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A useful typology of nationalisms can be constructed by simply working out the various possible combinations of the crucial factors which enter into the making of a modern society. The first factor to be introduced into this deductively established model is that of power. Here there is no need to play with binary or any other alternatives. There is no point in considering the possibility of the absence or diffusion of centralized power in a modern society. Modern societies are always and inevitably centralized, in the sense that the maintenance of order is the task of one agency or group of agencies, and not dispersed throughout the society. The complex division of labour, the complementarity and interdependence and the constant mobility: all these factors prevent citizens from doubling up as producers and participants in violence. There are societies - notably some pastoral ones - where this is feasible: the shepherd is simultaneously the soldier, and often also the senator, jurist and minstrel of his tribe. The entire culture, or very nearly, of the whole society seems encapsulated in each individual rather than distributed among them in different forms, and the society seems to refrain from specialization, at least in its male half, to a very remarkable degree. The few specialists whom this kind of society tolerates it also despises.
Whatever may be feasible among near-nomadic pastoralists, it is not remotely possible in complex modern industrial society. The specialists who compose it cannot take time off to shoot their way from home to office, take precautionary measures against a surprise raid by members of a rival corporation, or join in a nocturnal reprisal raid themselves. Bootleggers may have done this, but they did not become the model for the modern Organization Man. Mafia-type business flourishes on the whole only in areas where illegality makes the invocation of official enforcement agencies difficult. There would seem to be more movement from this kind of enterprise into legitimate business, than the other way. In fact, members of modern societies have little training or practice in applying or resisting
violence. Some sectors of modern society on occasion escape this generalization, like those who must live with urban violence in decaying urban centres; and there is at any rate one economically complex society, namely Lebanon, which so far seems to have survived the disintegration of effective central authority with astonishing resilience and success.
But these relatively minor exceptions do not undermine the basic contention that in a modern society the enforcement of the social order is not something evenly diffused throughout society - as is characteristically the case among tribesmen with segmentary social organization - but is concentrated in the hands of some of the members of society. In simpler terms, it is always the case that some wield this power and some do not. Some are closer to the command posts of the enforcement agencies than others. This engenders the admittedly loose, but nevertheless useful distinction between the power-holders and the rest, a contrast which provides us with the first clement in our simplified model of modern society, which is to generate, through diverse combinations of the further elements, the various possible types of nationalism.
The next element in the model is access to education or to a viable modern high culture (the two here being treated as equivalent). The notion of education or a viable modern high culture is once again fairly loose but nonetheless useful. It refers to that complex of skills which makes a man competent to occupy most of the ordinary positions in a modern society, and which makes him, so to speak, able to swim with ease in this kind of cultural medium. It is a syndrome rather than a strict list: no single item in it is, perhaps, absolutely indispensable. Literacy is no doubt central to it, though on occasion skilful and debrouillard individuals can get by in the modem world, or even amass fortunes, without it. The same goes for elementary numeracy and a modicum of technical competence, and a kind of non-rigid, adaptable state of mind often encouraged by urban living, and inhibited by rural traditions. By and large, one can say - and this is, of course, important for our argument - that suitably gifted individuals or well-placed sub-communities can sometimes acquire this minimal syndrome independently, but that its wide and effective diffusion presupposes a well-maintained and effective centralized educational system.
In connection with this access to education (in this sense), there are alternatives and different possible situations. With regard to
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power there are none: it is always the case, in an industrial society, that some have it and some do not. This provided us with our baseline situation, a society loosely divided into power-holders and the rest. But in connection with access to education, there is no such predetermined distinction. In terms of the given power-bifurcated society, there are now four distinct possibilities: it may be that only the power-holders have access, that they use their power-privilege to preserve for themselves the monopoly of this access; or alternatively, that both the power-holders and the rest have this access; or again, only the rest (or some of them) have such access, and the power-holders do not (a situation not as absurd, implausible or unrealistic as might appear at first sight); or finally, as sometimes happens, that neither party enjoys the benefits of such access, or to put it in simpler terms, that the power-holders, and those over whom the power is exercised, are both of them packs of ignoramuses, sunk, in Karl Marx's phrase, in the idiocy of rural life. This is a perfecdy plausible and realistic situation, not uncommon in the course of past human history, and not totally unknown even in our age.
The four possibilities envisaged or, rather, generated by our assumptions (each with two sub-alternatives in figure 2, to be explained) do correspond to realistic historic situations. When the category of those who have power roughly corresponds to those who also have access to the kind of educadonal training fitting them for the new life, we have something corresponding, all in all, to early industrialism. The powerless new migrants, newly drawn in from the land, are politically disenfranchised and culturally alienated, helpless ms-d-vis a situation in which they have no leverage and which they cannot understand. They constitute the classical early proletariat, as described by Marx and Engels (and quite wrongly attributed by them to the subsequent stages of industrial society), and such as is often reproduced in the shantytowns of lands which were submerged by the wave of industrialism later.
The second combination, on the other hand, corresponds to late industrialism as it actually is (and not as was erroneously predicted): great power inequality persists, but cultural, educational, life-style differences have diminished enormously. The stratification system is smooth and continuous, not polarized, nor consisting of qualitatively different layers. There is a convergence of life-style and a diminution of social distance, and the access to the new learning, to the gateway of the new world, is open to virtually all, and if by no means on terms
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of perfect equality, at least without seriously debarring anyone eager lo acquire it. (Only possessors of counter-entropic traits, as described, are seriously hampered,)
The third and seerningly paradoxical situation, in which those who wield power are at a disadvantage when it comes to acquiring I lie new skills, does in fact occur, and represents a by no means unusual historic constellation. In traditional agrarian societies ruling strata are often imbued with an ethos which values warfare, impulsive violence, authority, land-owning, conspicuous leisure and expenditure, and which spurns orderliness, time or other budgeting, irade, application, thrift, systematic effort, forethought and book learning. (The manner in which some of these traits could nevertheless become fashionable and dominant, and come to characterize the dominant strata of society, is after all the subject matter of the most famous of all sociological speculations, namely Weber's account of the origin of the capitalist spirit.) In consequence, these latter traits are then normally found only among more or less despised urban, commercial, learning-oriented groups, which may be tolerated and intermittently persecuted by their rulers. So far so good: within the traditional order, the situation acquires a certain stability. Personnel may change, the structure remains. The thrifty work-oriented accumulators are not normally permitted to displace the leisured class oriented to conspicuous consumption, because the latter regularly fleece and occasionally massacre them. (In the Indian case those who acquired a surplus tended to put all their money in temples to mitigate or to avoid fleecing.)
But with the coming of the industrial order, in the form of the diffusion of market relations, new military and productive technologies, colonial conquest and so forth, the erstwhile stability is lost forever. And within this new unstable and turbulent world it is the values and style and orientation of those despised urban commercial groups which provide a great advantage and easy access to new sources of wealth and power, while the old compensatory mechanisms of expropriation may no longer be available or effective.3 The
'Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, Princeton, 1977. It is, of course, possible that the individualist, mobile spirit preceded by many centuries, in one society at any rate, the coming of industrial order: see Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism, Oxford, 1978. That would not contradict our thesis, though it might throw light on the early emergence of national sentiment in England. For a summary of the
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counting house becomes more powerful than the sword. The single-minded use of the sword no longer takes you very far.
The old rulers may, of course, sense the wind of change and mend their ways. They did so in Prussia and Japan. But it is not at all psychologically easy for them to do it quickly (or, sometimes, to do it at all), and quite often they may not do it fast enough. The result then is the situation envisaged: it is now the ruled, or at least some of them, who are at a positive advantage, when it comes to access to the new education and skills.
Finally, there is the fourth scenario: neither rulers nor ruled may have any access to the relevant skills. This is the standard situation in any stagnant agrarian society, unaffected by the industrial world, in which both rulers and ruled are sunk in whatever combination of conspicuous display, superstition, ritualism, alcoholism or other diversion may be locally favoured, and when neither of them wish or are able to take the new way out.
By combining the (ever-present) inequality of power with the various possible patterns of the distribution of the access to education, we have obtained four possible situations: equal access, equal lack of access, and access tilted either in favour of or against the power-holders. But we have as yet not introduced the element which is most crucial from the viewpoint of nationalism: identity or diversity of culture.
It goes without saying here that the term 'culture' is being used in an anthropological, not a normative sense: what is meant by the term is the distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community. The term 'culture' on its own is never used in this discussion in its other sense, as Kultur, high culture or great tradition, a style of conduct and communication endorsed by the speaker as superior, as setting a norm which should be, but alas often is not, satisfied in real life, and the rules of which are usually codified by a set of respected, norm-giving specialists within the society. 'Culture' without qualification means culture in the anthropological, non-normative sense; Kultur appears as high culture. The relationship between the two kinds of 'culture' is of course a matter of central importance for our subject. The high (normative) cultures or traditions which specially concern us are, of course, literate ones. Hence
way in which the present theory of nationalism fits into a wider social philosophy, see John A. Hall, Diagnoses of Our Time, London, 1981.
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the problem of access to them appears, in the present discussion, as access to education. The phrase 'access to a culture' consequently means access to culture (anthropological sense) which is denied to a person in virtue of his membership of another culture, and not in virtue of lack of 'education'. This perhaps pedantic clarification was essential if misunderstanding of the argument was to be avoided.
To avoid premature complications, the diversity of cultures is introduced in the simplest possible form. Emulating the economists who sometimes discuss worlds containing only one or two commodities, we assume that in each case our society is either mono-cultural (everyone endowed with the same culture, in the anthropological sense), or alternatively, that there are two such cultures, the power-holders being a different culture from the rest. The complications in the real world arising from the simultaneous presence in one sphere of three, four or more cultures, does not very seriously affect the argument.
The imposition of this further binary opposition 'cultural unity/ cultural duality' on our already established four-fold typology, immediately generates eight possible situations (see figure 2). Note first of all that lines 1,3,5 and 7 correspond to situations where, whatever inequalities of power or access to education may prevail, nationalism has no grip, for lack of (ex hypothesi) cultural differentiation. Other conflicts may occur, and it is an interesting question whether indeed they do. The evidence seems to indicate that the classes engendered by early industrialism (let alone the smoother, milder stratification produced by its later form), do not take off into permanent and ever-escalating conflict, unless cultural differentiation provides the spark, the line-up as it were, the means of identifying both oneself and the enemy. Clearly there was a good deal of straight class conflict in, say, 1848: Tocqueville, who did not like it, saw it as unambiguously as did Marx, who did. But it did not go on becoming ever sharper and more uncontrollable.
Marxism, on the other hand, likes to think of ethnic conflict as camouflaged class conflict, and believes that humanity would somehow benefit if the mask were torn off, if only people became clearsighted and thereby freed from nationalist prejudice and blinkers. This would seem to be a misreading both of the mask and of the reality beneath it. 'Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid', the phrase once went, though it was not conspicuously echoed in the days of the Slansky trial or of the Polish purges of 1968, when a
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socialist regime fomented anti-Semitism. The workers, allegedly, have no country; nor, presumably, a native culture separating them from other workers, especially immigrants; nor, it would seem, any skin colour. Unfortunately the workers generally appear to be unaware of these interesting and liberating sensitivity-deprivations -though not for any lack of being told of them. In fact, ethnicity enters the political sphere as 'nationalism' at times when cultural homogeneity or continuity (not classlessness) is required by the economic base of social life, and when consequently culture-linked class differences become noxious, while ethnically unmarked, gradual class differences remain tolerable.
-E
A a E
a   early industrialism without ethnic catalyst
El   'Habsburg' (and points east and south) nationalism
A A -E
A   mature homogeneous industrialism
B   classical liberal Western nationalism
E
6 a
~ E
A   Decembrist revolutionary, but not nationalist situation
6   diaspora nationalism
8
8
untypical pre -nationalist situation
typical pre-nationalist situation
Figure 2 A typology of nationalism-engendering and nationalism-thwarting social situations
~ stands for negation, absence. P stands for power, E for access to modem-style education, and a and b for names of individual cultures. Bach numbered fine represents one possible situation; a line containing both A and b shows a situation in which two cultures co-exist in a single territory, and a line with A and A stands for cultural homogeneity in a similar territory. If A or B stand under an E and/or a p, then the cultural group in question does have access to education or power; if it stands under —E or ~P, it lacks such access. The situation of any group is indicated by the nearest E and p above it.
Line 1 corresponds to classical early industrialism, where both power and educational access are concentrated in the hands of some;
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but in line 1 the deprived ones are not culturally differentiated from the privileged ones, and consequently nothing, or at least nothing very radical, happens in the end. The conflict and cataclysm predicted by Marxism do not occur. Line 3 corresponds to late industrialism, with generalized access to education, and absence of cultural difference; and here there is even less reason to expect conflict than in line 1. We shall yet have to discuss the difficult and important question whether advanced industrialism as such in any case constitutes a shared culture, overruling the — by now — irrelevant differences of linguistic idiom. When men have the same concepts, more or less, perhaps it no longer matters whether they use different words to express them, you might say. If this is so, line 3 might characterize the shared future of mankind, after the general consummation of industrialism, if and when it comes. This question will be discussed later. Line 5, once again, gives rise to no nationalisi problems and conflicts. A politically weak sub-group is economically or educationally privileged, but being indistinguishable from the majority, is capable of swimming in the general pool without detection, and, like the proverbial Maoist guerrilla, it does not attract hostile attention.
Lines 7 and 8 are jointly exempt from the nationalist Problematik for quite another reason: because the question of access to a new high culture, which is a pre-condition of entry into and benefits from the new style of life, simply doesn't arise. Here, no-one has it, so no-one has it more than anyone else. This, of course, is the element which is crucial and central to our theory: nationalism is about entry to, participation in, identification with, a literate high culture which is co-extensive with an entire political unit and its total population, and which must be of this kind if it is to be compatible with the kind of division of labour, the type or mode of production, on which this society is based. Here, in lines 7 and 8, this mode is absent, even in the form of any awareness of it or aspiration towards it. There is no high culture, or at any rate none which possesses a tendency and capacity to generalize itself throughout the whole of society and to become the condition of its effective economic functioning. Line 7 is excluded from the nationalist issue twice over; once for the reasons just given, and once because it also lacks cultural differentiation which could give bite to its other problems, whatever they might be. Line 8 is more typical of complex agrarian societies than line 7: the ruling stratum is identifiable by a distinct culture, which serves as a
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badge of rank, diminishing ambiguity and thus strain. Line 7, with its cultural continuity, is untypical for the agrarian world.
Note a further difference between the picture underlying this typology, and the one customarily offered by Marxism. As already indicated, our model expects and predicts vertical conflict, between diverse horizontal layers, in a way which is quite different from Marxism. It anticipates it only in those cases where 'ethnic' (cultural or other diacritical marks) are visible and accentuate the differences in educational access and power, and, above all, when they inhibit the free flow of personnel across the loose lines of social stratification.1 It also predicts conflict sooner rather than later in the development of industrialism (with the proviso that without ethnic/ cultural differentiation virulent and decisively explosive conflict will not arise at all, early or late). But these differences in prediction are best seen not in isolation, but as consequences of the differences in underlying interpretation.
At this level there are at least two very important differences between the two viewpoints. One concerns a theme well explored and much commented on among critics of Marxism: its views on the social stratification engendered by industrialism (or, in its own terms, 'capitalism'). Our model assumes that a sharp polarization and social discontinuity does indeed occur in early industrialism, but that this then becomes attenuated by social mobility, diminution of social distance, and convergence of life-styles. It is not denied that great differences in ownership persist, but it suggests that the effective social consequences of this, both hidden and perceived, become very much less important.
Even more significant is the nature of the polarization that occurs in industrial society. What distinguishes our model from the Marxist one is that control or ownership of capital wasn't even mentioned. Identity of culture, access to power, and access to education were the only elements fed as premisses into the model, and used for generating our eight possible situations. Capital, ownership and wealth were simply ignored, and deliberately so. These once so respected factors were replaced by another one, generically designated as access to education, by which was meant, as explained, possession or
'This fact about the crucial fissures in society seems to have been recognized by an author who nevertheless continues to class himself as a Marxist. See Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, London, 1977.
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access to the acquisition of the bundle of skills which enable men to perform well in the general conditions of an industrial division of labour, as defined. I hold this approach to be entirely justified. The point is one much invoked by economists of development of a laisser faire persuasion. Quite impecunious populations (indentured transplanted Chinese coolies, for example) do astonishingly well when endowed with the apposite attitudes; while capital poured into unsuitable human contexts as an aid to development achieves nothing. Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.
The varieties of nationalist experience
Our model was generated by the introduction of the three factors that alone really matter: power, education, and shared culture, in the senses intended. Of the eight possible situations which the model generates, five are as it were non-nationalist, four of them because there is no cultural differentiation, and two because the question of access to a centrally sustained high culture does not arise (and one of the specimens, of course, is included both in the four and in the two). That leaves us with three forms of nationalism.
Line 2 corresponds to what one may call the classical Habsburg (and points south and east) form of nationalism. The power-holders have privileged access to the central high culture, which indeed is their own, and to the whole bag of tricks which makes you do well under modem conditions. The powerless are also the education-deprived. They share, or groups of them share, folk cultures which, with a good deal of effort and standardized and sustained propaganda, can be turned into a rival new high culture, whether or not sustained by the memory, real or invented, of a historical pohticalunit allegedly once build around that same culture or one of its variants. The required effort is, however, very energetically put into this task by the intellectuals-awakeners of this ethnic group, and eventually, if and when circumstances are propitious, this group sets up a state of its own, which sustains and protects the newly born, or re-born as the case might be, culture.
The resulting situation is of immediate and immense advantage to the said awakeners, and eventually may also be of some advantage to the other speakers of the culture, although it is hard to say whether they might not have done just as well out of assimilation into the
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culture of the original power-holders. Non-speakers of the new culture who happen to live in the territory now controlled by the new state themselves in turn now face the options of assimilation, irredentist effort, emigration, disagreeable minority status and physical liquidation. This model has been emulated in other parts of the world, with occasionally the significant modification of what one may call the 'African' type (though it is not restricted to Africa), which arises when the local folk cultures are incapable of becoming the new high culture of the emergent state, either because they are too numerous or too jealous of each other, or for some other reason.
This has already received some discussion in connection with the pseudo-hypothetical Rumania, above (chapter 5). But at that stage of the discussion I was concerned primarily with the difference between this Rumanian (or line 2) type, and a special problem facing advanced industrial societies through the presence of mobility-resisting, counter-entropic traits in their populations: the contrast between brakes on mobility due to difficulties of communication, and brakes due to difficulties of cultural identification, or if you like, due to the facility of the identification of inequality, the tar-brushing effect or the giving-a-dog-a-bad-name effect.
The barrier on mobility due to persistent clustering of some traits in underprivileged strata is a very serious problem, particularly for developed industrial societies, and the distinction is an important one; but it is not identical with the one which concerns us now; namely, the difference between lines 2 and 4. The situation symbolized by line 4 is interesting: some have power and some do not. The difference correlates with, and can be seized in terms of, differences of culture. But when it comes to access to education, there is no significant difference between the relevant populations. What happens here?
The historic reality to which this model corresponds is the unification nationalisms of nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. Most Italians were ruled by foreigners, and in that sense were politically underprivileged. The Germans, most of them, lived in fragmented states, many of them small and weak, at any rate by European great power standards, and thus unable to provide German culture, as a centralized modern medium, with its political roof. (By a further paradox, multi-national great power Austria was endeavouring to do something of that kind, but much to the displeasure of some of its citizens.)
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So the political protection of Italian and German culture was visibly and, to the Italians and Germans offensively, inferior to that which was provided for, say, French or English culture. But when it came to access to education, the facilities provided by these two high cultures, to those who were born into dialectal variants of it, were not really in any way inferior. Both Italian and German were literary languages, with an effective centralized standardization of their correct forms and with flourishing literatures, technical vocabularies and manners, educational institutions and academies. There was little if any cultural inferiority. Rates of literacy and standards of education were not significantly lower (if lower at all) among Germans than they were among the French; and they were not significantly low among the Italians, when compared with the dominant Austrians. German in comparison with French, or Italian in comparison with the German used by the Austrians, were not disadvantaged cultures, and their speakers did not need to correct unequal access to the eventual benefits of a modern world. All that needed to be corrected was that inequality of power and the absence of a political roof over a culture (and over an economy), and institutions which would be identified with it and committed to its maintenance. The Risorgimento and the unification of Germany corrected these imbalances.
There is a difference, however, between this kind of unificatory nationalism, on behalf of a fully effective high culture which only needs an improved bit of political roofing, and the classical Habsburg-and-east-and-south type of nationalism. This difference is the subject of a fascinating and rather moving essay by the late Professor John Plamenatz, an essay which might well have been called 'The Sad Reflections of a Montenegrin in Oxford'.1 Plamenatz called the two kinds of nationalism the Western and the Eastern, the Western type being of the Risorgimento or unificatory kind, typical of the nineteenth century and with deep links to liberal ideas, while the Eastern, though he did not stress it in so many words, was exemplified by the kind of nationalism he knew to exist in his native Balkans. There can be no doubt but that he saw the Western nationalism as relatively benign and nice, and the Eastern kind as nasty, and doomed to Hastiness by the conditions which gave rise to it. (It
'John Plamenatz, 'Two types of Nationalism', in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism, The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, London, 1973.
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would be an interesting question to ask him whether he would have considered the markedly un-benign forms taken by these once-benign or relatively liberal and moderate Western nationalisms in the twentieth century, as accidental and avoidable aberrations or not.)
The underlying logic of Plamenatz's argument is clear. The relatively benign Western nationalisms were acting on behalf of well-developed high cultures, normatively centralized and endowed with a fairly well-defined folk clientele: all that was required was a bit of adjustment in the political situation and in the international boundaries, so as to ensure for these cultures, and their speakers and practitioners, the same sustained protection as that which was already enjoyed by their rivals. This took a few batdes and a good deal of sustained diplomatic activity but, as the making of historical omelettes goes, it did not involve the breaking of a disproportionate or unusual number of eggs, perhaps no more than would have been broken anyway in the course of the normal political game within the general political framework and assumptions of the time.
Byway of contrast, consider the nationalism designated as Eastern by Piamenatz. Its implementation did, of course, require battles and diplomacy, to at least the same extent as the realization of Western nationalisms. But the matter did not end there. This kind of Eastern nationalism did not operate on behalf of an already existing, well-defined and codified high culture, which had as it were marked out and linguistically pre-convened its own territory by sustained literary activities ever since the early Renaissance or since the Reformation, as the case might be. Not at all. This nationalism was active on behalf of a high culture not as yet properly crystallized, a merely aspirant or in-the-making high culture. It presided, or strove to preside, in ferocious rivalry with similar competitors, over a chaotic ethnographic map of many dialects, with ambiguous historical or linguo-genetic allegiances, and containing populations which had only just begun to identify with these emergent national high cultures. Objective conditions of the modern world were bound, in due course, to oblige them to identify with one of them. But till this occurred, they lacked the clearly defined cultural basis enjoyed by their German and Italian counterparts.
These populations of eastern Europe were still locked into the complex multiple loyalties of kinship, territory and religion. To make them conform to the nationalist imperative was bound to take more than a few batdes and some diplomacy. It was bound to take a
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great deal of very forceful cultural engineering. In many cases it was also bound to involve population exchanges or expulsions, more or less forcible assimilation, and sometimes liquidation, in order to attain that close relation between state and culture which is the essence of nationalism. And all these consequences flowed, not from some unusual brutality of the nationalists who in the end employed these measures (they were probably no worse and no better than anyone else), but from the inescapable logic of the situation.
If the nationalist imperative was to be implemented in what Piamenatz generically designated as Eastern conditions, then these consequences followed. A modern type of society cannot be implemented without the satisfaction of something pretty close to the nationalist imperative, which follows from the new style of division of labour. The hunger for industrial affluence, once its benefits and their availability are known and once the previous social order has in any case been disrupted, is virtually irresistible. The conclusion to which this series of steps leads us cannot be avoided. With luck, understanding and determination, the price can be mitigated; but its payment cannot be altogether avoided.
Diaspora nationalism
Our discussion of the difference between lines 2 and 4 of figure 2 in a way repeats Plamenatz's distinction between Western and Eastern nationalisms; but it claims certain advantages over his treatment. For one thing, the contrast is not simply asserted as a contingendy, historically encountered distinction, but is a derived consequence of a simple model into which, by way of hypothesis, certain very basic and elementary factors have been fed. This constitutes an advantage at any rate for those who, like myself, believe that such model-building should at least be attempted.
But there is a further benefit: this 'constructive' approach engenders a further, third variant of nationalism, left out by Piamenatz altogether, but cogently generated by a further combination of those self-same elements which also account, in different combinations, for the two species which did preoccupy him. This third species can best be called diaspora nationalism, and it is, as a matter of historical fact, a distinctive, very conspicuous and important sub-species of nationalism.
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Traditional agrarian society, we have stressed, uses culture or ethnicity primarily to distinguish privileged groups, thus underscoring their distinctiveness and legitimacy, enhancing their aura, and dim inishing the danger of status ambiguity. If the rulers speak one kind of language or have one kind of accent and wear one kind of habit, it would be a solecism, or much worse, for non-members of the ruling stratum to use the same mode of communication. It would be a presumption, Use-majeUe, pollution or sacrilege, or ridiculous. Ridicule is a powerful sanction. It constitutes a most powerful social sanction against which reason is specially powerless, even or particularly when the verdict is passed by the least qualified of juries. Other and possibly more brutal punishments can also be deployed.
But the same social marker device of culture or ethnicity is used to identify and separate off not merely privileged, but also underprivileged, ambivalently viewed or pariah groups. And it is socially most useful to have such groups. As we have noted, in pre-industrial societies bureaucratic functions can best be performed by eunuchs, priests, slaves and foreigners. To allow free-born native citizens into such key positions is too dangerous. They are far too much subject to pressures and temptations from their existing local and kin links to use their position to benefit their kinsmen and clients, and to use their kinsmen and clients in turn to strengthen their own positions further. It is not till the coming of our own modern society, when everyone becomes both a mamluk and a clerk, that everyone can also perform reasonably as a bureaucrat, without needing to be emasculated, physically or socially. Now men can be trusted to honour what had been the politically awkward and untypical norms of agrarian society, but have become the pervasive and acceptable ones in ours. We are now all of us castrated, and pitifully trustworthy. The state can trust us, all in all, to do our duty, and need not turn us into eunuchs, priests, slaves or mamluks first.
But the manning of posts in an administrative structure is not the only reason for having pariahs in the agrarian order. Pariah bureaucracies are not the only form of exemption from full humanity, and bureaucracy is not the only source of social power. Magic, the forging of metals, finance, elite military corps, various other such mysteries and in some circumstances any kind of key specialism may confer dangerous power on the specialist who" has access to it. One way of neutralizing this danger, while at the same time tolerating the specialism and possibly confinning the monopoly of the guild or
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caste, is to insist that this social niche may be occupied only by a group easily identifiable culturally, destined for avoidance and contempt, and excluded from political office, from the ultimate control of the tools of coercion, and from honour.
Clear examples of such positions, often too dangerous to be given to locals and full citizens, and consequently reserved for foreigners, are palace guards and the providers of financial services. The handling of large sums of money obviously confers great power, and if that power is in the hands of someone precluded from using it for his own advancement, because he belongs to a category excluded from high and honourable office and from being able to command obedience, then so much the better. In the traditional order, groups occupying these positions take the rough with the smooth, accepting with resignation the benefits, the perils and the humiliations of then-situation. They are generally born into it and have little choice in the matter. Sometimes they may suffer a great deal, but often there are benefits as well as losses involved in their position.
The situation changes radically and profoundly with the coming of mobile, anonymous, centralized mass society. This is particularly true for minorities specializing in financial, commercial, and generally urban specialist occupations. With pervasive mobility and occupational change, it is no longer feasible to retain the monopoly of some activity for a particular cultural group. When so many members of the wider society aspire to these often comfortable, and in themselves (if not subject to confiscation) lucrative occupations, they can hardly be reserved for a minority, and still less for a stigmatized one.
At the same time, however, these previously specialized and segregated populations are liable to have a marked advantage when it comes to the new pursuits and the new style. Their urban style of life, habits of rational calculation, commercial probity, higher rates of literacy and possibly a scriptural religion, all fit them better than either the members of the old ruling class, or the old peasantry, for the new life-style.
It is often asserted, even by sophisticated sociologists such as Max Weber, that these minorities have a double standard, one for their own group, and another, instrumental and amoral, for outsiders. They do indeed have a double standard, but it is exactly the other way round. Their entire standing with the outside world previously hinged on performing some specific service or supplying some
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specific good. Their name and revenue depended entirely on doing this reliably, and they were indeed known for such professional reliability. This was quite different from the relations prevailing inside a moral community, where a commercial deal between two individuals was inevitably always far more than a mere commercial deal. The two partners in it were also kinsmen, clansmen, allies, enemies, and so forth; hence the deal was never restricted to a simple delivery of this good at this price. There was always a promise or a fear of greater advantages or possible betrayal. Both sides were involved in bargains and calculations far more long-term and intangible, and thus had to try to deliver more. If on the other hand they were dissatisfied with the deal, powerful considerations operated to inhibit complaints, lest all the other strands in the relationship were thereby also put at risk.
The advantage on the other hand of dealing with a minority, one with whom you could not eat, marry, or enter into political or military alliance, was that both parties could concentrate on a rational cost-benefit analysis of the actual specific deal in question, and expect, on the whole, to get what they bargained for, neither more nor less. Within the minority community, of course, relationships were once again many-stranded, and hence deals were less rational and reliable, and more many-sided. But in the wider society, those who lack status can honour a contract. Those on the other hand who enjoyed a social station, and had to respect its rights and duties, were thereby deprived of much of the elbow-room required for negotiating and observing specific contracts. Status and honour deprive a man of options, by imposing too many obligations and commitments. Deprivation of status enables a man to attend to the business at hand, negotiate a rational deal, and observe its terms.
So it is indeed true that the minority community had a double standard, but in the opposite sense from what is normally supposed. To the outsider they displayed that reliability which is the presupposed anticipation of single-stranded modern relations. It was with their fellows that their dealings had that rich many-stranded quality which, to our modern sensibility, smacks of corruption. But, of course, with the coming of anonymous mobile mass society, single-stranded, one-shot deals have become quite normal, and not a special feature of dealings between non-commensal groups.
Under conditions of modernization the erstwhile specialized minority groups lose their disabilities, but also alas their monopoly and their protection. Their previous training and orientation often make
them perform much more successfully than their rivals in the new economic free-for-all. Their background fits them for it so much better. But at the same time their background also contains a tradition of political impotence, and of the surrender of the communal right of self-defence. That, after all, had been the price of their entering the profession in the first place: they had to make themselves politically and militarily impotent, so as to be allowed to handle tools that could be, in the wrong hands, so very powerful and dangerous. But even without such a tradition, the political and military weakness of such a group follows from its minority status and, very often, from its dispersal among a variety of urban centres, and its lack of a compact defensible territorial base. Some economically brilliant groups of this kind have behind them a long tradition of dispersal, urbanization and minority status: this is clearly the case of the Jews, Greeks, Armenians or Parsees. Other groups come to occupy similar positions only as a result of recent migrations and aptitudes (or educational opportunities) only acquired or deployed in modern times. Such is the situation of overseas Chinese and Indians, or the Ibos in Nigeria.
The disastrous and tragic consequences, in modern conditions, of the conjunction of economic superiority and cultural identifiability with political and military weakness, are too well known to require repetition. The consequences range from genocide to expulsion. Sometimes a precarious and uneasy balance is maintained. The main point is that the central power now finds itself in a very different situation, and subject to very different temptations and pressures from those which prevailed in the days of the agrarian division of labour. Then, there was no question of everyone becoming mobile, educated, specialized or commercial-minded; who would then have tilled the land?
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the businessman?
Well, there were some. But they could not constitute the majority or the norm. An almost universally embourgeoised society was inconceivable.
The general population then did not covet the minority role, which was in any case stigmatized. The rulers welcomed a defenceless, fairly easily taxable, economically specialized group, tied to the rulers by its strictly sustained and reinforced defencelessness. But
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now, the national 'development' requires precisely that everyone should move in the direction which was once open only to a minority and stigmatized group. Once the state had an interest in protecting the minority, which was easy to milch. Now the state has more interest in depriving the minority of its economic monopolies, and, because of the minority's visibility and wealth, it can buy off a great deal of discontent in the wider population by dispossessing and persecuting it; and so the inevitable happens. This provides a most enjoyable (exeept for its victims) and pathetic theatre of humiliation, inflicted on the once-envied group, to the delectation of the majority. This pleasure can be savoured by a far larger category than just the restricted group of inheritors of the positions vacated by the persecuted minority, and that too is a politically important consideration, making this course a politically attractive option for the state.
Under these circumstances the minority is faced with the same kind of options (though under different circumstances) as those which faced our Ruritanian labour migrants. It can assimilate; and sometimes indeed the entire minority, or some considerable parts of it, succeed in doing just that. Alternatively, it can endeavour to shed both its specialization and its minority status, and create a state of its own, as the new protector of a now un-specialized, generic, newly national culture. For a dispersed urban population the major problem is, of course, the acquisition of the required territorial base. The Ruritanian peasants, being peasants, inevitably had a territorial base, destined soon to become the kingdom of Ruritania, and later to become the Socialist People's Republic of Ruritania. But what was an urban, specialized and dispersed group, with few or no rural links, to do?
For these kinds of nationalism, the acquisition of territory was the first and perhaps the main problem. The Hellenes initially thought not so much in terms of secession from the Ottoman Empire, as of inverting the hierarchy within it and taking it over, thereby reviving Byzantium. The first Greek rising took place not in Greece, but in what is now Rumania, where the Greeks were a minority, and moreover one doing rather well out of the Ottoman system. The use of what is now southern Greece as a territorial basis only came later.
The most famous and dramatic case of a successful diaspora nationalism is Israel. It is also the 'last, least typical of European
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nationalisms', in Hugh Trevor-Roper's words.1 (It solved a European problem by creating an Asian one, about which the Israelis have barely begun to think. In the diaspora, the Jewish religion referred to Jerusalem; once back in Jerusalem, semi-secular Zionism for a time used the dated socialist or populist cliches of nineteenth century Europe.) Nearly two thousand years of history had left no Jewish territorial base whatever, least of all in the land of Israel, and had moreover left Jews as a set of discontinuous and fairly highly specialized strata within the structures of other societies, rather than the kind of balanced population which can be the base of a more or less autarchic modern state, of a gesckhssener Handehtaat. Nevertheless, this extraordinary transformation was achieved, no doubt thanks in large part to the incentive provided by the persecutions, first in eastern Europe and then throughout Europe during the period of the Holocaust. These persecutions illustrate, better than any others, the kind of fate which is likely to befall culturally distinguishable, economically privileged and politically defenceless communities, at a time when the age of specialized communities, of the traditional form of organic division of labour, is over.
The human transformation involved in the Jewish case went counter to the global trend: an urban, highly literate and sophisticated, cosmopolitan population was at least partly returned to the land and made more insular. Normally the nationalist process is inversely related to its own verbiage, talking of peasants and making townsmen. Here it was really necessary to make a few surrogate peasants. In fact, they turned out to be peasants with certain crucial tribal traits: a form of local organization which was made up of units that were simultaneously productive and military in their effective role. The manufacture of such tribesmen-peasants from an urban background could not conceivably be an easy matter, and the surrogate peasant-soldiers were in fact formed by a species of secular monastic order. This needed an ideology, and by a historic accident the suitable mixture of socialism and populism was indeed available and pervasive in the intellectual milieux in which the order did its recruiting. The pro-rural, anti-division-of-labour, collectivist themes in this ideology were ideally suited for the purpose. Whether the kibbutzim do indeed provide the good life for modern man, as their founders believed and hoped, remains an open question; but as a
'Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jewish and Other Nationalism, London, 1962.
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piece of machinery for effectively re-settling the land by people drawn from heavily urbanized and embourgeoised populations, and effectively defending it in a military crisis with minimal and exiguous means, they proved to be quite outstanding, and indeed unequalled.
The problems of social transformation, cultural revivification, acquisition of territory, and coping with the natural enmity of those with previous claims on the territory in question, illustrate the quite special and acute problems faced by diaspora nationalisms. Those of them which retain some residue of an ancient territory may face problems which are correspondingly less acute. But the problems which face a diaspora culture which does not take the nationalist option may be as grave and tragic as those which face it if it does adopt nationalism. In fact, one may say that it is the extreme peril of the assimilationist alternative which makes the adherents of the nationalist solution espouse their cause in this situation.
The gravity of the situation faced by diaspora populations if they do not choose nationalism, and the manner in which the whole situation can be deduced from the very general characteristics of the transition from an agrarian to an industrial order, show that it is quite wrong to invoke diaspora nationalisms as counter-examples to our theory of nationalism:
Greek and Armenian nationalism arose among populations which were generally more prosperous and better able to understand the wealth-generating economies of modern Europe than their Ottoman Muslim overlords.1
In our Ruritanian case, nationalism was explained in terms of an economically and politically disadvantaged population, able to distinguish itself culturally, and thus impelled towards the nationalist
'Nationalism in Asia and Africa, ed. Elie Kedourie, London, 1970, p. 20. In the same volume (p. 132) Professor Kedourie challenges the doctrine that industrial social organization makes for cultural homogeneity: 'Large industrial enterprises have taken root and flourished in multi-lingual societies: in Bohemia and the United States in the nineteenth century; in Hong Kong, Israel, French Algeria, India, Ceylon, and Malaya in the twentieth.'
It has never been claimed that you can only have industrial enterprise in a society which is already culturally homogeneous. What the theory does claim is that if an industrial economy is established in a culturally heterogeneous society (or if it even casts its advance shadow on it), then tensions
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option. But the intolerable position, once the process of industrialization begins, of culturally distinguishable populations which are not at an economic disadvantage (quite the reverse), only at a political disadvantage which is inherent in their minority status, follows from the same general premisses, and points to the same conclusion, though naturally by its own specific path. To concentrate exclusively on economic disadvantage, which admittedly is prominent in the most typical cases, is to travesty our position. The industrial order requires homogeneity within political units, at least sufficient to permit fairly smooth mobility, and precluding the 'ethnic' identification of either advantage or disadvantage, economic or pohtical.
result which will engender nationalism. With the possible and temporary exception of Hong Kong, whose population is recruited from Chinese not wishing to live under the present mainland Chinese regime, so that the very principle of recruitment of the community selects for absence of irredentist longing, every single other country cited in Kedourie's list, far from constituting a counter-example to the theory, in fact illustrates it, and indeed provides veritable paradigms of the model which the theory proposes. Bohemia was the source of much of the early nationalist activity and theory, both German and Czech; the educational system of the United States was notoriously geared to turning a heterogeneous immigrant population into an ethnically homogeneous one, with the warm concurrence of the population so processed. All the other countries listed illustrate the story of nationalism, some of them in extreme and tragic form. It is true that in India, cultural homogeneity sometimes cuts across linguistic diversity: Hindus 'speak the same language' even when they do not speak the same language. But the theory does not preclude that.