Nationalism: Hymns Ancient and Modern
Mini Teaser: Why can't the world seem to settle down into nice well-ordered democratic nation-states on the Western model?
In western Europe, the unity of the EC seems to be unraveling. The
Balkans are being re-balkanized. In the Middle East, "national"
identity compounded by sectarian Islam asserts itself in wars that
drag in the whole world. In Africa, the "nations" that were the
legacy of arbitrary colonial boundaries are riven with tribal strife,
and the constantly ingenuous West is shocked to find the Zulus
killing their fellow black South Africans to retain their own
distinct "national" status. India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia are
repressing local nationalisms, and the "unity" of China is one of the
last engineered by centralized totalitarian force, after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union into its component nations. And so
the sorry tale--from the Western progressive liberal point of
view--continues. Why can't the world seem to settle down into nice
well-ordered democratic nation-states on the Western model?
This is not the first time these questions have been raised. My own
interest in nationalism was sparked early by the internationalism
with which I grew up from the thirties through the fifties. Its two
forms--of international socialism, and the idealistic hope in the
League of Nations or United Nations--both seemed, from the start,
doomed. The workers of the world just flat did not unite. On the
contrary, they seemed very happy to get a chance to dish it out to
the workers of other nations. And again, the sorry history of the UN
(following on the League) showed that governments of the nations of
the world would not unite either. The UN always seemed to me to be
killed by its own premise: that world peace and good governance could
come about by the cooperation of independent nation-states.
United Nations was almost an oxymoron. Nations existed to be
disunited from each other, only coming together in temporary
alliances out of self interest. Here it seemed that the utopian
internationalists had the better idea, in that they wanted to abolish
nations and achieve a "brotherhood of man" that refused to recognize
artificial national boundaries. Theoretically, that made more sense,
except that the boundaries just were not artificial; they were very
real. And the UN by adding to its councils ever more self-declared
"nations" (even if they were islands smaller than most small towns)
constantly compounded its problems.
Internationalism of all varieties then seemed to be an idealistic
failure. People at large just didn't think globally. But nationalism
itself had major problems, not least that many "nations" and
especially (but not exclusively) "new nations" were indeed artificial
entities: the creations of colonial map makers (Kuwait is a nation?)
or the Versailles Treaty carvers-up of eastern Europe. Many of these
"nations" cut across more ancient racial, religious, ethnic, and
linguistic boundaries, especially in Africa where whole tribes were
split in this way, or forcibly incorporated with traditional enemies.
This raised the issue of the relation of "nation states" to these
other units. For what seemed to be required of nation states was that
they behave like homogeneous tribes, even if this was plainly a
fiction. The problem continues to plague modern "new nationalisms."
The Scottish nationalists, for example, have to plaster over the
tremendous differences between the lowland (Presbyterian, mercantile,
urban) Scots, and the highlanders: Gaelic, Catholic, of Irish origin
and only recently emerged from territorial and kinship dominated
tribalism. (There were more Scots fighting against Bonnie Prince
Charlie at Culloden than for him.) And the Republican Irish
embarrassment over their northern Protestant brethren needs no
elaboration.
Back To Fundamentals
Instead of endlessly multiplying examples, we need to get back to the
fundamental questions about nationalism: When has a "nation" reached
the limits of its integration? What are the sure signs that its
various ethnic, racial, territorial, religious, linguistic, and
interest groups no longer feel a common bond or purpose? Most of the
modern debates on "nationalism" don't begin to answer these
questions. One opens a new, very large, and much-hyped book like Liah
Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, hoping for fresh
insights, and finds only the same dreary catalogue of facts. Most
books on the "nationalism" issue are written by political scientists,
sociologists, historians, politicians and other peddlers of ephemera.
The psychologists occasionally have a crack at it, but they are
prisoners of their schools and disagree as loudly as the nationalists
themselves. Ever since Freud assured us that the Russians would never
rebel against a Czar they regarded as a "little father" and whom they
had incorporated into their superegos, we have learned to be wary of
psychological advice in this field. It could be true that devotion to
national causes is be one way we escape Eric Fromm's "fear of
freedom"; but that doesn't tell us "why nationalism?"
The question, of course, assumes that there are some fundamentals:
some features of the human creature that predispose it to
"nationalistic" behavior. But this is dismissed by the
"nationalism-is-modern" school, for whom the phenomenon starts not
with Nature but with Herder (or a bit before in the precocious cases
of England and France.) Proponents of this dominant mode of thought
regard "nationalism" as co-terminous with the modern nation-state,
and indeed a creation of distinctly post-feudal, even industrial,
social conditions. Even the most diehard of the nationalism-is-modern
school, however, admit that "national sentiments" are very real. Thus
E.J. Hobsbawm admits that "what is in doubt is not the strength of
men's and women's longing for group identity of which nationality is
one expression." "What skeptics doubt," he continues, "is the alleged
irresistibility of the desire to form homogeneous nation states..."
Note the slippage here--from an admittedly "natural nationality" to a
definitely resistible "nation state."
I doubt anyone would want to argue that we have inbuilt
predispositions to form nation states. Natural selection would have
to have been remarkably (and teleologically) prescient to have
provided for that one--or even for states! But nations (if not
states) are formed out of something, and as Hobsbawm recognizes,
"longing for group identity" is one basis, if not the only one. Even
more noticeable is the slippage between "nationality" ("sense of
group belonging") and "nationalism"--which can only be some kind of
doctrine of nation-state primacy. Truly the state can exist without
the nation and the nation precede the state (or vice-versa), and some
kind of doctrine to justify, glorify and rationalize it all need only
arise well after the historical fact (England), or alternatively
precede and create that fact (Germany.) Commentators have made us
familiar with, not to say sick of, all the permutations. But what the
"nationalism-is-modern-not-natural" school are asserting, slyly
confounds these distinctions. Nationalism and the nation-state are of
course "modern." By the same token, appeals to human nature do not
explain them. For Hobsbawm they are blatantly historical epiphenomena
overdue for obsolescence. But as he too realizes, that naggingly
persistent "national feeling" is somehow independent of all this
historical jiggery pokery.
Let us put it this way: Whatever the origins, historical, social,
geographical, economic, military or whatever, of nationalism and the
nation-state, the one uniformity is the relative ease with which
"national" sentiments can be aroused and sustained in the populations
of these "modern" entities. This gives the theorists of nationalistic
"modernity" a deep sense of unease, since we are clearly dealing here
with deeply atavistic sentiments and motivations. It is obviously
disturbing to have to argue that a social phenomenon is "modern" and
a "construct" but at the same time to have to admit that it derives
its emotional energy from some unknown archaic dark corners of the
human psyche.
This would only be strange, however, to a theory that insisted that
sentiments and emotions themselves were solely the creations of
historical conditions; unfortunately that is the prevailing paradigm
for the social and historical sciences. If, however, one accepts that
man carries a baggage of evolutionary dispositions--mental as well as
emotional--then there is really no problem. The only problem is
empirical: What social conditions "fit" these dispositions and what
do not? I have spent a great deal of time complaining about the
conditions that fail to satisfy these paleolithic motivations and
mentations, but it equally follows that, often serendipitously it is
true, modern conditions will evoke and reinforce ancient
(paleolithic) sentiments. Thus bureaucracy will rarely ever work
since the attributes it demands are so implacably anti-paleolithic.
Sociologists too have noted the persistent failure of bureaucracy,
but are frustrated in their explanations since they can only look for
reasons within the historical conditions of bureaucracy itself.
Nationalism, at least in its form of real and obvious national
sentiments, creates the same dilemmas. Here is something that taps
and indeed thrives on atavistic motives and satisfactions--some
benign, some generous, some horrible, which cannot be explained as
creations of nationalism (and the nation-state) itself. The
historical contingency school is left only with various forms of
manipulative or conspiracy theories, by which the gullible masses are
somehow brainwashed into various ecstatic states. Hobsbawm to his
credit avoids this extreme nonsense, but equally he never comes to
grips with the problem raised by his vision of a non-nationalist
future: what will happen if you remove this source of human
satisfaction?
There are three things you can do to the paleolithic hunter that is
Man (the tiny episode we call "History"--at best the few thousand
years of the interglacial in which we live--has done nothing to
change our basic psycho-physico-social nature that evolved over two
and a half million years of the paleolithic). The three things are:
You can deny him his evolved needs either by simple deprivation or by
imposing institutions that distort them; you can satisfy or tap those
needs either directly or by modern institutions that utilize or at
least do not frustrate them; you can figure out how to fool the
evolved system so that we utilize atavistic motives to modern ends.
The current task of history and the behavioral sciences should be to
utilize the insights of evolutionary biology to help sort out where
we are satisfying, where frustrating and where fooling our
paleolithic selves. Most contemporary savants are running in the
opposite direction, and in circles to boot.
Up From Tribalism
The evolutionary line leading to the powerful "sense of belonging"
that the nationalism-is-modern school cannot deny but cannot
accommodate is simple. In the non-human primates we find intense
sociality within the troop, and equally intense xenophobia directed
to outsiders. In our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, this goes
beyond mere defense of range or territory to cooperative, predatory,
cannibalistic and ultimately genocidal attacks on other groups. But
above all there is the strong sociality and group identification.
This is reflected in the earliest of hominid societies, the
australopithecines, from at least three-and-a-half million years ago.
Small groups wandered the east African savannahs, scavenging and
catching small game. As the scale of hunting increased with the
advent of Homo erectus, the two-million year upsurge in brain size
and social complexity took off on its upward trajectory. By the close
of the paleolithic, larger bands making up "linguistic tribes" (up to
five thousand individuals) with ceremonial cave centers emerged. Then
came the neolithic revolution--agriculture and herding--and the rest,
literally, is history.
The sequence: primate troop--australopithecine horde--paleolithic
band--linguistic tribe--tribal confederation--chieftainship--tribal
state, and on up to city states, kingdoms, empires, etc, iswell
enough known. What is not well understood is how each level draws on
the lower levels. Thus the nationalism-is-modern school has a hard
time dealing with the "tribal" elements of nations, and the political
anthropologists often do not want to see the underpinnings of the
human band or tribe as lying in the primate troop. But just as early
human bands three million years ago drew on the socio-emotional
strengths of their ancestral primate heritage, so the tribe drew on
the strengths of the band, and, ultimately, the kingdom or state on
the strengths of the tribe.
At the heart of every nation then is tribal feeling writ large. And
this is at once both the secret of the peculiar strength of national
feeling and also its potential weakness. For when the nation is too
large and too heterogeneous, as many modern nation-states and
super-states become, then the bounds of paleolithic credibility
become dangerously stretched, and we resort to the third alternative:
fooling our paleolithic emotions. (So far we seem to have succeeded
best in this third case with drugs, which fool the brain into
thinking they are endogenous opiates. This fooling business is a
dangerous road to travel.)
One thing that characterizes the basic hominid social unit is
kinship. The paleolithic linguistic tribe, while split into many
bands or clans, preserved the idea that all those who spoke the same
tongue were kin, usually by some legend of common descent. This was
plausible, and explains what must often seem like a pathological
devotion to language as a marker of social identity in modern
nationalism. But the linguistic tribe was probably never more than
five thousand strong. When Aristotle set that limit to the number of
free citizens in an ideal city state, he knew whereof he spoke.
Beyond that limit we must resort to fictions of kinship in order to
tap (or fool) the emotions of group solidarity. Modern nationalists
know this very well, and the linkage of language and "blood"
(kinship) becomes an essential part of their racial rhetoric. Nations
are big tribes. Thus rulers do indeed become "little fathers" of
their people, and the nation itself a "mother-" or "father-land."
When the "sibling-citizens" are clearly not of common descent, as in
the United States or (former) USSR, then the focus has to be a
sibling of a parent, as in Uncle Sam or Uncle Joe. If we can all be
children (or nephews) of the same ancestors ("We few, we happy few,
we band of brothers") and speak the same tongue, then we can be
fooled into thinking we are the same tribe: familiars--literally of
the same family.
The fiction is very effective and not only nations but religious
orders and political and social movements freely use the rhetoric of
kinship to arouse the same feelings of defensive solidarity. But by
its very ambitions the modern industrial nation state (especially its
super-state version) strains this fiction to its breaking point. Even
so, "patriotic" appeals are never to self-interest but always to kin
altruism ("Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can
do for your country" etc.) But not only do very few people except a
few cranks believe in the brotherhood of man, very few others believe
that their co-citizens are really kinsfolk. If they did, they might
behave better towards them. The fiction, in the end, ceases to be
effective, especially if the pseudo-kinship has been forced on them.
The "all those who speak the same language are kin" ruse fails
miserably when one is forced to speak the language in question. The
appeal to territory or a shared past--both elements of the
troop-band-tribe scheme--is equally difficult to sustain as the
territory gets too diverse and the past too diffuse or painful to be
plausibly described as "shared." We can draw on the primitive sense
of kin-tribe solidarity just so far in supporting admittedly modern
nationalism. The disaster comes when we try to force the fiction
further than its bounds of plausibility. The paleo-cynic in us
rebels. The shotgun marriages of modern nationalism are suddenly on
the rocks--maintained only by force, duplicity and economic necessity.
One other way to maintain "national feeling" is the equally atavistic
call to war. "Defense of the realm" or destruction of its enemies
taps the deeply programmed "defend the clan" motivations and the
primate xenophobia. But this is difficult to sustain over long
periods with any intensity, since paleolithic "wars" were more in the
nature of raids or brief skirmishes. It worked well enough with the
incessant warring of small professional armies in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, but could only work in short bursts in the
conditions of modern total war. The appeal works very effectively,
but soon outstays its welcome.
Small is Workable
The moral of the tale told this way is very simple: The only
nationalisms that will ultimately work will be small nationalisms in
small national entities. These can plausibly draw on the basic
motivations to sustain themselves. If the larger nation-states and
super-states are to maintain themselves through the "nationalistic"
mode of social integration, then the paradox is that they must try to
appeal to something other than raw national sentiment to achieve
this. Rallying round white, European, English-speaking,
Dixie-costumed, Uncle Sam, will simply not do for the modern United
States, where at least a third of the nation cannot possibly feel
kinship with him. As one of my Hispanic students put it almost
vehemently, "Uncle Sam no es mi tio¡" Some more subtle appeal,
perhaps to enlightened self-interest ("you are better off here than
in any nation on earth"), will have to replace the raw national
appeal, which cares nothing about having superior economics, but only
about being superior people. This appeal to self-interest is what at
the moment seems to be tenuously holding together British and French
Canada, and for that matter the English and Scots, as well as the
Asian and African examples. The "national" sentiments here must work
on a lower level, and as we have suggested, may give some aspirant
but non-homogeneous nations like Scotland their own troubles.
In all this the USA in particular affects pious spectator status.
This is all happening "elsewhere." For the optimists--the
end-of-history crowd included--the world is rapidly going to adopt
our own form of perfectionism and all will be
democratically/capitalistically well. For the pessimists, it is the
same old story of the world failing to live up to our own high
standards and making its usual un-American mess of things. For the
isolationists, we should leave them to it; for the internationalists,
we must be the world's policeman (with or without the UN as suits
us); for the pragmatists, we should intervene only when our national
interests are at stake. But one finds very few people taking
seriously the proposition that we are not some kind of utopian
solution but very much part of the problem: The massive distrust of
government and the growing power of separatist sentiments is as
potentially destructive to us as it was to the USSR. It has happened
once in our history, with terrible costs.
The coming dissolution may not be as blatantly territorial as in the
Civil War but it will be no less ideological, and ideology kills as
surely as ever territory did. We have always, from our beginnings as
a "contractual" nation, been a mish-mash of warring factions only
loosely linked by "national" sentiment, however noisy that has been
at times--and it has had to be noisy to drown out the dissent. Can
any sociologist tell us how to measure how much more or less of a
mish-mash we are now? The mish-mash has been held together by some
very strong sense of being "American" - something that led even
segregated black and native American regiments in World War II to
feel "proud" of what they were defending. Does this still exist?
Since the sixties nothing is certain.
The paleolithic mentality and emotions cannot be indefinitely fooled,
for they are what we are. We can, of course, try to destroy them with
the likes of drugs, super nation-states, and impersonal bureaucracies. But they will fight back and the fighting will get rough. Not on
ly nationalism but a whole parade of so-called "modern social
problems" from teen pregnancy epidemics and high divorce rates, to
soccer hooliganism and religious fundamentalism, may well prove to
be, like "ethnic cleansing," examples not of system-driven
pathologies at all, but of the paleolithic organism fighting for its
survival, which is, after all, the most basic thing it knows to do.
Appeals to rational self-interest are always at a disadvantage, for
the interest may shift. The beauty of an appeal to "national
sentiment" is precisely its non-rational and often irrational nature.
It is an appeal often against self-interest and for self-sacrifice.
Hobsbawm's skeptics may turn out to be wrong: There is an
irresistible desire to form something, and even if it is not a
nation-state, it is homogeneous. Perhaps we could call this
irresistible desire "the perennial appeal of tribalism," and try to
remember that it allows for virtues that rational state bureaucracies
know nothing of but which are very dear to our basic natures. Try
heroism for starters. Hollywood and the sports world understand (and
profit from) this very well, even if political scientists and
economists find no place for it in their dreams of the "rational
actor" and other fantasies of academic life.
National states will continue insofar as they supply basic needs and
are small and homogeneous enough to appeal to basic sentiments of
belonging. But let us never be complacent about supra-national
political entities when they come into competition with the perennial
appeal of tribalism. A few hundred years is not even a blink of an
eye in evolutionary time.