Posted on 01/19/2004 7:35:26 AM PST by Valin
Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity
"Germans - think with your blood!" Bismarck's exhortation goes far to explain why liberal thinkers have often had difficulties with nationalism. It exalts the visceral above the intellectual and conformity above individuality, it is suspicious of internationalism, and neurotic about "foreigners", and its bottom line always seems to be the use of force to secure the national way of life or "national identity" - what German pioneers of nationalism called the Volksgeist.
The era of nationalism, launched by the French Revolution, has been the era of "total" world wars, in which nation-states have pitted their every last resource in what were held to be life-or-death struggles. Conor Cruise O'Brien, in a brilliant series of lectures at Harvard University in the late 1980s, recalled how as a history student he had pictured the French Revolution as a turbine-like contrivance: "In at one end poured a broad and placid stream of universalism, while what came out at the other end, for no visible reason, was a turbulent torrent of militant nationalism." Ever since the French unleashed that deadly torrent in 1789, people have been trying to grasp this invisible reason.
Nationalists, of course, always held that nations (in particular their own) were primal, natural communities that needed only to be awakened to full consciousness of their historic destiny. Social scientists, on the other hand, realised that the emergence of nationalism met a vital social need in the 19th century.
The process of "modernisation", that compound of industrialisation, mass politicisation, mass communications and secularisation, was rapidly destroying traditional society. Something was needed to bind together the new social order. When French revolutionaries abolished the monarchy and crushed the church, they invoked the people as the true source of legitimacy. After that, it was the nation that legitimised the state, and the days of dynastic empires were numbered.
The most baroque of these, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, with its 14 component nationalities, failed the test of war in 1914-18, and national self-determination became the ruling principle of world politics - in the words of one recent study of nationalism, "the god of modernity".
QED - maybe - except that it was obvious that nations were not simply "invented" in the 19th century. The myths and symbols that proved such spectacularly potent mobilisers of the masses were much older. O'Brien's view, in his book God Land, was that modern nationalism was a projection and magnification of old religious identities, striking root from the Hebrew bible's assertion of a divine covenant giving the "chosen people" their "promised land".
Surprisingly few writers seem to have taken up this idea, but now, 15 years on, Anthony Smith has run with it. Smith, who may well have written more books on nationalism than anyone, has come to recognise that "the passions evoked by nationalism could not be explained in conventional political and economic terms".
His latest book is not much like O'Brien's. Where O'Brien was terse, idiosyncratic and playful, Smith is careful, comprehensive and a little pedestrian. He has the social scientist's taxonomic urge to pepper his pages with numbered lists - a typical section might begin: "Golden ages can be categorised in various ways... " His approach can feel flat-footed, but it delivers a persuasive picture of a deep-rooted tradition of more or less one-sided covenants between peoples and their gods. (When he notes, in the first of his six points about covenants, that "God chooses a community and/or individuals to fulfil His designs" and the people "agree to enter into the relationship", the image irresistibly springs to mind of Monty Python's King Arthur receiving his instructions to seek the holy grail, and servilely enthusing "Good idea, Oh Lord!")
Like O'Brien, Smith limits himself to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but within this, the source of all modern nationalism, he ranges across nations big and small to build his core concepts of "missionary peoples", "sacred homelands" and "golden ages". These amount to a kind of smorgasbord of ethnic myths from which modern nationalists have composed their "imagined communities".
One of his most illuminating arguments is that varied and even conflicting myths, which might seem a source of weakness, in fact make nations more resilient.
The systematic comparison of so many different cultures calls for massive learning, and some of Smith's assertions don't ring true. Anyone who has seen Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, for instance, is likely to be puzzled by his statement that the Old Believers in Russia were massacred (rather than immolating themselves); and by his assertion that the other composers of the "mighty handful", such as Balakirev and Borodin, whose overriding ambition was to eliminate Germanness from their music, drew on German symphonic models. These are details, but Smith's larger analysis runs aground, as he recognises, at the crucial point of transition between these old traditions and modern nationalism - O'Brien's "turbine".
Why did nationalists adopt only some of the pre-existing symbolisms? Smith is convinced that, while older "belief systems" can supply rich resources for formulating images of the nation, they cannot give rise to nationalist movements. He proposes "elective affinities" rather than direct causation, though this suggestive concept raises as many problems as it answers.
His insistence that, while nations may be ancient, nationalism is entirely modern, should offer some hope to liberals that it may not be perennial. But it has been pronounced dead several times over the past 200 years, only for the dying embers (in a favourite nationalist metaphor) to be fanned into flame again. Smith gives us an idea just how hot those embers are.
Charles Townshend is Professor of History at Keele University
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