Authors: Benjamin Barber
7.
In his chapter on “Nationality” in
On Representative Government
. Rousseau’s most eloquent argument on behalf of nationalism as a condition for republicanism comes in his essay
Considerations on the Government of Poland
, written in 1771. See
The Government of Poland
, edited by W. Kendall, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972).
8.
G. Mazzini,
The Duties of Man and Other Essays
, chapter III (London: Dent, 1917), cited in S. Baron,
Modern Nationalism and Religion
(New York: Meridian Books, 1960), p. 49. For a full account of Mazzini’s extraordinary role as a liberal revolutionary nationalist see Dennis Mack Smith,
Mazzini
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
Anthony Smith is a neo-Mazzinian who believes there is no “alternative to the myth and ideal of nationalism as a cement and vision for large groupings of human beings, one which is both ideologically acceptable and sociologically feasible,” precisely because nations alone “can ground the inter-state order in the principles of popular sovereignty and the will of the people.” Anthony Smith, “Ties That Bind,”
The LSE Magazine
, Spring,1993, pp. 8–11.
9.
Paul Hazard,
European Thought in the Eighteenth Century
(Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1972), pp. 471–472.
10.
Eric Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism Since 1780
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 121. With the transformation, ethnicity and language became the decisive hallmarks of the new nationalism.
11.
José Ortega y Gasset,
The Revolt of the Masses
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1932), p. 83. Ortega hoped that the nationalist outburst of the twenties might signal its final passing: “The last flare, the longest; the last sigh, the deepest. On the very eve of their disappearance there is an intensification of frontiers.” We might hope the same today, were not Ortega’s hopes so dismally contradicted by subsequent history.
12.
Yael Tamir,
Liberal Nationalism, pp
. 6, 14.
13.
Edmund Burke,
The Works
, London, 1907, VI, p. 155.
14.
Anderson,
Imagined Communities
, p. 7.
15.
Joel Kotkin,
Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
(New York: Random House, 1993). “As the conventional barriers of nation-states and regions become less meaningful
under the weight of global economic forces, it is likely such dispersed peoples [as Jews, Chinese, Indians, etc.]—and their worldwide business and cultural networks—will increasingly shape the economic destiny of mankind.” p. 4.
16.
Eric Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” a lecture to the new Central European University in Budapest, reprinted in
The New York Review of Books
, December 16, 1993, pp. 62–63.
17.
Tony Judt, “The Old New Nationalism,”
The New York Review of Books, May
26, 1994, p. 45.
18.
Adam Michnik in “‘More Humility, Fewer Illusions’—A Talk Between Adam Michnik and Jurgen Habermas,”
The New York Review of Books
, March 24, 1994, pp. 24–29.
19.
Marshall Berman used Marx’s phrase as the title to a perceptive book about the condition (and pathology) of urban America. See
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1988).
20.
“Winter in the F.R.G.,” by the German band
Endstufe
(Final Stage), translated by Elizabeth A. Jackson for the London magazine
Searchlight;
reprinted in Stephen Silver, “The Music of Hate,”
The New York Times
, February 8, 1993, p. A 23.
21.
See Silver, “The Music of Hate,” ibid.
22.
At least two bands, Stoerkraft and Böse Onkelz (Destructive Force and Evil Uncle) have abandoned the Right: see Stephen Kinzer, “Berlin Journal,”
The New York Times
, February 2, 1994, p. A 4. See
Chapter 11
, note 21, below.
23.
The new realities nationalism is meant to address are not, however, really very well-suited to it. John Lukacs, for example, sees in nationalism “the main political force in the twentieth century.” John Lukacs,
The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), p. 8.
24.
Michael Ignatieff,
Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), p. 5.
25.
Feudalism had both an imperial and cosmopolitan moment, defined by the Holy Roman Church and the pan-German Empire and at the same time had a local and parochial moment manifested in, for example, France’s prenational provinces such as Burgundy and Provence or England’s prenational counties such as Essex and Dorset.
26.
Under the nominal suzerainty of distant emperors, Burgandians, Normans, Ouic northerners and Oc Franconian southerners had gone their parochial ways. Jeanne D’Arc strove to unite them through blood and battle in a “France” created from fratricide. This at least is how modern atavists like George Bernard Shaw tell the story in fictional re-creations like
Saint Joan
, where the maid of Orleans appears as both a nationalist and a Protestant. In England’s War of the Roses, chronicled dramatically by Shakespeare, from the corpses of feuding Dorsetmen and Lancastermen rose a new nation of Englishmen, whose clannish loyalties were replaced with the elementary obedience of subject to crown.
27.
The French historian Renan wrote: “Or, l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun et aussi que tous assent oublie des choses.” Cited, Anderson,
Imagined Communities
, p. 199.
28.
The after effects of population dispersals and Russian colonization are dirtying the transition of the Baltic states to independence and democracy today. Responding to Russian colonization under communism, which had left Latvians nearly a minority in their own country and Lithuanians and Estonians with large minority Russian populations, the Baltic countries have today imposed monocultural citizenship laws that amount to a kind of constitutional ethnic cleansing that may force the Russians out.
29.
For this reason, I will not try here to reproduce the graphic studies of fratricide and civil war that have been recently offered by Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Ignatieff, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Lukacs, William Pfaff, and Walter Connor along with many other fine historians and social scientists. In addition to the titles already given above in the notes, see Walter Connor,
Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Pfaff,
Wrath of Nations
.
Nor do I want to reproduce the kind of detailed everyday pictures of life in the ex-Soviet world and Eastern Europe we have come to expect from discerning journalists like Timothy Garton Ash in his series for
The New York Review of Books
and Georgie Anne Geyer in her columns for the
Washington Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
. Geyer was an early and keen observer of the coming of Jihad: a decade before Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Zbigniew Brzezinski were worrying about planetary pandaemonium, Geyer had written a prescient essay called “Our Disintegrating World: the Menace of Global Anarchy,”
Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year 1985
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 11–25.
1.
J. J. Rousseau,
Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater
(original published in 1758), Allan Bloom, editor, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 58.
2.
Michael Ignatieff,
Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), p. 5.
3.
French Minister of Culture Jacques Toubon worries about “tribal” tendencies in language, with executives speaking English, immigrants speaking their own languages, ordinary people speaking “the language of television,” and “in the middle the language of administration … and perhaps of intellectuals and professors”—all of which would result in a “catastrophe.”
The Latest European News
, published by United Airlines, November 29, 1994.
4.
According to Alan Riding, “Celts and Proud of It (Even if They Are French),”
The New York Times
, August 2, 1991, p. A 4.
5.
Of the 2.8 million who inhabit the peninsular fragment jutting out into the Atlantic, there are perhaps 100,000 involved in the local folk movement.
Once the target of Nazis who promised them independence if they would ally themselves with the Germans, the Celts of Brittany actually forged a Brittany Liberation Front and talked revolution in 1968. Today, more intellectuals than peasants actually speak Breton, although there is a “seed” school (a “Diwan”) with one thousand children enrolled, and leaders encourage local playwrights to compose Breton plays and urge academics to plan Breton dictionaries.
6.
The bureau was founded in 1982 and in 1993 had a $4.2 million budget. Marlise Simons, “A Reborn Provençal Heralds Revival of Regional Tongues,”
The New York Times
, May 3, 1993, pp. A
I
, 8. The “conceit” here is not the importance of cultural identity, but the belief that a handful of intellectuals can revivify languages that have no practical use in schools, commerce, or the home.
7.
See André Frossard, “L’Europe: une nouvelle tour de babel,” Document,
Paris Match
, 1993/4.
8.
The Swiss offer a particularly interesting case of multiculturalism in which the French Swiss identify with the progressive interests of France and Europe while the German Swiss (those in the country, not the Zurich bankers and Basel corporation executives) see themselves as true Swiss (not ersatz Germans) hostile to Europe and the McWorld it represents. I have written at length about the Swiss case in
The Death of Communal Liberty: the History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). See also the excellent compendium on Switzerland in Europe,
Can the Confederatio Helvetica Be Imitated?
Special issue of
Government and Opposition
, Vol. 23, No.
I
, Winter, 1988.
9.
The 1994 version of the advertisement, paid for by the Generalitat de Catalunya, offers a blank page and a point identified as Barcelona on it: “In which country would you place this point?” it mischievously asks. Several pages later comes the answer: Catalonia is “a country in Spain with its own culture, language and identity … a country in which many foreign enterprises have invested and are still heavily investing … a country with the know-how to get the Olympic Games for its capital.” An early advertisement appeared in
The New York Times
, July 17, 1992, pp. A 5, 7. The new campaign started in the spring of 1994 with an April 25
Newsweek
advertisement. The ambivalence toward McWorld is expressed in the simultaneous focus on Catalonian separatism and the Catalonian cultural heritage
and
on Catalonia’s capitalist and commercial virtues and its role as a European economic center; Barcelona’s patron saint Sant Jordi and Catalan heroes like Dalí, Miró, and Casals somehow get mixed in a description of Catalan multinational corporations. The same ambivalence appears in another version of the advertisement, which begins with the headline: C
ATALONIA, A MODERN COUNTRY WITH CENTURIES OF TRADITION
.
10.
Commentators have suggested King Juan Carlos may have bested Pujol in the short run by charming the crowds with his deferential Catalan and his good manners, and by making Pujol’s attempt to seize the Olympics look
clumsy and fanatic; but his performance was in effect orchestrated by the Catalan nationalists to whom he was responding and they are surely the real long-term victors.
11.
Alan Riding, “The Olympics Crown a King with Laurels,”
The New York Times
, August 12, 1992, p. A 5. The special privileges Pujol gained for Catalonia are now being sought by ethnic nationalists from other regions of Spain.
12.
As paraphrased by Marlise Simons, “A Reborn Provençal,” pp. A 1, 8.
13.
The measure passed by a nearly 80 percent margin in Geneva and Neuchâtel and failed by nearly the same margin in the founding German Swiss cantons of Schwyz and Uri (approximately 75 percent).
14.
“Switzerland and Europe: Time to Join the Others?”
The Economist
, November 28, 1992, p. 52. The insufficiently docile masses, perched imperturbably on their European Himalayas, managed on December 6, 1992, to once again ignore their elites. Though only a bare popular majority of 50.3 percent had said no, eighteen of twenty-six cantons had stood firmly against while only eight (all francophone) had voted yes (fourteen were needed for passage).
15.
For example, see “La vieille tradition du chemin solitaire” (the old tradition of the solitary road), in the Left daily
Libération
, December 7, 1992, as well as the accompanying editorial by Gerard Dupuy, “Un Nouveau Coup Contre L’Europe” (a new blow against Europe). Dupuy wrote: “‘L’exception’ suisse, sa fonction de soupape, n’a plus grand sens dans un monde en voie d’homogèneisation, en particuliere dans sa partie européenne.”
16.
The ban lasted only a few years, and was supported for more cynical reasons by the local railway company, but the language used to justify the ban was remarkably prescient in its predictions of economic encroachment and environmental ruin. For the details, see Barber,
The Death of Communal Liberty
.
17.
On Quebec, see Michael Ignatieff,
Blood and Belonging
. Because he is Canadian by birth, his treatment of Quebec is perhaps the most convincing section of his book.