Most of the best scholars who wrote about theories of nationalism in the last third of the twentieth century disliked it, and most current writing on this subject follows their lead. The process of demeaning nationalism, however, has led to a serious underestimation of its persistent power and its common corollary, ethnic conflict.
Eric Hobsbawm, the preeminent Marxist historian of our times, followed a well-established tradition that interpreted nationalism as a kind of false consciousness foisted on populations by the bourgeoisie and hoped that it could be replaced by working-class international solidarity. Hobsbawm’s writing has been far more nuanced than that of most other Marxists, but he nevertheless made his dislike of nationalism clear, and analyzed it as an obsolete bourgeois phenomenon destined to go away.^[1] In various essays, Marxist theoreticians Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein were more direct in associating official nationalism, racism, and various kinds of ethnic-based politics as efforts to mislead the working classes.^[2] In their view, this was just another way for the world capitalist system to avoid the inevitable day of revolution.
Benedict Anderson’s criticism of nationalism was more subtle.^[3] He found some merit in the anticolonial ideology of Latin American elites that led to wars of independence against Spain, and of subsequent anticolonial nationalism in general. But he viewed Western nationalism, considered by most other theorists to be the original source of modern nationalism, with undisguised contempt, particularly the English version. Furthermore, his catchy title, «Imagined Communities,» cleverly dismissed the whole phenomenon of nationalism as artificial. His constructionist theory only seemed to claim that nationalism is a social artifact rather than a biological one based on real blood ties, and that this is what «imagined» meant. Actually, hardly any serious scholar would disagree, and other leading theorists such as John Breuilly^[4] and Ernest Gellner^[5] agreed. The word «imagined,» however, slyly suggested something artificial that can be created quickly with manipulated «print capitalism,» and therefore, something that can be undone because it is merely «imagined.» This, I believe, was an effective way of demeaning the twentieth century’s most powerful ideological current, and led to the proliferation of a theoretical tradition that sees all social phenomena as «imagined.» Of course, they all are in some sense since they are created by human thought, but saying this about nationalism misses reasons for its power and persistence and opens the way for underestimating the genuine strength of closely related ethnic politics. Calls for ethnic solidarity make claims that the ethnic community is based on shared kinship, even if that is also partly or even largely fictitious. Both nationalism and ethnic solidarity nevertheless answer some very strong needs of most people in the modern world, and whether or not theorists like it, most who feel it deeply hardly think it is just «imagined.»
Defenders of Anderson’s theory correctly point out that he never explicitly equated «imagined» with «unreal.» Anderson certainly accepted the reality of nationalist sentiments. In a revealing interview with Alexander Semyonov published in the journal Ab Imperio, Anderson said, «Without my really intending this... Imagined Communities is today read by many people as the onset of the ‘cultural turn’ and a forerunner of postmodernist thinking. But this view of the book is quite misleading. Much of it is firmly historicist-structuralist.»^[6] In the same interview, however, Anderson also said, «I too think nations exist. But they exist in a manner that is closer to the way that Emma Bovary and Ivan Karamazov exist rather than that of the Eiffel Tower.»^[7] For someone who views himself as much a literary critic as a political scientist, that is a rather stunning comment. To what extent Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Dostoevsky’ Brothers Karamazov reflect social reality or influenced political and social opinions after they were published is something worth discussing. But these were fictional characters in novels, whereas the Eiffel Tower is a real construction. Therefore, ultimately, for Anderson, nations are real because they are fictions that reflect a kind of reality, but fictions nevertheless, unlike the political and material structures that underpin states. That is why his seeming surprise about being interpreted as a postmodernist rings a bit hollow, and why his many postmodernist followers have correctly interpreted his intentions.
The acclaim bestowed on Imagined Communities obscured some other major problems in Anderson’s analysis that are shared with more explicitly Marxist theories of nationalism. He began his book by asking himself why there was a war between Vietnam and Cambodia in 1978-1979. He blamed the French who artificially created new kinds of state-centered nationalism in their colony of Indochina. Anderson never asked why the Khmer Rouge regime was so bloody, or why communist revolutionaries in Southeast Asia, as elsewhere, so successfully used nationalism and xenophobic ethnic pride to legitimize their rule, and actually seemed to believe their own propaganda. Instead he claimed they just «inherited» (as he put it) the wiring of the old states they replaced.^[8] Nor in his other writings on Southeast Asia that are so critical of various non-Marxist regimes has there ever been even a hint of criticism of the communist states, except inasmuch as they perpetuated some prerevolutionary aspects of their rule.^[9]
We know that wherever communist regimes gained a strong measure of legitimacy it was primarily because of their nationalism. This was as true in Southeast Asia as in the Soviet Union (with Russian nationalism), Cuba, China, Romania, Albania, or North Korea. Anderson can only meet this fact with a contemptuous sneer that mocks nationalism. After all, his other most famous phrase, that nationalism is the product of «print capitalism,» raises questions about why in noncapitalist communist societies it played such an important role. As we will see, even the notion that «print» was necessary can be questioned because stories about ethnic origins and kinship that closely resembled modern nationalism were around thousands of years ago. Yet, it is important for Anderson to stress «print capitalism» because in a sense it absolves communist revolutionaries of the repression and wars they let loose on behalf of their nationalisms, and lays the blame, instead, on what they inherited and failed to eradicate.
This is not to deny that there is something particularly modern about the contemporary form of nationalism, or that political elites used intellectuals and various kinds of media to propagate it. Ernest Gellner,^[10] who also mocked some of the aspects of nationalism, at least stressed the fact that modern nationalism is an essential force needed to keep states functioning. Both economically and politically, without a common culture, usually a common dominant language, sometimes a common religion, but at the very least a common way of working together and a unifying ideology, the modern state cannot meet the challenges presented by its more unified neighbors. States whose various culturally defined groups lack a common nationalism have been the great disasters of the last half of the twentieth century: Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, a few (but interestingly, not most) parts of India, some parts of the former Soviet Union, and most sub-Saharan African countries ranging from giants like the Sudan and Congo to much smaller examples like Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau. Nor should this come as a surprise, since the catastrophes of the earlier twentieth century were partly the result of the failure of multinational empires to absorb their many different culturally defined communities into a national whole. The Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in particular failed dramatically to create a unifying sense of nationalism. This not only led to their collapse, but left legacies of violent conflict that have persisted to our own times.^[11] The ethnic cleansings, massacres, and wars that have resulted led Rogers Brubaker^[12] to call the most dramatic outcomes an «unmixing» of different ethnic populations that had previously lived together under imperial rule.
But just because there is a form of nationalism that is tied to modern states trying to turn themselves into nation-states legitimized by a sense of shared community and culture, this hardly means that the sentiments that lie behind the urge to create communal bonds are in any sense new.
We have to ask why nationalism is so powerful if it is something foisted on people by self-interested elites whose primary goal is only to strengthen the states they dominate and to perpetuate their own power. Why, after so many awful wars, genocides, and ethnic cleansings in the twentieth century, do both nationalism and ethnic consciousness continue to thrive, and if anything, seem to be growing in intensity?
From the beginning of human societies, deeply rooted feelings of group solidarity were required to provide the basis for cooperation in the face of constant challenges from other human groups and from the ever-changing natural environment. At first it was kinship, and when the size of groups grew, common cultural habits became a proxy for direct kinship. This is what Emile Durkheim called «mechanical solidarity.»^[13] In passing, it is worth noting that his terminology was as ideologically determined as Anderson’s, or most other prominent social theoreticians. «Organic» for modern sounded better in an intellectual milieu dominated by worries about the disintegration of social bonds produced by modernity, even though Durkheim’s description of modern society as a set of differentiated parts all working together sounds more like a machine than the smaller, more closely kin-based social groupings he called primitive. These might have been called more «organic,» except that this would then have defeated his ideological goal of «scientifically» showing how modern societies could become more integrated in ways that did not ask for a return to primitive conditions.
All bands, clans, villages, tribes, and eventually chieftainships and states needed some kind of binding ideology, and these evolved from real to somewhat fictionalized kinship, particularly as successful political units absorbed ever larger groups around their original cores. Modern nationalism is nothing but a further iteration of this tendency to claim some kind of kinship among large numbers of people living in a particular state.
Religious belief, always part of the cultural baggage holding societies together in spiritual kinship also evolved from locally based (or what have been variously called animist, shamanistic, or pagan) religions to so-called world religions, that is, typically, those fostered by imperial structures trying to create some sense of unity among disparate conquered tribes and peoples.
Nationalisms everywhere have tried to combine these various elements of older forms of solidarity to hold together larger societies, and where they have failed to unite most populations within a state, that has led to bitter internal ethnic, regional, and religious conflicts. Taking too functionalist a view of this, the way Gellner did, misses the point that human beings need to feel part of supportive groups to be secure, and this is so ingrained in us that it cannot be avoided. Alone, we are weak and helpless. If our group, at any level, is under threat, we react with alarm and cling more resolutely to social formations capable of protecting us. When it is successful, nationalism can meet that need, and when it is not, the unleashed passions leading to internal conflicts within states go far beyond mere practical issues.
Nationalism actually existed in many ancient states. No better documented example exists than the ancient, but constructed (or as Anderson would have it «imagined») community of Jews whose invented history and genealogy are spelled out in their Bible. Contemporary archaeological findings suggest that there was no Egyptian exile, no Exodus and wandering in the Sinai, and no great kingdom of David and Solomon. Rather, the Bible pieced together bits of old legends about leaders of small tribes with a set of religious exhortations and laws demanding complete obedience to the Jewish God. This was done mostly in the seventh century BCE, with later additions. The political geography in the Bible ascribed to more ancient times fits very well with the era in which it came into existence, not with prior periods. The Jews were probably Canaanites who gradually adopted and eventually codified their new religion, and in the process created a new nation that became a real one. Their fictitious history was written as the word of their God, and turned into what most of them believed to be a true account of their past. That would explain the constant exhortation to exterminate so many of their neighbors, especially the Canaanites, whose religious practices may originally have been similar, but whose continuing polytheistic practices threatened the monopoly of belief demanded by Yahweh (an Anglicized transliteration of the original Hebrew YHWH). The whole story, amended later on to fit with ongoing political events, strives to explain why the chosen people suffered so many political catastrophes. It was because they failed to follow the strict laws demanding complete devotion to their God, and did not eliminate Canaanite religious practices sufficiently. Thus, the frequent Biblical calls for purification and genocide make perfect sense, and the Bible worked brilliantly to create a nation that has survived in various forms until, two and a half millennia later, it was recreated as an intensely modern nation state. (This rather contentious version of Biblical history is spelled out in the two volumes written by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.^[14]) There is no doubt that modern Zionism was a reaction to the rise of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe, itself a product of the intensification of modern European nationalism, but the idea of a Jewish nation itself is much older and obviously predates both print and capitalism, though much of its longevity indeed can be ascribed to the genius of the written Biblical text created by devout intellectuals.
There were many other ancient examples. Reading Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian Wars it is hard to miss the fact that the Greek City-States were small nations that enjoyed a sense of patriotism and mass solidarity, at least among their free citizens, and that this closely parallels modern nationalism.^[15] The same was true of the Roman Republic until it was well on its way to becoming a great empire.^[16] This was the basis of Anthony Smith’s exemplary work claiming that many of the nations of Eurasia had an ancient ethnic origin. Though his work has been mischaracterized as «primordialist,» he does not believe in the kind of biological origin of nations often used by nationalist writers to justify their own nation’s superiority and right to treat others within their state who are not deemed to be of indigenous blood as inferiors who do not belong. Smith’s work does not even deny that ethnonationalist identities are created and legitimized by various historical mythologies; his claim, however, is that this has not been an exclusively modern phenomenon.^[17]
The seeming disjunction between more ancient and modern forms of nationalism is resolved by noting that in most of the highly populated regions of the world there was a long period of history during which older versions of nationalism did indeed become much less common. This was because of the rise of larger kingdoms and empires that took over so many different cultural spaces that integration into a common culture was neither possible nor even necessary under the political conditions of premodern empires. Elites and masses became effectively disconnected from each other because of enormous gaps in social habits, ways of thinking, wealth, and even spatial location. (See, for example, Barkey^[18] on the history of the Ottoman Empire that thrived by allowing diversity until this strategy no longer worked in the age of rising nationalism in the nineteenth century.)
As another of many examples we can cite Egypt. There probably was a sense of mass Egyptian nationalism for a long time, especially from the time of the New Kingdom in the sixteenth century BCE and for the next thousand years because the various dynasties ruled over the same space, and society experienced great economic and cultural continuity.^[19] Eventually, however, after periods of foreign rule under Assyrians and Persians, Egypt came under the rule of Greek Macedonians who ruled it for almost three centuries. The Ptolemies who governed from the Greek-speaking, cosmopolitan city of Alexandria left traditional religious practices in place for the sake of keeping the population politically quiet, but ordinary Egyptians could no longer associate their own culture with that of the ruling state. According to Plutarch, the first of the Ptolemaic rulers to actually learn the language of the common people, ancient Egyptian (which has survived as the ritual language of Christian Egyptian Copts) was the very last of these rulers, the famous Cleopatra VII, lover of Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony.^[20] Before her, for almost three centuries the Ptolemaic kings and queens did not even take the trouble to learn the language of most of their subjects. There followed a long period of Roman and Byzantine rule, and a drastic religious change when Egypt was Christianized. By the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century, there was little will to resist either foreign occupation or acculturation. Even then, gradual Islamization and Arabization were followed by a very long period of foreign domination by various Turkic and Kurdish dynasties, by Mamelukes, Ottoman Turks, an Albanian royal dynasty, and finally British domination.^[21] So, modern Egyptian nationalism developed very much along the lines proposed by Anderson and Gellner, as an anti-imperialist ideology led by intellectuals and officials exposed to Western European education and historical example, hoping to unite their masses in a revolutionary transformation. This nationalism combined a sense of both Egyptian and Arab identity that has created a whole new set of myths and emotions inspired by a sense of common identity and strongly reinforced by mass education and a grand nationalist modernization project.^[22] That Egypt, ruled for so long by foreigners, was changed by the development of mass nationalism in the twentieth century does not mean, however, that there had not been something similar, a kind of cultural communal identity, thousands of years earlier. In between, the masses of Egyptian peasants obviously held on to important identities and sources of social support from their religion, their village, and their family, but probably not through any great sense of identity with whatever state elite happened to be ruling them. Therefore, unlike today, they could not be mobilized to resist foreign domination of their state, or for any other grand purpose.
We can find similar modern transformations throughout the world, even where some variety of nationalism is very old. Writing about premodern China and Japan, for example, Reischauer and Fairbank labeled the combination of ethnocentrism and loyalty to a common cultural model as «culturalism» rather than modern «nationalism.»^[23] The difference between that and modern nationalism until the nineteenth century for Japan and the early twentieth century in China was that this common sentiment was shared by an elite, literate, bureaucratic neo-Confucian class in China and an elite warrior class in Japan, but was not part of any mass support for the state as such. The existence of a culturally aware and united elite class in China and Japan, as well as in neo-Confucian Vietnam and Korea, contributed greatly to the ability of these societies to rapidly develop a more modern, mass nationalism in the twentieth century. Thus the modern forms of nationalism were built on older and related, though more limited elite equivalents. Sociologist Gi-Wook Shin has shown how in Korea this elite kind of culturally based nationalism existed long before the twentieth century, but it was the emergence of Japan as a great power, and eventually as the colonial master of Korea, that stimulated both a revival of interest in Korean tradition and a mass movement that adopted an ethnic, blood-based kind of nationalism that has come to view the Korean nation as a large, anciently solidary family deserving a united state. Both North and South Korea share this sentiment and both have claimed to be the legitimate representatives of that ethnic, supposedly blood-based, ancient nationalism.^[24]
The modern state provides so many necessary benefits, jobs, economic investments, education, pensions, law courts, and protection from domestic criminals and foreign invaders, as well as emotional satisfaction and a sense of community that having it ruled by foreigners, or those considered to belong to different cultural communities, has become at best disturbing, and at worst, intolerable. This is not a new sentiment as it was present in the past in tribal societies and small states, but it was a feeling that waned during the period of large agrarian empires when states were not expected to deliver much of anything except reasonable security, and provoked uprisings only when they overtaxed their peasants so much that these were threatened with famine, or failed to protect their subjects from overly destructive wars.
During those times, religion was also an important source of comfort, but underneath the vast expanse of great «world religions,» Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, for a time Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism, it was local practices, local saints and preachers, local Sufi orders for Islam, and local interpretations of the major religious traditions that provided most of this comfort. Usually, empires and kingdoms were content to let the superficial unity of the official religion suffice, even if there were, in practice, many local variants. It was when the imperial authorities interfered too much with local practices that local preferences asserted themselves, and led to religious civil wars that made unity impossible. Not since the late Roman Empire in the fifth century have most Christians lived in one state or practiced a single, more or less united form of their religion; and not since the breakup of the Umayyad Caliphate in the eighth century have most Muslims lived in one state theoretically unified by a single version of their religion, though in fact there were religious conflicts and revolts provoked by conflicting local interests almost from the beginning of Islam.^[25]
Why is it important to remember all this if we try to understand the continuing power and dangers of contemporary nationalism? Because it reminds us that the sentiments that produced modern nationalism are very deeply rooted. They only seemed to wane during the long age of agrarian kingdoms and empires in which states were relatively superficial entities floating on top of subject populations. At the local level, people were forced to rely on more regional loyalties and small communities for most of their social needs, and had few emotional ties to their larger states’ elites. That is why ruling dynasties and clans could change and regions could be exchanged between states without provoking much local protest. (Imagine the outcry today if a part of France were given to England because of a marital arrangement between the British royal family and the president of France’s daughter! Such a possibility is absurd, but it was not in the high Middle Ages when the royal families of France and England had more in common with each other than with their peasant subjects.)
An interesting example of the difference between imperial and nationalist ideologies occurred as late as 1809 when the Russian Empire annexed Finland from Sweden. The Russian Christian Orthodox Tsar, Alexander I, assured the Finnish Estates, composed of Swedish-speaking (not Finnish-speaking) elites with some representatives of the Finnish peasantry, that he would grant them full property rights, religious freedom as Lutherans, and autonomy. He addressed them, naturally, in the international language of that time, French.^[26] How different this was from what was going on by the end of the nineteenth century when the Russian Empire was trying to forcefully Russify its diverse peoples and Finnish nationalism was increasingly hostile to being ruled by foreign Russians.
The structure of political life in the world created by the spread of Western colonialism, industrialization, and the rise of mass education made impossible the separation between state elites and the masses they ruled. There is no longer any viable alternative form of social solidarity capable of replacing state-centered nationalism, both as a way of making the state and economy work and as a way of providing necessary social support for populations. Perhaps one day there will be a different kind of world political structure, but that is not close to happening. International working class solidarity proved to be a myth that did not result in changing the loyalty of working classes. Third World solidarity proved to be as weak, except at expensive international gatherings that expended a lot of useless verbiage.^[27] The idea that multinational corporations can replace state-centered nationalism, either in real power or as an emotionally satisfying way of promoting solidarity, is a figment of some commentators’ imaginations. International Muslim solidarity is going to prove as weak a reed as did more limited pan-Arab nationalism. Perhaps the European Union will create a new, broader nationalism within Europe, though even that is doubtful, particularly since the European Union has been unable to forge a common foreign policy or even decide exactly what its boundaries should be. If it ever does happen, it would only mean that a pan-European nationalism has replaced more local, older nationalisms, but without a common language, a common religion, or a common shared history Europe is right now no more solidary than the large empires that ruled Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. A common economy is a first step toward creating a common nationalism, but it is hardly sufficient by itself because it does not build a shared sense of kinship to which everyone must cling for protection against competing outsiders and dangerous internal minorities. As we will see below, the EU’s most likely route to promoting a real sense of European nationalism is to set up closed boundaries against new sets of outsiders, primarily immigrants and Muslims.
Liah Greenfeld has captured this very well in her assertion that nationalism is the highest and most powerful kind of political identity in the modern world.^[28] This means that competition between nation-states will continue, and in certain dire circumstances, lead to violent conflict. It also implies that those culturally defined groups that, for whatever reason, feel they are not in a state that supports their community will not accept its nationalism and will retain the potential to revolt as well as remain vulnerable to persecution and perhaps even expulsion. It is a waste of time to decry nationalism’s negative and dangerous by-products without also admitting that it provides such powerful benefits when it works properly that it cannot be wished away or dismissed as a mere short-term artifact of recent history.
When the nation-state fails to deliver the desired benefits to a region or group within the state that identifies itself as a culturally distinct community, the stage is set for ethnic conflict. This is even more the case if there are various groups within the same state competing for scarce resources that can be obtained only if one’s own group happens to control the state’s machinery. It does not really matter whether the distinction between groups is based on a historical mythology that identifies one community as «indigenous» and the others as «invaders,» or «immigrants,» or whether at some time in the past there was no real conflict. Once cultural boundaries are established, or as Anderson would say, «imagined,» they are there, and become all the stronger and more likely to lead to conflict if communal identities are rooted in a particular region that is occupied by a discontented ethnic majority.^[29] The many ethnic conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, Burma, Indonesia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Spain, Russia, India, Lebanon, and so on are exactly this. People who have been living together for relatively long periods of time, but with long-held different ethnic or national identities, can rapidly turn against each other in moments of political or economic crisis, and once conflict has become violent, it is both difficult and time consuming to put the pieces back together. This is the case today in such disparate places as the breakaway parts of Georgia, Iraq, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Sudan.
A recent example much in the news is the separation of Ossetians and Georgians in South Ossetia. They had been living together, while maintaining distinct languages, for centuries, and there was a fair amount of mixing. In the very late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Georgian nationalists led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, began to claim that Ossetians were newcomers who «had arrived only 600 years ago» and who were «tools of the Soviet Union.» Then, when Georgia became independent with Gamsakhurdia as its first president, discriminatory policies were instituted against Ossetians, and the two communities began to irrevocably break apart.^[30] The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
The emotional importance of what seem to outsiders to be absurdly minor issues or grotesque historical fabrications reminds us of how a sense of communal solidarity extends well beyond simple material interests. Our feelings of honor, worthiness, and purpose are tied to such associations, and deeply influence our view of those outside the community. Closely associated to this is the fear of extinction that «our» people, «our» cause, «our» culture, or «our» history may not survive. This fear will elicit the most violent and extreme reactions because it threatens to kill the social group we hope will eternally outlive our own individual lives.^[31] Slobodan Milosevic, for example, was a master of making Serbs fearful about what would happen to them if they failed to maintain an ethnically pure Greater Serbia, as was his Croatian counter part Franjo Tudjman who did the same for Croats. Thus, for Serbs, the largely fabricated but emotionally powerful and widely accepted story of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 has served as a rallying point for the entire nation, despite its obviously destructive and impractical consequences.^[32] The fervor of South Koreans and Japanese defending their rights to insignificant, uninhabited islands claimed by both nations is another example,^[33] as are countless others around the world. Not all of these lead to wars, of course. But when real interests, or the sense of threat about what is at stake is great enough, then conflicting historical myths of different nations take on the power to provoke extreme violence and make accommodation impossible. One of the most intractable of these is the bitter conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs over control of places deemed holy because of ancient religious events, such as parts of Hebron or Jerusalem. One of lesser intensity, but surprising durability despite the seeming absurdity of the issue, is the continuing diplomatic conflict between Greece and Macedonia over the name of Macedonia. Greek nationalists, supported by their government, are furious about the use of that name by a majority Slavic speaking state (with a contentious Albanian minority) because they claim unbroken ethnic descent from ancient Greece to the present, and Alexander the Great’s Macedonia was part of the Hellenic world. Thus, the existence of a state with that name seems to them to threaten the unity of Greece. Slavic-speaking Macedonian nationalists, on the contrary, sometimes go so far as to claim that the ancient Macedonians, including Alexander, were not Greek at all, but some distinct ethnic group whose descendants predominate in modern Macedonia.^[34] Both claims are historically ridiculous, as any follower of constructivist theories of nationalism would gladly point out. Both the current Republic of Macedonia and the Greek adjoining province of that name have for millennia experienced countless migrations, religious changes, ethnic mixing, and political turmoil. By the time of the late Ottoman Empire they were among the most heterogeneous, ethnically and religiously diverse parts of Europe. A scholar who pointed that out in the 1990s, however, received death threats and Cambridge University Press refused to publish her book because Greek nationalists promised violent retribution.^[35]
There is no need to continue with examples that could be produced from most parts of the world. The constructivists, the Marxists skeptics, the many scholars who decry the destructive effects of ethnonationalism and emphasize its mythical, seemingly artificial nature are partly correct. They miss the point, however, that such sentiments are not just modern creations, but correspond instead to very strong and common sentiments, even if the institutional nature of these feelings has changed in recent times. Therefore, exposing their seeming artificiality, the fictitious nature of the myths on which most are based, and the fact that they are so easily manipulated in times of crisis by political entrepreneurs does very little to lessen their power and potential for creating long-lasting violent conflicts.
Myths of racial purity as justification for the persecution of supposedly alien minorities contributed to massacres in Rwanda, Burundi, and Cambodia, as well as, of course, to the rise of a particularly vicious form of modern anti-Semitism in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The historical reality is actually even worse than this because there is good evidence that all strong nationalisms are based on violent conflict with either internal minorities who come to be viewed as dangerous interlopers who threaten the «national» or «ethnic» dominant group, or with external state enemies, and usually, both. Establishing boundaries that define the in-group and exclude others strengthens communal solidarity. It is easy enough to blame unscrupulous political leaders who manipulate such sentiments, such as Paul Brass,^[36] or on a larger scale, John Breuilly;^[37] but the repetition, over and over, of such ideological ethnic or ethnoreligious boundaries in many parts of the world suggests that something more is at work.
There is a venerable tradition of separating «civic» from «ethnic» nationalism. Hans Kohn’s classic book on nationalism^[38] led to the widespread idea that there was a «Western» (mainly English, American, and French) version that was essentially good because it allowed various cultural groups to be integrated into emerging nations, and an «Eastern» European (including German and Russian) version that relied on ethnicity and notions of race. The latter led to Nazism and terrible ethnic war, while the former was progressive. A more recent version of this was proposed by Liah Greenfeld^[39] who ascribed the difference to founding nationalist myths. «Good» American and English nationalism relied on tolerant stories that stressed how citizens could overcome their differences and come together in an enlightened and democratic union, while «bad» German and Russian nationalisms were based on resentful and bitter dislike of the West and thus naturally led to brutal ethnic prejudice, dictatorship, and aggressive policies toward neighbors. France was placed more or less on the «Western» side, though with some reservations.
Even leaving aside the brutal nature of British and French colonial rule in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it is doubtful that many scholars still believe in this dichotomy, though some version persists in the American neoconservative justification for their country’s aggressive nationalism in the early twenty-first century. The issue is not, however, just what nationalist ideologues use to justify their nation’s foreign policy or to proclaim its unique goodness. The reality of how modern states took old-fashioned tribalism, ethnic defensiveness, religious passions, and cultural boundaries to create nationalist fervor can tell us a lot about why dangerous nationalism persists, why it is so often ethnic even if definitions of ethnicity are fluid, and why it is unlikely to be replaced by more benign forms of solidarity as the primary basis of political solidarity in the modern world.
In two highly original books, political scientist Anthony Marx blew apart the story of the benign «Western» or «civic» notion of Anglo-American and French nationalism. In his study of race relations in South Africa, Brazil, and the United States,^[40] he pointed out that what welded the United States back together after its bitter Civil War, and created America’s contemporary, modern form of nationalism was an agreement among whites to exclude blacks from full citizenship, to stigmatize them, and thus to draw ethnic boundaries around what was considered genuinely «American.» This racial exclusivity only gradually extended its boundaries to include various southern and eastern European immigrants, and only after World War II did it incorporate nonwhite minorities. In his study of Western European nationalism, Marx^[41] showed that England defined its nascent state-centered nationalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and well into the nineteenth, as anti-Catholicism. Catholics were associated with foreign influence, and not accepted as equal citizens. This had a lasting effect in that it ultimately prevented the integration of Ireland, but it helped solidify English nationalism. As for France, in the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it made rejection of Protestantism the cornerstone of rising French nationalism. Thus, these three kinds of quintessentially «civic» nationalisms hardly began this way, but rather developed with very explicitly defined internal ethnic and religious boundaries that excluded minorities and associated the nation with the dominant cultural group in highly defensive and conflictual ways that led to severe, brutal repression of those excluded.
There is good evidence that modern nationalism, like ethnic particularism and what used to be called tribalism, are all produced and reinforced by similar perceptions of threat from the outside. To be sure, original solidarity between close kin may be more than that, and some sort of sympathetic feeling for those who share common cultural traits need not be produced by any defensive reaction. Nevertheless, strong unity that encompasses many more people than in our immediate families or than among those we can directly know in our daily interactions goes far beyond this and does seem to need perceived enemies in order to be consolidated.
We know that states first developed about five thousand to six thousand years ago in the Middle East, and subsequently in several parts of the world where crowded, fertile valleys experienced population growth that significantly increased the competition for land, but where it was difficult for those living there to escape to less crowded environments. Intense competition led to almost permanent warfare, and the warrior elites that emerged became the rulers of the new states. In return for their protection and ability to mediate within their communities to solve disputes, they became the kings, aristocrats, and priests of these new states and appropriated the surpluses that raised their standards of living well above those they ruled.^[42] Since brute force is an expensive way to maintain social cohesion, elites tried to create an ideological basis for solidarity. Religion served this purpose to some extent, but of course recreating a sense of common kinship between ruled and rulers, even if it was fabricated, could be as useful, or even more so. In small states such as the Greek cities, or in the Judean kingdom, this meant differentiating the society from outsiders, setting up boundaries that excluded dangerous and hostile «others» from «us,» and emphasizing that it was «us» against «them.» It was, in short, a perpetuation of tribal solidarities that had united pre-state groups against their enemies. In conditions of permanent threat from the outside because of predatory warfare, this could sustain sentiments akin to patriotism, as communal unity was the only possible defense against the ravages of constant strife.^[43] In small states, like those of the Jews who wrote the Bible, or in exceptionally stable, geographically bounded ones like Egypt, this common loyalty that can be called a form of ancient nationalism could be maintained and consolidated throughout the whole population.
The problem, as already discussed, was that the most successful of these early small states turned into larger empires ruling over ever more heterogeneous societies. Maintaining a sense of common identity became too difficult, and eventually as various groups of conquerors took them over, one group of exploiters from outside came to seem much like any other. Trying to unify empires by fostering a common «world» religion was one strategy for increasing legitimacy. So was the creation of a culturally unified bureaucracy. But this usually did not work in large imperial states in the long run except in China. When the western part of the Roman Empire broke apart, its pieces fell into what were essentially primitive chiefdoms (hierarchical societies with ruling warrior elites but without permanent bureaucracies or very strong state machines), each ruled by local thugs whose behavior was little better than gang leaders involved in endless, anarchic warfare. It was out of this structure that European feudalism was born, and states eventually recreated.^[44] This kind of fragmentation was the danger faced by every empire until the rise of the modern state.
It is not necessary to go through the long process that created modern European states to show that endless wars combined with technological progress led to the strengthening of those states that managed to survive.^[45] This is where better communications, particularly print, and increasing literacy played a key role as it became possible to promote ideologies of fictitious kinship uniting all of the people in some states, most notably, early modern England and France. As we have seen, that meant uniting people against internal enemies, not simply external ones, and by defining those excluded as dangerous others beholden to foreign interests.
What the modern state discovered in promoting the new nationalism was essentially a rediscovery of something very old, the tribalism that had legitimized pre-state societies and had persisted in small early chiefdoms and states. The new nationalism therefore carried with it all of the violent and exclusionary traits that had always characterized tribal solidarity and the early states formed out of tribal societies.
Failure to draw boundaries and clearly define foreign and domestic enemies could be fatal to the establishment of national sentiments; therefore, as growing numbers of states around the world realized the importance of promoting nationalism to solidify themselves, retribalization proceeded apace. Not only German and Russian but also all other forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism have shared this characteristic. They thrived by identifying external and internal enemies, drawing cultural boundaries around themselves to defend their communities, and making war.
In an illuminating study of Latin American militarism, sociologist Miguel Centeno found that compared to Europe, Latin American states have spent much less on their militaries. This has been mostly because they have faced far fewer external threats. There have been interstate wars, but fewer, and most on a lesser scale than in Europe. Therefore, even though Latin America has had numerous military regimes, its armies were used more for internal repression than for international conflicts. For this, widespread universal drafts and strengthening of state bureaucracies to support big armies were not necessary, and neither was mobilization of whole populations.^[46] This accounts for the failure of most Latin American states to fully integrate their populations, for their exceptionally high degree of inequality, and for the bureaucratic weakness of most of their governments. There are two unfortunate conclusions to draw from this comparison: first, not going to war and not having menacing external enemies does little to promote internal peace and unity; and second, the strong nationalism that developed in Europe was partly a function of constant warfare or preparation for the next war.
This explains why creating fear of «the others,» either external enemies or internal minorities, is so useful in promoting nationalist fervor. Otto von Bismarck understood this well as he was faced with masses largely uninterested in German unification.^[47] War and fear of other powers as well as fear of disintegration by internal, anti-German forces such as Catholics and socialists, became the basis of Bismarck’s promotion of German nationalism, and ultimately created the paranoia that contributed to both World War I and World War II.^[48] But German nationalism was not unusual in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. All of the Western, Central, and Eastern European states tried to promote nationalism and adopted fantastic, xenophobic historical narratives to justify themselves.^[49] Anderson, Hobsbawm, and others are right about that; where they err is in thinking that somehow the sentiments and emotions behind such stories were new and might soon be replaced by something else. Only the institutional scope of this nationalism was original. In attempting to encompass such large masses in ways that resembled traditional tribalism more closely than the elite ideologies that had been promoted by empires, nationalists were appealing to very ancient, strong sentiments.
Communist leaders from Stalin to Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, and Fidel Castro understood this as well, and successfully translated their hatred of foreign and domestic threats into intensely felt nationalism. In Stalin and Pol Pot’s cases this also included deadly persecution of ethnic minorities.^[50] That is not to say that these leaders were hypocrites who did not believe their own nationalist obsessions. On the contrary, their own deep personal convictions made them all the more effective and brutal, and the more realistically they could portray the threat to their national communities, the more legitimate their rule became, despite all of the horrors they inflicted on their own people.
We should not forget how widespread such nationalism really is in nations that feel threatened or are engaged in direct conflict with internal and external enemies perceived to be very dangerous. The combination of war, paranoia, and fear about the survival of the nation was once again displayed in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and in Russia as Vladimir Putin rallied his nation by using the fear of Chechens, and more recently, Western intervention. Another important contemporary case is China, a country whose ruling Communist Party has increasingly substituted intense nationalism and resentment of foreigners for its waning socialist fervor, and in so doing, struck a powerful strain of Chinese public opinion.^[51] It is possible to go through many other contemporary cases, but even without an exhaustive list, the point is abundantly clear.
It is true that there has been a substantial body of social science literature, and even popular commentary, suggesting that nationalism is a spent force and that we may be entering an age of new empires. But in fact the most carefully thought-out versions of such arguments do not foresee the end of nationalism. Deepak Lal’s In Praise of Empires^[52] is a well-reasoned and moderate neoconservative call for the careful weighing of national interests and cultural differences. The United States, he argues, has the obligation to maintain order in the global system, and as such should develop a kind of imperial outlook and staff of officials similar to the ones the British had in the nineteenth century when they enforced global order. Americans, however, can do it better, he argues, by being less racist, but they should abandon the obsession to overmoralize and promote American-style democracy and be more rationally pragmatic. Empire in his terminology is not the kind of direct rule imposed by the British colonial state on foreign societies, but a kind of benign stewardship of the international system. Recent events make it appear questionable that the world will accept such unilateral policing of the system by the United Sates, or any other single power, and it is even unclear whether America has the economic, military, or political strength to be an «imperial» power in even this limited sense. Whatever happens, there is no sign at all that nationalism and the interests of nation-states are on the wane.
Michael Mandelbaum’s The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century is a more liberal version of the same argument.^[53] It does not call for a new American Empire as such, but agrees that without an American commitment to keep economic and political order in the world, globalization can turn out badly. By now, however, it has become obvious that there was much wishful thinking in both Lal and Mandelbaum’s books. American nationalism and arrogance are not substitutes for international cooperation that will have to come through careful mediation of competing nationalist interests between various global and regional powers. What is more likely to emerge in the twenty-first century, if we are fortunate, is the kind of balance of power arrangement that briefly existed in Europe for about four decades from 1871 to 1914. Unfortunately, that arrangement was also based on competing nationalisms, it included some imperial structures that were hotbeds of ethnic conflicts, and it came to a disastrous end with World War I.^[54] Perhaps the world can do better now, though that remains to be seen.
In two widely read books, Amy Chua has emphasized something quite different. Globalization and the rise of an American Empire have actually exacerbated ethnic conflict in much of the world, and produced growing xenophobia, intolerance, and narrow nationalism in the United States. The benefits of globalization have been unevenly distributed, and especially in poorer countries, there has been a tendency for certain entrepreneurial minorities to capture a disproportionate share of the gains, thus provoking increased ethnic hatreds. Chua emphasizes the fact that the single most successful example of breaking down narrow nationalist borders, the European Union, has actually hardened its boundaries against non-Europeans, and even as old conflicts between European nations have decreased, hostility to immigrants and the perception of danger from the outside have increased.^[55]
Nationalism is neither a spent force nor any less dangerous than it ever was. The antiquity of the feelings that lie behind it belie any notion that it is somehow a fairly recent creation, and therefore, one that is likely at any time soon to become obsolete. Where it was weak during the age of agrarian states, that was because states were ruled by culturally distant elites who cared little about the welfare of most of their people and who did not need their support. Since such imperial states are impossible today, and the state is such an important source of potential benefits, weak nationalist feelings leave states divided and in conditions of endless internal conflict. Competing clans, tribes, and ethnicities in weakly nationalist states fight against each other in bitter struggles for control of their states because allowing other communities to control government puts them at too much risk of being marginalized and excluded from education, jobs, and full citizenship rights. Being in a state ruled by others who define one’s own group as marginal is also emotionally terribly disturbing because it demeans one’s own community and very existence. Strong nationalism, however, presents as great a danger because it encourages bellicose attitudes toward competing nations, and intense distrust and potential persecution of those internal groups deemed disloyal to the nation.
The rise of religious extremism in the Islamic world, while it may seem to belie this claim, is itself an indicator of the economic and political failure of modernizing nationalism in most of the Arab world as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Iran, Islamic radicalism is the strong face of Persian nationalism. This hardly means that nationalism is a spent force. Islamic radicalism is, rather, a manifestation of the desperate struggle by various groups to control their state by appealing to religion and hoping to attract support from the wider Muslim world. This is certain to lead to more wars and the rise of stronger nationalisms that will replace the failed, more secular versions that were represented in the twentieth century by the Ba’ath, by Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and quite unsuccessfully by the last Shah of Iran, all of whom attempted to modernize their societies along Western lines while reducing the influence of religion and local ethnic or tribal divisions. (See Tim McDaniel’s interesting comparison between the Shah’s failure to successfully modernize Iran and the similar failure of the Romanovs. Violent, radical revolutions in 1917 and 1978-79 resulted, and both ultimately shifted the basis of their legitimacy from some form of internationalism to Russian and Persian nationalism.^[56]) Thus, the outcome of the rise of Islamic radicalism will ultimately create stronger local nationalisms in competition with each other, and even greater hostility toward minorities and foreigners.^[57]
To those who know that communal bonds, whether based on real, or more commonly fictitious, kinship are an essential part of the human condition, that they have always been accompanied by fear and hostility to outsiders, and that modern nationalism is but one new iteration of such sentiments, the persistence of nationalist and ethnic conflicts in the modern world should not comes as a surprise.