Introduction
This talk on nationalism and the national question is divided into three parts. The first deals with the main features of mainstream theories of nationalism and attempts to assess them from the perspective of historical materialism. The second examines the claims of writers working in the tradition of historical materialism who say that nationalism has been scientific socialism's great failure. The third part attempts to show the value of and generalise Marx and Engels's approach to nationalism and the national question.
Section One
Mainstream bourgeois theories of nation and nationalism have three fundamental features. The first is a subjective, idealist conception of the nation that is largely a product of the mind, an abstraction that emerges from the collective imagination. The second is the overemphasis on ethnic and cultural phenomena to explain the origins and development of the nation and nationalism, historically and today. The emphasis is on the primacy of superstructural factors. The third feature is that nationalism is viewed as an autonomous force. In this view, culture and ethnicity, divorced from class forces in society, take on a life of their own and form the basis of social relations and social movements and their ideologies, including nationalism. If mainstream bourgeois theories relate nationalism to something else it is 'modernization' or 'industrial society' as understood by conservative writers or the European Enlightenment.
A representative example of contemporary scholarship on nationalism is the work of Ernest Gellner (1925-1995), his 1983 book Nations and Nationalism (Oxford : Blackwell) in particular. It proved so influential that a Routledge journal is named after it. For Gellner, the primary unifying factor that nationalism utilizes to rally the masses behind the nationalist banner is culture. Culture, in Gellner’s view, plays a decisive role in defining national identity, and the particular use to which culture is put by the nationalist forces determines the impact of nationalism on society: “nationalism...sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures.” (op.cit., 49) Gellner argues that “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.” (ibid, 55)
Gellner bases his argument on cultural factors, his theories are constructed on the superstructural level, i.e., in the realm of ideas, values, beliefs, tradition, culture, etc.—not in the sphere of fundamental socio-economic conditions, let alone class and class relations. Such a subjectivist argument, divorced from the social basis that gives rise to the phenomenon of nationalism beyond 'industrial society' is a product of an idealist formulation and lacks a basis in material reality. Gellner does not speak of capitalism, only of industrial society. For Gellner, "nationalism is not a class conflict which has failed to reach true consciousness. Class conflict is a national one which has failed to take off.." (ibid, 72) Historical materialism thus has to be stood on its head. Failure to identify the social and class forces that are the decisive agents of nationalist ideology and nationalist movements thus seriously limits our understanding of this important social phenomenon.
There are, of course, other more sophisticated and sociologically oriented bourgeois theorists who focus on ethnic groups and ethnonationalist movements as central to the nationalist project placed in historical context, such as John Breuilly who in his 1982 book Nationalism and the State (Manchester University Press) puts emphasis less on the economic than on the politically transformative nature of national mobilisation. Still, in one form or another, these liberal attempts to explain the origin, nature, and development of nations and nationalism, as well as ethnicity and ethno-national conflict, are predicated on either eclecticism or on a variety of anti-Marxist contemporary mainstream perspectives such as neo-Weberianism.
Mainstream theories of nationalism are theoretically hostile to historical materialism because it is seen to fail to understand nationalism because of its alleged inherent reductionism (superstructures determined by the economic base) and its class essentialism. They also tend to be politically anti-communist. This is clear from the pronouncements of Ernest Gellner, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, in a politically-motivated, ideological polemic in his 1994 book Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell) designed to discredit historical materialism, denouncing Marxism as a fraud. (op.cit., 6–7, 64, 179) In Nations and Nationalism, Gellner writes with irony of "The Wrong Address Theory" of nationalism maintained by Marxism : "The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations." (op.cit, 129) The fact is that nationalism is ultimately seen by contemporary mainstream theories of the phenomenon as a primordial force which historical materialism is inadequate to explain and account for.
Section Two
The problem is that this is a conclusion also shared by many theorist ostensibly working in the tradition of historical materialism. In 1978, one year before his suicide, leading marxist theoretician Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) stated : "We have to recognize that there is no Marxist theory of the nation." (State, Power, Socialism, London : New Left Books, 93) One of the editors of New Left Review, Tom Nairn (1932-2023) in his 1977 book The Break Up of Britain : Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London : New Left Books) goes even further and claims that: “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.” Adding to the list of “failures,” where he cites “Marxism’s shortcomings over imperialism, the state, the falling rate of profit and the immiseration of the masses” Nairn writes that : “Yet none of these is as important, as fundamental, as the problem of nationalism, either in theory or in political practice.” (op.cit, 329)
For Nairn, the unevenness of capitalist development in stimulates, in the peripheral regions, an unconscious and irrational attitude resulting from envy, rage, and frustration over unfulfilled expectations. This irrational outburst emerges as nationalist ideology, the national movement. Nationalism, for him, is instinctive, unconscious, even a "dementia." It is merely a sort of psychosis of modernization. This is how Nairn sums up his (allegedly) historical materialist account of the national phenomena : "To say that the assorted phenomena ... of nationalism have a 'material' basis and explanation is akin to saying that individual neurosis has a sexual explanation. . . . 'Nationalism' is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as 'neurosis' in the individual, with ... a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies), and largely incurable" (op.cit., 359). When this explosive psychological reaction to modernization occurs in strong countries, it produces, according to Nairn, fascism. Fascism, says Nairn, is the essence, the "archetype," of national struggle, and fascism is therefore implicit in all national movements, all national liberation struggles. (ibid, 347)
Interestinly in the case of Ireland Nairn supports an independent Northern Ireland. "The Ulster Protestant territories clearly belong to this group . . . [Do] they have no right of self-determination because they are (relatively) economically developed?" (ibid, 248-249) Nairn's uncritical endorsement of Ulster protestant nationalism and pious belief that international capitalism is a rational entity keen to rid itself of such an anachronistic problem demonstrates a clear lack of scientific socialist theoretical bearings. (For an excellent critique of Tom Nairn on Ireland see: Diane Perrons (1980) Ireland and the Break-Up of Britain, Antipode, 12:1, 53-65)
Ephraim Nimni in his 1991 book Marxism and Nationalism: The Theoretical Origins of the Political Crisis, (London: Pluto) also claims that historical materialist theories of nationalism have been “a great historical failure”. For Nimni, historical materialism is founded on a form of evolutionism and economic determinism inevitably opening on a Eurocentric worldview. (op.cit, 4, 10) For examples illustrating this thesis, Engels approved the annexation of California by the United States because, according to his explanation, "the active Yankees would be better than the lazy Mexicans" in assuring the economic growth of the region. In 1848 Engels even welcomed - as Nimni stresses - the French conquest of Algeria as "a happy event for the progress of civilization"."In reality, the premise of Nimni's argument is a caricature of Marx's thought. For a dimatrically opposed interpretation of Marx's thought on the subject I will point you to the excellent book by Kevin B. Anderson (2010), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies, The University Of Chicago Press. Nimni attempts to re-habilitate the Austro Marxism of Otto Bauer (1881-1938) and his 1906 work The National Question and Social Democracy. But the definition of a nation offered by Bauer was resolutely non-materialist: “The nation is the totality of human beings bound together by a community of fate into a community of character.” Bauer’s work is hailed by Nimni and others as the only serious Marxist attempt to deal with the national question, but mainly because of its distance from Marxism. (ibid, 143, 181-184) Lenin claimed that Bauer’s theory was “basically psychological” and endorsed instead the “historico-economic” explanation associated with Kautsky and in his own writings, but failed to propose a comparably detailed alternative explanation for the emergence of nations or the nature of national consciousness. The economism of traditional marxist theories of nationalism can lead to a reaction against it which falls into a cultural idealism. This is the problem with certain of Bauer's formulations in which the nation seems to rise above social classes and even nations.
Taking this critique a step further, Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), in his 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London : Verso) asserts: “nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted.”(op.cit., 13) And what is his great discovery that Marxists have failed to confront? The discovery that the nation is an imagined cultural community and nationalism is a product of the collective imagination that is as real as religion. Benedict Anderson explained that he began to write his book in the late 1970s as a result of the wars between the socialist states of Democratic Kampuchea, Vietnam and China. His whole aim was to understand what it was about nationalism that made it a central feature of socialist as well as capitalist societies. (ibid, 1-2) Unable to account for the failure of actually existing socialisms to get to the heart of the roots of nationalism, he came to see these instead in the satisfaction of innate psychological needs. Benedict Anderson goes beyond orthodox marxist views of nationalism as ideology, addressing its ‘sacred’ role in Weberian terms. Language, literature and the press are seen as crucial in imagining the entity we call the ‘nation’.
In his 1990 book Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge University Press) which was based on a series of lectures given in Belfast in 1989 the ostensibly Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) expresses the view that nationalism today is an irrational ideology. Hobsbawm maintains that nationalism, meaning the national struggle to create something like a nation state was rational in the 19th century but is no longer so. He says that the rise of capitalism called for the creation of nation states but capitalism no longer needs the nation state hence national movements today are irrational and in effect attavistic. The nation, Hobsbawm writes, "is no longer a major vector of historical development" (op.cit., 163) Hence his insistence that nationalism can only be a nostalgic and reactionary ideological enterprise today - in strict terms, indeed, a decadent indulgence that no democratic consciousness can afford. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 concludes with its author's disparagement of nationalism in the post-1945 period as "a substitute for lost dreams," as he looks forward to the time - both imminent and inevitable, on his reading -when it will have withered away altogether (ibid, 178). From there he goes on to criticize all modern forms of national struggle including anti-colonial forms. While Hobsbawm does not deny that some modern national struggles have aimed at or achieved socialism, he considers this to be a rare sort of outcome, much less significant in the modern world than the creation of what he views as frivolous micro-states and irrational social movements. Note that Hobsbawm does not say that national liberation movements are reactionary but questions their rationality. His stance on Ireland is particularly negative, contrasting the largely civilized British state to the barbarism of the Irish. (Eric Hobsbawm, Barbarism: A User’s Guide, New Left Review, Issue 206 (July/August 1994), 44-54. For criticism of this article see in particular: Denis O’Hearn & Sam Porter, New Left Podsnappery: The British Left and Ireland, New Left Review, Issue 212 (July/August 1995), 131-147)
The next section will put into doubt the thesis that the national question has been historical materialism's great failure, however one can only agree that the question of so-called 'non-historic nations' has been a major problem and failure for the founders of scientific socialism, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) in particular. Compared to the great ‘historic nations’ such as Germany, Engels in particular developed the Hegelian notion of ‘non-historic’ nations or 'people without history' (geschichtslosen Völker). For Engels, ‘these relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation’. The Southern Slavs, the Czecks, the Basques and the Bretons for example were peoples without a history, were not viable and would never achieve independence. But the concept of progressive nations or reactionary peoples is metaphysical and hardly accords with democratic criteria. No national group can be condemned to the counter-revolutionary dustbin of history, nor can any democratic politics call for their annihilation ‘by the most determined use of terror’ as Engels infamously did on more than one occasion. In his excellent book Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848 (written in 1948 and published in English translation for the first time in the journal Critique volume 18, Issue 1, 1991) the independent Ukranian marxist Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) wrote what is considered to be the definitive historical materialist assessment of this problem.
Section Three
The previous two sections underlined the fact that most contemporary scholarship -including the ostensibly Marxist one- does not believe that historical materialism has anything worthwhile to say about the national phenomena. However, Erica Benner's important book Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels (Clarendon : Oxford University Press) published in 1995 (and republished by Verso books in 2018) counters a range of assumptions commonly held about Karl Marx (1818-1883)'s views of nationalism and internationalism, not least by twentieth-century marxists themselves. It shows that Marx did not envisage the abolition of national communities or nation states; that the politics of nationalism in Marx is not incompatible with a politics of class; that Marx was repeatedly critical of a "utopian" internationalism, and that the themes of nationalism and international solidarity, far from being necessarily in opposition, can be seen in many cases as mutually reinforcing. Nationalism then emerges in Marxist theory as a form of political self-identification and mobilization that can contribute to the broader project of social and political freedom.
It is a commonly held misconception that Marx and Engels did not understand the importance of nationalism. They are famous for writing in the 1848 Communist Manifesto that : « The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. » Does that mean that they have no interest in the nation ? In fact Marx and Engels understood very well the importance of nationalism for working class politics. In the same Manifesto they write that the proletariat "must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word." The question of the leading class of the nation is of extreme importance. Societies are divided into classes, so the 'national interest' must be represented by one of them. As Nicos Poulantzas points : "The modern nation is not the creation of the bourgeoisie, but the outcome of a relationship of forces between the 'modern' social classes – one in which the nation is a stake for the various classes." (op.cit., 115) The most progressive class in society would be truly national in so far as it was able to take the whole society forward, even while it was promoting its own interests. As Poulantzas says : "the nation does not have the same meaning for the bourgeoisie as it does for the working class and the popular masses." (ibid, 117) If it is not that of the proletariat, the nationalism will be that of the ruling classes that conceive their own interests as those of the entire nation. That capacity to represent the interests of a particular class as those of the entire nation -the 'national-popular' as Gramsci puts it- is very important.
Marx and Engels have also been accused of intending to abolish national differences and for advancing the idea that the nation will be abolished by the advancing tide of history. However, what they wrote is that the supremacy of the proletariat will cause the disappearance of "national de- limitations" (Absonderungen) and antagonisms between peoples. Absonderung can be translated as difference, delimitation, separation or isolation. Marx and Engels hoped that in a communist society national antagonisms and delimitations will disappear, they meant certainly not the 'abolition' of existing ethnic and linguistic communities (which would have been absurd) but that of sharp economic and social differences, economic isolation, invidious distinctions, political rivalries, exploitation of one nation by another. (Roman Rosdolsky, Worker and Fatherland : A Note on A Passage in the Communist Manifesto, Science and Society, 29:3, Summer 1965, 335-337) In the case of Ireland and Britain for example they advocated "the transformation of the present forced Union into an equal and free Confederation of possible, or into complete separation if necessary." It is worth remembering that Lenin once likened the principle of self-determination to divorce, saying that it did not imply the desirability of separation: in fact couples can only live together harmoniously if they have the right to divorce.
Marx and Engels did not propose a general theory of nationalism and the national question. Mike Davis (1946-2022) says of their writings on the subject that these “pieces defy simple classification as theory, journalism or instant history, and perhaps are best understood as an original genre of political writing in which theoretical concepts are developed and applied, but not abstractly formalized, in the course of trying to think and enact socialist politics." (Mike Davis, Marx's Lost Theory : The Politics of Nationalism in 1848, New Left Review, Issue 93, May-June 2015, 53) For Marx and Engels the national question was above all related to the question of democracy. The word 'nation' was itself transformed in the course of the French Revolution : the revolutionary democratic ideology which helped overthrow absolutism became the new French nation-state. In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, ‘To support nationalist aspirations for unity, autonomy, or independence was to support popular liberties against empire and absolutism’ (Erica Benner, op.cit, 9). For a Mazzini or a Herder, nationalist icons of the day, the flourishing of nation states was synonymous with democracy. Marx and Engels had a politically discriminating attitude towards the various national issues of the day, and displayed a normative approach towards the nationalisms of their day. For them, the guiding light was democracy, and later also internationalism. In a sense, they were not interested in analysing nationalism as a unified or consistent entity because they did not believe it was such. As Erica Benner writes, they could not have grasped the differences between the new forms of national politics and the democratic politics they advocated had they treated nationalism ‘as a phenomenon sui generis, rather than analysing national movements as a variety of distinct political programmes based on conflicting social interests’ (ibid, 10). It is this discriminating, deconstructionist approach to nationalism that we now need to outline.
This talk on nationalism and the national question is divided into three parts. The first deals with the main features of mainstream theories of nationalism and attempts to assess them from the perspective of historical materialism. The second examines the claims of writers working in the tradition of historical materialism who say that nationalism has been scientific socialism's great failure. The third part attempts to show the value of and generalise Marx and Engels's approach to nationalism and the national question.
Section One
Mainstream bourgeois theories of nation and nationalism have three fundamental features. The first is a subjective, idealist conception of the nation that is largely a product of the mind, an abstraction that emerges from the collective imagination. The second is the overemphasis on ethnic and cultural phenomena to explain the origins and development of the nation and nationalism, historically and today. The emphasis is on the primacy of superstructural factors. The third feature is that nationalism is viewed as an autonomous force. In this view, culture and ethnicity, divorced from class forces in society, take on a life of their own and form the basis of social relations and social movements and their ideologies, including nationalism. If mainstream bourgeois theories relate nationalism to something else it is 'modernization' or 'industrial society' as understood by conservative writers or the European Enlightenment.
A representative example of contemporary scholarship on nationalism is the work of Ernest Gellner (1925-1995), his 1983 book Nations and Nationalism (Oxford : Blackwell) in particular. It proved so influential that a Routledge journal is named after it. For Gellner, the primary unifying factor that nationalism utilizes to rally the masses behind the nationalist banner is culture. Culture, in Gellner’s view, plays a decisive role in defining national identity, and the particular use to which culture is put by the nationalist forces determines the impact of nationalism on society: “nationalism...sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures.” (op.cit., 49) Gellner argues that “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.” (ibid, 55)
Gellner bases his argument on cultural factors, his theories are constructed on the superstructural level, i.e., in the realm of ideas, values, beliefs, tradition, culture, etc.—not in the sphere of fundamental socio-economic conditions, let alone class and class relations. Such a subjectivist argument, divorced from the social basis that gives rise to the phenomenon of nationalism beyond 'industrial society' is a product of an idealist formulation and lacks a basis in material reality. Gellner does not speak of capitalism, only of industrial society. For Gellner, "nationalism is not a class conflict which has failed to reach true consciousness. Class conflict is a national one which has failed to take off.." (ibid, 72) Historical materialism thus has to be stood on its head. Failure to identify the social and class forces that are the decisive agents of nationalist ideology and nationalist movements thus seriously limits our understanding of this important social phenomenon.
There are, of course, other more sophisticated and sociologically oriented bourgeois theorists who focus on ethnic groups and ethnonationalist movements as central to the nationalist project placed in historical context, such as John Breuilly who in his 1982 book Nationalism and the State (Manchester University Press) puts emphasis less on the economic than on the politically transformative nature of national mobilisation. Still, in one form or another, these liberal attempts to explain the origin, nature, and development of nations and nationalism, as well as ethnicity and ethno-national conflict, are predicated on either eclecticism or on a variety of anti-Marxist contemporary mainstream perspectives such as neo-Weberianism.
Mainstream theories of nationalism are theoretically hostile to historical materialism because it is seen to fail to understand nationalism because of its alleged inherent reductionism (superstructures determined by the economic base) and its class essentialism. They also tend to be politically anti-communist. This is clear from the pronouncements of Ernest Gellner, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, in a politically-motivated, ideological polemic in his 1994 book Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell) designed to discredit historical materialism, denouncing Marxism as a fraud. (op.cit., 6–7, 64, 179) In Nations and Nationalism, Gellner writes with irony of "The Wrong Address Theory" of nationalism maintained by Marxism : "The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations." (op.cit, 129) The fact is that nationalism is ultimately seen by contemporary mainstream theories of the phenomenon as a primordial force which historical materialism is inadequate to explain and account for.
Section Two
The problem is that this is a conclusion also shared by many theorist ostensibly working in the tradition of historical materialism. In 1978, one year before his suicide, leading marxist theoretician Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) stated : "We have to recognize that there is no Marxist theory of the nation." (State, Power, Socialism, London : New Left Books, 93) One of the editors of New Left Review, Tom Nairn (1932-2023) in his 1977 book The Break Up of Britain : Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London : New Left Books) goes even further and claims that: “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.” Adding to the list of “failures,” where he cites “Marxism’s shortcomings over imperialism, the state, the falling rate of profit and the immiseration of the masses” Nairn writes that : “Yet none of these is as important, as fundamental, as the problem of nationalism, either in theory or in political practice.” (op.cit, 329)
For Nairn, the unevenness of capitalist development in stimulates, in the peripheral regions, an unconscious and irrational attitude resulting from envy, rage, and frustration over unfulfilled expectations. This irrational outburst emerges as nationalist ideology, the national movement. Nationalism, for him, is instinctive, unconscious, even a "dementia." It is merely a sort of psychosis of modernization. This is how Nairn sums up his (allegedly) historical materialist account of the national phenomena : "To say that the assorted phenomena ... of nationalism have a 'material' basis and explanation is akin to saying that individual neurosis has a sexual explanation. . . . 'Nationalism' is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as 'neurosis' in the individual, with ... a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies), and largely incurable" (op.cit., 359). When this explosive psychological reaction to modernization occurs in strong countries, it produces, according to Nairn, fascism. Fascism, says Nairn, is the essence, the "archetype," of national struggle, and fascism is therefore implicit in all national movements, all national liberation struggles. (ibid, 347)
Interestinly in the case of Ireland Nairn supports an independent Northern Ireland. "The Ulster Protestant territories clearly belong to this group . . . [Do] they have no right of self-determination because they are (relatively) economically developed?" (ibid, 248-249) Nairn's uncritical endorsement of Ulster protestant nationalism and pious belief that international capitalism is a rational entity keen to rid itself of such an anachronistic problem demonstrates a clear lack of scientific socialist theoretical bearings. (For an excellent critique of Tom Nairn on Ireland see: Diane Perrons (1980) Ireland and the Break-Up of Britain, Antipode, 12:1, 53-65)
Ephraim Nimni in his 1991 book Marxism and Nationalism: The Theoretical Origins of the Political Crisis, (London: Pluto) also claims that historical materialist theories of nationalism have been “a great historical failure”. For Nimni, historical materialism is founded on a form of evolutionism and economic determinism inevitably opening on a Eurocentric worldview. (op.cit, 4, 10) For examples illustrating this thesis, Engels approved the annexation of California by the United States because, according to his explanation, "the active Yankees would be better than the lazy Mexicans" in assuring the economic growth of the region. In 1848 Engels even welcomed - as Nimni stresses - the French conquest of Algeria as "a happy event for the progress of civilization"."In reality, the premise of Nimni's argument is a caricature of Marx's thought. For a dimatrically opposed interpretation of Marx's thought on the subject I will point you to the excellent book by Kevin B. Anderson (2010), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies, The University Of Chicago Press. Nimni attempts to re-habilitate the Austro Marxism of Otto Bauer (1881-1938) and his 1906 work The National Question and Social Democracy. But the definition of a nation offered by Bauer was resolutely non-materialist: “The nation is the totality of human beings bound together by a community of fate into a community of character.” Bauer’s work is hailed by Nimni and others as the only serious Marxist attempt to deal with the national question, but mainly because of its distance from Marxism. (ibid, 143, 181-184) Lenin claimed that Bauer’s theory was “basically psychological” and endorsed instead the “historico-economic” explanation associated with Kautsky and in his own writings, but failed to propose a comparably detailed alternative explanation for the emergence of nations or the nature of national consciousness. The economism of traditional marxist theories of nationalism can lead to a reaction against it which falls into a cultural idealism. This is the problem with certain of Bauer's formulations in which the nation seems to rise above social classes and even nations.
Taking this critique a step further, Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), in his 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London : Verso) asserts: “nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted.”(op.cit., 13) And what is his great discovery that Marxists have failed to confront? The discovery that the nation is an imagined cultural community and nationalism is a product of the collective imagination that is as real as religion. Benedict Anderson explained that he began to write his book in the late 1970s as a result of the wars between the socialist states of Democratic Kampuchea, Vietnam and China. His whole aim was to understand what it was about nationalism that made it a central feature of socialist as well as capitalist societies. (ibid, 1-2) Unable to account for the failure of actually existing socialisms to get to the heart of the roots of nationalism, he came to see these instead in the satisfaction of innate psychological needs. Benedict Anderson goes beyond orthodox marxist views of nationalism as ideology, addressing its ‘sacred’ role in Weberian terms. Language, literature and the press are seen as crucial in imagining the entity we call the ‘nation’.
In his 1990 book Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge University Press) which was based on a series of lectures given in Belfast in 1989 the ostensibly Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) expresses the view that nationalism today is an irrational ideology. Hobsbawm maintains that nationalism, meaning the national struggle to create something like a nation state was rational in the 19th century but is no longer so. He says that the rise of capitalism called for the creation of nation states but capitalism no longer needs the nation state hence national movements today are irrational and in effect attavistic. The nation, Hobsbawm writes, "is no longer a major vector of historical development" (op.cit., 163) Hence his insistence that nationalism can only be a nostalgic and reactionary ideological enterprise today - in strict terms, indeed, a decadent indulgence that no democratic consciousness can afford. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 concludes with its author's disparagement of nationalism in the post-1945 period as "a substitute for lost dreams," as he looks forward to the time - both imminent and inevitable, on his reading -when it will have withered away altogether (ibid, 178). From there he goes on to criticize all modern forms of national struggle including anti-colonial forms. While Hobsbawm does not deny that some modern national struggles have aimed at or achieved socialism, he considers this to be a rare sort of outcome, much less significant in the modern world than the creation of what he views as frivolous micro-states and irrational social movements. Note that Hobsbawm does not say that national liberation movements are reactionary but questions their rationality. His stance on Ireland is particularly negative, contrasting the largely civilized British state to the barbarism of the Irish. (Eric Hobsbawm, Barbarism: A User’s Guide, New Left Review, Issue 206 (July/August 1994), 44-54. For criticism of this article see in particular: Denis O’Hearn & Sam Porter, New Left Podsnappery: The British Left and Ireland, New Left Review, Issue 212 (July/August 1995), 131-147)
The next section will put into doubt the thesis that the national question has been historical materialism's great failure, however one can only agree that the question of so-called 'non-historic nations' has been a major problem and failure for the founders of scientific socialism, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) in particular. Compared to the great ‘historic nations’ such as Germany, Engels in particular developed the Hegelian notion of ‘non-historic’ nations or 'people without history' (geschichtslosen Völker). For Engels, ‘these relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation’. The Southern Slavs, the Czecks, the Basques and the Bretons for example were peoples without a history, were not viable and would never achieve independence. But the concept of progressive nations or reactionary peoples is metaphysical and hardly accords with democratic criteria. No national group can be condemned to the counter-revolutionary dustbin of history, nor can any democratic politics call for their annihilation ‘by the most determined use of terror’ as Engels infamously did on more than one occasion. In his excellent book Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848 (written in 1948 and published in English translation for the first time in the journal Critique volume 18, Issue 1, 1991) the independent Ukranian marxist Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) wrote what is considered to be the definitive historical materialist assessment of this problem.
Section Three
The previous two sections underlined the fact that most contemporary scholarship -including the ostensibly Marxist one- does not believe that historical materialism has anything worthwhile to say about the national phenomena. However, Erica Benner's important book Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels (Clarendon : Oxford University Press) published in 1995 (and republished by Verso books in 2018) counters a range of assumptions commonly held about Karl Marx (1818-1883)'s views of nationalism and internationalism, not least by twentieth-century marxists themselves. It shows that Marx did not envisage the abolition of national communities or nation states; that the politics of nationalism in Marx is not incompatible with a politics of class; that Marx was repeatedly critical of a "utopian" internationalism, and that the themes of nationalism and international solidarity, far from being necessarily in opposition, can be seen in many cases as mutually reinforcing. Nationalism then emerges in Marxist theory as a form of political self-identification and mobilization that can contribute to the broader project of social and political freedom.
It is a commonly held misconception that Marx and Engels did not understand the importance of nationalism. They are famous for writing in the 1848 Communist Manifesto that : « The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. » Does that mean that they have no interest in the nation ? In fact Marx and Engels understood very well the importance of nationalism for working class politics. In the same Manifesto they write that the proletariat "must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word." The question of the leading class of the nation is of extreme importance. Societies are divided into classes, so the 'national interest' must be represented by one of them. As Nicos Poulantzas points : "The modern nation is not the creation of the bourgeoisie, but the outcome of a relationship of forces between the 'modern' social classes – one in which the nation is a stake for the various classes." (op.cit., 115) The most progressive class in society would be truly national in so far as it was able to take the whole society forward, even while it was promoting its own interests. As Poulantzas says : "the nation does not have the same meaning for the bourgeoisie as it does for the working class and the popular masses." (ibid, 117) If it is not that of the proletariat, the nationalism will be that of the ruling classes that conceive their own interests as those of the entire nation. That capacity to represent the interests of a particular class as those of the entire nation -the 'national-popular' as Gramsci puts it- is very important.
Marx and Engels have also been accused of intending to abolish national differences and for advancing the idea that the nation will be abolished by the advancing tide of history. However, what they wrote is that the supremacy of the proletariat will cause the disappearance of "national de- limitations" (Absonderungen) and antagonisms between peoples. Absonderung can be translated as difference, delimitation, separation or isolation. Marx and Engels hoped that in a communist society national antagonisms and delimitations will disappear, they meant certainly not the 'abolition' of existing ethnic and linguistic communities (which would have been absurd) but that of sharp economic and social differences, economic isolation, invidious distinctions, political rivalries, exploitation of one nation by another. (Roman Rosdolsky, Worker and Fatherland : A Note on A Passage in the Communist Manifesto, Science and Society, 29:3, Summer 1965, 335-337) In the case of Ireland and Britain for example they advocated "the transformation of the present forced Union into an equal and free Confederation of possible, or into complete separation if necessary." It is worth remembering that Lenin once likened the principle of self-determination to divorce, saying that it did not imply the desirability of separation: in fact couples can only live together harmoniously if they have the right to divorce.
Marx and Engels did not propose a general theory of nationalism and the national question. Mike Davis (1946-2022) says of their writings on the subject that these “pieces defy simple classification as theory, journalism or instant history, and perhaps are best understood as an original genre of political writing in which theoretical concepts are developed and applied, but not abstractly formalized, in the course of trying to think and enact socialist politics." (Mike Davis, Marx's Lost Theory : The Politics of Nationalism in 1848, New Left Review, Issue 93, May-June 2015, 53) For Marx and Engels the national question was above all related to the question of democracy. The word 'nation' was itself transformed in the course of the French Revolution : the revolutionary democratic ideology which helped overthrow absolutism became the new French nation-state. In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, ‘To support nationalist aspirations for unity, autonomy, or independence was to support popular liberties against empire and absolutism’ (Erica Benner, op.cit, 9). For a Mazzini or a Herder, nationalist icons of the day, the flourishing of nation states was synonymous with democracy. Marx and Engels had a politically discriminating attitude towards the various national issues of the day, and displayed a normative approach towards the nationalisms of their day. For them, the guiding light was democracy, and later also internationalism. In a sense, they were not interested in analysing nationalism as a unified or consistent entity because they did not believe it was such. As Erica Benner writes, they could not have grasped the differences between the new forms of national politics and the democratic politics they advocated had they treated nationalism ‘as a phenomenon sui generis, rather than analysing national movements as a variety of distinct political programmes based on conflicting social interests’ (ibid, 10). It is this discriminating, deconstructionist approach to nationalism that we now need to outline.
Though Marx and Engels were keen supporters of German unification, they were not German nationalists. For them, national unification was a preliminary task of the German democratic revolution. Marx and Engels were equally sympathetic to the ongoing process of national unifica-tion in Italy, writing ‘No people, apart from the Poles, has been so shamefully oppressed by the superior power of its neighbours, no people has so often and so courageously tried to throw off the yoke oppressing it’. Here, we get a hint that support for nationalist demands was not unconditional for the founders of scientific socialism. Rather, it was tied to the big power politics of the day, and in particular to the dominating role of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. For Marx and Engels, neither a common language and traditions nor geographical and historical homogeneity were sufficient in themselves to define a nation. Rather, a certain level of economic and social development was required, and priority was given, on the whole, to larger units. So, for example, on the question of Germany ceding the Schleswig and Holstein territories to Denmark in 1848, Marx and Engels believed that the German role was revolutionary and progressive and advocated a resolute conduct of the Danish war from the beginning.
Marx and Engels sometimes advocated unification as in the case of Germany, and sometimes secession as in the example of Poland or Ireland. In the great historic nations peoples had gained the right to strong, viable national states through their struggles for unity and independence. These nations would be the standard-bearers of progress and civilization for Marx and Engels. Yet who would qualify for this ould depend on political circumstances. Thus, in 1851 Engels could write to Marx that ‘The Poles are une nation foutue’ and in 1864 they could refer to the Poles as ‘a subjugated people which, with its incessant and heroic struggle against its oppressors, has proven its historic right to national autonomy and self-determination’. The right of nations to self-determination was far from absolute for Marx and Engels, and depended, rather, on the international political conjuncture and the developments of the class struggle—or lack of it—in each national situation. They were, of course, practical politicians, and they were guided on national issues largely by political action considerations rather than theory.
Conclusion
From Marx and Engels, the scientific socialist approach to nationalism and national questions will have learned that it is a matter of "putting politics in command" rather than a general theory of the nation. The nation is viewed above all as a political community (as opposed to ethnic or cultural one) organised around universal values. The fundamental points is that their analysis of nationalism was always put in terms of (a) the strategic interests of the working class, and (b) emphasized the relation between nationalism and democracy. Scientific socialists have to understand simultaneoulsy the social roots of national struggles and the national content of class struggle. As Erica Benner has put it, their arguments are located in a distinctive theory of politics, which enabled Marx and Engels to analyse the relations between nationalism and other social movements and to discriminate between democratic, outward-looking national programmes and authoritarian, ethnocentric nationalism. Her book suggest that this approach improves on accounts which stress the `independent' force of nationality over other concerns, and on thos that fail to analyse the complex motives of nationalist actors.To conclude for Michael Löwy, a universal criterion is necessary for socialist dealing with a national question: “This criterion can only be that - common to socialists and democrats – of the right of self-determination (until separation) of each nation, that is, of each community which democratically decides it is a nation. The advantage of this criterion is that it refers not to ancestral or religious claims over territory but to universal principles of democracy and popular sovereignty. It also allows for a vital distinction between nation and state, recognising that national self-determination could take many different forms: state separation (independence), federation, confederation, or limited sovereignty or rights in a multinational or multi-ethnic state." (quoted by Neil Lazarus (1999), Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Cambridge University Press, 75)
Liam Ó Ruairc is the former co-editor of The Blanket.
Marx and Engels sometimes advocated unification as in the case of Germany, and sometimes secession as in the example of Poland or Ireland. In the great historic nations peoples had gained the right to strong, viable national states through their struggles for unity and independence. These nations would be the standard-bearers of progress and civilization for Marx and Engels. Yet who would qualify for this ould depend on political circumstances. Thus, in 1851 Engels could write to Marx that ‘The Poles are une nation foutue’ and in 1864 they could refer to the Poles as ‘a subjugated people which, with its incessant and heroic struggle against its oppressors, has proven its historic right to national autonomy and self-determination’. The right of nations to self-determination was far from absolute for Marx and Engels, and depended, rather, on the international political conjuncture and the developments of the class struggle—or lack of it—in each national situation. They were, of course, practical politicians, and they were guided on national issues largely by political action considerations rather than theory.
Conclusion
From Marx and Engels, the scientific socialist approach to nationalism and national questions will have learned that it is a matter of "putting politics in command" rather than a general theory of the nation. The nation is viewed above all as a political community (as opposed to ethnic or cultural one) organised around universal values. The fundamental points is that their analysis of nationalism was always put in terms of (a) the strategic interests of the working class, and (b) emphasized the relation between nationalism and democracy. Scientific socialists have to understand simultaneoulsy the social roots of national struggles and the national content of class struggle. As Erica Benner has put it, their arguments are located in a distinctive theory of politics, which enabled Marx and Engels to analyse the relations between nationalism and other social movements and to discriminate between democratic, outward-looking national programmes and authoritarian, ethnocentric nationalism. Her book suggest that this approach improves on accounts which stress the `independent' force of nationality over other concerns, and on thos that fail to analyse the complex motives of nationalist actors.To conclude for Michael Löwy, a universal criterion is necessary for socialist dealing with a national question: “This criterion can only be that - common to socialists and democrats – of the right of self-determination (until separation) of each nation, that is, of each community which democratically decides it is a nation. The advantage of this criterion is that it refers not to ancestral or religious claims over territory but to universal principles of democracy and popular sovereignty. It also allows for a vital distinction between nation and state, recognising that national self-determination could take many different forms: state separation (independence), federation, confederation, or limited sovereignty or rights in a multinational or multi-ethnic state." (quoted by Neil Lazarus (1999), Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Cambridge University Press, 75)
Liam Ó Ruairc is the former co-editor of The Blanket.
Very scholarly and incisive analysis of nationalism and it's hydra headed nature. Look forward to more work from Liam.
ReplyDeleteSeems to be rubbishing the brit lefts tendency in Ireland's take on the matter from a Marxist perspective. Something fenianism figured out over a century ago and looks like some locals are in the process again of rediscovering.
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