Nations, nationalism, nationhood

There is an enormous mess in language use and the underlying thinking when it comes to discussion of “nation”. The recent shift, following US usage, of substituting the word “nation” for country and state is merely the tip of a very complex iceberg indeed. There is widespread, if not actually universal agreement – this is always suspicious – that nationalism is a Bad Thing, possibly a Very Bad Thing Indeed, that it comes close to being the very embodiment of all the vices and that, tacitly anyway, nationalism is incompatible with democracy.

National interest, on the other hand, is fine, because every nation (i.e. state, country) has the welfare of its citizens at its heart and the pursuit of this welfare is different from nationalism, it is virtuous and morally superior (the use of ethical categories here is not a coincidence).

The factor that has made this transformation possible – or so its protagonists might argue – is that the modern nation (state, country) has entirely left ethnicity behind. Ethnicity, as we are all supposed to know, counts as an Even Worse Thing, except when it comes to the identities of non-European immigrants, for whom by a mysterious alchemy, it is benevolent. But majorities do not have ethnicity, they have civil society and citizenship instead.

Then, no one has ever explained how this shedding of ethnicity actually happened. It dropped, maybe, like the gentle dew. There was no debate, no deliberation, it just emerged. However, there is a twist. Whereas the countries – er, nations – of the West (roughly the EU-15) are thoroughly post-national, who knows maybe they have certificates to prove it, Europeans to the east of the Elbe are suspected of not having shed their ethnicity. In these shadowy lands, this line of argumentation might go, dubious processes somehow sustain ethnicity of the non-benevolent kind.

Now all this is very nice or would be, were it not for the fact that it is shot though with contradictions, closures, inconsistencies and all the other sins against clarity that tend to arise when ideologies raise their heads. In simple terms, the proposition that there is no ethnicity in the EU-15 is nothing more than an assertion. Culture, language, history, memory, symbols, rituals (there was that Royal Wedding in London last week, for one) are ever present to ensure the continuity of these collectivities. They are neither neutral nor innocent. They are, as anywhere, the raw material for reproducing ethnic identities.

But this is denied for a number of reasons. One of these is the supposed openness towards immigrants; if there is no ethnic community, presumably, it becomes much easier for migrants to integrate. This is what the valorised thinking would have us believe; in sociological reality, it is very difficult to integrate into a majority that is in denial about a significant part of its identity. Then the second, this time a more covert reason, is that by claiming that ethnicity, together with xenophobia, populism, racism etc., are to be found in the shadowy East-Elbia, means that the ideologists of post-nationalism can safely export their own guilt feelings eastwards. The German press does this all the time, and the French and British media are not far behind. And there is a third reason. If the nations of the East are still partly or wholly ethnic, then it follows that their national (state, country) interest is tainted by ethnicity, is, therefore, less reputable, less democratic and less legitimate than the national interests of the purportedly ethnicity-free of nations of the West. And that means that these East-Elbian national interests can be safely overridden by those nations which have the pristine type of national interest. How very convenient.

(more to come on this topic)

Sch. Gy