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National good |
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October 2000 |
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The ethnically homogeneous nation-state
is alive and well. It remains the largest feasible focus for
both belonging and democracy |
Michael
Lind | |
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Pity the poor nation-state. It is mentioned
only to be abused. The nation-state, we are told, is too small-too
tiny to be competitive in the global economy, too feeble to deal on
its own with "global issues" like climate change. At the same time,
the nation-state is too big. Its centralised bureaucracies are too
remote from the real centres of innovation, which are cities and
neighbourhoods. National cultures cannot compete with global pop
culture or with sub-national ethnic and regional cultures.
As if being the wrong size were not bad enough, the
nation-state is often regarded as positively evil. The idea of a
connection between government and an ethnocultural nation upon which
the nation-state is based is xenophobic, nativist, even fascist.
Nationalism leads to murder and ethnic expulsion in the Balkans; the
only wonder is that all nation-states, everywhere, are not engaged
in the genocide to which they are predisposed by their very nature.
Fortunately-or so the conventional wisdom goes-these
political dinosaurs are on the way out. The nation-state is fading
away under pressures from above, such as economic globalisation and
transnational communication, and pressures from below, such as
multiculturalism and regional reawakenings. Soon, maybe very soon,
the division of the world into nation-states will be replaced by a
new world order reminiscent of the middle ages-a miscellany of
tribes and city-states, coexisting more or less harmoniously under a
few loose global institutions, the equivalent of the medieval
European papacy and empire.
In a lecture series delivered in
1985, the American historian William H McNeill argued that the era
of nation-states, which began in 1789, came to an end in 1945. In
the post-national future, as in the pre-national past, political
identity and ethnic identity would be separated, as a result of mass
immigration and multiculturalism. In 1990, Eric Hobsbawm echoed
McNeill in his book Nations and Nationalism since 1780. According to
Hobsbawm, nationalism "is no longer a global political programme, as
it may be said to have been in the 19th and 20th centuries...
Nation-states and nations will be seen as retreating before the new
supranational restructuring of the globe. Nations and nationalism
will be present in history, but in subordinate and rather minor
roles."
But in the decade between the time these historians
wrote and the present, nationalism has reshaped the map of the world
and has been the main cause of conflict. More than 20 new sovereign
states have appeared. Germany was reunited. The Soviet Union,
Yugoslavia and, recently, Serbia have crumbled or lost territory,
giving way to new, more ethnically-uniform nation-states.
Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into the Czech and Slovak
republics. The UK appears to be going the way of Czechoslovakia;
Scotland has its first parliament in almost 300 years; Eritrea has
won its independence from Ethiopia, East Timor from Indonesia; and a
de facto Palestinian state is gaining its independence from Israel.
The US and China have clashed repeatedly over the desire of Chinese
nationalists to unite Taiwan with the mainland. Contrary to those
who have predicted the imminent demise of the nation-state,
nationalism is alive and well. Indeed, it is the most powerful
political force in the world today.
For all the talk about
the "Balkanisation" of the world, there are no signs that the
nation-state is about to be replaced by something smaller.
City-states like Singapore and Hong Kong are aberrations (and Hong
Kong has just been absorbed by a nation-state). The break-up of
multinational states like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia into
proper nation-states like Russia and Croatia is not a harbinger of
the break-up of nation-states along sub-national lines. A few
remaining multinational entities like the UK, Canada and Indonesia
may crumble, but homogeneous countries like Denmark and Japan will
not. And the US is a multiracial nation-state like Brazil or Mexico,
not a multinational state like Canada or Switzerland.
Is
there a trend for national sovereignty to give way to supra-national
governance, as many claim? The EU has many of the trappings of a
state-a common currency, a parliament, a flag, even an anthem. But
on closer examination the EU looks like a customs union pretending
to be a country. European nations are so jealous of one another that
no drawings of real monuments or landscapes were permitted on the
euro. Instead, artists invented imaginary landscapes and monuments-a
stratagem which was entirely appropriate, inasmuch as European
patriotism is imaginary. As Raymond Aron wrote in the 1960s, "the
old nations will live in the hearts of men, and love of the European
nation is not yet born-assuming that it ever will be."
This
is not to say that Europeans have not attained some genuine
achievements in international cooperation. It is simply to point out
that the example of the EU cannot be used as evidence that
nation-states are giving way to supra-national organisations. And if
regional organisation is not superseding the nation-state in Europe,
then it is not happening anywhere. Nafta is merely a trade treaty.
The idea of a common north American parliament would horrify
Americans, Mexicans and Canadians alike. In Asia, national
sovereignty is jealously guarded. Apec and Asean are economic
forums. There is no multinational Asian military alliance comparable
to Nato, only a series of bilateral relationships with the US.
Are immigration and multiculturalism sapping national
identity? Multiculturalism in the US is about race, not about
culture or language, which black Americans share with white
Americans. A high rate of immigration of Spanish-speakers is causing
some tensions in border states, but it is less of a threat to
national unity than was the proportionately larger immigration of
Germans and other Europeans in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nor is immigration threatening national unity in Europe or Asia.
Indeed, because of low fertility rates, Japan and western Europe
could benefit from more immigrants, on condition that they
assimilate to the cultures of their new homelands. If immigrants
cannot or will not assimilate, then the countries can limit
immigration. Elsewhere in the world, immigration is not a big
factor, either because countries do not permit it, or because they
are not attractive to immigrants.
the nation-state, then, is
not in danger of extinction. But the multinational state is. For the
past 200 years, the most significant trend in world history has been
the replacement of a few large multinational empires by a growing
number of mostly-small ethnically-homogeneous nation-states. The
idea of the nation-state has spread across the world like a computer
virus, erasing all rival forms of political organisation. This is a
radical break with the past. For most of history, the two main
political forms were the multinational empire and the city-state.
The nation-state is an invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. It
was made possible, although not inevitable, by communications
technologies such as printing and the telegraph, which created mass
reading publics with a sense of common identity, and by
infrastructure technologies such as the steam engine, which
permitted the political and commercial integration of large national
territories.
The same industrial technologies which made
nation-states possible also permitted imperial nations like the
British, the French and the Russians, and later, briefly, the
Germans and Japanese, to assemble large empires governing many
different ethnic nations. Since both kinds of regimes used the same
technology, why did multinational empires like the British empire
and the Soviet Union fail in competition with nation-states? After
all, in the military arena and the market place, technical economies
of scale should have given the prize to the empires.
The
answer is that the nation-state has prevailed because of
psychological economies of scale. The ethnic nation can be broadly
defined to include all people with a common language or culture, or
limited narrowly to people sharing a common descent. But whether it
is defined broadly, as in multiracial Brazil, Mexico or the US, or
narrowly, as in monoracial Japan or Sweden, the ethnic nation is the
largest community with which ordinary human beings can have an
emotional attachment. Even universal religions like Christianity and
Islam tend to inspire less devotion than their ethno-national
divisions: a person is not merely a Catholic, but an Irish Catholic;
not merely a Muslim but an Arab Muslim.
In many societies,
loyalty to the nation has to compete with lesser loyalties to the
province or the racial caste or the religious subculture. But
nothing larger than the nation-state seems able to inspire mass
loyalty. There may be some people who would give up their lives for
the EU, but they are few compared to those who would sacrifice
themselves for France. No one gets a lump in the throat on seeing
the flag of the UN raised, or goes misty-eyed at the reading of the
charter of the Organization of American States.
nations and
nationalism, then, will be the primary actors in world politics for
generations, perhaps centuries, to come. Recognising this, some
opponents of nationalism have sought to promote a distinction
between bad "blood-and-soil" or "ethnic" nationalism, and good
"civic" or "constitutional" or "territorial" patriotism. Ethnic
nationalism, we are told, is backward because it is based on loyalty
to an ethnic nation, not a state. Civic/constitutional/territorial
patriotism is progressive because it is based on commitment to a
political ideal. Like most Manichean dichotomies, the contrast
between ethnic nationalism and civic patriotism rigs the debate in
advance by defining the terms so that one side is identified with
virtue and truth. The problem with civic patriotism is simple: it
doesn't exist, and never has.
The countries held up as
exemplary models of non-ethnic civic patriotism-Britain, France and
the US-are nothing of the kind. What looks like civic ideology, from
within these nations, looks from the outside suspiciously like
national culture. The UK is a multinational state in theory, but
inasmuch as almost nine out of ten Britons are English, Britain
looks very much like an ethnic English nation-state with minorities
of various kinds. France has a tradition of Enlightenment
universalism-but that tradition has been propped up by an
old-fashioned tribal nationalism with an ethnic pantheon which
includes Joan of Arc and Vercingetorix the Gaul.
We
Americans are fond of claiming that the US, unlike the wicked
blood-and-soil nations of the old world, is a "universal nation"
which is "founded on an idea." But this is propaganda which dates
back only to the mid-20th century. From the time of the founding
fathers until the worldwide discrediting of racism by the Holocaust,
the US was a white-supremacist country. Only "free white persons"
could become naturalised citizens in the US between the 1790s and
the 1940s. Most American leaders and intellectuals took it for
granted that there was an American ethnic nationality-variously
described as Anglo-American, Anglo-Saxon, Saxon, Germanic or even
"Aryan." While this conception left out black Americans and
Irish-Americans, it was not altogether inaccurate: as late as the
early 20th century, a majority of Americans were of English or
Scots-Irish descent (today, more Americans cite German and Irish
than English ancestry). Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were
both advocates of a white-only America; they went to their graves
hoping that freed black slaves and their descendants could be
"colonised" abroad in Africa or Central America (Lincoln's term for
this was "deportation").
Only in recent generations has a
post-racist American intelligentsia struggled to define American
identity in terms of political ideology or civic patriotism. And
that non-ethnic definition of American identity has consistently
lost its battles with multiculturalism, which sees the US as a
multinational state based on five racially-defined ethnic
nations-white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native American. The
conflicts over racial quotas, race-based legislative districts and
the contents of the curriculum refute the claim that the US is
somehow a universal "civic" nation.
But isn't America's
"territorial" conception of citizenship enlightened, compared to the
"racist" conceptions of European and Asian countries? We Americans
make much of the moral superiority of our system of jus solis, or
birthplace citizenship, over the system of jus sanguinis, or
family-based citizenship, used in most of the world. But in the
words of the actress Tallulah Bankhead on leaving an avant-garde
play: "There is less to this than meets the eye." The US had no
national law of citizenship before the civil war; to be a US
citizen, you had to be a citizen of one of the states, which were
free to set their own standards. Following the abolition of slavery
after the civil war, it was necessary to make several million black
Americans US citizens in a hurry; this was done by the 14th
Amendment, which provided that everyone born on American soil was a
US citizen. Adopted to deal with a particular, unique, situation,
the American system of jus solis was never intended to be a model of
enlightened policy for the world. Indeed, it is rather
unenlightened, as it permits the children of illegal aliens to be
citizens if they happen to be born on US soil. Children born to
American citizens on holiday in France are not French (at least not
automatically), and there is no reason why they should be. Outside
the US, many of the countries with jus solis citizenship are in
Latin America, a region which, to say the least, has not been
associated with flourishing liberal democracy. Finally, even today,
at one of a few historic peaks of immigration to the US, nine out of
ten Americans became American citizens in the sinister old world
way: they were born to American parents.
the claim that
nationalism is intolerant is a half-truth. Every kind of political
community, no matter how tolerant, tends to react harshly to threats
to its legitimating principle. Dynastic empires which tolerated
cultural diversity did not tolerate threats to monarchical rule;
Leninist states may abandon socialism for the market but they will
repress challenges to one-party dictatorship. National identity is
the legitimating principle of most modern states. Where the
existence of an ethnic nation or its nation-state is most under
threat-as in Yugoslavia-nationalism tends to take on its most
vicious form. By the same token, in countries with settled borders
and an accepted national culture, nationalism tends to be benign.
But as the recent history of western Europe shows, the dormant
nationalism of even "sated" nations can be roused if the foundations
of the nation-state itself seem threatened, whether by the EU or by
Muslim immigration.
The fact that nationalism is exclusive
by definition does not mean that it is inherently vicious. It is
true that atrocities like ethnic cleansing and genocide have been
committed in the name of nationalism. But it is also the case that
ethnic cleansing and genocide have been committed by
internationalists in the name of cosmopolitan ideologies. The worst
record of political murder in human history, far outweighing the
death toll in all the wars of national independence, was compiled by
the Soviet and Chinese communists in the name of international
socialism. From the middle ages to the present, Christian and Muslim
crusaders and terrorists have been willing to murder and torture and
plunder in the name of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
man. It is really not fair to hold up Hitler as a typical
nationalist and Albert Schweitzer as a typical internationalist. It
would be just as absurd to treat Gandhi as a typical nationalist and
Stalin as a typical internationalist.
Imperial nationalism
is bad because it is imperial, not because it is nationalist. It is
worth recalling that most empires have been constructed on behalf of
dynasties, religions, or secular ideologies such as
Marxism-Leninism. Cultural nationalism, as a rule, is too
inward-looking to serve as the basis of an imperial ideology. Nazi
Germany is often held up as an example of the evils of nationalism,
but Hitler's ideology was a kind of racist transnationalism, which
held that all true "Aryans" were kin, whether they shared a common
language and culture or not. Anyway, imperial nationalisms are
greatly outnumbered by anti-imperial nationalisms, for the simple
reason that small ethnic nations have enough trouble holding their
own without trying to conquer their regions, much less the world.
The purpose of most nationalists is nothing more sinister than
trying to preserve the identity of a relatively small ethnic and
linguistic community by achieving and maintaining independence as a
sovereign political community.
This is why it is so absurd
to blame the world wars of the 20th century on the nationalist
movements in the Balkans. Nationalism in the decaying Habsburg
empire was the trigger of the first world war, not the cause. The
cause of the first world war was Germany's ambition to become the
dominant world power by becoming the dominant European power-an
ambition which threatened the interests of Russia, France, Britain,
and the US-empires all.
Instead of blaming nationalism for
20th-century wars which were really caused by imperial rivalries, we
should give some credit to the stubborn and defiant particularism of
anti-fascist and anti-communist nationalists in Europe and Asia for
defeating the transnational tyrannies of National Socialism and
communism. Nationalists from France to Poland to Greece battled
heroically to stop their countries from being melted down into
Hitler's New Order; and nationalists from central Asia to the Baltic
republics brought down the Soviet empire when the Soviet elite no
longer had the nerve to hold it together by terror. Some of those
anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet nationalists were democrats; some were
not. But even the partisans and the dissidents who did have
democratic values did not want democracy in the abstract. They
wanted democracy for their people-the Danes, the Ukrainians, the
Lithuanians, the Poles. Thanks in part to their battles for "narrow"
and "ethnocentric" national self-determination, the world was saved
from domination by supra-national totalitarianism. Johann Gottfried
von Herder wrote in 1791: "How wonderfully has Nature separated
nations, not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers
and climates, but most particularly by languages, inclinations and
characters, [so] that the work of subjugating despotism might be
rendered more difficult..."
critics of nationalism often
assume that national sentiment is somehow incompatible with
democracy. In fact, the relationship tends to be the other way
around. Almost all stable democracies are nation-states, while
multinational states tend to be dictatorships. The reason is simple.
In a mono-ethnic society, ethnic power is not an issue; whichever
party wins in Sweden will be made up of Swedes. That means that
there can be political coalitions based on various other aspects of
identity-class, or religion, or political ideology. But in a
multi-ethnic society, political parties usually coalesce around the
main ethnic groups. Each ethnic group is afraid that the others will
seize control of the machinery of government. In Belgium, the
Flemings worry that the Walloons will be too powerful; in Canada,
the Anglo-Canadians and Québécois eye one another with distrust. At
worst, as in Yugoslavia and Lebanon, the competition between ethnic
parties escalates into war.
Only Tito's dictatorship held
the Yugoslav federation together. The Soviet Union broke up along
national lines the moment that a degree of democracy was permitted.
There are very few stable multi-ethnic democracies. The ones that do
exist-such as Switzerland-tend to be based on intricate
constitutional arrangements such as elaborate systems of federalism
and equally elaborate systems of power-sharing. Political
philosophers and Op-Ed columnists can have fun devising intricate
power-sharing schemes for a multi-ethnic Bosnia or a multi-ethnic
Kosovo. But realistic policymakers have to face the fact that
power-sharing systems seldom work.
Where a state like
Yugoslavia has crumbled because its constituent ethnic nations do
not want to live together, it is folly for outsiders to try to force
them together in a shotgun marriage-or rather a shotgun remarriage.
In such circumstances, it is in the interest of all concerned that
the outside powers act as divorce counsellors, seeing to it that the
divorce takes place with as little bloodshed as possible. The wisest
course may be to turn temporary division into permanent partition,
and to recognise formally the existence of new nation-states. The
results will not always be fair: some individuals will not be able
to return to their homes; some groups will find themselves
minorities trapped behind new borders. But in diplomacy as in the
rest of life, the perfect is the enemy of the good. The rough
justice of partition may be acceptable if it prevents endless
warfare or endless peacekeeping.
The Balkans is not the only
place where there may never be lasting peace or prosperity until
borders are redrawn, at least roughly, along national lines. In
sub-Saharan Africa, most of the states are artificial creations of
British and French colonial administrators. The map of African
governments cuts across the map of African ethnic nations. There is
no Nigerian or South African nation, any more than there was a
Yugoslav or Soviet nation. One reason why so many African states are
dictatorships is that force is required to prevent these artificial
contraptions from breaking down in civil war among the rival ethnic
nations, like the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi.
(Incidentally, one of the unfortunate residues of western racism and
imperialism is the tendency to describe the nations of western
Europe as nations, the nations of eastern Europe as ethnic groups,
and the nations of Africa as tribes.) Any attempt to make political
borders correspond with ethnic nations in Africa, as in the Balkans,
would be messy and imperfect. But the alternative-preserving the
political relics of European colonialism forever at the cost of
endless authoritarianism and internecine conflict and the poverty
which comes in their wake-is much worse than redrawing a border here
and a border there.
Needless to say, most of the several
thousand ethnic groups in the world are too small to have states of
their own-although the example of the Slovenes proves that statehood
is possible for very tiny nations. The Sorbs and Wends of Germany
will never have their own nation-states, any more than the
German-speaking Amish in the US will have theirs. But the fact that
every tiny ethnic group does not qualify for statehood does not
discredit the desire for independence of substantial ethnic nations
like the Kurds.
At what point would there be too many
countries? Between 1945 and today, the number of UN member states
increased from 51 to 188. The addition of a dozen or two dozen more
nation-states would not create chaos. At any given time, there are
only a few great military and economic powers, and it is on their
relations among themselves, not the number of small states, that
international order depends.
Most nation-states are
relatively small, but this need not be a handicap. A small
nation-state can take advantage of commercial economies of scale by
joining the global market or a trading bloc like the EU or Asean;
and it can take advantage of military economies of scale by joining
a military alliance like Nato. Because of its political sovereignty,
a nation-state, even a small, weak, nation-state, can negotiate the
nature of its relations with its trading partners and its military
allies. This is something no ethnic minority in a multinational
state can ever do.
In this connection, it is useful to
distinguish internationalism from transnationalism. Internationalism
presupposes the existence of distinct nations which interact with
one another on a voluntary basis. Transnationalism posits the
disappearance of nation-states and their replacement by something
else-sub-national tribes, supra-national blocs.
While the
supposed trend toward transnationalism is a mirage, the growth of
internationalism is real. It is more a consequence of the end of the
cold war and the division of the countries of the world into rival
camps than of the internet or trade treaties. There is no
contradiction between the multiplication of nation-states and
increasing international integration. Slovenia escaped from its
involuntary membership in Yugoslavia, and immediately applied for
admission to Nato and the EU. It is an abuse of language to say that
when a country joins a military alliance or a trading bloc it is
"surrendering its sovereignty." On the contrary, it is exercising
its sovereignty, so long as it retains the option to quit the
alliance or trading bloc if it so chooses.
The globalisation
of commerce is an example of internationalism, not transnationalism.
A Norwegian may order a product from Thailand over the internet. But
he is still a Norwegian; the Norwegian government can tax and
conscript him, the Thai government cannot; and it is the Norwegian
government, not the Thai government, which provides for his health
care and his state pension out of taxes levied on his fellow
Norwegians. Globalisation is reshaping nations-but it is not
replacing them.
all of this raises an interesting question.
If the nation-state is alive and well, and if nationalism is by no
means the evil that it is made out to be, then why is there so much
loathing of nationalism and propaganda in favour of various kinds of
supra-national systems of world order? One reason is obvious: most
of the states in Africa, and the middle east, and much of Asia, are
non-national entities whose borders are threatened by nationalist
movements. The UN should really be called the United Regimes,
inasmuch as many of the members of the general assembly are
multinational states held together by repression. For obvious
reasons, many of these governments would prefer that
self-determination be sacrificed to the sanctity of inherited
borders, no matter how absurd and anachronistic the borders are. But
this doesn't explain the intense hostility to nationalism in the
western media, and all of the addled talk about the nation-state
withering away.
Every segment of the political spectrum in
the west-left, centre and right-has its own fantasy version of
cosmopolis. The socialist left, for almost two centuries, has hoped,
in the face of all evidence, that international class loyalties will
eventually prevail over inter-class national loyalties. Libertarians
hope to reduce countries to nothing more than postcodes in the free
global market. The influence of Protestant millenarianism and
evangelism can be seen on British liberal internationalism and
American Wilsonian liberalism. There is even a kind of conservative
internationalism-although it is that of reactionary traditionalists
such as John Lukacs, nostalgic for a pre-national, aristocratic
European Christendom, rather than of the populists and nationalists
who dominate the right in most western countries. (Given that most
of literate, civilised humanity lived for most of history under
non-national empires-some, like China and Rome, of long duration and
lasting cultural importance-it is surprising that there is not more
of this kind of conservative nostalgia for imperial civilisations.)
Whether the chattering classes like it or not, a century
from now there will be more nation-states in the world, and fewer
multinational states. Nation-states like Japan and Russia and China
and the US and Germany and India and Brazil, in some form, will
still be here. But many if not most of today's multinational states
will have vanished from the map. The UK may give way to a federation
of the nation-states of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Australia and New Zealand will be sovereign republics. Canada is
unlikely to survive the 21st century; the only question is whether
the English-speaking provinces join the US or straggle along on
their own, when the federation dissolves. Indonesia and Malaysia may
be replaced on the map by a number of new, smaller countries. Not
all of the nationalism of the century ahead will be disintegrative.
A Greater Albania and a Kurdistan might be cobbled together. The
inevitable overthrow of the remaining monarchies in the middle east
may produce the amalgamation of portions of the Arab world, a region
where the present borders were drawn up generations ago by the
colonial bureaucrats of Britain and France. Not every nation will
obtain its state: China is unlikely to free Tibet; and India is
unlikely to consent to a Sikh nation-state. Whether Africa
progresses or continues to decay depends in large part on whether
the international community permits genuine nation-states to be
formed from the wreckage of the post-colonial regimes. In some
cases, such as the break-up of the UK, these changes might occur
without bloodshed; in other cases they may be accompanied by immense
suffering, and may even trigger conflicts among rival great powers.
A case can be made that, on the whole, the good which has
come with replacing multinational dynastic empires and dictatorships
with nation-states which at least have a chance to become stable
liberal democracies, has outweighed the bad which often accompanies
the break-up of non-national states. In any event, the future seems
clear. The 19th century was a century of nationalism. The 20th
century was also a century of nationalism. In all likelihood, the
21st century will be a century of nationalism as well. |
Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New America
Foundation in Washington, writes books of nonfiction, fiction and
poetry. To buy "The Next American Nation" (1995), call 020 8324
5649 |
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