Ernest Gellner
Nationalism and industrial society
Nationalism as a product of industrial society
ERNEST GELLNER
Nationalism is primarily apolitical principle, which holds chat thepolitical and the national unit should be congruent.
Nationalism as a sentiment, or as a movement, can best be defined in terms of this principle. Nationalist sentiment is the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfilment. A nationalist movement is one actuated by a sentiment of this kind.
There is a variety of ways in which the nationalist principle can be violated. The political boundary of a given state can fail to include all the members of the appropriate nation; or it can include them all but also include some foreigners; or it can fail in both these ways at once, not incorporating all the nationals and yet also including some non-nationals, Or again, a nation may live, unmixed with foreigners, in a multiplicity of states, so that no single state can claim to be the national one.
But there is one particular form of the violation of the nationalist principle to which nationalist sentiment is quite particularly sensitive: if the rulers of the political unit belong to anation other than that of the majority of the ruled, this, for nationalists, constitutes aquite outstandingly intolerable breech of political propriety. This can occur either through the incorporation of the national territory in a larger empire, or by the local domination of an alien group.
In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state - a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation - should not separate the power-holders from the rest.
The nationalist principle can be asserted in an ethical, 'universalistic' spirit. There could be, and on occasion there have been, nationalists-in-the-abstract, unbiased in favour of any special nationality of their own, and generously preaching the doctrine for all nations alike: let all nations have their own political roofs, and let all of them also refrain from including non-nationals under it. There is no formal contradiction in asserting such non-egoistic nationalism. As a doctrine it can be supported by some good arguments, such as the desirability of preserving cultural diversity, of a pluralistic international political system, and of the diminution of internal strains within states.
In fact, however, nationalism has often not been so sweetly reasonable, nor so rationally symmetrical. It may be that, as Immanuel Kant believed, partiality, the tendency to make exceptions on one's own behalf or one's own case, is the central human weakness from which all others flow; and that it infects national sentiment as it does all else, engendering what the Italians under
Mussolini called the sacra egoismo of nationalism. It may also be that the political effectiveness of national sentiment would be much impaired if nationalists had as fine a sensibility to the wrongs committed by their nation as they have to those committed against it.
But over and above these considerations there are others, tied to the specific nature of the world we happen to live in, which militate against any impartial, general, sweetly reasonable nationalism. To put it in the simplest possible terms: there is a very large number of potential nations on earth. Our planet also contains room for a certain number of independent or autonomous political units. On any reasonable calculation, the former number (of potential nations) is probably much, much larger than that of possible viable states. If this argument or calculation is correct, not all nationalisms can be satisfied, at any rate at the same time. The satisfaction of some spells the frustration of others. This argument is further and immeasurably strengthened by the fact that very many of the potential nations of this world live, oruntil recently have lived, not incompact territorial units but intermixed with each other in complexpartems. It follows that a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogeneous, in such cases, if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals. Their unwillingness to suffer such fates may make the peaceful implementation of the nationalist principle difficult.
These definitions must, of course, like most definitions, be applied with common sense. The nationalist principle, as defined, is not violated by the presence of small numbers of resident foreigners, or even by the presence of the occasional foreigner in, say, a national ruling family. Just how many resident foreigners or foreign members of the ruling class there must be before the principle is effectively violated cannot be stated with precision. There is no sacred percentage figure, below which the foreigner can be benignly tolerated, and above which he becomes offensive and his safety and life are at peril. No doubt the figure will vary with circumstances. The impossibility of providing a generally applicable and precise figure, however, does not undermine the usefulness of the definition.
STATE AND NATION
Our definition of nationalism was parasitic on two as yetundefined terms: state and nation.
Discussion of the state may begin with Max Weber's celebrated definition of it, as that agency within society which possesses the monopoly of legitimate violence. The ideabehind this is simple and seductive: in well-ordered societies, such as most of us live in or aspire to live in, private or sectional violence is illegitimate. Conflict as such is not illegitimate, but it cannot rightfully be resolved by private or sectional violence. Violence may be applied only by the
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central political authority, and those to whomit delegates this right. Among the various sanctions of the maintenance of order, the ultimate one - force - may be applied only by one special, clearly identified, and well-centralized, disciplined agency within society. That agency or group of agencies is the state.
The idea enshrined in this definition corresponds fairly well with the moral intuitions of many, probably most, members of modern societies. Nevertheless, it is not entirely satisfactory. There are 'states' -or, at any rate, institutions which we would normally be inclined to call by that name - which do not monopolize legitimate violence within the territory which they more or less effectively control. A feudal state does not necessarily object to private wars between its fief-holders, provided they also fulfil their obligations to their overlord; or again, a state counting tribal populations among its subjects does nornecessarifyobjecrro the institution of the feud, as long as those who indulge in it refrain from endangering neutrals on the public highway or in the market. The Iraqistate, under British tutelage after the First World War, tolerated tribal raids, provided the raiders dutifully reported at the nearest police stationbefore and after the expedition, leaving an orderly bureaucratic record of slain and booty. In brief, there are states which lack either the will or the means to enforce their monopoly of legitimate violence, and which,nonetheless remain, in many respects, recognizable 'states'.
Weber's underlying principle does, however, seem valid now, however strangely ethnocentric it may be as a general definition, with its tacit assumption of the well-centralized Western state. The state constitutes one highly distinctive and important elaboration of the social division of labour. Where there is no division of labour, one cannot even begin to speak of the state. But not any or every specialism makes a state: the state is the specialization and concentration of order maintenance. The 'state' is that institution or set of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order (whatever else they may also be concerned with). The state exists where specialized order-enforcing agencies, such as police forces and courts, have separated out from the rest of social life. They are the state.
Not all societies are state- endowed. It immediately follows that the problem of nationalism does not arise for stateless societies. If there is no state, one obviously cannot ask whether or not its boundaries are congruent with the limits of nations. If there are no rulers, there being no state, one cannot ask whether they are of the same nation as the ruled. When neither state nor rulers exist, one cannot resent their failure to conform to the requirements of the principle of nationalism. One may perhaps deplore statelessness, but that is another matter. Nationalises have generally fulminated against the distribution of political power and the nature of political boundaries, but they have seldom if ever had occasion to deplore the absence of power and of boundaries altogether. The circumstances in which nationalism has generally arisen have not normally been those in which the state itself, as such, was lacking, or when its reality was in any serious doubt. The state was only too conspicuously
present. It was its boundaries and/or the distribution of power, and possibly of other advantages, within it which were resented.
This in itself is highly significant. Not only is our definition of nationalism parasitic on a prior and assumed definition of the state: it also seems to be the case that nationalism emerges only in milieux in which the existence of the state is already very much taken for granted. The existence of politically centralized units, and of a moral-political climate in which such centralized units are taken for granted and are treated as normative, is a necessary though by no means a sufficient condition of nationalism.
By way of anticipation, some general historical observations should be made about the state. Mankind has passed through three fundamental stages in its history: the pre-agrarian, the agrarian, and the industrial. Hunting and gathering bands were and are too small to allow the kind of political division of labour which constitutes the state; and so, for them, thequescionofthestatcofastable specialized order-enforcing institution, does not really arise. By contrast, most, but by no means all, agrarian societies have been state-endowed. Some of these states have been strong and some weak, some have been despotic and others law-abiding. They differ a very great deal in their form. The agrarian phase of human history is the period during which, so to speak, the very existence of the state is an option. Moreover, the form of the state is highlv variable. During the hunting-gathering stage, the option was not available.
By contrast, in the post-agrarian, industrial age there is, once again, no option; but now the presence, not the absence of the state is inescapable. Paraphrasing Hegel, once none had the state, then some had it, and finally all have it. The form it takes, of course, still remains variable. There are some traditions of social thought — anarchism, Marxism - which hold that even, or especially, in an industrial order the stare is dispensable, at least under favourable conditions or under conditions due to be realized in the fullness of time-There are obvious and powerful reasons for doubting this: industrial societies are enormously large, and depend for the standard of living to which they have become accustomed (or to which they ardendy wish to become accustomed) on an unbelievably intricate general division of labour and co-operation. Some of this co-operation might under favourable conditions be spontaneous and need no central sanctions. The idea that all of it could perpetually work in this way, that k could exist without any enforcement and control, puts an intolerable strain on one's credulity.
So the problem of nationalism does not arise when there is no state. It does not follow that the problem of nationalism arises for each and every state. On the contrary, it arises only for some states. It remains to be seen which ones do face this problem.
Ernest Gelfner
Nationalism and industrial society
THE NATION
The definition of the nation preset) ts difficulties graver than those attendant on the definition of the state. Although modern man tends to take the centralized state (and, more specifically, the centralized national state) for granted, nevertheless he is capable, with relatively little effort, of seeing its contingency, and of imagining a social situation in which the state is absent. He is quite adept at visualizing the 'state of nature'. An anthropologist can explain to him that the tribe is not necessarily a state writ small, and that forms of tribal organization exist which can be described as stateless. By contrast, the idea of a man without a nation seems to impose a far greater strain on the modern imagination. Chamisso, an emigre Frenchman in Germany during the Napoleonic period, wrote a powerful proto-Kafkaesque novel about a man who lost his shadow: though no doubt pan of the effectiveness of this novel hinges on the intended ambiguity of the parable, it is difficult not to suspect that, for the author, the Man without a Shadow was the Man without a Nation. When his followers and acquaintances detect his aberrant shadowlessness they shun the otherwise well-endowed Peter Schlemiehl. A man without a nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion.
Chamisso's perception - if indeed this is what he intended to convey - was valid enough, but valid only for one kind of human condition, and not for the human condition as such anywhere at any time. A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears; a deficiency in any of these particulars is not inconceivable and does from rime to timeoccur, but only as aresult of some disaster, and it is itself a disaster of a kind. All this seems obvious, though, alas, it is not true. But that it should have come to seem so very obviously true is indeed an aspect, or perhaps the very core, of the problem of nationalism. Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same contingency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other; that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a tragedy. But before they could become intended for each other, each of them had to emerge, and their emergence was independent and contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings of their own state. It is more debatable whether the normative idea of the nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior existence of the state.
What then is this contingent, but in our age seemingly universal and normative, idea of the nation? Discussion of two very makeshift, temporary definitions will help to pinpoint this elusive concept.
t Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
2 Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations maketh man; nations are the artefacts of men's convictions and loyalties and solidarities. A mere category of persons {say, occupants of a given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example) becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation, and not the other shared attributes, whatever they might be, which separate that category from non-members.
Each of these provisional definitions, the cultural and the voluntaristic, has some merit. Each of them singles out an element which is of real importance in the understanding of nationalism. But neither is adequate. Definitions of culture, presupposed by the first definition, in the anthropological rather than the normative sense, are notoriously difficult and unsatisfactory. It is probably best to approach this problem by using this term without attempting too much in the way of forma! definition, and looking at what culture does.
[...]
NATIONALISM AND INDUSTRIALIZATION
If cognitive growth presupposes that no element is indissolubly linked a prion to any other, and that everything is open to rethinking, then economic and productive growth requires exactly the same of human activities and hence of human roles. Roles become optional and instrumental. The old stability of the social role structure is simply incompatible with growth and innovation. Innovation means doing new things, the boundaries of which cannot be the same as those of the activities they replace. No doubt most societies can cope with an occasional redrawing of job specifications and guild boundaries, just as a football team can experimentally switch from one formation to another, and yet maintain continuity. One change does not make progress. But what happens when such changes themselves are constant and continuous, when the persistence of occupational change itself becomes the one permanent feature of a social order?
When this question is answered, the main part of the problem of nationalism is thereby solved. Nationalism is rooted in a certain kind of division of labour, one which is complex and persistently, cumulatively changing.
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High productivity, as Adam Smith insisted so much, requires a complex and refined division of iabour. Perpetually growing productivity requires that this division be not merely complex, but also perpetually, and often rapidly, changing. This rapid and continuous change both of the economic role system itself and of the occupancy of places within it, has certain immediate and profoundly important consequences. Men located within it cannot generally rest in the same niches all their lives; and they can only seldom rest in them, so to speak, over generations. Positions are seldom {for this and other reasons) transmitted from father to son. Adam Smith noted the precariousness of bourgeois fortunes, though he erroneously attributed stability of social station to pastoralists, mistaking their genealogical myths for reality.
The immediate consequence of this new kind of mobdity is a certain kind of egalltananism. Modern society is not mobile because it is egalitarian; it is egalitarian because it is mobile. Moreover, it has to be mobile whether it wishes to be so or not, because this is required by the satisfaction of its terrible and overwhelming thirst for economic growth.
A society which is destined to a permanent game of musical chairs cannot erect deep barriers of rank, of caste or estate, between the various sets of chairs which it possesses. That would hamper the mobility, and, given the mobility, would indeed lead to intolerable tensions. Men can tolerate terrible inequalities, if they are stable and hallowed by custom. But in a hectically mobile society, custom has no time to hallow anything. A rolling stone gathers no aura, and a mobile population does not allow any aura to attach to its stratification. Stratification and inequality do exist, and sometimes in extreme form; nevertheless they have a muted and discreet quality, attenuated by a kind of gradualness of the distinctions of wealth and standing, a lack of social distance and a convergence of lifestyles, a kind of statistical or probabilistic quality of the differences (as opposed to the rigid, absolutized, chasm-like differences typical of agrarian society), and by the illusion or reality of social mobility.
That illusion is essential, and it cannot persist without at least a measure of reality, just how much reality there is in this appearance of upward and downward mobility varies and is subject to learned dispute, but there can be no reasonable doubt that it does have a good deal of reality: when the system of roles itself is changing so much, the occupants of positions within it cannot be, as some left-wing sociologists claim, tied to a rigid stratificational system. Compared with agrarian society, this society is mobile and egalitarian.
But there is more than all this to the egalitarianism and mobility engendered by the distinctively industrial, growth-oriented economy. There are some additional subtler traits of the new division of labour, which can perhaps best be approached by considering the difference between the division of labour in an industrial society and that of a particularly complex, well-developed agrarian one. The obvious difference between the two is that one is more stable and the other is more mobile. In fact, one of them generally wills itself to be stable, and the other wills itself to be mobile; and one of them pretends to be
more stable than social reality permits, while the other often claims more mobility, in the interest of pretending to satisfy its egalitarian ideal, than its real constraints actually permit. Nevertheless, though both systems tend to exaggerate their own central features, they do indeed markedly posses the trait they claim as their own when contrasted with each other: one is rigid, the other mobile. But if that is the obvious contrast, what are the subtler features which accompany it?
Compare in detail the division of labour in a highly advanced agrarian society with that of an average industrial one. Every kind of function, for instance, now has at least one kind of specialist associated with it. Car mechanics are becoming specialized in terms of the make of car they service. The industrial society will have a larger population, and probably, by most natural ways of counting, a larger number of different jobs. In that sense, the division of labour has been pushed much further within it.
But by some criteria, it may well be that a fully developed agrarian society actually has the more complex division of labour. The specialisms within it are more distant from each other than are the possibly more numerous specialisms of an industrial society, which tend to have what can only be described as a mutual affinity of style. Some of the specialisms of a mature agrarian society will be extreme: they will be the fruits of lifelong, very prolonged and totally dedicated training, which may have commenced in early youth and required an almost complete renunciation of other concerns. The achievements of craft and art production in these societies are extremely labour- and skill-intensive, and often reach levels of intricacy and perfection never remotely equalled by anything later attained by industrial societies, whose domestic arts and decorations, gastronomy, tools and adornments are notoriously shoddy.
Notwithstanding their aridity and sterility, the scholastic and ritual complexity mastered by the schoolmen of adeveloped agrarian society is often such as to strain the very limits of the human mind. In brief, although the peasants, who form the great majority of an agrarian society, are more or less mutually interchangeable when it comes to the performance of the social tasks which are normally assigned to them, the important minority of specialists within such societies are outstandingly complementary to each other; each one of them, or each group of them, is dependent on the others and, when sticking to its last, its specialism, quite incapable of self-sufficiency.
It is curious that, by contrast, in industrial society, notwithstanding its larger number of specialisms, the distance between specialists is far less great. Their mysteries are far closer to mutual intelligibility, their manuals have idioms which overlap to a much greater extent, and retraining, though sometimes difficult, is not generally an awesome task.
So, quite apart from the presence of mobility in the one case and stabilirv in the other, there is a subtle but profound and important qualitative difference in the division of iabour itself. Dürkheim was in error when he in effect classed advanced pre-industrial civilizations and industrial society together under the
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single heading of 'organic solidarity', and when he failed to introduce properly this further distinction within the wider category of organic solidarity or of complementary division of labour. The difference is this: the major part of trainingin industrial society is generic training, not specifically connected with the highly specialized professional activity of the person in question, and preceding it. Industrial society may by most criteria be the most highly specialized society ever; but its educational system is unquestionably the least specialized, the most universally standardized, that has ever existed. The same kind of trainingor education is given to all or most children and adolescents up to an astonishingly late age. Specialized schools have prestige only at the end of the educational process, if they constitute a kind of completion of a prolonged previous unspecialized education; specialized schools intended for a younger, earlier intake have negative prestige.
Is this a paradox, or perhaps one of those illogical survivals from an earlier age? Those who notice the 'gentlemanly' or leisure-class elements in higher education have sometimes supposed so. But, although some of the frills and affectations attached to higher education may indeed by irrelevancies and survivals, the central fact - the pervasiveness and importance of generic, unspecialized training - is conjoined to highly specialized industrial society not as a paradox, but as something altogether fitting and necessary. The kind of specialization found in industrial society rests precisely on a common foundation of unspecialized and standardized training.
A modern army subjects its recruits first to a shared generic training, in the course of which they are meant to acquire and internalize the basicidiom, ritual and skills common to the army as a whole; and only subsequently are the recruits given more specialized training. It is assumed or hoped that every properly trained recruit can be retrained from one specialism to another without too much loss of time, with the exception of a relatively small number of very highly trained specialists. A modern society is, in this respect, like a modern army, only more so. It provides a very prolonged and fairly thorough training for all its recruits, insisting on certain shared qualifi cat ions: literacy, numeracy, basic work habits and social skills, familiarity with basic technical and social skills. For the large majority of the population the distinctive skills involved in working life are superimposed on the basic training, either on the job or as part of a much less prolonged supplementary training; and the assumption is that anyone who has completed the generic training common to the entire population can be retrained for most other jobs without too much difficulty. Generally speaking, the additional skills required consist of a few techniques that can be learned fairly quickly, plus 'experience', a kind of familiarity with a milieu, its personnel and its manner of operation. This may take a little time to acquire, and it is sometimes reinforced by a little protective mystique, but seldom really amounts to very much. There is also a minority of genuine specialists, people whose effective occupancy of their posts really depends on very prolonged additional training, and who are not easily or at all
replaceable by anyone not sharing their own particular educational background and talent.
The ideal of universal literacy and the right to education is a well-known part of the pantheon of modern values. It is spoken of with respect by statesmen and politicians, and enshrined in declarations of rights, constitutions, party programmes and so forth. So far, nothing unusual. The same is true of representative and accountable government, free elections, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech and assembly, and so on. Many or most of these admirable values are often and systematically ignored in many parts of the world, without anyone batting an eyelid. Very often, it is safe to consider these phrases as simple verbiage. Most constitutions guaranteeing free speech and elections are as informative about the societies they allegedly define as a man saying 'Good morning' is about the weather. All this is well known. What is so very curious, and highly significant, about the principle of universal and centrally guaranteed education, is that it is an ideal more honoured in the observance than in the breach. In this it is virtually unique among modem ideals; and this calls for an explanation. Professor Ronald Dore has powerfully criticized this tendency, particularly among developing societies, of overrating formal 'paper* qualifications, and no doubt it has harmful side effects. But I wonder whether he fully appreciates the deep roots of what he castigates as the Diploma Disease. We live in a world in which we can no longer respect the informal, intimate transmission of skills, for the social structures within which such transmission could occur are dissolving. Hence the only kind of knowledge we can respect is that authenticated by reasonably impartial centres of learning, which issue certificates on the basis of honest, impartially administered examinations. Hence we are doomed to suffer the Diploma Disease.
All this suggests that the kind of education described - universal, standardized, and generic - really plays some essential part in the effective working of a modern society, and is not merely part of its verbiage or self-advertisement. This is in fact so. To understand what that role is, we must, to borrow a phrase from Marx (though not perhaps in the sense in which he used it), consider not merely the mode of production of modern society, but above al) its mode of reproduction.
SOCIAL GENETICS
The reproduction of social individuals and groups can be carried out either on the one-to-one or on-the-job principle, or by what may be called the centralized method. There are, of course, many mixed and intermediate ways of doing this job, but their consideration can best be postponed until after the discussion of these two extreme, as it were polar, possibilities.
The one-to-one, on-the-job method is practised when a family, kin unit,
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Nationalism and industrial society 63
village, tribal segment or similar fairly small unit takes the individual infants born into it, and by allowing and obliging them to share in the communal life, plus a few more specific methods such as training, exercises, precepts, rites de passage and so forth, eventually turns these infants into adults reasonably similar to those of the preceding generation; and in this manner the society and its culture perpetuate themselves.
The centralized method of reproduction is one in which the local method is signi6cantly complemented {or in extreme cases, wholly replaced) by an educational or training agency which is distinct from the local community, and which takes over the preparation of the young human beings in question, and eventually hands them back to the wider society to fulfil their roles in it, when the process of training is completed. An extreme version of this system developed a high degree of perfection and effectiveness in the Ottoman empire, when under the devshirme and janissary systems, young boys, either secured as a tax obligation from conquered populations, or purchased as slaves, were systematically trained for war and administration and, ideally, wholly weaned and separated from their families and communities of origin. A less total version of this system was and in part still is practised by the British upper class, with its reliance on boarding schools from an early age. Variants of this system can on occasion be found even in relatively simple, preliterate agrarian societies.
Societies consisting of sub-communities can be divided into those in which the sub-communities can, if necessary, reproduce themselves without help from the rest of society, and those in which mutual complementarity and interdependence are such that they cannot do this. Generally speaking, the segments and rural communities of agrarian society can reproduce themselves independently. The anthropological concept of a segmentary society contains precisely this idea: the 'segment' is simply a smaller variant of the larger society of which it is a part, and can do on a smaller scale everything done by the larger umt.
Furthermore, one must distinguish between economic and educational self-sufficiency, in the sense of capacity for self-reproduction. The ruling strata of an agrarian society are, of course, dependent on a surplus drawn from the rest of society, but they may nevertheless be educationally quite self-sufficient. Various other kinds of non-self-sufficiency can also be engendered by social rules, such as those which make communities dependent on external ritual specialists, or on the supply of brides from outside. Here we are concerned with educational, not economic capacity for group self-reproduction. There are numerous complex, mixed and intermediate forms of group reproduction. When feudal lords send their sons as half-trainees, half-hostages to the local court, when masters accept apprentices who are not their sons, and so forth, we are obviously in the presence of such mixed systems.
Generally speaking, the situation in agrarian society seems to be this: the great majority of the population belongs to self-rep reducing units, such as in effect educate their young on the job, in their stride, as part and parcel of the
general business of living, without relying much or at all on any kind of educational specialist. A minority of the population receives specialized training. The society will contain one or more strata of full-time educators, who both reproduce themselves by taking on apprentices, and perform part-time services for the rest of the community; ritual, therapeutic, admonitory, secretarial, and so on. It may be useful to distinguish between one-to-one, incra-community training, and call it acculturation, and specialized exo-train-ing (on the analogy of exogamy), which calls for skills outside the community, and call that education proper.
A very important stratum in literate agrarian society are the clerks, those who can read and transmit literacy, and v?ho thus form one of the classes of specialists in that society. They may or may not form a guild or be incorporated in an organization. As, generally speaking, writing soon transcends its purely technical use in record-keeping, and acquires moral and theological significance, the clerks or clerics are almost invariably far more than mere grapho-technicians. It is not just writing, but what is written that counts, and, in agrarian society, the ratio of the sacred to the profane, within the realm of the written, tends to be heavily weighted in favour of the first. So the writers and readers are specialists and yet more than specialists; they are both parr of a society, and claim to be the voice of the whole of it. Their specialism says something, something special, more so perhaps than that of the woodcarvers and other designers, and much more than that of the tinkers.
Specialists are often feared and despised in this kind of society. The clerics may be viewed ambivalently, but in the main their standing is rather high. They are both specialists and a part of society among others, and yet also, as stated, claim to be the voice of the totality. They are in an inherently paradoxical situation. Logicians possess, in their armoury of allegedly deep and significant puzzles, the Problem of the Barber: ina village, all men can be divided into those who shave themselves, and those who are shaved by the barber. But what of the barber himself? Is he a self-shaver, or one of the barber-shaved? In this form, let us leave it to the logicians. But the clerics are somewhat in the barber's situation. They reproduce their own guild by training entrants, but they also give a bit of training or provide services for the rest of society. Do they or do the)' not shave themselves? The tension and its problems (and they are not just logical) are with them, and they are not easily resolved.
In the end, modern society resolves this conundrum by turning everyone into a cleric, by turning this potentially universal class into an effectively universal one, by ensuring that everyone without exception is taught by it, that exo-education becomes the universal norm, and that no-one, culturally speaking, shaves himself. Modern society is one in which no sub-community, below the size of one capable of sustaining an independent educational system, can any longer reproduce itself. The reproduction of fully socialized individuals itself becomes part of the division of labour, and is no longer performed by sub-communities for themselves.
Ernest Gellner
Nationalism and industrial society
That is what developed modern societies are like. Bur why must this be so? What fate impels them in this direction? Why, to repeat the earlier question, is this one ideal, that of universal literacy and education, taken with this most unusual, untypical seriousness?
Part of the answer has already been given, in connection with the stress on occupational mobility, on an unstable, rapidly changing division of labour. A society whose entire political system, and indeed whose cosmology and moral order, is based in the last analysis on economic growth, on the universal incremental Danegeldand the hope of aperperual augmentation of satisfactions, whose legitimacy hinges on its capacity to sustain and satisfy this expectation, is thereby committed to the need for innovation and hence to a changing occupational structure. From this it follows that certainly between generations, and very often withinsingle lifespans, men must be ready for reallocation to new tasks. Hence, in part, the importance of the generic training, and the fact that the little bit extra of training, such as is attached to most jobs, doesn't amount to too much, and is moreover contained in manuals intelligible to all possessors of the society's generic training. (While the little bit extra seldom amounts to much, the shared and truly essential generic core is supplied at a rather high level, not perhaps when compared with the intellectual peaks of agrarian society, but certainly when placed alongside its erstwhile customary average.)
But it is not only mobility and retraining which engender this imperative. It is also the content of most professional activities. Work, in industrial society, does not mean moving matter. The paradigm of work is no longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing. Work, in the main, is no longer the manipulation of things, but of meanings. It generally involves exchanging communications with other people, or manipulating the controls of a machine. The proportion of people at the coal-face of nature, directly applying human physical force to natural objects, is constantly diminishing. Most jobs, if not actually involving work 'with people', involve the control of buttons or switches or levers which need to be understood, and are explicable, once again, in some standard idiom intelligible to all comers.
For the first time in human history, explicit and reasonably precise communication becomes generally, pervasively used and important. In the closed local communities of the agrarian or tribal worlds, when it came to communication, context, tone, gesture, personality and situation were everything. Communication, such as it was, took place without the benefit of precise formulation, for which the locals had neither taste nor aptitude. Hxplicitness and the niceties of precise, rule-bound formulation were left to lawyers, theologians or ritual specialists, and were parts of their mysteries. Among intimates of a close community, explicitness would have been pedantic and offensive, and is scarcely imaginable or intelligible.
Human language must have been used for countless generations in such intimate, closed, context-bound communities, whereas it has only been used
by schoolmen and jurists, and all kinds of context-evading conceptual puritans, for a very small number of generations. It is a very puzzling fact that an institution, namely human language, should have this potential for being used as an 'elaborate code', in Basil Bernstein's phrase, as a formal and fairly context-free instrument, given that it had evolved in a milieu which in no way called for this development, and did not selectively favour it if it manifested itself. This puzzle is on a par with problems such as that posed by the existence of skills (for example, mathematical ability) which throughout most of the period of the existence of humanity had no survival value, and thus could not have been in any direct way produced by natural selection. The existence of language suitable for such formal, context-liberated use is such a puzzle; but it is also, clearly, a fact. This potentiality, whatever its origin and explanation, happened to be there. Eventually a kind of society emerged - and it is now becoming global - in which this potentiality really comes into its own, and within which it becomes indispensable and dominant.
To sum up this argument: a society has emerged based on a high-powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers involving a sharing of explicit meaning, transmitted in a standard idiom and in writing when required. For a number of converging reasons, this society must be thoroughly exo-educational: each individual is trained by specialists, not just by his own local group, if indeed he has one. Its segments and units - and this society is in any case large, fluid, and in comparison with traditional, agrarian societies very short of internal structures - simply do not possess the capacity or the resources to reproduce their own personnel. The level of literacy and technical competence, in a standardized medium, a common conceptual currency, which is required of members of this society if they are to be properly employable and enjoy full and effective moral citizenship, is so high that it simply cannot be provided by the kin or local units, such as they are. It can only be provided by something resembling a modern 'national' educational system, a pyramid at whose base there are primary schools, staffed by teachers trained at secondary schools, staffed by university-trained teachers, led by the products of advanced graduate schools. Such a pyramid provides the criterion for the minimum size for a viable political unit. No unit too small to accommodate the pyramid can function properly. Units cannot be smaller than this. Constraints also operate which prevent them being too large, in various circumstances; but that is another issue.
The fact that sub-units of society are no longer capable of self-rep reduction, that centralized exo-education is the obligatory norm, that such education complements (though it does not wholly replace) localized acculturation, is of the very first importance for the polirical sociology of the modern world; and its implications have, strangely enough, been seldom understood or appreciated or even examined. At the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the professor. Not the guillotine, but the (aptly named)
Ernest Oeiiner
Nationalism and industrial society
doctorat d'etat is the main tool and symbol of state power. The monopoly of legitimate education is now more important, more central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence. When this is understood, then the imperative of nationalism, its roots, not in human nature as such, but in a certain kind of now pervasive social order, can also be understood.
Contrary to popular and even scholarly belief, nationalism does not have any very deep roots in the human psyche. The human psyche can be assumed to have persisted unchanged through the many, many millennia of the existence of the human race, and not to have become either better or worse during the relatively brief and very recent age of nationalism. One may not invoke a general substrate to explain a specific phenomenon. The substrate generates many surface possibilities. Nationalism, the organization of human groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous units, is but one of these, and a very rare one at that. What is crucial for its genuine explanation is to identify its specific roots. It is these specific roots which alone can properly explain it. In this way, specific factors are superimposed on to ashared universal human substrate.
The roots of nationalism In the distinctive structural requirements of industrial society are very deep indeed. This movement is the fruit neither of ideological aberration, nor of emotional excess. Although those who participate in it generally, indeed almost without exception, fail to understand what it is that they do, the movement is nonetheless the external manifestation of a deep adjustment in the relationship between polity and culture which is quite unavoidable.
THE AGE OF UNIVERSAL HIGH CULTURE
Let us recapitulate the genera! and central features of industrial society. Universal literacy and a high level of numerical, technical and general sophistication are among its functional prerequisites. Its members are and must be mobile, and ready to shift from one activity to another, and must possess that generic training which enables them to follow the manuals and instructions of a new activity or occupation. In the course of their work they must constantly communicate with a large number of other men, with whom they frequently have no previous association, and with whom communication must consequently be explicit, rather than relying on context. They must also be able to communicate by means of written, impersonal, context-free, to-whom-it-may-concern type messages. Hence these communications must be in the same shared and standardized linguistic medium and script. The educational system which guarantees this social achievement becomes large and is indispensable, but at the same time it no longer possesses monopoly of access to the written word: its clientele is co-extensive with the society at large,and the re place ability
of individuals within the system by others applies to the educational machine at least as much as to any other segment of society, and perhaps more so. Some very great teachers and researchers may perhaps be unique and irreplaceable, but the average professor and schoolmaster can be replaced from outside the teaching profession with the greatest of ease and often with little, if any, Joss.
What are the implications of all this for the society and for its members? The employability, dignity, security and self-respect of individuals, typically, and for the majority of men now Jitnges on their education; and the limits of the culture within which they were educated are also the limits of the world within which they can, morally and professionally, breathe. A man's education is by far his most precious investment, and effect confers his identity on him. Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or aland or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture. And he is, generally speaking, gelded. The Mamluk condition has become universal. No important links bind him to akin group; nor do they stand between him and a wide, anonymous community of culture.
The obverse of the fact that a school-transmitted culture, not a folk-transmitted one, alone confers his usability and dignity and self-respect on industrial man, is the fact that nothing else can do it for him to any comparable extent. It would be idle to pretend that ancestry, wealth or connections are unimportant in modern society, and that they are not on occasion even sources of pride to their beneficiaries; all the same, advantages secured in these ways are often explained away and are viewed at best ambivalently. It is interesting to ask whether the pervasive work ethic has helped to produce this state of affairs, or whether, on the contrary, it is a reflection of it. Drones and rentiers persist, of course, but they are not very conspicuous, and this in itself is highly significant. It is an important fact that such privilege and idleness as survive are now discreet, tending to prefer obscurity to display, and needing to be uncovered by eager researchers bent on unmasking the inequality which lurks underneath the surface.
It was not so in the past, when idle privilege was proud and brazen, as it persists in being in some surviving agrarian societies, or in societies which continue to uphold the ethos of pre-industria! life. Curiously enough, the notion of conspicuous waste was coined by a work-oriented member of a work-addicted society, Thorsten Veblen, scandalized by what he saw as the survivals from a pre-in dust rial, predatory age. The egalitarian, work- and career-oriented surface of industrial society is as significant as its inegalitarian hidden depths. Life, after all, is lived largely on the surface, even if important decisions are on occasion made deep down.
The teacher class is now in a sense more important-it is indispensable-and in another sense much less so, having lost its monopoly of access to the cultural wisdom enshrined in scripture. In a society in which everyone is gelded by ^identification with his professional post and his training, and hardly anyone derives much or any security and support from whatever kin links he may nave, the teaching clerics no longer possess any privileged access to administrative
68  Ernest Geftner
Nationalism since 1989
posts. When everyone has become a Mamluk, no special mamhik class predominates in the bureaucracy. At long last the bureaucracy C3n recruit from the population at large, without needing to fear the arrival of dozens of cousins as unwanted attachments of each single new entrant.
Exo-socialization, education proper, is now the virtually universal norm. Men acquire the skills and sensibilities which make them acceptable to their fellows, which fit them to assume places insociety, and which make them'what they are', by being handed over by their kin groups (normally nowadays, of course, their nuclear family) to an educational machine which alone is capable of providing the wide range of training required for the generic cultural base. This educational infrastructure is large, indispensable and expensive. Its maintenance seems to be quite beyond the financial powers of even the biggest and richest organizations within society, such as the big industrial corporations. These often provide their personnel with housing, sports and leisure clubs, and so forth; they do not, except marginally and in special circumstances, provide schooling. (They may subsidize school bills, but that is another matter.) The organization man works and plays with his organization, but his children still go to state or independent schools.
So, on the one hand, this educational infrastructure is too large and costly for any organization other than the biggest one of all, the state. But at the same time, though only the state can sustain so large a burden, only the state is also strong enough to control so important and crucial a function. Culture is no longer merely the adornment, confirmation and legitimation of a social order which was also sustained by harsher and coercive constraints; culture is ncrw the necessary shared medium, the life-blood or perhaps rather the nrinrmal shared atmosphere, within which alone the members of the society can breathe and survive and produce. For a given society, it must be one in which they can all breathe and speak and produce; so it must be the same culture. Moreover, it must now be a great or high (literate, training-sustained) culture, and it can no longer be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition.
But some organism must ensure that this literate and unified culture is indeed being effectively produced, that the educational product is not shoddy and substandard. Only the state can do this, and, even in countries in which important parts of the educational machine are in private hands or those of religious organizations, the state does take over quality control in this most important of industries, the manufacture of viable and usable human beings. That shadow state dating back to the time when European states were not merely fragmented but socially weak - the centralized Church - did put up a fight for the control of education, but it was in the end ineffectual, unless the Church fought on behalf of an inclusive high culture and thereby indirectly on behalf of a new nationalist state.
Time was when education was a cottage industry, when men could be made by a village or clan. That time has now gone, and gone forever. (In education, small can now be beautiful only if it is covertly parasitic on the big.) Exo-
socialization, the production and reproduction of men outside the local intimate unit, is now the norm, and must be so. The imperative of exo-socializarion is the main clue to why state and culture must now be linked, whereas in the past their connection was thin, fortuitous, varied, loose, and often minimal. Now it is unavoidable. That is what nationalism is about, and why we live in an age of nationalism.
REFERENCES
Dore. R. (1976), The Diploma Disease, London: Allen & Unwin. Goody, J., ed. (1968), Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge.' Cambridge University Press.
Paradigm Change:
Analytical and Conceptual Approaches to the Post-Cold War World
Shlomo Avineri
The developments in Eastern Europe in 1989-91 were unprecedented both in their dramatic unfolding as well as in the relatively remarkable lack of violence involved in such a cataclysmic series of transformations. First, the toppling of communist regimes in all the countries bound to the Soviet Union by the Warsaw pact, the falling of the Berlin Wall, leading to the disappearance of the GDR and to German unification; and, finally, following the internal yet unintended logic of perestroika, the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, the demise of communism and the emergence of 15 new states on the ruins of the USSR, with Yeltsin's Russia now showing deep signs of instability and uncertainty in its direction, symbolizing both the bleakness and the immanent crisis of post-communist societies. The break-up of Yugoslavia, where violence of a massive scale did and continues to occur, casts an ominous shadow about similar possibilities in the former Soviet Union itself.
All these developments, one should add, came as a traumatic surprise not only to the leaders of the Soviet Union and her allies, but also to the leaders of the West as well: President Bush's Kiev speech against Ukrainian independence, just a few weeks before the August putsch, and President Mitterand's initial acceptance of the 19th August putsch are only two examples of how ill-equipped, intellectually and tactically, two of the most prominent Western leaders have been when having to navigate in unchartered waters and how much they lacked a conceptual framework of adequate alternative paradigms to their purely linear thinking.
By the same token, strategic thinkers are only slowly recovering from their own shocks: despite its title, Brzezinski's The Grand Failure was far from anticipating the total collapse of communism. Writing as late as 1989, the author is still capable of making the following prediction about the German Democratic Republic:
'East Germany has become a Communist Prussia, disciplined, motivated, and productive. It may remain so for quite a while, especially since West Germany generously contributes to its well-being. However, its success is likely to become associated more with its distinctive national and cultural traditions than with communism as such...''
On a more theoretic level, Brzezinski goes on (again in 1989!) to maintain that 'no communist regime has yet traversed peacefully that invisible divide {between totalitarianism and freedom, S. A.),' adding that even in Poland 'the prospects for a fully peaceful transition may not be quite as good.'*
It is obvious that ideological blinkers made it difficult for even such a sophisticated4nd experienced practitioner and observer like Brzezinski to grasp the enormity of what was happening before his own eyes. In this he was apparently following, perhaps without the dogmatic rigor, Jeane Kirkpatrick's catechism that in contra-distinc-tion to 'authoritarian' regimes, 'totalitarian' regimes do not have the capacity for interna! change. Notwithstanding the proven worthless-ness of her analysis, Kirkpatrick herself was not deterred from offering further advice to Western leaders, though in a much more sub-y dued tone.11
But 0Ul of this confusion, jit least one intellectually impressive attempt was made trying to pmTthe end of communism into a coherent conceptual framework; first in a much publicized article4, and then in a more comprehensive volume5, Francis Fukuyama tried to give a theoretical dimension to the triumphalist mood ot trie West taced' witfTtHe disintegration, "delegitimization and eventual bankruptcy of communism and the Soviet Union.
"STiorn of its Kojevian quasi-Hegelianism and neo-Nietzscheanism, Fujiyama's argument caty.be summarized as follows: Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic liberalism has been twice assailed in thelast century, lirst by lascism m its various forms and then by communism. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the last challenge to man's freedom and autonomy has disappeared, and it is in this sense that His-
Zhigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure, New York 19S9, p. 249.
Ibid., p. 248. His latest bonk, Out of Control, New York 1993, is an attempt, albeit a tentative one, 10 mate sense of the breakdown or earlier paradigms.
Cf. Jeanc J. Kirkpatrick, After Communism - What?, in: Problems of Communism, Jan,-April 1992, pp. 7-10. See also the interesting analysis of events in Eastern Europe in the special issue of World Politics, October 1991.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History?, in: The National Interest, Summer 19S9, pp. 3-18. ■ Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York 1992, Note that the question mark at the end ot [he title disappeared between the appearance of the initial article and the publication of the full volume.
tory, with a capital H, has come to its end^because its telos - autonomy and universal reciprocal human recognition - has been realized. In a language paradoxically reminiscent of Engels' messianic vision of an administration of things superseding domination of men, Fukuyama ennunciates that the possibilities of technology and the debacle of communism ensure that all those who fought to bring down communism - not only in Eastern Europe, but also in Tiananmen Square - will 'finally succeed, as they naturally must'6. Given^ this deterministic metaphysical certainty, manlrijTdJ^Jthgiit tn enter a" new" pbltmÔČTénfišTéŕa, in which the old problems andantagonisms will have "disappeared and vanished and only the great 'battles of the sfnnT~wiTTpreväŤl:
This is not the place to argue with either the philosophical premises, nor the propagandistic intend, of Fukuyama's thesis7. The question is, to what extend does his prognosis stand the test of reality as it can already be conceptualized in the short time that has elapsed since the disintegration of the communist system.
While we are obviously too close to the demise of communism to be able to give a definite answer, the triumphalism implied in Fukuyama's conceptualization, i.e., that liberalism is the only post-communist conceivable alternative, appears to be a very flawed guide for the understanding of the new reality unfolding before us; hence it is equally flawed as a guide for the fashioning of operative strategies intended to confront this new reality in its various ramifications.
Post-communist reality, so it appears, is far from being a smooth liiffiar transition either to stable democratic systems orto tunctiomng "ŕífaf Jtet ä'cTfftorrileji jeruirecent electoral victories of such diverse neo-
victones o arties TTEe'
communist (or 'Ttfrnrer Communist) parties ^ITEe Ihose^e^deoSby TTieT^ctTin komania and Brazauskas in Lithuania (as well as the im-mobilism of Kravtchuk's Ukraine) suggest that some of the developments connected with the demise of communism, though not a full-fledged return of the Soviet System, may be far from irreversable. These are the developments and tensions that give rise to the need for a renewed look at lingering strategic dilemmas,0
Yet it is only slowly becoming clear - and the war in the Balkans has now helped to underline it - that the focus of the new security
s Ibid., p. 312.
' I have tried to address this, at least partially, in: The Return to History, in: The Brookings Review, Spring 1992, pp. 30-33; also in: Comments an Nationalism and Democracy, in: Journal of Democracy, October 1992, pp. 28-31.
' See, e.g., Zbignicw Brttdnski, The Cold War and Its Aftermath, in: Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992, pp. 31-49.
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problems is going to be far from the New World Order so facilely en-nunciated by President Bush. It is also becoming clear what the focal point of the new tensions is going to be, Far from being a mere technical challenge of building a market economy or developing viable democratic structures and institutions, post-communist societies ate faced with problems of cultural and historical identity. Iranscending the merely instrumentalist mechanisms necessary for transition.5' It now appears that with the removal of communism, one of the forces that had been brutally suppressed by it re-appears again, and sometimes with a vengeance; nationalism.
1. Nationalism vs. Universalism
Communism, like Western liberalism, tended - in line with the common heritage of the Enlightenment - to favor the universal over the particular and to relegate 'he.national aspect of human iii'Mo_'the~ dustbin of history. It appears, however, that this was not being the case, and that 73 or 45 years of suppression under communism have not made nationalism - or. for.that matter, religion - clisappearT When a whole ail-encompassing world view like communism collapses, the demise of the holistic structure implied in communism throws people back to their immediate experience in the realms of culture, history and collective memory and elevates national and ethnic identity as the readily available unifying symbol around which they can anchor their rediscovered yet shattered selves.1" ' It was the rediscovery of the salience of nationalism that also led to a re-assessment of another version of the post-Cold War model which envisaged international politics moving from a bi-poiar strategic confrontation between the two superpowers to a multi-polar economic competition between the United States, a unifying Europe and Japan (or a wider Asia-Pacific rim). While such views are still popular, recent developments in post-communist societies have brought about the necessity of re-thinking a global strategy of international security which, while post-Cold War, will not fall into the fallacy that the demise of communism means an end of threats to international security and stability: the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and the ensuing (second) Gulf War also contributed to this realization
1 See my contribution on Panics, Mediation and the Rale of Civil Society, in: Larry Gerber and Eric Bjornlund (cds.). The New Democratic Frontier. Washington, D.C., 1992, pp. 161-111.
'" See Chin Nodia, Nationalism and Democracy, in: Journal of Democracy, October 1992, pp 3-;:; Michael Walzer. The New Tribaium, in. Dissent, Spring 1992, pp 164-17!.
that one of the unfinished business items of that war turned out to be the Kurdish question: this raises again the salience of ethnic conflicts and their danger to regional stability."
It thus appears that the expected move from super-power-confrontation to a mere economic competition, devoid of security problems, was overly optimistic and based on a linear projection, which gave precedence to purely economic issues over problems of identity, nationhood and historical consciousness.12 Massive immigration and refugee problems can also destabilize the internal balance of West European countries and add an e^tra burden to their relalions with East European governments. It became equally clear that the justifiable focus on the fate of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal was also a linear projection of previous thinking: without minimizing this danger, concentrating on it also tended to overlook the national conflicts within the CIS fought out with conventional arms, sometimes even on a small scale but with far-reaching regional consequences (Nagorno-Karabach).
It now appears that the end of the Cold War also introduced cracks into the process towards European unity as evidenced in the rocky road confronting Maastricht. It has been usually overlooked - for reasons of prudence as well as ideology - that a major ingredient in the drive towards European unity derived from the fear of the Soviet Union: after all, it was this fear which among others so greatly facilitated German-French rapprochment and the ability of these two nations to bury a centuries-old enmity. As long as the Federal Republic of Germany saw itself threatened by the Berlin Wall, the GDR and the proximity of Soviet forces, a close European Union was obviously its best insurance policy. With the disappearance of this threat and the considerable enhancement of the weight of Germany following unification, the whole geo-political landscape has changed, and some of the old national rivalries, or their distant remnants, are clearly re-appearing. It would have been naive to think that this would not be the case, but Cold War blinkers sometimes tended to smooth out, a-historically, many of the historical tensions still latent in Western Europe as well: different European reactions to the
" For a highly innovative approach, see Ashton B. Carter, William Perry and John D. Stcinbruner. A New Concept of Cooperative Security, Brookings Occasional Paper, Washington. D.C 1992; also Josef Joffe, Bosnia: TVie Return of History, in Commentary. Qclober 199;, pp. 2*-19, and after the election of Clinton, the thoughtful piece hy Leslie Gelb, Putting America First, The New York Time;, November 15, 1992, culls for 3 revised leading role for America under the new president.
'■' Richard H. Ullman. Securing Europe, Princeton. N.J., 1991; Paul B Stares (ed.). The New Germany and the New Europe, Washington, D.C, 1992,
break-up of Yugoslavia have shown how quickly traditional considerations, of what was once called raison d'etat can re-assert themselves, though not necessarily in military terms; and the current turmoil on the financial markets would also probably have played itself out differently if the 'Evil Empire' would still be around.
But the major dangers of national ethnic strife lie, of course, in Eastern Europe, and it may be useful just to enumerate some of them: In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbian-Croat conflict is far from over, and the UN holding-operation in the Serbian-controlled areas of Croatia is far from having solved the problem. The human horror and the intractability of Bosnia are obvious; Kosovo and Macedonia are looming on the horizon, and both have a potential to draw in neighboring countries. The break-up of the CSFR brings with it the dangers inherent in the complications of Slovakian policy vis-a-vis Hungary, both in terms of the Hungarian ethnic minority as weli as regarding the problems connected with the Danube dam. Ukrainian-Russian relations have a potential for multi-faceted conflicts (the Black Sea fleet, the Crimea, the problems of 11 million ethnic Russians in Ukraine). Among other issues, conflicts arise from the status of Kaliningrad, with the obvious Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and German interests involved; possible Polish-Lithuanian tensions; the status of Russian minorities in Estonia and Latvia, which have not been granted citizenship, have been disenfranchised and are in danger of being dispossessed as well by the new ruling majorities ; and, of course, the innumerable ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus and in Central Asia; to which should be added the dangers of ethnic strife within the Russian Federation itself (Chechenia, Tatar-stan, etc.).
Many of these problems were until recently totally unknown in the West, and certainly their complexity eludes many observers. Only during the summer of 1992 did Western statesmen and observers begin to realize the complexities and deep historical layers of what was involved in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The unpreparedness of the West for these problems obviously hampers its ability to develop coherent policies, and gives rise to simplistic solutions based on perceived economic 'self-interests' or puerile constitutional arrangements copied from totally irrelevant Western models. It is intriguing to note that it was a Russian observer, well acquainted with the West, who recently pointed out that some of these problems that have strategic significance for Russia, are inter-connected with its ability to democratize and hence are of enormous importance for the West; he further pointed out that while Russia is not a super-power of the stature of the former Soviet Union, the West should not overlook its strategic
interests and the connection between these ethnic issues and the very nature of the future Russian political system.13 That these comments were made publicly by none other than the Russian ambassador to Washington may suggest that he was not getting the kind of attention to these considerations in his private contacts and communications with the US administration.
To the triumphalist euphoria which made it difficult for the West to realize how serious the national issues will loom on the horizon of the post-communist world, should be added a series of perceptual prejudices - admirable in themselves, but not very helpful - deriving from the universalist biases of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment project, which in a way also sustains the drive towards European unity, looks down on the particularistic as parochial, partial, retrograde and bound to be subsumed, sooner or later, under the redemptive universalism of humanity at large or the market (we have already pointed out that Marxism shared a similar Enlightenment prejudice in its dealing with the national question). Hence every outburst of nationalism or ethnic assertion is judged not only negatively in moral terms, but is viewed as a mere hiccup, or distraction, sooner or later to be swept aside by the great river of unified humanity. What is thus misjudged is not only the power of national - and religious -consciousness, but also its ability to upset long-range international arrangements which overlook these issues.14 How much of the West's reluctance to accept the fact that Yugoslavia is going to break up into warring ethnic entities was sustained by the economistic fallacy that 'it does not make economic sense' to have an independent Macedonia (or Bosnia) or that eventually the 'extreme' nationalists will 'realize' that it is 'in everyone's interest' to pul! their economic resources together; a similar misconception informed the West's incredulity in seeing the Soviet Union fall apart. One can only surmise that for people living in comfortable, well-established nation-states it is difficult to imagine what it means to lack such an anchor for one's identity, just as people who have never been exposed to hunger cannot imagine what it means and what it does to human beings not to get one's daily bread.
" Vladimir P. Lukin, Our Security Predicament, in. Foreign Policy. Fall 1992. pp. 57-75.
'• Many observers will be shocked to be (old thai if ihe Arab-Israeli conflict has been going on for
45 years, the same may also be [he case with (he post-Yugoslav series or national conflicts in the
Balkans But it is certainly a possibility, frightening as il may appear,
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2. A Mix of Realpolitik and Idealpoh'tik
Is there a coherent way in which the West can try to address these issues without falling into the alternative pitfalls of either underestimating them or being totally surprised by them when yet another issue of that nature blows in its face, or getting involuntarily dragged into conflicts against its better judgement? While one should remain rightly skeptical of any neat projection of the nature of ensuing developments or conflicts, the following considerations should be taken into account:
a. It is possible to map out the possible, or probable, foci of future conflicts and identify them: there is no need to wait until Iran gets nuclear weapons to realize that it is now busy aiming at achieving that target; no need to wait for a violent confrontation say in Narva, in eastern Estonia on the border with Russia, where 95 percent of the population is Russian, all of whom are now disenfranchised in newly independent and supposedly democratic Estonia. Scholarly analysis could identify such areas of imminent possible conflict, present alternatives, suggest pre-emptive policies to be adopted now, and not when the crisis becomes acute, make policymakers acknowledge that problems exist, create public awareness to their existence, put up discussion teams and other structures which may be helpful if a crises breaks out.
The totally improvised way in which Europe addressed the Yugoslav crisis made it unprepared far the German pressure regarding immediate recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, and what is much more absurd and ominous, Greek pressure regarding Macedonia. Some homework on 'the Macedonian question' could have allowed the EC to come up with a number of pre-emptive measures which would have neutralized some of the extreme blackmail tactics of Greece while addressing the legitimate concerns of Athens.
b. This entails a greater awareness of history, political geography and cultural issues. During the Cold War, Western analysts were schooled in strategic studies, ideological combat and economic analysis. One can argue that a better understanding of Russia (and for that matter of Poiand) and not merely of Marxism-Leninism and ICBM's would have made many Western analysts more aware of the internal problems of the Soviet Union and its allies. Be this as it may, post-communist reality in Central and Eastern Europe certainly calls for a deeper understanding of and humility towards
history and the historical auspices under which people construct -or reconstruct - their identities.15
c. Because politicians naturally prefer to respond and react to immediate problems and pressures and may take a long-range perspective only if it can be shown to be involved with their perceived interests, ideologies and concerns, such an attempt to sensitize public opinion cannot come from the political realm proper. It will have to be the task of academics, intellectual think-tanks, high-class journalists and essayists. This sounds like a truism, yet it should be re-iterated because academics, like politicans, tend to be reactive to immediate developments and they too need to expand their time horizon, without getting into Utopian projects for the year 2050 or the like.
d. With the new President in the United States, a re-definition of the American role in world affairs will necessarily occur. But contrary to conventional wisdom, I do not think that in the long run Clinton will withdraw - or will be able to withdraw - into a radical neo-isolationist position: such a position just does not exist. But because there will be a re-definition of the US role, it should be carried out as part of a US-European dialogue, not unilaterally. The recent confusion in the articulation of a joint US-European approach to Bosnia augurs badly for such a project. But some lessons can be learned from it, though it may be too late to rescue the Muslims of Bosnia. Part of that dialogue should be an attempt, difficult as it may be, to define areas where primary responsibility for a Western response would be American and those where it should be primarily European. The ad hoc and not very well thought-out US relinquishing of responsibility for Yugoslavia based on wrong premises and flawed political considerations, turned out to be catastrophic precisely because of its unreflective and uninformed character. Cooperation in contingency planning before the fact is what is needed, not post factum running for shelter or improvisation.
e. Policies have to represent a mix of Realpolitik and Idealpoliiik. and no policy can be totally controlled by only one of these elements alone. No country will ever get involved in what may be a shooting war solely to save children or women from slaughter, but
15 A perusal of political literature in Eastern Central Europe would be helpful to realize how prevalent tht problem is perceived local!]!. Cf. the special issue of Polish Wesiern Affaus, Vol XXX1I/2, 1991, published by the Instytut Zachodny in Poznan, devoted lo the problems of the German minority in Poland. While The issue rs not, at the moment, acute, it may, paradoxically, be intensified by privatization and restitution of private property in the Western provinces of Poland.
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no country cart be totally unmoved by the kind of sights that have f haunted European and American TV screens coming from Bosnia. | It is not beyond imagination to conceive of a measured mix of | both realism and idealism even in the Bosnian case - e.g., a good argument could have been made in the summer of 1992 for lifting [ the arms embargo selectively on Bosnia alone: this would not only have allowed the Bosnians to defend themselves but also (as ar-gued by Margaret Thatcher) prevented Islamic fundamentalist • countries from getting involved if the Bosnians had felt that they > were being totally abandoned by the West. Furthermore, a meas-ured containment of Serbian advances in Bosnia could act as a i check on Serbian further steps in Kosovo and possibly Macedo- \ nia, and thus help prevent an internationalization of the conflict. \ To take another example of such a mix of realism and idealism, a | strong Western pressure on Estonia to accommodate more equi- | tably its Russian minority is not only morally right, but may also i minimize the danger that right-wing chauvinists in Russia itself f would adopt the cause of 'our oppressed brethren' in the Baltic j states as their rallying cry and put pressure on Yeltsin and the i army to intervene militarily (like the 14th Army in Moldova) on the side of the Russian minority. Such a mix of Realpolitik and Idealpolitik may be difficult to achieve, and can be easily shot ) down by hard-headed 'realists' on one hand and starry-eyed ■: 'idealists' on the other: it is, nonetheless, a possibility that should \ not be discounted. It may also fit very well with what might even- ? tually be the unique signature of Clinton's foreign policy philoso-phy. X
f. If it will be admitted that a re-nationalization of politics in En- \-rope, including (but to a lesser degree, Western Europe) is on the i agenda, better barriers against extremist nationalism and xeno- ^ phobia could be erected. Because most Germans did not realize \: that the very unification of Germany changed the agenda of German politics and necessarily tilted it towards a greater preoccupation with problems of national identity - a legitimate concern for \ Germans as for any other people - they were ill-prepared to real- *' ize that there might be also extremist manifestations of this preoc- & cupation that have to be countered not only by the police, but also I by strong political leadership and public education. Hence Ros- f tock and Solingen came as such a shock. •
g. Serious consideration should be given, in this context, to an all- '■ European Rapid Deployment Force for stabilizing situations ' where ethnic or border problems get out of hand. This is an ex- ;. treme measure, and whether this should be done under NATO or
WEU raises a whole lot of questions. But the availability of such a force, with or without UN sanction, may both act as a deterrent and make its deployment, once it happens, much more effective than the haphazard, slow and sometimes unprofessional way in which UN-sponsored forces seem to have functioned in Yugoslavia."1
3. The Return to History
When empires collapse and disintegrate, the ensuing conflicts have resonnances that bedevil the regions in question for many decades. The Arab-Israel conflict goes back to the question of the disposition of two districts of the old Ottoman Empire, and the agony of Lebanon has a similar root. In former Yugoslavia, the present and future series of conflicts is rooted not only in the aftermath of the disappearance of Tito's communist federal state, but also harks back to the historical, cultural, ethnic and religious fault-lines left by the demise of both the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires.
The same applies to the after-shocks of the dissolution of the Soviet/Russian empire. They will be on the world's agenda for the next few decades: it is not just a mapping-up operation. How much of this will be violent or not may depend in many cases on the Western reaction. Th^West has to develop the conceptual framework, and the institutional structures, tobe able to deal not with the 'Eh7TcTHisTory7 SuiwitB'theTntehsive fewirtTfTps^^
and in human historical memory. " ———
11 Sec Brian Urquhart's proposal for a UN volunteer military force in: The New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993; cf, the ensuing debate in tile June 24 edition of the same publication with contributions, among others, by Rep. Lee Hamilton, Gareth Evans and Stanley Hoffmann.
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ANTHONY H RICHMOND
Ethnic Nationalism and Post-Industrialism
The central problem facing sociologists and political scientists has always been the problem of integration. Ever since the problem was first stated in Plato's Republic, two solutions have been expounded. The first represents societies as being held together by the coercive power of the dominant groups whose interests are, in the last resort, maintained through military force. This force is used to repel external sources of threat as well as for the maintenance of order within the society. The alternative view emphasizes the importance of a common value system which binds people together in a social contract or consensus concerning the necessity for order.' In practice, of course, both principles operate simultaneously and with varying degrees of emphasis. Even the most coercive regime muse endeavour to translate naked force into legitimated authority, if all its energies and resources are not to be dissipated. Once achieved, a position of power can only be maintained if there is effective conn-ol over the agencies that disseminate information and influence human consciousness. The central value system must include legitimating principles that justify the existing differential distribution of economic status and political power. At the same time, varying degrees of economic division of labour and social differentiation give rise to mutual dependency which also contributes to the maintenance of social cohesion.'
The precise form of this relationship between economic andpolitical power, on the one hand, and types of legitimation and social integration, vary with levels of technological and economic development, The abstract relationship is represented in Figure I. Political power is exercised through control over the coercive forces, including the police and the military. The state is the supreme coercive power and those who control the armed forces ultimately exercise sovereignty. These forces are normally required to protect the territorial boundaries of the state but, in times of crisis, may also be used to quel! internal threats to the ruling elites. However, in order to maintain their position, the elites must also exercise control over the agencies that legitimate their power .nid convert it into authority and the rule of law. The legitimating agencies include the judicial system, the education system and all chose organizations concerned with the dissemination of information and the generation of belief systems containing cove values, They arc responsible for generating dominant ideologies which justify and sustain the existing distribution of political and economic power. These ideologies also rationalize and mobilize support for the use of coercion, for both external and internal purposes. There is a close link between the nature of the economic system, including the division of labour and the distribution of economic status, and the particular forms of social integration characteristic of the society in question. In the last resort the
ANTHONY H. RICHMOND 191
POLITICAL POWER
FIG. 1.   Power, legitimacy and social integration
economic elites also reiy upon coercive measures to maintain the status quo but, in normal conditions, legitimating agencies such as education and the law are sufficient to maintain social order.
Figure 2 illustrates the relationship between economic and political power ar,d the typical mode of social integration characteristic of a feudal economy and a theocratic state. Under these conditions there is a close alliance between Church and state in which the agencies of legitimation are dominated by the clergy, who also exercise direct political power. The King or other head ofstate rules by 'divine right' and is generally autocratic. The Church exercises effective control over both the judicial and the educational system. The dominant ideologies are those of the religion in question which sanctifies the use of military force in holy wars against the infidels. Internal rebellion will be coercively controlled by a ruler who is a 'defender of the faith'. Although such theocratic states have lasted to the present day they have their origins in a feudal type economy in which economic and social roles are essentially ascrip-tive. The characteristic form of social integration associated with such a system is that of a territorial community or 'Gemeinschafr'.' Such communities are comparatively small, often involving an extended kinship or tribal system with a restricted division of labour and little social differentiation. The value systems binding such a community together are chose of the dominant religion, generally imposed by the priesthood through oral tradition on an often illite-
G£M EIN SCHAFT -t- ECONOMY
FIG. Z    Power and legitimacy in a Gemeinschaft society
rate population. In such a system the law couns are ecclesiastical. Orthodoxy is maintained through inquisitions and harsh punishments. The classical form of the theocratic system was to be found in medieval Europe as it conducted its holy wars against Islam. Today some Islamic countries still exhibit the characteristics of such a theocratic state although their stability under conditions of rapid industrialization and social change is threatened.'
Figure 3 illustrates the relationship between political and economic power in the secular state that replaced the theocracies, following the decline of feudalism and the rise of the modem capitalist industrial system. The secular state retained many of the trappings of irs predecessor but effective power shifted from autocratic monarchs to more democratic parliamentary institutions, and a generally independent judiciary. At the same time, control over the education system shifted from the Church to the state. A process of functional differentiation occurred between the various agencies of legitimation. Nevertheless, there was a general consensus on the dominant value system, whose central unifying principle was nationalism. In the industrialized countries the unity of Church and state was replaced by a unity of Nation and state, in fact those two concepts came to be linked in a way that is critical to our understanding of the emergence of ethnic nationalism in the later post-industrial societies. The nation-state in the industrial era was an assimilating agency. Majority groups and dominant elites were generally intolerant of ethnic variation within its boundaries. The internal cohesion and social integration of the nation-state depended upon an elimination of previous local, tribal or provincial attachments and the inculcation of loyalty to the larger territorial unit dominated by the secular state. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalism was a unifying force which brought together people of diverse backgrounds at the price of subordinating their ethnic loyalties ta the larger entity. The dominant ideology was that of nationalism which idealized the state and deprecated the maintenance of any linguistic, religious or other sentiments that might conflict with loyalty to it.5 The holy wars of an earlier era were replaced with the patriotic wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which determined and maintained boundaries of these newly forged
(industrialism)
['IG. 3.   Power and legitimacy in a Geseltsciieft society
292    BEYOND NATIONALISM'
ANTHONY H. RICHMOND 193
nation-states. These countries also engaged in imperialist expansion outside Europe, in competing for access to raw materials in less developed regions. The agencies of legitimation were unified in support for patriotic wars against other nation-states, Ethnic loyalties, which sometimes transcended the boundaries of these states, were seen to be subversive and every attempt was made to suppress them.
The division of labour and the social differentiation that accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism created a new type of social integration, based upon economic and social interdependence, formal organizations, bureaucratic structures and Gesellschafi. As the economic system became more complex and technologically advanced, the franchise was extended to lesser property holders and eventually the adult population at large, A literate work force and electorate became essential. The public (state) school system became an important instrument of legitimation, an essential assimilating force in polyethnic societies, and the means of incuicatingpatriotic values. Nationalism in its most extreme forms glorified the state and, in its fascist manifestations, used geno-cidal policies to eliminate ethnic diversity,
The rise of capitalist industrialism also forged even stronger links between the economy and the military. Even under a feudal system the pursuit of holy wars had important economic and technological consequences. Taxation was never sufficient to pay for the wars in question, thus giving rise to inflationary pressures. However, these also provided an economic stimulus that reduced unemployment and created much profit for the craftsmen who made the armour and weapons used in the crusades and other religious wars. Later, the capitalist economic system became highly dependent upon the growth of an armaments industry whose enormous expenditures not only contributed to many technological advances but were a source of tremendous profit to the companies that manufactured the increasingly sophisticated weaponry. Wars, and die necessary preparation for them, were closely associated with the trade cycles of the nineteenth century. The rearmament that occurred in the mid-19305 provided the necessary anti-deflationary stimulus that brought Europe and America out of the great depression of that period. The capitalist system became increasingly dependent upon the exploitation of nationalism, not only in the advanced industrial countries but also in the Third World. Patriotic support for ever growing defense budgets led to a world-wide industry in new and second hand armaments that has now reached astronomical proportions.1
The concept of postindustrialism has been used to describe a variety of technological, economic and social changes that are currently taking place in advanced industrial societies, whether they are of the capitalist, free-enterprise type or the socialist, state-controlled form. There is evidence that these advanced industrial states are converging in their increasing interdependence as sub-systems within a global economy.' The roots of this global economy go back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and the mercantilism which
established trade connections between Europe and the rest of the world.* The expanding nation-states of Europe established a colonial domination, involving economic exploitation backed by military force, in many parts of Africa, Asia and the New World. What distinguishes the global economy of the postindustrial era is the emergence of multinational companies whose capital investments take advantage of cheap labour supplies outside the already industrialized countries. This has given rise to a designation of the global economy into 'core' regions, 'semi-peripheral' and 'peripheral' areas, with varying degrees of dependency upon the metropolitan centres, in fact, the system is more complex than this trichotomy suggests, as the boundaries between core and periphery are constantly changing. Furthermore, the industrialized countries themselves are undergoing rapid economic change and do not constitute a unitary system. There is a global division of labour even among industrialized countries. However, these postindustrial developments and the emergence of a global economy have threatened the viability of the traditional nation-state. North America and the countries of Western Europe are clearly in transition, but the movement toward supranational states is threatening national sovereignty."
Figure 4 illustrates the relationship between the economic and power structures of the emerging supranational states and corresponding forms of social integration. The ultimate coercive power rests with military alliances that transcend the boundaries of nation-states. The world is now divided by the confrontation of superpowers and by a precarious balance of nuclear terror. Each side has the capacity to totally annihilate the other and to destroy much of the rest of the world. Through the genetic damage which the use of nuclear weapons would entail, the destructive capacity extends into future generations of the whole human race. Under these conditions no nation-state, not even the largest and most powerful members of these opposing military alliances, can act independently.10
The power of the old nation-states is on the wane as they become more and more dependent upon military, economic, legal and social structures that transcend their territorial boundaries. In the case of Britain, and a growing
SUPRANATIONAL STATE
NETWORKS
international agencies Transnational television Co mou termed looming Satellite cammunicatIons
MULTINATIONALISM (Capitalism v, Communism)
IDEOLOGICAL WARS " [nuclear 'deterrence' terrorism)
WRBtNOUNGSmZSCHAFT «- ^T^Tt
(Postindustrialism)
Rc:, 4.   Power and legitimacy in a Verhindungsnetuchafi society
19"    HEYONO NATIONALISM?
ANTHONY H. RICHMOND 19?
number of countries in Western Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Treaty of Rome and the European Common Market place severe restrictions upon their autonomy. New judicial agencies are emerging that restrict the freedom of nation-states and require conformity to interna tional laws and agreements, Agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank use powerful economic sanctions to demand conformity to economic and social policies that are against the interests of particular countries but maintain the global economic system. New bureaucratic structures are springing up which will eventually supersede those of the old nation-states. Similar developments are occurring in the Communist dominated countries although the struggle for independence from the Soviet Union continues,just as Western countries resent the growing domination of the United States. War, and the justification for military build up and nuclear deterrents, is no longer legitimated in terms of patriotic senriments of a nationalistic type. Global confrontation is now expressed in terms of the overriding ideologies of Communism and anti-Communism.
The postindustrial era has been brought about by technological revolution. This revolution has been most evident in the spheres of computerization and automation, on the one hand, and in communications systems on the other. The full impact of this revolution has yet to be experienced. Previously labour-intensive industries, in both the manufacturing and the service sectors, will come to depend increasingly upon these new technologies. Already, worldwide telecommunications systems link individuals and organizations in complex networks of information exchange. Banks, insurance companies, stock markets and multinational companies, in every industrial sector, are now linked by these systems that permit instantaneous exchanges of information and the rapid movement of currency and capital from one country to another. At the domestic level our lives are being revolutionized by transnational radio and television networks aided by satellite communication systems. The education system is also being transformed by the use of television and various systems of computerized information storage and retrieval. Computerized learning systems are beginning to take over from traditional classroom instruction. Interactive computerized communication systems will remove the element of passivity which has characterized listening and viewing in the past.
A new principle of social organisation has been introduced which will transform the social system of postindustrial societies. When the industrial ■ revolution brought with it formal organizations of the Gue&sehafi type it did not completely replace territorial communities of the Gemeiiurfioft type, but the former diminished in importance as people became more involved in , transactional relationships and specialized economic and social roles. By the i same token, the complex social and communication networks, the Vabm&img- 1 snerzscJiaJt, that are charactenstic of posnndustrial societies will not entirely replace territorial communities or formal organizations. However, relation-
ships hased upon interpersonal inter organizational, international and mass communication nerworks, will be the characteristic mode of social interaction in the future.10
The dominant ideologies of the postindustrial penod are those which endeavour to rationalize and justify the activities of multinational companies, on the one hand, and multinational socialist regimes, on the other. In economic terms, the interests of national power elites are no longer aligned with the interests of nationally based economic organizations, whether under private enterprise or state socialism. Instead, the supranational power elites are aligned with the interests of multinational economic organizations, whether these are capitalist or socialist. The military-industrial complex is no longer an instrument of the nation-state for the pursuit of patriotic wars, It has become the instrument of the supranational state for the pursuit of ideological wars between the capitalist and communist superpowers. Even the civil wars within Misting nation-states have become ideological rather than patriotic. They involve economic and military support From external supranational states. Insurgent movements, whether in the advanced industrial countries or the Third World, are linked through complex communication networks with each other and with the dominant suprastate agencies that encourage them. This is true whether the insurgent movements identify with the ideologies of Capitalism or Communism. Terrorism no longer operates within national boundaries but has become an international phenomenon involving bombing, hijacking ■ind hostage Caking in almost every country of the world.
The emergence of posrin dust rial ism has profound implications for the future of ethnic consciousness, ethnic organizations and ethnic nationalist movements. In a theocratic state, variations in language, national identifica-Hon and ethnic group formation aie acceptable as long as all the sources of variation are subordinated to a single religious ideology. The ultimate power structure depends upon a close relationship between the religious, military and economic elites. There can he no religious toleration. Sectarian movements or competing religious faiths, including secular political philosophies, must be ruthlessly suppressed. Ethnic nationalism can survive under the conditions created by theocratic states as long as the ultimate power rests with the religious authorities. This was evident during the Catholic domination of Europe up to the Reformation and, to some c.went, is characteristic of islamic states today.
However, the theocratic structure of power was undermined as feudal economies gave way to industrialization. New power elites emerged that were n<: longer idennfied wirh the old religious order. The secular state, characteristic of industrialized countries, could afford religious toleration. The vest-i(;es of established religions may have lingered on but religious reformist .croups, new sects and widespread agnosticism or atheism were compatible wiih the new nationalist ideologies. However, the old link between Church
2»6   BEYOND NATIONALISM?
ANTHONY H. RICHMOND 1ST
and scate was replaced by a link between nation and state. The process of industrialization was a powerful assimilalory force that compelled people to relinquish the Gemeinseliaft attachments of the rural community in favour of the CeseUschafi relationships of the city. No matter how heterogeneous the ethnic origins of the city-dwelling industrial workers may have been, new loyalties were generated that ensured the solidarity of the new nation-state. The nineteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth century, in Europe and in North America, was a period during which old ethnic identities gave way to new nationalistic loyalties. Wars of religion were replaced by the Napoleonic era, and two world wars in which the patriotism of the linguistic and ethnic minorities within the nation-states was severely tested. The willingness to be conscripted into the military became a critical issue, Ethnic minorities that resisted conscription, or who were suspected of less than total loyalty to the nation at war,.were subjected to severe penalties. In Britain tht loyalty of Scottish and Welsh minorities was rarely in question but the Irish were less inclined to fight in the British cause. In Canada, there was a similar disinclination on the part of French-speaking Quebecers. In other parts of Canada, European immigrants and their children were often unjustly suspected of unpatriotic sentiments and behaviour. During the Second World War the Canadian treatment of Japanese Canadians is evidence of coercive assimilation and relinquishment of ethnic loyalties that was demanded. Tht McCarthy era in the United Stares was probably the last attempt to impose a single nationalistic ideology and to regard any non-conformity as evidence of 'un-American activities'. Already, the ideology of the new supranational state was emerging, that of ami-Communism.
Among first-generation immigrants in an industrialized society the maintenance of strong ethnic loyalties was seen as unpatriotic. In Europe, where changing boundaries of nation-states left many linguistic minorities politically isolated from those with whom they had cultural links, the incorporation of minorities into a single unit ready to fight in defence of the country concerned, became a major question in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, in the New World, waves of immigrants were to be incorporated as citizens of their new countries. In both the United States and Canada, the question of inculcating loyalty to the state continued to be an important political issue until after the Second World War. As the second and later generanons, of various ethnic origins, established themselves in the countries concerned, they sought to overcome the prejudice and discrimination which previous generations had suffered.
The 'Black power' movement in the United States led the way and other ethnic groups fallowed in their attempt to gain recognition. In many cases, the ethnic minorities in industrialized countries identified closely with the independence movements in formerly colonized territories in the Third World. Political imperialism was replaced by economic imperialism within
the framework of the global economy. Ethnic minorities within the industrialized countries began to regard themselves as having been exploited in the interests of dominant groups within the industrialized nation-states. Their situation has been interpreted as one of internal colonialism." The second half of the twentieth century has seen a reaction against the assimi-Utary pressures of industrialization and, at least among the elites within the ethnic populations concerned, a struggle for greater autonomy and even independence.
The emerging supranational states can afford to make concessions to the ethnic nationalist movements within industrialized countries as long as one overriding condition is fulfilled, That condition is an unswerving loyalty to the dominant ideology of the supranational state, In Western countries, this means unquestioning support for the economic philosophy of multinational-ism, Capitalism and anti-Communism. For countries within the Communist block the reverse is the case. Varying degrees of autonomy can be permitted for the constituent national groups as long as there is unswerving loyalty to the dictates of the Communist party. Any deviation from this is likely to be immediately suppressed, if necessary by military force.
It is not only ethnic groups which are geographically concentrated, and can establish an historical claim to particular territories, who will succeed in promoting their interests within the framework of the supranational state. The very nature ofpostindustrialism, with its technological advances in communication networks, facilitates the maintenance of language and cultural differences, even in remotely scattered populations. The immigrant minorities in countries such as Canada and Australia are already able to take advantage of multilingual radio and television channels. New developments in Pay TV and in satellite communications will further assist and promote the maintenance of linguistic and ethnic diversity. Mass communication networks will be supplemented by interpersonal networks, with kith and kin, maintained through rapid transportation and transnational telecommunications systems. Just as the emergence of the industrialized nation-state facilitated religious toleration, so the emergence of the postindustrial supranational state will facilitate the maintenance of ethnic diversity. However, those ethnic nationalist movements that identify themselves with the opposing ideology (multinational capitalism versus multinational communism) will be regarded as subversive and subject to coercive controls.
The transition from nationalism to multinationalism, and its associated multiculturalism, will not take place without a struggle between competing power elites. Already, the traditional power elites of the secular states are resisting incorporation into the new structures being created at the supranational level. The growing threat of a nuclear war on a global scale must eventually overcome the resistance of the weaker units who depend for their defence upon larger and more powerful countries. However, encroachments
ZVS   BEYOND NATIONALISM?
ANTHONY H. RICHMOND 299
on national sovereignty will continue to be resisted even as independence is undermined by the technological revolution ofpostindustrialism,
Meanwhile, within the old nation-states both ethnic and regional interests are asserting themselves. The emerging struggle for power has mo majoi dimensions. The first is economic. Generally, it is a struggle for access to and control over natural resources, particularly those relating to energy. En this context, industrial and commercial elites wi!l ally themselves with emerging ethnic or regional movements for autonomy and independence. In some cases, as in Scotland and Western Canada, the economic advantages of greater independence, and even separation, will be emphasized. Questions of mineral rights, export controls and taxation will be controversial. However, the economic elites may fail to gain popular support for their separatist policies which may not be perceived as in the best interests of the population as a whole.11
The second dimension of the struggle for power concerns the agencies of communication and legitimation. Specifically, the struggle focusses upon con-stitutional questions relating to devolution, the judicial system, the education system and the agencies of mass communication. The constitutional issues are fought out in the political arena through the electoral system and by the use of referenda. Again, the interests of regional and ethnic elites may not coincide with those of the electorate. The latter may be suspicious of the motives of the ethnic leaders; they may retain a lingering attachment to the larger nation-state, or they may consider that their economic interests will continue to be better served by remaining part of the wider society in its federal or other more centralized form. Much will depend upon the ability of the separatist movements to gain control of the socializing agencies that influence attitudes and public opinion. Teachers and journalists piay an important part in this respect and are often among the strongest supporters of ethnic nationalism.
Next in importance to the legitimating function of the constitutional debates are those relating to the control of education. Where regional and ethnic . interests converge, and are focussed on the maintenance of language and culture, the education system becomes a centre of controversy. In the earlier industrialized nation-states a single language of instruction was regarded as ; imperative and led, in some cases, to the use of coercive measures to eliminate j ethnic languages in. schools,1J Now newly merging ethnic elites may adopt i equally coercive means to impose theirown language requirements. Bilingual- j ism may be imposed upon members of the former dominant group, rather ; than being a functional prerequisite for an ethnic minority. In some cases the ! ethnic minority may succeed in imposing monolingual rules upon former ! majority group members, as in the case of recent Quebec legislation." Where I the ethnic minority groups do not have a territorial base they may, neverthe- j less, succeed in establishing the legitimacy of separate ethnic schools or bi- ■ lingual instruction. ;
As the poscindus trial revolution transforms the systems of communication in contemporary societies, a struggle for control of the networks also takes place. Access to and control over the instruments of mass communication becomes an important issue. Both child and adult socialization takes place through exposure to the information and the value systems transmitted through these networks. The school system itself becomes increasingly dependent upon televised and computerized learning systems. Some children actually spend more hours exposed to television viewing or video-terminals than they do in conventional classroom learning. Adults are also exposed increasingly to the flood of verbal and visual communications transmitted through the new technologies. At one time the number of channels was strictly limited, The effect was essentially assimilatory and homogenizing. Hence the resistance to American domination of mass communication networks in Canada. However, as the new technologies evolve a much greater variety of linguistic and cultural information will flow through these channels. Ethnic minorities will seek and generally obtain control over one or more television channels. This will permit the transmission of distinctive educational, informational, cultural and recreational programs in a variety of different languages.
Supranational states of the authoritarian or totalitarian type will have a special interest in controlling the mass communication networks and the educational systems. While some linguistic and cultural variation may be permitted, the networks will be the vehicle for transmitting a single dominant political ideology. In more democratically organized societies, there may be greater freedom of expression and more evidence of political discussion and dissent. However, ultimate control over licensing For broadcasting and reception is likely to rest with authorities who will not tolerate the use of the networks for active propaganda in favour of an opposing ideology. Nor wul they permit the networks to be dominated by any one foreign source.
As the influence of Verbindungsnetzschafi replaces that of Gemeinsehaji as a characteristic mode of social organization in postindus trial societies, the maintenance of ethnic identity will become less dependent upon either a territorial base or formal organizations. It will be possible for ethnic links to be maintained with others of similar language and cultural background throughout the world. Interpersonal networks may be sustained through videophones and other telecommunication links that will function much as the 'ham' radio networks have functioned in the past. Mass communication networks will also iranscend the boundaries of former nation-states to link people of many different linguistic, cultural and national origins wherever they may be located throughout the world, international migration will still occur but it will no longer be necessary to compel immigrants to assimilate culturally to the majority group in the receiving society.
Ethnic nationalism will merge with the claims of other provincial and regional interest groups seeking greater economic and political influence,
wherever numbers and territorial concentration make such an alliance advantageous. Even where ethnic minorities are widely dispersed they will still be able to maintain their links with others of similar ethnicity, wherever they may be. The complex communication networks of postindustrial societies will create the possibility of a new type of society, free of both religious and ethnic intolerance, by permitting great diversity within the structure of a supranational state. Reactionary movements, endeavouring to reassert national sovereignty and seeking to impose ethnic and cultural uniformity will likely occur. The transition from nationalism to multinarionalism and from industrialism to postindusmajism will not take place without conflict. Eventually, a new era of ethnic and cultural diversity may be predicted. Its achievement will depend upon one overriding condition, namely, that the supranational states do not destroy themselves, and the rest of the world with them, in a nuclear conflagration precipitated by the combined forces of militarism and multinationalism.
{'Ethnic Nationalism and Posiinduslriatism', £lfcnic and Racial Stud its. J l\ (I9S4), 5—16.J