Freedom and nationhood: two dead white European males shed light on the current messes in India and what was once Yugoslavia.

Lord Acton and John Stuart Mill were two great exponents of the idea of freedom in Victorian England, Acton from the perspective of a conservative liberal, Mill as a romantic radical. Nationalism was one subject on which they disagreed. Here they are imagined re-appraising their views in the light of today's experience.

ACTON: In 1861 you argued, Mr. Mill, in favor of Nationalism. Do not events of the twentieth century prompt you to change your mind?

MILL: I said that where there was a sentiment of nationality in a certain people, there was a case for uniting them under the same government and a government to themselves apart. I see no reason to alter that opinion. Indeed, since then it appears to have become almost universally shared.

ACTON: But do you not see how Nationalism has provoked one war after another in the years since you wrote-- international wars influenced by nationalist passions; civil wars of the kind in progress today in Yugoslavia; and totalitarian tyrannies such as Nazism and Fascism, which are simply Nationalisms carried to extremes?

MILL: I did not favor any and every movement which called itself Nationalist. All I said in the book called Representative Government was that the question of government should be decided by the governed.

ACTON: But you expressed your approval of the idea of the separation of peoples, their division into independent, autonomous states. And this, which is the whole essence of the Nationalist ideology, has proved a ruinous program.

MILL: I do not think it is felt to be ruinous by the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for example, whose first thought throughout the decades of Soviet domination was to recover their independence. Or by those of Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Moldavia, which had never had much experience of independence, but seized it as soon as the opportunity arose.

ACTON: The cases you mention are not all alike. In Moldavia, for example, the population is mixed, and when the Rumanian-speaking majority proclaimed a Moldavian republic, the Russian-speaking minority proclaimed a Dnestr republic: the one confronting the other. Their situation is by no means unique, because peoples do not live in isolated territories. In the architecture of that city which has been the scene of the most recent tragic consequences of Nationalism--Sarajevo-- we see a skyline in which Catholic spires, Orthodox domes, and Moslem minarets are intermingled. They date from the old Austrian Empire, when different religious communities and racial groups lived peaceably with their neighbors.

MILL: Only because they were united as victims of the same imperial despotism.

ACTON: That may well have been the case when Yugoslavia was united under Communism. But the Austrian Empire did not rule by terror, and neither did the British Empire.

MILL: But if the people feel they are being oppressed, they have the right to end their obedience.

ACTON: I have never denied that there are such cases. But far more often, people have been persuaded by Nationalist propaganda that whether they are oppressed or not, they ought to have their own national state.

MILL: That is how they understand their freedom.

ACTON: It is a wrong understanding of freedom, even by the standards of your own theory, which defines liberty as the realization of each individual's best self. The founders of Nationalism in Germany in our lifetime--Fichte and his followers-claimed that the freedom of every German-speaking person could only be realized in the freedom of a united independent German state: and the rights of individual Germans to life, liberty, and property came to be absorbed into the collective right of the German nation. Personal freedom was lost in the search for national freedom.

MILL: I am no champion of German metaphysics. But German Nationalism can be dated from the conquest of the German-speaking states by Napoleon; and although Napoleon proclaimed the object of his empire to be the transmission of liberty to all peoples, the Germans saw him as an alien despot, and they realized that their division into some three hundred separate states was a fatal weakness.

ACTON: It could perhaps be said that both German and Italian Nationalism the two most important forms it took in our lifetime--were constructive enterprises putting small states together into large ones. In the twentieth-century, Nationalism has been almost wholly concerned with breaking large states into smaller pieces: we have seen empires, kingdoms, and large republics which were composed of varied communities dissolve in pursuit of the goal of one community, one state.

MILL: Nationalism does not demand autonomy for every community, but only for every nation. I myself wrote in Representative Government that the Bretons or the Basques would be foolish to cut themselves off from the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people, which they enjoyed with membership in the French nationality. I said the same about the Welsh and the Scottish Highlanders, and their membership of the British nation.

ACTON: Nationalists of today would consider your reservations outdated. They say that the Welsh people and the Scottish people are nations. Nationalists have each his own idea of what the word "nation" means.

MILL: In the eighteenth century it was said that a nation was a group united by a common culture and language and perhaps religion.

ACTON: But we have also seen that definition denied. Ernest Renan, for example, said that a nation was simply a group of people united by shared memories and by a will to remain united a "plebiscite renewed every day."

MILL: Other theorists speak of race or what is today thought more decent to speak of as ethnicity. The nation is said to be composed of people of shared ethnic origins. That has obviously become a very influential conception of the nation.

ACTON: It is just that conception of the nation as a racial or an ethnic group which has put so much venom into Nationalism. We see Moslems being driven out of Bosnia because they are ethnically different from Serbs, and therefore treated as an alien nation. Jews and Armenians, because they are ethnically different from their neighbors, have been victims of genocide.

MILL: But these must be seen as exceptional cases in the general movement of the world toward what Woodrow Wilson called self-determination. The withdrawal of the United States from the British Empire and its establishment of an autonomous republic provided the model which dozens of other peoples have followed with a fair measure of success.

ACTON: The people of the United States did not repudiate British rule because they considered it alien rule; they did so because it had become an unjust and oppressive rule. The same motive prompted Germans and other peoples in Europe to resist, as you observed, Napoleon's rule. The objection to Napoleon was not that he was French, but that he was a tyrant. It was Nationalist propaganda which persuaded people to resist a ruler on the grounds of his nationality alone. Kings of foreign birth were often indeed preferred in the past because they were felt to be more impartial in adjudicating the claims of their subjects.

MILL: I believe the British government in India was favored there for much the same reason. But the time comes when a people, or a nation, desires to rule itself, as Jefferson explained in the Declaration of Independence. Paternalistic  government can well be exercised by a foreigner, but representative government must be exercised by men who have as much as possible in common with the people they represent.

ACTON: You use the words "people" and "nation" as if they were interchangeable. For me the word "nation" has meaning only in relation to a people which is united politically, and constitutes what Rousseau called a patrie, commanding the patriotism of its members. We could rightly speak of Poland as a nation, even at a time when it had no place on the map of Europe after neighboring princes had divided its territories as the spoils of war. There was a Polish nation because there had once been a Polish kingdom, and when the kings were driven out, the Polish nation remained, like a soul without a body, yearning for reunion.

MILL: Evidently, Lord Acton, you favor Polish Nationalism. Why can you not extend the same sympathy to the Nationalism of other countries? Could not an Italian Nationalist, for example, have said before 1860 that the Italian nation was a soul without a body, yearuing for reunion?

ACTON: Mazzini undoubtedly said such things, sitting in exile in France. But when he went to Italy in 1847 and told the Italian people they were "penetrated with the idea of unity and nationality," they did not know what he was talking about. They had had no experience, as the Poles had had, of patriotic association. Italy came to be unified as a result of the King of Sardinia acquiring by force and fraud dominion of the whole peninsula. Only after that could Italian patriotism be born and an Italian nation be created.

MILL: At least you must admit that Italian people acquired more liberty in the unified kingdom of Italy than some of them had experienced under the Bourbon monarchs of Naples or the Austrian viceroys of Lombardy.

ACTON: They certainly did not in the epoch of Mussolini, who was the most zealous of Italian Nationalists.

MILL: Mussolini exercised power for only 20 years of the 130 during which Italy has been united and independent. Fascism was a reaction against democracy, and in the end, democracy has triumphed in most cases over reaction.

ACTON: In most cases? It appears to me that in most cases, communities which have obtained national independence have merely exchanged an alien rule, which may or may not have been benevolent, for some form of indigenous despotism. The rule of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East was often corrupt, but it was usually too slack to be oppressive, and the ordinary Arabs had more freedom under the Turks than they have today under Saddam Hussein and other such despotic Nationalists.

MILL: As you know, I myself always justified the British government of India in my lifetime because the Indian people had not achieved political maturity. Our administration provided them with the education they needed to achieve their national independence, and by the 1940s they were ready for it.

ACTON: If the design was to create an Indian nation, it failed; for as soon as imperial rule ended, the Moslem minority seceded amid scenes of violence from India to establish Pakistan, and then the eastern provinces seceded from Pakistan to establish Bangladesh, and now we see the Sikh community demanding a state of its own. Indian Nationalism existed only as long as British rule prevailed; since then the Indian subcontinent has been the field of competing and conflicting Nationalisms.

MILL: Different religious communities in the Indian subcontinent have formed themselves into separate civil societies or states in which each member can feel that he is ruled by persons of his own kind, and the frontiers of the state correspond to the borders of the country which people of the same nationality inhabit. This answers a reasonable demand of a democratic age, even if the regimes concerned fall short of the ideas of democracy.

ACTON: You suggest that the Pakistani would prefer the misrule of a Moslem to the just rule of a Hindu. MILL: Evidently, if that is the choice. ACTON: Then the mind of the Pakistani in question must be distorted by the ideology of Nationalism, for it is not reasonable to prefer misrule to just rule.

MILL: The man in question does not believe he is making that choice, although I have heard more than one Irishman say he would rather live under a bad government in Dublin than a good government in London.

ACTON: The Irishman can say that because he believes that no government in London could ever be really good for Ireland. The Irish have endured too many centuries of oppression from English rulers. In a way, they are like the Poles. They once had their own kings and a culture older than that of England. At the time when the Scots finally merged their kingdom, and the Welsh their principality, with the English in the United Kingdom, Catholic Ireland did not do so, and the United Kingdom could only command the patriotism of the Protestant minority in Ireland reinforced by confiscation of land and the immigration of Presbyterians from Scotland.

MILL: I always hoped that the government in London would have introduced enough reforms to reconcile the Catholic population of Ireland to membership in the United Kingdom.

ACTON: The alternative, which the Liberal Party proposed in the nineteenth century, was Home Rule. In the event neither policy was adopted; instead a coalition government after World War I imposed Partition, which separated counties but did not separate peoples; so that we observe in Northern Ireland today a majority declaring itself part of the British nation and a large minority declaring itself part of the Irish nation, each hostile toward the other; and terrorism has become a part of daily life.

MILL: Since the one party is unwilling to be British and the other unwilling to be Irish, the only solution must be compromise and reconciliation.

ACTON: Unfortunately, the rise of Nationalism in the past two hundred years is just what has made reconciliation difficult, not only in Northern Ireland, but almost everywhere that populations with different religions, different cultures, different languages are intermingled. Progressive opinion welcomes what it now calls "multiculturalism"--but the fact is that multiculturalism does not flourish under progressive forms of government, such as that of a republic, where the people are expected to share their sovereignty with their neighbors. Under the sovereignty of a king, or an emperor, all manner of races and creeds could live peaceably side by side, united in their allegiance to that monarch, and secure in the peace he imposed.

MILL: In that case, we have to ask whether freedom is not worth more than peace. I agree that the pursuit of national self-determination may generate something like civil war in places where neighboring or intermingled communities fear, mistrust, or detest each other; but such circumstances are not as common or widespread as you believe, and, more often than not, nations have been able to achieve both autonomy and civil tranquility.

ACTON: I do not deny it. But autonomy is not the same as freedom. An independent state can have a government as oppressive as that of any external regime. The test of freedom is not the nationality of the sovereign, but whether the individual citizen is assured of his rights to life, liberty, and property. Nationalist ideology loses sight of this. MILL: I have never done so.

ACTON: But when you write, Mr. Mill, in support of Nationalism by saying that "it is a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide with those of nationality," you lend your authority to those who do not share your concern for personal freedom.

MILL: And when you write, Lord Acton, that "the combination of different nations in a State is as necessary a condition of the civilized life as the combination of men in society" you lend yourself to the service of imperialists who are seldom as liberal as you are.

Mr. Cranston is the author of, among other works, Political Dialogues.