Nationalism and the abstract world

by MAGGIE HELWIG

<*> There is a great deal of discussion of "nationalism" going on in the peace movement today, much of it sparked off by the conflict in former-Yugoslavia, as well as by the (possibly correct) perception that national and racial/ethnic wars are becoming increasingly common and disastrous. Too often, however, we seem to fall back on a series of truisms which do not bring us much closer to a real understanding of this very complex and important issue.

The first and most fundamental truism is that Nationalism Is Bad. This position, which fell out of favour for some while in the 1970s, is increasingly, once more, the common currency of most peace movement debate. Nationalism is, we often seem to be saying, by definition violent; by definition nationalism exploits women; by definition it is exclusive, opposed to the "other", possibly ultimately genocidal. No one can deny that there are large elements of truth in all of this, particularly in the perception that nationalism requires the denigration of other nationalities. But it is also hard for most of us to avoid the feeling that something is still being missed.

Thus, in what seems to be a holdover from the debates of the 1970s and early 1980s, the assertion that Nationalism is Bad is usually closely followed by the assertion that there is a phenomenon very similar to nationalism which, however, is Not Bad. There is a degree of unclarity in explaining what this phenomenon is. I have heard it described as "identification with places where you grew up, food your mother cooked as a child, songs of your people."

It has to be admitted that the Bosnian Serb army probably identifies strongly with traditional songs, traditional cooking, and their specific cultural and geographical sense of the small territory of Bosnia. On the other hand, much of the revival of Native society in North America, and many of the Native peoples' most positive efforts towards self-determination, are not based at all on living memory, but on the deliberate re-creation of a culture that was uprooted and destroyed several generations ago.

>>> Arbitrary choice

Nationalism is, of all the various ways of making people into groups, one of the most arbitrary, the most dependent on the exercise of the imagination and on deliberate choice--even the very concept of a "nation" is a rather recent invention. Distinctions by gender are, obviously enough, based on a simple binary division according to clearly defined physical characteristics of the individual. Race and ethnicity, though less simple, do have at least an approximate relationship to the person's body, kinship and line of descent; at least some roots in the physical world. Nation overlaps with race and ethnicity to a certain extent, even to the point where the different concepts can become confused. But they are, in the end, radically different. Some of the most vicious national conflicts take place between people who are ethnically identical; many of the bitterest racial and ethnic divisions occur between groups of people who agree that they share a nationality.

Nationality is, in fact, a purely abstract quantity, dependent on what is ultimately a chosen identification with a collective history (and most of us, if we think about it, could have chosen from a variety of national identities, though again almost all of us will find that we have chosen only one).

Interestingly, it is probably gender, that most clearly physically-rooted division, that we feel, at the moment, to be the most permeable border. It is regarded as a truism, by now, to say that we all have "male and female sides", and post-modern theory has been systematically and cheerfully proving over and over again that gender is an imaginative creation; an idea the theorists are less likely to apply to race and least likely to apply to nationality.

>>> Choice and fate

Of course, the simple reason for this is that we should all know that race and nationality are constructs. But we don't really know that--we rarely genuinely feel that. It is perhaps in part, and paradoxically, the very fact that choice is involved which makes the construct so inflexible.

The nation gives us a history. Like religion, it connects us to a larger community, both of the living and--perhaps more importantly--of the dead. Benedict Anderson's interesting study of nationalism, Imagined Communities (Verso 1983), notes this connection between "nationalism and death" (more accurately, I would say, nationalism and the dead) "No more arresting emblems exist of the modern culture of nationalism than the cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers ... Void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals ... "

For further demonstrations, one can find a whole series of national formulations along the lines of the infamous "Serbia is wherever Serbs are buried." Nationalism makes us a part of death, a partner of the dead. And at the same time, even by the same means, it makes us immortal. The nation overcomes the death of its constituent members. We are a part of the dead who live on.

And of course a nation, being an imaginative construct, is that much more safe than a race or a kinship group, which actually does die in the deaths of its individual members.

>>> A power for good?

It is not necessarily a bad thing for an individual to identify with a larger community. While it can mean shuffling off individual responsibilities, it can also be a route by which we can escape from solipsism, can admit that there are things larger than ourselves to which we owe some loyalty.

Our imaginations seem to require something which, at the moment, we most easily conceptualise in the form of a sort of nationalism, as evidenced by the recent upsurge in mock-national groupings, of which Queer Nation is the most famous. Even those who choose to step back from identification with "their" nation (or, as is the case for most of us, the several possible nations with which they could identify), tend to reach for an alternative which they frame still in national terms--queer nation, the nation of women, or on the other hand "their" nation's dissident traditions (Howard Clark in Peace News March 1995).

We could use other languages. But, on the whole, we do not.

And though the needs of the imagination cannot be allowed to run away with us, neither can they safely be denied. It is often the attempt to suppress these emotional demands that causes them to return in a more violent, more furious way.

Certainly, an awareness of the extent to which our nation is an invention can take us some distance towards defusing the potential violence of nationalism. Individuals who have made deliberately dissident choices, of whatever sort and for whatever reason, or those who have consciously faced the need to , are less likely to reify their national feeling, less likely to consider it a fate which they must serve.

Whether this works beyond the level of the individual is less clear; in part because, once it becomes collective, a national choice cannot be "dissident" in the same way.

>>> Building a nation from the ground up

A more complex case is the remarkable experiment of Indonesia, a nation deliberately created, from the language up, in the quite recent past, out of remnants of the Dutch East Indies with nothing but their colonial history in common. Indonesia demonstrates both the strengths of nation-making--it cannot be denied that it is a vibrant and fascinating nation, and that the conditions of life for the greater number of islands in the archipelago improved dramatically, particularly in the Sukarno period--and the dangers. The creation of Indonesia required the suppression of those cultures of the archipelago that could not be assimilated to the Javanese ideal (one of the commonest contradictions of national struggles, when the defense of one people's entirely legitimate right to "self-determination" seems necessarily to involve depriving other peoples of the same right). And even under Sukarno the government was becoming dangerously warlike and expansionist, and had seized West Papua some years before the Suharto coup.

>>> Cultural revival and bad novels

A curious anomaly in the history of nationalism, and one that might be worth looking at a bit more closely, is the Canadian nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s; an upsurge of nationalist feeling that was not at any time tinged with a sense of violence, which was manifested almost exclusively in the form of a cultural revival led to a large degree by women, and which seemed sufficiently meaningful for the distinguished anarchist thinker George Woodcock to identify with it.

It is the holdover from this movement that meant that, in the negotiations over the Free Trade Agreement, the most emotional and disputed area was not the protection of Canada's (rather good, and rather threatened) social programs, but the protection of Canadian culture, and particularly literature.

About the worst thing that the Canadian nationalist movement led to was the production of some bad novels, in which characters showed an alarming propensity for leaping into lakes, caves and forests primeval and finding Truth. It did not cause ethnic minorities or native peoples to be more seriously marginalised or mistreated than they were already, and in fact it is arguable that it led to an improvement.

For one of the singular facts of Canadian nationalism is that Canadians decided, at that time, to define themselves as a nation which valued diversity and multiple identity, which counterposed an official belief in multiculturalism to the "great American melting pot" that was being promoted during the same years.

This has, of course, been only a very partial success. Racism persists strongly in Canada. But it is also true that multiculturalism became, and remains, a mainstream value, accepted as a matter of course by a very large part of the population. The complex relationship between Anglo-Canadians and the Quebecois, within the nationalist movement and today, is too large to go into here. But it does not undermine--though it adds many complications to--the points I am making here.

Probably the biggest factor in making Canadian nationalism what it was, of course, is that fact that our only land border is with the overwhelming USA, and that the greatest motive force behind Canadian nationalism was the desire not to be like them. It was always a given that we (and you will notice that it is at this point that my own national identification comes to the foreground) were politically far weaker, that we could never come even close to matching their economic or military power.

This more or less required that Canada define itself as non-aggressive, conciliatory, multicultural. It more or less required that Canada offer sanctuary to US draft resisters during the Vietnam conflict.

It is also certainly true that the Canadian nationalist experiment took place in conditions of material prosperity and relative safety from military threats. But it does at least suggest that nationalism can take some unexpected forms.

>>> Shaping the national feeling

And the collective, is, after all, not entirely out of the control of the individual (at least, we must believe this is true if we continue to engage in political activism). There are choices that individuals can make, and constantly do make, which do shape the way that collective national feeling forms itself. To take one small example in which I am currently involved--there is a serious and sometimes angry debate taking place among East Timorese, and also among their supporters, as to what would be done about Indonesian settlers in an independent East Timor. This choice will be made (and it may be made sooner than we think) by individuals, many of whom I know; it will be particular people who will determine whether East Timorese nationalism takes this step in exclusiveness and the demonisation of "the other". And we will all be responsible for the outcome.

In the real world of our political actions, of course, most of us are not too confused. It is an easy choice, for me, to support the East Timorese and the Innu, and to see (though with a certain degree of scepticism and criticism) the value to them of their national feelings. It is clearly necessary to condemn the militaristic nationalism of, for instance, the Bosnian Serb army-- though it is also, I think, necessary to understand what it means to them. But we really should admit to ourselves that these are just several different faces of the same phenomenon, a complex human emotion which is not in itself either good or bad, and can turn from being a positive force to being a negative force (or vice-versa) with astonishing speed; and which we have to recognise, reckon with, and understand in ourselves as well as others.