Recurrent nationalism
Borders of Europe: Old and New Europe
Brno, 11 juli 2012
Gerrit-Bartus Dielissen
Utrecht University
Faculty of Social and Behaviourial Sciences
ERCOMER
g.b.m.dielissen@uu.nl
Overview
The ‘complex nature’ of the beast: nationalism
The East-West (European) distinction
Populist Nationalism and Anti-Europeanism
Beyond Reason: the ethnonational bond
A dynamic and processual understanding
(multidisciplinary approach)
Risks and opportunities: nationalism and the European
project
Tools
Nationalism: a political programme that holds that groups defined as
‘nations’ have the right to, and therefore ought to, form territorial states
of the kind that have become standard since the French Revolution
(Hobsbawm, 1991)
Patriotism: love for the political institutions of one’s country (Connor,
1993)
Ethnicity: not a political programme…is a readily definable way of
expressing a real sense of group identity which links the members of ‘we’
because its emphasizes their differences from ‘them’ (Hobsbawm, 1991)
‘Nation’: an ideological construct that has been essential to assigning
subject positons in the modern state (Verdery, 1991)
Today , few if any scholar would argue that ethnic groups, ..or nations…
are fixed or given: they are historically emergent and in some respects
mutable. In this sense we are all constructivists now (Brubaker, 2009)
Not the same…but related
Dimensions of nationalism
—  Homogenising and exclusionary phenomenon (politics
of belonging – e.g. Language politics)
—  Invocation of popular self-rule, collective autonomy
—  Integrative force
—  Portrayal of the nation as an organic unity between
people, history and territory
—  Tool for national advancement and increasing
competiveness (in regard with other nations, e.g.‘Made
in Germany’)
—  Justifying logic for the allocation of valued resources,
collective and symbolic goods (including deserving ‘us
and excluding undeserving ‘others’)
The East-West distinction
Western Europe
‘Civic’ Nationalism
-  Benign & emancipatory
(gradual inclusion of the
masses in government,
individual (human) rights
-  Citizenship: Ius solis
-  Inclusive
-  Equality of all citizens
-  (liberal) democratic
-  Replacing city-states and
empires à modern
-  Opposed minority rule in
feudalism
Eastern Europe
‘Ethnic’ Nationalism
-  Malign & resentful, agressive
-  Citizenship: Ius sanguinis
-  Exclusive (ethnic) national
identity, inequality between
‘majority’ and ‘minority’
ethnies
-  Self-determination for an
ethno-culturally, prepoliticaly
defined group
-  19th cent. Romantic
nationalist movements,
remnants of collapsed (multinational)
empires
Theoretical homogenious but
oversimplified
—  Historically speaking the distinction between Eastern and
Western nationalism is at best valid up to some length.
Becomes problematic if extended over time and obstructs a
proper analysis of contemporary nationalism
—  A clear-cut historical geographical distinction between
Western and Eastern European nationalism is contestable
(e.g.The imperialist wave of the end of the 19th century had
a strong sense of superiority of the Western ‘race’ and held
strongly exclusionary definitions of the nation)
—  Nationalism in the Eeast is more than ‘tribal nationalism’ and
and also civic nationalism can not do without some ‘thick’
emotive form of political and social cohesion
Populist nationalism
—  Resurgence of populism and nationalism in Eastern Europe after the
collapse of the communist regimes is result of ‘valley of tears’ of the postcommunist
transformation (from a centrally planned system to a
democratic, market society)
Two lines of argumentation:
The modernizationists
(‘social costs’ of the transition too hight, large number of ‘modernization
losers’ susceptible to mobilization of by populist movements)
The historical-determinist one
(tribal nationalism, atavistic ethnocentrism as essences of the Eastern
societies)
Solution?
The adoption of the ‘right’ institutional structures, procedurally based political
institutions of Western European states = moving towards a ‘civic’ form of
nationalism
Populism and Democracy
Political reality: last 2 decades: populism in Eastern and Western
Europe.
“Populism is not just a reaction against power structures but an
appeal to a recognized authority. Populists claim legitimacy on
the grounds that they speak for the people: that is to say, they
claim to represent the democratic sovereign, not a sectional
interest such as an economic class”
Clashing interpretations of democracy (Janus head)
Pragmatic (order & rule of law) ßà Redemptive (total and
direct power of the people (the sovereign)
Nationalists use an emancipatory
discourse
Rather than a reconciliation of redemptive and pragmatic
politics, a constant balancing and thus conflict over
democracy is a constitutive feature of modern politics à
populism is not a pathology in the modern setting, to be
transcended by liberal institutions, but a structural
element of modernity.
“If populism is a shadow of democracy, it will follow always as
a possibility – and probably as something more than a
possibility, since no one can choose whether or not to have a
shadow” (Arditi, 2004)
Populism and the nation
If exclusivists features of nationalism are underlined à
conflictive force (e.g. Separatism in Czechoslovakia, ethnic
strife in formerYugoslavia, conflicts with national
minorities in Romania, in the Baltic States, Belgium)
If emancipatory features of nationalism can be stressed à
Call for (national) self-determination or the enhancement
of particular group rights (maybe even the regional
autonomy) of an ethno-cultural group
Fits a political style that builds upon a rigid dichotomy of
‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’
Anti-Europeanism
—  Call for protection of national culture (rather called ‘cultural’
nationalism than ‘ethnic’ nationalism)
Goes hand in hand with an understanding of Europe different
from the ‘official’ version, namely, a ‘Europe of the Nations’ or a
‘Europe of the Regions’. Europe is often understood as the
cooperation between sovereign peoples, rather than an
incremental form of supra nationalism designed to gradually
overcome national differences.
Here popular sovereignity is directly linked with the survival of
the nation with its particular culture and history.This has a
much wider appeal than merely the ‘lunatic fringe’ (the extreme
right)
Discussion item: proud to be?
George Carlin (clip)
God Bless America
Beyond reason: the ethnonational
bond
—  Necessity of ‘enchantment’ of any social order
—  The importance of (national) poetry, religion, music / songs,
anthems, folkways, museums, history (books), sports (teams
and competition)
—  Anthropological universal:‘To belong” (to have a safe haven in
a heartless world)
—  Profoundly self-sacrifying love inspired by nations and
nationalism (not less real or powerful for being ‘imagined)
—  Fear of Freedom / Escape from Freedom (Erich Fromm)
Contrast with:
-  Multiple identities
-  Layered identities (e.g. European, Dutch and…)
Dynamic and processual
understanding
—  Shift from attempts to specify what an ethnic
group or nation is to how ethnicity and nation
works
—  à from a ‘language of nouns’ to a ‘language of
verbs’
—  Groupness is a variable not a constant
—  Multidisciplinary approaches
—  Paradigm shifts
a)  The SituationalistTurn (F. Barth)
b)  The CognitiveTurn (ethnicity and nationalism
are not things in the world, but perspectives on
the world)
Risks and opportunities for the
European project
—  Understanding where the fear, pain and critique of populist
and nationalist movements lays
—  The political project of the European polity ‘from above’ –
even if promoting to be ‘unity in diversity’ does not
convincingly rejoin the widely shared concerns in terms of
popular sovereignity, local autonomy and cultural diversity
—  Western Europe: civic solidarity as the cement of national
societies is the result of a longtime process (shared
background in language and cultures more latent); Eastern
Europe belated nation-building, experience of communism,
shifting borders, loss of collective identity etc, leads to more
problematic ‘national question’. Not to be mistaken for
structurally different forms of nationalism
The European project (continued)
—  Many (Western) European societies suffer from social
disorientation, of the fraying, and sometimes snapping of
the threads that used to be the network that bound
people together à fall prey to xenophobia (the fear of
the unknown) and pushes those who can no longer rely
on belonging anywhere else but to that imagined
community to which one can belong:‘the nation’, or the
ethnic group.
—  Only if civic nationalism (as projected at the European
level) is to be understood as a convincing substitute for
rather than in conflict with national identities and
‘thicker’ forms of the social bond, the populist critique
might be pre-empted (otherwise it might prove to be
more persistent)
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