The Anxious Triumph Page 6
The nineteenth century may have been the age of nationalism but the twentieth was the age of nation states, and the era of nationalism is very far from coming to an end. In 1900 there were just over fifty formally sovereign states (without counting various sultanates such as the Upper Aulaqi Sheikhdom, now part of the Republic of Yemen, and statelets such as Andorra, still extant), including the United States, Canada, and Haiti, plus nineteen states in Europe, seventeen in Latin America, and only six in Africa and seven in Asia (see Table 1).
Table 1 Sovereign States in the World, 1900
Argentina Luxembourg
Austria-Hungary Mexico
Belgium Montenegro
Bhutan Morocco
Bolivia Nepal
Brazil Netherlands
Canada Nicaragua
Chile Norway
China Orange Free State
Colombia Ottoman Empire
Costa Rica Paraguay
Denmark Persia
Dominican Republic Peru
Ecuador Portugal
El Salvador Romania
Ethiopia Russia
France Serbia
Germany Siam
Greece South African Republic
Guatemala Spain
Haiti Swaziland
Honduras Sweden
Italy Switzerland
Japan United Kingdom
Korea United States
Liberia Uruguay
Venezuela
By 1960 there were over one hundred sovereign states, and today there are more than two hundred. Yet despite its successes, nationalism has nowadays lost the unquestioned positive connotations it possessed in the nineteenth century. Although today’s schoolchildren may be taught about their glorious past, they are also often taught to be tolerant of and to value other cultures. This narrative usually comes from intellectual elites, the most cosmopolitan section of the population, who speak more than one language, travel easily, and are curious about other people’s mores. Nationalists are perceived by them to be provincial, narrow-minded, and obsessed with defending their own culture, while cosmopolitans glory in their ability to transcend borders and frontiers, in being ‘citizens of the world’. Yet, when it comes to culture and politics, the majority of the inhabitants of each nation state tend to be unaware of those of even neighbouring countries (unless it is American politics, which is constantly discussed by the international media, while American cultural products, particularly music, films, and television fiction are widely exported). Such abject ignorance about neighbouring nations is true even in highly advanced countries with fine schools and ancient universities. Thus Jean Racine, the seventeenth-century dramatist, who is studied in all French schools, is virtually unheard of in neighbouring Germany and Italy. Similarly, a majority of Germans and French have never heard of Dante.25 People still live in their nation as if they were in a village.
Some theorists, such as the Japanese management expert Kenichi Ohmae, go so far as to say that we live in a ‘borderless world’ and that since the great problems of our age are global, they can only be solved by a global or trans-national approach. They say that nation states are empty vessels, mere illusions belonging to the past, and ‘unnatural business units’ in a global economy: what matters now are ‘region states’, geographical units such as northern Italy, Wales, San Diego, Hong Kong, and Silicon Valley.26 Yet, at one time, Ohmae thought that Japan, far from being borderless, could unilaterally extend its borders and its sovereignty over coastal areas to 200 nautical miles – an ‘act of state’ that made Japan less dependent on ‘foreign’ fish.27 We are still far, after all, from the borderless state. The idea that nation states are doomed by ever-growing internationalization is barely new. In 1910, Gustave Hervé, then an international socialist and not yet a rabid nationalist and admirer of Mussolini, stated it forcefully in his pamphlet L’internationalisme: ‘Modern motherlands have just been created and already they are threatened by internationalism.’ He confidently predicted that if the nineteenth century was the century of nationalism, in the twentieth century internationalism would prevail.28
So how important are nation states in the era of globalization? It could be argued that if states did not count, their decisions would not be so important for the world economy. But would anyone make such a strange claim for the American decision in 1971 to devalue the dollar, or for the member states of the European Union to establish a single market under the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, or the decision in 1978 by the Chinese Communist Party to reform the economy, or, in 2016, that of Britain to leave the European Union?
The debate over whether the state is growing or shrinking rages on, fuelled by the difficulty in defining the state. Some point out that after years of almost unimpeded growth, the advent of neo-liberalism has led states to retrench themselves, cutting down on public spending on welfare, health, and education, and abandoning their control over the commanding heights of the economy they had developed in the thirty years of post-1945 growth. Here the statistics are not univocal. State spending remains surprisingly stable. General statements about ‘the state’ and its future often show a lack of understanding of the variety of states and their ever-changing relationship to each other. The Franco-Spanish border, now just a line on a map, was only too tangible to someone trying to flee from the Nazis. On the night of 25 September 1940 the great social theorist Walter Benjamin killed himself because he was told that he would not be able to cross the border and reach safety. Today, anyone can just walk across it.
How and why have states proliferated over the last 150 years? The new states were formed either by secession – breaking away violently or peacefully from a wider unit (e.g. former British colonies, Norway from Denmark, Slovenia from Yugoslavia) – or by unification imposed from above, as was the case with Italy and Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Secession is by far the norm, absorption is rare.
Each new state, however small, maintains all the paraphernalia of sovereignty largely established in the nineteenth century: passports, borders, armies, uniformed police, currencies, national anthems, national days, and central banks – later even airlines, national football teams, and entrants in the Eurovision Song Contest or the Miss World competition.
There is one conspicuous exception to all this. A number of European states have adopted a single currency (beginning with eleven members in 1999 and reaching nineteen in 2015) and abolished border controls among each other with the Schengen Agreement of 1985. Yet all sovereign states, including those in the European Union, celebrate a ‘national’ culture, have at least one or more national television channels that give priority to national news, and impart their national history in schools where children are taught to be proud of their country, even though most would agree that there is no personal merit in being born in any one particular place. They are given a somewhat embellished account of the birth and development of their nation.
The litany is fairly similar – a literary genre – poised between lachrymose self-pitying victimhood and vainglorious accounts of heroic deeds. ‘We’, it says, have been around for centuries, or even more (1066 in Britain; 966 in Poland; since Romulus and Remus in Italy; since Plato and Aristotle in Greece; since the days of Abraham in Israel). We have written glorious pages of history and they would have been even more glorious had it not been for the dastardly acts of our oppressors. Eventually we achieved our freedom, our independence, our happiness, and we, who are unlike everyone else (for we are Croats and not Slovenians, Italians and not Austrians, French and not Germans, Ukrainians and not Russians, etc.), can finally be like everyone else: members and possessors of a country, a nation, defenders of a remarkable literature, a major culture, a beautiful language, and a unique landscape.
We tend to think that a state is defined by its borders, but the borders and boundaries of most of today’s sovereign states are a relatively recent creation. This is as true in European states as across the globe. An Italian state has existed, in any sh
ape or form, only since 1861, but even this is too distant a date since Venice and its region were incorporated into Italy only in 1866 and its capital, Rome, only in 1870; the current borders with Austria have been extant only since 1919. Although an island, the present boundaries of Great Britain are even more recent. They are certainly not as old as 1066, as children used to be taught in British schools. Great Britain has been in existence only since 1707 with the Act of Union between Scotland and England. The UK’s borders changed again in 1801 when Ireland became part of the United Kingdom, and again in 1922 when the southern part of the island of Ireland became the Irish Free State. England, on the other hand, when it existed as a state, was relatively ancient, at least by European standards: by the end of the Middle Ages it had a shared language and strong state structures covering a clearly defined territory under clearly defined laws. But for a period, before 1066, under King Canute (Knut the Great), England was part of a northern Scandinavian kingdom with Denmark and Norway. After 1066 and the Norman Conquest, England was part of a polity that included a part of France at least until the late Middle Ages; after 1707 there was no longer a state called ‘England’.
History has dealt with borders and population in a cavalier way and determined that a place could be part of a state for reasons that had nothing at all to do with national feelings – a relatively simple task since in most cases such feelings did not exist. Had Immanuel Kant been born in 1946 in Kaliningrad rather than in 1724 in Königsberg (as it then was), he might have been a Russian philosopher rather than a German one. Had Arthur Schopenhauer been born in Polish Gdansk in 1946 rather than in German Danzig – as it was when he was born in 1788 – he would have been Polish. The inhabitants of Corsica are now French, whether they like it or not (and some don’t), only because France acquired it in 1770 – previously it was an independent republic that had freed itself from the ‘yoke’ of the Republic of Genoa. Had this not happened, Napoleon (born in 1769) might have been little more than a local strongman, since it is unlikely that Corsica could have conquered anything at all, let alone most of Europe. The people of Nice are French today because the city and its surrounding territory (plus what is now called French Savoy) were handed over by the Kingdom of Piedmont to the French in 1860 – had that not happened the Italian Riviera would have been much more extensive, tourists in Marseille might be regaling themselves with zuppa di pesce instead of bouillabaisse, and its inhabitants would have supported Italy’s national football team and not that of France. The city of St Louis in Senegal is an older French city than Lille since St Louis became French in 1659, whereas Lille was acquired by the French Crown nine years later, in 1668, by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. France’s boundaries have continued to change even after the Second World War when overseas territories such as Guadeloupe and Martinique have been incorporated as part of France. The country’s borders have been unstable throughout the centuries. Alsace, minus Strasbourg, was attached to France only at the end of the Thirty Years War (1648), as was (in 1659) the county of Artois. Lorraine became French only because Louis XV married Maria Leszczyńska, the daughter of the Duke of Lorraine (who had himself obtained Lorraine only in 1738 in compensation for renouncing the Polish throne). Yet for much of the twentieth century the children of Lorraine (who, until recently, spoke various German patois at home) were taught in French schools not only that they were French but that, as such, they were descendants of nos ancêtres les Gaulois (‘our ancestors the Gauls’). Even this belief that the Gauls were the ancestors of the modern French is recent. Gaul was unmentioned throughout the Middle Ages.29 The choice of the Gauls as the ancestors of the French nation was made during the nineteenth century.30 Current scholarship seriously doubts that there was ever even a single Gaulish nation. Indeed, the Gauls have not left any written texts whatsoever and all we know about the great ‘national’ hero Vercingetorix comes from his conquerors, the Romans.31 The amazing sales of the comic strip Astérix since 1959 have surely reinforced the belief in nos ancêtres les Gaulois.
French boundaries may have been unstable but they look as solid as rock when compared to those of Poland. This is not surprising since Poland is in the middle of the northern European plain, a near-flat landscape with few natural geographic limits. What is more surprising (unless one is familiar with the fervid imagination of nationalists) is that the Polish state celebrated ‘its thousand-year history’ in 1966 – ‘history’ having begun with the Christianization of the country and the baptism of King Mieszko I (the leader of the powerful Polanie tribe, one of many). In 1966 the country was still under communism, but the idea of the millennium rallied all and sundry, communists and patriots, Catholics and agnostics.32 Yet, the borders of the country celebrating its longevity had expanded and shrunk constantly. In 1634 ‘Poland’ was very large, including what is now Lithuania (another independent sovereign state with extravagant claims of longevity, in this case since 1253), as well as bits of Moldavia and Prussia. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as it was known, stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Then Poland began to shrink, partitioned over several decades between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. After the Napoleonic Wars much of what is Poland today came to be incorporated into the Tsarist Empire, and only regained its independence after the Russian Revolution, with boundaries quite different from those of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the Second World War, Poland shifted to the West as it acquired former ‘German’ territory and lost some to the Soviet Union (now in independent Ukraine, whose boundaries have been and continue to be equally elastic and hotly contested). As Norman Davies remarks: ‘Despite the Poles’ own fervent belief in the macierz or “motherland”, it is impossible to identify any fixed territorial base which has been permanently, exclusively, and inalienably, Polish.’33
Some states appear to have a truly long history, as is the case with Japan, with more or less the same boundaries for centuries, an easier feat if you are an island or, in this case, four large islands and a few thousand smaller ones. Nevertheless the idea of Japan as a nation state (kokka) lay dormant, in spite of the unification of the country in 1590 under the regency of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and primary loyalties belonged with local clans (han), who continued to fight it out for centuries. The few thousand islands also made a difference, acting as ‘zones of continuous economic and cultural exchange’ and delaying the drawing of proper ‘modern’ borders until the middle of the nineteenth century. So even the state of Japan is a modern artefact.34
The United States declared its sovereignty first and embarked on expansion later. The boundaries of the USA in 1776 have little in common with those of 2019. One could almost say that British settlers, having declared their independence from the mother country, and become Americans, continued the westward conquest the British had started.
Thus each nation state builds its own special ‘national’ history, however chequered. For instance, Montenegro (or, in Slavonic, Crna Gora, ‘Black Mountain’; Montenegro is the Venetian name) is one of the ‘newest’ European states, but it had been sovereign before the First World War (though its tiny borders changed over time), having successfully resisted complete subordination to Ottoman rule. It was amalgamated into Yugoslavia in 1919, and regained its independence in 2006 when it seceded from what was left of Yugoslavia (i.e. from Serbia). It acquired its own constitution, but not its own currency, having decided to use the euro even though it was not actually in the European Union. It had a diplomatic corps and its own armed forces but not its own language since everyone speaks Serbo-Croat. Local nationalists nevertheless insisted that their version of Serbian should be called Montenegrin, an assertion of identity that older states such as Belgium, Switzerland, and the USA have refrained from since they seem happy to use other names for the languages their citizens speak. No one speaks Belgian, Swiss or American but Montenegrins, apparently, speak Montenegrin. The country also has a new national anthem, Oj, svijetla majska zoro (‘Oh, Bright Dawn of May’), based on a nineteenth-century fo
lk tune with words that have been changed to fit the prevailing politics. Montenegro has fewer than 700,000 inhabitants – fewer than Birmingham in England or Tucson in Arizona but more than at least twenty other sovereign states (including EU members such as Malta and Luxembourg). Formally speaking, Montenegro is as ‘sovereign’ as the United States, but in practice sovereignty is limited by the power of other countries. Its inhabitants can affirm their pride in their country, but this is not much different from the inhabitants of Cornwall or Lombardy being proud to be Cornish or Lombard, even though neither has ever been a sovereign state.
Our new brave globalized world is thus also a world of ‘them and us’, of states, large and small (mainly small), trying to make their presence manifest, taking offence, being proud, and defending, sometimes hypocritically, the sanctity of their borders against secessionist claims by even smaller ‘nations’ simmering within and aspiring to get out. This is the situation Georgia faces with the recalcitrant inhabitants of South Ossetia and Abkhazia who do not feel they share the same ancestry as those Georgian nationalists who, in a remarkable flight of imagination, trace theirs to the Hittites in 1600 BC, or to the more recent kingdom of Egrisi (sixth–seventh century BC) – which was itself the outcome of local chieftains fighting it out for their own power and aggrandizement. Thus Kalistrat Salia’s Histoire de la nation géorgienne (1980), based on the works of nationalist ideologues such as Ivane Javakhishvili masquerading as historians, celebrates Georgians as an ancient people (‘one of the most beautiful races in the world’) who, in spite of external threats and invaders, managed to preserve their national personality, their language, and their culture.35 Ukrainian nationalism stands on similarly shaky foundations, which is one reason why so little was done by Ukrainians to achieve independence from Russia until the Soviet Union collapsed (on Russia’s initiative). Some Ukrainian nationalist historians, such as the popular Yurii Kanyhin, strongly endorsed by the first president of Ukraine (and former communist), Leonid Kravchuk (1991–4), even claimed that Ukrainians are mentioned in the Bible and are descended from Noah.36 In fact, there never has been an exclusively Ukrainian nation.