In his study of the evolution of nationalism, mainly in Europe, Eric Hobsbawm claims that the phenomenon of late twentieth-century nationalist, or ethnic politics, is ‘functionally different from the “nationalism” and the “nations” of nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century history. It is no longer a major vector of historical development.’1
The building of nations around national states and industrial economies in the nineteenth century, and the anti-colonial movements of national liberation and emancipation of the mid-twentieth century were both, he claims, central to historical development. But this is not the case with the ethnic and linguistic nationalisms that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which continue to proliferate today. Nation-building and national liberation movements were ‘typically unificatory as well as emancipatory’, whereas the characteristic late twentieth-century nationalisms are ‘essentially negative, or rather divisive. Hence the insistence on “ethnicity” and linguistic differences, each or both sometimes combined with religion.’
In line with classical Marxist analysis, Hobsbawm regards these movements as having links with earlier ‘small-nationality movements directed against the Habsburg, Tsarist and Ottoman empires’. But, in another sense, they are quite the opposite, a rejection of modern modes of political organization, based on
reactions of weakness and fear, attempts to erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world, similar in this respect to the resentment of Prague Germans pressed into a corner by Czech immigration rather than to that of the advancing Czechs.2
These fears have been fuelled by recent international population movements and rapid, fundamental socio-economic transformations. Hobsbawm cites the examples of Estonian, Welsh and Quebecois responses to Russian and Anglophone immigration, and adds: ‘Wherever we live in an urbanised society, we encounter strangers: uprooted men and women who remind us of the fragility, or the drying up of our own families’ roots.’3 He goes on to explain, in terms drawn from Simmel’s analysis of group conflict, that
The call of ethnicity or language provides no guidance to the future at all. It is merely a protest against the status quo or, more precisely, against ‘the others’ who threaten the ethnically defined group.
For:
nationalism by definition excludes from its purview all who do not belong to its own ‘nation’, i.e. the vast majority of the human race. Moreover, while fundamentalism can, at least to some extent, appeal to what remains of genuine custom and tradition or past practice as embodied in religious practice, as we have seen nationalism in itself is either hostile to the real ways of the past, or arises on its ruins.4
Why, then, have ethnic and linguistic nationalisms become so prevalent today? Because, according to Hobsbawm, they constitute ‘a response to the overwhelmingly non-national and non-nationalist principles of state formation in the greater part of the twentieth-century world’. But this does not mean that ethnic reactions can provide any alternative principle for the political restructuring of the world in the twenty-first century.5
Echoing a now familiar theme, Hobsbawm argues that the principles of such a restructuring have little to do with nations or nationalism. This is because nations have lost their former economic functions, though he concedes that large states will continue to exercise important economic functions. But in general global interdependence means that much larger economic units will provide the bases of community in the future. For Hobsbawm, it is axiomatic that nationalism ‘is nothing without the creation of nation-states, and a world of such states, fitting the present ethnic-linguistic criteria of nationality, is not a feasible prospect today’.6
Given this principle, it follows that as an ethnic or linguistic phenomenon,
in spite of its evident prominence, nationalism today is historically less important. It is no longer, as it were, a global political programme, as it may have been in the ninenteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is at most a complicating factor, or a catalyst for other developments.
Retreating before, or adapting to, the new ‘supranational restructuring of the globe’, ‘Nations and nationalism will be present in this history but in subordinate, and often rather minor roles.’ Taking his cue from Elie Kedourie, Hobsbawm is able to conclude that, with historians now making rapid progress in analysing the phenomena of nations and nationalism, this suggests that
as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.7
Hobsbawm’s analysis is one of many predicting the early demise of nations and nationalism. It represents a Marxist variant of this reading, with its differentiation of a positive, unifying (but nineteenth-century) nationalism and a negative, divisive (but contemporary) nationalism. This follows the historical distinction which Hobsbawm, consonant with that of Marx and Engels, draws between two kinds of European and non-European nationalism. The first, which flourished from 1830 to 1870, is a democratic mass political nationalism of the ‘great nations’ stemming from the citizenship ideals of the French Revolution. The second, characteristic of the period from 1870 to 1914, by contrast, is a narrow ethnic or linguistic nationalism, a small-nationality reaction to the obsolete polities of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Tsarist empires among mainly peripheral peoples in often backward areas.8
In the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Hobsbawm, urbanization, mass migrations and the new theories of ‘race’ gave the activities of romantic intellectuals a new political significance and mass support among the ‘lesser examination-passing classes’. This led to the vogue for ethnic or linguistic (or ethno-linguistic) nationalism, the kind of nationalism, so irrelevant to a global era of large-scale economies and polities, that continues to fire people’s imaginations, or rather to answer to their fears and weaknesses. The older, democratic political nationalism, having done its historical work and run its course, has been superseded by the spate of more recent ethno-linguistic nationalisms, which are little more than reactionary or bewildered responses to the rapidity of global changes. But they too will soon wilt and fade in the face of the inexorable large-scale politico-economic movements of world history.
Now this kind of optimistic materialist evolutionism is not confined to Marxists. It informs liberal critiques of nationalism, from Carr and Kohn to Smelser and Breuilly. Basically, all these critiques accept the persisting reality and historic role of the large-scale national state, but seek to depoliticize it, to render it harmless, by turning the nation into a purely cultural or folkloristic phenomenon stripped of all political significance, in the interests of wider segments of humanity or of humanity as a whole.9
One way to achieve this depoliticization is to separate the cultural level of the nation from the political level of the state, or better, from the regional economic association of states. Only the latter possess ‘real’ social and political importance in the evolving world order, since the ‘nation-state’ can no longer contain within its boundaries both a territorial market and a mass, public culture. Having lost both these public functions, the nation sinks to the level of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ or ‘folklore’ – a purely romantic attachment to the past, matching the romanticized cultural expressiveness of some scholarly approaches. It loses all its erstwhile political dimensions.10
A second way to depoliticize the nation is to demilitarize it. The nation, whether wedded to a particular state or not, is no longer the effective actor in the international arena, because in the contemporary world it is existentially bound to its neighbours or to a regional military bloc and can have no really independent defence or foreign policy. The nation-state is no longer free to conduct its external relations as it desires; it is bound not only by general, international norms such as those of the UN Charter, but also by specific regional treaties and associations into which it finds itself willy-nilly drawn. With the loss of its military guarantee, national sovereignty is radically curtailed, if not abolished.
Third, the nation can be ‘normalized’ and its nationalism ritualized. Through the United Nations, by means of international fora and conferences, multilateral agreements and organizations and the like, the national aspirations of each nation are legitimated and thereby tamed. They become part of the global framework of assumptions and the international institutional order. The fangs of nationalism are thereby drawn, and a benign and healthy national identity or patriotism with its replicated symbolism of flags, anthems and ceremonial parades is de rigueur. Within the comity of equal nations, nationalism has been stripped of its political force and reduced to the symbolic level, and to peaceful economic, artistic and sports competitions.
What all these ways have in common is the idea of sundering the nation from the political domain and returning it to the sphere of culture and civil society from which it sprang, as if thereby the evil genie could be sealed once again in his proverbial bottle. Unfortunately, such an idea betrays a serious misunderstanding of the nature of nationalism. It assumes that cultural nationalism and political nationalism are not only separate phenomena, they are unrelated to each other. But this is to miss an essential element of the power of nationalism, its chameleon-like ability to transmute itself according to the perceptions and needs of different communities and of competing strata, factions and individuals within them. It is also crucially to misunderstand the relationship between culture and politics in nationalism. Nationalism cannot be reduced to the uniform principle that the cultural unit must be made congruent with the political unit. Not only does this omit a number of other vital nationalist tenets, it fails to grasp the fact that the development of any nationalism depends on bringing the cultural and moral regeneration of the community into a close relationship, if not harmony, with the political mobilization and self-determination of its members. Hence, the idea that nationalism can be ‘returned’ to any sphere, even that of culture, is both naive and fundamentally misconceived. This is to remove the mainspring of nationalism, the ideal of communal regeneration in any and every sphere of human life, and substitute the ‘pure form’ of the territorial nation for its emotional content – on the lines of that other hollow strategy, ‘national in form, socialist in content … ‘.11
Empirically, too, the fact that nationalism continually reappears in different parts of the world, even among federal states and more advanced societies, suggests how dangerously misconceived and misleading is the belief that depoliticizing the nation can provide the cure for aggressive nationalisms. Indeed, Hobsbawm’s concluding admission that ethno-linguistic nationalisms have once again reappeared and are flourishing everywhere, even in highly industrialized states, undermines his earlier argument that nations and nationalism are being superseded by the transnational forces of late modernity. That it is the wealthier, more educationally endowed parts of states that often opt for radical autonomy or even secession – the Punjab in India, the Baltic states in the former Soviet Union, Slovenia and Croatia in the former Yugoslavia, Catalonia, the Basque country and Quebec – and continue to do so after nationalism has been on the political scene for some two hundred years – must give even the most hardened or optimistic of evolutionists pause. With the fate of so many polyethnic and multinational states hanging in the balance, it would be a bold person who could make out a case today for the success of ‘plural nations’ on the American or Australian model. It would be nearer the mark to suggest that ethnic nationalisms are making the running in contemporary state-making, and that the political nationalisms of national states and the ethnic nationalisms of its ethnic communities coexist uneasily or are locked in conflict with each other, a situation that has obtained at least since 1945 and shows no signs of abating or being resolved.12
Nor is there much sign of the demilitarization of nations. True, the nuclear superpowers are making deep cuts in their huge arsenals of weapons, but new dangers of nuclear proliferation in Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea have been accompanied by massive increases in weapons sales, especially to combatants in troubled areas, and continuing heavy expenditure by many states on military budgets. Many states, even in the European Community, remain firmly wedded to an independent defence and foreign policy, fed today by new concerns over terrorism, epidemics, narcotics and mass immigration. Fears of immigrant waves have fuelled resentments, and spurred renewed interest in cultural identity, national solidarity and defence of national interests, concerns that are turned by extremists into xenophobic racism and anti-Semitism and by more moderate groups into a reaffirmation of a defensive state nationalism. The many violent breaches of a once-vaunted ‘new world order’ within the last few years – in Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, South Africa, the Caucasus and elsewhere – have forced national states to reassess their military and security commitments and attitudes, with the result that in most cases each national state has acted in what its elites perceived to be its national interests.
Nor has the promotion of normalization damped down the ‘fires of nationalism’. While nationalism has been accorded a general global legitimacy, at least in the right of self-determination written into the UN Charter (though applied only to ex-colonies), it is simultaneously excoriated, or at least the manifestations of other peoples’ nationalisms continue to be routinely denounced. Though there is widespread acceptance of the nation as the only basis for political action and mass mobilization, nationalism, the ideology and movement, remains suspect, and national separatism is generally frowned on. Nor has the idea of harnessing ‘unbridled nationalism’ by binding together the nations of particular regions in economic and political associations met with much success. This is not to say that many national states do not cooperate on a variety of political and practical projects all over the world, as they have done in the past. But that is no guarantee against sudden irruptions of national fervour or ethnic separatism, whenever international circumstances permit and social conditions encourage it.13
All of which points to the emptiness of the predictions, and the failures of policies for, transcending the nation and superseding nationalism through measures of ‘depoliticization’. These measures have a fairly long history, stretching back to the League of Nations. Their repeated failure may not be sufficient to undermine widespread evolutionary approaches to nationalism (which nationalism itself has encouraged), but they should put us on our guard against the more sweeping claims of their proponents about the inevitable ‘movement of history’ and the irreversible forces of globalization.
Underlying both the socialist and the liberal evolutionist viewpoints has been the assumption that the large-scale nation or ‘great nation’ (always a national state) was the sole vehicle of social and political progress and that, once it had performed its world-historical role of bringing all peoples into the civilizing process, it would be superseded by even larger and more powerful units of human association. A staging-post in the ascent of humanity, the great nation would gracefully or otherwise cede place to the continental and regional association or community* This brings us to the idea of a ‘new imperialism’.14
In the more recent versions of the argument, the primary agents of world-historical progress are the huge transnational companies, the great power blocs and the vast systems of mass communications that encircle the globe. For theorists of ‘advanced capitalism’ in its global phase, it is the great transnational companies with their huge budgets, armies of skilled personnel, massive investments, far-flung markets and advanced technologies, that are the main carriers of capitalist modernity. Their dominant position and preponderance over all but the largest states represents a new stage of capitalism, but their operations also require both a transnational class of capitalists and a powerful global ideology and culture of mass consumerism, with all its familiar ideas and practices of mass advertising, packaging and material inducements which draw more and more populations and countries into the transnational domain. These practices, ideas and images, disembedded from any context, are like currencies, interchangeable in the world market of consumer culture, with the result that the national state and national identities are bypassed and relativized.15
Theories of ‘post-industrialism’ have been more impressed by the political potential of new systems of electronic mass communications. These vast networks of telecommunications, with their great advances in sophisticated computerized information technology, coupled with the impact of the new generation of visual mass media, have of course promoted the standardized packaging of products, images and markets of the transnational companies. But they have also enabled powerful international organizations like the IMF or World Bank to emerge and compete with all but the largest national states, and have suggested possibilities for a new cosmopolitan global culture, leaping over national boundaries and free of national limitations. It seems that where Esperanto failed, information technology might succeed.16
But there is another possibility. The new systems of mass communications – radio, television, videos, personal computers – are also encouraging much smaller social and political groups and ethnic and linguistic communities to create and sustain their own dense social and cultural networks, in opposition both to national states and to a wider continental or global culture. This is one, perhaps unexpected, source of that resurgence of ethnic nationalisms, not least in its advanced core, which Hobsbawm and others decry, but which continue to multiply under the umbrella of wider, looser associations like the European Union and their overarching ideologies.17
Now the dream of global unity is not new. It goes back to those universal empires – of Hammurabi and Alexander, Justinian and Harun al-Rashid, Genghis Khan and Charles V, Napoleon and the British Empire – which saw and proclaimed themselves to be the carriers of civilization and regarded others as backward savages and barbarians. They too presented themselves as universal sacred civilizations, holding sway over the known world and carried through an elite language and a ‘high’ culture that knew no boundaries – despite the fact that the great mass of their populations lived their lives in much smaller cultural orbits, only intermittently touched by these great traditions.
Today, of course, this old-fashioned imperialism has been invalidated, driven back by an assertive nationalism, though not abolished. The devotees of a global culture are far from desiring any association with such aspirations, even in their mildest cultural variants. Their cultural relativism and their forthright ecumenical cosmopolitanism stand in sharp opposition not only to a divisive nationalism, but also to aggressive and self-aggrandizing imperialisms of all kinds.
But can a global culture avoid cultural imperialism? Can it become truly cosmopolitan? Is not English, for example, increasingly the global lingua franca} Have not European (mainly French and British) institutions and American lifestyles come to define much of what passes for an international culture, the culture of Dallas, pop and jeans, but also of computer technology, the mass media, modernist urban architecture, constitutional law and democracy and social justice? Even those near-universal ideological frameworks, capitalism and socialism, were tied to a specific historical context, particular state formations and distinct regional power blocs, based respectively on American and Russian hegemony. Can we escape the specificity of a new imperialism, of a new Pax Americana or Japonica or Europeana, beneath the cosmopolitan cloak of a global culture? Too often, the examples of the global culture which are chosen to illustrate its growth turn out to owe their origins and much of their appeal to the power and prestige of one or other of the great metropolitan power centres and cultures of the contemporary world, the new ‘cultural empires’ of modernity. This suggests, at least, that the quest for a global culture and the ideal of cosmopolitanism are continually subverted by the realities of power politics and by the nature and features of culture.18
But let us for the moment try to picture a genuinely non-imperial global culture, one that is not tied to a particular time or place, and that does not mask a national origin and character. Such a cosmopolitanism is sometimes regarded as a natural concomitant or product of a ‘post-modern’ culture. Without going into the vexed question of the varieties and meanings to be attributed to ‘post-modernism’ in various spheres, what appears to be meant by the juxtaposition of globalism and post-modernism is a movement of cultural eclecticism and ambivalence or a pastiche of localized particulars married to a standardized and streamlined scientific technology. On the one hand, there is the playful, sometimes satirical use of various traditional styles, images and words quarried from older historical cultures in literature, music, the arts, architecture and fashion, seen from the standpoint of the medium; on the other hand, there is the unifying veneer of a streamlined, uniform ‘scientific’ discourse responding to the properties of a technical communications infrastructure.19
Indeed, for some, the narration of the nation itself, and especially the concept of the people today, partakes of this hybrid, eclectic character. It is formed from the ‘shreds and patches’ of historical cultures, and characterized by a ‘double time’ and a split between the authoritative historical, and pedagogical, narrative of the people and the repetitive, performative narrative of signification which occurs in everyday life and through which the people are reproduced. In this scenario, ‘national identity’ has become hybridized and ambivalent: it is an assemblage of tales told by all kinds of social groups and individuals, especially the marginalized and the outsider, the immigrant, the ex-colonized, the exiled and the subaltern. Presumably a global culture would be equally hybrid in character, with a number of ambivalent, even contradictory, components: a pastiche of traditional local, folk and national motifs and styles; a modern scientific, quantitative and technical discourse; a culture of mass consumerism consisting of standardized mass commodities, images, practices and slogans; and an interdependence of all these elements across the globe, based upon the unifying pressures of global telecommunications and computerized information systems.20
In practice, of course, a hybrid cosmopolitan culture would possess both ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ features. We would expect it to display both the rationalist, technical and scientific discourse of modernity, but also the ambivalent and nostalgic, if cynical and artificial, manipulation of a plural hybridized past, with its folk traditions and its national languages and cultures, which distinguishes the ‘post-modern’ reaction to modernity. And all of this would rest on the uniform quantitative and technological base of increasingly sophisticated computerized information networks and electronic mass-communications systems.
In this conception, a hybrid global culture has three features which mark it off as truly novel: it is universal, it is technical and it is timeless. It is universal in the sense that not even the most far-flung empire and its ‘cosmopolitan’ culture could ever be. Neither the Chinese, nor the Roman, nor the Buddhist, nor the Islamic civilizations could ever pretend to that universality; there were always other empires, and contrasting cultures, at their limes. They were always emanations of the properties of specific peoples at definite periods of their history; however attenuated they became, they were always tied to particular places and times, and usually carried by conquering armies. Even great civilizations like Islam and Christianity, which John Armstrong views as matrices of cultural symbols for a number of smaller ethnic communities, betrayed the character of their birthplace or seat of authority. Today’s or tomorrow’s global culture, on the other hand, even if it is more advanced in America and Western Europe, cannot easily be rooted in time and place. It has lost much of its spatial and temporal specificity in the patchwork of elements of which it is composed, and will surely lose more. It will become truly planetary.21
Today’s global culture is also the first purely technical civilization. Its use of ethnic or national elements is affectively neutral. Its pastiche is playful and calculated, draining the passion out of issues and reducing them to technical puzzles with purely technical solutions. Its cosmopolitanism reflects its uniform technological base, with its many systems of communications that create interdependent social networks, expressing themselves in an identical standardized, technical, and often quantitative, discourse. This is why a technical intelligentsia has become crucial to late modernity, and why it supplants the earlier humanistic and often nationalist intellectuals. It is the technicians who must man and operate the global mass-communications systems and it is their technical culture of critical discourse which determines the specific character of an emergent global culture.22
Besides, a global culture is without time. Forever pursuing an elusive present, an artificial and standardized universal culture has no historical background, no developmental rhythm, no sense of time and sequence. Contextless and timeless, this artificial global culture may quarry the past for illustrative purposes or cynically use motifs from particular pasts with eclectic caprice, but it refuses to locate itself in history. Stripped of any sense of development beyond the performative present, and alien to all ideas of ‘roots’, the genuine global culture is fluid, ubiquitous, formless and historically shallow.
Why do people imagine and fear the coming of such a rootless, cosmopolitan culture? Could it ever really sustain itself? They imagine and fear its coming because of the rapid advance of those large blocs, those huge transnational companies and mass-communications systems, and the accompanying culture of mass consumerism mentioned above. There is, after all, plenty of evidence of growing cultural and economic uniformity in all sorts of spheres and products. The advance of American mass culture, of the English language, of pop culture, of the visual mass media and computerized information technology, clearly represent significant global cultural trends. These trends are, in all likelihood, here to stay, at least for some decades. But what do they add up to? Can large numbers of men and women live by them, as well as with them? Do they amount to a new culture, a new lifestyle that is also a way of life, one that can inspire as well as comfort human beings for loss and grief and death? What memories, which myths and symbols, values and identities, can such a global culture offer?
For these are, after all, what past cultures have always sought to provide. Unlike a historically shallow, memory-less global culture, based presumably on the performative discourse of everyday life practices, the cultures of the past were also built around the shared memories, traditions, myths and symbols of successive generations of cultural or political units of population, of a class, a region, a polity, an ethnic or religious community, which they sought to crystallize and express. Unlike a demythologized and ambivalent cosmopolitan culture of the here and now, the cultures of the past were formed on the basis of archetypal myths and symbols, values and memories, told, retold and re-enacted by successive generations of each such culture-community. Unlike a value-neutral and traditionless future culture of the globe, the many particular cultures of the past and present sought always to preserve what Max Weber called their ‘irreplaceable culture values’, and the particular symbols, rituals, ideals and traditions of those who forged and participated in them.23
But perhaps the cosmopolitan culture of the future should not be measured by the standards of earlier time-bound cultures, with all their limitations and particularisms. By definition, rooted past cultures ruled themselves out from the universality necessary for a global culture of the whole of humanity, whatever their pretensions may have been. This is undoubtedly correct as far as it goes. But is there any evidence that we can forge a truly universal culture that can have the appeal, and meet the needs, of human beings all over the world in ways that are equivalent to those of past cultures? Does not the use by a would-be global culture of motifs and images from the many particular ethnic and national pasts suggest that these cultures continue to inform our sensibilities and permeate our social structures? Could we imagine ourselves escaping sufficiently from our pervasive, living pasts with all their beliefs and assumptions, and starting afresh, as it were, on the great enterprise of constructing the timeless, technical, universal global culture? And does this not also suggest that a global culture would not, after all, constitute the radical break with the nationalist past that its proponents seem so to believe and desire it to be, and that the best that can be hoped for in the twenty-first century is that we shall attain to that national ‘diversity in unity’ that some Euro-federalists have preached?
The fact remains that cultures are historically specific, and so is their imagery. The packaged imagery of the visionary global culture is either trivial and shallow, a matter of mass-commodity advertisement, or it is rooted in existing historical cultures, drawing from them whatever meanings and power it may derive. These cultures of past and present express the experiences of particular social groups that appear just below the surface of the well-packaged imagery of the derivative, hybridized mass-commodity civilization. For a time we may be able to get by and ‘invent traditions’ and manufacture myths. But if myths and traditions are to be sustained, they must resonate among large numbers of people over several generations, and this means they must belong to the collective experience and memory of particular social groups. So new traditions, too, must be culture-specific: they must be able to appeal to and mobilize members of particular groups while excluding, by implication, outsiders, if they are to maintain themselves beyond the generation of their founders.24
In short, a timeless global culture answers to no living needs and conjures no memories. If memory is central to identity, we can discern no global identity in-the-making, nor aspirations for one, nor any collective amnesia to replace existing ‘deep’ cultures with a cosmopolitan ‘flat’ culture. The latter remains a dream confined to some intellectuals. It strikes no chord among the vast mass of peoples divided into their habitual communities of class, gender, region, religion and culture.
Images, identities, cultures, all express the plurality and particularism of histories and their remoteness from any new imperialism and any vision of a cosmopolitan global order. The failure of hegemonic powers to control the nationalisms of embattled ethnic communities or of aroused national states runs parallel to the constant reassertion of communal or national autonomy against the demands and inducements of cultural imperialism and of a timeless mass-commodity cosmopolitanism. Whether it be in the sphere of the mass media, or the arts, education or daily life-styles, the claims of elite cultural imperialism and cosmopolitanism are constantly being contested and their boundaries redrawn, beneath the near-universal acceptance of mass-consumer products. In each case, those claims and demands are contextualized by the traditions and perceptions of the recipient community, as successive generations of indigenous intelligentsia seek to accommodate for themselves and their communities the respective demands of Westernization and autochthonous culture. In this chronic cultural warfare, the concept of the nation plays a key role.25
Two assumptions underlie all these arguments. The first is one of scale. For Marx and Hobsbawm, nationalism historically presupposed a nation that had an economic ‘threshold’, i.e. it could play host to a modern capitalist economy, because it possessed a population and territorial scale sufficient for economic viability as well as political independence. It ensured a large territorial market for trade and investments, for labour and commodity production. Even if the territory in question did not possess its own natural resources, at least not in sufficient quantity, it could sustain a population that had the necessary skills to manufacture mass commodities for less developed areas of the world. Such an economic criterion ruled out mini-nations as viable political units; indeed, it rendered them irksome thorns on the road of capitalist progress.26
Just this social and political progress was the historic achievement of classical Western mass political nationalisms from the time of the French Revolution until the 1860s. The assumption was that nations that could meet this economic and political criterion, that could furnish territorial markets for advanced capitalism and its mass culture, had and still have a central role to play in the development of political power and geo-political relations. They contributed decisively and disproportionately (if exploitatively) to the international division of labour. Nations that failed to meet the criterion of economic and political viability could play no part in the great movement of history, and their incorporation into the globalizing capitalist economy through the brief moment of their political independence marked their imminent demise as separate and self-determining political nations, a view to which a good many nationalists (usually from one or other ‘great nation’) have subscribed. In this sense, nationalism was indeed the ‘nervous tic’ of capitalism.27
The trouble with this view, of course, is that, whatever may have been the case in the nineteenth century when capitalism required heavy industry and a vast unskilled proletariat, today’s kind of advanced capitalism (or ‘post-industrialism’) requires instead large service industries, highly skilled labour and sophisticated information technology, thereby encouraging the reverse trends towards flexible specialization, diversification and interdependent networks. As a result, the absence of ‘economic viability’ and a limited size and scale in the would-be nation have not stood in the way of smaller cultural communities seeking autonomy or maintaining political and economic independence, once it has been achieved. Iceland, Portugal, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand, Israel and Tunisia are just some of the smaller national states whose independence has not been significantly hampered by limitations of size and scale (though lack of natural resources has proved a handicap in some cases); neither has their relative prosperity, although certainly dependent on the wider system of advanced capitalism (as whose prosperity is not?), required or encouraged the diminution of their political independence or cultural distinctiveness. On the contrary, in the eyes of small-nation nationalists, political independence has proved a singular economic boon. It has allowed them the chance to choose between rival great-power offers of aid-and-trade, alliance-and-defence, playing one power off against another, in a manner that colonial status or incorporation as a province in a wider empire or federation would have made quite impossible.28
Moreover, it is often the smaller, but economically wealthier and more productive communities and areas, especially in the affluent West or in the European states, that have recently sought or are seeking political independence, a situation that has recently been more widely, if still reluctantly and cautiously, accepted by the international community. This is true of such communities as Quebec, Euzkadi, Catalonia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia and the Baltic states, as well as Singapore, Taiwan and Kuwait. Size and scale, therefore, have become much less important in the moral economy of nations in the contemporary world, whereas political independence has remained an important intrinsic value and goal of ethnic communities in every continent.29
If Hobsbawm’s viewpoint is in this respect essentially conditioned by the classical experiences of nationalism in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, it is also caught up in that other mistaken nineteenth-century assumption, economic reductionism. What the twentieth century has surely taught us is that we should resist arguments that suggest that different levels of culture – or cultures – will, or must, conform to or be functional for certain kinds and stages of economic and political structures, and that global economic and political trends must be matched (after an appropriate time-lag) by corresponding changes in the scale, organization and type of cultural unit. The scale, budgets, technology, personnel and scope of the operations of economic organizations have been vastly augmented in the last few decades, but it does not follow that the nature, scale and operations of political units, much less of cultural ones, must undergo commensurate changes. They belong to different domains and each has its own processes and trends specific to that domain. In the cultural domain, mass communications have opened up new possibilities for small-scale networks and cultural communities to increase their social density and raise the level of their grassroots participation, at the same time as the number of power centres, and the scale of economic organizations, has grown. There is in fact little match between increasing technological scale and economic success on the one hand and the rise of ethnic nationalisms in the cultural and political domains on the other, or for that matter between economic stagnation or decline and the emergence of nations, as Walker Connor has conclusively demonstrated.30
This is not to deny that states and cultures have undergone radical changes, which parallel in intensity and depth those in the economic domain. But the nature of those changes, and the reasons for them, cannot be simply deduced from changes in the economic domain. They have to be discovered and analysed in their own right, for polities and cultures have characteristics and patterns of their own, which are quite different from those of economic systems. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sphere of nations and nationalisms.