Political Order and Political Decay (31 page)

Two major theorists of nationalism, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, link the emergence of nationalism to modernization, though their emphasis differs in certain key respects. Identity does not really exist as a problem in premodern societies. In either a hunter-gatherer or an agrarian economy, there is a differentiation of social identities—between hunters and gatherers, men and women, peasants, priests, warriors, and bureaucrats—but there is so little social mobility and such a restricted division of labor that one does not face much choice in one's associations. Indeed, in premodern India the entire division of labor was sacralized in the jati or caste system, which took a society with already limited mobility and froze it further through religious sanction. In agrarian societies, a person's important life choices—where to live, what to do for a living, what religion to practice, whom to marry—were mostly determined by the surrounding tribe, village, or caste. Individuals consequently did not spend a lot of time sitting around asking themselves, “Who am I, really?”

According to Anderson, all this begins to change with the emergence of commercial capitalism in sixteenth-century Europe, powered by the invention of the printing press and the growth of a market for books. The printing press sharply reduced the price of written communication and thus made possible publication of books in vernacular languages. Martin Luther, writing in German rather than Latin, became a bestselling author early in the sixteenth century and as a result played a key role in creating a sense of common German culture. Luther told his readers, moreover, that their salvation did not rest on conformity with rituals defined by the Roman Catholic church. It rested, instead, on an inner act of faith. By personal choice, individuals could be linked to a new community.

The emergence of a vernacular print language made possible for the first time what Anderson calls an “imagined community” of German speakers and readers. In a similar manner, the Filipino novelist José Rizal was able to create a common awareness of Philippine identity in the nineteenth century for a people spread out over seven thousand islands. The advance of newspapers, consumed by emerging educated middle-class readers, had an even more dramatic effect in building national consciousness in the nineteenth century. By reading, people who had never left the confines of their little village could all of a sudden perceive a connection to other people in other isolated villages. Well before the Internet and modern transportation, print media allowed people to travel virtually.
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Ernest Gellner also argues that nationalism emerged during a moment of profound social change, but he dates this shift to the transition from agrarian to industrial societies in the nineteenth century. In agrarian societies, there is no uniformity of culture: vast differences in language and ritual separate the different classes. Thus the Russian nobility spoke French, the Estonian and Latvian courts spoke German; the court language in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was Latin up until 1842. It was primarily peasants who spoke Russian, Estonian, or Latvian. These linguistic barriers, initially the result of conquest and dynastic politics, were deliberately kept in place because such stratified societies were set up to block mobility between social classes.

As Gellner explains, the requirements for an industrial society are very different:

A society that lives by growth must needs pay a certain price. The price of growth is eternal innovation. Innovation in turn presupposes unceasing occupational mobility, certainly as between generations, and often within single life-spans. The capacity to move between diverse jobs, and incidentally to communicate and cooperate with numerous individuals in other social positions, requires that members of such a society be able to communicate in speech and writing, in a formal, precise, context-free manner …

This is the general profile of a modern society: literate, mobile, formally equal with a merely fluid, continuous, so to speak atomised inequality, and with a shared, homogeneous, literacy-carried, and school-inculcated culture. It could hardly be more sharply contrasted with a traditional society, within which literacy was a minority and specialised accomplishment, where stable hierarchy rather than social mobility was the norm, and culture was diversifed and discontinuous.
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The expanding division of labor brought on by the process of industrialization thus prepares the ground for modern nationalism, where language-based culture becomes the central unifying source of social cohesion.
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The incentives for linguistic unification created by economic modernization are illustrated by the case of France. In the 1860s, a quarter of France's population could not speak French, and another quarter spoke it only as a second language. French was the language of Paris and the educated elite; in rural France, peasants spoke Breton, Picard, Flemish, Provençal, or any number of other local dialects. As in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, neighboring valleys could speak mutually incomprehensible dialects. With the expansion of the capitalist market economy during the nineteenth century, however, the use of French increased dramatically. In the words of Eugen Weber, “One has only to … browse through the Breton newspapers … to realize that more and more parents and children were becoming committed to integration, to Frenchification, which stood for mobility, advancement, economic and social promotion … Industrial development worked for the linguistic unification of the polyglot labor force that migrated to the cities.” The final linguistic unification of France was not completed until World War I, when common service in the trenches completed a process begun by economic necessity.
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Social mobility fostered by an expanding division of labor immediately opens up the question of identity in an acute fashion. At one moment I am a peasant in a small village in Saxony; the next moment I'm working in a large Siemens factory in Berlin. In the early twenty-first century, similar migrations are occurring throughout China as peasants leave their villages in the interior for job opportunities in the industrial sector of Shenzhen and Guangzhou. The fixed, intimate, and limited social world that was defined by the peasant village is replaced by the large, anonymous, and diverse world of the modern city. This shift—the classic transition from Gemeinshaft to Gesellschaft first elaborated by Ferdinand Tönnies—not only involves a change in identities from one social occupation to another; it also opens up the question of identity itself. Now that I'm no longer living under the thumb of my family and friends back in the village, I have a much greater degree of choice over my own life course. “Who am I?” has all of a sudden become a real and pressing question. This shift is experienced as a crisis or trauma and produces a condition that Émile Durkheim labeled anomie, or normlessness. Durkheim saw anomie manifest in higher suicide rates in modernizing societies, but it also finds expression in higher rates of crime and family breakdown that are often associated with rapid social change.
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One problem with Gellner's theory linking nationalism to industrialization and to a linguistically grounded culture is that it fails to explain the emergence of nationalism in nonindustrial societies. In many countries in Western Europe and North America, economic growth drove social change in the following sequence: expanding commerce
→
industrialization
→
urbanization
→
new forms of social mobilization. This is not an inevitable sequence, however. In Greece and southern Italy, as we have seen, the industrialization stage was either skipped or sharply curtailed in its impact. Both societies urbanized without creating large industrial sectors—a phenomenon that I labeled “modernization without development.” This pattern has prevailed in many non-Western societies as well, where colonialism fostered urbanization and the creation of a modernized elite, without engendering the wholesale transformation of society through large-scale industrial employment.

Nationalism had other, different sources in the former colonial world than it did in Western Europe. If these countries did not industrialize on a Western European pattern, they nonetheless acquired a new stratum of elites who confronted the totally different cultures of their colonizers. These elites felt enormous pressures to conform to the culture and mores of the colonial power, and many indeed got sucked into the dominant power structure. But this created a crisis of identity, as they were separated from their families and compatriots by language and Westernization. This was the crisis that struck the young British-trained lawyer Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi while practicing in South Africa and led him eventually into the struggle for Indian independence. It was this crisis that compelled three black writers from different French colonies, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Senghor, to develop the concept of “Négritude.” They sought the transvaluation of the meaning of the word
nègre
, which for white Frenchmen at the time had an entirely pejorative and racist connotation, into something that was a source of pride.

The ideas of collective national identity and demands for recognition of the dignity of indigenous identities were among the many things exported from Europe to the colonial world. As Liah Greenfeld explains, “As the sphere of influence of the core Western societies (which defined themselves as nations) expanded, societies belonging or seeking entry to the supra-societal system of which the West was the center had in fact no choice but to become nations.”
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This meant, however, that nationalism took on a very different form in the former colonial world. In Western Europe, the preeminent nationalist movement was that of the Germans, which sought to unite all German speakers under a single sovereignty. In India, Kenya, and Burma, nationalism could not be built around language, since these were ethnolinguistically fragmented societies with no dominant group that could unite the whole country around its culture. Thus the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, led by Jomo Kenyatta, was dominated by Kikuyus, who comprised a bit more than 20 percent of the population. They could not hope to permanently dominate the country or impose their language or customs on the whole of the society. Indeed, in many countries the language of the colonizer remained the lingua franca because, first, it was regarded as a more neutral choice than any of the languages of the ethnic subgroups, and second, it connected the former colony to the wider global economy better than any indigenous language.

FOUR ROUTES TO NATIONAL IDENTITY

Most scholars studying the phenomenon of national identity assert that it is “socially constructed.” They contest the view of many nationalists that nations are primordial, biologically based groupings that have existed since time immemorial. Ernest Gellner argues that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, which responds to the needs of an industrial, urbanized society. Others go further, unmooring national identity from its connection to large social forces like industrialization and making it a product of the creativity of artists and poets. Another school influenced by economics argues that identities are essentially coordinating mechanisms used by political entrepreneurs to promote underlying economic interests.
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It is certainly correct that nationalism was a by-product of modernization, and that specific national identities were socially constructed. But the social constructivist view begs a number of important questions. Who is it that constructs new national identities? Is it a top-down or bottom-up process? Some national identities, once created, become incredibly durable, while others fail to stick. The Soviet Union, for example, spent seventy years trying to create a “new Soviet man” who would be cosmopolitan and transcend categories like ethnicity and religion. And yet, when the USSR broke up into its constituent union republics in 1991, older national identities thought to be long dead reasserted themselves. Today there are no Soviets in a place like the Crimea, only Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars. Similarly, the European Union has been trying to construct a postnational sense of European citizenship since the 1950s, a project that has run up against clear limits in the wake of the euro crisis that began in 2009. What are the limits and possibilities of nation building?

Far from being an open-ended process of social construction, national identity is formed through four basic processes, which can occur separately or in combination. Some are overtly top-down and political, requiring the power of states to enforce. Others are more bottom-up, the result of spontaneous actions by populations. There must be some complementarity between the top-down and the bottom-up processes, otherwise identities won't take root.

First, there is the defining of political borders to fit populations; second, the moving or physical elimination of populations to fit existing borders; third, the cultural assimilation of subpopulations into the dominant culture; and fourth, modification of the concept of national identity to fit what is politically feasible, given the social and physical endowments of the society. Most successful national identity projects resulted from the interaction of all four approaches. Note, however, that the first three of these processes often involve violence and coercion.

1. Moving borders to fit posited national identities. Dynastic polities around the world from the Roman and Mauryan to the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires were constructed without regard to cultural identity. As the nationalist principle took hold from the French Revolution onward, the large extant political units began to break apart into more ethnolinguistically homogeneous ones. Thus Turkey was reduced to its Turkish-speaking core in Anatolia, and Austria-Hungary fragmented into the myriad small nations of the Balkans. The most recent of these imperial dissolutions was that of the former Soviet Union, a country built on ostensibly universalistic ideological principles which collapsed after 1991 into smaller states based on ethnolinguistic solidarity. In other cases, borders were expanded to include conationals, as in German and Italian unification.