The Passion of Modernity
by Stanley Hoffmann
NATIONALISM: FIVE ROADS TO MODERNITY by . Harvard University Press, $49,95.
OF ALL THE secular ideologies that have moved men and women to action in the past couple of centuries, nationalism now appears to be the most widespread—and the toughest survivor. It has led to the unification of peoples who had been living under a variety of rulers but felt that they belonged in a single state, such as the citizens of nineteenth-century Germany and Italy. More frequently nationalism has resulted in the disintegration of multi-ethnic states and empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and, today, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It has also provoked the collapse of colonial empires, once the colonizing powers found themselves too weak to resist the onslaught of peoples who had never in the past formed nations but now caught the contagion of the nationstate and became determined to obtain their independence and sovereignty. The demand for national self-determination had been endorsed by liberals: in France during the French Revolution, in England by John Stuart Mill, in the United States by Woodrow Wilson. Today liberals are beginning to recoil, because at the same time that economic interdependence is emptying sovereignty of substance, demands for sovereignty are multiplying—leading to a proliferation of conflicts and the risk of endless challenges to existing borders in a futile quest for the perfect “pure” nation-state. Meanwhile, migrations old and new have made it almost impossible to avoid the presence of minorities on the soil of any conceivable unit (unless it succeeds in closing off its borders completely and in expelling all such minorities—another recipe for disorder and tragedy).
Attempts at transcending nationalism and the nation-state have been far less effective than the ideology itself. The United Nations and other international organizations have limited resources and powers and can only try to cope with the conflicts that the quest for selfdetermination constantly provokes. Communism, which pretended to transcend nationalism and to reorganize the political universe on the basis of class alone, did not ultimately succumb because of nationalism, but it began to split because of it: remember Tito’s defection in 1948, the USSR-China split a dozen years later, and the war between China and Vietnam in 1979. And once communism collapsed in the USSR and Eastern Europe under the weight of its economic and political rigidities, national quarrels re-emerged with a vengeance. The attempt by the European Community to move the peoples of Western Europe beyond the nationstate has been only partly successful. It has integrated their economies, and made war among them inconceivable, but their polities remain distinct, and the EC’s own ideologues have never been able to explain how one could create a truly unified Europe without simultaneously creating a new European nationalism to replace the nationalisms of its members. No such European nationalism exists, and many of the champions of a united Europe do not want to see it anyhow, because they are afraid of the ugly aspects of nationalism. But in its absence the EC remains above all a utilitarian arrangement that serves the interests of the member states and can go only as far as the national governments and their citizenries allow it to go.
The literature on nationalism is not as impressive as one would expect, given the importance of the phenomenon. For a long time, before and just after the Second World War, what flourished was principally the study of the idea of nationalism: the intellectual history of the concept and of the writers, poets, historians, and geographers who celebrated it. This told us little about its appeal, about the reasons for its spread or for its hold on the imaginations of millions of people. Later came the sociologists, who analyzed nationalism as a process of social communications and interactions (rather than as an idea)—a part of the sweeping advance of “modernity,” of which capitalism was seen as the most important manifestation. Lost in this shift was the rich texture and diversity of the nationalist phenomenon; we got taxonomies instead. We also got books, usually by Marxist historians, that looked at this phenomenon as something irrational, an atavistic anachronism that was bound to disappear sooner or later in a rationally organized universe.
These days social scientists often thirst for general theories, grand testable hypotheses, structural analyses, and quantifiable results. Nationalism does not lend itself to these. One of its strengths, and the reason for its durability and resilience, is its diversity. It may well be true that nationalism has played, and continues to play, a vital role as a kind of substitute for religion in parts of the world where religious faith has declined, but it can also ally itself with religious surges, as in the case of Islamic fundamentalism. And since nationalism responds to local circumstances, feeds on the peculiarities of a multitude of social and political systems, colors authoritarian as well as liberal ideologies, and can be promoted by any class or coalition of interests, it is too elusive to be easily captured and dissected by modern social scientists. They are often more interested in the evolution and operation of structures (such as class systems or capitalism) than in the feelings, desires, and needs of human beings, and when they gingerly approach social psychology, they do so with highly rudimentary concepts and hypotheses. As a result, our understanding of the appeal of nationalism and of its multiple manifestations and perversions leaves a great deal to be desired.
THIS EXPLAINS why Liah Greenfeld’s new book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, has been received with a great deal of respect and even awe. Greenfeld is a young sociologist who came to this country from Israel, where she had lived for a while after emigrating from the Soviet Union. Her boldness is breathtaking: “This book is an attempt to understand the world in which we live. Its fundamental premise is that nationalism lies at the basis of this world.” Greenfeld deals with five enormous cases: England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States. She is curious about the interplay of ideas and interests, and tries to identify the groups in whose interest it was to adopt the idea of the nation. But—unlike many present-day social scientists, who see passions as a kind of overflow of interests, and ideologies as the rationalization of interests—she does not believe that history is the product of rational decisions by people and groups engaged in a cool calculation of benefits and losses.
A key factor in Greenfeld’s analysis is ressentiment, “a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred . . . and the impossibility of satisfying these feelings”; she sees nationalism as often growing out of the resentment that certain groups feel toward a society that deprives them of or undermines the status to which they feel entitled. She also sees the idea of the nation as ”the constitutive element of modernity”: “Rather than define nationalism by its modernity, I see modernity as defined by nationalism.” She points out the initial link between nationalism and democracy: “Democracy was born with the sense of nationality”; both locate sovereignty in the people and proclaim “the fundamental equality among [the people’s] various strata.” But this connection does not always prevail, and Greenfeld divides nationalism into two categories: “individualistic-libertarian” nationalism, a form of civic nationalism which stresses the rights of individuals and conceives of the nation as an association of equal and free individuals; and “collectivistic-authoritarian” nationalism, which celebrates not the “actual sovereignty of individuals” but a collective being, the Nation, endowed with a will of its own. This kind of nationalism can be either civic, when “nationality is at least in principle open and voluntaristic; it can and sometimes must be acquired,” or ethnic, the more usual case, when only members of the dominant ethnic group constitute the Nation.
To study her five cases, Liah Greenfeld has read voraciously, in four languages, memoirs, diaries, private correspondence, “laws and official proclamations, . . . works of literature” and political philosophy, and a vast number of secondary works. She covers a period of five centuries, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present, although her focus is on the formative period of national identity and consciousness in each case. Some of the most stimulating passages are set pieces—not digressions, for they are important to her study, but stories that can be read almost independent of it: the role of science and empirical knowledge in seventeenth-century England, German Romanticism, American attitudes toward intellectuals. The book is thought-provoking, and one can only pay tribute to the author’s ambition, erudition, and stamina. At a time when much of social science either reduces the most profound human experiences to equations or tells us more and more about less and less, Greenfeld’s intellectual audacity and her civic concern (she does not conceal her preference for “individualistic-libertarian” nationalism) must be applauded.
And yet this is a flawed book. Two kinds of flaws have to be distinguished: those of her design and those of the specific case studies. The main weakness in design is displayed on the very first page, where Greenfeld tells us,
The word “nationalism” is used here as an umbrella term under which are subsumed the related phenomena of national identity (or nationality) and consciousness, and collectivities based on them—nations; occasionally, it is employed to refer to the articulate ideology on which national identity and consciousness rest, though not—unless specified—to the politically activist, xenophobic variety of national patriotism, which it frequently designates.
This is a real mess. On the one hand, Greenfeld lumps together such different concepts as nation, which The Oxford English Dictionary defines as “an extensive aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language, or history, as to form a distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory” (a definition full of inevitable hedges); national identity, the material and spiritual, physical and behavioral, features that are characteristic of a given nation and distinguish it from all others; national consciousness, the subjective self-image that citizens have of their nation, which often selects only some features of the national identity, or distorts them, or invents new ones; patriotism, which is a sense of attachment and loyalty to one’s nation; nationality, which is a legal concept; and nationalism, which is an ideology, a program of action that sets goals (and, more often than not, defines and defies enemies). Much of the trouble with the book results from the blending of these quite distinct notions, and readers would do well to ask themselves at every moment which of them the author is actually discussing. The most interesting object of study is the relationship between national consciousness and nationalism—between the way in which different groups in the population conceive of the nation and the specific programs, propaganda efforts, campaigns, and so forth that leading intellectuals, political activists, and agitators put forward. National consciousness may grow in the absence of any nationalist ideology; nationalism as an ideology can foster national consciousness and modify it; yet a strong national self-image can limit the appeal of, or neutralize, nationalistic ideologies incompatible with it. In order to study these connections, one has to begin by disentangling the two notions, and this Greenfeld fails to do.
On the other hand, insofar as she focuses on the ideology of nationalism, primarily in the chapters on Russia and Germany, and insofar as her distaste for the “collectivistic-authoritarian” model of the nation is one of the most powerful foundations of her whole enterprise, leaving out the “xenophobic variety” means excluding a major part of the story (and, indeed, she finds she cannot leave it out completely). If “nationalism” today evokes the horrible images of rape and murder in Bosnia, of turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh, and of the destruction of Muslim mosques in India, rather than the serene vision of Jules Michelet, Giuseppe Mazzini, and John Stuart Mill, who dreamed of a harmonious world of nation-states, it is because the xenophobic version of nationalism has tended to shape national consciousness more often than the liberal version.
A second flaw of design lies in the author’s decision to focus on the beginnings of national identity and consciousness in each case. This means that she dwells on England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on France from 1715 to 1789, and on Russia, Germany, and the United States during the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. If the hook had been called The Origins of National Consciousness in Five Cases, this would have been fine. But Greenfeld herself recognizes that “the origins of a nationalism which define its nature” do not completely “shape its social and political expressions,” and I would add that the nature of national consciousness is not determined or defined exclusively by its origins. The book is profoundly disappointing, especially if we are interested both in the later forms of national consciousness and in nationalist ideologies, because it leaves us on the threshold of the era in which international relations ceased to be merely the game of states and became the clash of nations—a clash that resulted in two world wars—with rival nationalist ideologies often clashing at home. For instance, Greenfeld abandons French nationalism at the beginning of the Revolution, just as it became the dominant force inside France and abroad, and she has nothing much to say about American national consciousness and nationalism in the twentieth century. Only in the cases of Russia and Germany does she go beyond origins, but the study of the later developments in Russia is very thin, and in the passionate chapter on Germany she tends to read what is going to be the evil future into the past on which she concentrates; indeed, it is as if this future explained her interpretation of the past. Also, since the formative period for some nationalisms was later than for others, when we are learning about, say, Germany and the United States in the early parts of the nineteenth century, nothing is said about developments in Britain or France that occurred at the same time and may have influenced or paralleled what happened in the United States and Germany.
THIS BRINGS ME to the problems of the specific chapters. In the case of England one might ask whether the emergence of a national sentiment that Greenfeld calls “English” national consciousness ought not to have been called British. For, as the Yale historian Linda Colley has shown in her brilliant book on this subject, Britons (1992), what developed was a sense of nationhood that was superposed on and coexisted with English, Scottish, and Welsh loyalties. Colley, who focuses on the eighteenth century, and Greenfeld, who discusses the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both stress the importance of Protestantism in that development. Greenfeld sees in the British brand of national consciousness the consciousness of one’s dignity as an individual, and she connects it to the principles of individual liberty and political equality. She shows how struggles with the antiProtestant Queen Mary, the early Stuarts, and other monarchs, in which the growing middle classes and a new aristocracy based on merit took part, shaped these liberal ideas and the ideal of the rational, empirical intellect. Since Greenfeld admires England, ressentiment has no place in her story. But Colley shows how in the eighteenth century Francophobia and war played important roles in the development of a British national sense, and she pays far more attention than Greenfeld to economic progress (profits as a source of patriotism) and to a focus on the monarchy, after the Glorious Revolution, as the source of pride and loyalty. Only in the chapter on the United States does Greenfeld tell us that the “idealistic” national consciousness she analyzed in the chapter on England had not been the only one, that there had also been a more conservative, concrete, and materialistic one, “the emotional attachment to the land, government, and ways of England ... an updated particularism, clothed in nationalistic rhetoric.” It is the idealistic national consciousness she sees blooming in the United States, whereas “Englishmen in England tended toward the concrete or materialistic variety....” One would never have guessed it from her chapter on England, although a reader of Colley’s richly textured book would have known it.
Greenfeld’s treatment of the French case is, to be blunt, far more wrong than right. She is right in pointing out (though she does so at excessive length) that “a narrow elite circle” had for centuries “the consciousness of being French,” but that this was not yet a national consciousness. France was first seen as a Christian country; not until the seventeenth century did the polity become equated with the King. Only the Huguenots, in their bitter struggles with Catholics in the sixteenth century and with Louis XIV in the seventeenth, appealed to all the oppressed in modern terms, by calling for popular resistance. But the bulk of Greenfeld’s story is the development of national consciousness by the eighteenth-century aristocracy, the truly revolutionary class. The aristocracy had lost its political power to the absolute and centralizing monarchy; it was losing its economic power to the rising bourgeoisie. It reacted by incorporating the intellectuals, rejecting and despising capitalism, and embracing the ideas that there was a French nation and that “the nobility was the bearer of the sovereignty of the polity.” These ideas were imported from England, but anti-British ressentiment gave to concepts such as liberty, equality, and nation a very different meaning, one both collectivist and undemocratic. Take the word “nation.”
From ... a name for the association of free, rational individuals, it turned into a super-human collective person. ... In England, it was the dignity of the individuals who composed it that dignified the collective body.
. . . But in France it was the dignity of the whole that restored dignity to those who claimed membership in it.
Two things are wrong with this account. First, Greenfeld distorts the role of the aristocracy. Yes, the Revolution began as an aristocratic reaction against an absolute monarchy that had deprived the privileged castes of any power to block unwelcome changes in taxation and in the social order. But insofar as the modern idea of the nation is concerned, it was the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals who used it as a war machine against both the absolute monarchy and the privileged orders (Church and nobility). Second, she misreads Montesquieu, who was not merely a champion of the thèse nobiliaire (the idea of the nobility as the “legitimate, governing part of the sovereign nation”) but also the great exponent of the British system of government, with its lower House representing the middle classes. And she misreads Rousseau, turning him into a Hegelian. It is true that Rousseau’s conception of the general will, which captured the imagination of the French revolutionaries, sharply differs from the liberal emphasis on individual rights and limited government. But the sovereign nation is a democratic concept: the general will is not a force imposed on individuals, it is the will of all of us when we think, as citizens, about the common good. What makes Rousseau’s idea dangerous is its utopian assumption that citizens will, if properly enlightened, always agree on what is the common good. It can be all too easily diverted and distorted by clever demagogues, but the conception is neither authoritarian nor truly collectivistic. The community is seen as an association of free and rational individuals, who, unlike the citizens of a liberal state, transfer all their rights as social beings to it and gain citizenship in exchange. If one wants to find a really authoritarian and collectivistic French nationalism, one has to wait for the end of the nineteenth century, with Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras. Only then did a major part of the French nobility finally convert to nationalism, adopting that rather ugly ideology after a whole century of having rejected and despised the revolutionary, Rousseauistic nationalism of the Republicans, and of having devoted its loyalty to the absent King and the Pope in Rome.
The chapter on Russia dwells on the ambivalence of Russian thinkers toward the West—on the split between admirers of the West, who wanted Russia to use it as a model, and Slavophiles, who denied that Russian society and culture were inferior and that the West had anything good to offer. Both groups, Greenfeld tells us, were steeped in ressentiment.
In Slavophilism, this revulsion [against Russian reality] was transformed into excessive self-admiration. In Westernism, the very same sentiment led to the generalized revulsion against the existing world and to the desire to destroy it.
This is the Westernism that she sees in Leninism and the Russian Revolution. Admirers of the West, in her eyes, shared the Slavophiles’ view of Russia as the anti-West but “still accepted the direction in which the West developed as the only way.” I find this hard to follow. It is a curiously schematic and bloodless chapter, in which social and political realities barely figure, and here the absence of most of the past two centuries is particularly regrettable.
There is nothing bloodless about the chapter on Germany. Greenfeld’s profound dislike of German nationalism animates every page. She sees it as a belated creation of “unattached” intellectuals who were resentful of their inferior and often miserable situation in a society dominated by aristocrats, divided into many authoritarian states, and endowed with a very small reading public. These intellectuals were attracted first by a form of religious mysticism called Pietism, which was egalitarian and emotional, stressed individual salvation rather than dogma, and associated beauty with blood. Later the intellectuals invented Romanticism, which demoted reason, exalted the irrational and unthinking feeling, and denounced the “unnatural” view of society propagated by the Enlightenment. The cult of action, the emphasis on the importance of geniuses and artists and on “the never-never land of the perfect Community”—all this resulted in “a new and sinister ideal of political leadership.” Romantic philosophy is analyzed here entirely as the product of “the intellectuals’ dissatisfaction with their personal situation,” and German national consciousness as the direct product of another ressentiment: French invasion and occupation during the wars of the Revolution and of Napoleon. According to Greenfeld, “German nationalism is Romantic nationalism,” with its view of Germany as the only pure and perfect nation, and of the West as the “antimodel.” She makes a long, brilliant, and highly questionable digression into Marxism, which she describes as a kind of inversion of nationalism involving simple substitutions of class for nation, the proletariat for Germany, and capitalism for the West, still the embodiment of evil.
Quite apart from the issue of whether Marx was really, as she thinks, a German nationalist, there are many problems with this chapter. Why did Romanticism in Germany lead to a political philosophy and a kind of nationalism so profoundly different from those that it fostered in France? Why did the view of Germany as the nation that expressed humanity most fully lead to results far more “sinister” than the quite similar view of France held by Michelet? Is it fair to read Hegel as a totalitarian? Greenfeld would have been well inspired to read the late political theorist Judith Shklar’s books, After Utopia (1957), on Romanticism, and Freedom and Independence (1976), on Hegel. How did German hatred of the West settle on an “Asiatic” race, the Jews, and how did they become “the principal embodiment of Western degeneracy”? How did the old Christian anti-Semitism become the modern hatred of the Jews as a race? In order to understand German nationalism and why “German national identity was from the outset defined as a racial identity,” one needs answers to all these questions, but they are not provided, nor are the questions even asked, by Greenfeld. Her main concern seems to be to show that “Germany was ready for the Holocaust from the moment German national identity existed.” Providing answers would have required, here again, moving much further into the nineteenth century, and examining both the pseudoscientific forms and the social appeals of modern racism. Moreover, no reader of this chapter would guess that there were also German defenders of a conception of the nation derived from the Enlightenment and steeped in liberalism.
The chapter on the United States presents American national sentiment as the blossoming of the idealistic British conception, imported by the immigrants who came to this country with a pre-existing (English) national identity. The revolt against British violations of their rights transformed it into an American national identity, which was later adopted by immigrants who came with no pre-existing national feelings. “They embraced American identity eagerly,” Greenfeld writes, “because only as Americans were they elevated to the status of men.”She spends only a few pages on the Civil War (she sees the South as having had a nascent ideology that would, like Germany’s and Russia’s, have been racial, anti-capitalist, and authoritarian). She is more interested in refuting Richard Hofstadter’s thesis about anti-intellectualism in America. Citing Ralph Waldo Emerson, she stresses the individual American’s enthusiasm for knowledge and culture and dismisses the intellectuals’ lament as mere annoyance at the refusal of Americans to pay special respect to professional thinkers, as a result of which the intelligentsia has eschewed “patriotic effusions” and retreated into universities, to become an aristocracy of merit within the larger democracy. This, in turn, has produced a cultural vacuum in the society at large, which mass culture fills—but the removal of intellectuals to the ivory tower has probably been good for social and political stability.
Again, much is left out, and much is questionable. Hofstadter was talking not about Emerson but about manifestations of a refusal to take seriously ideas devoid of obvious practical application, and about various forms of evangelism and primitivism. These have almost no place in Greenfeld’s one-dimensional celebration of America’s cult of liberty, equality, and reason. That a nation of free individuals can also suffer from the pressure of social conformity and from what Alexis de Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority—despite, as Greenfeld writes, the “plurality of tastes, views, attachments, aspirations, and self-definitions, within the shared national framework”—is neither mentioned nor accounted for. Nor does the time span Greenfeld selected allow her to consider recurrent forms of antiimmigrant nationalism. “Americanism” in its uglier guises is never treated here. I am no fan of systematic debunking and revisionism, but the idyllic image offered by Greenfeld seems a bit too close for comfort to the kind of cultural propaganda offered by the Voice of America during the Gold War. One can admire American national sentiment without concealing its blemishes or the fact (also analyzed by Judith Shklar in her last book, American Citizenship [1991]) that the battle for inclusion has been constant, and isn’t over yet.
GREENFELDS enormous effort is serious and impressive. But a satisfactory study of national consciousness would require a far deeper look into the minds of people in a variety of social groups and settings, and into the ways in which highbrow intellectuals, popular culture, the media, the economic elites, and the politicians who pull all the levers of power inculcate such consciousness into citizens—or even, as Eugen Weber has shown in his classic Peasants Into Frenchmen (1976), turn subjects into citizens of a nation. And a satisfactory study of nationalism as an ideology would require a much closer examination of political doctrines and programs, and of the reasons why they were embraced by a variety of groups. Ressentiment is certainly one of the springs of social action. But how it leads to a particular brand of nationalism, and how it can be redirected against scapegoats, is a far more complicated story than what we are told here. Politics in its broadest sense—not merely what goes on in the political system but its interaction with the society at large—is, unfortunately, absent from the book.
The development of national consciousness is more than a product of “the structural contradictions of the society of orders.” It is, as Greenfeld also says, ”fundamentally, a matter of dignity.”National consciousness arises in large part as a democratic demand. Every society is hierarchical, whether or not it is a society of orders, and many of the groups in which we live and work— family, profession, church—are also inegalitarian. If nations are imagined communities, as in Benedict Anderson’s celebrated 1983 title, it is because we can indeed imagine a community different from the ones we experience daily, one in which we are all alike and equal, no longer separated by rank and by division of labor. In addition, national consciousness arises from a powerful desire to protect what we see as common to “us” from “others”: enemies, invaders, or intruders. (The “other” need not even be a foreigner: to the revolutionaries of 1789, the resented other was the privileged orders.) Nationalist projects have been built on both of these foundations.
Even more significant than the distinction between liberal and authoritarian national self-images, and between civic and ethnic conceptions of the nation, is the distinction between inclusive and exclusive ones. Ethnic conceptions are by definition exclusive. Non-ethnic ones can be exclusive too, as the case of right-wing French nationalism from Barrès to Jean-Marie Le Pen shows. Moreover, there is rarely a single national self-image or a single form of nationalism. Rival conceptions usually fight it out—as we see today in India, where an inclusive and secular idea, symbolized by Nehru, stands against the religious and exclusive conception embodied by Hinduism, Making different conceptions and programs coexist peacefully within a country is often as hard as making different ethnic groups coexist within a state.
Both the virtues and the flaws of Grecnfeld’s book force one to think more about a phenomenon whose importance is as profound as are its complexity and diversity. This is no mean achievement. Greenfeld has written mostly about ideas and ideals. She should now turn to societies and politics, and thus yield to what she herself calls “the irresistibly fascinating nature of social processes,” which in this book she has resisted only too well.