Ever since I first got to know him, many years ago, the Chilean historian Claudio Véliz has been organizing seminars. In the sixties he had his office in Chatham House, alongside Arnold Toynbee’s, and he brought to London ideological Latin American economists and anthropologists to verify their inability to deal with the pragmatic English. He invited me to one of these reproductions of the Tower of Babel and I had a very good time.
Like the history to which he devotes his time, Claudio Véliz has become global and now directs La Conversazione, a tricontinental conference that moves intellectuals around between Oxford, Melbourne and Boston to talk about every topic imaginable. The one that has just been held was on nationalism, a theme that has now become topical as, suddenly, old nations have begun to disintegrate and others have begun to reconstruct or reinvent themselves in Europe, Asia and Africa, in a further turn of the screw to this spectacular end of millennium.
The paper that I commented on was by Professor Roger Scruton, a subtle essayist who had marshalled more complex arguments than one normally hears to defend his idea of the nation. The nation, according to Professor Scruton, stems from a communitarian feeling similar to, but much richer than, that of the tribe, that fraternity of the first person plural, the ‘we’ that incorporates the dead, and those still to be born, into the society of the living, as members with full rights. Language, religion and the land that they share are the basis of nationalist feeling. But writing enriches and ‘immortalizes’ it when, as in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic or English, with the King James Bible, it takes the form of representative religious texts through which the living speak with their ancestors and descendants. A community cemented in this way frees itself from history and acquires a metaphysical permanence which precedes and is much deeper than the constitution of the State, a modern phenomenon which — in only a few privileged cases, it is true — fits the nation like a glove on the hand.
But in the case of Europe, there is even more mortar to strengthen
this structure. Its nations inherited the greatest achievement of the Roman Empire, a system of laws for the resolution of conflicts which are universal and independent of the arbitrary actions of those who govern. This inheritance has been particularly fertile in the case of Britain, where it has created a ‘gravitational force of territorial jurisdictions’, through which conflicts are resolved, contracts are legalized, institutions are strengthened and one lives in security and freedom thanks to the strong links established between the members of a national ‘we’ that feels and knows itself to be different from the rest, from ‘them’.
I suspect that it would not worry Professor Roger Scruton that his delicate conceptual mechanism for describing what is a nation can only be applied to one nation, Great Britain, and that all the others in the world are exceptions. He is that rara avis of our time: an intelligent conservative without an inferiority complex. I always read him with interest, and sometimes with admiration, although his essays — and the provocative journal that he edits, The Salisbury Review — often give me confirmation of the difference that Hayek described between a conservative and a liberal.
His thesis seems to me an elegant sophism, an attractive intellectual creation which, as happens in fictions, falls to pieces when set against reality. I have nothing against fictions, I dedicate my life to writing them and I am convinced that existence would be intolerable without them for most mortals. But there are benign and malign fictions, those that enrich human experience and those that impoverish it and are a source of violence. For the blood that it has caused to be spilled throughout history, for the way in which it has contributed to stoke up prejudices, racism, xenophobia, lack of communication between peoples and cultures, for the alibis that it has provided for authoritarianism, totalitarianism, colonialism, religious and ethnic genocide, the nation seems to me to be a pristine example of a malign fantasy.
A nation is a political fiction imposed on a social and geographic reality almost always by force, for the benefit of a political minority and maintained through a system of uniformity which imposes homogeneity, either gently or severely, at the price of the disappearance of a pre-existing heterogeneity and sets up barriers and obstacles which often make the development of religious, cultural or ethnic diversity impossible within its boundaries. Many are now scandalized at the
operations of racial and religious cleansing of the Serbs against the Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, but the reality is that the history of every nation is plagued by savagery of this kind which patriotic history — another fiction — takes charge of hiding. This has happened not only in New Guinea and Peru — two nations that Scruton mentions with scepticism — but also in the oldest and most respected ‘imaginary communities’, as Benedict Anderson calls them, those which through their longevity and power seem to have been born with the form and spontaneity of a tree or a storm.
No nation has arisen naturally. The coherence and fraternity still displayed by some also mask frightening realities beneath the embellishing fictions — be they literary, historical or artistic — in which their identity is formed. In these nations as well we find pitilessly destroyed those ‘contradictions and differences’ — creeds, races, customs and languages, which are not always minority — which the nation, like Camus’s Caligula, needs to destroy in order to feel safe, to guard against the risk of fragmentation. And not even that multitude of African and Latin American nations that have come about as a result of the eccentric demarcations imposed on those continents by the colonial powers have such an arbitrary and artificial lineage as Transjordan, a country invented by Winston Churchill with the stroke of a pen on a Sunday afternoon, according to his famous boutade.
The difference is that the old nations seem more serious, necessary and realistic than the new ones because, like religions, they have acquired an abundant literature and also seem to be validated by the oceans of blood that they have spilled. But this is a mirage. Because, contrary to the hypotheses that Roger Scruton lays out in his conclusions, it is extraordinary that, despite the enormous efforts made by the oldest nations to create this common denominator, this protective and isolationist ‘we’, what are becoming each day more manifest in these nations are the irresistible centrifugal forces that challenge this myth. It is happening in France, in Spain, let alone in Italy and even in Great Britain itself. And, of course, in the United States where the development of multiculturalism frightens conservatives like Allan Bloom as well as progressives like Arthur Schlesinger, who see in this flowering of diverse cultures — African, Hispanic, Native American — a serious threat to the nation (which of course it is). With few exceptions, modern societies display an increasing mixture of ‘them’ and ‘us’ in very diverse forms — racial, religious, linguistic, regional,
ideological — which weakens and erases the geographical and historic common denominator that Charles Maurras called ‘the land of the dead’, on which the idea of the nation has been founded since the Enlightenment.
Is Great Britain an exception? Did this truth, this coherent, compact, integrated society formed by the sea, the climate, common law, reformed religion, individualism and freedom, which Roger Scruton evokes so beautifully in his writings, ever exist? Over the past thirty years I have frequently visited and lived for long periods of time in this country — the country I admire the most — and I have observed and studied it with unceasing devotion. But I have never seen what Scruton sees, this metaphysical Albion. And of course much less now than in that winter of 1962 when, as soon as I had crossed the Channel and got on the Dover train, I was presented with a cup of tea and a biscuit, which shook my tenacious incredulity with respect to national psychologies.
Great Britain is today the Austrian Popper, the Latvian Isaiah Berlin and the Islamic fundamentalists who burn The Satanic Verses in Brighton and want to kill Salman Rushdie. And it is also the Pakistani Rushdie and the Indian-Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul, the most British of British writers, not only because of the elegance of his English, but above all because none of his colleagues can equal him in those traditional English literary virtues: irony, sardonic wit, gentle scepticism. Can we take seriously a ‘we’ that includes Roger Scruton, whose political plan for Europe is a revival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, who would like to establish the Soviet Socialist Republic of Great Britain and with the drunken and painted hordes that I’ve had to contend with when I’ve been to watch Chelsea Football Club? I fear that despite his Celtic and Norman ancestors and my ancestors — an outrageous mixture of Extremadurans with Catalans and Incas — that it would be much more consistent to have a ‘we’ that would include him and me, the only two writers in the world who admire Margaret Thatcher and detest Fidel Castro.
Nationalism is a form of lack of culture that pervades all cultures and coexists with all ideologies, a chameleon resource at the service of politicians of every persuasion. In the nineteenth century it seemed that socialism would put an end to it, that the theory of class struggle, revolution and the proletarian international would lead to the disappearance of frontiers and the establishment of universal society. The
reverse occurred. Mao strengthened the idea of the nation to a chauvinistic degree and now, with the bankruptcy of communism, it is in the name of nationalism that regimes like North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba justify their existence. They allege that their rigid systems of censorship and isolation are there to defend national culture threatened by ‘them’.
Beneath these pretexts there lies a truth. All nations — poor or rich, backward or modern — are today less stable than they once were. There is a process of internationalization of life which, in some cases more rapidly, in other cases more slowly, is eroding them, gnawing at those boundaries that had been established and preserved at the price of so much blood. It is not socialism that is perpetrating this outrage in the world. It is capitalism. A practical system — not an ideology — for producing and distributing wealth, which, at a certain moment in its development, found frontiers to be obstacles to the growth of markets, companies and capital. And then, without proclaiming it, without boasting about it, without hiding its intention — to gain profits — behind big words, the capitalist system, through the internationalization of production, trade and property, has imposed on nations other coordinates and demarcations which create links and interests between individuals and societies which in practice increasingly denaturalize the idea of the nation. Creating world markets, transnational companies, disseminating shares and property in societies throughout the globe, this system has been depriving nations, in the economic sphere, of many of the prerogatives on which their sovereignty was based. This has had already an extraordinary effect in the cultural field, and is also beginning to have an effect in the political sphere, where the steps that are beginning to be taken, here and there, towards the formation of vast supranational organizations like the European Community or the Free Trade Treaty in America, would have been inconceivable in any other way.
This process must be welcome. The weakening and dissolution of nations within broad and flexible economic and political communities, under the sign of freedom, will not only contribute to the development and well-being of the planet, lessening the risk of warlike conflicts and opening new opportunities for trade and industry; it will also allow the diversification and development of genuine cultures, which arise and grow out of a need for expression of a homogeneous group, even though they do not serve the will of political power.
Paradoxically, only internationalization can guarantee the right to existence for those minority cultures that the nation has swept away in order to consolidate the myth of its untouchability.
Cambridge, Mass., November 1992