Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.

Liberals have never really known what to do about nationalism. Their general rule seems to be: when in doubt (which they usually are), denounce it. In their eyes it is something murky, primordial, and sinful, like sex or violence, which if it cannot be eliminated altogether must at least be kept under control. Part of the litany of liberal dinner conversation for the last three or four years has been the claim that, whatever you may say about Communism in Eastern Europe, you have to admit that it did at least keep nationalism in check. Now, according to the standard metaphor cliche, the lid has been taken off the cauldron, and all the ancient nationalistic hatreds are bubbling to the surface again.

Meanwhile in Western Europe the bogey status of nationalism is put to good use by those liberals who have the creation of a European federal state on their agenda. If a hundred teenagers demonstrate in a London suburb against the growth of the Bangladeshi immigrant population there, this is treated as evidence that Britain is succumbing to the terrible disease of "nationalism." The cure for this disease, we are told, is to remove the power of self-government from the British people and transfer it to a European government in Brussels. (Why putting people under foreign government should be regarded as a way of making them less resentful of foreigners is never explained.) Anyone who wants to preserve the British (or French, etc.) state as a self-governing entity can also be accused of nationalism: he is then immediately identified as belonging to the forces of evil, in a Manichaean battle between enlightenment and primeval darkness. As Bruce Ackerman typically puts it in his recent book, The Future of Liberal Revolution, "the danger" of "resurgent nationalism" is "the central challenge for liberals in Western Europe." The epic battle of our times, in Professor Ackerman's view, is "the Western struggle between liberal federalism and retrograde nationalism."

There are two different sorts of answers that need to be given to these vapid but plausible claims. The first is historical: nationalism has taken many differing forms at various times and in various countries, and only the differing histories of those countries will explain why any nationalism has the particular qualities it possesses. Just taking the most objectionable features of some nationalisms, such as intolerance or aggression, and treating them as if they were the universal essence of nationalism as such, explains nothing. That is like taking the intolerance of, say, Iranian fundamentalists as the essence of religion. The nationalism of a British Conservative may differ as much from the nationalism of a Bosnian Serb gunman as the religion of an Anglican vicar differs from the religion of an Iranian imam: they have different contents, different histories. And, by the way, one need not spend very long looking at the history of nationalism in Eastern Europe to notice that much of its present belligerence and brutality was actually created, not suppressed, by Communist policies.

The second type of answer to the liberal attack on nationalism is to point out that nationalism can and does have a moral and political value. Most of us felt this in our bones when we watched the peoples of Eastern Europe throwing off the last vestiges of Soviet control and reinstating the national and religious symbols of their own history. Liberals who are quick to assert the communal rights of minorities are curiously slow to recognize that membership in a nation may also convey some rights which are infringed when national identity is suppressed by political structures.

At the very least, the sense of national identity has been a useful part of the machinery of modern democracy: some basis of fellow feeling is required if any numerical minority is to feel content with the decision of the majority. John Stuart Mill argued that representative government was impossible "among a people without fellow feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages," and he thought it advisable that "the boundaries of the government coincide in the main with those of nationalities." This respect for the nation-state is a rather neglected part of the liberal tradition (liberal in the philosophical sense, that is); it has been touched on by writers such as Michael Walzer, however, and it is explored in an important recent book, Yael Tumir's Liberal Nationalism.

Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity seems at first sight to combine the two lines of defense which I have just described. It offers a sequence of detailed historical studies of the origins and growth of nationalism in five countries: England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States. In each case, as Professor Greenfeld shows, the nationalism served a different purpose and acquired a different set of contents. No one, after reading this book, could possibly join in the kind of liberal chatter which describes nationalism as a universal force which just "flares up," like violence, here, there, and everywhere.

While Liah Greenfeld emphasizes the diversity of different nationalisms, she also insists on the one common feature of these five cases: the role of nationalism in making democratic politics possible. "The location of sovereignty within the people," she writes, "and the recognition of the fundamental equality among its various strata, which constitute the essence of the modern national idea, are at the same time the basic tenets of democracy. Democracy was born with the sense of nationality. The two are inherently linked, and neither can be fully understood apart from this connection."

That sounds like an extremely strong claim. But Professor Greenfeld is a sociologist, which means that nothing is quite as strong as it seems. She is not in fact making a philosophical connection between nationalism and democracy, although she may think she is doing so. What she means here, as the five case studies in her book amply show, is that the same set of sociological conditions gave rise both to the growth of nationalism and to the growth of democratic politics.

The mechanism in each case involved a shift from a kind of society in which people identified with their social class or "estate" to one in which they identified with their "nation." Professor Greenfeld's idea is that in each country there was one particular opinion-forming class which brought this transformation about, in an attempt either to defend or to aggrandize its own position by identifying its own interests with those of the country as a whole. In most cases it was an upper social class which performed the transformation: "The Russian elite," for example, "was attracted to national identity because this identity could provide it with the basis for status and self-esteem that noble identity failed to provide."

Professor Greenfeld makes a good case for this argument in at least three out of her five countries (France, Germany, and Russia). But the more thoroughly she expounds the argument, the more one wonders whether this kind of sociological reductionism explains anything at all. National identity and its Siamese twin, democratic politics, turn out to be nothing more than the products of an ideological trick played in each case by a disgruntled class of minor noblemen or intellectuals. If that is so, one wants to know, why was the trick so hugely successful? It is not enough to show why it was in some people's interests to promote the doctrine of "the nation"; one must also show why all the other people in the country were so apt to believe it.

There is, I suspect, a whole range of objective historical factors which need to be given more weight in the argument. Professor Greenfeld says very little, for instance, about the role of war in making people identify themselves as members of a nation. Curiously little too is said about language: she tends to treat nations as purely socio-political constructs, in which the ingredients of linguistic or ethnic identity are mere optional extras. Her prize specimen here is the United States, which from an early stage had a national identity but not an ethnic one; yet it is surely difficult to imagine the United States developing "nationality" as it did without a national language. Would Lincoln's arguments have sounded so convincing if the whole Southern population had spoken a separate language?

So this book supplies some, but not enough, of the materials for the defense of nationalism against the liberal attack. It reminds us that different nationalisms have different histories, but it makes those histories seem contingent, almost accidental, and it downplays some of the major factors which drew people toward nationhood in modern European history. And although it points to a connection between nationhood and democracy, it does so only by making democracy itself seem the contingent product of diverted class interest. "National" is one of the most resonant adjectives in our political vocabulary, because the nation is a locus of real values. Somehow Diverted Class Interest Review just wouldn't sound the same.