Volume 7, No. 4, April 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
The central contention of this article so far is that the mystery of the nation state disappears when it is seen as the typical form of political administration associated with the advance of capitalism, from its beginnings in the western fringe of Europe to its present day conquest of the whole world. At each stage those who have striven to share in the gains of this advance, whether they themselves have been capitalists, state bureaucrats or members of the literate middle class, have wanted to have a local national state of their own. The fact that in order to gain such a state they have sometimes had to bend the definition of ‘national’ almost beyond belief is irrelevant, as is the failure of many of the new states to deliver the economic gains expected from them.The system of nation states, then, is the political correlate of the full blown capitalist mode of production. It is the political form which, having aided capitalism in its conquest of the world in its youth, persists into its maturity and old age.
The strength of the ideology of nationalism under capitalism is not, then, surprising. It is part of the reflection in people’s consciousnesses of the experience of living in a capitalist world. Just as living under capitalism makes the great mass of people take for granted that commodity production, alienated wage labour and competition are more common than co-operation, so it makes them take for granted the necessity of the nation state. And nationalist consciousness makes sense so long as they do not challenge the system as a whole: within it the individual capitalist is in a very weak situation unless he has a state to enforce his interests on others[103]; the individual peasant family hopes the state will protect it against the inevitable ups and downs of the market in foodstuffs; the individual worker knows he or she has to belong to a state to be allowed to work and live freely, and to apply for welfare benefits when necessary.
Marx made the point nearly 150 years ago that the ruling ideas are always the ideas of the ruling class. And one of those ideas is the idea of the nation as a ‘natural unit’ for grouping together a section of humanity into its ‘own’ cordoned off part of the planet.The ruling ideas are not immutable. On this at least Hobsbawm is absolutely right. Great social crises create situations in which ideas and realities move in opposite directions, in which social turmoil and human suffering conflict with old allegiances, in which people find it literally impossible to continue to live according to the old ways, in which the outbreak of sudden confrontations creates new antagonisms and new loyalties. In such periods people’s consciousness is not monolithic, but contradictory, to use Gramsci’s description.[104] Old ways of seeing things co-exist with new ways of seeing things. People continue to express themselves using concepts while taking actions that imply completely new ones. In the end the contradiction can only be resolved by breaking with the old or abandoning the new. But the end can sometimes be a very long time in coming.
Thus the development of capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries created forms of social behaviour that challenged the whole ideology of medieval Christianity. The logic of this challenge led to the complete rejection of religious ways of thinking by the Enlightenment. But this rejection did not permeate right through into popular consciousness for centuries. In the interim, people who identified with the new ways of living tried to reconcile themselves partially to the old ways of thinking by continuing to accept Christianity, but in new reformed versions.
The speed of the onset of crises and the degree of social turmoil is much greater under capitalism than under any previous mode of production, and the stresses besetting old forms of consciousness accordingly that much more acute. Nevertheless, contradictory, hybrid forms of consciousness are an inevitable feature of mentality for the great mass of people at the first stage of any great convulsion: the mass of workers who overthrew the Tsar and established Soviets in February 1917 did allow Prince Lvov to head the Provisional Government; the German workers who got rid of the Kaiser and ended the war did, disastrously, allow Ebert, Scheidemann and ‘the bloodhound’ Noske to maintain the power of the bourgeoisie and the officer corps; the Polish workers who created a huge independent trade union in the summer of 1980 did bow down to the Pope and accept the advice of those who preached compromise with their rulers.
It is in this context that we have to explain the sudden rise of new nationalisms. The idea of the division of humanity into nations is etched into people’s consciousness under capitalism. If one national state fails them, the easiest thing is to turn to the idea of creating a different national state. It seems so much more ‘practical’ to rearrange the pieces on the board than to invent a totally new game.This can be encouraged by the material interests of wide sections of the middle class – especially where a large part of a region’s population are fluent in a language other than the official one of the old state. For some of them a separate state – or at least a grant of national autonomy – means improved access to bureaucratic posts. Hence the flourishing of Catalan nationalism in the last couple of years of the fascist regime in Spain, as wide sections of the Catalan speaking middle class joined and exercised influence on a struggle that had previously been spearheaded by mainly Spanish speaking workers. But language is not an indispensable factor: in any formation of a new state identification with the struggle for it can enhance many career prospects.
The directing of discontent into nationalist demands can also be of benefit to important sections of the capitalist or state capitalist ruling class. The most powerful rarely promote nationalism themselves, and they sometimes do their best to resist it as detrimental to their own powerfully established links with the old state. But even then they can come to regard it as the lesser evil compared with the growth of a movement for social revolution. And less powerful elements within the ruling class can see sponsorship of a secessionist state as a very good way of accelerating their own accumulation of wealth. Thus it was not the small Bengali speaking big bourgeoisie who initiated the movement to separate East Pakistan from the central state apparatus in West Pakistan in 1971, but some of them managed to profit enormously when separation finally led to the formation of the new national state of Bangladesh.
A final factor is also of immense importance in helping to trigger identification with nationalist slogans – the extent to which the old state carries through policies that can be seen as involving oppression along national lines. The classic form this takes is discrimination against those who speak a certain language – as with the Turkish government’s attempts in the 1980s to ban Kurdish or the Sri Lankan government’s insistence that Sinhalese, not Tamil, is the official language. Although the middle classes suffer most, workers too face problems every time they come in contact with the state – with its police, its courts, or even its post offices. But discrimination does not have to be formal, as black people in Europe and North America are all too aware. A particular linguistic or religious group can find they are treated as second or third class citizens every time they come into contact with police officers, officials or employers. This was always the experience of the Irish (especially, but not only, the Catholics) under British rule, of the Bengalis under Pakistani rule, and of Kurds under Iraqi rule. The logic of the situation leads to a vicious circle of oppression: the minority protest at the discrimination against them, the state regards them as disloyal, arrests their spokespeople, disbands any representative institutions they possess, censors their press, encourages further discrimination against them, and thus heightens their feeling of alienation from it. What begin as mild protests aimed at securing a better place within the existing state often end up as irreconcilable demands for secession.
But the element of real oppression is not always necessary for a movement to gain mass support. Just as there is usually support of a fairly passive nature for the official nationalism of the state among the majority of its population, so great social and political crises can see that support transferred by a section of the population to its secessionist rival. Indeed, because secession offers change and any change seems like improvement, the loyalty to the new nationalism can be stronger than that to the old – although this increased strength need not last long.
Scotland provides an example of how the nationalism of the non-oppressed[105] can fluctuate wildly. Independence, or at least devolved government, seems on occasions to offer a quick way for people to break from the hold of a Tory government and the grim effects of Britain’s long drawn out economic decline. Support for nationalism, and for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in particular, grows very quickly. Identification with the superficial symbols of British nationalism – the ‘national’ sports teams, the ‘national’ flag, ‘national’ culture and ‘national’ celebrities – becomes overwhelmingly an identification with Scottish symbols. But the support remains passive for the great mass of people and when no breakthrough to independence occurs, can die down as quickly as it arose. And then people see no contradiction in identifying with Scottish symbols (the football team) and British symbols (the monarchy, the armed forces, and even the Olympic team[106], an identification that the SNP does not challenge!).
This does not mean that the nationalism of the non-oppressed cannot occasionally present problems for the existing state. Fortuitous conditions can turn it into a focus for much wider discontents of a social nature, and the state can react by trying to crush it, so creating oppressive conditions that did not exist before. It is worth remembering that until the mid-1930s Basque nationalism was a right wing force in Spanish politics; it was the actions of the state itself that forced it to align itself with the left and to take up a position of irreconcilable hostility to fascism.[107]
More recently the nationalisms of peoples who are not subject to oppression on the basis of any national characteristics, but who live on different sides of state boundaries drawn by great powers in the past, have had considerable political impact. The movement against the East German state machine in 1989 transformed itself into a movement for incorporation into the Federal German Republic, while in South Korea much of the reformist left has seen national reunification as the central slogan – even though parties of the conservative right also call themselves “unification” parties.
In any case, the turn towards nationalism among workers must be regarded as one of the ways the ideas of the ruling class continue to exercise an influence, even when the crisis of the system begins to break people from a conservative attachment to the old order. The extent of this influence depends here, as in other cases, on two factors: the level of collective struggle against the system, and the degree to which socialist organisations exist on the ground, capable of taking up political and ideological arguments in each workplace and locality. Where nationalist influence is greatest is where the crisis results in defeat and demoralisation rather than struggle among workers, and where the ideological crisis of most of the left has done most damage.
For the rise of nationalism cannot be separated from the crisis of the left internationally, which has accompanied the crisis of the system. There is an enormous vacuum on the left, which often leaves those who preach nationalism (or in large areas of the world, religious fundamentalism) with little socialist competition.
Nationalism since the collapse of the Soviet Union
The vacuum on the left is greatest and the crisis of the system reaping more havoc than anywhere else outside sub-Saharan Africa in the countries that used to be called Communist. It should be no surprise that these have experienced the greatest growth of rival nationalisms in the last few years.The fate of the former USSR shows how economic crisis – the ‘stagnation’ that began in the last Brezhnev years giving way to contraction and mass impoverishment in the last Gorbachev years – can create political crises, and political crises find expression in the growth of national movements. It shows how members of the middle class intelligentsia create movements that make the national question the focus through which all other discontents are meant to be focused – the popular fronts in the Baltic states, Moldavia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Rukh in the Ukraine, and the Round Table in Georgia. It shows how the very real oppression suffered by very large numbers of ordinary people could allow these movements to gain enormous mass followings (a much larger and more active following than the various democratic movements among the Russians). And it shows how at a time of major political crisis important figures within the ruling class itself could switch to nationalism as a way of maintaining their control over part at least of the old state – Kravchuk in the Ukraine, Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan and, most amazingly of all, Yeltsin in Russia beat the nationalist drum and claimed the dominant nationality had been exploited by the others.
But it is the Yugoslav case which is the most revealing – if also so far the most horrific.The state had been carefully reconstructed after the defeat of the German occupation in WWII to balance its main Slav constituents – Slovenes, Serbs and Croats – against each other, so preventing political disruption caused by Croats and Slovenes feeling they were being dominated by Serbs (as in the pre-war monarchy) or Serbs feeling they were dominated by Croats (as under German occupation). To this end the Serbs of Montenegro, the Macedonians (regarded by the Serbs previously as “southern Serbs”) and the mixed Serbian-Croat-Muslim population of Bosnia were all given their own republics separate from Serbia proper, while the mixed Serb and Hungarian speaking area of Vojvodina in northern Serbia was given an autonomous status. All Slavs had an equal chance of rising in the state bureaucracy; the only oppressed nationality was the Albanian speakers of Kosovo, who were denied their own republic and subject to systematic discrimination at the hands of everyone else. But it is important to understand that the structure was not based on any systematic attempt to undermine national allegiances, rather on using each to neutralise the others. Divide and rule was always present.
The structure worked well for its rulers until the late 1960s. The state’s cohesion was such that it survived unscathed through the various serious external political crises of 1948, when it split from the Russian bloc, and the economy grew rapidly for the next 20 years. When a loss of economic dynamism led to another political crisis in the late 1960s, with the purging of the interior minister, the weakening of police control allowed discontent to express itself through student demonstrations in Belgrade and a rise of Croat nationalism within the ruling party itself in Croatia. A clampdown succeeded in breaking both movements, but only because it was followed by a growing institutionalisation of the rival Slav nationalisms at the governmental level. The heads of each of the republics were able, to some extent, to head off discontent by giving the impression they were fighting for “national” interests within the federal government.
Then in the 1980s an economic crisis broke out with a vengeance. There was growing unemployment, growing inflation and a drop in living standards until they were no higher than they had been in the 1930s. There was an explosion of discontent – and much of it on a class basis. The number of strikes leapt from 100 in 1983 to 1,530 in 1987, when there were powerful calls for a general strike as workers broke into the federal parliament. But at this point powerful political figures set out to protect themselves against the growing anger from below and to advance their own careers by deliberately inflaming national hatreds.
The first to do so was Slobodan Milosevic, a rising figure in the Serbian party leadership. He launched a massive campaign against the alleged persecution of Serbs in Kosovo and used huge demonstrations of all the classes in Serbia – industrial managers gave workers time off to attend, where they were joined by student organisations, veterans, members of the academy of science and so on – to take over control of the Serbian leadership and then to impose his nominees on Vojvodina and Montenegro. His efforts were soon matched by others. In Croatia a Titoist general who had fallen from grace, Franjo Tudjman, began courting supporters of the wartime Ustashe regime that had butchered Serbs and demanded that Croats police the Serbian inhabited areas of Croatia. In Slovenia leaders of the old ruling party threw in their lot with what had been the leadership of the liberal opposition throughout Yugoslavia to join together to press for secession.[108] The rival nationalist campaigns of Milosevic and Tudjman reinforced each other. By bringing down the Vojvodina and Montenegro governments, Milosevic frightened Croats with the spectre of Serbian hegemony over the whole of Yugoslavia. By attacking the rights of the Croatian Serbs, Tudjman drove them into the hands of Milosevic and forces even further to the right. By supporting the Yugoslav armies onslaught on Slovenia and then parts of Croatia, Milosevic encouraged Croats to rely on Tudjman and the paramilitary groups to his right. The horrific logic of what they were both up to was shown when they agreed secretly to partition Bosnia between them and to destroy the harmony that had existed between Serbs, Croats and Muslims in its capital, Sarajevo. “Uniting the divided nation” became a slogan that authoritarian right wing parties in both Serbia and Croatia could use to draw support behind them.What Milosevic and Tudjman had discovered was that in a declining economy nationalist slogans could draw sections of the middle class into a fight for rival state machines and the careers available within them, could divert workers from fighting to defend living standards and could give sudden popularity to individual members of the old ruling class. Because nationalism has always been part of the ruling ideology, it always presents a possible safety valve for sections of ruling classes in moments of acute crisis.
But that is not the end of the matter. For if the movement to form new national states cannot open up new economic possibilities for society as a whole, then it cannot provide more than temporary relief for ruling classes. Here the difference between national movements in capitalism’s youth, when they advanced the forces of production, and their role today, when they constrain any such advance, is important. Having gained power, the nationalists still have to confront the crisis of the national economy, and this at a time when pressure to placate the nationalist desires of their own supporters exerts pressures on them to seize fresh territory and enlarge “the nation”. So long as the nationalist frenzy continues its upward path, the economic problems get greater. The moment the nationalist frenzy fades, the economic problems – and with them the class struggle – suddenly move back centre-stage. The very discontents sidetracked by the nationalist agitation then return to haunt those who used it to hoist themselves into power.
As so often in history, war is used to head off class struggle, but the cost of war then heightens the class bitterness in society, and threatens to end in the overthrow of those who promoted it. There is no stable political outcome to a situation in which nationalism can tear states apart but has no economic programme for carrying society forward. Just as general social discontent switched into nationalist hatreds, so national hatred can suddenly switch back into social struggles, particularly as the violence and cost of inter-ethnic struggles produces war weariness and bitterness against those who run the governments.A war like that in former Yugoslavia necessarily gives rise to vague desires for peace among vast numbers of people and to anti-government demonstrations. If these feelings can be fused with the struggles of workers against the cost of the war and the effects of the economic crisis, then the wave of nationalism can be beaten back. But class politics does not arise automatically. It has to be argued for. Here an enormous responsibility lies with those small groups, who alone of the genuine left have survived the crisis.
Socialists and nationalism
The left cannot fulfil its responsibilities unless it is clear on the relation between nation and class. Its starting point has to be a clear understanding that nationalism is about the organisation of capitalist society. On this Kautsky and Lenin were absolutely right against Otto Bauer. Internationalism cannot be achieved by the arithmetic addition of different nationalisms. There are not Serbian or Croat, English or Irish, Russian or Ukrainian socialists, but socialists who happen to live in one or other of these states.
At the same time, however, socialists have to understand the only way to bring workers of different nationalities together is to insist on free association. Internationalism does not mean identification with existing states. Workers who regard themselves as having a certain nationality cannot unite freely with other workers within the same state unless they know those workers defend their right to secede if they so wish. Croat workers will not unite with Serb workers unless the Serb workers defend their rights – including the right to secession. Serb workers will not unite with Croat workers unless Croat workers oppose every attempt to discriminate against and oppress the Serb minority within Croatia. Only by the workers of different nationalities defending each others’ rights can they create circumstances in which nationality ceases to be of significance to any of them.
There is a difference between oppressor and oppressed nationalities that socialists have to understand. We can fight on the same side, temporarily, as the bourgeois or petty bourgeois leaders of the oppressed nations against the oppressor. We can never be on the same side as the oppressors against the oppressed. And internationalism can never mean simply balancing between one and the other. But even when we find ourselves on the same side of the barricades as the leaders of a national movement, we have to understand their goals are not our goals, their methods not our methods. They are out to establish new capitalist or state capitalist states, and that will mean them turning against their own workers and if necessary turning their guns on us. We are out to develop the international struggle of workers, to unite workers of the oppressed nationalities with workers who have mistakenly identified with the oppressor in the past. We are for the right of secession – and, in certain concrete situations for the struggle for secession – because we are for the unity of workers.
One of the reasons the left is in such poor shape to deal with nationalist challenges like that in former Yugoslavia or the former USSR is that it has not understood these things in the past. It has flipped between wrapping itself in the flags of small “progressive” nationalisms and identifying with the great oppressor states like the USSR – or even, in the war in former Yugoslavia, calling for the intervention of the major Western imperialisms. It will indeed be tragic if the left does not learn how to fight for internationalism.
Notes:
103. Both Nigel Harris and to a lesser extent, Eric Hobsbawm, make great play of the existence of capitals today that are not tied to national states or are tied to very small ones, like Singapore or Hong Kong. But these capitals are overwhelmingly the exception, not the rule. The great corporations that dominate world production may operate across national frontiers, but they all make sure they have at least one national state to fall back on in emergencies. Even Hong Kong’s capitalists are not really an exception: they have relied on the British state in the past, and are now much keener on the statelet merging into the giant Chinese state than are the great mass of Hong Kong people. For the more general arguments against Nigel Harris’s view, see my “The State and Capital”, International Socialism, 2:51.
104. Il Materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin, 1948, p.38).
105. For the arguments showing the lack of national oppression in Scotland, see C Bambery: Scotland’s National Question (SWP, 1990).
106. Thus the Glasgow Herald, August 10, 1992, could emphasise the “achievements” of the British team at the 1992 Olympics and print a list of medals under the title Britain’s Roll of Honour, even if some of the emphasis was on the performance of Scottish competitors. At the same Olympics thousands of spectators in the audience showed their double national identity by waving the Catalan flag when a Castillian athlete won a major event.
107. G Brennan: The Spanish Labyrinth, op. cit., pp. 268, 279-280.
108. For a detailed account of developments up to the end of 1991, see D Blackie: “The Road to Hell”, International Socialism, 2:53, Winter 1991.
(Concluded)