Umut Ozkyrymly (ed.): Nationalism and its Futures.

Umut Ozkyrymly (ed.)

Nationalism and its Futures

Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2003, x + 157 pp.

ISBN 1-4039-1713-2 (hbk) 45.00 [pounds sterling]

With nationalist politics ascendant in many countries, there is evidently a need for a serious analysis of the phenomenon. This short collection began life as a conference at a university in Istanbul to which a number of well-known professors were invited, from Britain, Canada, the us and India. At the end of the event, their papers were collected together to form this book. Unfortunately, the talents of an international keynote speaker are often more concentrated on delivery than on content. The form itself encourages anecdote and generality; it is not an occasion to test original research. None of the pieces in the collection references any original sources, and few even source the relevant journal literature. Several of the papers had already been delivered, not only once, but to different audiences and in different countries. In a collection that aspires to tease out the contradictions between cosmopolitanism and globalisation, the very 'universality' of the chapters acts significantly to reduce their interest. In 150 pages, there are few surprising facts, and few striking ironies or memorable contradictions.

The various pieces by John Hall, Partha Chatterjee, Fred Halliday, John Hutchinson, Craig Calhoun and Nira Yuval-Davis consist of observations on the literature of 'the nation', with individual references made to the books of Benedict Anderson, Otto Bauer, Ernest Gellner and Mark Mazower. The papers reflect on the success and on the destructiveness of nationalist thinking. The three most interesting papers are perhaps those written by Chatterjee, Halliday, and Yuval-Davis.

Chatterjee's piece is effectively an extended book review of Anderson's The Spectres of Comparisons. Anderson is said to argue for a form of liberal nationalism, untainted by demands for ethnic purity. Chatterjee claims that this thesis depends on a conception of 'homogenous' time, in which the victory of modernity is assured. Liberal humanism depends on capitalist advance. Buttressing her arguments by reference to the events in India leading up to partition, Chatterjee maintains that lived time is always heterogeneous. Ethnic hatred belongs to the past, while liberalism is a creature of the present. Since there can be no future that does not also contain the past, there can also be no nationalism without the idea of ethnic cleansing.

Fred Halliday, by contrast, seeks to subordinate nationalism precisely to the principles of equality and tolerance, the universal categories of democratic right. Yuval-Davis's paper uses the work of the early twentieth-century Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer and the recent ideas of the Subaltern Studies collective in India, in order to compare the rival merits of 'indigene' and 'diaspora' as perspectives from which to view the world. These are interesting authors to cite, but they are acknowledged, not explored. Yuval-Davis's most original observation is to note that in an era of cheaper international transport, the mediations between exile and home are (in general) reduced.

Reading several of these articles, I was reminded of the recent books of Nigel Harris. They apply a similar tone to a much more explicit idea of universal spirit, which reviewers have taken to mean the common decisions of men of goodwill, power and influence, and their shared belief in a liberal future, which will in turn secure a more enlightened future for everyone. Several of the contributors to this volume seem to share a similar notion, without which their general appeals to universal values (untainted by the need for any force to achieve them) make little sense at all.

One final point: the conference at which these papers were presented took place in spring 2001. Few--except Halliday--make any reference to the rise of a 'nationalistic' cosmopolitanism in the Middle East, to Islamic fundamentalism, or to its Western patron-turned-adversary.

One easy way in which the editors of this collection might have reduced its inherent generality and abstraction might have been to take the simple step of asking the contributors to comment on the ways that nationalism, or their understanding of it, had changed in the two extraordinary years since September 11. That might have produced a rather different book.