Reimagining the Nation-State: The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building
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Reimagining the Nation-State: The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745313641 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2001 |
| Series: | Contemporary Irish Studies Series |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x (d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The Naturalisation of Nationbuilding in the Nineteenth Century: The Anomalies of Minority Nations
Nationalism and the Modern Nation-state
One of the major paradoxes surrounding the study of nationalism is the fact that, despite the duration of the process in the metropolitan world at least, theories of nation-building and nationalism are of relatively recent origin (Blaut, 1987; Breully, 1982; Davis, 1978; Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990; Hroch, 1985; Smith, 1981). This is all the more surprising in view of the fact that the nineteenth century was an age of nation-building which also witnessed the coming of age of the social and political sciences. For most of that century, however, the study of nationalism was imbued with nationalist and anti-nationalist sentiments inherited from highly charged racist, nationalist and anti-nationalist environments. The nineteenth was clearly also a century which, for the most part, frowned upon minority expressions of nationalism and ethno-nationalism. It was a time when everything was done to prevent Europe's ethnic and nationalist minorities from engaging in nation-building. On the other hand nationalism-as-national-unification was the nation-building norm for much of the nineteenth century. This expressed itself as Unionism in the contested terrains of nineteenth-century nation-building Ireland. It was equally evident in the powerful drives for national unification in Germany and Italy in the 1860s and 1870s (Clark, 1998; Rietbergen, 1998). This brand of nationalism had its origins in post-Revolutionary France in the late eighteenth century. It was especially important in class-divided industrial Britain in the nineteenth century. Indeed it was encouraged precisely because it contributed to a politics of national – if not nationalist – consensus while all the while fostering the growth of strong multinational nation-states. As an expression of 'big-nation' nationalism this genre of nationalism was never meant to apply to minority nationalities – let alone minority nations – like for example the Irish, the Welsh, the Bretons or the Basques (Williams, 1984a, p. 114). From the start it cast serious doubt on the ability of these small nations, and other European ethnic minorities, to go it alone in a nineteenth-century world consisting of a handful of powerful nation-states lording it over myriad national minorities at home and a whole range of politically subordinate colonial societies abroad.
National separatism, especially minority expressions of nationalism – as in Irish nationalism and Basque nationalism – were to be resisted because they threatened the territorial integrity of some of western Europe's most powerful nation-states like late-nineteenth-century Britain and Spain (de Cortazar and Espinosa, 1994, p. 284; Heiberg, 1989). Minority nationalisms were also condemned because it was felt they could give bad example to struggling nationalities in central and eastern Europe and to colonial elites in countries as far apart as India and South Africa. Ethno-nationalist and national separatist movements were still being disparaged as 'Balkanising' forces as recently as the 1960s. They too were seen to threaten the breakup of highly centralised state systems and encourage the transformation of the late colonial world into innumerable nation-states. Elie Kedourie, a leading student of nationalism in the 1960s, rekindled this scepticism towards postwar expressions of nationalism when he suggested that this was an ideology that was invented in the nineteenth century but was now a redundant, even a retrogressive force in the brave new world of the 1950s and 1960s (Kedourie, 1960, 1971). Kedourie, writing of the nineteenth century, was clearly addressing a post-war western world that was witnessing the breakup of European empires. He insisted that nationalism was simply one of a whole series of Kantian Enlightenment doctrines which undermined world order and upset an old global political status quo. National liberation struggles, including the new anti-imperial nationalisms of the colonial world, were to be reviled because they threatened the destruction of this European world order which, some argued, had not yet reached its full developmental potential.
Hans Kohn, writing around the same time as Kedourie, was also extremely pessimistic about the future of nation-building and nationalism in the modern world. Writing between two world wars which saw Europe torn apart by international warfare, Kohn suggested that 'errors of judgement' regarding the centrality of nationalism in historical affairs contributed greatly to these global conflagrations (Kohn, 1955, p. 89). Bemoaning the lack of a Rousseauian confidence in the goodness of individuals, he was even more sceptical than Kedourie about the ability of national collectivities to act as good and peaceful forces once the fetters imposed by colonialism and by traditional dynasties were once removed. Thus, writing from a clear Euro-centric perspective, Kohn insisted that the new nationalisms, particularly in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, could never hope to create the 'open society' which, he believed, classical nationalism had fostered in nineteenth-century western Europe. Instead, he argued, post-war nation-building in the colonial world marked a trend towards collective and territorial self-assertions in global regions which the modern world, especially the west, could well do without. Nationalism, Kohn concluded, was a luxury which Third World countries could ill afford because it would result in escalating defence budgets and detach them from the overlordship of paternalistic metropolitan societies without whose help, so many anti-nationalists in the west believed, the Third World could not prosper.
Kedourie and Kohn were not alone in this disparagement of nationalism. Louis Snyder, another leading authority on this topic in the 1950s, labelled nationalism the 'great enigma' in an age otherwise characterised by a modern optimism (Snyder, 1954, p. 62). For Snyder indeed nationalism was an ideological relic from a more backward age. Harold Laski also regarded nationalism as an obsolete and destructive force in this modern world system (Laski, 1944, p. 7). Erich Fromm similarly excoriated nationalism as 'our incest, our idolatry, and our insanity' (Fromm, 1968, p. 19). Bertrand Russell encapsulated the western bourgeois Eurocentrism of all these writers, when he wrote:
although everybody is agreed that the nationalism of other countries is absurd ... the nationalism of one's own country is noble and splendid and anyone who does not uphold it is a lily-livered cur. (Russell, 1965, p. 108)
More than any other modern political ideology nationalism, for a whole variety of reasons, has perplexed its students. Carleton Hayes, a leading analyst of nationalist movements in the 1930s, concluded that 'we really do not know what has given vogue to nationalism in modern times' (Hayes, 1953, p. 16). After a lifetime spent studying it, Hugh Seton-Watson, another leading authority on the nation-state, was driven to the conclusion that no 'scientific definition' of a nation can be devised. He went on to state:
All I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one. It is not necessary that the whole of the population should so feel, or behave, and it is not possible to lay down dogmatically a minimum percentage of a population which must be so affected. When a significant group holds this belief, it possesses 'national consciousness'. Common sense suggests that if this group is exceedingly small, and does not possess great skill in propaganda, or a strong disciplined army to maintain it until it has been able to spread national consciousness down into much broader strata of the population, then the nationally conscious elite will not succeed in creating a nation, and is unlikely to be able to indefinitely remain in power on the basis of a fictitious nation. (Seton-Watson, 1977, p. 42)
As I have argued elsewhere, little is to be gained from this genre of criticism which suggests that nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe was an entirely natural and progressive force, whereas demands for national self-determination in the late colonial world of the mid-twentieth century were considered irrational at best, or worse still retrogressive (Mac Laughlin, 1986a, p. 313). We have to analyse the contextual settings of nation-building and nationalism, explain how nationalist ideology contributed to the development of bourgeois hegemony. We also have to relate the nation-centred social sciences which legitimised nation-building to the socio-economic and territorial environments within which they evolved. The sections that follow begin this general inquiry by critically examining the role of the intelligentsia, including professional academics, in the ethnicisation of politics in western Europe in the nineteenth century.
The Intellectual Origins of Modern Nationalism
The study of nationalism has been seriously hampered by the too close identification of the ideology with the nationalist intelligentsia, especially with cultural nationalists. Even today nationalism is regarded as a middle-class ideology imposed upon apolitical masses by an ethnic intelligentsia whose manifest destiny it is to convince the latter of the superiority of nation-centred goals over and above the narrow parochialism and sectionalist interests of the rural poor and working class. Discussing the nineteenth-century origins of Basque separatism Stanley Payne has argued that nationalism was born out of the 'intersection of traditionalism with modernity' (Payne, 1974, p. 131). Like all modern ideologies, he added, it was a creation of the intelligentsia which was subsequently imposed upon the masses. Similarly Anthony Smith, one of the leading theorists of nation-building and nationalism today, has suggested that nationalism's primary function is 'the resolution of the crisis of the intelligentsia' (Smith, 1981, p. 15). Smith and his many followers interpret the resurgence of national separatism in western Europe since the 1960s, including the more recent upsurge of ethnonationalisms in India and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, as perfectly natural expressions of ethnic protest. Under the hegemony of a valiant ethnic intelligentsia, these new nationalist movements, it is argued, have been struggling against 'big-nation' nationalism, the over-centralisation of government, and the 'unnaturalness' of 'foreign' rule (Akbar, 1985, pp. 304-8; Chatterjee, 1986, pp. 18-25; Hiro, 1994, pp. 304-25; Huttenbach, 1990, pp. 1-7). The modern ethnic intelligentsia, Smith adds, not only comprises cultural nationalists and other idealists – it also includes 'hard-headed' technocrats intent on overcoming the 'political malaise induced by the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state' (Smith, 1996b). He neglects to mention that many members of the nineteenth-century ethnic intelligentsia were equally 'hard headed'. They comprised what C. Wright Mills would have labelled 'organisational men', that is, local leaders who literally stitched local communities into the nation-state (Mills, 1963, pp. 23-34). Discussing the interplay between linguistic and ethnic factors on the one hand, with political and economic factors in nation-building on the other, Smith argues that most nationalist movements have been more concerned with cultural than with economic or political issues (Smith, 1996b). In so doing he fails to explain the relationship between the nationalism of language defence movements and cultural nationalists on the one hand and the political and economic objectives of powerful sectors in nation-building societies on the other. Many nationalist and separatist movements have begun life as coteries of cultural nationalists concerned more about language decline, folklore, traditional lifestyles and cultural imperialism than with state-centred political or economic issues. However, as the case of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism clearly shows, their transformation into full-blown national movements has often depended upon their linkages with more powerful sectors of society who had a far more materialist, and a far more state-centred political agenda than that of either cultural nationalists or language defence movements. A focus on the class origins of the ethnic intelligentsia and their relations with these powerful interest groups in capitalist, and now more recently in post-communist societies, can throw more light upon the reasons for nationalist successes and failures than an exclusive focus on the cultural and ideological underpinnings of modern nationalism.
The 'idealist' approach to nationalism which emphasises the role of the ethnic intelligentsia in the mobilisation of nationalist forces can be faulted on at least three grounds. First, it ignores the many transformations that can occur within nationalist movements between their moment of inception and their final victory. Historically speaking at least, nationalist movements which began as ethnic defence movements have had a habit of broadening out into much wider political blocs that served the disparate political and economic interests of whole sections of nation-building societies (Mac Laughlin, 1986a, p. 317). Second, most writers in the idealist mode of theorising tend to over-emphasise the role of subjective factors in the origins and success of nationalist movements. They tend to explain away their successes in terms of the cultural attributes, particularly the cultural authenticity, of ethnic populations in their struggle for self-determination (Smith, 1988, pp. 13-16). In so doing they reify ethnicity, transform it into an abstract theoretical category, and attribute historical agency to ethnicity itself rather than to the human agents of historical change. This is another way of saying that idealist interpretations of nation-building and nationalism attach more explanatory power to cultural and subjective factors – language, religion and ethnicity – than they do to objective forces and political and economic factors. At their most extreme they regard nationalism simply as an ideological expression of the intelligentsia whom they view as mere trajectories of underlying natural cultural forces. Finally, and perhaps most serious of all, idealist perspectives on nationalism are elitist in the extreme. They often ignore the capacity of subordinate social groups to oppose middle-class nationalist objectives, to reject the leadership of the nationalist intelligentsia, and to formulate their own socio-economic and cultural agendas inside and outside parameters set down by their nation-building 'betters'. This happened again and again in nineteenth-century western Europe, as the examples of Ireland, Spain, France, Italy and Germany clearly show. Workers and peasants here regularly rejected the nation-centred plans of conservative cultural nationalists and the nationalist middle class. They frequently gravitated instead towards socialism, syndicalism and even anarchism. As Hobsbawm has shown, they often tended to place internationalism and international class solidarity on a higher plane than inter-class solidarity and support for the narrow nationalisms of those who sought to tie them into the nation-state (Hobsbawm, 1982, pp. 75-85).
Quite often also the success of minority nationalist movements was predicated upon a widening of their cultural agenda to encompass the social and economic concerns of subordinate sectors like, for example, the working class and rural poor. This was the case not only with Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century but also with Plaid Cymru and a host of other smaller nationalist movements, in this century. As Gwynn A. Williams has shown, modern Welsh nationalism had its origins in a rural-based traditionalist nonconformist cultural pressure group concerned with the defence of the Welsh culture and the preservation of the Welsh language (Williams, 1985, pp. 280-5). Their narrowing of nationalism to a focus on purely cultural and linguistic issues, however, presented the leaders of Plaid Cymru with a whole range of problems in the formative years of the movement's growth. Emphasis on the language, for example, not only marked out the Welsh from the rest of Great Britain. As the geolinguist Colin Williams suggests, it also separated the Welsh-speaking Welsh from non-Welsh speakers and emphasised the gap between Welsh-speaking rural communities in the valleys and the industrial working class of south Wales (Williams, 1982, p. 12). The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the transformation of Plaid Cymru into a political party with a much wider regional, social and economic agenda, one that appealed across social classes to urban and rural communities alike.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements, vi,
Introduction, 1,
1. The Naturalisation of Nation-building in the Nineteenth Century: The Anomalies of Minority Nations, 10,
2. English Nation-building and Seventeenth-century Ireland, 43,
3. 'Political Arithmetic' and the Early Origins of Ethnic Minorities, 70,
4. Theorising the Nation: 'Peoplehood' and 'Nationhood' as 'Historical Happenings', 91,
5. Nationalising People, Places and Historical Records in Nineteenth-century Ireland, 135,
6. Social and Ethnic Collectivities in Nation-building Ireland, 165,
7. Pressing Home the Nation: Print Capitalism and 'Imagined Communities' in the Nineteenth Century, 187,
8. Pamphlet Wars and Provincial Newspapers in Protestant Ulster, 210,
9. The Surveillance State and the Imagined Community, 227,
10. Local Politics and Nation-building: The Grassroots of Nationalist Hegemony, 242,
Bibliography, 272,
Index, 285,