Ryszard Kapuscinski in his book Imperium formulates the problem succinctly: [F]ollowing the disintegration of the USSR, we are now facing the prospect of the disintegration of the Russian Federation, or, to put it differently; after the first phase of decolonization (that of the former Soviet Union) the second phase begins – the decolonization of the Russian Federation. (Kapuscinski 1994: 172)

The strongest exponent of this is Rafael Khakimov, one of president Mintimir Shaimiev’s chief advisers in the early 1990s and still an influential figure in Tatarstan. He espoused the ‘decolonization’ model, contrasting a Moscow-based officialdom and ‘a provincial, colonial nation living in another world’ (1993: 16). In his view, as the regions struggled for greater cultural and economic autonomy and gained ever more legal sovereignty, Russia itself would gradually disappear: Russia will increasingly become an ephemeral notion limited to rather vague emotional slogans. There is no hope of preserving Russia in its earlier condition. Russia’s borders have lost their legitimacy. There are no legal norms whereby its approximate borders could be defined ... Regional interests and the idea of regionalization offer a way out of the impasse for Russia. (Khakimov 1993: 62)

In this way sub-national (regional) identities emerged as one of the dominant discourses of the 1990s, condemning the Russian statebuilding endeavour as fundamentally illegitimate. For Khakimov, Russia as a geopolitical reality is destined to disappear. It was fear of this coming about that prompted Putin to restore state coherence. He took advantage of the widespread desire to restore greater integrity to the state, and to give form to the political nation. While ethno-federal separatism remained strong in Chechnya, elsewhere the strong regional identities of macroregions such as the Urals and Siberia now lack a separatist dynamic. Putin is more of a nation and state builder than an empire restorer, and rejected any forceful attempts to restore anything like the former Soviet Union. In internal politics he recognized, with the terrible exception of Chechnya, that any attempt at an overtly authoritarian solution to Russia’s myriad problems, like the August 1991 coup earlier, would provoke the result that it seeks to avoid, namely the disintegration of the country. He recognized the

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multiplicity of post-communist identities, as long as they remained within the framework of the constitution, and recognized the authority of the federal authorities. On the level of nationality politics this means that one might simultaneously consider oneself a Russian, a Tatar and, residually, a Soviet person, while politically favouring democracy and the restoration of closer links between the former republics of the Soviet Union. It is for this reason that Valery Tishkov (director of the Institute of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an adviser to the government) argued for the development of a multicultural nation on the basis of a ‘dual and not mutually exclusive identity (culturalethnic and state-civic)’. The formula proposed a strategy of ‘the gradual de-ethnicization of statehood and the de-etatization of ethnicity’ (Tishkov 1995: 9). This to a degree is the programme pursued by Putin in a type of neoJacobin republican state-building endeavour. CONSTITUTING THE NATION Russia has traditionally had a strong state, a weak society and an under-developed sense of nation. The imperial idea substituted for nationalism, and thus Russia remained rooted in nineteenthcentury ideas of national grandeur, but failed fully to enter the era of mass nationalism. Today, however, it would be misleading simply to say that Russia has a weak state and a weak nation: in fact, the country has an exceptionally strong cultural sense of its own identity, although this lacks clear political characteristics. In this respect both political nationalism and ethnonationalism are relatively weak, while cultural nationalism (the civilizational identity that we called nationism above) is extremely strong. As in so many other areas, terms and definitions that are appropriate for the rest of Europe have to be modified when applied to Russia. NATIONISM AND THE ‘RUSSIA IDEA’ Post-communist Russia is engaged in a multiple process of political and economic modernization,

accompanied by the passage from expansive ‘empire-state’ to a reduced notion of the nationstate. The national subject of these transformations has not been resolved, and thus the ‘Russian question’ remains on the agenda (Allensworth 1998). As we have suggested above, the very idea of nationalism is a highly ambivalent category and remains an arena where different representations of the national idea are contested. Before 1917 Russian nationalism became associated with the shift in empire-building strategy following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Alexander III sought to employ Russification policies to enhance the cohesion of an empire under strain from within from various stripes of revolutionaries and from outside by a new array of great powers (Germany, and later Japan). In the Soviet era Russian nationalism was submerged in the larger communist modernization and formally internationalist project. Today Russia once again finds itself facing renewed plans for modernization and international integration, provoking typical reactions ranging from adaptation to nativist rejectionism. ‘Nationalism’ as such is alien to the Russian tradition, where the focus has historically been on maintaining the state and advancing the culture. Igor Klyamkin noted that ‘Nationalism has not taken root in the Russian mentality, and contrary to the West, is perceived by Russians with suspicion’ (Klyamkin 1995: 19). Patriots in the Slavophile tradition consider nationalism yet another Western invention, like Marxism, imposed on long-suffering Russia. Pozdnyakov (1994: 61) insists that patriotism, love of the motherland and one’s people, has nothing in common with nationalism. In his view ‘Nationalism is the last stage of communism, the last attempt of an outdated ideology to find in society support for dictatorship’ (1994: 74). In Russia nationalism is a recent political phenomenon, and even then has shallow roots. ‘Russia has been a statenation rather than a nation-state … identity has been centered on the state, which became an empire long before the population consolidated as a nation’ (Goble 1995: 163). The state was the primary agent of development and the focus of identity, with the society left to follow.

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The ‘Russian idea’ is the term used to express ‘the conviction that Russia had been entrusted with the divine mission of resuscitating the world by sharing with it the revelation that had been granted to her alone’ (Szamuely 1988: 92). The monk Philotheus in 1510 penned his famous address to the Tsar arguing that ‘two Romes have fallen, but the third stands’, suggesting that Moscow should take up where Rome and Constantinople had left off, a view that later took the form of the conviction that the Russian nation was a ‘God-bearing people’ (narod bogonosets). The theme of the individual’s duties to the state, the idea that collectivism, known as sobornost’ or communality, was of a higher moral order than crass individualism, and the view of the Russian as otherworldly and idealistic rather than grossly materialistic like the Westerner, all contribute to the Russian idea (McDaniel 1996). The belief that the country is fated to tread a distinct path is not unique to Russia, but its combination with a residual messianic belief in the transcendental virtues of Russian exceptionalism is. Almost every significant Russian writer has had something to say on the question of ‘the Russian idea’, and the whole notion is at the centre of debate over Russia’s path of post-communist development and the relevance of Western notions of liberal democracy to Russia. The Russian idea in one way or another suggests a unique path for Russia, and reflects Nikolai Berdyaev’s view that Western capitalism and Soviet communism both represented blind alleys in the development of humanity (Berdyaev 1946). Dostoevsky was not the only one who believed that from Russia would come the salvation of the world. Nevertheless, he refused to be bound by any narrow nationalist agenda and sought to broaden Slavophile ideas to become the source of universal redemption (Hudspith 2004). However, as noted, messianism has been on the wane, and exclusionary forms of Russian nationalism find relatively few supporters. The potential for exploiting Russian nationalism, which both Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov in different ways counted on, was disappointed. There is no influential nationalist political party in Russia and Russian nationalism is not

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an independent subject of the political process. This may change, however, under the pressure of terrorist shocks and internal disorder.

STATE- AND NATION-BUILDING PROJECTS: OFFICIAL NATIONISM National identity is both immanent (passive) and instrumental (projectural). In the active voice, national identity takes the form of a national project. A ‘national project’ is a predominating, coherent vision arising out of a complex of alternative variants of development models proposed by different political forces and individual thinkers of a given community. In the case of Russia today, its national project is multifaceted and highly fragmented, although some common themes emerge: the maintenance of the integrity of Russia as a sovereign multi-ethnic state, the entrenchment of political identity and economic self-sufficiency, recognition of its international great power status, and ensuring predominance in Eurasia. Some sections of the Russian elite take a rather more ‘democratic’ approach, emphasizing human rights, the development of civil society and enforcing the separation of powers and the rule of law. For the neocommunist left, there is greater emphasis on social cohesion and equality, while for traditional nationalists Russia should become the core of a new ‘state-gathering’ enterprise to restore the unity of the East Slavic world. Even some liberals have been attracted to such ideas, as in the call by Anatoly Chubais, one of the leaders of the democratic Union of Right Forces, in the December 2003 parliamentary election campaign to establish a ‘liberal empire’ based on Russia’s economic power over former Soviet states. One reason for the weakness of projectual Russian nationalism today is that it has a small role to play in the current remodernization project. As Mikhail Molchanov puts it: It is not paving a road to modernity. It is not being called upon to consolidate a socially divided society, or to create a new, postcolonial identity for the empire’s former subjects … This nationalism was born in the fight for resources that had transformed amorphous

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movements for democratization and decentralization into a struggle for full national independence, as only full independence gave the right to choose developmental paths and international alliances freely. (Molchanov 2000: 283)

With independence achieved, nationalism in Russia took on a subaltern role. In the passage out of communism statehood was thrust upon the local administrative elite, and they certainly were in no mood to allow various intelligentsia or religious elites to dominate state- and nation-building agendas. The prolonged debate over the adoption of Russia’s new national symbols – the flag, emblem and a new national anthem – revealed Russia’s confused identity. According to Andranik Migranyan (2000: 3), ‘a country without symbols is only a territory, and the people a population’. Putin insisted that ‘The difficulty over Russia’s national symbols is real. If we accept the fact that in no way we could use the symbols of the previous epoch … then we must admit that our mothers and fathers lived useless and senseless lives, that they lived their lives in vain.’ In a speech on 28 December 2000, Putin argued that Russia must ‘stop living in permanent contradiction with itself ’, and on this basis sought to forge a syncretic Russian national identity that drew on all phases of Russian history (Sakwa 2004). The adoption in 2000 of the tsarist eagle as the nation’s emblem, the republican tricolour of 1917 as the country’s flag, and a modified version of the Soviet anthem sought to reconcile all political generations. Soon after Putin returned the red star to the Russian Army, reinforcing the sense of continuity with the past, while refusing to restore the hammer and sickle or the name ‘Stalingrad’ to the city of Volgograd; although in 2004 the word ‘Stalingrad’ once more commemorated that most terrible of battles at the eternal flame by the Kremlin walls. Putin’s model of liberal republicanism espouses individual citizenship against traditional communitarian views of group solidarity. The central principle of the 1993 Russian constitution is that individuals, not communities, are the supreme legal entity in the country. The USSR had been negligent in establishing

a national identity, perpetuating separate ethnicized identities through the notorious fifth point in the passports issued from 1932. From 1997 Russia began to issue new passports. Ethnicity is no longer stated on the new passports, provoking a storm of protest in Tatarstan, Dagestan and some other ethno-federal republics. President Mintimer Shaimiev in Tatarstan, for example, feared that the officially recorded existence of non-Russian majorities at local level, in effect the source of ethnocratic power, was being deliberately undermined. Defenders of Tatar national identity were concerned that the end of the formal registration of nationality would lead to the identity of minority ethnic groups becoming lost in the amorphous mass of a denationalized citizenry. It appeared to be the first step towards the gubernification of Russia (that is, as noted, its transformation into a unitary state), a policy long advocated by Solzhenitsyn and Zhirinovsky in the belief that sub-national identities were no more than constituent strands of the rich tapestry that was the Russian nation. Being half Jewish himself, Zhirinovsky could speak with a certain authority on the question. Even Jews, long discriminated against on the basis of their passport identification, were hesitant about the loss of ethnic markers as Russia’s post-communist leaders sought to forge a deethnicized civic identity. This was the view defended by Tishkov, who insisted that the abolition of Point 5 was a major advance, removing one of the most divisive forms of totalitarian control, and allowing the emergence of a civic national identity (Tishkov 1996). Putin sought to give substance to Yeltsin’s idea of Rossiiskii citizenship. The de-ethnicized citizen became reconstituted as the subject of Russian political space.

THE NATION TODAY Nationalism is a set of competing symbols over which elites struggle, but in contemporary Russia there is little passion at the national level for the struggle. Nationalist fundamentalism remains a relatively minor political

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phenomenon. Perhaps more important is the escape from tradition, from the burden of messianic interpretations of Russian national destiny in either the traditional imperialist or communist forms. Post-communist democratization for Russia is a way of escaping from the burden of the past, and allows a reinterpretation of tradition that brings to the fore the democratic elements in Russian political culture (Petro 1995). With the dissolution of communist power the Russian Orthodox Church provides a template for the definition of Russian-ness. As with Orthodox churches elsewhere, while the church does have a national-political dimension, in the post-communist context it is challenged by a number of other traditions, including the secularism with which the Soviet project was identified. Orthodoxy’s engagement with issues of social policy and political matters, as Noel Malcolm stresses, is more distant than is the case with Protestantism or Roman Catholicism: ‘The intellectual energies of Orthodoxy’, he notes, ‘have been devoted to mystical theology, and the real focus of religious life is placed … on just one thing: the celebration of the liturgy’. He goes on to argue that the alleged Byzantine legacy of ‘caesaro-papism’, the fusion of temporal and spiritual rule, has been misunderstood, and that the problem is not so much Orthodoxy endowing politics with mysticism and fanaticism, but the inverse: ‘far from fusing themselves with politics, the Orthodox Churches withdrew from social and political engagement into a realm of contemplation and liturgical celebration’ (Malcolm 1998: 13). In Russia it is only belatedly that the Orthodox Church has begun to develop a social policy, but it remains a body torn between traditionalists who seek to impose the hegemony of the church on society, and those who see the church acting more modestly as an agent of moral and social renewal in a democratic pluralistic society (Knox 2005). The distinction between nationalist and patriotic trends in Russian thought remains. Solzhenitsyn’s patriotism revived elements of the Slavophile critique of Western liberalism but sought to find a democratic way to institutionalize Russian exceptionalism. Right-wing nationalists, however, condemn the West in its

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entirety and retreat into isolationist policies. The collapse of the reform communist current during perestroika opened the way for an open alliance between irreconcilable parts of the communist tradition, Stalinists and neocommunists, and right-wing Russian nationalism, something that Yanov had predicted more than a decade earlier. In the exit from communism, two main paths were available for the communist party, social democratization or ‘Russification’. The CPRF under the leadership of Zyuganov took the latter (Urban and Solovei 1997; March 2002). This placed them in direct competition with other nationalistic groupings, and meant that they were also essentially fighting for the same political terrain as authoritarian statists. One of these is Zhirinovsky’s LDPR. In his bestknown work The Last Push to the South, Zhirinovsky argues that Russia’s geopolitical problems (and the world’s) would be resolved by a Russian advance to the Indian Ocean that would bring Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan under Moscow’s control. His thinking is imperial rather than nationalistic, although he clearly privileges ethnic Russians over all others as the core of empire. The imperial theme is strong in Dmitry Rogozin’s Rodina (Motherland) party, one of the main opposition groups in the Fourth Duma from December 2003. The Rodina party is potentially the vehicle for the ugliest manifestations of classical nationalism. There are numerous right-wing (leftconservative) nationalists, a tendency that includes Alexander Prokhanov, Igor Shafarevich, Lev Gumilev (who died in 1992) and Alexander Dugin, called the Russian New Right by Thomas Parland (1993). The mere mention of the names above, however, shows the enormous variety in nationalist thinking. Prokhanov is obsessed with empire and is a Slavophile who insists on a ‘sovereign path for Russia’. ‘Russia’, he insisted, ‘will keep producing for the world, and particularly the Western world, the idea of a subtle irrationalism, of a universal love, of pan-humanity.’ He showed little of this universal love towards what he called the Occidentalists: ‘Today’s Westernisers in Russia are the liberals and radicals. They are criminals; they are destroying Russia’ (Prokhanov 1997: 76–7). Dugin’s geopolitical

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Eurasianism returns to the ideas of conservative Russian nationalists of the late nineteenth century, who opposed the liberalism of the West and bureaucratic absolutism in favour of a popular authoritarianism based on the unity of the tsar and the people (Gubman 2004). Lev Gumilev brilliantly but eccentrically expounded on the birth of nations (ethnogenesis) and Russia’s Eurasian destiny. Sharafevich’s denunciation of Russophobia was in part accurate and in part demented, and is a theme taken up by the author Alexander Zinoviev. It is for this reason that Parland’s simple description of them as ‘right-wing’ is inadequate: the ‘left-wing’ component needs to be recognized: right-wing thinking veers into fascism at one extreme, moderates into democratic conservatism in the middle and runs again into Russified communism at the other end. Yanov compares contemporary Russia with Weimar Germany, and although marred by sweeping generalizations and the failure to define terms, some of his points are valid. He insists that the transition to capitalism by no means denotes the triumph of democracy, that the failure of democracy in Russia would have enormous international security implications, and asserts that the West in the early 1990s focused too narrowly on economic reform and failed to support the broader democratization process (Yanov 1995). During perestroika the rise of the extreme right, above all the various tendencies of Pamyat, attracted much attention, yet when faced by the test of the ballot box they attracted few votes. Today there are numerous extreme rightist organizations, some of whom are fascists or neo-fascists, yet none can be portrayed as a genuine mass movement (Shenfield 2000). The fascistic Russian National Unity disintegrated leaving a residue in the inchoate racist violence of skinhead groups. Social surveys agree that the major identities of respondents were social and professional, and only then ethnic and state (Grushin 2000: 8). A survey by the St Petersburg Institute for Complex Sociological Research (NIKSI) revealed that while 59.7 per cent are proud of being born in Russia, ‘serving Russia’ is a priority only for 2.7 per cent, appearing last on a list of priorities. Even ‘state-mindedness’ is

not a slogan that attracts many votes, while a majority reject the use of military force for the sake of statehood, with statehood as such valued by no more than a third (Cheremnykh 1997). Other survey evidence suggests little support for imperial policies, although cultural nationalism remains strong. Russians are not only becoming citizens, but their citizenship is as much of the world as it is of a narrowly defined Russia. As in other countries, statist and cultural forms of nationalism transcend the old dichotomies of ethnic versus civic forms (Gans 2003).

CONCLUSION As an exercise in nation-building the USSR proved an epic failure. The Bolsheviks tried to transform an empire into a state based on illdefined notions of ‘socialist internationalism’, and failed. Russia is now seeking to build a multinational state based on universal citizenship while exploiting the resources of only the mildest of forms of nationalism, a nationism that is inclusive and culturally based. The development of a post-communist national identity is distorted by a range of distinctive factors: the legacy of empire; the presence of some 25 million Russians in the former Soviet republics; the existence of ethno-federal republics within the borders of its formally sovereign republic; the humiliation of the geopolitical collapse at the end of the Cold War; the unprecedented scale of economic collapse and social polarization. At the same time, a number of salutary features reinforce a sense of national cohesion: the Russian Orthodox Church; the vigorous development of patriotic Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and numerous other confessions; a rich cultural legacy that represents a deep well of social capital; and a civilizational sense of national identity. The main problem today is to give this a coherent political form. While Russian nationalism in the late nineteenth century might have begun to reach the ‘mass movement’ phase (Hroch 1985), its history for most of the twentieth century has taken a very different trajectory.

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Post-communist mass Russian nationalism has not been mobilized to pursue an aggressive or irredentist foreign policy, even though there is a broad consensus among elites that Russia must remain a great power. At home, the primordialist view of ‘one state – one nation’ has not taken root. Russia is at last becoming a nation-state based on principles of ethnic and religious diversity and civic inclusion. Nationism is triumphant, although the danger of nationalism can never be discounted.

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35 Modernity and Nationalism: Turkey and Iran in Comparative Perspective E . F U A T K E Y M A N A N D S¸ U H N A Z Y I L M A Z

The claims of nationality have come to dominate politics in the last decade of the twentieth century. As the ideological contest between capitalism and communism has abated with the breakup of the Soviet Union and its satellite regions, so questions of national identity and national self-determination have come to the fore. It matters less, it seems, whether the state embraces the free market, or the planned economy, or something in between. It matters more where the boundaries of the state are drawn, who gets included and who gets excluded, what language is used, what religion endorsed, what culture promoted. (Miller 1995: 1)

David Miller’s diagnosis has so far been correct and illuminating not only for the 1990s, but also for the first years of the new millennium. Nationalism and nationalist sentiments were unleashed rather than suffered a demise during the last decade of the twentieth century, and dictated the return of culture and authenticity in globalization by bringing about ethnonationalist and religious fundamentalist identity conflicts in different parts of the world. As the claims to national identity and national self-determination have recently involved the simultaneous existence of global terrorism and war, both of which constituted the defining features of what has come to be known as ‘the post-9/11 world’, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that

nationalism will retain its dominant place in politics in the foreseeable future of national and global affairs. It is in this sense that there has been an upsurge of interest in academic and public discourse concerning the question of the power of nationalism to remain one of the dominant ideologies of modern times, as well as of its ability to revitalize itself and resurface in various forms in different world-historical contexts, and to articulate itself in different political ideologies and social movements. Turkey and Iran constitute one of the important and interesting cases in demonstrating how nationalism has been able to maintain its presence both ideologically and politically in modern times, and to understand its systemdefining and system-transforming power even today. Nationalism had operated as a dominant ideology in the process of the transition to modernity in both Turkey and Iran. Moreover, the historical experience of modernity in these countries throughout the twentieth century, and even now, has to a large extent been determined by the continuing system-defining and system-transforming power of nationalism. In both countries, the modern state-building

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process and the state-centric mode of modernization have constituted the very foundation on which nationalism has acquired its dominant ideology status and its transformative power. Moreover, both countries represent a case for alternative modernity, since while these countries have accepted the norms and institutions of Western societal modernization, they also had to confront the challenge of establishing them in predominantly Muslim societies. Given this similarity, it should be pointed out, however, that the connection between nationalism and modernity has been experienced differently and, more importantly, has given rise to different claims to nation-state, national economy and national identity in these countries. In what follows, we will elaborate on these points by delineating the ways in which the ideology of nationalism has been put into practice in relation to modernity in Turkey and Iran. First, we will focus on the Turkish case with a special emphasis on the republican era, when the relationship between modernity and nationalism was constructed through and in the process of nation-state-building. The experience of the republican era provides important insights to account for the continuing presence of nationalism in Turkey today. Secondly, we turn our attention to the Iranian case, in which the focus will be on the interrelationship between religion and nationalism that has framed the domestic and foreign policy orientations of the strong state. In conclusion, we will suggest that it is only through the democratization of the state– society relations in Turkey and Iran that we could resist the power of nationalism and its continuing impact on the nature and formation of modernity in these countries.

MODERNITY AND NATIONALISM IN TURKEY Although it is true that ‘Turkey did not rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It was “made” in the image of the Kemalist elite which won the national struggle against foreign invaders and the old regime’,

the history of nationalism goes back to the late-Ottoman times (Ahmad 1993: 2). A quick glance at the Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876) and the Young Turk movement (1908–1918) in the late-Ottoman times demonstrates that nationalism was put into practice as an articulating principle of the need for modernization and the desire to save the Ottoman state (Kazanc¹gil 1981: 37–9). The making of modern Turkey however brought about a rupture with the Ottoman past, with the emergence of the nation-state, and in that context nationalism was situated in the process of making in direct relation to the process of state building. To a large extent, the republic indeed presented a radical break with the past, as it was nurtured by ‘concepts and doctrines such as progress, laicism, nationalism, Comtean positivism and solidarism’, owed a lot ‘to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and nineteenth-century scientism’, and aimed as ‘its ultimate consequence to create “a modern Turkish state”’(Kazanc¹gil 1981: 37). The creation of modern Turkey presented a rupture with the past, insofar as it privileged the Turkish state as the sovereign and dominant actor of modernity. Yet, at the same time, it carried in itself certain elements of continuity with the past, since the goal of ‘saving the state through modernization’ remained the dominant motto of nationalism in the republican era. In fact, this legacy still frames the debate on nationalism in today’s Turkey. This means that nationalism has been one of the most important and effective characteristics of the process of making modern Turkey, and it has remained and continues to play that role, even in different contexts and articulations. Since the main goal of Atatürk and his followers was to reach the level of ‘Western civilization’ by installing an independent nation-state, fostering industrialization, and constructing a secular and modern national identity, and this goal was derived to a large extent from the desire for saving the state and securing its existence, it was nationalism that linked security with modernity, and became the dominant ideology of the state (Keyman forthcoming). From its inception in 1923, modernity and security have constituted intertwined processes that had to

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be carried out by the Turkish nation-state through the ideology of nationalism. The Kemalist elite’s will to civilization was not simply a local project of economic or political modernization. Nor was it based essentially upon an attempt to create a national identity for Turkey. It was a more complex and at the same time more ambiguous project of modernity, aiming to achieve a top-down and statebased transformation of a traditional society into a modern nation by introducing and disseminating Western reason and rationality. In this context, according to Mardin, the project of modernity involved the conceptualization of the Turkish Republic as a nation-state and required a set of transitions, including: (i) the transition of political authority from personal rule to impersonal rules and regulations, that is, the rule of law; (ii) the shift from divine law as the explanation for the order of the universe to positivist and rational thinking; (iii) the shift from a community founded upon the ‘elite-people cleavage’ to a political community; and (iv) the transition from a religious community to a nation-state. These transitions were regarded by Mustafa Kemal as the precondition for Turkey living ‘as an advanced and civilized nation in the midst of contemporary civilization’ (Ahmad 1993: 53). As an integral element of the project of modernity, nationalism was employed by the state to initiate a ‘rapid’ political, economic and cultural modernization, in order to create a modern institutional political structure, a quickly industrializing economy and a homogeneous national identity with a highly secular and progressing society. The rapid modernization was necessary not only to catch up with the level of Western civilization, but also to make the Turkish state more secure and stronger. Therefore, how to achieve both modernity and security simultaneously was and has remained the fundamental question for the state to cope with, and it was in this context that nationalism was considered and employed as the effective answer. The idea of the state in the mind of Atatürk and his followers was by no means abstract: rather it was a reaction to two aspects of the Ottoman state, which they identified as key to

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the Empire’s decline. Because the Ottoman state was identified with the personal rule of the sultan, eventually it was unable to compete within the European state system which was organized on the basis of legal-rational authority (Heper 1985). Secondly, the Islamic basis of the Ottoman state was seen as the primary obstacle to progress in Ottoman society, insofar as modernization required the regulation of state–society relations through the nationstate. Therefore, the republican elite sought to create a state distinct from the person of the sultan and secular enough to reduce Islam to the realm of individual faith. For them, the state had to involve commitment to political modernity, meaning that the link between the modernization of the polity and that of society had to be established by the state. It is for this reason that the republican elite initiated reforms, imposed from above to ‘enlighten the people and help them make progress’ (Heper 1985: 1). These reforms were designed to equate the national will with the general will, and included the principles of republicanism, nationalism, étatism, secularism, populism and revolutionism (or reformism from above). In each principle, nationalism enabled the state to initiate political and economic modernization, to construct a secular and homogeneous national identity and thus to make sure that the security of the state could be maintained. Moreover, it is through nationalism that the state maintained its sovereign and dominant role in almost every sphere of societal relations, from politics to economics, from cultural identity and morality to everyday life practices of individuals. Having delineated the basic premises of the ideology of nationalism and its employment by the state, we can make a number of suggestions about its power and continuing presence in the course of modernity in Turkey. First, nationalism derives its power from its central role in Turkish modernization, in which the state seeks to achieve security and modernity simultaneously. Secondly, the ideology of nationalism has always been one of the defining characteristics of modern Turkey, insofar as it played a vital role not only in the process of nation-state building, but also in the

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top-down and state-centric attempt to achieve the economic and cultural modernization of society. Thirdly, nationalism has also operated as the main ideological imperative of the state in formulating its international politics. In other words, nationalism has constituted the ontological foundation for the state-centric formulation of Turkish foreign policy (Çelik 1999). Fourthly, given the significant changes that the formation of Turkish modernity has faced throughout the contemporary history of modern Turkey, such as the transition to democracy after World War II, the post-1980 economic liberalization, globalization, European integration and the emergence of religious, ethnic and cultural identity-based conflicts in the 1990s, and the increasing importance of civil society organizations, nationalism has nevertheless remained influential and effective. In other words, the question of modernity and nationalism has continued to occupy its central place in academic and public discourse, even though its content has been subject to reconstructions and been articulated by different, and even contrasting, political actors and movements. In this sense, the continuing power of nationalism in Turkey can be said to have gone hand in hand with the success of the strong state in governing its society. In modern Turkey, this success can be observed in the creation of the necessary institutions of political and economic modernization in terms of politics, law, economics and industrialization, in the transition to multi-party democracy in 1945, as well as in foreign policy with respect to Turkey’s integration in the Western alliance system. Yet, since the 1980s, especially during the 1990s, we have seen the increasing failure of the strong state to link modernity and nationalism with one another, as a result of the significant changes and transformations confronting the state-centric and top-down operation of Turkish modernity (Cornell 2001). In this period, at the economic level, the strategy for industrialization shifted dramatically from import-substitution to exportpromotion, and much more emphasis was placed on market forces. The export-oriented industrialization created a strong shift from a

vision of society which was heavily statist, towards one that is characterized by neoliberal free-market individualism. In this sense, the emerging neoliberal ideology in Turkey during the 1980s called for and initiated radical market-oriented reforms in the name of economic progress (Önis¸ 1997: 750), which in turn has generated a serious challenge to the state. The neoliberal restructuring of the economy, which has placed the idea of market rationality at the center of the state–economy interactions challenged both the dominant regulatory role of the state in the economy and its national developmentalist ideology. At the political and cultural levels, Turkish modernity has been confronted by a number of identity-based conflicts challenging the homogeneous and secular national identity. A variety of claims to identity and demands for recognition with different political imaginations have made their mark in all spheres of social life. From the resurgence of Islam, the Kurdish question, the women question, the minority question to civil-societal calls for individual and cultural rights and freedoms, in a wide spectrum, identity politics, with its challenge to national identity, has become one of the important characteristics of post-1980 Turkish modernity (Keyman and Içduygu 2005). Moreover, identity politics, which has been voiced and put into practice by different societal groups, has simultaneously involved both democratic demands for multiculturalism and pluralism, and the communitarian political strategies with anti-democratic and ethnoreligious nationalist claims to nationality. It is true that, today, it is not possible to think of modernity without reference to identity. Yet it is equally true that identity politics is not necessarily democratic, but often conflictual and crisis-ridden. It is due precisely to this fact that identity politics, and the frequent use of ethno-religious nationalism in it, has made it very difficult for the state to maintain the secular and homogeneous basis of the national identity it has attempted to create through the ideology of nationalism as an articulating principle of modernity and security. Thus, since the 1980s, there has been an increased dominance of security in state discourse, understood as

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the security of both the territorial state and the secular national identity of the republic. However, the most far reaching impact of identity politics on Turkish modernity has been a shift in the ideology of nationalism from modernity to security (Bora 2003: 433–53). In other words, if in the republican period, rapid modernization with the intention of reaching the level of Western civilization had been considered an answer to the question of saving and securing the Turkish state, the post-1980 Turkey has witnessed the privileging of security over modernity. It has to be acknowledged that the historical context in which this shift from modernity to security has occurred and has given meaning to the changing content of the ideology of nationalism, is not only national, but also regional and global. The former Turkish Foreign Minister Ismail Cem emphasized the significance of this broader international context by arguing, ‘In the formation of Turkey in the twenty-first century, foreign policy is a determining factor … The goal of current generations should be to create a Turkey … which will be a global and regional center of attraction with its history, cultural richness, democracy, economy and progressiveness based on social justice’ (Cem 2004: 59–60). With the end of the Cold War, Turkey emerged as a pivotal regional power in a volatile region. Since the 1980s, Turkish modernity has also been exposed to globalization, which has triggered the process of the widening, deepening and speeding-up of the interconnections between states, economies and cultures in the world. One of the most important impacts of globalization on national societies has been the increasing importance of the global, regional, national and local interactions that have provided a suitable platform for the emergence of new demands for cultural identity and political recognition. As the research on globalization has indicated, the identity-based conflicts that have been occurring throughout the world since the 1980s, but especially during the 1990s, have been locating themselves in the intersection between the global and local, making claims to nationality and national identity, voicing strong demands for recognition, and strengthening

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themselves through global networking (Keyman and Koyuncu 2005: 105–29). The ideology of nationalism has been influenced by globalization in two ways; first, it has been articulated by the locally organized political movements in their struggle for recognition, and thus we have observed the emergence of micro-nationalism in ethnic, religious and cultural terms; and second, the national context has lost its capacity and power to be the most important spatial ground for nationalism, and thus we have observed that nationalism has become a more and more globally and locally constructed ideology. These two impacts of globalization on nationalism have been observed in Turkey too. As has been noted, the post-1980 Turkey has witnessed the emergence of mainly religious and ethnic identity-based conflicts which have confronted the secular and homogeneous character of national identity. Moreover, the way in which these conflicts have voiced their demands for recognition, legitimized their struggle to gain cultural rights and freedoms, and more importantly politicized themselves to influence national and local politics has to a large degree benefited from globalization and global debates about identity/difference. As a result, not only has nationalism become localized in ethnic and religious terms, it has also become the main ideology of the state to react against these identity demands and conflicts in a highly security-oriented manner. In the context of globalization, nationalism in Turkey has continued its dominance, but this time it was framed by security concerns (Özbudun 2000). It should be pointed out, however, that there are two specific processes, namely those of the end of the Cold War and European integration, which should be taken into account in order to understand how security concerns have characterized the modus vivendi of nationalism and its relation to modernity in post-1980 Turkey. The end of the Cold War gave rise to the emergence of important changes and ambiguities in the domestic and foreign policy initiatives of Turkey. It is true that the end of the Cold War has also ended the ‘buffer state foreign policy identity’ of Turkey, which Turkey had enjoyed and benefited from

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in the years of the hegemonic struggle between two superpowers, and thus has brought about a need for Turkey to search for a new identity. Yet it is also true that in the post-Cold War years, as well as in today’s post-9/11 world, the geopolitical and historical significance of Turkey in the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia has become increasingly apparent, and thus Turkey has been increasingly perceived as a key regional actor in the creation of regional peace and stability (Larrabee and Lesser 2003). However, the new identity and role of Turkey in the post-Cold War era, in which international affairs have been undergoing a significant transition and transformation process, is not yet certain. Instead, change and uncertainty about the future are going hand in hand and this has had important consequences for the ideology of nationalism in Turkey. The post-Cold War era has created a new impetus for the ideology of nationalism to continue its dominant role in modernity, a role defined increasingly by the security concerns of the Turkish state (Fuller and Lesser 1993: 148). This uncertainty, embedded in the foreign policy identity of Turkey since the end of the Cold War, and the increasing identity-based conflicts in ethnic and religious terms that have marked the changing nature of domestic politics in Turkey, have both reinforced the security-oriented operation of the ideology of nationalism and its relation to modernity in Turkey. Likewise, changes and uncertainties have also become more and more apparent in the process of European integration since the mid1990s, as Turkey has attempted to achieve full membership status in the European Union. As a country on the borders of Europe, trying to start the full accession negotiations, and initiating the significant political and constitutional democratic reforms necessary for full membership, Turkey’s expectation has been to receive an objective and fair response from Europe. However, the high level of uncertainty in Europe about whether or not culturally it regards Turkey as part of itself has brought about not objectivity and universality, but instead a sense of double-standards skepticism, and mistrust in Turkish society. As a result,

even though, in the period between 1999 and 2004, Turkey–EU relations deepened, and full accession negotiations began in October 2005, the prevailing dominance of such uncertainty has strengthened nationalism in Turkey. The ideology of nationalism, used by the antiEuropean integration forces, voicing the significance of the state and its sovereignty to maintain the security of Turkish modernity and territorial integrity, has benefited from the high level of uncertainty within Europe about the place of Turkey in it. Nevertheless, the EU integration process has served as an important external anchor, giving impetus to the democratization process in Turkey (Ugˇ ur and Canefe 2004) and has also played a critical role in shaping the intricate dynamics of the EU–Turkey–US triangle (Önis¸ and Y¹lmaz 2005). It would not be mistaken to suggest that the impressive record of Turkey in upgrading its level of democracy in recent years, as well as its perception by the US as a key actor for the future of the Middle East would not have been possible without the positive role of the European integration process. It can also be suggested in this sense that the way in which the Turkey-EU full accession negotiations develop will determine to a large extent the role and the power of nationalism in reshaping the formation of Turkish modernity in the near future. Having briefly outlined the domestic and global developments that have contributed to the continuing dominance of nationalism in Turkey since the 1980s, we could conclude here that insofar as nationalism functions as the main articulating principle of modernity and security, and operates as the dominant ideology of the formulation of domestic and foreign policies of the state, it continues to operate within a system-defining and systemtransforming capacity. Put differently, we could suggest that as long as the experience of modernity involves a strong state without a normative and political commitment to democracy and its consolidation in societal affairs, nationalism acts as a dominant ideology and maintains its presence as such. In this sense, the presence of democratic deficit and that of nationalism are in fact two sides of the

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same coin, namely state-centric modernity. To elaborate on this point, we will now turn to the Iranian case.

FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM: EXPLOSIVE DILEMMAS OF IRANIAN NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY The crafting and re-crafting of national identity through political mobilization has been a recurrent theme in modern Iranian history. While following an alternative path through the global process of modernity, Iranian nationalism has developed in a ‘bombastic and dualistic fashion’ (Fahri 2005: 7), swinging like Foucault’s pendulum between the extremes of glorification of Iran’s pre-Islamic past and its Islamic heritage, secularism and Islamic fundamentalism, isolation and the desire for a pivotal regional role, and an ardent anti-imperialism and integration in global trends. Ironically, while the Islamists generally uphold political Islam as an ostensibly universalistic ideology and condemn nationalism, they are often strikingly nationalistic. In the Iranian case, they also display a parochial nationalist character (Munson 2003: 40–53). Moreover, in its efforts to ensure its security and to form a sphere of influence in the Middle East (and in Central Asia in the post-Cold War era) as a pivotal medium-size regional power, Iran had to persistently tackle the challenge of coping with its Persian Shi’ite heritage as ‘the other’ in a predominantly Arab and Sunni region. Consequently, these factors have played a critical role in shaping the nature and course of Iranian nationalism and modernity. Iran has experienced two major revolutions in the modern period: the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–09 and the Islamic Revolution of 1977–79. The first one marked the triumph, albeit brief and limited, of the modern intelligentsia, who wanted to reshape their society in the image of contemporary Europe. They were inspired by such ideologies as nationalism and liberalism and drafted a predominantly secular constitution. The second revolution, on the other hand, brought the traditional ulema to the epicenter of a

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political earthquake in Iran. In sharp contrast to the previous period, this time Iran’s political leaders were inspired by ‘the golden age of Islam’ and have sealed their victory by creating a thoroughly clerical constitution and an essentially Islamic fundamentalist republic. Consequently, they tried to Islamize Iranian nationalism by bringing the religious dimension to the forefront. During the first Pahlavi state of Reza Shah from 1926 to 1941, as well as during the second Pahlavi era of his son Mohammed Reza Shah (after a period of foreign occupation during World War II) continuing up to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a glorification of Iran’s pre-Islamic past and an emphasis on the ethno-linguistic dimension of Iranian identity were coupled with the promotion of an ardently secular version of nationalism. In these periods, the monarchy’s attempts to mold a secular Iranian nation-state were accompanied by a rapid process of top-to-bottom modernization and these efforts marked the transformation of a society (with varying degrees of success) whose primary forms of identification were mainly at the religious and tribal levels. While creating an autocratic style of rule, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah Pahlavi, had a clear idea of the path along which Iran should be moving. The goal was the rapid creation of a modern and secular nationstate like Turkey. The ruling elite envisioned Iran as a distinct cultural and political entity molded and enriched by history (with particular emphasis on the pre-Islamic heritage) and language (Persian) (Tavakoli-Targhi 2001). The attempt to create a common national identity was perceived essentially as a modernization project. As Yapp emphasizes, ‘For Reza Iran was a teleological as well as a historical concept; the greatness of Iran was in the future as well as the past and it depended upon modernization.’ (Yapp 1996: 174–5) Yet, whether the society would be able to cope with this extremely rapid pace of modernization or share this particular version of Iranian nationalism was not a major concern for the ruling elite. Like his father, Mohammed Reza Shah also believed in the process of rapid modernization, calling it the

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march towards the great civilization. In this respect, modernization was perceived as a Westernization project. During this fast-paced march, however, the Pahlavi regime often had to resort to coercion, because it was after all an elite regime (often perceived as a pawn of Western powers) which tried to push a reluctant society frequently in a direction in which it did not want to move. The ruling elite tried to shape Iranian nationalism through a distinctly secular ideology by diminishing the role of Islam in Iran. They attempted to accentuate the ties with Iran’s pre-Islamic past, as well as to underscore the racial difference between the ‘Aryan’ Iranians and the Arabs (Yousefzadeh 2004). In doing this, the major strategy was to de-emphasize Arab, hence Islamic, influences on Iranian history. In addition to placing the glorious history of the Achaemenid dynasty in the limelight, the ruling elite presented Western modernity as the ideal model for Iran. Similar to the Turkish case, the attempt to shift from divine law to positivist and rational thinking lay at the core of the Iranian modernization project. However, unlike the Turkish experience, with the continuation of the monarchy, the transfer of political authority from personal rule to an impersonal institutional structure marked by the rule of law did not materialize. Moreover, the transition from a community shaped by ‘elite–people cleavage’ to a political community also failed. The extremely close ties of the monarchy with foreign powers (first with the British and Russians and then with the Americans), not only severely challenged the legitimacy of the rulers, but also accentuated the ‘elite-people’ division. Hence, although the ruling elite took a number of measures to curb the power of the clergy and to diminish the role of Islam in Iran, the transition from religious community to a nation-state assumed a parochial and precarious nature. Between 1960 and 1979, the socio-economic landscape in Iran was, nevertheless, transformed in a very radical way. There was significant population growth accompanied by rapid urbanization. Some 3.7 million people left their villages to settle in towns between 1956 and

1976 compared to virtually none before 1934 and only 750,000 between 1934 and 1956. By 1979, close to half of the population was urban. There was also land reform curbing the power particularly of major absentee landlords. In this period, the government developed infrastructure and communications by constructing ports, railways and especially roads, of which more than 20,000 kilometers were built (Yousefzadeh 2004). There was also a push for industrialization and particularly for the development of the iron and steel industry. The money to finance the economic growth and the additional services came from oil revenues that had started to flow in. By 1970 Iran’s oil revenues were approximately one billion dollars a year and as a result of drastic increases in oil prices during the early 1970s Iran’s earnings from oil reached 20 billion dollars per annum in 1976. No country in the Middle East, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, was transformed more in those years than Iran. Over the whole period, the average annual economic growth rate was approximately 12 per cent (Wilber 1981: 263–331). While Iran still lagged behind countries like Israel, Egypt and Turkey on a number of indicators, Iran had begun from a much lower baseline and thus compressed its economic growth into a much shorter period. The Shah’s White Revolution that gained momentum between 1960 and 1963 and the ensuing period of rapid economic growth transformed Iran drastically by shifting the center of gravity from rural to urban, from agriculture to industry and most importantly from landowning notables to the state. Ironically, the urban character of the Islamic Revolution would reflect both the influence of religion and the unintended consequences of this rapid transformation and modernization of Iranian state and society. As far as Iranian nationalism is concerned, during the reign of Mohammed Reza Shah (like his father), the pre-Islamic dimension of Iranian national identity was emphasized. The ruling elite presented the history of pre-Islamic Iran as its golden age and frequently portrayed the monarchy as the descendants of the glorious kings of the Achaemenid dynasty such as Cyrus and Darius. While emphasizing Iran’s

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glorious pre-Islamic past, they tried to present the clergy as a backward class and an obstacle to the reforms in Iran. For instance, the monarchy often referred to the potential tyranny of ‘the Red and the Black’, with the ‘Red’ symbolizing the communists and the ‘Black’ referring to the clergy. However, the Shah’s attempts to marginalize the powerful Islamic clergy clearly backfired and with the advent of the Islamic Revolution the discontented masses led by the ulema cast a ‘Black’ shadow over efforts to mold a secular Iranian nationalism. In this respect, the revolution not only brought the end of the 2,500-year-old monarchy, but also ‘sought to make Iran less a land of Cyrus and Darius, and more a land of Mohammed’ (Wilber 1981: 263–331). The primary components of Iranian nationalism promoted during the monarchy were turned upside down with the 1979 revolution. However, the duality itself was not fundamentally altered. As opposed to the constitutional discourse that emphasized Iran’s pre-Islamic past as a time of enlightenment and glory, the revolutionary discourse re-constituted that past as the dark era of monarchical despotism and oppression and instead presented the Islamic period as the golden age. The charismatic leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, repeatedly argued that the only part of Iran’s past worth studying and glorifying was the period after Iran’s transformation into an Islamic country, following its conquest by Arab and Muslim armies. For instance, as early as 1924, Khomeini stated that ‘Before Islam, the lands now blessed by our True Faith suffered miserably because of ignorance and cruelty. There is nothing in the past that is worth glorification’ (Wilber 1981: 263–331). By the time of the 1979 revolution the battle lines were clearly marked with pre-Islamic symbolisms and monarchy on one side and Islam and the clergy on the other (Abrahamian 1993: 88). By creating memory wars and ideologizing the past, Islamic clergy leading the masses attempted to redefine Iranian identity and nationalism along religious lines and intensified the temporal divide separating the pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran. Moreover, the new Islamic republic set out to crush all remnants of secular Iranian

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nationalism. Thus, the Iranian pendulum has swung from one extreme to another, yet again by policies enforced on the society from the top. Iranian nationalism, being a modern phenomenon, submerges its roots in the construction of the modern state; hence, in the policies of territorial centralism and in the efforts to construct a uniform national identity. In this respect, the geographical context and the protection of Iran’s territorial integrity and security remain as one of the most persistent themes in Iranian nationalism. The aftermath of the Islamic Revolution was marked by two concomitant trends. On the one hand there was the attempt towards Islamizing Iranian nationalism. Yet, on the other hand, while political Islam aspired to be a universalist ideology, Islam itself was nationalized by the peculiarities of the Iranian case. What ultimately provided the essential link between these two opposing trends, which could have served as a perilous centrifugal force, was the presence of a strong centralized state. Three main factors, namely, modernization, mobilization and participation, have shaped the course of the revolution and the post-revolutionary politics in Iran. The fundamentalist strategy was to take over the state and to conduct the affairs of the state in strict compliance with the Shari’a (Islamic law). Hence, once again there was a radical shift from a secular state to divine law as the source of political authority and legitimacy. However, due to the establishment of a strong state system and the international context, this reversal was not accompanied by a similar transition from the nation-state back to the religious community. Moreover, the Islamic clergy in their efforts to reshape Iranian society and politics along religious lines did not oppose the other main elements of modernization such as a powerful state and rapid economic development. Yet, while trying to present a path towards an alternative modernity, they insisted that modernization should not necessarily be accompanied by the acknowledgement of the epistemic and moral dominance of the West. As argued by Fred Halliday, ‘Revolutions were a product of the tensions of a developing modernity, of the

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combined and uneven spread of that modernity across the world, but they were also constrained by that process’ (Halliday 1999: 54). Hence, the Iranian revolution was both a reaction to modernization and also in return was shaped and constrained by it through mass mobilization and political participation. In the post–revolutionary period in Iran, during the first decade under the leadership of Khomeini, efforts to Islamize the state and society and to carry out the inqilab-i farhangi (cultural revolution) marked the domestic scene. In the international arena, Iran was preoccupied with eight years of Iran–Iraq war and the desire to export the revolution in defiance of the Western powers and the Soviet Union. Ironically, however, by co-opting a religious rhetoric, Saddam pushed the Iranian regime to use nationalism instead of Islam, in order to get the support of the masses against Saddam’s armies. Once again, in Iran’s search for security appealing to nationalist sentiments proved to be the most convenient and effective mechanism to unite the people against a common enemy. During the late 1980s, under President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the desire for social, economic and political reform gained momentum, both among an influential group of political elites and the public. Particularly, under the leadership of Khatami the need for reforms in all aspects of the Islamic system was emphasized. This was accompanied by a foreign policy orientation towards promoting peaceful co-existence and reconciliation with neighbors and other countries, as well as an attempt towards better integration with global trends and the push for increased regional cooperation both in the Middle East and in Central Asia. Just like Turkey, Iran also had to respond to the penetrating impact of globalization. However, in Iran these new domestic and foreign policies faced difficulties of a different nature than identity politics and were frequently challenged by the confrontation between the conservatives and the reformists. Hence, the reform process was carried on with limited success. External factors have played a crucial role in shaping the dilemmas of Iranian nationalism.

Initial impetus for nationalism, similar to the Ottoman Empire and many other countries, was strongly intertwined with patriotic sentiments and lamentations over the loss of Iranian territory and diminishing Iranian military might vis-à-vis the imperial powers (Cole 1996: 36–56). Ever since, Iranian nationalism has been closely tied with Iran’s constant search for security. However, unlike Turkey which was never colonized and had fought a glorious war of independence against the Western powers, prolonged foreign interference in the domestic affairs of Iran (particularly by Britain and Russia and by the United States since the end of World War II) not only increased the public’s skepticism towards equating modernization with Westernization, but also tainted Iranian nationalism with a spirit of xenophobia which was to be clearly reflected during the Islamic Revolution. In the aftermath of the revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran, while trying to enhance its regional influence by emphasizing an Islamic worldview and political structure, remained rather isolated. In this respect, Iran’s Persian and Shi’a heritage in a predominantly Arab and Sunni region served as an additional obstacle in exporting its own version of an Islamic Revolution and state. In the end, just as Trotsky’s vision to export the communist revolution differed from the Stalinist model of ‘socialism in one country’ shaped by the realities of the domestic and international arena, despite their universalist claims the Islamists had to operate within a national context. Thus, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranian foreign policy moved from radical revolutionary ideals to a relatively more rational and peaceful orientation, particularly under President Khatami. However, Iran’s recent attempts to develop nuclear weapons might perilously alter regional balances and set Iran on a course of isolation and confrontation with the United States. Moreover, unlike Turkey, for which the prospect of European Union membership serves as a powerful impetus for the democratic reform process, due to the deep-rooted skepticism towards the West and particularly thorny relations with the United States, Iran lacks an effective

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external anchor for democratization and reform. Hence, the domestic tensions between the reformists and conservatives also find their resonance in external relations and there is a persistent democratic deficit. Iran’s 2005 presidential elections, bringing the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, Ahmedinejad, into power with a quite unexpected landslide victory, will swing the pendulum of Iranian politics once again towards the religious conservative hardliners to the dismay of the reformist camp. Iranian nationalism is not a monolithic or a uniform concept and encompasses multiple facets and manifestations of Iranian national identity, including the territorial, linguistic, ethnic and religious. This is not very surprising for a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural country like Iran. However, what makes the Iranian case rather unique, as Firouzeh Kashani-Sabet underlines, ‘is the way, in which the varying emphases on these complementary, but often competing articulations of nationalism, has transformed Iranian politics in radical ways’ (Sabet 2002). In return, the radical changes in Iranian politics also gave way to major swings and stark choices as to which components of national identity would be at the forefront. For instance, if at one time the ruling elite upheld secular nationalism and language as the principal defining characteristics of modern Iran, at another historic juncture (after the Islamic revolution) religion has become the primary determinant of being Iranian. The struggle between these two visions and the versions of Iranian nationalism still continues. Moreover, there has been a persistent mismatch between the perceptions of the political leaders regarding the defining characteristics of Iranian nationalism with those of the masses, as well as the pace and the course of modernization in Iran. Consequently, their level of success in permeating their particular version of Iranian identity in its extreme forms (in either the militantly secular or Islamic fundamentalist version) and alternative models of modernity through top-to-bottom coercive policies, both in the past and present remains highly questionable.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS: TURKEY AND IRAN IN COMPARISON In the light of the foregoing analysis of the Turkish and the Iranian experiences of nationalism, a number of comparative insights can be drawn, which should be taken into account in delineating the way in which nationalism operates and remains one of the dominant ideologies of modernity. These insights are as follows. First, both countries represent postimperial social formations with strong historical, philosophical and cultural imperial legacies. In analyzing nationalism in Turkey and Iran, one cannot ignore the impact of the Ottoman and the Persian imperial past on the connection between nationalism and modernity within the context especially of the nation-state-building process. Since neither of these countries have experienced prolonged periods of direct foreign rule, it is important to underline that their nation-state-building process took place not in the postcolonial, but the post-imperial context. Secondly, both countries represent strong-state traditions, in which the practice of the ideology of nationalism has been embedded in the active and major role of the state as the sovereign subject of the process of the top-down modernization and transformation of traditional society. Thirdly, both countries represent a case for alternative modernity, insofar as their experience of modernity has taken place in a Muslim social setting with Islamic cultural and religious identity. As an alternative modernity, both countries have accepted the institutions of the Western societal modernization, such as the nation-state, political institutions and economic market relations, and have attempted to establish them in a Muslim social setting. Fourthly, both countries act as pivotal states in international politics, due precisely to their regional power. In this sense, the ideology of nationalism in these countries takes place at the intersection of domestic and international politics, and thus acts as an integral element of the role and power of the state in shaping and reshaping the structure and formation of not only domestic relations but also regional politics. Fifthly, both for Turkey and Iran their

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geopolitical context and constant search for security have shaped the course of their nationalism and modernity. While in the early phases of their nation-building process the emphasis was on the link between nationalism and modernity, in the Cold War period and particularly in the post-Cold War era nationalism started to be more closely tied with security, resulting in the securitization of the nationalist discourse. In light of these common denominators, we have argued that it is the state-building process and the continuing presence of the strong-state tradition in Turkey and Iran that provide an adequate theoretical and political ground for an analysis of the historically and discursively constructed relation between modernity and nationalism in these countries. However, the historical course of modernity in these societies has given rise to different, even contrasting, articulations of nationalism and politics which have resulted in the emergence of different state ideologies, political regime structures and possibilities of democratization. In Turkey, the relation between modernity and nationalism has been determined to a large extent by the secular state aiming to create a modern society with a strong desire to reach the level of contemporary Western civilization. Therefore, the Turkish experience has revealed the fact that the ideology of nationalism can be employed by the state to establish the necessary institutions of Western modernity and to create a modern society through a homogeneous secular national identity. This experience has demonstrated that a secular and modern political structure is possible in a Muslim social setting, and Turkey becomes an example of the possibility that a secular state can govern a society with a predominantly Muslim population. In Turkey, the relation of nationalism and modernity has produced a highly secular state structure and the topdown construction of a secular national identity, which, in turn, brought about the possibility of the coexistence (rather than the clash) of Islam with modernity. In contrast, in the course of Iranian modernity, religion has played an important role in the formation of national identity, as well as in the process of

building the nation-state. Religious institutions have reinforced the ideology of nationalism, and religious beliefs have been integral to national identity formation. Thus, despite the militant secularism of the ruling elite, religion has given meaning to the historically and discursively constructed relation between nationalism and modernity in Iran, which, in 1979, resulted in the Iranian revolution that has created a religious state structure. Although the course of modernity in Iran has been statecentric, the religiosity of nationalism has been used by the strong state in governing its society, as well as in formulating its foreign policy both regionally and globally. As a result, nationalism in Iran has gone hand in hand with religion and operated as a dominant ideology of the state. Finally, both Turkey and Iran represent republican political formations where the statecentric constitution of modernity through nationalism has not involved democracy, and as a result the ‘democracy deficit’ has remained one of the main characteristics and problem areas of the modernization process in these countries. However, while for Turkey the EU serves as an important external anchor for democratization, despite some critical attempts Iran’s democratization and modernization process has been deeply troubled by the tension between reformists and conservatives as also revealed by the Iranian presidential election of 2005. In both cases, the democratization of state–society relations and the interaction of a complex set of domestic and international factors will continue to determine the course and nature of their respective nationalisms and their alternative modernities.

REFERENCES Abrahamian, E. (1993) Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Ahmad, F. (1993) Making of Modern Turkey. London: Routledge. Bora, T. (2003) ‘Nationalist Discourses in Turkey’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102: 433–53. Çelik, Y. (1999) Contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy. Westpoint, CT: Praeger.

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Cem, I. (2004) Turkiye, Avrupa, Avrasya (Turkey, Europe, Eurasia). Istanbul: Bilgi Universitesi Yayinlari. Cole, J. R. (1996) ‘Marking Boundaries, Marking Time: The Iranian Past and the Construction of Self by Qajar Thinkers’, Iranian Studies, 29: 36–56. Cornell, E. (2001) Turkey in the 21st Century. Richmond: Curzon. Fahri, F. (2005) ‘Crafting a National Identity amidst Contentious Politics in Contemporary Iran’, Iranian Studies, 38 (1): 7–22. Fuller, G.E. and Lesser, I. O. (1993) Turkey’s New Geopolitics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Halliday, F. (1999) Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and the Fall of the Sixth Great Power. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Heper, M. (1985) The State Tradition in Turkey. North Humberside: Eothen Press. Kazanc¹gil, A. (1981) ‘The Ottoman-Turkish State and Kemalism’, in A. Kazanc¹gil and E. Özbudun (eds), Atatürk. London: Hurst & Company. pp. 37–56. Keyman, F. (ed.) (forthcoming) Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Modernization, Democratization. Oxford: Lexington Press. . Keyman, F. and Içduygu, A. (eds) (2005) Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions, Turkish Answers. London: Routledge. Keyman, F. and Koyuncu, B. (2005) ‘Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and the Political Economy of Turkey’, RIPE, 12 (1): 105–29. Larrabee, F. S. and Lesser, I. O. (2003) Turkish Foreign Policy in the Age of Uncertainity. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.

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Miller, D. (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munson, H. (2003) ‘Islam, Nationalism, and the Resentment of Foreign Domination’, Middle East Policy, 10 (2): 40–53. Önis¸, Z. (1997) ‘The Political Economy of Islamic Resurgence in Turkey’, Third World Quarterly, 4: 750–70. Önis¸ , Z. and Y¹lmaz, S¸. (2005) ‘The Turkey – EU – US Triangle in Perspective: Transformation or Continuity?’, Middle East Journal, 59 (2): 265–84. Özbudun, E. (2000) Contemporary Turkish Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. Sabet, K. F. (2002) ‘The Evolving Polemic of Iranian Nationalism’, in N. R. Keddie and R. Matthe (eds), Iran and the Surrounding World. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Tavakoli-Targhi, M. (2001) Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. New York: Palgrave. Ugˇur, M. and Canefe, N. (eds) (2004) Turkey and European Integration. London: Routledge. Wilber, N. D. (1981) Iran, Past and Present: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yapp, M. E. (1996) The Near East Since the First World War: A History to 1995. London/New York: Longman. Yousefzadeh, P. (2004) ‘Iranian Nationalism’, Persian Journal. Retrieved from WWW address: http://www.iranian.ws/cgi-bin/iran_news/exec/ view.cgi/2/1639 in March 10, 2004.

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36 Nation and Nationalism in South Asia T. K . O O M M E N

The nationalism of South Asia analysed in this chapter could be referred to as anti-colonial, geographical, linguistic, religious, secular, territorial and Third World, and derivatively South Asia has different types of nations. To complicate matters, the six South Asian countries which I subject to analysis vary enormously in terms of their size, socio-cultural features, developmental levels, type of political system and the like, which impinge on the process of nation formation and the crystallization of nationalism in them. Religious and linguistic identities directly shape the national fabric and nationalism in South Asia as elsewhere. Even in this context the variations between the South Asian countries are substantial (see Table 36.1). An examination of the data presented in Table 36.1 reveals that all six South Asian states1 have one dominant religion but none is mono-religious. It may be noted here that all the countries of South Asia, except India, have enclosed their dominant religion as their state/national religion. The situation with regard to language is more complex. In India and Pakistan, only 40 and 48 per cent respectively speak the most numerically dominant language. While India has 24 official languages, in Pakistan only Urdu, the mother tongue of less than 8 per cent of its citizens, is recognized as the official

language, because of its attributed association with Islam in the subcontinent. Except India, only Sri Lanka has recognized a second official language. By recognizing only one religion as the state/national religion and only one language as official, four out of six South Asian states have adopted the collectivistic-ethnic idea of nation wherein the fusion of citizenship and nationality is the ideal. If one were to go by available empirical evidence, this does not augur well for the full flowering of democracy. Sri Lanka by recognizing two languages as official languages opted for a bi-national state and India by recognizing 24 languages as official has opted for a multinational state. Thus the notions of citizenship and nationality are conceptually differentiated. The merit of this arrangement is that common citizenship becomes an instrument of equality and the recognition of different nationalities (linguistic groups) provides the anchorage for secular identity, that is, an identity neutral to religious affiliations. While the Sri Lankan and Indian model approximates the individualistic-civic idea on nation, it goes beyond it in that the nation is not conceived as a collective of sovereign individuals but as a collective of culturally distinct units having reciprocal and interdependent economic and political involvement. This model provides for the legitimacy of collective/group rights

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Table 36.1 Religion and Language Variations in South Asian Countries Country Bangladesh

Religion 86% Muslims 12.5% Hindus 1.5% others; state religion Islam

Language 95% Bengali (official language)

Bhutan

70% Buddhists 25% Hindus; state religion Buddhism

70% Dzongkhsa (official language) 25% Nepali

India

82% Hindus 12.12% Muslims 2.34% Christians 1.94% Sikhs; no official/state religion

40.22% Hindi 8.3% Bengali 7.8% Telugu 7.45% Marathi 6.32% Tamil 5.18% Urdu (24 languages are officially recognized)

Nepal

89.5% Hindus 5.3% Buddhists 2.7% Muslims; state religion Hinduism

58.45% Nepali (official language) 11.1% Maithili 7.6% Bhojpuri

Pakistan

97% Muslims 2% Hindus; state religion Islam

48.2% Punjabi 13.1% Pushto 11.8% Sindhi 9.8% Saraiki 7.6% Urdu (official language)

Sri Lanka

69.8% Buddhists 15.17% Hindus 7.36% Muslims; state religion Buddhism

70% Sinhala (official language) 15% Tamil (second official language)

within sovereign states. Such an arrangement is conducive for the co-existence of political federalism and cultural pluralism (cf. Greenfeld and Chirot 1994: 79–130).

CONCEPTUALIZING NATION AND NATIONALISM2 Broadly speaking, one can identify seven ways in which nation has been defined in the Indian subcontinent. These are: (1) ancient civilizational entity; (2) composite culture; (3) political entity; (4) religious entity; (5) geographical/ territorial entity, with a specific cultural ethos; (6) a collection of linguistic entities; and (7) unity of great and little nations. The first three of these are specifically pre-partition conceptualizations. The fourth initiated the impulse of partition, achieved that objective and has continued to provide a source of legitimacy to Pakistan and Bangladesh. The fifth, sixth and seventh conceptualizations largely belong to the post-partition period. However, it is important to note that these conceptualizations did not always surface in the order in which they are listed; some of these co-existed and competed for legitimacy. Radhakumud Mookerji (1914) had asserted the essential unity of India based on natural geography, an ancient pan-Indian Hindu

culture, economic self-sufficiency and the interdependence of its constituent regions. Further, he had alluded to the ‘national’ consciousness, which had become a ‘settled habit of thought’ since ancient times. In the same vein, a quarter of a century later Beni Prasad (1941) referred to India’s ‘geographical wholeness’ and her ‘urge to political unification in defiance of vast distances and immense difficulties of transport and communication’. If geography had been the basis of constituting nations, there would have been only a handful of them in the world and quite a few would not have emerged at all. The reference to Hindu culture as the element that provides the essential unity implies (a) that the time-referent is prior to Muslim and British intrusion/ intervention, (b) and that the contributions of the Muslims and the British are largely ignored and/or they are treated as aliens, (c) that they ‘disturbed’ the unity of India that was provided by Hindu culture, and (d) that religion is a necessary element in the conceptualization of nation and national identity. The reference to the ‘urge for political unification’ implies that a nation is a united political entity, comprising of one dominant religious collectivity. The two writers, Mookerji and Prasad, are mistaking civilizations for nations although the former is a much broader entity compared to the latter. Generally speaking, several nations

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and/or states co-exist within a civilizational region. Second, ‘natural geography’ or religion are both not necessary conditions for a nation to emerge and exist. Third, a nation is essentially a cultural entity and it is not natural for a nation to establish its own state, as is widely believed. Those who describe India as a composite culture emphasize the fusion of Hinduism and Islam, as against the distinctiveness of Hindu culture. This fusion, a product of conflict and synthesis, although an ancient tendency, is believed to have intensified with the Muslim conquest. ‘As soon as the first waves of conquest, plunder and desecration had spent themselves, there began the operation of the forces, inherent in human nature, which interknit contacts into conational wholes and transform plurality into community’ (Prasad 1941: 8). Tarachand (1963) graphically described the efforts of Kabir, the saint-poet, to fuse Hinduism and Islam; Humayun Kabir (1955) referred to Emperor Akbar’s effort at creating a syncretic religion as the first conscious attempt to establish a ‘secular state’. The Muslim ‘conquest’ provides the salient point in Indian history to those describing India as a composite culture. In contrast, those who describe India as an ancient Hindu culture and civilization consider the Aryan ‘advent’ as marking the beginning of Indian history. For both, pre-Aryan culture either did not exist, or if it did, it was a ‘low culture’ contributing nothing to ‘Indian culture’. Thus, this conceptualization ignores the pre- and non-Aryan peoples (the Dravidians, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) who together constitute nearly 50 per cent of the population of India. If Hinduism provides the essential content of Indian nationalism, as per the first mode of conceptualizing India, according to the second mode it is the fusion of Hinduism and Islam that provides content to Indian nationalism. In retrospect it would seem that the very characterization of Indian culture as composite was a political project intended to avert the partition of India. Despite the nobility of intention, the project failed and in the process another conceptualization, namely, the ‘two-nation theory’, got wide currency. Compositeness

implies assimilation and fusion, and hence is the very antithesis of pluralism, which instead is the celebration of diversity in order to facilitate the co-existence of cultures, in spite of their distinctiveness. The ‘synthetic’ view had its predictable consequences; the Indian ‘nation’ came to be viewed as a political entity; state and nation became interchangeable. In characterizing the Indian ‘nation’ as a fusion of Hindu and Muslim cultures the reference was to a civilizational entity, a vast continent inhabited by onequarter of humanity. During the colonial era the nationalist expectancy was visualized primarily in political terms. The ‘nation’-to-be was conceived as a community of would-be citizens; the thrust of the anti-colonial struggle was to transform subjects into citizens. But as the dismantling of colonialism became imminent, this disjuncture between state and nation should have been squarely recognized and an appropriate reorientation in conceptualization should have been effected. But this was not to be. Consequently, in the post-partition subcontinent state and nation became synonymous notions. Even Indian Marxists, who conceptualize India as a multinational state, do not maintain a clear distinction between state and nation. For A. R. Desai a nation is an entity consisting of economic, political and cultural elements. Almost everything, from the development of agriculture, to religious reforms, to the emancipation of women is viewed as the expression of ‘nationalism’ (see Desai 1948: 382–7). While the existence of nationalities, that is, linguistic collectivities, is recognized, some of them are seen as ‘dormant’, others ‘wakened’ and yet others moving from the dormant to the wakened stage (1948: 387–90). Such a characterization of the Indian ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ is problematic because it postulates a hierarchy among Indian nationalities. Although the ‘two-nation’ theory was the one to gain wide currency, in fact three religious communities (Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs) had explicitly invoked religion as the basis of nation, admittedly for different reasons. In 1940, M. A. Jinnah, the then president of the Muslim League observed: ‘The history of 1,200 years has failed to achieve unity and has

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witnessed, during the ages, India always divided into Hindu India and Muslim India’ (1960: 161). Basing himself on this view he asserted that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations and demanded a separate ‘homeland’ for the Muslim ‘nation’. The fact that the majority of Indian Muslims were converts from Hindu castes and tribes did not improve the standing of the neo-convert Muslims in the Hindu social structure (1960: 230). Viewed in this perspective, the movement for Pakistan was aimed at equality for Muslims in the subcontinent and indeed it overshot its target! Those invoking Hinduism as the basis of the Indian nation were more explicit in their advocacy. The statements of Golwalkar were the clearest and sharpest in this regard. For him the basic divide was between believers in the religions of Indian origin – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism – and believers in religions that had originated outside India, like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and the Baha’i faith. Those professing religions of Indian origin were insiders and nationals while all others were outsiders and aliens, expected to reconcile themselves to a subordinate position or agree to be assimilated. He held: The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must learn to either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture … may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges not even citizen rights. In this country, Hindus alone are national, and Muslims and others, if not actually anti-national, are at least outside the body of the nation. (Golwalkar 1939: 55–6)

There are several difficulties with this position. Let me list just three. First, there is no Hindu language; Hindus are drawn from several speech communities. Second, the notion of a Hindu race is a howler. Third, this position is utterly undemocratic. For both Jinnah and Golwalkar national reconstruction meant reappropriation of an appropriate past. For the Hindus this meant ancient Indian culture and civilization, with the Gupta Age being regarded as the golden age of India and Chandra Gupta Maurya as the ideal emperor. For the Muslims the golden age

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was the medieval period when they had been the rulers of India. Both the Hindus and the Muslims had to invent and construct tradition and history. The third religious collectivity in India that defines itself as a nation is the Sikhs. The demand for a separate Sikh ‘nation’ was first articulated in 1946, but a majority of the Sikhs preferred to stay with India. Sikh demands were not feasible because in the Indian Punjab, where they are concentrated, the Sikhs constituted a mere 33 per cent. In spite of the fact that the Hindu–Sikh interaction was intense and included intermarriages, an essential wedge existed between them. The popular belief that the Hindu–Sikh divide is recent, and is the handiwork of a handful of crafty politicians, militants and terrorists, is not exactly correct. Khushwant Singh, an acknowledged ‘secularist’, writes: ‘The only chance of survival of the Sikhs as a separate community is to create a state in which they form a compact group, where the teaching of Gurumukhi and the Sikh religion is compulsory, and where there is an atmosphere of respect for the traditions of their Khalsa forefathers’ (1966: 305; the reference to ‘a state’ is not to a sovereign state but to a province within a federal set-up). The untenability of conceptualizing India (which at the time included the Pakistan and Bangladesh of today) as a nation by invoking religion was understood by a few, for example, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya (see Pandey 1990: 212) and Lala Lajpat Rai (see Nagar 1977: 175). But Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi articulated it with greater clarity: If the Hindus believe that only Hindus should people India, they are living in dreamland. The Hindus, the Mohammedans, the Parsis and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen … In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms; nor has it ever been so in India. (1938: 49)

If religion is not a necessary element in nation formation, what are the essential attributes of a nation? All available facts and experiences suggest that the two most critical elements in nation formation are territory and language. These could be ancestral or adopted. Thus if a people have a common homeland and if they

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have and/or adopt a common language they could become a nation. Such an effort was made and is being pursued in India. The Indian practice clearly indicates that all major linguistic collectivities with a territorial base are deemed to be culturally distinct entities, that is, nations/nationalities, although these terms are not acceptable to most. The Indian National Congress endorsed the idea of creating administrative units based on linguistic homogeneity as early as 1921. In 1928 the Jawaharlal Nehru Report acknowledged the desirability of creating linguistic provinces. Although as Prime Minister Nehru accepted the principle underlying linguistic provinces on 27 November 1947 in the Constituent Assembly, the mobilization by linguistic collectivities was perceived as a threat to the ‘nation’ (that is, to the state) and was labelled as chauvinist, parochial and ‘anti-national’. But after this initial resistance and ambivalence, the States Re-organization Commission was appointed in 1955. The Commission did by and large uphold the principle of a language-based administrative reorganization of India, which in effect is a vindication of the definition of nation as a linguistic collectivity with a territorial base. The Indian experience also demonstrates that if nations are conceded a certain level of politicoadministrative autonomy within a federal setup they may not demand separate sovereign states; the co-terminality between nation and state is not axiomatic. In fact, most Indian nations have renounced the idea of having their own sovereign states. There has been a tendency among some authors to refer to tribal and linguistic collectivities as sub-nations or ‘little’ nations. In this strand of thinking, the ‘little nations’ and their nationalism are juxtaposed to the great Indian nation and its nationalism. Thus ‘great nationalism’, according to Guha, emerged in the colonial context as the ideology of the pan-Indian big bourgeoisie which was eager to capture an appropriate share of the growing market in India. The big bourgeoisie perceived an Indian state more conducive to meeting its aspirations and establishing the hegemony of Indian capitalism. On the other hand, the ‘little nationalism’ emerged as the ideology of the regional

small bourgeoisie, the regional middle classes, who feared competition not only from the middle classes of other regions but also from the pan-Indian big bourgeoisie. Thus, the ideology of little nationalism is oriented to the exclusive control of regional markets by the respective middle classes (see Guha 1979: 455–8; 1982: 2–12). N. K. Bose (1941: 188–94) discussed what he terms sub-national movements among tribes, which are, according to him, typically characteristic of economically backward communities in new nations, initiated by the emerging elite to subserve their interests and aspirations. Roy Burman (1971: 25–33) goes a step further and distinguishes between proto-national and sub-national movements among tribes. Protonational movements emerge when tribes experience a transformation from ‘tribalism’ to nationalism; it transcends tribalism. In contrast, sub-nationalism is initiated by an acculturated tribal elite to cope with the disparities of development. In sub-nationalism the ultimate sanction is the coercive power of the community; in proto-nationalism it is primarily the moral consensus of the community which is the motive force. All the authors who refer to sub- or little nationalism endorse the view that India is a nation but what they mean by nationalism varies according to individual perceptions. For Guha, the battle between the two nationalisms – great and little – is motivated by economic considerations. However, no nation or nationalism can emerge and exist exclusively on this basis. In contrast, proto-nationalism is transtribal whereas sub-nationalism is intra-tribal, both being anchored in the problematic of identity; the first in transcending and the second in reinforcing it. But there are several movements which are inter-tribal (for example, the Jharkhand movement) and geared simultaneously to economic development, political autonomy and cultural identity. Bose’s contention that sub-nationalism is a characteristic feature of backward groups and a mere manifestation of manipulations by an elite is too rash an evaluation. The fact is that several nations are vivisected across South Asian states: the Tamils between

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India and Sri Lanka, the Bengalis between India and Bangladesh, the Nagas between India and Myanmar (Burma), the Punjabis and the Kashmiris between India and Pakistan. While these collectivities have a common nationality, their citizenship differs. Having briefly reviewed the different modes of conceptualizing the ‘nation’ in South Asia, it is necessary to indicate which of these conceptualizations are proximate, if not entirely isomorphic, with its social reality. While there has existed and perhaps there continues to exist a South Asian civilization, the territory that this civilization encapsulates now hosts several states. The frame of reference of those who refer to India as a civilizational entity is the Indian subcontinent. Admittedly, independent India constitutes only a part of this civilizational region. One cannot and should not substitute the part, even if it is a substantial and significant part, for the whole. Further, the effort to equate South Asian civilization with Hindu civilization is unsustainable because it ignores the nativity of non-Hindu groups and underestimates their contribution to this civilization. However, language and tribe have been accepted as the bases to constitute administrative units, thereby investing them with a degree of legitimacy. This in effect means that linguistic and/or tribal collectivities with a firm territorial base are implicitly recognized as ‘nations’. But, some of the linguistic collectivities and tribes which are viable ‘nations’ are denied the possibility of maintaining their cultural identity because of state policy and the hegemonic tendencies of the bigger nations. The utility of a concept depends on its ability to come to grips with the empirical reality it intends to capture. A meaningful conceptualization of nation and national identity in South Asia should combine several elements identified in the different modes of conceptualizations that I have listed. First, South Asia is home to a long and enduring civilization, which was earlier referred to as the Indian civilization. Second, this civilizational region now hosts several states and some of these states are divided into administrative units with a certain level of cultural specificity and political autonomy. Third, the states have jurisdiction over

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clearly demarcated territories; disputes, if there are any, will have to be settled satisfactorily on the basis of agreed principles. In turn, some of these states (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) should be viewed as collectives of linguistic groups, quite a few of which are large and firmly anchored to specific territories. The people of these linguistic collectivities cognise the territory to which they are attached as their ancestral homelands. That is, they are nations – products of fusion between territory and culture (see Oommen 1997). Even though nations, most of them, do not aspire to become sovereign states, they are state-renouncing nations. They only insist on having a certain level of administrative and fiscal autonomy. In the final analysis, South Asian states should be viewed as collectives of nations co-existing within federal states. I find support for this mode of conceptualizing in the articulations of a statesman and of a scholar. I will let them speak in their own words. It is fascinating to find how the Bengalis, the Marathas, the Gujarathis, the Tamils, the Andhras, the Oriyas, the Assamese, the Canarese, the Malayalis, the Sindhis, the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Kashmiris, the Rajputs and the great central block comprising the Hindustanispeaking people, have retained their peculiar characteristics for hundreds of years, have still more or less the same virtues and failings of which old tradition or record tells us and yet have been throughout these ages distinctly Indian, with the same national heritage and the same set of moral and mental qualities. (Nehru 1961: 61)

In the same vein, Mukerji (1958: 268–9) had written: Cultural symbiosis is the outstanding feature of India’s cultural reconstruction. It is to be clearly noticed in the specific culture patterns of the Arya Bhumi and the Anarya Pradesh of Bengal, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. We submit that these symbiotic patterns are the true significance of the terms ‘nationalities’ in India. Our nationalism in the political sense may be the gift of industrial capitalism … but the student of Indian history with the proper approach will find the meaning of nationalism in every case in the formation of cultural patterns.

It should be underlined here that to uphold this conceptualization one needs to distinguish between citizenship and nationality. The former alludes to membership in a politico-legal

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State-centred

State-renouncing

State-seeking

State-sponsored

Linguistic territorial nationalism within the federal polity

Secessionist

Autonomist

Assimilationist

Primacy for identity; disengagement from the present state

Identity and equality within the federal polity

Barter collective identity for individual equality

Figure 36.1

Deterritorialized ‘ethnonationalism’ within the federal polity

Identity-asserting and equalitydemanding

Types of New Nationalisms in South Asia and their main features

entity, that is, the state and the entitlements thereof. The latter refers to membership in a cultural entity, that is, nation, and the identity that it implies (Oommen 1997). South Asia’s polities include different religious communities and a multiplicity of castes, none of which can legitimately lay an exclusive claim to the whole or specific parts of the territory as both these socio-cultural categories are territorially intermingled. The persisting effort to define some of these religious communities as ‘outsiders’ to the soil and others as ‘insiders’ is to perpetuate falsehood and distort history. Similarly, the tendency to perpetuate the ageold discrimination and oppression based on caste and tribe is to undermine the cardinal principles of democratic citizenship.

NEW NATIONALISMS IN SOUTH ASIA3 The postcolonial nationalisms of South Asia, which I designate as New Nationalisms, may be categorized into two: state-centred and staterenouncing (cf. Tilly 1993). In turn, state-centred nationalism has two sub-types: state-seeking and state-sponsored. Figure 36.1 illustrates the

types of new nationalisms and their main features. One variety of state-centred nationalism conflates state and nation and views sovereignty of the state as the critical marker of nationalism: like one variety of old nationalism, it is also state-seeking. But there is a critical difference between the old and the new variety of state-seeking nationalism. The old variety of state-seeking nationalism was a struggle to wrest the state from an external colonial power; it was a confrontation between the colonial state and an aspired national state. Understandably there was near-universal participation and consensus regarding the goal of that struggle. But the enemy of the new stateseeking nationalism is not an external but an internal agent. Although the internal colonizer is often perceived as a hegemon, the ‘colonized’ are sharply divided about the solution; while one section insists on secession from the state to which it is presently attached and the creation of a new sovereign state, another section argues for the acquisition of a certain level of autonomy within a federal polity. Both are asking for group rights but the quantum and the quality of these rights vary. In general parlance, the secessionists are called ‘anti-nationals’ and

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‘extremists’, although they are acute nationalists in their perception. Those who opt for autonomy within the federal framework are usually viewed as moderates, the autonomists. However, most of the time secessionists reconcile to become autonomists. The Tamil-speaking Dravidian Hindus in free India saw Hindi-speaking Aryan Hindus as a hegemon in the 1960s and 1970s, but with the accommodation of Tamil nationalist parties in the federal government, abandoned the state-seeking goal of their movement. Today the ‘Tamil national movement’ only seeks the protection of ‘Tamil interests’ in India; from the demand for national self-determination they moved to assertion of their collective rights in the form of adequate representation in power sharing and maintenance of cultural identity. The Naga and Mizo national movements are divided in their goals. While some factions in both movements are secessionists, others are autonomists; both insist on collective rights. This is also true of the Sikh-led Khalistan movement, although the secessionists are reduced in strength and the autonomists have gained substantially in recent times. Tamil Hindu nationalists of Sri Lanka perceive Singhla-Buddhists as a hegemon, but while one faction is secessionist and insists on a sovereign state for Tamils others opt for different degrees of autonomy within a federal set-up. The three minority nations of Pakistan – Sindh, Baluchistan and Pashtunistan – view the Punjab as an internal colonizer; in fact, they think Pakistan has become ‘Punjabistan’. But the secessionists are particularly vociferous in Sindh. The grand old man of Sindhi nationalism, G. M. Syed, is candid. He maintains: ‘Sindh has always been there, Pakistan is a passing show. Sindh is a fact, Pakistan is a fiction. Sindhis are a nation, but Muslims are not a nation. Sindhi language is 2000 years old. Urdu is only 250 years old … The Sindhis have long been fooled in the name of Islam’ (quoted in Malkani 1984: 134). However, while some of the state-seeking new nationalists of South Asia are willing to shed their secessionist orientation, and a minority among them even abandon their nationalist orientation and become assimilationists, the majority aspire to be autonomists; they only insist on

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certain collective rights within a federal polity. This is in utter contrast to the state-seeking nationalism of the colonial times wherein there could not have been any compromise on the goal of a national sovereign state. The second variety of state-centred new nationalism is state-sponsored; it seeks to mobilize the resources of one sovereign state against its ‘enemy’ state. Inter-state rivalry is the fodder on which this variety of nationalism is fed, wherein states are defined and cognised as nations and nationalism is nurtured through the hatred towards an external and despised other. Understandably, chauvinism and jingoism are likely manifestations of this variety of nationalism. If intra-state tension is the feature of state-seeking new nationalism, interstate conflict is the necessary accompaniment of state-sponsored new nationalism. However, in so far as the states in conflict are not socio-culturally homogeneous and have populations that share the same characteristics – religion, language, physical features – the conflicts have serious intrastate consequences. This is the situation of South Asia and this is the context in which collective rights become relevant. But in order to render collective rights of minorities irrelevant, assimilationist nationalism is put on the agenda – Islamic nationalism in Pakistan and Bangladesh, Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Hindu nationalism in India are examples of this. This often prompts secessionist nationalism. In South Asia inter-state rivalry has been at its peak between India and Pakistan. There have been two wars and a war-like situation, the Kargil conflict in 1997. Nuclearization is viewed by both states as a project of national security; questioning excessive expenditure for defence purposes is instantly labelled anti-national; the soldiers killed in conflicts become martyrs; the usually uncared-for defence personnel instantly become charismatic objects; even tax evaders may contribute ‘liberally’ for the National Defence Fund and can become ‘nationalists’. Amidst this heightened national temperature, the Muslims in India and Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan become objects of suspicion; they are required to prove their loyalty to the respective nations/states. This puts enormous strain on

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these minority populations and on their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression, a test to which members of the majority community are scarcely subjected. Not only the collective rights of these religious minorities (for example, congregational worship, pilgrimages, religious processions, are occasionally in jeopardy) but markers of their collective identity (dress pattern, food habits, hairstyles) may also become ‘security risks’. State-sponsored nationalism endangers the collective rights of those minorities who share cultural characteristics of the majority of the ‘enemy state’. Of the two varieties of state-renouncing nationalism, one manifests in the demand for establishing coterminality between politicaladministrative units and cultural boundaries in multinational federal polities. Inter-nation equality along with preservation of cultural identity are the goals of this variety of staterenouncing nationalism. However, while renouncing sovereign states, these nations invariably insist on their ‘provincial’ states. The movement for linguistic reorganization of India in place of the artificial administrative units set up by the British is an example of this kind of nationalism. Most of the large linguistic collectivities in India and Pakistan have their own ‘states’ if they have their own homeland. In the case of Sri Lanka, the goal of autonomists among Tamils is precisely this while secessionists demand an exclusive sovereign state for Tamils. Even in the case of Bangladesh, which is predominantly populated by Bengali Muslims, the non-Bengalis insist on cultural autonomy. The Chakma leader, Manabendra Narayan Larma, articulated the demand for cultural identity of Chakmas, who are predominantly Buddhists and inhabit the Chittagong Hill Tract, thus: ‘Under no definition or logic a Chakma can be a Bengalee or a Bengalee can be a Chakma … As citizens of Bangladesh we are all Bangladeshis but we also have a separate ethnic identity, which unfortunately the Awami League leaders do not want to understand’ (quoted in Hussain 1986: 201). While the major linguistic groups (that is, nations) in India and Pakistan have their own provincial states, this is not true of the tribal communities or the subaltern nations. If the

demand for their provincial states is conceded, it is to tone down their demand for sovereign states. But such subaltern nations invariably have their homelands on inter-state borders and hence command considerable political clout and striking power. Thus, the numerically smaller Nagas (1.2 million) and Mizos (0.7 million) of India have their own separate provincial states but the demand by larger encysted tribes of central India for separate provincial states is not yet conceded. In fact, some of the central Indian tribes are much larger in size: Santals, 6 million; Bhils, 6 million; Gonds, 3 million; and Oraons, 2 million. Subaltern nations such as Santals and Bhils are denied their collective rights to protect and preserve their cultural identity as their legitimate demand for provincial states is not conceded. To deny them collective rights, be it in South Asia or elsewhere, may be designated as culturocide (Oommen 1990a: 43–66), the systematic liquidation of cultural groups. One of the contentions in multinational federal polities is the relative importance to be assigned to the central government and provincial governments. Those who argue for a strong centre see themselves as ‘nationalists’, and those who prefer strong provincial governments are dubbed as ‘regionalists’ who uphold parochial interests. But it is often forgotten that what are designated as ‘regions’ are ‘nations’ in a multinational polity and the ‘regionalists’ are arguing for their national collective rights. Conversely, those who prefer a central government with limited but crucial areas of operation (defence, foreign policy, fiscal policy, etc.) and substantial decentralization of political authority to provincial governments define themselves as ‘democrats’ and dub those who insist on a strong centre as ‘authoritarians’. These varying perceptions are rooted in the underlying conceptual differences between them: the ‘nationalists’ consider the federal polity as the ‘nation’ and the ‘regionalists’ view the regions as nations. The former indirectly deny collective rights and the latter directly endorse collective rights. The second type of state-renouncing nationalism surfaces in the context of ethnification and

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minoritization. Ethnicity is a product of dissociation between culture and territory (see Oommen 1997). Ethnies are constrained to renounce exclusive states for themselves because they are territorially dispersed; they lack a spatial anchorage. Ethnies are of several backgrounds – refugees and exiles who flee to freedom or safety and immigrants who seek better pastures. Once in the new habitat, often a search for roots begins; they become aware of the need to maintain their cultural specificities, particularly religion and language. This search becomes acute if they are persecuted and discriminated against at the point of arrival and/or the conditions for nurturing cultural specificities become adverse. The Sindhi Hindus who left their ancestral homeland are dispersed all over urban India. Their vociferous demand for according constitutional recognition to the Sindhi language persisted for two decades till it was conceded in 1967. This collective cultural right is about the only device to maintain this diasporic nationalism, although third generation Sindhi migrants have practically forgotten the language (see Daswani 1996). That is, constitutional protection of cultural rights is no guarantee for sustenance of national identity. The story is exactly the opposite in the case of Mohajirs, the Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from northern India. Through their political alignment with the largest and the most powerful nationality of Pakistan, the Punjabis, and due to its presumed linkage with Islam in the Indian subcontinent, Urdu became the official language of Pakistan. This facilitated not only the preservation of the cultural identity of Urdu speakers but also their domination. Yet they remain an ethnie in Pakistan, which is evident from the fact that these immigrants were initially labelled as Pahangirs or Hindustanies, a clear connotation of their outsider status. To escape this stigmatization they adopted the label ‘Muhajir’, invoking its association with the prophetic tradition of hijrat (Ahmed 1988: 33–4). That is, dominant status in itself will not ‘nationalize’ a group if it is territorially dispersed. Even the Muhajir claim as the ‘fifth nationality’ of

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Pakistan (the other four being Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi and Pushtoon) is not conceded by the Pakistani state or mainstream society. The case of ‘Bihari Muslims’, the Hindispeaking Muslims from North India, in Bangladesh is a third case of ethnie in South Asia. As the Urdu-speaking Muslims, the Bihari Muslims too thought that their Muslim-ness was a sufficient condition to comfortably graft them on to the Eastern wing of Pakistan. Although their deterritorialization was a disability right from the beginning, their religion provided a partial compensation. But with the transformation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh, linguistic identity gained salience and the intensity of the Bihari Muslims’ ethnification increased. Not only were they uprooted from their ancestral homeland in India but they are also being uprooted from their adopted homeland (Bangladesh). This clearly points to the need to uphold collective rights in the case of minority ethnic collectivities. Finally, we come to those who continue to live in their ancestral homeland but underwent instant minoritization due to the redrawing of state boundaries. Consequent to the division of territory and immigration of population, those Muslims who remained in India and those Sikhs and Hindus who remained in Pakistan became minorities instantly. It is important to note here that, in so far as the dislocation happened within the national territory, not only was there no ethnification but there was no minoritization either. For example, although the Punjabi Muslims and Punjabi Sikhs exchanged their residence, as long as they remained within Punjab, Indian or Pakistan, they could retain their nationality and dominance. Thus, those Sikhs who came from the Pakistan-Punjab and remained in the IndianPunjab were not culturally uprooted like the Sikhs who went to other parts of India, where they became refugees, outsiders and ethnies. Similarly, the Hindu Bengalis from East Pakistan who settled down in West Bengal did not face the kind of cultural stigmatization as did those Bengalis who settled outside Bengal. Once again, if the settlers become a majority in their adopted homeland, as in the case of Bengalis in Tripura in India, they can shed

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their minority and ethnic status and become nationals.

CONCLUSION I must conclude this chapter by indicating the domain assumptions and the rationale which inform the arguments presented. The assumptions are: (1) even in the most homogeneous societies class distinctions emerge and persist and are perhaps unavoidable. In contrast, discrimination, oppression and exploitation based on race, language, religion, gender and so on are avoidable. (2) The dignified co-existence of a plurality of nations within a federal state is possible and even desirable. (3) A democratic polity can be constituted only if the people participate in the decision-making process, for which their mother tongue should be fostered. In a multi-lingual state this can be achieved only by constituting language-based administrative units to effect substantial decentralization of the decision-making process. (4) A nation does not necessarily aspire to a sovereign state of its own. Now for the rationale. Although a wide variety of factors provides the bases for constituting polities, the most frequent ones are race, religion and language, or often a combination of these factors. While races or physical types and geographical spaces were originally closely linked, conquests, colonization and immigration have drastically changed the situation. Today, a large number of polities are multiracial. Similarly, notwithstanding the fact that particular religions had their origin in specific parts of the world due to conquest, proselytization and immigration, the original association between religion and territory has become irrelevant except as a symbolic association. Generally speaking, there is a close association between language and territory. When groups migrate and settle in new linguistic regions they may have to learn the language of the new habitat, whereas they need not change their religion and, of course, they cannot change their race. That is, the reshuffling of populations does not go counter to the need for developing a common language, an imperative for communication.

This, however, does not imply that each linguistic group (nation) should have an exclusive sovereign state for itself. One can visualize several substantial linguistic groups co-existing within the territory of a state. I have identified seven different conceptualizations of nation and nationalism in twentiethcentury South Asia. Arguing that the utility of a concept depends on its appropriateness to capture the complex empirical reality, it has been suggested that South Asian states can best be conceptualized as collectives of nations coexisting within politically federal states. After identifying different types of new nationalisms in South Asia it is demonstrated that secession of minority nations from a multinational state is often a response to assimilation advocated by the majority nation with hegemonic tendencies. To cope with the situation an adequate level of political and cultural autonomy should be bestowed on national minorities. In the case of ethnic minorities, as they are territorially dispersed, there is only limited possibility of conceding political autonomy but it is possible to provide cultural rights to protect their identity. In the cases of both national and ethnic minorities conceding collective rights is often an adequate substitute for a sovereign state.

NOTES 1 The South Asian countries referred to are Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, all members of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC). The seventh member, the Maldives, the Atoll state, is left out because the relevant information is not accessible. The data referred to here are drawn from the World Development Report 2000/2001 and the Human Development Report 2001. 2 Of the six counties listed in Table 36.1 the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan was a protected British Colony and the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal was not colonized. Anticolonial movements which occasioned the crystallization of postcolonial states were absent in them. Sri Lanka was a British colony but the anti-colonial mobilization was not a mass movement. For the above reasons the discussion in this section is confined to the Indian subcontinent – Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This is a substantially condensed version of an earlier paper of mine (see Oommen 2000: 1–18). 3 This section draws from Oommen (2004: 52–62), but is considerably condensed.

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REFERENCES Ahmed, F. (1988) ‘Ethnicity and Politics: the Rise of Muhajir Separatism’, South Asian Bulletin, 8: 33–48. Ambedkar, B. R. (1955) Thoughts on Linguistic States. Bombay: Ram Krishna Press. Bose, N. K. (1941) ‘The Hindu Method of Tribal Absorption’, Science and Culture, 7 (2). Daswani, C. J. (1966) Status of Sindhi in Multilingual India. Delhi: Sindh Academy. Desai, A. R. (1948) The Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Gandhi, M. K. (1938) Hind Swaraj. Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishers. Golwalkar, M. S. (1939) We or Our Nationhood Defined. Nagpur: Bharat Prakashan. Greenfeld, L. and Chirot, D. (1994) ‘Nationalism and Aggression’, Theory and Society, 23 (1): 79–130. Guha, A. (1979) ‘Great Nationalism, Little Nationalism and Problems of Integration: A Tentative View’, Economic and Political Weekly, 14 (7&8): 455–8. Guha, A. (1982) ‘The Indian National Question: a Conceptual Frame’, Economic and Political Weekly, 17 (31): 2–12. Hussain, H. (1986) ‘Problem of National Integration in Bangladesh’, in S. R. Chakravarty and V. Narain (eds), Bangladesh: Volume 1. History and Culture. Delhi: South Asia Publishers. Jinnah, M. A. (1960) Speeches and Writings, Volume 1 (ed. by J-D. Ahmed). Lahore: Shaik Muhammad Ashraf. Kabir, H. (1955) The Indian Heritage. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Malkani, K. R. (1984) The Sindhi Story. Delhi: Allied Publishers. Mookerji, R. (1914) The Fundamental Unity of India. London: Macmillan.

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Mukerji, D. P. (1958) Diversities. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House. Nagar, P. (1977) Lala Lajput Rai: The Man and his Ideas. Delhi: Manohar. Nehru, J. (1961) Discovery of India. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Oommen, T. K. (1990a) State and Society in India: Studies in Nation-building. New Delhi: Sage. Oommen, T. K. (1990b) Protest and Change: Studies in Social Movements. New Delhi: Sage. Oommen, T. K. (1997) Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity: Reconciling Competing Identities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Oommen, T. K. (2000) ‘Conceptualizing Nation and Nationalism in South Asia’, Sociological Bulletin, 48 (1&2): 1–18. Oommen, T. K. (2004) Nation, Civil Society and Social Movements. New Delhi: Sage Publishers. pp. 42–62. Pandey, G. (1990) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Prasad, B. (1941) The Hindu–Muslim Question. Allahabad: Indian Press. Roy Burman, B. K. (1971) ‘National Movements Among Tribes’, Secular Democracy, 4 (3&4). Seeley, J. R. (1883) The Expansion of England. London: Macmillan. Singh, K. (1966) History of the Sikhs, Vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Strachey, J. (1888) India: Its Administration and Progress. London: Macmillan. Tarachand, (1963) Influence of Islam on Indian Culture. Allahabad: Indian Press. Tilly, C. (1993) European Revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell.

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37 Nations and Nationalism in Central Asia A N AT O LY M . K H A Z A N O V

Central Asia has always been an ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse region. Periodic invasions and infiltrations of nomads complicated and often disrupted ethnic integration in its sedentary areas. Processes of assimilation lasted for centuries there and often had many local and temporal peculiarities (Khazanov 1992: 73ff.; Subtelny 1994: 45ff.). In pre-revolutionary Central Asia, prevailing identities were religious, political, regional and tribal, to some extent ethnic, but in no way national. Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbeks (in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, this term was mainly applied to the descendants of those who migrated to Central Asia proper from Dasht-i Qipchaq steppes during the Shaybani Khan conquest, in the sixteenth century), and some other ethnic groups retained a segmentary kinship and descent-based organization. Thus, the Uzbeks of Dasht-i Qipchaq origin were subdivided into different tribes, clans and sub-clans that maintained their separateness and were often rivals with one another. Their ethnic self-identification may be at best characterized as a hierarchical one. An individual thought of himself primarily as a Mangut, a Kungrat, or a Keneges, that is, as a member of an individual tribe; and only secondarily and

in specific situations did he acknowledge that he was also an Uzbek. The same can be said about Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Turkmen. The urban and sedentary population of Central Asia was known variously as Tajiks or Sarts. For the most part the direct descendants of the indigenous, sedentary, Iranian-speaking population in Central Asia were called Tajiks. However, up to the first half of the twentieth century, the term ‘Tajik’ sometimes also had strong economic and social connotations. In some regions it was applied to any sedentary population, even the Uzbek-speaking one. This was a continuation of the old tradition according to which any Muslim population in Central Asia, Iran and even in several Caucasus regions, which had been non-tribal and sedentary for a long period of time, was called Tajiks. Another numerous sedentary group was the Sarts. They were similar to the Tajiks in their economic activities and way of life, however most of them spoke Uzbek. They were either Turkicized descendants of the Iranian-speaking population of the Central Asian oases, or detribalized descendants of Turkic migrants who had settled there before the arrival of the Dasht-i Qipchaq Uzbeks. The Sarts did not consider themselves even nominally to be Uzbeks. Both groups lacked kinship-based

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segmentary organization. The Tajiks had a rather weak sense of ethnic identity; the Sarts lacked it completely and did not perceive themselves as a distinct ethnic group. In addition, Turkic– Tajik bilingualism was quite widespread in many sedentary regions of Central Asia (Fragner 1994: 15ff.). Thus, the ethnic map of pre-revolutionary Central Asia lacked modern nations with clear self-consciousness and self-identification. Ethnic borders in the region never coincided either with political-administrative or with cultural-linguistic ones, and as a rule ethnicity was not perceived in terms of language, territory, polity or even common historical experience. Only in the late nineteenth and in the early twentieth century did some members of small educated strata under the influence of the Young Turk movement in Ottoman Turkey begin to promote identities that transcended narrow tribal and regional boundaries. But to a large extent the new identities were not national but rather pan-Turkic, panTurkestani, or pan-Islamist. Nevertheless, the communists boldly initiated a project of ethnic engineering and nation-building out of this diverse and fragmented material in line with the nineteenth-century European model.

THE SOVIET PERIOD The construction of the Central Asian nations was mainly the outcome of the Soviet nationalities policy, and inasmuch as it was based on ethno-territorial and primordialist principles, the new nations in the region, just as elsewhere in the USSR, were designed as ethnic ones. Each republic had to have a titular ethnic nation pivotal to its very creation. In Central Asia, this policy included political delimitation and creation of Soviet republics with titular nations, ascriptive ethnic identities, manipulative census and ethnic registration policies, forced assimilation of some smaller ethnic groups into the titular ones (called ‘ethnic consolidation’ or ‘coalescence’ in the official Soviet parlance), corresponding educational, cultural, linguistic and social policies, and many other measures. As a

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result, in Uzbekistan, the Sarts had already disappeared as an officially recognized separate category by 1924 (Ilkhamov 2004a: 296ff.), while later many Tajiks were pressured to register themselves as Uzbeks. In Tajikistan, a campaign of forced assimilation of the Pamiri ethnic groups had been pursued, although the latter spoke languages quite different from Tajik and have many significant cultural differences. In principle, this policy, amongst other goals, was aimed at obliteration of sub-national divisions. Ethno-territorial delimitation of the region took significant time, from 1920 through 1936, and was complicated by many factors, such as the fluidity and uncertainty of many ethnic identities, economic rationality, external and internal political considerations, conflicting interests and rivalries of indigenous politicians, and so on. Nevertheless, in general, the Soviet policy was quite successful (Roy 2000: VIIff.). To some extent, it resulted in interiorization of the very notion of a nation in the minds, attitudes and behavior of members. In this regard, just as in cases of many other nations worldwide, education, mass media, the promotion of national histories, and last but not least, functional administrative structures and institutions played an important cementing role. Territorialization of new nations, institutionalization of ethnic identities as an important criterion for social and political advancement in the Central Asian republics, and cultural standardization were but some of the measures aimed at shaping new allegiances. Each nation was provided with quasi-state structures and political apparatus, and, thus, with a model of the ethnonation-state. Each nation was provided with its own officially designated and standardized literary language based on dialects at the maximum linguistic distance from other related languages, which substituted for previous overarching literary languages, like Farsi and Chagatai (Turki, called Old Uzbek in the Soviet period to conceal the historical roots of the modern Uzbek language). The Soviet scholarship was preoccupied with ethnogenesis, that is, the origins of contemporary ethnic nations. It was perceived as an almost teleological, spontaneous, essentialist and timeless process which had been

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going on since the most ancient times. Correspondingly, each Central Asian nation was provided with its own version of ethnic history, or rather mythistorical past, since, not infrequently, these histories smacked of mythologies. The uniqueness, separateness and allegedly primordialist character of the Central Asian nations was overstated, while their commonalities and a history of the region in general were played down. This was a difficult endeavor, especially with regard to Uzbeks and Tajiks, who for a long time shared the same territories and states, and, to a large extent, the same cultural heritage. Moscow retained ultimate control over the writing and re-writing of national histories and the selection of national heroes, since by no means should these be antagonistic to the Russians and to the official Russian/Soviet narrative (Smith et al. 1998: 71). However, it was much more condescending to the fierce competition between narratives of individual Central Asian republics, which, not infrequently, acquired a certain nationalistic dimension. National historiographies invented in the Soviet period were aimed at forging new identities and led to the compartmentalization of the ethnic and cultural history of the region. At the same time, they tended to stress an ethnic and cultural continuity between ancient and medieval populations of the region and the newly created nations, thus justifying the Soviet nationalities policy as the culmination of long historical processes. Still, a congruence of political and ethnolinguistic borders has never been achieved in Central Asia, first, because of significant ethnic mixture and intermingling, mosaic settling patterns and widespread bilingualism which was characteristic of its many regions; and second, because of a certain arbitrariness of national delineation in the region. Many Tajik-populated regions were included into Uzbekistan, while some Uzbek-populated regions were included into Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In addition, the Soviets brought to the region a significant number of Russians and other Slavs, as well as many exiled peoples and groups, which further complicated its ethnic composition. By 1989,

the titular nation constituted 72 per cent of the whole population in Turkmenistan; 71.4 per cent in Uzbekistan; 62.3 per cent in Tajikistan; 52.4 per cent in Kyrgyzstan; and 39.7 per cent in Kazakhstan.

Subnational identities The consolidation of Central Asian nations should also not be overestimated. Ethnonational identities in the region were of a clearly hierarchical character. An individual considered himor herself a member of a given ethnic nation via-à-vis other ones, but within the individual’s nation, local, regional and/or kin- and descent-based clanal and tribal identities retained significant meaning and played an important role in his or her loyalties. Whether all these identity groupings go back directly to the pre-revolutionary period, and to what extent some of them were reordered in the Soviet period (Roy 1997: 137) are still open questions that demand special scholarly attention. These groupings are not infrequently (but erroneously) called by the umbrella term ‘clans’, which obscures their real varieties and differences. In any case, they remained very much alive and conspicuous in the public consciousness, attitudes and behavior: from personal relations and marriage arrangements, to the ways of social and political advancement and career promotion; and, especially, to the in-fighting within the political elites in Central Asian republics. However, the ordinary population, which was denied any participation in political life and was poorly protected by the state, also tended to rely on traditional institutions, such as kin, descent and other groups, and on their old rules of mutual aid and reciprocity. In Tajikistan, the notion of a single Tajik nation remained in flux, while localized cultural and regional identities remained very strong. These differences were conspicuous even in the intra-ethnic division of labor. The natives of the northern Leninabad province, primarily from Khujant (formerly Leninabad) and to a lesser degree from Kanibadam, had come to dominate the Communist Party

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apparatus and government in the late 1930s; descendants of migrants from Samarkand and Bukhara, as well as people from Garm and the Pamirs, made up a significant part of the intellectual elite; natives of Kuliab and Badakhshan regions represented a majority in the law enforcement bodies; and Garm natives were entrenched in trade and the shadow economy (Bushkov and Mikulski 1993: 26). In Kazakhstan, the importance of belonging to a certain zhuz (‘horde’ in the past, something similar to a tribal confederation), as well as to a certain tribe and clan, was well known by all Kazakhs. Although there was an unwritten rule about maintaining a certain balance between members of different zhuzes among the republican nomenklatura, those who were in power tended to recruit, support and promote people of their own zhuz (Dzanguzhin 1993: 179). Members of the Middle zhuz were overrepresented in the first generation of the indigenous communist leadership, however all these people were exterminated during Stalin’s purges. After Almaty became the capital of the republic, members of the Elder zhuz began to gradually increase their number in the governance and administration. Since the 1960s, members of the Elder zhuz and their allies from the Junior zhuz became overrepresented in the power structures, while the intellectual and cultural elites to a large extent remain constituted of members of the Middle zhuz. In Kyrgyzstan, the struggle for power between northern and southern tribes was characteristic of most of the Soviet period. From the 1930s through the 1950s, the majority of the leading positions were occupied by the southern Kyrgyz from the Kypchak tribe; then the balance of power began to change in favor of the northern Sary-Bagysh and Solto tribes (Filonyk 1994: 158). When Akaev, a member of Sary-Bagysh, became president in October 2000, his election was connected with struggles not only between reformists and conservatives, but even more so between northern and southern Kyrgyz (Ponomarev 1989: 9–10). In Turkmenistan, tribal loyalties remained a major factor of social life. One witnessed a constant competition for lucrative positions between members of different tribes, especially

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the largest ones: Teke, Saryk, Goklen, Salyr, Yomut and Ersari. It became common for the first secretaries of the republican Communist Party immediately after their appointment by Moscow to put their tribesmen in prominent and important positions in the government, administration and even in the scientific and cultural establishments in the capital of the republic Ashghabad. At the same time, regional party organizations sometimes resembled tribal fiefdoms. An ordinary Turkmen who settled in the territory of an alien tribe had no prospects for social and economic advancement. In everyday life he felt the scornful attitude of his neighbors. Marriages between members of different tribes were very rare (Demidov 2002: 9ff.). In Uzbekistan, regional identities rooted in different historical experiences, ethno-cultural traditions and socio-economic conditions remained very strong. They were reflected in the struggle for leading positions in the republican party organization and government. The period from 1937 until 1957 was marked by the dominance of the Tashkent and Fergana factions, while members of the Samarkand, Bukhara and other factions were relegated to positions of secondary significance. In about 1957, the balance of power changed, and the central and western factions became the main source of leading cadres. In the early 1980s, the Tashkent and Fergana factions restored their supremacy within the republic’s political elite, but in 1989 another shift brought to power the Samarkand faction (Carlisle 1991). Thus, the Soviet nationality policy was very contradictory. While having constructed ethnic nations, it simultaneously was very suspicious of their nationalism. While aimed at the modernization of the new nations, it dismissed the very concept of nationalism as a concomitant product of modernity. These inconsistencies and their consequences became fully revealed in the post-Soviet period.

THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD After independence, communist ideology as the legitimation of power was thrown overboard

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and was replaced with the ideology of ethnic nationalism, indigenization and ethnonationstate building (Koroteyeva and Makarova 1998; Adams 1999; Kuru 2002: 73f.; Manz 2002; Olcott 2002: 58ff.). Propagated by the ruling elites and many in the intellectual and cultural elites, it is considered instrumental to the societal consolidation of the majority population. Actually, it helps the political elites to neutralize, or to convert to their cause, some strata of the indigenous populations. Despite individual variations, the disjunction between ethnic identities, the notion of civil nationhood and citizenship is evident in all Central Asian states. From the very beginning they rejected a double-citizenship option for their Russian minorities (Turkmenistan abolished double-citizenship in 1993), but simultaneously they granted citizenship to all their residents. In principle, this implied legal equality in terms of rights and duties. However, the new states did not embark on a venture of civic nation-building, which in any case seems impossible at the moment. If one assumes that the concept of civic nation implies more than simple membership in a political community, but is connected with the acceptance of shared values, norms, rituals, symbols and, last but not least, historical narratives and myths, which are linked with a notion of patria and are acceptable to the multi-ethnic majority, one should conclude that the gulf between dominant ethnic nations and those who have turned out to be minorities is too big to be bridged in the near future. This is especially evident with regard to Russians and other Europeans. Occasional lip-service notwithstanding, civic nationhood is not on the agenda of the new Central Asian states, since they are not interested in, nor capable of, unifying integration. Following Brubaker (1996: 76ff.), they can be characterized as nationalizing states, for example as the states of and for particular nations, yet not actualized to a sufficient degree. In such states citizenship is divorced from the membership in the nation, since the latter is perceived as an ethnic one. In one way or another, the constitutions of all Central Asian states imply the priority rights of dominant

nations on the territories of corresponding countries, which are claimed to be their homelands. Kazakhstan grants citizenship to all ethnic Kazakhs from abroad, but denies it to co-ethnics of its minorities. Special clauses in constitutions of Central Asian countries stipulate that their presidents should be fluent in the state languages, which practically guarantees that they should be members of ethnic majorities. Besides this, the nationalizing policies include overt or covert measures aimed at assertion of the dominance of the titular nations in the governance, administration, educational and cultural spheres, judiciary and law enforcement agencies, and in the economy. In all privatization schemes an advantage is given to members of titular nations.

Language policy The policy of linguistic Russification promoted in the Soviet Union was detrimental to the development of indigenous languages. One of its consequences is that the minorities of European origin, as a rule, do not speak local languages. Even a significant number of members of indigenous political and cultural elites, especially in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, have an insufficient command of their languages. After independence, all Central Asian countries adopted special language laws granting the status of state languages to titular ones with the further aim of making them the sole languages of governance and administration. One should also mention the replacement of many Russian loan words with Turkic and Farsi terminology. However, the practical implementation of the language laws turned out to be more difficult than had been anticipated, and it was slowed down. Across the region, Russian remains necessary for many daily interactions and retains a strong position in inter-ethnic contacts, business, science and professions. This is evident not only in the most Russified countries of the region, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but also in such countries as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Still, the lack of proficiency in indigenous languages further limits the possibilities of employment

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in the state sector for the members of ethnic minorities. To further distance themselves from the Russian language, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have adopted the use of Latin script instead of Cyrillic, though at the moment Cyrillic is still widely used in Uzbekistan (Kosmarskii 2003). Latin scripts as opposed to Cyrillic ones serve as markers of new post-Soviet identities.

National historiographies National historiographies continue to serve political causes, nowadays those of the new states (Bregel 1996). While reiterating many concepts developed in the Soviet period, especially with regard to ethnogenesis, they have become not only nationalistic but also explicitly statist (Uyama 2003: 51). They contain the same substitution of histories of titular nations for histories of corresponding countries and territories based on arbitrary manipulation of archaeological data and written sources. The origin of contemporary nations is perceived as an almost teleological process. The nationalist components of the somewhat revised historiographies of the Soviet period have become much more conspicuous and are propagated without any constraint. They include the following.

Autochthonism The example of Central Asian states confirms the significance of notions of territory and homeland in the formation of national identities. In the Soviet Union, the autochthonous theory had first been developed in the 1940s. It claimed that all ancient and medieval inhabitants of corresponding republics were the ancestors of their contemporary titular nations or participated in their ethnogenesis. Nowadays, the Kazakh, Turkmen and Uzbek nationalist narratives appropriate Iranian-speaking populations that in the distant past peopled the territories of the new states. In addition, autochthonism is used to confirm the historical rights of ethnonations on territories of their states and whenever it is considered expedient to deny these rights to ethnic minorities. Thus, in 2000,

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Kyrgyzstan celebrated with great pomp the supposed three thousandth anniversary of the city of Osh. This was done in a way that presented the city as an indivisible part of Kyrgyz history and culture and to bolster Kyrgyz legitimacy over the mostly Uzbek territory.

The search for glorious ancestors This also existed in historiographies of the Soviet period, and was supposed to boost national pride. Since independence, the privatization and valorization of particular historical periods, states and historical and cultural personalities continue unrestrained, and wherever it is considered expedient, the concept of autochthonism is supplemented by concepts of political and ethnic continuity. Not infrequently, ancient and medieval states and peoples are claimed as predecessors and ancestors of the new states and nations even in cases when they emerged in quite distant territories. This approach makes possible the spatial and temporal extension of national histories and makes them more glorious. Tajik nationalist narrative, for example, tends to blur the differences between the Iranian-speaking populations of Central Asia and of other regions, such as Iran and Afghanistan. This allows Tajiks to claim the cultural and other achievements of virtually all Iranian peoples as Tajik ones, and to refer to many famous Farsi-language writers, like Rudaki, Firdawsi, Nizami, Sa’adi, Hafez and Iqbal, as Tajiks even if they never lived in Central Asia. Tajiks are presented as legitimate heirs to 2500 years of Iranian civilization in both its Persian and Central Asian varieties. In the same fold, the Sogdians, one of the major peoples in ancient and early medieval Central Asia, are defined as the direct ancestors of Tajiks, and the Samanid state (819–992) is perceived as a Tajik state; its 1100–year anniversary was celebrated in the country in 1999. Tajik scholars continue to compete with Uzbek ones for the right to claim the philosopher and physician Avicenna (10–11th centuries) as their own, although he wrote mainly in Arabic. In 2003, Kyrgyzstan celebrated the 2200-year anniversary of Kyrgyz statehood, which allegedly emerged in Inner Asia in 201 BC. Likewise, some historians call the Kyrgyz polity

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of the Yenisei, in the early medieval period, the ‘Great Kyrgyz empire’. A famous writer of the eleventh century, Yusuf Balasuguni, is called a Kyrgyz only on the grounds that he was born in the city of Balagasun, situated on the territory of contemporary Kyrgyzstan. In the Kazakh historiography, the concept of Turkism (not to be confused with pan-Turkism in its Turkish meaning) has become very popular. The early medieval Turkic empire that had emerged on the territory of contemporary Mongolia and its cultural heritage, as well as some other Turkic polities, are perceived as direct predecessors of the Kazakh state. In Uzbekistan, all famous personalities who ever lived on its contemporary territory are appropriated as the ‘great ancestors of the Uzbek people’. Timur has become a national hero and a ‘great Uzbek statesman’, and huge monuments to him have been built in Samarkand and Tashkent. Remarkably, the latter replaced the demolished monument to Karl Marx. In this regard, however, nobody can compete with Turkmenistan. Its dictator boldly claims in his book, Rukhnama – which is obligatory reading for all of his subjects – that the Turkmen nation has existed already for five thousand years, and that the Parthian, Hsiungnu, Karakhanid and many other states were actually Turkmen ones (Turkmenbashi 2002: 86, 165, 190, 207ff.).

Victimization New historiographies have embraced the rhetoric of postcolonialism and victimization, which should foster a sense of unity among the nation. A lot of attention is paid to real or perceived historical injustices for which the Russians, as the embodiment of Tsarist and Soviet rule, are mainly blamed. In Uzbekistan, the ‘Museum of the Victims of Repression’ (tsarist and Soviet) was opened in 2001, and in Kazakhstan, along with several monuments, the ‘Museum of the Victims of Soviet Oppression’ was opened in 2003 in Almaty, in the building that once housed the KGB. While the tsarist period is depicted in black colors everywhere in the region, the overall negative attitude to the Soviet period is remarkably characteristic of the most authoritarian countries in the region, Turkmenistan

and Uzbekistan. In other countries this attitude is more nuanced and ambiguous. In Kazakhstan, the forced collectivization and sedentarization of nomads in the early 1930s, and the famine that followed, during which some 1.7 million people perished, are included in the master narrative, while the Virgin Lands campaign of the 1950s is also often criticized. Everywhere revolts and resistance movements against Tsarist and Soviet rule, condemned as reactionary in the Soviet historiography (for example, the Khan Kenesary rebellion in Kazakhstan in 1837–1847; the 1879 battle of Geok Tepe, in Turkmenistan; the Andijan uprising, in 1898; the uprisings of 1916; and the Basmach movement, in the early Soviet period) are hailed now as anti-colonial movements. Intellectuals of the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet periods, like Jadids or the members of the Alash Orda movement, executed in the 1930s as ‘bourgeois nationalists’, are rehabilitated and glorified.

Other characteristics Ethnic and national iconography are salient and important because they are both inclusive and exclusive, marking ‘us’ from ‘them’ very clearly and on a regular basis. Independence has brought to the fore the manufacture of state symbols, which allegedly reflect the ethnic iconography of dominant nations. The flag of Kazakhstan is blue, a color associated with early medieval Turks, and contains a traditional Kazakh ornamentation at the side. The roof of a yurta, a nomadic felt tent, appears on the flag of Kyrgyzstan. Sometimes new symbolism also includes Islamic elements (Bohr 1998: 145, 160–1), for example the green parts and crescents of the national flags of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Islam and Islamic heritage are recognized as a part of national identities, but by no means as the main one. The widespread celebration of historical anniversaries is also quite common and is playing an important role in the legitimation of contemporary political regimes. One is also witnessing the restoration or substitution of indigenous toponyms for the Russian and Soviet ones, celebration of new holidays, as well as some traditional ones, like Navrus (Adams

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1999: 364ff.), which were forbidden in the Soviet period, and indigenization of political and administrative terminolgy.

Subnational identities The somewhat modernized tribalism/regionalism still plays an important role in the political process and contributes to structural weakness of Central Asian states. Exploited by the ruling elites, it helps to play down social and economic differences in the interests of local loyalties and makes more difficult the emergence of a liberal national consensus. It is difficult to mobilize citizens on the basis of nation-wide appeals or organizations, when most of them are involved in personal patron–client relationships and in conditions when their allegiance goes first to various sub-national groupings. Power is confined to rather small elites which are not sufficiently consolidated and lack a nation-wide support base. During the entire independence period, Tajikistan has experienced a power struggle between Khujant, Garm, Kuliab, Badakhshan, Gissar and other factions. At times, the struggle was so fierce that it resulted in civil war. This war is sometimes perceived as the struggle between ex-communists and secularists, on the one hand, and Islamists, on the other. However, it can be better explained as the struggle of regional factions that for various reasons have chosen different political orientations and political garments (Bushkov and Mikulski 1996; Djalili et al. 1997; Niiazi 1997; Zviagelskaya 1997). Thus, the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan was comprised mainly of inhabitants of Garm and Karategin. Eventually, the Kuliab–Khujant–Gissar alliance, with the assistance of Russia and Uzbekistan, defeated the Garm–Karategin–Pamir alliance. At the moment, the leading positions in the country belong to the Kuliab faction, despite the fact that Kuliab is one of the poorest and the most backward regions in the country. This situation is much resented by other factions, especially the Khujant one, to the extent that one may wonder if the Kuliab faction would be able to remain in power without Moscow’s military support.

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In Kazakhstan, according to a 1995 opinion poll, 39 per cent of the respondents believed that belonging to a particular zhuz was important in getting a job or a promotion (Olcott 2002: 185). Just like in the late Soviet period, the dominant positions in the country’s leadership are occupied by members of the Elder zhuz, who still have to share power with members of the Junior zhuz, since the country’s main oil deposits are located on the territory of the latter. At the same time, most of the opposition consists of members of the Middle zhuz (Masanov 1996: 46ff.; Khliupin 1998: 7ff.). In Kyrgyzstan, President Akaev increasingly relied on the support of his own and his wife’s tribesmen, while members of the tribes located in Chuisk, Naryn, Osh and Dzhelal-Abad regions were dissatisfied with their shares of power and national wealth (Anderson 1999: 39–42). In his ousting from power in 2005, tribal loyalties retained their importance for all factions involved. In Turkmenistan, even the national flag contains five carpet designs that are characteristic of the main tribes in the country. President Niiazov belongs to the most numerous Teke tribe, from which, especially from its Akhal subdivision, he recruits many of his subordinates (Dudarev 1998: 169; Akbarzadeh 1999: 282–3; Kadyrov 2001: 6ff.). Remarkably, even some members of the opposition to Niiazov perceived democratization of their country only in terms of the substitution of a federation of tribes for the current hegemony of one tribe (Kadyrov 2001: 22). In Uzbekistan, President Karimov rules with the support of the Samarkand faction and its allies from the Tashkent faction, while the members of the Fergana, Bukhara, Khwarazm and Surkash (Surkhan-Daria and KashkarDaria regions) factions are pushed aside to less prominent positions (Petrov 1998: 97). The tenacity of subnational identities and allegiances is sometimes explained as a usual center–periphery competition (Ilkhamov 2004b; Jones Luong 2004). However, in Central Asia it should be better perceived not only as a struggle of peripheral political elites for their share of scare resources and spoils,

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but also for dominant positions in the center. It is worth noting that, contrary to some other regions of the world, there are no secessionist or autonomist movements amongst subnational groups of titular ethnic nations in Central Asia. Instead, their members are involved in power struggles within the ethnic nation-states’ borders. In any case, the salience of subnational groupings and identities is detrimental not only for the emergence of civil society, but even to consolidation of ethnonations. The majority of indigenous populations take for granted a social hierarchy passed off as a traditional one. Individuals who are not included into kin, clanal, tribal and regional networks, which perpetuate the authoritarian model of power, are doomed to a kind of social vacuum. Ethnic minorities Nationalizing policies, as well as economic crisis in the region, have resulted in a significant outmigration of members of ethnic minorities, which has contributed to a certain homogenization of the ethnic composition of the new states. Out-migration was most significant amongst the Russians and other Slavs, Germans, Meskhetian Turks and Jews, while the members of other dispersed groups, like Tatars and Koreans, and especially indigenous Central Asian ethnic groups, do not tend to emigrate. By 1989, Russians constituted 37.6 per cent of the whole population of Kazakhstan, 21.4 per cent of Kyrgyzstan, 9.5 per cent of Turkmenistan, 8.3 per cent of Uzbekistan, and 7.6 per cent of Tajikistan. Their number decreased in Uzbekistan by 2000 to 4.0 per cent; in Turkmenistan by 1995 to 6.7 per cent; in Kazakhstan by 1997 to 32.2 per cent; in Kyrgyzstan by 1997 to 15.3 per cent; and in Tajikistan by 1996 to but 3.2 per cent. Still, ethnic minorities remain quite numerous in most Central Asian countries. With the exception of Tajiks in Uzbekistan, so far the Central Asian regimes are not pursuing a policy of assimilation of ethnic minorities in any consistent way. However, nationalizing policy and ethnicization of political discourse puts ethnic minorities at a disadvantage in all

Central Asian countries. This is especially resented by Russians who were used to the status of the dominant nation in the whole Soviet Union, and considered all its territory as their vast homeland; hence their widespread grievances about discrimination, circumscribed social mobility, injustice, violations of human rights, colonial ingratitude, and so forth. Still, the response of ethnic minorities is rather muted, and mainly is limited to the cultural sphere. So far, the autocratic rulers in the region have successfully prevented attempts at political mobilization of ethnic minorities, which were rather weak in any case. Ethnic clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks and Kyrgyz and Tajiks, in Kyrgyzstan in 1989 and in 1990, were of spontaneous character, and were sparked mainly not by political but by economic issues. In the 1990s, a poorly organized separatist and irredentist movement was noticeable amongst some Russians in the northern parts of Kazakhstan, however it lacked the support of the Russian government and was easily suppressed. During the perestroika period some Tajiks in Uzbekistan stepped up their cultural and educational demands, but the government responded negatively, and it seems that at the moment these demands lack mass support from the bilingual Tajik minority. There is little room for irredentist movements in any case, since all Central Asian countries support the principle of inviolability of state borders.

CONCLUSION A widespread but far from always precise term ‘nation-state’ can be applied to the new states in Central Asia only with reservation. It is still more a project than reality. There is no consistent policy of assimilation or acculturation of ethnic minorities. Nationalizing and homogenizing policies pursued by political classes are aimed not at their incorporation into a civic nation, but at asserting the dominant positions of titular ethnic nations. In this regard, the new states may be characterized as

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ethnocracies, and this factor contributes to their stable instability.

REFERENCES Adams, L. L. (1999) ‘Invention, Institutionalization, and Revival in Uzbekistan’s National Culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2: 355–73. Akbarzadeh, S. (1999) ‘National Identity and Political Legitimacy in Turkmenistan’, Nationalities Papers, 27 (2): 271–90. Anderson, J. (1999) Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia’s Island of Democracy? Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Bohr, A. (1998) ‘The Central Asian States as Nationalizing Regimes’, in G. Smith et al. (eds), Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 139–64. Bregel, Y. (1996) Notes on the Study of Central Asia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Refrained: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bushkov, V. I. and Mikulski, D. V. (1993) Tajikistan: chto proiskhodit v respublike? Moscow: Insitut etnologii i antropologii. Issledovaniia po prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii, document No. 40, seriiia A. Bushkov, V. I. and Mikulski, D. V. (1996) Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny v Tajikistane. Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii. Issledovaniia po prikladnoi i neotlozhnoi etnologii. Carlisle, D. S. (1991) ‘Power and Politics in Soviet Uzbekistan: From Stalin to Gorbachev’, in W. Fierman (ed.), Soviet Central Asia: The Failed Transformation. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. pp. 93–130. Demidov, M. S. (2002) Postsovetskii Turkmenistan. Moscow: Natalis. Djalili, M-R., Grare, F. and Akiner, S. (eds) (1997) Tajikistan: The Trials of Independence. New York: St Martin’s Press. Dudarev, K. P. (1998) ‘Turkmeniia: Postkommunisticheskii avtoritarnyi rezhim’, in A. M. Vasil’ev (ed.), Postsovetskaia Tsentral’naia Aziia. Moscow: Vostochnaia Literatura. pp. 161–90. Dzanguzhin, R. (1993) ‘Kakim ia vizhu novyi Kazakhstan’, Prostor, 9: 173–84. Filonyk, A. O. (1994) ‘Kyrgyzstan’, in M. Meshabi (ed.), Central Asia and the Caucasus. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. pp. 149–63.

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Fragner, B. G. (1994) ‘The Nationalization of the Uzbeks and Tajiks’, in E. Allworth (ed.), Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. pp. 13–32. Ilkhamov, A. (2004a) ‘Archaeology of Uzbek identity’, Central Asian Survey, 23: 289–326. Ilkhamov, A. (2004b) ‘The Limits of Centralization: Regional Challenges in Uzbekistan’, in P. Jones Luong (ed.), The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Jones Luong, P. (2004) Institutional Change and Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kadyrov, S. (2001) ‘Turkmenistan: institute presidentstva v klanovom postkolonial’nom obshchestve’, Vestnik Evrazii, 2 (13): 5–32. Khazanov, A. M. (1992) ‘Nomads and Oases in Central Asia’, in J.A. Hall and I.C. Jarvie (eds), Transition to Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 69–89. Khliupin, V. N. (1998) ‘Bol’shaia sem’ia’ Nursultana Nazarbaeva. Moscow: Institut aktual’nykh politicheskikh issledovanii. Koroteyeva, V. and Makarova, E. (1998) ‘The Assertion of Uzbek National Identity: Nativization of StateBuilding Process?’, in T. Atabaki and J. O’Kane (eds), Post-Soviet Central Asia. New York: I. B. Tauris. pp. 137–43. Kosmarskii, A. (2003) ‘Smysly latinizatsii v Uzbekistane (konets XX – nachalo XXI veka)’, Vestnik Evrazii, 3 (22): 62–85. Kuru, A. T. (2002) ‘Between the State and Cultural Zones: National Building in Turkmenistan’, Central Asian Survey, 21 (1): 71–90. Manz, B. F. (2002) ‘Tamerlane’s career and its uses’, Journal of World History, 13 (1): 1–25. Masanov, N. (1996) ‘Kazakhskaia politicheskaia i intelektual’naia elita: klanovaia prinadlezhnost’ i vnutrietnicheskoe sopernichestvo’, Vestnik Evrazii, 1 (2): 46–61. Niiazi, A. (1997) ‘Tajikistan: Regional’nye aspekty konflikta (1990-e gg.)’, in A. Malashenko, B. Koppiters and D. Trenin (eds), Etnicheskie i regionnal’nye konflikty v Evrazii. Kn. 1. Tsentral’naia Aziia i Kavkaz. Moscow: Ves’ Mir. pp. 51–74. Olcott, M. B. (2002) Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Petrov, N. I. (1998) ‘Uzbekistan: Politicheskaia stabil ‘nost’ v usloviiakh komandno-administrativnogo rezhima’, in A. M. Vasil’ev (ed.), Postsovetskaia Tsentral’naia Aziia. Poteri i obriateniia. Moscow: Vostochnaia Literatura. pp. 94–121. Ponomarev, V. (1989) Kirgiziia. Moscow: Spetsial’nyi vypusk informatsionogo tsentra moskovskogo Narodnogo Fronta. Roy, O. (1997) ‘Is the Conflict in Tajikistan a Model for Conflicts throughout Central Asia?’, in M-R. Djalili, F. Grare and S. Akiner (eds), Tajikistan: The Trials of Independence. New York: St Martin’s Press. Roy, O. (2000) The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations. New York: New York University Press. Smith, G., Law. V., Wilson, A., Bohr, A. and AllWorth, E. (1998) Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet

Borderlands: Politics of National Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subtelny, M. E. (1994) ‘The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik’, in B. F. Manz (ed.), Central Asia in Historical Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. pp. 45–61. Turkmenbashi, S. (2002) Rukhnama. Ashkhabad: Turkmenskaia. Gosudarstvennaia Izdatel’skaia Sluzhba. Uyama, T. (2003) ‘Research Trends in the Former Soviet Central Asian Countries’, in S. A. Dudoignon and K. Hisao (eds), Research Trends in Modern Central Eurasian Studies (18th-20th Centuries): Part I. Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko. pp. 48–68. Zviagelskaya, I. D. (1997) The Tadjik Conflict. Moscow: Russian Center for Strategic Research and Political Studies.

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38 Contending Nationalisms in South-East Asia D AV I D B R O W N

The contemporary politics of South-East Asian nationalism cannot be characterized in terms of any overarching trend. There are real differences in the degree and character of nationhood in, for example, the corporatist cohesion of Singapore, the authoritarian stalemate of Burma1 and the ‘post-authoritarian’ instabilities of Indonesia. Moreover, some nationstates are apparently being strengthened by globalization, others weakened; some characterized by increased ethnic conflict, others by its easing; some consistently authoritarian, others intermittently democratic. The comparative evaluation of South-East Asian nationalisms is, however, problematized by conceptual ambiguities.2 When national identities are seen as the outcome of a long modernizing process of national integration, Vietnam, Burma and Thailand might be seen as developing into nations over several centuries (Tarling 1998), but both there and elsewhere, nationhood in contemporary South-East Asia remains vitiated by religious and linguistic diversities (Connor 1979; Engelbert and Schneider 2000), and by the asymmetries of political and economic clientelist networks (Neher 1987). Alternatively, national identities can be seen as reactive responses to external pressures, so as to invite the view that colonialism not

only created nations by imposing centralized and unified territorial states on South-East Asia,3 but also reactively generated the anticolonial nationalist movements which imbued the populations of these states with strong national loyalties (Neher 1994). According to some observers, the external forces of globalization have subsequently weakened the nationalist autonomy and legitimacy of some South-East Asian nation-states, notably Indonesia (Beeson 2002, 2003). National identities are also sometimes seen as crucially dependent on ideas of equal citizenship, so that it is the shallowness of democratization transitions in this region which is identified as the key inhibiting influence on the growth of national identities (Henders 2004).4 But there is a fourth approach, the one adopted in this chapter, which sees national identity not as a reflection of societal structures, but rather as a contingent and variable ideological construction. National identities are seen to vary because they arise out of the interplay between civic and ethnic myths of nationhood which are deployed in the course of political interactions, by both state and non-state actors. This implies that while there are no linear trends in national identity common to all countries in the region, there are nevertheless some

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consistent patterns to the variations in their national cohesion. In the rapidly changing societies of SouthEast Asia, politics cannot be understood as solely the pursuit of material self-interests. It also reflects the search for cultural and ideological resolutions to the insecurities engendered by the varying impacts of globalization, which foster prosperity for some and impoverishment for others. This is reflected not just in the economic gulf in per capita GNPs between, for example, Singapore and Cambodia (US$30,170 and US$260 for 1998, cited in Funston 2001), but also in the social gulf, evident throughout the region, between swidden agriculturists under threat from ‘development’ and new urban middle classes seeking security in consumerism. In such circumstances, globalization, far from promoting the cosmopolitan homogeneity of South-East Asia, is likely ‘to generate difference, uniqueness and cultural specificity’ (Kahn 1998: 9). Nationalism can then be seen as an ideology which attaches to such specificities so as to ameliorate the anomic impact of disruptive social change. Nationalism, in its various forms, offers myths of moral and cognitive certainty as to the causes of contemporary disruptions and the prescriptive visions of community towards which politics can mobilize. National identities in South-East Asia offer such ideological security to citizens in the form of three visions, denoted here as ‘ethnocultural’, ‘civic’ and ‘multiculturalist’. These terms are not used to refer to descriptions of contemporary political or social structures, but rather to the distinct ideals of national development towards which populations can be mobilized by political elites. Ethnocultural nationalism depicts the modern nation-state as built on a high-status ethnic core, and offers a promise of security through assimilationist development towards ethnocultural sameness. Civic nationalism portrays the nation-state as developing towards a community governed by ethnically blind norms, so as to offer security in the vision of progress towards equal citizenship. Finally, when the nation-state is imagined in multiculturalist terms, it offers security in the vision of an ethnically balanced polity,

promising just autonomy and resources to each of its component ethnic communities. So long as either or all of these visions of the nation-state retain widespread mobilizing and legitimatory power, then current inequities can be seen as resolvable through national development. Moreover, the three visions can become so intertwined in state symbolism and in the nationalist imaginings of civil society, that the tensions between them remain inchoate, thus promoting the political cohesion of the nation-state. This has not, however, been the case in South-East Asia. The contentious politics of its nationalisms derives in part from the tensioned interplay between civic, ethno-cultural and multiculturalist nationalist visions; and in part from the politics arising out of the internal dynamics of each of these visions

THE ETHNIC DIMENSION OF NATIONALIST POLITICS The political dynamics of nationalism in SouthEast Asia can be traced in large part to the type of nation-building strategies promoted by state elites during or after decolonization. The dominant tendency throughout Asia was for state elites to portray the emergent nationstate as being built, in historical or status terms, upon an ethnic core, thus labelling and peripheralizing other linguistic, racial or religious communities as ‘ethnic minorities’ (Young 1976). In many parts of South-East Asia, there is little convergence of linguistic, religious, racial, ancestral homeland, and contemporary homeland boundaries, so that many writers on the region resist the concept of ‘ethnicity’ for fear of imposing a primordialist cement on the subtleties and fluidities of communal identities (Steinberg 1987). At the same time, however, it is widely recognized that the colonial regimes sought to legitimate themselves by constructing ethnic categories, making alliances with minorities such as Christian Karens in Burma and Moluccans in Indonesia, and sometimes also depicting the new ‘artificial’ state as the

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successor to pre-colonial kingdoms, as in Burma and Vietnam. The resultant majority– minority politics puts South-East Asian nationalist elites under some pressure to adopt ethnicity as a way of mobilizing majority support against the colonialists (Anderson 1998). When state elites have sought to use such ethnic mobilization for nation-building purposes, to construct the nation as built on an ethnic core, this has in turn influenced the construction of an ‘ethnic minority’ consciousness amongst religious, racial or linguistic minorities. Moreover, even in the Indonesian case where the anti-colonial struggle did not employ ethnicity as its mobilizing tool, subsequent separatist minorities have nevertheless legitimated themselves by depicting the state as an agency of ethnic core (in this case Javanese) domination. The result has been a nationalist politics of recurrent ethnic core–minority tensions. There are variations in the extent of the ethno-cultural nationalist tendency in SouthEast Asia, and thence in the degree to which the ethnic cores have been overtly favoured in public policies and in state symbolism. Moreover, the identity of the ethnic core is never uncontested. Thus, for example, in the case of the Philippines, the categories of Tagalogspeakers, Christians, lowland Malays and the central and southern Luzon region all have claims to be the core of the nation. However, because of the crucial importance of language for nation-building, it has in most cases been the largest linguistic community which has been identified as the nation’s ethnic core.5 In some cases, as with the ethnic Thai, Burman, Lao and Malay communities, the ethno-cultural basis for nation-building was signalled directly in the name adopted for the state. Even where the name of the country (or as in Indonesia, also the choice of national language) did not specify the ethnic core, it has been evident, for example in school history curricula, in the recruitment profiles of administrative and military personnel, or in the cultural statushierarchy promoted by the state, that Tagalogspeakers in the Philippines, Javanese in Indonesia, Khmer in Cambodia and Kinh in Vietnam were to be regarded as the core of the modern nation. In some cases the identity of

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the nation’s ethnic core has been promoted in religious terms, as with the Buddhism of the Khmer, the Burmans and the Thai and the Islam of the Malays. In several countries, the ethnic core has been the linguistic group predominant in the fertile lowland regions, which has subsequently become the focal region for economic development, with ethnic minority communities occupying the more geographically and economically peripheral upland areas. In such cases, in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the bias of state policies in favour of the ethnic core has remained partly implicit, portrayed as a response to market forces, a reflection of disparities in access to education, or a consequence of the urban–rural divide. The corollary of this has been that the states’ depictions of indigenous linguistic minorities occupying the upland areas as culturally primitive, economically backward, or politically subversive, has seemed to stem as much from their geographically determined marginalization from the focal points of capitalism and commerce, or their location in border zones, as from any explicit ethnic discrimination on the part of the state. By the same token, ethnic discrimination has sometimes been most overt in those cases where the ethnic core and the ethnic minorities have shared the same urbanized locations. Such ethnic discrimination was institutionalized in Malaysia from 1970 onwards in the New Economic Policy of affirmative action in favour of Bumiputra (‘sons of the soil’, mostly Malay, but also Kadazan, Iban and others of eastern Malaysia), so as to disadvantage the ‘migrant’ Indian and Chinese minorities (and also the indigenous Orang Asli)6. In Cambodia, discrimination against the predominantly urbanized Vietnamese minority was explicit in the 1954 citizenship laws, and in the anticommunist pogroms of the early 1970s and the Pol Pot period. Ethno-cultural nationalism has been least evident in Singapore and East Timor. In the case of East Timor, which achieved independence, after an armed struggle, in 2002, most observers saw national unity as developing more on the basis of perceptions of a common enemy (Indonesia), and the spread of a

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common religion (Catholic), than on the idea of a Tetun Dili ethno-linguistic core (Kingsbury 2001). In Singapore it is indeed the case that the Malay minority (14 per cent) are depicted in the constitution as having a ‘special position’, with Malay as a national language. But since the mid-1960s the Singaporean government has downplayed this element of national identity, not least because its main political constituency has been amongst the Chinese majority (78 per cent). During the 1980s and 1990s, there were indeed some signs of a shift towards a Chinese focus for national identity, with the state promotion of Mandarin and Confucianism, and then the advocacy of an East Asian-oriented ‘Asian Values’ nationalist ideology. But the PAP government has taken some care to ensure that state policies and national symbolism do not appear to favour either the socio-economically and numerically dominant Chinese, or the socio-economically disadvantaged Malay minority. The PAP leaders are aware of the political dangers inherent in favouring either a Malay minority in a predominantly Chinese country, or a Chinese majority in a predominantly Malay region. In those countries where state elites have constructed the nation in the language and symbolism of the ethnic core/ethnic minority distinction, the result has been that identity constructions of ethno-linguistic or ethno-religious categories and disparities have attained hegemony in public discourse, and have been cemented predominantly in the terminology of ‘race’. This has promoted the ethnic assimilationist enterprise in those cases where governments have depicted the ethnic minorities as sharing the same racial stock as the ethnic core. Thus the SLORC regime in Burma claims that all ethnic communities are descended from a common racial stock, and thus are amenable to assimilation, if not for the interference of ‘fanatical racists, ideological insurgents, and so-called religious insurgents’ (Government of Burma, Ministry of Information 1992, quoted in Lambrecht 2004: 155). In Laos and Cambodia (and to a degree in Thailand), ethnic minorities have been pressured into assimilation with the ‘culturally superior’ ethnic cores, by being officially

classified as Lau Theung (upland Lao) and Lau Sung (highland Lao) in Laos, or as Khmer Loeu (upland Khmer) and Khmer Islam in Cambodia.7 But in other cases, the construction of ethnicity in terms of race has functioned precisely to inhibit assimilation. In Malaysia, the depiction of ethnicity in racial terms has been employed so as to push ‘Indians’ and ‘Chinese’ into an acceptance of their low status as citizens on the margin of a Malay-focused nation, and to emphasize the structural nature of the socio-economic and political disparities which accompany racially defined status. Thus even though intra-ethnic disparities of wealth and income have coexisted with inter-ethnic disparities (Roslan 2004), it has been the latter that have been politically salient, with economic disparities almost universally portrayed and perceived, until recently, in terms of an imbalance between Malay poverty and Chinese or Indian wealth. Many ethnic minority communities have perceived their lower status as deriving from discrimination by a state seen as the agent of the ethnic core. But ethnic minority responses to this have varied, in part reflecting their diverse positions as decentralized aboriginal communities, as homeland communities with a history of political cohesion and autonomy, or as communities of migrant origin (Lande 1999). Where assimilationist policies have been applied to migrant communities, as with the Sino-Thais or the Chinese Indonesians, they have met with more success than when applied to ‘hill tribe’ minorities (such as the Hmong in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam), where they have been ‘usually ineffective and often destructive’ (Duncan 2004: 6). Migrant communities that have been pushed to accept low status as ‘second class citizens’ have generally been acquiescent. Chinese and Indian communities in Malaysia have indeed periodically responded to their marginalization in ethnic riots, but by and large the state has been successful in its strategy of co-opting their political and economic elites so as to promote ethnic minority acquiescence to ethnic core dominance.8 When subjected to persecutions in Cambodia, the Vietnamese have remained

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more the victims than the perpetrators of ethnic violence. It has been the impact of ethno-cultural nationalism upon previously autonomous homeland ethnic minorities which has been most disruptive of national unity in South-East Asia. State interventions into ethnic minority homeland regions in many cases involved the disruption of traditional authority structures, as ethnic minority elites were replaced by governmental officials recruited from the ethnic cores; and as social cohesion was disrupted by the progressive impositions of new fiscal, administrative and educational structures, as well as by migrations of labour. Such attempts to expand state control over peripheral ethnic minority regions have frequently had a reactive impact, provoking some amongst the dislocated elites and disrupted communities into ethnic nationalist rebellion. These have occurred, for example, among the Patani Malays in Thailand; the Mindanao Moros in the Philippines; the Karen, Shan, Kachin, Chin and others in Burma; the Papuans and Acehnese in Indonesia: and the Hmong in Laos. In many cases these rebellions could trace their roots both to pre-colonial disputes, and to unrest in the early colonial period directed against the expanding influence of the modern state. During the global ‘ethnic revival’ period from the late 1960s, they began legitimating their calls for political autonomy within or outside the existing nation-states, on overtly ethnic nationalist grounds (Christie 1996). In all cases, the governing regimes responded to such outbursts of inter-ethnic violence and separatist ethno-regional rebellion with the use of coercion. Characteristically, the coercive capacity of states has been sufficient to contain rebellions, or at least to impose a military stalemate, but not to fully dislodge the militants so as to restore effective state control of the disputed ethnic minority regions. Popular support for such movements has fluctuated, as ethnic minority populations such as those in Aceh, Patani or Muslim Mindanao have been subjected to divergent pressures from the developmental promises of the nation-state, the autonomy promises of their separatist elites and the coercive pressures from militants on both sides. The resultant trauma and stalemate

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of these confrontations breed the anxieties and insecurities on which the nationalisms of militants feed. The conflicts thus persist and become entrenched, not just because of the socioeconomic and power disparities associated with the ethno-cultural dimension of the nationstate, but also because of the ideological absolutisms, the nationalist fanaticisms, in which politics becomes simplified as a struggle between two stereotyped communities, the virtuous ‘Us’ and the demonized ‘Other’. This was evident, for example, when the confusion underlying tensions between migrants and locals in Ambon became reconstructed, during 1999, into the moral clarity of an Islamic jihad against subversive separatism, versus a Christian crusade against Islamic ‘evil oppressors’ and the ‘absolute tyranny’ of the Indonesian state (Turner 2002: 2, 5). Visions of ethnic minority separatism thus remain salient in nationalist ideologies, both as the internal threats against which the imperative of national unity can be asserted by state elites, and also as the legitimatory banner for the ethnic nationalist militants who continue the struggles against the alien state.9 Such military and ideological stalemate, which has kept several of these South-East Asian separatist disputes going since the 1960s (and in the case of Karen separatism in Burma since the late 1940s), can however be broken. The perceptions of alienated or marginalized ethnic minorities that the state is the agency of an ethnic core, can be tackled by changes in constitutions, state symbolism or government policies, which employ more ethnically neutral language or reduce ethnic biases in favour of the core. This was attempted in Malaysia by the replacement of the overtly pro-Bumiputra New Economic Policy by the National Development Policy in 2000, and is one interpretation of Cambodia’s ‘ethnically blind’ 1993 Constitution (Ovesen and Trankell 2004: 252–3). However, the political capacity of South-East Asian governments to move away from assimilationist policies has varied. It has depended not just on their administrative capabilities, but also, more fundamentally, upon their ideological ability to reconstruct the nation-state in terms other than that of ethnic core versus

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ethnic minorities. Indeed, most South-East Asian countries, with the exception of Burma, have had some degree of success in ameliorating inter-ethnic confrontations by deploying visions of the nation-state as a civic community transcending ethnic differences. Ethnic minority perceptions of state bias in favour of the ethnic core remain politically salient and unresolved, but they are not the only focal point of nationalist politics.

THE CIVIC DIMENSION OF NATIONALIST POLITICS Throughout South-East Asia, ethno-cultural constructions of the nation have been accompanied, since the decolonization period, by civic nationalism: the idea that the state constitutes a community of sovereign citizens whose status as ‘one people’ ought not to depend upon their ethnic identities, but should derive from the common patriotic loyalties of those permanently residing within its territorial boundaries. In no country has citizenship been restricted to the ethnic core, and in all countries some areas of public life have functioned on the basis of ethnically neutral legal norms. The language of civic nationalism is indeed sometimes employed as rhetoric to camouflage ethnic dominance, but even where that has been the case, its influence has nevertheless been more than cosmetic. It ameliorates ethnic tensions by ensuring that at least some members of ethnic minority communities come to see the state as not just an agent of ethnic core domination, but rather as a potential engine of progress towards ethnically blind development and social justice. Even if such beliefs are regarded as misguided or naive, their impact is to act as a kind of buffer between proponents of ethnic core domination and proponents of reactive ethnic minority rights. The civic vision of the egalitarian citizenship community has manifested itself in different forms. The predominantly authoritarian bent of most South-East Asian governments has been reflected in their depictions of the nation-state as an artefact of colonialism,

forged through nationalist struggle, whose unique collective identity must be repeatedly defended against external threats, and also against the internal fissiparous impacts of individual rights claims, minority vested interests and ethnic rivalries. The nation is thus portrayed in monistic terms as a singular people sharing a common developmental destiny. This kind of collectivist civic nationalism thus serves to legitimate the claim by authoritarian-inclined governments that they are the sole articulators of the will of the unified nation.10 This has been the dominant construction of the nation-state employed by Singapore’s PAP government, initially promoted in the 1960s to inculcate a siege mentality of ‘survivalism’ as a small, resource-poor island in a hostile region. Subsequently the regime promoted a civic nationalism which focused on developing a patriotic pride in the state’s economic transformation. In this civic nationalism it is the uniqueness of the Singaporean collectivity rather than the equality of the individual citizens which is stressed, so that individuals are called on to accede to the inequities of a ‘meritocratic’ hierarchy, inter-ethnic socio-economic disparities, and authoritarian suppression of individual liberties, as the price individuals must pay for collectivist development (Chua 1995). Most South-East Asian authoritarian regimes have promoted such collectivist civic nationalist visions by intertwining them with ideas of ethno-cultural nationalism, in order to enhance their legitimacy amongst citizens of ethnic minority origin uneasy with the dominance of the ethnic core. Thus, in the case of Thailand, the various authoritarian regimes of the ‘bureaucratic polity’ legitimated themselves by employing ethnic Thai structures of the monarchy, Buddhism and the ‘Standard Thai’ language as symbols of the civic unity of the modern territorial state. In Suharto’s Indonesia, the ideology of Panca Sila translated Javanese ethnic values into a universalistic civic language. In the case of Malaysia, Mahathir began his Prime Ministership in 1981 as the defender of Malay-centric ethno-cultural nationalism. But he modified this by moving in a civic direction as he began tentatively to wind back Malay dependence on ethnically

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based state patronage and to adopt some aspects of the neo-liberal agenda for globalization. He sought to modify the Malay-centric view of Malaysia by articulating a more civic vision of a ‘united Malaysian nation’, Bangsa Malaysia, in which Malays and non-Malays were developing ‘a sense of common and shared destiny’ (Mahathir 1991, quoted in Cheah 2002: 221). But such collectivist-authoritarian civic nationalisms breed their own reactions. The rapid economic development of some of the South-East Asian countries has promoted the growth of new middle classes and civil societies which have been increasingly active in making diverse demands – for increased freedoms from state intervention in some areas, but also for increased access to state patronage or government subsidies in others. States which have stressed that they are the sole legitimate articulators of the will of the nation, are thus challenged by civil society claims that the nation is pluralistic rather than monistic, and that the focus of the nation is not the central institutions of the state, but rather the vibrancy of civil society (Rodan 1997). The resultant contentions between collectivist and pluralist proponents of civic nationalist visions can push the issue of ethnic conflict towards the political margins. In Malaysia, the clash between the two strands of civic nationalism took political centre stage in the 1990s, so that the issue of Malay priority in relation to the Chinese and Indians ceased to dominate politics. Mahathir’s sacking of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim provoked a conflict in which their divergent liberal and collectivist civic visions for Malaysia’s development, mobilized large segments of Malaysian society so as to cut across ethnic lines. In Thailand, the progress of democratization, evident since the 1973 Bangkok student protests, began to generate a ‘new nationalism in Thailand … geared towards assisting reformed Thai capital’s venture into the global economy’ (Connors 2003: 239). This took a pluralist form as the centralized ‘bureaucratic polity’ was modified into a potentially more pluralistic and decentralized ‘bourgeois parliamentary political

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system’ (Anderson 1998) with a strengthened civil society. However, it also opened the door for provincial elites to take part in ‘money politics’ and political clientelism, and thence to ally under the ‘democratic authoritarian’ umbrella of Prime Minister Thaksin’s populist nationalism (Pongsudhirak 2003). In the Philippines, the civic nationalist vision has been promoted by President Aroyo’s articulated goal of a ‘strong republic’ whose effective governmental and administrative institutions would be better able to combat corruption and terrorism; but the salience of this vision remains vitiated by the unresolved tensions between the ‘People Power’ nationalism of mass demonstrations advocating such reforms, and the continued patronage influence of the interlocking dynasties which constitute the Philippines’ national oligarchy (Anderson 1998). The result, in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, is not a transition from an authoritarian-collectivist to a liberalpluralist national identity, but rather an unresolved tension between these divergent ideas of the civic nation. It is not only the dual character of the civic vision which influences contemporary nationalist politics, but also its volatility. The appeal of civic nationalism depends primarily upon the extent to which members of ethnic core and ethnic minority communities share a faith that the elites and institutions of the state have the capacity to lead civil society towards the promised developmental social justice. The extent of this faith varies not just with fluctuations in national economic performance, but also with variations in the ideological skills of state elites in mobilizing civic nationalism in response to external enemies or internal threats. The volatility of civic nationalism can be seen in the Philippines, where widespread disillusionment and cynicism with political corruption and with the incapacity of the state to promote development and social justice coexist with sudden bursts of optimistic ‘People Power’ mobilization behind leaders (notably Aquino in 1986, then both for and against Estrada in 2002) who promise a strong state capable of rebuilding civic national unity. This variability of civic nationalism is significant for nationalist politics since fluctuations in

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the strength of the civic buffer between majority-focused ethno-cultural nationalism, and the proponents of ethnic minority rights claims, mean that ethnic tensions can intensify or ameliorate in response to variations in popular perceptions of the developmental or social justice capacities of an incumbent regime or individual leader. When the civic nationalist buffer does weaken, in response to a loss of faith by citizens in the ability of state elites to manage the economy or to defend the nation from threats, then the prospect of an escalation of ethnic conflict can prompt both state elites and civil society activists to search for a different construction of the nation, in which contending ethnic demands might be accommodated.

THE POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM During the decolonization period the ethnic pluralism of South-East Asia was widely depicted, both by governments and by academic observers, as a serious threat to national unity which might limit the opportunities for stable democratization, thus justifying the imposition of centralized authoritarian rule. Such warnings were apparently justified by the incidence of ethnic riots and ethno-regional rebellions in the 1950s and 1960s. The idea that ethnically plural societies can only be held together by authoritarian means is still argued, when convenient, by South-East Asian state elites. But since the 1980s, the counterargument has been increasingly articulated that political stability might be best promoted by the accommodation of ethnic differences – by a shift from policies of ethnic assimilation or domination, towards the making of concessions to ethnic minorities (Myers 1996). One implication has been a modification of the construction of the nation by state elites, so that ethnic minorities, including migrant communities, have increasingly been portrayed, not as merely peripheral to the ethno-culturally defined nation-state, but more as component parts of a multicultural nation-state. The extent of consequential policy change has varied, but in most countries multiculturalism

is more than ‘meaningless rhetoric’, while remaining insufficiently influential to counteract entrenched ethno-culturalist patterns. In Thailand, for example, a ‘resurgence of expressions of ethnic culture and identity’ (Jory 2000: 18) is manifested in the ‘rediscovery’ by Sino-Thais of their Chinese names and cultures, the celebration of hill tribe cultures as a component of Thailand’s culture and a source of tourist revenues, the increased acceptance of Lao and Khmer languages, and the administrative decentralization and political pluralism which have accompanied democratization. It has also been reflected in the shift from centralized assimilation to decentralized accommodation in relation to the Patani Muslims. During the 1990s these latter reforms led to the significantly increased recruitment of Malay Muslims to both appointed and elected governmental/ political positions, the reduction of Muslim– Thai economic disparities, and the teaching of Malay and the celebration of Islam in Patani schools. The result, during the 1990s, was a ‘de-radicalization’ of Malay–Muslim separatism (Wan Mahmood 1999). The multiculturalist vision of the nation comes in two variants. In its collectivist form, multiculturalism implies a corporatist state strategy towards ethnic pluralism, whereby the state provides limited ethnic autonomy through institutional and ideological structures which are determined by the state, and designed so as to promote the cooptation of ethnic elites and ethnic demands. In its liberal form, it implies the decentralization of power and resources to ethnic minorities through internally self-governing institutions or territorial regions. Thus the politics of multiculturalist nationalism focuses upon the unresolved tensions between these two manifestations of multicultural nationalism; state attempts at corporatist control of ethnicity, and the attempts by ethnic minority elites and by multiculturalist influences within civil society at a restructuring of governmental power and social status in favour of ethnic minorities. The fact that state policies to promote the status and autonomy of ethnic minorities are thus open to interpretation as genuine concessions or as ‘fraudulent’ co-optations

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means that moves to institutionalize a more multiculturalist national identity have rarely succeeded in resolving ethnic conflicts, and remain politically problematical. The Philippines has probably made most concessions in a multiculturalist direction, so as to offer significant autonomy both to the Igorot and to the Mindanau Muslims. The offer of territorial autonomy to Mindanao came only after the state-sponsored migration of Catholics had produced a situation in which Muslims formed a minority in most parts of Mindanao. This fact, together with the inefficiencies of the autonomous Mindanao administration under Nur Misuari, and the interventions of Jemaah Islamiah in giving support to Islamic militants, have combined to ensure that the Moro problem remains unresolved. In the case of Burma, cease fires with ethnic rebellions were achieved by concessions which most observers have considered to be cosmetic, and ‘many of these agreements are essentially elite pacts between the military junta and minor despots, drug dealers, and bandits’ (Lambrecht 2004: 167). In Singapore, the multiculturalist element in national identity took a rather different corporatist form, with the formation from the late 1980s onwards of ethnic associations for the Malay, Indian, Chinese and Eurasion communities, which have functioned to co-opt ethnic elites, to monitor ethnic cultures and to distribute ethnic welfare funds. In Indonesia it was manifested in the administrative decentralization measures of 1999 and in particular in the offers of ‘special autonomy’ to Aceh and Papua. In both these latter cases, ‘autonomy’ was greeted with suspicion by the ethnic minority nationalists. In Aceh for example, the GAM nationalist movement had become so radicalized by the state-sponsored violence towards them of the TNI armed forces that they rejected the regional autonomy measure and the subsequent peace deal as ‘a trick by the Javanese state’. They rejected the autonomy compromise, not in favour of full independence, but in favour of a return to violence, in part because ‘GAM leaders believe deeply in an ethos of blood sacrifice’ (Aspinall and Crouch 2003: x). In Thailand, the impact of government accommodations to the Patani Malay-Muslims

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in easing support for secessionism was counteracted by an upsurge of violence, variously attributed to ‘bandits’ or to Jemaah Islamiah, culminating in the carnage of April 2004. This appears to have fuelled a revival of MalayMuslim perceptions of the Thailand state as an agency of Central Thai domination. Constructions of national identity by state elites in South-East Asia have often been modified, since the 1970s, so as to reassure ethnic minorities that they are component parts of a multi-ethnic nation united by the vision of inter-ethnic social justice. But as in other parts of the world, the promotion of multicultural nationalism has been recently undermined by the issue of Islamic terrorism, with governments now frequently portraying social discontent or political opposition in Islamic ethnic communities as politically subversive, allegedly playing into the hands of, or instigated by, domestic or foreign Islamic terrorists.

RESULTANT VARIATIONS IN NATIONALIST POLITICS The core issue in the nationalist politics of SouthEast Asia thus remains the tension between the construction of the nation around the idea of an ethnic core and the construction of ethnic minority communities as thereby unjustly marginalized. If ethnic majorities and minorities alike share a faith that the state is moving towards civic nationalist goals, then this tension can be ameliorated. But in South-East Asia the volatility of this civic nationalist ‘buffer’ engenders a variability in its nationalist politics, which was evident, for example, in the diverse impacts of the 1997–8 economic crisis. In Indonesia, where faith in the Indonesian civic nationalist project had been undermined by the corrupt and coercive practices of the Suharto regime (Anderson 1999), the economic crisis meant that the demands for democratization which led to the downfall of Suharto, initially offered only a weak civic buffer to the clash between divergent ethnic nationalist visions of democracy. The demands of the students calling for the overthrow of Suharto, for a liberal civic nationalism

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of equal individual rights, proved less powerful as a basis for political mobilization between 1998 and 2003 than did the assertions of ‘majority rights’ demands for the reform of the state in diverse Islamic directions, and of ‘minority rights’ demands for ethno-regional separatism. The resultant politics of ethno-religious and ethno-linguistic conflict seemed as if it threatened Indonesian national integrity. But by 2004, an upsurge of widespread support for the election of ‘SBY’ (Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) as President was interpreted by some observers as a renewal of faith in the capacities of an as yet unsullied leader, ‘a man of integrity and competence, neither overly religious nor anti-Muslim’ (Della-Giacoma 2004: 14), who could revive the civic Indonesian project. In Thailand economic crisis had a catalytic effect on the development of civic nationalism, immediately facilitating the pluralist provisions of the 1997 Constitution, and subsequently facilitating the concentration of power of Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai (‘Thais love Thailand’) party in 2001. Both the liberal and the collectivist elements in this civic democracy served to strengthen the buffer between contentions of ethnic nationalism (Reynolds 2002). In Malaysia the economic crisis was employed by Mahathir to strengthen his authoritarian-collectivist civic nationalism against the liberal civic nationalism articulated by Anwar, thereby shifting the focus of politics in a civic direction. Previous Prime Ministers of Malaysia, initially wedded to Malay-dominance policies, had tried to become more ‘inclusive’ (Cheah 2002), but Mahathir was able to use the situations offered by the economic crisis so as to take this civic shift further than his predecessors, and to do so without suffering a Malay backlash. The strength of nation-states in South-East Asian states does not depend, as is sometimes suggested, simply on the economic performance legitimacy of their governments. The 1997–8 economic crisis had varying impacts on the nationalist cohesion of different countries and the nationalist legitimacy of different regimes. The explanation for this lies only partly in the variations of governmental economic strategy.

CONCLUSIONS The picture of unpatterned diversity in the cohesion and character of South-East nationstates is modified once we see the common nationalist tensions which structure their contemporary politics. Ethnocentric constructions of the nation-states remain sufficiently strong to fuel ethnic minority resentments, which take varying political forms. At the same time, authoritarian-collectivist assertions of civic nationalism continue to challenge liberalpluralist constructions of the nation. The result is that any ‘tendency’ towards more democratically multiculturalist constructions of the nation remains incipient; blocked in Burma by the reassertions of an authoritarian and ethnoculturalist regime, unresolved in ‘transitional’ Indonesia, contested in the weak state of the Philippines, partial in the case of Malaysia, contained by the PAP regime in Singapore. In a South-East Asia of incipient or emergent NICs, national identities are indeed undergoing change. But this change should not be conceptualized as any linear ‘transition’ from ethno-cultural, through civic, to multiculturalist national identities; or from authoritarian to democratic nation-states. Rather, we see a politics of nationalist contestation; a contestation which is still partly about the territorial boundaries of the nation, but which increasingly focuses on the tensions between civic, ethno-cultural and multiculturalist constructions of national identity. It is indeed the weakness or strength of the state which is central to an understanding of nationalism in South-East Asia. But it is not the administrative or economic weaknesses of states which directly threaten national unity, so much as ideological limitations in the state management of this nationalist contestation.

NOTES 1 The Burmese language name for the country is ‘Myanmar’. In 1989 the military government decreed that this term also be used as the English term for the country. This was interpreted by some as an assertion of Burman ethnic dominance over the ethnic minorities.

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2 Evident, but unresolved, in the various chapters of Leifer (2000). 3 Thailand was not colonized, but both its boundaries and its state structures were directly influenced by colonialism. 4 On the impacts of democratization in Thailand, see Connors (2003). 5 Percentage figures are misleading, in part because of variations in the treatment of the dialect-language distinction. Thus, for example, estimates of the Lao in Laos vary between 30 and 70 per cent, depending on whether diverse lowland T’ai-speaking groups are conflated. In Indonesia, the national language is not that of the ethnic core. The Javanese are the largest ethno-linguistic group, but Malay was adopted as the national language because it had been used by the Dutch as the language of administration. In the Philippines, Tagalog is the most widely used language, but some estimates list Cebuano as a larger ethno-linguistic group (24 per cent) than the Tagalog (21 per cent). In tiny Brunei, it is the language of the ethnic Bruneis which has become the lingua franca; nevertheless it is Islam which is the central core for nation-building. 6 While the state does indeed seek to assimilate Orang Asli into Malay culture, they are nevertheless excluded from Bumiputra status, and its patronage benefits (Endicott and Dentan 2004). 7 In Laos this official classification schema was dropped in 2002. In Thailand, governments have until recently referred to non-Chinese ethnic minorities primarily in regional terms – as the communities of central, north, north-eastern and southern Thailand. 8 But the unease underlying Chinese acquiescence is indicated, for example, in Glad (1998). 9 For an examination of this process of nationalist ideologization in the Acehnese case, see Brown (2004). 10 Liah Greenfeld (1992) employs the distinction between ‘collectivistic-authoritarian’ and ‘individualisticlibertarian’ nationalisms, which is adapted here.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1998) The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. London: Verso. Aspinall, E. and Crouch, H. (2003) ‘The Aceh Peace Process: Why it Failed’, in Policy Studies 1. Washington, DC: East–West Center. Beeson, M. (2002) ‘Southeast Asia and the Politics of Vulnerability’, Third World Quarterly, 23 (3): 549–64. Beeson, M. (2003) ‘Sovereignty under Siege: Globalization and the State in South-East Asia’, Third World Quarterly, 24 (2): 357–74. Brown, D. (2004) ‘Why Independence?: The Instrumental and Ideological Dimensions of Nationalism’,

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International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 45 (3–4): 277–96. Cheah, B. K. (2002) Malaysia: The Making of a Nation. Singapore: Institute of South-East Asian Studies. Christie, C. J. (1996) A Modern History of South-East Asia: Decolonization, Nationalism and Separatism. London: I.B. Tauris. Chua, B. H. (1995) Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London: Routledge. Connor, W. (1979) ‘An Overview of the Ethnic Composition and Problems of Non-Arab Asia’, in T. S. Kang (ed.), Nationalism and the Crises of Ethnic Minorities in Asia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Connors, M. K. (2003) Democracy and National Identity in Thailand. New York: Routledge Curzon. Della-Giacoma, J. (2004) ‘Listening to the People’s Voice: Indonesian Voters’ Perspectives on the Presidential Elections’, in Asia Program Special Report No. 123 – A Billion Ballots for Democracy: Election Year in Indonesia. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Asia Program. Duncan, C. R. (ed.) (2004) Civilizing the Margins: South-East Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Endicott, K. and Dentan, R. (2004) ‘Into the Mainstream or into the Backwater: Malaysian Assimilation of Orang Asli’, in C. Duncan (ed.), Civilizing the Margins: South-East Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Engelbert, T. and Schneider, A. (eds) (2000) Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism in South-East Asia: Festschrift dedicated to Hans Dieter Kubitscheck. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Funston, J. (2001) (ed.) Government and Politics in South-East Asia. Singapore: Institute of SouthEast Asian Studies. Glad, I. (1998) An Identity Dilemma: A Comparative Study of Primary Education for Ethnic Chinese in the Context of National Identity and Nation-Building in Malaysia and Singapore. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henders, S. (ed.) (2004) Democratization and Identity: Regimes and Ethnicity in East and Southeast Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Jory, P. (2000) ‘Multiculturalism in Thailand: Cultural and Regional Resurgence in a Diverse Kingdom’, Harvard Asia Pacific Review, 4 (1): 18–23. Kahn, J. S. (ed.) (1998) Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in

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Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Singapore: Institute of South-East Asian Studies. Kingsbury, D. (2001) Southeast Asia: A Political Profile. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Lambrecht, C. W. (2004) ‘Oxymoronic Development: The Military as Benefactor in the Border Regions of Burma’, in Christopher R. Duncan (ed.), Civilizing the Margins: South-East Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lande, C. H. (1999) ‘Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Accommodation, and Nation-Building in SouthEast Asia’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 33 (4): 89–112. Leifer, M. (ed.) (2000) Asian Nationalism. London: Routledge. Myers, D. (ed.) (1996) The Politics of Multiculturalism in the Asia/Pacific. Darwin: Northern Territory University Press. Neher, C. D. (1987) Politics in Southeast Asia. Rochester, VT: Schenkman. Neher, C. D. (1994) South-East Asia in the New International Order. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ovesen, J. and Trankell, I-B. (2004) ‘Foreigners and Honorary Khmers: Ethnic Minorities in Cambodia’, in C. R. Duncan (ed.), Civilizing the Margins: South-East Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pongsudhirak, T. (2003) ‘Thailand: Democratic Authoritarianism’, in South-East Asian Affairs

2003. Singapore: Institute of South-East Asian Studies. Reynolds, C. J. (2002) ‘Thai Identity in the Age of Globalization’, in C. J. Reynolds (ed.), National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today. Chiang Mei, Thailand: Silkworm. Rodan, G. (1997) ‘Civil Society and Other Political Possibilities in South-East Asia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 27 (2): 156–79. Roslan, A. H. (2004) ‘Income Inequality, Poverty and Development Policy in Malaysia’, http://ced.u-bordeaux4.fr/sbroslan.pdf (accessed 18 January 2005). Steinberg, D. J. (ed.) (1987) In Search of South-East Asia: A Modern History, 2nd edn. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Tarling, N. (1998) Nations and States in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, K. (2002) ‘Utopian Visions and Kinship Divisions’, Harvard Asia Quarterly Online, 6 (3):1–8 http://www.fas.harvard.edu/asiactr/200203/ turner.pdf (accessed 4 August 2004). Wan Mahmood, S. S. (1999) ‘De-Radicalization of Minority Dissent: A Case Study of the MalayMuslim Movement in Southern Thailand, 1980–1994’, in M. C. Ferrer (ed.), Sama-Sama: Facets of Ethnic Relations in South-East Asia. Quezon City: University of the Philippines. Young, C. (1976) The Politics of Cultural Pluralism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

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39 Nation and Nationalism in Contemporary Japan YOSHIO SUGIMOTO

The Japanese term for nation, kuni, denotes three different levels of community. At the most local level, kuni refers to the villages or towns from which one’s family originated. For many contemporary metropolitan dwellers, their respective kuni refers to the place where their ancestors used to reside, their parents or grandparents still live, and where their ancestral family tomb is located. They return there during the New Year holidays or summer bon vacation when their ancestors’ souls are believed to be present. Such people consider these villages and towns as their spiritual homes and therefore hold them dear to their hearts. The folk communities of these areas, with their collective memories of rice paddies, creeks, mountains and other bucolic imagery, create and sustain a sense of homeland for those connected to them. Kuni in this sense is a folk community comprised of people that share a ‘we-feeling’ based on common ancestral origin, cultural practice and linguistic heritage. At the intermediate level, kuni also stands for the regional units that originated in the seventh century when the imperial clan secured control of a significant amount of the Japanese archipelago and established a government system based on three tiers of administration. Under this system, kuni was the highest regional unit,

followed by a middle level unit called gun (or ko-ri) and the smallest unit ri (or sato). Toward the end of the Tokugawa feudal period, there existed some 68 kuni units. These served as the basis of the prefectural units later created by the Meiji government at the time of modern statebuilding in the middle of the nineteenth century. At this level, even today kuni can refer to a region defined by a common system of customs, practices and beliefs. For instance, the Japan Alps region in and near Nagano prefecture is Shimano no kuni (or Shinshu–). Kagoshima prefecture more or less corresponds to Satsuma no kuni. Regional identities are often expressed in such local products and events as Echigo rice (produced in the Echigo region, present-day Niigata prefecture), Iyo oranges (Ehime prefecture) and Awa dancing (Tokushima prefecture). Japan, then, is made up of these sub-nations. As a largest unit, kuni means Nihon (or Nippon), the Japanese national entity, though it is not a constant but a variable. Its territorial boundaries have contracted and expanded over centuries. In ancient Japan, with the gradual unification of Nihon under the imperial household in the eighth century onwards, the Japanese nation as kuni denoted the territory that we today call the Kinki region, with Kyoto as its capital and geographic centre. While the

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‘nation’ of Japan expanded to cover the three main islands of the Japanese archipelago – Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku – over time, Hokkaido, where the Ainu retained their own culture, remained outside Nihon until the latter half of the nineteenth century when the Tokyo government confiscated the Ainu’s land and officially incorporated it into the Japanese territory. In the first half of the twentieth century, Nihon expanded into Asia as a result of the Japanese annexation of the Korean Peninsula, the colonization of Taiwan and the military occupation of parts of China and South-East Asia before and during World War II. The Ryukyu Islands, situated in the south-west of Kyushu, had their own kingdom and polity for centuries and were closely connected with the Asian continent and the Pacific islands until incorporated as Okinawa prefecture in the Japanese state structure in the late nineteenth century. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Okinawa was occupied by the United States until its return to Japan in 1972. Thus, the Nihon we know today as a nation with 47 prefectural units stretching from Hokkaido to Okinawa is a post-1972 phenomenon. The Japanese nation as kuni has, over time, inflated and deflated in size and has never been a fixed and historically frozen entity. Given Nihon’s territorial fluidity, the definition of who Nihonjin (the Japanese nationals) are has also vacillated over time. Korean residents in Japan, for example, were classified as having Japanese citizenship until 1952 when they were reclassified as non-Japanese at the conclusion of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Furthermore, different individuals use different criteria to define ‘Japanese’, including citizenship, biological pedigree, language competence, place of residence, place of socialization and so forth. Table 39.1 illustrates the variability of how Nihonjin are defined, depending on which yardsticks are applied and in what way. If one does not simply rely on citizenship criteria, many questions arise. Should soccer players, like Santos and Ramos, who have obtained Japanese passports be regarded as more Japanese than expatriate Japanese who have forfeited Japanese citizenship? What

about the children of expatriate Japanese who have grown up abroad, and for whom English is their first language? What about Japanese Latin Americans who have come to live in Japan? To answer these questions, one can be exclusive and argue that those who satisfy all the criteria (those who have a plus in each column) are real Japanese. Conversely, one can be inclusive and maintain that those who meet at least one criterion (those who have at least one plus in the columns) can be classified as Japanese. Of course, there are many middle positions in between these two poles. These considerations sensitize us to the larger question as to who has the right to decide who is and is not ‘Japanese’. Such variability in the definition of Japan and the Japanese problematizes various forms of Japanese national identity. This chapter attempts to sketch aspects of contemporary Japan’s nationalism by focusing on: (1) the context in which Japanese self-definition has involved duality throughout the modernization processes; (2) the extent to which the paradigm of ethnic nationalism prevailed in post-war Japan, taking both racial and cultural forms; (3) the way in which a new paradigm of national integration has emerged as a consequence of the globalization of the Japanese economy and the multiculturalization of the population; and (4) the demographic patterns in which different groups consume competing national perspectives in the population.

DUALITY OF JAPANESE NATIONALISM: HISTORICAL CONTEXT Nationalism in contemporary Japan is a product of its historical legacy and embodies contradictory elements because its modernity has been built upon apparently mutually competing forces. Japan was a late-developing country with colonial ambitions and participated in the international competition of capitalism and colonialism after early developers such as Britain, the United States and France had already made considerable inroads into the

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Table 39.1 Various types of ‘Japanese’ Nationality (citizenship)

‘Pure Japanese genes’

Language competence

Place of birth

Current residence

Most Japanese Korean residents in Japan

+ −

+ −

+ +

+ +

+ +

Japanese businessmen posted overseas

+

+

+

+

−

Ainu and naturalized foreigners

+

−

+

+

+

First-generation overseas who forfeited Japanese citizenship

−

+

+

+

−

Children of Japanese overseas settlers

−/+

+

+/−

+/−

−

Immigrant workers in Japan

−

−

−/+

−

+

Third-generation Japanese Brazilians working in Japan

−

+

−/+

−

+

Some returnee children

+

+

−

+

+

Some children of overseas settlers

+

+

−

−

−

Children of mixed marriage who live in Japan

+

+/−

+

+/−

+

Third-generation overseas Japanese who cannot speak Japanese

−

+

−

−

−

Naturalized foreigners who were born in Japan but returned to their home country

−

−

+

+

−

Most overseas Japan specialists

−

−

+

−

−/+

Specific examples

Source: Adapted from Sugimoto (2003: 186)

global market. Japan has established itself as the most advanced economy outside the socalled ‘West’.1 The nation relied substantially on both technological and cultural input from Western countries throughout its modernization process. With its defeat in World War II, the country was occupied by the United States for several years and still remains under the military umbrella of the United States. Meanwhile, its leadership has made every attempt to maintain and develop what it

deemed to be Japanese civilization and culture and to avoid full-scale Westernization. Thus, Japan has been both in the East and in the West, both at the centre and at the periphery, and both post-modern and pre-modern. The geopolitical and socio-economic location of Japan as a ‘peripheral centre’ (Arnason 2002) makes it an interesting testing ground for theories of nationalism. When the Meiji Restoration of 1868 began the process of modernization and industrialization,

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the nation’s elite put into circulation the two key nationalist slogans made up of dualistic concepts that clearly reflected their orientation. One of these slogans was wakon yo-sai (Japanese spirit and Western technology), which tacitly conceded that Western countries were ahead of Japan in the material, scientific and productive sphere, but stressed that Japan was superior in the cultural, spiritual and mental domain (Kawamura 1994: 15–17). It was argued that these non-material qualities represented the essence of Japan that should not be contaminated even if the nation embraced Western technology. The separation of these fields enabled Japan to compete with advanced countries in the area of universal technology, while also maintaining a grip on its domestic culture. The second slogan, datsua nyu- o- (quit Asia and join Europe), cast Asian countries as negative and underdeveloped entities that Japan should dissociate itself from and European countries as positive and advanced models that Japan needed to follow and eventually surpass. This attitude formed the basis of Japan’s Orientalism – or autoOrientalism as some authors have termed it (Lie 2000). Over time, this view made the nation’s elite highly conscious of its location in the international pecking order vis-à-vis the United States and European countries and at the same time served to justify the racial prejudice harboured by some Japanese against people in the Asian region (Tsurumi 1982), which ultimately resulted in Japan’s military aggression against East and SouthEast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Japan’s ambivalent, conflicted relationship with both Asia and the West manifested itself throughout its modernization process. Even while acknowledging its desire to ‘catch up’ to Europe before and during World War II when Japanese military aggression in Asia was in progress, an anti-Western nationalist discourse in Japan maintained that this was a war against Western imperialism to ‘liberate’ Asian countries under white colonial rule (William 2000; Wilson 2002). Though the argument simply served to justify Japan’s own colonial

ambitions, it was highly persuasive at the time because of the duality, the Janus-faced nature of Japanese nationhood. Even today this argument has its followers. For instance, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, a vocal historical revisionist group formed in 1997 to produce new textbooks, regards the prevailing narratives of Japanese history as too negative and ‘masochistic’ under the influence of two sets of external worldviews – Western ideology and Marxist propaganda. More broadly, the question of how to ‘transcend Western modernity’ has been a thorny issue for a nation that attained a high degree of development without becoming fully modern in the Western sense. In more recent years, some analysts have drawn links between the ‘Japanese dilemma’ and the postcolonial discourse in Asia and beyond. In the ‘world system of knowledge’, the Japanese intellectual community is at the periphery, with its European and American counterparts continuing to occupy the central position. The de-centralists argue that, despite Japan’s economic and technological dominance around the world, the imbalance remains in North America’s and Western Europe’s favour in terms of intellectual exchange (Asquith 1999; Alatas 2001; Kuwayama 2004). For example, a large quantity of Western books and articles are translated into Japanese every year, but only a small number of Japanese publications are translated into English and other influential European languages. The Japanese balance of payments in intellectual commodities in the social sciences and humanities has consistently shown an excess of imports against a deficit of exports. To a considerable degree, such imbalance is attributable to the dominance of English as the lingua franca of international communication, the outworking of what some call ‘English-language imperialism’, in which the native speakers of English have a distinctive advantage over non-natives. This de-centralist argument resonates with postcolonialist discourse to the extent that Japan shares with Asian, African and Latin American states cultural, psychological and mental subordination to their past colonial powers, although Japan’s position is more

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complex than most because, in a broad sense, it has been both colonizer and colonized. After Japan’s crushing defeat in World War II, the duality of Japanese nationalism took a convoluted form, portraying the Japanese not as aggressors but as victims. The belligerent militarist ideology of the pre-war and wartime period found little popular support. In its place, however, moral support for various kinds of victims (for example, of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Tokyo Air Raid) shaped the nation’s sense of togetherness. ‘Victim nationalism’, as it were, has galvanized collective self-pity and self-sympathy without fully considering the victims of Japan’s overseas acts of aggression. In the current political scene, two different cases illustrate this. First, despite repeated protests by Korean and Chinese governments, high-ranking Japanese politicians (including Prime Ministers and Cabinet members) regularly visit the Yasukuni Shrine – a memorial to the nation’s war dead (including Class A war criminals from World War II) – because they know that such visits strike a chord with their electorates. Second, news of the North Korean government’s abduction of Japanese civilians in the 1980s and 1990s for intelligence purposes stimulated mass support for the victims and the popular demonization of North Koreans in the 2000s. This is in sharp contrast to the ambivalence and hostility of the Japanese public’s response to the claims of ‘comfort women’, the large number of mainly young Korean women abducted by the Japanese military during World War II to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers on the frontline (see Tanaka 2002; Ueno 2004). So long as Japan remains a central power in the periphery, this type of duality and imbalance in national consciousness is likely to continue to survive.

PREVALENCE OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM Japan’s nationalism – both state-led and popular – has tended to advance its argument in ethno-racial terms and to use the notion of Nihon minzoku as its central pillar. Minzoku, which literally means a ‘folk tribe’, represents a

477

mixture of race and ethnicity and embodies a racial group with a supposedly common biological extraction and ancestral lineage which shares an internally homogeneous culture. Nihon minzoku, therefore, is an imagined Japanese race that forms Japanese nationhood, cultivates Japanese ethnicity and relishes Japanese culture, making nationhood (N), ethnicity (E) and culture (C) almost synonymous and interchangeable. Based on this N = E = C equation (Sugimoto 2003), Japan’s nationalism has often had an overtone of racial exclusiveness that crystallizes in the notion of Nihon minzoku. At the same time, the Japanese modern nation-state has been envisaged as kokka, a ‘national house’ in which Nihon minzoku live inside as a family to the exclusion of foreigners who are supposed to live outside the ‘house’. The family metaphor is consistent with the assumption of racial homogeneity.

Racial nationalism The racially oriented nationalism of this sort prevails both at the state and popular levels. Prominent politicians have often kindled controversies by invoking the images of Japanese racial superiority. In 1986, then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone publicly avowed that the Japanese had a higher level of intelligence than Americans and attributed the difference to Japanese racial purity as opposed to America’s racial heterogeneity. In 2000, Takao Koyama, then LDP member of the House of Councillors, stated in the Japanese parliament that ‘nations (kokka), peoples (kokumin) and races (minzoku) have their own DNA’. He was arguing that the Constitution that was imposed on Japan by the American Occupation Forces right after World War II needed to be revised to ‘become compatible with Japan’s DNA’.2 In the same year, Tokyo’s Governor, Shintaro- Ishihara, publicly attributed a series of vicious crimes in the capital to the sangokujin (third-country people, a derogatory term for Koreans, Chinese and other Asian residents in Japan), and suggested that they might riot in the event of a natural disaster.3 These sorts of views, which in most advanced countries would only be advocated by the

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Table 39. 2 Time-series survey results on the superiority of the Japanese to Westerners. In a word, do you think the Japanese are superior or inferior to Westerners? Year 1953 1958b 1963 1968 1973 1978b 1983 1988b 1993 1998 2003

Superior (%) 20

Inferior (%) 28

Same (%) 14

Cannot say in a word (%) 21

Other (%) 1

Don’t know (%) 13

Totala 99 (2,254)

33 47 39

14 11 9

16 12 18

27 21 26

1 1 0

9 7 7

100 (2,698) 99 (3,033) 99 (3,055)

53

8

12

21

2

5

101 (2,256)

41 33 31

6 11 7

27 32 31

20 19 24

0 0 1

5 6 6

99 (1,833) 101 (1,339) 100 (1,192)

a

The figures in brackets indicate sample sizes. The question was not asked in 1958, 1978 and 1988.

b

Source: Institute of Statistical Mathematics (2004: 120)

extreme racist Right, are, in Japan, expressed by powerful mainstream politicians. This reflects the extent to which racial nationalism remains a potent force in contemporary Japan and the degree of its political appeal at the grassroots level. A nationwide time-series survey conducted by the Institute of Statistical Mathematics and spanning half a century includes a problematic but intriguing question: ‘In a word, do you think the Japanese are superior or inferior to Westerners?’ The fact that a reputable survey research centre has continued to ask such a question over five decades is in itself indicative of the extent to which race consciousness prevails in Japan. The survey results, shown in Table 39.2, suggest among other things that national self-esteem fluctuates in accordance with the nation’s economic performance. In the 1950s, when Japan was still suffering from wartime devastation, more Japanese felt inferior to Westerners. With the start of the highgrowth economy in the 1960s, however, the Japanese regained national confidence and a sense of ethnic superiority. The pattern culminated in the 1980s when the so-called bubble economy reached its peak. After the Japanese economy stagnated and entered recession in the 1990s, such self-glorification gradually declined, though a clear majority still felt superior to ‘Westerners’. One can also observe that the proportion of the Japanese population

who perceive no difference between the two groups has steadily increased over time. The trend is consistent with a decline in support for the thesis that the Japanese are racially unique. This forms a backdrop against which the racial criteria are gradually losing ground in Japan’s national identity debate, a point which we will take up later. Even so, Japan’s institutional and legal structure continues to sustain the nation’s racial ideology. The Nationality Law constitutes the bedrock of Japan’s state nationalism. First, this law emphasizes blood relations as the foundation of citizenship acquisition and thereby reinforces Japan’s self-image as an ethnically homogeneous nation. It stipulates that one can automatically qualify as a Japanese national at birth if at least one parent possesses Japanese nationality. Even if born in Japan, the children of foreign nationals cannot obtain Japanese citizenship without their formal applications being approved by the Ministry of Justice. Secondly, the Nationality Law disallows dual citizenship on the grounds that it is a dangerous arrangement that would threaten national cohesion. Approximately half of the thirty-odd member states of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) accepts dual citizenship in one form or another. Most of the G8 (Group of Eight) nations, made up of superpower economies, allow their citizens to hold citizenships in other countries

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with some qualifications. Germany used to be an exception but now belongs to the majority group after the German parliament passed legislation that permits Turkish citizens to also become German nationals. This has left Japan as the only G8 country unwilling to authorize dual citizenship. For this reason, many Koreans living in Japan – even though a majority of them have resided there for four or five generations – do so without Japanese citizenship. This, despite the fact that their first language is Japanese and that they are culturally more familiar with Japan than with Korea. Both South and North Korea share Japan’s genetic approach to citizenship and as such reject dual citizenship, which puts Korean residents in Japan in a kind of double bind. Cultural nationalism: Nihonjinron As racism has become increasingly unacceptable internationally, ethnically oriented nationalism has shifted its focus from the hard racial dimension to a softer cultural one. The cultural mode of nationalism manifested itself widely in post-war Japan in the form of the so-called Nihonjinron, a genre of writings that literally means a theory of what it is to be Japanese and has established itself as a field of its own with many bestsellers and perennial sellers in the publishing industry. Most Nihonjinron literature emphasizes the uniqueness of Japanese psychology and culture, stresses the exclusive superiority of the Japanese and gives its readers a sense of national pride and self-esteem. The ideology of wakon yo-sai (Japanese spirit and Western technology) was reinforced in numerous wellreceived books and articles written in this genre from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. This, of course, was a period of Japan’s spectacular economic advancement in the international market, when overt political and militaristic nationalism was still taboo after the defeat in World War II. While the specific substance of Nihonjinron is wide-ranging, the genre is defined by a few common features (Dale 1986; Mouer and Sugimoto 1986; Yoshino 1992; Befu 2001). The first is the essentialist assumption that the Japanese are homogeneous and have a common set of

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cultural characteristics and value orientations, regardless of their class, gender, age, region, occupation and other sociological variables. Internal variation, diversity and stratification are either unrecognized or ignored, with stereotypes being Nihonjinron’s stock in trade. Secondly, the literature is either explicitly or tacitly predicated upon the proposition that the uniformity of the Japanese is derived from their racial commonality. Some advocates go so far as to argue that the Japanese think and behave in the same way because they share a common bloodstream. Others contend that the Japanese can understand each other with ease because they share the same ethnicity. Thirdly, Nihonjinron use the socalled West as the yardstick against which Japan is favourably compared. The West – the United States in particular – has been the significant ‘Other’ for Nihonjinron analysts, which reflects the fact that Japan’s cultural leaders have long been preoccupied with the nation’s standing vis-à-vis other industrialized countries. The datsua nyu-o- and ‘catch-up and overtake’ mentality that dominated the thinking of the pre-war Japanese elite has remained a deep-rooted sentiment among post-war cultural nationalists. Fourthly, methodologically, Nihonjinron writers have used arbitrarily chosen anecdotes, key words and phrases and personal experiences as evidence for their claims and thereby made their publications a form of popular entertainment rather than serious scholarly writings. As mass consumption goods, Nihonjinron have penetrated into many sections of Japanese society and have become the dominant way that the Japanese interpret and understand themselves and their culture. Fifthly, these widely held views within Japan have contributed to the international stereotype of Japanese national identity. While the Nihonjinron industry has recently declined with Japan’s economic stagnation, its main claims still remain influential and entrenched. Isomorphism between mainstream and dissenting discourses Dissenting groups typically build their counterarguments against mainstream institutions and values with the same logical structure as that of

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Nihonjinron. The essentialist isomorphism between groups at the centre and those at the periphery is evident. For example, minority groups in Japan, as elsewhere, tend to define their minority culture in static and homogeneous terms. When Korean residents in Japan endeavour to maintain what they see as Korean culture, their framework resembles that of Nihonjinron to the extent that they take it for granted that there exists a uniform and unchanging Korean national culture. New migrants to Japan are also inclined to preserve a sense of their respective ‘national culture’ and thereby become cultural nationalists in a way similar to the majority Japanese who glorify Japanese tradition, cultural uniqueness and national ethos. It is also the case that cultural nationalism à la Nihonjinron has been so pervasive in Japan that it has been embraced not only by the political right but also by the left (Oguma 2002). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Japan Communist Party adopted minzoku dokuritsu (independence of the Japanese race from the United States) as an official slogan. Many Japanese public intellectuals who write harsh critiques of Japanese society often deliver what might be called ethno-criticism, whereby they develop theories of the ‘patterns’, ‘deep structure’ and ‘underlying tones’ shared by all Japanese regardless of their positions and locations in society and throughout Japanese history. Though the substance of their argument may be opposed to the complacent self-glorification of Nihonjinron, ultimately ethno-criticism only mirrors its ethnocentrism by perpetuating the assumption of the ethnic uniformity of the Japanese. The isomorphic correspondence stems from the fundamental dilemma that exists between essentialism and de-centrism. When one portrays Japan as being a culturally peripheral nation in the international community, one is on the slippery slope of essentialising Japan. When variations within Japan are emphasized, however, the reality of Eurocentrism in the global context tends to be diluted. Similarly, Korean residents in Japan, who advocate the maintenance of their Korean ethnic culture, often unwillingly affirm the notion that cultures are

uniform and homogeneous entities. However, when they stress the internal diversity of Korean culture, they tend to attenuate it, making it difficult to collectively impact the might of Japan’s majority culture. In other words, there exists a negative correlation between intra-societal and inter-societal cultural relativism.

‘Developmental state’ as efficient disseminating mechanism The Japanese state has been well equipped to propagate state nationalism with its highly centralized and efficient structure of ideological dissemination, at the core of which sits the state bureaucracy. The bureaucracy constitutes one side of the so-called iron triangle of the establishment – the other two sides being parliament and big businesses – and formulates long-term state policies and programmes, often subjecting individual corporate interests in the private sector to the imperatives of what it deems to be the national interest. This type of polity, referred to as the ‘developmental state’ (Johnson 1996), contrasts with that of Western capitalism in which the market dominates with few state interventions. Japan represents the prototype of Asian developmental states in which ‘plan rationality’ takes precedence over ‘market rationality’. Under this system, state-programmed ideology can be disseminated and penetrate into the everyday life of the Japanese with relative ease (Garon 1998; McVeigh 2003). For instance, in the sphere of education, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology oversees the entire school system from primary through secondary to tertiary levels. All textbooks used in government elementary and middle schools must be authorized by the Ministry, and teachers are required to follow its official curriculum guidelines. At the community level, households are organized compulsorily into neighbourhood associations known as cho-naikai, which serve, among other things, as the information dissemination channels for governmental programmes and instructions. NHK

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(Japan Broadcasting Corporation), public broadcasters funded primarily by compulsory fees paid by all TV and radio owners, have nationwide networks and have played a crucial role not only in the standardization of the Japanese language and but also in the propagation of establishmentarian ideas (Krauss 2000) since their foundation eight decades ago. Faced with the acceleration of globalization, however, this centralized system of efficient ideology dissemination appears to be undergoing a profound change.

PARADIGM SHIFT TO MULTICULTURAL NATIONAL INTEGRATION At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Japanese state is split over the usefulness of ethnic nationalism as the major tool for national integration in the future. Japan’s domestic reality is more multi-ethnic than ever as a consequence of the influx of migrants into Japan. This is attributable not only to the transnationalization of the economy but also to the twin processes of a declining birth rate and increased longevity, which has made Japan a rapidly ageing society. Japanese society is now unable to maintain itself without accepting a large number of foreign migrants. Official statistics show that the total number of foreign nationals in Japan exceeds 1.3 million,4 in addition to which about a quarter million undocumented foreigners reside in various parts of the country. More significantly, some 5 per cent of marriages in Japan are now between Japanese and nonJapanese nationals.5 In the area of popular culture, Korean movie stars and singers have attained unprecedented popularity in Japan, which suggests that a considerable segment of Japanese society is increasingly oriented to multiculturalism. Japanese animation films have succeeded in the export market by their makers ‘de-odorizing’ their Japanese flavour (Iwabuchi 2002) and adopting a more transcultural format. In Japanese spectator sports, professional soccer and baseball clubs are already multiracial. In the supposedly traditional national sport of sumo- (Japanese

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wrestling), Mongolians, Hawaiians and East Europeans have dominated the top ranks to the dismay of old nationalist fans. Given that this trend is irreversible, if the Japanese state is to continue to unite the population via some form of nationalism, it is faced with the challenge of generating a narrative that can both accommodate the reality of increasing ethnic hybridity while still embracing a notion of national homogeneity. To the extent that nationalism is a mechanism to reconcile the incongruence between state and society, it makes sense that an increasing number of Japanese national leaders has made every attempt to hijack a new form of nationalism to maintain their interest. In contrast to the hitherto predominant framework which can be called ‘monocultural nationalism’, the emerging and increasingly prevalent paradigm can be labelled ‘multicultural nationalism’. Table 39.3 contrasts both the demographic/ structural basis and the ideological components of the two types. The multicultural discourse appears to be based on at least three features. One ingredient concerns the extent to which citizenship rather than ethnicity is placed at the core of Japanese identity. Loyalty to Japanese nationhood is measured in terms of whether one has Japanese citizenship regardless of one’s ethnic background. Multicultural national assimilation is ostensibly based more on legal-rational principles than ethnic ones. The growing emphasis on citizenship blurs the lines of demarcation between ethnic majority and minority groups. Minorities such as old-comer Koreans who have permanent residency status have gradually moved into the mainstream of Japanese society, while newcomer foreigners have come to occupy its fringe. Some ten thousand individuals acquire Japanese citizenship every year, including resident Koreans whose older generations have long refused to do so. Meanwhile, the golden rule of not allowing dual citizenship remains intact and leaves no grey areas between Japanese citizenship holders and others. The Japanese state continues to impose very strict border control over refugees and accepts only a tiny number of them despite its ratification of

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Table 39.3 Competing orientations of two types of nationalism in Japan Criteria Ethnic variety in the nation Domestic use of cultural symbols Cultural symbols for foreign consumption Monarchy Territorial issues Foreign workers to be recruited Naturalization as Japanese State structure Trade

Monocultural nationalism Claim for mono-ethnic society Glorification of nostalgic symbols

Multicultural nationalism Acceptance of multi-ethnic reality Enforcement of state symbols

Exotic and ‘traditional’

Universal and ‘trans-Japanese’

Patriarchal imperial system Rallying points Preferential treatment of the descendants of overseas Japanese Obstruct as much as possible Developmental state Protectionist but export-oriented trade

Acceptance of a female head of state Consideration for economic relations Priority placed upon skilled workers

the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. In the cultural sphere, symbols that glorify Japanese sovereignty and citizenship have been increasingly reinforced. The governmental machinery, for instance, forces schools to make their students sing the national anthem and hoist the national flag on ceremonial occasions, a practice that used to be voluntary and discretional. School teachers who do not follow the government instructions now face disciplinary measures. While it is difficult to make cross-national comparisons regarding the extent to which people commit themselves to their citizenship, one measure might be the proportion of emigrants who acquire citizenship of the country in which they permanently settle. Australian data suggest that the percentage of those Japanese migrants who apply for Australian citizenship is distinctively lower than that of any other ethnic group (Sato 2001: 159). Such attachment to Japanese citizenship might well prove to be the bedrock of continuing Japanese multicultural nationalist sentiments into the future. The second ingredient relates to the way in which national sovereignty is emphasized. Advocates of this orientation argue that Japan should become an ‘ordinary nation’, one equipped with a fully fledged, legitimated military congruent with its economic and technological power. To this end, they urgently seek amendments of the existing constitution so as to transform the Self Defence Forces into a fully legitimatized national military. Despite constitutional sensitivities, Japan’s leadership

Encourage to sustain the economy State under deregulation and privatization Free trade

has now sent peace keeping forces overseas and thereby attempted to assume the status of strategically capable sovereign nation. This blend of nationalists believe that, for the sake of its national self-esteem, Japan should acquire a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations. While all forms of nationalism identify territorial issues as the cornerstone of nationhood, it is notable that multicultural nationalists are concerned with them primarily from economic rather than ethnic perspectives to defend the fishing rights, oil fields and other natural resources around the disputed territories in question. Vis-à-vis Russia, the Japanese government has long claimed that four islands off the eastern coast of Hokkaido – Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashiri and Etorofu – which are currently deemed to be Russian, rightfully belong to Japan. As such it argues for their early return to Japanese sovereignty. Japan is also entangled in a territorial dispute over Takeshima, a set of reefs off the coast of Shimane Prefecture. Koreans call them Tokdo and Seoul claims sovereignty over them, whilst Tokyo argues that South Korea’s occupation of them is illegal. Another territorial conflict exists among Japan, China and Taiwan over the Senkaku Islands (Tiaoyutai or Tiauyutai Islands in Chinese) near the main island of Okinawa. The three-way dispute provokes nationalist sentiment on all sides, even though the islands in question are small and uninhabited. In all these cases, while territorial issues provide rallying points for monocultural nationalists,

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their multicultural counterparts tend to deal with them more softly so as not to adversely affect economic relations between the countries involved. The third feature is ostensibly paradoxical: multicultural nationalism requires internationalist symbols to consolidate itself. International cooperation, cultural exchange programmes and sister-city arrangements tend to sharpen rather than attenuate national consciousness. International sporting events, international exhibitions and even international tourism foster a sense of ‘Us versus Them’, our nation versus their nation, and national identity versus otherness. Even English-language education in Japanese schools is compatible with multicultural nationalism to the degree to which it exaggerates differences between Japanese and English and attributes these differences to the ‘national character’ of the Japanese. It is no coincidence that the Japanese government and cultural leaders began promoting kokusaika (the internationalization) of Japanese society in the 1980s when multicultural nationalism was beginning to emerge. Inter-nation-ism and multicultural nationalism are interdependent concepts bound together by the powerful imagery that the world is divided into many sovereign nation states, each with its own internal citizenship arrangements. It is important to emphasize here that the multicultural national integration scheme has not replaced the monocultural type. Rather, they coexist and not only compete with each other but also mutually support each other. For instance, both types accept the notion that the emperor symbolizes national unity and integrity, though the monocultural framework would adhere to the conventional patriarchal system of successions and the multicultural one would contemplate the possibility of a female head of state. Both orientations promote Japanese cultural symbols internationally, although the monocultural type tends to rely on nostalgic, ‘traditional’ and exotic representations (such as the Japanese tea ceremony, flower arrangements and noh plays) and the multicultural type is inclined to sell universal, ‘transcultural’ and ‘translocational’ images

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(such as certain types of animations, youth music and comic stories).

DEMOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF NATIONALIST ORIENTATIONS 6 Different orientations to nationalism derive from different demographic bases. To examine the consumption patterns of various perspectives, it would be helpful to consider two dimensions of the globalization process – the market and the state. The first concerns the extent to which a given group accepts or rejects the penetration of global, neo-liberal market forces from the hegemonic centres of the world, particularly the United States, into their domestic environment. The second dimension relates to the extent to which a given group accepts or rejects national unity under the state apparatus. Criss-crossing these two axes, Figure 39.1 demonstrates four rival discourses that prevail in different sectors of Japan, namely: (1) global cosmopolitans, who regard the process of globalization as civilizing and the erosion of both the state and nationhood as desirable; (2) multicultural nationalists, who promote interactions and intercommunications with other nation-states while defending domestic national unity and state-based integration; (3) monocultural nationalists, who advocate a strong state and the essence of ‘Japaneseness’ and criticize globalization as Americanization and Westernization; and (4) communitarian localists, who see the penetration of the global market into the community as destructive, yet favour the reduction of state control and the disintegration of national identity. These four analytical categories, whose characteristics are exhibited in Table 39.4, are of course ideal types. As in other developed countries, global cosmopolitans abound in the sectors that have reaped the benefits of globalization. Highranking employees of Japan’s multinational enterprises travel the world and often, for a short period, become business expatriates in foreign countries and thereby acquire a global market-oriented perspective that rejoices in consumerism and detests the interventions of

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Globalization under MARKET forces (+)

Global cosmopolitans

Multicultural nationalists

(−)

(+)

Communitarian localists

National unity under strong STATE

Monocultural nationalists

(−) (+) inclined to accept (−) inclined to reject

Figure 39.1

Four-fold typology of competing orientations to the state and the market

national government agencies and officials (see Ohmae 1999). These cosmopolitans are generally well educated, enjoy high incomes and communicate well in English. Some have extravagant lifestyles at home and abroad and engage in fraternal conversations with their overseas counterparts, with whom they share analogous educational backgrounds and similar hobbies, such as golf and tennis. Cosmopolitans promote global arrangements designed to weaken the control of national bureaucrats over the affairs of sovereign states. Those in the IT industry and in import and export businesses also tend to develop this type of value orientation because of their daily exposure to the world beyond their national boundaries. Multicultural nationalists differ from global cosmopolitans in defending, sometimes even wishing to expand, the integrative power of the state and Japan’s sense of national unity. They do this, however, while accepting the necessity for Japan to increase cross-border economic

transactions and cross-cultural interactions more generally. Their internationalization paradigm differs from that of the globalization promoted by cosmopolitans in that it envisions a future in which mutually exclusive and internally cohesive nation-states interact with each other. Hence, in this paradigm it is assumed that the governance structure of the international system of competing nation-states will remain unchallenged, with the internal regulatory power of each state remaining intact. The collaboration of the main agents of consumer capitalism and the machinery of the state would, in their model, be ensured. If profit motives are predominant amongst cosmopolitans, ‘national interests’ remain uppermost in the minds of multicultural nationalists. ‘Adaptive’ politicians and ‘enlightened’ bureaucrats in Japan tend to take this stance. As the guardians of the Japanese nation-state, they seek to adjust the state structure in response to changing external economic circumstances

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Table 39.4 Some characteristics of four types in Japan Comparative Criteria Market State Benefits from multinationals

Global cosmopolitans + − Full

Multicultural nationalists + + Great

Monocultural nationalists − + Little

Communitarian localists − − Negative

Linkage with the political establishment

Some

Close

Close

Limited

Relations with other countries

Borderlessness

Co-existence

Japanization

Glocalization

Foreign migrants

Accept as many migrants as the domestic economy requires

Accept skilled workers only to make the national economy competitive

Limit foreign migration as much as possible to retain national stability

Defend the rights and the quality of life of migrants

Citizenship

Global citizenship; dual citizenship

National citizenship (status quo)

Exclusively national citizenship

Equal rights between citizens and non-citizens; voting rights for permanent residents

Some visible groups

Executives of multinational corporations; IT professionals; international sports people; technocrats; overseas sojourners

Many mainstream mass media; urban middle class; large corporations, cultural exchange promoters; adaptive government officials

Farmers; self-employed independent business people; new history textbook movement; ‘petit nationalist’ youngsters

NGOs and NPOs; citizens’ movements; some ethnic minorities; housewife activists

without undermining their governing control over it. The ‘enlightened’ urban middle class, employed mainly by large corporations, also tend to adopt the multicultural nationalist position. They are all too aware that Japan’s economy is firmly intertwined with the outside world, a situation that requires smooth international relations. Even so, their lives are so intricately connected with the national systems of employment, welfare, education and taxation that they never dream of abandoning their commitment to Japan’s nationhood. Monocultural nationalist sentiments are most prevalent among the agricultural and small, independent business sectors, both of which find it necessary to safeguard their vested interests against the penetration of international market forces. In one public opinion survey after another, farmers and self-employed

small business people demonstrate strong nationalist leanings of this type. Like their counterparts elsewhere, Japanese farmers and their families feel vulnerable to agricultural produce, meat products, dairy commodities and other cost-competitive imports. Obviously it is in the interest of these farmers for the Japanese government to adopt protectionist policies, to provide them with farm subsidies and to further raise import taxes on agricultural goods. For small self-supporting businesses, globalization represents the threat of multinationals and big business organizations making inroads into, and eventually taking over, the limited markets that they serve. Small shop managers, subsidiary and subcontracting manufacturers, family business owners and other petty independent, self-supporting proprietors have networks of self-protection. Shops at sho-ten-gai (shopping

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streets) provide solid voting blocs of support for particular politicians and thereby exercise considerable political clout. Communitarian localists comprise a variety of community groups that have found themselves subjected to the adverse effects of global market forces, yet remain opposed to an expansion of government power. Many of these groups take part in what are broadly called citizens’ movements, which are organized by individual volunteers concerned about specific issues in their local community. Such issues include environmental destruction, residential degradation, ethnic prejudice, gender discrimination and many others that impart upon the everyday lives of citizens at the community level. These citizen groups emphasize quality of life, voluntary cooperation and the spontaneity of grassroots activities. Civic, localist thinking is common among students, housewives, senior citizens and some sections of the casual workforce – groups that are distant from the power centres of the state and are not directly connected with the capitalist order of production and distribution. They tend to view the activities of both market-oriented companies and poweroriented state machineries as detrimental to human communities and natural environments alike. Many of these localists identify themselves not so much with the Japanese nation state as with kuni at community and regional levels, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The benefits and costs of globalization are variously distributed among different classes and other social groupings and this creates a diversity of views about the desirability, as well as the form, of Japan’s nationhood. With neither nationalism nor anti-nationalism monopolizing the public discourse, national integration or disintegration in Japan rests upon the shifting balance between rival groups and a set of complex dynamics of their competing perspectives.

NOTES 1 To the extent that ‘Japan’ and the ‘West’ are cultural constructs, we would almost always have to put these terms in brackets, though we generally try not to do so to avoid unnecessary cumbersomeness.

2 Asahi Shimbun morning edition, 28 March 2000. 3 Asahi Shimbun evening edition, 10 April 2000. 4 2000 national census. 5 Statistics of population dynamics compiled by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in 2003. 6 An earlier version of this section appeared in Sugimoto (2005).

REFERENCES Alatas, S. F. (2001) ‘The Study of the Social Sciences in Developing Societies: Towards an Adequate Conceptualization of Relevance’, Current Sociology, 49: 1–28. Arnason, J. P. (2002) The Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilization. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Asquith, P. J. (1999) ‘The “World System” of Anthropology and “Professional Others”’ in E. L. Cerroni-Long (ed.), Anthropological Theory in North America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. pp. 31–49. Befu, H. (2001) Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Dale, P. (1986) The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Garon, S. (1998) Molding Japanese Minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Institute of Statistical Mathematics (2004) A Study of the Japanese National Character: The Eleventh Nationwide Survey. Tokyo: Institute of Statistical Mathematics. Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnson, C. (1996) Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State. New York: W. W. Norton. Kawamura, N. (1994) Sociology and Society of Japan. London: Kegan Paul International. Krauss, E. S. (2000) Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kuwayama, T. (2004) Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Lie, J. (2000) Multiethnic Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McVeigh, B. J. (2003) Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Mouer, R. E. and Sugimoto, Y. (1986) Images of Japanese Society: A Study in the Social

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Construction of Reality. London: Kegan Paul International. Oguma, E. (2002) A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Selfimages. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Ohmae, K. (1999) The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. New York: HarperBusiness. Sato, M. (2001) Farewell to Nippon. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Sugimoto, Y. (2003) An Introduction to Japanese Society, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sugimoto, Y. (2005) ‘Four Types of Encounters with Globalization: Japan and Australia’, in S. Alomes (ed.), Islands in the Stream: Australia and Japan Face Globalization. Melbourne: Maribyrnong Press. pp. 27–41.

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Tanaka, Y. (2002) Japan’s Comfort Women: The Military and Involuntary Prostitution during War and Occupation. London: Routledge. Tsurumi, S. (1982) An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945. London: Kegan Paul International. Ueno, C. (2004) Nationalism and Gender. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. William, D. (2000) ‘In Defence of the Kyoto School: Reflections on Philosophy, the Pacific War and the Making of a Post-White world’, Japan Forum, 12: 143–56. Wilson, S. (ed.) (2002) Nation and Nationalism in Japan. London: Routledge/Curzon. Yoshino, K. (1992) Cultural Nationalism in Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. London: Routledge.

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40 China and Chinese Nationalism P E T E R H AY S G R I E S

On 4 August 2003, construction workers in China’s north-eastern city of Qiqihar uncovered and mistakenly ruptured five drums of mustard gas left behind from the wartime Japanese occupation. Dozens were injured and one man died. Chinese newspapers carried gory photos of the injured and their chemical burns, and the popular reaction to the news was fast and furious. Chinese Internet chatrooms were filled with anti-Japanese invective. A million signatures were rapidly gathered on an Internet petition demanding that the Japanese government thoroughly resolve the chemical weapons issue. The petition was handdelivered to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on 4 September as Chinese and Japanese diplomats were negotiating compensation for the victims of the Qiqihar accident. Petition organizer and cyber-nationalist Lu Yunfei later said that he sought to ‘put pressure on the Japanese government’.1 The popular Chinese reaction to the Qiqihar incident was no aberration; indeed, it stood in the middle of a long summer and fall of antiJapanese activity in China (see Gries 2005). In June, Internet activists organized the first ever Mainland Chinese trip to the contested Diaoyu/Senkaku2 Islands east of China. In July, nationalists organized a Web-based petition to deny Japan a Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail link contract. In August, rather than celebrate

the 25th anniversary of the 1978 Sino-Japanese Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Chinese and Japanese diplomats spent much of the month doing damage control after the Qiqihar mustard gas incident. In September, the disclosure of a sex party involving hundreds of Japanese businessmen and Chinese prostitutes in the southeast city of Zhu Hai sparked another flurry of anti-Japanese invective on the Internet. And in October, a risqué skit by three Japanese students and one of their teachers at Northwestern University in Xian led to a 7,000-strong demonstration on campus and nationwide condemnation. Anti-Japanese activity seemed to be everywhere: as Hong Kong’s Sing Pao Daily (2003) put it in December: ‘Chinese feelings of hatred for the Japanese are rising without interruption.’ The events of 2003 should be understood in the broader context of the swelling tide of popular nationalism that began in mid-1990s China. In 1996 came the publication of the best-selling book China Can Say No and a host of copycat anti-American and anti-Japanese diatribes. With Hong Kong’s ‘return to the motherland’ from Britain in 1997, Chinese eagerly anticipated the ‘erasing of the national humiliation’. The furious popular reaction to the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, taken with the firebombing of the US consul’s residence in Chengdu and

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a near siege of the US Embassy in Beijing, revealed that feelings of humiliation persisted. And the two weeks of US–China ‘apology diplomacy’ following the 2001 plane collision between a US EP-3 and a Chinese F-8 demonstrated that nationalism remained a major determinant of Chinese (and US) foreign policy. As we have seen, 2003 witnessed a flurry of antiJapanese activities that led some pundits to declare 2003 the year of ‘Internet nationalism’ (Guoji xianqu daobao 2003). At the turn of the twenty-first century, a new nationalism has emerged in China.

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explain the passions so clearly evident in Chinese nationalist politics today. Chinese nationalism is not just about the instrumental pursuit of China’s national interest; it is also about what it means to be ‘Chinese’ today. Indeed, sense and sensibility often conflict, as when the popular anti-Japanese protests of 2003 contributed to a deterioration in SinoJapanese relations, jeopardizing China’s interest in maintaining stable relations with a vital trade partner. In short, the ‘party propaganda’ view of Chinese nationalism today fails to capture the role of popular passions in Chinese nationalist politics.

NATION AND NATIONALISM IN CHINA How should this new nationalism in China be understood? Is Chinese nationalism a threat to the West and to China’s neighbors? Or is it a natural product of China’s developmental experience? The dominant Western view of Chinese nationalism today is that it is ‘party propaganda’, constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to legitimize its rule. With the crisis of communism, the Party elite is seen as fomenting nationalism to maintain its grip on power. Thomas Christensen (1996: 37) expressed this dominant view succinctly in an influential Foreign Affairs article: ‘Since the Chinese Communist Party is no longer communist, it must be even more Chinese.’ This ‘party propaganda’ view of Chinese nationalism is not wrong – the CCP clearly seeks to use nationalism – but, as even the brief discussion above of the Qiqihar incident reveals, it is far from complete (see Gries 2004). By focusing exclusively on the CCP and its ‘state’ or ‘official’ nationalism, the orthodox view fails to capture the independent role that the Chinese people (like Lu Yunfei) are increasingly playing in nationalist politics. A genuinely bottom-up and popular nationalism has emerged in China – one that, as the 1999 Belgrade bombing and 2003 Qiqihar protests reveal, the CCP has its hands full just containing. The view of Chinese nationalism as ‘propaganda’ is also rationalist and thus fails to

WHERE DO THESE POPULAR PASSIONS COME FROM? This chapter argues that to understand Chinese nationalism today, one must engage Chinese understandings of their identity, and that national identities are constituted in large part through stories told about the national past. Historian F. W. Mote (1999: xv) has argued that ‘ignorance of China’s cultural tradition and historical experience is an absolute barrier to comprehending China today’. I agree. To comprehend Chinese nationalism today, however, even more important than understanding the Chinese past itself is an understanding of how Chinese themselves narrate their national past. Narratives are the stories that we tell about our pasts. These stories, personality psychologists have argued, infuse our identities with unity, meaning and purpose (McAdams 1996; Singer and Salovey 1993). We cannot, therefore, radically change them at will. Sociologists Anthony Giddens and Margaret Somers maintain that narratives infuse identities with meaning. Giddens (1991: 5) argues that narratives provide the individual with ‘ontological security’: ‘The reflexive project of the self … consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continually revised, biographical narratives.’ Somers (1994: 618) contrasts ‘representational narratives’ (selective descriptions of events) with more

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foundational ‘ontological narratives’: ‘the stories that social actors use to make sense of – indeed, to act in – their lives. [They] define who we are.’ The storied nature of social life, in short, infuses our identities with meaning. ‘Identities,’ Stuart Hall notes, ‘are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past’ (see Olick and Robbins 1998: 122). Following Elie Kedourie (1993 [1960]: 141), who noted that nationalism ‘is very much a matter of one’s self-view, of one’s estimation of oneself and one’s place in the world,’ this chapter takes a social psychological approach to nationalism. Specifically, it follows social identity theorists (SIT) in defining national identity as the aspect of an individual’s selfconcept that derives from his or her perceived membership in a national group (see Tajfel 1981: 255). Nationalism is here understood as the commitment to protect and enhance national identity. The chapter begins by exploring three ‘pasts’ central to constructions of Chinese nationalism today: the ‘5,000 Years’, the ‘100 Years’ and the ‘Ten Years’. These pasts together help constitute what it means to be ‘Chinese’ at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It then seeks to move beyond the elite instrumentalism of the party propaganda view by exploring the roles that the Chinese people and their passions play in Chinese nationalism today.

THE 5,000 YEARS: THE BURDENS OF ‘CIVILIZATION’ Pride in the superiority of China’s ‘5,000 years of Civilization’ is central to nationalism in China today. Xiao Gongqing (1994), an outspoken neo-conservative intellectual, advocated the use of a nationalism derived from Confucianism to fill the ideological void opened by the collapse of communism. The mid-1990s, indeed, witnessed a revival of interest in Confucianism. The CCP, which only 20 years earlier in 1974 had launched a campaign to ‘Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius’, ironically became an active sponsor of Confucian studies. President Jaing

Zemin himself attended the 1994 celebration of Confucius’s 2,545th birthday (Guo Yingjie 2004: 35). Popular nationalist writings also frequently evince pride in China’s ‘Civilization’. The cover of a 1997 Beijing Youth Weekly, for instance, has ‘Chinese Defeat Kasparov!’ splashed across a picture of the downcast Russian chess grand master. Two of the six members of the IBM research group that programmed Deep Blue, it turns out, were Chinese-Americans. ‘It was the genius of these two Chinese’, one article asserts, ‘that allowed Deep Blue to defeat Mr. Kasparov’. Entitled ‘We Have the Best Brains’, the article concludes that ‘we should be proud of the legacy of “5,000 years of civilization” that our ancestors have left for us’ (Beijing qingnian zhoukan 1997: 30). Blood and culture are frequently fused in Chinese discourse of ‘Civilization’. The 5,000 Years are more frequently deployed, however, to construct Chinese superiority over a threatening United States – not lowly Russia. For instance, in the 1996 diatribe Surpassing the USA, authors Xi Yongjun and Ma Zaizhun amuse themselves with ‘a few theatrical and rather comical juxtapositions’. They begin with clichés. China is the world’s richest spiritual civilization, America the most advanced material civilization; China is the collectivist capital, America an individualist’s heaven. Xi and Ma then become playful and self-indulgent: America has but two hundred years of history, while China’s Tongrentang Pharmacy alone is 388 years old; the American Declaration of Independence was a handwritten document of but four thousand words, while China’s ‘great’ ‘Four Books’ was printed on the world’s first press and contains over three billion characters (Xi Yongjun and Ma Zaizhun 1996: 3–4). The authors clearly intend to establish Chinese superiority at America’s expense. Just as many in the West use the ‘Orient’ to define themselves, many in the East clearly deploy the ‘Occident’ to the same ends. The text on the back cover of the ‘Sino-American Contest’, a special 1996 issue of the provincial Chinese magazine Love Our China, for instance, begins with some contrasts: ‘China has 5,000 years of civilized history … while America has

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only 200 years of history.’ It then turns to insults: ‘Facing an ancient Eastern colossus, America is at most a child.’ ‘Emotion-cues’, sociologist Candace Clark (1990: 314) reminds us, ‘can be used to manipulate, reminding and counterreminding each other of judgments of the proper place.’ By ‘altercasting’ America as a child, China can play the superior elder (see Weinstein and Deutschberger 1963). Following Edward Said’s discussion of ‘Orientalism’, such Chinese uses of the West have been labeled ‘Occidentalism’, a ‘deeply rooted practice [in China] of alluding to the Occident as a contrasting Other in order to define whatever one believes to be distinctively “Chinese”’ (Chen Xiaomei 1995: 39). The 5,000 Years are also central to the dream of a ‘prosperous country and a strong army’, which still inspires Chinese nationalists over a century after it was first promoted by late Qing-dynasty reformers. People’s Liberation Army writer Jin Hui (1995: 186–7) writes that ‘For over one hundred years, generation after generation of Chinese have been dreaming that since we were once strong, although we are now backwards we will certainly become strong again.’ The ‘unlimited cherishing of past greatness’, Jin laments, is tied to overconfidence that ‘in the future, we will certainly be “first under heaven”’. Such ‘illusions’, Jin Hui warns, are ‘even worse than spiritual opiates.’ The burdens of Civilization can certainly lead to self-delusions, as Jin argues; they can also lead to racism. In 1995, for example, Vice Chair of the National People’s Congress Tian Jiyun declared that ‘The IQs of the Chinese ethnicity, the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, are very high’ (Sautman 1997: 79). ‘Confucian nationalism’ is not an oxymoron: Confucianism allows for the reinforcement of cultural boundaries when barbarians do not accept Chinese values. The ‘universal’ ‘all under heaven’ can and often has become a closed political community (Duara 1995). Historian Lei Yi (1997: 49–50) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing has used the phrase ‘“Sinocentric” cultural nationalism’ to describe such views. The Confucian world was not ‘one big happy family’, but extremely Sinocentric, involving a ‘fierce racism, rejection of other cultures … and

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cultural superiority’. In China, cultural and ethnic nationalism are frequently intertwined.

THE 100 YEARS: A ‘CENTURY OF HUMILIATION’ Narratives about the ‘Century of Humiliation’ frame the ways that Chinese interact with the West today. This period begins with China’s defeat in the First Opium War and the British acquisition of Hong Kong in 1842. The period was marked by major wars between China and the Western powers or Japan: the two Opium Wars of 1840–42 and 1856–60, the SinoJapanese ‘Jiawu’ War of 1894–95, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the ‘War of Resistance against Japan’ of 1931/1937–1945.3 Many educated Chinese today are painfully aware of the ‘unequal treaties’ signed with the British at Nanjing in 1842 and the Japanese at Shimoneseki in 1895. Unilateral concessions forced on the Chinese in these treaties, such as indemnities, extraterritoriality and foreign settlements in the treaty ports, are still perceived as humiliating losses of sovereignty. Other symbols of the period still resonate with today’s nationalists. The stone ruins of the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing, looted and burned by Europeans in 1860, are a reminder of the ‘rape’ of China. Lin Zexu, a famous Chinese crusader against opium and British aggression, still stands for Chinese courage and virtue. The Century of Humiliation is neither an objective past that works insidiously in the present nor a mere ‘invention’ of present-day nationalist entrepreneurs. Instead, the Century is a continuously reworked narrative about the national past central to the contested and evolving meaning of being ‘Chinese’ today. Furthermore, the Century is a traumatic and foundational moment because it fundamentally challenged Chinese views of the world. In Chinese eyes, earlier invaders became Chinese, while barbarians beyond the border paid humble tribute to ‘Civilization’. Both practices reinforced a view of Chinese civilization as universal and superior. Early encounters with ‘big noses’, from

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Marco Polo to pre-nineteenth-century European and American traders and missionaries, did not challenge this view. ‘Our ancient neighbors’, writes one young Chinese nationalist, ‘found glory in drawing close to Chinese civilization’ (Li Fang 1996: 23). The violent nineteenthcentury encounter with the ‘West’ was different. The Central Kingdom was not only defeated militarily, but was also confronted by a civilization with universalist pretensions of its own. ‘The Western impact’, writes Tu Weiming (1991: 2), ‘fundamentally dislodged Chinese intellectuals from their Confucian haven … [creating a] sense of impotence, frustration, and humiliation.’ The ‘Western devils’ had a civilization of their own that challenged the universality and superiority of Confucian civilization. The traumatic confrontation between East and West fundamentally destabilized Chinese views of the world and their place within it. ‘Trauma brings about a lapse or rupture in memory that breaks continuity with the past,’ writes historian Dominick LaCapra (1998: 9) in a discussion of the Holocaust. ‘It unsettles narcissistic investments and desired self-images’. Just as the trauma of the Holocaust led many in the postwar West to re-examine their tradition (see Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1944]), the Century threatened a Chinese identity based upon the idea of a universal and superior civilization. ‘The Israelis’ vision of the Holocaust has shaped their idea of themselves,’ Tom Segev (1993: 11) writes, ‘just as their changing sense of self has altered their view of the Holocaust and their understanding of its meaning.’ Since stories about the past both limit and define our national identities in the present, the same is true of the Chinese and the Century of Humiliation; Chinese visions of the Century have shaped their sense of self, and these changes to Chinese identity have altered their views of the Century. Today, Chinese struggles to come to terms with this period of trauma are reflected in the emergence of new narratives about the Century. Under Mao, China’s pre-‘Liberation’ (1949) sufferings were blamed on the feudalism of the Qing Dynasty and Western imperialism, and the anti-feudal, anti-imperialist masses were valorized for throwing off their

chains and repelling foreign invaders. This ‘heroic’ or ‘victor’ national narrative first served the requirements of Communist revolutionaries seeking to mobilize popular support in the 1930s and 1940s, and later served the nationbuilding goals of the People’s Republic in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. One 1950s movie about the First Opium War, for instance, changed its title from The Opium War to Lin Zexu to glorify Chinese heroism. New China needed heroes. During the 1990s, however, the official Maoist ‘victor narrative’ was joined by a new and popular ‘victimization narrative’ that blames ‘the West’, including Japan, for China’s suffering. This ‘new’ storyline actually renews the focus on victimization in pre-Mao Republican-era writings on the Century (Cohen 2002: 17). Indeed, the trope of China as a raped woman, common in Republican China but unpopular during the Maoist period, has re-emerged. In Republican China, playwrights like Xiao Jun used rape in nationalist plays such as Village in August, in which Japanese soldiers rape a patriotic peasant woman (see Lydia Liu 1994). The return of the ‘rape of China’ theme may be seen in such bestsellers as Chinese-American Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1997). This book helped transform the 1937 Nanjing massacre into a ‘rape’. The contrast between ‘victor’ and ‘victim’ national narratives is nicely captured in two Chinese movies about the First Opium War of 1840–42. Lin Zexu (1959), mentioned above, is a story of the Chinese people’s heroic antiimperialist struggle. Named Lin Zexu to highlight resistance, it does not focus solely on Commissioner Lin, but emphasizes his close relations with a peasant couple who seek vengeance against Eliot, the evil British trader who had killed the peasant woman’s father. Lin and the Chinese people are one in an upbeat tale of popular defiance. Opium War (1997), by contrast, is an unmitigatedly dark and depressing tragedy of the past (see Karl 2001). It is only at the very end of the movie, with the image of a stone lion and the message that ‘On July 1, 1997 the Chinese government recovered sovereignty over Hong Kong,’ that China is redeemed. Director Xie Jin’s vision of the past

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is one of opium addicts and humiliation; his vision of the present and future is one of mighty lions awakening to exact their revenge. A victim in the past, China will be a victim no longer. The year 1997 seems to have been a pivotal moment in the re-emergence of the victimization narrative in China. The countdown to Hong Kong’s ‘Return to the Motherland’ in the spring and summer of 1997 created a strong desire to ‘wipe away’ the ‘National Humiliation’. And in the fall of 1997, 60th anniversary commemorations of the Nanjing massacre, as well as Iris Chang’s book about it, directed Chinese attention to their past suffering as never before. Anticipating closure on the ‘Humiliation’, many Chinese paradoxically reopened a longfestering wound. For many Chinese nationalists, this painful encounter with past trauma was expressed in the language of victimization. The China of 1997 may thus prove to be comparable to 1961 Israel, when Eichmann’s trial precipitated a dramatic shift in Israeli attitudes towards the Holocaust. The repression of Holocaust memories in the name of the nation-building (creating a ‘New Israel’) that prevailed in the late 1940s and 1950s gave way to a new identification with victimization in the 1960s. The early post-war Israeli rejection of victimhood is reflected in the evolution of Holocaust Day, which was established only in 1953 and did not become a mandatory national holiday until 1959 (see Zerubavel 1995). Early Holocaust Day commemorations emphasized the ‘martyrs and heroes’ of the ghetto resistance, not the victims of the concentration camps who were memorialized in later tributes. China is now undergoing a similar process, as long-suppressed memories of past suffering resurface. Chinese nationalism since the 1990s cannot be understood without taking note of this new encounter with the traumas of the past. Despite the new focus on ‘victimization’, heroic narratives about the Century of Humiliation have not disappeared. Narratives of ‘China as victor’ and ‘China as victim’ co-exist in Chinese nationalism today. The Century is arguably both what psychologist Vamik Volkan calls a ‘chosen glory’ and what he

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calls a ‘chosen trauma’ (Volkan and Itzkowitz 1994). The publisher’s preface to a series of books entitled ‘Do not forget the history of national humiliation’ is typical, describing the Century as both a ‘history of the struggle of the indomitable Chinese people against imperialism’, and a ‘tragic history of suffering, beatings, and extraordinary humiliations’. Many Chinese nationalists, it seems, are eager to capitalize on the moral authority of their past suffering. But there is a downside to the new ‘victimization narrative’. It entails confronting vulnerability and weakness. The enduring need for heroism and a ‘victor narrative’ serves, it seems, to allay the fears of those who are not yet ready to directly confront the trauma of the 100 Years.

THE TEN YEARS: MAOIST MELANCHOLY, RED GUARD ENVY The ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, later known as the ‘Ten Years of Chaos’, engulfed China from 1966 to 1976, when Mao Zedong died. Mobilized by Mao to attack his enemies in the Party bureaucracy, young Red Guards both denounced and violently attacked their teachers, local Party officials, their parents, and each other. The thirty-something ‘fourth generation’ of young Chinese nationalists today grew up after the Cultural Revolution in the relative prosperity of China under reform. The Ten Years of Chaos has nonetheless left an indelible imprint upon them. Ironically, the fourth generation appears to find the new victimization narrative of Chinese suffering at the hands of Western imperialists appealing precisely because they, unlike their elders, have never suffered. The first generation of revolutionaries endured the hardships of the anti-fascist and civil wars of the 1930s and 1940s. The second generation suffered during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. And the third generation of Red Guards was sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. The fourth generation of PRC youth, by contrast, grew up with relative material

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prosperity under Reform in the 1980s and 1990s.4 In their 1997 psycho-autobiography The Spirit of the Fourth Generation, Song Qiang and several of his co-authors of the 1996 nationalist diatribes China Can Say No and China Can Still Say No are envious of the third generation who, ‘proud of their hardships’, can celebrate them at Cultural Revolution restaurants like Heitudi (The Black Earth) in Beijing, nostalgically eating fried corn bread, recalling the good old, bad old days. They then ask, ‘Are we an unimportant generation?’ In a section entitled ‘How Much Longer Must We be Silent?’, they lament that ‘We in our thirties are without a shadow or a sound … it seems that we will perish in silence’ (Song Qiang et al. 1997: 206, 202). Many of this generation, it seems, have a strong desire to make their mark. And they seek to do so through nationalism. In the 1990s, young conservatives compared Beijing Spring 1989 to the Cultural Revolution to justify the government clampdown on June 4th. The specter of chaos was brandished to assert the need for national unity and authoritarian CCP rule. More broadly, many fourth generation nationalists today have selfconsciously defined themselves against the ‘Liberal ‘80s’. Sociologist Karl Mannheim (1952) long ago argued that the formative events of youth mark each generation (see also Halbwachs 1980). Late-1980s experiences like the pro-Western ‘River Elegy’ television sensation and Beijing Spring 1989 came at a pivotal time in the lives of Chinese nationalists now in their thirties. Today’s nationalists frequently dismiss the 1980s as a period of dangerous ‘romanticism’ and ‘radicalism’; they then depict themselves as ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ defenders of stability and order (see Xu Ben 2001). Even as they condemn the Ten Years of Chaos, however, many Chinese nationalists are both nostalgic for Mao and have embraced the Red Guard style.5 The Mao craze of the mid1990s was motivated in part by a pronounced nostalgia for Mao’s tough, stand-tall image (see Barmé 1996). Many young Chinese nationalists did not have the patience for Deng Xiaoping’s economics-first strategy of ‘biding one’s time’. Instead, they were wistful for the days of Mao’s

tough talk and violent confrontation with the US in Korea and Vietnam. The Red Guard style of take-no-prisoners nationalism in China today is well exemplified by the popular reactions to the ‘Zhao Wei wears the Imperial Japanese flag’ and ‘Jiang Wen goes to Yasukuni’ affairs that occurred in late 2001 and the summer of 2002. The September 2001 issue of the state-run Fashion magazine features a picture of Chinese model/actress Zhao Wei wearing a short dress with an Imperial Japanese flag imprinted upon it. On 3 December 2001 a Hunan newspaper ran an exposé on the photo, igniting widespread Internet condemnation and national coverage (Zhang Datian 2001). During the week of 3–10 December, over 6,000 mostly angry messages about the Zhao Wei affair were posted on the popular website Sina.com (Japan Economic Newswire 2001). And words were linked with action: protestors used bricks and bottles to smash Zhao’s house in Wuhu City in Anhui Province (Straits Times 2001). On 10 December Zhao Wei made a public apology, which was first circulated on the Internet, and later broadcast on national television. Zhao declared that she had learned ‘an excellent lesson’ about this period of history. ‘In the future, I will be more careful about what I say and do … and work hard to improve myself ’ (Beijing qingnianbao 2001). Some Chinese nationalists, however, refused to accept Zhao Wei’s apology. At a New Year’s Eve event held at Changsha on 28 December, an enraged man rushed up on stage, pushed Zhao over and smeared excrement on her dress. During most of the controversy, Zhao Wei herself was in Xinjiang filming Warriors of Heaven and Earth. Coincidentally, the film’s male protagonist, played by actor/director Jiang Wen, became the subject of another Japan controversy the following summer. On 27 June 2002 a Tianjin newspaper ran an exposé that Jiang had been to Yasukuni Shrine several times (Beijing chenbao 2002). Yasukuni is a shrine in Tokyo where Japanese go to honor their war dead, including executed war criminals from World War II. When Japanese politicians go there to worship, Chinese nationalists view it

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as a sign of Japanese militarism and Japan’s continuing lack of repentance for wartime aggressions against China. Some Chinese thus took offense at Jiang’s Yasukuni trip. In the view of many Chinese nationalists, Jiang’s ‘nationalist integrity’ was now suspect (Shen Xiaoma 2002). Many in China’s cultural elite, however, boldly and publicly defended Jiang. They argued that Jiang had gone to Yasukuni to do research for his film Devils on the Doorstep, and that ‘visiting’ Yasukuni was a far cry from ‘worshipping’ there. Author Shi Tiesheng declared that ‘a director trying to understand the crimes of militarism is not the same as standing on the side of militarism’. Director Tian Zhuangzhuang similarly insisted that ‘Jiang Wen is an artist with a clear sense of right and wrong, and an extremely strong sense of racial responsibility’ (see Chen Yifei 2002). Director Feng Xiaogang, ‘indignant’ at the antiJiang media coverage, claimed that it was using Gang of Four (read: Cultural Revolution) style methods: ‘The shadow of the extreme “left” persists in the thinking and behavior of many people today’ (Yu Shaowen 2002). I agree with Feng. A winner-takes-all, showno-mercy style reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution is prevalent in Chinese nationalist discourse today. Many cyber-nationalists exhibit a ferocious, Red Guard style: words and deeds that seek to literally silence one’s opponents, from physically assaulting both Zhao Wei’s house and her body to accusations of treason against Jiang Wen to widespread death threats against Chinese liberals.

POPULAR PASSIONS AND THE FATE OF THE NATION Over the past quarter century, the constructivist and rational choice revolutions that have swept the social sciences have synergized in studies of nationalism. Nationalist elites, Benedict Anderson (1993 [1983]) and Eric Hobsbawm (1983) have taught us, construct nations and their traditions. By focusing on the writing of nationalist histories, this new approach has successfully

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combated the ‘pastism’ of earlier scholarship that held that deep-rooted animosities from the past predetermine present-day nationalist conflict. But the over-correction of the problem of ‘pastism’ has generated a new problem: ‘presentism’, an extreme constructivism that leaves readers with the impression that the past is a blank slate that nationalists can rewrite at will. In ‘presentist’ scholarship, the weight of the past is lost. In this chapter I have argued that the 5,000 Years, the 100 Years and the Ten Years do not predetermine present-day nationalist politics – and that they are not easily malleable tools in the hands of nationalist historians either. Instead, I have argued that because narratives about these national pasts infuse Chinese identity with unity, meaning and purpose, while they can and do change, they can only do so slowly through a process of contestation – such as the challenge that the new ‘victimization’ narrative about the Century of Humiliation poses to the Mao-era ‘victor’ narrative. These stories, in the end, both constrain and are constrained by current nationalist practice. Past and present are interdependent; neither completely dominates the other. Today’s rationalist, constructivist nationalism theory has thus shifted attention from the past to the present; it has also shifted attention from the people and their passions up to the elites and their instrumental politics. Early Western approaches to nationalism emphasized its mass basis. At the turn of the nineteenth century, sociologist Emile Durkheim (1966 [1899]) argued that uprooted and ‘anomic’ individuals are drawn to the feeling of community provided by nationalist movements. In the middle of the century, major nationalism theorists continued in Durkheim’s sociological tradition, arguing that nationalism fills the ‘unnatural’ religious void modernization creates in the hearts of the people (Kohn 1944; Hayes 1960). Today’s focus, however, is on elite uses of nationalism. To be sure, ‘subaltern studies’ approaches to nationalism have shifted attention from the colonizers to the colonized as the subjects of Third World history. But postcolonial scholarship

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has nonetheless remained largely elitist in its focus: Indian intellectuals, for example, producing alternatives to the British vision of ‘India’ (see Kaviraj 1992; Chatterjee 1993). G. C. Spivak’s (1988) lament that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ is reflective of a general postmodern emphasis on the elite production and mass consumption of discourse. To understand Chinese nationalism today, we must redirect our gaze back from the high politics of CCP propaganda to the messy realities of the lived experiences of the Chinese people and their emotions. The CCP is losing its control over nationalist discourse. Under Mao, the Party claimed that because it led the revolutionary masses, the Party and the nation were fused into an inseparable whole. Only communists, in other words, could be genuine Chinese nationalists. Under Deng and especially under Jiang, however, the CCP’s nationalist claims are increasingly falling on deaf ears. Popular nationalists now regularly speak of the ‘Motherland’ and the ‘Chinese race’ without reference to the Party. And this separation of the Party-state from the nation is not occurring only in marginal popular publications. PLA writer Jin Hui, mentioned above, published Wailing at the Heavens in 1995 as part of an official series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War of Resistance. The book underwent rigorous editing at the People’s Liberation Army Literature and Arts Press, and General Zhang Zhen wrote the preface, further granting the book official status. General Zhang cites Deng Xiaoping on how ‘Only socialism can save China’ to make the standard official nationalism argument that ‘In modern China, patriotism is tied to socialism.’ In the book itself, however, Jin Hui (1995: 465) unties that knot, underscoring the ‘separation of the Chinese concepts of state and motherland’, and arguing that ‘there are “two Chinas”: the Chinese people’s “motherland”, and the rulers’ “state”’. Jin’s analysis radically undermines the idea that China is dominated by a monolithic ‘Party-state’ with complete control over nationalist discourse. Because the anti-foreign tenor of popular nationalism is largely the same as that of state nationalism, Western analysts have too frequently dismissed popular nationalists as

puppets in the hands of the Communist elite. This view is a grave mistake. In China today, popular networks are challenging the state’s hegemony over nationalism, threatening to rupture the Chinese nation-state. And this is occurring at a time when, given the bankruptcy of communist ideology, nationalism has become even more central to state legitimation. Both the Party and the people are recognizing that the people are playing a greater role in nationalist politics. The ‘party propaganda’ view of Chinese nationalism not only excludes the Chinese people; it also excludes the emotions. Like all peoples, the Chinese are motivated by a complex interplay of both sense and sensibility. Despite compelling neurological evidence to the contrary, there is a strong tendency in the West to view emotion and reason as locked into a zero-sum relationship in which any gain for one is a loss for the other (see Unger 1975: 55; Damasio 1994). In other words, becoming more emotional entails becoming less rational, and vice versa. Studies of Chinese nationalism are no exception, pitting reason against the emotions. Optimistic pundits tend to downplay the role of the passions in Chinese nationalism. They acknowledge the role of Chinese national feelings, but then assert that the rational pursuit of China’s national interest will win the day. More pessimistic pundits, by contrast, lament that reason is impotent when confronted with the passions. Arguments over the nature and future direction of Chinese nationalism thus often tell us more about the optimism or pessimism of their Western proponents – whether they follow in the ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ liberal traditions – than they do about China. Human motivation is complex, including elements of both reason and emotion. I therefore suggest that the newly emergent sub-fields of the sociology and psychology of emotion have much to teach us about nationalist practice. For instance, anger is an emotion that is (obviously) central to nationalist practice – yet rarely treated in the literature on nationalism. Anger seeks to restore status after it has been taken away unfairly. In Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, Barrington Moore (1978: 17) argues that ‘vengeance means retaliation. It also

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means a reassertion of human dignity or worth, after injury or damage. Both are basic sentiments behind moral anger and the sense of injustice.’ Where Moore highlights the emotional, J. M. Barbalet (1998: 136) stresses the instrumental: ‘Vengefulness is an emotion of power relations. It functions to correct imbalanced or disjointed power relationships. Vengefulness is concerned with restoring social actors to their rightful place in relationships.’ Anger expressed through vengeance can thus simultaneously have both emotional and instrumental dimensions. Indeed, Chinese nationalists frequently speak of injustice. The Chinese who threw bricks at the US Embassy in Beijing after the bombing of their embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 were impelled by an ethical anger that sought to right a wrong. They were genuinely angry – not, as the Western pundits generally suggested, playthings in the hands of communist propagandists who manipulated them. Chinese protestors sought retributive justice: to restore China’s proper place in international society (see Gries 2001). Popular passions, in sum, are a vital but understudied element in Chinese nationalism today. Indeed, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is well aware that popular nationalists now command a large following, and is actively seeking to appease them. For instance, during the protests about the 1999 Belgrade bombing and the 2001 spy plane collision, popular nationalists severely restricted the range of political options open to those who make decisions about the Party’s foreign policy. John Keefe (2001), who was special assistant to US Ambassador to China Joseph Prueher during the April 2001 spy plane incident, later related that, during the negotiations in Beijing, American diplomats ‘saw a Chinese government acutely sensitive to Chinese public opinion’. Such sensitivities are only likely to increase. Western policymakers ignore how this new factor affects Chinese foreign policy at their own peril. NOTES 1 Guoji xianqu daobao (2003). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Chinese are my own.

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2 I put ‘Diaoyu’ first not to take China’s side in the dispute, but simply because I approach the issue from a Chinese perspective. 3 The Japanese invaded and colonized Manchuria following the Mukden Incident of 1931. However, the invasion of the rest of China did not begin until after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937. Chinese from the north-east invariably cite 1931 as the onset of the war; others frequently cite 1937. 4 Note that this categorization of Chinese youth generations conflicts with the delineation of generations of political leadership. To distance himself from Mao, leader of the ‘First Generation’, Deng declared himself leader of the ‘Second Generation’, despite the fact that they both participated in the Long March and the War of Resistance. Hence Jiang is of the ‘Third Generation’, and Hu Jintao now leads the new ‘Fourth Generation’ of technocratic leadership. See Li Cheng (2001). 5 A few members of the ‘New Left’ of nationalist intellectuals in China were an exception, having actually sought to affirm the Cultural Revolution. See Guo Yingjie (2004: 32).

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Olick, J. and Robbins, J. (1998) ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24: 105–40. Sautman, B. (1997) ‘Racial Nationalism and China’s External Behavior’, World Affairs, 160 (2): 78–96. Segev, T. (1993) The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang. Shen Xiaoma (2002) ‘The Popular Judgment’ [Liuxing pipan], in Southern Daily [Nanfang dushibao], 10 July. Reprinted on Sina.com at http://cul.sina. com.cn/l/d/2002–07–10/14918.html (accessed 16 December 2003). Sing Pao Daily (Hong Kong) (2003) ‘Netizens Call for a Restoration of Respect for the Chinese People’ [Wangmin hu taohui Zhongguoren zunyan], 1 November. Available at http://www. singpao.com/20031101/international/470629.html (accessed 19 December 2003). Singer, J. A. and Salovey, P. (1993) The Remembered Self: Emotion and Memory in Personality. New York: Free Press. Somers, M. R. (1994) ‘The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach’, Theory and Society, 23: 605–49. Song Qiang et al. (1997) [The Spirit of the Fourth Generation: The Savior Complex of Modern Chinese] Disidairen De Jingshen: Xiandai Zhongguoren De Jiushi Qingjie. Lanzhou: Gansu wenhua chubanshe. Spivak, G. C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Straits Times (Singapore) (2001) ‘Actress Sorry for Wearing “Wartime Japan Flag” Dress’, 11 December: A2. Tajfel, H. (1981) Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Tu Weiming (1991) ‘Cultural China: The Periphery as Center’, in Daedalus (Spring) Special Issue The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, 120 (2): 1–32. Unger, R. (1975) Knowledge and Politics. New York and London: Macmillan. Volkan, V. and Itzkowitz, N. (1994) Turks and Greeks: Neighbors in Conflict. Cambridgeshire: Ethoden. Weinstein, E. A. and Deutschberger, P. (1963) ‘Some Dimensions of Altercasting’, Sociometry, 26 (4): 454–66. Xi Yongjun and Ma Zaizhun (1996) Chaoyue Meiguo: Meiguo Shenhua De Zhongjie [Surpassing the USA: The End of the American Myth]. Harbin: Neimenggu daxue chubanshe. Xiao Gongqing (1994) [Deriving from Nationalism a New Resource that Congeals the State],‘Cong minzuzhuyi zhong jiequ guojia ningjuli de xinziyuan’ [Strategy and Management] Zhanlue yu guanli, 4. Xu Ben (2001) ‘Chinese Populist Nationalism: Its Intellectual Politics and Moral Dilemma’, Representations, 76 (1): 120–40. Yu Shaowen (2002) ‘On the “Yasukuni” Incident, Feng Xiaogang comes to Jiang Wen’s defence’ [Zhendui ‘Jingguo shenshe’ shijian Feng Xiaogang ti Jiang Wen ma bu ping], Beijing qingnianbao [Beijing Youth Daily], 2 July. Available at http://bjyouth.ynet.com/article.jsp?oid=749158. (accessed 24 December 2003). Zerubavel, Y. (1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zhang Datian (2001) ‘Zhao Wei wears a “Japanese Military Flag Outfit” and Creates a Furore’ [Zhao Wei zhao ‘Riben junqizhuang’ yinlai juda fengbo], Beijing chenbao [Beijing Morning Post], 4 December. Reprinted on the People’s Forum at http://www.people.com.cn/GB/wenyu/64/129/ 20011204/618330.html.

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Two conflicting narratives compete in the historiography of Arab nationalism. Each is worthy of our attention as together they form a comprehensive perspective on the complex subject this chapter seeks to introduce. The two points of view are reflected in the first of the three paradoxes Benedict Anderson relates to nationalism: ‘the objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eyes vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of the nationalists’ (Anderson 1991: 5). The first narrative was told from within the movement and it is a simple tale of the awakening of a dormant primordial ethnic beauty by princes, some of them foreign, in the late nineteenth-century Arab world. The second narrative is mainly academic and it challenged, from within and without, the national narrative. In this version, nationalism in general appears as a pure modern phenomenon and one that was activated in the Arab world by the growing involvement of European powers in the past two centuries. The two views – discussed in the first part of this chapter – had two features in common. First, they attempted to present nationalism in the Arab world as an emotional expression of identity and a common political aspiration of exclusiveness. And secondly, they described it as a foreign commodity bought by the local elite and disseminated later to the society as a

whole. In recent years both these assertions were questioned and novel approaches to the subject developed. The fresh research – to which we devote the last part of this chapter – pointed to a profusion of ‘national’ manifestations in the Arab world, almost to the point of defeating the attempt here to include within one general category all these complex revelations of what passes for ‘Arab nationalism’. The contemporary research is equally doubtful about the ‘Western’ nature of the phenomenon and attributes to it originality and uniqueness that fitted the world in which it was born. The debate thus is still open and the spectacle of nationalism in the world at large and in the Middle East in particular still eludes those of us insisting on finding out what it is all about.

THE CONVENTIONAL TALE: A SLEEPING BEAUTY AND A FOREIGN PRINCE The first encounters of the Arab world with Europe varied in time and place, but one particular engagement stands out as more traumatic than others: Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. In the hegemonic narratives of Middle Eastern historiographies – appearing as late as the 1960s – the French landing marked the beginning of the modern era in the

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Arab world. The contact exposed Europe as a superior political and economic power and it sent the local elite into an almost perpetual search for the ample response to this formidable threat and challenge. The French bridgehead expanded and as a result new realities unfolded on the ground throughout the nineteenth century. The area as a whole was now caught in a transitional phase between a disappearing old Ottoman world and an emerging new European one. Soon after Napoleon’s arrival, North Africa was devoured by greedy European powers, hungry for markets and territories, whereas the Eastern Middle East remained still within the realm of Ottoman rule; but there too the Arab territories were gradually exposed to the growing political, economic and cultural involvement of the ambitious European states and interests. Nationalism came at this meeting point between East and West. It was a primordial ethnic sense of identity that was awakened by modernity and its agents in the area. Until the second half of the twentieth century one particular narrative of this tale predominated the scene. It was written in the 1930s by a senior official in the Educational Department in Mandatory Palestine, George Antonious, and appeared in his book entitled The Arab Awakening (Antonious 1945). His version fitted the conventional narratives of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe, attributing the existence of national identities to ancient roots. Modern nationalism was thus the revival of an antique ethnic identicalness and the reformulation of past affiliations as a powerful political force able to liberate people and build states. Antonious’s narrative is still the one used in many textbooks even today, although it has been altered through criticism and additional historical revelations (some of which are discussed later in this chapter). It is through Antonious that English readers learned that Arab nationalism was an ideological movement engulfing the Arab world as a whole: calling for the creation of one Arab polity from the western end of North Africa to the eastern borders of Iraq, and from the southern Turkish borders to the southern tip of the Sudan. This aspiration was voiced by

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intellectuals and activists for the first time in the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time in history, both European colonialism and Ottoman imperialism shared control over the Arab lands (the former ruling North Africa, the latter the Middle East). Realization of that dream meant therefore liberation from both. Nationalism consequently was articulated as an anti-colonialist dream, as well as an anti-Ottoman sentiment. Not surprisingly, in the eastern Middle East, the orientation was anti-Ottomanist, more than anti-European. In Antonious’s version, the leaders of the movement were in fact seeking a strategic alliance with the anti-Ottoman powers of Europe, notably Britain and Russia. There were several power bases for this ideological innovation. The most important one was the hub of Protestant and Catholic institutions of higher education that became the Alma Mater for the first generation of Arab nationalists. In these institutions the notion of nationalism was preached by Western missionaries, who acted as college teachers, stressing in their curriculum the bondage between the Arabic language and the collective identity. Among these teachers one group is outstanding: American Protestant missionaries who founded among other establishments the two American universities in Beirut and Cairo. They will continue to star as the princes who had awoken the sleeping national beauty: they appear as such in Antonious’s work of course, but also in the writings of professional historians who accepted the pivotal role he accorded to them (Hourani 1962; Tibi 1997: 110–30). Another more marginal group is that of Russian Orthodox missionaries who also helped to ‘Arabize’ the Christian communities in the Arab world in order to weaken the hold of the Greek churches in the area (Hopwood 1969). It is interesting that Antonious did not attribute such sinister motives to the American missionaries – in his tale, they were genuinely helping the Arabs in the cause of selfdetermination and in the name of liberation. The missionaries’ role in the midst of a basically Muslim society accorded to the formative stages of Arab nationalism, in Antonious’s narrative, a very secular flavour. Not surprisingly

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in this version, nationalism attracted first and foremost the Christian minorities; but the Muslim elite soon joined in. The tyranny of the last effective Ottoman Sultan (Abdul Hamid II, 1876–1908) brought both sects together in an anti-Ottoman struggle. This process was intensified after the Young Turks revolution in 1908/9. The new rulers in Istanbul wished to Turkify all the inhabitants of the Empire, the majority of which were Arabs, annulling the previous Ottoman pretence to unite Arabs and Turks under the banner of Islam. Arab nationalism emerged as a reasonable response to the challenge of Turkification. In the wake of the missionary work, secret national Arab societies came forth after the revolution in Istanbul. Their earlier demands were quite modest: they wished Turkey to share their enthusiasm for the revitalized role they found for the teaching of Arabic. They called for a comprehensive educational reform, with a strong linguistic stress on Arabic – one which was partially accepted by the government in Istanbul, hoping to control what it could not defeat. But soon more ambitious claims were voiced: introducing a vision of fuller Arab autonomy and later on, even independence. In 1913, the first Arab national conference, convening in Paris (for fear of Turkish persecution), tried in vain to negotiate some sort of an Austro-Hungarian model with the Turkish government. After these manoeuvres failed, the road was opened for a tacit alliance between the Arab national societies and Turkey’s enemies in the impending world war, namely Britain and Russia. Britain had already been involved in the second power base of Arab nationalism: the Hejaz. There, the leading notable family of the holiest city, Mecca, the Hashemites, revolted too against the secular Turkifying new government. For that purpose, they enlisted the assistance of the legendary T. E. Lawrence who brought them in touch with the British legation in Egypt (under British control since 1882). Egypt, our third centre of activity, was crucial not only because the British were there as potential allies, but also since their presence in the land of the Nile generated a local national movement that contributed to the overall rise

of nationalism in the Arab world. Although the Egyptian movement centred more on liberating Egypt, rather then uniting the Arab world, it was similar enough to empower the panArabist movement elsewhere. North Africa as a whole should have been the fourth power base, but Antonious did not cover that area. There, Algerian nationalism was in the making ever since the country was occupied by France in 1830. As in Egypt, the focus was not on pan-Arabism, but the leaders of the movement cherished in public the clarion call for Arab unity in a political form that was yet to be decided: a kingdom, as the Hejazi people wanted it, or a republic, which better fitted the Algerian aspirations. In between the wars, and particularly after World War II, the difference between the Algerian variant and the rest of the Arab world became starker. The assimilationist policies of the French in Algeria, especially during the reign of Jacque Soustelle as Governor-General, necessitated a forceful anti-colonialist response. The British Empire in the Middle East, on the other hand, was not based on assimilation and hence it provoked a different variation of nationalism: contemplative, cooperative to a point and seeking all the time the golden mean between the more militant elements from within and the colonialists from without (Thomas 2000). Therefore, when Britain did not deliver independence the disappointment was momentous. The British promised much, but gave very little in Antonious’s estimation. The fact that Arab nationalist groups such as the Hashemites and others helped the Allies in World War I against Turkey was rewarded only by semi-independence in some parts of the Arab world (Iraq and Jordan) while others were given to the French (such as Syria and Lebanon, in addition to the North African colonies).1 But for Antonious, writing from Jerusalem, Albion became outrightly perfidious in its policy in Palestine. It crossed the line with the Balfour Declaration made in November 1917. Antonious predicted, and in hindsight quite rightly so, that opposition to Zionism, no less then colonialism and Turkish secularism, would become a rallying force

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among those with a vision of pan-Arabism. Antonious’s book leaves the impression that without Zionism, greedy French colonialism and British opportunism, a liberal democratic nationalism could have developed in the Arab world.

THE ARAB AWAKENING RECONSIDERED Antonious’s tale, much as other formative official narratives, came under the scrutiny of a more cynical, at times even hostile, research. The historiography of Arab nationalism was radically transformed, with the rest of Middle Eastern studies, and became academic and professionalized. This was also true about the general inquiry into the nature and development of nationalism (Smith 2001). Already in the mid-twentieth century, critical voices were heard against the association of nationalism with primordial roots and simple processes of modernization. The fresh approach conceptualized nationalism as an inevitable historical elitist expression of modernization. Nationalism was an instrument in the hands of a political elite and a functional substitute for pre-modern categories. Max Weber, the first of those theorists, contexualized nationalism within a specific period of time: a historical event with clear beginnings, and maybe even a predictable end. Within this span of time, it was a theory that served the ideological and material interests of a political and intellectual elite, which was fully cognizant of the artificial nature of the new dogma they invented for their benefit (Weber 1948: 171–80). Others followed suit. Eli Kedourie, for example, credited this elite not only with the inception of a theory but also with the making of states. In his view the formation of new states constructed national identities, and not vice versa as the national narratives themselves argued. Not only was it not an organic process, it was a cruel, at times manipulative, case of imposing on a given society a hegemonic identity – obliterating on the way particularistic identities – which served best the elite’s interests. His most famous example was the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose primary asset, its strong political structure, was only

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subsequently supplemented with invented Austrian and Hungarian nationalisms, as part of a larger strategy of state control. In short, for Kedourie, nationalism, an elite affair superimposed from above, was closely connected to an oppressive modern state apparatus (Kedourie 1960). Ernest Gellner went even further in his critique, brushing aside any talk of national awakenings. He stated: ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’ (Gellner 1983: 48). National ‘awakening’ – a totally fictional version of history in his eyes – was possible only with the progress attributed to education and industrialization. Critical to this process was the modernization and systemization of language, the basis for constructing new geopolitical realities from which national movements rose. He too recognized the utility of the concept in abolishing old forces – such as the European aristocracy – and in building new ones – such as the urban middle class. In the wake of this critical inquiry, historians of the area adopted a culinary view towards the making of national identities in the Arab world: nationalism became a dish cooked at a certain period and the research could determine which ingredients were included and which were not, and why. Antonious’s work itself was scrutinized in such a manner, enabling the historians to reveal how his tale was concocted. They felt Antonious exaggerated intentionally the anti-Ottoman nature of Arab nationalism and its proEuropean inclination. It seemed that the first generation of Arab nationalist thinkers and activists wished in fact to operate within the pax Ottomana they knew and respected; indeed, they seemed to be more Ottomanist reformers than Arabists (al-Azmeh 2000: 73). They sought more autonomy but not full cession from the Ottoman world. Even the Turkification enterprise of the Young Turks was slow in stirring a desire in them for total independence. As for the early nationalist thought and its relationship with European sources, here an intrigue ensued over the ideological origins of

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the dogma that is still relevant today. Antonious was suspected as overemphasizing the liberal democratic character in order to legitimize Arab nationalism in the eyes of Britain and France, and to a certain extent he succeeded in doing so. It is possible therefore that he ignored certain features and overstressed others. While, the historians who viewed the subject 30 years later concurred that the ideas were borrowed from Europe, many of them felt it was rather a romantic variant of European nationalism – authoritarian and illiberal – that appealed to the early generation of Arab nationalist thinkers. This ideological inclination led eventually to the rise of nondemocratic and despotic regimes in the Arab world (the late Eli Kedourie leading the way in this direction). This view was challenged by historians who attempted a less reductionist approach to the subject. These historians rejected the exclusive role accorded to romantic nationalism in the making of the present political set-up in the Arab world. They pointed to additional, more important, factors such as the Western economic exploitation of the local economy and the political suppression of liberal nationalism by the European powers. The wider perspective also revealed a far more complex web of influences on the local national thinkers, not all of them European or Western, and yet many of them humanist and modern. The European sources were digested locally and in many ways became original contributions and what they indicated was great respect for Europe’s liberal philosophies and democratic inclinations, but abhorrence of its repressive policies in the Arab world. These policies empowered those who coveted power at all cost, nepotism, corruption and tyranny, and this is where we are today. However, the more promising past could still return (American policies, replacing Europe and the Soviet Union ever since the early 1970s, seemed from this perspective to play a similar role in pushing the area away from democratic nationalism for the sake of imperialism – even it is done in the name of democracy – the late Albert Hourani best representing this orientation). How far the local version was loyal to the original was a subject for scholarly debate.

The discussion focused on the writing of the Syrian philosopher and educator Sati alHusri – one of the movement’s founding fathers at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, most scholars attribute to him the inception of the idea and he appears to be the first coherent articulator of the ideology. Al-Husri made a distinction between German (that is romantic) and French (that is liberal) nationalisms. He rejected the latter variant and derided it as void of any historical and cultural references, but was intrigued enough by it to conduct an imaginary dialogue with Ernest Renan, negating the Frenchman’s wish to include in the nation anyone who shared the same civic obligations and social solidarity. The German version, in his view, was preferable since it located at the centre of the identity a collective cultural past and a shared classical language. Al-Husri accepted the Germanic perception of the nation as a predetermined entity but discarded race as a unifying factor. For him, the core identity of the nation was social and dynamic; constantly changing with time and place. Two social forces played the crucial role in shaping the collective identity of the people who lived in the Middle East ever since the seventh century: Arab civilization and Islam. They were bonded together by the sacredness of the Arabic language in the Islamic religion. It was in fact the language even more than the religion that moulded the national identity of the Arabs (Suleiman 2003). Was this interpretation a mere variant of the Germanic version of nationalism or was it an original thought that proved the authentic nature of Arab nationalism? Questions of this kind were now occupying the scholarly agenda in the generation that followed Antonious’s pioneering work (Naffa 1987; Choueiri 2000: 120–5). On the sidelines of this debate, other historians noted additional influences such as those of Communist and Socialist political thought. Here too the debate was intriguingly the same: was the Arab left mirroring European radicalism or did it construct its own brands of socialism and communism (Halliday 1999)? Some historians found the Gramscian prism the most useful one for explaining the interplay between class and nationalism in the Arab

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world; others viewed the process by relying on the energetic field of political economy and development studies (Beinin and Lockman 1988; Davis 2004; Owen 2004). Maybe quite understandably, the outstanding case study for many was Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), where Communism was in vain nourished as a viable alternative to national interpretation of reality and was preached as a vehicle for peace and reconciliation.2

THE LITMUS PAPER OF ARAB NATIONALISM: THE PALESTINE QUESTION One of the less debatable points in the historiography of Arab nationalism is the centrality of the Palestine question within the panArabist agenda, however its roots are described or evaluated. This was not originally so, but developed incrementally with the ongoing conflict in Palestine. The significant turning point was the 1936 rebellion which transformed pan-Arabist sentiment from an intellectual and political position into a popular, at times populist, movement. But the genuine solidarity movement was expropriated by more cynical politicians, mainly ambitious military officers, who attempted to take over nation-states and succeeded in doing so in several Arab countries. It began with Baqr Sidqi in Iraq in 1936 who was followed by Husni Zaim in 1949 Syria and culminated in the 1952 Egyptian Free officers’ revolution. All these groups, and those who followed in Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and the Sudan, were attracted to the pan-Arabist ideology, calling for the unification of all the Arab states within one united, socialist, secular and authoritarian state. The principal means, indeed the litmus paper, for examining the commitment of the many contenders to lead this historical move was the question of Palestine. More traditional Arab states were also drawn to the Palestine pan-Arabist arena and the result was a dangerous illusion that developed in Palestine that the Arab world in its entirety was standing behind the Palestinian struggle and would save the people in the Holy Land from the Zionist

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threat. The issue of Palestine was so powerful that it served as a catalyst for the formation of a pan-Arabist regional organization in 1944, the Arab League. This outfit promised to enrol the Arab world as a whole to the last battles in the war against colonialism in Algeria and Palestine. It was less needed in the former case, but it was badly wanted in the latter. The League promised the Palestinians it would master the military might of the Arab world, in the name of pan-Arabism, to prevent a Jewish takeover. Disillusionment came tragically and bitterly in 1948 when the Palestinians were expelled from their lands, their villages and towns were destroyed and the people dispersed into diasporic communities and refugee camps. The Palestinian movement rose from the ashes with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization and infused the pan-Arabist rhetoric with new life, and with it the commitment to the Palestinian cause. But it was more than just a discursive feature: it became a vital force that induced Egypt and Syria to embark unwittingly on an brinkmanship policy vis-à-vis Israel that ended in their defeat in June 1967, which put an end to any such attempts in the future. A real anti-colonialist war of course was fought only in North Africa, and particularly in Algeria. The different colonial experience vis-à-vis a settler community of Europeans was parallel to the Palestinian case. Both situations nurtured the Arab imagination and painted the discourses of nationalism with radical language and images. But the inertia on the ground was not favouring pan movements of any kind. Within the nation-states developed in the aftermath of World War II the local national identity solidified at the expanse of the regional one.

WATANIYYA VERSUS QAWMIYYA In between the two world wars the national workshop produced all kinds of possible variations on the theme of nationalism. Socialist thinkers were moving in one direction, Islamists

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in another and in the middle liberal and less democratic groups and personalities were struggling for dominance. With the end of World War II, many of these groups fused together into liberation movements that hastened the withdrawal of the European powers from the Middle East. The question was now not how to defeat the common enemy but who would succeed him. The post-colonial era began with the consolidation of individual Arab nation-states replacing the old Ottoman and colonial regimes. Within this new set up, pan-Arabism was reconstructed. It was no more a cradle ideology but rather an alternative vision for the post-World War II reality. Those who subscribed to the ideology claimed now that Arab societies would benefit and thrive if their dreams of independence were to transcend the borders of individual nation-states. Some of the new elites employed the renovated version of pan-Arabism as a means for safeguarding their rule, others wished to distance themselves from it, fearing it would be used to destabilize their hold over their countries. A very dramatic manifestation of the panArabist aspiration was the creation of the Arab League, mentioned earlier, a regional organization founded by Egypt’s and Iraq’s leaders at the end of 1944, admittedly for more mundane and pragmatic reasons, but nonetheless one that planted (in retrospect false) hopes of unity and progress. The two leading countries were still part of pax-Britannica in the area, and it stands to reason that the respective prime ministers believed, erroneously, that they could build on British aid to implement the dream of Arab unity, even in a federated loose form (Dawn 2000: 41–62). The Arab League was considered the ultimate symbol of Arab nationalism but 60 years later no one inside or outside the Arab world claimed it succeeded even modestly in implementing or fulfilling the pan-Arabist aspirations. It nonetheless remained the principal stage for voicing the rhetoric of pan-Arabism and will probably continue to be so, at least as long as the Palestine question persists in dominating the regional agenda. In the formal realms of life, in this period, Arab nationalism

as a modern ideology slowly disintegrated into local national ideologies, although well into the 1960s the discourse of pan-Arabism was heard loud and clear in Cairo and Damascus (Dawisha 2002). The two competing affiliations – the regional versus the local – produced two very different terms in Arabic for nationalism: qawmiyya, representing the pan-Arabist identity, and wataniyya, the local one. One way for the more radical and committed pan-Arabists to deal with the schism of qawmiyya– wataniyya was to accord to their own country a leading role in bringing about Arab unity. The most interesting protagonist of this kind of pan-Arabism was Gamal Abd al-Nasser. Before 1956 he showed limited interest in the topic. After the Suez Crisis, he advocated a unity under his leadership based on a socialist and secularist ideology coupled with a strong commitment to advance the cause of Palestine and the struggle against Western imperialism and its allies in the area (whom he named ‘reactionary regimes’). The endeavour was short-lived and ended with defeat on the battlefield against Israel in 1967. Until this policy collapsed, Nasser inspired many in the Arab world to follow suit. In some cases, such as Jordan in 1957 and Lebanon in 1958, Nasser’s radicalism was thwarted by direct Western military intervention. In others, coups and revolutions brought to power equally committed pan-Arabists, in Syria and Iraq in 1958, in the newly liberated ex-colonies in the Maghreb through the 1950s and 1960s, and finally in the Yemen in the 1970s. This kind of struggle necessitated an alliance between radical Arab nationalism and the Soviet Union, embroiling the area in the Cold War. Nonetheless, Nasser insisted, and obtained, ideological independence despite the strategic alliance. Thus came into play his ‘Arab Socialism’, a brand of pan-Arabism based on a local variant of socialism, a unity around Egypt and assuming a significant role in the AsianAfrican bloc of states; its closest potential ideological allies were also bitter enemies: communism, political Islam and the Ba’ath party in Syria and Iraq. The latter was probably the most significant contender. The Ba’ath party – formerly the

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Ba’ath Arab socialist party – was founded by middle-class educators in the early 1940s. Two of them, Salah al-Din al-Bitar and Michel Aflaq, chose Damascus as the centre for their political activity. By 1947, they convened their first official congress and promulgated a constitution. A year later the Ba’ath had branches all over the Eastern Middle East, but it was mainly in Syria and Iraq that they became a force to reckon with3. Ideologically, the Ba’ath was quite close to Nasser’s kind of nationalism. It also had a socialist orientation (in fact it merged with the Syrian socialist party in 1952) and placed Arab unity as a primary objective. It was therefore natural that the two rivals/partners to the idea would attempt to work together and thus emerged the United Arab Republic – a union between Syria and Egypt – that lasted for three years (1958–61). Egyptian dominance in that unity was not just ideological, but also political and economic and hence this was a short-lived experience. It was followed by less promising developments when in Syria and Iraq local nationalist orientations, in the guise of panArabist ideologies, brought to power an authoritarian president, Hafiz al-Asad, in Syria, and a tyrannical ruler, Saddam Husayn, in Iraq4. Nasser was better in rousing the masses than building political institutions. And yet the nationalism that enveloped him led to land reform for the peasantry, women’s rights polices, better trade unionism and social welfare. One can also credit him, if one is so inclined, with resisting religious influence in the legal system and shunning dogmatic communism (Aburish 2005). The discourse of pan-Arabism lingered on until 1967, when Nasser’s Egyptian army was defeated with other Arab armies by Israel in the June war. But its demise was already in the making before this calamity, due to inter-Arab cold and actual wars. The concept of a single Arab state stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf as the best means of struggling against colonialism, imperialism and Zionism, attracted the more radical states but was deemed as a threat by the conservative ones. Probably more important was the noticeable failure of leaders to translate rhetoric on

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the only issue of pan-Arab consensus – the need to liberate Palestine – with action. This failure was already evident in 1948 and once again in the 1967 defeat (Khalidi et al. 1993). In the aftermath of the 1967 defeat – a blow not only to Nasser’s prestige, but also to his prophecy of pan-Arabism – the notion of qawmiyya was losing ground. It still appeared in the rhetoric of Iraq and Syria’s leaders, who found it useful in cementing with Ba’athi ideology their authoritarian regimes. Competing political forces which themselves were pushing for a pan-Arabist vision, such as the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, were banned and outlawed. In other places, the idea was reduced to attempts, most of which were abortive, to create federations and co-federations. The more successful ones were economic and reflected commercial strategies more than a shared ideology. In the less pragmatic spheres, the intellectual and ideological debates about nationalism continued also in the post-1967 period. But the focus moved from the axis of wataniyya– qawmiyya to the more complex and confusing impact political Islam had on the lives of many people in the Arab world.

POLITICAL ISLAM AND NATIONALISM As long as nationalism was researched within the framework of a modernization process, secularization and nationalization seemed to go hand in hand. This is probably why George Antonious tended to sideline the role played by Muslim thinkers in his narrative. This underemphasis was reversed by a later generation of historians who stressed the importance of reformist Islamists in propagating the notion of an Arab nation going back to the seventh century, when a new Islamic polity emerged in the Arabian peninsula. The polity became successive empires in the name of Islam which were for most of the time predominantly Arab in their ethnicity. The way forward for Arab prosperity was thus through the revival of the old bond between religion and ethnicity. A central figure among these thinkers was the Egyptian religious reformer Muhammad

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Abduh (1849–1905), who together with his teacher and associate Jamal al-Din al-Afghani clarified from their position in the university of al-Azhar the need to reform Islam so as to make it both a compass to a modern society and an effective tool in the struggle against colonialism. They had colleagues and followers sharing similar views around the Sunni Arab world at that time. They were what Sami Zubaida calls ‘cosmopolitans’: namely, an elite circle of intellectuals, aristocrats and politicians who directed their efforts very much within these milieus (Zubaida 1999: 15–33), dreaming of a pristine Muslim and Arab past and its revival as superior to the West and yet willing to borrow from the European market of ideas. When Christian and Muslim endeavours fused into a joint enterprise of forming a panArabist consciousness and movement, great care was taken not to use Islam as the signifier of Arabism so as not to prejudice the nonMuslim minorities in the Arab world. The common base lay in a shared cultural heritage centred around the language and dating back to pre-Islamic Arabism. This all changed when in the 1970s political Islam rose as a significant actor on the regional scene. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the origins of the phenomenon, suffice it to say that this, very generally speaking, was both a personal and a collective response to the failure of secular nationalism to deliver any of its promises for social welfare and economic prosperity. Politically too the balance sheet of secular nationalism was not very impressive but the failure here was attributed to the overwhelming Western, and mainly American, aggression and interventionist policies (and particularly, the US support for Israel and the conservative absolute Arab monarchies). From within the perspective of political Islam, Arab nationalism turned from a project of modernization into a movement trying to redeem the Arab world from the evils of such a project. But that proved quite impossible in the globalized world of the end of the previous century. The wish of political Islamic movements to show resilience against invasion by foreign ideas and norms has, in a way,

also transformed into a national variant of nationalism. The agenda from left and right (Islamic) polars of the political fields was much more national than religious. The power of nationalism is such that even the most phenomenal Islamic party in the Arab world, the Hizbullah in Lebanon, has been Lebanonized and is propagating less an Islamic ideology and much more the old list of aspirations and dreams of the early pan-Arabists (Wain 1999). At the end of the twentieth century, nationalism became the language of opposition, religious or not, to the ruling elites and their supporters in the West. The one case which may not fit the above assertion is North Africa, where there seems to be a clearer transition from the nationalist discourse to the Islamist one (unlike the case of Hizbullah). The realization of leading figures in the nationalist movement there that nationalism was after all a Western-inspired ideology and at heart anti-Islamic, formulated a view that located Islam as an authentic holistic framework within which the society can act. And thus many who were mesmerized in North Africa by the nationalist fervour of Nasser and the Ba’ath, turned to this more pure form of Islamism in the 1970s. Time will tell whether they have indeed constructed an a-national identity for people in North Africa and beyond (Burgat 1997).

PRESENT AND FUTURE AGENDAS OF RESEARCH The new realities on the ground dictated different interests in, and a different understanding of the essence of, nationalism in the Arab world. Nationalism was still very much alive, although much less clearer as subject matter for scholarly research. No less important in transforming the perception of the phenomenon was a new wave of critical deconstruction in the 1980s of nationalism in general. We learned from the previous critique that nationalism was an ideological construct that could push tyranny as much as it propelled democracy. This cognition was expanded by a

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more Marxist point of view. Eric Hobsbawm combined a Marxist outlook with Weberian functionalism and explained the birth of nations as a direct outcome of capitalist ambitions in European societies to control units, large enough to secure the financial gains of its bourgeois elite. In the process this elite engaged in the ‘human engineering of the society’, which required complimentary selfimages and degrading images of the other in order to nationalize past and present realities (Hobsbawm 1990: 14–25). From this perspective, according to Hobsbawm, national historiography is thus emplotted, in the words of Hayden White (White 1974: 277–303). The plot is spun with selection and re-composition of past events and symbols, as new ‘national’ traditions are ‘invented’. A very original contribution to our understanding of what nationalism can be all about was its association to human imaginings, as proposed by Benedict Anderson. His notion of ‘imagined communities’ directed attention to the discursive forms through which nations imagine themselves rather than the structural and objective constituents of the nation. In his eyes nationalism was a product that was sold not as a whole, but as a modular commodity that would fit different geographical locations and historical periods. But like all the other modernists, Anderson remarks that when this product was disseminated it was done with engineering, manipulation and the invention of historical stories to serve the few in the name of the many. However, by suggesting that nations, nation-ness and nationalism were ‘cultural artifacts of a particular kind’, Anderson sought to repudiate previous objectivist conceptions of the nation, thus emphasizing its universality as a phenomenon and the ‘irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestation’ (Anderson 1991: 8). This last reference in particular appealed to two historians who looked at Egypt in between the two world wars and reconstructed what they felt was the developing national imagination of certain classes in the society: an imagination that fluctuated between wataniyya and qawmiyya identifications (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986).

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This discussion around the constructedness of national identity has been further explored by Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, Partha Chaterji and other members of the subaltern postcolonial school of inquiry, questioning not only the ‘invented traditions’ of national identity but the very systems of cultural representation involved in producing them. In all of their works they have sought to identify the exclusionary practices endemic to the formation of national identity (Said 1983; Chartaji 1986; Bhabha 1990). Like Anderson, they moved the discussion away from the socio-historical and political roots of nationalism to its discursive contours, especially the heterogeneity that nationalism tries to subsume. As we shall see, this too had an impact on the historiography of Arab nationalism towards the end of the twentieth century. To some, national identity whether imagined, engineered or manipulated, is a recent human invention born out of the integration of conflicting ethnic or cultural identities or the disintegration of such identities. It is a modern invention of an axis of inclusion and exclusion that is not organic or natural thus requiring the artificial identification of those who belong to the nation and, more importantly, those who are excluded from it. In the process, constituting an ‘other’ of this national identity becomes critical for the formation of the national self. It demands the subordination of other identities – communal, religious, ethnic and so forth. This subjection defines the parameters of ‘otherness’ and the degree to which it is constituted as a source of menace to the prevalent or hegemonic identity. In this context and as Michel Foucault argues, in the field of knowledge constructed by nationalism the ‘other’, the ‘enemy’ occupies exclusively the negative pole of that field (Foucault 1980). With the passage of time this part of the theoretical input was much more relevant for understanding the making of the Jewish identity in Israel than for explaining the formations of such identities in the Arab world, but this too, as is demonstrated towards the end of the article, enriched the historiography of the local cases. Various anthologies and collections of recent years on Arab nationalism reflected

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the theoretical shifts and new orientations (Gershoni and Jankowski 1997). I will touch upon only some of the new themes explored in these works. The first is a recognition of the modular and dynamic nature of the national identity. Arab nationalism seemed to resolve not only into wattaniyya constituents but also to even smaller particularistic elements. These reformulations were not linear and were often affected by regional, sectarian and religious impacts; defeating the attempt from above to create a cohesive national identity. Iraq is the most known and recent case, but also in more homogeneous countries such as Palestine similar processes took place. The dispersion, occupation and exile in 1948 produced a multiplicity of experiences that prevented the national cohesiveness so needed for survival (Budeiri 1997; Simon 1997). The second feature of the updated research, in the wake of the subaltern and postcolonial school, is the perception of nationalism in the Arab world as an identity forged not only by external factors but also by internal dynamics; nationalism in the Arab world as not just a Western phenomenon but rather as a local form of identification with distinct characteristics, dating back to the pre-Westernization period. Here too some promising beginnings were made in the case study of Palestine – understandably so, for as the only Arab national movement still struggling for independence and selfdetermination it provided a kind of laboratory in the making of nationalism in pre-state conditions. As a recent historical survey into the making of Palestinian identity shows, the initial need to identify nationally was motivated by the challenge of external attempts to conquer the land and colonize it (a very frequent phenomenon in modern times); however, in more tranquil times, such a pressure to identify or to rally around a collective identity was not called for, and the communal energy was channelled into building local solidarity often accompanied by a sense of pride in a history of a continuous presence on such a coveted land. This too could be defined as nationalism, or at least protonationalism (Pappe 2003: 31–62). Thirdly, the forces that shaped and reshaped a national identification and imagination thus

were recent and distant, foreign and local. But moreover they were expressed in a geographical and chronological variety. Their manifestations differed also from one group to another and thus developed a recognition of the need to delve deeper into the reception of nationalism among the non-elite groups and not just be content with the chattering classes’ articulation of the sentiment and ideology. Such a perspective produced intriguing research into the trajectory of the ideas in the formative years of Arab nationalism from the thinkers through the officials and officers into the common people during the time of World War I (Haddad 1994: 201–22). Within this orientation, feminist historiography developed as well trying to fathom how women reacted and acted toward the new ideology. In Egypt, for instance, as Beth Baron has shown, nationalism was symbolized as a feminine figure which catered to the wider public in Egypt, but also served a feminist agenda. Women in the 1930s unveiled themselves and demanded ‘modernization’ as part of the overall national objective of independence from British occupation (Baron 1991: 275–91); 50 years later women would veil themselves as part of a demand to liberate Egypt from Americanism and its cultural invasion. Feminist perspectives on nationalism are one item on the future agenda to be further explored. Others are the more discursive analyses of what Homi Bhabah called the power of the nation to narrate, where national amnesia in the Arab world, especially about the Ottoman times, seems to be a favourite topic (Piterberg 1997: 104–24). And finally, a very recent avenue was attempted by research echoing interdisciplinary studies elsewhere: a thorough examination of the way nationalism appears within popular and official cultures. National anthems, novels and poems, and lately films and TV series, were deconstructed as forms of indoctrination, representation or manipulation by the powers that be in their attempt to sustain the nation as an imaginary father or mother of the society. Quite naturally, much attention has been devoted to television and its relationship with nationalism. Seen from this perspective,

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television is the great national educator and homogenizer. Egyptian TV in particular, seen all over the Arab world, has undergone intriguing changes of emphasis in this respect. In the 1980s it reflected, even battled against, Islamic fanaticism and dogmatism. And yet this agenda failed to reflect the wide support for political Islam within the society at large. The dialectical relationship between the society and its electronic media produced, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a more mixed agenda – infused with religious texts and sensitivities, affecting significantly the line-ups in the local and regional television shows and programs (Abu-Lughod 1996: 269–82). Indeed, nationalism in the Arab world became more than just a cultural fact but a mass cultural signifier of the public space through the printed press and much more so through electronic media. To such an extent that we may witness the resurrection of the dying notion of pan-Arab nationalism through the satellite networks; most notably through al-Jazeera – the self declared symbol of Arab nationalism (Deen 2004). We began with pan-Arabism as an intellectual exercise for few a officials and thinkers and we ended with the possible return of pan-Arabism either through political Islam or supranational communicational giants such as al-Jazeera. The American occupation of Iraq, the continued conflict in Palestine, the fluctuating power of political Islam and the socio-economic predicament that refuses to disappear, promise that the national interpretation of reality will continue to dominate life in the Arab world. As before, the research on nationalism in general and the developments on the ground will continue to affect the dynamic and uncertain field of historiographical inquiry in the future.

NOTES 1 Admittedly with a pledge through the League of Nations for independence one day, but this seemed vague and insincere. 2 Zacharly Lockman showed in his research the challenges of class solidarity to the national agenda and the violent clash between the two, when narrow political and economic

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interests motivate the local elite to crash any alternative identification and solidarity. This contributed in the case of Palestine to the escalation of the conflict (Lockman 1996). 3 The regime in Syria today is, and in Iraq until 2003 was, loyal ostensibly to the Ba’ath ideology. 4 Muhlberger and Mansfield (1991) give the impression that the creation of local national identities was a degeneration.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1997) ‘Dramatic Reversals: Islam and the Egyptian Television’ in J. Beinin and J. Stork, Political Islam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. pp. 269–82. Aburish, S. K. (2005) The Last Arab: A Biography. New York: St Martin’s Press. Al-Azmeh, A. (2000) ‘Nationalism and the Arabs’, in D. Hopwood (ed.), Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism. The Antonious Lectures. London: Macmillan. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso. Antonious, G. (1945) The Arab Awakening. Beirut: Khayats. Baron, B. (1991) ‘The Making and Breaking of Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt’, in N. R. Keddie and B. Baron (eds), Women in the Middle East. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. 275–91. Beinin, J. and Lockman, Z. (1988) Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Bhabha, H. (ed.) (1990) The Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge. Budeiri, M. (1997) ‘The Palestinians: Tensions between Nationalist and Religious Identities’, in I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 171–90. Burgat, F. (1997) The Islamic Movement in North Africa. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Chartaji, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Verso. Choueiri, M. Y. (2000) Arab Nationalism: A History, Nation and State in the Arab World. Oxford: Blackwell. Davis, E. (2004) Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identities in Modern Iraq. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Dawisha, A. (2002) Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Dawn, C. E. (2000) ‘The Quality of Arab Nationalism’, in D. Hopwood (ed.), Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 41–62. Deen, T. (2004) ‘Is Al-Jazeera the New Symbol of Arab Nationalism?’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 12 October. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings. New York: Pantheon. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gershoni, I. and Jankowski, J. (eds) (1986) Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930. New York: Oxford University Press. Gershoni, I. and Jankowski, J. (eds) (1997) Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press. Haddad, H. M. (1994) ‘Arab Nationalism Reconsidered’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 26 (2): 201–22. Halliday, F. (1999) Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopwood, D. (1969) The Russian Presence in Syria and Palestine, 1843–1914: Church and Politics in the Near East. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hourani, A. (1962) Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khalidi, R., Anderson, L., Muslih, M. and Simon, R. (eds) (1993) The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Kedourie, E. (1960) Nationalism. London: Hutchinson. Lockman, Z. (1996) Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948, Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Muhlberger, S. and Mansfield, P. (1991) A History of the Middle East. London: Penguin. Naffa, H. (1987) ‘Arab Nationalism: A Response to Ajami’s Thesis on the End of Pan-Arabism’,

in T. E. Farah (ed.), Pan Arabism and Arab Nationalism: The Continuing Debate. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Owen, R. (2004) State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East. London and New York: Routledge. Pappe, I. (2003) A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piterberg, G. (1997) ‘The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness: The Egyptian Case’, in I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 104–24. Said, E. (1983) Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, A. (2001) Nationalism: Theory, Ideology and History. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Simon, R. S. (1997) ‘The Imposition of Nationalism on a Non-Nation State: The Case of Iraq during the Interwar Period, 1921–1941’, in I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 87–104. Suleiman, Y. (2003) The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Thomas, M. (2000) The French North African Crisis: Colonial Breakdown and Anglo-French Relations, 1945–1962. New York: St Martin’s Press. Tibi, B. (1997) Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry. New York: St Martin’s Press. Wain, M. (1999) Staying the Course: The ‘Lebanonization’ of Hizbullah. Beirut: Al-mashraq. Weber, M. (1948) Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. White, H. (1974) ‘The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact’, Clio, 3: 277–303. Zubaida, S. (1999) ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Middle East’, in R. Meijer (ed.), Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. pp. 15–33.

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42 African Nationalism B E N YA M I N N E U B E R G E R

African nationalism is rooted in the Americas. Born as a pan-black ideology and movement, it was then called pan-Negroism. It was a diaspora nationalism and as such had similarities to and affinities with Jewish diaspora nationalism (‘Zionism’) (on these affinities, see Neuberger 1985, 1986b). It was a typical minority nationalism, a nationalism of a ‘numerical minority’ (as in the United States) or a ‘sociological minority’ (as in the Caribbean) against domination by another racial group, against oppression, discrimination, exclusion and racism (on the concepts of minority and diaspora nationalism, see Smith 1971). Race was central: pan-Negroism was based on black identity, black unity and black solidarity, and on a deep intellectual and emotional connection between the African diaspora and the African homeland (on the importance of race, see Neuberger 1975). This racial (as different from racist) panAfricanism emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth century. In the United States it was a bitter reaction to the disappointment felt by black intellectuals in the aftermath of the Civil War. Instead of emancipation, came a whole array of discriminatory legislation, de- facto disenfranchisement in the South, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and a spreading lynch ‘justice’. Many of the black ideologues hailed from the

Caribbean islands – from independent Haiti, from the British colonies of Trinidad, Jamaica and Barbados, from the French territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique, from Americanheld St Thomas and from British Guiana in northern Latin America. The Caribbean islands had a legacy of harsh slavery as they operated a plantation economy based on slavery and also functioned as intermediaries and markets in the slave trade. As early as 1804, Toussaint l’Ouverture led a successful slave rebellion, which led to Haiti’s independence that same year. European colonialism in the Caribbean preceded colonialism in Africa by centuries, giving rise to anti-racist and anti-colonial ideologies at a time when Africa had hardly yet become colonized. The same is true with regard to the United States in the nineteenth century. (On the history of pan-Africanism, see Esedebe 1994; Fredrickson 1995; Geiss 1974; Langley 1973; Neuberger 1977.) The founding fathers of African nationalism are Edward Blyden from St Thomas, Marcus Garvey from Jamaica, Henry Sylvester Williams and George Padmore from Trinidad, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Ras Makonnen from Guiana and Burghardt Du Bois (whose father was Haitian) from the United States. Blyden migrated to Africa in the late nineteenth century, became a well-known educator in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and

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Liberia’s Foreign Minister. Fanon participated in the Algerian struggle for independence and, in 1957, became an adviser to President Kwame Nkrumah in independent Ghana, as did Ras Makonnen and George Padmore. Du Bois too spent his last years in Ghana at the invitation of Nkrumah in order to edit an Encyclopedia Africana (see Blyden 1967 [1889]; Du Bois 1964 [1903], 1965 [1947]; Garvey 1963, 1980; Lynch 1971; Padmore 1956; Van Deburg 1997). All the founding fathers viewed their nationalism as an antithesis to slavery, racism, degradation and oppression, while simultaneously emphasizing their rich historical legacy. They thus rejected the racist-colonialist claim that they had no meaningful history. Theirs was a pride in their African origins, in the ‘African Personality’. They repudiated the race theories that flourished in Europe and America and depicted all Negroes (as blacks were then called) as ‘savage, primitive, lazy and inferior’. To counter such allegations, they frequently referred to a bygone black paradise, to a black pharaonic Egypt, to a historical black Ethiopia, to a black Jesus and a black Christianity (Diop 1959). The nineteenthcentury Haitian scholar Joseph-Antenor Firmin countered Arthur de Gobineau’s racist classic Essai sur l’inégalitié des races humaines (Gobineau 1967 [1853–55]) with the publication in Paris in 1885 of De l’égalité des races humaines (Firmin 1985 [1885]). The American pan-Africanists saw Africa as ‘our homeland’ and the ‘land of our fathers’. There was an underlying assumption in their writings that the standing and fate of the black diaspora were inextricably linked with Africa’s prestige, that is with its culture, folklore, history and its historic states (such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ashanti, Congo and Zimbabwe). ‘Bad’ and ‘good’ news from Africa had a tremendous impact on the panAfricanists of the New World. They were very much aware of the large-scale massacre of Congolese in the Belgian ‘Free State’, of the genocide perpetrated by the Germans against the Herero in German South-West Africa (today’s Namibia), of the ongoing slavery and slavetrade in Zanzibar (today part of Tanzania),

of the institution of forced labour in the Portuguese and French colonies and of the harsh racist legislation in all settler colonies. They were exhilarated by the foundation of Liberia (the ‘Land of the Free’) and Sierra Leone (whose capital was named ‘Freetown’) by freed slaves, by the resistance against colonial conquest and domination in South Africa, the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana), Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) and German East Africa (today’s Tanzania), and by the Ethiopian victory against the invading Italians at Adowa in 1896. The attitude of the American panAfricanists towards Africa was embodied in two major orientations. One current, whose most famous representative was Du Bois, regarded Africa as a historical homeland, a spiritual and cultural centre and an inspiration to the diaspora. The other aspired to an independent Africa as a power centre of all blacks in Africa and in the diaspora. The latter, whose major representatives were Blyden in the late nineteenth century and Garvey in the 1920s and 1930s, adhered to the idea of a ‘return to Africa’ (‘Black Zionism’). Garvey’s movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), was populist-nationalist and spoke of the need to create a ‘Negro Empire’. American pan-Africanism, which failed completely in America (at least in its ‘Black Zionist’ version), had a profound impact on Africa. The rising African intelligentsia adopted the ideas of independence, power, Black Empire, black unity and resistance to white domination, in particular in South and West Africa. Black nationalist ideas were also exported to Africa by black British soldiers from the Caribbean serving in Africa. Another pathway was via black American missionaries, who founded ‘Ethiopian’, ‘African’ and ‘Zionist’ churches, and introduced ideas about black Christianity, black churches and black government. Noted leaders of African nationalism – John Chilembwe and, later on, Hastings Banda from Nyassaland (today’s Malawi), Nkrumah from the Gold Coast and Nnamdi Azikiwe, Eyo Ita and Obafemi Awolowo from Nigeria – studied in the United States at black universities (Lincoln University, Howard University) and absorbed the pan-African ideas

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(Awolowo 1960; Azikiwe 1968 [1937]; Nkrumah 1962, 1963; Shepperson and Price (on Chilembwe) 1958). In 1900 a worldwide pan-African movement was founded. Its first congresses – 1900 and 1921 in London, 1919 in Paris, 1923 in Lisbon and 1927 in New York – were dominated by the black Americans. However, in the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, the Africans (Nkrumah, Banda, Jomo Kenyatta) became prominent, although an important American delegation (Du Bois, Padmore, Amy Garvey, Ras Makonnen) still participated. In Manchester the first demands for national self-determination, freedom, democracy and independence were voiced, while the old, preWorld War II goals of protection, mandate and trusteeship were rejected. (On the Pan-African congresses, see Geiss 1974; Langley 1973; Thompson 1969).

FROM PRIMARY RESISTANCE TO PROTO-NATIONALISM African nationalism stems both from the Americas and from Africa. Though the ‘American’ contribution was of great ideological importance, early resistance to colonial conquest and colonial rule prepared the ground for the emergence of Africa-rooted African nationalism. If nationalism is understood simply as opposition to foreign rule, this implies it developed in the early days of colonial rule (Hodgkin 1956). If, however, nationalism is seen as a ‘modern’ ideology aiming at self-determination, nationstates, sovereignty, national unity, modernization and cultural roots, and if it is a movement led by modern, educated leaders leading modern mass-movements, parties or guerilla groups, then the stirrings of early anti-colonial wars are pre-nationalist. They are nevertheless important for the later emergence of full-scale nationalism. The early anti-colonial wars in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century establish a continuity of resistance from the early days of colonialism to independence in the 1960s. In fact, many territories were

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occupied by unequal treaties with traditional rulers, and in many colonies there were, alongside rebellion and resistance, long periods of tranquility, passivity and even collaboration. Colonial powers very much exploited the diversity and enmity of various African groups within the colony by a policy of divide et impera. Nevertheless, at one time or the other, most colonial territories saw revolts and resistance, which African nationalism would later on be able to build on. Anti-colonial resistance in the late nineteenth century is called ‘primary resistance’, that is, resistance of local ethnic or sub-ethnic groups, led by traditional rulers and chiefs, against the colonial conquest. Such were, for example, the Swahili resistance to the German conquest of the East African coast, the Ashanti Wars against the British and the Kingdom of Dahomey’s war against the French. Later on came the ‘early rebellions’ against an established colonial administration and its abuses. These were usually large-scale rebellions, encompassed a variety of traditional and ethnic groups and were led by new leaders, ‘charismatic prophets’ who had no traditional status, but were not ‘modern’ in the sense of having been Western-educated. These rebellions broke out for a variety of reasons – insults by racist colonial officials, abuse of the native religion, forced labour (e.g. the Shona and Ndebele rebellion in Rhodesia and the MajiMaji in German East Africa), taxation on heads, women or huts (e.g. the Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone), opposition to disarmament (e.g. the Basuto Gun War), land expropriation and the seizure of cattle (e.g. the Herero Revolt in German South-West Africa) and cruel treatment by the colonial administration and their local collaborators. Primary resistance and early rebellions were a source of pride and inspiration for future nationalists. They proved that Africans had not been merely ‘partitioned’; they had fought and resisted, had shown courage in the face of a modern army and had not surrendered easily. They had sometimes even been victorious – the Ethiopians defeated the Italian army at Adowa (1896), the Hehe of East Africa wiped out an entire German Expeditionary Force and

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the Basuto’s Gun War prevented Basutoland (today’s Lesotho) from being annexed to South Africa and settled by whites. The victories, still emphasized in today’s African historiography and narratives, demonstrate that Africans did have military skills and organizational capabilities and, contrary to colonial race theory and prejudice, were in no sense inferior. (On the primary resistance and early rebellion and their connection to modern nationalism, see Ranger 1968.) The period between the world wars is a period of proto-nationalism, or evolutionary nationalism. Proto-nationalism did not have the characteristics of a fully fledged nationalism, but had prepared the ground for its emergence later on. By the end of World War I most rebellions had been crushed by force and the colonies had been ‘pacified’. In the 1920s and 1930s another development took place, which prepared the ground for the emergence of a post-World War II full-scale anti-colonial nationalism. Modern African social, cultural and political organizations were founded by members of the new African intelligentsia. In the colonial capitals and urban centres of most colonies, unions, congresses, parties, veterans’ associations, school graduate clubs and cultural circles emerged. Their demands were modest – more equality, more representation in legislative bodies, more openings for Africans in the middle and upper levels of the public service, the abolition of discriminatory laws. There were no demands for independence or decolonization. It had not yet become full-scale modern nationalism. It was, however, ‘proto-nationalism’, first because the demands were partially ‘national’, secondly because some of the leaders would later on lead the nationalist struggle and, finally, because there was some organizational continuity between the proto-nationalist organizations and the future nationalist movements (Geiss 1974).

CULTURAL NATIONALISM Culture is important for a people’s identity and, as such, plays an important part in many

nationalisms. It was especially important in African nationalism. The African renaissance had to overcome colonial notions of Africa’s inferiority, primitiveness and lack of meaningful culture. While some Africans imitated everything European and Western, thus internalizing psychological colonialism which claimed Africa was ‘different and unequal’ or ‘different and inferior’, the nationalists countered this with ‘Africa is different and equal’, and sometimes with ‘different and superior’. One such voice of cultural nationalism was found in négritude, a movement led by Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Senghor of Senegal. In the 1930s they already underscored the beauty of African music, folklore, painting, sculpture, dance and poetry. While colonialists saw Africa as savage and primitive, the proponents of négritude pointed out that this so-called ‘primitiveness’ was in reality an expression of humanity, harmony, spontaneity, love, intuition, vitality, warmth, simplicity and reflected the African’s closeness to the other, to tradition, nature, land and homeland. The African cultural nationalists recognized Europe’s advantage in military skills, technology and rationality, but they stressed African hospitality and solidarity, the African attitude toward the aged, and the egalitarian, cooperative and ‘democratic’ character of African society. (On cultural nationalism, see AMSAC 1962; Césaire 1971 [1947]; Diop 1959, 1962; Hymans 1971; Senghor 1945, 1990.)

LIBERAL IDEAS, MODERNIZATION AND ANTI-COLONIAL NATIONALISM In the 1930s and 1940s liberal-democratic ideas about human rights and liberties, about national self-determination, the rule of law and the equality of peoples and races, and about tolerance and justice gradually percolated into Africa. Africa’s new elites absorbed these ideas at British, French and American universities, through their contacts with French socialists and British Labour leaders, and through the teachings of liberal-minded missionaries in Africa. Nkrumah, Azikiwe,

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Tanganyika’s Julius Nyerere, Kenyatta and his fellow Kenyan Tom Mboya, Senghor, Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavuvu from the Belgian Congo, Banda, Uganda’s Milton Obote, Northern Rhodesia’s Kenneth Kaunda, Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela all fought against Western colonialism in the name of Western liberal values. They demanded that the West realize its own goals and values, but this time in Africa and for Africans. (On the introduction of liberal ideas, see Avineri 1963; Braganca and Wallerstein 1982; Hanna 1964; Hodgkin 1956; Kedourie 1970; Mutiso and Rohio 1975; Neuberger 1986a; Taylor 2002.) The liberal ideas of freedom did not grow in a vacuum. Socio-economic change – such as urbanization, modern transportation, the spread of Western education, growing literacy, commodity agriculture replacing subsistence agriculture, international trade, the rapid rise of Christianity and Islam, the establishment of workers’ unions, student organizations, ethnic associations and political parties – prepared the ground for the rise of nationalism. In Africa’s new colonial towns – in Dakar, Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, Leopoldville (today’s Kinshasa), Dar-es-Salaam, Nairobi, Kampala and Luanda – a ‘national’ consciousness, crosscutting ethnic loyalties, grew among the new urban elites. Associations based on class, profession or education, developed a ‘national’ orientation and identity. Racial segregation in the colonial capitals, the visible juxtaposition of white suburbs and African slums created the conditions for nationalist mobilization. Modern transportation made it possible for leaders from different regions and ethnic groups to meet, and for urban party activists to reach the countryside. Information and ideas were transmitted via radio and newspapers in colonial and African languages. Modernization created a small, but sociologically and politically important, working class employed in mines and ports, on railways and in the colonial administration. Their wages were low and they worked alongside white workers whose wages were much higher. All employers and managers were white. The rise of an African working class led to the establishment of

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unions that made the connection between their miserable living conditions and colonialism, and played a pivotal role in anti-colonial nationalism. The nationalist parties were also a product of modernization since parties cannot exist without educated leaders, a politicized public, a modern press and modern transportation and communication. Anti-colonial nationalism, as represented by parties like the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the West African Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), the Union Camerounaise (UC) and the Union Nationale Congolaise (UNC), would be unthinkable without the socioeconomic modernization of the 1930s and 1940s. (On the connection between modernization and the rise of nationalism, see Aluko 1974; Birmingham 1995; Coleman 1971; Falola 2001; Hodgkin 1956; Joseph 1977; Mazrui and Tidy 1984; Sklar 1994; Wallerstein 1966; Young 1970.) Full scale anti-colonial nationalism erupted in Africa after World War II, when hundreds of thousand of Africans had fought on the Allied side in the name of liberty and selfdetermination, had perceived the gap between the proclamation of the Allies and colonial reality, seen the whites slaughtering each other, and the British and French need of African and Indian troops. The 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester indicated a turning point. There was deep disillusionment with pan-Negroism. In the United States the struggle against oppression and for equality increasingly became a struggle for civic rights in America itself. Pan-Negroism became anti-colonial nationalism – more African, less based on race and culture (compared to racial pan-Africanism and négritude), fiercely anti-colonial and more political and territorial. The ultimate aim was liberation, though in the 1940s and 1950s, it still remained unclear whether the focus was on ‘Africa’, on the ‘colonial peoples’, on regions like West Africa, East Africa or Central Africa, or on particular territories like Uganda or Nigeria.

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Reformist proto-nationalism gave way to movements which arose all over Africa and demanded not only liberation, independence, self-determination and autonomy, but also democracy, ‘freedom now’, majority rule, ‘one man one vote’ and human rights. The movement also had socio-economic goals – modernization, industrialization and education. Its aims were future-oriented rather than to revert to a traditional pre-colonial Africa, as had been the aim of primary resistance and early rebellion. Modern anti-colonial nationalism was led by Western-educated Africans (journalists, teachers, social scientists and union leaders), not by chiefs, emirs and sultans. It was a modern, polycentric nationalism (see Smith 1971), which wanted to integrate Africa into the family of nations, to assure her a respectable place on the world stage, and to close the gap between the ‘have’ nations of the North and the ‘have not’ nations of the South. Its language was no longer moderate, gradualist and evolutionary, but harshly anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, opposed to exploitation and calling for mobilization and struggle. The means were either a determined political struggle – demonstrations, rallies, general strikes, electoral competition and the mobilization of outside support in the colonial countries or the UN – or a violent struggle, that is, guerrilla warfare. In some countries (such as Tanganyika, Uganda, Nyassaland, the Belgian Congo or the Ivory Coast), the struggle was mainly political; in others (such as French Cameroun, Angola, Mozambique, GuineaBissau, Southern Rhodesia), it was to a large extent a bloody war for liberation. In still other territories, like South Africa, Kenya and Namibia, the struggle was mixed, led either by one major anti-colonial movement (South Africa) or by competing and sometimes complementary political and violent anti-colonial movements (Kenya). (On modern anti-colonialism, see Birmingham 1995, 1998; Hanna 1964; Hodgkin 1956; Maddox and Welliver 1993; Neuberger 1986a; Nkrumah 1962, 1963; Nyerere 1966; Young 1970.) Anti-colonial nationalism started as an elite-nationalism of a small circle of intellectuals. It then spread to the wider urban

population – mainly white-collar and blue-collar workers in the civil service, the nascent industries, the ports, the railways and the mines. It finally became mass-nationalism when the peasantry was mobilized. (On the way nationalism spreads, see Hroch 1985.) The success of anti-colonial nationalism cannot be called into question. In 1957 the first African colony (the Gold Coast) became independent. In the 1960s almost all British, French, Italian (Somalia), Belgian (Congo, Rwanda, Burundi) and Spanish (Equatorial Guinea) colonies achieved independence, to be joined in the 1970s by all Portuguese territories (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe). Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, the last bastions of European rule (Southern Rhodesia, South-West Africa and South Africa) succumbed to the anti-colonial onslaught.

SOCIALISM, COMMUNISM AND ANTI-COLONIAL NATIONALISM The October Revolution in Russia (1917) has made communism a major force in the twentieth century. An in-depth analysis of anti-colonial nationalism in Africa should not disregard its direct and indirect impact, which has accelerated Europe’s withdrawal from Africa. An entire generation of educated Africans who aspired to national liberation was deeply affected by Marxist–Leninist ideas about the connection between colonialism and capitalism, about the exploitative economic nature of colonialism, about its being a product of the capitalist system. Lenin’s Imperialism – the Highest Stage of Capitalism had a profound influence (Lenin 1939 [1917]). Lenin argued that imperialism was based on the concentration of capital, the fusion of industrial and financial capital, the export of capital to underdeveloped countries, the formation of international monopolies and the partition of the world among the capitalist powers. In the early years of the Soviet Union, anti-capitalism became identified with hostility towards the West, that is with hostility towards Western companies that operated in Tsarist Russia and

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towards the ‘imperialist’ powers that intervened in the Russian Civil War. Chinese Communism also perceived capitalism and Western imperialism – which directly or indirectly ruled China via spheres of influence and capitulations – as two sides of the same coin. The communist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba may be seen as antiWestern nationalism, as opposition to foreign rule by imperial powers and capitalist companies. African anti-colonial nationalism was profoundly influenced by developments in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, Vietnam and Cuba. African nationalists also associated colonial rule with capitalist exploitation by Western companies and European settlers. Capitalism was identified as a worldwide system based on the extraction of primary products from Africa and the exploitation of cheap African labour. In the eyes of the anticolonial nationalists, colonialism was almost identical with Western capitalism, and anticolonial nationalism was mostly anti-Western and anti-capitalist. The communists saw the West as the common enemy of the Soviet Union, of all Communist parties around the world and of the colonized peoples. For a short period, some of the early pan-Africanists, like Du Bois, Padmore and Césaire, were members of the Communist Party (in the United States, Great Britain and France). Other founding fathers of African nationalism, like Nkrumah and Kenyatta, had loose connections with communist circles during their studies in England. In the postWorld War II era, a close cooperation developed in French West Africa between the French Communist Party (PCF) and the major nationalist party, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), led by Félix Houphouet-Boigny from the Ivory Coast and Modibo Keita from the French Soudan (today’s Mali). The image of the Soviet Union as a state that had, within a very short period of time, crushed capitalism, contained Western intervention, instituted agrarian reform and had become a leading industrial and military force, raised the admiration of African nationalists. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, capitalism was seen as an unsuitable model for rapid modernization as

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it had taken the West generations to industrialize and modernize. At the time, African nationalists were unaware of Stalinist oppression and terror, and their image of Soviet and Chinese progress was highly flawed. The leaders of Africa’s anti-colonial movements accepted any assistance for their struggle. The Soviet Union and the communist parties in the West strongly supported this struggle because it weakened their Western enemy. The linkage between communism and anti-colonial nationalism in Asia accelerated the process of decolonization in Africa. The relatively swift decolonization of Western and Eastern Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s aimed at preventing protracted guerrilla warfare and communist-nationalist fusion à la Vietnam. In the Portuguese colonies, from which Portugal refused to withdraw until 1974, the anti-colonial struggle became very much radicalized by guerrilla movements led by Marxists and supported by the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. The same held for the Southern African territories under white settler domination, namely South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and South-West Africa. Different social groups in Africa identified with anti-Western nationalism and anticapitalism. Peasants, integrated into the colonial money economy and growing cash crops for export, resented their dependence on impersonal market mechanisms, which determined the price of ground-nuts, coffee, cocoa and cotton and had a great impact on their wellbeing. They were very much aware of their exploitation by Europeans because the gap between what they were paid for primary commodities and what the foreign companies earned by selling the products in Paris, London or Brussels was enormous. Africans were often dependent on Arab or Indian money-lenders, whom they considered to be part of the hated colonial system. In addition, colonialism introduced private ownership of land in areas that had hitherto only known communal ownership; this created a class of landlords, resulting in populist resentment amongst the peasantry that could be mobilized by the new nationalist parties and movements.

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Artisans and small-scale retail traders, for whom modernization and colonialism meant competition by foreign imports and foreign trade networks, joined the nationalists. So did the workers. Their employers in ports, mines, industries and railways were either the colonial government or the European foreign companies. The labourers were uprooted from their villages, from the traditional order and from the safety net of the larger family. They lived in slums, felt isolated and alienated, their wages were meagre, and the contrasting wealth of the Europeans was all too visible. They developed growing feelings of hatred against white rule and white capitalists. This could easily be mobilized by the nationalist intellectuals and translated into ideas about the need for a radically different social order. (On the mobilization of the different social groups, see Kautsky 1976.) Most anti-colonial nationalists did not want to imitate the Soviet or Chinese model. They wanted a socialism of their own, a national variety they called ‘African Socialism’. African Socialism emphasized its unique African character, and can therefore be considered a form of nationalism. It rejected some of the main tenets of European Marxism, such as class struggle, hostility towards religion and historical materialism. Despite the fact that African Socialists also accepted the capitalist explanation of colonialism, they did not – as opposed to the orthodox Marxists – believe in the power of economics to shape politics. African Socialists also argued that precolonial Africa was socialist and that Socialism had therefore not been imported from elsewhere. Socialism simply meant a return to the roots, the reinstatement of a traditional society based on solidarity, communality and equality. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania called this African Socialism Ujamaa (familyhood) in order to stress its African roots. The way African socialists looked at pre-colonial African society was very similar to that of the cultural nationalists, such as the proponents of négritude. (On African Socialism, see Friedland and Rosberg 1964; Nyerere 1968; Senghor 1964.) During the anti-colonial struggle almost all African leaders identified with one or the other variety of socialism. Very few believed in

capitalism. African socialists and nationalists strove not only for independence, but also for a socio-economic revolution based on accelerated industrialization, a centralized economy and state planning. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s very few believed in a laissez-faire market economy. However, African Socialism failed to effect a socio-economic transformation. This is one of the reasons why the later anti-colonial movements in the Portuguese colonies and in Southern Africa veered towards radicalism – radical nationalism, radical socialism and guerrilla warfare.

RADICAL NATIONALISM Radical nationalism developed in the Portuguese colonies and the white settler territories of Southern Africa, which refused to join the decolonization process prevalent in most of West, East and Central Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Portuguese colonialism dismissed moderate demands for reform and outlawed all political organizations and parties and continued with its harsh oppressive policies and forced labour. In defiance of African nationalism and liberal public opinion in the West, a harsh Apartheid regime was imposed on South and South-West Africa. In 1965, a white settler government issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Southern Rhodesia. It is no coincidence that most territories that did not gain independence in the 1960s and 1970s were white settler colonies where African land was expropriated on a large scale and where the settlers imposed a policy of oppression and racial segregation. In most of these territories, armed struggle became the mode of operation of the national liberation movement. Radical nationalism was deeply influenced by the writings of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who participated in the Algerian war of independence. In his famous books Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon argued for violent struggle as the only weapon of the colonized to meet the challenge of violent

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colonialism. In his view only violence could mobilize the colonized masses, integrate the intellectuals and the masses, undo the colonial divide and rule, and restore dignity by creating a ‘new man’: active, creative, courageous and modern. He called not only for independence, but also for the total destruction of the colonial order. He rejected as a ‘colonialist invention’ and a ‘corrupting compromise’ any decolonization initiated by colonial powers and accepted by moderate nationalism. The radical movements – the ANC and PAC in South Africa, ZANU and ZAPU in Rhodesia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA in Angola – first tried the political option, but after its rejection by the colonial governments, they opted for armed struggle. This frequently occurred after colonial massacres (1945 in Setif/Algeria; 1960–61 in Mueda and Xinavane/Mozambique; 1960 in Sharpville/ South Africa; 1959 in Pijiguiti/ Guinea-Bissau). The guerrilla movements aimed at achieving independence and liberation, and also wanted to do away with all the attributes of postcolonial neo-colonialism – the capitalist system, dependence on the West, the presence of foreign companies and the rule of African oligarchies. Their rhetoric was harshly anti-imperialist, anticolonialist, a populist hailing of the masses and the revolution. (On radical nationalism, see Cabral 1969; Fanon 1952, 1961; Henriksen 1983; Joseph 1977; Mondlane 1969; Neuberger 1990; Nkrumah 1968, 1969, 1970.)

CONTINENTAL PAN-AFRICANISM Continental pan-Africanism is another variety of African nationalism. While racial panAfricanism (pan-Negroism) was still important in the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester (1945), pan-Africanism became continental in the 1950s. It detached itself from the black diaspora and now included Arab North Africa. The driving force behind this development was Kwame Nkrumah, who became Ghana’s first president in 1957. In a way, continental

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pan-Africanism imitated Gamal Abdul Nasser’s pan-Arabism, which had a strong appeal in the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s. Continental pan-Africanism was built on what was perceived as a common colonial past of Arab and African Africa, and on a growing AfroAsian solidarity, which emerged after the first Afro-Asian summit in Bandung/Indonesia in 1955. These were the times of a rising ‘neutralist’ Third Bloc (later to include Latin America and become the Third World). White Arabs were accepted by pan-Africans as fellow Africans and non-Europeans, and as part of the ‘colonial peoples’. Nasser’s strong support of African independence movements, which had their base in Cairo, whence they could broadcast in African languages, strengthened African– Arab ties. So did the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), which became a symbol of anti-colonial struggle, heroism and pride. In Africa Must Unite, Nkrumah proposed the creation of a United States of Africa, a strong united African state similar to the USA and the Soviet Union (Nkrumah 1963). He thought this was the only way to liberate the whole of Africa, to create development and prosperity through a common market, to have an African say in world affairs and to avoid the weakness caused by balkanization and fragmentation. Nkrumah and his supporters thought Africa’s partition and borders were artificial and would become redundant in the future United States of Africa. In April 1958 Nkrumah convened the first Conference of Independent African States (CIAS), to be attended by African Ghana, Liberia and Ethiopia, as well as Arab Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco and Tunisia. In December 1958 another important conference convened in Accra, the All African Peoples’ Conference (AAPC), which assembled representatives of governments, parties and underground movements from all over Africa. In the 1960s, the CIAS and the AAPC convened annually. Nkrumah and other leaders also tried to fulfil the pan-African dream by uniting colonial territories. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s the efforts to create unions of independent African states included the Ghana–Guinea

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Union, the Association of Independent African States (Ghana and Liberia), the Union of African States (Ghana, Guinea and Mali), the Mali Federation (French Soudan and Senegal) and the East African Federation (Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda). All these efforts ended in failure. The only fusions to succeed were the Republic of Somalia (Italian Somalia and British Somaliland), which disintegrated in the 1990s, the unification of French Cameroun and the British Southern Cameroons, the unification of British Togoland and the Gold Coast within Ghana, the fusion of Nigeria and the Northern Cameroons, and the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which resulted in the creation of Tanzania in 1964. There were local, historical, cultural and ethnic reasons for each of these successful mergers, but pan-Africanism also played a role. A United States of Africa failed because territorial nationalism proved to be stronger. The new ruling elites did not want to give up their sovereignty and power; in addition, there were deep cleavages between Arab Africa and Black Africa, between the Francophone and Anglophone states and between the proWestern and the pro-Soviet governments during the Cold War. Instead of achieving a maximalist pan-Africanism, what was achieved was a minimalist-functionalist version of panAfricanism in the form of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), founded in 1963 and transformed into the African Union (AU) in 2002. The OAU/AU is not one state, but a loose international organization of states that remain independent and insist on the principles of sovereign equality, non-interference and territorial integrity. The OAU was, nevertheless, very successful in its struggle for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies, UDI-Rhodesia, SouthWest Africa and Apartheid South Africa. Both the OAU and, later on, the AU effectively put an end to some inter-African wars (e.g. Morocco– Algeria in the 1960s, Ethiopia–Eritrea in the 1990s) and to civil wars (e.g. Mozambique in the 1980s). However, it failed in other cases (e.g. Nigeria–Biafra in the 1960s, Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s, Rwanda in the 1990s). The OAU/AU also became an organization for inter-African cooperation in economics, transportation,

education and technology. Similar functionalist organizations were established on the regional level, the most successful of which are the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which comprises both Anglophone and Francophone states, and the Southern African Development and Cooperation Council (SADC). (On continental and regional PanAfricanism, see El-Ayouty and Zartman 1984; Foltz 1965; Legum 1965; Mazrui and Tidy 1984; Neuberger 1977; Nyerere 1963; Welch 1966.)

TERRITORIAL NATIONALISM AND NATION-BUILDING The failure of pan-Africanism has meant that nation-building has had to be accomplished by territorial nationalism in each colony about to become an independent state. With few exceptions, like Somalia, Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, the populations in these states were multi-ethnic. There was not one ethno-cultural nation in one single colony so that the newly independent states were not nation-states. Anticolonial nationalism in the various colonies was a ‘nationalism without a nation’, a nationalism that aimed at liberation, self-determination, unity, power, prestige and finding roots, to create a new nation. The French, British and Italian nations came into being in a similar way. Anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalism could build on a common colonial history, which had lasted for 60–80 years, on a common European language (French, English, Portuguese) among the territory’s elites, on links established within the colony-turned-state through commerce, transportation, communication and urbanization, and on a common anti-colonial struggle. Many of the anti-colonial movements did indeed stress their loyalty to the territory in its colonial boundaries by adopting the colony’s name. They were named the Kenya African National Union, the Tanganyika African National Union, the Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union, the Nyassaland African Congress, the South West African Peoples’ Organization (SWAPO), the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire, the Frente de

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Libertaçâo de Moçambique (FRELIMO), the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) and the Movimiento Popular para la Liberación de Angola (MPLA). Most of them insisted on maintaining the ‘sanctity’ of the colonial boundaries. In many colonies and postcolonial states, major ethnic groups, such as the Kikuyu and Kalenjin in Kenya, the Hausa-Fulani in Nigeria, the Wolof in Senegal and the Amhara in Ethiopia, had vested interests in preserving the postcolonial status quo. (On the problematics of nation-building within the colonies turned states, see Neuberger 1994, 2000; Nzongola-Ntalaja 1993; Rotberg 1966; Rothchild 1986, 1991; Rothchild and Oluronsola 1983; Yeros 1999.) Various ways and means were adopted to forge new nations. Frequently, a common history was invented by the creation of integrative common myths. Thus, the Mau-Mau rebellion, led by ethnic-Kikuyu but opposed by many other ethnic groups, became an all-Kenya anticolonial struggle. The Maji-Maji Rebellion in German East Africa, the Ashanti Wars in the Gold Coast, the Herero Revolt in German South-West Africa and the Zulu Wars in South Africa have become ‘nationalized’ in a similar way in today’s Tanzania, Ghana, Namibia and South Africa respectively. (On the use of history in nation-building, see Ajayi 1966; Anderson 1991; Kalinga 1998; Neuberger 1987.) Another way to foster integration is by ‘nationalizing’ the tradition and folklore of one or several ethnic groups. In Banda’s Malawi, for instance, Chewa culture and tradition were taught to be truly Malawian (see Forster 1994). Another strategy of nation-building is through linguistic integration: either by institutionalizing one indigenous language as national language (Swahili in Tanzania, Somali in Somalia, Amharic in Ethiopia, Malagacy in Madagascar, Arabic in the Sudan, Swati in Swaziland), or by strengthening a common European lingua franca (English in post-Apartheid South Africa and Namibia, French in the Ivory Coast, Portuguese in Angola). Sometimes, a common ideology was thought to be the right device for nation-building: Ujamaa in Tanzania from the 1960s to the 1980s, Marxism–Leninism in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Islamism in Sudan in the

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1980s and 1990s, Christianity in Zambia in the 1990s and authenticité in Mobutu’s Zaire in the 1980s. New centrally located inland capitals replacing colonial coastal capitals were another device of nation-building adopted by Nigeria (Abuja), the Ivory Coast (Yamassoukro), Tanzania (Dodoma) and Malawi (Lilongwe). Another deliberate step taken to enhance the population’s pride in the historical state was by Africanizing the name of the state or of its capital. The Gold Coast thus changed its name to Ghana, the French Soudan to Mali, Southern Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, Northern Rhodesia to Zambia and Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. The capitals Leopoldville and Salisbury became Kinshasa and Harare. An additional nation-building strategy was to reduce socioeconomic gaps between regions and ethnic groups by heavily investing in the poor and disadvantaged areas. African nation-building rested on three basic strategies. One was the Jacobin strategy of homogenizing the country through coercion and with the use of force. The effort by Ethiopia under Haile Selassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam to ‘amharize’ the non-Amharas by suppressing their languages and culture, and by discriminating against Muslims is one example. Other examples of such Jacobin strategy are the wars waged by Sudan (1955–72, 1983–2002 and 2004) to arabize and Islamize the Africans of Southern Sudan and Darfur; the slaughter of the Arabs and Indians in Zanzibar (1964), the expulsion of the Indians from Uganda (1971) and the genocide perpetrated in Rwanda (1994). A second basic strategy is gradualist nationbuilding. In an attempt to mould one ethnocultural nation in the long run this strategy accepts pluralism in the short run while rejecting coercion and force. This melting-pot strategy relies on integration by a common European or African language, communication and the growth of a shared patriotism over time. It was favoured by regimes like Nkrumah’s Ghana, Nyerere’s Tanzania and Banda’s Malawi. A third strategy aims to build an ethnoculturally heterogeneous, pluralist civic nation.

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Pluralism may be either fully insitutionalized through federalism or regional autonomy (as it has been in Nigeria since independence, in Ethiopia after 1991, and in Sudan between 1972 and 1983). It can also be partially formalized through ethno-cultural provinces (as in Kenya) or provinces that are at least in part ethno-cultural (as with the Western Cape and Kwazulu-Natal in post-Apartheid South Africa). One additional pluralist strategy is non-institutionalized pluralism, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the Ivory Coast. (On the different strategies, see Neuberger 1984, 2000.) CONCLUSION African nationalism has meant different things to different people over different periods of time: pan-Negroism in the second half of the nineteenth century until World War II; primary resistance and early rebellions against colonial rule in Africa from the 1880s to World War I; proto-nationalism between the world wars; modern anti-colonial nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s; radical nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s; territorial nationalism before independence and nation-building in the postcolonial state. One could have added white settler nationalism in South Africa or Southern Rhodesia, but the focus of this chapter has been on black African nationalism. REFERENCES Ajayi, A. J. F. (1966) ‘The Place of African History and Culture in the Process of Nation-Building in Africa South of the Sahara’, in I. M. Wallerstein (ed.), Social Change: the Colonial Situation. New York: Wiley. pp. 606–16. Aluko, O. (1974) ‘Politics of Decolonization in British West Africa’, in A. J. F. Ajayi and M. Crowder (eds), History of West Africa. London: Longman. pp. 622–30. AMSAC (ed.) (1962) Par-Africanism Reconsidered. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Anderson, B. R. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Avineri, S. (1963) ‘Afro-Asia and the Western Political Tradition’, Parliamentary Affairs, 15 (2): 139–45. Awolowo, O. (1960) Awo: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Azikiwe, N. (1968 [1937]) Renascent Africa. London: Cass. Birmingham, D. (1995) The Decolonization of Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Birmingham, D. (1998) Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Blyden, E. W. (1967 [1889]) Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braganca, A. D. and Wallerstein, I. M. (eds) (1982) The African Liberation Reader, Vols 1, 2, 3. London: Zed. Cabral, A. (1969) Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle: Selected Texts. London: Stage 1. Césaire, A. (1971 [1947]) Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine. Coleman, J. S. (1971) Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Diop, A. (1962) ‘Remarks on African Personality and Négritude’, in AMSAC (ed.), Pan-Africanism Reconsidered. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. pp. 337–45. Diop, C. A. (1959) L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique Noire. Paris: Présence Africaine. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1964 [1903]) The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1965 [1947]) The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has played in World History. New York: International Publishers. El-Ayouty, Y. and Zartman, W. I. (eds) (1984) The OAU after Twenty Years. New York: Praeger. Esedebe, P. O. (1994) Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–1991. Washington, DC: Howard University. Falola, T. (2001) Nationalism and African Intellectuals. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1961) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Firmin, A. (1985 [1885]) De l’égalité des races humaines (anthropologie positive). Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Éditions Panorama. Foltz, W. (1965) From French West Africa to the Mali Federation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Forster, P. G. (1994) ‘Culture, Nationalism and the Invention of Tradition in Malawi’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 32: 477–97.

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Fredrickson, G. M. (1995) Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Friedland, W. H. and Rosberg, C. G. (eds) (1964) African Socialism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Garvey, A. J. (1963) Garvey and Garveyism. Kingston, Jamaica/London: Collier and Macmillan. Garvey, A. J. (ed.) (1980 [1923]) Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. New York: Atheneum. Geiss, I. (1974) The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen. Gobineau, A., Comte de. (1967 [1853–55]) Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. Paris: P. Belfond. Hanna, W. J. (1964) Independent Black Africa: The Politics of Freedom. Chicago: Rand McNally. Henriksen, T. H. (1983) Revolution and Counterrevolution: Mozambique’s War of Independence. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Hodgkin, T. L. (1956) Nationalism in Colonial Africa. London: Muller. Hroch, M. (1985) Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymans, J. L. (1971) Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Joseph, R. A. (1977) Radical Nationalism in Cameroun: Social Origins of the UPC Rebellion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kalinga, O. J. M. (1998) ‘The Production of History in Malawi in the 1960s’, African Affairs, October, 523–49. Kautsky, J. (ed.) (1976) Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries: Nationalism and Communism. Huntington, NY: R. E. Krieger. Kedourie, E. (ed.) (1970) Nationalism in Asia and Africa. New York: World Publishing Company. Langley, A. A. (1973) Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900–1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Legum, C. (1965) Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide. New York: Praeger. Lenin, V. I. (1939 [1917]) Imperialism – the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. New York: International Publishers. Lynch, E. W. (ed.) (1971) Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden. London: Cass. Maddox, G. and Welliver, T. K. (eds) (1993) Articles on Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa: A

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Four-Volume Anthology of Scholarly Articles. New York: Garland. Mazrui, A. A. and Tidy, M. (1984) Nationalism and New States in Africa from about 1935 to the Present. Nairobi: Heinemann. Mondlane, E. (1969) The Struggle for Mozambique. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Mutiso, G.-C. M. and Rohio, S. W. (eds) (1975) Readings in African Political Thought. London: Heinemann. Neuberger, B. (1975) ‘Racial Nationalism in Africa’, Wiener Library Bulletin, XXVIII (35/6): 15–156. Neuberger, B. (1977) ‘A Comparative Analysis of Pan-Africanism’, in R. A. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction. Washington, DC: University Press of America. pp. 237–58. Neuberger, B. (1984) ‘On Dealing with Multiethnicity in Africa and Europe’, Plural Societies, XV (3): 239–54. Neuberger, B. (1985) ‘Early African Nationalism, Judaism and Zionism: E. W. Blyden’, Jewish Social Studies, XLVII (2): 151–65. Neuberger, B. (1986a) National Self-Determination in Postcolonial Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Neuberger, B. (1986b) ‘W. E. B. Du Bois on Black Nationalism and Zionism’, Journal of Jewish Sociology, XXVIII (2): 139–44. Neuberger, B. (1987) ‘History and African Concepts of Nationhood’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, XIV (1): 161–79. Neuberger, B. (1990) ‘Nationalisms Compared: ANC, PLO, IRA’, in H. B. Giliomee and J. Gagiano (eds), The Elusive Search for Peace: South Africa, Israel and Northern Ireland. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. pp. 54–77. Neuberger, B. (1994) ‘State and Nation in African Thought’, in J. Hutchinson and A. D. Smith (eds), Nationalism. pp. 231–5. Neuberger, B. (2000) ‘Ethnic Groups and the State in Africa’, in S. Ben-Ami, Y. Peled and A. Spektorowsky (eds), Ethnic Challenges to the Modern State. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 294–308. Nkrumah, K. (1962) Towards Colonial Freedom. London: Heinemann. Nkrumah, K. (1963) Africa Must Unite. London: Heinemann. Nkrumah, K. (1968) Handbook for Revolutionary Warfare. London: Panaf Books. Nkrumah, K. (1969) Dark Days in Ghana. New York: International Publishers. Nkrumah, K. (1970) Class Struggle in Africa. New York: International Publishers.

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Nyerere, J. (1963) ‘A United States for Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies, I (1): 1–6. Nyerere, J. (1966) Freedom and Unity (Uhuru na Umoja). Dar-es-Salaam: Oxford University Press. Nyerere, J. (1968) Freedom and Socialism (Uhuru na Ujamaa). Dar-es-Salaam: Oxford University Press. Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (1993) Nation-Building and State Building in Africa. Harare: SAPES Books. Padmore, G. (1956) Pan-Africanism or Communism?: The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: Dobson. Ranger, T. O. (1968) ‘Connections between Primary Resistance Movements and Modern Nationalism in East and Central Africa’, Journal of African History, IX (3 and 4): 437–53, 631–41. Rotberg, R. I. (1966) ‘African Nationalism: Concept or Confusion’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 4 (1): 33–46. Rothchild, D. (1986) ‘State and Ethnicity in Africa: A Policy Perspective’, in N. Nevitte and C. H. Kennedy (eds), Ethnic Preference and Public Policy in Developing States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. pp. 15–62. Rothchild, D. (1991) ‘An Interactive Model for StateEthnic Relations’, in F. Deng and W. I. Zartman (eds), Conflict Resolution in Africa. Washington, DC: Brookings. pp. 190–215. Rothchild, D. and Oluronsola, V. (eds) (1983) State versus Ethnic Claims. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Senghor, L. S. (1945) La Communauté impériale française. Paris: Alsatia. Senghor, L. S. (1964) On African Socialism. New York: Praeger.

Senghor, L. S. (1990) Oeuvre poétique. Paris: Seuil. Shepperson, G. and Price, T. (1958) Independent Africa: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sklar, R. L. (ed.) (1994) Nationalism and Development in Africa: Selected Essays/James Smoot Coleman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Smith, A. D. (1971) Theories of Nationalism. New York: Harper. Taylor, R. H. (ed.) (2002) The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Thompson, V. B. (1969) Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism. London: Longman. Van Deburg, W. L. (ed.) (1997) Modern Black Nationalism: from Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan. New York: New York University Press. Wallerstein, I. M. (ed.) (1966) Social Change: The Colonial Situation. New York: Wiley. Welch, C. (1966) Dream of Unity: Pan Africanism and Political Integration in West Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yeros, P. (ed.) (1999) Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics. New York: St Martin’s Press. Young, C. (1970) ‘Decolonization in Africa’, in L. H. Gann and P. Duignan (eds), Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 450–502.

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43 A Nation before Nationalism: The Civic and Ethnic Construction of America S U S A N-M A R Y G R A N T

The modern debate over American nationalism is a truly trans-Atlantic one, as befits its origins in nineteenth-century America when two individuals, one French and one American, argued for the exceptional nature of America’s national development. The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who published his assessment of Democracy in America in the 1830s, has been described as ‘the initiator of the writings on American exceptionalism’ (Kammen 1993; Lipset 1996: 17). His perspective was reinforced in 1893 when the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued at the Chicago World’s Fair for the significance of the frontier in creating a unique American identity, or what he saw as the ‘nationalizing tendency of the West’.1 Between them, Tocqueville and Turner set the parameters for much of the modern debate over American nationalism. Despite the fact that most of that debate has taken place without overt reference either to Tocqueville or to Turner’s famous frontier thesis, it remains the case that much of the scholarly interest – perhaps more so the relative lack of interest – in American nationalism is predicated on the proposition that Americans are unlike other peoples; that they are, in fundamental ways, exceptional: their history, their

development and their national identity set them apart from, and perhaps even at odds with, other societies and nations. Seymour Martin Lipset, revisiting his earlier analysis of ‘the first new nation’, notes the widespread belief that America is ‘qualitatively different’ from other nations, a belief derived from America’s revolutionary origins, ‘the first colony, other than Iceland, to become independent’. As such, while other nations ‘define themselves by a common history as birthright communities’, Americans have had to look elsewhere for the bonds that would provide national cohesion. Unable to lay claim to a common ancestry, a common history, shared cultural or political traditions or even the land itself, American nationalism was from its inception, according to Hans Kohn and others, ‘an ideological nationalism, the embodiment of an idea’, an argument that Richard Hofstadter summed up succinctly in his observation that America’s fate was ‘not to have ideologies but to be one’ (Lipset 1979; 1996: 17–18; Kohn 1945 [1944]: 289; 1961 [1957]: 25; Hofstadter in Lipset 1996: 18; Ravitch 1990: 3). For some modern scholars, however, the first new nation is actually no nation at all. Primordialists and perennialists argue that nations

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can only be constructed around ‘birthright communities’, and although they accept that societies developed on an ideological premise display national attributes, and may have constructed – as America very obviously has – many of the outward trappings of patriotism, they do not consider that such communities are nations ‘in the pristine sense of the word’ (Connor 1978: 381; 2004: 37). America’s immigrant origins may, in part, explain the reluctance of some of the major nationalism scholars to engage with America. Even modernists such as Benedict Anderson, having acknowledged that the American nation represented a revolutionary – in all senses – break with the past, have little more to say about the American case, a case further complicated by the element that scholars term Southern or sometimes more specifically Confederate nationalism (Anderson 1992: 192–3). The South, seemingly a nation within a nation because it was unable to break away from the United States during the Civil War of 1861–65 is, as such, something of a stumbling block for those seeking to identify an over-arching American identity. Consequently, although American nationalism is discussed by a variety of scholars from widely different academic disciplines ranging from sociology through history to communication studies, there has been no recent, full-length study of the American case, nor is it yet fully incorporated into the specific scholarship on nationalism. Given the persistent fascination with the question of American national identity exhibited by Europeans and Americans alike over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lack of such scholarship seems surprising, until one considers at what points American nationalism actually has inspired scholarly interest, if not yet much extended debate. American nationalism has exercised American scholars at those times when the nation faced a direct challenge, be it from immigration or from the Civil War that seemed to replicate in some respects the nationalist struggles of Europe, but it was not until America made itself felt as a force in Europe that the academic world began to contemplate the nationalist dimensions and ambitions of the New World.

REVOLUTION One of the earliest and still most valuable studies of American nationalism was provided by Kohn, who explored the American case in comparative context – up to a point – in The Idea of Nationalism, a work published during the Second World War. The fact that Kohn regarded that conflict as ‘a consequence and climax of the age of nationalism … a struggle for its meaning’ doubtless influenced his analysis of the ‘ideological’ nationalism of the New World, an analysis he developed in his 1957 study American Nationalism: An Interpretative Essay. Kohn was the first to propose the argument – later developed by Daniel Boorstin – that ‘the very slight knowledge of actual conditions of life in [colonial] America contributed to their idealization; the Americans of whom Europeans then dreamed were legendary figures rather than real human beings. For that very reason’, Kohn suggested, ‘they could become the embodiment of the European ideals’ (Kohn 1945 [1944]: x, 265). Some twenty years later, Boorstin pointed out that this idealization of the unknown was not restricted to European perspectives on the New World, but was an integral part of the development of American nationalism itself. America, he argued, ‘was so fertile a repository of hopes because it was so attractive a locale for illusions’. American life, according to Boorstin, ‘was distinguished by its lack of clear boundaries’, a situation that encouraged, rather than in any way hampered, the nation’s earliest enterprises, and influenced both the form and the function of the emergent nation itself. From ‘a European point of view’, he observed, ‘the creation of the United States was topsy-turvy. Its very existence was a paradox’. Whereas nationalism in Europe was ‘selfconscious, elaborately articulated, and passionate’, American nationalism was ‘shaped by the fact that the nation had not been born in any ecstasy of nationalist passion’. The American nation, he argued, ‘would long profit from having been born without ever having been conceived’, a point reinforced by John Murrin’s famous observation that ‘Americans had erected their constitutional roof before

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they put up national walls’ (Boorstin 1988 [1965]: 401, 221–3; Murrin 1987: 347; Parish 1995: 220; Waldstreicher 1997: 112–13; Butler 2001 [2000]). Prior to the American Revolution, of course, there was no such thing as the American nation; nationalism, however, was not lacking. The ‘nationality of American identity and consciousness does not require an explanation’, Liah Greenfeld asserts: ‘The English settlers came with a national identity; it was a given … National identity in America thus preceded the formation not only of the specific American identity … but of the institutional framework of the American nation’ (Greenfeld 1992: 402). Although historians concur that an aggrieved sense of their rights as free-born Englishmen explains, at least in some part, the colonists’ behaviour toward the mother country, it is difficult to conceive of English nationalism sustaining a people that, on the eve of independence, comprised ‘a polyglot of English, Scots, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, French and Africans’ (Butler 2001: 2). More plausible is Kohn’s description of the ‘rising stream of American nationalism’ being influenced by a combination of English nationalism and the natural rights’ philosophy of the Enlightenment, but even as the colonies debated the question of separation from Britain, this stream had hardly become a flood. ‘No sense of loyalty to America filled the hearts of the colonists before the Revolution’, Kohn observed, and it was unlikely that any such loyalty could have existed in an environment in which a heterogeneous population exhibited equally heterogeneous loyalties, either to Britain or, increasingly, to the states in which they had made their home (Kohn 1945 [1944]: 276–7). That there was a growing sense of difference, a difference that was in certain aspects ‘American’, is obvious, but to describe that sense as nationalism is premature. Indeed, as Greenfeld notes, immediately prior to the Revolution there were, in effect, 13 separate American nations, and afterwards ‘the uncompromising commitment of Americans to the purified principles of civic nationalism … was bound to hinder the formation of a consensus regarding the geo-political referent of American national loyalty, leaving open the question of

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what was, or whether there was, the American nation’ (Greenfeld 1992: 423). As Edmund Morgan put it, the American ‘nation was the child, not the father of the revolution’ (Morgan 1977: 100). In their focus on the popular rituals of the Early National period, scholars have explored the development of America’s national political culture, a process of legitimization not just for parties but for the nation itself. Via public festivals – most notably the 4th of July and Washington’s birthday – the street celebrations surrounding these, and a burgeoning press, Americans expressed themselves in what was an increasingly national voice (Newman 1997; Waldstreicher 1997; Ratcliffe 2000). Although from the early nineteenth century onwards Americans extended the franchise and evolved a mass political system, facilitated by widespread literacy and ever-expanding communication systems, scholars who identify these developments as significant to the construction of nations post-1870 fail to engage with America’s earlier efforts in the direction of modern nationhood (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Anderson 1991). In part this may be because, as Parish pointed out, the centralization that frequently accompanied such developments in other nations was lacking in early America, nor were there many overt declarations of confidence in the American nation, but rather the opposite. As Linda Kerber reminds us, the prediction that the centre could not hold was, for much of the Early National period, ‘a standard conversational gambit’ (Parish 1995: 222). An equally widespread rhetorical gambit, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, was an emphasis on the need for unity rather than on its existence. Washington’s famous Farewell Address reminded Americans that they were ‘Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country’, and urged Americans to place national loyalties over state distinctions. Lincoln, too, was not oblivious to the lack of ethnic ties in a nation of immigrants, a lack that he believed voluntary acceptance of the principles contained in the Declaration of Independence could replicate. Foreign observers and Americans alike were acutely

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aware that such patriotism as existed in the Early Republic tended to be local in form and function; it was the states, Tocqueville astutely observed, and not the Union, that Americans ‘identified with the soil; with the right of property and the domestic affections; with the recollections of the past, the labours of the present, and the hopes of the future’.2 The Revolution, it seemed, had produced a functioning federal Union, with many of the outward trappings of nationalism but not yet the imagined community that made such nationalism a cohesive and durable force. Although the years following the War of 1812 saw the growth of what Dangerfield termed a ‘common tradition’, it took the form of a new kind of introspective nationalism that did not necessarily bode well for national cohesion. There is as yet little consensus on the lineaments of antebellum American nationalism, and in some cases profound disagreement over both its nature and its durability. Donald Ratcliffe, on the one hand, has warned against too glib an assessment of the weakness of the federal Union prior to 1860, and the concomitant argument that ‘an American nation, based on a true American nationalism, developed only after’ the Civil War. The development of what he terms ‘sectional nationalisms’ was, he argues, predicated on a shared sense of ‘Americanism’, and on the feeling in the South that ‘non-Southerners were twisting Americanism into something that contradicted traditional shared values’ (Ratcliffe 2000: 28). Carl Degler, on the other hand, has argued that the Civil War ‘was not a struggle to save a failed Union, but to create a nation that until then had not come into being’ (Degler 1990: 10). In part, the apparent contradiction between those who perceive a functioning nationalism prior to the Civil War and those who focus more on the fault lines of the pre-war Union stems from a different understanding of that Union and its relationship to American nationalism: Ratcliffe’s emphasis on the national ties that bound antebellum Americans draws for its support on the political framework that the federal Union represented; Degler’s description of the Union as ‘more a means to achieve nationhood than a nation itself ’, more readily

permits of an evolutionary conception of American nationalism as a process predicated on the Union, not as a fixed structure constructed on it (Degler 1990: 14; Parish 1995: 220, 224: Nagel 1964). In some ways, it depends on whether antebellum America is seen as a community of interests or a community of sentiment. As a nation in which membership was, in theory at least, voluntary both descriptions might equally apply, but it was nevertheless the case that when interests appeared to clash, as they did over the issues of slavery and westward expansion after 1848, such sentiment as existed proved insufficient to hold the Union together. With expansion came division, and increasingly that division was sectional in form. As both North and South began to see in the other a society antithetical to their own they set in motion a process described by Major L. Wilson as ‘a pattern of creation by destruction’, culminating in a civil war that, according to Kohn, ‘can be well understood as a war for national independence with nationalism as its chief issue’. As Boorstin astutely observed,‘Americans had their nation first and paid the price afterwards’ (Dangerfield 1965: 3; Wilson 1974: 188; Kohn 1961 [1957]: 115; Boorstin 1988 [1965]: 401; Foner 1970: 40–72; Taylor 1979 [1961]: 18–20 et passim; Grant 2000a: 6, 39–60; 2000b).

REBELLION If the first secessionist war had created the American nation, the second threatened to destroy it. The war’s outcome resolved the ‘federal vagueness’ that had proved both a blessing and a curse to the antebellum Union, and the war itself became the focus for a reinvigorated, but also reconfigured, American nationalism that scholars are beginning to explore in greater depth (Boorstin 1988 [1965]: 393, 400–1; Doyle 2002; Grant 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000a, 2000b; 2004; Lawson 2002a, 2002b). The subject is not without its difficulties, however. The problem of the Civil War’s role in the development of American nationalism is twofold. First, as a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the federal Union, the outbreak of

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that conflict revealed the shortcomings of American nationalism as a cohesive force between the Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century; at the same time, scholars argue that the Union’s very ability to wage war at all points to a strong sense of nationalism that was itself reinforced in the process of fighting for the nation. Second, ‘The South’ – or ‘the south,’ depending on one’s perspective – is rather an awkward element in this equation whereby nationalist sentiment plus military victory equals increased nationalist sentiment, since the Confederacy’s defeat did not, obviously enough, produce a sudden volte-face in favour of national rather than sectional sentiment among elements of the southern population. Further, the juxtaposition of American and Southern nationalism disguises the sectional nature of nationalism in nineteenth-century America, wholly ignores its northern variant, and assumes – as indeed did some northerners – that the American nation was, or ought to be, New England writ large. In part, too, the difficulty arises from the debate over whether the Confederacy was, or was not, a nation in its own right, a debate that began in 1861 and has continued to this day. As early as 1862 William Gladstone, then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that ‘there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation’. This was a declaration too far for Foreign Secretary Lord Russell, who rebuked Gladstone for going ‘beyond latitude … when you say that Jefferson Davis had made a nation. Recognition would seem to follow, and for that step I think the Cabinet is not prepared’.3 Nevertheless, the possibility that the Confederacy might have been recognized as an independent nation was real; that it never was in no way diminishes the efforts made to achieve that end. Leaving aside the tangled Constitutional issues over which Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, not to mention the various interested foreign powers, wrangled at the time, scholars have by and large accepted that there was such a thing as ‘Southern nationalism’, whether or not its existence was predicated on, or was productive

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of, a clearly defined Southern nation. Indeed, in contrast to its northern, or American, variant, Southern nationalism has received a disproportionate share of scholarly attention. Again, Kohn was one of the first contemporary scholars to explore the subject, and although he considered that antebellum ‘Southerners were fully imbued with the common feeling of the American nationalism of the period’, he also described Southern ideology as a ‘nascent true nationalism, distinct from the original American nationalism’. The impulse behind secession, according to Kohn, was nationalism, in the sense of its being an ‘emotional impulse’ that transmuted Southern state loyalties into a unified whole (Kohn 1961 [1957]: 101, 116). Although Henry Timrod, the ‘Poet Laureate of the Confederacy’, described the South as a ‘nation among nations’ at the point of its separation from the Union, scholars have differed over the extent to which nationalism was the cause, rather than a product, of the war itself.4 Despite its title, Avery O. Craven’s study of the South between 1848 and the outbreak of the war did not uncover much evidence of a distinct Southern national identity prior to 1861, but David Potter argued that this period clearly saw the ‘group loyalties’ of Southerners begin to draw away from the Union. John McCardell, similarly, identified the ‘idea of a Southern nation’ in relation to Southern politics, education, religion, literature and, of course, the proslavery argument even earlier, in the 1830s. Southernism, Potter argued, ‘instead of working sectionally within a framework of nationalism, tended to take on the character of nationalism itself and to break down the existing pattern of nationalism’ in America at that time (Craven 1953; Potter 1968: 61; McCardell 1979; Niebuhr and Heimert 1963: 39–41). Southern and Confederate nationalism are not, of course, synonymous, and no such thing as ‘The South’ chose to secede from the Union in the winter of 1860/61; the various states that did secede did so individually ‘and piecemeal raked together their Confederacy as an aftermath’ (Ratcliffe 2000: 30). Having done so, however, Southerners did then clearly seek to establish the validity of their nation at both local and international level and invoked not

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just the precedent of the American but also that of the French Revolution in support of their claims. As Drew Gilpin Faust has noted, Confederates ‘cast their struggle for independence as the equivalent of successful nationalist movements’, and explored the Dutch, Italian, Polish and Greek examples for parallels with their own experience, parallels that scholars are just beginning to pursue in the context of the modern debate on nationalism (Faust 1988: 11; McPherson 1999; Doyle 2002). Confederate nationalism itself was for a long time indistinguishable in the scholarship from support for the South’s military effort during the war – and by extrapolation support for slavery – and consequently has been disparaged on the moral grounds of repugnance for the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ and on the practical basis of the South’s defeat, a defeat that some have ascribed to a dearth of national sentiment. The title of Paul Escott’s 1978 study said it all: After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism. Escott saw Davis himself as the fatal flaw in the Confederate nationbuilding process, a man who alienated rather than involved his people. This argument, when juxtaposed with the great number of studies that portray Lincoln – as both man and later symbol – as crucial to the Union’s version of American nationalism, identifies leadership as a crucial factor in national construction. One group of scholars who explored the reasons for Southern defeat went further in their analysis of why the South lost, arguing that ‘the Confederacy functioned as a nation only in a technical, organizational sense, and not in a mystical or spiritual sense. An inadequately developed sense of nationalism’, they assert, ‘hampered Southerners in their quest for independence’. In the end, they conclude, Confederate ‘nationalism was insufficient to maintain its war effort’ and, therefore, not a true nationalist ideology at all. Whilst it is recognized that ‘Confederate nationalists surely existed’, Confederate nationalism is dismissed as ‘more a dream than anything else’ (Beringer et al. 1986: 66–7, 77). The argument that military defeat revealed a fatal flaw in Confederate nationalist sentiment, however, relies entirely on hindsight. The Civil

War’s outcome validated northern nationalist claims, and placed the Confederacy firmly and forever in the ‘Lost Cause’ camp. The nationalism of the Union triumphed, and so historians too frequently reason that the northern variant of American nationalism had always been the stronger and more valid. From the perspective of the time, however, the war’s outcome was by no means certain, and in any case the failure of the South to break away from the Union does not in itself prove that Confederate nationalism was fundamentally weak – only that it was, ultimately, unsuccessful. Neither does it prove that American nationalism as promulgated by the North was, by comparison, strong. More recent research has succeeded in showing that Confederate nationalism was rather more than a pipe dream and that the ideology that sustained the South’s attempt at secession had both form and substance. Yet, crucially, these studies continue to examine the Confederacy almost in isolation. Lacking the wider context of the Union’s search for national meaning, they continue to present the Confederacy very much as a world, and a nation, apart (Faust 1988; Gallagher 1997). Certainly this is what the Confederacy very much hoped to be, but despite its best efforts the battle for Confederate nationalism was conducted both in the context of and in ironic parallel with a similar process in the North. The Confederate struggle towards national definition was tightly bound up with the Union’s defence of the Civil War and its reformulation of American nationalism during the war years. Each relied, in fundamental ways, on the other. Conflict – ideological as well as military – between the Union and the Confederacy helped each side to construct and then defend its relative position. The Union victory ensured that its particular interpretation of American nationalism would dominate, but this new nationalism was both forged and, to a degree, tainted by the challenge offered to the Union by the South. In short, the experience of the Civil War operated on the construction and refinement of both Union/ American and Confederate nationalism in much the same way. In their analysis of Confederate nationalism, scholars have come close to suggesting that,

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in the American case, nationalism is simply successful sectionalism, and in drawing comparisons with the Revolution – comparisons that were common currency during the Civil War itself – seek to show that America is in some ways ‘a nation of rebels’, which is a romantic but essentially flawed interpretation of the nation-building process in America (Carp 2002). Not that contemporary comparisons with the Revolution were off the mark; they were all too close to it. ‘Through identification with the War of American Independence,’ Faust points out, ‘Confederates … intended to claim American nationalism as their own, to give themselves at once an identity and a history’ (Faust 1988: 14; Grant 1998: 171; Kammen 1991: 64–6 Mitchell 1988: 1–2; 1993: 144). Yet this was in no sense a purely southern preoccupation: both sides were completely immersed in the ideology and symbolism of the Revolution, with the result that it was held up as defence and justification for both the act of secession and the military response against this. Both sides argued that they were upholding the ambitions of the revolutionary generation and sticking to the letter, and the sentiment, of both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In constructing a separate Confederate Constitution, Southerners did little more than imitate the Constitution of 1787, and in their declarations of the causes of secession the various states similarly drew on the Declaration of Independence. There were, of course, telling differences between the original documents and the revised Confederate versions. Most obviously, the idealistic desire ‘to form a more perfect union’ contained in the Preamble to the original Constitution became, in the Confederate version, a rather prosaic intention ‘to form a permanent federal government’. Nevertheless, this reliance on America’s founding documents as support for both Union and Confederacy reveals that it was not only Southerners who sought to present themselves as ‘the authentic heirs of the Founding Fathers, the true defenders of the ark of the covenant’ (Parish 1993: 113). The ideological issues accompanying the war forced the North to move toward a redefinition of nationalism that both justified its

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actions in the face of the challenge offered by the Confederacy and offered a basis for postwar reconstruction of the American nation. The centrality of the Revolution, to American as well as Confederate and Union nationalism, meant that the Union had to find some way of showing that the original Revolution had been the result of ‘a legitimate nationalistic impulse’ which bore no relation whatsoever to the act of secession that had prompted the Civil War. Northerners had, in short, to show that ‘the American Revolution was over and that revolutionary ideology had no further application to American society’ (Fredrickson 1968 [1965]: 133, 135). Fredrickson has shown how, in the process of addressing this problem, Northern conservative intellectuals shifted the boundaries of American nationalism. The Union, they asserted, merited support not because it represented the hope of liberty for the world but because it provided the rather more tangible and traditional basis of American national power. Further, since their arguments in support of loyalty to the Union were directly linked to their support of the Federal war effort, the logical conclusion of their deliberations was to show that ‘the ultimate America to which allegiance was due was not some vague and improbable democratic utopia but the organized and disciplined North that was going to war before their eyes’ (Fredrickson 1968 [1965]: 150). Other scholars have begun to probe the ways in which national sentiment was inculcated in the North both prior to and during the Civil War, but purely in terms of the historiography, the North has a fair amount of catching up still to do (Grant 2000a and b; Lawson 2002). Until this happens, the debate over American nationalism during the Civil War will continue to be one-sided and incomplete.

RACE It can be argued that the Civil War ‘even more than the end of British colonial rule, represents the true foundational moment in American political development’, but this new foundation

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was rather different from the voluntaristic nationalism of Washington and Lincoln (Bensel 1990: 10). Both more robust in its insistence on loyalty to the nation-state and more effective in ensuring that loyalty, the Civil War ultimately ‘compromised the voluntary principle at the root of the American nation by the resort to compulsion in order to save the Union’ (Parish 1995: 226; Bensel 1990: 11). The development of what Bensel describes as a new kind of ‘imperialistic nationalism’ was, he argues, a necessary one for a nation facing a choice not ‘between one nation and two but between one nation and many’. Prior to secession, he suggests, nationalism was of ‘comparative unimportance’ to America, separated – and therefore protected from – the intrusion of foreign states (Bensel 1990: 62–3). The challenge offered by Southern separatists to the nation forced not just a reassertion of American nationalism but also a reappraisal of it. When the radical politician Charles Sumner addressed the question ‘Are We a Nation?’ two years after the war’s end he did not hesitate to answer in the affirmative: ‘Even if among us in the earlier day there was no occasion for the word Nation’, he observed, ‘there is now. A Nation’, he confidently asserted, ‘is born’. But Sumner noted that although the word nation ‘was originally applied to a race or people of common descent and language’ in its modern incarnation it referred to a common government. ‘Originally ethnological’, he observed, ‘it is now political … the essential condition is one sovereignty, involving of course one citizenship’.5 As a radical, Sumner’s vision of America was one of a nation of equals, but it was not a vision shared by all. In the second year of the Civil War, the leading black spokesman Frederick Douglass invoked birthright and voluntarism in his claim for American citizenship: ‘I am an American citizen. In birth, in sentiment, in ideas, in hopes, in aspirations, and responsibilities’, he declared. ‘I am an American citizen’, he repeated, ‘I am not only a citizen by birth and lineage. I am such by choice’.6 The fact that Douglass felt compelled to state his case so forcibly tells its own story. Douglass’s claims on behalf of African Americans were realized up to a point. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the Thirteenth Amendment, abolished slavery,

leaving the way clear for the civic nationalism of America to be, as Sumner described it, truly inclusive of all citizens regardless of colour. The persistence of de facto segregation, however, undermined both the ideal and the nationalism constructed around it. North and South had reached a new national consensus by the dawn of the twentieth century but it was, in many ways, a white, male consensus, predicated on a combination of nostalgia for the past and deep-rooted opposition to an integrated society (Silber 1993; Blight 2001). The history of the ‘American Century’ is, in many respects, a combined story of ideological and ethnic entrenchment, set against a background of the debate over nationalism in the context of the various immigration acts passed since World War I, two of which – the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924 – represented clear attempts to control the nation’s ethnic composition. By the 1960s, a decade which saw a new and more open immigration act come into force, the Civil Rights Movement became the most obvious outward expression of the challenge to America’s racial order in a period where segregation – both official and unofficial – highlighted the imbalance between American ideals and the nation’s reality. When America sent troops not once but twice into Europe in support of a liberty that was denied its citizens at home, incarcerated some 71,000 JapaneseAmericans during World War II whilst another 12,000 were actually serving in the nation’s armed forces and failed to protect its black citizens from the brutality of racial violence that exploded on the streets of Chicago, New Jersey and the Deep South, it was, at best, sending out mixed signals about who belonged in the nation and what the American citizen might expect from the state. The twentieth century was, perhaps, the period in which America paid most dearly for having its nation before fully realizing its nationalism. The challenges American nationalism faced in that period were the logical outcome of its development. Anthony Smith has described America as the ‘model for the plural concept of the nation. The historic dominance of its white Puritan Anglo-Saxon culture and language,

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coupled with its messianic myths of origin and foundation’, he argues, ‘have provided a firm ethnic base for its subsequent experiment in cultural pluralism’ (Smith 1995: 107–8). Yet so far from providing a firm base, it can be argued that the American national edifice was built on sand. America’s civic nationalism was, from the outset, constructed along clearly demarcated ethnic lines. Skin colour proved the means to inclusion for many immigrant groups and exclusion for both indigenous and imported non-white peoples. Even before the colonies broke away from Great Britain, ethnic divisions had begun to supplant class divisions in a society where racial slavery was becoming the norm (Morgan 1975: 269–70; Foner 1999 [1998]: 37–9). As Patricia Hill Collins describes the process, ‘whiteness, whether propertied whites or indentured servants, became defined in opposition to and elevated above the non-white status assigned to indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. This core racial triangle among white settlers, indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans’, she argues, ‘became foundational to the new US nation-state’. This ‘racial triangle’, she asserts, ‘neither disappeared nor radically transformed’ but both lies at the heart of and ‘describes a template for conceptualizing US national identity’ (Collins 2001: 7, 9; Kim 2004: 994). Indeed, from the colonial period through to the Revolution itself, European interest in America as a new kind of nation – and Americans as a new kind of people – was countered by American determination to be a nation in the European mould. America’s civic ambitions were, from the start, couched in distinctly ethnic language. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s famous enquiry, ‘What, then, is the American, this new man?’ was of far greater interest to Europeans than to the fledgling Americans of the revolutionary era. Although Crèvecoeur’s work sold well and widely throughout Europe, in America itself it met with lukewarm interest.7 So far from seeing themselves as a new kind of people, America’s founding fathers invoked a primordialist construction for their nation, one distinctly at odds with the reality of its population and its politics. John Jay made the case for American nationalism clearly and succinctly in The Federalist Papers of 1788 when he argued

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that the erstwhile colonists had for ‘all general purposes been one people … As a nation we have made peace and war; as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies; as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conventions with foreign states’. However, when he then went on to assert ‘that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs’ he was describing a nation that did not, neither at the time of writing nor since, exist.8 Jay’s conceptualization of the new nation as, in effect, a birthright community comprising the descendants of a single immigrant – British and white – group was codified two years later in the 1790 Naturalization Law, which offered citizenship to ‘free white persons’, and reinforced in the mid-nineteenth century by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s ruling in denial of black citizenship rights in the 1857 Dred Scott case. Ever since, and despite the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the tension between the nation’s civic ideals and its ethnic social and political constructions has challenged, compromised and, some argue, actually defined American nationalism. Beyond the study of its historical development during the Revolution or the Civil War, if American nationalism is discussed at all today it tends to be in the context of politically charged debates over multiculturalism, pluralism, affirmative action, and the rise of what Carol Swain has identified as ‘the new white nationalism’. Challenging the ‘triumphalist narratives’, that not only ‘involve a creative reimagining of US history’ but, crucially, ‘function as national mythology’, this scholarship locates the problem of inequality within the context of both the historic and the modern nationalist forces at work in America (Kim 2004: 989). More effective at revealing American nationalism’s shortcomings than in explaining its persistent resonance even among groups who feel excluded from the nation-state, it sometimes collapses the

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construction of the nation as state into the development of American nationalism as political and emotional force. No one can dispute that from the colonial era onwards ‘American nation-building was vitally dependent upon the forcible extraction of labour, land, and other resources from coloured bodies’, nor that ‘multiculturalism’s sanguine story of voluntarism and consent’ masks a plethora of involuntary dispossession and destruction (Kim 2004: 994–5). Further, that there was a great deal of hypocrisy involved in the Founding Fathers’ espousal of liberty and equality for all in a society increasingly reliant on racial slavery is obvious, but the approach taken to what Collins has termed this ‘paradox of US national identity’ differs considerably. Some scholars stress that diversity – religious, cultural, ethnic – offers no barrier to inclusion in the American nation, the first nation to make ‘diversity itself a source of national identity and unity’ (Fuchs in Malik 1996: 180). Stressing the strength and durability of what Eric Foner calls ‘the story of American freedom’ as central to the nation’s sense of itself, these scholars regard American ideals of freedom and equality as a persistent goal, never yet fully realized but nevertheless the cornerstone of American nationalism (Foner 1999 [1998]; Beasley 2001: 171–3). Others are less confident that American ideology can either survive or, indeed, that it ever had much meaning in a nation in which racial inequality has been so persistent and so destructive. From this perspective, the ‘mythology of American freedom’ is interpreted less as a foundation myth of American nationalism and more as a myth in the sense of a fable; a story of American freedom, certainly, but a fictional one (Swain 2002).

CONCLUSION In the early nineteenth century, many Europeans were, like Tocqueville, fascinated by – and many not a little critical of – the republic that had emerged across the Atlantic. Their

fascination was shared by Americans themselves who were acutely conscious both of the criticism and of the need to establish not just their nation, but a functioning sense of nationalism in this ‘age of nationalities’. By the end of that century, America had come through a Civil War that had challenged the nation’s very existence, celebrated its centennial and welcomed many hundreds of thousands of new immigrants into a society already characterized by dramatic social, demographic and economic change. When Turner turned his attention to the question of American character, it was in part a response to this degree of change, but in part, too, an attempt to assert Americanness in the face of the prevalent assumption that America was Europe transplanted. ‘Our history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment’, he observed. ‘Too exclusive attention has been paid … to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors’.9 Americans themselves consistently debated the lineaments of their nationalism, particularly in the context of the rising immigration toward the end of the nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth century, scholarly interest waned in the aftermath of World War I, a war that made nationalism appear a destructive and not a constructive force. It was not until World War II, and America’s growing international role, that the question of American nationalism began to exercise Americans and Europeans in any kind of sustained way. Americans themselves felt the need to assert their patriotism as part of the war effort; Europeans sought to understand the nature of the nation that would come to dominate the ‘American Century’. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and elsewhere on US soil, that prompted both an emotive upsurge of patriotism but also its backlash, the question of American nationalism is more important than ever. However, long before the horrific events of 9/11, the concern had been voiced that America’s ‘best years as a nation’ were over. With American exceptionalism now described by one leading scholar as ‘a double

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edged-sword’, scholarly interest in the question of American nationalism, how it was created and sustained, and what it means to Americans – and by extrapolation to the rest of the world – is both necessary and long overdue (Lipset 1996: 17). What debate there is over American nationalism continues to revolve around the concept of America as an exceptional nation and Americans as an exceptional people held together not by blood but by belief, a shared ideological consensus predicated on selective aspects of the American social, religious and political historical experience from the original Puritans’ ‘errand into the wilderness’ through the war for independence, the Civil War and the westward expansion of the later nineteenth century. Although what Beasley describes as the ‘shared beliefs hypothesis’ is viewed by some as ‘a hegemonic myth which has functioned historically to privilege some voices and marginalize others’, it continues to function as an epistemological tool in the study of American nationalism, whether the focus of inquiry is historical, political or sociological. At its heart lies the concept of America as the ‘redeemer nation’, a concept, Tuveson argued, rooted in millennialism, already present in the ‘nascent nationalism’ of colonial America, articulated politically at the point of separation from Europe, refined socially in the growing belief in ‘Manifest Destiny’ during the nineteenth century, and justified morally by the outcome of the Civil War (Tuveson 1968: 101–2; Niebuhr and Heimert 1963: 10–11, 123–8; Cauthen 2004; Smith 1999, 2003: 137–40; Cherry 1997 [1971]; O’Brien 1988). This belief in America as, in Lincoln’s words, the ‘last, best hope of earth’, was explored and challenged in the scholarship of the 1960s that probed the lineaments of America’s sense of nationalism at a time when American ideology, juxtaposed against Soviet ideology, seemed if not always consistent in application at least clear-cut in conception. The changes that American nationalism has gone through since are less well understood because of America’s absence from the major studies of nationalism, an absence that is

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regrettable on several levels. The premise of American exceptionalism has never yet been fully explored in the context of other nation’s experiences, despite the fact that America clearly shares many of the attributes of the modern nation as scholars define it. Where America may differ from other nations is in the resolution, albeit sometimes an uneasy one, that it achieves between its civic and ethnic elements and, perhaps, in its millennialist ideology. Although America’s current President, George W. Bush, denies that Americans see themselves as ‘a chosen nation’, his emphasis on ‘the unfinished work of American freedom’ reinforces the concept of American religious purpose in a nation where the evolving interaction between the civic and the ethnic, the religious and the secular may define not just America, but the future of nationalism itself.10 NOTES 1 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893), the full text is available through the University of Virginia at: http://xroads. virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/ (accessed 30 January 2005). 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley), 2 vols (1835, 1840), reprint New York: Vintage Books (1945), Vol. I, p. 28. 3 William Gladstone’s speech at Newcastle, 7 October 1862, and Lord Russell’s rejoinder in Becker Sideman and Friedman (1962: 157). 4 Henry Timrod, Ethnogenesis quoted in Kohn (1961 [1957]: 127). 5 ‘Address of Hon. Charles Sumner before the New York young men’s Republican union, at the Cooper Institute, Tuesday evening, Nov. 19, 1867’ (New York, 1867), pp. 4–5. 6 Frederick Douglass, ‘The Black Man’s Future in the Southern States,’ address delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, 5 February 1862, in Masur (1993: 109–11). 7 See St John de Crèvecoeur (1983 [1782]: pp. 69–70 and Introduction, p. 8). 8 John Jay, ‘Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence,’ The Federalist Papers, No. 2 (1788). This can be found in the Penguin edition of The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1988). pp. 91–2; however, The Federalist Papers can be accessed most easily via the Avalon Project at Yale Law School: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/ avalon/federal/fed02.htm (accessed 5 February 2005). 10 George W. Bush Inaugural Address, 2005, at ttp://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/01/print/ 20050120–1.html (accessed 15 February 2005).

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Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kammen, M. (1991) Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kammen, M. (1993) ‘The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration’, American Quarterly, 45 (1): 1–43. Kim, C. J. (2004) ‘Imagining Race and Nation in Multiculturalist America’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27 (6): 987–1005. Kohn, H. (1945 [1944]) The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background. New York: Macmillan. Kohn, H. (1961 [1957]) American Nationalism: An Interpretative Essay. New York: Macmillan. Lawson, M. (2002a) Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Lawson, M. (2002b) ‘‘‘A Profound National Devotion”: The Civil War Union Leagues and the Construction of a New National Patriotism’, Civil War History, 48 (4): 338–62. Lipset, S. M. (1979) The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. London: W.W. Norton. Lipset, S. M. (1996) American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W. W. Norton. Malik, K. (1996) The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Masur, Louis P. (1993) The Real War Will Never Get in the Books: Selections from Writers During the Civil War. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 109–11. McCardell, J. (1979) The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860. New York and London: W. W. Norton. McPherson, J. M. (1999 [1998]) Is Blood Thicker than Water?: Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books. Mitchell, R. (1988) Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences. New York: Simon and Schuster. Mitchell, R. (1993) The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, E. S. (1977) The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Morgan, E. S. (1975) American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Murrin, J. (1987) ‘A Roof Without Walls: the Dilemma of American National Identity’, in R. Beeman, S. Botein and E. C. Carter II (eds), Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 333–48. Nagel, P. C. (1964) One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776–1861. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newman, S. P. (1997) Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Niebuhr, R. and Heimert, A. (1963) A Nation So Conceived: Reflections on the History of America from Its Early Visions to Its Present Power. London: Faber and Faber. O’Brien, C. C. (1988) God-Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parish, P. J. (1993) ‘The Road Not Quite Taken: The Constitution of the Confederate States of America’, in T. J. Barron, O. D. Edwards and P. J. Storey (eds), Constitutions and National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 111–25. Parish, P. J. (1995) ‘An Exception to Most of the Rules: What Made American Nationalism Different in the Mid-Nineteenth Century?’, Prologue, 27 (3): 219–29. Potter, D. M. (1968) The South and the Sectional Conflict. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Ratcliffe, D. (2000) ‘The State of the Union, 1776–1860’, in S-M. Grant and B. Holden Reid (eds), The American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations. Harlow, Essex: Longman. pp. 3–38. Ravitch, D. (1990) The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation. New York: HarperCollins. Silber, N. (1993) The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, A. D. (1995) Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smith, A. D. (1999) ‘Ethnic Election and National Destiny: Some Religious Origins of Nationalist Ideals,’ Nations and Nationalism, 5 (3): 331–55. Smith, A. D. (2003) Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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St John de Crevècoeur, J. H. (1983 [1782]) Letters from an American Farmer. London: Penguin. pp. 69–70 and Introduction, p. 8. Swain, C. (2002) The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, W. R. (1979 [1961]) Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, J. (1893) ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. p. 1.

Tuveson, E. L. (1968) Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Waldstreicher, D. (1997) In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press. Wilson, M. L. (1974) Space, Time and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815–1861. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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44 Nationalism in South and Central America JOSÉ MAURÍCIO DOMINGUES

The independence of the Iberian colonies in the New World was one of the elements that heralded the advent of modernity. It is within this context, with of course its particularities south of the Equator, that nation-building and nationalism in the Americas must be understood. Modernity has ‘disembedded’ people from their more circumscribed ways of existence and entirely changed the space-time in which their lives develop. ‘Re-embeddings’, at both the individual and the collective level, are an answer to this new situation (Giddens 1990; Wagner 1995; Domingues 2006: ch. 4). By and large the nation-state has been, at least in Europe and the Americas, the main frame in which such re-embeddings have been achieved. Modernity implied a process of complexification of social life, cut across by a drive towards differentiation. Nationalism provided a counter-trend: the de-differentiation of collective identity through the homogenization of the nation that emerged thereby, giving birth to a novel focus for cathectic, psychological investment. Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however restricted, formally and practically, citizenship has accompanied the formation of the nation-state in these areas and the telos of social development, such as was built (and built itself) into the minds and imaginaries

of the peoples of these countries, was their incorporation into the nation as equally free citizens. Citizenship, however, as a bundle of rights and (to a lesser extent) duties, and implying de-differentiation too in its universalism, is excessively thin to provide for the construction of identities. Re-embeddings therefore must be cast also in other dimensions, with greater substance. In ‘societies’ that aimed at homogeneity, through the steeringforce of the state (a point I will resume below), nationalism, in one way or another, has provided the means for thicker individual and collective identities. It is less abstract than citizenship and stresses the particularities, historical and cultural, that weld together a specific population (Domingues 2006: ch. 7). Besides, although it is universalist and homogenizing, a fundamental ambiguity remains – and is apparent in the cases in point – since differences do not totally disappear and race and class, as well as gender, are hierarchized within what is in principle a homogeneous nation (Wade 2001). While the atomism of liberal views was strong in Western societies and was somehow in tension with the Romantic and all-inclusive perspective of nationalism, in the Americas colonized by the Iberian kingdoms the prevalence

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of neo-Thomism as a Renaissance worldview in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries eased the path for the intervention of the state in the ‘civilizing’ sense of creating nations from the amalgam of rather different cultures and peoples. That doctrine lost its proper vocabulary; nonetheless, its main conceptions outlived their explicit formulation and were included in the new political ideologies that flourished after independence, helping the processes of what I have once called ‘nation-building’ (Morse 1982; Domingues 1993, 1995). To this internal characterization we must add that nationalism must of course also be placed in the context of international relations. It has an external, interactive aspect, in terms of identity-building and (broadly conceived) interest definition. In this regard nationalism in South and Central America shows great differences from that which arose in the ‘core’ countries of the global system. It took at once a defensive and liberating stance, as well as a developmentalist one, which aimed at levelling out the situation of the diverse nations within the global system. At this point we need to introduce a further distinction. Nationalism may assume aggressive forms and search for domination over other nations, or at least hold an exclusionary view; this is often the case of right-wing nationalism. However, it may also assume more benign forms, liberating nations against foreign domination, evincing therefore an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist character; this has often been the case of left-wing nationalism, whether or not of a socialist persuasion. Right-wing, fascist and authoritarian nationalism – petit bourgeois in the 1930s and later with the military dictatorships that plagued the area from the 1960s to the 1980s – did appear in ‘Latin’ America. However, the subcontinent has by and large been prone to the second type, left-wing or centrist type of nationalism, increasingly incorporating the popular masses in its promises of development and autonomy (Vilar 1971). In any case, both types of nationalism appear as forms of re-embedding and identity construction, whose specific cultural and political content depend on concrete social dynamics.

Therefore, nationalism has two features that can be analytically distinguished, although they are concretely weaved together in social process. Nationalism must be placed within an interactive context, that is, as a means to or an aspect of the construction of a collective subjectivity – the nation – that interacts with other collective subjectivities, namely other nations and social systems. And it has also an internal aspect which allows for the social integration (which should, in my view, be grasped as a sense of belonging and recognition rather than via the functionalist notion of an attachment to overall common values) of modern, complex ‘society’, a particular type of collective subjectivity, in its process of identity building (see Delanty and O’Mahony 2002: 35ff. 70). Finally, characterized by the heightened globalization which is one of the features of what can be defined as the ‘third phase of modernity’ (Domingues 2006: ch. 8), the present configuration of the world has indeed brought about some renewal of nationalism in South and Central America. Overall, nevertheless, a weakening of national identities (especially in those countries that comprise large indigenous populations and have always had greater trouble in achieving a more homogeneous nationbuilding) as well as a willingness to fit, in one way or another, into the globalizing movement have been two features of present cultural and political dynamics. Greater complexity and the pluralization of identities, as well as the rolling back of the state and the problematic issue of strategies of development geared to overcome the subaltern position of such countries in the global arena, have been the obverse of those twin social processes.

INDEPENDENCE AND NATION-BUILDING The independence of South and Central American countries was achieved in the period from 1810 to 1825, although Cuba, for instance, became entirely emancipated from Spain as late as 1898, just to be closely controlled by the United States. Few countries in the world, therefore, had to face up to processes

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of nation-building as early as they did. In this regard they were indeed pioneers, as Anderson (1991: ch. 4; see also Vilar 1971) insightfully noted.1 However, differently in particular from England and France – and to a great extent to the United States too, though slavery remained in this northern country – one can hardly speak of literacy and popular participation in independencies and in the building of the ensuing nations. To be sure, there were popular sectors, slaves and other small people that joined the independentist effort (especially, though not only, in the regions that became Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay), but they were a minority and in the aftermath of the downfall of the colonial empires were unable to exert any sway upon the new polities. This in fact marks a distinction from Western Europe and gives a particular, oligarchic face to these pristine nationalist movements. Social integration at a higher level of complexity and as the means for the re-embedding of large social strata was not achieved thereby. In fact, its predominantly agrarian character, the continuous personal subordination of most of the population (also in the urban centres) through either ‘feudal’ forms or slavery, to landlord and bureaucrats, the confinement of most of the population to specific space-time coordinates (though ‘traditional’ domination would be a poor term to describe the situation), did not imply the need for nationalism as a means to create broader forms of solidarity. The emerging ruling classes and state groups (something at times difficult to separate), who had thus far been excluded from the high ranks of the administration, had indeed a need for new forms of identification and solidary links. Nationalism provided that. However, to some extent the relational aspect of nationalism – which provides for identity and interest definition vis-à-vis ‘external’ collectivities – predominated at this stage. The struggle against colonial powers by the criollos of Spanish America and their counterparts in Brazil led the way and demanded forms of ideology which were able to buttress such a dangerous and doubtful endeavour, that is, the struggle to free their regions from metropolitan domination. I do not mean by this that there was an immediate profit to be

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gained from that effort, since for many of the colonial freedom fighters the outcome was disastrous, entailing loss of property, physical suffering and even death. From the very beginning, hence, nationalism exercised its tantalizing power as both a social and a psychological force. If there was a general drive behind the moves towards independence, the specific social conditions were conducive to rather distinct results. The main contrast has to be made between Brazil and the Spanish American colonies. The Portuguese colony kept its integrity while the latter gave birth to a myriad of countries. Of all the explanations to this quite astonishing disparity the most sound is that which points to the intellectual leadership of the two processes as being fashioned in rather distinct ways (Carvalho 1982). The Portuguese colony was never allowed local universities. All its intellectuals and bureaucrats were formed, until the creation of the new country, in the University of Coimbra, and seem to have enjoyed a high level of collective identification, which was maintained in the struggle against the former embracing kingdom. Moreover, this was combined with the transmission of power in the newly independent colony to the son of the king of Portugal, implying an obvious continuity in politics and administration, giving birth, in 1822, to the Empire of Brazil. In contradistinction, the Spanish colonies found their points of fracture and formation of newly independent countries around local universities, which were responsible, during the late colonial period, for the education of intellectuals and administrators. We must not be oblivious, though, to the violence of the process also in Brazil: during the whole nineteenth century local elites and intellectuals organized movements to break free – often through republican ideology – from the new Brazilian Empire, and were severely repressed by the armies of the central government. During the nineteenth century – which some historians have even deemed a lost one – there was no dramatic change in this configuration. In any case capitalism developed, state bureaucracy was strengthened, social complexity overall increased, urbanization and an

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incipient process of individual and collective disembedding came about. On the new terrain that slowly emerged it was possible for the appeal of nationalism to be more broadly felt. Military conflicts between the new countries mobilized the population and raised the spectre of citizenship – though very restricted – via participation in war; the opening of the electoral franchise to the majority of the population, however, was accomplished only in the twentieth century. Frequent military and territorial conflicts opposed especially Brazil and Argentina, as well as them both, plus Uruguay, against Paraguay (a country where a more popular form of government and nationalism had taken root), in the War of the Triple Alliance. Chile, Peru and Ecuador also had their wars for territory, as did Chile and Argentina, while Mexico very early on had part of its immense land mass conquered by its northern neighbour. And yet, by and large, nationalism remained a business of the ruling collectivities. Nation-building did not expand to include the popular classes until at least the 1920s. Moreover, since states were neither strong nor organized enough, they were not actually capable of waging massive and sustained wars during this period, which meant that nationalism did not find an especially relevant connection in this area of social life (Centeno 2002). During the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first three of the twentieth century a crisis brewed. It found distinct resolutions. Modernity was by and large, though in a sort of uneven development, established in the subcontinent. Demands were to deepen it and often to democratize social conditions. In all countries, with greater or less success, these years witnessed the rising – albeit not always irresistible – tide of the popular masses.

MASS NATIONALISM, DEVELOPMENT AND NATIONAL LIBERATION The advance of modernity, in the economy and in social life, had effects that reached the

political system in most South and Central American countries. Mexico opens the twentieth century south of the Rio Grande with the first great revolution since the 1789 French upheaval. Mexico had been governed by a strong and authoritarian, though legally based, political system, led by Porfirio Díaz, which modernized the country in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many interests were alienated by the regime, however, which also increasingly faced the opposition of peasant communities in the north and the south. In 1910 revolution broke out, Díaz was toppled and a new period began for Mexico. This included, of course, the forging of a new nation, one in which the popular masses, peasants and the emerging working classes would play a pivotal role. Liberalism and the very revolutionary process, alongside the evocation of the mestizo (the ‘cosmic race’, such as proposed by Vasconcelos, an important Mexican intellectual), were placed at the core of the new Mexican identity. While liberalism was not actually that relevant for the political and social life of the country, in which an authoritarian, corporative and interventionist state overwhelmingly steered social life, at times in a nationalistic and pro-autonomous industrial development direction, mass participation and rights were taken as a pillar of government legitimation (Córdova 1979; Hale 1997; Aguilar Rivera 2001: 203ff.). Argentina underwent a process which was in many respects similar, although important differences must of course be stressed too. The 1910s brought universal suffrage (although interrupted by some military coups later on) and the rise of the working classes. If Mexico was overall a country of mixed races, especially Indians and Spanish descendants, urban Argentina was mainly a country of immigrants (a process which actually conformed to the racist ideologies that yearned for a white wave to ameliorate the racial make-up of the country). Thousands of people arrived at the beginning of the century in Argentina from Spain and Italy, as well as, in much smaller numbers, other countries. A universal and lay educational system played a key role, unparalleled in any country in the subcontinent, with

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the exception perhaps of Uruguay, in the homogenization of this mass of people into a single national identity. This implied social rights, steady labour and literacy as the basis of national belonging (Sarlo 1999, 2001). However, the 1940s and1950s were witness to the emergence of an entirely new situation: immigration decreased and the masses from the countryside became the core of the Argentine working class. National identity was lent a twist at this stage through the rise of Peronism, which abandoned the more cosmopolitan outlook of previous socialist and anarchist movements of the immigrant period, and assumed also an often more marked ‘anti-imperialist’ attitude (Rock 1987: chs. 6–8). Although time and again toppled by military coups, Peronism remained to a great extent a crucial element of national identification in Argentina, either as a positive national overall feature, or as signalling a never-ending crisis of nation-building. Brazil underwent a rather more selective incorporation of the masses into the nation. The 1930s marked the rise of a strong state, nationalist in the sense of struggling for autonomy within the international system and in the economic domain. But the rural masses remained excluded from political life and from social rights. The construction of a national identity was the task carried out over the next decades. This was couched in terms of a mixed race – crystallized in the idea of ‘racial democracy’ – in which Indians and blacks enjoyed the same level of recognition as whites (of course a phenomenon more imaginary than real and although the telos of development entailed the whitening of the nation). A further important strand was the maintenance of the unity of such a vast country, as during the earlier independence process, against the more federalist views prevalent during the first years of the so-called ‘Old Republic’ (1898–1930). Stringent intellectual efforts were applied to this (Oliveira et al. 1982; Ortiz 1985, 1988; Domingues 1993). Democratic and military regimes alike sustained this project, although the relations with more active popular participation and autonomy in the process obviously varied. Other countries in the region followed similar paths, albeit within less successful

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modernization processes (cf. Venezuela, Colombia, etc.). Others still had much more trouble in terms of nation-building, due to the deep differentiation of the population and the difficulty in solving the ‘problem of the indian’. This was the case of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Guatemala. Mexico had similar difficulties but within a more complex and larger social formation, and through the revolution, it was somewhat more successful in coping with the issue.2 Cultural and political fragmentation were attacked, often through the attempt, sometimes with Marxist inspiration, to treat the problem not in ethnic terms but rather framing it as a class and land issue (see Mariátegui 1928). This actually worked to a great extent. As the incorporation of such masses of ‘peasants’ into the nation lagged behind, the 1970s started to see a new wave of ethnic mobilization which meant the dilution of the Indian masses within the nation. In most of these countries ‘national-popular’ regimes were placed at the very kernel of nation-building: they aimed at internal class compromises and external accommodation, even though development was their assumed goal (Touraine 1988: Part III). Neither entirely above and detached from nor merely responsive to ‘civil society’, but rather entwined with it, the national-popular state was crucial in the nationalist arrangements of the period. It tried to extend, with varied reach and success, citizenship to the popular classes. Economic development – or ‘developmentalism’ – too, in order to break free or reduce dependency and heteronomy vis-à-vis the world capitalist centres, always loomed large on its horizon (Cardoso and Faletto 1970).3 The need to craft a synthetic national identity, through a selection of cultural features, which would bring out the ‘essence’ of the Mexican, the Brazilian, the Peruvian, etc., or even that of the ‘Latin American’, as well as to devise and implement policies capable of integrating and autonomizing the re-founded nations, led intellectuals one way or another to rally around the nationalpopular states (Domingues 2003 [1992]). In this regard there are parallels between the South and Central American experience on the one hand,

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and the European cases on the other. But although there were indeed right-wing nationalist perspectives and movements, expansionist and chauvinistic (Oddone 1986; Rock 1993), most of the energy of nationalism was employed in more benign ways across the region, contrary to what was too often the case in the old continent: ‘Latin’ American popular masses rarely lent fascist and chauvinistic movements their support. Instead national emancipation and development have been much more popular. On the other hand, national liberation movements have been rare as well. They have been concentrated in Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua) and gathered strength mainly from the 1970s on (Touraine 1988: 331ff.). They were not effective in the long run either. Cuba is in this regard of course a special case. It could have followed the same route as Puerto Rico, and, having achieved independence from Spain only at the turn of the century, become a colony or even an associated protectorate of the United States. Social struggle and an anti-imperialist programme became strongly linked in the Cuban revolution from 1959–60 onwards and increasingly directed not only against the internal political system but also against the United States. This rupture with national-popular regimes and projects was achieved only in Cuba in a sustained way and furnished the hard core of the country’s identity in the second half of century (Vilar 1971; Touraine 1988: 347–58). The left, however, wavered strategically during the twentieth century between alliances with those regimes and a more head-on confrontation with ‘imperialism’, although the link between social struggle, nation-building and national autonomization and development can consistently be found in its programmes (Castañeda 1993). Some conceptual conclusions can be derived from this brief exposition of the predicament of nationalism in South and Central America in the twentieth century. Nations were not ever found there in a ready-made way. To be sure, this is never the case, anywhere, but in this region it was even more pronounced. There was a massive pre-Columbian population, millions of black slaves were imported, European immigration, from several areas and

in successive waves, played a highly prominent role, and miscegenation, despite the deepseated plague of racism, was far-reaching. Altogether this demanded, after the dreams of ruling circles in the nineteenth century of creating white nations faded, an enormous effort at integration and homogenization. Except for the pre-Colombian populations, especially in the Andean and the Central American countries, common national languages, Portuguese and Spanish, greatly facilitated the process, which nonetheless required dedication from intellectuals, bureaucrats and the political leadership to be accomplished. Nation-building, searched for and achieved with greater or less success by a state which seems to have inherited the neo-Thomist, integrative outlook of the colonial state, was the result rather than the starting point of the process. Hierarchies of race and class nevertheless remained ambiguously omnipresent, with whites and white culture on top, with often a general perspective of whitening of the population, racially and culturally, being envisioned (Wade 2001). Military dictatorships in some measure interrupted this process. Anti-popular and antinational popular (Touraine 1988: 367–93), they have thought of the nation in much more geopolitical ways. Their extreme anti-communism, their usually chauvinistic perspectives (also within the South American context), their alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union and its ‘internal allies’, have crystallized in the Doctrines of National Security, according to which the internal, divisive enemy was to be combated in the course of a situation of total warfare (Comblin 1977). But this has never been able to play an integrative role. At most it worked to freeze conflict and arrest the processes of social mobilization which nonetheless surfaced time and again across the subcontinent. Moreover, an argument about nationalism in its relational aspect can be put forward, which distinguishes South and Central America from Europe. It is true that armies have been based on conscription (which has been a condition for citizenship in America) and wars broke out and at times performed a part in the construction of the nation (Argentina versus Chile or Paraguay or Brazil,

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Brazil versus Paraguay and the eternal threat of Argentina, Chile versus Bolivia, Peru versus Ecuador, as well as Mexico against the United States and also the French, who occupied the country and supported Maximiliano’s Napoleonic Empire, defeated in 1867). Military mobilization and participation in the army have not been particularly important elements in the definition of individual belonging to the nation, though, perhaps because while in the nineteenth century armies did not enlist the popular classes after independence, in the twentieth century the armed forces were used precisely against popular mobilization for rights and democracy. In contradistinction, citizenship at large has played, as elsewhere, an important role as an answer to social mobilization.4 Electoral franchise and social rights did not everywhere reach all of the population. But even where they did not, they remained as an individual and collective goal: to belong to the nation was ultimately to be able to enjoy such rights. ‘Real abstractions’ as they necessarily are (since they consist of abstractly universal attributes of individuals and simultaneously organize key institutions of social life), these rights were tersely coupled with the concrete features of to a large extent state-created nations. This mixture of abstract and more concrete individual and collective identity, in which rights and nation are fused and is typical of the second phase of (state-organized) modernity (Domingues 2005: chs. 3–4 and 8–9), was, as it necessarily is, combined with a particular form of relational pattern. As collectivities, South and Central American nations have consistently striven for inclusion in the international system in a situation of less dependency than they have actually enjoyed. This has barely been achieved. The disembedding and re-embedding processes which are indicative of modernity and obtained throughout the Americas, found here therefore a particular shape, way beyond their limited scope during the nineteenth century and the peculiar liberal and agrarian contours of the first phase of modernity in those undeveloped countries. Now as citizens and members of enlarged nations, enjoying rights and an inclusive identity, Brazilians, Uruguayans, Mexicans, Peruvians, Bolivians, still saw themselves as subordinated to

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foreign powers in the international systems, although no longer submitted to a colonial situation. This remained a problem, except for those fractions of the ruling collectivities which profited from the situation.

ROLLING BACK THE STATE, SOCIAL PLURALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY The last three decades of the twentieth century were characterized in South and Central America by a crisis which bit as deep as it did elsewhere. Capitalism underwent a major crisis and Keynesianism had its foundations contested. This meant a sweeping crisis for national, state-based development policies which were particularly important in the previous period. I shall not go here into whether or not classes and class identities have been less relevant in this continental context than in Europe. The fact is, however, that workingclass organizations and the national-popular movements somehow connected to them were also hit by the crisis of the 1970s. This was still more deeply felt with the demise of the Soviet Union and the East European real socialist societies. Working-class projects and identities seemingly lost much of their plausibility and viability all over the world and in particular in this region. Meanwhile capitalism started to recover. New technologies and a more prominent role for network mechanisms of coordination implied a new arrangement between state, market and other organizations. Social complexity, the social division of labour and pluralism in all spheres of life took large strides. Globalization put huge pressure on the national state. As an answer applied especially in South and Central America, neo-liberalism and ‘sound’ economic policies were introduced, along with a far-reaching redefinition of the role of the state, which was rolled back, at least in some crucial areas. This could not but affect national societies that had had the state as a key factor for their organization. In other words, a new phase, the third, of mixed articulation, started in South and Central America, although apparently facing many more

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difficulties in finding viable paths and alternatives of development for the region than has been the case, for instance, in Asia or the United States and in certain areas of Europe.5 How do nationalism and nations appear in this new situation? A number of issues must be singled out here. The first points to the rise of social pluralism, derived from the greater complexity of social life, its heterogeneity, as well as from the incapacity of national and class identities to perform the trick of generating inclusive and cohesive solidarities and collective subjectivities. The transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes has accompanied these social and economic changes. The second issue is of course the impact of deepened globalization upon the nation-state and national identities. The combination of these two factors leads us to a third problem: the rise of ethnic and racial identities that tend to break the pattern of nation-building through the homogenization of society and culture, including sometimes links with transnational movements and identities. Finally, the emergence of economic blocs, especially the Mercosur, the integration of Mexico through NAFTA and more recently the debate around ALCA imply new issues and roles for the state and national identities in the face of increased globalization. I shall go on later to comment on some countries of special relevance which can help illustrate these more general processes. By and large, although the crisis of development was deeply felt across the subcontinent, the processes which unfolded from the 1920s onwards, with different chronologies and paces in distinct countries, put South and Central America decisively within the bounds of modernity, of course with specific features, as anywhere else for that matter. As we have seen, disembedding processes were part and parcel of such an unfolding, having been dealt with by an effort on the part of the ruling collectivities to build cohesive national identities. The state was instrumental in this regard. The success of such developments eventually found its limits in a society freed to a great extent from personal forms of domination, wherein

people enjoy open possibilities to choose who they are, irrespective of the deep social stratification and the uneven resources each social class, gender and racial or ethnic group has at their disposal to operate such choices.6 The crisis of working-class identities, strongly felt throughout the world, and the demise of socialism as a project, especially after the terminal crisis of Soviet socialism and even the hopes sustained vis-à-vis the Cuban revolution, made this openness of social identities more acute. Informal job markets and theoretically controversial processes of class mutation added a further element to this crisis. For nations and nationalism the main consequence of this combination of circumstances was a weakening of the possibilities of continuation of national popular movements and regimes. The resulting heterogeneity of social change does not allow for sweeping constructions of the nation (Canclini 1989). The democratic transition from military rule (or authoritarian regimes like the Mexican postrevolutionary state) has at once contributed to this process of pluralization and helped to overcome the possible fragmentation it may entail (Touraine 1988: Part V). Allowing for interests to come more freely into a renewed public sphere, it has provided in some measure a mechanism of social integration. On the other hand, this openness has provided room for the divergent articulation of interests and identities. Racial – especially black – and ethnic identities – mainly those of the descendants of large pre-Columbian populations, such as Maya or Quechua and Amayra, among others; religious pluralism – with the spread of Protestantism and exoteric sects alongside Catholicism and black and Indian religions; and a simple general perception of people as the ‘poor’: these seem to be the major axes of identification more recently. Citizenship has once again been a main element in the construction of national identity; or at least the demand for rights – civil, political and social – has been placed at the core of national democratic politics. A struggle for recognition, which includes rights, but also the esteem due to particular ways of life (cf. Honneth 1992), is

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evident in this trend as well. An answer to those demands has proved harder than expected, though, in a continent with the highest levels of inequality to be found in the whole world. Internal problems, class, cultural and political resistance have been responsible for a protected answer to demands for recognition and citizenship. The way globalization reached the subcontinent, however, has decisively contributed to this difficulty and yielded repeated crises in South and Central America, insofar as national polities cannot be responsible to the population due to the strains the financial system and organisms such the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have superimposed on them. Dependency remains therefore a central issue in a transformed situation, one in which alternatives seem scarcer while time and social constraints look starker than ever thanks to the mere institutionalization of democratic regimes – which run the risk of demoralization. In view of that, the relational aspect of nationalism may resurface in terms of attempts to redress this subordination to global financial markets and apply developmentalist policies, hopefully directed to adjust those countries to the requirements of the third phase of modernity (see Haggard and Kaufman 1992).7 Economic processes of integration have moved pari passu with other changes. Mercosur, congregating Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, although undergoing periodic crises, answers for almost half of the trade of the two main partners in the organization. Thus far it remains, nonetheless, merely a commercial venture – politics and social integration, including identity, lag far behind. The Andean Pact and other regional treaties are economically feebler, although agreements between them and Mercosur have also worked to actualize a dream of many ‘Latin American’ intellectuals – the creation of a single country or at least of a strong alliance between the countries of South and Central America (Domingues 1992; Sierra 2001). The inclu-sion of Mexico in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has worked as a counterbalance to that project of continental integration, since it

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represents the United States’s hegemony over the Mexican economy and possibly political processes (Canclini 1996b). The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would be a step further in such a contested direction, opening markets and nations in South and Central America to the impact of the economy and finance of the United States, although protectionist interests in this latter country as well as Brazilian and Argentine resistance and strategy have clouded the perspectives of a quicker process of integration.8 Of the countries that, during the twentieth century, enjoyed successful development processes, the most dramatic situation of all is that of Argentina. A very rich country according to any international standard, the last decade of the twentieth century set the stage for perhaps its deepest crisis ever. The former notion of Argentine identity was reversed and now includes a faltering public educational system, unemployment and sharp inequalities. There is no longer a strong and relatively homogeneous working class which was the basis of Perón’s support, especially when youth is taken into account. The peso parity with the dollar, bizarrely enshrined in the constitution by Menen, something that was supposed to mean the definite integration of the country in the so-called ‘First World’, proved to be the last straw in the national debacle, which culminated in the demise of De la Rúa’s presidency after massive street demonstrations. For a while it was as though Argentina had no possible future and was doomed to descend into poverty and shame (Sarlo 2001). On the one hand this seems to have been a crisis long prepared and hinges on the location of the country in the new phase of modernity, beyond agrarian exports, light industry and a welfare state based on the prosperity such an equation afforded. On the other hand, the strains brought to bear by IMF policies and the demands of financial speculation precipitated and deepened the crisis. Mercosur and the integration with the Brazilian economy are now increasingly perceived as main elements in the recovery of the national economy but also as a means to re-insert Argentina into

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‘Latin’ America and help recover a national project and the nation’s self-esteem. Brazil, on the other hand, has consolidated the electoral aspects of its democracy. However, as a rather plural society, its institutions have not been able to deal with the emergence of freer agents and integrate them within a national project and fashion basic daily solidarity. Widespread violence is a result of these shortcomings, which is antagonistic as well as an aspect of national identity. Although formally available and politically relevant, citizenship has fallen short of implying respect for civil rights and actual social rights. Such violence is the outcome of this lack of integrative mechanisms and sense of belonging to the national community (Domingues 2004 [2002]). The project of becoming the leading country in the continent has been strongly resumed and Mercosur constitutes one of its main instruments, although the tension generated by the dependency of the country in relation to global financial markets and IMF policies remains a limiting element in the development of a democratic and inclusive national identity, and is thus a drawback with respect to contemporary forms of social integration of the country. A relatively independent and particularly interesting process, closely connected to disembedding and reembedding mechanisms, is the re-emergence of the race issue, revolving around the inequalities and discriminations suffered by the large population of African descent in the country. The notion of ‘racial democracy’ has come under heavy attack from the black movement (which tends to adopt the United States white–black divide, against the ‘false consciousness’ arguably inherent in the praise of miscegenation), while plural black identities have mushroomed, without however conflicting with the perspective of integration, via market and citizenship, into a more egalitarian nation. This is connected in different ways with the peculiar location of Brazil within the broad notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’, implying links, formal or otherwise, with general political and cultural trends that span that ocean connecting Africa, the Americas and Europe in

a decentred transnational collective subjectivity (Sansone 2003). In contradistinction, having eventually started, since the 1990s, to democratize its postrevolutionary, as a matter of fact one-party, system and accepting therefore that it must deal with a more heterogeneous society than ever, Mexico has grappled with its integration into the economic space of North America. This has had an inevitably enormous impact on the national identity and the nation’s project, while at the same time the social fabric has become much more plural, especially as regards the encompassing notion of the mestizo, which, although arguably stressing the role of indigenous people in the construction of the nation, denied them autonomy and special rights. Thus far much has been achieved concerning economic processes, although it is not clear which sort of influence the United States will enjoy culturally, and much less how this will work the other way round (Canclini 1996b, 1999; Aguilar Rivera 2001). An outcome of these twopronged, far-reaching changes has been the rise of ethnicity and especially of a peasant movement with a strong ethnic basis in the extremely poor region of Chiapas, once the stage of the pristine struggle of Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution. Fighting for the rights of indigenous minorities and against economic integration with the United States, it has fiercely denounced neo-liberalism and resumed guerrilla tactics which seemed absolutely defunct in the subcontinent.9 While it has strong internal roots and resonance, this new brand of Zapatism has been able to mobilize strong external support, configuring itself to some extent as a truly global movement (Johnston and Laxers 2003). If in Mexico we can already detect the presence of what specialists have been calling the ‘fourth wave’ of Indian mobilization in the subcontinent (Trejo 2000), in Bolivia and Ecuador this has assumed dramatic contours. While a peasant class identity for a while was able to frame the political mobilization of these Indian communities, a web of factors has altered the identity response these modernized peasants have found to their predicament:

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the withdrawal of the state, under neo-liberal dictates, from steady support to small and communitarian agriculture, revision of ejido (community land) law (in Mexico) as well as the action of groups influenced by Protestant and Catholic liberation theology in the Andean region (including the teaching at school of ancient languages). Former state corporatist and religious networks seem to have facilitated and been drawn upon by the new indigenous leadership. Bolivia is an interesting case that helps to bring to the fore the never-solved problems of integration which afflicted those societies with massive pre-Columbian populations, whose rights and specificities have been consistently overlooked since independence in the construction of national identities and polities, along with the deleterious pressure of the IMF for neo-liberal policies of financial restriction and privatization. In a situation of crisis of the oncepowerful miners’ movement and attempts by an already weak and composite government to privatize even water supplies, an alliance of Indianspeasants, cocoa producers and the urban poor, which rejects the traditional political party form though utilizing other structures of mobilization, ousted the government and staged a semi-revolution with important symbolic consequences in ‘Indian’ America. For the first time an autonomous ethnic leadership had been able to play decisive cards in the Andean political game. With the election of Evo Morales to the Presidency in Bolivia in December 2005 and other developments, it is clear that the movement’s momentum will be maintained. Finally Cuba, the brightest star in the constellation of nationalisms and national liberation movements in the whole subcontinent, has been undergoing a very tense ideological and cultural transition. Advanced modernity, especially during the crisis that preceded its third phase, saw the emergence of irredentist or secessionist nationalisms which offered grand narratives to substitute in particular for the vanished socialist project and identities (Delanty and O’Mahony 2002: 126–8). But that crisis was also the stage for the spread of postmodernism and its defiance and mistrust

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of grand narratives (regardless of being itself a bird of the same feather). Cuba is a country where the protracted crisis of actual existing socialism has not been surpassed. Nationalism, a modern idea itself and one closely entwined with the Cuban revolution and regime, may have been to some extent engulfed by that crisis and has now to compete in a ‘soup of signs’, a problem that is bound to afflict above all, though not only, the intellectuals, for whom the issue has been a crucial one since the days of the national poet and hero José Martí (killed in the war of independence against Spain and one of the first to denounce the imperialist intentions of the United States over ‘our America’) (Davies 2000). What this means for a country whose economy has been faltering since the Soviet Union disappeared and lives daily under the brutal pressure of the United States government remains to be seen.

CONCLUSION Nationalism is a curious phenomenon, which sociology has not easily explained nor even unquestionably described. As a means to create identities and embed people in modern relationships it has been very effective. Several cultural and political collectivities have been involved, in a more sincere or instrumental way, with nationalism also as a means to generate legitimacy for the state and find an appropriate place for their nations in the global system in which, from the very beginning, they have been placed. The internal and relational aspects of nationalism of course vary, although they always share this more abstract problematic. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the New World were in the forefront of nationbuilding and nationalism in the early hours of modernity. Only slowly, however, did the actual incorporation and integration of rather heterogeneous masses to the nation take place in the countries that emerged from independence. Citizenship has in particular played an important role in this regard, despite or even

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due to the difficulties of making it come true. Having broken away from their former colonial masters these nations found themselves in a world wherein their position was one of subordination to foreign powers that enjoyed supremacy in the global capitalist market and military superiority. They have tried, against inner circles that profit from this situation, to overcome that uncomfortable position. The internal and relational aspects of nationalism during the first and the second phases of modernity maintain therefore a considerable level of continuity in South and Central America. These countries begin the twentiethfirst century facing similar problems, although the third phase of modernity imposes new dilemmas and demands creative solutions, some of which seem not as yet to have been forthcoming. To some extent the future of the subcontinent hinges on how these new problems and solutions will eventually be tackled. NOTES 1 However, it is worth noting that, against Anderson’s strong theses, Lomnitz (2001) argues three points: terminologically his work has mistakes; that his emphasis on ‘horizontal’ comradeship overlooks the articulation of nationalism with hierarchy; and that his view of selfsacrifice in the name of the nation as a key feature is far-fetched. See Bethell (1987) for an overview of South and Central American independencies. 2 For historical information, see Applebaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt (2003). 3 The creation, in 1948, of Cepal (the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America) played an extremely important role in this regard, making room for independent economic thought which combined Keynesianism and a ‘structural’ approach with the political goal of generating conditions for autonomous economic and social development in the continent. The dependency theory was its main left-wing offspring. 4 It is worth mentioning here one of the most influential interpretations of ‘Latin’ American modernization. Analysing the rise of national popular regimes, or ‘populism’, Germani (1965: 92–5, 136–43, 157, 161–2, 245) uses functionalist ideas to state the role of nationalism in the integration, through common values, of society: the transfer of loyalties from community to the nation is rooted in the expansion of citizenship and full participation. However, the masses, coming from a traditional background and open to manipulation by populist elites, due to the resistance of traditional oligarchies to democratization,

combined the demand for freedom with an ersatz of participation and authoritarian nationalism. Of course, neither functionalism and its view of integration, nor such understanding of national popular regimes, although Germani did have some crucial insights, are supposed here. 5 Instead of denying any relevant change or speaking of something like postmodernism or network society, I have elsewhere put forward the concept of a third phase of modernity, linking this to a more complex combination of mechanisms of coordination (market, hierarchy and network). After its first, basically liberal, and second, stateorganized, phase – and the ensuing crisis of the 1970s – modernity found new paths to unfold. The subcontinent is certainly not the most advanced area in terms of the development of this third phase. Therefore, it suffers from its backwardness in this respect, since former patterns are no longer efficient in terms of social coordination and development. Problems rather than solutions beset its countries, which also suffer the impact of processes that have gained momentum, often in other regions. Modernity has been characterized overall by uneven processes of development, although a more general pattern, implying the aforementioned third phase of modernity, can be globally identified today. See Domingues (2006: esp. ch. 8). In national and ethnic terms its consequences have not, however, been so dramatically deleterious here as in countries of Africa or Eastern Europe. 6 To be sure, clientelism and corporatism are important elements of the new social and political situation. They must be seen as modern features of these societies rather than the survival of old forms of political practice. 7 A further issue is the expanding military presence of the United States in the subcontinent, especially in Central America, the Andean region and in relation to Colombia (see Herz, 2002). 8 A country that has been a pioneer in the practice of neo-liberalism in the subcontinent since the days of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chile has long since connected its economy to the United States. 9 With the exception of Colombia, where oligarchic domination, peasant poverty and coca plantations have torn the country apart. 10 In Burt and Mauceri (2004) there is an interesting comparison between the Andean countries (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador), in particular regarding the ethnic question today.

REFERENCES Aguilar Rivera, J. A. (2001) ‘Ensoñaciones de la unidad nacional: la crisis en la identidad national en México y Estados Unidos’, Política y gobierno, 3 (1): 195–220. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, 2nd edn. London: Verso. Applebaum, N. P., Macpherson, A. S. and Rosemblatt, K. A. (eds) (2003) Race and Nation in

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Modern Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press. Bethell, L. (ed.) (1987) The Independence of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burt, J-M. and Mauceri, P. (2004) Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict and Reform. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Canclini, N. G. (1989) Culturas híbridas: Estratégias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Mexico: Grijalbo. Canclini, N. G. (1996a) Consumidores e cidadãos: Conflitos multiculturais da globalização. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ. Canclini, N. G. (ed.) (1996b) Culturas en globalización. América Latina – Europa – Estados Unidos: libre comercio e integración. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad. Canclini, N. G. (1999) La globalización imaginada. Buenos Aires, Mexico, Madrid: Paidós. Cardoso, F. H. and Faletto, E. (1970) Dependência e desenvolvimento na América Latina. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Carvalho, J. M. (1982) ‘Political Elites and StateBuilding: the Case of Nineteenth Century Brazil’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24 (3): 378–99. Castañeda, J. G. (1993) Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Centeno, M. A. (2002) Blood and Debt: War and the Nation State in Latin America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Comblin, J. (1977) Le Pouvoir militaire en Amérique Latine: L’idéologie de la sécurité nacionale. Paris: Delaye. Córdova, A. (1979) La ideologia de la revolución mexicana. Mexico: Era. Davies, C. (2000) ‘Surviving the Soup of Signs: Postmodernism, Politics, and Culture in Cuba’, Latin American Perspectives, 27 (4): 103–21. Delanty, G. and O’Mahony, P. (2002) Nationalism and Social Theory. London: Sage. Domingues, J. M. (1993) ‘State and Nation-Building in Brazil’, Bulletin for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, 7: 15–8. Domingues, J. M. (1995) ‘Richard Morse and the Iberian American Path’, Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia, 45 (3): 161–9. Domingues, J. M. (2003 [1992]) ‘A América. Intelectuais, interpretações e identidades’, in Do ocidente à modernidade. Intelectuais e mudança social. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Domingues, J. M. (2004 [2002]) ‘A dialética da modernização conservadora e a nova história do

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Brasil’, Ensaios de sociologia. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG. Domingues, J. M. (2006) Modernity Reconstructed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Germani, G. (1965) Política y sociedad en una época de transición. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haggard, S. and Kaufman, R. R. (eds) (1992) The Politics of Economic Adjustment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hale, C. A. (1997) ‘Los mitos políticos de la nación mexicana: el liberalismo y la revolución’, Historia Mexicana, XLVI (4): 821–37. Herz, M. (2002) ‘Política de segurança dos EUA para a América Latina após o final da Guerra Fria’, Estudos avançados, 46: 85–104. Honneth, A. (1992) Kampf um Annerkenung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Johnston, J. and Laxers, G. (2003) ‘Solidarity in the Age of Globalization: Lessons from the Zapatista Struggle’, Theory and Society, 32 (1): 39–91. Lomnitz, C. (2001) ‘Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America’, in M. A. Centeno and F. López-Alves (eds), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mariátegui, J. C. (1928) Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidade peruana. Lima: Amauta. Morse, R. (1982) El espejo de Próspero. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Oddone, J. A. (1986) ‘Regionalismo y nacionalismo’, in L. Zéa (ed.), América Latina en sus ideas. Mexico: Siglo XXI and Unesco. Oliveira, L. L., Gomes, A. M. C. and Velloso, M. P. (1982) Estado Novo: Ideologia e poder. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Ortiz, R. (1985) Cultura brasileira and identidade nacional. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Ortiz, R. (1988) A moderna tradição brasileira. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Rock, D. (1987) Argentina, 1516–1987. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Rock, D. (1993) La Argentina autoritária: Los nacionalistas, su historia y su influencia en la vida pública. Buenos Aires: Ariel. Sansone, L. (2003) Blackness without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sarlo, B. (1999) ‘Educación: el estado de las cosas’, Punto de vista, 63: 17–21. Sarlo, B. (2001) ‘Ya nada será igual’, Punto de vista, 70: 2–11.

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Sierra, G. (ed.) (2001) Los rostros del mercosur: El difícil camino de lo comercial a lo societal. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Solón, P., Espinoza, C., Glozaler, G., Gómez, T. A. and Linera, A. G. (2003) Revista del OSAL, 10. Touraine, A. (1988) La Parole et le sang. Paris: Odile Jacob. Trejo, G. (2000) ‘Etnicidad y movilización social: una revisión teórica con aplicaciones a la “cuarta ola” de movilizaciones indígenas en América Latina’, Política y gobierno, 7 (1): 205–50.

Vilar, P. (1971) ‘Amérique Latine: Rapport de synthèse’, in Comision International de Histoire des Mouvements Sociaux et des Structures Sociales, Mouvements nationaux d’independence et classes populaires aux XIXe et XXe siècles en Occident et en Orient, vol. II. Paris: Armand Collin. Wade, P. (2001) ‘Racial Identity and Nationalism: a Theoretical View from Latin America’, Racial and Ethnic Studies, 24 (5): 845–65. Wagner, P. (1994) A Sociology of Modernity: Freedom and Discipline. London: Routledge.

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45 Nations and Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand PETER BEILHARZ AND LLOYD COX

Australia and New Zealand present a fascinating case when it comes to nations and nationalism. Both are evidently imperial artifacts, the results of the expansion of the British Empire into the Southland in the eighteenth century. Both are examples of what is best described as settler capitalism, agrarian-based primary commodity export economies with British superstructures imposed from above. Both nations therefore displace indigenous peoples, though these indigenous peoples also differ dramatically in culture and organizations across the Tasman (indigenous peoples make up 14 per cent of New Zealanders and 2 per cent of Australians). Both white cultures look alike, to the outsider, even if New Zealand looks more British. Both share British state institutions, patterns of party organization and union organization. Both share imperial commonwealth culture, from cricket to Fabianism. Yet the two experiences are also dramatically different. Australia is a big country, more accurately a small country or society connected by large distances. Only the southern lands of Australia are temperate. Twothirds of Australia is arid; its populace hugs the urban edge of the continent. All of New Zealand is green and temperate. Its inhabitants are more widely spread over a much smaller space, though a disproportionate number of them

now live around Auckland. Australian history is more clearly artificial, additionally, in the sense that its identity is more often local or regional, at least in terms of everyday life. The idea of Australia reaches back to Terra Australis Incognita before first settlement in 1788, but its practical identity until Federation in 1901 (and after) is colonial, constituted by the colonial cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Hobart. New Zealand, despite the Dutch associations of the name, was later viewed from its Anglo beginnings as Arcadia. Yet the parallel paths of the two nations are also constitutive of their identities. The older Greek image of the antipodes leads on to the collective identity of Australia and New Zealand as Australasia across the path of the nineteenth century. Australia and New Zealand certainly worked together as part of a larger imperial labour market and labour movement, as well as a shared market for finance and commerce. The earlier arguments for Australian federation, indeed, were arguments for Australasian federation. The Australian Constitution, drafted for 1901, still contains within it a clause leaving open New Zealand as a possible member of the Australian Commonwealth. So these are stories at once both intertwined and distinct.

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If these are parallel paths, but not quite parallel histories, then they are also stories of separate nations, perhaps most emphatically after World War II, when nation-building proceeded apace as national developmentalism and Fordism made their mark, even if more evidently in Australia than New Zealand (McMichael 1994; Rolfe 1999). Into the 1990s, in the face of the new globalization both experiences were described anew as historic settlements; what in the critical literature was referred to as settler capitalism in the new world (Denoon 1987) was now reviewed as the ‘Australian Settlement’ by Paul Kelly (Kelly 1992), and with a different emphasis, the ‘Pakeha Settlement’ in New Zealand by James Belich (Belich 1996). In both cases, the image was one of a white man’s new world, protected from the ravages of the world system by institutions like arbitration, and able to deliver prosperity on an agrarian production base. As Zygmunt Bauman likes to remind us, you only notice something when it fails to work. And so, in these historic cases, did the image of settlement become apparent when it was blown away by the new wave of globalization.

AUSTRALIA The myth of modern Australian history is that Australia’s defining attribute is its nationalism. The nation-state Australia is a twentiethcentury phenomenon, and so is nationalism. Certainly the nation-state becomes a powerful reality in Australia, but this is only strikingly so after World War II, in the period when war, followed by nation-building, the post-war boom and decolonization all coincide. What is more evident geographically speaking is that Australia is a land mass or continent, a continent which in the eyes of the federation fathers a century ago was looking for a nation (Ward 1977). Given its lack of a myth of national foundation, in war or revolution, given its accidental and bureaucratic origins as a penal colony, to the afterlife of which its instigators apparently gave little thought, it may actually be more useful to view Australia as an accidental nation. If

we begin from the premise that Australia was an accidental nation, then the historiographical and widespread popular sense that Australia is a country of strong nationalism becomes less persuasive. Nationalism in Australia might then be viewed as a more complex phenomenon, politically contingent and periodically enforced upon citizens by their political leaders for electoral reasons or beaten up by the media for sporting events, not least in times of crisis, whether local or global. To begin to think about the nation in Australia is difficult. To begin to think about Australia is difficult, in terms of the standard liberal or Marxist sensibilities. First, from penal settlement in 1788, the state precedes capital. Second, in a particular cultural sense, labour precedes capital, as bond labour becomes free with the end of transportation, and as capital remains in London, whereas labour, as always, is geographically fixed (though it is also mobile across the Tasman). The kind of nationalism which is then identified as central by historians into the twentieth century is labour nationalism. After its Whig phase, Australian historywriting becomes labour history, history from below as befits the image of the land and its popular inflection as ‘down-under’. The most powerful images of labour nationalism in the 1890s are imperial and racially exclusive (McQueen 1970). The image of White Australia finds its enthusiasts across liberal and labour ranks, and this is telling, for the identity of Australia and of Australian nationalism here is in its original form racially defined. Everyday life and loyalty are colonial, defined by the reach of concerns in regional shearing sheds or in the suburbs of Brisbane or the slums of Melbourne, but national identity, when it is presenced, is primarily racial. Indeed, the first legislative act of the new Federal Parliament was to introduce the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901. Australian identity here, is white, Anglo, European, not of Asia, neither yellow nor black. The aura of Australia, in this period, was that of A New Britannia in the Southern Seas. New Zealand, more racially pure in its settler population, less tropical in its geographical extremities, still later identified its dream as that of a Better Britain.

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This is not to say that labour nationalism ruled, or that its content was absolutely shared by Australia’s political elite. For one thing, labour nationalism would also happily dispense at least in principle with the aristocratic fops of the political elite. Its socialist dream was often of capitalism without capitalists, as elsewhere in Europe and the New World; and its racism was often moderated by the internationalism of labour and the idea of universal brotherhood. But its mainstream, the labourism that was to dominate both the Left and popular culture, was racially exclusivist. Did the advocates of white Australia then see themselves as Australians? Yes, in this particular register, facing outwards, towards the wider world and not only inwards, or on to the next day and its bread. Yet the presence of imperial consciousness and the images of the New Britannia were such as to qualify this sense irredeemably. In the context of a New Britannia, the citizen (male) would be an Independent Australian Briton. This was confirmed by federation in 1901, the ordinary impact of which is still subject to dispute. There were nation-builders leading up to this event, though their identities were also colonial, for before federation there was no national capital, and Canberra, an artificial invention built in the shadow of Washington, DC and garden city planning, was a city that was never a colony. The city of Canberra thus became identified with the twentieth-century project of nation-building in a way that made the two mutually constitutive, at the same time confirming their distance from the everyday life of most citizens in the older and commercial colonial cities. The next significant phase was marked by World War I. In the absence of a foundational revolution, the imperial event at Gallipoli became symbolic of Australian nationalism in the context of the imperial heritage. Here the figure of the bronzed, laconic Aussie was born, or constructed. The figure of the ANZAC is expressive of the moment: imperial, Britain in the European theatre of world war; Australian, marked by the pragmatism and comradeship of the wide brown land; and bonded together with the Kiwis, the NZ part of ANZAC.

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The Australian state, and the colonial traditions which proceeded it, have long been connected with the idea of colonial socialism, or state socialism (Reeves 1902; Eggleston 1932). Australia and New Zealand together, and perhaps especially New Zealand, were viewed from the north as the social laboratory of the New World. The institution of arbitration was constructed in traffic across the Tasman; then in 1938 the Savage Labour government pioneered global developments in welfare provision in New Zealand ‘from the cradle to the grave’. Both the statist tradition and, in a different sense, the practical socialism of the antipodes was confirmed, momentarily, in the period of reconstruction after World War II. The significance of the war for the project of nation-building in Australia cannot be underestimated. For it saw, for example, the first moment at which taxation became a federal prerogative, presuming now that it was the nation rather than the colonies (or then states) which was both the appropriate organizational unit of the state and the desirable carrier of collective identity. If federation was the first serious political attempt to make a nation-state, then post-war reconstruction was its practical sequel and extension in a world where nationbuilding and rebuilding was now the shared global imperative. The national-development phase of global capitalist development in Australia shared its impulses. Import substitution was consolidated on a grand scale with the development of local Fordism and the shift from car assembly to local car production (Davison 2004). The idea of a National Health Service was mooted in Australia and defeated. The 1944 Federal Labor government referendum on the widespread extension of state powers was defeated by the electorate. The Australian National University was established in 1949, together with a Research School of Social Sciences to guide it and Canberra. National demography became an academic priority and a developmental object, via programmes of Southern European migration to build industry and its suburbs, and to push programmes of national development like the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme in New South Wales, a national development

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programme that could be compared to the Hoover Dam in the United States. The result of the post-war boom and programme of national development was the emergence in the period of the so-called ‘Lucky Country’ in the 1960s (Horne 1964). Here the image was of the Australian nation as a consumptive more than productive culture, where primary export commodity markets could maintain a strong and well-fed largely Anglo population and facilitate its historic shift from the hope of a civic nation into the fun palace of a leisure nation. This was a lazy nationalism, the product of widespread abundance; it remained racially exclusive, though now increasingly European rather than strictly British. One result was that during the 1960s the idea or at least the slogan of the White Australia Policy was abandoned, both by the Labor party and by the state, though assimilation clearly ruled. Into the 1970s both nation and nationalism took a social democratic turn, marked at government level by the reformist Whitlam moment, 1972–75. This represented a new period of cultural nationalism, perhaps reminiscent of Trudeau in Canada, together with a cosmopolitan inflexion. The Whitlam government encouraged the development of a national literary canon, not least in the form of film and television, as well as the valorization of cultural diversity. Against a backdrop of accelerated globalization, shifts in diplomatic priorities from Europe and North America to Asia, and immigration trends that diluted the demographic weight of ‘white’ Australia, the new doctrine and practice of ‘multiculturalism’ progressively displaced pre-existing unicultural narratives of nationhood in most official discourse. While certainly more tolerant of cultural diversity within the nation than its ethnocentric predecessor, this new exercise in civic nationalism was not without its detractors. Many critics of multiculturalism have argued that it conceals the continuation of a hard Anglo ethnic core, dominated by a white Anglo-Celtic elite that defines itself, and is defined by others, as non-ethnic (Hage 2000; Jakubowicz et al. 1984). Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) has similarly argued that multiculturalism

called upon Aboriginal Australians to identify with an impossible ideal of ‘traditional’ cultural authenticity, the logic of which is both conformist and non-conflictual. However, although seeking to domesticate the mobilizing power of ethnic identification and grievance within safe cultural parameters, multiculturalism also opened up new spaces for political assertiveness. Indigenous peoples used the new sense of the expanding political sphere or civil society to organize public presence, not least in the form of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a self-fabricated space located in the grounds in front of Parliament House in Canberra. The image of the black nation could no longer be avoided by the white mainstream. By the 1980s, the Labor government returned to office, restyled now as the party of state, no longer as the party of the labour movement. The long Labor Decade, 1983–96, saw Australia Labor in tandem with New Zealand Labour anticipate Blair’s subsequent New Labour in Britain (Beilharz 1994). This represented the closure of the moment of the project of national development, and the reformation of the nation-state in terms of the globalizing project. The return to power of the conservatives, or Liberals under Howard since 1996, has seen the maintenance and acceleration of the processes of economic globalization together with a formal return to the politics of monoculturalism. In this way, the political achievement of Howard has been to connect back to the populist core of the image of labour nationalism, to refigure this as a middle-class ‘battler’ ethic and to connect this to the political economy of deregulation.

NEW ZEALAND Nationalism in New Zealand presents a series of striking contrasts and parallels with its Australian counterpart. The contrasts are perhaps less obvious, especially to the outside observer, but are critical to understanding the specific form, content and historical trajectory of New Zealand nationalism and nationality. Their genesis can be traced to the decades

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following the 1860s land wars between the Maori and the colonial government, which generated mutually determining pan-Maori and pakeha (white) New Zealand identities. These were the bases for, and manifestations of, two opposing nationalist imaginaries that continue to shape contemporary New Zealand politics. In the late nineteenth century, they both represented proto-nationalisms in search of nations. In 1854, Canterbury pioneer Thomas Cholmondeley wrote about American precedents for the New Zealand nation, while Governor George Grey told Maori chiefs that one day ‘a great nation will occupy these lands’ (cited in Sinclair 1986: 1). It was not until the final decades of that century that the idea took on a more coherent collective expression. If ‘nations’ are formed not so much by any identifiable empirical property as by nationalist claims themselves, as Craig Calhoun (1997) has argued, then it is clear that Maori and pakeha nations became gradually sharpening frames of reference during this period. What we might usefully call ‘Maorination’ came first. The most obvious manifestations were the Kingitanga (King Movement) and Kotahitanga (Maori Parliament) (Denoon and Mein-Smith 2000: 184–95). Born in the shadows of and as responses to colonial dominance, both sought to encompass particularist tribal claims and identities within a more inclusive ‘Maori’ framework. Both sought to marry cultural autonomy with political objectives, not least of which was the securing of Maori interests, leadership and sovereignty (tino rangatira tanga) in the face of colonial rule, irrespective of tribal affiliation. It is this coupling of culture and politics that marks them out as protonationalist. Their ultimate collapse as viable institutions should not blind us to their protonationalist character, nor to their enduring legacy for the Maori cultural and political renaissance of the 1970s. They also made a crucial contribution to the formation of a white settler nationalism and identity, against which the Maori were increasingly defined and, at least partially, marginalized. Settler nationalism, and its twentiethcentury progeny, has always been unclear about the status of the Maori within its self-proclaimed

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nation. On the one hand, an assimilationist strain sought to incorporate the Maori within narratives of national becoming. In this view, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was a unique experiment in cooperation between an indigenous population and European settlers, rather than the imperial fraud that radicals often present it as being. It expresses a compact between, and a founding document of, two peoples who would go on to form one nation. The early vote for the Maori (1876 for male Maori with individual property title), and their physical survival and relative prosperity as compared to indigenous peoples elsewhere, are presented as proof of the enlightened attitude of New Zealand’s colonial administration and its desire to incorporate Maori citizens within the new nation. Indeed, one of the arguments put forward against joining the federation with the six other Australasian colonies was that the latter could not be entrusted to uphold the rights of ‘our natives’ given the savage treatment of their own. On the other hand, white settler nationalism evinced a more straightforward exclusionary vision. This vision was premised on a racialized view of the world, which condescendingly viewed the Maori like aborigines, as a window into Europe’s anthropological past – an unassimilable ‘race’ on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder. The new nation would be a nation of and for the white race, as made clear by New Zealand’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1899. This excluded those who were not of British or Irish parentage and who could not pass an English language test; this was a ‘white New Zealand’ policy two years prior to the implementation of its more infamous Australian counterpart. As Denoon and Mein-Smith note, by the end of the nineteenth century in New Zealand, ‘the shared idea of “the people” had coalesced and permeated public consciousness so that all who were non-white, non-Christian and non-European in culture were labelled “unassimilable’’’ (2000: 211). White settler nationalism was also ambivalent about New Zealand’s relationship to Britain. As a British colony peopled largely by English and Scottish settlers and their descendants, notwithstanding the large Maori minority, ‘New Zealandness’ elicited divided loyalties

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and contending identities, often within the head and heart of the same settler. Britain remained the mother country amongst early generations of white settlers, including those born in New Zealand. For them, New Zealand promised a Britain of the South Seas, an improved arcadian model to be sure, but one that was still organically tied to, loyal towards and dependent upon the home country. For a time, New Zealand even sought to fashion itself in the imperial image of its British parent, claiming an empire writ small in the South Pacific. Its direct colonial administration of the Cook Islands, Samoa (after World War I) and other small Pacific Islands, and its continued economic and political dominance of them to this day, represent important episodes in the formation of white New Zealand nationalism. Needless to say, the history of New Zealand’s involvement in the South Pacific Islands was also crucial to the emergence of nationalism in the latter, though that story is beyond the scope of this chapter. Even when the demographic balance shifted in favour of a ‘native born’ white New Zealand populace in the 1880s, the image of the imperial centre as home continued for many pakehas. New Zealanders generally viewed themselves as ‘better Britons’, but Britons nonetheless, and this would continue until at least World War I. But alongside, or perhaps more accurately within, this ‘better Britonism’, was growing a more explicitly separate New Zealand identity. This was reflected in the emergence of a more politically assertive nationalist journalism, the formation of ‘New Zealand natives associations’ in the 1890s, and the establishment of numerous national organizations. The New Zealand Farmers’ Union, the New Zealand Rugby Union, the National Council of Women, the first national political parties and trade unions, and many other national organizations date from this period (Sinclair 1986: 3). They expressed a growing sense of separateness from both Britain and, equally important, the other Australasian colonies. From the standpoint of the present, it might seem inevitable and natural that New Zealand and Australia should form two separate national states and identities. The 1,200 miles

separating Sydney from Auckland have themselves been identified as 1,200 good reasons for national separateness, a distance which is magnified by the various cultural, geographic and historical differences that national-centred historiography commonly emphasizes. But this is to read history backwards. It involves a kind of retrospective nationalism which, through a sleight of hand, transforms what was a historically contingent, could-have-been-otherwise process of national-state formation into a historical necessity, a national destiny, or both. What existed prior to the twentieth century was not ‘Australia’ and ‘New Zealand’, but seven British colonies that bore a pattern of family resemblance and, relative to the rest of the world, a high degree of economic, political and cultural traffic between one another, which helped constitute a ‘Tasman’ or ‘Australasian World’. This could just as well have been the basis for the emergence of one rather than two national states and identities. New Zealand’s reasons for not joining the Australian Commonwealth in 1901 have been the subject of extended historical debate (see Fairburn 1970; Sinclair 1987; Belich 2001). It has been suggested by some that the main reasons are economic. The economic crises of the 1890s affected the other Australasian colonies far worse than they did New Zealand, whose relative economic dynamism was said to be an incentive to remain apart. Some commentators have concluded that New Zealand’s intensified export trade to Britain since the advent of refrigerated shipping in the 1880s had diminished the importance of access to Australian markets, and thus diminished the economic incentives to federate. Finally, some nascent New Zealand industries, along with the trade unions, which overwhelmingly opposed federation, were seen to be fearful of competition within the new unitary market that would be formed by the Australian Commonwealth. While such explanations offer important insights into why some constituencies were against federation, they have difficulty in accounting for why these interests prevailed over others that would have clearly benefited from federating, including the powerful farming lobby. A more rounded explanation

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must take into account New Zealand settler nationalism itself, which impeded and then was consolidated by federation. Apart from the emergence of a pan-Maori identity, what were the other developments that moulded New Zealand’s settler nationalism? New Zealand’s transport and communications infrastructure had been transformed from the 1870s, under the stewardship of Julius Vogel. From then on, the rapid growth of a national railway system, the multiplication and improvement of roads, and the proliferation of telegraph lines and postal services, compressed time and space and linked distant localities within and between New Zealand’s two main islands. This not only accelerated provincial interdependencies and extended the reach of the colonial state, it gave material and institutional substance to the imagined space of an emerging nation – developments which Livingston (1996) has perceptively described as ‘technological nationalism’. Intensified economic and social interconnectedness was coupled with accelerated political centralization. Up to the period of the land wars, political power and administration had been dispersed across the main provincial centres. The debts incurred and demanded by extended military campaigns undermined the autonomy of the provinces, concentrating power in the hands of an expanding central state apparatus. This apparatus, in conjunction with its imperial overseers, set about forging and perfecting legal and administrative uniformity on every square inch of ‘its’ territory – a stimulant to and index of institutional nationalization. From the 1870s, the colonial state also imposed mandatory primary school education for all children, a key instrument of national cultural homogenization in New Zealand as elsewhere. While Gellner’s (1983) claim that nationalism demands and begets the coincidence of cultural and political boundaries is over-generalized, he was surely correct that relative cultural uniformity improves the prospects of initial state formation and consolidation, and that education is one of the key means by which this is accomplished. This was certainly the case in New Zealand, with generations of school children learning a national catechism and

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mythology within the classroom, thereby helping to form identities that they would carry with them for life. The other two factors that were constitutive in the emergence of a white New Zealand nationalism during this period, even though shared with Australia, were institutionalized class compromise in the form of compulsory industrial arbitration, and New Zealand’s involvement in war. The 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act (IC&A) represented the key achievement in a line of progressive legislation implemented by the Liberal government, which gave New Zealand the seeds of a social security system and an international reputation as a social laboratory. The IC&A Act provided a foundation for New Zealand’s lengthy twentieth-century attachment to economic nationalism, while also giving workers as citizens more of a stake in the new state. The IC&A Act and other progressive legislation obscured cleavages of class beneath a unifying veneer of community, providing apparent resolution to social antagonisms that remained unresolved. The myth of egalitarianism and a classless society became incorporated into and central features of the very fabric of New Zealand’s dominant pakeha nationalism. As in Australia, this myth was enhanced by New Zealand’s involvement in war. Jock Phillips (1996) has identified at least two ANZAC myths. The first is premised on an imperial vision, and commemorates the sacrifices that New Zealanders (and Australians) as ‘better Britons’ made in defence of and as part of the British Empire. The second is less overtly militaristic, more introspective and focused on the private horrors of individual soldiers whose sacrifices were made on behalf of what was ultimately a foreign power. What both narratives share is a sense of national becoming: in the first vision, New Zealand plays its part as a new nation on the global stage, punching above its weight; in the second, New Zealand loses its pre-national innocence, the blood its soldiers spilled a sacrificial rite of national passage. In the immediate aftermath of the war it was the first vision that was dominant, as reflected in the iconography of the shrines and monuments that mushroomed in New

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Zealand’s towns, cities and rural districts between 1918 and 1922. The ANZAC myth has subsequently been remade and its meaning transformed for new generations, and these same monuments are now interpreted in line with the second vision. They now provide tangible points of reference linking New Zealand’s past, present and future, thereby establishing the continuity necessary for the imagining of a national subject. New Zealand’s post-war, nation-building project begins in the 1930s with the election of the first Labour government, and more precisely with its enactment of the 1938 Social Security Act. The Act contained a raft of progressive policies centred on state subsidization of health, housing and education, which laid the main pillars of a recognizably modern welfare state. During and beyond Labour’s reign, which ended in 1949, these policies were extended and institutionalized. They developed alongside and as an integral part of a programme of economic nationalism and import substitution, which sought to relieve New Zealand of its heavy reliance on primary production and the importation of manufactured products. Figures like the public servant and economic historian W. B. Sutch (1966, 1972) provided a powerful intellectual rationale for the post-war welfare consensus and its further extension, arguing that economic diversification and the avoidance of foreign control could only be accomplished through tariffs and state intervention into the economy. High consumer prices and heavy state regulation were the prices to be paid to ensure national independence and a more equitable distribution of national income. For a time, New Zealand’s welfare state became a source of national pride and identity. Any child from the 1950s or 1960s could recite the frequently trumpeted fact that New Zealand enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world. But this fact, and the complacent assumptions of the dominant nationalist orthodoxy on which it rested, were beginning to be undermined by internal and external challenges; a resurgent Maori nationalism on the one hand, and the corrosive effects of intensified globalization on the other.

A Maori nationalist revival was initiated in the late 1960s and intensified over the following two decades. It would, eventually, be realized in the ideology and political practice of ‘biculturalism’, which was in many ways to New Zealand what ‘multiculturalism’ was to Australia. In the wake of the Second World War large numbers of Maori had moved from rural to urban areas, and were concentrated in areas of high poverty and relative deprivation. These would in time become a focus for Maori grievances, and sites of cultural re-affirmation. In this context, Donna Awatere’s Maori Sovereignty (1984) provided both an articulate challenge to the white nationalist orthodoxy, and a militant alternative vision framed by Maori self-determination. The large land rights march in 1975, which spanned the length of the North Island in order to publicize Maori grievances, confirmed the depth of Maori nationalist sentiment. It was followed by a major confrontation at Auckland’s Bastion Point in 1978, where hundreds of Maori who had occupied some of the city’s most exclusive real estate were physically evicted by a huge police mobilization. The South African rugby tour of 1981, and the violence that ensued in its wake, further radicalized Maori youth and sharpened feelings of national marginalization. Taken together, these events contributed to the reinvigoration of a moribund Waitangi Tribunal that had earlier been set up to address Maori land claims. The co-opting of prominent Maori activists into its bureaucratic machine was simultaneously symptom and cause of the differentiation of Maori nationalism between radical and reformist strains, itself a reflection of increased socio-economic differentiation within the Maori population. This process accelerated after the fourth Labour government came to power in 1984 and immediately set about transforming New Zealand’s political economy, allegedly in response to globalization. The deregulation of the New Zealand economy, the corporatization and privatization of state-owned industries, and the hollowing out of welfare provision and entitlement, have had their corollary in a shifting national idiom and sensibility. The cult of individualism and the destructive social logic of unfettered free

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markets have placed greater strains on the pretensions of nationalism to be a unifying, levelling force. New Zealand’s dominant nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s took on all of the trappings of a cynical marketing exercise, packaged and repackaged in Americas Cup extravaganzas and the commercialization of sport more generally. It also had the odious effect of reanimating a far-right nationalist populism – in the form of Winston Peters’s anti-Asian, anti-immigrant New Zealand First party – which appeals directly to the fears and prejudices of a constituency marginalized by globalization and neo-liberal restructuring. In this it mirrors the development of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in Australia, though as in Australia the larger dynamics indicate striking social division rather than severe political polarization.

CONCLUSION The emergence, maturation and transformation of New Zealand and Australian identity and nationalism over the long century discussed in this chapter draw out one key fact: the essentially contested nature of the ways that the categories New Zealand and Australia are imagined. This struggle for control over imagination about community in its antipodean context is likely to intensify over the coming years as the communities that they encompass diversify in response to the rapidly changing rhythms of an increasingly globalized world. In both countries, this struggle will also likely continue lock-step, given the respective strength and tradition of the parties to struggle. In New Zealand, the contest will remain more clearly bicultural; in Australia, it will likely be rather between images of an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ Australia (Beilharz 2004). Looking back at these stories of the rise and renegotiation of antipodean nation-building, the conceptual clarity of the idea of the nationstate and of nationalism blurs. These were accidental, or incidental nations imposed, differently, both on indigenous peoples and on convict and settler subjects, who were at best

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Britons with local accents and markings. The traffic across the Tasman has meant that only more recently has the question of citizenship become more decisive, and yet more indifferent, as more and more antipodeans travel out. As Bauman indicates, you only notice what you have when it’s gone. The Australasian experiment was state-dependent, and only latterly more clearly nationalistic. Now it is deregulated, and its nationalisms are less wellrehearsed, even if they are increasingly hostile towards one another. For those who remain, the vicissitudes of settlement continue.

REFERENCES Awatere, D. (1984) Maori Sovereignty. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Beilharz, P. (1994) Transforming Labor. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Beilharz, P. (2004) ‘Rewriting Australia?’, Journal of Sociology, 40: 4. Belich, J. (1996) Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders – From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Belich, J. (2001) Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders – From the 1880s to the Year 2000. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Davison, G. (2004) Car Wars. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Denoon, D. (1987) Settler Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denoon, D. and Mein-Smith, P. (2000) A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Oxford: Blackwell. Eggleston, F. (1932) State Socialism in Victoria. London: P. S. King. Fairburn, M. (1970) ‘New Zealand and the Australasian Federation, 1883–1901: Another View’, New Zealand Journal of History, 4 (2): 38–67. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hage, G. (2000) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge. Horne, D. (1964) The Lucky Country. Ringwood: Penguin.

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Jakubowicz, A., Morrissey, M. and Palser, J. (1984) ‘Ethnicity, Class and Social Policy in Australia’, SWRC Reports and Proceedings, No. 46. Kelly, P. (1992) The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980’s. St. Leonards NSW: Allen and Unwin. Livingston, K. T. (1996) The Wired Nation Continent: The Communications Revolution and Federating Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. McMichael, P. (1994) Development and Social Change. London: Sage. McQueen, H. (1970) A New Britannia. Ringwood: Penguin. Phillips, J. (1996) A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male – A History. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Povinelli, E. A. (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian

Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reeves, W. P. (1902) State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. London: Grant Richards. Rolfe, M. (1999) ‘Faraway Fordism?’, New Zealand Journal of History, 33: 1. Sinclair, K. (1986) The Native Born: The Origins of New Zealand Nationalism. Massey Memorial Lecture: Massey University. Sinclair, K. (ed.) (1987) Tasman Relations: New Zealand and Australia, 1788–1988. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Sutch, W. B. (1966) The Quest for Security in New Zealand. Wellington: Oxford University Press. Sutch, W. B. (1972) Poverty and Progress in New Zealand. Wellington: Reed. Ward, R. (1977) A Nation for a Continent. Richmond: Heinemann.

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Index Acton, Lord 10 Afghanistan 185–6, 326 African nationalism 513–26 anti-colonial resistance 515–16, 517–18 cultural nationalism 516 economic system 519–20 founding fathers 513–14 liberal-democratic ideas 516–18 pan-Africanism 513, 514–15 continental 521–2 primary resistance to proto-nationalism 515–16 socialism and communism 518–20 radical 520–1 territorial nationalism and nation-building 522–4 Agadzhanov, S. 410 agency vs. passivity 74 Ahmad, F. 427 Al-Husri, S. 504 al-Qa’eda 184, 185, 186 Algeria 183, 186, 502, 505 ancient Greece 227, 263, 266, 358–9 ancient Rome 227, 263 Anderson, B. 11, 27, 28, 45, 60–1, 76, 105–6, 157, 207, 237–8, 240, 242, 243, 250, 251, 317, 335, 336, 345, 370–1, 374, 376–8, 463, 467, 469, 500, 509, 528, 529 anger 76 Anglo-Saxonism 197 anomie meaning vs. 74–5 as price of modernity 166–7 Anthias, F. 120 and Yuval-Davis, N. 119, 120, 289 anthropological perspectives 26–7, 35, 77, 171–2, 276–7 anti-colonial resistance 378, 515–16, 517–18 anti-semitism 227–8, 275, 276, 302 Antonious, G. 501–3, 504, 507 anxiety 75 ANZAC 557, 561–2 Appadurai, A. 252, 254–5, 339 Arab League 506 Arab national identity 509–10 Arab nationalism 500–12 and Europe 500–3, 503–4 Palestine question 505 political Islam and nationalism 507–8 present and future agenda of research 508–11 reawakening reconsidered 503–5 Arab territories, Ottoman Empire 88–9 Arabic language teaching, Turkey 502

Arendt, H. 132, 207, 275, 325, 328, 335, 340 Argentina 544–5, 546–7, 549–50 Armenians 177, 302 ASEN convention 157, 158 Asia see Central Asia; South Asia; South-East Asia; specific countries Asian countries, Japan’s relationship with 476 Asian forms of nationalism 45, 55 Asian immigrants, Britain 232–3 assimilation, ethnic and religious identities 338 Atlantic seaboard 51 atonement strategies 218 attachment theory 71, 73 Australia 55, 556–8 aboriginals 199–200, 558 Labor government 557–8 labour nationalism 556–7 race 199–200, 556, 557, 558 social democratic turn 558 Austria 230, 252–3, 405 language and identity 108–10, 111, 112–14 Austro-Hungarian Empire 25, 34, 252–3, 503 autochthonism 455–6 autonomy and liberalism 346, 352, 353 and national identity 95, 97, 98 see also self-determination Avery, J.G. 199, 200 Ba’ath party, Iraq 506–7 Balibar, E. 193, 195, 198, 201 and Wallerstein, I. 24 Balkans 36 Ottoman Empire 88 Baltic states 401–2, 406 ‘banal nationalism’ 78, 303–4, 351 Bangladesh 439, 446 language 447 Banton, M. 195, 196, 197, 200 Baron, B. 510 Barth, F. 171 Basque culture 120–1 Bauer, O. 24, 25, 27 Bauman, Z. 556 Beasley, V.B. 536, 537 Beaune, C. 151 Beck, U. 130, 349, 366 Beckham, D. 255–6 Beissinger, M. 415 Belgium 194

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Belich, J. 556 Bell, D. 9, 147, 178 Bensel, R.F. 533–4 Beringer, R.E. 532 Berlin, I. 390–1 Bible origins of nationhood 15 and Prayer Book translations 178 Billig, M. 78, 105, 194, 206, 210, 304, 309, 317, 351 bin Laden, Osama 185, 186, 190 biological groups 61, 62–3 Blair, T. 316 Bloom, S.F. 44, 68, 77, 79 Bohrer, K.-H. 208 Bolivia 545, 546–7, 551 Bolshevism 303, 412, 413 Bonwick, J. 199–200 Boorstin, D.J. 528–9 Bourdieu, P. 86, 106 bourgeoisie 66–7, 69, 70, 71, 72, 227 Bowlby, J. 73 Brague, R. 105 Brazil 543, 545, 546–7, 549, 550 Bretton Woods Agreement 387 Breuilly, J. 7, 14, 22, 23, 24, 152, 174, 307, 308 Britain and Arab world 502 immigration 231–3 liberal democratic 315–17 nineteenth century 304 Rome rule, Christianization of 150 and US 386–7 British Empire, genocides 323 British national citizenship 226 British national identity and postcolonialism 230–4 British welfare institutions 229 Brubaker, R. 84, 86, 237, 239, 301, 340, 454 Brustein, W.I. 275 Buddhist concepts and movements 189–90 Bulgaria 406 bureaucracy see local administration; state administration bureaucratization 22, 23 Burma 461, 462–3, 464, 465, 469 Butler, J. 529 Butterfield, H. 7, 12 Calhoun, C. 46, 70–1 Cambodia 324–5, 462, 463, 464–5 Caminal, M. and Matas, J. 246 Cannadine, D. 11 capitalism industrial 296 see also entries beginning economic Carayo-Abengózar, M. 120, 122 Caribbean immigrants, Britain 232–3 pan-African ideology 513 Carlyle, T. 201 Cassirer, E. 137 Castles, S. 291

Catalan 244, 245, 246 categorization 76–7 Catholicism 303 Cem, I. 429 Central Asia 450–60 ethnic minorities 458 language policy 454–5 languages and tribes 450–1, 452–3 national historiographies 455–7 post-Soviet period 453–8 Russians 458 Soviet period 451–3 subnational identities 452–3, 457–8 victimization 456 Central and Eastern Europe 11–12, 24, 25, 51, 399–409 contemporary patterns 404–7 ‘ethnicized groups’ 401 general historical overview 400–2 local theoretical models 402–4 Central Europe 51 charismatic leaders 67, 68, 79 Chatterjee, P. 378, 379 Chechnya 416, 417 child rearing 69 see also motherhood Chile 546–7 China 13, 189, 324, 519 Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1959–62) 324 choice theory of secession 101–2 Christianity Catholicism 303 concepts and movements 187–8 Protestantism 70, 146, 147–8, 178, 303 Roman rule, Great Britain 150 citizen identities 70, 72 citizenship 16, 225–36 British 226 education programmes 218 French 234 German 230 historical origins 227–8 human rights and erosion of 234–5 immigrants 288 Japanese 23, 478–9, 481–2 Latin American 541–2, 547 liberal 228, 229 US 229–30 and welfare states 228–30 ‘civic’ definition of nation 173–4 civic dimensions of nationalist politics, South-East Asia 466–8 ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ conception of nationhood 170 civic ideals and race 193–4 ‘civil society’ 163 civil wars American 528, 530–3 English 152 genocide 326 ‘civilization’ 62

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class bourgeoisie 66–7, 69, 70, 71, 72, 227 and ethnicity 299 and immigrants 291–2 Ottoman Empire 88 and race struggle 196–8 stratification/division 63, 165, 196–7 working 392, 394, 547, 548 Cockburn, C. 121 Coke, Sir Edward 12 Cold War Olympic Games 266 collective amnesia 216, 217 collective memory 11–12, 76, 214–15 collectivist-authoritarian regimes, South-East Asia 466–7 collectivities 205 collectivization of authority 161 Colley, L. 8, 146, 147, 178 Collins, P.H. 535, 536 colonialism 226 anti-colonial resistance 378, 515–16, 517–18 genocide and ecological catastrophe 322–3 ‘internal colonialism’ 30 see also post-colonial countries commemoration 205–13 definition 206 devices 209–10 historical events and periods 206–9 history to memory 211–12 organization and politics of 211 commercial sponsorship of mega-events 268 communal violence and memory 216 communciation codes 175 communication 21–2, 26–8 historic 377 communicative action 386 communism and Arab world 504–5 fall of 267 see also post-communist countries; specific countries communitarian localists, Japan 483, 486 community/ies 133–4 and engagement vs. loneliness 73–4 ‘imagined community’ 60, 66–7, 72, 74, 76, 105–6, 133–4, 240, 250, 335 Japan 473 ‘millet’ communities, Ottoman Empire 87–8 ‘regnal communities’, medieval Europe 15–16 ‘virtual communities’ 80 see also Gemeinschaft comparison 77–8 Confino, A. 11 conflicts of interest 29–30 Connor, W. 102, 158, 169–70, 174, 195, 237, 296, 300, 308, 320, 337, 528 Connors, M.K. 467 Constitution of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (CSFRY) 313 contractarianism 346 corporatist welfare regimes 228

cosmopolitanism 357–68 Japanese 483–4 Jewish 362–3 migrants 291 in nineteenth century 358–61 revival of 363–6 in twentieth century 361–3 de Crèvecoeur, J. 535 Cuba 519, 546, 551 Culinovic, F. 314–15 cultural approaches 57–65 discursive challenge of national individuality 59–61 nationalism and modernity 61–4 similitude, principle of 58–9 ‘cultural capital’ 80 cultural differences and genocide 326, 327–8 cultural division of labour 86–7 cultural nationalism (Nihonjinron), Japan 479–80 culture and identity 98 and power 50 Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic 11, 34, 38, 48, 104, 401 dangerous nationalism 78–9 Dark Ages, England 149–51 Darwinian theory 195, 199, 351 Davies, R.R. 149, 150 Davis, M. 329 D’Azeglio, M. 14 De Master, S. and Le Ro, M.K. 281 de-industrialization 277 Degler, C. 530 Delanty, G. 352 and O’Mahony, P. 79, 239, 349–50 ‘democide’ 327 democracy 354, 364–5 democratization 163, 225 demographics see population Denmark 38–9 Denoon, D. and Mein-Smith, P. 559 Desai, A.R. 440 desire as impelling action 73 Deutsch, K. 25–7, 160, 237, 334, 338, 402, 403, 404 developmentalism/Westernization 321–2, 323–4, 325 diaspora nationalism 290 Diez-Medrano, J. 281 direct rule 84–93 Ottoman Empire, disintergration of 87–9 and peripheral nationalism 86–7, 89–90 scope and penetration 86 and state-building nationalism 85–6, 89–90 why indirect rule thwarts nationalism 85 discourse-analytical/socio-linguistic approaches 104–17 methodologies 107–14 perspectives for further research 114–15 discourse-historical approach 112–14

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discourses challenge of national individuality 59–61 and national identities 105–6, 108–10 text and context 106–7 see also language(s) disgust 76 Douglas, F. 534 Dreyfus Affair 275 Dugin, A. 421–2 Dumont, L. 58, 61 Durkheim, E. 69, 72, 74, 76, 135, 166, 193, 250–1, 350–1, 352 Dutch nationalism 151 Dutch Revolt against Spain 152 ‘early modernity’ 262–3 East Timor 463–4 Eastern Europe 51 ecological catastrophe and genocide 322–3 economic competition 162–3 economic conflict 30 economic dislocation and national identity 302, 303 economic modernization 25–6 ‘print-capitalism’ 27, 72 ‘economic nationalism’ 163 economic systems 162–3 Africa 519–20 Iran 432 New Zealand 560–1 The Economist 385 Ecuador 545, 546–7 education programmes, citizenship 218 education systems 28–9, 69, 71–2 cultural homogeneity 334 Japan 480 New Zealand 561 see also school textbooks egalitarianism 161, 162 Egypt Arab nationalism 502, 507, 511 feminist historiography 510 Islamic nationalism 184, 185, 190 as ‘old–new nation’ 177 El Salvador 545, 546 Elias, N. 347–8 elites see bourgeoisie Elizabethan era, England 148, 226 emotions, avoiding adverse 75 employment, gender and EU 124–5 England Anglo-Saxonism 197 Guy Faulks night 207 national emblems 298 see also pre-modern nationalism (England) English Civil War 152 English football 253–5 flag 249–50, 251, 253–4 strips 254, 255 team 256–7 English identity 252, 253

INDEX

English language teaching, Japan 476, 483 English monarchy 11 English nationalism 15 Enlightenment 70, 295, 302–3, 351, 359 French 400 Kantian philosophy 225, 348, 360–1 environmental disasters 302, 326 equality of national membership 164–5 Eriksson, Sven Goran 257, 258 Escott, P. 532 Esping-Anderson, G. 228 ethnic cleansing see genocide ethnic/ethnicity 169–81 Central Asia 458 Central and Eastern Europe 401 confict, India 41 dimension of national politics, South-East Asia 462–6 embodiment 373 historical perspectives 14–15, 16, 53–4, 172, 177–9 and ideological religious nationalism 184 military recruitment policies 296 nationalism and national identity 175–7 paradigms of nation 172–5 politics of exclusion 334–44 boundary-making perspective 336–41 creation and management of minorities 339–41 variations 341–2 and race 61, 62–3, 64 Russia 420 and territoriality 373–5 see also immigrants; immigration; xenophobia ethnie 52, 53, 54, 170–2, 372, 447 ethno-federalism, Russia 412–15, 416–18 ‘ethno-symbolists’ 157–8 ethnographic approaches, Medieval England 149 ethnonational community 195 Eurocentric bias 45 Europe and Arab world 500–3, 503–4 dichotomies 105 four zones typology 51–2 and Japan 476 medieval ethnicity 14–15 pluralist dynamic 394–6 West and East 48, 49, 53 see also specific countries European history 21, 22, 23, 50–1, 53–5 European Union (EU) 104–5, 365 and gender 124–5 legislative regions 243 Schuman Declaration 387–8 and Turkey 430 European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) 273–4 expressionism 390–1 facticity 78 Fahri, F. 431 fair treatment right 95–6 famine 302

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Fanaon, F. 520–1 Fascism 134, 392, 393 Faust, D.G. 532, 533 fear, anxiety and powerlessness 75 feminism 121–2 see also gender Fenton, S. 193, 194, 198, 326 Figes, O. 324 Fiji 199 Fishman model of languages 28 flags 253–5 banal nationalism 351 English football 249–50, 251, 253–4 Russian 420 football European championships 249–50, 251, 253–4 fans 249–50, 255–6 French 257–8 Scottish 254, 258 World Cup 260, 268, 269 see also English football Foote, S. 150 Ford, H. 324 Foucault, M. 64, 86, 196, 197–8, 201, 226, 321, 349, 411, 509 France and Algeria 502, 505 and Arab world 500–1 Catholicism 303 class division 196–7 commemoration of historic events 209 Debre law 274–5 Dreyfus Affair 275 Enlightenment 400 headscarf affair 281 historical definition of nation 9–10 human rights and erosion of citizenship 234 immigration/xenophobia 276, 277, 278, 279, 281 Napoleonic Wars 70–1 national identity 14, 135 national socialism 391–3 Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) 10, 12 Francophilia (18th century English aristocracy) 146 Frankfurt School 68, 71, 80 Fredrickson, G.M. 276, 533 French football team 257–8 French nationalism 15, 146–7, 151–2, 504 French Revolution 9, 10, 24, 152, 153, 227, 303, 359–60 Freud, S. 67, 68 Fromm, E. 68, 74 functionalist perspective 37 Furet, F. 12 Gandhi, M.K. 441 Geary, P. 1 Geertz, C. 60 Gellner, E. 11, 13, 25–6, 30, 33, 34–6, 37–9, 39, 40, 50–2, 66–7, 84, 118, 120, 132, 150, 157, 193, 205, 302, 307, 309, 320–1, 334, 336, 337, 349, 351–2, 362–3, 370–1, 372, 402–3, 404, 503, 529

Gellner Memorial Lecture (2004) 157 Gemeinschaft 69, 355 and Gesellschaft 132, 309, 349–50, 352 see also community/ies gender 118–28 contested relations between nations and other polities 124–5 employment, EU 124–5 nation and globalization 125–6 nation and state formation 125 and nationalism, mediation in relationship between 123–4 and nationalist ideals 120–3 genocide 320–31 ecological catstrophe and imperialism 322–3 forms of 326–7 homogenization and 327–8 modernity and nation-state 321–2 rapid development, social change and 323–5 and war 325–6 see also memory geopolitical conflict 39, 40–1 German minority, Austro-Hungarian Empire 34 German vs. French nationalism 504 Germany 11, 14 ‘bellicose spirit’ 135 citizenship 230 commemorations 208, 298 Frankfurt Jews 274 historical perspectives 153, 400–2 immigrants/immigration 232–3, 276–7 Nazi era 34, 122, 134, 197, 265–6, 324, 386–7 racist violence 276–7 Unification 297, 404–5 Giddens, A. 22, 23, 72, 130, 237, 296, 309, 317, 346–7, 350, 370–1 Gladstone, W. 531 global television 267–8 global terrorism 134 ‘global village’ 267–8 globalization and cosmopolitanism 357–8 and gender 125–6 and genocide 329 and identity 80, 254–5 localization and transnationalization 253 and nation-state 243 and religious nationalism 190 and Turkey 429 see also imperialism and globalism Glorious Revolution (1688–9), England 147, 207 Goble, P. 418 Goffman, E. 110 Golwalkar, M.S. 441 Gorbachev, M. 413, 414 Gorski, P.S. 87, 175, 178 Gotman, A. 274–5 ‘governmentality’ 226 Grant, M. 201

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Greece 11, 88 ancient 227, 263, 266, 358–9 Olympic Games 264 Greek nationalism 360 Greenfeld, L. 15, 24, 49, 75, 77, 175, 178, 362, 371, 529 Grosby, S. 15, 173, 176, 177 group solidarity 84, 85 ‘groupthink’ 78 Guatemala 545, 546 Guest, L. and Law, P. 255 Guibernau, M. 24, 66, 80 Guizot, F. 9 Habermas, J. 24, 27, 135–6, 241, 355, 361, 363, 364–5, 394 habitus 106 Hall, C. 196 Hall, J.A. 34, 35, 37, 52 Hall, S. 105, 196 Halliday, F. 433–4, 504 Hapsburg Empire 50, 51, 400, 402–3 Hastings, A. 15, 371 hatred 76 Havel, Y. 104–5 Hearn, J. 238–9 Hechter, M. 30 Held, D. 363, 364 Helgerson, R. 148 Heper, M. 427 Herder, J.G. 48, 390, 400, 402, 405 heroic sacrifice 176–7 Hill, C. 12 Hinde, R. 75 Hindu movements 188 Hinduism 439, 440 India 440–1 historians/historical approaches 7–20, 47–8 discourse analysis 112–14 history definition of nation 9–10 genocides 322–3 narrating the nation 12–16 see also pre-modern nationalism (England); specific nations and subjects Hobsbawm, E. 7, 8, 14, 23, 24, 27, 123, 152, 169, 261, 296, 509, 529 and Ranger, T. 11, 120, 338 Hofstader, R. 527 Holmes, D.R. 276, 385, 390, 391, 394 Holmes, W.H. 200 Holocaust 325, 326 homogenization 37, 38–9 conditions for 39–41 education systems 334 options and constraints: from prescription to description 41–2 South and Central America 541–2 Hong Kong 230–1 Hooghe, L. 30 Horowitz, D.L. 30, 325, 341 Hoschchild, A. 73

INDEX

Hough, J.F. 415–16 Howard, M. 300–1 Hroch, M. 44, 53–4, 86, 338, 403–4 human rights 234–5 Human Rights Act (1998) 315 Hundred Years War, England 149–51 Hungary 401, 405, 407 Huntington, S. 42, 406 Hussain, H. 446 ideal type of nation 174–5 identification 77 identity/identities assimilation, ethnic and religious 338 citizen 70, 72 culture and 98 fluctuating 299–303 ‘identity groupings’ 57–8 memory, nationhood and 215–17 multiple, immigrants 291, 292 politics 94, 95, 100, 245–7 regional 252 religious 302–3 self, desire and emotion 72–3 ‘social identity’ 76 territorial 239 see also national identity/ies ideology 307–19 ethnic and ideological religious nationalism 184 layers: nationlism in practice 311–17 modernity 307–11 and national identity 302–3 power of nationalism 317–18 ‘imagined community’ 60, 66–7, 72, 74, 76, 105–6, 133–4, 240, 250, 335 immigrants 111, 113 as others 287–90 and transnational identifications 290–2 immigration Britain 232–3 from Commonwealth 231–2 Victorian 231 British legislation 231, 232 Germany 232–3, 276–7 and xenophobia: post-war period 275–8 see also xenophobia imperialism and globalism across traditional-modern divide 371–7 context of 377–9 see also colonialism; globalization independence South and Central America 542–4 see also post-colonial countries independence days 207 India 13, 41, 188–9, 378–9, 439, 440–2 language 41, 441–2, 446, 447 and Pakistan 445–6 religion 440–1 Tamils 445 ‘two nation’ theory 440–1

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indirect rule 85 individual choice 97, 98 see also autonomy individuality, national 59–61 Indonesia 186, 462–3, 465, 466, 469–70 industrial capitalism 296 industrialization model 40–1 critique 25–6, 37 integralism 389–90 ‘internal colonialism’ 30 internationalism, women’s role 123 interpersonal relationships, memory as reconciling for 218 invisible politics 387–8 Iran 183, 185, 190, 431–6, 507 ‘Aryan’ and Arab Iranians 432 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (CIRI) 311 economic growth 432 Islamic 311–13 Islamic (Shari’a) Law 433–4 nationalism and modernity 431–5 Pahlavi dynasty 431–2 Iran-Iraq war 434 Iraq 135–6, 185 Iraq war 193 Ireland 39, 252, 298, 302 Catholic Church 353 Nothern 121, 122, 184, 219, 221, 222, 223 Islam 79 Achehnese Declaration (1976) 371–2 and Arab world 505–8 Iran 311–13, 433–4 Somalia 372 see also entries beginning Muslim Israel 187, 207 Italy 14, 244–5, 279–80 Japan 45, 55, 62, 184, 473–87 Buddhism and Shintoism 189 citizenship 230 demographic distribution of nationalist orientations 483–6 duality of nationalism: historical context 474–7 ethnic nationalism 477–9 nation 473–4 paradigm shift to multicultural integration 481–3 slogans 475–6 Jay, J. 535 Jayawardena, K. 120, 121–2, 123 Jewish concepts and movements 187 Jewish cosmopolitanism 362–3 Jewish nationalism 184 Jews anti-semitism 227–8, 275, 276, 302 Czech 34 European 274, 275, 276 ‘old–new nations’ 177 Jinnah, M.A. 440–1 just-cause theory of secession 101, 102

571

Kant, E. 76, 225, 348, 360–1 Kapuscinski, R. 417 Kayali, H. 89 Kazakstan 453, 454, 456, 457, 458 Kazancigil, A. 426 Keating, M. 239, 244, 252 Kedourie, E. 335 Keegan, Kevin 257 Kelly, P. 556 Keynes, J.M. 386, 387 Khazanov, A. 416, 417 Khomeini, I. 311–12, 433, 434 Kim, C.J. 535, 536 Kitromilides, P. 11 Klyamkin, I. 418 knowledge of social life 346–7 Kohn, H. 7, 24, 46–50, 170, 173, 238, 335, 402, 403, 404, 527, 529, 531 Koonz, C. 122 Korea Koreans and Japan 477, 479 North and South 266–7 Kosovo 135–6, 328 Kramer, J. 276–7 Kurdish peripheral nationalism 89–90 Kymlicka, W. 97, 98, 99, 363, 365 Kyrgyzstan 453, 454, 455–6, 457, 458 Labor government, Australia 557–8 labour nationalism, Australia 556–7 Lambrecht, C.W. 469 Lamont, M. 281 Lancaster, S. and Lancaster, T. 316–17 language(s) 28, 240, 371 Arabic 502 Austria 108–10, 111, 112–14 Bangladesh 447 Central Asia 450–1, 452–3, 454–5 and dialect 349 education and linguistic homogeneity 334 English in Japan 476, 483 India 41, 441–2, 446, 447 and literacy 28–9 minority 100 Pakistan 446, 447 printed 27–8 South Asia 438, 439 South-East Asia 442, 443, 462–3 see also discourse Laos 463, 464, 465 Latin America 220, 221, 323 citizenship 547 military dictatorships 546–7 race 546 Lavisse, E. 9–10 Le Pen, J.-M. 277, 278, 279, 281, 385, 389, 392, 393–4, 395 leaders, social psychology approach 67, 68, 71, 79 Lemke, J. 106 Lend Lease Agreement, Britain and US 386–7 Lenin, V.I. 324, 518

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liberal citizenship 228, 229 liberal democratic ideas, Africa 516–18 liberal democratic theories of legitimacy 101–2 liberal democratic United Kingdom 315–17 liberal justice theory 101 liberal welfare regimes 228 liberalism 345–56 concepts 346–7 and liberal theory 94, 96–8, 101–2 normative considerations 353–5 origins of nationalism and 347–53 Lipset, S.M. 527, 536–7 literacy 28–9 Llobera, J.R. 24, 25–6 local administration, modernization of 22–3 Lorimer, D.A. 196 Maarten, V.G. 122–3 McDowall, D. 89–90 McVeigh, T. 188 Magocsi, P.R. 407 ‘mainstream modernization’ and mega-events 262 Malaysia 186, 199, 463, 464, 466–7 Malcolm, N. 421 Malik, K. 536 Malkani, K.R. 445 Mann, M. 23, 33, 37, 39, 40–2, 133–4, 169, 230, 238, 300, 304, 308, 309, 321, 323–4, 326, 335, 336, 337, 339 Manzo, K. 289 Maoris 559, 562 Marshall, T.H. 229 Marx, A. 339 Marx, K. 86, 131, 132, 158, 227, 281, 518 Marxism 391–2, 508–9 Masaryk, T. 34, 40 mass nation banal nationalism 303–4 fluctuating identities 299–303 nationalism from below 297–8 patterns of identification 299 rise of 295–7 South and Central America 544–7 meaning vs. anomie 74–5 Medieval era, England 149–51 mega-events development of, in modernity 261–3 and international culture 260–72 in late/mature modernity 267–9 ‘multiple mega-events’ strategies 268–9 Megalomania 36, 40, 402 Meinecke, F. 361 Melson, R. 323, 325 Melucci, A. 246 memory collective 11–12, 76, 214–15 commemoration 211–12 nationhood, identity and 215–17 and peace strategy 217–19, 223–4 personal 215, 216, 217–18 in post-trauma societies 214–24

INDEX

memory cont. truth recovery 219–20 understanding 214–15 and victimhood 22–4, 219–20, 223–4 why truth is important 220–2 Mercosur 549–50 methodological nationalism ambivalent position of nation-state in modernity 137 and critique 129–40 debate in two waves 130–1 historic opacity of nation-state 131–3 normative ambivalence of nation-state 135–7 sociological uncertainty of nation-state 133–5 Mexico 544, 545, 546–7, 549, 550–1 Michelet, J. 8, 9, 12 Migranyan, A. 420 militarism and gender 121, 123 military action 22–3, 29 international 135–6 social psychological accounts 75, 76 military commemoration 209 military conflicts, Latin America 544 military defeat by foreign power 11–12 military dictatorships, Latin America 546–7 military ideology, Japan 477 military recruitment policies and ethnicity 296 military revolutions 296 military technology 325 Mill, J.S. 10, 96–7, 355 ‘Millennium’ mega-events 260 Miller, D. 96–7, 102, 425 ‘millet’ communities, Ottoman Empire 87–8 minority groups 365–6, 406 minority nationalism 97, 100–1 missionaries, Arab world 303, 501–2 modernists 13, 14, 50–3, 157–8, 159, 173–4 position: development and divergences 144–5 and pre-modernists 143–4 typology of nations and nationalism 50–3 modernity, definition 159–62 modernity and nationalism 61–4, 159–62 anomie 166–7 nationalism debate 157–9 structural implications 162–6 modernization and communication 21–2 and communication in nation formation 21–32 of state and local administration 22–3 Molchanov, M. 419–20 Mongolia 189–90 Monnet, J. 386, 387–8, 389 monocultural nationalists 483, 485–6 monuments 209–10 Mookerji, R. 439–40 Morgan, E. 529 Morocco 186–7 Moscovici, S. 76 motherhood 120–1 see also child rearing Mukerji, D.P. 443

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multi-ethnic states 178–9 conflicts of interest 29–30 Fishman model of languages 28 post-colonial countries 198–9 multicultural nationalists, Japan 483, 484–5 multiculturalism 38, 99–100 Japan 481–3, 484–5 South-East Asia 468–9 multinationalism 99 multiple identity, immigrants 291, 292 Murdoch, R. 255 Murrin, J. 528–9 Musil, R. 210, 211, 252–3 Muslim Brotherhood 184, 185 Muslim concepts and movements 184–7 Muslim ‘conquest’ of India 440 Muslim immigrants, violence against 276 Muslim India 440–1 myth-and-memory cultivation 175 Nairn, T. 30, 233, 243, 252 Namier, L. 8 Nasser, G.A. 183, 506, 507 nation formation 369–70 modernization and communication as factors in 21–32 phases and processes 53–5 nation-building 13 legitimacy of 98–101 ‘national character’ studies 77 national dress 78 national flags see flags national historiographies, Central Asia 455–7 national identity/ies as acceptable form of identity 96–8 Arab 509–10 autonomy and 95, 97, 98 British, and postcolonialism 230–4 discourse perspectives 105–6, 108–10 economic dislocation and 302, 303 and ethnicity 175–7 French 14, 135 ideology and 302–3 as Janus-faced process 286–7 ‘natural disturbances’ and 302 Russian 410–12 social psychology approach 71–2, 77 South and Central America 547–51 and state 300 subnational identities, Central Asia 452–3, 457–8 see also cultural approaches; ethnic/ ethnicity; identity/ies national socialism, France 391–3 nationalism, definitions 21, 144–5, 161–2 nations without states 239–43 ‘natural disturbances’ and national identity 302 Nazi Germany 34, 122, 134 Olympic Games 265–6 state racism 197 transport 324 Nehru, J. 13, 183, 442

neo-nationalism in understated nations 243–5 ‘New Order’ 386–7 New Right movements 194 New Zealand 555, 556, 557, 558–63 economic system 560–1 education 561 industrial arbitation 561 involvement in war 561 Maoris 559, 562 post-war nation-building 562 settler nationalism 559–61 transport and communications 561 welfare system 562 Newman, G. 145–6, 147 Nicaragua 546 Nkrumah, K. 521–2 normative realm 309 and operative realm 310, 317–18 North Africa 35, 36 North–South divide, gender relations 125 Nothern Ireland 121, 122, 184, 219, 221, 222, 223 October Revolution (1917) 518 Old Testament 178 ‘old–new nations’ 177 Olympic Games 260, 261, 263 internationalism 266–7 in mature/late modernity 263–9 super-nationalism in inter-war period 265–6 in twentieth century 263–5, 266–7 ‘Olympic Truce’ 266 ontological security of everyday life 351–2 operative realm 310 and normative realm 310, 317–18 Orridge, A.W. 30 otherness and rootlessness 362–3 other(s) 76, 77–8, 79 immigrants as 287–90 and Significant Others 285, 286–7 ‘we’ and, discourse analysis 113–15 Ottoman Empire 87–9, 427, 501, 502, 503 Paine, T. 360 Painter, G.S. 200 Pakistan 186, 439, 445, 447 and India 445–6 language 446, 447 Palestine 184, 185, 505, 510 pan-Africanism 513, 514–15, 521–2 pan-Arabism 506–7 Paraguay 546–7, 549 Parish, P.J. 533, 534 Parsons, T. 134 peace settlements and memory 216–19, 223–4 perennialist view of nations 13, 14 peripheral nationalism 89–90 and direct rule 86–7 Kurdish 89–90 personal memories 215, 216, 217–18 Peru 545, 546–7

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Petran, J. and Petranova, L. 11, 12 Pettigrew, T.F. 277 Philippines 463, 465, 467, 469 Pincus, S. 147, 148 pluralism 391, 394–6 Poland 153, 207, 338, 406 political autonomy see self-determination political citizenship and gender 125 political emancipation 22, 23–4 political engagement, opportunity for 163–4 political movements at Olympic Games 264–5 political philosophy 94–103 political subjectivity, rise of 69 politicians, discourse analysis 111–12 ‘politicide’ 327 politics of exclusion see under ethnic/ethnicity and gender 121, 125 of identity 94, 95, 100, 245–7 invisible 387–8 and religion 190 popular sovereignty 164, 165 population growth 302 mobility 26–8 pressure 302 Portugal 249 positive emotions 73–6 post-colonial countries 378–9 Arab world 506, 510 British national identity and 230–4 multi-ethnicity 198–9 notion of nation 366 secular nationalism 183 see also independence post-communist countries 208, 212, 246–7 post-trauma societies see memory postmodern nations 369, 376 Potter, D. 531 Powell, E. 231–2 Powell, J.W. 200 powerlessness 75 Pozdnyakov, A. 418 Prasad, B. 439–40 pre-modern nationalism (England) 143–56 eighteenth century 145–7 modernist defences and premodernist rejoinders 152–3 Protestant Reformation to Glorious Revolution 147–8 special case of England 151–2 towards postmodern theory 153–5 Venerable Bede to Hundred Years War 149–51 Pred, A. 278 primordialist view of nations 13, 157–8, 159, 351 ‘print-capitalism’ 27, 72 printed language 27–8 Prokhanov, A. 421 Protestantism 70, 146, 147–8, 178, 303 proto-nationalism, primary resistance to 515–16 psychoanalytical theory 67–8 public culture 175

‘public sphere’ 24, 27 Puhle, H.-J. 22 Putin, V. 417–18, 420 Quebec 244, 245–6 Quillian, L. 277–8 race Australia 199–200, 556, 557, 558 as civilization 192–3, 199–201 classificatory/anthropological: Victorian hierarchy 195–6 and cultural difference 288–90 definitions 194 and ethnicity 61, 62–3, 64 Latin America 546 as nation 192 nationalizing and globalizing 201 and nations: classes of people and things 194–5 struggle and class struggle 196–8 tacit majorities and multi-ethnicity 198–9 transnational hierarchies 199–201 universalism, civic ideals and nation-state 193–4 US 533–6 within nations 192, 196–8 racial conflicts/violence Britain 232 Germany 275–6 racial markers, immigrants 288 racial nationalism, Japan 477–9 Racioppi, L. and O’Sullivan, K. 119, 121 racism 79 see also xenophobia Ram, H. 312–13 Ratcliffe, D. 530, 531 Rawls, J. 348, 349, 355 Ray, L. 216 re-memorializing strategies 219 re-remembering strategies 218–19 recognition/dignity vs. shame 74 reflexivity 350 regional–local schism (qawmiyya–wataniyya), Arab nationalism 505–7 regionalism and nationalism 238 regions and identity 252 Japan 473 and nations definition 238 nations without states 239–43 ‘regnal communities’ 15–16 Reich, W. 68 Reicher, S. and Hopkins, W. 76, 77 religion 182–91 ambivalence towards 182–3 and gender 123–4 intolerance of 183–4 Russia 414, 421 South Asia 438, 439

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religious identity 302–3 ethnic and 338 religious markers, immigrants 288 religious nationalism 184–90 criticisms of 190 ethnic and ideological 184 Renan, E. 7–8, 12, 13, 60, 172, 206 republicanism 359–60 ressentiment 78–9 envy, shame and humiliation 75–6 Reynolds, S. 15–16, 178 ‘Right Shock Model’ 280 right-wing nationalism Europe 278–80 Russia 421–2 and women 122–3 rights and welfare regimes 228–9 Rokkan, S. 22, 30, 54 Roma/gypsies 406–7 Romania 406 Rome, ancient 227, 263 Rome rule, Christianization of Great Britain 150 Rummel, R.J. 327 Ruritania 36, 40, 51, 402–3, 407 Russell, Lord 531 Russia 230, 324, 326, 338, 410–24 constituting the nation 418 end of empire 415–16 ethno-federalism Soviet, to Russian nation-state 412–15 and threat of disintegration 416–18 historical context 410 nation today 420–2 national identity and nationalism 410–12 nationalism and ‘Russian Idea’ 418–19 October Revolution (1917) 518 perestroika 412, 413, 415, 422 state- and nation-building projects: official nationalism 419–20 Russian Orthodox Church 414, 421 Russian Revolution 303 Russians, Central Asia 458 Russo-Ottoman War (1877–78) 88 Ruthenia 407 Sabet, F. K. 435 sacred traditions 175–7 Saddam Hussein 434, 507 Sahlin, P. 8 Sarts 450, 451 Scharma, S. 178, 196, 298 Schesinger, A.M. 99 Schieder, T. 24 Schiffrin, D. 111 Schlereth, T. 360 Schnapper, D. 241 school textbooks communist Yugoslavia 314–15 Iran 312–13

575

school textbooks cont. UK 316–17 see also education systems Schuman Declaration 387–8 Scotland 11, 240, 241–2, 244, 245, 252 Scottish football 254, 258 Scottish nationalism 15 secession see self-determination secular commemorative practice 211 secular nationalism 183 criticisms of 183–4 self identity, desire and emotion 72–3 and Significant Others 285 self-definition 175, 178 self-determination 85 and fair treatment right 95–6 and international law 136–7 justifiability of 101–2 see also autonomy self-realization 165–6 self-sacrifice 352 ‘sense of belonging’ 60, 74 Shakespeare, W. 148, 226, 227, 327–8 shame 74, 75–6 shame apologies 220, 221 Shaw, M. 324, 325, 327 Significant Others 285, 286–90 Sikhs 188–9, 441, 447 Silverman, M. 193, 289–90 similitude, principle of 58–9 Simmel, G. 274 Simonia, N.A. 415 Singapore 461, 462, 464, 466, 469 Singh, K. 441 Skidelsky, R. 386–7 slogans, Japan 475–6 Smith, Adam 323 Smith, Anthony 10, 13, 14–15, 52–3, 118, 120, 130, 143, 145, 157, 158, 166–7, 172, 174, 175, 177, 205, 262, 286, 300, 307, 335, 358, 372, 373, 411, 503, 534–5 Sniderman, P.M. 279–80, 281 social communication see communication social constructivism 351–2 social democratic turn, Australia 558 social democratic welfare regimes 228 social emancipation 22, 23–4 social and human rights 234–5 ‘social identity’ 76 social memory see collective memory; memory social psychology of nationalism 66–83 categorization 76–7 comparison 77–8 facticity 78 identification 77 national identities 71–2 nationalism turns dangerous 78–9 postitive emotions 73–6 psychoanalytical theory 67–8 rise of nations 70–1

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social psychology of nationalism cont. self, identity, desire and emotion 72–3 theories 68–9, 76 social transformation and genocide 323–5 memory as 218 socialism 94 Africa 518–21 Arab world 504–5, 506–7 France 391–3 ‘socio-biologist’ view of nationalism 158–9 socio-linguistic approaches see discourse-analytical/ socio-linguistic approaches sociological perspectives 12, 13, 73, 133–5 soldier as ‘volunteer-citizen’ 300 Solzhenitsyn, A. 414–15, 416, 420, 421 Somalia 372 Sorel, G. 391–2 South Africa 217, 219, 220–1, 222 mega-events 268–9 Olympic Games boycott 266 South Asia 438–49 conceptualizing nation and nationalism 439–44 new nationalisms 444–8 South and Central America 541–54 independence and nation-building 542–4 mass nationalism, development and national liberation 544–7 modernity 541, 544–7 ‘re-embedding’, citizenship, homogeneity 541–2 rolling back the state, social pluralism and national identity 547–51 South-East Asia 461–72 civic dimensions of nationalist politics 466–8 ethnic dimension of national politics 462–6 politics of multiculturalism 468–9 resultant variations in nationalist politics 469–70 Soviet Union 25, 35, 36, 38, 158, 518–19 Olympic Games 265 and religion 183–4 state racism 197 Spain 122 Dutch Revolt 152 mega-events/sports 264, 268 Spanish Empire/colonies 323, 543 Spillman, L. 72, 207, 210, 211 sport 249–59 mega-events 260 new localism 253–6 theorizing the nation 250–3 transnationalism 256–8 Sri Lanka 189, 445, 446 Stalin, Josef 324, 327 state administration 22–3, 296 Japan 480–1 state-building nationalism and direct rule 85–6 Turkey and emergence of Kurdish peripheral nationalism 89–90 statehood 62

INDEX

state(s) concept of 164 modernization of 22–3 and national identity 300 nations without 239–43 status hierarchies 94–5 Sternhell, Z. 392, 393 Stoddard, L. 201 structural approaches 33–43, 162–6 malign fates 34–5 theories of nationalism 35–6 critique 37–8 positive perspective 38–9 subnational identities, Central Asia 452–3, 457–8 subordinate groups and race 288, 289 Sudan 187 Sumner, C. 534 Sun Yat-Sen 13 Suny, R.G. 7, 8, 10, 11–12, 13, 16, 412 supranationalism: twenty-first century 385–98 ever-closer union 388–9 invisible politics 387–8 ‘New Order’ 386–7 Sweden 278 Syria 507 Szamuely, T. 419 Taifel, H. and Turner, J. 286 Taine, H. 9 Tajikistan 452–3, 454, 457, 458 Tajiks 450, 451, 452, 455 Tamils 445 Tatarstan 416, 420 Taylorism 324 Teodosic, R. 314 territorial disputes, Japan 482–3 territorial identity 239 ‘territorial nation’ and ‘ethnic nation’ 373–5 territorial nationalism, Africa 522–4 territorialization 175 Thailand 189, 461, 463, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470 Thatcher, M. 231 theoretical perspectives 35–6, 44–56 ‘Third Estate’ 9 Third World feminist issues 121–2 Third World narratives 13 Tibet 189–90 Tilly, C. 22, 296, 300, 335 ‘timar’ system 87, 88 Tishkov, V. 418 Tito, General Josef Broz 314 de Tocqueville, A. 9, 182, 183, 205–6, 527, 529–30 Tönnesson, S. and Antlöv, H. 45, 55, 173 totalitarianism 132, 134, 207–8 traditional nations 369 Transylvania 405–6 Treaty of Westphalia 227 Trevor-Roper, H. 11 Triandafyllidou, A. 286 tribalism 372–3

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Turkey 187, 324, 325, 426–31, 435–6 Arabic language teaching 502 and emergence of Kurdish peripheral nationalism 89–90 modernity and nationalism 426–31 Ottoman Empire 87–9, 427, 501, 502, 503 post-Cold War 429–30 Turkish immigrants, Germany 276–7 Turkmenistan 453, 455, 456, 457, 458 Turner, B. 125 Turner, B.S. 226, 230, 234 Turner, F.J. 527 Turpin, C. 315 Ukraine 407 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 327 uneven development 30 unified world order, secular nationalism 184 United Kingdom see Britain United States 42, 48, 62, 125, 207, 377 Afro-Americans 38, 196, 200 and Britain 386–7 Christian movements 184, 188 citizenship 229–30 civic and ethnic construction 527–40 Civil War 528, 530–3 European immigrants 198 genocide 326, 328–9 indigenous Americans 200, 323 and Japan 479 pan-African ideology 513, 514–15 race 533–6 revolution 528–30 Uruguay 549 utilitarianism 346 Uzbekistan 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458 Uzbeks 450, 451, 452 Venerable Bede 149–51 vengeful justice 216 Versailles Treaty 301 ‘victim nationalism’, Japan 477 victimhood 22–4, 219–20, 223–4 memory as healing 218, 219, 223, 224 victimization, Central Asia 456 Vietnam 461, 462–3, 519 ‘virtual communities’ 80 Walby, S. 118, 119, 120, 126 Wales 240, 252 Walicki, A. 411 Wallerstein, I. 24, 193 Walzer, M. 273 Ward, M. 120, 121, 122, 123

577

warfare 355 and genocide 325–6 and national identity 300–1, 303 ‘we’, use of personal pronoun 111–13 Weber, E. 8, 14, 86 Weber, M. 39, 44, 77, 133, 174–5, 212, 227, 250–1, 308, 348, 352, 392, 503 West and East ‘ethnic nations’ 173–4 West and East models of nationhood 48, 49, 52, 53 Westbrook, D. 386, 388, 389 Western ‘civic’ definition of nation 173–4 Western secular nationalism 183 Western technology, Japan 476 Westernization/developmentalism 321–2, 323–4, 325 Widdicombe, S. 108 Wieviorka, M. 277 Wilber, N.D. 433 Wilson, J. 111 Wimmer, A. 295, 337, 339, 340, 341, 342, 358 and Schiller, N. 130, 336 women internationalism 123 right-wing nationalism 122–3 womanhood and motherhood as symbols of nation 120–1 see also gender Woolf, V. 123 working class 392, 394, 547, 548 World War(s) 301 I Olympic Games 263, 266 II 275 Olympic Games 266 Wormald, P. 149–50 xenophobia 273–84, 362 European Right and new nationalism 278–80 as historical phenomenon: Dreyfus Affair to World War II 275 and immigration: post-war period 275–8 reaffirming nationhood 280–2 as social form 274–5 see also immigrants; immigration Yapp, M.E. 431 Yeltsin, B. 412, 416–17 Young, I. 100 youth, political action of 164 Yugoslavia 38, 79, 184, 252, 338, 401, 406 communist 313–15 genocide 326–7, 328 Yuval-Davis, N. 120 Anthias, F. and 119, 120, 289 Zacek, J.F. 11, 12 Zimmerman, D.H. 110 Zubrzycki, G. 153