Nationalism as a Vehicle for Universalism

Nowadays we are not used to thinking of nationalism as being "on the left," but once upon a time that was the case. Not too long ago, there was a vibrant black nationalism on the left (whereas nowadays it is either non-existent or, as with the New Black Panther Party, taken over by reactionary, non-universalist Muslims). I just wrote a blog post about how the Hippie movement could have manifested itself—and in my mind much more successfully so—as a left nationalist movement. There used to be a secular Arab nationalism on the left in the Arab world. There used to be leftist national liberation movements all throughout the 3rd world. Nowadays we only have Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia as the only real outposts of left nationalism remaining (and maybe Uganda and some other countries that don't really show up on our political radar screen).

The mother of all left-nationalisms, though, was once upon a time the French Revolution. The proponents of the French Revolution envisioned the French nation, not as what we would call today a right-wing *ethnic* nation, but as a (what we would call left-wing) universalist *civic* nation that would act as a vehicle for the universalism of the French Revolution (and so, to defend the French nation from the emigré plots and from the alliances of reactionary monarchs was to defend the French Revolution. Think of it as "Bourgeois Liberalism in one Country." Stalin would have understood).

That is, from its very beginning, the French nation was foremost envisioned as a social contract between individuals, and second (or not at all) as a primordial collection of ethnically "French" people (à la German nationalism) that should band together not because of political interest, but because of some shared primordial ethnic destiny.

In contemporary France there is, in fact, an official debate being held over how exactly to define the French nation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/08/france-national-identity-debate-race
Many French on the left view this "debate" as an attempt to redefine French nationalism from being a "nation civique" (that would universally welcome any immigrants who shared the républicain vision) to being a "nation ethnique" (that would not be as welcoming to immigrants, and that would try to (quite ridiculously) redefine the French as the descendants of the Gaulois, as the descendants of those who built Notre Dame—in short, as the French-speaking descendants of anyone who didn't arrive in France within, oh, let's conveniently say, the last 60 years.

The reason why this debate seems so ridiculous to me is that there really didn't exist a French "nation" as recently as 1789. There was, instead, a political entity (that happened to be called "France") being ruled by a monarchical dynasty that happened to contain within it many different nations, but that happened to later come (mostly) under the control of a new political system that transformed all of these different nations into one "French" nation. In a way, a civic nationalism would have been the only nationalism that would have made sense in 1789. Ethnically, in France there were people who spoke Alsatian, Breton, Basque, Gascon, Occitan, Provençal, le Français national (basically the Parisian dialect), etc. The culture of southern France and Northern France was very different. Some regions had had totally different levels of limited self-government before 1789. Some parts of "France" had only been recently acquired (Alsace) and were widely considered to be hardly ethnically French at all as late as 1939.

Rather, the ethnic French nation that nowadays co-exists in a subordinate role to the civic French nation came about precisely thanks to that civic nationalism—the levée en masse, the national education system founded in large part in order to spread republicanism to the whole population of France, etc.

Even with the partial consolidation of the ethnic French nation, though, there still remains a vibrant love of French "provincialism." In France nowadays most people would see no contradiction between celebrating provincial specificities (cheeses, wines, quirks of manner, quirks of speech, etc.) and being a French nationalist, precisely because the French nation is foremost a civic one that does not rely on ethnic commonality in order to define itself.

This is precisely how I envision my "nation of a thousand flags" project—that is, the advent of a nationalism (and I hope eventually a new corresponding nation) that not just tolerates, but simultaneously celebrates and draws inspiration from hip-hop, salsa, mariachi bands, Norse pagan heavy metal, Buddhist chanting, and what have you. This nation would be able to do this, and still stay coherent as a nation, only if it is defined as a civic (and potentially universal) nation.

Even so, France was theoretically supposed to be a "universal nation," but that didn't stop it from using its self-proclaimed universalism to justify imperialism under the banner of a "mission civilatrice." This is where we must supplement the ethnic/civic nationalism distinction with a mutually-exclusive distinction between nationalism and imperialism.

One could make the case that there is nothing contradictory between ethnic nationalism and imperialism, and while this is not quite true, one must admit that imperialism in the service of an ethnique nation has a certain logic. The ethnic nation conquers and subjugates a foreign group of people and exploits them, enriching themselves. Simple enough. But even in such a case as this, problems may arise for the ethnic nation.

We can see this in the case of Nazi German imperialism (which, one may suppose, had these same motives of plunder at heart). For example, whereas Hitler had wanted to rid Germany of foreign populations, in fact the war ended up bringing many more foreigners into the (newly-enlarged) Germany (even if the foreigners were non-citizens or industrial slaves). To a lesser extent, this has been a "problem" that Britain has recently been facing with regards to Afghanistan. It turns out that Britain's participation in the war there has helped to drive many Afghanis out of Afghanistan, and some of them have ended up in Britain, angering British nativists.

In the case of the U.S., we can see how imperialism can actually work antithetical to nationalism by looking at the U.S. military. This military is now a thoroughly non-national institution. It icharacterized by imperial ambition, bureaucracy, professionalism, careerism, and mercenary enticements, rather than the (ethnic or civic) nation patriotically upholding its nationalism. To be sure, the U.S. military often talks about "spreading democracy," (that is, the U.S.'s civic nationalism) to other lands, and soldiers often justify their participation in the military by saying that they just wanted to "serve their country" (ethnic nationalism) or "protect the Constitution" (civic nationalism), in reality I would wager that economic/career motives are by far the strongest factors in a person's decision to join the military nowadays, perhaps in conjunction with a personal penchant for that sort of line of work. In any case, we do not find U.S. soldiers in Iraq regularly singing the American equivalent of the Marseillaise or busying themselves with spreading republican virtues and republican ideas among the Iraqi population. Instead we find mostly a bunch of fratty guys being bros with one another, havin' fun, doing their job, occasionally raping some women or massacreing some Iraqis, or perhaps being thoroughly professional, but in any case not showing any special zeal for spreading the U.S.'s civic nationalism. What we are missing is a military that approaches the task of war not in the professional, non-ideological manner in an imperial army, but in the nationalist manner of citizen's defending the country.

And what is this country that the American military defends? Is it a national territory, or an imperial one? Considering how it includes territories such as Diego Garcia, Qatar, Kuwait, and all of the rest of the U.S.'s 700+ foreign military bases, it is clearly the latter.

There is a more fundamental distinction, though, between nationalism and imperialism other than the effects that the two have on a military. There is also the question of general motivation. An empire seeks only power. It does not care about the nature of its imperial holdings. The local people can believe in this religion or that, can speak this language or that, can hold this ideology or that, the empire doesn't care. It just wants to hold the territory and recieve taxes (or, in the modern version, provide access to that territory for corporations, which in turn will uphold the empire). A nation, by contrast, is an intimate community (whether for ethnic or civic reasons). A nation cares very much about what religions members of the nation hold, or whether the members of the nation can communicate with each other, or whether the members of the nation subscribe to the nation's civic nationalism. Nationalism is, then, by its nature more totalitarian-minded than plain imperialism. I consider this a good thing. To be sure, an empire can be more invasive. It can have more secret police. It can arrest more people. But the motivation is always simply to maintain its power. It is interested in getting rid of, or intimidating, its enemies; it is not interested in winning the allegiance of its internal adversaries (for the sake of national community...that is, unless such efforts can easily profit the empire's power).

Let's look at Nazi Germany, for example. Was Nazi Germany a nation, or an empire? Well, it would depend on the timeframe. One could make the argument that, up until the spring of 1939, Nazi Germany was a nation. But after its takeover of Czechoslovakia, (after its motivation was clearly no longer the reunification, protection, and regeneration of Germans, but the acquisition of imperial power and territory) it became an empire. This was the point, in fact, when many leftists such as Simone Weil decided that Nazi Germany's territorial demands were no longer legitimate. In his "Age of Extremes," British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comment that when he was in Germany in 1934 and saw French flags flying in the Ruhr, that even someone like him had to feel that there wasn't something quite right about that. If one reads the lyrics from the Horst-Wessel Lied, it almost sounds like Nazi Germany was a national liberation movement. "Die Knechtshaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit," etc. Well, the point here is that, at the *very least* (i.e. perhaps much earlier), Nazi Germany ceased to be a national liberation movement, and began to be an empire, in the spring of 1939.

And likewise, the moment that France came to rule over people whom it treated as second-class citizens, rather than equal members of the French civic nation, and the moment that it ceased to be concerned with spreading its civic universalism and became focused on acquiring imperial power, that is when its rhetoric about universalism became transformed from a beacon of hope to a cynical excuse for empire. That France's imperial ambitions (under Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, under the 3rd and 4th Republics) had an adverse effect on its original civic nationalism and universalist mission is obvious.

Therefore, any civic nation with universalist pretensions would do well to stay far away from any imperial temptation. It will only corrupt or override the universalist civic nationalism.

The French Revolution was far more totalitarian than Nazi Germany...and far more awesome!

Yes, let me repeat that: The French Revolution was far more totalitarian than Nazi Germany.

Nazi Germany: the grotesque, archaic zombie of Prussian Despotism and German Romanticism, electrified with economic despair and youthful disillusionment, dressed up in an industrialist's top-hat, and hellbent on ripping its Krupp artillery into the flesh of modernity. All this was less totalitarian than the French Revolution?

Absolutely.

For some background first:

Just as in Nazi Germany, in feudal France, people did not exist as individuals. They existed within incorporated entities (guilds of the "mechanical arts" (which existed for both artisans and merchants, and on roughly equal footing in terms of status!)), religious orders, the noble household, the biological family, the master/apprentice type of family, the feudal manor, etc.) If you didn't belong to one of these pateralistic corporativist groups, you were a non-entity (a vagabond, a casual laborer, a petty thief, etc.) You could only become incorporated into one of these social stations by swearing a solemn oath of loyalty to one's king to uphold the honesty and goodness of the Community (in the big, capital, "Gemeinschaft" sense of the term---not in the fake sense of the term that we use today). Incorporation into a corporativist community gave you certain "privilèges" (literally, private laws) that went beyond the common laws, which varied depending on your social station. If you didn't have a social station, you had no privileges, and you were totally at the mercy of common law. Why didn't absolutist France need police everywhere? Because everyone in a corporativist community policed everyone else according to moral norms wherever you were (at the church, at the tavern, in the home, in public, at work, there was no escape into anonymity, unless you wanted to experience social death in being cast out and losing all privileges and possibly all prospects of employment). As rigid and hierarchical as this seems, this was not totalitarian. For one, it was softened by genuine social mores of paternalism (which were long eroded in Germany by the time the Nazis tried to resurrect this feudal zombie), and most importantly, although these incorporated entities were ultimately beholden to the king's goodwill along the lines of a hierarchical pyramid, one had an independent basis of social power within these social stations. One was not subject to the "State" and to the State alone. There were plenty of intermediary institutions.

In Nazi Germany, supposedly nothing was supposed to come between the individual and the State. Hah! The family was FORCED back into an intermediary position (which had actually been eroded by capitalist development and State education). The Nazis had their own secular clergy to provide spiritual guidance to their "Volksgemeinschaft" ("people's community"). The Hitler Youth. The Sturmabteilung (Brownshirts) and Schutzstaffel (Blackshirts), the civil service, the German Labor Front party-controlled unions, the party-controlled marching bands, the (tamed) Catholic and Protestant churches, the freakin' Junker estates, etc. Yes, one served in these social stations at the pleasure of the Fuhrer, and one swore a sacred oath of loyalty to him---just as to a king. But at least you had your social station as XYZ, and Der Fuhrer had his social station as leader and protector of the German nation (which was determined by the archaic qualification of bloodline, not place of birth, civic loyalty (as in the bourgeois-revolutionary U.S. and bourgeois-revolutionary France), or even spoken language---so German-speaking Jews who were born in Germany and who were loyal to the laws and customs of Germany still did not count---because they were not a part of the all-important Community with a capital "C." They were non-entities, not entitled to the special privilèges that German members of the German community were entitled to. At least, as a proper member of the German racial community serving in the Hitler Youth, at least you had some station in life, some specific base of social power and respect.

This is the horrifying spectre of Nazism---a zombie-like resurrection of German romaticism, of solemn torchlight parades, of fervent reveries and panegyrics about organicist Communities (instead of the mechanistic calculations of self-interest and rights of the individual borne out of the Enlightenment, capitalist development, and the bourgeois revolutions)---Nazi Germany as an all-out assault on 1789 and the entirety of modernity (one Nazi ideologue, I forget which, once famously said, "Now we have erased 1789 from human history forever."

All of this is why we should find Nazi Germany horrifying---not because it was "totalitarian." It wasn't (relatively speaking, compared to revolutionary France). Comparatively, Nazi Germany looks like an archaic despotism armed with Stuka divebombers and cyanide chambers (that's being flippant and incredibly simplistic and irresponsible as a historian,but just run with it for a second). But consider the industrial slavery and industrial genocide of Nazi Germany alongside the international slavery and religious slaugther and torture of the early-modern period in Europe. Not exactly equivalent, but definitely a supporting piece of evidence for the argument for continuity, rather than for the common idea of Nazi anti-Semitism and revived organicist Volksgemeinschaft as coming out of nowhere.

What was truly totalitarian---and in a way, really remarkable and progressive for its day---was the French Revolution, a complete social revolution that demanded that nothing come between the individual and the National State, that all citizens be held to the same common laws (no privilèges or special considerations given to you because you belong to this community or that community, to this estate or that estate, etc.), that all citizens have the same equal rights, and that no citizen refuse the dignity of holding himself (eventually, herself) up in public society and in front of the state as an individual. A revolution that forbade you from proclaiming or uniting on any common interest or association that came between one's own interests and the entire nation's interests (this means, no uniting based on "special interests"---the interests of the nobility, of the clergy, of the master craftsmen, of the journeymen, of the bourgeoisie, of the sans-culottes, etc. No intermediary associations that come between you and the National State. No regional associations, no labor unions, no craft guilds, no religious orders, no households of nobility, etc. You must not recognize any interest other than your own self-interest (especially in the marketplace---free trade), and the interests of the National State as the protector of the political order in accordance with Natural Law in which those self-interests can flourish).

How incredibly totalitarian! And how awesome! (For its time...)

BTW, if you are curious where I'm getting this nonsense, it's from this book I'm reading for a class, "Paris: Capital of the 19th century." The book is entitled, "Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848" by William Sewell.

Also, I'd like to end on a note about Marxism: when are we gonna get back to thinking about Marxism as a methodological capstone to the Enlightenment rather than as some Confucianist Mao's-little-red-book mumbo-jumbo apologia for anti-imperialist agrarian despotism in the Third World?????? Eh????