Democratization The 'new nationalism' and

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The ‘new nationalism’ and democracy: A critique of Pro Patria Robert Fine

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Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology , University of Warwick , Coventry Published online: 26 Sep 2007.

To cite this article: Robert Fine (1994) The ‘new nationalism’ and democracy: A critique of Pro Patria , Democratization, 1:2, 423-443 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510349408403402

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The 'New Nationalism' and Democracy: A Critique of Pro Patria

Downloaded by [University of Warwick] at 02:48 26 September 2014

ROBERT FINE

This article addresses a way of thinking which has entered the current literature on democratization and which I call the new nationalism. The main argument of this approach is that a certain kind of nationalism is essential for the future of democracy. It is conceptualized variously as 'civic nationalism', 'national identity', 'esprit general', 'constitutional patriotism' or even 'post-nationalism' and is contrasted with conventional forms of nationalism marked by ethnic hatred. The 'new nationalism' rejects Marxist internationalism, which it sees as nullifying the importance of the nation-state for democracy. I shall explore the arguments put forward in this mode by Ignatieff, Kristeva and Habermas; criticize the national chauvinism which continues to run through them; reassess their criticisms of Marxism; and compare them with the more critical approach of Hannah Arendt. I shall, finally, argue that the 'new nationalism' is an inadequate framework for theorizing democracy in the modern age. Patriotism in general is certainly based on truth (whereas merely subjective certainty does not originate in truth but is only opinion) . . . As such, it is merely a consequence of the institutions within the state, a consequence in which rationality is actually present, just as rationality receives its practical application through action in conformity with the state's institutions.-This disposition is. . .one of trust. . . that my substantial and particular interest is preserved and contained in the interest and end o f . . . the state . . . As a result, this other (the state) immediately ceases to be an other for me and in my consciousness of this I am free (Hegel).' If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori (Wilfred Owen).2 Robert Fine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, Coventry. He would like to thank Professor Gillian Rose, Dr Ian Campbell, Dr Shirin Rai, Dr Peter Barnham, Marion Doyen, Professor Simon Clarke, Dr Michael O'Sullivan, Glynis Cousin and Professor Robin Cohen for their helpful comments and encouragement. Democratization, Vol.1, No.3, Autumn 1994. pp.423-443 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS. LONDON

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Introduction

The 'new nationalism' contends that there are two fundamentally different kinds of nationalism: one is essential to democracy and one is destructive of it. The new nationalism claims legitimacy as an advocacy of the former. It is anti-Marxist because it sees Marxism as devaluing the national identity and security provided by nation-states. It is uncomfortable with cosmopolitanism as the privilege of those blessed with the security that only the nation-state can offer. It prides itself on a realism which recognizes both the necessity of nation-states and the heterogeneity of their populations. It views itself as the standard bearer of the Enlightenment tradition of patriotism, in combat with both the dark forces of reaction and the Utopian internationalism of Marxist doctrine. The 'new nationalism' expresses a current and widespread tendency within political thought to embrace a 'western' and 'civilised' form of nationalism in response to the rising wave of ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Though its conceptual and theoretical language is diverse, its nucleus is the convergence of nationalism, citizenship and democracy. Sometimes its nationalism is explicit; more often it is indirectly articulated. Either way, it considers itself enlightened, tolerant and rights-based — 'others' are bigots, ethnic cleansers and anti-enlightenment. My contention is that the relation of the new nationalism to these unenlightened bigots and ethnic cleansers is neither so straightforward nor so distant.1 Three contemporary authors have helped to form the 'new nationalist' paradigm: Michael Ignatieff, Julia Kristeva and Jiirgen Habermas. They confront the difficulties of building democratic political communities in contemporary Europe, but, as I shall argue, they forget that nationalism does not have to be ethnic to be dangerous. The works of Hannah Arendt, written some 40 years earlier, explain the rise of ethnic nationalism in the inter-war period without reverting to an alternative nationalist ideal. I suggest that, in so doing, she begins to find a way out of the dilemmas of nationalism. By means of a journey through these writings, I hope to throw fresh light on the difficult relationship between nationalism and democracy in our own times. The Two Nationalisms: Ignatieff, Kristeva and Habermas

In his book Blood and Belonging (1993), Michael Ignatieff captures the spirit of the new nationalism in the distinction between what he calls 'civic' and 'ethnic' nationalism. He declares himself a 'civic nationalist', defining this as 'someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security


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and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives'.4 He argues that civic nationalism enables individuals to 'reconcile their rights to shape their own lives with the need to belong to a community'.5 It visualises 'a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values' and maintains that the nation should be composed of 'all those - regardless of race, colour, creed, gender, language or ethnicity - who subscribe to the nation's political creed'.6 He justifies the new nationalism above all as a realism which recognizes the fact that modern societies are heterogeneous and multi-cultured. Ignatieff counterposes the new nationalism to the revival of ethnic nationalism taking place both in some former Communist countries and in the West. In east and central Europe, Ignatieff argues, ethnic nationalism was re-born out of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the 'systemic fear' which arises when the legitimate authority of the state begins to collapse: Faced with . . . political and economic chaos, people wanted to know who to trust and who to call their own. Ethnic nationalism provided an answer that was intuitively obvious: only trust those of your own blood.7 The alternative, a political culture based on multi-party competition, was never allowed to grow. The remedy which Ignatieff prescribes is a better kind of nationalism: democratic rather than authoritarian, inclusive rather than exclusive, respectful of other national identities rather than consumed by racial hatreds, critical and reflective rather than sunken in sentimental kitsch. He puts the argument with admirable clarity: The only reliable antidote to ethnic nationalism turns out to be civic nationalism, because the only guarantee that ethnic groups will live side by side in peace is shared loyalty to a state, strong enough, fair enough, equitable enough to command their obedience . . .What's wrong with the world is not nationalism itself. Every people must have a home, every such hunger should be assuaged. What's wrong is the kind of nation, the kind of home that nationalists want to create and the means they use to seek their ends. A struggle is going on . . . between those who still believe that a nation should be a home to all, and that race, colour, religion and creed should be no bar to belonging, and those who want their nation to be home only to their own. It's the battle between the civic and ethnic nation.8 Civic nationalism is presented not merely as a lesser evil than ethnic nationalism, but rather as the ideal form of political community. For

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Ignatieff this seems to be an absolute position. The difficulty which he confronts in this political re-definition of the nation, concerns those who fall outside its boundaries: those who do not share this 'patriotic attachment' nor 'subscribe to the nation's political creed'. In her book Nations without Nationalism (1993), Julia Kristeva analyses the rise of ethnic nationalism in psychoanalytic mode. She argues that this is the work of wounded souls who quickly move from defensive hatred to persecuting hatred, making others the scapegoat of their own depression and suppressed conflicts: The cult of origins is a hate reaction. Hatred of those others who do not share my origins and who affront me personally, economically and culturally . . . Hatred of oneself, for when exposed to violence, individuals despair of their own qualities. . .and. . . withdraw into a sullen, warm private world . . . the impregnable aloofness of a weird primal paradise - family, ethnicity, nation, race.' Ethnic nationalism is presented as the symptom of a deep crisis of national identity. Kristeva compares national pride to the good narcissistic image or ego ideal that the child gets from its mother. Her thesis is that, by not being aware of or degrading such a narcissistic image or ego ideal, one humiliates the child and lays it open to depression. The same process holds for the nation. Kristeva argues that in itself nationalism is neither good nor bad. It is a reality of the modern world which cannot and should not be transcended in the forseeable future: 'cannot' because the world is composed of nationstates as its fundamental units of organization; 'should not' because people without nations are deprived of citizenship and rights. The point, then, is not to reject nationalism but to choose a nationalism which offers freedom and democracy over hatred and despair. The nation state 'compels recognition': One can hope for the emergence of mature peoples who do not need a someone to represent . . . their identity. One can wish that the very idea of the nation. . . might open up to other unions. . . forcing political discourse to move away from national constraints.10 But Kristeva abjures such utopianism. She reads allegiance to a universal principle of humanity as an Augustinian legacy which denies the realities of the nation-state. She grieves to hear left-wing intellectuals selling off their national culture in the name of cosmopolitanism, declaring that it results only in their leaving to the far right 'the easy privilege of appropriating to itself the wealth of our cultures'." On the other hand, Kristeva argues that it is necessary to think of the



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nation in terms of 'new, flexible concepts'. To find them, she returns to the enlightened patriotism of Montesquieu. She upholds his concept of the 'French national idea' as the optimal version of the nation today. It brings together the national and the cosmopolitan without erasing national boundaries; it constructs a social body with a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights; it offers a general recognition of otherness and others; it creates new social groupings based on choice rather than origin; it respects the 'strangeness' of each person within a secular community; it is founded on a 'legal and political pact between free and equal citizens', which not only ensures the development of capitalism but also of the rights of man. '2 In Montesquieu's contractual model, Kristeva contends, the nation is conceived as a series of 'differences', in which the particular rights of individuals are highlighted while at the same time being absorbed into the aggregate of the nation as a whole, where they give way before the general interest. In turn, the general interest of this nation is 'transitional' in that it 'spreads open in the direction of sets that acknowledge and limit it for the sake of another general interest - the general interest of Europe and the world'.11 The nation state appears here as both a necessary form of political cohesion and a relative form which is 'immediately taken over by international associations'.14 The significance of Montesquieu's model of the enlightened nationstate for Kristeva lies in the idea of a community of reason within which toleration and encouragement of difference are contained. The actualization of Montesquieu's ideas into a shared patriotic commitment appears as the normative goal of political philosophy. The critique of nationalism developed by Jiirgen Habermas in The New Conservatism (1989) and Solidarity and Autonomy (1992) is more radical than that of either Ignatieff or Kristeva.'5 Habermas proclaims unequivocally 'the end of nationalism' and the advent of what he calls 'post-nationalism'. The main opposition for him is not between ethnic and civic nationalism but between nationalism and 'post-nationalism'. Beneath the surface of this conceptual difference, however, Habermas too inhabits the 'new nationalist' paradigm. Habermas argues that nationalism once provided 'certain moral resources' for anti-imperialist struggles and the building of the welfare state, but that it can no longer meet the needs of the modern age. There is no state any more that does not contain a mix of nationalities, cultures and traditions and that is not itself inserted in a larger international set of associations. The realist will recognize that what has happened to the nation-state is on the one hand, the growth of supra-national organizations, alliances, movements and migrations without, and on the other, the proliferation of ethnicities, cultures, languages and histories within. By


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reason of this historical change, Habermas repudiates the central principle of all nationalism: that national identity be converted into a principle of political cohesion, or that the boundaries of the state be identified with those of the nation." What is now required is 'post-nationalism': a political modality which recognizes that ethnic and cultural hybridity is here to stay, that the multicultural polity is the way of the future, and that the nation-state is a part of a wider international complex. Habermas defines 'post-nationalism' as a universalism which relativizes one's own way of life, grants strangers with all their idiosyncrasies the same rights as oneself, enlarges tolerance and shows respect for others. Drawing on developmental psychology, Habermas identifies postnationalism as a form of 'post-conventional identity' which brings social construction into everyday consciousness. It indicates the transition from a conventional law and order orientation based on fixed rules, unreflective duty and respect for authority, to a mature, reflective, scrutinizing attitude toward identity formation. It signifies a capacity to evaluate moral authority critically in terms of general ethical maxims which burst asunder the 'sociocentrism of a traditional order'. It would appear, then, that Habermas's work lies outside the parameters of the new nationalism: whereas the latter posits one form of nationalism to remedy another, Habermas seems to reject nationalism in toto as a normative force in the modern age. This appearance, however, is misleading, for the content of 'post-nationalism' is in fact another form of nationalism, one which he calls 'constitutional patriotism'. For Habermas what is still worthy of retention is that enlightened and cosmopolitan form of patriotism, born out of the French revolution, which denotes commitment to the principles of the constitutional state. Habermas concedes that there is a danger that the universalist elements of the democratic nation-state could be swamped by the particularist selfassertions of one nation against another.17 He maintains, however, that the 'abstract viewpoints of legality, morality and sovereignty', under whose aegis bourgeois society developed, were 'best suited to the identity of world citizens, not to that of citizens of a particular state that has to maintain itself against other states'." Habermas also acknowledges the risk that the principles of constitutional patriotism might be turned into a demand for unthinking obedience to the law. He identifies such 'authoritarian legalism', however, with conventional forms of nationalism, arguing that constitutional patriotism makes a distinction between law and right and 'mandates' that all positive law be evaluated in the light of universal precepts embodied in the constitution. He defends the right of civil disobedience on the grounds that the modern state can only 'expect of its citizens obedience to the law


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if and insofar as it rests on principles worthy of recognition', and that positive laws can be rejected as illegitimate in terms of the precepts of the constitution itself." Habermas proffers 'post-nationalism' as the antidote to the wrongs of nationalism. The substance of 'post-nationalism', however, remains that of a form of nationalism, based on a community of law, which he calls 'constitutional patriotism'. Habermas reserves the term 'nationalism' for that kind of regressive credo which unreflectively celebrates the history, destiny, culture or blood of a 'nation'; he perceives this as the seal of the Anti-Enlightenment: 'a terrible, horrific regression (which) Western Europe only surmounted . . . in 1945'.2" He confronts the rise of nationalism, bravely and seriously, by defining 'post-nationalism' as a constitutional community of reflective citizens. It is his illusion, however, that in the substance of'post-nationalism' nationalism has in fact been surpassed. Habermas quotes a comment written by Thomas Mann in Germany and the Germans (1945) to the effect that 'There are not two Germanys, an evil and a good, but only one which, through devil's cunning, transformed its best into evil.' He also cites Walter Benjamin's aphorism that 'There has never been an artifact of culture that is not at the same time an artifact of barbarism.'21 To my mind these are excellent quotations, but Habermas' own polarized oppositions - conventional and post-conventional, nationalist and post-nationalist, enlightenment and anti-enlightenment, regression and rectification - repeat the dichotomous way of thinking that Mann and Benjamin sought to identify and overcome. The New Nationalism and National Chauvinism

That the new nationalism does not surpass the limitations of the old nationalism is evinced by the competing national loyalties of its protagonists. Ignatieff locates the 'civic tradition' in the British model of the nation; Kristeva finds the 'nation without nationalism' in the French model; and Habermas discovers 'constitutional patriotism' and 'postnationalism' first and foremost in Germany. Each puts forward his or her own patriotic loyalty: the first two on behalf of their adopted nation. Ignatieff sees the origins of civic nationalism as peculiarly British: By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was already a nation state composed of four nations - the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh and the English - united by a civic rather than an ethnic definition of belonging, i.e. shared attachment to certain institutions: the Crown, Parliament and the rule of law.22 He argues that it is British model of civic nationalism which was largely

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successful in the West, where 'most. . . nation states define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity'.23 The main exception to this rule, according to Ignatieff, is Germany. He writes: Napoleon's invasion and occupation of the German principalities in 1806 unleashed a wave of German patriotic anger and Romantic polemic against the French ideal of the nation state. The German Romantics argued that it was not the state which created the nation, as the Enlightenment believed, but the nation . . . which creates the state. What gave unity to the nation . . . was not the cold contrivance of shared rights, but the people's pre-existing ethnic characteristics: their language, religion, customs and traditions.24 Ignatieff argues that it was in Germany that the nation as Volk began its 'long and troubling career in European thought' and provided the ideal which peoples of nineteenth-century Europe looked to when they articulated their right to self-determination in the face of imperial rule. When Germany was unified in 1871 and became a world-power, her achievement appeared to demonstrate 'the success of ethnic nationalism to all the captive nations of imperial Europe'.25 Ignatieff ascribes the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism in Germany to a long-term crisis of national pride. As he put it, 'the rest of the world never allowed Germans to be proud of what they could be proud of'.26 The defect of post-war liberal Germany was to have seen itself 'so much as a post-nationalist or even anti-nationalist state that it found itself incapable of defining clear national interests'." Ignatieff concluded that Germany should both renounce the relics of its ethnic tradition, such as the right of return for all 'ethnic Germans', and 'the Utopia of a post-nationalist state', symbolized by Germany's liberal asylum policy. Ignatieff disallows ambiguity; the dividing line between civic and ethnic nationalism is fixed and absolute; but it is this very lack of equivocation which is most troubling. He disregards what the quotations at the beginning of this essay are intended to illustrate: on the one side, the presence of the anti-ethnic and rights-based tradition of patriotism in German political thought, personified in the writings of Hegel, and on the other side, the presence of an ethnic and murderous tradition of patriotism in British political thought, ruthlessly bared by Wilfred Owen. The practical effect of the immigration measures which Ignatieff recommends for Germany would doubtless be the narrowing of borders to non-Germans along with a tighter definition of what it is to be a 'German': such a policy of exclusion easily slips over into ethnic politics.



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On the other side, Ignatieff simply did not address the possibility of common British loyalty to the crown turning into a common ethnicity distrustful of strangers. The idea that Great Britain was the first to be united by a consensual attachment to civic institutions, captures nothing of Cromwell's invasion of Ireland nor of the eighteenth-century experience of burning highland Scots out of their homes - a process known as 'highland clearances' and designed to obliterate old clan structures - nor of the nineteenth century imperial experience of racializing the term 'British' as distinct from African, Jewish, Black and so on.1" Consent and dissent were not opposites. The chasm which Ignatieff fancied between the civilized and ethnic nation-state was crossed by a hundred bridges; we actually find intersecting and overlapping usages. For Kristeva the choice between bad and good nationalism is expressed in the relation between Herder's German romantic ideal of the Volkgeist and Montesquieu's French enlightenment ideal of the esprit general. Like Ignatieff, she argues that the mystical concept of the nation - rooted in soil, blood and language - is essentially German, and that it was Herder's concept of the Volkgeist which celebrated 'the votary people's genius German style'* and inevitably became 'a repressive force aimed at other peoples and extolling one's own'.1" By contrast, she chooses France as the example to follow: the model of the 'nation without nationalism'. Kristeva formally acknowledges the dark side of the French revolution: its history of terror against foreigners and the many republican decrees that promulgated their brutal persecution in the name of nationalism. But where else, she asks, might one find a conception more concerned with respect for the other and more watchful of citizens' rights? Where else a re-integration of the different levels of social reality into the universal without their being absorbed by the universal? The very notion of citizenship seems to become relative, heterogeneous, dynamic and 'confederate' in the French nation where 'civil society is manifold'." In line with this thought, Kristeva calls for a shift in French attitudes to 'immigrants'. She affirms the right of foreigners to be integrated into French citizenship, on the ground that this will further enrich the French nation, but at the same time she insists that respect for immigrants should 'not erase the gratitude due to the welcoming host'.'2 She asks what each immigrant community contributes to the lay concept of the national spirit as taught by the French Enlightenment; she expects foreigners to respect the strangeness of those who welcome them; she insists that France can be a base 'where foreigners can put out roots, only if they accept its identity'.33 Otherwise she is haunted by the spectre of 'selfish people withdrawn into their own common denominators'.34 The same can be said of Kristeva's France as of Ignatieff s Britain: the


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equivocations manifest in the practice of revolutionary terror against foreigners in the eighteenth century were still manifest in the French state's wartime collaboration with Nazis and initiation of autonomous actions against Jews; the rounding up of Jews in the Vel d'Hiver bicycle stadium in Paris 1942 comes to mind. The difficulties which the French had in accommodating Jews had previously been apparent in respect of the Huguenots and is manifest again in their difficulties in accommodating Muslims. Kristeva underestimates what would appear to be the specifically Catholic component of the French idea of the nation, which even in its 'original' form included the Bigoted Other as well as the Enlightened Citoyen. When Habermas writes about nationalism 'as a German', he draws different conclusions from those of both the 'Anglo-Saxon' Ignatieff and the 'French' Kristeva. Habermas places himself in the post-Auschwitz era when fascism has robbed nationalism both in Germany and everywhere of its last traces of innocence. The German condition, as he sees it, highlights the central fact of modernity: that national identity, defined by 'the unity of cultural, linguistic and historical forms of life', does not coincide with the organizational form of the state, and that to seek such a coincidence through the revival of nationalism can only repeat an awful past. For the German nationalism is no longer possible as an ethical norm; in this regard Habermas sees Germany as a model for the world. Discerning the damage done to German national identity by the Nazi past, Habermas affirms the need for a 'critical appropriation of ambiguous traditions' to understand how a civilized population could be capable of such crimes. For Habermas the neo-conservative resurrection of German nationalism offers a totally false resolution of this ambiguity: whether in the form of Michael Sturmer's search for 'a higher source of meaning' that only the nation and patriotism can provide; or Andreas Hillgruber's call for historical identification with 'the desperate and costly struggle of the German army in the east. . . who were trying to save the population of the German east from the Red Army's orgies of revenge'; or Ernst Nolte's normalization of Auschwitz as part of a long tradition of totalitarian collectivism responding to a 'more original Asiatic deed'. For Nolte the 'class murder' perpetrated by the Bolsheviks was more original than the 'race murder' committed by National Socialists; it was as if 'the so-called annihilation (sic) of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction to or a distorted copy' of Stalin's deed, carried out because Germans regarded themselves as potential or actual victims.33 Habermas abhors this re-formed German nationalism as a 'conventional morality' designed to compensate for the late and precarious attainment of German nationhood. The nationalists offer their dream of ancient greatness and



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future destiny as recompense for feelings of impotence and rage among people with a sense of having been left behind by history.3* Against the revival of German nationalism, however, Habermas also advocates a reconstruction of German national identity; where he differs - and greatly so - is in its content. True German patriotism, he argues, requires a sense of joint responsibility which carries over into the next generations: an anamnestic ability to mourn the past, so that the murdered may not be cheated out of the one thing that can be granted to them." It is not only on behalf of the victim but also the perpetrator that Habermas writes of the'obligation incumbent upon us in Germany . . .to keep alive the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands' and of 'the burden of reconciliation imposed on the griefwork and the critical self-examination of subsequent generations'. It is the liberating power of 'reflective remembrance', self-consciously filtering and selecting what is worthy of retention, which he hopes will rebuild German 'postnationalist' identity and provide the model for a new 'post-nationalist' age.1" The idea of 'constitutional patriotism' as the core content of 'postnational identity' inherits an old tradition of German thought, with resonances, for instance, of Max Weber's idea of 'rightful' German nationalism in the first quarter of this century. Whereas Weber, however, never lost sight of the connections between constitutionalism and violence, Habermas creates a mythic constitution intimately tied to freedom. After all, the actual post-1945 German constitution was to a large extent imposed by foreign powers; it has been the legal framework in which much oppressive legislation (notably Berufsverbot) has been enacted and applied; it has harboured a right of return for Germans defined in ethnic terms; and it is the focal point around which a broad political coalition that is afraid of radical change has coalesced. This constitution can only provide the substance of post-conventional identity in its potentiality: in terms of what might be, not what is. Habermas avows that democracy was possible in post-war Germany only because nationalism was discredited, but he himself resurrects a patriotic spirit. Each of these writers presents his or her 'own' nation - whether inherited or adopted - as the exemplar of what an ideal nation-state ought to be. For Ignatieff the Anglo-Saxon nation offers a community of authority where words like 'command', 'obedience', 'subject' and 'strength' abound. For Kristeva the French nation offers a community of reason where 'consensus' and 'difference' are harmoniously reconciled. For Habermas, it is the modern German nation which offers a community of law where critical, reflective and self-conscious citizens are engaged in ongoing reconstruction of their identity. For all, however, the 'new nationalism' is not beyond its own national chauvinism.

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The differences between civic nationalism, esprit general and constitutional patriotism on the one side and ethnic nationalism on the other are substantial. In the former it is the state which defines the nation; in the latter it is the nation which defines the state. But what they have in common as forms of nationalism is not explicated in a paradigm which treats them exclusively as opposites. The propagation of one form of nationalism in order to rid society of another is a refusal to confront the antinomies of nationalism in general. Marxism and the 'New Nationalism' The new nationalism rejects Marxist and other inter-nationalist critiques of nationalism, on the grounds that they fail to understand the imperatives of national identity. Because they pose all nationalism as class-based manipulation from above or as a symptom of alienation from below, Marxists are said to ignore the legitimate need which individuals have for a sense of 'home' and 'belonging'. The new nationalists argue that this need should be recognized as valid and channelled in a civilized direction rather than be denied in the name of internationalism. Because of its abstract opposition to every kind of nationalism, Marxism appears itself to have inadvertently contributed to the rise of ethnic nationalism an association of ideas seemingly borne out by the strength of ethnic nationalism in post-Communist states.19 Michael Ignatieff argues in this vein that the rise of extreme ethnic nationalism in Nazi Germany was in part at least a symptom of the failure of competing political currents, especially German Social Democracy. This is right, but he diagnoses the defect of German Social Democracy in terms of its 'strongly internationalist and anti-nationalist consciousness' and its refusal 'to speak the language of the nation, believing it to be chauvinist, bourgeois and reactionary'.*' It was this incapacity on the part of the Marxist left to mobilize behind civic nationalism which, according to Ignatieff, bequeathed a vacuum which Hitlerism could then fill. The lesson which he draws from this history is that Germany's present task is not 'to pass beyond nationalism altogether . . . but instead to move from the ethnic nationalism of its past to the civic nationalism of a possible future'.41 As far as German Social Democracy was concerned, however, its most notable practical contribution to the national question prior to the advent of Nazism was its support for the German war effort between 1914 and 1918 and its suppression of anti-nationalist currents personified by Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists. The German Communist Party for its part was most noted after the war for its slavish obedience to Russian national interests, particularly when prior to the rise of Hitler it attacked



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Social Democracy as 'social fascism' and sometimes allied itself with the Nazis against the Social Democratic Party. This was hardly the stuff of the 'anti-nationalism' with which Ignatieff identifies Marxism. It could be argued more persuasively that it was the actually existing nationalism of German Marxism that fertilized the growth of national socialism. In differentiating between good and bad forms of nationalism, the 'new nationalism' in fact inherits a Marxist tradition. For this was precisely the strategy adopted by Lenin and his followers when they distinguished between the 'nationalism of the oppressed' and the 'nationalism of the oppressor': an opposition rooted in the division of the world between imperial and colonized countries, which became a justification for the uncritical embrace by Marxists of all manner of 'anti-imperialist' nationalisms. This distinction, which has been neglected or rejected by the new nationalists, was in the anti-colonial era real and important; but once it became an organizing principle of political thought for Marxists, it resulted in the legitimation of nationalist movements afforded the label of 'oppressed' and in the subsequent loss of independent, critical perspective. Even Lenin, who did much to disseminate this doctrine, was moved to warn his over-enthusiastic followers not 'to paint nationalism red'.4:The warning went unheeded, when official 'Leninism' went on to accept the proposition that the 'non-capitalist path' could be led by bourgeois nationalists, provided that they were 'anti-imperialist'. The 'new nationalism' should be seen, then, as reproducing the misapprehensions of 'orthodox' Marxism to the extent that both present one form of nationalism as not only 'better' than another but divided from it, as it were, by a Chinese wall. Marxism posed the difference between nationalisms in terms of their substance - whether it was the nationalism of the 'oppressor' or the 'oppressed'; it ignored the question of form and as a consequence ended up supporting or justifying some extremely undemocratic movements in the name of this principle. The new nationalism poses the difference between nationalisms in terms of their form, but ignores the question of content; as a consequence, it loses sight of the relations of power and domination which distinguish them. Each theory leads to its own peculiar difficulty: one subsumes the formal qualities of nationalism to a materialist assessment of oppression; the other subsumes the substantive aspect of nationalism to a formalistic evaluation of its human rights record. What they have in common is the conviction that one type of nationalism can resolve the contradictions set by another. The new nationalism in fact misunderstands the role which Marxist internationalism played historically. Marxism was characterized in the post-war period not so much by 'anti-nationalism' as by its assimilation to Third World or Russian nationalism in the name of internationalism.

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Internationalism was the label beneath which support for 'anti-imperialist' national liberation movements or worse, great-power chauvinism was framed.41 The assimilation of Marxism to the 'nationalism of the oppressed' had deep roots in the earlier history of the Marxist movement, but its fruition came after 1945. As Maxime Rodinson put it, writing about the Arab Middle East, On the one hand, pure nationalism utilised justifications of a Marxist kind and recruited apologists formed by Marxism. . . On the other, international leftism . . . vigorously denounced the pure nationalist regimes . . . But it did not give any less priority to the national struggle . . . Social revolution was . . . seen in . . . a nationalist perspective. Thereby it runs the risk of subordination.44 Similarly Eric Hobsbawm referred to post-war Marxism as being 'at the mercy of nationalism' and 'swallowing some nationalist assumptions whole'. He called for Marxists to become enemies both of 'great-nation' and iittle-nation' chauvinism.45 From a standpoint far more sympathetic to nationalism, Benedict Anderson also affirmed that Marxist movements and states have tended to become national in both form and substance and that there is nothing to suggest that this trend will not continue. He drew, however, the opposite conclusion: that the '"end of the era of nationalism", so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight' and that 'nationness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time'.* A similar observation was made from yet another standpoint by Vaclav Havel when he painted his famous image of the greengrocer in a Communist state who puts the sign 'workers of the world unite' among his carrots and onions. Havel used this image to illustrate how 'posttotalitarian' regimes demand the loyalty of their subjects through the forced acceptance of prescribed rituals: it is as i/this was a spontaneous manifestation of socialist consciousness rather than what it actually was, an act of conformity to the Labour Code. It is as */the slogan of 'workers of the world unite' meant something other than a sign of compliance. The post-totalitarian system was permeated with hypocricy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her ultimate liberation . . .the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed" It was not important that individuals believed all these lies, but it was



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crucial that they behaved as if they did: 'they must live within a lie'. Ideology became reality; the interest of the Russian elite became internationalism. I would suggest, then, that 'Marxism' should be conceived as a factor in the growth of ethnic nationalism, not because of its anti-nationalism, but because the real content of official Communism and many Left oppositional currents was irredeemably nationalist. Within Marxist political thought, the conflictual relation between democracy and nationalism was glossed over, either under the sign of an 'anti-imperialism' which demanded the association of democracy and national self-determination, or under the influence of a communitarianism which emphasized the solidarity of the natural community. Today, in contemporary political thought, the danger exists that democracy may again become victim of the distinction between apparently antithetical forms of nationalism. Hannah Arendt and the Decline of the Nation-State The current regression from civic to ethnic nationalism is not the first in this century. Its major antecedent was in the period which began with the nationalist fervour of the First World War and ended with the rise of Nazism. Its starting point was the political collapse of the great multinational empires which dominated central and eastern Europe, coupled with the social explosion of mass unemployment which seized whole nations and sowed untold misery. The disappearance of the central despotic bureaucracies of the old Empires - and the common focus which they provided for the anger of the oppressed nationalities - led to the evaporation of the last remnants of solidarity between the formerly subject nations. Now everybody was against everybody else and most of all against their closest neighbours: Slovaks against Czechs, Croats against Serbs, Ukrainians against Poles, all against Jews. From the standpoint of the imperial powers, these conflicts looked like petty nationalist quarrels in an old trouble spot, EastCentral Europe, without further consequence for the political destinies of Europe. In reality they heralded a wider collapse of democracy. In her work on The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), Hannah Arendt discusses this period in terms of what she calls 'the decline of the nationstate'. She argued that after the First World War there was ushered in a new principle of the nation state, which tilted the delicate balance between 'nation' and 'state' sharply toward the 'nation' pole. In its juridic mode it was the state which defined the nation, not according to criteria of ethnicity, language, culture, religion, history, destiny and so on, but by virtue of common citizenship in a shared political community. In its ethnic mode


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it was the nation, defined independently of the state, which defined the state. What Arendt called 'the decline of the nation state' was the triumph of the principle that each nation has a right to its own state.4* This shift in the character of the nation-state was marked both by a proliferation of wars between one nation and another and by the internal division of political communities into four distinct elements: (i) state peoples: those nationalities which were granted their own states; (ii) equal partners: those nationalities (like the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia or the Croats and Slovenes in Yugoslavia) who were meant to be equal in government but were not; (iii) minorities: those nationalities, sometimes officially recognized by Treaties, to whom states were not conceded (like the Jews and Armenians); and finally (iv) stateless peoples: those who had no governments to represent them and therefore lived outside the law (these 'displaced' persons were officially numbered at one million but Arendt claims that in reality there were more like ten million in 1930). The triumph of nation over state in the inter-war years was driven both by the internal dynamics of nationalist movements and by the modes of intervention of western powers. Everyone became convinced, as Arendt put it, that 'true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights'.4" The right of national self-determination became the crucial mediation in the process of democratization. Even the treaties guaranteeing the rights of minorities had the effect of declaring that only 'nationals' could be full citizens and that persons of different 'nationality' needed some law of exception. Once established within the 'belt of mixed populations' of central Europe, this nationalist principle of the state spread through Europe. Millions of people were denationalized by post-war governments, driven from their homes, turned into refugees, and confronted by a disappearing right of asylum abroad and repatriation at home. Expulsion and exclusion were everywhere and plumbed new depths in Nazi Germany, which first distinguished legally between full Reich citizens and 'nationals' without political rights, and then deprived all those of 'alien blood' of their civil as well as political rights. In 1938 the German Reich declared that all children of Jews, Jews of mixed blood or persons of otherwise 'alien blood' were no longer 'nationals'. Stateless and minority people were the visible evidence that national independence - the right of a nation to have its 'own' state - was the presupposition of human rights. The coinage of human rights discourse was diminished, as it came to refer to les miserables who had nothing better to fall back on once they lost their home, nation and state, and found themselves outside the law - any law. The efforts of international



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human rights organizations were frustrated in the face of the search by the subject people themselves for national solutions. Arendt underlined how far the enlightenment idea of human rights was vitiated by the emergence of the modern pariah, who not only lacked this or that right but the right to have rights in the first place. The enlightenment concept of human rights indicated universal equality, emancipation from dependency, protection from the despotism of the state, the inalienable dignity of each individual that no power could deny. But the existence of human rights was such that they became the property of nation-states, membership of which was the real precondition of the right to have rights. If the right to have rights cannot be entrusted to the nation state, it must be guaranteed by humanity itself. But how was this to be possible? I do not think that Arendt knew. She too was sceptical of what passed under the name of 'internationalism'. International organizations and law, to the extent that they still operated in terms of reciprocal agreements between sovereign states, could not transcend particular state interests. Arendt argued that the antinomies of the modern nation state are apparent in its forms of constitutionality, public life and representation. As Arendt notes in respect of the American Bill of Rights, by serving as a support for the privatization of individual interests constitutionalism can petrify public life: 'The mortal danger to the republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the citizens, without giving them the opportunity of being republicans and acting as citizens."" The development of public life in the shape of a participatory political culture overcomes privatization only at the cost of inducing all-round suspicion of the private sphere and resentment of the singularity of individuals: The reason why highly developed political communities, such as the ancient city-states or modern nation-states, so often insist on ethnic homogeneity is that they hope to eliminate as far as possible those natural and always present differences . . . The 'alien' is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such.5' Modern representative government is conventionally put forward as the reconciliation between these extremes of subjectivity and overpoliticization, so much so that its identification with public freedom has become a hardened prejudice. Arendt argued, however, that representative government is built upon the exclusion from political life of the majority of citizens. It leaves a mass of politically indifferent, non-party, non-organized people beyond the normal forms of representation. The separation of the people from public affairs is the germ of normal


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bourgeois society which prepares the ground, first, for dictatorships still based on the rights of individuals, and then, if the old party systems break down, for totalitarian movements which aim to transform 'the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganised, structureless mass of furious individuals'.52 The core of Arendt's argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism was anti-statist and anti-nationalist." The changes in the form of the nationstate which traversed Europe in the inter-war years were rooted in the antinomies of the modern nation state itself. There was no ideal moment of enlightened patriotism; the 'decline of the nation state' into ethnicity and fascism was an immanent feature of its own development. Arendt traced the decline of the nation-state back to the isolated subjectivity of the individual in civil society and thereby threw doubt on the simple family remedy of reaffirming trust in the nation-state in the face of the spectre of ethnicity. Arendt addressed herself instead to the fate of the human being who 'has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole'.54 The 'mere existence' of this pariah, she argued, could be adequately dealt with 'only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis" (I want you to be)'.55 In the absence of political foundation for human rights, Arendt looked to the Augustinian civitas peregrina and its conception of love for the Other as her experiential starting point for what lies beyond nationalism. Conclusion: Beyond the New Nationalism

There are definite parallels between the new nationalism and Arendt's approach, inasmuch as both contrast law and ethnicity as foundations of the modern nation-state and distinguish between enlightened and unenlightened nationalisms. In contrast to the thesis of the 'new nationalism', however, Arendt observed that the rise of ethnic nationalism rested on the real defects of the nation-state and not solely on the pathologies of ethnic consciousness. Arendt provides us with good reasons for doubting the 'new nationalist' resolution. To be sure, not all nationalisms are the same; but the defects of nationalism in general are not overcome when the nation is defined in terms of citizenship instead of blood. The new nationalism distorts history when it presents German history as hegemonized from the start by a reactionary, romantic view of the nation at odds with the universalistic conceptions of British and French Enlightenment. This account renders invisible the actual clash of political ideas which ran through German history. Even Hegel, the arch-critic of



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romantic nationalism, is misconstrued as a proto-ethnic nationalist and forerunner of totalitarianism. It equally distorts history when it seeks to cleanse British and French nationalisms of their ethnic content: in Britain by elevating the authority of common institutions such as the Crown and Parliament, in France by celebrating the civilizing influence of the separation of powers even under Presidential unity. Citizenship is depicted unproblematically as an inclusive concept, but we need also to understand the conferring and withholding of citizenship as an exclusive process - at least in its potentiality. The moral basis of the new nationalist case is eroded as nation-states begin to withhold access rather than simply demand assimilation in the old French revolutionary tradition. Now there are those who say that some people can never be French. Within the new nationalism there are major differences: Ignatieffs non-conflictual model of civic nationalism is more ahistorical and conservative than Habermas's agonistic model of post-nationalism; their conceptualization pushes them in different directions. The strength of the new nationalism in general is to look with compassion and anger at those who respectively suffer and perpetrate ethnic politics; this is certainly better than to turn away. In so doing, however, the new nationalism iterates the separation of good and evil, light and dark, culture and decadence, in its own conception of democratic renaissance. It presents itself as the antidote to ethnic consciousness, but there is no sphere nor moment of innocence within modern political life. What Arendt says is that 'we', the children of Enlightement, are closer to 'them', the ethnic cleansers of Counter-Enlightenment, than we would like to think. 'We' helped to bring about the decline of the nation state through the League of Nations; 'our' civic idea of the nation slipped over into that of ethnicity when we excluded refugees or made second class citizens of immigrants; 'our' western state of Germany became under Nazi rule the most barbaric embodiment of ethnic cleansing in world history. What Arendt offers is a more troubling conclusion than the 'new nationalism' can contemplate: one which challenges 'our own' innocence. This essay offers no recipe for democratization. It only sounds a warning note lest nationalism be dressed up in democratic cloth. Valid distinctions between different forms of nationalism lead to invalid conclusions when one is set against the other as good against evil. If it is true that the idea of democracy cannot be dissociated from the birth of nationalism, still it remains the case that democracy and nationalism - even in its most civic and constitutional forms - are uneasy bedfellows.

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NOTES 1. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), paragraph 268. 2. W. Owen, 'Dulce Et Decorum Est', The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto&Windus, 1963). 3. My argument develops Michael Billig's perceptive comment on Richard Rorty that 'the nationalism of Western democratic nation-states is not straightforward, for it does not present itself as nationalist. The members of Western nations tend to imagine their nations to be tolerant and non-nationalist; "others" are bigots and ethnic cleansers.' Billig argued that Rorty's denial of nationalism was itself nationalist. This, I contend, is true of the 'new nationalism' more generally. See M. Billig, 'Nationalism and Richard Rorty', New Left Review, 202 (Nov.-Dec. 1993), p.71. 4. M. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: BBC Books and Chatto & Windus, 1993), p.9. 5. Ibid., p.4. 6. Ibid., p.3. 7. Ibid., p.6. 8. Ibid., pp. 185 and 189. 9. J. Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.3. 10. Ibid., p.75. 11. Ibid., p.32. 12. Ibid., p.40. 13. lbid., p.41. 14. Ibid., p.43. 15. J. Habermas, 'Overcoming the Past', New Left Review, 203 (Jan./Feb. 1994); J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians Debate (ed. Shierry Weber Nicholsen) (Cambridge, MA: MIT 1989 and Polity Press. 1991); Autonomy and Solidarity. Interviews with Jurgen Habermas (London: Verso, 1992), esp. Ch.11 'The Limits of Neo-Historicism'; J. Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society (London: Heinemann, 1991). 16. See E. Gellner. Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1990). p.1: 'Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent'. 17. Habermas, The New Conservatism, p. 165. 18. Ibid., p.114. 19. Ibid., p.102. 20. Ibid., p.8. 21. Quoted in R. Wolin, 'Introduction' to The New Conservatism Cultural Criticism and the Historians'Debate(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Also discussed in J. Torpey, 'Introduction: Habermas and the Historians', New German Critique, 44 (Spring/Summer 1988). 22. Ignatieff, p.4. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. See P. Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987). 29. Kristeva, p.42. 30. Ibid., p.54. 31. Ibid., p.53. 32. Ibid., p.60. 33. Ibid., p.31. 34. Ibid., p.61.



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35. Nolte (a former Heidegger student) wrote 'Between Myth and revisionism: The Third Reich in the perspective of the 1980s', in H. Koch, Aspects of the Third Reich (London: 1985). In his attempt to relativise Nazi crimes, he cited the alleged declarations by Chaim Weizmann (President of the Jewish Agency in 1939) urging Jews to support the cause of democracy, a call which 'justified' Hitler treating them as prisoners of war. He argued that Germany was not unique in its destructiveness except in terms of its 'technical procedure of gassing'. Andreas Hillgruber wrote Two Sorts of Destruction: The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry (Berlin: 1986). Itwasthe same 'heroic' German army which Hillgruber defended which established the Jewish ghettos, supported the SS Einsatzgruppen in the extermination of Jews, was responsible for shooting Jews and non-Jews alike in Serbia and Poland and in whose hands at least two million Soviet prisoners perished. Michael Sturmer defined the role of history as the establishment of 'inner-worldly meaning' arguing that 'in a land without history, whoever fills the memory, coins the concepts and interprets the past, wins the future' ('Geschichte in geschichtslosem Land' in Historikerstreit, Munich: 1987). See Habermas, The New Conservatism, 'Apologetic Tendencies' and 'On the Public Use of History'. 36. Habermas, Communication, p.61. 37. Habermas, The New Conservatism, p.233. 38. Ibid., p.225. 39. Ernest Gellner set the scene for this argument when he declared that, despite the mythical quality of the nation, 'nationalism is fated to prevail, but not any one particular nationalism'. He wrote that it is for better or worse a reality of the modern world and an inescapable one. Marxism likes to think of ethnic conflict as camouflaged class conflict and believes that humanity would somehow benefit if the mask were torn off. If only people became clear-sighted and freed from nationalist prejudice and error, all would be well. Marxism declares that the 'workers have no country'. This is caught in Adorno's phrase: 'anti-semitism is the socialism of the stupid'. Unfortunately, Gellner answers with heavy sarcasm, workers generally appear to be unaware of this 'interesting and liberating sensitivity'. Gellner, p.93. 40. Ignatieff, pp.63-4. 41. Ibid., p.76. 42. Roy, Memoirs (Bombay: 1964), p.395, cited in E. Hobsbawm, 'Some Reflections on the Break-up of Britain', in Politics for a Rational Left (London: Verso, 1989), p.140. 43. R. Fine, Beyond Apartheid: Labour and Liberation in South Africa (London: Pluto, 1990), 'Nationalism, Socialism and Democracy'. 44. M. Rodinson, Marxisme et Monde Musulman (1972), pp.564-565, cited in Hobsbawm, 'Some Reflections', p.140. 45. Hobsbawm, 'Some Reflections', p.140. 46. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1990), p.12. 47. V. Havel, Power of the Powerless (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p.30, emphasis added. 48. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Andre Deutsch, 1986), Ch.9. 49. Ibid., p.272. 50. H. Arendt, On Revolution (Middlesex: Penguin, 1988), p.252. 51. Arendt, Origins, p.302. 52. Ibid., p.315. 53. Arendt argued that Nazism, too, was a form of anti-nationalism and anti-statism born out of the limits of the nation-state: a 'pan' movement contemptuous of national provincialism. Its aim was to transcend the restrictive horizons of modern nationalism and build a world empire modelled negatively on the projected image of the supranational Jew. This was why modern anti-semitism grew in proportion to the decline of traditional nationalism and reached its climax at the moment when the European system of national states crashed. 54. Arendt, Origins, p.301. 55. Ibid.