Volume 7, No. 3, March 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
The return of the National Question – III
Nationalism since the First World War
Chris Harman
There can be little doubt that Lenin was right in his argument against Rosa Luxemburg and others that the development of capitalism was leading to a proliferation of new nationalisms. Far from these being ‘Utopian’, nationalist movements contributed to the break up of all the great empires. The Russian Revolution of 1917, like its precursor in 1905, involved the seizure of power by nationalist movements around its periphery as well as by workers and peasants at its centre. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian war effort in October 1918 led to rapid secession by the Czechs, the Romanians of Transylvania, the Croats and the Slovenes, leaving behind separate rump Hungarian and Austrian states. Even the victorious British Empire was shaken by a revolt in Ireland, which succeeded in gaining independence for three quarters of the country, by the first massive demonstrations in India and the first revolutionary upsurges in China. The weakening of the European colonial empires as a result of WWII was followed by independence for India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia and then, after a bloody war, North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, to be followed by Ghana, Nigeria, Malaysia, Kenya, Uganda, Morocco, Tunisia, most of French Africa, the Congo, Zambia, Malawi, and after further bloody wars, Algeria, Aden, the rest of Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and finally Zimbabwe. By this time virtually every member of the world’s population would define themselves as a citizen of one or other of 194 national states[73], with the USSR remaining the only sizeable multinational empire. Just as market, commodity production and capital accumulation had conquered the whole world, so had the national state as the archetypical form of organised political power.
The formation of new nations did not always throw the old empires into convulsions: Britain finally abandoned India, Holland abandoned Indonesia and Belgium abandoned the Congo without being thrown into any great domestic crisis. But on occasions it did, with the wars in Indo-China and Algeria shaking metropolitan France, the war in Vietnam throwing the US into a deep political crisis, and the wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea leading to political revolution in Portugal. To this extent too, Lenin was vindicated. Indeed, the vindication often went further than he himself could ever have imagined. So much has the ideal of the national state become part of the ruling ideology throughout the world system that it was taken up by movements that differed in some important respects from those he had known. The movements that fought against the old colonial empires were usually based in the administrative divisions created by those empires themselves. These divisions ignored whatever boundaries there might once have been between groups with different languages or traditional cultures. They separated like from like, and threw like together with unlike. Yet it was within these divisions that those who took over from the colonial empires attempted to create new nations – in India and Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and throughout black Africa – without a common language for the whole country and sometimes without even a unified market. Alongside these there have been cases of minorities reacting to their oppression by seeing themselves as a nation, even though they do not live in any defined territory or share a separate common language. This was true by the 1930s of many of Europe’s Jewish minorities and by the early 1970s of very many black Americans. Finally, precisely because the notion of nationhood was so central to the ideology of the system, people’s reaction to the economic and political crisis of one existing national state was to look for a way out through the creation of a new nation, based on different criteria to the old – as with the attempts to carve a Biafran national state using the Ibo language out of Nigeria in the late 1960s, Catalan and Basque states out of post-Franco Spain, an Akali state based on the Sikh religion out of the Indian province of Punjab, or Serb and Croat states, based on the same language but different religions, out of what used to be Yugoslavia. In each case, those who preached the nationalist project seemed far less ‘utopian’ and far more ‘practical’ than those who turned to class politics. The nationalists were, after all, cutting with the ideology of nationhood that had come to dominate the world with capitalism.
Nationality and culture today
The profusion of nationalities has been accompanied everywhere by a stress on the differences of cultures. In the advanced Western countries the ideology of biological racism has, to some extent, given way in the last quarter of a century to what might be called cultural racism. This does not talk in terms of biological inferiority of non-whites, but of the “cultural backwardness”, or at least the “cultural difference” of those who come from non-British, non-French, non-German – or more generally non-European or non-Western – backgrounds. So it was that back in 1978 Margaret Thatcher played the race card shortly before an election, claiming British people were being “swamped by people of a different culture”.
In a slightly less extreme form the argument goes, “Everyone has their own culture, so we naturally identify with ours, and other groups with theirs.” Such thinking underlies the stress of the right wing ideologues who increasingly dominate the content of the national teaching curriculum in Britain on ‘British history’, ‘English literature’ and the Christian religion. Interestingly, these ideologues are pressing for the right of both evangelical Christians and Islamic fundamentalists to set up their own schools.[74]
The argument is, at least in part, accepted by some of those usually regarded as being on the left. Many liberal intellectuals stress that everyone must value their own culture, and even go so far as to show concern about the “bastardisation of cultures”.[75] And many of those who react against the disguised racism of the various forms of cultural supremacism do so by asserting a cultural separatism of their own – which in a few cases becomes an inverted form of cultural supremacism. They argue that because they are of Irish, Jewish, Armenian, Asian, Arab, Muslim, African, etc. ancestry, then they have to fight to preserve the purity and independence of their “indigenous culture”. They justify their stand with references to the “fight against cultural genocide” and “cultural imperialism”.
Yet all these different stresses on maintaining the separation of cultures – whether from the conservative right or from those who see themselves on the anti-racist, anti-imperialist left – rest on the same fallacy. They all assume that the growing proliferation of nationalities and nationalisms rests upon a growing diversity of cultures. But the modern world is, in fact, marked by a growing together of cultures, by a trend towards a homogeneous world culture – a trend enormously more marked than when Marx and Engels noted how “the intellectual creations of individual nations become common property, national one sidedness and narrow mindedness becomes more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature”[76], or than when Kautsky and Lenin wrote about the merging of cultures 90 or so years ago.
The word ‘culture’ has two different meanings, one broad and one narrow. In its broad meaning it refers to the totality of people’s social practices including such things as the way they get a livelihood, their religious practices, the relations between the sexes, their moral attitudes, their sense of time, their treatment of old people and children, their cooking, and, drawing all these activities together, their language. The more restricted meaning refers to art, music and literature. The two meanings are connected. For culture in the narrow artistic sense is an expression of culture in the wider, way of life sense. Art grows out of the soil of the wider culture and displays certain of the elements within it in a form that can bewitch or delight, thrill or frighten. When people like a certain artistic product, they do so because they find in it something which, in one way or another, gives expression to their own lives and dilemmas. It is this which enables ‘culture’ in the narrow sense to provide a sense of identity to people from a particular society, something to which they can try to cling at moments of social crisis. This is why conservatives of all sorts seek to extol what they claim is the “traditional national culture”. They are endeavouring to appeal to past ways of living so as to oppose any challenges to the old society. It is also why those who seek to establish new nations under their own hegemony search for what they claim are radically different counter-traditions.
But culture in the narrow sense can never be more than a partial expression of people’s wider way of life in a class society. For in such a society there is not one way of life, but different ways of life for each class. And art and literature tend to express the way of life of those classes who alone have the resources and the leisure to sustain artistic production – the privileged exploiting classes. Even though the best artists are those who attempt to reflect the total social experience, which includes elements of the experience of the oppressed and exploited, they do so from the point of view of those who depend on the oppressors and exploiters for sustenance, even when they are not themselves from the ruling classes. When we talk of British art, Russian art or Chinese art, we are talking of the art of the rulers of those societies, art which may say something about the exploited classes, but only in an indirect oblique way. This is even true when we talk about Aztec art or much art from pre-colonial Africa, for specialisation in artistic production was not possible on any scale until there was at least the beginning of a polarisation into classes.
What is more, as society changes, so culture changes. It cannot be a changeless fixed thing. Any attempt to treat it as such is, in reality, a fiction, an ideological device used to bind people to certain approved patterns of behaviour. This is especially true in the modern world, a world which has been changed utterly by the development of capitalism. Everywhere on the globe people’s lives have been transformed as they have been subordinated to market relations and dragged from the relative isolation of rural life into contact with vast population centres.
When people talk of “traditional culture” of any sort, they are harking back to something which no longer fits the reality of their lives anywhere. This is true of attempts to force us to live a traditional “English culture”, most of which was historically created by and for leisured gentlemen living in a predominantly agrarian society. It is true too of those who, out of a justified revulsion against such cultural reaction, would have us turn to “Celtic culture”, “Indian culture”, “African culture”, “Islamic culture”, or any other.
In fact, the forms of culture that dominate in every part of the world are products of very recent history, even when the conservatives claim an ancient lineage for them. It was, for instance, only a century ago that Celtic literature was reborn at the hands of modern, bourgeois – and usually Anglo-Irish – intellectuals like Lady Gregory and Yeats, or that modern petty bourgeois nationalists sought to create a Hindi speaking culture in opposition to that of the plebeian market language of the Delhi region, Hindustani, and the courtly version of it, Urdu.
The contemporary ‘national’ forms of both high art and popular art are very much the products of the recent, capitalist, period of human existence – thus with the different forms of popular music that tend to dominate different regions of the globe. As an authoritative study of non-Western popular music tells, these are all relatively recent products, based on the drawing together of elements from different cultures: “The most conspicuous form of acculturation involves Western influence – especially the adoption of Western musical elements (such as instruments, harmony and vocal style) by non-Western musical cultures…The Western disco, rock and slow ballad have become international styles, promoted by a network of multinational corporations.”[77]
But, of course, Western music itself was not a product of the European peoples alone. A central component of it came into being as “descendants of African slaves in the Americas developed dynamic, hybrid musics synthesising African-derived rhythms and Western melodic and harmonic patterns.”[78] Similarly, in parts of the globe new regional styles have been based on a synthesis of traditional and Western forms. Thus Indian film music, which today has a multinational audience stretching from Vietnam and Indonesia to the former Yugoslavia[79], is formed by a merging of local styles from south and north India, using “Western harmony in its own distinctive way”[80], while modern African popular music arose as “some…Caribbean…styles – especially the Cuban rumba – became widely popular in the Congo and other parts of Africa from the 1950s on, and generated new hybrids of native African and Afro-Caribbean music”.[81]
The example of popular music shows how advanced the tendency towards the fusion of cultures can be. There may not yet be a single world popular music, but there are a relatively small number of interacting regional styles, with the trend being towards fusion and the conquest of worldwide audiences, not towards separation and narrow national traditions. That is why its impact is resented by the cultural conservatives in every country. Yet popular music is probably the form of artistic culture that most penetrates the life of the great mass of people: its closest rival in terms of popularity, spectator sport, although hardly an ‘artistic product’, is even more a uniform worldwide phenomenon.
Such cultural growing together should really surprise no one. The dynamic of capitalist accumulation is creating, in fact, a worldwide way of life (or rather contrasting worldwide ways of life for the opposing classes). Significantly, the creators of modern popular cultures are those thrown together in the great cities by the spread of capitalism: “One of the most remarkable features of the evolution of popular music is its association in numerous cultures worldwide with an unassimilated, disenfranchised, impoverished, socially marginalised class, the lumpenproletariat of hoodlums, pimps, prostitutes, vagrants, sidewalk vendors, drug addicts, musicians, miscellaneous street people and assorted unemployed migrants…It was such groups…that gave birth to such diverse and vital forms as rebetika, modern kroncong, reggae, steel band, the tango and jazz…The lumpenproletariat are city dwellers…They are inherently predisposed to new forms of cultural expression.[82]
But it is not only the creators of an art form who determine its popularity, and therefore who determine what will flourish and what will die out. It is also the consumers, those for whom they perform. And for the mass of workers and the urban middle class (as well as the lumpens), tempos of work, patterns of consumption, styles of dress, forms of recreation, forms of sexual relations and the rest increasingly cut across the old cultural barriers. Languages remain different, but what they say is increasingly the same. If there is, in this broad sense, increasingly a world culture, it is not surprising that art – both in its popular and its ‘highbrow’ forms – is increasingly international, with a world audience for films and TV programmes, rock bands and symphony orchestras, for novels and operas. Just as in popular art there is increasing interaction between regional styles, each the product of capitalist development, so in high art the pre-capitalist forms have been replaced by international, capitalist forms. Thus the novel, which was a literary form created as the bourgeoisie fought for power in Western Europe, has been adopted and mastered by writers from the non-Western world like Ngugi, Achebe, Rushdie, Ben Ochre, Marquez and so on.
Cultural imperialism occurred when dominating powers forced conquered peoples to adopt their language and their view of world history – as the British and French did in various parts of their empires, or as the Russians did first under the Tsar and then under Stalin. It was a by-product of imperialism proper – the bloody and barbaric process by which empires were carved out and whole peoples exterminated. But the fusion of cultures today cannot be dismissed as simply a product of enforced subjection. Rather, it flows from the irreversible changes wrought by the spread of capitalism. It occurs because throughout the world people are trying to come to terms with living in societies that are moulded by the same world system, which are subject to the same tempos of accumulation. As the forms of exploitation undertaken by ruling classes get more and more alike, so do their lifestyles and their culture. By the same token, as the humdrum everyday lives of the mass of people become ever more dependent on their ability to sell their labour power and to fit into the tempo of work in the factory, mine or office, so their forms of recreation, culture and even dress converge. Rhythms of modern pop, for instance, reflect – even if only by trying to provide an escape from – the reality of urban life and the compulsion to paid labour. The novel form dominates in literature everywhere because it gives expression to the way bourgeois and petty bourgeois intellectuals experience a present day worldwide reality.
Nothing brings home the fact of an increasingly international culture more than television images of the civil wars between rival nationalities that have broken out in the former Yugoslavia and the former USSR. For the mass of fighters on either side wear the same jeans and the same trainers, listen to the same Walkmans or ghetto blasters, follow the same sports and quite likely watch the same soap operas. This is because, if they were not fighting, they would be living essentially similar lives, working at near identical jobs.
The process of transformation is not of course complete. A large portion of the world’s population are still peasants rather than wage labourers. Among the wage labourers there are those who live on the brink of starvation, unable to get anything more than the occasional day’s work, and those who are in full time employment in large industry. In many cities there is a very large petty bourgeoisie, often merging at its lower reaches with a mass of still barely urbanised former peasants, which can still mobilise behind the demand for a return to tradition – as with the Islamic movements in many Middle Eastern countries or the Hindu supremacist movements in India. Yet the trend towards fusion of cultures is still overwhelming, simply because the pressures of the world system on the lives of everyone within it are overwhelming. That is why the returns to tradition are always phoney: the traditions are manufactured, with the most modern techniques being used to recast the meaning of the oldest texts.
The culture created by modern capitalism is of course a deficient distorted culture. It is the culture of a class society that drains meaning from the lives of millions of people. It is a culture that has condoned slavery while preaching freedom, producing Belsen as well as Beethoven. The point is not to worship this culture in the manner of so many postmodernists, but to recognise it as the only terrain people have to fight on, since the system that created it has made obsolete and destroyed all others.
Modern theories of nationality and nationalism
The two great tendencies of the last 75 years – the proliferation of nations, with many created among groupings that did not fit into the classic 19th century model, and the growing homogeneity of culture worldwide in every respect except language – has led to confusion among certain recent writers on nationalism. They see that although there no longer seems to be any fixed, objective criteria for saying what is a nation and what is not, an identification with ‘your own’ nation is taken for granted by virtually the whole of humanity. The result has been a tendency to see nationalisms as arbitrary constructs, detached from the economic development of capitalism. This is the tenor of Nigel Harris’s recent book, National Liberation. For Nigel, capitalism is by its very nature an international system, based on the free movement of commodities and finance. It grew up within a system of national states, which were being constructed by pressures – the competition between rival absolutisms – other than itself, but today has an innate tendency to break through the boundaries between these states and to establish a new multinational order. All that holds it back is the continuing ability of political forces to get people to identify with the ideology of nation.
Benedict Anderson’s very influential book, Imagined Communities, makes a greater effort to locate the growth of rival national consciousness in material reality. What he calls “print capitalism” plays a very important role in his account. And he sees the rising bourgeoisie as playing a vital role in the creation of the first European nations: “The coalition between Protestantism and print capitalism quickly created large new reading publics – not least among merchants and women who typically knew no Latin – and mobilised them for politico-religious purposes.”[83] The growth of new national consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries was possible because of “a half fortuitous but explosive interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print) and the fatality of human linguistic diversity”.[84] Once some nations were already established, individuals from certain social groups could imagine establishing new ones, based on giving a printed form to languages. “The ‘nation’ thus becomes something capable of being consciously aspired to…rather than a slowly sharpening frame of vision.”[85] “A model of the independent nation was available for pirating.”[86] The audience for the new printed languages came, by and large, from “families of ruling classes of nobility and landed gentry, courtiers and ecclesiastics, rising middle strata of plebeian lay officials, professionals, and commercial and industrial bourgeoisies”.[87] So “in world historical terms bourgeoisies were the first class to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis…In Europe these solidarities had an outmost stretch limited by vernacular legibilities”.[88] But once the model was established along linguistic lines in Europe, it could operate if necessary without them. The European powers established administrations in the colonies that cut across old linguistic divisions. The indigenous middle class that was recruited to fill many lower and middle administrative positions began to imagine themselves taking charge and copying the European model: “Is Indian nationalism not inseparable from the colonial administrative-market unification, after the Mutiny, by the formidable and advanced of the imperial powers?”[89]
However, Anderson does not succeed in combining these elements into a coherent, total, materialist analysis. For, instead of recognising the nation state as the typical form of capitalist rule, he puts the emphasis on subjective factors that led people to want to “imagine” new forms of community. These factors first emerged, he argues, when social and economic changes in the late medieval period led to the breakdown of “cultural concepts of great antiquity” that gave “a certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above all, death, loss and servitude)”. From that point, “the search was on for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together”.[90] The roots of the nationalist ideology, then, are finally located in existential yearning, not capitalist development, despite the promise of much of Anderson’s argument. This becomes clearer in his more recent New World Disorder [91] in which the strength of nationalism is ascribed, not to capitalism as such, but to “two significant factors” linked to “the rise of capitalism…mass communications and mass migrations”. “Print capitalism brought into being mass publics who began to imagine through the media a new type of community: the nation”, while “the mass appearance in settled communities of thousands of immigrants did not, and will not, fail to produce its own ethnicisations…Le Pen’s neo-fascist movement in France…the National Front in Britain…‘White Power’ extremists in the United States…” This is to repeat the old fallacy that immigration is to blame for racism – despite the very powerful evidence that racism is often strongest where there are fewest members of ethnic minorities (as with anti-semitism in Poland today, or with anti-black racism in virtually all white towns and suburbs in Britain).
The weakness in Anderson’s otherwise powerful argument is undoubtedly connected with the starting point of his book. He began to write it, he explains, in the late 1970s under the impact of the first war between what he saw as socialist states – China and Vietnam. His whole aim was to understand what it was about nationalism that made it a central feature of socialist as well as capitalist societies. By refusing to see China and Vietnam as societies dominated by the dynamic of competitive accumulation – as a state organised variant of capitalism – he was driven to look outside capitalist society for the roots of nationalism, to see these instead in the satisfaction of innate psychological needs.
The result, paradoxically, is that Anderson is blind to something which the non-Marxist, Ernest Gellner, does grasp. Gellner sees the development of history not in terms of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism, but rather of “primitive” society, agrarian society and industrial societies. Despite the innumerable faults with this approach, it does provide him with one advantage over Anderson when looking at the so-called socialist societies of the mid-20th century. He does not expect them to be any different in their essentials to capitalist societies, and looks for material explanations for those shared features that differentiate both from previous societies. Thus he is absolutely scathing about attempts to see nations as eternal: “Nations as a natural God-given way of classifying men are a myth; nationalism which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them and often obliterates pre-existing cultures – that is the reality”.[92]
He argues it is the need of each “industrial society” for a “homogeneous” population, literate in a single tongue, that gives rise to the nation: “It is not the case that nationalism imposes homogeneity…It is the objective need for homogeneity that is reflected in nationalism…A modern industrial state can only function with a culturally standardised, interchangeable population…Nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that is how it does present itself. It is, in reality, the consequence of a new form of social organisation, based on deeply internalised education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state.”[93] Just as the nation is a result of objective material realities, so too is the striving after nationhood among the masses. With industrialisation: “The illiterate, half starved populations from their erstwhile cultural ghettos who are pulled into the melting pots of shanty towns yearn for incorporation into one of those cultural pools which already has, or looks as if it might acquire, a state of its own, with the subsequent promise of full cultural citizenship, access to primary schools, employment, and all.”[94] When entry into the perks of nationhood is easy, he argues, they will forget their old culture and assimilate – thus explaining the reality that there are around ten times more potential languages in the world than there are nations or aspiring nations. But when they are “spurned” they will seek some other way to define themselves. “Nationalism as such is fated to prevail, but not any particular nationalism”.[95]
Gellner can therefore go beyond both Anderson and Harris in seeing why the drive to identify with a nation – and if necessary to try to create new nations – is such a central feature of the modern world: “Nations can be defined only in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than the other way round…When general social conditions make for standardised, homogeneous, centrally sustained high calderas, pervading whole populations and not just elite minorities, a situation arises in which well defined educationally sanctioned and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit which men willingly and ardently identify…Only then does it appear that any defiance of their boundaries by political units constitutes a scandal…Under these conditions, and these conditions only, can nations be defined in terms of both will and culture.”[96]
But Gellner has a vast blind area of his own. He does not conceive it possible that industrial society could be organised in a way other than it is. To this extent his much more materialist analysis leads to a conclusion very like Anderson’s: the nation dominates all existing societies, and we have to like it or lump it. Gellner, who was involved in protests against the descent into rival barbaric nationalisms in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1991, clearly does not like it all that much. But he can point to no other way forward.
Eric Hobsbawm’s work Nations and Nationalism since 1780 takes for granted a framework very similar to Gellner’s,[97] although with far more references to the Marxist tradition which, Hobsbawm points out, was the first to grasp that nations are not timeless entities but constructed with the rise of “modern society”. Most of the work is concerned with fixing a mass of historical material into the framework – so much at times that the reader is in danger of getting lost amidst a mass of fascinating facts, unable to see the wood for the trees. But Hobsbawm departs from Gellner at a number of points.
First, he insists the views of those who align with national movements or national states may not be as clear cut as the nationalist leaders claim: “If I have a major criticism of Gellner’s work it is that his preferred perspective of modernisation from above makes it difficult to pay adequate attention to the view from below. The view from below, i.e. the nation as seen not by governments and spokesmen and activists of nationalist (and non-nationalist) movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda, is exceedingly difficult to discover…We cannot assume that national identification – when it exists – excludes or is always or ever superior to the remainder of the sets of identifications which constitute the social being…National identification and what it is believed to imply can change and shift in time, even in the course of quite short periods.”[98]
Later he elaborates the argument further: “Men and women did not choose collective identification as they chose shoes, knowing that one could only put on one pair at a time. They had, and still have, several attachments and loyalties simultaneously, including nationality, and are simultaneously concerned with various aspects of life, any one of which may at any moment in time be foremost in their minds, as occasion suggests. For long periods of time these different attachments would not make incompatible demands on a person…It was only when one of these loyalties conflicted directly with another that problems of choosing between them arose.”
He provides a graphic example of how social concerns and national loyalties have interacted by quoting Peter Hanak’s research on letters from soldiers from different ethnic backgrounds serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War: “During the first years there was not much nationalism or anti-monarchism among the correspondents…The years of war, but especially the first Russian revolution, raised the political content of the intercepted correspondence dramatically. Indeed, the censors’ reports on public opinions unanimously observed that the Russian revolution was the first political event since the outbreak of war whose shock waves penetrated to the lowest levels of the people. Among the activists of some of the oppressed nationalities such as the Poles and Ukrainians, it even raised hopes of reform – perhaps even of independence. However, the dominant mood was for peace and social transformation. The political opinions which now begin to appear even in the letters of labourers, peasants and working class women, is best analysed in terms of three interlocking binary opposites: rich-poor (or lord-peasant, boss-worker), war-peace, and order-disorder. The links, at least in the letters, are obvious: the rich live well and don’t serve in the army, the poor people are at the mercy of the rich and powerful, the authorities of state and army, and so on. The novelty lies not only in the greater frequency of complaints…but in the sense that a revolutionary expectation of fundamental change was available as an alternative to passive acceptance of destiny.”
National feeling comes into the arguments only indirectly, chiefly because, to cite Hanak, “until 1918 national sentiment had not yet crystallised out, among the broad masses of the people, into a stable component of consciousness…” Nationality appears most often as an aspect of the conflict between rich and poor, especially where the two belong to different nationalities. But even where we find the strongest national tone – as among the Czech, Serbian and Italian letters – we also find an overwhelming wish for social transformation…The period when the October revolution made its first impact was the one in which the social element in the public mood was at its strongest…
It was only when the wave of strikes in Austro-Hungary and Germany in January 1918 failed to bring down the regime and force an end to the war that people began to look away from social revolution and to look for their salvation through nationalism: “But even when, in the course of 1918, the national theme finally became dominant in popular consciousness, it was not separate from or opposed to the social theme. For most poor people the two went together, as the monarchy crashed…” Hobsbawm argues that “nationalism was victorious…to the extent that the movements which reflected the real concerns of the poor people of Europe failed in 1918. When this happened, the middle and lower strata of the oppressed nationalities were in position to become the ruling elites of the new independent…petty states”.[99]
The second novelty in Hobsbawm’s account is that he claims the hold of nationalism is declining, despite the widespread belief to the contrary. He bases his claim on a number of arguments. First, he denies that most of the new states that have emerged in the ex-colonial world since 1945 can really be counted as national states, since confined within the old colonial administrative boundaries they cannot achieve linguistic homogeneity or gain any real loyalty from the mass of their subjects. Yet this only proves they are unsuccessful – because late coming – national states. All aspire to become the focus of identity of their subjects, and some are successful, even if the identification is not total (but then, Hobsbawm’s own analysis shows we should not expect it to be): despite the state’s failure to impose a common language, very many Indian citizens do identify with “their country”, even if they also identify themselves as Hindus or Muslims, workers or employers, Brahmins or untouchables. In Africa and the Middle East the fact that state boundaries cross cut linguistic boundaries does not always stop the state becoming a focus of loyalty for the middle classes who depend on it for a livelihood and look to it to ‘modernise’ society, and who in turn exert ideological influence on the workers, the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry.
At the time of writing he had a second, even more dubious, argument, concerning the ‘socialist’ countries: “Inasmuch as such regimes do not, at least in theory, identify with any of their constituent nationalities and regard the interests of each of them as secondary to higher common purpose, they are non-national…It was the great achievement of the communist regimes in multinational countries to limit the disastrous effects of nationalism within them…The ‘discrimination’ or even ‘oppression’ against which the champions of various Soviet nationalities abroad protest, is far less than the expected consequences of the withdrawal of Soviet power.”[100]
One only wishes at this point that Hobsbawm would take seriously his own injunction to look at things ‘from below’ and not just in terms of how official spokespersons present them. He might have asked himself what it meant to be a Tatar or Caucasian temporary worker living in a hostel in Moscow, a Turkic speaking conscript into a Russian speaking army, or a Kazakh speaking child in Alma Ata, a city without a single nursery using the native language. As it is, the realities of oppression are confined to two footnotes, one mentioning the Romanisation of Ceausescu’s Romania (but not persecution of the Turks in Bulgaria, still less the ethnic cleansing which drove Hungarian speakers from Slovakia and German speakers from Bohemia, Moravia and western Poland after 1945) and “the mass transfer of entire populations on the grounds of their nationality which took place after the war” in the USSR (but not the glorification of Tsarist Russia’s conquest of the non-Russian peoples that became the official ideology from that time on).
Whether Hobsbawm likes it or not, all the Eastern European regimes were seen by everyone who lived in them as regimes dominated by single nationalities.[101] It is hardly surprising that, since people have been able to express themselves freely, there have been revolts of minority nationalities, and attempts – often orchestrated by remnants of the old ruling parties – to mobilise the dominating nationalities against them.
But Hobsbawm makes two other points that have rather more going for them. He argues: “Nationalism…is no longer a major vector in historical development. In the ‘developed’ world of the 19th century, the building of a number of ‘nations’ which combined nation state and national economy was plainly a central fact of historical transformation…In the ‘dependent’ world of the first half of the 20th century…movements for national liberation and independence were the main agents for the political emancipation of most of the globe…Both were typically unificatory as well as emancipatory…The characteristic nationalist movements of the late 20th century are essentially negative, or rather divisive.”
There is a correct element in this argument. Capitalism today finds even the biggest existing states too small for its operations. The idea that smaller states will make it easier for people to cope with the vagaries of the system is absurd. But this was already true 80 years ago when Rosa Luxemburg used this argument against Lenin. And in economic terms she was right: the successor states to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, failed abysmally to advance their economies in the inter-war years[102], cut off as they were by state boundaries from their old raw materials and markets. But politically she was wrong, because millions of people flocked to nationalist movements, tore the old empires apart and created new states anyway. The fact that nationalism is a blind alley does not automatically stop people going down it, even if it does mean at some point they are likely to do a U-turn and start coming out again.
Hobsbawm’s final point is that much that is loosely called nationalism is not concerned with building new states at all, but rather with mobilising people from certain linguistic or ethnic backgrounds to exercise political pressure on existing states. This, he says, is a product of the way in which economic development has pulled vast numbers of migrants from many different backgrounds into the great cities of the world. The degree of ethnic mixing makes any idea of establishing a new mono-ethnic state impossible. But it also creates powerful constituencies for those who want to make political careers by promising favours to one linguistic, ethnic or religious group rather than another. In extreme cases the result will be horrendous communal bloodbaths. But even if these groups are organised around nationalist identification with a distant land of origin, they cannot be considered nationalist in the way the term is usually used.
His case here is very strong. Yet he still overstates it. In conditions of economic collapse, movements demanding the driving out of other ethnic groups can fight for control even of modern, multinational cities – as we have seen in Bosnia in recent months. Ethnicity can go beyond communalism and aspire to impose new ethnic state boundaries using the most barbaric means.
Some of Hobsbawm’s arguments show that the potential exists for resisting nationalism, that it is not the unstoppable juggernaut many people believe. But they do not show how that potentiality can become a reality. To do that Hobsbawm would have to break with his own watered down Eurocommunism, with its residual admixture of nostalgia for Stalinism, and look to the class alternatives he mentions when writing of the First World War.
Notes
(To be continued)