Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Brian Jenkins, Spyros A. Sofos, Brian Jenkins, Spyros A. Sofos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134805808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The resilience of nationalism in contemporary Europe may seem paradoxical at a time when the nation state is widely seen as being 'in decline'. The contributors of this book see the resurgence of nationalism as symptomatic of the quest for identity and meaning in the complex modern world. Challenged from above by the supranational imperatives of globalism and from below by the complex pluralism of modern societies, the nation state, in the absence of alternatives to market consumerism, remains a focus for social identity.
Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe takes a fully interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the 'national question'. Individual chapters consider the specifics of national identity in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Iberia, Russia, the former Yugoslavla and Poland, while looking also at external forces such as economic globalisation, European supranationalism, and the end of the Cold War.
Setting current issues and conflicts in their broad historical context, the book reaffirms that 'nations' are not 'natural' phenomena but 'constructed' forms of social identity whose future will be determined in the social arena.

Part I
NATION AND IDENTITY: THEORY AND CONTEXT

1
NATION AND NATIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE

A theoretical perpective

Brian Jenkins and Spyros A.Sofos

The end of the Cold War and the demise of the bloc system in the late 1980s initially fuelled speculation about the advent of a ‘New World Order’. The collapse of state-socialist regimes in Eastern-Central Europe, and then in the republics of the Soviet Union itself, raised expectations that liberal democracy and the market economy would establish themselves across Europe, and that economic and cultural globalisation would progressively promote this model worldwide.¹ In the process, it was argued, new opportunities for international cooperation would be opened up to tackle global issues like the environment and Third World debt, and to compensate for the declining autonomy of the nationstate in the field of economic and foreign policy Indeed, what Hobsbawm has called ‘the supranational restructuring of the globe’ was seen by many to herald the slow demise of the nation-state, and by derivation the decline of national consciousness and of the viability of ‘nationalism’ as a political project.² The moves towards integration of the European Community through the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the recent enlargement of the European Union to fifteen members, as well as the prospects of further enlargement, seemed to confirm the beginnings of this process.

These expectations were severely dented in the early 1990s. The resurgence of so-called ‘ethnic’ nationalisms in post-communist Eastern and Central Europe, most tragically in what used to be Yugoslavia, and potentially with equal force in the territories of the former Soviet Union, threatens the dream of a ‘common European home’. Furthermore, within Western Europe itself, the ‘national question’ has reasserted itself with a new vigour in a variety of different ways. Extreme right-wing forms of nationalism have re-emerged, with startling success in France, and with disturbing historical echoes in the reunified Germany and in Italy. The centrality of the issue of immigration in contemporary political discourse has raised questions about the rights of citizenship, the nature of nationality, the viability of a multicultural society, across the European Union. The rise of the Northern Leagues in Italy has challenged the integrity of the nation-state; the separatist ‘micro-nationalisms’ which flourished in the 1970s in old established states like Spain, Britain and France have stubbornly refused to disappear while new forms of particularism of diaspora and migrant communities have emerged.³ Finally, events like the Gulf War and the Bosnian conflict have raised doubts about the efficacy of the EU, while the impact of the new recession has swollen the ranks of those who feel economically threatened by further transfers of sovereignty to ‘Brussels’. Some of the momentum of European integration has been lost, and the traditional exponents of nationalist and ethnic/religious particularist rhetoric have found a new lease of life.

Of course, it may be argued, such developments are simply ‘reactionary’, a vain attempt to resist the inevitable process of globalisation. If nationalism no longer has any economic rationale, why should it long survive as a political project, whether of the Left or of the Right? Reason surely dictates otherwise? The process of growing economic and cultural interdependence is irreversible, and has already undermined the autonomy of even the strongest nation-states in Western Europe. The new ‘Balkanisation’ in the East is a historical throwback, a curious by-product of the collapse of the Soviet ‘Empire’, and the new states will sooner or later be forced by economic necessity to cooperate with one another, to federate, and to participate in European supranational structures.

Such hopes may be widely shared, but it should not be imagined that these predictions are new. The whole rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, in both its liberal and socialist derivations, rests on the notion of a ‘civilising process’, a process of diffusion of a universalist democratic discourse of rights, radiating out in a linear fashion from its European core, breaking down parochialism and prejudice. As ‘difference’ was confined to the realm of the private, it was often assumed that, in this process, nations—seen primarily as cultural and/or economic entities—and nationalism would eventually be superseded by wider international solidarities and institutions. Of course, it may now be argued (as it has been before!) that the process has reached a critical stage, that the nationstate has fallen below some crucial threshold of credibility but equally it may be that this entire perspective is flawed.

Among the several attempts to explain the resilience and pervasiveness of nationalism in ‘late modernity’ Tom Nairn’s analysis seems to provide an—at first sight—plausible link between nationalism and the dialectics of imperialism and the related process of economic globalisation the former sets in motion.⁴ Rejecting the linear enlightenment model, he invoked a dialectical process driven by the global rationale of ‘uneven economic development’; nationalism was identified as an ideology of economic modernisation, mobilising societies on the semi-periphery and periphery of the world system to resist imperialism and compete with the ‘core’ nations for economic resources. In their turn, the core nations were forced to respond. Nationalism had thus become the ‘pathology of modern developmental history’, ensuring that the battle between nation-states would supersede the Marxist concept of ‘class struggle’.

Instructive though this approach may be, it remains rooted in a form of historical determinism and generalisation which we are anxious to avoid.⁵ This volume does not aspire to erect an ‘overarching theory’ of this type. The complexity and diversity of the phenomenon which we are dealing with precludes such an ambition, though of course it has fuelled our debates, and will continue to do so. However, this is not to say that we have not established some ‘common ground’, though it would be pretentious to claim that this represents a ‘theoretical framework’. Central to our shared position is the belief that ‘nationalism’ is essentially a ‘political’ phenomenon. This is not to dismiss economic, cultural and geographical factors as irrelevant to the subject of enquiry But it does challenge the view that ‘nationalism’ is somehow the product of pre-existing socio-cultural entities called ‘nations’. A starting point for the study of nationalism is not whether ‘nation’ exists; it is rather how the category operates in practice, that is, how nationalist logics and frames of reference are formulated and deployed. In a way similar to proposed conceptualizations of ‘race’,⁶ we would argue that ‘nation’ should be conceptualized as ‘an unstable and ‘decentred’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. We would thus prefer to invert the relationship and regard nations as ‘political’ artefacts called into being by nationalist ideologies and movements.

Of course, the ideology of nationalism needs something on which to feed, some ‘raw material’ of collective identity. The potential ingredients of this are diverse —a common language, a shared history or culture, religious particularism, a sense of territorial, ethnic or ‘racial’ distinctiveness and/or assertion of opposition to other communities, or indeed the existence either in the past or in the present of some political identity—a state or subordinate administrative unit. However, such ‘timeless’ generalities detract from the fact that the concept of nationhood is a historically specific phenomenon, and a relatively recent one which has extended its influence across the globe only in the last two hundred years. From this point of view, more interesting than the ‘raw material’ of nationhood are the social-historical processes that have politically mobilised the former and promoted the proliferation of nations and nation-states.

In other words, nationalisms are the product of complex social negotiation, premised on the activation of social and cultural relationships and emotional investments among the—potential—members of the national community, as well as on strategies for the pursuit of interests, and attainment of power by individuals and collectivities. Their emergence, sustenance and demise are the outcome of conflict and negotiation at several levels of the ‘social’. But it is the articulation of the ‘national’ to political discourses and practices, the elevation of the nation to the status of a political subject that characterises nationalism.⁷

Benedict Anderson, in his remarkable book Imagined Communities locates the beginnings of this process in the decline of the religious ‘imagined communities’ in early modern Europe, the gradual replacement of Latin by the vernacular in the wake of the printing revolution, the secularisation brought about by the Enlightenment, the weakening of the great dynastic empires.⁸ This, primarily cultural, perspective is a useful corrective to the economistic focus of classical Marxism, with its emphasis on the capitalist quest for wider markets, and the role of a common language as a vehicle for commodity exchange. The direct linkage thereby established between the rise of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and that of the nationstate has often proved problematic, for example when applied to the nationalisms of economically undeveloped Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, or indeed to the more recent national liberation struggles in the ‘Third World’. None the less, the significance of socio-economic factors can clearly not be ignored.

The development of commerce and industry, the widening of markets, greater social mobility, urbanisation, the speeding up of communications especially with the railway revolution, all of these processes made it easier for people to ‘imagine’ their membership of a national community, though the level of this ‘consciousness’ was inevitably related to the degree of societal integration and to social class. Even in a country like France, already a prototype nation-state under the absolutist monarchy of the seventeenth century, and whose revolution launched the very principle of national sovereignty and the ideology of nationalism, peasants did not achieve a real sense of being ‘French’ until the closing years of the nineteenth century.⁹

However, while these cultural and economic processes clearly helped to prepare the ground for the emergence of ‘national’ identity, and subsequently helped to promote and to broaden it, they were not the key catalysts which brought nation-states and nationalism into being. The concept of nationhood is inextricably bound up with the notion of political legitimacy, with the location of sovereignty in the ‘people’. As long as authority was deemed to derive from Divine Right, from hereditary succession, from a ‘natural order’ based on a society of graded estates, kings ruled over ‘territories’ not ‘peoples’, and the latter were ‘subjects’ not ‘citizens’. It was in early modern Europe, and especially in the later part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that the ‘people’ became a politically significant term, denoting initially a moral community.¹⁰ In France, however, the revolutionary process drew the masses on to the political stage and associated the concept of the ‘nation’ with the powerful political symbolism of popular sovereignty¹¹ The subsequent impact of these ideas on the rest of Ancien Régime Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars paved the way for the development of the ‘nation-state’ idea across the continent in the nineteenth century. This association of nationhood with the goals of democratic citizenship and social emancipation within a territorially bounded political community has been a powerful motor in the advent of political modernity virtually everywhere. It has characterised nationalist movements in diverse historical settings, from the first explosion of national sentiments in the European revolutions of 1848 to the era of post-war decolonisation, from the anti-fascist liberation struggles in occupied Europe to the contemporary autonomist aspirations of Scots, Bretons and Quebecois. However, it would clearly be perverse to suggest that nationalism is endemically associated with such ‘progressive’ ideals, or indeed that the proclamation of such ideas by ‘nationalists’ should necessarily be taken at face value. To do so would be to deny the ambiguity and political ‘malleability’ of nationalism.

NATIONALISM AND POLITICAL LEGITIMACY

The first key to understanding the contradictions of nationalism lies in the concept of political legitimacy The popular movements of early modern Europe and especially the French Revolution challenged the traditional foundations of authority that underpinned the European ‘Old Order’, and ensured that states would increasingly need to invest themselves with the aura of popular consent. This was the driving force behind the gradual decline of the dynastic empires in nineteenth-century Europe, and growing aspirations to national selfdetermination and self-government. However, this process did not necessarily imply the adoption of ‘bourgeois democracy’ or, later, ‘liberal democracy’, let alone the radical forms of ‘popular sovereignty’ envisaged by the French revolutionaries of 1793. Indeed, in France the Bonapartist interlude was soon to prove that the imagery of the ‘nation’ and the ‘general wiir could be hijacked by a charismatic leader and an authoritarian plebiscitary dictatorship. This simply confirmed that the invocations of ‘popular legitimacy’ would not be the exclusive prerogative of democrats. The revolutions of 1848 did not secure the full democracy demanded by radical nationalists, but the more limited principle of constitutionalism. This in itself was seen to confer representative status, irrespective of the limitations imposed on the right to vote, on parliamentary powers or on civil liberties. It was the cautious liberalism of Cavour that eventually prevailed over the radicalism of Mazzini in the process of the Italian Risorgimento, while Germany was finally unified by Bismarck’s Junker army. The 1870–1914 period was a crucial phase in the consolidation of the nationstate form in Western Europe, and in the development of what Hobsbawm calls ‘state patriotism’, but by the First World War few countries yet combined all the ingredients of a ‘liberal democracy. In this respect, it becomes difficult to sustain the argument that national self-determination is necessarily tied to a democratic project, whether ‘bourgeois’ or ‘popular’. What can surely be said, however, is that nationalism is a product of the modern problematique of state legitimacy in the age of ‘mass politics’. To be clear, nationalism is closely linked to the imagery of popular sovereignty, not necessarily to democracy. It articulates demands for expression of the national/popular/ general will, without however necessarily linking them to the representation of particular social identities and interests. Its power therefore can be unifying, homogenising, as well as democratising as far as the national community is concerned. The way the nation is imagined is therefore crucial in exploring the relationship between nationalism and democracy

IMAGINING THE NATION: CITIZENSHIP AND ETHNICITY

The crucial role of the French Revolution in the launching of nationalism is paradoxical in one important respect, namely that France was already, under the Ancien Régime, a prototype nation-state with well-established frontiers, a centralised administration, a standing army and a long history as a collective entity Its revolution was ‘national’ in the sense that it conferred political identity on the ‘nation’ through the concept of citizenship. Since the geographical boundaries of the national unit were already defined, it did not need to be ‘imagined’ in territorial terms. In the sense that France was a ‘state’ before it became a ‘nation’ in the modern sense, it did not need to be ‘invented’ along those dangerous faultlines of language, religion and so-called ‘ethnicity’. Of course, this is not to deny that many were wrongly stigmatised as traitors, were arbitrarily ‘excluded’ from the national community, were persecuted often unjustly for their social origins, religious convictions or political ideology. However, the cruelties of the revolutionary process did not detract in the long run from the principles of nationhood that were bequeathed to posterity; namely that the nation was a voluntary association of equal and free citizens, who enjoyed membership of the community by virtue of their residence on national soil, irrespective of their ethnic origins or religious beliefs. This model was, at least in theory, not only ‘open’ but ‘universalist’; it bequeathed to all nations equal rights and status in the world community.

The export of these principles of national self-determination to a Europe still based on dynastic empires, petty principalities and statelets, and indeed in the East on feudal particularism, raised a different set of problems. In as far as the territorial divisions of the continent w...