Debating Nationalism

The Global Spread of Nations

Florian Bieber

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350098121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This concise introduction offers an overview of the global rise and spread of nationalism since the late 18th century. Reflecting on key themes and existing scholarship it presents case studies and primary sources to track the emergence of the modern nation, and understand how nationalism has given rise to phenomena such as identity-based conflict, authoritarian politics and populist movements. Debating Nationalism uses an inclusive perspective that goes beyond a Western European focus to explore how nationalism has expressed itself in nation states and influenced a range of political ideologies over the last 300 years. It engages with the key debates within nationalism studies such as the origins of nations, the mechanisms and actors that reinforce it and the dynamics of ethnic conflict. Using a historical lens to shed light on contemporary issues, it also considers debates around migration, diversity and authoritarian politics found in new nationalism in the modern day. This book includes a dedicated chapter as a guide to key debates and further reading alongside a glossary of terms to help students achieve a holistic understanding of the history of nationalism.

1

Introduction

In 1983, concluding his seminar study on nationalism, British historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that “the owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.”¹ To this hopeful assessment, Antony Smith, himself an important scholar of nationalism, replied, “it is still nationalist high noon, and the owl of Minerva has not stirred.”² Two decades into the twenty-first century the sun is not setting on nationalism.

Indeed, nations are still all around us. We talk about international relations, the United Nations, the nation to describe a state or one’s nationality. These terms, including the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, betray a confusion between state and nation. The UN currently brings together 193 states but not all nations. There are plenty of nations, such as the Kurds, who lack a state. In addition, many nations might transcend borders, such as Hungarians or Russians, but the members of the UN only represent states and their citizens, not all members of a nation. There are also members of the UN whose citizens do not necessarily identify with a distinct nation but consider themselves part of a larger transnational community, such as many Arabs.

Thus, the UN and its predecessor are misnomers reflecting the confusion between state and nation. Similarly, many use the word “nation” to describe a state. This is also reflected in other languages. In German, for example, international law is known as Völkerrecht, literally the law of peoples. Similarly, the terms “nationality” and “citizenship” are often used interchangeably. This creates particular confusion in multinational states, where nationality is not identical to the citizenship held.

The many ways in which we are confronted with the word “nation” and its symbols in everyday life, from sports competitions to the news, from “ethnic” foods to tourism advertisements, highlight the omnipresence of nations around us. For their (apparent) innocence, these often stand in seeming contrast to the “outbreaks of nationalism,” ethnic violence, and far-right and other groups threatening expressions of nationalism. To understand nations and nationalism, we need to capture both: the everyday variant, which might seem normal and nearly invisible to most, and the violent, threatening kind that can lead to ethnic conflict and electoral success for radical political parties and candidates.

Nationalism and patriotism

The first big challenge for anyone writing about nationalism is the strong emotions, mostly negative, that the word evokes. While nations and nationalism are ubiquitous, few would describe themselves as nationalists. For instance, if a survey seeks to identify the relevance of nationalism in a given society, it cannot simply ask respondents to identify themselves as nationalists. This negative association is not only a challenge in identifying nationalism, but also poses a dilemma for understanding. As German historian Peter Alter noted, nationalism is usually seen in moral terms as aggressive and negative, unlike other concepts such as “national interest” or “national pride.”³ Yet, this negative association is far from universal however. Where nationalism is a force against a colonial rule or where it seeks to unite multiple ethnic groups under a common roof, nationalism might evoke positive associations.

Frequently, nationalism is distinguished from patriotism as a way to distinguish between “good” and “bad”. In this case, “nationalism” acquires negative and “patriotism” acquires positive connotations. For example, in 2018, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, French president Emanuel Macron argued that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is treason. By saying ‘our interests first and what do the others matter!’ we erase what a nation holds most precious, what makes it alive, what makes it great, that which is most important of all: its moral values.”⁴ His statement was widely viewed as a thinly veiled criticism of American president Donald Trump and his motto of “America first.” However, the dichotomy between a “positive patriotism” that evokes universalist values and a “selfish nationalism” reflects a common misunderstanding. Nationalism and patriotism are not opposites but are intrinsically linked. “Patriotism is a form of nationalism. They are ideological brothers, not distant cousins,” noted the Swiss sociologist Andreas Wimmer (1962–).⁵ Both emphasize the importance of self-rule and a shared political community, and the distinction between “good” patriotism and “bad” nationalism offers little help in understanding the dynamics of either. The British writer Samuel Johnson is said to have remarked in 1775 that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”⁶ With this quip, he meant that claims of patriotism—or, for that matter nationalism—are an easy justification for a wide range of policies, including those of ill intent. Yet to understand nations we need to move beyond such categories.

Furthermore, the negative connotations of nations and nationalism in Europe and North America are not universal. In many societies and countries, the term evokes distinctly less negative associations, not least because the two World Wars, which helped bring nationalism into disrepute, were still primarily European wars, save for East and Southeast Asia and sporadic episodes in Africa. By contrast, in the “Global South” nationalism was often an important anti-colonial force that reclaimed colonies from European colonial rule.

Some scholars of nationalism, such as the Israeli political scientist Yael Tamir, have argued that nationalism is an essential force, and potentially a positive one, in contemporary society. Tamir thus argued that:

Nationalism helps fortify well-functioning states; it can also serve as a tool to foster solidarity in government efforts to address localized social challenges, fight social and economic inequalities, and take care of social groups that have been left behind. As such it is better not to abandon nationalism, but rather to channel its beneficent features to recreate the social state.⁷

For Tamir and others, nationalism is not only about exclusion but also transcending other differences within a community, such as class.

Universalism and nationalism

Nationalism emphasizes membership in a particular group: a nation. Its opposite is not patriotism but rather universalism. Whereas universalism stresses commonalities among all of humanity and explores cooperation among all humans, nationalism emphasizes proximity and cooperation among the members of one nation, no matter how it is defined. This dichotomy can be useful in understanding nationalism and its links to other ideas, especially as nationalism is able to coexist with other political ideas ranging from communism to liberalism and conservatism.

First, all modern political ideologies can be considered to have both nationalist and universalist expressions.⁸ Liberalism, socialism, and conservatism can all be directed to the confines of a nation or to a broader community. Most prominent have been the discussions among socialists and communists about whether to pursue a universal approach to workers’ rights and empowerment or whether to focus on particular countries, and therefore nations, first.

Second, this distinction is also visible in how nationalist groups and movements oppose universalists, or others accused of not belonging to the nation. This pattern can be recognized in the recent rise of nationalist populism, which often demonizes “globalist elites.” The discrepancy between the supposedly authentic population of the nation and an elite—a population that is universalist or not rooted in that nation—is a recurring feature in nationalist discourses. In the past, the accusation has been directed against monarchs, liberal critics of nationalism, and minorities, particularly Jews, who have often been the useful “other” for radical nationalist visions that juxtapose the “authentic national” and the “hybrid global”. In the German Reich at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the term “Vaterlandslose Geselle,”—literally “fellow without a fatherland,”—was a pejorative term to describe Marxists and social-democrats. More sinister was the anti-Semitism of the first half of the twentieth century, which viewed Jews not just as a different nation rather, instead but as a different race and an enemy within the nation.

Third, the national-universal antagonism does not mean that the nationalist worldview excludes cooperation among nationalists. The liberal nationalists of the nineteenth century in particular, assumed, as we shall discuss in Chapter 3, that the new nations arising from the empires and small principalities could coexist peacefully. The idea of harmonious coexistence of nations proved to be illusory, however, and cooperation among nationalists often came to an end as neighboring nationalists launched competing claims over particular land or people, rendering any alliance difficult. Thus, nationalists might envisage—or rather assume—that the world is divided into nations and therefore view nations as the normal building blocks of modern societies. But the practicality of cooperating might be a challenge despite the shared worldview.

Nationalism is not inherently directed against the global, as long as internationalism is based on the logic of the nation. In fact, many of the architects of the global system after the First and Second World Wars, in the shape of the League of Nations and the United Nations respectively, were not so much globalists hoping to overcome the nation through international cooperation, but rather statesmen convinced of nations and nationalism as the central pillars of international order.⁹

Defining nations and nationalism

So how does a nation constitute itself? The world today is shaped by the seeming paradox of global nationalism: the understanding that the world is built on nations. If societies around the world are shaped by nations, the question is how these nations distinguish themselves from one another. In fact, one of the important debates on nations and nationalism is how membership is defined. Historically, objective definitions have prevailed. When Joseph Stalin was tasked by Lenin to write a programmatic text on the national question in 1913, he argued that the “nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”¹⁰ The underlying assumption of the definition was the possiblity of defining fixed criteria that determine membership in a nation, including language and culture. Such objective criteria are challenged, however, as there are many nations that lack some or several of them. There are multilingual nations, such as the Swiss nation, and one language can be spoken by multiple nations, such as Germans, Swiss, and Austrians; there are nations spread over a large noncontiguous territory, such as Greeks or Germans prior to the First and Second World Wars respectively. Furthermore some criteria such as shared culture, are hard to define, such as a “shared culture,” and may even be shared with neighboring nations. National movements claim a shared community with a shared culture, yet these claims often neglect both internal heterogeneity and possible cultural similarities with neighbors who might share the cultural “core”, from music to cuisine. At best, the objective criteria of nations can identify features which are partially shared by most members of most nations and thus give an indication of the grounds on which nations emerge. The difficulty in identifying a conclusive list of criteria for what constitutes a nation also highlights the limitations of defining nations objectively, as the modes of exclusion and inclusion are often arbitrary and historically contingent. Of course, nations – or rather national movements – often imagine themselves in such objective terms, including a common reference to shared descent. Common descent is then traced to premodern times, sometimes even antiquity, such as the ancient Greeks, Macedonians, Aryans, and other real and mythological groups from which the contemporary nation is said to have descended. Such references are, in reality, mostly myths with little foundation in historical fact.

Instead of attempting to determine fixed objective criteria, the prevailing understanding in scholarship has focused on subjective self-definitions. The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) noted that the “concept [of the nation] undoubtedly means, above all, that one may exact from certain groups of men a specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups.”¹¹ Weber thus underlines common solidarity as the foundation for nations and a marker of distinction from other nations. Rather than solidarity, Karl Deutsch (1912–1992), an American political scientist originally from Prague, emphasized communication, suggesting that “nationality means an alignment of large numbers of individuals from the middle and lower classes linked to regional centers and leading social groups by channels of social communication and economic intercourse.”¹²

For Weber and Deutsch as well as other proponents of subjective definitions, objective markers are only indirectly relevant. A shared language might facilitate communication, just like a shared religion or sense of common history enables a sense of solidarity. But neither are prerequisites, and communication is possible in multilingual nations, as many citizens might be fluent in multiple languages (or at least those elites that forged the nation were). Likewise, solidarity can rest on particular historical events and narratives surrounding them, irrespective of shared or divergent objective criteria. Shared solidarity and the ability to perceive others as members of the same community is crucial. Those who rule need be seen as representatives of the larger political community. While democracy might be an obvious tool to secure this, autocratic rules have been effective in claiming to represent the nation. At the same time, democracies have been at times unable to convince some of their citizens that democracy constitutes self-rule. In the end, defining the nation is a deeply political process for determining membership in a shared political community. In essence, nationalism is about self-rule, or to cite one of the leading scholars of nationalism, British-Czech sociologist Ernest Gellner (1924–1995), “nationalism holds that they [nations and states] were destined for each other; that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a tragedy.”¹³

The crucial question of when a nation is a nation is not a matter of fact, but rather, of mutually agreed fiction. This fiction is constituted by the mutual agreement of members of a community to belong to the same nation. Such a process could be called nation-building. Its success is facilitated by commonalities among its members, but not guaranteed. As Andreas Wimmer has noted, nation-building can succeed when there are earlier structures of cooperation, such as civic networks, and the state provides shared goods. This has allowed multilingual Switzerland to emerge as a single nation, whereas in Belgium the different linguistic communities—Flemish, Francophone, and to a lesser degree a small German-speaking group—identify as separate nations.¹⁴

Without individuals’ choice to belong to a nation, and the ability to form a community with others, a nation cannot exist. Objective markers such as language and seemingly objective criteria such as a shared history or descent are, rather, features that facilitate the subjective sense of belonging to a nation, but they are not necessary. National belonging, however, is not just a feature of self-identification but also is often ascribed by others, both claiming or excluding certain persons.

National movements claim communities and individuals based on their definition of the nation. For instance, Turkish nationalism has traditionally claimed Kurds as Turks, sometimes using derogatory terms such as “Mountain Turks.” Conversely, national groups might also exclude some of those who seek to be part of the nation. For example, in the first half of the twentieth century, anti-Semites across Europe considered Jews to be alien and thus excluded them from the nation and, in the case of the policies of National Socialist Germany and its allies, from citizenship.

Accordingly, belonging to a nation stands at the intersection between individual choice and collective acceptance. Individuals have to identify with a nation, but this identification requires the consent of the larger community to be effective.

Belonging to a nation is one of the more rigid markers of identity. While it might be easier to change than gender, it is harder to switch than social position or political conviction. Here, we can distinguish between inclusive and exclusive nations in the sense of the ability to join or leave the nation. Inclusive nations are frequently based on citizenship rather than descent. Examples include many nations founded on large-scale immigration, such as the United States, Canada, or Australia, or from republican origins, such as France. The more rigidly a nation emphasizes descent as a criteria, the harder it is to join for those who lack such ancestry. This is the case in Germany, at least historically, and Japan. ...