- 20 Feb 2023 08:39
#15265556
As we know, the world population is divided into national communities and the political world is divided into nation states. It is an inevitable legacy of our history, because early human beings, devoid of means of communication and means of transport, were forced to live with a close horizon. Admittedly, migrations and encounters (peaceful or hostile) are as old as the world, but the share of the population taking part in these encounters remained limited. The very tight ties that the harshness of life imposed within the small communities contributed to limiting contact with the outside world.
As civilization develops, communities expand in territory and numbers. When societies pass from the primitive state to civilization, political power undergoes a mutation: tribalism (blood ties) gives way to the territorial state. More precisely to the States, since the States are born from the tribes.
After fifty centuries of civilization, the division into national communities is still well rooted. History has endowed these communities with their own languages and customs. Sometimes language is the only observable difference, sometimes physical characters differentiate national types; almost always, geography separates them. The same individual can have multiple affiliations. You can be Welshman, British man and European at the same time. One can be American and White or American and Black. Most states have succeeded in creating a national community on the basis of their citizenship: in France, citizens feel French despite the fact that their ancestors, annexed by France, were Flemish, German, Spanish or Italian.
The relationship between citizenship of a state and membership of a national community is multifaceted. Let us distinguish three situations:
Let us now turn to the factor which very often makes the national question problematic. If nations are communities, this implies that a sense of belonging binds individuals. But history, both ancient and recent, shows that the feeling of national belonging regularly leads to a form of mistrust vis-à-vis other communities or some of them. The intensity of this mistrust is very variable, but it can go as far as open hostility. I call nationalism the feeling of national belonging when it is tinged with hostility. Its manifestations are xenophobia when mistrust prevails, racism when based on a feeling of superiority. The drift of the sense of belonging into nationalism is not systematic. I call imperialism the manoeuvres of a nation to dominate or plunder other peoples. This is the extreme stage of nationalism. It commonly leads to war, either because the modus operandi involves military operations, or because the other people resist imperialist manoeuvres. So we have the gradation: feeling of national belonging, nationalism with latent hostility, nationalism with patent hostility, imperialism, imperialism with war.
For the purposes of my presentation, I allow myself to attribute to the terms “nationalism” and “imperialism” or even “nation” a specific definition exposed in the text. Of course, other meanings of these terms are also used.
In history, there has probably not been a single year without war somewhere in the world, since the dawn of humanity. And war is only the tip of the iceberg of international hostility. Diplomacy is often just the pursuit of war by other means . Cases of true friendship between nations are quite rare, especially if we except alliances against a third nation. European integration is an example of a friendship that is built slowly. The extreme difficulty of the negotiations which prepare for joint decision-making is evidence of the resistance opposed by old mistrust.
What is the cause of nationalism, why does it exist, why are the often problematic relations between nations superimposed on relations between individuals of different nations? Answering this question is difficult. My belief is that significant phenomena usually have more than one cause. It would be easy to invoke fear, which we know is a bad adviser. The unknown is scary and the stranger is less known. This explanation may have some truth, but only some. Human beings have an explorer's temperament and curiosity ultimately wins out over fear. There is even a taste for exoticism. The first contacts between individuals of different nations often take place in a more or less peaceful way but degenerate when one of the nations builds plans for domination. In my opinion, it is in repression that nationalism finds its energy. The nation is subject to internal oppositions, for example between social classes, between religious or philosophical beliefs. These oppositions offend the sense of belonging to the national community, which arouses an uneasiness that must be curbed. The abroad of the nation then serves as a valve for repressed aggressiveness. A bit like individuals suffering from family dysfunctions who show antisocial behaviour. A particular case of this mechanism is the practice of scapegoating: a nation perceived as foreign is seen as the cause of all the problems.
The antagonism between nations has a political nature. The institutions working here are typically political: states and political parties. Many nations having trouble with others see within them a political party setting itself up as defender of the cause. Militias can also intervene. The state is obviously a key player. But its role is instrumental. He places himself at the service of a national cause which pre-exists him, or at the very least which pre-exists his intervention in the national conflict, a cause which instrumentalizes him. Two situations must be distinguished which make this instrumentalization take different forms: when the rival nations are part of the same state, the parties of each will try to control the state to their advantage. They will ensure that legislation, taxes, public expenditures, appointments are favourable to their national cause. When the rival nations each have their own state, these states carry out an aggressive foreign policy vis-à-vis the rival nation. In this second case, it is not so obvious that the State is instrumentalized, because it apparently merges with the nation into an entity where the state takes the initiatives. But these initiatives respond to the needs of the national cause which is defended by the nationalist parties and the part of public opinion that is won over to them. Public opinion plays a fundamental role in the national question.
While nationalism is mostly a state of mind, imperialism is a tangible fact. Various processes, together forming a structured system, strip the members of a nation of their rights and resources. Military action generally plays a role, although it may be in background; the army can simply be used as a means of pressure to impose unequal exchange. The threat, even implicit, can be enough, especially in the event of imbalance of forces. Nations made powerful by their demography or their economy have an advantage of which it is tempting to make use. Most have engaged in imperialist schemes at one time or another in their history.
When and why does nationalism breed imperialism? Even hatred of the foreigner does not suffice. The engine is the collective selfishness of a nation, the desire of its members to derive certain advantages, often of an economic nature but not only. Without this objective, most of the conflicts in history would not have taken place. Imperialism is necessarily based on an object of rivalry. It is a form of competitive covetousness. Land is the most common object. An important concept is that of the national cause. It is the common perception of the members of a nation regarding its rivalries with other nations with which it is in relation.
According to the processes it implements, we can distinguish several forms of imperialism. I cite here the main ones without claiming to be exhaustive; they are not mutually exclusive. In each, the role of the state is important.
1. Colonialism: a State governs an abroad territory. This territory is deprived of autonomous political institutions and its inhabitants are therefore deprived of the political rights enjoyed by those of the homeland. The objective is always of an economic nature, for example the exploitation of natural resources.
2. Unequal exchange: a power forces a weaker state to trade with it and imposes the rules governing this trade to its exclusive advantage. In the decades following decolonization, the former colonial powers imposed this regime on formerly colonized countries; the objective was to import raw materials against the export of finished products and services.
3. Limited sovereignty. The dominated state formally keeps independence. An external power tries to take control of it through various forms of interference such as the action of the secret services, the financing of local political groups. If these manoeuvres are effective, the external power chooses the rulers of the dominated country; the objective is that these rulers accept unequal economic relations or the installation of military bases.
4. Territorial invasion: a State enlarges its territory by including all or part of the territory of a neighbouring State against the will of its inhabitants. These must accept the citizenship of the new State where they generally form a minority whose rights may be restricted. Or they are to take refuge abroad.
5. Ethnic cleansing: This is a variant of territorial annexation, where the natives are driven off from the land they occupied; they are either confined to reservations or forced to take refuge abroad. The goal is the appropriation of the land to allow the installation of settlers from the invading state.
6. Genocide: A nation and its state murder on a large scale the members of another nation with the intention of eradicating it more or less completely. Sometimes the genocide is linked to the conquest of a territory (“a good Indian is a dead Indian”), sometimes it concerns a minority more or less well integrated into society, such as the Jews or the Gypsies under Nazism.
7. Enslavement: Ancient empires and cities conducted wars and conquests in order to grant a supply of slaves. More recently, eleven million Africans were savagely kidnapped from their native land to be sold as slaves in the United States of America, Brazil and the West Indies. Enslavement can turn into indirect genocide when the working conditions are excessively harsh, as the Indians of Latin America had to endure under the yoke of the conquistadors.
8. Racial discrimination and apartheid: In a multi-ethnic country, not all races have the same political rights. A dominant ethnic group, sometimes a minority, sometimes a majority, monopolizes power, but this political monopoly is not an end in itself or is only partially so. It is used to secure economic benefits, especially with regard to the sharing of land. If the dominated ethnic group is a minority and racism is very present in the dominant ethnic group, granting political rights is not enough to eliminate discrimination.
9. Cultural denial: a national minority is forcibly assimilated to the dominant nation. Its existence as a nation is denied. The use of its language is forbidden. Any form of expression of its own culture is stifled.
Marx's sociology erected the economy as the infrastructure of society which determines the form of everything else (called superstructure), that is to say political institutions, customs (family system…) and thought (morals, religion, science and philosophy…). In my opinion, there is not one but at least three groups of social relationships which serve as an infrastructural basis: the economy, the family system and the national cause. If the national cause has an “infrastructural” nature, it obviously affects politics and ideas. It produces an ideology. Nationalism exists as a fact, but also as an ideology. The term "ideology" is by the way too summary, because it contains the word "idea". The “mental production” of infrastructural bases goes beyond the framework of ideas; the sentimental and emotional aspect is also important. Simultaneously are built an intellectual justification of the national cause and a feeling of attachment to the fatherland. All areas of culture are mobilized, including arts, morality, the novel of national history and religion. As an illustration of the latter, it suffices to see how the Orthodox clergy of Russia and Ukraine are currently at loggerheads.
Understanding these social mechanisms is more difficult with regard to the national question than with regard to the economy or the family system, because the national cause can only manifest itself through politics and culture. There pre-exists a latent capacity for national-type conflict, that materializes politically and culturally. The ideology produced by the national cause looks like the phenomenon which is at its source. National attachment stays national attachment.
Before the First World War, public opinion was white-hot in most countries, mainly in the Balkans, France and Germany. In France, many were waiting for the revenge of 1870. The Dreyfus affair brought together two xenophobia’s, one against the Jews and the other against Germany. Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and others enlisted literature in the service of chauvinism. In 1914, the pacifist Jaurès had become a troublemaker, which led to his assassination; his killer was considered by many to be a hero, so that the assize jury found him not guilty despite his confession.
For the ruling class and for the state that serves it, nationalist chauvinism is a godsend and it often serves as an asset to the parties in power. Is there a better way to divert the underprivileged classes from the temptations of protest? All the popular attention captured by animosity against “the other” comes as a deduction from the interest that peoples can devote to domestic social oppositions. A manifest example is the Falklands War (1982). While Margaret Thatcher's government, with its program of destroying the welfare state, was at its lowest in the polls in 1981, the nationalist outburst sparked by this war and the British victory gave the Conservative party an electoral triumph in 1983. The problem here is not the attitude of the Thatcher government in the war but that of its supporters and especially the tabloid press which loved this war. The Conservative Party had only to reap the rewards.
From so much imperialism for so long, stems the existence of many oppressed nations, because of less endowment in economic and military means to defend the national cause. Many of these peoples have fought or are fighting for their freedom; unfortunately, their liberation has passed, is passing and will yet pass through wars of liberation. As legitimate as these struggles are, victory cannot be a goal in itself. There is no full solution except in reconciliation. The wish of any imperialist power is to dominate in peace, which explains why national liberation struggles can be victorious even against a more powerful army. Reconciliation then becomes possible, because as long as imperialist domination reigns, the two camps can at best cease fire. True peace requires reconciliation and reconciliation involves justice.
As civilization develops, communities expand in territory and numbers. When societies pass from the primitive state to civilization, political power undergoes a mutation: tribalism (blood ties) gives way to the territorial state. More precisely to the States, since the States are born from the tribes.
After fifty centuries of civilization, the division into national communities is still well rooted. History has endowed these communities with their own languages and customs. Sometimes language is the only observable difference, sometimes physical characters differentiate national types; almost always, geography separates them. The same individual can have multiple affiliations. You can be Welshman, British man and European at the same time. One can be American and White or American and Black. Most states have succeeded in creating a national community on the basis of their citizenship: in France, citizens feel French despite the fact that their ancestors, annexed by France, were Flemish, German, Spanish or Italian.
The relationship between citizenship of a state and membership of a national community is multifaceted. Let us distinguish three situations:
- - Perfect coincidence between a State and a nation. Although this case is the simplest, it is rather an exception.
- Several nations cohabit within a State. For example, there are three indigenous communities in Belgium, more than one hundred in a huge country like Russia. In Canada, there are Francophones and Anglophones, but also Native Americans. Added to this are immigrants who have recently migrated.
- Some nations are divided into several States, sometimes numerous, as is the case with the Jews. The Kurdish nation is split between several neighbouring states. There are Hungarians not only in Hungary, but also in Romania.
Let us now turn to the factor which very often makes the national question problematic. If nations are communities, this implies that a sense of belonging binds individuals. But history, both ancient and recent, shows that the feeling of national belonging regularly leads to a form of mistrust vis-à-vis other communities or some of them. The intensity of this mistrust is very variable, but it can go as far as open hostility. I call nationalism the feeling of national belonging when it is tinged with hostility. Its manifestations are xenophobia when mistrust prevails, racism when based on a feeling of superiority. The drift of the sense of belonging into nationalism is not systematic. I call imperialism the manoeuvres of a nation to dominate or plunder other peoples. This is the extreme stage of nationalism. It commonly leads to war, either because the modus operandi involves military operations, or because the other people resist imperialist manoeuvres. So we have the gradation: feeling of national belonging, nationalism with latent hostility, nationalism with patent hostility, imperialism, imperialism with war.
For the purposes of my presentation, I allow myself to attribute to the terms “nationalism” and “imperialism” or even “nation” a specific definition exposed in the text. Of course, other meanings of these terms are also used.
In history, there has probably not been a single year without war somewhere in the world, since the dawn of humanity. And war is only the tip of the iceberg of international hostility. Diplomacy is often just the pursuit of war by other means . Cases of true friendship between nations are quite rare, especially if we except alliances against a third nation. European integration is an example of a friendship that is built slowly. The extreme difficulty of the negotiations which prepare for joint decision-making is evidence of the resistance opposed by old mistrust.
What is the cause of nationalism, why does it exist, why are the often problematic relations between nations superimposed on relations between individuals of different nations? Answering this question is difficult. My belief is that significant phenomena usually have more than one cause. It would be easy to invoke fear, which we know is a bad adviser. The unknown is scary and the stranger is less known. This explanation may have some truth, but only some. Human beings have an explorer's temperament and curiosity ultimately wins out over fear. There is even a taste for exoticism. The first contacts between individuals of different nations often take place in a more or less peaceful way but degenerate when one of the nations builds plans for domination. In my opinion, it is in repression that nationalism finds its energy. The nation is subject to internal oppositions, for example between social classes, between religious or philosophical beliefs. These oppositions offend the sense of belonging to the national community, which arouses an uneasiness that must be curbed. The abroad of the nation then serves as a valve for repressed aggressiveness. A bit like individuals suffering from family dysfunctions who show antisocial behaviour. A particular case of this mechanism is the practice of scapegoating: a nation perceived as foreign is seen as the cause of all the problems.
The antagonism between nations has a political nature. The institutions working here are typically political: states and political parties. Many nations having trouble with others see within them a political party setting itself up as defender of the cause. Militias can also intervene. The state is obviously a key player. But its role is instrumental. He places himself at the service of a national cause which pre-exists him, or at the very least which pre-exists his intervention in the national conflict, a cause which instrumentalizes him. Two situations must be distinguished which make this instrumentalization take different forms: when the rival nations are part of the same state, the parties of each will try to control the state to their advantage. They will ensure that legislation, taxes, public expenditures, appointments are favourable to their national cause. When the rival nations each have their own state, these states carry out an aggressive foreign policy vis-à-vis the rival nation. In this second case, it is not so obvious that the State is instrumentalized, because it apparently merges with the nation into an entity where the state takes the initiatives. But these initiatives respond to the needs of the national cause which is defended by the nationalist parties and the part of public opinion that is won over to them. Public opinion plays a fundamental role in the national question.
While nationalism is mostly a state of mind, imperialism is a tangible fact. Various processes, together forming a structured system, strip the members of a nation of their rights and resources. Military action generally plays a role, although it may be in background; the army can simply be used as a means of pressure to impose unequal exchange. The threat, even implicit, can be enough, especially in the event of imbalance of forces. Nations made powerful by their demography or their economy have an advantage of which it is tempting to make use. Most have engaged in imperialist schemes at one time or another in their history.
When and why does nationalism breed imperialism? Even hatred of the foreigner does not suffice. The engine is the collective selfishness of a nation, the desire of its members to derive certain advantages, often of an economic nature but not only. Without this objective, most of the conflicts in history would not have taken place. Imperialism is necessarily based on an object of rivalry. It is a form of competitive covetousness. Land is the most common object. An important concept is that of the national cause. It is the common perception of the members of a nation regarding its rivalries with other nations with which it is in relation.
According to the processes it implements, we can distinguish several forms of imperialism. I cite here the main ones without claiming to be exhaustive; they are not mutually exclusive. In each, the role of the state is important.
1. Colonialism: a State governs an abroad territory. This territory is deprived of autonomous political institutions and its inhabitants are therefore deprived of the political rights enjoyed by those of the homeland. The objective is always of an economic nature, for example the exploitation of natural resources.
2. Unequal exchange: a power forces a weaker state to trade with it and imposes the rules governing this trade to its exclusive advantage. In the decades following decolonization, the former colonial powers imposed this regime on formerly colonized countries; the objective was to import raw materials against the export of finished products and services.
3. Limited sovereignty. The dominated state formally keeps independence. An external power tries to take control of it through various forms of interference such as the action of the secret services, the financing of local political groups. If these manoeuvres are effective, the external power chooses the rulers of the dominated country; the objective is that these rulers accept unequal economic relations or the installation of military bases.
4. Territorial invasion: a State enlarges its territory by including all or part of the territory of a neighbouring State against the will of its inhabitants. These must accept the citizenship of the new State where they generally form a minority whose rights may be restricted. Or they are to take refuge abroad.
5. Ethnic cleansing: This is a variant of territorial annexation, where the natives are driven off from the land they occupied; they are either confined to reservations or forced to take refuge abroad. The goal is the appropriation of the land to allow the installation of settlers from the invading state.
6. Genocide: A nation and its state murder on a large scale the members of another nation with the intention of eradicating it more or less completely. Sometimes the genocide is linked to the conquest of a territory (“a good Indian is a dead Indian”), sometimes it concerns a minority more or less well integrated into society, such as the Jews or the Gypsies under Nazism.
7. Enslavement: Ancient empires and cities conducted wars and conquests in order to grant a supply of slaves. More recently, eleven million Africans were savagely kidnapped from their native land to be sold as slaves in the United States of America, Brazil and the West Indies. Enslavement can turn into indirect genocide when the working conditions are excessively harsh, as the Indians of Latin America had to endure under the yoke of the conquistadors.
8. Racial discrimination and apartheid: In a multi-ethnic country, not all races have the same political rights. A dominant ethnic group, sometimes a minority, sometimes a majority, monopolizes power, but this political monopoly is not an end in itself or is only partially so. It is used to secure economic benefits, especially with regard to the sharing of land. If the dominated ethnic group is a minority and racism is very present in the dominant ethnic group, granting political rights is not enough to eliminate discrimination.
9. Cultural denial: a national minority is forcibly assimilated to the dominant nation. Its existence as a nation is denied. The use of its language is forbidden. Any form of expression of its own culture is stifled.
Marx's sociology erected the economy as the infrastructure of society which determines the form of everything else (called superstructure), that is to say political institutions, customs (family system…) and thought (morals, religion, science and philosophy…). In my opinion, there is not one but at least three groups of social relationships which serve as an infrastructural basis: the economy, the family system and the national cause. If the national cause has an “infrastructural” nature, it obviously affects politics and ideas. It produces an ideology. Nationalism exists as a fact, but also as an ideology. The term "ideology" is by the way too summary, because it contains the word "idea". The “mental production” of infrastructural bases goes beyond the framework of ideas; the sentimental and emotional aspect is also important. Simultaneously are built an intellectual justification of the national cause and a feeling of attachment to the fatherland. All areas of culture are mobilized, including arts, morality, the novel of national history and religion. As an illustration of the latter, it suffices to see how the Orthodox clergy of Russia and Ukraine are currently at loggerheads.
Understanding these social mechanisms is more difficult with regard to the national question than with regard to the economy or the family system, because the national cause can only manifest itself through politics and culture. There pre-exists a latent capacity for national-type conflict, that materializes politically and culturally. The ideology produced by the national cause looks like the phenomenon which is at its source. National attachment stays national attachment.
Before the First World War, public opinion was white-hot in most countries, mainly in the Balkans, France and Germany. In France, many were waiting for the revenge of 1870. The Dreyfus affair brought together two xenophobia’s, one against the Jews and the other against Germany. Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and others enlisted literature in the service of chauvinism. In 1914, the pacifist Jaurès had become a troublemaker, which led to his assassination; his killer was considered by many to be a hero, so that the assize jury found him not guilty despite his confession.
For the ruling class and for the state that serves it, nationalist chauvinism is a godsend and it often serves as an asset to the parties in power. Is there a better way to divert the underprivileged classes from the temptations of protest? All the popular attention captured by animosity against “the other” comes as a deduction from the interest that peoples can devote to domestic social oppositions. A manifest example is the Falklands War (1982). While Margaret Thatcher's government, with its program of destroying the welfare state, was at its lowest in the polls in 1981, the nationalist outburst sparked by this war and the British victory gave the Conservative party an electoral triumph in 1983. The problem here is not the attitude of the Thatcher government in the war but that of its supporters and especially the tabloid press which loved this war. The Conservative Party had only to reap the rewards.
From so much imperialism for so long, stems the existence of many oppressed nations, because of less endowment in economic and military means to defend the national cause. Many of these peoples have fought or are fighting for their freedom; unfortunately, their liberation has passed, is passing and will yet pass through wars of liberation. As legitimate as these struggles are, victory cannot be a goal in itself. There is no full solution except in reconciliation. The wish of any imperialist power is to dominate in peace, which explains why national liberation struggles can be victorious even against a more powerful army. Reconciliation then becomes possible, because as long as imperialist domination reigns, the two camps can at best cease fire. True peace requires reconciliation and reconciliation involves justice.
Paul Jael
- By Pants-of-dog
- By Puffer Fish
- By Fasces