The failure of the modernist viewpoint to account for the resurgence of nationalism throws our original paradox into sharper relief. As we have seen, the revolution of modernity has by no means exhausted itself. At the same time, ethnic fragmentation and separatist nationalism are fundamental trends in recent history, not some temporary by-play, and they persist even in areas of advanced modernity. So why should they be renewed with such force at a time when the trends of modernity and the erosion of traditional values seem to contradict the particularism and fragmentation which ethnic nationalism continually engenders? What can an ethnic revival signify in the late twentieth century? Why have the fires of ferocious nationalism been rekindled, not forty years after they were thought to have burnt themselves out in the Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich?
Or is it a rekindling and a revival? Perhaps we have been deluded: the fires of nationalism were never quenched, only temporarily screened from view by our guilty realization of their awful consequences. Even in the West, ethnic nationalism survived under a thin veneer of social democracy and liberalism. Many of the post-war movements for ethnic autonomy which surfaced in Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s can be traced back much earlier. The movements for Breton and Flemish autonomy were founded immediately after the First World War, the movement for Scots autonomy emerged in 1886 and the Scottish National Party’s predecessor in 1928, the Basque movement of Sabino Arana was founded in 1894, and the Catalan movement in the 1880s.1
Although these and other Western movements experienced a mass renewal in the 1960s, their cultural origins can be traced as far back as the early nineteenth century and their early political manifestations to the late nineteenth century. Only the revulsion against racism and everything connected with ethnicity induced by the horrors of the Second World War can have obscured the persistence of these ethnic nationalisms from view and occasioned such surprise at their apparent sudden renewal.2
But dates do not tell the whole story. What exactly survived, what was revived? Was there a popular nationalism in the nineteenth century, which was revived in the 1960s? Can we speak of an ethnic community surviving intact from even earlier, pre-modern times? Or was there a pre-modern ‘nation’ that had, as the nationalists would have it, ‘fallen asleep’, to be revived ‘with a kiss’ in the heady atmosphere of the swinging sixties?3
This is very much the standpoint of the ‘perennialists’. From their viewpoint, modern nations are simply recent examples of an age-old phenomenon, the immemorial nation, instances of which can readily be found in antiquity and the Middle Ages. There is nothing really new about the ‘modern’ nation, except the period in which it emerges and the technology and apparatus which its administrative and military elites can command. The nation as such, which they see as a named community of shared culture, history and language in its own homeland, has hardly changed. What we are witnessing in the late twentieth century is merely a reassertion of the national ‘base’ over the political and economic ‘superstructure’, to reverse (as nationalists themselves are wont to do) the Marxist metaphor. In other words, culture, national culture, has reasserted its primacy over politics, economics and technology, for culture is the unchanging fabric of society, with its slow rhythms of communication, its deep structures in the human psyche and its all-encompassing symbolic codes and networks of social relations.4
But, can the idea of the ‘immemorial nation’ be upheld? Can we maintain that the nation has, in some sense, always ‘been there’, the same in antiquity as in the modern epoch? Can we realistically claim that modern nations are the lineal descendants of their medieval counterparts, that the modern Russian or English nations are in all essentials identical with medieval Russia and England, or that these communities were the ‘true ancestors’ of the modern English (or Russians), as the introduction to the exhibition catalogue on the Anglo-Saxons The Making of England put it?5
Such a view suggests that ‘modernity’, for all its technological and economic progress, has not affected the basic structures of human association and that, on the contrary, it is the nation and nationalism that in each case leads us towards or brings about what we call ‘modernity’, each nation defining that modernity in its own way. Thus the ancient Jewish commonwealth under the Hasmoneans (Maccabees) and Herodians, for example, boasted the same features of homeland and people, history, language, central cult, as well as kingship, army and capital as many of their neighbours; and several of these are the same features that we find in modern nations. Is it not possible that the concept and reality of the nation is, after all, perennial, and that it determines our view of history, including what we call the modern era, and all its works?6
Now it is, of course, possible always so to define the concept of the nation that it will be coextensive with every larger territorial and cultural identity in any epoch. In that sense, the nation cannot be distinguished from the ethnic community or indeed from any collective cultural identity and community. Nevertheless, as a general viewpoint, perennialism is flawed. It makes some sweeping assumptions about the underlying nature of cultural communities, overlooks some important differences between pre-modern and modern culture-communities and oversimplifies an often complex picture of human association. To begin with, modern nations are ‘mass nations’. That is to say, they appeal to the whole people and when they elevate the ‘people’ into the nation, they theoretically include all strata of the designated population in the sovereign nation – even if it took several centuries for this claim to be realized fully in practice, with the emancipation of women in the early twentieth century. Parallels in antiquity or the medieval era are rare – the ancient Jews constitute perhaps a significant exception. The mass nation, when it emerges, is in important respects different from the small elite groupings that usually pass for ‘nations’ in antiquity and the Middle Ages and which generally included only the upper strata. In the modern ‘mass nation’, every individual member is a citizen and there is theoretical equality of citizens in the community. The laws of the nation apply equally to all citizens and in theory there are no intermediate bodies mediating between citizens and the national state. This means also that the citizenry of mass nations is generally much more numerous than the politically active membership of pre-modern ethnies or city-states.7
In the second place, the modern nation is a ‘legal-political’ community, as well as a historical culture-community. There are two aspects here. The first is internal. The modern nation is a community governed by common codes of law and membership in such a community is therefore a legal as well as a social status. A citizen is understood as one who, in virtue of sharing in the common public culture of the nation, exercises certain rights and performs certain duties towards his or her co-citizens. These rights and duties are laid down in formal constitutions or in common law, or both, but the underlying assumption is that the latter are codifications of the national will which expresses the shared pattern of values and traditions of the community. The external aspect of modern nations is revealed in the concepts of autonomy and sovereignty. The modern nation is a ‘political community’ in its exercise of self-government and autonomy in relation to other nations, either within a federation of nations or as a sovereign national state among other sovereigns. It is a national political community insofar as it requires government to be national self-government of the whole community.8
In the third place, modern nations are legitimated through a universally applicable ideology, nationalism. As an ideology, nationalism holds that the world is divided into nations, each of which has its own character and destiny; that an individual’s first loyalty is to his or her nation; that the nation is the source of all political power; that to be free and fulfilled, the individual must belong to a nation; that each nation must express its authentic nature by being autonomous; and that a world of peace and justice can only be built on autonomous nations. This ‘core doctrine’ of nationalist ideology emerged only in the eighteenth century, first in Europe and then elsewhere, although some of its components were foreshadowed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was unknown before 1500 in Europe or elsewhere, and therefore anything resembling the modern mass nation (underpinned by nationalism) was likely to be fortuitous as well as rare. Modern nations implicitly subscribe to this nationalist ideology, and frequently invoke elements of it to underpin various claims and practices.9
Fourth, the modern nation is part and parcel of a wider international system, one in which the whole world is divided into separate national states which are then related to each other by common ideas and practices, including those implicit in the nationalist ideology. This system came into being in Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and became the dominant pattern in Europe, North America and Latin America after 1815. It was then carried by colonialism and the post-colonial state-nations to other parts of the world – to the Middle East, Asia and Africa. As I shall argue later, the dominant principles of the modern world are cultural and political pluralism. They ensure that the national state is the norm of both government and interstate relations, and that popular consent is the only theoretical justification for the tenure of political power.10
Finally, the modern nation is pre-eminently territorial in character. That is to say, the nation is a human population that is territorially bounded with mobility throughout that territory and whose members belong to a particular territory which is recognized as ‘theirs’ by right. There is a close correspondence, even union, between the homeland and its resources and the people, one that is mediated through history as seen through the eyes of the participants and often of neighbours. The people and the land are united both through a shared landscape and the ecological base of a unified economy and as a result of a history of shared experiences and memories, of common joys and sufferings, which tie events to specific places – fields of battle, scenes of treaties, habitations of princes, retreats of saints, colleges of sages and so on. It is by the banks of these rivers, on those hills and mountains, in these valleys, that ‘our people’ were born, were nurtured and flourish; the landscapes of the nation define and characterize the identity of its people.11
These are some of the characteristics that underlie the concept of the nation in the modern world. They suggest a working definition that unites territorial, legal and public cultural elements with the shared memories and heritage that characterize any collective cultural identity. On this reading, a nation can be defined as ‘a named human population which shares myths and memories, a mass public culture, a designated homeland, economic unity and equal rights and duties for all members’.12
But, as this working definition suggests, we have sketched in only part of the picture. True, we may not find ‘nations’ in pre-modern epochs, at least not in the mass, legal, public and territorial form they took in recent centuries. On the other hand, we do find a number of looser collective cultural units, which we may call ethnies, and which we can define as ‘named units of population with common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity, at least among their elites’. These cultural collectivities, or ethnies, which I have discussed elsewhere, have appeared in the historical record since at least the late third millennium, since the ancient Sumerians, Elamites and Egyptians, and they have reappeared in every continent at different periods of history.13
If nations are modern, at least as mass phenomena legitimated by nationalist ideology, they owe much of their present form and character to pre-existing ethnic ties which stemmed from earlier ethnies in the relevant area. Of course, many earlier ethnies disappeared, or were absorbed by others or dissolved into separate parts; examples include the Phoenicians and Assyrians in antiquity, and the Wends and Burgundians in the medieval era. Nevertheless, some ethnic ties have survived from pre-modern periods, among at least some segments of given populations, and these have often become the bases for the formation of latterday nations and nationalist movements. The modern Breton movement clearly relies for its appeal on the persistence of Breton traditions, myths, memories and symbols, which survived in various forms throughout the long period of metropolitan French domination from the incorporation of Brittany through dynastic alliance in 1532. Similarly, Catalan nationalism, which emerged in the 1880s and experienced a revival in the 1930s and again in the 1970s, has drawn for its inspiration on the long maritime history of Catalonia, when it was a powerful semi-independent kingdom, and on the attraction and prestige of the Catalan language and culture. Croat and Serb nationalisms today resume earlier periods of popular nationalism, both in the mid-twentieth and in the nineteenth centuries, which are themselves dependent on modern reworkings of popular memories and symbols of independent medieval kingdoms and of ancient religious differences.14
This is not the place to explore further the possibility of pre-modern nations. What is clear is that, while some recent Western nationalisms hark back to nineteenth-century popular nationalisms, their forms and goals are significantly different today; and while in pre-modern epochs, we encounter many ethnies and several ethnic states, the evidence for pre-modern nations is at best debateable and problematic.15
The preceding discussion has made it clear that, if we are to grasp the import of any ‘ethnic revival’ and resurgence of nationalism in the contemporary world, the sources of the power of these political forces must be traced back to the ‘ethnic substratum’ of collective identity and community. This requires a brief recapitulation of the main concepts used in the analysis of pre-modern ethnies, to enable us to locate the different routes by which they have given rise to modern nations.
Pre-modern eras are characterized by various kinds of ethnic community in different areas. The most common have been the ‘lateral’ or aristocratic, and the ‘vertical’ or demotic types of ethnies. ‘Lateral’ ethnies are fairly extensive and diffuse in character, but their ethnic culture is confined to the upper classes – the Court and bureaucracy, clergy, nobility and rich merchants. Hence the ethnie is also a high-status group. ‘Vertical’ ethnies are territorially more compact. Their ethnic culture spreads to all classes of the community and barriers to entry tend to be high. Their members, too, can be more easily mobilized by ethno-religious movements of renewal and by charismatic leaders, who often emerge from ‘the common people’. Both types of ethnie may at times be fired by a sense of mission and myths of ethnic election – Hungarian knights and Catalan nobility as much as Arab or Israelite tribes, Swiss peasant warriors or Sikh militants. In each of these cases, we can trace the persistence of various collective vernacular memories, myths, traditions, rituals and symbols. Both among lateral and vertical ethnies they help to forge and preserve a historical culture-community, distinguished by specific work patterns and life-styles. Many of these culture-communities have persisted for generations, with the vertical or demotic ethnies often frozen, as it were, into a composite mosaic of (usually subordinated) status groups, despite undergoing many changes. The result is that in the modern era they form varying degrees of ready-made or ‘available’ networks of interaction and sentiment, endowing population clusters with a sense of familial intimacy and separate ancestral identity, in contrast to the ‘alien’ ways and beliefs of outsiders.16
The modern era is, from this standpoint, no tabula rasa. On the contrary, it emerges out of the complex social and ethnic formations of earlier epochs, and the different kinds of ethnie, which modern forces transform, but never obliterate. The modern era in this respect resembles a palimpsest on which are recorded experiences and identities of different epochs and a variety of ethnic formations, the earlier influencing and being modified by the later, to produce the composite type of collective cultural unit which we call ‘the nation’. As we shall see, the differences and conflict between the two basic forms of ethnie, the lateral and the vertical, will be found to underlie many of the political problems and conflicts of the contemporary world.
The situation is similar with regard to the movement and ideology of nationalism. Of course, no such secular ideology or movement is recorded before the eighteenth century – or in religious form, before the sixteenth century in the Netherlands and England. But there were earlier ideologies and movements which prefigured nationalism. These are ethnicist movements in defence of given ethnies, both lateral and vertical, and an ethnocentrism whose basis is a missionary sense of ethnic chosenness. Sometimes such movements flared up into open revolt and warfare, as when the Ionians and Egyptians revolted against the Achaemenid Persians, the Gauls and Jews against the Romans, and the Swiss and Scots against the Habsburgs and Plantagenets. These ideals and the heroic legends that grew up around these exploits have undoubtedly influenced the modern nationalist aspirations of particular ethnies; and a later, secular nationalism has modified but retained some of the older heroic traditions and myths of ethnic election.17
A second important ethnic legacy from pre-modern epochs has been the survival of many so-called ‘peripheral’ ethnies. These are usually demotic or ‘vertical’ in character. Examples from the West would include the Quebecois, Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Bretons, Welsh, Scots, Frisians, to name just a few; outside Europe, there are the Ewe, Bakongo, Copts, Kurds, Druse, Sikhs, Nagas, Tamils, Moro and Australian Aborigines. These ethnic communities have in the past stood (and in some cases still stand) in relations of alienation and subordination to larger, dominant ethnies whose elites ruled the state into which they had centuries ago been incorporated by expansionist lords and monarchs, or more recently by European colonial powers. The leaders of these peripheral ethnies, or the leaders of movements claiming to speak on their behalf, frequently contend that their communities continue to be exploited and oppressed in varying degrees. In the past, social, cultural and political issues formed the basis of protest. Today economic issues predominate, with the peripheral communities claiming their resources and labour are exploited and their regions are neglected or marginalized by governments dominated by the core or strategic ethnie in the state.18
There are a number of aspects to this situation. First, as noted before, modern Western states have been built up on the basis of ‘core’ ethnies – Castilians, French, English, Swedes – whose elites and monarchs forged strong states which then incorporated surrounding minority populations. A similar principle applied in other areas of Europe, though with less success: in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. In the Eastern European cases, there was a dominant ethnie around which the state was constructed – Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Magyars, Serbs – but the territory of the state included a number of significant ‘peripheral’ ethnies: Ukrainians and Tatars, Jews, Gypsies, Croats, Muslims, etc. This ‘mosaic’ of dominant-and-subordinate, centre-and-periphery ethnic relations has formed the historical background to the rise of the national state in much of Europe, but it can also be found outside.19
Second, in relation to a given state and its dominant ethnie, the incorporated ethnic communities and categories were treated as sociological minorities. That is to say, they were not only minorities in numerical terms, they were also marginalized and discriminated against, in varying degrees. The French slogan: ‘No Breton, no spitting’, can stand for the many prejudices against ethnic minorities that stemmed from their subordinate status. As Michael Hechter has documented for the industrialized West, such minorities were subject to a whole series of economic exploitations, social exclusions and cultural discriminations. Their economies were distorted to suit the market and commodity needs of dominant ethnies, their skilled labour was often forced to emigrate, their elites were culturally assimilated, high status positions were reserved for members of the dominant ethnie, social welfare for minority communities was restricted, and there was a much higher rate of social alienation among minorities – more crime, more alcoholism, higher divorce rates and the like.20
Third, these ethnic minorities retained into the modern epoch a sense of their cultural distinctiveness. They remained, in varying degrees, separate from the culture of the state and of the dominant ethnie. This could result as much from their ‘frozen’ subordinate status as from any penetration of trade and capitalism. We find ethnic communities retaining a sense of their separateness in ‘backward’ agrarian states as well as in ‘advanced’ industrial ones, among relatively illiterate communities as much as in culturally well-equipped states. This applies not just to diaspora ethnies like the Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Gypsies, but equally to resident ethnies like the Basques, Slovenes, Czechs, Ukrainians, Finns, Tatars, Kurds and Tamils, and latterly to communities as distant and culturally diverse as the Mohawks in Canada, the Uigurs of China and the Aborigines of Australia. In all these cases, some traditions, values and symbols that distinguished the minority from the culture of the dominant ethnie and the state, retained their hold on segments of the population.21
It is, however, another feature of the pre-modern legacy that was to have the most profound consequences once the processes of modernization began to affect different areas of the world. This was the uneven diffusion of ethno-history.
By ‘ethno-history’ I mean not an objective historian’s dispassionate enquiry into the past but the subjective view of later generations of a given cultural unit of population of the experience of their real or presumed forebears. That view is inseparable from what the historian and social scientist would term ‘myth’. As intimated earlier, ‘myth’ does not signify fabrication or pure fiction; generally speaking, myths – particularly political myths – contain kernels of historical fact, around which there grow up accretions of exaggeration, idealization, distortion and allegory. Political myths are stories told, and widely believed, about the heroic past that serve some collective need in the present and future. Ethno-history, or ethnic mythistoire, in turn represents an amalgam of selective historical truth and idealization, with varying degrees of documented fact and political myth, stressing elements of romance, heroism and the unique, to present a stirring and emotionally intimate portrait of the community’s history, constructed by, and seen from the standpoint of, successive generations of community members.22
Ethno-history is characteristic of most cultural communities in all ages, whereas scholarly, dispassionate history is a minority phenomenon peculiar to certain societies and civilizations. The Homeric poems and the Bible are among the most familiar examples in the Western tradition of ethno-historical writing; the epic and the chronicle have always been the main forms of pre-modern ethno-history. This kind of didactic history has other characteristics: an emphasis on the heroic and dignified, a belief in the example of virtue, a story of the origins and early wanderings of the community, perhaps also of liberation from oppression and unification, an account of the foundation of the polity, above all a myth of the golden age of warriors, saints and sages, which provides an inner standard for the community, an exemplum virtutis for subsequent emulation, and a spur and model for ethnic regeneration. Greeks could look back to classical Athens or Justinian’s Byzantium, Romans to the early republican era of Cincinnatus and Cato, Jews to the kingdom of David and Solomon or the times of the Sages, Arabs to the Age of the Companions, Persians to the Sassanid epoch, Indians to the Vedic era and Chinese to the classical age of Confucius.23
Now such ethno-histories are not equally distributed among the world’s populations. On the contrary, some communities are well endowed with rich, and fully documented, ethno-histories, while others are bereft of their ethnic pasts, and have few records of their ancestors’ experiences and activities. On the whole, the major ethnies have been able, by dint mainly of political monopoly, to retain and preserve their ethnic heritage, and especially their ethno-histories. They have full records, rich and diverse memories, well-developed codes of communication, institutional recordkeeping and a class of specialists in the creation, preservation and transmission of such records, usually priests and scribes but also bards, prophets and artists. Many of the smaller, demotic and peripheral ethnies, on the other hand, excluded from the instruments of political transmission and bereft of institutional support, and sometimes without a class of specialists and developed codes of communication, have been unable to salvage much of their ethno-histories beyond a few generations. Their memories are tenuous, their heroes shadowy, and their traditions, if not entangled with those of other, more powerful neighbours, are patchy and poorly documented.24
To this a rider must be added: some ethnies, because of their strong alternative modes of transmission (usually through decentralized or itinerant religious and cultural personnel), have been able to preserve and transmit their heritages and ethno-histories from generation to generation – one thinks of diaspora peoples like the Jews and Armenians, but also of oppressed resident ethnies like the Irish, Basques, Kurds and Sikhs.25
The uneven diffusion of ethno-history has exerted a strong influence on the course of nationalist mass mobilization, which continues right into our era of advanced modernity. We can distinguish a number of overlapping cultural phases of a process in which vertical, demotic ethnies are turned into ethnic nations. At the outset, tiny nuclei of indigenous intellectuals, exposed to the cultures of more advanced states and experiencing a crisis of legitimate authority, become fired by a desire to rediscover their community’s ethnic past, and begin to realize the extent or lack of knowledge of that history and to compare it with the known traditions, myths and shared memories of other communities. We might term this the first stage of historical reappropriation. Historians, linguists and writers attempt to rediscover the community’s past and to elaborate, codify, systematize and streamline into a single coherent ethno-history the various collective memories, myths and traditions that have been handed down piecemeal from generation to generation. Where there is a well-established ethno-history in a canonical form, they select and use those of its components which in their judgement can serve specific political purposes.
Through these activities, first the intellectuals, then the wider stratum of professionals or intelligentsia, and finally other classes, are brought back to their real or presumed indigenous traditions and customs, languages and symbols, myths and memories, many of which are still extant in one form or another among the peasantry or in certain provinces that are deemed to retain an authentic tradition. This was the case with a number of French intellectuals and artists who made the pilgrimage to Brittany with its ancient, religious and hence ‘authentic’ culture. Such was also the case with the province of Karelia in Finland, where Elias Lönnrot, Akseli Gallen-Kalela and other Finnish artists and intellectuals repaired to rediscover an authentic and heroic past, which they took to be the remaining exemplar of Finland’s ancient history, embodied in its peasant ballads which Lönnrot wove into the Finnish epic, the Kalevala.26
The recovery of an ancient ethno-history, then, is the starting-point for the subsequent process of vernacular mobilization. It is essential for any nationalist aspirations to be satisfied, that the chosen community be furnished with an adequate and authentic past. This is why the concept of ‘authenticity’ is so important. It attests to the originality, the self-generating nature, of a given culture-community. Since Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, popularized the idea of the genius of a nation, and since Herder’s advocacy of the idea of the original and authentic spirit of a nation, authenticity has become the litmus test for any cultural, and hence political, claims. To say that an ethnie lacks an authentic culture and ethno-history is to deny its claim to national recognition.27
But authenticity and dignity are the hallmarks of every aspect of ethnic culture, not just its ethno-history. Of these the best known and most important is language, since it so clearly marks off those who speak it from those who cannot and because it evokes a sense of immediate expressive intimacy among its speakers. The outstanding role played by philologists, grammarians and lexicographers in so many nationalisms indicates the importance so often attached to language as an authentic symbolic code embodying the unique inner experiences of the ethnie. Though language is not the only significant aspect of the nation, as so many Central and Eastern European nationalists claimed, and as the experience of so many Asian and African nationalisms appears to have contradicted, it remains a vital symbolic realm of authentication and vernacular mobilization.28
The process of vernacular mobilization extends into other realms – to the arts of music, dance, film, painting, sculpture and architecture, to the national appropriation of landscapes, historical monuments and museums, and to the construction of a national political symbolism and mythology. Visual art and music have been of special importance in the crystallization of authentic national imagery and its dissemination to a wider audience. The popular reception accorded to certain ethnic and ‘nationalist’ paintings by David and Delacroix, Mihály Muncasy and Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Vasili Surikov and Diego Rivera, to Eisenstein’s or Kurosawa’s ethno-historical films, to the operas of Verdi, Wagner and Musorgsky, or the symphonies and symphonic poems of Elgar, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky – or in this century, of Bartók, Janacek and Sibelius – reveal the growing mobilization of wider social groups into the vernacular ethnic culture reappropriated and sponsored by native intellectuals.29
The ‘vernacularization’ of political symbolism is particularly important for demonstrating the irreplaceability of ethnic culture values in a global moral economy. For the nationalists, certain events and heroes, and certain signs, are elevated into national icons. It might be the figure of a Caesar or a King Alfred, an era like the golden age of Athens or the kingdom of David and Solomon, a monument like Great Zimbabwe or Angkor Wat, or a rejuvenated tradition like Emperor worship in Meiji Japan. Or it might be a mythology of national revolution, or of refoundation, like the celebration of Bastille Day in France or the Fourth of July in the United States of America – or the Great Trek and the Battle of Blood River celebrated annually by the Afrikaners. All these efforts are prompted by the need to demonstrate the possession of a unique, authentic and adequate cultural heritage and ethnic past, one which will bear comparison with those of other nations. The fact that nationalist intellectuals must, so often, labour to furnish the community with these culture values is evidence for their very uneven diffusion, and for the burning desire in many communities to compensate for a perceived deficiency of ethno-history and ethnic culture.30
The next phase of national regeneration moves into the political arena. It involves two processes, the politicization of culture and the purification of the community.
As outlined above, certain symbols, events, heroes and monuments of the past were endowed with new national meanings. Moses, for example, was traditionally for the Jews the ‘Master of the Prophets’ and God’s greatest servant. For Zionists, however, he became a national hero, a liberator of his people, a national lawgiver and leader. Likewise, Muhammad in Islamic tradition is Allah’s greatest Prophet and his message the final revelation, but for Arab nationalists he has become primarily a national leader of the Arabs, the founder of the Arab Islamic nation, and the greatest expression of an Arab national genius. Whole eras of the past may be similarly politicized, and their meanings transformed by a ‘retrospective nationalism’. So the post-Vedic era of classical Indian city-states became the golden age of Aryan India, and Arjuna a prototype of the fearless patriot; and the pagan era of Cuchulain, Fin Mac Coil and the High Kings of Tara in fourth-century Ireland was now invested with heroic grandeur and became a golden age of Irish national glory.31
Not just the past, but also the folk culture of the present can take on a political aspect. Polish, Swiss or Hungarian peasant customs and institutions have become models for national life-styles and the national regeneration of an effete cosmopolitan urban class. This kind of ethnic populism, with its cultivation of peasant customs, traditions, sports and crafts, has become almost inseparable from the pursuit of national ideals. It was greatly assisted by movements of political romanticism that mobilized the intelligentsia and other strata from the early nineteenth century. For romantics, the arts, literature, architecture, crafts, song and dance, dress and food, were all imbued with the creative, yearning spirit of the people, and demonstrated their native genius. Only by rejoining the people through their vernacular culture, could latterday urban classes ‘realize’ themselves in their uncorrupted, authentic being.32
The politicization of native culture, therefore, often went hand in hand with the purification of the community. This meant, first of all, jettisoning all ‘alien’ cultural traits – words, customs, dress, food, artistic styles – and reappropriating vernacular traits for a renewed indigenous culture. But it also meant purifying the people themselves, forging the ‘new man’ and the ‘new woman’, in the image of a pristine ideal found only in an idealized past of heroic splendour. Thus ‘volkisch’ writers of the nineteenth century held up the vision of the old-German colonist, a settler on virgin soil, living a pure and simple life in nature. In the same way, Slavophile writers in nineteenth-century Russia idealized the old, classless, pre-Petrine Russia and its sacred union of Church, land and people under their redeemer-Tsar.33
To purify the community entailed a hardening of attitudes to foreign elements and ethnic minorities in one’s midst. Where before minorities and foreigners had been tolerated as millets or middleman trading enclaves, they now came to be seen not just as economic rivals, but as indigestible cultural elements, or, worse, as insidiously eroding the moral fibre and biological purity of the nation. The desire to preserve intact the unique cultural heritage of the people was soon transformed into anxiety over the threat to the destiny of the community, a sense of impending national decline and thence into a fanatical hatred of everything alien. This in turn led to the branding of ethnic minorities, who had long lived side by side with each other or with majorities, albeit sometimes uneasily, as an imminent danger to the very existence and character of the nation, to be surgically removed, where possible.
So the desire to create a homogenous moral community worthy of its heroic ancestors and regenerated through its politicized, vernacular culture required the purification of its citizenry and the rigorous exclusion, or destruction, of everything alien. The history of Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael is a good example of this progression. Starting as a movement of romantic nationalist populism against urban values and bourgeois capitalism, it preached the defence of the native culture and the Romanian countryside against the depredations of urban cosmopolitanism. But it soon degenerated into a vigorous and brutal proto-fascism, which sought the purification of the Romanian community through a militant crusade of violence against Jews and foreigners.34
Today, too, we can still witness the incipient desire to purify a reborn community in Eastern Europe and Russia. Small but vociferous movements of national regeneration urge the radical purification of the liberated nations of the East through the exclusion of their foreign elements, and once again anti-Semitism follows hard on the heels of a romantic conservative nationalism. Movements like Pamyat (memory) in Russia or Vatra Romaneasca in Romania use ethno-religious metaphors – of mother Russia, of Russia as a holy monastery, of the chosen Slavic people, of the Romanian hearth and home – to kindle in their followers the ideal of a purified community contaminated by foreign, and especially Jewish, cosmopolitan elements. Not until they have been removed can Russia (or Romania) resume their destinies and mission as the truly chosen Orthodox Slavic community.35
In milder form, the appeal to vernacular culture, the politicization of that culture and the desire to purify the community have left their mark on the movements for ethnic autonomy in the West from the 1960s on. Few of these movements have drawn the full logical consequences of their ideals in the manner of East European movements before the war and recently. But the same desire to rejuvenate a neglected culture and community informs the Scots, Welsh, Breton, Basque, Catalan and Occitanian movements.36
In all these movements, there is the same logic of vernacular mobilization, cultural politicization and communal purification. The Breton movement sought to re-create through folksong and the arts a cultural revival, in opposition to a pervasive French cultural influence; the Welsh Language Society has tried to rejuvenate the Welsh language and keep the dominant English influences and people at bay; Basques have striven from time to time to exclude foreign elements and Castilian intrusions using racial ideas. In each case, though in varying degrees, there has been concern for a dying language, fear of ethnic and cultural admixture and decline, anxiety over the loss of traditional life-styles, and a sometimes violent desire to mobilize the populace against the dominant ethnic power, the French, English and Castilians.37
It may be objected to this that recent ethnic nationalisms, particularly the Western movements, do not really fit the cultural pattern that I have outlined here, and that we would do better to search for their roots and character in recent economic and social trends.
The theoretical reason for my having said little about the economic aspects of ethnic nationalisms should be clear. ‘Modernist’ theories generally emphasize social and economic causes, implying that nations and nationalism are products of the large-scale social changes associated with the rise of capitalism. The present analysis departs from such a ‘modernist’ standpoint, arguing instead that modern nations and nationalism are grounded in pre-existing ethnic ties and their political mobilization, and are formed by this legacy, a view which inevitably accords a lesser role to purely economic factors. It would be absurd to claim that socioeconomic causes like capitalism, urbanization and industrialism are irrelevant to the birth and course of nationalism, or that they do not play a significant role in the creation of ethnic conflicts and the treatment of ethnic minorities. But the assumption that ethnic conflict and nationalism can be ascribed to predominantly economic factors appears equally one-sided. Besides omitting the crucial domain of politics, such a view suggests that recent ethnic nationalisms can be largely understood without reference to the historic cultural and social components of ethnic categorization and identification, a claim that is both inherently implausible and empirically unconvincing. In the case of Western ethnic neo-nationalisms, socio-economic factors may help to explain the social composition of such movements, but they tell us little about their character, forms and intensities, or why they emerged among some of Europe’s peripheral ethnies, and not others. Economic factors do not help us to answer the question of why it was Basques and Bretons, rather than Sicilians or Frisians, who sought ethnic autonomy.
We can pursue this a little further by considering the familiar arguments about ethnic labour markets. This holds that most modern ethnic conflicts are ultimately reducible to social antagonisms resulting from competition over labour markets in a capitalist society. Either capitalists attempt directly to divide the labour force on the lines of ethnic categories through unequal wages, or the exploited workers themselves seek to better their wages, security and working conditions by policies of ethnic discrimination and job reservation. Similarly, white-collar professionals and other middle strata may seek to restrict to their own ethnic kinsmen the opportunities for jobs and education in a competitive market.38
It suffices here to say that such arguments have force only to the extent that they implicitly accept both the fact and the shared significance of ethnic categorization and identification. It would be pointless to attempt to divide along ethnic lines a labour force whose cultural characteristics were, and were perceived to be, homogenous. Nor would it prove possible to restrict job opportunities to ethnic kinsmen, if a sense of ethnic identity and difference was lacking in the population of a given state. In one sense, this is a truism. But, in another sense, it points to the nature and independence of ethnic variables in any social setting: to the importance of myths of common ancestry, historical memories and a shared culture, and of attachments to land and people. It is just these characteristics that constitute the pervasive legacy of pre-modern ethnies in the modern world.
My claim is not that economic factors play little part in the genesis and course of ethnic neo-nationalisms. Clearly, they do, if only in the form of catalysts. Economic trends or crises often account for the timing of ethnic nationalisms. But, as Walker Connor has convincingly shown, ethnic nationalisms can emerge in every kind of economic setting – advanced, backward, improving, declining and stagnant. Ethnic nationalisms do not generally correlate with economic trends.39
Rather the contribution of long-term economic trends to the creation of nations and nationalism should be viewed in the context of class formation and wider class roles. These trends apply equally to capitalist and state socialist societies, since nations and ethnic nationalisms figure prominently in both socio-economic formations. Economic variables form the background for the formation of those classes and strata which have habitually taken the lead in ethno-nationalist movements in both kinds of economy, notably the mainly secular intelligentsia, from whom such movements have derived much of their impetus. Their needs, preoccupations and aspirations have tended to dictate the goals and strategies of ethnic nationalisms, in community after community. Though the significance of this stratum has varied between societies, it has been at the forefront of nationalist movements all over the world.40
This is especially true of recent ethnic nationalisms in both West and East. In the 1960s and 1970s a new more technical intelligentsia, supported by businessmen and traders, spearheaded the protests against the centralized Western national state, both in North America and Europe, to be followed in the late 1980s and 1990s by their counterparts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. To take the West, first. In Quebec, for example, professionals of all kinds – lawyers, doctors, journalists, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, technicians and the like – pushed through what came to be known as the ‘quiet revolution’ of the early 1960s. They wrested power in the province from the traditional leaders of an agrarian and Church-dominated community, and began to agitate for the recognition of the French language in all walks of life and for its parity with English. The return to the vernacular in modern life was accompanied by a movement for the elevation of Francophones into middle-class positions and, in the shape of the Parti Quebecois, for their assumption of political power in the province. From here it was a short step to the demand for full ethnic autonomy, and ultimately ethnic secession.41
In the United Kingdom, the movements for greater ethnic autonomy have been led by a growing intelligentsia, notably in Scotland. There the Scottish National Party, supported predominantly by professionals and small businessmen, has striven for outright independence since at least the 1960s. Yet, though on the face of it the economic climate has been favourable, with the discovery of North Sea oil, most Scots have failed to respond to this appeal, especially in the devolution vote of 1979 which fell well short of the 40 per cent requirement – though thereafter autonomy and devolution have again become political issues. These political variations seem unrelated to the strong and persistent popular consciousness of a Scottish national cultural identity and an overall desire for greater autonomy. While the majority of Scots seem to want more local participation, the process of Scottish political mobilization has been limited by the long tradition of Scottish involvement in a wider British society and polity, and by the strong hold of the Labour Party in Scotland. The flexibility of the British state over the decades has also damped down separatist demands, at least until recently, as has the ability of Scotland to make its political voice sufficiently heard in both local government and the law, and through national institutions like the Scottish Office.42
In Wales, this process of vernacular mobilization has had less success. Despite the efforts of intellectuals in the Welsh Language Society, the Welsh language is largely confined to the agrarian north of the country; the industrial south has opted for an English-language Welsh identity, saturated with strong working-class traditions. Despite the retention of a distinctive Welsh culture, manifested in the preference for chapel over church, in the traditions of poetry, choral singing and sports, and in the cultivation of collective historical memories in the Eisteddfodau and Gorsedd, support for the Welsh Party (Plaid Cymry) remains low, and the influence of English society and the British state is marked. The impact of a Welsh nationalist intelligentsia has been limited, though at least two of the Welsh colleges (Bangor and Aberystwyth) conform to the well-known pattern of nationalist fervour found among university staff and students.43
In Catalonia, too, the influence of the Catalan language and the Catalan intellectuals has been pervasive. This is traceable to the mid-nineteenth century literary Renaixenca (mentioned in chapter 2 above) and to the cultural and political nationalism of influential figures like Prat de la Riba in the early twentieth century. Franco’s repression of Catalan culture and language had the effect of broadening and deepening the influence of both, since resistance naturally centred on their protection in the private domain. Since the transition to democracy, there has been a strong revival of Catalan culture and Catalan language publications, coupled with increasing demands for maximum autonomy, many of which have been conceded in the form of a revived ethno-regional institution of self-government.44
In these cases, ethnic agitation for greater autonomy by a native secular intelligentsia has been limited both by the historic presence of a wider political identity and by the possibility for democratic accommodation of ethnic grievances. On the one hand, the long-term incorporation of peripheral ethnies and the interventionist power of the central state of the hegemonic ethnie has added another circle of political identity and loyalty to the original ethno-national one; Bretons, Scots and Catalans can and do also feel French, British and Spanish, particularly to outsiders and abroad. At the collective level, the historic central national state has been able to forge its own political national identity on the basis of territory, law, citizenship and political culture, usually over centuries – even though at first this was unintended and only dimly perceived.
On the other hand, the growth of democratic institutions and practices has helped, in varying degrees, to counteract the alienation of peripheral ethnic populations and their intelligentsias. They have been able to provide channels through which their collective grievances might be redressed and their interests accommodated. While no Western polyethnic state can be said to have ‘solved’ its underlying ethnic problems, those states with a long democratic tradition have so far been able to alleviate ethnic grievances, forge an inclusive political mythology and symbolism and shape a system of common values and political memories for all their constituent ethnies. They have also generally had the wealth and political (often imperial and colonial) power to offer high-status positions to ambitious, educated members of the peripheral ethnies. Examples that spring to mind include the Corsicans in France and Scots in the British Empire.45
While the secular intelligentsia play an important part in popular Western ethnic neo-nationalisms, their recent role in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been pivotal. Here the leadership of an even smaller stratum of ‘pure’ or ‘free-floating’ intellectuals has been widely acknowledged. This recalls the well-known distinction of Hans Kohn, who argued that, unlike ‘Western’ nationalisms with their rational and civic character and bourgeois social base, the nationalisms of ‘the East’ (east of the Rhine) owed their often authoritarian, mystical and ‘organic’ character to the leadership of a small stratum of intellectuals in the absence of a bourgeoisie. This, of course, is to simplify matters; intellectuals have been crucial in French and English nationalism, which are unimaginable without Rousseau and Michelet, Milton and Burke. There is, however, some truth in the linkage for the more recent era, since the command economy of soviet-style communism vacated the social and political space of discontent and alienation to a dissident intelligentsia, who were encouraged to link their concerns for human rights with ethnic and national grievances by the recent heavy-handed communist policies in both areas.46
Intellectuals of this ‘organic’ kind have played important roles in Western neo-nationalisms as well; Hugh McDiarmid in Scotland, Saunders Lewis in Wales, Yann Fouere in Brittany, Frederico Krutwig among the Basques, have prepared and articulated the ethnic renascences of their respective communities and proposed strategies for their realization. But in the East, intellectuals and professionals have been even more prominent in nationalist politics. The role of the intellectuals in popular movements like the Prague Spring and the Czech Velvet Revolution of 1989, the Croat movement of the early 1970s and the Polish Solidarity movement is well known. Equally vital has been their contribution to Sajudis, the Lithuanian national movement, and to Rukh, the Ukrainian national democratic movement; many of the leaders, including the first president of an independent Lithuania, were intellectuals. The intelligentsia have also been prominent in the growth of a populist Russian nationalism, and intellectuals have played a leading role in the post-1967 growth of dissident refusenik Jewish nationalism in Russia. Indeed, one of the most pressing problems confronting the Soviet Union in its death throes was the growing demand by republican and other ethnic intelligentsias for greater political power, a demand that could not ultimately be accommodated within the existing Union, or be reconciled with the claims of the many Russian settler communities in non-Russian republics.47
With the breakdown of the universalism of Marxist communism, first into a polycentric national communism and thence into ethnic nationalism, the intellectuals and professionals were driven back to their respective ethnic heritages and mythologies, in the hope of realizing the messianic promise of a revolutionary transformation of society within their own communities. But theirs has been a disappointed universalism, transposed onto a limited, infertile terrain, of the kind that Eduard Shevardnadze has encountered in his native Georgia and Leonid Kravchuk, communist-turned-nationalist, in the Ukraine. In other cases, resistance to communism was fuelled by a long-suppressed nationalism. In Poland, Solidarity had close links with a national Catholic Church as well as with nationalist Polish intellectuals, and successive Polish governments have placed a national Polish interest at the centre of their concerns and policies.48
In the Czechoslovakia of the late 1980s, Vaclav Havel and his Civic Forum merged their concerns for human rights with a steadfast national solidarity in the face of a Russian-backed soviet-style regime. But, beneath the surface, the tensions between the poorer Catholic regions of Slovakia and the more advanced and Westernized Czech society – tensions that had found clear expression in their different regimes and statuses during the Second World War – injected a strong note of ethnic nationalism into the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, preparing the way for the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia. It may not be possible to trace with ease the recent parting of the ways to the different cultural backgrounds, histories and linguistic traditions of the Czech and Slovak ethnies and their homelands, and the uses to which they have been put by elites on both sides. But the uneven depth and distribution of their respective ethno-histories, the former peripheral status and overshadowing of the Slovaks by their culturally better equipped neighbours, and the Slovaks’ desire to assert their national individuality, form the cultural substratum, basic parameters and historical legitimations of recent political movements and actions.49
The role of such ethnic memories, myths and symbols, and their uses by intellectuals and other elites, have been the subject of considerable debate in accounting for recent conflicts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Few would dispute the centrality of intellectuals and professionals in the leadership of many ethnic nationalisms in these countries, but their role is viewed in quite different terms by instrumentalists and primordialists. The former see the intellectuals as fashioning and orchestrating national conflicts through their manipulation of ethnic memories, symbols and myths; their pursuit of rational strategies based on their economic and status interests largely determines the shape and content of so many ethnic nationalisms in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. This is especially true of the former Yugoslavia: Franjo Tudjman the historian confronts Radovan Karadzic the poet, but both construe and fashion the symbols and goals of the conflict they have done so much to guide for their own partisan ends. Primordialists, on the other hand, are inclined to minimize the role of elites, including intellectuals, and to trace the sources of the Serbo-Croat conflict to underlying historic antagonisms of which the intellectuals are merely the articulators and executors. In this view, deep religious differences and historic conflicts going back to the medieval epoch, as well as the very different trajectories of Serbs and Croats under the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, have produced the collective antipathies so brutally manifested in the massacres of the Second World War and again today.50
Neither position seems adequate to explain the complexities of these conflicts. Serbo-Croat hatred (and brotherhood) are in fact fairly recent, going back to the 1920s at the earliest, when they were first incorporated into a single Serb-dominated Yugoslav kingdom; before that time, despite the intellectuals’ dream of south Slav unity in the early nineteenth century Illyrian movement, the two peoples had separate political traditions and histories, and were separated by rival empires. On the other hand, the political manipulations of Serb and Croat intellectuals could become effective only where sufficient members of their ethnically designated constituencies were ready to respond to the call of ethnicity and the content of its myths, memories and symbols. Moreover, if religion is today more a ‘badge’ of ethnicity than a profound spiritual force in the former Yugoslavia, its political potency derives from centuries of cultural differences and social exclusion between Serbs, Croats and latterly Muslims which have become part of the fabric of society in the Balkans. What remains, and what can and has been used to such devastating effect, is a rich harvest of symbols, memories, myths and traditions in which epics of battles, legends of sages and saints, and ballads of heroes and bandits, are handed down from generation to generation as living cultural traditions of the people in the small towns and villages. It is in the intellectual and popular uses, and limits, of these fundamental symbolic components of ethnicity that we must search for more adequate answers to the variations of inter-ethnic relations and the invocation of nationalism as the ultimate political and territorial solution to ethnic relations in mixed areas.51
The role of intellectuals and professionals must therefore be placed within this longer historical setting and broader cultural context. The pivot of this analysis can be neither the aims and activities of the intellectual, professional and other elites, nor the mass sentiments and memories of the common people, but the often complex relationships between the two. In the social and political role of the intelligentsia we see a microcosm of our initial paradox: the well-known ‘crisis of identity’ which afflicts so many educated men and women, as they move from a more restricted and traditional form of society to one that is more open, mobile and pluralistic, mirrors the contradictions of the wider society. The education of the modernizing intellectuals and professionals, with its culture of critical discourse, and its universalistic rational and technical ethos, binds them to their counterparts in every land. On the other hand, by separating them from their ethnic kinsmen, from ‘the people’, professional rationalism sets up countervailing emotional and cultural pressures of alienation that can only be resolved by a new type of identity and community, one based on vernacular mobilization and the reappropriation of authentic history: that of the modern nation, an autonomous political community in which intellectuals and professionals may apply their skills and training, but in the service of the people, their ethnic and civic compatriots.52
This process of reappropriating an ethnic past has also helped to foster a powerful religious revival. The return of many secular Muslims in Bosnia to Islam, the growth of strong Islamic movements among the Islamic communities of the West and the vigorous, sometimes fanatical, espousal of Islam and Hinduism on the Indian subcontinent, even the return to nationalist Orthodoxy in Russia, are all related to the intensification of ethnic ties and a sense of ethnic election among embattled ethnic communities in what they feel to be an alien, if not hostile, environment. This is coupled with a deep ambivalence over the values of modernity. On the one hand, the technological, economic and military power associated with Western modernity commands respect, even emulation; on the other hand, there is a deep revulsion against what appears to be the social and moral breakdown engendered by unregulated rationalism and unbridled progress. This revulsion quickly takes on religious and ethnic dimensions. The West’ or ‘Western Christianity’ is categorized as the Other in relation to which ‘the pure’, ‘the noble’ and ‘the elect’ must realize their true worth and find redemption. This means rejecting the anomie of ‘Western values’ in favour of the retention of traditional family structures and ethnic values, ancient customs and communal faiths. It is, however, through their ethnic exemplifications that the Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox, Jewish and Buddhist revivals become politically effective: in Iran, Syria and Algeria, in India, Russia and Israel, in Sri Lanka, Burma and Tibet. This is true even of the Shi’a revolution which threatened to engulf the Middle East. Its roots and growth in Iran ensured a strong influence of Iranian nationalism over the political expressions and activities of Shi’a Muslim revolutionaries – as well as of Iranian clerics and centres of learning.53
Herein lies a particularly acute contradiction. The spread of global patterns of politics and communications have helped to revive the ethnic ties of many communities through the return by many people to religion and religious mythologies, particularly in India, the Middle East and Africa. But this is not simply a collective response of fear and protest against the pressures of globalization in its Western forms. This revival is to be found in some Western and Westernised heartlands of modernity, too: in America, the Netherlands and Japan, as well as in Israel, Poland, Ireland and Mexico. The Protestant revival and the renascence of Catholicism and Judaism, though not as impressive as the resurgence of Islam or Hinduism, have considerable followings, and are often linked to ethnic self-assertion and myths of ethnic election. In such cases, religious mythologies act as guarantors of the redemption of oppressed ethnies or reinstators of by-passed ethnic values and life-styles. Through the myths of the resurgent religion and its chosen bearers, the forces of modernity can be brought under control and made to serve the interests of aspirant or marginalised classes and ethnies.54
Hence, it is a mistake to see in the return to radical forms of religion an expression only of fear and resentment, or of the collapse of traditional values and symbols. The global picture is more complex. Given the community-forming propensity of most religious myths, symbols and traditions and the longevity and pervasiveness of their influence, there is nothing unexpected or remarkable in a return by either the elites or the wider populace to such traditions and symbolic systems to see how they can help, and make sense of, both the opportunities and the tribulations of rapid change and modernity. Above all, the return to religion and its myths of ethnic chosenness enables elites and people alike to relativize their immediate experience through traditions that continue to promise the salvation of immortality beyond the present order of experience. At the same time, they increasingly combine this traditional promise with an expectation of terrestrial redemption in the collective afterlife for the chosen through the judgement of posterity, that is, the judgement of one’s descendants who form the next generations of an identical community of history and destiny.
What is happening, then, in so many areas of the world is a double collective appropriation: of the traditional message of individual and collective salvation beyond the world of experience, and of the new nationalist message of collective immortality for the elect through posterity and its judgements. The union of these two appropriations is the singular achievement of the historicist vision of humanity and the premium this places on the unique culture values and destiny of each historical segment of humanity. It is the achievement of nationalism to have given political expression to these twin appropriations by linking the memories of ethno-history and the older religious myths of election to the striving for collective territorial recognition and political autonomy in a historic ‘homeland’. In the modern world, such autonomy and recognition are best secured and preserved in a state of one’s own.