Nations And States

An Enquiry Into The Origins Of Nations And The Politics Of Nationalism

Hugh Seton-watson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429726545
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Política

This major book by one of the great political and social historians of our time is a study of the force of nationalism, a force that continues to shake our world. Reaching beyond nationalism as a doctrine, beyond the content, psychological origins, and analysis of that doctrine, the book represents and enquiry into all the important political move

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Nations and Nationalism

The object of this book is to examine the processes by which nations have been formed, the types of political movements which have sought to achieve what has been considered to be the national purpose, and the ways in which such movements have influenced and been influenced by the internal policies of states and the relations of states with each other.

The distinction between states and nations is fundamental to my whole theme. States can exist without a nation, or with several nations, among their subjects; and a nation can be coterminous with the population of one state, or be included together with other nations within one state, or be divided between several states. There were states long before there were nations, and there are some nations that are much older than most states which exist today. The belief that every state is a nation, or that all sovereign states are national states, has done much to obfuscate human understanding of political realities. A state is a legal and political organisation, with the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens. A nation is a community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness. Yet in the common usage of English and of other modern languages these two distinct relationships are frequently confused.

In the United States the expression ‘throughout the nation’ simply means ‘throughout the country’. In the main European languages the words ‘international relations’ and their equivalent are used to denote the relations between states. The organisation set up at the end of the Second World War with the hope of preventing war and promoting peace between states was called ‘United Nations’, and its predecessor had been called ‘League of Nations’. But membership of both these organisations was confined in fact to governments of states. It was assumed in the age of President Wilson that states would embody nations; that the people of every state would form a nation; and that eventually, in the golden age of self-determination which was dawning, every nation would have its state. There were of course in 1918 many such states: the expression ‘nation-state’ in such cases reflected a reality. There were, however, many others, some of which became members of the League of Nations, of which this was not true. The rhetoric of Wilson was still used in the age of Roosevelt (a founding father of the United Nations, though he did not live to see it function). Many of the original members, and many who later joined it, were nation-states, but many of each category were not. The United Nations in fact has proved to be little more than a meeting place for representatives of Disunited States. The frequently heard cliché that ‘we live in an age of nation-states’ is at most a half-truth. What is arguably true is that we live in an age of sovereign states. Many people believe that state sovereignty is a major cause of international tension, and a potential cause of future wars; and that steps should be taken to diminish it. It is also often asserted that ‘the age of the nation-state is coming to an end’. The truth is less simple; the problems of sovereignty and of nationalism, of states and of nations, are not the same. There have been times when the existence of state sovereignty has been a cause of war, and others when the aspirations of nations have led to war. There have been examples in recent times of diminution of state sovereignty, and it is quite possible that there will be a growing trend in this direction. But the disappearance of state sovereignties has not caused the disappearance of nations, any more than the creation of new state sovereignties has sufficed to create new nations. Whether nations can be destroyed is a subject for dispute.

Even more confusion commonly attaches to the word ‘nationalism’. It is often used to denote any form of collective selfishness or aggressiveness of which the writer or speaker disapproves. It has become a pejorative term, used in contrast to the respectable word ‘patriotism’. In fact, ‘I am a patriot: you are a nationalist’.

Governments are often said to have ‘nationalist’ policies if they pursue their own interests at the expense of other governments. ‘Economic nationalism’ is the pursuit of the supposed economic interests of the people of one country, without regard for those of other peoples in other countries. Yet selfish regard for their own interests has been a feature of the policies of countless governments throughout history, long before nationalism or nations were heard of. Another misuse of the words ‘national’ and ‘nationalism’ relates to the collectivist policies of the governments of states. In the course of the last half-century governments, whether as a result of military or financial pressures or of the ideological convictions of their politicians, have intervened more and more in the economic activities and private lives of their citizens, have mobilised more and more their persons and their possessions. This trend was described in the French language by the useful word étatisme, which has no satisfactory equivalent in English. Seizure of property or of business enterprises by the state (étatisation) has been misleadingly rendered in English as ‘nationalisation’, and this word has also passed into French and other languages. It is misleading because the seized properties are in reality placed at the disposal not of the nation but of a dominant bureaucratic caste.

This book is concerned with nations and states, and only to a lesser extent with nationalism. Nevertheless the word and the phenomenon of ‘nationalism’ will frequently occur in the following pages, and it is necessary at the outset at least to give some indication of what I mean by it. As I see it, the word ‘nationalism’ has two basic meanings. It would greatly improve the clarity of individual and public thinking if the word could be shorn of all accretion, and confined to these two. One of these meanings is a doctrine about the character, interests, rights and duties of nations. The second meaning is an organised political movement, designed to further the alleged aims and interests of nations.

The two most generally sought aims of such movements have been independence (the creation of a sovereign state in which the nation is dominant), and national unity (the incorporation within the frontiers of this state of all groups which are considered, by themselves, or by those who claim to speak for them, to belong to the nation). In the case of many, though not of all, nations there has been a further task for nationalists: to build a nation within an independent state, by extending down to the population as a whole the belief in the existence of the nation, which, before independence was won, was held only by a minority.

I shall be concerned in this book overwhelmingly with the movements. I shall not rigidly limit discussion of movements to the pursuit of the three aims of independence, unity and nation-building, but they will occupy most of my attention. With the doctrine, or ideology, this book is hardly concerned at all. There are already many good books, both old and new, on this subject. As a doctrine, it is not very interesting, being essentially a variant of eighteenth century doctrines of popular sovereignty, with half-digested chunks of socialism added to the broth in the course of time. It has inspired immense outputs of rhetoric, and each brand has its own peculiarities, some of which must be admitted to be picturesque, though literary distinction and beauty are qualities which I should hesitate to attribute to them. The preparation of an anthology of nationalist rhetoric has not been part of the task which I have undertaken; but such anthologies exist, some with penetrating commentaries,¹ and readers whose main interest lies in that field would do well to study them.

All that has been said above assumes the use of the word ‘nation’, and this is much more difficult to explain. Many attempts have been made to define nations, and none have been successful. The most widely known without doubt is that of the late Joseph Stalin, whose work Marxism and the National Question, based on an article which he wrote at the request of Lenin in 1913, was later diffused in scores of languages in scores of millions of copies. All that Stalin could say was that a nation must have four characteristics: a common language, a common territory, a common economic life and a common mental make-up. No group which did not possess all four was entitled to be considered a nation. The fourth of these characteristics is of course vague. One may indeed strongly argue that vagueness is inherent in the phenomenon itself. But that is not an argument used by Stalin; on the contrary, he seems to have believed, and it was certainly claimed on his behalf by his disciples, that his four points provided a fully scientific definition. Stalin mentioned neither religion nor historical tradition. The truth is that Stalin’s article was written not as a piece of social-political analysis, but as a polemic—arising out of the conditions of 1913, against the Jewish socialist movement, the Bund—intended to prove that the Jews were not a nation.²

Most definitions have in fact been designed to prove that, in contrast to the community to which the definer belonged, some other group was not entitled to be called a nation. The distinction between ‘cultural nation’ (a community united by language or religion or historical mythology or other cultural bonds) and ‘political nation’ (a community which in addition to cultural bonds also possesses a legal state structure) has at times been useful, but it too has often been misused for the purpose noted above.

In nineteenth century Central Europe a distinction was made between ‘nations’ and ‘nationalities’, the former being the superior category. ‘My community is a nation: yours is a nationality’. Whole theories were based on this distinction, the purpose of which was to deny the status of nation to others. In later chapters I shall discuss the distinction at greater length. Apart from the sense mentioned, the word ‘nationality’ has, in the English language (more frequently in its British than in its American variant), the meaning of ‘state citizenship’ (Staatsangehörigkeit is the more precise German term). When I have occasion, in the following pages, to refer to this legal category, I shall use the unambiguous word ‘citizenship’. There is, however, a third sense in which ‘nationality’ can be used: as a neutral and abstract word, meaning the quality of belonging to a nation. This is at times a useful concept, and it is the only sense in which I shall use it, without quotation marks, in the following pages.

Another distinction seems at first sight to have much to commend it: the distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’. The word ‘tribe’ has usually been applied to comparatively small groups of people, with a rather low level of culture. Such were the tribes which the Romans met in Gaul and Germany (there was no Gaulish or Germanic ‘nation’), or the groups, following various leaders, who spoke various Baltic or Slavonic or Turkic languages, and came into conflict with the Holy Roman, Byzantine and Abbasid empires. Other examples can be found among the various land invaders of India and China. The Scottish clans, and the septs into which they were divided, might also be considered to be ‘tribes’; and something of the same sort could be found also in Ireland. In the nineteenth century European explorers, and the European administrators who followed in their steps, made frequent use of the word ‘tribe’ for African peoples. Most of these communities, scattered across the globe and the centuries, shared a fierce loyalty both to their chiefs and to fellow-members of the community. The difficulty is to decide at what point ‘tribal consciousness’ becomes ‘national consciousness’. Those who use the word ‘tribe’ of others are usually convinced that they themselves belong to a higher culture and are looking at persons of a lower culture. Such was certainly the view of Romans and Chinese, and in modern times of European colonial officials. Yet arbitrary differentiation between ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ closely resembles the differentiation between ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ discussed above, and amounts to no more than that between ‘my group’ and ‘your group’. In the independent new states of Africa, ‘tribalism’ has become a blanket term to cover, and to condemn, any sort of movement for autonomy, let alone separate statehood. Nevertheless, great differences in cultural level have existed, do exist, and are recognisable. Should one say that in 1900 the Yorubas were a nation, and the Dinkas a tribe? How can differences in the level of culture be measured, and who is an impartial judge? Because there are no clear answers to these questions, one has to be very cautious in the use of the words ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’; yet the difference does exist, just as the difference in the spectrum between blue and green exists, though the colours merge in the human eye which beholds the rainbow.

Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of a nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists. All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one. It is not necessary that the whole of the population should so feel, or so behave, and it is not possible to lay down dogmatically a minimum percentage of a population which must be so affected. When a significant group holds this belief, it possesses ‘national consciousness’. Common sense suggests that if this group is exceedingly small (let us say. less than one percent of the population), and does not possess great skill in propaganda, or a strong disciplined army to maintain it until it has been able to spread national consciousness down into much broader strata of the population, then the nationally conscious elite will not succeed in creating a nation, and is unlikely to be able to indefinitely remain in power on the basis of a fictitious nation.

It is hoped that these introductory remarks have served to indicate the nature of my subject; and that this will become clearer in the course of later chapters.

The doctrine of nationalism dates from the age of the French Revolution, but nations existed before the doctrine was formulated. Once the doctrine had been formulated, it was used as a justification for creating nationalist movements, and then sovereign states to encompass the lands in which it was claimed that nations lived.

The French revolutionaries, and their disciples outside France, zealously spread oversimplified versions of some of the ideas of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. In the revolutionary era a man who had a little education, setting him above the majority, felt himself both qualified and morally bound to translate his principles into political action. Government must now be based, not on the accidents of history and privilege, on institutions and hierarchies which had grown up in the past, but on rational principles, worked out in programmes and blueprints. Nationalism as a doctrine was derived from the eighteenth century notion of popular sovereignty. In France, when the hated old regime had been overthrown, power belonged to the nation, or to those who claimed to speak for it. It was obvious who were the French nation: France was populated by Frenchmen, and Frenchmen were not to be found outside France, though there were some thousands of people of French speech on the borders of Switzerland and Belgium. Beyond the Rhine and the Alps things were not so clear. The enemy, the old regime, was easily identifiable, but it was not obvious what should be the units in which popular sovereignty should be exercised. The answer increasingly given by the local converts to the new ideas was the German nation, or the Italian nation—not just the people of Hesse-Kassel or of Lucca.

Nationalist doctrine, as it developed in the Napoleonic era, had also another source, the cult of individuality, both personal and cultural. The German philosophers Fichte and Herder stressed the importance of language as the basis of nationality. Herder emphasised the divine diversity of the family of nations, the unique quality of each culture. His enthusiasm was by no means confined to the Germans: in a famous chapter on ‘the Slavs’ he idealised their moral and cultural qualities. Herder’s ideas spread to the few educated persons among the smaller and more backward peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. Each group in turn felt more strongly that the community with which it identified itself was, or ought to be made into, a nation.

I shall make no attempt to summarise the ideas of the founding fathers of nationalist doctrine, or to trace their philosophic origins. This has been done by many writers, and perhaps best of all in a recent short masterpiece.³ It is, however, important to distinguish between two categories of nations, which we will call the old and the new. The old are those which had acquired national identity or national consciousness before the formulation of the doctrine of nationalism. The new are those for whom two processes developed simultaneously: the formation of national consciousness and the creation of nationalist movements. Both processes were the work of small educated political elites.

The old nations of Europe in 1789 were the English, Scots, French, Dutch, Castilians and Portuguese in the west; the Danes and Swedes in the north; and the Hungarians, Poles and Russians in the east. Of these, all but three lived in states ruled by persons of their nationality, and therefore needed no national independence movement; though this of course does not mean that these peoples did not suffer from various degrees of political or social oppression, and so, in the opinion of radicals and revolutionaries, ‘needed’ liberation. The three exceptions were the Scots, who since 1707 had shared a single state with the English and the Welsh, while preserving important institutions of their own; and the Hungarians and Poles, who were simply subjected to foreign rule. The Hungarians had at one time been divided between three states (the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman empire and the principality of Transylvania), but at the end of the eighteenth century were all subject to the Habsburg Monarchy; whereas the Poles had been divided since 1795 between the kingdom of Prussia, the Russian empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. Thus, though Poles and Hungarians had a continuous national consciousness going back for several centuries, the continuity of the Polish and Hungarian sovereign states had been broken.

There were also at this time other communities in which there was, in the educated class, undoubted awareness of a cultural community and a long history, but in which the formation of national consciousness even in the elite was incomplete. Such were the Germans and Italians; perhaps also the Irish, Catalans and Norwegians.

In the rest of Europe there was little sign of national consciousness. In these lands, new nations were formed in the course of the following century, and this process was then extended, by educated elites influenced by European ideas, into the Muslim lands, southern and eastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Nations of European origin also emerged in the colonies of settlement in America, South Africa and Australia.

The distinction between old and new nations seems more relevant than that between ‘historical’ and ‘unhistorical’, which came into use in Central Europe in the late nineteenth century. All nations have a history. Some of the communities in which, in 1789, national consciousness did not exist, or was still weak, had had long and brilliant histories—not only the Italians and Germans, but the Greeks and Bohemians and Serbs. However, continuity had been broken by conquest. The basic difference, then, is between old continuous nations and new nations; and it is of some importance for our theme.

The process of formation of national identity and national consciousness among the old nations was slow and obscure. It was a spontaneous process, not willed by any one, though there were great events which in certain cases clearly accelerated it.

In medieval Europe the word natio was in legal use, but it did not mean the same thing as the modern ‘nation’. Many medieval universities attracted many students from other lands beside their own. These were placed in nationes, named after the territories from which the largest number of each originated, but including also persons from other countries.⁴

In Transylvania in the fifteenth century there were three nationes recognised by law, who were represented in the Transylvanian Diet: ...