Discussing the Statement - Nationalism Is Intrinsic to Modernity - Assignment Example

Nationalism as intrinsic to modernity: A Critical Inquiry Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrinkwrap peoples brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. (Arundhati Roy 2002). Historical accounts have it that on April 25, 1987, Slobodan Milosevic, the fallen President of Serbia, went to Kosovo Polje and was met with a crowd of fifteen thousand Serbs, majority of whom were disgruntled over perceived discrimination by ethnic Albanians. It is said that during that gathering, an old man from the crown suddenly shouted to Milosevic that the ethnic Albanians were beating them. A deathly silence followed as the crowd waited for Milosevic – at that time, known to be a loyal Communist, as opposed to Serbian nationalist – to respond. He did by calling out to the man, “No one shall dare beat you again.” As if these remarks were not incendiary enough, he proceeded to say, “This is your land, your fields, your gardens; your memories are here”. A decade later, under Milosevic’s watch, in defense of fields, gardens and memories, Serbian forces unleashed ethnic cleansing in Kosovo -- resulting in the massacre of thousands of ethnic Albanians and the forcible displacement of around 800,000 more. The retaliation of the ethnic Albanians on the few Serbs that have been left behind still continue to this day, pointing to the cyclical nature of the violence. The ethnic divides in the conflict-torn and poverty-ridden ex-Yugoslav region have cut deep and painful wounds, and generations of distrust and hatred fuelled in large part by nationalist myth-making, have created a situation where according to Anastasijevic (2004:105) “the prevalent mode of interaction has been traditionally one of dominance, rather than coexistence or assimilation.” This paper interrogates the notion that nationalism is intrinsic to modernity, or is an indispensable ingredient of modernity. Quite to the contrary, many manifestations of nationalism are do not lead to modernity, but actually create even deeper wounds and perpetuate violence against those who do not fall within the orthodox imaginary. This is a classic example of “primordialism”. Daniele Conversi explains that “(p)rimordialists appeal to emotional and instinctive constraints as ultimate explanations for national mobilisation. They typically date the origin of nationhood back to remote epochs, treating them as emotional givens. Their approach is often associated with nationalist discourse, which occasionally reverberates in academia. (2006: 15)” What is this drug that induces this kind of madness? What is the “nation” and why has it become so powerful a source of identity that history is rife with examples of people who had died or had been willing to die on its behalf? How is it that nationalism has managed to embed itself so completely into the human psyche as a fixed variable, impervious to scrutiny and interrogation? The most famous definition of nationalism was given by Gellner in the seminal book Nations and Nationalism (1973: 1), which defines nationalism as a political principle “which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.” Almost equally famous and as often cited is the depiction of Benedict Anderson (1991: 48) of the nation as an “imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. However, this paper will not look the epistemological definition of nationalism or nationhood. Rather, it will look at how nationalism is both reproduced and deployed – imagined and reimagined -- in contemporary times as an adjunct of modernity and the notion of sameness that is constantly reinforced. The reproduction and deployment of nationalism in the present day – natural, everyday, insidious -- gives rise to structural violence, and thus the only form of development it can lead to is one that reinforces existing power arrangements and privileges the political and economic elite. By structural violence, this paper will use the definition of Prontzos (2004: 300), who defined the term as “deleterious conditions that derive from economic and political structures of power, created and maintained by human actions and institutions.” Hoffman (2004) argues that nationalism imagines a place where sameness and individuality can coexist. Sameness—as a sense of group and collectivity—is achieved by underlining existing commonalities and bringing to light shared histories, narratives, legends, and myths. It is about socializing, becoming aware and accepting the shared culture, which Gellner understands as "the same system of ideas, signs, associations, and ways of behaving and communicating" (Gellner 1983). For Anderson sameness would mean that regardless of the already existing inequalities among people, a nation appears as a "deep and horizontal comradeship" (Anderson 1991: 50). What state nationalism achieves is to reach agreement in a consented, hence non coercive fashion, about the national ethos that supersedes the multiple sub-state national ethoses. To quote once more Gellner’s discussion on nationalism. “Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations maketh man; nations are the artefacts of men’s convictions and loyalties and solidarities.” (1983: 6) In the attempt to bind people together under one umbrella that holds their “convictions and loyalties and solidarities”, what is created is one monolithic homogenous mass that highlights only similarities and obscures valid differences that need to be investigated. Vertical differences are craftily concealed, and inequalities are tidied up and swept under the rug. Thus, it makes it more difficult to address festering issues of unequal access to resources and uneven development between various groups (class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) Moreover, the national identity is more often than not, defined by those that held political and economic power. Explains Watson (1990: 195): For ‘homogeneity [was] imposed by the objective, inescapable imperative’ of industrial civilization, of which the major state nationalisms were the expression and vehicle, with minority national groups dissolving into the wider culture; state and culture had to be one on a large scale as required by the industrial society based on economic growth to which mankind was irreversibly committed. And this is structural violence of a most virulent kind – because it invites discrimination, marginalization and consignment to a life and identity designed and imposed by those who do not think, look and live like he or she does. Can nationalism, as imagined and deployed by developmental elites, encompass all citizens within the national identity and national project? In other words, how many other nations and nationalisms are underrepresented by the notion of nation-state? I argue that one ought to be suspicious and critical about how nationalist rhetoric is [mis] used and manipulated by states (often naively conceived as Public Interest and/ or Weberian states) to win public consent (legitimization) to undertake economic and political agendas that often, either alienate or assimilate other nations. Nationalism, as invoked by political and economic elites, can become a hegemonic discourse that obliterates plurality, and a tool of control at the service of only those who share and fit into the national imaginaire and of a particular western notion of development. The example of the nationalist rhetoric in Serbia is a good example of this. Indeed, for centuries wars have been fought using the rhetoric of defending the motherland. In recent times, wars have been fought to push an idea – the American Way of Life, for instance. Indeed, it is a form of nationalism that believes that one’s way of life, one’s ideological firmament is more stable, and thus should be exported to the rest of the world, even if it means using guns and killing civilians. But wars cost money, and every cent channeled to finance a war is a cent taken away from the domestic population. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes (2010: 1) dicussed what he calls the “opportunity costs” of the war They explain: The Iraq war didnt just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war. Indeed, the victims of structural violence in that case are the multitudes who were laid off from work, who were rendered vulnerable by the recession. And for what? Because their government deemed it best to spread the American way of life to the Iraqis, because Saddam Hussein had to be punished for being anti-American in values. This message is reproduced in various means and various ways. Michael Billig introduced the term “banal nationalism” to cover unnoticed, daily practices that naturalize nationalism through daily reproduction. To quote, “The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion, it is a flag hanging unnoticed in a public building.” (1995:8) Nationalism and the rise of the modern state Which brings this paper to its second point: what state nationalism imagines and diffuses is a notion of “nation-state”, a powerful political abstraction that alludes that the nation’s interests coincide with those of the state. According to Adrian Leftwich, the state is the only agency capable to act as a “central coordinating intelligence or coordinating capacity” for development (Leftwich 2000: 7). He argues that it is the state—in fact, the ‘developmental state’ — which has the “authority, power and capacity...to manage the market” (2000: 8) and hence, is capable to generate sustained developmental momentum. Drawing from the work of Chalmers Johnsons (1982), Alice Amsden (1989) and Robert Wade (1990), Leftwich asserts that one of the major components of the ‘developmental states’ is the presence of highly nationalistic elites leading the development process. Nationalism is then imperative “to respond to regional competition and external threats” (2000: 155) thus, crucial to development. Although, Leftwich does provide important insights on the politics of development and the interplay of the different characteristics of ‘developmental states’, I propose a further analysis on his statement on nationalism. “Nation-state”, in itself, is a form of legitimization. At this point, it is necessary to introduce Gramsci and his concept of hegemony in this analysis. Gramscis proposition is that capitalism maintains control over accumulation and surplus extraction, not only through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through an ideological discourse and project. This form of political power is achieved through the ability of the state to build an ideological and intellectual discourse capable to win the consent of its citizens. I argue that states (from Marxist point of view) formulate and disseminate ideas of nationhood and development that bind subordinate groups into the existing social order (Overbeek 2004). The hegemonic power of the state lies in that is able to adopt a leadership role paving and suggesting the direction of the economy and political aspects of life. What is important here is to consider that coercion in all its forms—economic, political and military—is only a partial basis for a dominant power. Consent and cooperation are just as important. So, a hegemonic state "must act in such a way as to make the claim that is acting in the general interest plausible to others even when is acting out of narrow self-interest" (Harvey 2003: 8). This is what exercising leadership through consent is about: a legitimization of the authority by the illusory idea of a state as public and committed with the common interest. That the notion of nation is malleable and wielded by the dominant social actors within it is a point elucidated elegantly by Delanty and Mahoney (2002: 99), who stated: The hermeneutic approaches to the nation discourse, which have united interpretive work to the present, and that have been on the whole very productive, should be retained. But they might operate in a more tentative manner in which the nation is conceived more as a shifting set of signifiers that ‘remains a floating representation’… [whose origins]… the stages of its foundation and the vectors of its destiny are, therefore, constantly being displaced and are always subject to the decisions of social actors… Despite arguments that the nation-state has withered as a result of the rise of the global capital economy, the unavoidable truth is that the imperial nation-state has yet to be dislodged as the primary entity that keeps the wheels of the capitalist economy grinding. James Petras (2003: 1), for example, has discussed how the imperial state has aided and abetted the reproduction of the capitalist system, and has given three concrete illustrations: First, imperial states protect Northern mercantilism by supporting home markets and eliminating competition; second, trade liberalization agreements are entered into and enforced by states, and third, states guarantee property rights to favor multinational corporations. Ultimately, this creates a system that privileges the rich countries and impoverishes the south. Condemnation of this atrocious state behavior by its own nationals would promptly result in labeling of “anti-nationalistic” or “anti-American.” Recent changes at the global level, especially the creation of globally operative political and economic institutions, are creating a global regime. In the midst of this reality: Can nationalisms survive? Or instead, are we doomed to start identifying with a shared global culture, which—borrowing Anthony Smith’s definition of nation— will entail common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all its members… legitimized by the modern ideology of nationalism with its ideals of autonomy, unity, authenticity and popular sovereignty? (Smith 1991: 2) My belief is that nations will not cease to exist. Taking the risk of sounding too optimistic, I feel that globalization is creating an opportunity for interconnectivity and mutual understanding of differences to happen, pumping life to nations and to their constant evolution, instead of exterminating them. Drawing from the work of Arturo Escobar (2007: 179) and Boaventura de Soussa (2009: 105), this liberal world could very well be allowing us to think about “diversality and interdependency as a universal project” (Escobar 2007: 180), and of an “ecology of nations” and knowledges of these nations (Santos 2009: 103). What is crucial, however, is the continued critical interrogation of nationalism vis a vis modernity and the belief-system that perceives nationalism and the nation state as impervious to scrutiny. Going back to Kosovo – sight of Slobodan Milosevic’s rabble-rousing nationalism -- nearly a decade after the cessation of the war in the blighted land, efforts at reconstruction have been marred by systematic acts of violence perpetrated against rival ethnic groups, including the Roma, Gorani, Muslim Slavs and Croats, and carried out with impunity because of ineffective law and order institutions. Peacekeepers have remained largely impotent and the over-all climate of insecurity and vulnerability has only served to heighten ethnic tensions. Nationalism as key to modernity is not enough – the task includes looking at the broad and multiplex power dynamics that underlie these identities and become the basis for the conferral or denial of economic, political or social privilege. (word count: 2531) References Anderson, B (1991) ‘Imagined Communuties’ in Imagined Communities: Reflections in the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, pp. 48-49. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Delanty, G. and O’Mahony, P. (2002). Nationalism and Social Theory. London: Sage. Escobar, A (2007) ‘Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise’ Cutural Studies 21: 2, 179-210 Gellner, E (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 6-7 Harvey, David (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lane, J (2006) ‘The Public Choice Approach’ in The Public Sector: Concepts, Models and Approaches. London: Sage, pp. 201-216. Leftwich, A (2000) States of Development: On the primacy of politics in development. London: Polity. Overbeek, H ‘Global Governance, Class, Hegemony: A historical materialist perspective’ Vrije Working Papers Political Science No. 2004/01. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Prontzos, P. (2004) “Collateral Damage: The Human Cost of Structural Violence”, in A. Jones (ed.) Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity. London-New York: Zed Books, pp. 299-315. Roy, Arundhati (2002) ‘Come September’ Roy reading and Ms. Roy and Howard Zinn in conversation Lensic Performing Arts Center Santa Fe, New Mexico (18 September). Santos, Boaventura de Soussa (2009) ‘A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 26 (7-8): 103 -125 Smith, A (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stiglitz, J. and L. Blimes. (2010) “The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 trillion and Beyond.” The Washington Post. Accessed 24 April 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html Weber, Max (1997) ‘Rational-legal Authority and Bureaucracy’ in Michael Hill (ed.) The Policy Process. A Reader, pp. 323-327. London: Pearson, Printice Hall. Watson, M. (1990) Contemporary Minority Nationalism. London and New York: Routledge. Read More