Nationalism and Culture (36 page)

Hegel's play with empty words, whose lack of content he knew how to hide by a symbology as pretentious as it was incomprehensible, has for decades artificially inhibited in Germany the inner urge for real knowledge. It has seduced many an able mind into pursuing the shadow forms of idle speculation instead of approaching life's realities and devoting heart and mind to a new organization of the conditions of social life.

A man who speculates, I say to thee, Quite like a beast on barren heaths appears to me By wicked sprite in circles led around While all about is beautiful rich ground.

Goethe might well have been thinking of the Prussian state philosopher when he wrote these sprightly lines, for as a matter of fact Hegel was all his life led in circles by the spirits he had himself conjured up. Thousands followed him as the bearer of the torch of truth, never suspecting that it was but a will-o'-the-wisp that flickered over swamps and lured them ever deeper into the misty realm of a barren metaphysic.

Hegelianism in the form of Marxism acted on the great movement of socialism like mildew on a germmating seed. It scorned the hot, living words of Saint-Simon, "Remember, my son, one must be enthusiastic in order to accomplish great things" j and taught men to curb their longings and to listen to the regulated ticking of the clock which expresses that silent reign of unchangeable law, according to which all coming and going in history proceeds. Fatalism is the grave-digger of every burning desire, of every ideal yearning, of all overflowing power seeking expression and striving to transmute itself into creative activity. For it kills that inner faith and confidence in the justice of a cause which is at the same time faith in one's own power. Friedrich Engels boasts: "We German socialists are proud that we descend not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte, and Hegel." It was largely this descent which gave socialismin Germany such a hopelessly authoritarian character. It surely would have profited German socialism more if it had taken its inspiration from Lessing, Herder and Jean Paul, instead of going to school to Kant, Fichte and Hegel.

To be a revolutionary means to compel social changes by the assertion of one's own power. It is fatalism to accept conditions because one believes one cannot change them. Qnly a fatalist in the worst sense could have said: "What is reasonable, that is realj and what is real, that is reasonable." Acceptance of the world as it is, is the intellectual preliminary to all reaction. For reaction is nothing else but standing still on -principle. Hegel was a reactionary from head to heels. All libertarian feeling was foreign to him J it did not fit into the narrow frame of his fatalistic concepts. He was the stern, implacable advocate of a spiritless authoritarian principle,

worse even than Bonald and de Maistre; for these only saw in the person of the monarch the living incarnation of all power, while Hegel made of a political machine, that crushes man with its merciless levers and gears and nourishes itself on his sweat and blood, a vessel of all morality, a "God on earth." This is his work in the light of history.

THE RELATION BETWEEN SOCIETY AND STATE. FOLK AND STATE. THE STATE AS A POLITICAL CHURCH ORGANIZATION. NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP A POLITICAL CONFESSION OF FAITH. DEMOCRACY AS PIONEER OF MODERN NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. LASSALLE ON DEMOCRACY AND THE NATION. NATION AND NATIONALISM. ECHOES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN GERMANY. SOCIAL CONDITIONS. FOREIGN RULE. PRUSSIA'S COLLAPSE. THE RISE OF THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT. ARNDT AND FICHTE. SCHARNHORST AND GNEISENAU. THE ENDEAVORS OF THE BARON VON STEIN. CABALS OF PRUSSIAN JUNKERDOM. PRINCELY PROMISES. THE GERMAN DREAM OF FREEDOM AND THE GERMAN PRINCES. BETRAYED AND SOLD. GOETHE'S JUDGMENT CONCERNING THE SO-CALLED "WARS OF LIBERATION."

WE have seen under what circumstances the national state put in its appearance and gradually took on the democratic aspect which gave birth to the modern concept of the nation. Only when we view with open eyes the manifold ramifications of this most important social change in Europe will we get a clear idea concerning the real character of the nation. The old opinion which ascribes the creation of the nationalist state to the awakened national consciousness of the people is but a fairy tale, very serviceable to the supporters of the idea of the national state, but false, none the less. The nation is not the causey but the result^ of the state. It is the state which creates the nation, not the nation the state. Indeed, from this point of view there exists between people and nation the same distinction as between society and the state.

Every social unit is a natural formation which, on the basis of common needs and mutual agreement, is built organically from below upwards to guarantee and protect the general interest. Even when social institutions gradually ossify or become rudimentary the purpose of their origin can in most instances be clearly recognized. Every state organization, however, is an artificial mechanism imposed on men from above by some ruler, and it never pursues any other ends but to defend and make secure the interests of privileged minorities in society.

A people is the natural result of social union, a mutual association

of men brought about by a certain similarity of external conditions of living, a common language, and special characteristics due to climate and geographic environment. In this manner arise certain common traits, alive in every member of the union, and forming a most important part of its social existence. This inner relationship can as little be artificially bred as artificially destroyed. The nation, on the other hand, is the artificial result of the struggle for political power, just as nationalism has never been anything but the political religion of the modern state. Belonging to a nation is never determined, as is belonging to a people, by profound natural causesj it is always subject to political considerations and based on those reasons of state behind which the interests of privileged minorities always hide. A small group of diplomats who are simply the business representatives of privileged caste and class decide quite arbitrarily the national membership of certain groups of men, who are not even asked for their consent, but must submit to this exercise of power because they cannot help themselves.

Peoples and groups of peoples existed long before the state put in its appearance. Today, also, they exist and develop without the assistance of the state. They are only hindered in their natural development when some external power interferes by violence with their life and forces it into patterns which it has not known before. The nation is, then, unthinkable without the state. It is welded to that for weal or woe and owes its being solely to its presence. Consequently, the essential nature of the nation will always escape us if we attempt to separate it from the state and endow it with a life of its own which it has never possessed.

A people is always a community with rather narrow boundaries. But a nation, as a rule, encompasses a whole array of different peoples and groups of peoples who have by more or less violent means been pressed into the frame of a common state. In fact, in all of Europe there is no state which does not consist of a group of different peoples who were originally of different descent and speech and were forged together into one nation solely by dynastic, economic and political interests.

Even where, influenced by the growth of democratic ideas, the effort toward national unity took the form of a great popular movement, as happened in Italy and Germany, the effort really started from a reactionary germ which could lead to no good outcome. The revolutionary efforts of Mazzini and his adherents for the establishment of a unified nationalistic state could but serve as hindrance to the social liberation of the people, whose real goal was hidden by the national ideology. Between the man Mazzini and the present dictator of Italy yawns a mighty abyss j but the development of the nationalistic system of thought from Mazzini's political theology to the fascist totalitarian state of Mussolini proceeds in a straight line.

A glance at the fresh-baked national states which appeared as a result of the World War gives us a factual picture which cannot be easily misunderstood. The same nationalities which before the War never ceased to revolt against the foreign oppressor reveal themselves today, when they have reached their goal, as the worst oppressors of national minorities, and inflict upon them the same brutal moral and legal oppressions which they themselves, and with full right, fought most bitterly when they were the subjected peoples. This ought to make plain to even the blindest that a harmonious living together of peoples within the framework of the national state is definitely impossible. But those peoples who in the name of liberation have shaken off the yoke of a hated foreign rule have gained nothing thereby. In most cases they have taken on a new yoke, which is frequently more oppressive than the old. Poland, Hungary, Jugoslavia, and the border states between Germany and Russia are the classic examples of this.

The change of human groups into nations, that is, into state peoples, has opened no new outlook for Europe j it has rather thrown up a strong bulwark of international reaction and is today one of the most dangerous hindrances to social liberation. European society was divided by this process into antagonistic groups which confront one another always with suspicion, and often with hate; and nationalism in every country watches with argus eyes to keep this morbid condition permanent. W^herever a mutual approach of peoples begins, there the adherents of nationalism always add new fuel to the flames of national antagonism. For the nationalist state lives by these antagonisms and would have to disappear the moment it was no longer able to maintain this artificial separation.

The concept of the national state rests, therefore, on a purely negative principle, behind which, however, very positive aims are hidden. For behind everything "national" stands the will to power of small minorities and the special interest of caste and class in the state. It is they who in reality direct the "will of the nation," for, as Menger rightly remarks, "The states as such have no purpose; only the rulers have." But that the will of the jew may become the will of all —for only thus can It develop its full effectiveness—every form of intellectual and moral drill must be employed to anchor it in the religious consciousness of the masses and make it a matter of faith. Now, the true strength of a faith lies, in the fact that its priests draw sharply the lines which separate the orthodox from the adherents of any other religious communion. Without Satan's wickedness, it would go ill with God's greatness. National states are folitical church organizations; the so-called national consciousness is not born in many but trained into him. It is a religious concept; one is a German, a Frenchmany an Italiany just as one is a CatholiCy a Protestanty or a Jew.

With the spread of democratic ideas in Europe begins the rise of nationalism in the various countries. Only with the creation of the new state, which, at least in theory, secures for every citizen the constitutional right to participate in the political life of his country and to have a part in the choice of its government, could the national consciousness take root in the masses, and the conviction be bred in the individual that he was a member of the great political union of the nation, with which he was inseparably intergrown and which gave to his separate existence its content and purpose. In the pre-democratic period such a belief could take root only in the narrow circle of the privileged classes, remaining entirely alien to the great mass of the population. Quite rightly Lassalle remarks:

The principle of free independent nationalities is the basis, the source, the mother and the root of the concept of democracy in general. Democracy cannot tread the principle of nationalities under foot without raising a suicidal hand against its own existence, without depriving itself of the support of every theoretical justification, without basically and on principle betraying itself. We repeat, the principle of democracy has its foundation and life source in the principle of free nationalities. Without this it stands on air.-*

In this respect, too, democracy differs essentially from liberalism, whose field of view embraces mankind as a whole, or at least that part of mankind belonging to the European-American circle of culture or to one which has developed under similar social conditions. Since the point of view of liberalism starts with the individual and judges the social environment according as its institutions are useful or harmful to men, national limitations play but an unimportant part for its adherents, and they can exclaim with Thomas Paine: "The world is my country, all men are my brothers!" Democracy, however, being founded on the collective concept of the common will was more closely related to the concept of the state and made it the representative of the common will.

Democracy not only endowed the "national spirit" with new life; it also defined the concept of the national state more sharply than would ever have been possible under the reign of absolutism. Although the apostles of the latter, as French history clearly shows, constantly strove to unite the national forces ever more strongly and to put the whole administration of the country under a centralized direction, in doing this they always had the interest of the dynasty in view, even where they found it more advisable to veil their true intentions.

With the beginning of the democratic penod all dynastic assumptions disappear, and the nation as such becomes the focal point of political events. Thus the state itself achieves a new expression. It now becomes

^ Ferdinand Lassalle, Der Italienische Krieg und die Aufgabe Preusscns.

in reality the national state by including all its inhabitants as equally privileged members of a whole and welding them together.

Filled with the principles of an abstract political equality, the representatives of democratic nationalism made a distinction between the nation and nationality. The nation they considered to be a political group which, united by community of language and culture, had collected itself into an independent state entity. As naiionalkies, on the other hand, they counted such groups of people as were subject to a foreign state and were trying to achieye their political and national independence. Democratic nationalism saw in the struggles of the suppressed nationalities which were trying to form themselves into nations the assertion of an inviolable right J and it acted in this spirit. If the individual citizen of a nation wished to enjoy in his own country all rights and liberties without hindrance, \as guaranteed to him by the constitution, even so the nation as a whole should in its individual life be subject to no foreign power and be equal to all other nations in its political independence.