Thomas Meaney: The Idea of a Nation
Here’s to my
countrymen, wherever they happen to hail from!
Wojciech Chojnicki,
in Joseph Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb
A generation ago, when
Benedict Anderson was asked on Dutch television what country he would be
prepared to die for, he hung his head in silence. “It would depend very much on
the circumstances,” he finally said. A leading left thinker about nationalism
in his generation, Anderson was born into an Anglo-Irish family in the
collapsing Republic of China, and raised in the Republic of Ireland and the
United States, where he made his academic career. He devoted much of his life
to studying Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, where he died in 2015. He
was not a provincial person. Yet the credo of post-nationalism ascendant in the
1990s found no place in his affections.
For Anderson, the force of nationalism
was not a dark phantom. Like other domains that sometimes seem to be exclusive
property of the right—the market, the military—the “nation” was ideological
terrain that could be harvested for high and low ends. Drafted into a Bush war
in the Middle East, Anderson would have been on the first plane to Canada, but
called up for the Indonesian War of Independence against the Dutch, or for the
Easter Rising against the British, it would not have been hard to imagine him
taking up position.
What is the idea of
the nation for? It depends, as Anderson said. Over the centuries nationalism
has swung back and forth as a progressive and retrograde force, depending on
historical conditions. In revolutionary France the “nation” started as a
wrecking ball against feudalism and the church. Before the “nation” became
defined by its limit of concern, it appeared to the Old Regime as terrifying in
its limitlessness. Before the “nation” could be for anyone it had to be against
specific someones: kings, priests and their enablers. Nationalism became a
forest fire of fraternity that Napoleon wanted to control-burn through Europe
in order to make fertile ground for the imposition of his uniform Code.
Hegel
believed this was a great leap for the world, but also witnessed its reversals:
the way the Napoleonic armies provoked crude nationalist backlashes. He mocked
the nationalist students around him determined to throw off the French yoke:
“Liberation? Liberation from what? … If I ever see one liberated person with my
own eyes, I shall fall to the ground and prostrate myself before him.”
Despite later attempts
to tar them as proto-totalitarians, the major early theorists of the “nation”
were hardly blinkered chauvinists. (A telling slur, named for the apocryphal
gung-ho soldier Nicolas Chauvin in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, the meaning of
chauvinism evolved from indicating excessive national excitement to a more
spiteful and hate-prone temperament.) Johann Gottfried Herder spoke
of a cosmopolitan world of nations because he was worried that any attempt
to iron out cultural difference between peoples would result in violent
extinctions (though he didn’t seem to anticipate that nationalism itself would
become the bulldozer of his beloved regional dialects). His idea of the Volksgeist as
the unique spiritual endowment of each people would be appropriated in
different ways by his successors.
For Hegel’s contemporary, Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, it was a genetic inheritance whose spurning meant cultural suicide; for
others, like Hegel himself, it was the outcome of a state’s legal, political
and cultural forces, not the cause. Giuseppe Mazzini, the most dogged
nineteenth-century promoter of nationalism, believed nations had no pasts, only
futures: they were collective stabs by peoples to engrave their aspirations in
constitutions. “We have made Italy,” Massimo d’Azeglio famously declared. “Now
we must make Italians.” For d’Azeglio, Mazzini and more earthy nationalists
like Garibaldi, there was no sharp distinction between nationalism and
internationalism: the two agendas shared a common universal aspiration.
Garibaldi himself spread nationalism in Latin America, was invited by Lincoln
to command the Union Army and served in three different national assemblies. In
his eyes, the nationalist and the internationalist were mutually dependent.
Early modern European
states owed their organization to their purpose as war-fighting machines that
only became more effective as they transitioned into “nation-states.” .. read more:
