When people assert that the nation-state has had it day and that other forms of political association have become more appropriate vehicles of post-modern or post-industrial processes and trends, they are making a number of separate claims. The first, as explained above, is that global communications and economic trends transcend national boundaries and that the nation-state can therefore no longer maintain its control over these and other processes. This claim was refuted in chapter 1. A second, related, claim, also touched on, is that there is a zero-sum relationship between national and other forms of political association and that the new forms of political association necessarily involve the relegation of nation-states as foci of political loyalty. To this claim I intend to return in chapter 5.
Here I want to consider a third claim: that contemporary nation-states are undergoing erosion, if not disintegration, because their plural, or polyethnic, character is undermined by the processes of state expansion and modernization and by the problems they have engendered.
It is both true, and significant, that most modern states are plural. In that respect, they are clearly not nation-states. At best they are ‘national states’.
Strictly speaking, we may term a state a ‘nation-state’ only if and when a single ethnic and cultural population inhabits the boundaries of a state, and the boundaries of that state are coextensive with the boundaries of that ethnic and cultural population. (This, of course, is a criterion which would rule out ethnically homogenous states some of whose co-ethnic and co-cultural population inhabit neighbouring, or indeed other, states.) In this sense, there are very few nation-states. Portugal, Iceland, Japan (except for the Ainu and Koreans), Denmark (except for the Faroese), are examples. Several states, like Poland, have come to approximate this model. Nevertheless, less than 10 per cent of all states in the United Nations are nation-states. Most states are polyethnic in character and many are severely divided along ethnic lines, some of them with numerically significant ethnic minorities and others divided into two or more large ethnies – such as Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, Nigeria, Belgium Canada and Britain.1
How did this state of affairs come about? Nations, as I indicated, were formed along two main routes. The first that I discussed was through a process of vernacular mobilization and it has accounted for a large percentage of today’s national states. The second route was essentially a process of bureaucratic incorporation. This began from the base-line of ‘lateral’ ethnies – extensive, ragged in boundaries, and largely confined to the upper strata. In most cases, in fact, an aristocracy led usually by a king or prince and his court and staff, and supported by the clergy, ruled over one or more regional or ethnic communities and categories who supplied the labour and services necessary for the maintenance of the aristocracy’s life-style. This was the pattern in much of Europe, and it persisted in the eastern half of the continent after the three great empires – the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman – were fully established. It also persisted well into the nineteenth century in other parts of the world – in the Middle East, in South Asia and the Horn of Africa. In the course of the nineteenth century, the European colonial empires established a modified version of this basic pattern; in this case, the ‘aristocracy’ in question was an overseas administrative elite, sometimes supported by missionaries and settlers, forming a ‘parallel society’, a pattern already established in Central and Latin America in the sixteenth century.2
These ‘lateral’ or aristocratic ethnies were generally content with preserving the basic pattern of cultural difference and political hierarchy. This was true of the many ancient ruling aristocracies such as the Hittites, the Medes and Persians, and the Philistines, who made little or no attempt to incorporate members of subordinate ethnies, at least on any scale, into their dominant culture and society. Content to receive tribute, labour or services, the elites of the dominant ethnie happily preserved the cultural gulf between themselves and the ethnic categories and communities whom they had conquered and whose lands they had annexed and were exploiting.3
But, for reasons that remain not altogether clear, a few of these aristocratic or lateral ethnies, or their rulers and clergy, began to feel the need to spread their ethnic culture donwards and outwards – to some of the middle (if not lower) strata and to some of the outlying regions of their domains. In both cases, defence considerations may have played a crucial role. Constant attacks by marauders and other states may have prompted a firmer policy of cultural incorporation in the marchlands of the aristocratic state, such as occurred on the Welsh borders, in Languedoc and Provence or in Finland. This was often achieved by settling ethnic kinsmen on the volatile frontiers, or by a greater measure of central administrative control, or both. Ecclesiastical control could also be used to this end: recognition of the jurisdiction of the higher clergy over the disputed or ethnically mixed lands helped to secure them for the aristocratic state. Religion may also have supplied a motive. In the Spanish case, the defence of Catholicism against Muslim invasion became a fundamental component of later Spanish national identity, while in the French case, Papal backing for Frankish and later Capetian claims for ethnic ‘chosenness’ in defending the Catholic domain proved crucial for the later expansion of French royal jurisdiction, especially in the face of the heretical tendencies in Languedoc. Much later, religion was used by English Tudor monarchs not only to bolster their own position in England, but also to prevent continental Catholic powers from attacking England through Ireland by extending English control in Ireland through Protestant settlements.4
Certainly, it was in Western Europe that the processes of bureaucratic incorporation of outlying regions and middle strata became most evident. Broadly speaking, the absolutist monarchs increasingly sought to standardize and homogenize their ethnic populations. At first, this was a by-product of their need to increase their revenues and military resources to maximize their effectiveness in the competition between dynastic states which became the dominant element in European politics from the late fifteenth century. In the mid-sixteenth century the debilitating political effects of religious strife within kingdoms following the Reformation hastened the process of homogenization. By the seventeenth century religious and cultural standardization and homogenization were increasingly seen as a precondition of success in interstate rivalries, Richelieu’s measures of linguistic reform and Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes being only the most obvious examples. A century later England’s leadership was being attributed to its early political, linguistic and religious unity and the ensuing ideology of liberty.5
The processes of bureaucratic incorporation have been various. They include the familiar measures of state-making: creation of a single code of law and system of courts throughout the territory, creation of a single taxation system and fiscal policy, construction of a unified transport and communications system, streamlining of the administrative apparatus and centralization of control in the hands of the ruler in the capital city, formation of professional cadres of skilled personnel for the key administrative institutions, and the creation of effective military institutions and technology under central control. At a later stage, measures of welfare benefit, labour protection, insurance, health and education came to be included in the processes of state-making; and these were usually accompanied or succeeded by an extension of the franchise to middle and then lower strata, and finally to women.6
Alongside these processes of state-making there developed a strong national consciousness. This was partly the result of the state-making processes, but it was also the product, and later also the cause, of overlapping if analytically separable processes of ‘nation-building’. This is a term often used interchangeably with state-making processes, but the foci and emphases of nation-building processes are rather different.
They include:
• the growth, cultivation and transmission of common memories, myths and symbols of the community;
• the growth, selection and transmission of historical traditions and rituals of community;
• the designation, cultivation and transmission of ‘authentic’ elements of shared culture (language, customs, religion, etc.) of the ‘people’;
• the inculcation of ‘authentic’ values, knowledge and attitudes in the designated population through standardized methods and institutions;
• the demarcation, cultivation and transmission of symbols and myths of a historic territory, or homeland;
• the selection and husbanding of skills and resources within the demarcated territory;
• and the definition of common rights and duties for all the members of the designated community.
The emphasis throughout these processes is subjective: these are mainly attitudes, perceptions and emotions connected with symbols, myths, memories, traditions, rituals, values and rights. But they also involve definite sets of ‘objective’ activity: the authentication, cultivation, selection, designation, preservation and inculcation of values, symbols, memories and the like. These processes of nation-building also tie in with our working definition of the nation 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’.7
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, there has been an enormous increase in the power and penetration of the ‘scientific state’ as a key component of the wider processes of modernization. Essentially this means that a bureaucratic state seeks to use science and the latest technology to enhance its effectiveness and efficiency in both internal and external affairs. If the state’s economic control is now being challenged by the vast transnational companies and practices that dominate much of the globe, if its military preponderance has been limited first by the superpowers’ nuclear dominance and then by the internationalization of command structures and military technology, its social and cultural power and penetration have, if anything, been enhanced, despite the unprecedented transformations resulting from computerized information technology and global mass-communications systems.
This may be briefly illustrated in three areas: public education, the mass media and cultural and social policy. All three bear closely on the ethnic character and national identity of the state’s population.
Public education is deemed by some theorists to be central to the production of a ‘high’, literate culture and hence homogenous nation. Certainly, most governments since the end of the nineteenth century have seen it as one of their prime duties to establish, fund and increasingly direct a mass system of public education – compulsory, standardized, hierarchical, academy-supervised and diploma-conferring – in order to create an efficient labour force and loyal, homogenous citizenry. This was the explicit aim of the French Third Republic after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. A mass, standardized, public education system was established as one of the key instruments for unifying and creating ‘Frenchmen’, able to resist Prussia and reconquer the territories of Alsace and Lorraine lost after the French defeat in that war. To this end, new practices of physical fitness and new ideals of Greek athletic beauty were adopted, displacing the earlier intellectualist and Catholic disdain of the body and physical activity. The leaders of the Republic also used the teaching of a standard history through the common Lavisse textbook at various school grades to inculcate a shared sense of France’s past greatness, of its heroes and virtues, and its pre-eminent place among the nations. The criterion of greatness was largely territorial: the ability to expand France’s borders and integrate and unify its inhabitants. Thus Richelieu and Louis XIV scored high, despite their monarchical aims, while the account of Napoleon, for all his original republican patriotism, was deeply ambivalent: he had, after all, by 1814–15 lost most of the territories France had gained in the Revolutionary Wars. Even more important, the delineation of French grandeur going back to Clovis was based on the dynastic succession and the persistence of the territorial hexagon at the core of the concept of the French realm and state. And it was this nationalist history that French (and colonial) children had to learn in every school at every grade by state decree.8
Equally important was the contemporary use of mass public education in Japan. Here, a few years after the Meiji Restoration of the Emperor in 1868, the reforming aristocratic leaders of Japan issued the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) which laid down that loyalty to the Emperor was to be the guiding principle of mass education by the state in Japan. The aim, of course, was to emulate and compete with modern Western states and societies on their own terms, the Japanese reformers being convinced that in secular education lay the key to Western military and economic success; and to achieve this goal they instituted a large-scale hierarchical system of education to inculcate modern skills and imperial Japanese values. More recent examples of homo-genization through mass, public education can be found in the new states of Africa and Asia. In most cases, standard literary and historical texts recount the contributions and history of the nation and its heroes. In other cases, notably some Islamic states, a religious dimension is invoked to support and reinterpret what are essentially nationalist aims and values. In Egypt under Nasser, for example, the Islamic Arab elements were harmonized by state education policies, despite the fact that, as in Syria, Egyptian nationalism was essentially secular in orientation. What is important is that the mass education system which inculcates these common values and outlooks is a state system under state control. In Nigeria and Kenya, in Syria and Iraq, in Israel and Egypt, in Malaysia and Singapore, the state has intervened directly to guide as well as establish and fund the mass education system.9
The mass media have also played an increasingly vital role in underpinning the power of the state and enabling it to penetrate the social consciousness. This was taken for granted by one-party communist and fascist states in the 1930s. In the 1950s in the Middle East, Daniel Lerner and his associates found the state’s use of radio and television was making a strong impact on the middle classes. Fear of the uses of the mass media in the hands of rival organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood drove many Arab states, even where they were not already so inclined, to take over control of the mass media, especially the radio and television stations. In the hands of (among others) the Libyan, Algerian and Iranian regimes, the mass media have expanded the role of the state and wedded it to the identity and destiny of the nation. So important have these instruments of mass communication seemed, that the first step of any coup leader has been to seize the transmitters and stations to broadcast the message of liberation, and the state in turn has realized the vital importance of retaining them under its control.10
Even in the West, with its greater press freedoms and more liberal traditions of state intervention, there is a high degree of state regulation of radio and to a lesser extent of television. Even where there is greater freedom, the content of many transmissions, whether of news or documentaries or even drama, is distinctly national in flavour and bias: the world is still largely seen through the lens of one’s national state.
The state’s intervention in and control over cultural and social policies has also markedly increased. The emergence of ‘official’ cultural nationalism in European states in the later nineteenth century is a familiar story, with policies of Magyarization, Russification and Germanization (of Poles in the Poznań area). By the twentieth century the state’s cultural nationalist policies had become more sophisticated. In Mexico from the 1920s, the post-revolutionary regimes of Obreron and Vasconcelos framed an all-embracing policy of cultural nationalism based on the idea of a ‘fusion of the races’ and a union of their very different cultural heritages under the aegis of the Mexican state. Making use of the archaeological discoveries of Teotihuacan, the researches of such anthropologists as Manuel Gamio and the talents of such painters as David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, the state commissioned and presented to the people a panorama of successive cultures through which a modern myth of the fusion of races, mestizaje, could be traced back to the pre-Colombian past, and in this way the lineage of the modern national state could be firmly rooted in a millennial Mexican past. At the same time, the modern national state could be presented as the legitimate heir and synthesis of the different successive cultures – Indian and Hispanic – that composed the culture area and heritage of Mexico, at the expense, one should add, of the indigenous ‘Indian peoples’.11
In the twentieth century, too, the cinema has been a potent means for presenting state cultural policies and national ideals that can reach millions. Sergei Eisenstein’s great historical films such as Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible were able to crystallize and disseminate the sense of the Russian nation and (Soviet) state under threat from enemies within as well as without, to millions of Soviet citizens. Other great directors – Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Satjayit Ray, Andrej Wajda – were also able to convey a sense of national individuality by re-creating through the camera unique national landscapes, legends and atmospheres, past and present. Most of them operated outside specific state policies, or were critical of them, but their works conveyed a sense of separate national history and destiny, indirectly underlining the attachments of citizens to their national states. In our day, too, the symbiosis of state and nation has been intensified through growing ministerial control over all aspects of cultural and social policy. This is patently clear in the field of education, and especially higher education, but it has become increasingly manifest in many other areas like regulation of the press, radio and television, medicine and health services, the liberal professions, labour law, family status and benefits, genetic engineering, criminal justice, policing and prison services. Through the use of the latest advances in science and technology, the bureaucratic state has been able to penetrate every area of professional and social life, extending its spatial range into the remotest corners of its territorial domain and to every household in each region of the country.12
Yet this very power and penetration has produced a deep crisis of legitimacy and cohesion in the modern national state. As discussed above, few states are mono-ethnic and so genuine nation-states. Most are plural ‘national states’, and many of them possess large ethnic and regional minorities. These minorities are of two kinds: scattered immigrant minorities, often from former colonial possessions overseas, and resident territorially compact minorities, often of long standing. The former usually live and work in a climate of discrimination, marginalization and racism, whereas the latter are today generally viewed as ‘legitimate’, if less favoured, co-residents of the national state, who had in earlier periods experienced neglect and discrimination on the part of elites of the dominant ethnie. Now, both kinds of ethnic minority increasingly represent a fracturing of the homogeneity and purity of a national identity that was pictured as an organic whole for didactic and political purposes. In this familiar ‘pedagogical narrative’, immigrants, ex-colonials and the marginalized – and it may be added, the co-resident ‘peripheral’ ethnies – are increasingly felt to undermine the fabric of the nation by their demands for separate but equal treatment, their cultural differences and their aspirations for diversity and autonomy. And these perceptions are grounded in a social transformation wrought by the very expansion and penetration of the national state itself, and by its project of national acculturation and homogenization.13
The spread of national public education, of the national mass media and of national bureaucratic cultural policies to the minority ethnies and the peripheries, and the state’s attempts to acculturate, even assimilate, immigrants, ex-colonials and marginals, into the culture of the dominant ethnie, have met with only partial success. The national state has managed to establish a national system of education and compel most minorities and immigrants to put their children through its uniform schooling system, or variants of it. It has also managed to bring minorities and immigrants within the compass of the electronic media, while its cultural policies – in the arts and museology, in universities and colleges, in the regulation of the press, radio and television, in the uses of science and medicine, in family values and so on – have embraced most areas of work and leisure of immigrants and minorities. On the other hand, state penetration and modernization have too often been accompanied by a failure to deliver on its economic and social promises: of full employment, better housing, more educational resources, better health care and so on. These failures have, of course, been general. They have affected the whole population, but they bear most heavily on the poorer, the less educated and the more peripheral sectors of the national state. By its actions and failures, the over-extended state has helped to galvanize protest and provoke resistance to its insistent pressures for regimentation and its consequent discrimination against the poorer and less well-educated ethnic and regional minorities. The very instruments of communication, mobilization and participation which it used to incorporate and assimilate its citizenry have been turned against the national state and are used to question and even deny the national basis of its power and legitimacy.
Here two kinds of critique of the state’s power and legitimacy, and two types of current crisis in which the state finds itself, must be distinguished. The first is external, the crisis – and critique – of its military and economic power in a world of giant transnational companies, military blocs and continental associations linked together by electronic mass communications. The second crisis and critique is internal, a challenge both to the efficacy of the national state and its legitimacy and representativeness as a national state answering to the needs and interests of its citizens. It is this latter challenge that I want to examine, through an exploration of the problems of two kinds of national identity and types of national political order.
The theory of the national state has generally assumed a civic form of nationalism. The ideal of the sovereignty of the people has always presupposed a clear vision of the nature and boundaries of the ‘people’ who constitute the citizens of the national state. It is through membership of a ‘people’ that individuals are accorded the rights and duties of citizenship. Only members of a people can be citizens and receive the benefits of modernity which only citizenship of a national state can confer. Only those who share in the public culture of the people, who adhere to the ‘civil religion’ of the national state, are entitled to a share in those rights and duties which constitute citizenship. If the rights and duties of the individual citizen are in principle universal, and presuppose a uniform basis applicable across the globe, they are in practice open only to individuals who are, or have become, members of a people. Thus the Jews, emancipated by the French Revolution, had to divest themselves of their ethno-religious particularity in order to become ‘universal’ individuals ‘like everyone else’ and receive the benefits of modernity by becoming citizens. But in practice they exchanged one ancient collective particularity for another, more modern one. To receive the benefits of modernity, they had to become citizens of the national state of France, and embrace a French public culture, including the French language and French history and schooling.14
In France as in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, the Jews tried hard to assimilate, but in the end succeeded, if at all, only in individual cases. The forces of anti-Semitism – economic, social, racial, but grounded in earlier, mainly religious, definitions and antagonisms – did not permit any large-scale, collective assimilation. This is not simply another example of the general ‘survival’ into the modern era of pre-modern categorizations and hatreds. It also springs from the internal contradiction at the heart of the national state between a universal conception of citizenship, with its uniform rights and duties, and an inevitably particularist conception of the ‘people’, i.e. the community of which each citizen is a member. Here we have to return to the ethnic basis of so many nations. The communities themselves are often descended from pre-modern peoples and have inherited their memories and traditions, symbols and myths and values: ‘the people’ are the heirs of these ‘peoples’ and usually retain some of their ethnic ties and characteristics. Though the national state may be ‘born anew’, in Year One of the Revolution, its members and the community they form possess antecedents, a pre-history of subordination, wandering, exile, suffering, but a pre-history nonetheless and hence a sense of shared experience that marks that people off from others and endows it with a feeling of belonging.15
But it is not simply a question of ethnic lineage. Very often there is a strong shared conviction of moral superiority, a sense of the centrality and irreplaceability of the culture values of the national community, which can be traced back to the earlier cultivation of a myth of ethnic election by elites of pre-modern ethnies. Whereas in the past such myths were fundamentally religious in character, today they are often secularized expressions of ethnic superiority, at least in their official versions. Even today, beneath the public version there is often a deeper religious content to the sense of value and dignity of the national community, one which inevitably lends an air of exclusiveness to the core ethnic community of the nation. This is a sense of national dignity and chosenness that exists in France as much as in South Africa, in the United States as much as in Israel or Japan, in Australia as much as in Sri Lanka.16
In other words, modern nations are simultaneously and necessarily civic and ethnic. In relation to the national state, the individual is a citizen with civic rights and duties, and receives the benefits of modernity through the medium of an impersonal, and impartial, bureaucracy. Hence the nationalism of the national state is bureaucratic as well as civic. For the national state is institutionalized, and represented, through the bureaucracy and its organs in their relations with its citizens. So the bureaucracy and its staff increasingly forms the locus of the nationalism of the national state, not simply in terms of the material and status interests of the incumbents of bureaucratic offices, but in terms of the power and unity and interests of the national state itself whose representatives, both internally and externally, are the civil servants and functionaries who work for the organs of the national state and execute its laws and policies.
However, in relation to the ethnic community or ‘the people’, individuals are members with ties and affinities based on history and vernacular culture and for that reason are accorded the rights of citizenship (and the benefits of modernity) of the national state that represents, contains and protects the community. Hence the nationalism of the national community, of the territorial community of history and culture, is popular as well as ethnic. For the nation and its identity is expressed and revealed in the ‘authentic’ memories, symbols, myths, heritage and vernacular culture of the ‘people’ who form a community of history and destiny, and whose intellectuals and professionals seek to authenticate, safeguard and embody that heritage and culture through cultural and educational institutions in an autonomous homeland. The need for protection, recognition and belonging encourages the nation and its members, especially its intellectuals and professionals, to seek to institutionalize their symbols, culture and heritage in and through a national state which will both embody that heritage, symbols and culture and fulfil these needs. So the intellectuals and professionals who guard and run the cultural and educational institutions in the autonomous homeland or national state form the locus of the nationalism of the popular ethnic nation; they do so not just in terms of their material and status interests, but as an expression and embodiment of the identity, unity and autonomy of the people of the nation, who are generally represented by ethnic intellectuals and professionals who direct the nation’s cultural policies and authenticate its heritage, culture and symbols on behalf of ‘the people’.17
The nation, on this reading, represents a sometimes uneasy but necessary symbiosis of ethnic and civic elements, built up on bureaucratic and popular-professional social bases. The success of any nation in the modern world is dependent on this symbiosis and these social bases. This alignment of social forces, the one able to command the organs of state, the other to mobilize the energies of the people, is mirrored in the convergence of civic and ethnic elements, in which the people are seen as simultaneously citizens and ethnic members. When this symbiosis is almost perfect, when there is no fissure between the civic and ethnic components, culture and citizenship reinforce each other and the capacities of the nation are fully realized. Conversely, when this symbiosis is undermined or rent asunder, as occurred in late nineteenth-century France during the Dreyfus Affair, when the civic or the ethnic elements come to predominate, the unity and power of the nation are impaired, and citizenship and ethnicity may be brought into conflict.18
It is often assumed that the intrusion of ethnic elements and sentiments of collective belonging into the life of the nation inevitably breeds exclusiveness and intolerance, and that ethnic closure is the chief basis of many of the current national conflicts that afflict the world. The common vilification of nationalism is really a condemnation of one of its most common forms, ethnic nationalism and its ethnic exclusiveness. Such a view is a gross simplification of an often complex set of issues. Ethnic nationalisms are of varying kinds and degrees, some of them relatively peaceful like the Catalan and Czech movements, others aggressive and exclusive of the kind witnessed in pre-war Germany and Italy or present-day former Yugoslavia. Besides, there is no one-to-one relationship between ethnic nationalism and exclusiveness; again, the Czech and Catalan movements stand as counter-examples.19
But, most important, the common view fails to grasp the nature of civic nationalism. From the standpoint of affected minorities, this kind of nationalism is neither as tolerant nor as unbiased as its self-image suggests. In fact, it can be every bit as severe and uncompromising as ethnic nationalisms. For civic nationalisms often demand, as the price for receiving citizenship and its benefits, the surrender of ethnic community and individuality, the privatization of ethnic religion and the marginalization of the ethnic culture and heritage of minorities within the borders of the national state. That was how Black elites and Jews were treated by French civic nationalism: their cultures and heritages were depreciated, their traditional religions were despised and privatized or suppressed, and their ethnicity stripped away from them. To become citizens of France, they were compelled to become black or Jewish Frenchmen.20
Hence, not only ethnic but also civic nationalisms may demand the eradication of minority cultures and communities qua communities, on the common assumption, shared by Marxists and liberals, not just of equality through uniformity, but that ‘high cultures’ and ‘great nations’ are necessarily of greater value than ‘low’ cultures and small nations or ethnies. So the pedagogical narrative of Western democracies turns out to be every bit as demanding and rigorous – and in practice ethnically one-sided – as are those of non-Western authoritarian state-nations, since it assumes the assimilation of ethnic minorities within the borders of the national state through acculturation to a hegemonic majority ethnic culture. The civic equality of co-nationals destroys all associations and bodies that stand between the citizen and the state, and the ideology of civic nationalism relegates the customary and vernacular to the margins of society, to the family and folklore. In doing so, it also delegitimizes and devalues the ethnic cultures of resident minorities and immigrants alike, and does so consciously and deliberately.
This deliberate and open denigration of cultures and mores other than those of the hegemonic ‘civic majority’ has helped to create the present internal crisis of the national state. It is not simply that the ‘scientific state’ has invaded every sector of society, extending its laws, regulations and demands to every class and region within its domain, without regard for ethnic and cultural differences, while failing to fulfil the economic and social expectations of the poor and the minorities – so raising the consciousness and the participation of previously silent strata and exploited regions. What has brought the issue of the ‘nation-state’ to a head has been its predominantly plural ethnic character, the arousal of previously dormant and submerged minority ethnies by the social penetration and cultural regimentation of the ‘scientific state’ run by elites from the dominant ethnie, coupled with unfulfilled popular expectations, and the resulting growing pressure of discontented minorities on the political arena of the centre and its dominant ethnic community.21
The fact that this crisis of legitimacy has affected the oldest, most firmly established, democratic national states such as France, Britain, Belgium and even Switzerland has led many people to regard the nation-state as an obsolete form of political association and to announce the end of the ‘epoch of the nation-state’. Apart from external pressures of globalization and Europeanization, the evidence for this view comes from the current revival of ethnies below the level of the national state resulting from state penetration and ethnic majoritarian democracy. This revival, which is summed up in the slogan of ‘L’Europe des ethnies’, appears to threaten the integrity and question the legitimacy of the national state. We have seen the force and scope of this resurgence of ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as in Asia and Africa, and its ability to reshape the map of the world, despite tenacious resistance by the community of states and by individual states. Regional inequalities, the uneven distribution of cultural resources, the revival of older ethnic antagonisms, may all contribute to this resurgence, but the fundamental needs of the national state and the rapid extension of state power, not least in the colonial and post-colonial state, coupled with majority ethnic hegemony, gives to these differences, inequalities and tensions a new salience and power by first incorporating and then mobilizing excluded strata, regions and ethnies under the banner of an ethnic nationalism.22
But this kind of national mobilization does not simply dissolve old empires and national states, it creates more new national states, each based on a dominant ethnie. This means that the idea, numbers and structures of the national state have been reinforced by a new wave of cultural and political pluralism. Not only has the number of national states multiplied, the concept of the national state itself has actually become more firmly entrenched as the norm of political association in the modern world, and its structures have been strengthened by the trend to greater cultural homogeneity that successful ethnic secession entails. Of course, practically every secession creates further ethnic enclaves, new ‘trapped’ minorities. But the newly created national states are in general more cohesive and solidary, because they are organized more firmly and clearly around a dominant ethnie – around the Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Russians, Lithuanians, Armenians or Georgians. That, at any rate, has been the aspiration of the seceders, though sometimes geography, history and demography combine to thwart these hopes, as they are doing in Bosnia, or in Latvia and Kazakhstan, where the numbers of Russians have posed new problems of cohesion and identity for these newly created republics.23
In generalizing about the survival or obsolescence of the national state, we need to bear in mind the following considerations:
1 As of now, the national state remains the only internationally recognized structure of political association. Today, only duly constituted ‘national states’ are admitted to the United Nations and other international bodies, though aspirant ethnic nations may be admitted as observers.
2 Since 1991 at least eighteen new national states have been recognized as ‘successor states’ and the principle of ethnic secession by popular will has been conceded, even if reluctantly. This follows a long period of general refusal upheld by the superpowers during the forty years of Cold War, and broken only in the special cases of Singapore and Bangladesh.
3 Historically, the creation of new national states has proceeded in such ‘waves’, usually following periods of war and treaties – after 1783, 1830, 1878, 1918 and 1945 being the most obvious cases. In other words, their creation and recognition have never been smooth nor universally accepted; they have emerged from situations of constraint and conflict which international events have suddenly transformed. We should, therefore, be careful not to pronounce too categorically on an issue that, by its nature, appears to be so explosive and unpredictable.24
4 Sociologically, the range of existing national states is considerable. At one end stand national states more or less completely dominated by a core ethnie – in Poland, Denmark and Japan – while at the other pole are those ethnically deeply divided national states like Belgium, Canada, Lebanon, Nigeria, Zaire, Angola, India and Pakistan. In between come those many national states with a dominant or core ethnie, but with one or more important ethnic or national minorities like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, Iran, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Mexico, Peru, Spain, France, Britain, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia.25
5 Politically, too, there is considerable variation. Some national states are democratic, others authoritarian and unlikely to concede easily to demands from their ethnic minorities. In some national states such as post-Franco Spain and Canada, successive governments have worked hard to accommodate the ethno-national grievances of their constituent ethnies, while in others like the Sudan and Burma, there has been little or no concession to ethnic minority aspirations and demands. In all these cases, however, the national state remains the sole arena for the resolution of ethnic problems.
From these considerations it would appear then that, despite the wide range of social and political differences, the preeminence of the national state as a general norm has not been seriously challenged. What is increasingly questioned is the behaviour and effectiveness of individual states and their regimes, and the distribution of powers and resources between the constituent ethnies of a national state. In fact, only where there has been a failure to resolve these issues and where, often for quite different reasons, the power of the state has been shaken, and where a powerful regional or superpower patron has taken up the secessionist cause, have ethnic movements mounted a successful challenge to the existing national state and established new national states based on the seceding ethnies.26
The result has been to redefine and strengthen the concept and shape of the national state through a global process of cultural and political pluralism. This means that nationalism’s ideal of a world of incommensurable but equal national states, each possessing its own irreplaceable character and destiny, already proclaimed in the nineteenth century by Fichte, Mazzini and Michelet, has come to embrace every part of the globe and has taken deep root in every continent. The older political pluralism of a Europe of sovereign states and their colonial dependencies has been transformed, reinforced and multiplied by the nationalist principle of cultural pluralism, of each historic culture-community with its peculiar traditions, myths and memories, obtaining its own historic territory and, preferably, its own sovereign state. In the process, the earlier ideal of ethno-national homogeneity and purity, which even then was often breached, has been increasingly abandoned in favour of a ‘dominant ethnie’ model of civic nationalism, one that entails both a more conscious attempt to embrace the civic ideal and simultaneously insists on the national state being underpinned by the culture and traditions of its dominant or core ethnie, to which most members feel they belong. This uneasy compromise, which was characteristic of the earliest Western national states, haunts the current successor states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where a common fear, fuelled by waves of immigrants, is that an unrestrained ethnic nationalism of the kind occurring in the former Yugoslavia, may once again succeed in plunging the region into turmoil and in redrawing the map of large areas of the world. The result, once again, is not the supersession of the national state ideal and structure, but on the contrary its proliferation and ethnic reinforcement.27
In the West, however, both the ethnic and the civic models of the nation have been increasingly questioned and apparently undermined. Again, massive immigration, the influx of ex-colonial peoples, the flood of refugees and asylum-seekers, and the impact of Gastarbeiter, have been the catalysts and provided the material for national redefinition and a new understanding of collective attachments and belonging. As a consequence, there have been attempts to marry the civic ideal to the more recent concept of the ‘plural’ nation. In this concept, the constituent ethnies that make up the national state are seen as the sites of emotional attachment and belonging. They are therefore given wide powers over their social and cultural life and encouraged to preserve their cultural heritages, whether through federal or customary arrangements; but the identity of the nation as a whole is expressed through the national state, its laws, public culture and foundation myths. The United States of America has provided a model for the plural concept of the nation. The historic dominance of its white Puritan Anglo-Saxon culture and language, coupled with its messianic myths of origin and foundation, have provided a firm ethnic base for its subsequent experiment in cultural pluralism. Through the English language and culture, and the legal codes and constitutional structures of its federal arrangements, the United States has succeeded in welding together successive waves and generations of immigrants since the end of the nineteenth century. This has allowed the several ethnic communities that make up the United States to achieve considerable freedoms and resources in large areas of social life, culture and even political organization – though it was long assumed that their different and alien ethnic cultures would be eroded as they adopted the American creed with its providentialist myths, ethnic heritage and public culture of the Anglo-Saxon founders. Only recently has the ideal of genuine ethnic diversity within an overall national unity based on the national state and its Anglo-Saxon public culture become more widely, though by no means universally, accepted.
The remarkable quality of American nationalism is its comprehensive fervour. The United States is one of the very few national states that has avoided a ‘nationalities problem’, despite its extraordinary diversity, while at the same time many groups feel a profound sense of overarching American destiny. Of course, the United States is beset by troubling racial and ethnic problems; but, because immigrants were dispersed across the continent and secured no territorial base, ethnic rivalries have not led to ethnic nationalisms (apart from a brief episode among some black groups in the 1960s). At the same time, most immigrant ethnic groups, as well as the majority of the black and American Indian populations, have subscribed to the American ideal based historically on Anglo-Saxon culture; where they have not, as with the recent wave of Hispanic immigrants, this has produced a strong, if uneven, reaction among English-speaking Americans in defence of the English language in various states.28
In Canada similar federal arrangements, but without the concomitant unifying myths of origin and foundation, have ensured that within an overarching national legal and political framework, the ethnic communities enjoy wide powers in the economic, political and cultural spheres. Recently, after Quebec’s silent revolution, there has been a growing commitment to multiculturalism and the ideal of a plural, polyethnic nation, so much so that, together with the effects of Quebecois secessionist tendencies, the very fabric of any historic identity sustaining the Canadian federation has, many would claim, been jeopardized. In the Canadian case, the dual cultural origins of state and society, and its liberal immigration policies, have created a unique situation at the very limit of sustainable national identity.
The importance of the ‘plural’ model should not be exaggerated. Compared with the civic and ethnic models, it has only recently come to command support and only in a few national states, notably immigrant societies like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. Nor has the model been without its problems. In most of these cases, there was a dominant ethnic elite – creole or Anglo-Saxon pioneers and settlers – and it was they who created the legal, linguistic and educational framework of the new national state and supplied most of its heroes and myths of origin, even if some of them have recently come under critical scrutiny. Only after some decades did large influxes of immigrants begin to change the character of the national community and pluralize its former ethno-national identity. Yet the original ethnic underpinnings have set limits on what can be admitted to the ‘plural nation’ without wholly undermining the community and its national solidarity. Where such limits have been unduly strained, as in Canada with its dual ethnic heritage, alternative foundation myths and a militant Francophone movement, the unity and integrity of the national state itself, and of its plural, multicultural nationalism, have been jeopardized. The central difficulty of the ‘plural nation’ model is revealed in its inability to secure sufficient political cohesion after abandoning both ethnic solidarity and civic uniformity.29
In Western Europe, too, the ‘fraying at the edges’, found in the received national identities of the older Western national democracies, has also operated within clear limits. The influx of large numbers of immigrants, Gastarbeiter, refugees, ex-colonials and aliens, has certainly altered the present character of French, British or Dutch ‘national identities’. They can no longer be described in the simple, relatively homogeneous terms characteristic of the pre-war period. There are today several more ‘faces’ of national identity in France, Britain and the Netherlands – there had always been important variations – with new differences in colour, religion, language and the like. Yet, the historical, numerical and sociological preponderance of the long-established, hegemonic ‘core’ communities has largely determined the boundaries and much of the character of the changing identities of these national states – in the mores of their public life, the nature of their legal codes and institutional norms, their languages of education and politics, the content of much of the history and literature taught in their schools, and in the traditions of their culture and political life.
In all these areas, aliens, refugees, ex-colonial and immigrant communities have made vital contributions whose cumulative effect has been to modify the received character of older national identities and give them a greater fluidity and diversity of expression. But though these changes in national identity have compelled national states to redefine some of their roles and functions, they have not led to a diminution of their scope and powers. The crises of legitimacy that have accompanied these changes have in the end served to strengthen the conflation of national identity with the national state within these old-established states, if not for most of the immigrants, then at least for the core and peripheral communities. In some cases, the multiculturalism implied in attempts to accommodate some of the larger immigrant communities has produced an ethno-national backlash which proclaims the ‘original character’ of the dominant ethnie and the native traditions of the national state. Even in national states which have embraced a civic model of the nation, the ethnic nationalism of the core population is an underlying resource that can still be effectively mobilized; it can spill over into the kind of exclusive and aggressive chauvinism and racism recently seen in Europe which so many people assume to be the ‘natural’ expression of any and every ethnic nationalism.30
Once again, the changes in the character of national identities even in the established democracies of the West should not be overstated. The changes in question are all being played out in the arena of the national state, despite appeals to ‘Europe’ and ‘the world community’ and frequent use of national comparisons. Such comparisons only serve to underpin the power and centrality of the national state at the expense of stateless nations and immigrant communities. There is as yet little evidence in many of these Western cases for a real and genuine erosion of popular national identities focused on the national state in favour of regional or immigrant ethnic communities, and for any major movement in the direction of a multicultural and ‘plural’ conception of the nation.
To a large extent, this is the result of the historic primacy of all-embracing ethnic and civic models of the nation, first in Europe and then outside. It is also a consequence of the nationalist drive to attach national identity to a territorial political community. This holds for both types of national identity. In the ethnic model, where the nation is conceived of as a popular community of descent and vernacular culture seeking political autonomy in its historic homeland, the nationalist drive is to mobilize the people and fuse the popular ethnic community with a territorial political community. In the civic model, where the nation is regarded as a territorialized community of citizens bound by common laws and a shared public culture and civil religion, the nationalist drive is to unify the citizen community in its national territory around a set of shared symbols, myths and memories and fuse it with an identifiable culture community. Either way, the result is to reinforce and strengthen the ideal and structures of the national state and its conflation with a popular national identity. This attempt to bring together and fuse national identity and the national state has been a leitmotif of European, and world, history, even when particular attempts at secession have failed, and cultural nationalism with limited autonomy has remained the only viable option. The principle of national self-determination, enshrined in Mazzini’s Young Europe movement and, a century later, in the Charter of the United Nations (albeit with limited application), succinctly expresses the close relationship between ethnic and civic nationalisms and the drive to fuse the popular national community and identity with a territorial political identity and its national state.31
For many scholars, nationalism is a movement that seeks to equate the nation with the state. They claim that without this close linkage between nation and state, nationalism would have had little social or political significance. What has been of central importance in modern history has been not so much nationalism as such, but the phenomenon of the national state which nationalists through the principle of national self-determination have so consistently elevated and pursued. Without that linkage to the state, nationalism would have been of merely folkloric interest.32
There is some truth in this assertion, but it needs to be strictly qualified. The political programme of nationalism has generally involved the conquest of the state by the nation, and the fusing of a popular-national with a territorial-political identity and community, in accordance with the principle of national self-determination. This follows from some of the central tenets of nationalist ideology. The main propositions of nationalism include the idea that the world is divided into distinctive nations and that the nation is the source of all political power, the claim that the individual’s supreme loyalty is to the nation, and the belief that nations must have maximum autonomy to be authentic in a world of nations. But, just as we can see that the ideology of nationalism focuses on the nation rather than the state, so in practice we find cases where maximum autonomy falls well short of statehood, and where the national community seems content with a special or a federal political status, as with Scotland and Catalonia (to date). The two observations are closely linked. It is the nation that must be nurtured, protected and rendered effective, and any framework that will afford such protection and bestow such efficacy is regarded as appropriate. The territorial state is the most obvious and best-placed candidate for such a protective role, but it is not the only one. It follows that the drive for congruence between state and nation is a frequent and powerful, but by no means an inevitable, component of nationalism.
This means that nationalism in all its varieties must be separated out from the national state, and national identity from state sovereignty. The aim of nationalism is to make the civic or ethnic nation the mould and measure of the state, to make the state bend to, and express, the will of the nation. Nationalism, from this standpoint, adds to classic democratic formulations the ideal of the historic community of citizens sharing the same public ideological culture – or, in the ethnic version, the same ancestral culture and vernacular heritage. It is the people, defined as the (civic or ethnic) nation, whose voice must be heard and whose will must be obeyed. The national state is one which hears only the voice of the people and executes only its will. In and of itself, the state is nothing but an instrument for executing the will of the nation, and the significance of nations and nationalisms resides in their capacity to mobilize large numbers of people in every area of the globe for concerted political action, through or against the state and the state system of the day.
To grasp the significance of nationalism in the modern world, it is not enough to uncover the secular drive to forge national states. The direction of that drive must be grasped: from culture to politics, from the historic culture-community to the national state of citizens. The state that nationalism aims to create is a culturally defined and culturally suffused polity; it derives its raison d’être as well as its character from the historic culture of its dominant ethnie, or more rarely from the historic cultures of more than one ethnie. This is true even in those cases where many of its citizens are recent additions to the national community. Once again, within each national state, it is the cohesive power and historic primacy of ethnic communities, their symbols and myths, memories and values, which are revealed in the formation and character of the civic nation.
The national state, in its turn, draws its power and sustenance from the dominant ethnie around which it was formed and which it in turn helped to coalesce and crystallize. It does so by expressing and giving effect to the ‘will’ of the people which it helps to shape into a cohesive nation with a single public culture and education system. Even where that culture has recognized variants, as in the different official languages of Switzerland, the national identity which emerges from the interplay of dominant ethnies and territorial states is expressed in a single public culture and a dominant set of ethnic myths and historical memories, which are usually (though not invariably) adopted by individuals and groups that adhere later to the national state, as with the French- and Italian-speaking cantons of Switzerland or the later immigrants to the United States or Australia. Such a culture is not necessarily uniform and homogeneous; it may in fact have been woven from many ethnic and linguistic strands and it may reveal subtle regional variants. But it is sufficiently common and inclusive for all the citizens to share in it at the public level, and so to endow them with a feeling of cultural affinity with members and a sense of distinctiveness from outsiders.33
This mutual sustenance of state and nation has ensured the survival and resilience of the national state as a form of cultural polity, and continues to do so to this day. Even when the attainment of statehood is not strictly necessary for nationalism to realize its goals – as in cases of cultural nationalism, or those of autonomy (‘home rule’) – it has become the normal mode of national self-realization in the modern world. This is partly because of the physical and psychological protection it affords, as nationalists are never tired of repeating; and of the general recognition that a system of national states confers on those that conform to its principles. But it is also the result of a historical development by which the first modern and highly successful professionalized states – those of England (later Britain) and France – also became the models of a cohesive national identity founded on a core or dominant ethnie. The relatively compact Anglo-French model of the national state remains the most influential on the international market. It is more easily adapted and imitated than the American ‘plural’ model, given the latter’s size, scale and resources, and the peculiar checks and balances of its federal Constitution, which are so ill suited to the exigencies of the smaller, poorer and later-developing ‘state-nations’ in Africa and Asia. Besides, the Anglo-French model was historically prior: most of these ‘state-nations’ owed their existence as states as well as their boundaries to the European colonial powers, notably France and Britain, and they still look to them for the basic model of how a national society and national state should be formed and sustained.34
As long as this mutual sustenance continues, as long as states protect and fashion national identities while drawing for their power and solidarity on the mobilized historic culture-community at their core, so long will national states remain the prime political actors in the modern world, and so long will the peoples of our planet place their loyalty and trust in the sovereign, territorially finite, national state.