Nationalism in a Global Era

Mitchell Young, Eric Zuelow, Andreas Sturm, Mitchell Young, Eric Zuelow, Andreas Sturm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134123094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume makes a unique contribution to the literature on nations and nationalism by examining why nations remain a vibrant and strong social cohesive despite the threat of globalization.

Regardless of predictions forecasting the demise of the nation-state in the global era, the nation persists as an important source of identity, community, and collective memory for most of the world's population. More than simply a corrective to the many scholarly but premature epitaphs for the nation-state, this book explains the continued health of nations in the face of looming threats. The contributors include leading experts in the field, such as Anthony D. Smith, William Safran, Edward Tiryakian as well as younger scholars, whom adopt a variety of approaches ranging from theoretical to empirical and historical to sociological, in order to uncover both the reasons that nations continue to remain vital and the mechanisms that help perpetuate them. The book includes case studies on Ireland, Thailand, Poland, the Baltic States, Croatia and Jordan.

Nationalism in a Global Era will be of great interest to students and researchers of international politics, sociology, nationalism and ethnicity.

1
The owl’s early flight

Globalization and nationalism, an introduction

Eric Zuelow, Mitchell Young and Andreas Sturm

It is not impossible that nationalism will decline with the decline of the nation-state, without which being English or Irish or Jewish, or a combination of these, is only one way in which people describe their identity among many others which they use for this purpose, as occasion demands. It would be absurd to claim that this day is already near. However, I hope it can at least be envisaged. After all, the very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.

(Hobsbawm 1990:192)

The owl has been busy since Eric Hobsbawm made the above comment in 1990. Today, in 2006, scholars share knowledge in at least four journals dedicated to nations and nationalism (and countless other publications that touch on the subject); academic presses are replete with nationalism-related monographs/collections; and scholarly nationalism studies associations offer an intellectual community for those interested in national identity. Just as Hobsbawm predicted the evolution of a more global sense of identity, now scholars make use of a truly global medium, the internet, to communicate about an identity that is supposed to be on the wane.

What has all of this study taught us? Hobsbawm’s decline of the nation-state thesis still has its supporters, even adherents who go much farther than Hobsbawm himself was willing to go. Arjun Appadurai, for example, suggests “we need to think ourselves beyond the nation” because the modern nation-state is in “a serious crisis” brought on by transnational conditions. Globalization has “de-territorialized” the nation and created post-national citoyens du monde (Appadurai 1996). Appadurai is not alone in this view. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Janet Staiger (among others) point to the demise of national cinema as but one sign of growing homogenization (Williams 2002:217–48). Others have coined new phrases, Disneyfication, McDonaldization, and even Coca-Colonization, to illustrate the submergence of national distinctiveness in a sea of Americanized global-culture.

Public intellectuals present this erosion of both the state as a politicallegal body and the nation as a cultural community as inevitable. Harvard economist Richard N.Cooper has written that population increase, growth in per capita income, and greater capacity in computation and communication will lead to “increased international mobility among firms and individuals, reducing economic and ultimately cultural differences among different parts of the globe” (Cooper 1997). Influential columnist Thomas L. Friedman quotes the equally influential writer Fouad Ajami, saying the market will “empower common men and women” to fulfill desires that might include “strip malls along every street and Taco Bells on every corner …even though in the short run that will steamroll their local and national cultures” (Friedman 1999:241).

Despite these pronouncements, many examples suggest that nations, national identity, and nationalism persist. The following cases can stand for others. In 1999, Scotland and Wales were granted devolved parliaments—the result of long nationalist campaigns—and the countries’ respective nationalist parties, the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru in Wales, attained official opposition status in these new bodies. In response, English nationalists formed the English Defence Force, the English National Party and the English Democrats in order to secure a devolved English parliament. At virtually the same time, across the Irish Sea, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party, both “nationalist” in the scholarly sense though advocating diametrically opposed versions of Ulster identity, emerged as the leading political parties in Northern Ireland. The Palestinian nationalist group Hamas won a 58-seat majority in the Palestinian legislative elections held in January 2006. Volunteers (or vigilantes, depending on one’s view) seeking to limit illegal immigration into the United States have adopted a traditional American symbol of resistance, the Minuteman. While the Basque separatist organization ETA announced a permanent ceasefire in March 2006, it did so largely because the Madrid train bombings altered the political landscape, not because the group had abandoned nationalist aspirations. And finally, on a more banal level, no national community in the world acknowledges the demise of its national distinctiveness—each still believes itself unique and continues to point toward an assortment of exceptional national characteristics, traditions and places. Even the adoption of the Euro, sometimes depicted as a sign of diminishing national distinctiveness in Europe, prominently features the national symbols of member states on both coin and paper currency. In short, this time at least, the owl of Minerva may have decided to stretch its wings at noon rather than dusk and the story of early twenty-first-century nation-states appears to be one of persistence, not decline.

Nationalism in a Global Era: The Persistence of Nations provides an interdisciplinary and varied exploration of why nations have continued to be vibrant and strong social cohesives. More than simply a corrective to the work of scholarly eulogists intent on writing a premature epitaph for the nation-state, this collection sets out to explain the continued health of nations despite looming threats. Contributors adopt a variety of approaches ranging from theoretical to empirical and historical to sociological, in order to uncover both the reasons why nations continue to remain vital and the mechanisms that help perpetuate them.

The present volume is divided into three parts. The first offers three theoretical approaches toward understanding the persistence of nations. The second examines how celebrations, monuments and even tourism, said by many to be a harbinger of the demise of national identity, help nations remain relevant. The final part addresses both the threats to modern national identities and nation-states as well as the response to these threats.

Theoretical approaches

Few subjects in the social sciences and humanities have spawned anything like the copious theories and debates found in nationalism studies—a fact that reflects both the booming scholarly interest in and the complex nature of each. Since the early 1980s, scholarly discourse has been dominated by the view that nations are a product of modernity, created by nationalist elites to mobilize and unify diverse populations. The main proponents of this view are ubiquitous in scholarly discourse—Hobsbawm, Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson. Yet the dominant orthodoxy is not without challengers. Anthony D.Smith and his supporters, for example, doubt that intelligentsias could form nations ex nihilo. For Smith nations are the product of almost primordial ethnie: assorted traditions, historical experiences, language and other common socio-cultural antecedents. This alternate model, called ethno-symbolism, promises an understanding both of why particular nations were formed and why nationalisms possess distinctive features and content. According to Smith, nations existed during the premodern age and continued to develop over an extended period of time. Nationalism, however, is a product of modernity that used preexisting ethnie to form a strong emotional connection between people and nation. By providing nations with a longer and more coherent genealogy, Smith placed nations and nationalism onto a broader historical canvas while drawing attention to the importance of emotion for the mobilization of nationalist sentiment.

As the authors in Part I of this volume show, Smith’s ethno-symbolist view provides a means for understanding the persistence of nations; because nations have deep roots, they carry with them tremendous emotional appeal. While an emerging “global culture” might seem significant, the reality is that it poses a minimal threat to the nation precisely because people have a deep loyalty and affection for their national communities.

Smith himself opens the first section by examining the extent to which globalization is diminishing national identity in Western and Central Europe. He concludes that nationstates, both as political bodies and cultural communities, have come under considerable stress. Among other issues, nation-states are threatened by immigration, the loss of common national myths, pan-Europeanization and increasing economic integration. Today, states must avidly debate the question “who is ‘us’” while at the same time developing a polemics of multiculturalism and multiethnic state membership. Local populations must defend national laws against European directives. Preservationists must be forever vigilant in guarding “national” heritage—whether buildings or the countryside—against “international” developers and those not tuned into the national soul. For Smith, however, these threats and the spirited response to them is clear indication that “the nation” as a social-psychological phenomenon is far from dead.

This “persistence of the nation” is accompanied by what Smith sees as a growing alienation from the state on the part of many publics in Western Europe. Public dissatisfaction with state responses to perceived threats to the “national” community may contribute to a future decoupling of “the state” and “the nation” even in the old, established states of Western Europe. Here, the hidden “dominant ethnicity” may reemerge under the pressures of globalization. As Smith puts it, “the mingling of different cultures and religions in a harsher political climate has once again returned the dominant ethnie to its ethnic moorings amid moral panics…”

William Safran picks up where Smith leaves off by providing an extended exploration of the territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterroritorialization of the nation. To this end, he examines three diasporic ethnie: Armenians, Sikhs and Jews. Safran begins by discussing the concept of “homeland” which may exist with or without an independent state. He notes that the homeland is often the location of centers of religious worship— indeed this is true of all three of his cases. The diasporic nation “differs from a diaspora ethnie in that it territorializes and politicizes the ‘myth-symbol complex.’” Diaspora ethnies are an early and continuing example of globalization as they constitute “part of a trans-border, and often highly organized, global communication network; many of their institutions are transnational, and they use a language that is disseminated far below an intellectual elite or a church hierarchy and far beyond the confines of their host countries.”

Of course, diasporas have played an important part in gaining or regaining the political independence of the homeland. Safran points to the mobilizing effect that diasporas can have on fellow members of their ethnie residing in the “homeland.” Certainly the Sikh, Armenian and Jewish diasporic ethnie have played a role in the attempts to gain political status for the cultural and religious homeland. This echoes the findings of Meredith L.Weiss (2006) that diasporic communities matter when such a “population has resources and motivation to contribute.”

In his chapter Tiryakian, asks an important question: “When is the nation no longer?” Modernist academics tend to equate nation-states with nation; therefore, in the case of the disappearance of such a state, Yugoslavia and apartheid South Africa, for example, it is assumed that the nation disappears as well. Tiryakian rejects this approach by distinguishing between the two entities. He strengthens Anthony Smith’s argument that nations can persist over long periods of time by showing that nations can survive even in a submerged state. Reviving such nations in later periods means that some nations could emerge from multiple beginnings and be resilient to change. Central in this process of remaining a nation is that critical segments of the population still view themselves as members of that nation’s societal community.

Memory and the persistence of nations

Diasporic communities rely heavily on an idealized memory of the homeland, just as nations rely on specific, romanticized memories of the past. Indeed, the relationship between nations and memory has been clear since at least 1882 when Ernest Renan famously suggested: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (Renan 1996:45). Nationalists remember only what is helpful to their cause. Scottish nationalists remember Robert Bruce’s stunning upset against the English at Bannockburn in 1314 while the great king’s tendency to change sides frequently is forgotten (Barrow 1988). Americans celebrate a mythology of manifest destiny and the settlement of uninhabited space while forgetting the reality of indigenously occupied place. One simply cannot separate “collective memory” from national identity.

During the past 20 years, scholars from across disciplines recognized the importance of group memory and turned their attention to the nature of the memory process (Halbwachs 1992; Connerton 1989), the subjects remembered (Eley 1988; Rousso 1991), and the tools of remembrance (Koshar 1998, 2000; Young 1993). Memory scholars have also endeavored to historicize group memory. Most famously, Pierre Nora (1989) contends that prior to the nineteenth century, memory was absolutely central to society (mileux de mémoire), while today memory must be connected to specific places of memory (lieux de mémoire). John R.Gillis (1994) offers a slightly different view which features three overlapping phases: “the pre-national (before the eighteenth century), the national (from the American and French Revolutions to the 1960s), and the present, postnational phase” (1994:5). Each phase was different from the last, but in all cases, identity, memory and politics were closely connected (1994:3–5).

This connection between politics, identity and memory rests at the very heart of memory studies because modern politics gains legitimacy from a remembered past while forwarding contemporary agendas. Commemoration of the Holocaust is particularly instructive. During the Cold War, Holocaust memory in the Soviet sphere was dominated by the idea that the Holocaust was a result of Western imperialism—a threat that must be forever guarded against. Meanwhile, in the West, the Holocaust was explained as a result of totalitarianism, once exemplified by Fascism, then by Soviet Communism, but always to be guarded against (Huener 2003; Young 1993). In both cases, political regimes and political ideologies were bolstered by self-definition as the polar opposite of evil.

The contributors to the second part of Nationalism in a Global Era build on these debates by placing particular emphasis on the role played by memory in assuring the persistence of nations; just as the two Germanys used Holocaust memory to meet new demands, so too do nations recast the past in the face of global challenges. Toward this end, the authors pay particular attention to who is both behind and involved in the shaping of collective memory, whether that be elites, average citizens, or some combination of the two.

Gabriella Elgenius begins the section with a comparative discussion of national celebrations and commemorations, focusing specifically on Bastille Day (France), Constitution Day (Norway), and Remembrance Sunday (Britain). Building on two assumptions, that national days represent an expression of nationhood and that their status illustrates the continued popularity of the nation, Elgenius argues that national holidays help to sanctify the nation, setting the national liturgy apart from the mundane of the everyday. National days represent secular religious practice that helps perpetuate the symbolism of the nation in much the same way as the Catholic mass or other religious ceremony does for the faithful. As Elgenius notes, national days can be powerful tools that bind past, present and future generations together.

Elgenius is careful to point out that the three holidays that she has chosen for study differ in form and therefore suggest variance in the relative importance of various social groups. Britain’s Remembrance Sunday, for example, celebrates Britain’s war dead and therefore resembles a national funeral with full military honors. Average Britons can watch the parade and lay flowers but do not themselves march past the Cenotaph in Whitehall. In contrast, Norway’s Constitution Day features a children’s parade and can “best be described as a sincere and joyful national celebration marked by flag-waving, national music, national dress (bunad), parades, speeches, church services and the laying of wreaths at war memorials”—it is, in other words, a more grassroots experience involving far more of the population. On the one hand, memory work is predominately carried out by the state as the masses watch, while on the other the action of commemorating the past is far more grassroots, even if the state plays a significant role as well.

Whereas Elgenius suggests but does not emphasize the importance of place to successful memory work, Christopher Wilson offers an extended exploration of the role of place in Turkish national memory by examining both the creation and uses of Anitkabir, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s mausoleum complex at Ankara. Wilson begins by placing the construction of the various buildings into historical context and exploring how particular design elements were chosen to create a history for the modern Turkish people that at once forgot the Ottoman Empire while looking back further to classical and even preclassical origins. Of course, the story of Anitkabir does not end with its design and construction. One cannot assume, following a popular Hollywood movie, that “if you build it, they will come”—it is necessary to continually ensure relevance through the development and perpetual re-enactment of a commemorative liturgy. Wilson explores how Anitkabir is variously used by the state to celebrate the nation and by protest groups anxious that the site serve to nationalize various political issues—a variety of groups, in other words, are given a chance to participate in the perennial (re-)construction of the nation. By using the site, whether for protest or national celebration, Anitkabir is at once reaffirmed as the symbolic soul of the Turkish ethnie while also lending this symbolic resonance to whatever group performs memory work at the site.

In his chapter, Andreas Sturm also recognizes the importance of place by tracing the development of Thai memory sites from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. For Sturm, the commemorative process is less about cross-societal creation and more about the combination of “mainstream elite groups” involved in an active process of contesting the precise definition and composition of the nation. The result of this process is a constant “reinterpretation and adaptation” of the nation, producing “distinguishably different nationalisms” over time and allowing the Thai nation the crucial malleability needed to persist despite global threats. Sturm identifies three distinct competing n...