Nationalism and Its Relation with International Management Context - Example

Nationalism 1. Introduction In this review, we will examine one of the most important topics in the world today: Nationalism and its relation with International Management context. The course begins with an overview of nationalism, including topics such as definitions of nation and nationalism, Identifying if nationalism really affects international management and its effect on product management, communication management, political economy, culture, consumer ethnocentrism. 2. Concept of Nationalism Nationalism encompasses majorly of two phenomena noted as (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their identity as members of that nation and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take in seeking to achieve or to sustain a way political sovereignty. (See for example, Nielsen 1998-99: 9.) Both these two raises questions about the concept of nation or national identity, about what it is to belong to a nation and about how much one must care about one's nation. Nations and national identity may be defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and while an individual's membership in the nation is often regarded as involuntary, it is sometimes regarded as voluntary. The degree of care for one's nation that is required by nationalists is often, but not always, taken to be very high: according to such views, the claims of one's nation take precedence over rival contenders for authority and loyalty (see Berlin 1979, Smith 1991, Levy 2000, and the discussion in Gans 2003). It also tells a questions about whether sovereignty entails the acquisition of full statehood with complete authority for domestic and international affairs, or whether something less than statehood would suffice. Although sovereignty is often taken to mean full statehood , more recently possible exceptions have been recognized Despite these definitional worries, there is a fair amount of agreement about what is historically the most typical form of nationalism. It is the one which features the supremacy of the nation's claims over other claims to individual allegiance and which features full sovereignty as the persistent aim of its political program. The state as political unit is seen by nationalists as centrally ‘belonging’ to one ethno-cultural group and as charged with protecting and promulgating its traditions. This form is exemplified by the classical, “revivalist” nationalism, that was most prominent in the 19th century in Europe and Latin America. This classical nationalism later spread across the world and in present days still marks many contemporary nationalisms. 2.1 The Concept of a Nation In its general form the issue of nationalism concerns the mapping between the ethno-cultural domain (featuring ethno-cultural groups or “nations”) and the domain of political organization. In breaking the issue into its components, we have mentioned the importance of the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity. This point raises two sorts of questions. First, the descriptive ones. What is a nation and national identity? What is it to belong to a nation? In this section the descriptive questions are to be discussed, starting with What is a nation and national identity? and what is it to belong to a nation? If one wants to enjoin people to struggle for the national interest, one must have some idea about what a nation is and what it is to belong to a nation. So, in order to formulate and ground their evaluations, claims and directives for action, pro-nationalist thinkers have been elaborating theories of ethnicity, culture, nation and state. Their opponents have in their turn challenged these elaborations. Now, some presuppositions about ethnic groups and nations are essential for the nationalist, others are theoretical elaborations designed to support the essential ones. The former concern the definition and status of the target or social group, the beneficiary of the nationalist program, variously called “nation,” “ethno-nation” or “ethnic-group.” Since nationalism is particularly prominent with groups that do not yet have a state, a definition of nation and nationalism purely in terms of belonging to a state is a non-starter. Civic loyalties are often put into a separate category under the title “patriotism,” or “constitutional patriotism” (Habermas 1996). This leaves two extreme options and a lot of intermediate positions. The first extreme option has been put forward by a small but distinguished band of theorists, including E. Renan (1882) and M. Weber (1970); for a recent defense see Brubaker (2004). According to their purely voluntaristic definition, a nation is any group of people aspiring to a common political state-like organization. If such a group of people succeeds in forming a state, the loyalties of the group members might be “civic” (as opposed to “ethnic”) in nature. At the other extreme, and more typically, nationalist claims are focused upon the non-voluntary community of common origin, language, tradition and culture, so that in the classical view an ethno-nation is a community of origin and culture, including prominently a language and customs. The distinction is related to that drawn by older schools of social and political science between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism, the former being allegedly Western European and the latter more Central and Eastern European originating in Germany (a very prominent proponent of the distinction is Hans Kohn 1965). Philosophical discussions of nationalism tend to concern its ethno-cultural variants only and this practice will be followed here. A group aspiring to nationhood on this basis will be called an ‘ethno-nation’ in order to underscore its ethno-cultural rather than purely civic underpinnings. For the ethno-cultural nationalist it is one's ethno-cultural background which determines one's membership in the community. One cannot chose to be a member; instead, membership depends on the accident of origin and early socialization. However, commonality of origin has turned out to be mythical for most contemporary candidate groups: ethnic groups have been mixing for millennia. Therefore, sophisticated pro-nationalists tend to stress cultural membership only and to speak of “nationality,” omitting the “ethno-” part (Miller 1992 and 2000, Tamir 1993, and Gans 2003). Michel Seymour in his proposal of a “socio-cultural definition” adds a political dimension to the purely cultural one. A nation is a cultural group, possibly but not necessarily united by common descent, endowed with civic ties (Seymour 2000). This is the kind of definition that would be accepted by most parties in the debate today. So defined, nation is a somewhat mixed, both ethno-cultural and civic category, but still closer to the purely ethno-cultural than to the purely civic extreme. The wider descriptive underpinnings of nationalist claims have varied over the last two centuries. The early German elaborations talk about “the spirit of a people,” while somewhat later ones, mainly of French extraction, talk about “collective mentality,” ascribing to it specific and significant causal powers. A later descendent of this notion is the idea of a “national character” peculiar to each nation, which partly survives today under the guise of national “forms of life” and of feeling (Margalit 1997, see below). For almost a century, up to the end of the Second World War, it was customary to link nationalist views to organic metaphors of society. Isaiah Berlin, writing as late as the early seventies, proposed within his definition that nationalism consists of the conviction that people belong to a particular human group and that “...the characters of the individuals who compose the group are shaped by, and cannot be understood apart from, those of the group ...” (first published in 1972, reprinted in Berlin 1979: 341). The nationalist claims, according to Berlin, that “the pattern of life in a society is similar to that of a biological organism” (ibid.) and that the needs of this ‘organism’ determine the supreme goal for all of its members. Most contemporary defenders of nationalism, especially philosophers, avoid such language. The organic metaphor and talk about character have been replaced by one master metaphor: that of national identity. It is centered upon cultural membership and used both for the identity of a group and for the socially based identity of its members, e.g., the national identity of George in so far as he is English or British. Various authors unpack the metaphor in various ways: some stress involuntary membership in the community, others the strength with which one identifies with the community, yet others link it to the personal identity of each member of the community. Addressing these issues, the nationally minded philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre (1994), Charles Taylor (1989), M. Seymour and others have significantly contributed to establishing important topics such as community, membership, tradition and social identity within the contemporary philosophical debate. Let us now turn to the issue of the origin and “authenticity” of ethno-cultural groups or ethno-nations. In social and political science one usually distinguishes two kinds of views. The first can be called “primordialist” views. According to them, actual ethno-cultural nations have either existed “since times immemorial” (an extreme, somewhat caricaturistic version, corresponding to nineteenth century nationalist rhetoric), or at least for a long time during the pre-modern period (Hastings 1997: see the discussion of his views in Nations and Nationalism, v. 9, 2003). There is a very popular moderate version of this view championed by Anthony Smith (1991 and 2001) under the name “ethnosymbolism.” According to it, nations are like artichokes, in that they have a lot of “unimportant leaves” that can be chewed up one by one, but also have a heart, which remains after the leaves have been eaten (the metaphor stems from Stanley Hoffmann: for details and sources see a recent debate between Smith (2003) and Özkirimli (2003). The second are the modernist views, placing the origin of nations in modern times. They can be further classified according to their answer to a further question: how real is the ethno-cultural nation? The modernist realist view is that nations are real but distinctly modern creations, instrumental in the genesis of capitalism (Gellner 1983, Hobsbawn 1990, and Breuilly 2001). On the same side of the fence but more in a radical direction one finds anti-realist views. According to one such view nations are merely “imagined” but somehow still powerful entities; what is meant is that belief in them holds sway over the believers (Anderson 1965). The extreme anti-realist view claims that they are pure “constructions” (see Walker 2001, for an overview and literature). These divergent views seem to support rather divergent moral claims about nations. For an overview of nationalism in political theory see Vincent (2001). Indeed, older authors — from great thinkers like Herder and Otto Bauer, to the propagandists who followed their footsteps — have been at great pains to ground normative claims upon firm ontological realism about nations: nations are real, bona fide entities. However, the contemporary moral debate has tried to diminish the importance of the imagined/real divide. Prominent contemporary philosophers have claimed that normative-evaluative nationalist claims are compatible with the “imagined” nature of a nation. (See, for instance, MacCormick 1982, Miller 1992 and 2000, and Tamir 1993.) They point out that common imaginings can tie people together and that actual interaction resulting from togetherness can engender important moral obligations. Classical nationalism is the political program that sees creation and maintenance of a fully sovereign state owned by a given ethno-national group (“people” or “nation”) as a primary duty of each member of the group. Starting from the assumption that the appropriate (or “natural”) unit of culture is the ethno-nation, it claims that a primary duty of each member is to abide in cultural matters by one's recognizably ethno-national culture. Classical nationalists are usually vigilant about the kind of culture they protect and promote and about the kind of attitude people have to their nation-state. This watchful attitude carries some potential dangers: many elements of a given culture that are universalist or simply not recognizably national might, and will sometimes, fall prey to such nationalist enthusiasms. Classical nationalism in everyday life puts various additional demands on individuals, from buying more expensive domestically produced goods in preference to the cheaper imported ones, to procreating as many future members of the nation as one can manage. (See Yuval-Davies 1997.) On the other hand, it is becoming more and more evident that as the world becomes internationalized, we will have to address the issue of ethnocentrism versus cultural relativism. Ethnocentrism put simply is the view that our way is the best way. Cultural relativism is the belief that cultures should be judged by their own standards. (Thomas, W. 2000) 2.2 Cultural and Economic Nationalism In the medieval period of history, nations and states were constituted on the basis of religion.  Most of the wars were fought on religious grounds. Since the Industrial Revolution, war became an instrument of colonisation for acquiring raw materials or conquering markets for finished goods. But in the recent past, nations were constituted and identified in the name of Capitalism (U.S.A.), Socialism (Scandinavia) and Communism (USSR). This process acquired further momentum during the Cold War until these economic ideologies failed and many nations eventually ruined.  Human nature survived all these artificial divisions and retrieved the fundamental spirit of mankind that believes in nationalism as the basis of the nation state. Nationalism is the eternal identity of a group of people who cultivated and developed a particular set of cultural traditions, including art, music and philosophy. The term "Economic Nationalism" was first used by Walter Lippman to describe the American Economic Policy towards International Trade Agreements. All nations practice economic nationalism unashamedly and unapologetically. There is no international trade discussion which is not conducted by any country other than in the best interest of that country itself.  India is the only major country which permits all types of economic activity whether it is detrimental to the national economy or otherwise. 3. Conclusion The philosophy of nationalism nowadays does not concern itself much with the aggressive and dangerous form of invidious nationalism that often occupies center stage in the news and in sociological research. Although this pernicious form can be of significant instrumental value mobilizing oppressed people and giving them a sense of dignity, its moral costs are usually taken by philosophers to outweigh its benefits. Nationalist-minded philosophers distance themselves from such aggressive nationalisms and mainly seek to construct and defend very moderate versions; these have therefore come to be the main focus of recent philosophical debate. In presenting the claims that nationalists defend, we have started from more radical ones and have moved towards liberal nationalist alternatives. In examining the argument for these claims, we have first presented metaphysically demanding communitarian arguments, resting upon deep communitarian assumptions about culture, such as the premise that the ethno-cultural nation is universally the central and most important community for each human individual. This is an interesting and respectable claim, but its plausibility has not yet been established. The moral debate about nationalism has resulted in various weakenings of the cultural arguments, proposed by liberal nationalists, which render the arguments less ambitious but much more plausible. Having abandoned the old nationalist ideal of a state owned by its dominant ethno-cultural group, liberal nationalists have become receptive to the idea that identification with a plurality of cultures and communities is important for a person's social identity. They have equally become sensitive to transnational issues and more willing to embrace a partly cosmopolitan perspective. This new project, however, might demand a further widening of moral perspectives. Given the experiences of the twentieth century, one can safely assume that culturally plural states divided into isolated and closed sub-communities glued together only by arrangements of mere modus vivendi are inherently unstable. Stability might therefore require that the plural society envisioned by liberal culturalists promote quite intense interaction between cultural groups in order to forestall mistrust, to reduce prejudice and to create a solid basis for cohabitation. On the other hand, once membership in multiple cultures and communities is admitted as legitimate, social groups will spread beyond the borders of a single state (e.g. groups bound by religious or racial ties) as well as within them, thus creating an opening for at least a minimal cosmopolitan perspective. The internal dialectic of the concern for ethno-cultural identity might thus lead to pluralistic and potentially cosmopolitan political arrangements that are rather distant from what was classically understood as nationalism. 4. Bibliography Gellner, E., 1983, Nations and Nationalism, Blackwell, Oxford. Smith, A. D., 1991, National Identity, Penguin, Harmondsworth McKim, R. and McMahan, J. (eds.), 1997, The Morality of Nationalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Couture, J., Nielsen, K., and Seymour, M. (eds.), 1998, Rethinking Nationalism, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplement Volume 22. Miscevic, N. (ed.), 2000, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict. Philosophical Perspectives. 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