National Consciousness And Nationalism
I thank Dr. Gottfried for his response, and I appreciate the point that he and several commenters have made. From the reaction to the last post, I see that I must not have been sufficiently clear about what I meant. National consciousness did exist prior to the rise of nation-states, and indeed was the basis for the cultivation of nationalist feeling and the inspiration for conceiving of political organization along national lines, but that is absolutely not what I was talking about. National consciousness in the Balkans is a complex matter, since most people until at least the 18th century still primarily identified themselves by their religion and among some nationalities (e.g., Romanians and Bulgarians) the educated members of these groups identified culturally as Hellenes up into the 19th century, but there were certainly stirrings of it in early modernity. When Western-educated Greek nationalists began to organize the independent Kingdom of Greece, their idea of what Hellenism entailed clashed with the customs of the broad mass of the population, and the Greek nation imagined by the classically trained nationalists and the Philhellenes was one that had no necessary or obvious connection to the existing Greek laos. One of the predicaments for Greek folklorists in the latter half of the 19th century was to reconcile the existing laos to the image of the ethnos. National consciousness emerged sooner in those unified absolutist dynastic states that were able to exercise more control over different regions, and it emerged more slowly in places where there was a profusion of polities. In western Europe even a distinctly national identity was a product of a particular region or principality, and the language that came to be treated as the proper national literary language was the one associated with the region or principality that took the lead in cultivating national consciousness into a more or less coherent political and cultural program.
It is this program and the attachment to it that I am describing when I refer to nationalist feeling, which I would maintain is not the same as national feeling. In the case of the latter, you could self-identify as part of a nation, a particular people, and yet that might take second or third or fourth place to other, more immediate loyalties, and it might not imply any political objective or aspirations for independence or sovereignty. Nationalism is an ideology that tells someone who possesses a consciousness of being part of a certain nationality that this consciousness implies or requires the pursuit of a set of political goals; the move from having national feelings to having nationalist feelings is the move from self-identification with a national group to believing that this identity now takes precedence over most or all other loyalties and that it compels some kind of political action. Nationalism inspires people to give priority to national identity and a political project undertaken in the name of the nation, such that national identity comes to trump religion or civic loyalty, and indeed revolutionary liberal nationalism required turning against the rule of foreign dynasties. Multinational empires had existed for centuries with subjects who possessed national consciousness without meaningful disturbances; they began to fragment and suffer internal upheaval when those national feelings were given an ideological cast (i.e., when these people became nationalists). To identify with an ethnicity means at a minimum that you believe that you are descended from common ancestors (whether or not you are) and originated from the same home country; in practice, the use of a common language is normally taken as evidence of shared ethnicity (even though the boundaries of an ethnicity need not, and sometimes do not, match up with linguistic lines). Identifying with a nation of millions does require abstraction in order to imagine a unitary people spread out over hundreds of miles of territory, and it requires fashioning some kind of ideal type of who belongs to the nation to which the inhabitants of different regions in all their variety will then try to adhere themselves. In practice, national unification and the pursuit of uniformity throughout the nation-state have come at the expense of whole regions that do not fit the mold crafted by those leading the charge for unification. In this way, devotion to the Nation can directly conflict with the welfare of the people. Likewise, the pursuit of national missions can have terrible consequences for the actual members of the nation, as the catastrophic failure of the Megali Idea reminds us. The nationalist will treat such calamitous disasters as evidence of betrayal from within or by foreign powers or both, while the non-nationalist will tend not to embark on them in the first place.
In my earlier post, I was not discussing how earlier national consciousness is directed by nation-building monarchs or politicians, but was considering how nationalists make use of patriotic loyalties to build up the nation-state. These are not entirely unrelated processes, but they are different ones, and it was solely the latter that I was concerned with in the previous post. I hope this has managed to remove any confusion that may have been created earlier.
Comments
You are correct about the evolution of nationalist movements in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, a process advanced largely by the bourgeoisie, intellectuals,
and in Central Europe certain far-sighted statesmen. But I still would have trouble
thinking of Bush or of Wolfowitz as either an American patriot or as a nationalist,
except in a peculiarly neoconservative sense.
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Historically there is a difference between Romantic Nationalism and loyalty to fellow citizens of a sovereign polity over against the foreigner. One shouldn’t appear to exclude the possibility of Principled Nationalism as a loyalism that reasonably derives compulsion of loyalty from attributes of sovereignty. Neocons and all kinds of other one-worlders are very much interested in EQUIVOCATING national loyalties with romantic nationalism, and further extremes of national feeling which tend to be equated with racism, fascism etc.
The whole approach is a smear-mongering one, aimed at detroying the basic loyalties of citizens to each other over against the foreigner. At the minimum, the nation exists only to compel allegiance of nationals to each other in just that case where the foreigner enters with aggression. To want to destroy these loyalties is also a wish to destroy civilization, so that the assumption of good faith may not reasonably be given to universalists, one-worlders, and others who are found continually trying to smear national loyalties as leading inevitably to horrors.
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Mr. Larison is somewhat better.
Now let’s deal with current events and have a good analysis on this website of the Alleanza Nazionale and the Lega Nord. Those whom Rush correctly calls the “Drive-Bys” keep calling them neo-fascists and Neo-Fascists, and Front National types live in the fantasy that these movements in Italy are identical to their own.
Such an analysis might redeem this website. But I’m not holding my breath.
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The problem with Mr. Larison’s ‘anti-nationalist’ position is that he seems to think the ‘ideology’ came about from nothing—Herder or whomever invented it in the late 18th century. This is well-trod ground, see Kedourie’s work, Nationalism. I would say, however, that nationalism was present avant la lettre at least from the English reformation (see Greenfeld’s Nationalism, Five Roads to Modernity. Moreover, Nationalism is an ideology in the sense that capitalism is. Smith and others systematized thought on how the actual economy operated, and in thus doing, actually created a justification for the further expansion of a certain way of organizing production. Likewise, Herder, Fichte and others were both describing how things were shaking out in Europe, and justifying that shake out.
Finally, while it is true that Serbs are often identified merely as ‘orthodox’ in, say, censuses (Ottoman or Austrian), it is quite clear they knew which patriarchs were Serbs, which Phanariots, and often rebelled against being led by the latter. And of course the Romanians eventually rebelled against Phanariot princes.
PS—I am not Serbian, but play one on the internet
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Nationalism didn’t come from nothing, but it had catalysts in certain historical circumstances and was heavily influenced by post-1789 trends in European culture. On the whole I think imputing nationalism as such to early modernity is a real stretch. As for Orthodox in the Balkans, they were aware of linguistic and ethnic differences among them, and the language of the liturgy and the ethnicity of bishops were important matters that were cause for controversy (and which could create cleavages that later contributed to the rise of nationalist movements--see the Exarchate), but they had still not made the nationalist move of privileging nationality over religion (or fusing the two together) to the degree that many did later. The Romanians did eventually rebel against the Phanariots, when the Phanariots were perceived as foreign and alien to Romania because they were of at least partly Greek descent. The intermarriage between Romanians and Greeks in the aristocracy of the principalities was considerable, and Bucharest was a major center of Greek culture...prior to the emergence of Romanian nationalism. There is no question about the rebellions, but the causes and timing of those rebellions are what interest me, and I think we will find that you did not see really nationalist rebellions prior to the 19th century. That leaves quite a long time when you had national feelings and no nationalism, which suggests that it is possible to have one without the other.
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It seems to me that Daniel’s account of nationalism is very sound.
But under that definition, the militant and abstract internationalism of the neoconservatives would not easily fit. It’s no more nationalist than Bolshevism or the unifying impulse of the Crusades. Thus, while it demands certain things from the US, it’s not because of some characteristic of her people or history. It’s instead solely a consequence of power: we’re the “sole superpower” and since these foreign policy goals--democracy, capitalism--are non-negotiable and also the highest good, any omission on our part in bringing them about would not be just. It’s a redefinition of the people and the nation as a mere instrument in the story of “progress,” a Hegelian trajectory towards political and economic institutions similar to our own, but hardly identical, not least because our own are redefined more narrowly and abstractly than they are in practice. Thus elections, courts, and the like are enough, even when they’re filled with illiberal parties, as in Iraq. It’s a joke.
To me nationalism is understood more narrowly in the present: it’ s avital, natural identity with a narrow political goal to include self-preservation as a people and resistance to homogenization through global institutions, including the pressures of transnational business entities.
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“PS—I am not Serbian, but play one on the internet”
Posted by stari_momak on May 05, 2008.
You’re not fooling anyone, young man.
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So the problem with neocon cosmopolitanism is only that they’re not loyal to Christendom?
The lack of loyalty to fellow nationals over against foreigners entering with increase of aggression, is not to be criticized, and might even be praised, if it were recruitable to a multinational loyalty to a Christian super-sovereignty?
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Mr Bolton,
‘The lack of loyalty to fellow nationals over against foreigners entering with increase of aggression, is not to be criticized, and might even be praised, if it were recruitable to a multinational loyalty to a Christian super-sovereignty?’
I have a hunch which Christian institution you are referencing, and one cannot be a member in good standing of that institution if he does not love his country and desire the best for his countrymen. These imperatives derive from the virtues of charity and justice. Even then, historically and theologically, neo-conservatism has a lot more that makes it incompatible with the Church than just its immigration policy. Certainly it would not be illogical to call neo-conservatism an anti-Christ ideology.
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The concept and term “nationalism” is easily falsified when applied to traditional criteria for what one respondent called “the witches’ brew” of the American ideological hegemon (before he resorted to “red-fascism” as its description) Since Hegelianism is an essential ingredient in the mix, “witches’ brew” conveys Voegelin’s view of Hegel as a sorcerer and author of a grimoire which he attempts to substitute for reality and human nature and create a “secondary reality.”
We all recall the unnamed neocon who taunted the journalist as “a member of the reality based community” and boasted of his own perogative: “We create reality” as well as O’Brien in 1984 who taunts Winston Smith: “We create human nature, Winston.”
In rhetorical terms, “nationalism” applied to the neocon American ideological hegemon is a catachresis, an attempt to denote something for which, without the catachresis, there is no actual name, e.g., “a table’s leg”
Its name is legion at least in its component parts and can’t be understood without Carlton Haye’s sense of nationalism as a subsitute for religion, Voegelin’s sense of gnosticism, and Santayana’s sense “egotism and will” as the genealogy of The German Mind.
To relieve my “hobby horse” a bit I’ll note that in 1977 in “A Last Look at the Tube” Marshall McLuhan predicted that a nationalist religion and military dictatorship would emerge in the US as one result of television.
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Yes, yes Dan. The Greeks were happy Dhimmi until the evil romantic nationalists created a mess.
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