Nationalism
Jerusalem, can you hear the Banshee’s wail?
I ended up in San Diego at the beginning of the '88 primary season. It was a pretty sordid group of candidates for president. I introduced myself to the San Diego Rainbow Coalition and offered services as an informal advisor/organizer. The San Diego Rainbow Coalition was certainly that, ethnically comprised of African Americans, Mexicans, Central Americans, Japanese, Filipinos, various Pacific Islanders, and others. Near election day, ten Germans from the German Marshall Fund showed up. No one really wanted to talk to them, so they pushed it on the white boy. No problem, I enjoy talking to foreigners of any stripe.
Unrelated, I had just finished writing a piece titled “Nationalism Uber Alles,” which I passed out at the meeting. There was a point you couldn't beat hard enough on the Germans about their National Socialist experience. They took it all with the penance of a good Roman Catholic crawling on hands and knees up a cobblestone street. However, the piece was no German affront, but a critique of nationalism as a historically dubious notion. Over its relatively short history, nationalism had proved more harmful than helpful to the human experience.
Decades later, despite all the talk of globalizing this and that, nationalism remains as powerful and harmful a force in human affairs as it’s ever been. From the beginning, the ideas, tenets, and practices of nationalism were forged in Europe, largely post-Renaissance, but with roots reaching back further. There are several important factors that are common to all nationalist doctrines; the use of violence, the subjugation of previous language diversity to one, a national people’s myth, and the importance of land enshrined by arbitrary national boundaries.
In his wonderful The Gutenberg Galaxy, technology historian Marshall McLuhan also documents the essential importance of the printing press in the creation of the modern nation state, national language, ideology and order. On nationalism’s birth, McLuhan points to American diplomat Carlton Hayes' work Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (1931). McLuhan quotes Hayes,
“Nor is it at all certain that the "masses" in any country have been directly responsible for the rise of modern nationalism. The movement appears to have gotten under way first among the "intellectual" classes and to have received decisive impetus from the support of the middle classes. ...there can be little question that in the first half of the eighteenth century the masses of Europe, as well as of Asia and America, whilst possessing some consciousness of nationality, thought of themselves chiefly as belonging to a province or town or an empire, rather than to a national state, and made no serious or effective protest against being transferred from one political domain to another, and that their later thought and action as nationalities were taught them by the intellectual and middle classes of their respective countries.”
This is an essential point: nationalism always descends from the few. Hayes remarks on its evolution, “By 1815 liberal nationalism was a fairly definite intellectual movement throughout western and central Europe. . . . It was surely not aristocratic, and, though paying lip-service to democracy, it tended to be middle-class.” Across the 19th century, middle class influence rose with industrialization, becoming increasingly dominant. As with all established rule by a minority, violence was an essential means to power.
McLuhan ties militarism, the great forge of nationalism, to the world created by the printing press. He writes,
“The modern soldier is especially the instance of the movable type, the replaceable part, the classic Gutenberg phenomenon. De Tocqueville has much to say of this in his European Revolution: 'What the republican partisans took for love of the Republic was chiefly a love of the Revolution. In fact, the army was the only class in France in which every member, without exception, had gained by the Revolution and had a personal interest in supporting it. To it every officer owed his rank, and every soldier his chance of becoming an officer. ….Deep down the army cared nothing for civic liberties. Hatred of foreigners and a love of his native land are generally the only elements of the soldier's patriotism even in free nations; still more must this have been the case at that time in France. The army, like almost every other army in the world, could make nothing of the slow and complicated gyrations of a representative government; it detested and despised the Assembly, because it understood only powers that were strong and simple; all it wanted was national independence and victories.'”
Of course the Little Corporal and self-crowned emperor would briefly turn the French Republican Army into the imperial La Grande Armee, but the established revolutionary army model, one might even reach back a century earlier to Cromwell's New Model Army, would play an essential role in national development across the next two centuries. Most infamously, the practice was brutally enshrined in Bismarck's words on his forging the German nation with “eisen und blut.” The United States would use this model first in the destruction of its indigenous populations and then in establishing its great blood drenched national covenant with Mr. Lincoln's war.
Similarly in the 20th century, armies were central institutions in the forging of nation states with the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires at the beginning of the 20th century and the breakup of Europe's Asian and African empires after World War II. In every new national state, the army became a pillar of national dogma, a violent glue composed of sticky blood.
As McLuhan noted, the army's role was fostered by the new world created by the printing press, “the Gutenberg method of homogeneous segmentation.” The press’ role would prove most essential in establishing a dominant and unifying national language, again best exemplified with Germany. It is little recognized today that before the Modern Era, Germany was one the most tribally divided areas of Europe. Luther, with the indispensable aid of Gutenberg's press, was instrumental in creating what we know as the modern German language. McLuhan writes,
“In Germany, more pluralistic and tribally diverse than the rest of Europe, the unifying services of printing in the formation of a literary language were strikingly effective. And, write Febvre and Martin L'Apparition du livre: 'Luther made a language which in all domains approaches modern German. The enormous diffusion of his works, their literary quality, the quasi-sacred character which belonged in the eyes of the faithful to the text of the Bible and of the New Testament as established by him, all this soon made his language a model. Accessible immediately to all readers... (the German) employed by Luther finally conquered, and numerous words used only in medieval German were finally adopted universally. And his vocabulary imposed itself in so imperious a fashion that most printers did not dare to diverge from it in the least.'”
Similarly, McLuhan writes of France and print's role as language’s great nationalizing force,
“If the original Jacobins were sluggish in translating all their theories of education into action, they were prompt to recognize the significance of language as the basis of nationality and to try to compel all inhabitants of France to use the French language. They contended that successful rule by "the people" and united action by the nation were dependent, not only on a certain uniformity of habits and customs, but even more on an identity of ideas and ideals which could be effected by speeches, the printing press, and other instruments of education, provided that these employed one and the same language. Confronted with the historic fact that France was not a linguistic unit-that, in addition to widely variant dialects in different parts of the country, 'foreign' languages were spoken in the west by Bretons, in the south by Provencals, Basques, and Corsicans, in the north by Flemings, and in the northeast by Alsatian Germans – they resolved to stamp out the dialects and the foreign languages and to force every French citizen to know and employ the French language.”
This process of language hegemony was repeated over the next two centuries as nationalism spread across the planet, despite whatever other ideological flag waved. In China, Mandarin became the official dialect over several others and numerous tribal languages. While in many of the newest nations formed in the second half of the 20th century, such as India and many African nations, official languages either don't exist or remain an issue of contention, nationalism's grip is a little looser.
Nationalism has become entwined and entangled in all that's considered modern. “Since industrialism even the arts, philosophy, and religion have been patterned by nationalism. Hayes writes:
“For a century and a half major improvements in technology, in the industrial arts, and in material comfort, as well as most developments in the realms of intellect and aesthetics, have been yoked to the service of nationalism. The Industrial Revolution, despite its cosmopolitan potentialities, has been largely nationalized in actual fact. Modern scholarship, despite its scientific claims and its ubiquitous nature, has been preponderantly enlisted in support of nationalism. Philosophies which in origin were not expressly nationalist and were sometimes definitely intended to be antinationalist, philosophies such as Christianity, Liberalism, Marxism, and the systems of Hegel, Comte, and Nietzche, have been copiously drawn upon and frequently distorted for nationalist purposes. The plastic arts, music, and belles-lettres, despite their universal appeal, have become increasingly the product or the pride of national patriots. So much is nationalism a commonplace in the modes of thought and action of the civilized populations of the contemporary world that most men take nationalism for granted. Without serious reflection they imagine it to be the most natural thing in the universe and assume that it must always have existed.'”
Not only has nationalism not always existed, it is a relatively recent political/cultural invention. Looking back on humanity's national era, the future will judge the United States as the nation of nations. Derived from all the elements that created European nationalism, despite a population comprised of people from across the planet, an extreme nationalist mindset infests the citizenry. Importantly, with America's creation of history's first secular government, nationalism assumed a quasi-religious role. More recently with the establishment of the post-World War II Pax Americana and the American National Security State, nationalism and militarism have been continuously and endlessly stoked in official defense of empire, the word itself never used. This has been most detestably accomplished with the creation of a vast chasm of ignorance and fear between the American people and the rest of the world.
Ironically, in the US, the great migrant populations of Europe came together, and with the exception of Mr. Lincoln's War, managed to live together relatively peacefully as Europe continued ripping itself apart with ever more violent national wars for another century. In the US, after a generation or two, Europeans lost their previous national identities. A little more fitfully has been the integration of Asians, Central and South Americans, African Americans, and of course, its indigenous populations – America's rainbow nation. Population wise, nationalist US is the great antithesis of any national people's myth, revealing nationalism to be the completely modern, plastic construct it is and always has been, no matter where on the planet its been instituted.
Today, nationalism remains the planet's most powerful political force. Its active power resides in very powerful leviathan corporations and most especially national military forces. It is not a mistake two great wars of the present are national wars, civil wars really if we necessarily peer deeply, historically, naturally as post-modern citizens, understanding the only true borders are the planet itself. All future wars are civil wars. Ukraine/Russia have for centuries been coexistent, historically integrated. For Europe, Ukraine is late to the nationalist game. They are quickly finding while the game has not changed, the rewards are now meager, if any.
Israel/Palestine have an even longer historical coexistent, yet now grapple with the violence and stilted nationalist thinking imported from Europe. There is a certain irony that modern Israel/Palestine was birthed from the logical excess of national zealotry carried to despicable genocidal depths by Germany's National Socialists. The irony, in reaction to this nationalist brutality, this assembly line horror, crimes against humanity, it was thought a good idea to create another national state.
Six decades before the Shoah, Nietzsche having fled Germany wrote of Luther's and Bismark's nationalist construct, “These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay.” After two millennia of persecution in Christian Europe, the universalist Jew would be fatally entrapped in Europe's growing nationalist bog. Nietzsche suggested,
“Of the people of Israel. Among the spectacles to which the coming century invites us is the decision as to the destiny of the Jews of Europe. That their die is cast, that they have crossed their Rubicon, is now palpably obvious: all that is left for them is either to become the masters of Europe or to lose Europe... They themselves know best that a conquest of Europe, or any kind of act of violence, on their part is not to be thought of: but they also know that at some future time Europe may fall into their hands like a ripe fruit if they would only just extend them.”
After the war, Germany should have been extended into their hands, a rule for a half-century or more by nationalism’s greatest victims. Then the people of Israel would have been “called the inventors and signposts of the nations of Europe,” out of tragedy, a post-nationalist sense of humanity would have rose.
Along this thinking, the FT has an important interview with Susan Nieman. She laments the loss of Jewish universalism with the establishment of nationalist Israel.
“She has the advantage of being able to invoke Albert Einstein. For 23 years, she has led the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, a research institute based at his one-time summer home. 'Einstein was a total universalist Jew . . . We care about his politics and his biography because that’s why he became a cultural icon.'” She quotes Einstein from 1929 regarding his thinking about establishing the state of Israel. Einstein said, 'Should we be unable to find a way to honest co-operation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing from our 2,000 years of suffering and will deserve our fate.'”
It's clear neither the Israelis or anyone else, certainly not the US, have learned anything. We will all deserve our fate.
I do not in anyway mean to single out the present brutal nationalist conflicts of Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia. They are simply the most recent to clutter the screen, though the latter increasingly less these days. Nationalist wars continue across every continent on the planet, too many to list really. What’s a nationalist war? It involves a national army. The wars meet American awareness only if it’s in the perceived interest of the American National Security State. The National Security State’s is intricately responsible for these latest national conflagrations as it has been intimately involved in most others across the globe for the last seventy five years.
With the breakup empires over the last two centuries, national borders have largely been drawn where the troops stopped. They are arbitrary. This arbitrariness of not just national borders, but many other geographic political lines helps make established political and government institutions increasingly impotent. The solution is to look at land from two different perspectives. The first is from the “local,” that is by a given area's natural landscape contours and ecological characteristics. Secondly, the understanding, depending on with how fine a measure you wish to define local, how these almost infinite localities complexly interact to define this whole planet. Our politics and institutions need to be reformed, distributedly networked together using these factors.
Nationalism has been a political creation of dubious value. Today, it remains a powerful political force, the greatest organized political power on the planet. Yet, it is clear, nationalism, the organization of the nation state increasingly fails to meet our present challenges, most imperatively that of a technologically, overly clever species beginning to understand we are an extremely fragile life form dependent on a very small planet.