by David J. Lobina
Like the study of any other complex idea, the analysis of nationalism requires building up boundaries between different phenomena, drawing various theoretical distinctions, and recognising the inevitable splits that arise within what may look like a whole ideology at first. It is by teasing out the building blocks of nationalism that we may obtain a better view, and it is by drawing attention to its psychological underpinnings that it might be possible to make sense of where nationalism comes from, both as an idea and as a real-life event.
Say what?
Well, this is a nice little summary of my general take on the phenomenon of nationalism, as laid out, from the perspective of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, here, here, and here, and with a little help from the anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker (here, here, and here).
I am bringing this into play now once again as a way to provide the right segue to the long-promised conclusion to my series on the use and abuse of fascism to describe current political events, especially in the US (started here). It’s been quite a while since then, and there is a fair amount to pick up and discuss, and so I thought it would be in my best interest to write a sort of “refreshment” about what I was on about last time around.
The final-parter, which will double down on my original point – to wit, that the term fascism is used far too loosely these days, that most of the people it is being applied to are hardly fascists in any meaningful sense, and that modern political undercurrents bear little to no relationship to the European fascism of the 1920-30s, especially to Italian fascism – will come out next month and hopefully bring an end to the series (pending commentary forcing me to retake it later on, of course; actually, do comments still exist at 3 Quarks Daily? I haven’t seen any recently).
In this post, I want to bring in the thought of Rudolf Rocker for the last time in order to clarify a few issues orbiting around the study of nationalism and national interests. This brief discussion will constitute a nice segue to next month’s post on the application of the term fascism to current political events and movements, most of which, I will argue then, are best characterised as examples of “populist nationalism”, or even “wannabe fascism”.
As amply argued in my previous posts, then, the gathering of a large group of people under a specific nationality, language or culture is clearly artificial and the result of a concerted and top-down effort. Humans do naturally form groups on their own, are prone to communicate with each other by using some sort of common code, and co-operate with each other for various purposes (to work, to socialise, to create art, etc.).
There are certain precursors to the nationalist spirit, not least in the human propensity to imitate and share each other’s ways of speaking and acting, but there are few givens in nature and no common or naturally congruous languages and cultural customs but infinitely many diverse manifestations of these phenomena.
What nationalism does is co-opt a number of basic properties of human nature, exploiting the fact that human cognition allows for both commonalities and diversities in the very phenomena that are central to building a nationalist sentiment – language, culture, etc. But the commonalities nationalisms produce are always due to modern conditions, often created anew and dubiously ever created from pre-existing ties, apart from the manner in which cultural or ethnic ties are imagined to be as well as how these perceptions are used by the elites to construct the very identities that are central to individual nationalisms but for which there is typically very little actual precedent.
There is something rather natural about nationalism as an idea, though in practice a specific nationalism is a contingency and particular national identities in a way illusory, based as they ultimately are on unobservable, internal realities such as the mental grammars that underlie what looks like an external language, but quite isn’t (and likewise for cultural customs).
Rocker did but intuit the general state of affairs, but he lacked the theoretical tools to ascertain it properly at the time. His magnum opus, Nationalism and Culture, the book I keep on recommending in this Column, constitutes an immensely rich analysis of nationalism, a phenomenon approached from many different viewpoints in the book, many in need of further elaboration, most notably the following, I would say: the power relations within communities that typically arise where nationalism and which often result in different castes or classes; the tendency of nationalism to do away with federalist ties and push towards centralisation, often by playing up so-called “national interests”, which in extreme form can derive into fascism; and the relationship of nationalism to capitalist models of production and social Darwinist models of society.
Take the role of “national interests”. Now, interestingly, one of Rocker’s main points in his book is that there is no unified set of national interests. So-called national interests never apply to a population at large but typically only reflect the interests of the small groups of people who are in charge (once again, the elites):
The alleged community of national interests does not exist in any country; it is nothing more than a representation of false facts in the interest of small minorities (Nationalism and Culture, p. 264; my emphasis).
To make this point, Rocker argues that for the majority of people who are born and grow up in a particular nation the state of affairs is such that, strictly speaking, they have little say in what type of citizens they become – in particular, what national identity they will acquire. The school system and the overall environment where a person is born conspire, as it were, to make one a citizen of a special kind – i.e., of a particular national identity – but there is no choosing involved and possibly no legitimising where one is born. What matters for Rocker is one’s immediate environment, for it is
the force of social circumstances [that]…is always stronger than the abstract assumptions of all nationalistic ideology (p. 275).
What I mean by legitimising where one is born – the legitimisation of one’s national identity, effectively – is that in the overwhelming majority of cases throughout history the question of whether any citizen is given the right to consent, or indeed accept, the political system they inherit hardly ever arises. There are of course exceptions, but these tend to come after crises and do not occur as a matter of fact; there were various referenda in both Italy and Spain after the regimes imposed by Mussolini and Franco fell, for instance, resulting in the adoption of novel constitutional arrangements, but subsequent generations have had little to say in the matter (minus elections and other, narrower referenda).
This sentiment is a familiar one in the anarchist literature, in fact, from Rocker’s own work to modern discussions of the tension between the authority of the nation-state and the autonomy of the individual (e.g., here). The point here is that there can often be quite a large intellectual and political chasm between what effectively are rather recent generations, and the gap can only increase the further back we go in history. The political continuity can perhaps be best exemplified by the common practice of sharing and even taking pride in the past glories (and, sometimes, guilt) of previous generations of supposed co-nationals, even centuries apart. But what justifies these beliefs, really?
If there is no real historical continuity to languages and cultures when these events are viewed from the perspective of linguistics and psychology – that is, as primitive properties of human cognition, as I have argued consistently in previous posts, aforementioned – then the chasm will be more significant still when it comes to political ideas and belief systems. People from different centuries often inhabit very different worlds, and the implication that anything travels down generations, from glories and egregious crimes to nationalist feelings and social contracts, certainly shouldn’t be taken for granted. The specific point to mind here is the significance of the belief that there is continuity in political ideas and thus in political structures and national interests, regardless of the actual historical record.
Rocker thought that one unifying phenomenon was culture and cultural output, though he certainly denied that the artist derives much inspiration from national interests. Instead, Rocker argues, artists draw inspiration from their own personal circumstances and endowments as well as from the “great cultural unity” artists supposedly belong to:
Every artist is in the end only a member of a great cultural unity which, along with his personal endowments, determines his work; and in this nationality plays an entirely subordinate role (p. 516).
Man’s ability to enjoy other cultures (p. 347), Rocker stresses, derives from the proclivity of human beings to create culture and the arts to being with, a tendency that may be
in its essence everywhere the same despite the ever increasing number and the endless diversity of its special forms of expression (p. 345).
This is not to deny that different political systems may very well have different effects on the type of art that is produced. Rocker may be right to point out that the modern state and nationalism developed pari passu rather than independently of each other in early modern Europe, one of the main points of the book, but no state is a monolith and there are all sorts of non-capitalist and non-nationalist currents in modern countries, many of which plausibly have an effect on art and culture. Nevertheless, the general idea is in line with Rocker’s own understanding of freedom and the role of culture in resisting some of the more restrictive policies of the nation-state, for he conceived freedom
as a practical possibility which guarantees to every member of society that he may develop to the fullest all those powers, talents and capacities with which nature has endowed him (p. 344).
Maybe so. And maybe nationalism, as I am prone to argue, proves to actually be innocuous to the human capacity for language and culture in that the richness of human experience can continue more or less unabated despite the homogenisation a given nationalism imposes, an aspect that Rocker was in no position to appreciate given his limited understanding of the psychological underpinnings of both language and culture.
But the life experience nationalism forces upon a person is anything but innocent. There is much more to a person than the national identity one is supposed to belong to, and it would be a gross mistake to subordinate the autonomy of individuals and the associations individuals freely form to the unconditional acceptance of what is supposed to be common to a given group of people, for such premade representations of what a person is imposes quite wide-ranging constraints. Nationalist feelings do not arise naturally, and the fact that they are ubiquitous precisely because there is an overall structure that promotes them is an indication that they may not be so central to the fabric of human societies after all.
Still, it is precisely because of these characteristics of nationalism that the phenomenon is ripe for demagogy, populism, and taken to the extremes, for the totalitarian ideology that is – that was – fascism. And no doubt that there are many wannabe fascists and sentimentalist reactionaries out there, but (Italian) fascism was the result of particular historical events and conditions (among other things, extreme political violence from all sides, the birth of party-militias, totalitarian views of society, etc.) and the similarities between that time in Europe and our own societies – or, as brought up by the philosopher and political commentator Jason Stanley in a comment to my original post, between Europe and the US in the very 1920-30s – are extremely superficial and I would argue that very little is in fact gained for the understanding of our own political situation from these comparisons.
I do realise that the word fascism is often used simply to mean right-wing authoritarianism, and that’s fine as far as it goes, though I think this also adds very little to our understanding of current events and seems to be used, mostly, to score ideological points. I also realise that many people, especially in the US and the English-speaking world, are quite taken with Umberto Eco’s popular essay on Ur-fascism and take this article as a sort of authoritative take on fascism’s mode de vie, but that essay was on ways of acting and speaking, at its heart, and it is hardly a good guide to understanding historical fascism or even the Italian post-fascist parties from the time that Eco wrote the essay (the latter is the actual context of Eco’s article). But anyway, more about all this anon (also known as next month’s post!).