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:




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