NATIONALISM NATIONALISM A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi © Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman 2002 First published 2002 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing from the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash – I New Delhi 110 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 4720 5 ISBN 0 7619 4721 3 (pbk) Library of Congress Control Number: 2001 132952 Typeset by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford, Surrey Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Ambivalent Legacies: Nationalism, Political Ideology and Social Theory 5 2 Contemporary Approaches to Nationalism 26 3 Nationalism, Culture and the Politics of the Imagined 57 4 Good and Bad Nationalisms 94 5 Nationalism and Democracy 121 6 Nationalism in a Global World 157 7 Beyond Nationalism? 185 Bibliography 208 Index 234 Acknowledgements This book has emerged from a collaboration of some six years of thinking, reading, writing and teaching about nationalism, and more than 40 years of friendship, discussion and (sometimes) of argument. We would like to thank all of our colleagues and friends who have helped us with this book and sustained us over a long period of gestation. In particular thanks to Mike Hawkins for his patience and care in reading several drafts, and to Joe Bailey, Brian Brivati, Terry Sullivan and Paul Auerbach for their helpful comments on various chapters. We would also like to thank the support we have had from our institutions, particularly the time (and some funds) made available from the Faculty of Human Sciences at Kingston University, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the School of Psychology and Sociology at Napier University, and its then Head, Norman Bonney. Our editor at Sage, Lucy Robinson, has been consistently cheerful and helpful and, through this, has substantially lightened the load in the final stages of our endeavour. We would like to thank her and her colleague Vanessa Harwood for their help. Finally, the conventional thanks to our families is in this case richly deserved. Thanks to Rosa and Reuben for engaging in some illuminating discussions with their father. Adam and Anna perhaps found their father more distracted at times than he would have wished and for rather longer than he had anticipated. Above all, we are much indebted (respectively) to Jane and Ginnie, who have been tirelessly encouraging throughout, and without whose support we could not have completed this project. This book is dedicated with affection to our parents. Albert Wollman has taken an enthusiastic and proud interest in progress throughout. Sadly, Adele Wollman, Trudy Green and Cyril Spencer died in earlier stages of our joint work and we only wish they could have been here to see it come to fruition. viii PERMISSIONS Some chapters of the book draw on material previously published in journal articles or book chapters elsewhere. We are grateful to Ashgate Publishing Limited for permission to use material from ‘Nationalism, Politics and Democracy in the Development of Post-communist Societies’, in C. Williams and T. Sfikas (eds) Ethnicity and Nationalism in East-Central Europe and the Balkans, Ashgate, 2000; Taylor and Francis for material from ‘“Good” and “Bad” Nationalisms: A Critique of Dualism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3(3), 255–74, 1998; and Palgrave Press for material in ‘Civic Nationalism, Civic Nations and the Problem of Migration’, in S. Ghatak and A. Showstack Sassoon (eds) Migration and Mobility – the European Context, Palgrave, 2001. Patriotism has an inherent flaw. By preferring one segment of humanity over the rest, the citizen transgresses the fundamental principle of morality, that of universality; without saying so openly, he acknowledges that men are not equal . true morality, true justice, true virtue presuppose universality, and thus equal rights (Tzvetan Todorov, 1993, p. 183) At one meeting at which no Pole was present, Brauner [a participant at the first All Slav Congress in Vienna] told an anecdote of how peasants in the district of Sacz in West Galicia, when asked whether they were Poles, replied ‘We are quiet folk.’ ‘Then are you Germans?’ ‘We are decent folk.’ (in Lewis Namier, 1944, p. 107) 1 2 3 4 5 6 Introduction 7 8 9 0 11 12 13 14 We began to think seriously about nationalism, perhaps like many others, 15 when faced with the catastrophic consequences of what appeared to be a 16 sudden explosion of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. 17 How, we wondered, did some people, who had been living side by side in 18 cities, towns and villages, end up driving out their neighbours from their 19 homes, killing and raping them in the brutal process that came to be called 20 ‘ethnic cleansing’? For those of us brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, 21 the atrocities being perpetrated in Yugoslavia produced both a terrible sense 22 of impotence and an insistent need to think critically about what sorts of 23 beliefs drove people to act in these ways. What exactly is claimed for the 24 nation and its identity in situations like these, what is it that seems to matter 25 so much, and what role do nationalists play in the mobilization of such 26 powerful and destructive forces? 27 In trying to think critically about nationalism in this case, we began 28 to think more generally about nationalism as an ideology, about what is 29 involved in arguments about the ‘nation’ and, especially, about national 30 identity. We had expected, it has to be said, to find a literature that was highly 31 critical of nationalism. Instead we felt increasingly that much of the literature 32 in its claims to ‘take nationalism seriously’ had become oddly uncritical. 33 The relatively small number of writers who were critical of nationalism 34 were often specifically attacked on the grounds that a critical stance would 35 somehow get in the way of a real understanding of the phenomenon. On 36 the other hand, in many areas of study impinging directly on nationalism, 37 in writings on such matters as ethnicity, racism, identity and cosmopolitanism, 38 there seemed to be a growing literature, from a variety of disciplines, that 39 was implicitly or explicitly critical of treating the nation or national identity 40 as a fixed, necessary and wholly positive feature of human society. 41 Our analysis of nationalism has been influenced by these writings, 42 which we use to illuminate, contextualize and problematize the nation, and 43 it differs from what we see as the dominant voices in nationalist studies. It 44 is not just, as Hobsbawm has argued, that ‘no serious historian of nations 2 NATIONALISM and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist’ (1992, p. 12). It is, more generally, that a profound scepticism about nationalist claims is indispensable for a clear understanding of nationalism and national identity. In developing a sceptical viewpoint, more particularly, it became clear to us that there were certain features inherent in all forms of nationalism. This is not to suggest that there are not different kinds of nationalism, or that different nationalist movements cannot have distinctive aims, policies or philosophies. However, what is common to nationalist claims is in our view as, if not more, important than what differentiates them. We have come to accept the arguments of those who suggest that fundamental to all forms of nationalism are processes of categorization that create and reproduce as enemies, strangers and others those who do not fit inside the nation, just as they also seek to provide a sense of ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ for those who are included inside the nation (Anderson, 1991, p. 7). The divisive consequences of this have implications – in the short or long term – for issues of democracy, human rights, citizenship and sometimes even the survival of minorities within nations. In identifying the common elements, as indeed in discussing anything to do with the nation, there is the fundamental difficulty of definitions. As Kamenka once noted in this connection, ‘definitions, if they are useful, come at the end of an enquiry and not at the beginning’ (1976, p. 3). Certainly, as anyone remotely familiar with the vast literature on this subject knows, the central focus of nationalist attention and energy, the nation, is a slippery and elusive object. For Louis Snyder indeed, the compiler of an extensive encyclopaedia of nationalism, ‘the term nation is fundamentally ambiguous’ (1990, p. 3). The criteria for deciding on what constitutes a nation are highly contested, involving complex issues relating to identity, culture, language, history, myth and memory, and disputed claims to territory (we discuss these in Chapter 3). In the modern period especially, claims to territory have often led to a confusion between the terms nation and state. Although there is certainly a close relationship between them, as a number of writers have shown (see Chapter 2), they are not quite the same thing. One (the state) has to do with sovereignty, with power and authority over a given area and population; the other (the nation) has to do with relationships between people, with how people see themselves as connected over both time and space, as sharing some kind of collective identity.