Global Nationalism: Ideas, Movements and Dynamics in the Twenty-first Century 1800611536, 9781800611535

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GLOBAL NATIONALISM Ideas, Movements and Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century

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GLOBAL NATIONALISM Ideas, Movements and Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century

Editors

Pablo de Orellana Nicholas Michelsen King’s College London, UK

NEW JERSEY

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LONDON

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SINGAPORE

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BEIJING

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SHANGHAI

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HONG KONG

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TAIPEI

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CHENNAI

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TOKYO

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Published by World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd. 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE Head office: 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Orellana, Pablo de, editor. | Michelsen, Nicholas, editor. Title: Global nationalism : ideas, movements and dynamics in the twenty-first century / editors, Pablo de Orellana, Nicholas Michelsen, King’s College, London, UK. Other titles: Ideas, movements and dynamics in the 21st century Description: Hackensack, NJ : World Scientific, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021046875 | ISBN 9781800611535 (Hardcover) | ISBN 9781800611542 (eBook for Institutions) | ISBN 9781800611559 (eBook for Individuals) Subjects: LCSH: Nationalism. Classification: LCC JC311 .G6179 2023 | DDC 320.54--dc23/eng/20220106 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046875 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher.

For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. For any available supplementary material, please visit https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/Q0341#t=suppl Desk Editors: Soundararajan Raghuraman/Michael Beale/Shi Ying Koe Typeset by Stallion Press Email: [email protected] Printed in Singapore

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About the Editors Pablo de Orellana is a Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London. His interdisciplinary research interests include diplomacy, nationalism, history of ideas, and the relationship between art and conflict. In happier times, instead of researching nationalism, he drives his vespa and pursues poetic and archaeological passions. Nicholas Michelsen is a Reader in International Relations at King’s College London. His research interests include international relations, strategic communications and informational conflict, insurgency, extremism and terrorism, twentieth century European philosophy, transnational movements and nationalism.

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About the Contributors Javier Carbonell Castañer is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, where he analyses the responses of mainstream parties to the rise of the far-right in relation to national identity. He is also the Coordinator for the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN), an associate of LSE IDEAS and teaches at Sciences Po. Joel Chong is currently Research Associate at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. His research interests span state-society relations, religion and politics, nationalism, and identity politics. He is currently developing a comparative study of Buddhist Ruth and Islamic religious bureaucracies in Asia and the Middle East, examining their structural variations, their impact on religious orthodoxy and majority-minority relations, as well as the oscillation between the fragmentation and consolidation of religious authority in the regions. Mireille Manga Edimo is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the International Relations Institute of Cameroon (IRIC), in the University of Yaoundé II, Cameroon. She researches public policy in Africa and is a member of the International Public Policy Association. Moran M. Mandelbaum is Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University. His research lies at the intersection of nations and nationalism, political theory, and critical approaches to IR and security. Recent publications include an analysis of homonationalism in Israeli society: Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and a book offering a psychoanalytical

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genealogy of nationalism in political and IR theory: The Nation/State Fantasy: A Psychoanalytical Genealogy of Nationalism (Cham: Palgrave 2020). Zarqa Parvez is a PhD student at Durham University. Her research interests include nationalism, national identity, women, state and society in the Gulf region. She is also a former Lecturer at Hamad bin Khalifa University. Some of her past research projects include research on women and family friendly practices as well as on public policy and identity. Julie Patarin-Jossec holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bordeaux, and is Associate Fellow at the Centre Emile Durkheim and temporary Lecturer at the State University of Saint-Petersburg. Working with ethnography and arts-based methods (such as photography and filmmaking), her research emphasises how space programmes contribute to State-building processes and the regulation of inter-State relations. Daniel Rueda is a PhD candidate in European and International Studies at King’s College London, where he also works as a Teaching Assistant. His research focusses on contemporary forms of nationalism and the rise of right-wing populist movements. He currently works as a managing editor at SEN Journal (Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism), based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Bavo Stevens is a PhD student at McGill University and a Lecturer at Ubon Ratchathani University. His research interests include civil-military relations, state repression, forced displacement, and Southeast Asian politics, with a focus on Thailand. He holds an MA in War Studies from King’s College London and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Abrham Yohannes Gebremichael is a doctoral researcher in Sociology at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS), Germany and Research Fellow at Ernest Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES). He works on theories of nation and nationalism, concepts of ethnicity, identity formation and minority groups, particularly in the community called “Beta Israel” or Ethiopian Jews.

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Hassan Zaheer is a postgraduate in Sociology from the University of Karachi specialising in Political Sociology and the Sociology of Religion. He is currently a Non-Resident Research Associate at the Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research (CSCR), Islamabad. He is also a Visiting Lecturer at Iqra University where he teaches Sociology.

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Contents About the Editorsv About the Contributorsvii Introductionxiii   Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen Part I

Nationalist Theories and Concepts

Chapter 1 The Repetitions of Nationalism: Ontology, Fantasy, and Jouissance Moran M. Mandelbaum

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Chapter 2 Materialising the Nation: Envisioning a  Post-Cultural Nationhood Joel Chong

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Chapter 3 Viral Nationalism: The Return of Ethno-Nationalist Ideas Through the New Right Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo de Orellana

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Part II

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Nationalist Dynamics

Chapter 4 Bringing the Armageddon: Carl Schmitt and Surging Nationalism in South Asia Hassan Zaheer

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Chapter 5 Nationalism as a Site of Contestation for Political Legitimacy in Thailand Bavo Stevens

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Chapter 6 The Co-Production of Civic Nationalist Conflict: Spain and Catalonia Javier Carbonell Castañer

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Chapter 7 The Return of the Rising Sun? The National and International Dimensions of Japan’s Contemporary Nationalism131 Daniel Rueda Part III

Liminality and Identity in Late Modern Nationalism151

Chapter 8 Nation, Minority and Nationalism: A Sociological Perspective on How Ethiopian Jews Construct and Configure Identity Abrham Yohannes Gebremichael

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Chapter 9 Manufacturing National Heroes: Cosmonauts and Post-Soviet Identity in Putin’s Russia Julie Patarin-Jossec

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Chapter 10 Responding to Failed Nationalist State-Building: Anglophone Secessionism in Cameroon Ruth Mireille Manga Edimo

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Chapter 11 Tribalism and National Identity in Qatar: History and Emerging Trends Zarqa Parvez

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Index235

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Introduction Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen Department of War Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

Nationalism is back. From the 2010s, nationalist formal and informal political formations have moved from the fringes to the centre of both democratic and non-democratic politics. This is most visible in the rise of leaders like Trump, Modi, Johnson, Xi, Duterte, Salvini, Le Pen, Modi, Bolsonaro among many others. Despite widespread media focus on their personas, these leaders have emerged by riding a wave of nationalist politics, ideas and their discursive expressions. This international wave has propelled new or existing nationalist parties to electoral success, including movements such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, the Brexit Party in the UK, Lega in Italy or Rassemblement National (RN, formerly Front National) in France. Nationalist ideas and their champions have been extremely successful in taking over existing conservative formations such as the Liberal Party in Japan, the Republican Party in the United States, the Conservatives in Britain, and Brazil’s Partido Social Liberal. What lies behind the re-emergence of nationalism in the early twenty-first century? What ideas animate these political movements?

This volume is a contribution to scholarly efforts to understand nationalism in our time. It seeks to extend global enquiry into the ideas, politics and organisations fuelling the rise of this late modern wave of nationalisms. We look at a range of aspects of nationalism, including various xiii

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movements, from the well-known to the obscure; the various causes taken up in the context of nationalist politics, from racial supremacists, who seek to grant rights to one identity alone and exclude others, to the nationalisms we might call secessionist or self-determining, who seek equal rights for a defined identity within a state by achieving a new independent statehood. This entails exposing the broad range of nationalist ideas and their conceptual conditions of possibilities as well as their specific histories and political movements. Ultimately, these research interests and agenda are united by a concern to understand the nexus between the powerful ideas that animate contemporary nationalisms and the movements that draw upon them. In this volume, we offer reflections and analysis of a number of wellknown case studies, as well as more obscure and less studied ones. Our objective is that this set of critical reflections on contemporary nationalism contribute to creating a basis for the global study of nationalist movements, their politics and ideas. Before returning to the research endeavours opened up in the scholarly contributions in this volume, however, in the following pages we discuss how this volume has approached research into nationalism, particularly how it approaches the study of nationalist ideas, history, movements. In short, we offer a series of opening reflections on the complexity and diversity of nationalist ideas today, their history, their classification for the purpose of global study and research, and their future.

Reflections on Contemporary Nationalism: Critique, Diversity, and the Internationalist Challenge What do contemporary nationalisms look like? What are their political, conceptual and discursive dynamics? We speak of nationalisms in the plural because we are looking at a spectrum of interrelated, mutually inspiring but often contradictory movements that to some extent share a common set of ideas. We are therefore looking at an ecosystem of ideas and movements that are often ideationally and organisationally — as well as financially related to one another, as is the case with European nationalists from Le Pen to Orban and Putin. They are, furthermore, mutually and openly supportive of each other in the international arena, as is most visible with Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro, or the Polish-Hungarian “illiberal” alliance within the EU. This shows how contemporary nationalists

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are remarkably internationalist in conceptualising and operationalising the reach of their shared ideas and international cooperation among nationalists against liberalism. How to study such a complex amalgam of ideas and actors? For some time, scholars interested in nationalism have focussed on two interrelated questions at the core of all nationalisms. Firstly, and crucial as a key condition for effective political engagement, the way in which the state is itself conceptualised in terms of its inhabitants and, crucially, its agency in relation to the population. This question was vital to studies pioneered by Marxist historian of ideas Eric Hobsbawm.1 This tradition located the inception of nationalism along this axis, where nineteenth century claims for a state that represents a single identity underpinned national inception myths. Those myths drove political action on the basis of an identity politicised exclusively in relation to the power of the state. This tradition, it should be noted, remains important in understanding the links between the theories of the state and theories of the nation,2 even though its assumption of the nation as a nineteenth century bourgeois myth does have the effect of intellectually downplaying the importance of identity and especially how it may be constructed as a political paradigm. To us, these efforts to understand nationalism highlight the need to study the relationship between the very real dynamics of a culture and language, and the ways in which they are politicised and weaponised by nationalists. The link between nationalism and the state is a vital one. All nationalists make claims upon the power of the state, or the need to establish a state, which they seek to control so as to “order” identity, and then allocate rights on the basis of that order. Speaking with the benefit of hindsight, it makes sense that Marxists would first become heavily interested in nationalism: Marxists like Antonio Gramsci suffered bodily from the defeat of socialism at the hands of il Duce, el Caudillo and the Führer. The central quandary for these writers centred on why and how attachment to ethnic identities as a political paradigm could be more convincing than attachment class and economic consciousness. It was logical that for these authors the core question concerned how nationalist claims based on blood and birth managed to defeat socialist claims to class as the core E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2 John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 1 

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paradigm of politics in the early twentieth century. This concern was of course also bound up with the postwar philosophical move away from considering only materiality in society and politics, and the search to understand the other processes through which social and political meaning are constructed, perhaps best exemplified in the emergence of the Frankfurt School. From these beginnings, subsequent work on nationalism has sought to broaden the basis on which nationalism is considered. The very constructedness of identity and community was a subsequent and vital area of focus, particularly for Benedict Anderson and his inheritors.3 AD Smith is the best representative of a widespread effort in the 1990s to add a social perspective to the study of nationalism, for instance exploring the construction of identity and its politicisation.4 This led to more recent critical engagements on this theme, which have explored the extent to which nationalism claims rather than outright invents the nation’s deep cultural referents, and the significance of the latter understood in the context of social, ritual and collective practices.5 This perspective, however, crucially retained a focus on the historical construction of identity and its politics pioneered by Hobsbawm. Indeed, a historical approach became ever more urgent and complex, as it became clear that history was the most important site for nationalist construction of narrative, identity and meaning — and thus politics. Almost all nationalisms construct a historical perspective that is foundationally dependant on redressing historical grievance. In nationalisms claiming the right to inequality among identities, from the loss of supremacy due to unfair rules-based restraints typical of Trumpian discourse, to Milosevic’s attempt to reverse 600 years of history to restore 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. edition (London,  New York: Verso Books, 2006). 4 Anthony D. Smith, “Memory and modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s theory of nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (November 1, 1996): 371–388; Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 2000); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 5 Erik Ringmar, “How do performances fuse societies?,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8, no. 1 (April 1, 2020): 29–44; Erik Ringmar, “Nationalism: The idiocy of intimacy,” British Journal of Sociology (1998): 534–549.

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the “rightful” place of Serbs, history is the key container of grievance, the stage of past sins, future redress and the justification for action in the present. Likewise, in more liberal nationalisms claiming political ­equality with dominant identities and polities, usually focussing on self-­ determination, history — for example, invasion, slavery or ­colonisation — is the key referent in informing the specific construction of the case for changing political structures. It is no coincidence that so many contemporary nationalisms are keenly invested in cultural wars over the meaning and legacy of colonialism. For ethnonationalists identity is h­ istorically unchanging and violence among identities is natural, two key reasons to reject criticism of colonial ancestors that, in their view, were only reaping the benefits of their biological superiority. In this account identity does not change, so a critique of the past is a critique of their very identity. History must not be “edited” and any criticism equates to unpatriotic betrayal.6 For their more liberal rivals, conversely, historical critique is essential because it provides the basis for the need for political change. For these reasons, recent developments in the study of nationalism treat history as a key analytical site. Taking their cue from nationalists’ own enthusiasm for political conflicts over history, authors like Shapiro and Ozkirimli focus on how powerful political claims are constructed as narratives of the past and its impact on the present, as well as a site where history can be reinvented, and indeed where identity can be made, unmade or indeed erased entirely.7 This has also produced opportunities to study the constitution of identity, agency and historical discourses, as part of conflicts over what history means for the present. Working as a part of these developments within the study of nationalism in the late 2010s, we seek to contribute by asking two distinct questions. Firstly, how do contemporary nationalisms relate to older nationalist movements, ideas and contexts; and secondly what do they seek from international relations?8 Building on the work of the above-discussed predecessors but deploying Anna Mikhailova, “Boris Johnson attacks ‘dubious’ campaign to ‘Photoshop’ Britain’s history,” The Telegraph, June 14, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/14/ boris-johnson-attacks-dubious-campaign-photoshop-britains-history/. 7 Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge, 2004). 8 Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen, “Reactionary internationalism: The philosophy of the new right,” Review of International Studies 45, no. 5 (December 2019): 748–767. 6 

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a historical method of our own, we launched a project, based at King’s College London, to understand the place of contemporary nationalists in the broader history of nationalist ideas and more specifically in ideas of the international. However, even as we published our first results,9 it was clear to us that this project must live alongside an explicit embrace of the vast complexity, variety, and contradictory histories of the many nationalist traditions found around the world. Though nationalism begun its history in the nineteenth century as a Western idea because the politics and the specific states it referred to were European constructs, by the early twentieth century its ethnonationalist variant was spreading and being reinvented across the world. Furthermore, the colonial struggles of that century drew on liberal European traditions (the nemesis of early ethnonationalists) to develop a rights-based form of emancipatory nationalism that rejected racial identities and ideas of racial “preparedness” for civilisation, and claimed equal rights for all, specifically the right to equal global political participation and self-determination. By the late twentieth century nationalism has become so widespread that it could coexist with apparently contradictory forms of politics, as is the case with Stalin and Mao’s melding of “communism in one country” with ethnic nationalism and hierarchy. Furthermore, liberation nationalisms in countries like India have given way to claims to primordialist ethnic supremacy, constructed around religious identities that are treated as rooted in ethnic biology. Back in Europe, regional nationalisms seeking self-determination have arisen, and more recently ethnic nationalisms drawing on nineteenth century ideas have exploded back into the mainstream of politics, denoting that nationalisms are now effectively being created, exchanged, conceptualised, and re-conceptualised the world over. In sum, there is no simple story to tell about nationalism. Rather, in this volume we seek to embrace the complexity and contradictory nature of nationalisms and propose a starting range of case studies, each of which points to a different type and tradition. The analyses in this volume expose Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo de Orellana, “Discourses of resilience in the US alt-right,” Resilience 7, no. 3 (September 2, 2019): 271–287; Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo de Orellana, “Pessimism and the alt-right: Knowledge, power, race and time,” in Tim Stevens and Nicholas Michelsen, Palgrave Studies in International Relations eds., Pessimism in International Relations: Provocations, Possibilities, Politics (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), 119–136. 9 

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the huge variety of nationalisms and their histories. It is the result of a one-day workshop supported by the British International Studies Association and the Research Centre in IR at King’s College London held in June 2018. Drawing together scholars addressing nationalist ideas, events and movements of the last two decades through a variety of interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical perspectives and methods, this workshop sought to contribute to establishing a forward-looking research agenda for the study of contemporary nationalisms, and disseminating it though this edited volume. Contemporary nationalist movements, discourses and ideas engage directly with the unique context of our time, address new issues born of globalisation, particularly the social and ­cultural changes of the last thirty years, and show evolving conceptualisations of identity, security and gender relations as well as international norms. This workshop addressed these scholarly and analytical challenges by bringing together novel and ongoing research on nationalism to reflect on specific aspects of its contemporary expressions. The volume in your hands is a selection of the papers presented at the 2018 workshop and pays particular attention to new research as well as submissions by Early Career and Doctoral Researchers. Studying nationalism, its ideas, and dynamics, is a vital and yet challenging endeavour, one that remains crucial to understanding modernity itself. For this reason, we feel three important acknowledgements are in order, and we wish to make them here, amid the history of studying nationalism. We are grateful to Uygar Baspehlivan, who acted as our assistant editor for the first two years of this project, and to the British International Studies Association for the grant that made this workshop possible. We would like to offer our heartfelt thanks to our contributing authors, who patiently worked with us through many drafts from the day of the workshop in 2018 until 2022, when the volume in your hands became a reality. Their contributions are vital to providing a truly global dimension to our study of nationalism that is, furthermore, able to bring to readers and students the extent to which nationalism is a diverse, complex and global ecosystem of ideas, movements, and dynamics. While understanding nationalism is an ongoing work in progress, this volume presents reflections that embrace the variety, scope and contradictions of contemporary nationalisms. This has produced some common observations regarding how contemporary nationalist ideas work and their precise history. Of these, two are worth highlighting as they impact the broader study of nationalism. Firstly, we note that whereas different

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traditions of nationalist thought are clearly compatible in some respects, their ideas do not share the same plethora mechanisms of identity, agency and politics. The core mechanism shared by all nationalisms is the very basic trinity of concepts shared also by all previous waves of nationalism since Napoleon: identity (however defined); the need to capture of state power on its behalf (through a variety of means); and linking collective rights provided by the state to that identity (sometimes exclusively). However, despite sharing that basic mechanism, they each draw on a specific history of ideas and nationalist traditions, which set them on distinct political trajectories. An example is to contrast the set of movements known as the New Right (of which Trump, Brexiters and Salvini are good examples) to Modi’s BJP in India. Though on the surface they both appear exclusionary, ethno-nationalist, xenophobic, quasi-religious as well as populist in method, their ideas draw on different histories and sometimes incompatible foundational definitions of identity. For example, the central subject claimed by Trumpian identitarianism is a “Western Christianity,” but this formation is defined by a foundational relation to white European ethnic origin, whereas BJP’s central nationalist subject is confessional (Hindu) at its root definition, which is then constructed as ethnic upon this religious basis. In even greater contrast, Nehru’s anticolonial nationalism was nationalist insofar as it sought an independent state for Indians, while remaining liberal in rejecting racialised arguments of ethnic inadequacy and seeking to afford Indians the same rights as the British. Another commonplace assumption we counter in this volume is the assumption that all nationalisms are isolationist. We do not believe this is true even for the usual suspects, the Axis powers of the 1930s, who were isolated from the international community whose rules they rejected, but worked extensively to spread their ideas and support each other, as most clearly visible in their energetic intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and the vast extent to which they drew on each other’s ideas, traditions and even aesthetics. In fact, nationalists from the age of Bismack onwards saw their ideas an alternative paradigm for both national and inter-national politics based on what they argued was the fairer paradigm of identity rather than individual rights. This meant that it spread very quickly, and it was possible for it to be endlessly absorbed, reinvented, repurposed, and reinvented again. Across all nationalist traditions, the successes of one have inspired the absorption of that paradigm elsewhere, sometimes in the form of new political formations, or by invading existing ones. This is

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particularly visible in the global emergence of the New Right in the 2010s, in part following the success of Brexit. The New Right provides a particularly illustrative example of this energetic internationalism. This is not the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century, but rather its opposite doppelganger, “the other internationalism” sometimes called, in reference to its liberal rival, “the dark enlightenment.” This nationalist internationalism is focussed on and highly effective in creating international coalitions so as to reverse liberal ­paradigms of equal human and gender rights that they feel prevent an unleashing of the rightful and righteous power of identities. Their internationalism is cemented by a shared drive to destroy extant liberal equalities embedded in individual rights claims: in gender, race and religion, where they argue that these equalities sabotage collective identity and its future. In this thesis, the truly international aspect of today’s nationalisms rests in their belief that if only these equalities are expunged from international relations, a more just world can emerge, one driven by a natural order of struggle and triumph. This is visible in Putin’s macho revivalism, through to Trump’s victory and departure, Brexiter fantasies about freewheeling economic success, and Xi’s strongman regional suprematism. We are witnessing the birth of a reactionary internationalism that has long been the dream of anti-liberal ethnonationalists since Bismarck and Barrès, united by their desire to create substantively new, and not simply revived, nationalist principles of order for global relations.

Reflecting on Nationalism: The Historical View Nationalists frequently claim that their cause is as old and natural as humanity itself, with identity and its biological basis as the only constant across history. This historicising claim belies how recent nationalist ideas are, and that they emerged as one of various reactionary challenges to the emergence of liberalism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Indeed, as ideas of freedom for all emerged in the enlightenment, nationalism was only the last of a series of birth-based reactionary counter-liberal movements determined to ensure birth remained the dominating political and social paradigm. The universal historical claims articulated by nationalisms render it more difficult to disaggregate and analyse the many nationalist traditions. After all, its transhistorical claims on histories involve figures as varied as

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Siegfried, Qin Shi Huang, Vercingetorix, or William Tell. These historical discourses claim ancient heroes as early identitarian warriors, and in their nationalist reframing, be it Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen or The Birth of a Nation, we see their heroism reframed as a concern to maintain and defend a natural birth-determined hierarchy of races. Furthermore, they are designed to support the notion that identity was always the core of the polity’s politics and that identitarian conflict is timeless and natural, usually counterpoised to the same foe across all time. Understanding contemporary nationalism is further confounded by comparisons and approximations to previous major waves of nationalism, especially the early 1800s Napoleonic incarnation, late 1800s Bismarckian ethno-geopolitics, and 1920s–1930s high-modernist ethno-geopolitics, the most famous by far. The latter in particular, due to its universal ­rejection in the aftermath of WWII, remains a potent symbolic touchstone that to some extent conceals the scale of ideological and conceptual development nationalism has seen since the 1940s.10 Though it is frequently said that contemporary nationalisms mark a “return” to fascism, contemporary nationalisms defy such reduction through their remarkable capacity to speak to distinctly late modern grievances including globalisation, inequality, democratic deficits, as well as loss of citizen and local agency. Further, they have absorbed insights from other ideological and philosophical traditions and discarded others. As a result, new nationalist movements cross older political boundaries, reconceptualise identity and sovereignty, and have increasingly challenged the discursive nature of truth itself, borrowing from the post-1968 societal critics they often claim to oppose. It is therefore no longer possible to understand these movements solely by comparison to or lineage from older forms of nationalism. The answer to the hardest questions, we suggest, lies in exploring the genealogy of these ideas: their history, their continuities but also, just as importantly, discontinuities. To make sense of contemporary nationalisms, we must ask how specific ideas changed and why, who was involved and what the context was. In our own work, this is combined with an Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, “Radical conservatism and global order: International theory and the new right,” International Theory 10, no. 3 (November 2018): 285–313; Jean-François Drolet and Michael C Williams, “From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations,” Journal of International Political Theory, May 28, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/17550882211020409. 10 

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archaeological approach, which consists of in-depth explorations of how specific mechanisms of nationalist theory work, and in relation to what other concepts and discourses. This approach, which inspired this volume’s collection of in-depth explorations of very different nationalist cases and ideas, allows us to understand each nationalist idea in isolation and then link it to the ambulant broader history of nationalism and its ideas. This helps us answer a pressing set of questions about today’s nationalisms: how do they conceptualise the world? What types of politics have they produced? How do they draw/cease to draw on older nationalist thinking? Our genealogy of nationalism suggests that its history is principally shaped by the various ways it has engaged with liberalism and its core concepts and precepts. Interestingly, while born of a series of reactionary challenges to Enlightenment Republicanism that sought to re-establish birthright as a social and political paradigm, its first successful iteration engaged with liberalism in depth and captured many of its core ideas. The story of how, in Napoleonic France and Revolutionary America, liberal rights came to be granted only to subjects determined by racial birth is a key moment of discontinuity within this history of ideas. As seen in the tragic case of Haiti and Toussaint L’Ouverture for example,11 this rupture involved no less than the limitation of previously universal “rights of man” on the basis of a birth-determined identity. In other words, Bonapartist nationalists were mostly liberal, but their nationalism consisted of limiting the grant of rights only to Frenchmen. This theoretical synthesis at the root of the liberal nationalist tradition was similarly at the heart of the Frankfurt parliament’s 1848 failed attempt to democratically unite Germany. Their challengers, the statist ethno-geopolitical nationalist tradition heralded by Bismarck, did not believe in individual rights at all. They believed that nations were species eternally struggling to survive, and that equal rights, both domestic and international, were a betrayal of the nation that only encouraged and fostered weakness and unpatriotic dissensus, and deviated from the “natural” national cause of survival. The latter overrode all other considerations, constitutional and democratic, to pursue the natural interest of the nation. In full opposition to all liberal traditions, even nationalist ones, it proclaimed that nations are not made by votes, but Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution Française et Le Problème Colonial, Vol. 26 (Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1960). 11 

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by “blood and iron,” and claimed the right to reject all forms of equality as an unnatural limitation of the nation’s power. It is at this time too that traditionalist conservatism around gender was reframed in nationalist thought as a “natural” outcome of the same biological logic that makes foreigners different, where birth and biology naturally determine social and identity roles and behaviour. This tradition was refined by their French adversaries, especially Maurras and Barrès, who established an even more clearly articulated relationship between blood, birth, nation, and culture, arguing that behaviour is a symptom of blood and birth and not of individual will. They located culture in the “eternal” unchanging character of the nation, pioneered anti-migrant discourses and the term “nationalisme,” canonised Joanne d’Arc and launched the antisemitic 1890s Dreyfus crusade as part of an all-out race-existentialist war for survival with Germany. This war would play out over the next 50 years, with Germany’s version of ethnic nationalism evolving dramatically in the interwar years. Crucially, National Socialist and Fascist nationalism constituted a ­high-modernist technology-obsessed version of ethno-geopolitics that explained the failure of its predecessor by reference to its insufficient radicalism. This logically resulted in an urge to fighting an all-out survivalist race war against foreigners, race-traitors at home, and competing races abroad, so as to foster national rebirth. Very openly, the struggle begun with a war on equality by enacting the right not to be bound by the same rules as others: allocating different rights according to race at home, and internationally demanding the natural right to struggle for supremacy. All European politics were influenced or even dominated by forms of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, it is important to highlight that on opposing sides of WWII, both de Gaulle and Pétain illustrated the persistence of Barrès’ nationalism, in the absorption of Joan of Arc as a national icon, the rejection of secular republicanism in favour of quasi-monarchical presidentialism, and a keen belief in natural colonial racial hierarchies. The early nineteenth century success of these ideas, and the key role they played in the latter phase of European colonialism in justifying racial hierarchies of power, meant that it was unavoidable that contiguous and opposing ideas would emerge in the colonised world. Liberal nationalisms such as Sun Yat-sen’s sought to grant the same rights to all and create a multi-ethnic Chinese Republic based on the liberal concept of self-determination, but his successor Chiang Kai-shek

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did not agree. He reframed the Kuomintang’s vision of China along the ethnocentric frame then dominant in Europe, placing the Han as the racial core of China entitled to dominate minorities. Likewise, a better-known example is the Japanese Nationalist tradition best represented by Hideki Tojo, which blended ethnocentric geopolitical hierarchical nationalism with traditionalist conservatism. Conservative traditions were not alone in being influenced by nationalist thought. In the same period Stalin integrated ethnonationalist ideas into his vision of an ethnically managed domestic Soviet polity. This was visible in ethnic policies where race frequently determined loyalty, and in his Russia-first policy of Socialism in One Country internationally, as well as his determinant practical (though not rhetorical) 1930s refusal to assist anticolonial movements. Following from Stalin, Mao retained significant ethnic elements within his own conceptualisation of socialism, which were later inherited and energetically developed and emphasised by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. An anticolonial nationalist tradition emerged to claim the early twentieth century concept of self-determination. Versailles expressly limited self-determination to some Eastern Europeans formerly under the German and Austro-Hungarian Empire, but this liberal concept was greatly legitimised by its adoption in the Treaty and was immediately integrated into the claims of the early Catalan and Irish independence movements. Anticolonialists elsewhere adopted this frame, which linked the existence of an discrete identity to the right to choose an autonomous political future, from Nehru’s Indian Congress to Ho’s Vietminh, and claimed access to the apparently now-universal values of humanity: equal rights for all people, and specifically the right to determine their fate through democratic self-rule. This came to a head in the immediate aftermath of WWII, when anticolonialists were able to quote the Atlantic and San Francisco Charters’ enshrining of universal rights. Anticolonial nationalists did not assume a survivalist struggle between identities, did not advocate ethnic suprematism, but did link the existence of a nation to the rights of statehood. This type of nationalism is today best represented by movements such as the Scottish National Party, the Sahrawi Polisario, or, as analysed later in this volume, the Catalan independentist parties. Socialism and communism remained vital to how anticolonial nationalists like Nehru, Ho, Nasser, Nyerere, and Ben Bella sought to modernise their countries after independence, but not to their vision for international cooperation and decolonisation. Indeed,

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anticolonial nationalists like Nkrumah were well aware of the need to articulate their nationalisms within substantive visions of a reconstituted global order that could allow them to flourish.12 The move of anticolonial nationalists towards a loosely liberal frame based on self-determination, advocating for global institutional reform or the construction of regional federalisms, was accelerated by the increasingly clear evidence, after WWII, that Stalin’s USSR and its attendant European Communist parties were unwilling to consider supporting colonial self-determination, in many cases voting with conservatives in European parliaments to repress anticolonial movements. As exemplified by the ideas emerging from the Bandung Conference and the broader Arab Nationalist movement, this frustration, best illustrated by Nehru and Ho’s frustrated 1945 appeals to the international norms that the allies had championed in WWII, led to a broader questioning of the liberalism and socialism of the time as irremediably Eurocentric.13 Whether explicitly questioned or otherwise, the gradual collapse of these ideas, often coinciding with one-party rule after independence, opened the way for the development of nationalist movements that, claiming their predecessors had betrayed identity, demanded supremacy for a single ethnic group. This would be seen in anticolonial Arab Nationalists, who from Morocco to Libya sought to erase non-Arab identities and cultures in the name of progress and unification, essentially appealing to the older Barrèsian logic that diversity threatens ethnic survival.14 In the 2020s, this pattern is visible in rising nationalist states like China and India. This is, furthermore, an illustrative example not only nationalism being key to the birth of the modern notion of the nation-state, but of the extent to which it still defines notions of statehood.

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 13 See, for example, Ahmad Rizky Umar, “The Bandung ideology: Anti-colonial internationalism and Indonesia’s Foreign Policy (1945–1965),” Asian Review 30, no. 2 (2017): 29–50; Pablo de Orellana, The Road to Vietnam (London: IB Tauris, 2020). 14 James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jeffrey James Byrne, “Our own special brand of socialism: Algeria and the contest of modernities in the 1960s”, Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 427–447; John Howe, “The crisis of Algerian nationalism and the rise of Islamic integralism,” New Left Review (1992): 85–85. 12 

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It is impossible to claim clear lines of uninterrupted evolution between these very different movements. While they share ideological, philosophical and practical precedents, it is vital to commit to studying distinct threads in their own contexts. These are messy histories with complex genealogies that tell us more about the influence of specific ideas than indicate unambiguous pathways of direct descent. While the White Nationalists that stormed the Capitol in 2021 shared many ideas with famous 1930s ethnonationalists, calling them Fascists is not only inaccurate, but obscures how their thinking operates and when/where it came from. In this specific case, genealogy reveals that these nationalists share precedents with 1930s ethnonationalists rather than stem directly from them, but also include ideological and conceptual fragments borrowed from many other movements, notably from Gramsci and the New Left. The complex birth and evolution of these ideas is most visible in the New Right, which refers to the series of nationalist movements behind Trump, Johnson, Salvini, Le Pen, Orbán, and others. This movement or set of movements, though superficially similar to other nationalists and extreme nationalists from preceding centuries, has a unique genealogy. Emerging from the birth-focussed tradition of Barrès, they combined that reactionary tradition with ideas about culture and politics from the Gramscian New Left to reach an understanding of identity and culture that, in its latest iteration, holds a view that unchanging cultures can only be accessed by individuals born into specific biological conditions.15 By the same token, the New Right views the liberation of people from their biologically determined roles (race and gender) as destructive of the biological conditions for survival, which is why the concern with ending and reversing migration goes hand in hand with a war on feminism and gender liberation.16 At the international level, as domestically, the nationalists of the New Right reject any notion of universal rights and have worked to replace them, nationally and internationally, with paradigms that impose hierarchies based on birth-culture. Besides allowing them to speak of race through reference to birth into a culture without mentioning race itself, the New Right retains the Barrèsian assumption that people of different Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “Manifesto: The French new right in the year 2000,” Telos 115, no. Spring (1999): 117–144. 16 We have explored this concept, its history and international application extensively in Orellana and Michelsen, “Reactionary internationalism.” 15 

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birth-cultures are destined to struggle. Crucially, though, and unlike their older counterparts, the New Right does not seek an energetic programme for racial power. Rather it inherits the deregulating modus operandi of its 1980s neoliberal influence, blended with postwar “revolutionary conservatism” to argue, as occurred with Brexit, that once liberated from unjust constraints that weaken the nation by subjecting it to the same rules as others, its triumph is assured. These unjust constraints are specifically ideas and programmes designed for equality among genders and identities, which the New Right argue are natural differences to be celebrated and unleashed rather than supressed. Gender and Human Rights have been their key international and domestic targets over the last few years, as exemplified by anti-abortion, anti-Me Too, anti-LGBT and anti-Human Rights New Right international collaborations at the UN, the EU and elsewhere.17 But while the main political agents of the New Right, from Trump to Orbán and Bolsonaro, appear united in their war on international liberal norms, their movement is significantly more divided than it might appear. Though these politicians draw mostly on the “mainstream” of the New Right, best represented by thinkers like de Benoist and proponents like Bannon or Gove, it is itself split over the question of how pessimistically to interpret the late modern condition. De Benoist and others, whom we might call the defensive wing of the movement, share the belief that the collapse of the West can be interrupted if the liberal norms and traitors that sabotage its successful defence are destroyed. This is why domestic and international culture war on liberal norms are central to their policy agenda. This is ­countered by the argument of another of its early French members, Faye, that the corruption of white ethnic groups and their lands is already too far advanced. Faye argues that the only solution is for a cadre of loyal ethnically aware pioneers to prepare and arm for an apocalyptic end to the current cycle of decadence, which will culminate in a global race war for survival. This wing of the movement, which has a strong presence in the United States, plans for an “archeo-futurism” to come: a future predicated on ethnic birth, biology, culture and primordial links to the land. There are similarly fundamental cleavages in the New Right over how to manage national economic resources, and the degree to which global norms around ­ free-trade and deregulation should be accelerated or shattered for the good of the nation. See, for example, Feliciano De Sá Guimarães and Irma Dutra De Oliveira E Silva, “Farright populism and foreign policy identity: Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservatism and the new politics of alignment,” International Affairs 97, no. 2 (March 1, 2021): 345–363. 17 

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We are, therefore, looking at a complex ecosystem of ideas loosely centred on the political entitlements of a nation. Looking at this history of ideas, we identify a growing number of splits along key paradigms that often only unite to oppose their ancient liberal nemesis: birth, blood, regional, gender, and other claims to identity, each of which is claimed to be the only “natural” paradigm for political and social conduct. Studying these traditions and their internal debates is further complicated by the far greater visibility of their political agents such as Le Pen and Génération Indentitaire, as opposed to the main thinkers of these traditions such as de Benoist. This is vital, for in political practice the New Right relies on loose, changing and often very discreet or informal alliances that are liable to change quickly and often remain united only by common appeals to culture wars.18 These alliances are not only a way of gathering several constituencies that might not otherwise unify under a single party, but reflect a veritable modus operandi that responds to the many divisions in the New Right whilst denoting how their alliances are so far held together by hatred of liberal norms. This is visible in Trump’s relationship with the Alt-Right, the Brexit campaign, where two campaigns, one more ethnically radical than the other, fought to leave the EU but did not explicitly contradict each other. The drive uniting most nationalists worldwide today is how to challenge liberal universalism seeking equal rights for all. This is the main reason we identify a major split between ethnonationalist-geopolitical traditions and nationalisms based on self-determination. This split is one of the most stable in the vast ecosystem of nationalist ideas, as is readily apparent by their constant feuds with nationalists of other traditions. Examples include the conflict between a Barrèsian ethnonationalist France led by de Gaulle, for whom domination over “the Indochinese races” proved the “superiority of France” — a clear commitment to racial inequality directly contested by the Vietminh’s demand for self-determination as a universal right.19 This is a good example because, like the memory of the Algerian War and indeed most colonial history in Europe, it has been the subject of energetic revisionism by nationalists that wish to defend this

This is most visible in how Trump, Brexiters and Le Pen tacitly drew support from extremists such as respectively, Alt-Right groups, Leave.EU, and Generation Identitaire in 2016–2017. 19 See Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 18 

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history, and especially how this history necessitates and assumes ideas of identity hierarchies. The dichotomic divide between ethnic and self-determination nationalists is of particular significance. Firstly, their ideas are diametrically opposed, one advocating ethnic superiority and institutional inequality, the other the right for self-determination on the assumption of equal rights. Secondly, this clash has led to long-running conflicts of varying severity, from the Spanish-Catalan question, which has been simmering since the early twentieth century and is joined by many other European “regional” nationalisms such as the Basque and Corsican cases, to the conflicts caused by movements seeking to retain or establish ethnic supremacy such as the efforts of Rhodesian and South African white minorities to retain supremacy over self-determination rebels ZANU-PF and ANC, and even the conflict in Northern Ireland. The latter example reminds us of the vast complexity and variety of nationalisms and how they conceptualise identity as, not unlike Modi’s Hindu nationalism, it frequently treats confessional allegiance as akin to ethnic birth. This divide within nationalism reflects and is the product of ethnic nationalism’s own and oldest causus belli: the war on liberalism and its ideas of equality. The divide revolves around two vital loci of ideas, which may be understood as two systems of thought that have been facing off for over two centuries. These are what poststructuralists call epistemes: systems that govern meaning, order what is seen, how it is interpreted, and inform the logic of subsequent action and interpretation as well as material, discursive and other affects. The first is built around classical liberal concepts of individual rights, based on the assumption that birth should not determine social, political and other rights, and the very gradual extension of these rights to other identities, particularly in the twentieth century. Opposing it is the reaction against the very idea of a common human condition, and the claim that birth and its biological identity should continue to be the basis for social and political order, and legitimate any resulting differential hierarchies. In other words, what is at stake here is the extent to which birth and its biological conditions should determine a human’s place. Answering this question defines the divide between nationalists and liberals today as it did when Bismarck embraced ethnonationalism to smash liberalism in Germany, and indeed between ethnonationalist and self-determination nationalists from the interwar period onwards. Furthermore, we argue, it is also the key reason why the ethnonationalist family of ideas remains so

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fractured to this day, for they are too divided on questions such as whether national, regional or continental identities matter more to defining a nation, whether wealth inequalities should be considered the result “­natural” inequalities, and, as is the case of the accelerationist-defensive divide within New Right Nationalists, whether identity might already be too corrupted to save. This is but a broad and tentative typology of nationalism induced from its own intellectual history. There is no space in this volume for an exhaustive genealogy of nationalist ideas, but this reflection on the state of nationalist ideas and their history allow us to take a detailed view of the diverse territory of nationalisms. For it is only by understanding these ideas in their contexts, linking the ideas, their mechanisms and logics to those of the movements that front them in space and time that we can analyse and draw insights from these ideas in action, and critique their political dynamics. In the following diagram (Figure 1), we summarise the broad findings of our genealogy of nationalist ideas as summarised in this introductory chapter. It is not exhaustive, and for many movements and schools we have only been able to include key examples and thinkers, but it provides a tentative means to visualise their evolution, where ideas cross and draw on one another — or do not, and instead introduce new fracturing ideas into the lineage.

Whither Nationalism? In this introductory chapter, we have argued that understanding nationalism requires embracing the complexity of its intellectual traditions. We are looking at a huge family of ideas featuring complicated histories, breaks, splits, incoherent deployments of concepts and histories, narratives and political purposes that do not always align neatly and may sometimes contradict each other. This is precisely why it is vital to understand when and how they come to cohere and resonate in specific formations, sometimes producing counter-intuitive political consequences and discursive effects.20 In sum, nationalist intellectual history requires methodically For a common contradictory discursive formation absorbed by the US New Right that would benefit from this approach, see William E. Connolly, “The Evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (2005): 869–886. 20 

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[

EVOLUTION

[

]

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) • permanent struggle in nature • survival of the fittest

]

GEOGRAPHY

Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859) Carl Ritter (1779-1859) • geography as study of the ‘anatomy of the earth’

ETHNO-GEOPOLITICS Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904)

• ‘anthropogeographie/politische geographie’

[

determines ‘the history of mankind’ as a struggle for lebensraum Rudolf Kjéllen (1864-1922) • Geopolitik as five conditions for survival: 1.Reich: Raum + Leben organised to perform violence; 2. Volk: race-as-nation; 3. Haushalt: land autarchy for self-sufficiency; 4. Gesellschaft: social organisation of Volk; 5. Regierung: government to coordinate above

GEOSTRATEGY

Alfred Mahan (1840-1914) • ‘thassalocracy’ and naval bases

FUTURISM

Karl Haushofer (1869-1946)

• total consensus needed for acceleration and

survival through war, framed as per Kjéllen’s spatial-racial theory • determines ‘the history of mankind’ as a struggle for lebensraum • 'the Eurasian order': strategic application of Lebensraum and Heartland theories

• razza-spirito as core identity and subject • history is the expression of the will of race

develop national power

• vita nazionale to replace family and traditional social life

Rudolf Hess (1894-1987) Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) • geostrategic drive for Lebensraum as colonising space in Europe • socio-biological determinism: gender, race, history as a struggle for purity and space • history determined by race+space • autarchy, racial leadership, agency of state-as-race, not individual

Aleksandr Dugin (1962-) • Geopolitical European race-civilisation • 'Eurasia’ against geopolitical foes in Asia and the Americas • authoritarian politics and economy • Eurasian Orthodox birth-race-religion

Giulio Evola (1898-1974)

social revolution

• accelerazione e sublimazione as means to

NATIONAL SOCIALISM

NATIONAL BOLSHEVISM

REACTIONARY TRADITIONALISM

Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944)

• Lebensraum as a pan-regional strategy for racial

Jean-François Thiriart (1922-1992) • Pan-European cultural and racial identity • 'Great Europe' against geopolitical foes Asia and Americas • communitarian economy

Charles Maurras (1868-1952)

• birthright, monarchy, anti-democracy • cultural permanence • natural inequality

Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) • ‘geostrategy’ and the ‘heartland theory’

ETHNO-GEOSTRATEGY

NATIONAL COMMUNISM

]

INTEGRAL NATIONALISM

FASCISMO Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) • Unione di fasci (corporatist society) • dictatorship on behalf of razza-spirito • Azione Fascista and national consensus • vita nazionale to replace traditional society

ETHNO-HISTORICAL CYCLES Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) • cultures as organisms with limited lifespans • cultures/civilisations inevitably struggle • cultural history is predicable in cycles • West declining due to self-destructing ‘Faustian’ tendencies

NOMOS OF THE EARTH Carl Schmitt (1888-1985)

• Eurocentric civilisation as only manageable global order • sovereignty is ausnahmezustand (state of emergency) • rejection of universal laws • state unity defined by struggle against enemy • unity under ausnahmezustand

NEO-SPENGLERIANISM Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960)

• West can only survive when supreme • only absolutism can save West

Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008)

• civilisations destined to ‘clash’ • necessary to think of international order as civilisational struggle

KEY non-nationalist influences influence or reuse of concepts NAPOLEONISM key nationalist schools of thought key thinkers Rudolf Kjéllen key ideas • [EVOLUTION]

© Pablo de Orellana, 2021

ACCELERATIONIST NEW RIGHT Guillaume Faye (1949-2019)

• inescapable cycle of civilisational decadence • must accelerate into global race war • prepare for ‘archeo-futurism’ after global race war

Figure 1:    Diagram summarising the history of key nationalist ideas and their influences.

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[

LIBERALISM Locke/Rousseau/Jefferson

]

• universal rights • democracy and political freedom • free trade • equality of rights and before law

NAPOLEONISM Napoleone di Buonaparte (1769-1821) • populist republican dictatorship • French ‘nation’ as core subject • liberal rights limited to one identity

[

LENINISM Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)

]

• vanguard of the proletariat dictatorship • centrally planned economy • historical-materialist analysis of human

REACTIONARY INSTITUTIONALISM Maurice Barrès (1862-1923)

relations

• core subject is class

• race-as-culture • birthright to land and spirit • 'populisme' as government legitimacy

ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISMS Nehru/Ho/Nyerere

• communitarian social contract • postcolonial consciousness including rejection

SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY

of single-identity statehood • often co-existed with communism + vanguard dictatorship

Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) Mao Zedong (1893-1976)

• ethnic management of loyalty • communism surviving in one country is priority • geopolitical management of international relations

[

NEW LEFT

]

[

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

• political acceptability as focus of struggle for power

• post-Marxist identity and

[

economics

NEOLIBERALISM Von Mises/Hayek/Friedman (1980s)

• 'the freedom to fail'- economic

CONFUCIAN COSMOLOGIES

]

Various authors from Confucius (551-479BCE) • five phases in cosmic cycle • nation is one body, must work in ‘harmony’ • enlightened rule to ‘rise’

]

Darwinism (Hayek) • reform by 'liberalisation' - removal of universalist constraints (Friedman) • "nomos of the earth" is economic success (von Mises)

NEW RIGHT CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARY Armin Mohler (1920-2003) Dominique Venner (1935-2013) • focus on European civilisation • birth-determined belonging to culture (birth-culture) • revolution against liberal modernity and universality of rights • struggles are economic and civilisational • populism as sovereign will

HARMONIOUS SOCIETY New Confucianists Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan and Zhang Junmai

• "A Manifesto on Chinese Culture to the World" (1958) • all ideational resources available within Chinese culture, • ‘harmony’ as focus of rule • Chinese particularity in culture and humanity

HINDUTVA NATIONALISM Vinayak Savarkar (1883-1966)

• homogenised Hindu majority (‘race-culture-nation’) as core subject • seeks ethno-cultural hegemony • restructure society along ‘natural’ (often caste/gender) order • promote ‘Hindu view of history’

XI THOUGHT Xi Jinping (1953-)

DEFENSIVE NEW RIGHT Alain de Benoist (1943-) Pierre Vial (1942-) Paul Gottfried (1941-) • birth-culture, natural inequality of identities • liberalisation (removal) of universalist norms as reform method • defend against the ‘ethnic colonisation’ of Europe • politics downstream from culture

b4463-FM.indd 33

• Communism with Chinese Characteristics • exploit ‘time to rise’ phase in cycle • geostrategic competition with other countries • links identity to dissent/loyalty • ‘harmony’ as social discipline; re-link human to nature

• ‘cultural confidence’ and role of Confucianism

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unpicking specific traditions and theories, and how these were used, transformed, synthesised or morphed through political use and discourse to shape instantiations in the present. This volume embraces an approach that seeks to be sensitive to the theoretical, historical and political specificities of nationalism. In Part I we examine key concepts and approaches in nationalism in an attempt to discern the dynamics that constitute its political grounding. To this end, Moran M. Mandelbaum explores the repetition of nationalist discursive and affective appeal, seeking to illuminate the role of utopianism and joy in the reproduction of nationalism and its political success. Joel Chong uses the case of Singapore to retrieve and emphasise the material coproduction of the imagined community of the nation, while in Chapter 3 the editors offer their own insights into how classical nineteenth century ethnic nationalism returned with new conceptual, discursive and political tools that challenge approximations and comparisons with 1930s ethnic nationalist movements and instead point us to the vital role played by online cultures in the development of the latest iteration of nationalist ideas. Part II of the book explores the practical dynamics of nationalist politics at work. These chapters focus on the formation of identity, in contesting and negotiating — even defining — political legitimacy, and how opposing nationalisms can co-produce one another. In Chapter 4, Hassan Zaheer deploys discourse analysis methods to explore the precise competitive (and co-productive) mechanisms through which nationalism in India and Pakistan with Narendra Modi and Imran Khan appear to be on the cusp of establishing an inescapable Schmidtian confrontation. Bavo Stevens, conversely, analyses in Chapter 5 how nationalism constitutes a contested political site for the production of political legitimacy in Thailand. In Chapter 6, Javier Carbonell Castañer examines how Spanish and Catalan nationalisms are locked in a cycle of mutual co-production and grievance, and in Chapter 7 Daniel Rueda explores whether Japan and China have become entangled in a cycle of nationalist mutual co-­ production, drawing on unresolved historical grievances. Part III explores the production of boundaries of identity. It focusses on discourses that address, govern and inscribe the social conditions of nationalist identity and belonging, particularly focussing on ethnic, gendered heroism, nation-building, and the place of those living at the conceptual and social edges of the modern nation. In Chapter 8, Abrham Yohannes Gebremichael employs sociological approaches to discern the

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mechanisms of Ethiopian Jewish identity production, arguing that there are key nuances in the configuration of its positionality key to its evolving politics. Retrieving the vital role of gender in the production of nationalist discourses of status, power and nationalist heroism, in Chapter 9, Julie Patarin-Jossec analyses how post-Soviet Russia has drawn on its achievements in space exploration to establish a post-Soviet heroic identity drawing on and consecrating gendered representations. Conversely, in Chapter 10, Ruth Mireille Manga Edimo explores the ways in which the Anglophone secessionist movement in Cameroon has emerged as a response to the failure of Cameroonian nation-building. Finally, testing the limit conditions of nationalist identity-making, in Chapter 11, Zarqa Parvez explores the complex ways in which tribalism was co-opted by Qatar in its historical myth-making, but also left outside of the “proper” remit of the modern Qatari nation. This is but a beginning to understanding nationalist ideas and the movements that proclaim them. In this volume, we seek explicitly to showcase a set of reflections on a number of cases, concepts and concerns. Furthermore, the essays in this collection reflect the huge analytical advantages to be had from taking an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of nationalism. As was clear at the workshop where this volume originated, this is but a start to contributions to thinking critically about contemporary nationalisms, one explicitly devoted to conceptually detailed, historically and contextually informed analyses of the greatest issue of our time by established, early career and junior scholars. Rather than offering a complete analytical solution, in this volume we showcase new work that has sought to unthread and expound traditions, practices and applications of nationalist thought and discourse. It takes this as a starting point and reflects on contemporary nationalism in detail, accepting its historical and present-day heterogeneity and diversity as vital to illuminating how nationalist movements think, feel and practice their ideas about humanity, society, and the state. The work of understanding nationalism must continue. In particular, the key challenge in this realm lies in embracing methodological pluralism while also emphasising the need for analytical depth in coherently exploring the relationship between nationalist theories and the resulting political and governance and practices that draw on them. For it remains the case that the effects of nationalism are much more visible than its own diverse methods to construct constituencies of support. Further inquiry into how nationalist identity-making works remains vital and

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underexplored, most probably because nationalists can draw on the widespread assumption that the state should contain a single nation, thus making their theories a realisation of an old ideal of statehood that their discourses make into an unchanging and timeless frame of reference. Furthermore, as argued by Mandelbaum in this volume, there are emotional, empathetic and affective forces addressed by nationalist discourses that need further exploration, not to mention the far more subjective but frequently significant artistic, aesthetic and sensorial dimensions of these discourses. Before leaving our readers to consider the contributions offered in this volume, we would like to make the case that the priority in understanding nationalism and its political movements must however be its ideas. This is because, particularly in the first two decades of the new millennium, nationalist ideas have evolved at a frantic speed across many sites. Many, like the apocalyptic accelerationists who seek to provoke a global race war, begun as very small niche online movements discussing ethnonationalist theories of “race realism” before exploding into dozens of far larger, more visible and increasingly organised parties, militias and grassroots movements. The present nationalist moment appears to comprise a particularly chaotic but hyper-productive intellectual scene, where ideas mix and draw on one another, developing and introducing new concepts and then rejecting them at speed. And, it is worth emphasising, this is not simply a technological phenomenon living its life online. We are seeing ideas that, in the case of the accelerationist wing of the New Right, have been developing for over 20 years and in the last decade have not only produced movements such as Génération Identitaire, but also radicalised individuals that have subsequently committed murderous outrages to carry out their ideas. This was, for example, evident in the case with the attacker at Christchurch, who had been radicalised by the Austrian chapter of Génération Identitaire. As he explained in his manifesto, he was motivated by the accelerationist thesis of a racial replacement and hoped to speed society into an inevitable race war. When considering the need for effective analysis of the power of nationalist ideas today, the stakes are high.

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Part I

Nationalist Theories and Concepts

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Governing Asia

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Chapter 1

The Repetitions of Nationalism: Ontology, Fantasy, and Jouissance Moran M. Mandelbaum SPGS, Keele University, Keele, Newcastle ST5 5BG, UK

What is it about nationalism that lends itself to such continuous permutations and repetitions, to its mobility? Why are “we” continuously investing in it despite its failures and indeed its darker side of exclusions, xenophobia, and even genocide? This chapter reflects on the power and form of nationalism in (late) modernity by offering a reading of nationalism’s recurrences and its affective appeal. Specifically, this chapter develops three mutually enabling machineries that drive and animate projects of nationalism. These are as follows: (1) the ontological fissure at the heart of the nation/state and indeed the national ­subject/object (the split subject), (2) the phantasmatic nature of national narratives of utopian closure and wholeness, and (3) the jouissance (enjoyment) in nationalism, namely the temporal nature of affective belonging and the sense that this mode of enjoyment was lost and/or stolen by an other.

3

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Introduction This chapter seeks to contribute to this Global Nationalism collection by unpacking the machineries that drive and animate nationalism.1 It asks: What is it in nationalism that lends itself to such continuous p­ ermutations and repetitions, to its perpetuum mobile? Why are “we” continuously investing in it despite its failures and indeed its darker side of exclusions, xenophobia, and even genocide? This does not mean that “history repeats itself,” that what we are witnessing today is the reincarnation of twentiethcentury-European fascism. Rather, this chapter reflects on the machineries that enable nationalism’s recurrences, whilst deploying a psychoanalytical reading of nationalism’s ontology and affective power. The scholarship on nationalism in modernity and contemporary (new) nationalism is rich and indeed growing, especially in recent years following the rise of nationalist sentiments across Europe, the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the USA. Nonetheless, with some notable exceptions,2 very few have deployed a psychoanalytical perspective in their reading of nationalism. Taking a historical and/ or a comparative political approach, some analyse the rise of populist/ nationalist far-right political parties and movements in recent decades, looking into a broader historical, often European, trajectory and u­ npacking

I’m grateful to the organisers, Pablo de Orellana and Nick Michelsen, and the participants of the Reflections on Nationalism workshop at King’s College, June 2019, for their excellent comments and suggestions. 2 Christopher S. Browning, “Brexit populism and fantasies of fulfilment,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32, no. 3 (May 4, 2019): 222–224; Catarina Kinnvall, “Ontological insecurities and postcolonial imaginaries: The emotional appeal of populism,” Humanity & Society 42, no. 4 (November 1, 2018): 523–543; Moran M. Mandelbaum, “The Brexit fantasy,” E-International Relations (blog), June 28, 2016, https://www.e-ir.info/2016/06/28/the-brexit-fantasy/; Moran M. Mandelbaum, The Nation/ State Fantasy: A Psychoanalytical Genealogy of Nationalism, 1st ed. 2020 edition (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Nikolay Mintchev and Henrietta L. Moore, “Brexit’s identity politics and the question of subjectivity,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 24, no. 4 (December 1, 2019): 452–472; Nadya Ali and Ben Whitham, “The unbearable anxiety of being: Ideological fantasies of British Muslims beyond the politics of security,” Security Dialogue 49, no. 5 (October 1, 2018): 400–417 who offer a strong psychoanalytical interrogation of anti-Muslim sentiments in the UK. 1 

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the complex relationship between populism, nationalism, and fascism.3 Others focus on the discursive productions of national identity, xenophobia and racism, identifying the ways in which immigrants, “foreigners” and in many cases Muslims are rendered the enemy.4 To International Relations (IR) scholars, today’s nationalism is better read within the post-WWII geopolitical context. Focussing on new nationalism and the New Right (e.g. Steve Bannon, Marine Le Pen), Drolet and Williams, for instance, urge us to interrogate the New Right’s intellectual lineage, historical development and political ideology vis-à-vis the existing geopolitical order.5 De Orellana and Michelsen take this further, arguing that the New Right envisions a normative and ideological international architecture that is reactionary vis-à-vis the existing liberal order and a humanist-universalist agenda, whilst grounding their identitarianism in ethnic “birth-culture”.6 Elisabeth Carter, “Right-wing extremism/radicalism: Reconstructing the concept,” Journal of Political Ideologies 23, no. 2 (May 4, 2018): 157–182; Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Distinctions and articulations: A discourse theoretical framework for the study of populism and nationalism,” Javnost — The Public 24, no. 4 (October 2, 2017): 301–319; Roger Eatwell, “Ten theories of the extreme right,” in Cas Mudde, ed. The Populist Radical Right (London: Routledge, 2016); Aristotle Kallis, “Breaking taboos and ‘mainstreaming the extreme’: The debates on restricting Islamic symbols in contemporary Europe,” in Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik, and Brigitte Mral, eds., Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, 1st edition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017); Cas Mudde, ed., The Populist Radical Right: A Reader, 1st edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Ben Stanley, “Populism in central and Eastern Europe,” in Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser et al., The Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 4 Stuart Croft, Securitizing Islam: Identity and the Search for Security, Illustrated edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); John E. Richardson and Ruth Wodak, “Recontextualising fascist ideologies of the past: Right-wing discourses on employment and nativism in Austria and the United Kingdom,” Critical Discourse Studies 6, no. 4 (November 1, 2009): 251–267; Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What RightWing Populist Discourses Mean (London: Sage, 2015). 5 Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, “Radical conservatism and global order: International theory and the new right,” International Theory 10, no. 3 (November 2018): 285–313. 6 Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen, “Reactionary internationalism: The philosophy of the new right,” Review of International Studies 45, no. 5 (December 2019): 748–767. 3 

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In recent nations and nationalism scholarship, Rogers Brubaker has advocated reading the contemporary juncture as national-populism, arguing that in the USA and parts of Europe the archetypical “us vs. them” narrative entails both the populist-vertical and the nationalist-horizontal axis.7 Brubaker further argued, however, that within this new architecture of national-populism we could identify a specific cluster of countries (e.g. Netherlands, France), exhibiting a shift from nationalism to “civilisationalism.” In this cluster “… the opposition between self and other” consists of an ambiguous and paradoxical convergence of Christian and philosemitic sentiments together with progressive-liberal stances regarding sexuality, LGBTQ and women’s rights vis-à-vis an Islamic and illiberal world,8 thus lending itself to homonationalist claims of sovereign legitimation.9 The rise of (new) nationalism and populism further raises political, legal and ethical questions regarding democracy and its relationship with the demos, the people.10 Focussing on the USA and the UK, Babones pointed to the vitality of contemporary populist politics,11 whereas others

Rogers Brubaker, “Between nationalism and civilizationism: The European populist moment in comparative perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 8 (June 21, 2017): 1191–1226; Rogers Brubaker, “Populism and nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 1 (2020): 44–66; compare with Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Distinctions and articulations: A discourse theoretical framework for the study of populism and nationalism,” Javnost — The Public 24, no. 4 (October 2, 2017): 301–319. 8 Brubaker, “Between nationalism and civilizationism,” 1193. 9 Moran M. Mandelbaum, “‘I’m a proud Israeli’: Homonationalism, belonging and the insecurity of the Jewish-Israeli body national,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 23, no. 2 (June 1, 2018): 160–179; Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 10 Brubaker, “Populism and nationalism”; Dr Margaret Canovan, The People, 1st edition (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2005); Moran M. Mandelbaum, “The fantasy of congruency: The Abbé Sieyès and the ‘nation-state’ Problématique revisited,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 42, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 246–266; Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 11 Salvatore Babones, The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity, 2018). 7 

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critiqued the authoritarian and antidemocratic facets of populism and new nationalism within and beyond the West.12 Nationalism, therefore, may be multi-faceted, manifesting itself across time and space in myriad permutations and lending itself to multiple crossfertilisations with other ideologies and/or movements such as populism, civilisationism and/or the New Right. Equally important, nationalism, either old or new, raises key ethical questions regarding democracy and its vitality. One thing is clear: nationalism’s ubiquitous and repetitive nature in modernity and in the contemporary world is u­ ndeniable.13 Strikingly, however, this precise issue of nationalism’s r­ epetitions has gone somewhat unnoticed. As such, nationalism’s fluctuations, mutations and recurrences raise the simple question: “How is this possible?” This chapter reflects on the power and form of nationalism,14 as I offer three main machineries that animate and drive nationalism, aiming to advance our understanding of nationalism’s repetitions in (late) modernity. I develop here a Lacanian inspired framework which is useful to analyse nationalism at the ontological-formal level, namely by revealing what conditions its possibility, as well as in examining specific cases of national identities, national movements and the contemporary architecture of the New Right and the geopolitics of civilisationism. First, I reflect on nationalism and the ontology of the nation/state, identifying the void and anxiety at the heart of the nationalist promise, through a psychoanalytical reading of Ernest Gellner’s theorisation of nationalism. Second, I reflect on the fantasmatic function of nationalism, namely how on the one hand Editorial, “The rise of ‘authoritarian populism’ in the 21st century: From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America,” Journal of Global Faultlines 4, no. 1 (2017): 3–6; Henry A. Giroux, “White nationalism, armed culture and state violence in the age of Donald Trump,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 43, no. 9 (November 1, 2017): 887–910; Nadia Urbinati, “A revolt against intermediary bodies,” Constellations 22, no. 4 (2015): 477–486. 13 Daniele Conversi, “Modernism and nationalism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 17, no. 1 (February 1, 2012): 13–34; Moran M. Mandelbaum, “The fantasy of congruency: The Abbé Sieyès and the ‘nation-state’ Problématique revisited,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 42, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 246–266. 14 Mandelbaum, The Nation/State Fantasy; Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 189–210; Yannis Stavrakakis and Nikos Chrysoloras, “(I can’t get no) enjoyment: Lacanian theory and the analysis of nationalism,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 11, no. 2 (August 1, 2006): 144–163. 12 

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it offers a narrative that seeks to stabilise the contingency of the national body and offer the utopian vision of closure and security, whilst on the other hand, identifying an inside/outside element to blame for the inability to ascertain that promised utopia. Third, I reflect on the affective dimension of nationalism, enabling it to produce the national edifice and subject through modes of collective jouissance.15 This is to go beyond the discursive-formal aspect of nationalism and interrogate nationalism’s power of interpellation.16 Overall, the three machineries at play — i.e. the ontological fissure at the heart of national subjectivity and objectivity, the fantasmatic nature of the nationalist utopia, and the enjoyment to be found in nationalism — mutually sustain one another. Their relationship is thus dialectical in the sense that the ontological void produces anxiety which drives an endless search for subjective and objective resolution. This in turn lends itself to impossible narratives of wholeness (fantasy), always keeping national subjectivity in a mode of suspension, and animated by temporary modes of bodily enjoyment (e.g. national celebrations, projects of “national renewal,” militarisation). This chapter proceeds as follows: The first part puts forth a Lacanianpsychoanalytical reading of the nation/state and nationalism. The second part unpacks the fantasmatic nature of nationalism, whereas the third and the final part unpacks the jouissance that animates projects of nationalism. The conclusion summarises the key argument, whilst reflecting on the mutually sustaining relationship between the three main machineries this chapter unpacks.

Nationalism and the Empty Ontology of the Nation/State The crux of this chapter suggests reading nationalism and the nation/state through the psychoanalytical ontology of void. This means drawing on, but going beyond, the rich scholarship on the socio-historical making of

Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left; Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, New edition (London: Verso Books, 2009). 16 Moran M. Mandelbaum, “‘I’m a proud Israeli’: Homonationalism, belonging and the insecurity of the Jewish-Israeli body national,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 23, no. 2 (June 1, 2018): 160–179. 15 

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nations/states and the international,17 as well as the social constructivist, poststructuralist and feminist readings of nationalism, security and global politics.18 This is so because I am here reflecting on the ontological possibility of nationalism’s repetitions in modernity. It is the empty ontology of the nation/state, I argue, that establishes the conditions of possibility for the myriad and contingent socio-political, historical, and gendered performative practices that make the nation/state. I begin with Ernest Gellner’s theorisation of nationalism as a political principle of legitimate authority relying on cultural homogeneity, or the rendering of state and nation congruent. As Gellner famously puts it: Nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state — a contingency already John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press); Daniele Conversi, “‘We are all equals!’ Militarism, homogenization and ‘Egalitarianism’ in nationalist state-building (1789–1945),” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 7 (October 1, 2008): 1286–1314; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples: 84 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990, 1st edition (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993); Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge England and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era (London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism reconsidered and E. H. Carr,” Review of International Studies 18, no. 4 (October 1992): 285–293; Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology, 1st edition (Cambridge: Polity, 1987); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 18 Linda Åhäll, “The dance of militarisation: A feminist security studies take on ‘the Political’,” Critical Studies on Security 4, no. 2 (May 3, 2016): 154–168; Victoria Basham, “Gender, race, militarism and remembrance: The everyday geopolitics of the poppy”. Gender, Place & Culture 23, no. 6 (2016); L. Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006); Brent J. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State, 1st edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 1st edition (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd., 1997); Ayşe Zarakol, “Ontological (in) security and state denial of historical crimes: Turkey and Japan,” International Relations 24, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 3–23. 17 

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formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation — should not separate the power-holders from the rest.19

To Gellner, nationalism as the production of homogeneous political communities was functionally key to modern society going through industrialisation. This was so, according to Gellner, since “[w]ith the passage to industrial society, a standardized ‘high’ culture became an allpervasive requisite,”20 a form of social engineering designed and executed by the state apparatus. This mode of nation/state congruency is often read as paramount to security, peace, democracy, and a modernised international order in a myriad of political science and IR scholarship.21 Gellner’s theorisation of nationalism has been foundational to the nations and nationalism scholarship,22 lending itself to various scholarly debates and critiques over the years.23 A key issue with Gellner’s theory of nationalism and the nation/state, however, is his essentialising and somewhat deterministic approach, reading history as a teleological move towards an international order based on congruent “nation-states.”24 Nonetheless, I suggest we read Gellner’s theorisation of nationalism as an idealised future promising to achieve homogeneous political communities, rather than an empirical observation. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1. Conversi, “‘We are all equals!’ Militarism, homogenization and ‘Egalitarianism’ in nationalist state-building (1789–1945),” 1290; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 34. 21 Moran M. Mandelbaum, “One state-one nation: The naturalisation of nation–state congruency in IR theory,” Journal of International Relations and Development 16, no. 4 (October 1, 2013): 514–538. 22 Brendan O’Leary, “Ernest Gellner’s diagnoses of nationalism: A critical overview, or, what is living and what is dead in Ernest Gellner’s philosophy of nationalism?”, in John A. Hall (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 23 Geert Van den Bossche, “Is there nationalism after Ernest Gellner? An exploration of methodological choices,” Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 4 (2003): 491–509; John A. Hall and Ian Charles Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996); Chris Hann, “Gellner’s structural-functional-culturalism”, Czech Sociological Review 9, no. 2 (2001): 173–181; John A. Hall (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 24 Moran M. Mandelbaum, “The Gellnerian modality revisited: Towards a ‘Genealogy’ of cultural homogenization and nation-state congruency,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (August 26, 2014), vol. 37, no. 11 (2014): 2014–2033. 19 

20 

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Thinking of the Gellnerian maxim of congruent polities and reading it through a psychoanalytical lens means theorising the ontology of void at the heart of both objectivity and subjectivity. According to Jacques Lacan, on the back of Freud’s theory of the splitting of the ego as a defence mechanism (Spaltung), we ought to read subjectivity as barred ($), a split subject.25 As Fink argues this is a split “… between consciousness and unconsciousness, between an ineluctably false sense of self and the automatic functioning of language (the signifying chain) in the unconsciousness.”26 The ontological status of the subject in the Lacanian register is one of lack, that is, a lack of identity, leading to an unremitting quest to cover the lack, to overcome the impossibility of identity.27 As Paul Verhaeghe explains: Again, Lacan distances himself from any idea of substantiality. The subject is not an unconscious intention that will interrupt the normal conscious discourse. The interruption or division does not take place between a real or authentic part and a false, external one, but the split defines the subject as such.28

This is why we are not talking here about the autobiographical narration of national identity29 or the security-seeking nature of states in global Jacques Lacan, in Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X, 1st edition (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2016). 26 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Revised edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 27 Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999); Charlotte Epstein, “Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics,” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (2011): 327–350; Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and religious nationalism: Self, identity, and the search for ontological security,” Political Psychology 25, no. 5 (2004): 741–767; Catarina Kinnvall, “Feeling ontologically (in)secure: States, traumas and the governing of gendered space,” Cooperation and Conflict 52, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 90–108; Andreja Zevnik, Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics: Rethinking the Ontology of the Political Subject (London: Routledge, 2016). 28 Verhaeghe, Paul, “Causation and destitution of a pre-ontological non-entity: On the Lacanian subject”, in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Dany Nobus (ed.). (London: Routledge, 1995). 29 Felix Berenskoetter, “Parameters of a national biography,” European Journal of International Relations 20, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 262–288. 25 

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politics as such.30 Rather, this ontology of the split and lacking subjectivity entails an endless and bound to fail process of identification.31 As Stavrakakis clearly explains: “What we have then … is not identities but identification, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play.”32 This is where the various practices of national commemorations and mythscapes play a role,33 namely, by offering an illusionary national ­edifice with which to identify and thus attempting, whilst failing, to close the subjective lack and satisfy the subject’s desire.34 The objective field, nonetheless, is also in a state of void thus reintroducing the split at the subjective level. As Stavrakakais puts it: If I need to identify with something it is not only because I don’t have a full identity in the first place, but also because all my attempts to acquire it by identifying with a supposedly full Other are failing.35

The Lacanian reading of the lacking subject and object, taken together with Freud’s Group Psychology, is crucial here to avoid the artificial application of psychoanalysis from the individual to the collective level. Rather, it is the confluence and the void of both the subject and the object, their ontological lack, which renders political battles for meaning an endless venture,36 and underpins the relentless and repetitive reproductions of the nation/state ideal. As Žižek explains,37 Lacan’s major contribution

Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3 (September 1, 2006): 341–370. 31 Epstein, “Who speaks?” 32 Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, 29. 33 Duncan S. A. Bell, “Mythscapes: Memory, mythology, and national identity,” The British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (2003): 63–81. 34 Slavoj Žižek, “The seven veils of fantasy,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis Dany Nobus (ed.), (London: Routledge, 1995); Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies. 35 Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, 41. 36 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990); Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, 40–54. 37 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). 30 

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here is how the national Symbolic Order is itself a barred and lacking structure.38 The impossible yet desired sense to fill the gap at both levels, ­therefore, is what matters here because it is the void of the “master ­signifier,” the nation/state, that creates this ambivalence and perpetual subjective-objective relations. In other words, it is the split that constitutes the subject as an anxious subject continuously trying and failing at overcoming the split. The Lacanian lack or split, therefore, “… is not simply a property of the subject. It makes up its very being, its relationship to itself, to others, and to the world. This lack, in other words, is the condition of the sovereignty of the Lacanian subject.”39 Returning to the Gellnerian ideal of congruent nations/states in modernity, we could therefore theorise the ontology of the nation/state in three major ways. First, the lacking of the nation/state, that is, its ontological state of void at both the subjective and objective levels, is what conditions the possibility for its myriad permutations and reproductions, albeit always failing. It is precisely the idealised yet impossible promise to achieve congruency that enables the repetitions of nationalism in modernity and in our contemporary conjuncture. Second, the nation/state subjectivity is produced here not so much as the result of “invented traditions,” identity/discursive practices, or through narration of Self. Instead, I argue that it is the empty and lacking ontology of the nation/state in tandem with the promised state of cultural homogeneity that give rise to the barred nation/state subjectivity. The nation/state subjectivity, therefore, arises paradoxically in the crack, in the gap between the nation and the state precisely as that which seeks to cover the lack through the promise of congruency and thus obtain the full and secure life. Offering this empty ontology of the nation/state, nonetheless, requires further theorisation of how exactly nation/state narratives operate, continuously negotiating this anxious subjectivity, suspended between the utopia of national congruency and that which stands in the way to materialise this future. This is where the logic of fantasy is crucial, as I explain in the next section.

See also Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Lacan and political subjectivity: Fantasy and enjoyment in psychoanalysis and political theory,” Subjectivity 24, no. 1 (September 1, 2008): 256–274; Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras, “(I can’t get no) enjoyment.” 39 J. Peter Burgess, “The real at the origin of sovereignty,” Political Psychology 38, no. 4 (2017): 653–668. 38 

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The Fantasy of Nationalism Fantasy is the narrativised response to the split subjectivity, to its empty ontology, through a dual and ambiguous way. Interrogating nationalism and the nation/state, what we are dealing with here is the utopian promise of obtaining the homogeneous political community ideal and that which hinders it. As such, it means collapsing the distinctions between nationalism’s mutated manifestations, say, between ethnic and civic, nationalism and patriotism and/or between the “nation-state” and the “state-nation.”40 Fantasy constitutes and animate the anxious subjectivity, the national subjectivity, around the relentless desire to obtain subjective closure, to achieve nation/state completeness and wholeness.41 As Libbrecht puts it: Fantasy takes the form of a scenario which governs the subject in his/her relation to the object a. Hence, the fantasy serves both the function of supporting desire and of sustaining the subject at the level of his/her vanishing desire.42

The logic of fantasy is twofold: fantasy1 and fantasy2.43 Fantasy1 protects us from the contingency of socio-political life by offering a utopian narrative in which national subjectivity is whole and thus secure. This is the beatific and stabilising aspect of fantasies.44 Fantasy, therefore, “… obfuscates the true horror of a situation: instead of a full rendering of the antagonisms which traverse our society, we indulge in the notion of ­society as an organic Whole, kept together by forces of solidarity and co-operation.”45 Indeed, the logic of fantasy operates in a myriad of Moran M. Mandelbaum, “The fantasy of congruency: The Abbé Sieyès and the ‘nationstate’ problématique revisited”, Philosophy & Social Criticism 42, no. 3 (2016): 246–266. 41 Mandelbaum, The Nation/State Fantasy. 42 Katrien Libbrecht, “The original sin of psychoanalysis: On the desire of the analyst,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis Dany Nobus (Ed.), (London: Routledge, 1995), 88. 43 Žižek, “The seven veils of fantasy.” Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies. 44 Žižek, “The seven veils of fantasy,” 192. See also Ilan Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and development: Contributions, examples, limits,” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 7 (August 9, 2014): 1134; Ty Solomon, The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2015), 90. 45 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 5; see also Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Publications, 2006), 47–60. 40 

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c­ ontexts such as the idealised “postracial” society,46 foreign policy,47 or the rise of national-populism.48 Moreover, as Eberle explains, the logic of fantasy can also be useful in broader cases of identity and narrative ­constructions in IR, such as nations’/states’ engagement with their past, particularly trauma, shame, honour, and/or as security seeking subjects.49 Nonetheless, the logic of fantasy and how it directly relates to the Lacanian split subjectivity is more fundamental than the narrativisation and autobiography of Self. It is not merely that subjects or nations/states seek security and a complete, yet impossible, sense of Self, to which narratives are of course key, but that it is fantasy as such that creates the subject as it “literally teaches us how to desire.”50 The Gellnerian ideal of the homogeneous community is thus a fantasy in the sense that it teaches us how to desire the impossible, namely by prescribing for a future in which subjectivity is complete, on the one hand, and by rendering an inside/outside element the obstacle to materialising the perfect social existence: the complete, whole, and secured nation/state. This is the role of fantasy2. Fantasy2 is crucial here as it keeps the nation/state subjectivity in check, suspended between utopia and that which is in its way, threatening “our” existence with catastrophe if “we” fail to address or overcome the obstacle.51 This is the Other blamed for “our” blocked identity, stealing “our” jobs, exploiting “our” public services and, in extreme racist discourses, contaminating “our” racial/blood purity. The contemporary Andreja Zevnik, “Postracial society as social fantasy: Black communities trapped between racism and a struggle for political recognition,” Political Psychology 38, no. 4 (2017): 621–635. 47 Jakub Eberle, “Narrative, desire, ontological security, transgression: Fantasy as a factor in international politics,” Journal of International Relations and Development 22, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 243–268; Jakub Eberle, Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War (London: Routledge, 2019). 48 Browning, “Brexit populism and fantasies of fulfilment”; Mandelbaum, “The Brexit fantasy.” 49 Eberle, “Narrative, desire, ontological security.” See also Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kinnvall, “Globalization and religious nationalism”; Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations; Zarakol, “Ontological (in)security and state denial of historical crimes.” 50 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 48. 51 Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2007), 147. 46 

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conjuncture of the Alt-Right and its national-civilisational dimension operates according to this logic of fantasy by mourning the loss of white/ imperial/colonial potency and privilege and blaming the Other, the Muslim/Jew/immigrant, for thwarting their nostalgic utopia. The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, for instance, had to continuously rely on this duality of fantasy, fantasy1 as the promise and fantasy2 as the disavowal of fantasy1: The foreclosed obverse of the Nazi harmonious Volksgemeinschaft returned in the guise of their paranoiac obsession with the Jewish plot. Similarly, the Stalinists’ compulsive discovery of ever new enemies of Socialism was the inescapable obverse of their pretending to realize the ideal of the “new Socialist man.”52

The Brexit campaign leading to the referendum in June 2016, and indeed the Brexit discourse ever since, is quite telling in the ways in which the fantasy of a sovereign and independent UK has been constructed. The main motto of Vote Leave, the formal campaign to leave the EU, was “Vote Leave, take back control,” thus envisaging the perfect future outside the EU and the catastrophe lurking behind the corner if “we” failed to vote leave, during the referendum, and deliver on the Brexit vote since. The webpage, Why Vote Leave,53 on the website of Vote Leave, operates remarkably according to this dual logic of fantasy. The viewer has two options, two expandable tabs: one in light blue entitled “If we vote to leave the EU,” i.e. fantasy1; the other in red entitled “If we vote to stay in the EU,” i.e. fantasy2. The informal, and often more blunt pro-Brexit campaign, LEAVE. EU, offered an even stronger aspect of fantasy2 and its disavowal aspect, the obstacle or threat to come if “we” fail to obtain the Brexit fantasy.54 This is the infamous campaign ad sponsored by LEAVE.EU and the UKIP Party, then led by Nigel Farage, which appeared just weeks before the referendum vote. The ad made clear references to the flow of refugees Žižek, The Seven Veils of Fantasy, 192. “Why Vote Leave?” accessed 24/11/2019. http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/why_ vote_leave.html. 54 Daniel Wincott, “Brexit dilemmas: New opportunities and tough choices in unsettled times,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19, no. 4 (November 1, 2017): 680–695. 52  53 

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throughout Europe in 2015, mostly from war-torn Syria and Afghanistan, which clearly invoked a racial and xenophobic worldview, warning ­people against staying in the EU. Overall, the nostalgic past of Great Britain, as an imperial world power fighting against evil (i.e. Nazism and Communism), was rendered as lost and promised, whilst being thwarted by the Brussels bureaucracy impeding Britain’s sovereignty and the immigrants’ pressure on UK’s public services. Indeed, the two are produced as the archetypal enemy, blurring the inside-outside boundaries.55 The contemporary geopolitics of civilisationism, particularly since 9/11, also follows this logic of fantasy, structured around a civilisational constellation of presumably Western and progressive-liberal nations/ states.56 In this homonational assemblage, the nation’s/state’s claim to sovereign legitimacy is rendered palpable through the projection of internal societal divides, racism, misogyny and homophobia onto the Other, the Arab/Muslim.57 The phantasmatic promise of an organic, whole, free, and secure society in this national-civilisational scenario, is thwarted by the Arab/Muslim Other as the terrorist and/or in the guise of the ­immigrant/refugee.

The Jouissance in Nationalism Reading nationalism through the empty ontology of subjectivity and as produced through the fantasy of nation/state congruency exhibits nationalism’s formal-structural apparatus. But what animates nationalism, condemning it to continuous failure and repetition? The answer lies in the affective dimension of nationalism as fantasy, resting on the ontological premise of the split/lacking subject/object. This is jouissance, meaning that “when subjectivity is conceived in terms of lack, then, this lack can be understood as a lack of jouissance.”58 Browning, “Brexit populism and fantasies of fulfilment”; Mandelbaum, “The Brexit fantasy.” 56 Brubaker, “Between nationalism and civilizationism.” 57 Gilly Hartal and Orna Sasson-Levy, “The progressive orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 39, no. 1 (February 1, 2021): 11–29; Mandelbaum, “I’m a proud Israeli”; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times. 58 Glynos and Stavrakakis, “Lacan and political subjectivity,” 261. 55 

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First, fantasies are embroiled with jouissance, a libidinal and affective investment entailing bodily enjoyment that produces and interpellates populations.59 As such, the phantasmatic narrative of “our” nation/state always entails a story in which an Other stole “our” enjoyment and/or having their own secret enjoyment usually at “our” expense. As Žižek puts it: Fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us. In the anti-Semitic ideological fantasy, social antagonism is explained away via the reference to the Jew as the secret agent who is stealing social jouissance from us.60

Moreover, the operation of jouissance is such that it is “alwaysalready lost,” resulting in “our” perpetual attempts to recoup it, thus recapturing “our” lost subjectivity. As this is an impossibility, the national fantasy repetitively reinvigorates the national (imaginary) past, a stolen past of grandeur, prestige and might, and the “Evil Other” to blame for “our” loss. As Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras argue: “[n]ationalist propagandas are based on the assumption that the desire of each generation is to try and heal this (metaphoric) castration, and give back to the nation its lost full enjoyment.”61 The same logic operates in the contemporary national-populist discourse, fantasying about “our” lost national jouissance that was stolen by some subversive force. In the Brexit discourse, this is articulated via references to Britain’s history as an imperial and military power, whose prestige and sense of national pride had been taken away by the internal bureaucrats and politicians and the external imposing power of Brussels. This was the narrative of the Veterans for Britain pro-Brexit campaign, clearly articulated by Major-General Tim Cross in an op-ed published a month before the June 2016 referendum: Bloody minded, indeed arrogant, we stood firm under inspirational and visionary leadership that made no apologies for what we stood for and Ernesto Laclau, “Ideology and post-Marxism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 2 (2006): 103–114. 60 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 43. 61 Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras, “(I can’t get no) enjoyment,” 153. 59 

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what we were capable of achieving. Today Whitehall is stuffed full of senior politicians, civil servants and advisers who believe that Britain cannot survive unless we bury ourselves inside an amorphous mass of unelected bureaucrats. They have no pride in where we have come from as a nation and no clue as to what we can be in the future … Many of us are not prepared to accept this defeatism …62

The national fantasy of recapturing the lost subjectivity and enjoyment, moreover, entails the emotive power of collective enjoyment, embodied in the national edifice, symbolic order and the myriad collective practices in which “we enjoy the nation.”63 We could therefore read national holidays, military parades, commemoration of national defeats and trauma as well as victories precisely as such, as collective enjoyment, corporeally experienced and thus symbolising the image of the bodynational. As Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras put it: … the lost golden era of absolute enjoyment and the possibility of a return to this era is a chimera. However, the existence of this fantasy fosters the solidarity of the community, consolidates national identity, and animates national desire.64

The lure of jouissance, however, is ambivalent and phantasmatic as it merely allows for partial experiences of belonging, rendered palpable exactly via such moments of “coming together.” This is key to understanding the affective power of nationalism since it endeavours to eliminate the split national subjectivity by offering partial modes of belonging, of partial identification with the Lacanian objet petit a as the object-cause of desire.65 As such, the desiring national subject has no object that “could Tim Cross, “Stiffen your sinews and Vote Leave — Brexit will make Britain great again,” The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/24/stiffen-yoursinews-and-vote-leave---brexit-will-make-britain-gr2/. 63 Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 189–210. 64 Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras, “(I can’t get no) enjoyment,” 153. 65 Badredine Arfi, “Fantasy in the discourse of ‘social theory of international politics’,” Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 428–448; Glynos and Stavrakakis, “Lacan and political subjectivity,” 262–263; Ty Solomon, “‘I wasn’t angry, because I couldn’t believe it was happening’: Affect and discourse in responses to 9/11,” Review of International Studies 38, no. 4 (October 2012): 907–928; Solomon, The Politics of 62 

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satisfy it.” There is no specific national thing with which the subject can fully identify, and they end up with perpetual movement “simply for the enjoyment (jouissance) of pursuing it.”66 This means reading Othering differently. Rather than rendering the internal and external threat to “our” congruent and complete national subject as the way in which “we” negatively predicate “our” being, Othering operates here as the condition of possibility of jouissance, of partially and imperfectly “enjoying the nation.” The Other is thus the prohibition that animates the fantasy of nationalism and allows “us” to experience bodily jouissance, although never fully, precisely by deferring it because someone, the Other, the prohibition, is in our way.67 In conclusion, the Lacanian conception of Jouissance (enjoyment) as a function of prohibition is crucial to explaining nationalism’s repetitions and its phantasmatic aspect in three main ways: first, jouissance explains why/how “we” continuously and emotively invest in projects of nationalism, of obtaining the full nation/state, despite its impossibility and indeed exemplary failures and horrors. Second, jouissance is directly linked to the national subjectivity’s fantasy of one day becoming complete and secure. This is because jouissance is precisely that which is “always already-lost,” thus emotively constituting subjectivity as lacking and in a perpetual and failing quest to ascertain full identification. Third, jouissance manifests itself, albeit only partially, in the national symbolic order through various collective practices, both banal and extraordinary, entailing corporeal effects and creating the imaginary glue that keeps and ­animates the collective consciousness.

Conclusion This chapter began with a simple puzzle: how could we explain nationalism’s repetitive nature? What drives the project of nationalism across time Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses; Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies; Compare with Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 66 Dylan Evans, “From Kantian ethics to mystical experience: An exploration of jouissance,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Dany Nobus (ed.), (London: Routledge, 1995), 5. 67 Arfi, “Fantasy in the discourse of ‘social theory of international politics’”; Evans, “From Kantian ethics to mystical experience”; Zevnik, Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics; Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies.

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and space to the extent that, despite its mutations and permutations, its failures and horrors, “we” continuously invest in it? Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this chapter analysed three key machineries of nationalism, and its recurrences in (late) modernity, operating at the ontological/structural level of national subjectivity, and objectivity. This therefore means offering an analysis at the very edge of theory and going beyond existing scholarly studies on the history of nationalism,68 the history of theory and specific theories of nationalism,69 as well as the linguistic and discursive constructions of national identity and othering.70 More specifically, I suggested we should explore nationalism in three ways. First, we should interrogate nationalism through the ontology of void, the gap in the nation/state. This means reading the national subject and object as split, a gap in the ideal of the nation/state. In support of this, I revisited Ernest Gellner’s theorisation of nationalism as an ideal of congruency, of achieving a homogeneous political community, which from a psychoanalytical perspective is impossible and as such constitutes the anxious and desiring national subject, perpetually trying and failing to achieve national closure. Second, I argued we should read nationalism through the logic of fantasy, that is, as a narrative that “teaches us how to desire” by promising “us” the utopia of nation/state congruency whilst prohibiting it by projecting nationalism’s failure onto the Other. The fantasy of nationalism ­functions here rather ambiguously, since it both produces the desiring subject, the national subjectivity that seeks homogeneity, and at the same time including a built-in failure preventing the satisfaction of that national ­fantasy and offering an explanation for why fantasy cannot be materialised.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (London and New York: Verso Books, 2006); Breuilly, Nationalism and the State; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed; Walker Connor, “When is a nation?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 92–103; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; John Hutchinson, Nationalism and War (Oxford: OUP, 2017). 69 Orellana and Michelsen, “Reactionary internationalism”; Drolet and Williams, “Radical conservatism and global order”; Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 2000). 70 Wodak, The Politics of Fear; Claire Sutherland, “Nation-building through discourse theory,” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 2 (2005): 185–202. 68 

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Finally, I argued that what nonetheless animates the fantasy of ­nationalism is jouissance, the collective and “always-already lost” bodily enjoyment. Jouissance functions in national fantasies as both the thing “we” want to recoup, to recapture and hold, and as momentary and partial enjoyment “we” experience corporeally and emotively as a nation. Taken together, this means that the national edifice entails a libidinal bribe and trade-off. The national edifice interpellates populations, through its collective but partial acts of jouissance, whilst the failure in covering up the split subjectivity and recapturing the lost and presumably authentic enjoyment is projected onto the Other.71 This Other signifies “our” lack, and its function is both to constitute the national subjectivity and render its full and complete realisation impossible. The Other is the necessary explanation for the failure to obtain full national closure.72 This establishes how national fantasies both promise “us” the satisfaction of desire, the recouping of the lost jouissance, security, and fulfilment of “our” national aspirations, and at the same time making sure this promise is kept at bay, unrealised. The reason is that identification can never be fully achieved, full belonging is impossible, “it is like writing in water.”73 It cannot realise its national desire and instead it transposes it onto the future-to-come, whilst maintaining the Other as the obstacle, the explanation for why “we” are not yet there.

Mandelbaum, “I’m a proud Israeli.” Arfi, “Fantasy in the discourse of ‘social theory of international politics’”; Eberle, “Narrative, desire, ontological security, transgression”; Eberle, Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy; Glynos and Howarth Logics of Critical Explanation, 147; Zevnik, “Postracial society as social fantasy”; Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies. 73 Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003). 71  72 

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© 2023 World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1142/9781800611542_0003

Chapter 2

Materialising the Nation: Envisioning a Post-Cultural Nationhood Joel Chong ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore

Does being rich count as a national identity? Can material development be the basis of national identity-making? Or can nation-building, ­usually described as a political process, also be the literal physical building of a nation? This chapter argues that globalisation and the enveloping reach of the global economic order has incited new ways of envisioning the nation — materially, rather than ethnically or identitarian. This takes form in material nationalism. In material nationalism, the nation is envisioned and built on its material and economic achievements, or the potential for such achievements. This chapter utilises Singapore as a case study to illustrate material nationalism’s interaction with the global economic system and how the identity-blind appeal of economic prosperity makes material nationalism a welcome alternative in heterogeneous polities such as Singapore. This chapter also briefly discusses material articulations of nationhood in the United States, India, Japan, and Tanzania, arguing that material nationalism is a distinct and unique variant of nationalism and not a regional or historical phenomenon. Through its focus on the material dimensions of nationhood, material nationalism also challenges the identitarian conceptual hold over nationalism and suggests that other non-identitarian forms of nationalism are also possible. 23

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Introduction What lies ahead for the nation-state? Alexandre Kojève, in debate with Leo Strauss, opined that the inescapable outcome of world history would be the creation of a single “universal and homogeneous state” — “the actualisation of the supreme political ideal of mankind.”1 Kojève would not be the first nor last to foretell the demise of the nation-state and of its place in the proverbial “dustbin of history.” The inevitable decline of nationalism in an increasingly globalised world has become a familiar and recurring thesis in the post-Cold War era, running through both scholarly and popular work. Globalisation, however, has also provided the material and discursive context for a nationalist push back, reminding scholars of the vast mobilising prowess of nationalism. The resurgence of “nativist” nationalism in Western politics, underscored by Brexit as well as the rise of Donald Trump and his right-wing counterparts in Western Europe, highlights how this new era of economic and demographic c­ onnectivity has simultaneously dampened and stoked nationalist sentiments. This chapter argues that globalisation has in fact incited new ways of envisioning the nation. Leveraging the vocabulary of the hegemonic global capitalist system, this new understanding of nationhood transcends the constrains of the ethnic or cultural nation into what this chapter calls material nationalism. Material nationalism defines the nation in material terms, as opposed to ethnic, linguistic, or religious formulations of the nation. It is a post-modern response to the traditional question of nationhood, and an increasingly attractive option in the era of economic modernisation and integration. This chapter firstly conceptualises and defines material nationalism by examining its place within current paradigms of nationalism theory. The concept of material nationalism is then fleshed out through the case study of post-independence Singapore. This chapter concludes by reexamining material nationalism’s theoretical and empirical arguments, its contributions, and explores the potential for further research related to material and other post-modern and non-identitarian forms of nationalism.

Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 146.

1 

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Theorising a Material Nation Prominent debates on nationalism — from Benedict Anderson’s “cultural artefacts” to Anthony D. Smith’s “ethnies” — have largely centred on cultural or ethnic aspects of nationhood,2 reflecting nationalism’s deep-rooted and discursively central evocation of ethnic, linguistic, or religious indicators as “hard” or “deep” referents of identity. This is not to say, however, that the material has been entirely absent from nationalism t­heory. For instance, Tom Nairn argued in The Break-Up of Britain that nationalism emerged as a response to the (violent) imperialist export of capitalism, the development of a global political economy and, most importantly, uneven material development between core and periphery.3 Michael Hechter ­similarly argued that core-periphery economic inequality — or “internal colonialism” — produced distinct material realities which, in turn, engendered group solidarity and identity.4 Likewise, Ernest Gellner acknowledged that “nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion.”5 The “tidal wave of modernisation,” he argued, swept territories successively rather than simultaneously, producing severe social and economic stratification which, in turn, precipitated “the re-thinking and re-drawing of loyalties” — or nationalism.6 These recurring themes of imperialist ­capitalism, uneven development, and material growth will be revisited when discussing material nationalism. Nonetheless, what has been described as a “division of scholarly labour” — between nationalism scholars studying culture, and economists and development scholars studying political economy — has stymied the growth of vigorous interdisciplinary approaches to studying nations and nationalism.7 The need for such approaches has become increasingly apparent as novel responses to the question of nationhood emerge within Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 1991); Anthony D. Smith, Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (London: Routledge, 2009). 3 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: NLB, 1977). 4 Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Develop­ ment, 1536–1966 (London: Routledge, 1975). 5 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 166. 6 Ibid. 7 Radhika Desai, “Introduction: Nationalisms and their understandings in historical perspective,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2008): 398. 2 

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this new global economic context. Understanding post-modern nationalism thus requires new frameworks which account for the entanglement between the nation-state and the global political economy. Material nationalism occurs when the nation is envisioned and built on its material and economic achievements. In other words, in material nationalism the nation comes into being through a shared sense or desire for economic and material success. The nation, in material nationalism, is not an ethnic, religious, or linguistic community, but rather a community “imagined” through its shared journey to economic and material development, or the potential for such development. National identity and pride, in material nationalism, is promoted as overcoming the (economic) odds. This narrative is encouraged, in some cases by the state but possibly by other political actors, through the promotion of national symbols of ­material and economic success (GDP growth, high standards of living, infrastructure) and the inscription of national identity as determined by shared economic success. Nationhood is thus conceived and experienced materially. Membership in the material nation is therefore not determined primarily through traits such as ethnicity, religion, or language, but through the partaking of and contribution to a shared developmental past and destiny. The presence of material nationalism does not constitute an automatic absence of other forms of nationalism in that context. No single variant of nationalism is at work in any context at any particular time. This is an acknowledgement of the constant contesting visions of the nation, and reflects the persisting question of who gets to speak for the nation. As elaborated further in this chapter, material conceptions of nationhood have proven to co-exist with and even complement cultural forms of nationalism. While Singapore represents the most fully actualised invocation of the material nation, one can easily identify the presence of material nationhood in populist America and India, post-war Japan, as well as newly independent sub-Saharan African states such as Tanzania. Material nationalism is thus not a Singaporean anomaly nor a bounded regional phenomenon, but a distinct post-modern form of nationalism that ­harnesses the material and economic vocabulary of the global capitalist system as the basis of national identity-making. As briefly outlined above, theorists have long alluded to the economic and material dimensions of national identity. While few have put it front and centre as a basis of national identity, these theorists’ study of the ­material conditions which nationalism is catalysed by and interacts with

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nonetheless provides important groundwork for this chapter’s discussion of material nationalism. Gellner’s examination of nationalism within an intricate nexus of modernisation, industrialisation, and emergent postmercantilist capitalism, for instance, gives conceptual merit to material nationalism’s claim that the nation can be substantiated through economic and material development.8 Just as Gellner sought to turn Rostow on his head by arguing that “it is the need for growth which generates nationalism, not vice versa,”9 material nationalism goes one step further and argues that economic growth has not only generated nationalism, but also come to substantiate it. In other words, in material nationalism the material is not only a condition for, but also the basis of national identity. Nationalism’s relationship with uneven material development likewise exemplifies how national identity has been and continues to be ­intertwined with material development. Material nationalism argues that the imperialist export of capitalism not only engendered a nationalist pushback from the periphery, as noted by Nairn and Hechter, but also introduced an ideological currency which nationalists have used to ­articulate and rally a sense of national consciousness from. Thus just as modernists have argue that nationalism was catalysed by societies’ exposure to industrial modernisation, material nationalism can similarly be seen as societies’ reaction to globalising forces, making it a post-modern response to the national question. Material nationalism, as discussed and analysed below, is the result of dialogue and negotiation with the global economic environment. This post-modern reaction is not confined to the cultural vocabularies of its modern counterparts but leverage new developmental and economic vocabulary afforded to it by its new global environment. In other words, material nationalism represents nationalism’s “refraction into a variety of new expressions” in this ­globalised era.10 Theoretical debates on nationalism have naturally not come to a standstill since Gellner, Nairn, and Hechter, with new approaches e­ merging and some engaging robustly with the role of the material in nationhood and national identity. Three lines of scholarship stand out — commercial nationalism, developmental nationalism, and economic nationalism. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Gellner, Thought and Change, 168. 10 George T. Crane, “Economic nationalism: Bringing the nation back in,” Millennium 27, no. 1 (1998): 61. 8  9 

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These important contributions have helped recentre the material in contemporary debates on nationalism, but at the same time fall short of articulating a distinct form of national identity based on and substantiated by the material. It is these gaps which material nationalism engages with and seeks to fill. Robert Foster notably argued that the consumption of commodities is an integral part of nation-making. National identity, according to Foster, “derives less from common membership in a polity and more from common participation in a repertoire of consumption practices.”11 In other words, modern national identities are engendered by a shared material experience, rather than cultural ascriptions. Other scholars have also similarly studied how consumers express and cultivate national identities through strategic food choices, as well as how national identities are reproduced through the likes of national lotteries, theme parks, and ­popular culture.12 Building on this line of scholarship, communication scholars have used commercial nationalism as a framework to analyse how ­commercial actors — particularly the media — “piggyback on and exploit conceptions of national identity for commercial ends”; as well as how states craft commercial products and strategies to advance national agendas.13 These scholars argue that commercial nationalism reflects how national identity is a commercial rather than cultural project. While providing an important insight into the material production of national identity, commercial nationalism largely studies how the nation is produced and reproduced — how nationalistic sentiments are communicated and transmitted — rather than what the nation is. Acknowledging that the nation is forged through consumption patterns, for example, does not shed light on what the nation is, or what it claims to be. While the production and reproduction of national identity is undeniably an important dimension in the study of nationalism, material nationalism provides a framework of not only what the nation claims to be — a community Robert Foster, “The commercial construction of ‘New Nations’,” Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 3 (1999): 265. 12 Melissa L. Caldwell, “The taste of nationalism: Food politics in postsocialist Moscow,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 67, no. 3 (2002), 295–319; Kosaku Yoshino, ed., Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). 13 Zala Volčič and Mark Andrejevic, eds., Commercial Nationalism: Selling the Nation and Nationalizing the Sell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 4. 11 

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defined by a shared economic and material experience; but also how national identity is produced and reproduced — through the promotion of national symbols of material success and the linking of national identity with material development. Radhika Desai’s conceptualisation of developmental nationalism is another important contribution to the study of non-identitarian nationalisms. Desai’s framework explores the role of the political economy and material development in the formation of national identity, striving to reposition the “material ballast” front and centre within the study of nationalism. Desai argues that the evolution of nationalism can be divided into two “phases” — “developmental nationalisms” and “cultural nationalisms.”14 Seeing the two as historically distinct types of nationalism, rather than specific typologies, Desai argues that concepts of nationhood evolved from post-war developmental nationalisms to cultural nationalisms by the end of the twentieth century. The varying importance of the political economy and cultural politics, Desai argues, differentiates these two phases — the political economy playing a larger role in the articulation of developmental nationalisms while cultural politics taking the lead in cultural nationalisms. Desai characterises developmental nationalism as “looking forward to brighter national futures as modern egalitarian cultures and polities and as economies of generalised prosperity in a comity of nations: they typically promised a better tomorrow.”15 Desai also acknowledges the ability of developmental nationalism to sidestep potentially destructive cultural cleavages during the nationbuilding process — a theme that is also echoed in this chapter’s study of material nationalism. The utility of Desai’s developmental-to-cultural-nationalism thesis, however, is limited. Desai’s argument that developmental nationalism is a historically distinct category is problematic when confronted with modern-day manifestations of “non-cultural” nationalisms. As this chapter will illustrate through its case study of Singapore, material nationalism has endured — and flourished — well beyond the turn of the century and continues to function as the cornerstone of national identity in several polities today. Instead of waning or evolving into a cultural form of Radhika Desai, “Conclusion: From developmental to cultural nationalisms,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2008): 647. 15 Desai, “Introduction: Nationalisms and their understandings in historical perspective,” 400. 14 

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nationalism in the twenty-first century, material nationalism continues to be strengthened by the promise of further material development as well as the growing reach of the global capitalist system. The framing of developmental and identitarian nationalisms as distinct historical phases also precludes the possibility of the two co-existing with and even complementing each other, a point that will be contested below. Desai’s transition from developmental to cultural nationalism is also characterised as mirroring the shift from developmentalism to neoliberalism in national economies. Desai, however, neglects to demonstrate how nationhood is conceptualised and articulated within these economic models, rendering developmental nationalism a closer cousin of teleological narratives (such as the modernisation theory) than a means of forging an “imagined community” or nationhood. Robert Gilpin’s classic realist definition of economic nationalism sees it as the subordination of economic activities to “the goal of state-building and the interests of the state.”16 Economic nationalism is thus frequently associated with mercantilism, autarky, and economic insulation within the study of international political economy.17 As an economic policy, economic nationalism often entails the promotion of domestic production, restrictions on foreign imports, and securing a favourable balance of payments, among others.18 Therefore despite its moniker, economic nationalism bears little connection to debates on national identity. Most notably invoked by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, New Right “economic nationalism” links national rights to national identity by establishing an identity’s right to preferential economic treatment, and is marketed as an ideological pushback against “globalist” forces which privilege foreigners, multinational companies, and the wealthy international elite.19 New Right economic nationalism, through trade protectionism and curbing immigration, proposes to rebuild the country’s “fundamental” (white) identity by restoring its historic economic dominance and, resultingly,

Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 31. 17 Simon Lee, “Economic nationalism,” in R. J. Barry Jones, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2001). 18 William E. Rappard, “Economic nationalism,” in Authority and the Individual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937). 19 See de Orellana and Michelsen Introduction chapter. 16 

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bind the country “together, making the country economically as strong as possible for its citizens.”20 This rhetoric is echoed not only by Bannon’s New Right counterparts in Europe, but also resonates with other recent non-Western, populist discourses of nationhood. Narendra Modi’s “strong” Indian nation, for instance, is a fusion of his own distinct brand of swadeshi and Hindutva, promising a second golden age of economic and material success for the Hindu nation — “making India great again.” As Priya Chacko notes: “While [Hindu nationalism] has routinely embraced dominant economic ideas, in doing so, it has sought to reframe these ideas within Hindu nationalist discourse and for the benefit of its base.”21 This “intermingling of cultural nationalism and neoliberalism,” Chacko argues, promotes the ­creation of the “virtuous market citizen” — “an entrepreneurial consumer who is regulated in his/her behaviour by the cultural framework of Hindu majoritarianism and is driven by a desire to strengthen the Hindu nation.”22 For Bannon and Modi the nation ultimately remains an artefact of identity, and economic nationalism the spoils for their identity — restoring the nation’s “greatness” as reparations for the “wronged” American/Indian nation. While short of conceptualising the nation as a material rather than cultural community, such populist invocations of the nation illustrate the potential for material conceptions of nationhood to co-exist with and even amplify identitarian forms of nationalism. Efforts to re-theorise the role of the nation in economic nationalism have generated mixed results. While acknowledging that economic practices strengthen and amplify national identity, this line of scholarship still places the economy as external to the nation — in service of it, but not of it.23 Material nationalism, in this aspect, differs from economic nationalism as well as “economic wealth” or “economic development” by internalising the material aspects within the nation. By themselves, “economic Steve Bannon, interview by Charlie Rose, September 9, 2017, https://charlierose.com/ videos/30969. 21 Priya Chacko, “Marketizing Hindutva: The state, society, and markets in Hindu ­nationalism,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (2019): 379. 22 Ibid., 380–381. 23 For instance, see James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Takeshi Nakano, “Theorising economic nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 3 (2004): 211–229; Adam Harmes, “The rise of neoliberal nationalism,” Review of International Political Economy 19, no. 1 (2012): 59–86. 20 

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development” and “wealth” stand external to and discrete from the nation, while material nationalism notes that the nation is defined by the material. A notable exception to this critique is George Crane’s efforts at “bringing the nation back in” to economic nationalism, where he p­ ersuasively explores the relationship between nation, economy, and development.24 This chapter integrates and builds on Crane’s work and disentangles this new approach from the already established school of economic nationalism. Material nationalism, despite its relative novelty, thus remains ­tethered to and engages with the dense web of nationalism scholarship outlined above. It builds on modernist theories by arguing that the material is both condition and basis for national identity, and a response to the enveloping reach of the global capitalist system. Material nationalism also engages with contemporary material approaches by providing a framework of not only what the nation claims to be, but also how national identity is produced and reproduced. It is not a historically distinct category, but a form of nationalism which has endured and flourished beyond the turn of the century. Last but not least, material nationalism seeks to internalise the economy and material within the nation, rather than external and in service of it. The following section examines the case study of Singapore, with a specific focus on two key discourses: the narrative of progress from backwater to key global hub, and the comparative nationalist hierarchy that emerges from the oft-repeated articulation of its material progress from “third world to first world.”

The Singapore Story: The “Unexpected Nation,” “from Third World to First” On National Day, we celebrated how we had turned vulnerability into strength. We started off with no hinterland and a weak economy […] We were a poor third world country; people lived in cramped and squalid slums, no modern sanitation, no utilities, but we built HDB flats to house all of us and made Singapore a first world metropolis and our beautiful

Crane, “Economic nationalism: Bringing the nation back in.”

24 

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home […] We celebrated our journey from third world to first as one united people.25

The Singapore Story is one that has overwhelmingly been told as a success story, success for the Self as well as success as compared to other nations. Summarised by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s 2015 National Day Rally speech in celebration of Singapore’s 50th year of independence, the narrative of city-state’s rags-to-riches struggle is interwoven into virtually every major national event — from closely watched National Day Rally speeches to eulogies at state funerals. It is one that emphasises the country’s humble beginnings, from a “foolish and absurd proposition” to its present-day status as a global economic hub.26 The articulation of the “unexpected nation” is central to this narrative: an island thrust into nationhood against its will, a country that was not meant to be.27 Unceremoniously evicted from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, the former British Crown colony found itself having to deal with new-found statehood. With it came the unanswered question of nationhood. After spending years cultivating a pan-Malaysian identity in preparation for merger, a Singaporean “nation” seemed illogical and unnatural. As then prime minister Lee Kuan Yew noted: We ask ourselves, what is a Singaporean? In the first place, we did not want to be Singaporeans. We wanted to be Malayans. Then the idea was extended and we decided to be Malaysians. But 23 months of Malaysia — a traumatic experience for all parties in Malaysia — ended abruptly with our being Singaporeans.28

The newly independent Singapore government was forced to create a nation for its new state. In Singapore’s case the nation-state was something yet to be fulfilled, with historical events resulting in statehood Lee Hsien Loong, “National Day Rally 2015,” August 23, 2015, https://www.pmo.gov. sg/Newsroom/national-day-rally-2015. 26 John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984), 258. 27 For example, see Edwin Lee, Singapore: The Unexpected Nation (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). 28 Quoted in Alex Josey, Lee Kuan Yew: The Crucial Years (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2013), 457. 25 

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preceding nationhood. As Kwok and Mariam note: “The category ‘Singaporean’ […] had no substantive content before the sudden separation from Malaysia.”29 Questions of nationhood and national identity, however, would be put on the back burner as harsh economic realities set in. Driven by a siege mentality and an “ideology of survival,”30 the Singapore government embarked on an ambitious developmental blueprint, turning the fledging state into a first-world economy and a financial, technical, and logistical hub. This unparalleled economic journey is enshrined in the Singapore success story. Presented as an arduous journey rife with obstacles and challenges, the Singapore nation is characterised as having resiliently weathered all it that has been thrown at it by the world, from its untimely statehood to the 1997 Asian financial crisis and SARS. It is a story that emphases the nation’s ability to conquer and overcome, and one of material success centred around its transformation from a “backwater fishing village” to an urbanised, industrialised global city.31 Singapore’s material nationalism blurs the line between state-building and nation-building. Its discourses, particularly its shared historical memories but also entire articulations of values and norms associated to Singaporean identity, do not depend “on a mythological view of its origins.”32 Rather, they feature exclusively material, infrastructural, and economic successes, and solidarity being the work and shared wealth reaped from this developmental journey. Singapore celebrated its 50th year of independence in 2015 in a fashion befitting a country with one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world. Celebrations, branded “SG50” by the government, began a year in advance of National Day. No expenses were spared in the organisation Kwok Kian-Woon and Ali Mariam, “Cultivating citizenship and national identity,” in Arun Mahizhnan and Yuan Lee Tsao, eds., Singapore: Re-Engineering Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 113. 30 Chan Heng Chee, Singapore: The Politics of Survival, 1965–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 31 Terence Chong, “The role of success in Singapore’s national identity,” in Terence Chong, ed., Management of Success: Singapore Revisited (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010). 32 Anthony Stockwell, “Forging Malaysia and Singapore: Colonialism, decolonization and nation-building,” in Gungwu Wang, ed., Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), 212. 29 

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of (government-endorsed) celebratory events across the island, with a special war chest even set up to fund events that would carry the ­ SG50 brand.33 Nation-building rhetoric kicked into high gear in the lead up to SG50 celebrations — and with it, the retelling of the “sacred” Singapore success story. As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted in his 2015 National Day Message, after independence “we began building a nation. […] we grew our economy and created jobs, built homes, schools, hospitals and parks. We built a nation.”34 This categorical centring of material and economic achievements as the basis of Singapore nationhood, with national identity vested in material fruits of the nation, was emblematic of SG50 celebratory rhetoric. Singapore’s material nationalism was not a spontaneous phenomenon, but in many ways a natural outgrowth of the “inclusive” multi-racial model the Singapore state was established on at the point of independence. Founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s aspirations for a “Malaysian Malaysia” multi-racial meritocracy had clashed with Kuala Lumpur’s consolidation of bumiputera ethno-nationalist politics,35 a key factor which contributed to Singapore’s eventual ouster from the federation. In an unequivocal and forceful rejection of ethno-nationalist politics, Lee Kuan Yew declared in his first address upon independence that “We are going to have a multi-racial nation in Singapore. We will set the example. This is not a Malay nation; this is not a Chinese nation; this is not an Indian nation. Everybody will have his place.”36 50 years later, his son Lee Hsien Loong reiterated in his National Day Rally speech that “we Monica Kotwani, “SG50 celebration fund almost doubled with S$4m cash injection: Lawrence Wong,” TODAY, May 13, 2015, https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/ sg50-celebration-fund-almost-doubled-s4m-cash-injection-lawrence-wong. 34 Lee Hsien Loong, “National day message 2015,” August 8, 2015, https://www.pmo.gov. sg/Newsroom/national-day-message-2015. 35 Bumiputera, or “sons of the soil,” is a term used to refer to Malays and the indigenous people of East Malaysia. See Vejai Balasubramaniam, “A divided nation: Malay political dominance, Bumiputera material advancement and national identity in Malaysia,” National Identities 9, no. 1 (2007): 35–48. 36 Lee Kuan Yew, “Transcript of a press conference by the Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, at the Broadcasting House, Singapore, at 12.00 P.M. on Monday, August 9, 1965,” National Archives of Singapore, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/speeches/recorddetails/740acc3c-115d-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad. 33 

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determined to be a multi-racial society […] we created a culture — a culture of self-reliance, and also mutual support.”37 This unabashedly manufactured national “culture” is thus not an exclusive one informed by notions of race or ethnicity, but rather an inclusive one underpinned by the Singapore success story. This national culture of success, not unlike many other “national ­cultures,” is built on tropes such as hard work and sacrifice, the mythologising of older generations, and the romanticisation of past struggles.38 This is best encapsulated in the government’s hagiographical promotion of the “pioneer generation.” Perhaps the closest primordial link to the Singapore nation in state nationalist discourses, the “pioneer generation” refers to the independence-era generation who exemplified hard work — and, implicitly, acquiescence with the national strategy set by Lee Senior — which allowed for the economic flourishing and rise of the Singapore material nation. The “pioneer generation” were the beneficiaries of a heavily promoted SG50 social welfare project — the “Pioneer Generation Package” — and were evoked consistently across the year-long SG50 celebrations, praised for their hard work and contributions to the Singapore material nation.39 The “pioneer generation” soon evolved into a branding exercise that expressed itself in daily practice, extended to everything from priority lines at supermarkets and public clinics to community interest clubs. This referent of identity is not an ethnic, religious, or linguistic attribute, but a material link to the nation and its strategy and leadership, who emerge as symbolic gatekeepers of the essence of the Singapore nation. This mythologising of a “pioneer generation” mobilises (invented) history, “lending the nation a seamless narrative and thereby linking the present to an ancient past […] used to lend the nation the authority of history.”40 As with the myths and heroes of other “national cultures,” the “pioneer ­generation” sought to inspire hard work and underscore the importance of contributing to the success of the material nation. With the target of such Lee, “National day rally 2015.” Chong, “The role of success in Singapore’s national identity,” 5. 39 Lee Hsien Loong, “National day rally 2014,” August 17, 2014, https://www.pmo.gov.sg/ Newsroom/national-day-rally-2014. 40 Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, “Introduction: Nations and identities in Asia,” in Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, eds., Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 4. 37  38 

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“inspiration” undeniably the younger generations of the Singapore nation, this m ­ ythologising of the “pioneer generation” was thus a key instrument for the production and reproduction of the material nation. The “pioneer generation” also demonstrates how material nationalism remains grounded in the emotional and psychological mechanics of national identity formation. It shares many strategies with identitarian nationalisms, in this case singling out a specific political and economic behaviour, just as other nationalisms might choose a past force, conquest or period, as representative of national identity. Just as how Anthony D. Smith noted that memories of war and conflict often form the basis of national identities,41 George Crane points out that economic and material life too can provide such shared “national” memories: Beyond warfare, memories of common economic experiences are of the same importance in the construction of national identity […] Just as history, language, and culture are regularly remade in the ongoing performance and articulation of the nation, so, too, economic life is subject to the interpretation and reinterpretation to serve the abiding demand for collective identification.42

Like most nationalist discourses, the Singapore success story also locates its identity among others. Lee Hsien Loong’s call to “celebrate how we journeyed from Third World to First, as one united people, ­leaving no one behind,”43 for instance, illustrates how this inscription of identity places Singapore in a hierarchy of identities defined by their respective economic achievements. Singapore’s achievements are, in this sense, measured against not only its own “backwater” past, but also against its neighbours and the world. It is a success emphasised as an exception to the post-colonial developmental trajectory of the region, and which is enjoyed exclusively by the Singapore nation, differentiating it from its neighbours. The salience of this top-of-the-pack self-image is reinforced through its constant championing of its “world’s best” airport, “world’s busiest” port, “region’s top” universities as icons (and evidence) of bona fide Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998), 67. 42 Crane, “Economic nationalism,” 68, 75. 43 Lee, “National day message 2015.” 41 

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nationhood. Superiority or alterity, in this case, is not defined by birth or the potential goods of a specific biological identity, as in many ethnic and primordial nationalist discourses, but by the scale and impact of economic achievement. Singapore’s narrative of astounding economic success is thus located within a comparative hierarchy (of economic success) designed to elicit pride and association with what and who was responsible for that success. Indeed, Lee Hsien Loong’s call to “celebrate how we 44 additionally consecrates the turned vulnerabilities into strengths”  regime, governance, and strategic choices that made “strengths” possible as part of the national identity.

Visualising a Material Nation The material nation is evoked consistently at key national events, traditionally accompanied by well-worn facts and figures including, but not limited to, GDP growth, per capita income, employment rate, etc. In the years leading up to 2015, the National Day Message and Rally underwent a shift in themes and delivery. The speeches, as SG50 drew closer, evolved from terse reports of the country’s economic performance — ­usually ending with a call for Singaporeans to work harder to ensure the survival of the nation — to more symbolic attempts at nation building. The ushering in of SG50 in particular prompted new ways of visually producing and reproducing the material nation. The new nation-building effort included a visual makeover of key national rituals. The chosen site of the prime minister’s National Day Message, for instance, became an important symbolic aspect of the address. Typically shot at an outdoor venue showcasing the country’s infrastructural development, recent years have seen the prime minister acknowledge explicitly (rather than implicitly, as previously) the key material link between the year’s chosen venue and the Singapore success story. In 2013, the prime minister spoke at the newly constructed Singapore Armed Forces Recreation Association (SAFRA) clubhouse in Toa Payoh, acknowledging it as “an example of how we are upgrading our amenities and environment as Singapore develops, year by year.”45 Ibid. Lee Hsien Loong, “National day message 2013,” August 8, 2013, https://www.pmo.gov. sg/Newsroom/national-day-message-2013. 44  45 

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2014 saw the prime minister speak from the Alexandra Park Connector in south Singapore. He highlighted the area’s origin as a village surrounded by swamps, then pointed to its current state as a developed neighbourhood served by modern-day amenities as “an example of how we are upgrading Singapore, year by year.”46 The 2019 National Day Message was filmed at the new Jewel extension of Singapore’s international airport — the country’s latest engineering marvel that boasts, among other features, an elaborate indoor waterfall and forest. As the prime minister mused in his address: “We are very proud of our new gateway to the world. It reminds us of what makes this country special.”47 Physical markers of Singapore’s progress-as-nationhood are reproduced visually not only for domestic consumption, but also as a symbol of itself to the world. A recent redesign of the Singapore passport, for instance, featured new landmarks such as the Marina Barrage, the completely rebuilt Singapore National Stadium, and Punggol New Town on its visa pages, replacing the Esplanade and the Singapore Central Business District skyline in the previous design.48 Icons of Singapore’s material and economic success, as the nation’s defining image of itself, thus function not only as an internal affirmation of national identity but also as an international projection of nationhood and a statement to the world. The Singapore material nation, therefore, is not only evoked symbolically through the Singapore success story, but also visually through its fruits — infrastructural development. This highlights the tangibility of the material nation, turning the cityscape into a live museum for Singaporean identity; as well as the “banalisation” of national identity in Singapore, with material fruits serving as everyday representations of the material nation.49

Lee Hsien Loong, “National day message 2014,” August 8, 2014, https://www.pmo.gov. sg/Newsroom/national-day-message-2014. 47 Lee Hsien Loong, “National day message 2019,” August 8, 2019, https://www.pmo.gov. sg/Newsroom/National-Day-Message-2019. 48 Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, “ICA introduces new design for Singapore biometric passport with additional security features,” October 26, 2017, https://www.ica. gov.sg/news-and-publications/media-releases/media-release/14370. 49 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). 46 

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(De)Colonising the Material Nation Fresh from the euphoria of SG50 celebrations, the Singapore government announced its intention to commemorate 2019 as the nation’s “bicentennial milestone.” This refers to the 200th anniversary of the “discovery” of Singapore by British colonial officer Stamford Raffles in 1819.50 This key nation-building exercise stuck closely to the blueprint of SG50, featuring a year of conferences, exhibitions, and festivals to celebrate the nation’s journey to development. As mused by Prime Minister Lee at the launch of the bicentennial: 1819 marked the beginning of a modern, outward-looking and multicultural Singapore. Without 1819, we may never have launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today. Without 1819, we would not have had 1965, and we would certainly not have celebrated the success of SG50. 1819 made these possible […] In this Bicentennial year, as we reflect on how this nation came into being, let us also think of how we can move forward together. For we are never done building Singapore. It is every generation’s duty to keep on building, for our children, and for our future. So that in another 50 or 100 years, Singaporeans not yet born will have a richer and greater Singapore Story to tell, and one that we will have helped to write together.51

The decision to commemorate the arrival of colonialism highlights how Singaporean national identity is inextricably intertwined with Western conceptions of modernity. While once again replete with material nationalist rhetoric — the nation as something to be materially built — as opposed to SG50, which marked 50 years of independence, the bicentennial was instead an awkward salutation to the advent of colonisation and the specific type of modernity it engendered. This apparent “celebration” of colonisation sparked consternation among small but Toh Ee Ming, “S’pore to commemorate 200 years of history with series of events in 2019,” TODAY, April 9, 2018, https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/sporecelebrate-200-years-history-series-events-2019. 51 Lee Hsien Loong, “Speech by PM Lee Hsien Loong at the launch of the Singapore bicentennial,” January 28, 2019, https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/PM-Lee-HsienLoong-at-the-launch-of-the-Singapore-Bicentennial-Jan-2019. 50 

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vocal circles who argued that such an event obscures the atrocities of colonisation and runs roughshod over precolonial history.52 While forcing the state to somewhat revise the historical scope of the event, the planned bicentennial discourse remained by and large committed to the “turning point” of 1819.53 What underpins the sacred role of 1819? Why is the advent of colonisation heralded as the starting point, not an interregnum, of the national narrative? While indeed peculiar — and even problematic — to mark the “birth” of the nation with the dawn of colonisation, treating the precolonial world as tabula rasa and disregarding precolonial national histories,54 this makes sense when read through the lens of Singapore’s specific discourse on material nationalism. In essence, 1819 gave birth to the material nation because Singapore’s modern development to the city-state it is today was birthed by colonisation in every conceivable manner. Unlike the awakening of national consciousness that is usually theorised in identity-based nationalisms, this particular imagining of ­ Singapore nationhood — as foreshadowed in the quote above — was built by colonialism and Singapore’s place in the material and military economy of the British Empire. This material nation is built not only physically, through (Western) modernisation and development engendered by colonisation, but also ideologically through the vocabulary of the global capitalist system that it was (forcibly) integrated into. In this discursive articulation, any semblance of a cultural nationhood prior to 1819 becomes impossible and contradictory. This places Singapore in an awkward position within postcolonial discourse. Its national identity, as promoted by the PAP-led state, has long relied on its colonial past for ideological sustenance and its symbolic origin myth. Singapore’s contemporary definition of Self as economically successful while explicitly not ethnically primordial to its own island prohibits it from weaning itself off the ontological frameworks of the colonial project. There is, thus, seemingly no Singaporean nation outside Western modernity. As Partha Chatterjee notes: “History, it would seem, Tee Zhuo, “Singapore’s bicentennial: Our colonial conundrum,” The Straits Times, January 13, 2019, https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/singapores-bicentennial-ourcolonial-conundrum. 53 Toh, “S’pore to commemorate 200 years of history with series of events in 2019.” 54 Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli, The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Past (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 14. 52 

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has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity.”55

The Allure of the Material Nation The Singapore success story is both alluring and functional. Material ­development and economic prosperity, being seemingly race- and religionneutral, sidesteps contentious ethno-nationalist politics which often plague multi-ethnic societies like Singapore. The identity-blind appeal of economic development and prosperity, with membership being objective, inclusive, and undiscriminating, makes material nationalism a welcome alternative in heterogeneous polities, compared to its potentially divisive identitarian counterparts. It is also a result of Singapore’s desire to find its place — and survival — within the global economic system, a reflection of material nationalism’s post-modern nature. As an ideology of collectivised material success, material nationalism also has the ability to obscure, deflect, or even silence notions of intranation economic inequality. Material nationalism, like any other group identity discourse, forges collective identity through the (imagined) homogenising of its members — or in this case, the equal sowing and reaping of material success. This, when layered with an assertive multiracialism in Singapore,56 racial economic inequalities are either nonexistent or explained not through institutional/structural deficiencies but rather members’ failure to fully invest in the national (or regime’s) developmental vision.57 As Lee Hsien Loong asserted in 2015: “Therefore, for SG50, every community in Singapore is celebrating because every ­community has progressed with the nation.”58 Material nationalism thus “imagines” not only the collective material development of the nation, but also its equitable distribution.

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5. 56 For a critical discussion of multi-racialism in Singapore, see Chua Beng Huat, “Multiculturalism in Singapore: An instrument of social control,” Race & Class 44, no. 3 (2003): 58–77. 57 Terri-Anne Teo, “Perceptions of meritocracy in Singapore: Inconsistencies, contestations and biases,” Asian Studies Review 43, no. 2 (2019): 184–205. 58 Lee, “National Day Rally 2015.” 55 

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Nonetheless, the attractiveness of material nationalism and the Singapore success story is evident through its eager consumption among Singaporeans themselves. The centrality of the Singapore success story is a recurring theme across both popular history books and academic literature.59 Selvaraj Velayutham, through a series of ethnographic interviews, found that economic achievements, standard of living, and a clean, safe environment were the key defining features of national identity highlighted by Singaporeans, rather than abstract or “primordial” attributes.60 This, Velayutham theorises, has been brought about by “the absence of alternative symbols of national identity,” with the material plugging the cultural gap.61 The material nation has thus become more than a state-led top-down narrative: it is being actively embraced and reproduced by the “nation” themselves. Material nationalism represents an intriguing and understudied phenomenon within the field of nationalism. Through its focus on the material dimensions of nationhood, it challenges the identitarian conceptual hold over nationalism. It suggests that other non-identitarian forms of nationalism are also possible and serves as an alternative vantage point into nation-making processes. This chapter’s study of post-independence Singapore provides an empirical basis for the study of material nationalism and illustrates material nationalism’s dialectical relationship with the global economic order. With a national narrative featuring exclusively material, infrastructural, and economic successes, the Singapore nation is envisioned as a material rather than cultural community, one which requires the active work of its people to build and construct — both literally and metaphorically. The Singaporean material nation is not only evoked spiritually through the Singapore success story, but also visually through its fruits, with icons of Singapore’s infrastructural development serving as the nation’s defining image of itself and as an affirmation of national identity. This national identity is also one that was physically and ideologically birthed by For a discussion on the study and production of Singapore history, see Albert Lau, “Nation-building and the Singapore story: Some issues in the study of contemporary Singapore history,” in Gungwu Wang, ed., Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005). 60 Selvaraj Velayutham, Responding to Globalization: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007). 61 Ibid., 174. 59 

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colonisation and “Western” modernity, and which continues to rely on its colonial past for ideological, symbolic, and conceptual sustenance. The identity-blind appeal of economic prosperity makes material nationalism particularly attractive in multi-ethnic Singapore.

Theorising Material Nations Beyond Singapore Material nationalism is in no way an exclusively Singaporean phenomenon. As outlined earlier in this chapter, the articulation of nationhood in material terms can also be increasingly seen in populist — and far more identity-based — nationalisms in the United States and India. The intimate relationship between economic prosperity and Japanese national identity, from Meiji-era notions of fukoku kyōhei (rich country, strong army) to the nihonjinron (theories of “Japaneseness”) of the 1970s and 1980s, also illustrates how Japanese national identity, which was and is far more ethnic when proclaimed by Japanese nationalists, became heavily reliant on economic success to legitimate itself. The prevalence of material nationalist rhetoric in newly independent multi-ethnic African states also highlights how the prospect for material success can likewise be used to envision and bind material national ­identity, in lieu of actualised material achievements. Newly independent African states were confronted with endemic underdevelopment as well as fragmented ethnic and tribal communities within their inherited and often arbitrary borders, upon the departure of colonial powers. Resultingly, as Crawford Young notes, African nationalist leaders often courted their peoples with the “enchanting future possibilities,” offering them “the blessings of modernity, brought within reach by the rapid and transformational development which nationalism promised.”62 Kpessa et al.’s survey of nation building projects in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) likewise highlights the widespread use of material referents of identity to build national unity and forestall territorial and ethnic fragmentation.63 In particular, the authors point out that SSA leaders sought to Crawford Young, “Nationalism and ethnic conflict in Africa,” in Montserrat Guibernau and John Hutchinson, eds., Understanding Nationalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 166–167. 63 Michael Kpessa, Daniel Béland, and André Lecours, “Nationalism, development, and social policy: The politics of nation-building in sub-Saharan Africa,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 12 (2011): 2115–2133. 62 

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displace ethnic bonds within their communities with material ones by framing the ­provision of housing, education, and healthcare through nationalist lens. These material bonds, the authors argue, serve as “concrete national ties” and “give real-world existence to an ‘imagined ­community’, as the sense of belonging to a community of social and economic support generates feelings of national solidarity.”64 The concept of ujamaa in newly independent Tanzania, for instance, sought to displace ethnic, tribal, and religious loyalties through the creation of a new material national identity. Conceived by Tanzania’s foremost nationalist Julius Nyerere, the principle of ujamaa first emerged in 1962 and was later institutionalised through the 1967 Arusha Declaration.65 Variously translated as “familyhood,” “community,” “development,” or even “African socialism,” ujamaa became an ideological model which Nyerere, who became Tanzania’s first president, used to steer the country’s post-independence social, political, and economic development.66 While already extensively studied as an economic doctrine which underpinned Nyerere’s unabashedly socialist development agenda,67 Hunter notes that ujamaa was also “a key political turning point which introduced a new lexicon of political metaphors.”68 Ujamaa “offered a vocabulary for talking about community” in newly independent Tanzania by emphasising a “virtuous national community” held together by its members’ shared desire for material development and economic prosperity.69 Like Singapore, the Tanzanian nation was envisioned as a material community that needed to be constructed both metaphorically and literally. In the same vein as Singapore’s “pioneer generation,” ujamaa exalted a symbolic gatekeeper and builder of the Ibid., 2118. Katrina Demulling, “Nyerere, Julius Kambarage (1922–99) and Ujamaa,” in John Stone et al., eds., The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (Hoboken: Wiley, 2016), 1–2. 66 Emma Hunter, “Revisiting Ujamaa: Political legitimacy and the construction of community in post-colonial Tanzania,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, no. 3 (2008): 472. 67 For example, see Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980); Paul Collier et al., Labour and Poverty in Rural Tanzania: Ujamaa and Rural Development in the United Republic of Tanzania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 68 Hunter, “Revisiting Ujamaa,” 472. 69 Ibid., 475. 64  65 

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Tanzanian material nation — the “virtuous farmer.”70 As the central figure of ujamaa nationalist discourse, the virtuous farmer as well as slogans such as uhuru na jasho (freedom and work) sought to reinforce the notion that Tanzania was not an ethnic or religious entity but rather a nation defined and brought together by its members’ commitment to the nation’s material development.71 Ujamaa thus suggests that it is possible for material nationalism to ideologically coexist with a decidedly “non-capitalist” regime — that material solidarity, not just material accumulation, can also underwrite the material nation. As outlined earlier, a key allure of material nationalism is its ability to function as an ethnically neutral platform for nation building. As James Mayall notes, new states regarded economic development as an “undeniably modern (and therefore legitimate by virtue of this fact) […] means of detaching loyalties from clan, tribe and region and transferring them to the new state-nation.”72 Like Singapore, Tanzania had sought to divert various existing ethnic referents of identity into a new “ethnically sterile” national identity. Ujamaa was therefore the ideological glue that, however briefly, bound together the country’s 120 ethnic groups together as a material community. Indeed, as Dunn and Englebert acknowledge: “Nyerere did succeed in building a Tanzanian identity and reducing ethnicity to relative political insignificance, a landmark achievement among his peers.”73 This brief survey of Tanzania additionally raises the need to examine another pertinent question. What becomes of the material nation when material development, or the prospect for material development, collapses? The 1979 Oil Crisis and resulting recession among advanced economies severely impacted export-reliant SSA states, which by the mid-1980s were overwhelmingly subjected to World Bank and International Monetary Fund-imposed structural adjustment policies. State subsidies and social policies in many SSA states were quickly cut, undermining material nation-building efforts and contributing to the

Ibid., 472. James R. Brennan, “Blood enemies: Exploitation and urban citizenship in the nationalist political thought of Tanzania, 1958–75,” The Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 394. 72 Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, 117. 73 Kevin C. Dunn and Pierre Englebert, Inside African Politics, 2nd edition (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019), 87. 70  71 

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resurgence of ethnic and religious mobilisation across the region.74 Tanzania was likewise not spared, with the recession, cost of the UgandaTanzanian War, and declining agricultural production laying bare the inefficiencies of the ujamaa development model.75 Increased economic hardship and widening social inequality led to the eventual collapse of ujamaa and its nation-building effects. The accompanying increase of ethnic and religious strife in Tanzania, Campbell argues, highlights how “the failure of ujamaa/socialism has eroded the salience of secular nationalism” in the country.76 In conclusion, material nationalism is a distinct and unique variant of nationalism, present in varying degrees and various forms across regions and countries. It is not a regional or historical phenomenon, but rather an alternative imagining of the nation that has leveraged a new set of vocabularies to articulate its identity. This chapter’s study of material nationalism hopes to function as a key stepping stone to further theoretical and empirical work related to material, post-modern, and non-identitarian forms of nationalism. While much scholarly effort has been dedicated to studying the relationship between globalisation and nationalism77 and even post-nationalism, “denationalisation,”78 or “flexible citizenship,”79 more could still be done to uncover how post-modern and non-identitarian forms of nationalism fit in and contribute to nationalism studies.

Kpessa, Béland, and Lecours, “Nationalism, development, and social policy,” 2128. John Campbell, “Nationalism, ethnicity and religion: Fundamental conflicts and the politics of identity in Tanzania,” Nations and Nationalism 5, no. 1 (1999): 105–125. 76 Ibid., 120. 77 For example, see Liah Greenfeld, Globalisation of Nationalism: The Motive-Force Behind Twenty-First Century Politics (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2016); Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In (London: SAGE Publications, 2006). 78 Saskia Sassen, “Towards post-national and denationalized citizenship,” in Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner, eds., Handbook of Citizenship Studies (London: SAGE Publications, 2002). 79 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 74  75 

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Chapter 3

Viral Nationalism: The Return of Ethno-Nationalist Ideas Through the New Right Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo de Orellana Department of War Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

Resurgent nationalist movements present a challenged to globalisation and Neoliberal economics,1 challenging liberal international norms such as equality of rights for cultural, ethnic and gender identities, multilateral international relations agreements,2 binding rules-based international organisations and even limitations in the exercise of coercive power. Electoral successes for nationalist movements in the UK, US, France, Italy, Poland, India, Russia, and Brazil have revealed remarkable coherence between their foreign policy objectives, a coherence which centres on a shared conceptual assemblage known as New Right.3 This chapter Angelos-Stylianos Chryssogelos, “Undermining the West from within: European populists, the US and Russia,” European View 9, no. 2 (December 1, 2010): 267–277. 2 Andrej Zaslove, “Exclusion, community, and a populist political economy: The radical right as an anti-globalization movement,” Comparative European Politics 6, no. 2 (July 1, 2008): 169–189. 3 The link between New Right ideas and its theory is evidenced by Bannon’s, Lega’s and Le Pen’s explicit references to de Benoists’s work. See “Alain de Benoist en ‘soutien ­critique’ à Marine Le Pen,” Le Monde, accessed August 11, 2018. http://droites-extremes. 1 

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explores this intellectual assemblage and its promotion of its own brand of nationalism in the twenty-first century.

Introduction Nationalists who refer to themselves as the New Right, or read thinkers who do, include Donald Trump, Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg, European nationalists like Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, and Viktor Orbán, and newcomers such as Santiago Abascal and his Vox party in Spain. All of these nationalist politicians maintain informal yet relatively loyal alliances with more extreme groups like Generation Identity, the US alt-right, or Fratelli d’Italia. Such groups bring together young activists and champion extreme nationalist causes and campaigning. These act vigorously online and in the street against those they consider threats to their survival: immigrants, feminists, and liberals. In this chapter, we examine the New Right’s intellectual history, by locating it within the nationalist tradition. We analyse the political discourse and conceptual foundations of the New Right and enquire into how it imagines the international and international relations. Though the term “New Right” initially referred to 1980s supply side conservatism associated with Reagan and Thatcher, its “social” expressions, after initial alliances with 1980s free market radicals, gradually found independent expression.4 Its various — often incoherent and ­contradictory — expressions in the 2000s also self-labelled as “New Right” (or “Alternative” in American grassroots conservatism), and share a set of political sensibilities, theories and approaches to the international. It has been a common argument is that New Right nationalists like Trump or Le Pen are returning to 1930s fascist nationalisms. We will argue below

blog.lemonde.fr/2011/01/26/alain-de-benoist-en-soutien-critique-a-marine-le-pen/; Matthew N. Lyons, “Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Origins and ideology of the alternative right,” Political Research Associates (blog), January 20, 2017, http://www.politicalresearch.org/ 2017/01/20/ctrl-alt-delete-report-on-the-alternative-right/; Matteo Andriola, “Nuova Destra: Alain de Benoist e Matteo Salvini,” Paginauno, accessed August 10, 2018. http:// www.rivistapaginauno.it/nuova-destra-lega-nord.php. 4 Joseph Lowndes, “‘From new class critique to White nationalism: Telos, the alt right, and the origins of Trumpism’,” Konturen 9 (August 7, 2017): 8–12.

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that today’s New Right nationalists are more directly inspired by late nineteenth century French “cultural” nationalism. The New right is also often associated with a “withdrawal” from international engagement.5 We argue below that New Right nationalists propose a radical remake of the international. As Steffak observes, it is clear that “not all internationalism was Liberal” or opposed to the concept of the nation. Rather, the nature and role of the nation and nations within internationalism has always been understood variously.6 This reflects an certain ambivalence that has always marked uses of the “word internationalism.”7 This chapter argues that the international in fact provides the key unifying frame for New Right nationalists today, and this is a central consequence of their common emphasis on culture.8 This which unites the foreign policy programmes of diverse actors including Trump, Le Pen, Erdogan, Orban and Putin.9 It is also evident in the wider discourse around Brexit.10 New Right Nationalist discourse coheres around resistance to Liberal or “globalist” norms, following an account of their negative social economic consequences, rooted in a cultural identitybased logic.

Nationalism, Culture, and Geopolitics Nationalism is the cousin of liberalism, both sharing a project to establish freedoms and rights. If the French Revolution gave rise to the “rights of man,” Napoleon’s subsequent idea of the “nation” argued that only the “Trump, and American Decline,” The New York Times, April 27, 2018, https://www. nytimes.com/2018/04/26/opinion/bush-41-trump-and-american-decline.html; “Trump’s dangerous global retreat,” The New York Times, June 9, 2018, sec. Opinion, https://www. nytimes.com/2018/05/04/opinion/trumps-dangerous-global-retreat.html. 6 Jens Steffek, “Fascist internationalism,” Millennium 44, no. 1 (September 1, 2015): 3–22. 7 Warren F. Kuehl, “Concepts of internationalism in history,” Peace & Change 11, no. 2 (July 1, 1986): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0130.1986.tb00536.x. 8 Nancy S. Love, “Back to the future: Trendy fascism, the Trump effect, and the alt-right,” New Political Science 39, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 263–268. 9 “Trump’s UN ‘hate Speech’ Criticised,” BBC News, September 20, 2017, sec. US & Canada, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41327130. 10 Nigel Farage, “The Little people have had enough — Not just here, but in America too,”  The Telegraph, October 9, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/10/09/ the-little-people-have-had-enough---not-just-here-but-in-america/. 5 

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French, not all men, should enjoy those rights. Half a century later, nationalism was regularly used by politicians like Otto von Bismarck to combat claims to political rights with the argument that the national necessity of a vaguely defined identity trumped granting certain rights to citizens. Bismarckian nationalism framed constitutionalism, Liberal rights and military moderation as existential risks for Prussia and declaimed that “it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided […] but by iron and blood.” For Bismarck, the niceties of individual, parliamentary and legal rights hindered national power, which remains a key nationalist concept. National necessity established a hierarchy whereby the needs of the nation sat firmly above the rights of its individuals. This discourse viewed individual rights as always potentially a threat to national security or, in social contexts, as a threat to the freedom to exercise state power. Classical nationalist discourse assumed friction among identities as a natural condition in political life. This underpinned the understanding of nations as distinct species struggling for survival, common to nineteenth century nationalisms. These ideas were formalised as spatial and ethic struggle in the pseudo-scientific Geopolitical tradition pioneered by Kjéllen and Ratzel.11 International Relations was here viewed as a zerosum game where the survival of a nation sometimes naturally necessitates the destruction of others. These ideas where significantly developed by Maurice Barrès in 1897. Barres pioneered a shift in the focus of nationalist ideas, resulting in a more restrictive definition of national identity than those of the ­previous nationalists. This new idea of nationalism was focussed on birth and culture, rather than civil belonging (as for Napoleon) or loyalty (as for Bismarck). This was a direct response to the universalism in French Republicanism, which has at times been termed “reactionary Alison Bashford, “Nation, empire, globe: The spaces of population debate in the interwar years,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 01 (January 2007): 170–201, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417507000448; Mark Bassin, “Race contra space: The conflict between German Geopolitik and national socialism,” Political Geography Quarterly 6, no. 2 (April 1987): 115–134, https://doi.org/10.1016/0260-9827(87)90002-4; Geoffrey Parker, “Ratzel, the French School and the birth of Alternative Geopolitics,” Political Geography 19, no. 8 (November 2000): 957–969, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(00)00037-8; Ola Tunander, “Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century: Rudolf Kjellén’s,” Review of International Studies 27, no. 03 (July 2001): 451–463. 11 

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institutionalism” in opposition to republican liberal institutionalism. Barrès theorised that the culture and integrity of a nation was “eternal,” fixed and unchanging, and that any change to it, whether brought about by foreign influence or progressive politics, would bring about its demise. Any cultural change, be it to the arts, to the role of women, or to racial assumptions, was seen to erode the spirit of the nation and its way of life. Ideas about the state, belonging and politics, which emerged from Barrès and like-minded thinkers like Charles Maurras advocated racial and cultural exclusion as necessary to national survival. The key idea introduced to nationalism by Barrès, then, was the link between race and culture. This link meant that culture needed to remain unchanged if it was to survive, as did the race that produced it. Even more importantly, it introduced the notion that any progressive, modern or culture-changing idea endangered the nation’s survival. Crucially, when it comes to the individual, birth-culture also defines belonging. For example, an individual born into a different birth culture is not expected to ever be able to peacefully cohabitate with those born into others. For Barrès this is due to fundamental biological differences, which limit access to culture, and to the ethno-geopolitical logic of different identities being locked in an eternal struggle which prevents cohabitation and collaboration since individuals will always favour and struggle for their own birthculture above others.12 This concept is at the heart of New Right nationalisms today, which is why contemporary nationalists often attack domestic liberals, socialists, feminists, progressives, and their institutions as much as they worry about foreigners. Indeed, the New Right shares much more with nineteenth century nationalists than with nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and Mustafa Kemal. Fascist nationalisms also believed that geopolitics was characterised by Maurice Barrès, The Faith of France: Studies in Spiritual Differences Unity (Forgotten Books, 2015); Maurice Barrès, The Undying Spirit of France (Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2009); Maurice Barrès, Étude Pour La Protection Des Ouvriers Français: Contre Les Étrangers, 1893 (Paris: Grande Imprimerie Parisienne, 1893), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k814588; Maurice Barrès, Les Traits Éternels de La France, 1917, https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56036095; Jean-Pierre Rioux, “Maurice Barrès: ‘ma soumission à mon innéité’,” 1900: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 11, no. 1 (1993): 101–106; Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, 1902 (Paris: Juven, 1902), https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56013884. 12 

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competition between states struggling for survival. Rather than professing faith in the status quo, they pursued a revolution in all aspects of society to prepare for this struggle. They often advocated for radical social and even biological change. Cultural change was not avoided but designed for and sought after. The 1930s Fascist nationalists believed in re-making nature, developing and bending it to the will of man. While they disagreed on the exact means, Mussolini, Futurists and similar theorists like Primo de Rivera did not only seek to purify identity, but also to create a new obedient national warrior subject, l’uomo fascista, that responded to national imperative as dictated by the saviour-leader Duce, Caudillo or Father of the Nation. “Fascist Man” has to be invented, moulded and made: a detailed vision of society far beyond purifying national identity from foreignness and traitors. A characteristic feature of Fascism was that it had this programme for deep social change, beginning with a vision of people’s membership of society and the state that erased the social unit of the family — though not its biological role — in favour of state-corporatist social units that ­separated men, women and children, linking each to the state via work, dopolavoro (after-work) socialising, women’s collectives, civic labour, youth organisations and particularly the military.13 Nurturing spirito as the optimal realisation of the biological identity of razza-spirito was the task of the early twentieth century fascist politician. Fascist nationalists sought racial purification and expansion through modern science. In anticipation of populating huge empires after the destruction of their original populations, Nazi scientists sought to double the German population by ensuring each pregnancy yielded twins, while Mussolini even attempted to discourage Italians from eating pasta as the supply of Durum wheat it needed was not as strategically available and reliable, thus making pasta a cultural artifact that placed Italy at risk. Fascist nationalism gave total control to a saviour-leader. It demanded total discipline over the entire country and all of its social, cultural, biological, economic, and even artistic functions.

Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, “La Dottrina Del Fascismo,” in Enciclopedia Italiana (Rome: Treccani, 1932), http://www.polyarchy.org/basta/documenti/ fascismo.1932.html; V. de Grazia, Consenso e Cultura Di Massa Nell’Italia Fascista. L’organizzazione Del Dopolavoro (Rome: Laterza, 1981); John G. Hammerback, “José Antonio’s rhetoric of fascism,” Southern Communication Journal 59, no. 3 (September 1, 1994): 181–195, https://doi.org/10.1080/10417949409372937. 13 

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In sum, the fascist generation of nationalists planned to thoroughly revolutionise culture and society in order to propel the race to triumph.14 Today’s New Right nationalists are distinct in that they primarily want to stop and reverse social and cultural change. At the root of this impulse we find the idea, pioneered by Barrès, that cultural change always signals social decadence and corruption. New Right nationalists have no plans to revolutionise society and thus newly empower their national culture. They believe in the extant perfection of national culture and want to set it free from any presumption of equality with other identities so that it can thrive and fulfil its innate potential. This is why the New Right nationalisms are so often defined by a politics of nostalgia. It is also why they consistently speak of culture, not race, and are often vocal in claiming that race is not their concern. As their intellectual pioneer, French philosopher Alain de Benoist, argued in 1999: Mankind as such does not exist, because their membership within humanity is always mediated by a particular cultural belonging [...] Biological differences are significant only in reference to social and cultural givens.15

In other words, race is only relevant because as it determines which culture an individual may belong to. Cultural belonging may be underpinned by birth, which is why speaking and defending culture, as the New Right does, has powerful racial implications. But the emphasis on culture circumvents restrictions on — and public revulsion for — overt racism. The New Right assumes that cultures are caught in a permanent struggle to the death for survival. This, of course, carries a tendency towards extremism. Many on what we term the accelerationist wing of the New Benito Mussolini, “La Storia Del Fascismo,” accessed August 11, 2015. http://www. ilduce.net/discorsi.htm; Gentile and Mussolini, “La Dottrina Del Fascismo”; Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1996); “Fascismo: Documenti,” accessed January 13, 2016. http://www.storiaxxisecolo.it/fascismo/fascismo10g.htm; Giulio Sapelli, La Cooperazione e Il Fascismo: Organizzazione Delle Masse e Dominazione Burocratica (Lega nazionale cooperative e mutue, 1976); Emilio Gentile, La via Italiana al Totalitarismo: Il Partito e Lo Stato Nel Regime Fascista, vol. 46 (Carocci, 2008). 15 Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “Manifesto: The French new right in the year 2000,” Telos 115, no. Spring (1999): 117–144. 14 

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Right, which in its political expression includes the alt-right in America and movements like Generation Identity in Europe have taken these beliefs to their inevitable conclusion: that a global race war needs to be fought to ensure the survival of the white race. This can be clearly and explicitly read in the manifestos of the gunman who attacked a mosque in Christchurch, Anders Breivik in Norway in 2011 or the public statements of the Charlottesville protesters in 2017 in the United States. The New Right, building on the work of Barrès, believes that culture is biologically mediated rather than socially determined. If one is of the wrong biology then participating in another culture is difficult and has negative impact on the host culture. The restoration of the nation therefore logically requires the purification of culture and — only by implication — race. To adopt the Liberal assumption of equality among identities is to betray the nation, since it undermines its chances of survival.16 This explains all sorts of grievances, from poverty to social frustrations. These grievances are attributed to an upending of the natural order that gives equal rights to those who have no inherent stake in a culture and are ­furthermore biologically determined to defend their own birth-culture.17 A very similar intellectual mechanism is responsible for the New Right’s fixation with gender. Just as biology determines which culture one may or may not belong and thrive in, biological differences between sexes are seen to determine women’s social and political role. The liberation of women is viewed as a prime example of how liberal humanist assumptions about equality are unnatural and can destroy a culture.18 Women’s control of their reproductive functions is viewed as a particular risk, undermining the Tomislav Sunic, Alain de Benoist, and Paul Gottfried, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (2011). 17 Alain de Benoist, Au-delà des droits de l’homme (Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2016); Alain de Benoist, “De la différence à la ‘diversité,’” Valeurs actuelles, August 11, 2019, https://www.valeursactuelles.com/clubvaleurs/lincorrect/de-la-difference-la-diversite-109775; Alain de Benoist, Les démons du bien (Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux Editions, 2013); Alain de Benoist, Nous et les autres: Problèmatique de l’identité (Paris: Editions Krisis, 2007); Alain de Benoist, The Indo-Europeans: In Search of the Homeland (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2016). 18 For a succinct example, see Eugénie Bastié, Adieu Mademoiselle — La Défaite Des Femmes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2016); For a more thorough exposition, see de Benoist’s “no to gender theory!” manifesto: Alain de Benoist, Non à La Théorie Du Genre! 2014 (Paris: Mordicus, 2014). 16 

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nation’s survival, by yielding to the selfish caprice of women that refuse to play their nature-given, distinctive, part. The Brexit referendum campaign and Salvini’s 2017 electoral campaign in Italy provided excellent examples of how these ideas can unfold in practice. Those campaigning for Leave like Nigel Farage, for example, never argued that migration was to be limited due to racial difference but demanded the right to “retake control of our borders” in the name of the preservation and prosperity of the national culture. Matteo Salvini likewise avoids discussion race and focusses on the right of Italians to ensure Italy’s survival regardless of the cost to others. And, along with Vox in Spain, he advocates a rollback of Italian women’s rights, beginning with contraception, to restore “the natural order” and ensure the future of the nation. New Right nationalist ideas centre around the claim that nature has already determined the structure of society and politics, and so their advocates seek to restore what they see as the natural state — one determined by difference between birth-cultural identities. This is contrasted against Liberal internationalist or globalist ideas that subvert the natural order of different genders, identities and the natural struggle among nations.

Nationalism, Reactionary Internationalism, and the New Right Liberal International norms are deemed, by the New Right, to obfuscate the exercise of elite power. Liberal modernity is viewed as having revealed an “inherent trend to degeneration or self-cancellation,” “done by people of a certain kind with, and not uncommonly to (or even against), other people, who were conspicuously unlike them.”19 A misguided imperial universalism is thus identified with Liberalism, which “has been the main cause of its subsequent attempts to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the crusades); yesterday to its political principles (colonialism); and today to it social and economic and social model (Development).” Liberal Internationalism is this identified with an extended effort to erase cultural identity and national distinctiveness, and today’s development ideology is viewed as simply the latest iteration of Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, 2012, http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/thedark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/. 19 

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this assault on national cultural difference. Liberalism is accused of having destroyed ethno-cultures around the world. Liberal internationalism is thus defined against embodied ethno-cultural particularity, as “the westernisation of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness by imposing on the world a supposedly superior model invariably presented as ‘progress’.”20 This requires the construction of an alternative or particularist internationalism. Cultural destruction can only be addressed, following Schmitt and evoking Huntington, by the emergence of “a new organisation of international relations” based on “a multipolar world of emerging civilisations.” This discourse can be seen clearly in the discourses of Bannon, Le Pen, Orban, and Salvini, but also in Putin, Xi, Erdogan and Modi. Ethno-cultural civilisations may collaborate but “in a multipolar world, power is defined as the ability to resist the influence of others rather than to impose one’s own.”21 The New Right construction of international cultural freedom views all universalist Liberal norms as eroding the capacity of indigenous cultures to compete, but also to simply subsist in their autonomous particularity. In nurturing the capacity to refuse the erasure of particularity under a logic of universal progress, resistance to Liberal internationalism underpins the capacity of ethno-culturally determined national identities to endure.22 This new internationalist project is framed as shared across and between all national-cultures, which are now under threat from Liberal internationalism or “Globalism.” This framework of analysis clearly draws on the nineteenth century heroic nationalist temporality analysed above. Faced by the crisis integral to Liberal internationalism, only an international remembrance of cultural traditions will allow for the collective defence of national particularity. Liberal aid and knowledge transfer on universalist or paternalistic grounds is categorically rejected in favour of each cultural particularism becoming free to actualise its own potential. As a consequence, New Right Nationalists tend to advocate for mutually acknowledged national spheres of influence, and a strict commitment to non-intervention, in international relations.

de Benoist and Champetier, “Manifesto: The French new right in the year 2000.” Ibid. 22 Curtis Yarvin, “The Cathedral compilation,” accessed August 13, 2018. http://atavisionary. com/the-cathedral-compilation/. 20  21 

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The New Right call for the re-connection of international politics with birth-cultures, which renders all global normative interference dangerous. In other words, to oppose Liberal internationalist norms is, for the New Right, to defend “true” internationalism. They understand internationalism as a matter of ensuring that those who wish to remember their culture can determine what is right for themselves. This is an argument resonant with almost all classical expressions of communitarian ethics in International Relations theory, as may be found in articles by authors, such as Martin Wight, Herbert Butterfield, Hans Morgenthau, or even Hedley Bull in more pluralist passages. What distinguished classical IR communitarians, from contemporary New Right Nationalists was their domestic advocacy of Liberal political values. An implicitly or explicitly Darwinian conceptualisation sits behind calls for ethno-cultural diversity among the New Right (folding together, for example, European, American, Russian and Indian formations): “defenders” of any particularism can believe themselves the most effectively “fitted” to succeed in world finally cured of the oppressions of universalism. These new nationalists advocate for a patriotic internationalist subject committed to a rejection of the universal as a constitutive ideal, whose agency is rooting in reactionary discourse of birth-culture, yet forward facing, in its recognition that the international cannot be ignored or be isolated from. New Right Nationalists advocate for a form of reactionary internationalism because the discourse they have developed rests on the re-enchantment of cultural particularity, believing they are restoring birth-cultures to the centre of history by making nations once more the masters of their own fate. Their struggle against the rights of foreigners and women is thus part of a reactionary internationalist project, which is architectural to contemporary New Right nationalist ideas. To betray the “natural order” is a betrayal of one’s own identity and its survival. This has implications for how New Right Nationalists think about truth. They have determined that mainstream news cannot be believed using an expansive idea referred to as “the cathedral.” The cathedral posits that modern globalised universities, media and cultural institutions function to establish and enforce faith in liberalism, which is viewed as a new global religion. The New Right argue that any rational questioning of liberal beliefs around gender, race or culture becomes heresy against this global ideological formation. This suggests that the New Right see themselves as the true heirs to the Enlightenment project to free humanity from doctrine, anti-rationalism,

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ignorance and superstition. New Right politicians thus prove their credibility, as truth tellers, through willingness to publicly depart from the irrational faith in liberal ideas, so as to represent the legitimate interests of the identity that is “left behind.” This is why Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Environment, was able to casually throw scientific expertise out the window in the Brexit referendum and why Trump survived the spectacle of issuing “alternative facts” from the White House. For this reason, the New Right’s characteristic loathing for political correctness is a feature common to all the new Nationalists. It signals to supporters that their leaders are willing to transgress liberal power, by speaking out against Liberal ideology. Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” as well as regular chauvinistic comments from New Right politicians like Nigel Farage and Salvini play so well with supporters because they are read as a promise to return public discourse to a natural condition of “common-sense.” New Right ideas about survival and identity coalesce in the claim that they alone have seen through the “unnatural” irrational story woven by liberals. This is encapsulated in the concept of the “red pill,” common in New Right online discussion threads internationally, which refers to a scene from The Matrix in which hero Neo is asked whether he wishes to see the harsh reality or a pleasant illusion. To be red-pilled is to see “the truth”: a world destroyed by liberal assumptions of equality, between genders and national identities, but also between weak and strong, rich and poor, masking the natural condition that rewards strength and punishes weakness. The online incubation of New Right ideas in the run up to Trump’s election was underwritten by the argument that gains from a millennia of white male leadership are being undermined by “libtards” (“liberal retards”) and “SJWs” (“social justice warriors”) who, informed by “fake news” and wracked by “white guilt,” give away the achievements of Europeans to others, and even undermine their own survival by losing control of their women. This highly conspiratorial mode of thinking is used to explain to its public the negative consequences of technological shifts in the world of work, the sense of a loss of control over one’s destiny, hopelessness, and community decay. If one buys into the ­ ­assumption that there is a Liberal internationalist or globalist ideology that causes these problems, nationalism seems to offer immediate solutions to them. New Nationalist movements are united around grievances. This is why a common characteristic of New Right movements internationally is

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the existence of powerful electoral alliances between relatively mainstream and more extreme actors. The basic template usually seeks to secure a broader vote by mainstreaming or taking over a party (as with Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party) while retaining the extremist vote through proxies that are neither overtly recognised as allies nor disavowed (the alt-right and even the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Trump’s case). This system of New Right electoral alliances clearly emerged in the Brexit referendum. Despite superficial disagreements, Vote Leave, Leave.EU, and UKIP never contradicted one another. The same is true of Trump’s Republicans and alt-right “very fine people”; Le Pen’s Front (now Rassemblement) National and Generation Identity; and Salvini’s Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Nuova and Casa Pound. These alliances tend to be mostly leaderless, and are therefore relatively unstable, particularly given they often involve international or cross border associations. New Right Nationalist coalitions depend on the continued presence of grievances that directly affect people’s lives, particularly growing poverty for those in work, the collapse of stable and safe social identities linked to work, the increasing instability of employment security, and the rapid change of local communities due to emigration, migration, collapsing housing affordability, and redevelopment initiatives that displace communities. These shared grievances, frequently coded as a set of culture war precepts against liberalism, feminism, equality and other progressive norms, are in fact what holds these alliances together. This means that the specific shape of the alliances has shifted repeatedly and frequently while retaining a very sizeable constituency. This instability should not only be seen as a weakness, however, as it provides a fast shape-shifting flexibility to the electoral expressions of the New Right. Crucially, even after changing shape, leadership and groupings, they remain bound together by a sense that all grievances share an origin in a crisis created by Liberal internationalism. This stands in stark contrast to the strictly organised, strictly doctrinarian political organisations of the Fascist era. The flexibility and ultimately surprisingly low degree of ideological uniformity of the New Right is vital for another key reason beyond party political expression. This flexibility has made it possible for a diverse ecosystem of New Right and Far Right opinion and indeed theorising and communication to emerge and thrive in online environments. This means that, while unity is only apparent when confronting liberals or expressing outrage, the overall constituency has been able to grow faster, more broadly, and more diversely than otherwise possible. Crucially, the

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diversity of the New Right, which is to some extent exacerbated by its long incubation in disaggregated online environments, has made it possible for its candidates to exercise a strategy of electoral cakeism: its principal political proponents can enjoy the support of online extremists through denunciation of the common liberal enemy, while simultaneously claiming dissociation from them. Furthermore, some New Right adherents have slid into ever greater (and yet ever more disorganised and centreless) extremism through online groups and their development of New Right ideas, particularly New Right Accelerationist precepts, as occurred with the perpetrators of the abovementioned terrorist attacks in Christchurch and Pittsburgh. Moving in the opposite direction, towards the absorption of former moderates that is, this flexibility allowed for huge constituencies to coalesce very quickly, bringing together exceptionally diverse ideological, social and political groupings (particularly uniting moderate conservatives with the Far Right and former left-wing voters) around anti-liberal grievances rather than detailed agendas. These alliances are frequently short-term and very informal, often only visible by their shared targets of grievance and outrage, but the speed of their coalescence and broad appeal betray the influence of anarchical yet truly viral internet cultures based on outrage.

Conclusion The project to overturn constricting Liberal internationalist or “globalist” norms binds together New Right nationalist movements, ideas and discourses. Despite clear contradictions within the New Right, for instance on the economy between protectionists and more extreme anarcho-­ capitalist libertarians, they are coherent insofar as they occupy contiguous locations in the spectrum of how to proceed in the reconstitution of international norms around autonomous birth-cultures. New Right Nationalists share the assumption that liberation from Liberal internationalism will permit triumph in an unconstrained order where cultural strength will be unleashed, its mettle tested and the deserving succeed. The New Nationalism is thus united by a vision of international normative destruction and reconstitution. The New Right does not want to disengage from the international, but to re-engage with it on different, albeit reactionary, terms. New Right Nationalists proposes the unravelling and destruction of the rights-based

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norms that govern much of international relations (equality of rights among states, or human rights for example). Mussolini, Evola and Marinetti were not afraid of isolation to create the perfect “fascist man” and society.23 Conversely, Trump, Brexiteers, Continental, Russian, and Chinese nationalists all want to reconstitute the international rules of the game. The background assumption is that the rules are currently weighted in favour of global elites and competitors, unfriendly to the interests of national cultural identities. In Western movements, the gains anticipated are primarily economic, a greater share of the profits of global wealth and trade by overturning norms that in their view limit it, as was the case with Trump’s position on US–China trade. Much as in Hayekian theory the market, once set free, achieves balance and fairness, the New Right’s birth-cultural identity, once set free from “globalist” normative burdens, will inevitably achieve its real potential. This vision is projected as the basis of a more just international relations where innate birth-cultural quality will triumph. This is evident that a remarkable number of political movements around the world adhere to this core tenet, from Putin’s United Russia Party to the Polish Law and Justice Party as well as Xi’s “Communism with Chinese Characteristics,” who demand to be set free from — at least some — international norms as the means to achieve international success. Their discourse, based on enunciations claiming a cultural identity’s right to overturn or be except from specific norms has been rewarded with electoral success, whether independently as in the case of Lega, or conquering conservative movements as with British Conservative and the American Republican parties. The New Right retains classical nationalist principles: A historically immutable ethno-cultural identity as normative, social and political grounding for thinking about the state and policy, opposition to modernity and its norms as a betrayal of the Self and a return to the pure Self — be it normative, cultural, ethnic or a combination thereof — as a grounding normativity, fuelling an ethos of protecting the Self at the expense of any hindering internationalist norm or actor. Further, rather than descending simply from 1920s to 1930s nationalisms, New Right thought emerges from the older nineteenth century nationalist tradition best represented Gentile and Mussolini, “La Dottrina Del Fascismo”; Benito Mussolini, “La Storia Del Fascismo.” 23 

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by thinkers like Barrès, and Maurras, as well as politicians like Napoleon III and Bismark. New Right departures from classical nationalisms are significant, however. Its suspicion and pessimism as to Liberal modernity are not invested principally on democracy, but on internationalist norms — which, in certain circumstances, include democracy.24 Their salvation politics are deeply influenced by the neoliberal drive to unchain the gods, which raise normative destruction to a core prescription. However, liberation remains grounded on identity rather than the economy per se, making faith in its natural superiority a key discursive driver. This is clearly different from 1920s to 1930s nationalisms, which had extensive, pervasive and invasive plans to remodel nature, people, society, the economy and their structures. Further, 1930s violent survivalism is replaced with an economic version that accepts international interconnectedness and interdependence — Trump, Brexiteers, Le Pen, and Salvini don’t want to end trade, only demand better terms. Unlike the USSR, Turkey, Japan and Italy in the 1930s, they do not seek isolation from the rules, but their remaking around unilateral sovereignty — as Trump and Xi also favour, replacing multilateralism with bilateral deals that reward coercive power and deal-making. The vision of the international that results forcefully places survivalist geopolitics as the main conceptual frame of reference for international relations.25 This is evident in the renegotiations of international norms currently driven by New Right actors in the United States, Britain, and Italy, who appear to relish the opportunity to dismantle the international norms that bind them. Indeed, pessimism appears to be a more central feature of New Right thought than in past nationalisms.26 1890s nationalists believed that global European power might be corrupted by liberalism, and thus Particularly if “imposed” from without, as is the case with Poland’s PiS. This has been studied principally in the case of Russia. See Marlène Laruelle, “The two faces of contemporary Eurasianism: An imperial version of Russian nationalism,” Nationalities Papers 32, no. 1 (March 1, 2004): 115–136, https://doi.org/10.1080/009059 9042000186197; Anton Shekhovtsov, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism: The new right à La Russe,” Religion Compass 3, no. 4 (July 1, 2009): 697–716, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00158.x. 26 Michelsen, Nicholas, and Pablo de Orellana, “Pessimism and the alt-right: Knowledge, power, race and time,” in Tim Stevens and Nicholas Michelsen (Eds.) Pessimism in International Relations (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 119–136. 24  25 

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projected — and enacted — a reactionary salvation of cultural permanence; 1930s fascists detested modern decadence and planned for an expansive future in extreme detail, from the purification and reconstruction of identity itself to a mechanised industrial economy that aggrandised it to epic proportions. Conversely, the New Right vision of the national and international is entirely framed by a reactionary imaginary. These thinkers and movements presuppose an international already at breaking point and see its collapse as an opportunity for cultural identity to emerge as salvation, informing an interpretation of all crises as the result of Liberalism’s normative failures, and thereby limiting its solutions to the destruction of Liberal norms. It is striking that New Right nationalist actors do not conceive of each other as threats, but rather remain focussed on a collective struggle against international norms and institutions themselves. It is important to consider, however, that even as they agree on the need to dismantle international norms, the assumption remains that even among them there must be victors and defeated in the world of total sovereignty they imagine. Reaction to international Liberal norms, and their supposed role in giving birth to crisis, provides the critical unifying factor — for the time being.

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Part II

Nationalist Dynamics

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© 2023 World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1142/9781800611542_0005

Chapter 4

Bringing the Armageddon: Carl Schmitt and Surging Nationalism in South Asia Hassan Zaheer Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research (CSCR), Islamabad, Pakistan

Contemporary global politics is witnessing a tectonic shift in ideas and discourses with political actors and national polities moving to the right. Strongman authoritarianism is on the rise in many states. Demagogues are preying upon the primal fears of their people. The political context of South Asia is not unfamiliar to these political ideas, inasmuch as conservative nationalism has often trumped liberal notions of cultural and political pluralism. This chapter examines ascendant right-wing nationalisms in India and Pakistan with Narendra Modi and Imran Khan as their leading proponents and embodiment. I show that in cultivating their nationalisms, both leaders articulate common ideas regarding the conception of the nation, sovereignty, and democratic institutions, which ultimately combine to increase the likelihood of violent confrontation.

Introduction A rightward shift in political practices and associated discourses defines the global present. Old nationalist ideas are being resurrected, reframed, and adapted in modern ways, producing an intensification in conflictual 69

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inter-state relations across the globe. Augmented by the globalisation of technology and means of communication, people across the world show a proclivity towards embracing ideas that strengthen their sense of distinctive, conflicting, and exclusive national identity, resulting in an increasingly polarised world. In the context of this rising wave of conservative nationalism, this chapter analyses the vital case of nationalisms in India and Pakistan. In the contemporary international political context, there are three strong incentives to explore and focus on the relationship between ascendant right-wing nationalisms in India and Pakistan. First, unlike many of their counterparts, the nationalisms in these countries are analogous to each other in the application of nationalistic ideas, but also possess distinctive ideas and conceptualisations as to history, society, security, culture, nationality, and most importantly, religion, all of which are key factors in nationalist political identity-making.1 Second, in the context of their leading eschatological doctrines, both nationalisms see themselves as representative of distinct religions, and consider the other as an absolute enemy, with no place in their worldview and future projections for each other’s continued prosperity.2 Third, both nations spend a significant amount of their national budgets on building arsenals of conventional and nuclear weapons. This means that rising friction between them carries with it a real risk of a large-scale conflict.3 This analysis grounds its understanding of nationalist security emergency in the theories of Carl Schmitt on sovereignty and the state of exception, as well as his conception of political community, and the crisis of parliamentary democracy. Besides utilising these as a theoretical resource to contextualise the nationalist discourses of Prime Minister of

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005); Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (California: University of California Press, 1994). 2 Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Rahul Sagar, “‘Jiski Lathi, Uski Bhains’: The Hindu Nationalist View,” in India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases, ed. Kanti Bajpai, Saira Basit, and V. Krishnappa (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2014), pp. 234–258. 3 Owen B. Toon, Charles G. Bardeen, and Alan Robock et al., “Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe,” Science Advances, Vol. 5, no. 10 (October 2, 2019): pp. 1–13. 1 

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India, Narendra Modi and Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan4, Schmitt’s overarching theory articulated in Nomos of the Earth captures the intensity and perils of the competition of ideas regarding national identity and religion between India and Pakistan as mutually exclusive communities. This theory postulates a territorialisation of political conflict between political communities who define themselves distinctively in their outlook on life and of life and are each other’s vital threat.5 Although his theory sought to demarcate the territory so as to contain war, the religious dimension of the Pakistan–India relationship means that the territorial demarcation between these countries may be a recipe for unbridled violence, rather than offering a route to containment of their antipathies towards each other. This article deploys Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) to examine the speeches of Narendra Modi and Imran Khan. These are treated as identity-constitutive speech acts, which serve as a means to illuminate the architecture of discourses of these leaders, and their implications for their respective societies. The rationality for adopting FDA lies in the distinct historical, political, and cultural contexts of South Asia. The modern political history of South Asia, particularly since the emergence of independence movements opposing the British Raj in India, can be characterised as a process of storytelling proposing several alternate identities, often overlapping and, crucially, mostly deterritorialised. These evolved into contesting narratives comprising distinct civilisational ethos and cultural values as well as ideologically driven political representations that guide political rhetoric, upon which collective social actions are motivated and organised. These narratives latently shape group-based political violence.6 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988); Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffery Seitzer (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008). 5 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006). 6 Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, Reprint (New York: Mariner Books, 2016); Anam Zakaria, The Footprints of Partition: Narratives of Four Generations of Pakistanis and Indians (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). 4 

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The political narratives articulated in the postcolonial struggle for freedom revolved around cultivating and embedding a distinct set of ideas and values. These pertained to religion and nationalism, sovereignty and political dispensation, the communal outlook of life and on life, and conceptions of security and the role of minorities. These political narratives came to define the social and political imaginations of both peoples.7 FDA makes it possible to capture the intrinsic power of these imaginations by showing how the discourses of Narendra Modi and Imran Khan underwriting the nationalisms of India and Pakistan are a continuation of the pre-partition narratives.

A Schmittian Sovereign Post-partition India and Pakistan cannot be understood without taking into account the influence of the British Raj on the socio-political makeup of these countries. There is already a great deal of scholarship engaging with the question of colonial legacy on India and Pakistan dealing with variables such as their security architectures, religious institutions, caste and class systems, administrative structures, and the distribution of assets in the partition period.8 Yet, besides these tangible elements of colonial influence, there is an underlying colonial imprint comprising of ideational factors that continues to resonate today in the polities of India and Pakistan. One of those ideational factors is the idea of sovereignty. Notwithstanding the European import of its production and operationalisation,9 the idea of sovereignty in these nations is distinct in Ted Svensson, Production of Postcolonial India and Pakistan: Meanings of Partition (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2013); Jisha Menon, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 8 Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire (London: Hurst Publishers, 2017); Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Maya Tudor, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017); William Dalrymple, “The Great Divide: The violent legacy of Indian Partition,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ 06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple. 9 Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). 7 

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its content and consequences. The idea proposes centralisation of power in one person or institution with the authority to wield, make or unmake all legal and executive powers and competencies. But in India and Pakistan, this power has come to be predicated on the ability of the individual or the institution to craft a political community based upon a singular sense of religious identity. During the struggle for partition, the movement for Pakistan was framed around the political idea of religious communalism. “Muslim Pakistan” stood as an antithesis to a “Hindu India”.10 Unlike its counterpart, however, Indian political thought was and remains internally divided between Nehruvian Secularism and Hindutva Nationalism.11 However, despite this historical diversity of thought in India and relative uniformity of thought in Pakistan, since Modi’s election in 2014, they have increasingly mirrored each other inasmuch as the construction of identity is now primarily based upon religion and conservative nationalism in both states. This conception of sovereignty is clearly similar to Carl Schmitt’s conception. Schmitt’s argument in relation to the presence of an idea of the sovereign in the existing modern constitutional framework forms the bedrock of his ideas on the political distinctions in society and a perpetual crisis of parliamentary democracy. Schmitt’s argument posits that there cannot be any functioning legal order without a sovereign authority.12 Modern law subjects people to the determinate demands of the law, which overlooks the aspect that modern law may fail to give certain guidance without an interpretation of the law.13 But contemporary legal frameworks typically give the authority to interpret the law to the Supreme Courts, which are binding for every political actor within the state. Schmitt, however, argues that the applicability of legal norms presupposes a condition of normality. In extraordinary circumstances, the procedural application of law compromises the effective action necessary in the situation of the Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion (Massachusetts, United States: Harvard University Press, 2013). 11 Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Fate of Secularism in India,” In BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism, ed. Milan Vaishnav, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 4, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/04/fate-ofsecularism-in-india-pub-78689. 12 Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, pp. 5–35. 13 Ibid., pp. 18–35; Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffery Seitzer, pp. 169–196. 10 

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state of exception.14 From this argument emerges the famous dictum of Schmitt that “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception”. Schmitt’s view is that when an exceptional situation arises in any given polity, the person or institution, which has the capability of suspending the law in totality and bring the situation to normalcy through extra-legal measures is the sovereign in that polity. Consequently, he argues that the sovereign decision is the basis of the legal order.15 With both nations serving as an heir to the traditions of the British Empire in law, politics, and warfare, authoritarian tendencies in the legal and political dispensations of both nations may be a natural outcome. The constitutions of both nations have separate clauses for the declaration of emergency. These emergency clauses produce a proclivity towards an executive-based set of responses to any emergency. These clauses are the vestiges of legal order in British India, as the primary motive behind the declaration of emergency was to be able to maintain peace and governance, ultimately the power of government itself. They still reflect the Raj’s ultimate priority of retaining rule over British India, which is why to this day, they operate even at the cost of human rights and institutions.16 The contemporary environment in both nations has resulted in a steady undermining of the independence of legal institutions. Notwithstanding a history of successive military dictatorships suspending the constitution in its totality in Pakistan, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s imposition of a state of emergency in India, Imran Khan and Narendra Modi seek to control institutions through intimidation and co-optation, rather than through suspending the constitution altogether. Both leaders, though striving to maintain a façade of juridical independence through their discourse, have sought to undermine the independent functioning of legal institutions. See Table 1 for discursive examples. The discourse around juridical independence developed by Modi and Khan often expresses commitment to the unbiased application of law, yet their rhetoric of legal impartiality masks attempts to coerce law into supporting them. Since the coming into power of the Modi-led BJP in 2014, there has been a marked decline in judicial freedom which now is best exemplified by the ruling of the Supreme Court in favour of the extreme Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, p. 13. Ibid., pp. 5–12. 16 Faryal Nazir, “Constitutional design for emergency provisions: A comparative analysis of Pakistan and India,” LUMS Law Journal, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2014): pp. 1–18. 14  15 

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• “Our constitution has kept us united.” • “Actions of Congress party are proving that it considers itself above country, democracy, judiciary and public.” • “Who imposed the Emergency? Who trampled over the spirit of the Constitution, gagged the media and bullied the judiciary? We can’t forget those dark days.” Imran Khan • “If the Supreme Court does not issue a verdict according to their wishes, does that mean they will come out on the roads and paralyse the country?” • “The landmark judgement in Panama papers leaks case laid the foundation of a new Pakistan.” • “The cornerstone of a society is rule of law, so therefore I call my movement, the movement for justice. And I believe that rule of law is the fundamental thing which differentiates a civilised society from one which is not civilised.”

right-wingers in the Ayodhya case.18 Furthermore, since the 1990s, the BJP has been at a political advantage in a “Secular India” partially owing to judgments by courts which favoured considerably the BJP and legitimised its growing Hindu nationalism.19 For speeches, see: Narendra Modi, “Our constitution has kept us united: PM Modi,” Narendra Modi, November 26, 2007, https://www.narendramodi.in/excerpts-of-pm-saddress-at-the-valedictory-function-of-national-law-day-2017--537951; Narendra Modi, “Actions of Congress party are proving that it considers itself above country, democracy, judiciary and public: PM Modi,” Narendra Modi, December 16, 2018, https://www. narendramodi.in/text-of-pm-s-address-at-inauguration-of-various-development-projectsat-prayagraj-up--542642; Staff, “India’s soul was crushed to stay in power: PM Modi reminds Congress of Emergency,” India Today, June 25, 2019, https://www.indiatoday.in/ india/story/india-soul-crushed-power-pm-modi-emergency-congress-1555926-201906-25; Staff, “‘Do not clash with the state’: PM Khan issues stern warning to agitators after Aasia Bibi verdict,” Dawn, October 31, 2018, https://www.dawn.com/news/1442630; Syed Irfan Raza, “PM credits CJP with founding ‘Naya Pakistan’,” Dawn, December 06, 2018, https://www.dawn.com/news/1449786; Staff, “PM Imran says he has never seen as much anticipation as there is for his UNGA address,” Dawn, September 2, 2019, https:// www.dawn.com/news/1507649.  18 Editorial Board, “Peace and justice: On Ayodhya verdict,” The Hindu, November 11, 2019, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/peace-and-justice/article29938535.ece. 19 Saumya Saxena, “Court’ing Hindu nationalism: Law and the rise of modern Hindutva,” Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 26, no. 4 (2018): pp. 378–399. 17 

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Meanwhile, Imran Khan while proclaiming to institute a just and fair system in the country has apparently been in pursuit of his own form of authoritarian control. It is ironic that before becoming Prime Minister, Khan even held a rally in support of the judiciary when it was attacked by the government of the time. In the early days of his premiership, when the Supreme Court of Pakistan issued a verdict in favour of the accused in a blasphemy case, segments of reactionary groups took to the streets chanting slogans against judges, the Army Chief, and the Prime Minister. Khan publicly stood by the Supreme Court. Subsequently, Khan also credited former Chief Justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar for opening the Panama Files case, which led to the disqualification of Khan’s political rival Nawaz Sharif for corruption. However, behind the façade of energetic calls and support for an independent judiciary lies a notion of the judiciary which does the government’s bidding against its opponents whilst maintaining a semblance of impartiality. Though at the time of writing, Khan has only been a year into his premiership, unlike Modi who has been premier since 2014, the former’s apparent authoritarian tendencies were revealed when in mid-2019, the government filed a reference against a Supreme Court justice in the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC). This was viewed by the legal community as an attempt to undermine judicial independence.20 Both leaders continue to be popular among the general public and with powerful constituencies in their respective countries. This is notwithstanding the dichotomy between their political rhetoric regarding the need for an impartial judiciary and acts that clearly undermine the fairness in the judicial process through fear and co-option. The public’s apathy towards these moves is precisely why they can move against institutions like the judiciary without attracting much public anger. Khan, over the years, has cultivated an aura of incorruptibility around him which has led to a cult of personality. Moreover, Imran Khan has strong support from the Pakistani military — the most powerful institution in the country.21

Salahuddin Ahmed, “Comment: Scrap reference against Justice Isa,” Dawn, June 9, 2019, https://www.dawn.com/news/1487022. 21 Daniel Ten Kate and Chris Kay, “Meet the New Pakistan, a lot like the old Pakistan,” Bloomberg, August 1, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-01/howpakistan-s-new-leader-imran-khan-embodies-its-old-problems; Michael Kugelman, “Is Imran Khan the Pakistani military’s ‘favourite son’?,” Al Jazeera, July 23, 2018, https:// 20 

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With regards to Modi, though religious radicalism and charges of genocide in Gujarat continue to taint his career, his economic success in the same province of Gujarat and the promise of replicating the Gujarat Model in India as a whole, has helped him to co-opt India’s economic elites. By reshaping Indian identity in a civilisational context and exhibiting more machoism in foreign affairs, Modi has also enhanced his ­personal image in the eyes of young ordinary Indians.22 By engaging with powerful constituencies in their countries, manifesting strong religious and nationalistic credentials, co-opting militaries and economic elites of their nations, while dismantling the opposition through state institutions and political rhetoric, appearing muscular on foreign policy, and identifying themselves as belonging to the people, both leaders have cultivated a cult of personality around them.

National Self Versus the Other The world is experiencing a violent surge of identity politics and conservative nationalism. Social groups in various societies are contesting with each other for the political space to create new markers of collective national identity and define The National Self in relationship to The Other. Carl Schmitt, in the early twentieth century, premised his Concept of the Political on the ability of liberalism to sow the seeds of conservative nationalism.23 Schmitt argued that for a sovereign to exist, it doesn’t really have to be grounded in the constitutional framework of the polity but draws the ability to act from the constituent power of the people, leading to the conclusion that it is essential for a people to first exist as a political community. To grasp the idea of the sovereign — the ability to suspend the law in totality and bring about a condition of normality — it is pertinent to explore his conception of the political to understand what really www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/imran-khan-pakistani-military-favourite-son180723044709061.html. 22 Saptarshi Ray, “Hindu nationalism is reshaping Indian politics. Can it propel Modi to another victory?,” World Politics Review, April 30, 2019, https://www.worldpolitics review.com/articles/27802/hindu-nationalism-is-reshaping-indian-politics-can-it-propelmodi-to-another-victory; Kanchan Chandra, “The triumph of Hindu majoritarianism,” Foreign Affairs, November 23, 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/201811-23/triumph-hindu-majoritarianism. 23 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, p. 126.

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constitutes the political community and how it comes into being always alongside enemies. Existing as a Self, necessitates the existence of a threatening Other that justifies sovereign action on behalf of the polity. According to Schmitt, the political existence of the people is defined in contrast to distinctions from others in aesthetics, economics, and morality. For example, the constitutive distinction in morality is between goodness and evil. Likewise, the constitutive distinction in economics is between profitability and loss, while aesthetics are based on the distinction between beautiful and ugly. For Schmitt, the distinction which constitutes the political is not reducible to these other distinctions, rather, the constitutive distinction of the political is that between Friend and Enemy.24 The societies of India and Pakistan show how the distinction between friend and the enemy may operate at a broad societal level. Sharing a fractious past with a long history of civilisational, religious, and structural violence, the relationship between the two peoples is mutually acrimonious.25 However, the identity-constitutive elements — a communal sense of religion and unified national cultural outlook — which informs the construction of the National Self and The Other is also remarkably similar in both nations.26 This mutually-constitutive parallelism is highlighted in Table 2. In Schmitt’s perspective, the substantive value of the political distinction of friend–enemy derives from the “utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation”.27 In other words, one can judge people belonging to other groups as morally good, yet Ibid, pp. 25–26. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Stephen P. Cohen, Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013); Kai Schultz, “‘We were friends, and then we started killing each other’. India recalls partition. carefully,” New York Times, February 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/world/asia/indiapakistan-partition-museum.html; Guneeta Singh Bhalla, “What really caused the violence of partition?,” The Diplomat, August 28, 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/08/ what-really-caused-the-violence-of-partition/. 26 Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006); Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (London: Hurst Publishers, 2019). 27 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, p. 26. 24  25 

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Table 2:    Conception of the Political: Religion, Security, Inequality, and Accountability28 Narendra Modi • “The entire nation agrees that the menace of terror has to be eliminated.” • “Today, every Indian is saying — ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’.” • “We have a clear vision of building a ‘New India’, a country that is strong, transparent and provides equal opportunities for all.” • “Unfortunate that the Congress manifesto and Pakistan speak in the same tone when it comes to Kashmir.” • “India has only two castes — the poor and those that want to remove poverty.” Imran Khan • “To only incite people by rubbing salt into their wounds regarding the past oppression and then not presenting any solution [to the issues does not help].” • “Our country has been left behind because of one reason: corruption. Through a clean government [and] by ending corruption, we will lift this country.” • “My mistake is I didn’t cave under pressure and give them an NRO [National Reconciliation Ordinance]. The country fell into debt because of two NROs.” • “Muslim women wearing hijabs has become an issue in some countries as if a hijab is some kind of weapon. This is happening because of Islamophobia.” • “We will fight and when a nuclear-armed country fights to the end it will have consequences far beyond the borders, it will have consequences for the world.”

For speeches, see: Narendra Modi, “The entire nation agrees that the menace of terror has to be eliminated: PM Modi,” Narendra Modi, March 4, 2019, https://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-pm-s-speech-at-dedication-of-guru-gobind-singh-hospital-to-thenation-in-jamnagar-544019; Narendra Modi, “Today, every Indian is saying — ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’: PM Modi,” Narendra Modi, March 20, 2019, https://www.narendramodi.in/ text-of-pm-s-speech-at-interaction-with-security-guards-across-the-country-onradio-544188; Narendra Modi, “We have a clear vision of building a ‘New India’, country that is strong, transparent and provides equal opportunities for all: PM Modi,” Narendra Modi, April 6, 2019, https://www.narendramodi.in/amp/text-of-pm-modi-s-speech-atpublic-meeting-in-nanded-maharashtra; Narendra Modi, “Unfortunate that the Congress manifesto and Pakistan speak in the same tone when it comes to Kashmir: PM Modi,” Narendra Modi, April 9, 2019, https://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-pm-modi-s-speechat-public-meeting-in-latur-maharashtra--544501; Narendra Modi, “India has only have two castes — the poor and those that want to remove poverty: PM Modi,” Narendra Modi, May 23, 2019, https://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-pm-modi-s-speech-at-bjp-headquartersdelhi--545105; Staff, “PM Imran endorses grievances of Pashtuns, but says agitation will not yield any benefits,” Dawn, April 19, 2019, https://www.dawn.com/news/1477157; Staff, “‘Naya Pakistan is being created in front of your eyes’, PM Imran tells packed crowd in 28 

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one must be willing to go to war against them for one’s own preservation. This is the substantive value of the friend–enemy distinction in forming political communities. Only when a group of people decides upon the friend–enemy distinction can the political community become existent. Subsequently, to ground this distinction as well as to perpetuate it, markers of identity are chosen by the group to define itself in opposition to the other which includes religion, ethnicity, political ideology, and civilisational experience. However, this ability to cultivate markers of identity rests only upon the social group and no third party could interfere in this process of identity-shaping. The foundational determinant for the group to define its identity is the friend–enemy distinction: that is, the willingness of the political community to go to war to preserve its way of life or to consider other groups as a threat to one’s way of life and thus potentially needing to be annihilated.29 Both Indian and Pakistani societies owing to a different outlook on life and of life, share strong derision towards each other to the extent that they fought three wars since their independence in 1947. In both societies, the external enemy is a significant element in the marker of collective national identity — but it is not the only marker.30 In India, at least since the 1990s, the idea of Hindu majoritarianism has been gaining more currency in the Indian political realm than the Nehruvian idea of a secular India. With the sweeping of BJP into the Indian legislative and executive institutions with a strong mandate in 2014 and its re-election in 2019, the idea of an exclusivist and majoritarian India where identity is primarily based on religion gained a strong foothold in the national political consciousness.31 Washington,” Dawn, July 22, 2019, https://www.dawn.com/news/1495534; Staff, “PM Imran vows to go after ‘the thieves who put country badly in debt’,” Dawn, June 11, 2019, https://www.dawn.com/news/1487597; Staff, “Takeaways from Imran Khan’s speech at UN General Assembly,” Gulf News, September 28, 2019, https://gulfnews.com/world/ asia/takeaways-from-imran-khans-speech-at-un-general-assembly-1.1569641835080. 29 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, p. 27. 30 Global Conflict Tracker, “Conflict between India and Pakistan,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 15, 2019 (last updated), https://www.cfr.org/interactive/global-conflicttracker/conflict/conflict-between-india-and-pakistan. 31 Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, “Narendra Modi: The making of a majoritarian leader,” Al Jazeera, April 29, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/narendra-modi-

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BJP nationalist discourse is fraught with references to Hindutva i­deology. These references are specifically geared towards establishing and defending the idea that whoever belongs to the “National Self” must subscribe to the majoritarian view propounded by the BJP or risk being brandished as “anti-national”.32 Consequentially, there has been a marked decline in the freedom of speech, religious freedom, and pluralism in political discourse. The institutional consequences are, however, more pervasive on the ground. In proportion to the promotion of Hinduism as the core national identity, ethos, and raison d’être, conditions for minorities in Modi’s India have worsened. There has been a documented spike of violence against minorities since Modi’s ascendance in what constitutes an “Othering” process of the minorities from Indian citizenship.33 However, Modi’s political rhetoric frequently seeks to give the impression that he is no more than a nationalist seeking to support India’s identity through economic reforms, uprooting corruption, and collective development.34 On the other side of the border, Pakistan has shown a historical predisposition towards religious majoritarianism since its inception. ­ Embedded in the legislative framework in the formative period, the Objective Resolution marked the distinction between National Self and Others.35 The othering of minorities is thus older, more deeply structured into the institutions of the state, and is not dependent upon any particular

making-majoritarian-leader-190423123253793.html; Pankaj Mishra, “How Narendra Modi seduced India with envy and hate,” New York Times, May 23, 2019, https://www. nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/modi-india-election.html. 32 Swati Chaturvedi, I am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army (New Delhi: Juggernaut Publishing, 2016); Jeffrey Gettleman, Kai Schultz, Suhasini Raj, and Hari Kumar, “Under Modi, a Hindu Nationalist surge has further divided India,” New York Times, April 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/asia/modi-indiaelections.html. 33 Eliza Griswold, “The violent toll of Hindu nationalism in India,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/the-violent-toll-of-hindunationalism-in-india. 34 Prashant Waiker, “Reading islamophobia in Hindutva: An analysis of Narendra Modi’s political discourse,” Islamophobia Studies Journal, Vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 2018): pp. 161–180. 35 Farahnaz Ispahani, “Cleansing Pakistan of minorities,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, Vol. 15 (2013): pp. 57–66.

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government.36 Besides minorities, the Others in Pakistan also include ethno-nationalists and dissenters belonging to the liberal and secular side of the political spectrum. But Khan’s contribution to extending the list of Others in Pakistan concerns only one group; corrupt politicians. Cunningly framing their discourses around national security, anticorruption, economic inequality, and communal phobias, both leaders have shaped the political consciousness of their people. By continuously asserting their incorruptibility and national security credentials, they amass power to designate anyone as the “Other” who does not subscribe to their conception of social norms, order, and practice.

Choreographing Political Disruption In the political history of South Asia, particularly during the decades of partition, the numerical strength of different sets of populations, specifically Hindus and Muslims, played a pivotal role in determining political developments in the region. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to state that numerical size was a key variable in the struggle for freedom from colonial rule, and the ways it took place along communal and religious lines.37 In the context of the role of numerical strength in the nation-building exercises of India and Pakistan in the post-partition formative years, the concept of the will of the people based on majoritarian principles and a shared communal sense of enemy was already in play. The distinct political dispensations which came to be institutionalised in both nation-states embedded this conception of the will of the people within them since the onset.38 Therefore, Carl Schmitt’s ideas pertaining to parliamentary democracy and constitutional theory were already manifested in the social Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Religious bias okayed,” Dawn, September 15, 2018, https://www. dawn.com/news/1433054. 37 Amar Sohal, “Ideas of parity: Muslims, Sikhs and the 1946 Cabinet mission plan,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 4 (2017): pp. 706–722; Ishtiaq Ahmed, “The unfinished partition,” The Friday Times, October 23, 2015, https://www.thefridaytimes.com/ the-unfinished-partition/; Shashi Tharoor, “The Partition: The British game of ‘divide and rule’,” Al Jazeera, August 10, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/08/ partition-british-game-divide-rule-170808101655163.html. 38 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2003); Niraja Gopal Jayal, Democracy in India (Oxford: Oxford 36 

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structures of both nations. Notwithstanding the strong vilification of each other’s national characters, both nations closely mirror each other’s practices of gauging and asserting the people’s identity and will as a central tenet and discursive core of their polities. In Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt postulated that democracy is self-rule of the people wherein the government expresses the will of the people. His view of the mechanism to institutionalise the will of the people had a dramatic consequence, as in the practice of politics, the identification of the right to rule with the will of the people is not straightforward. If we negate the majoritarian principle in parliamentary democracies, Schmitt asks, what might then serve as the basis of the identification of government with the will of the people? Yet, if the majority is seen as the representative of the will of the people, what would then happen to people who found themselves in the minority? Wouldn’t they be justified, Schmitt asks, in abandoning the majority and identifying their own will with the will of the people, by submitting them to re-educative dictatorship? Schmitt concludes, on the basis of this logic, that electoral dispensations are no more democratic in essence than dictatorship exercised in the name of the people.39 In his Constitutional Theory, Schmitt also contends with the question of the basis upon which identification of the will of the people occurs. For Schmitt, any legitimate rule is grounded in the principle of political equality. However, the Schmittian notion of political equality is in stark contrast with a liberal interpretation of the concept. In its exclusivist interpretation, Schmitt’s notion of political equality is grounded in his notion of political community: a group of people determining a friend–enemy distinction for their existence.40 In essence, if the ruler and the ruled share the same conception of friend–enemy distinction, then the political rule is representative of the will of the people.41 In other words, in this frame, a nationalist is automatically the legitimate representative of the national will, regardless of the electoral or legal process. Table 3 contains a number of exemplary quotes from both South Asian leaders linking themselves to identity and thus to national will. University Press, 2009); Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014). 39 Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy, pp. 25–32. 40 Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffery Seitzer, pp. 255–257. 41 Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy, pp. 10–14.

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84  Global Nationalism Table 3:    Political Disruption: Centralisation of Power, Cult of Personality, Bypassing Laws, Undermining Democratic Institutions42 Narendra Modi • “We want to free the country from the infiltrators. It reflects in our stringent actions against them.” • “I have complete faith; under this new system we all will be able to free Jammu and Kashmir of terrorism and separatism.” • “Candidates submit details of cases against them in the forms they submit while filing nominations. I will not discriminate … even if they are from BJP or the NDA.” • “Those people who want to weaken the Army are levelling allegations [against me].” Imran Khan • “After the 18th Amendment, the federation has become bankrupt.” • “Opposition leader’s family was responsible for this mess — how can they accuse us? In western democracies, the parliament protects public interest. Here, people who faced massive corruption charges are in the parliament lecturing us.” • “Those talking about [me being] ‘selected’ were themselves manufactured in the nursery of military dictatorship.” • “I wish I could follow President Xi’s example and put 500 corrupt people in Pakistan in jail. Unfortunately processing [cases] in Pakistan was ‘very cumbersome’.”

In India, parliamentary tradition is well-grounded in the polity, with the exception of Indira Gandhi’s 1975–1977 emergency period. But since 2014, with the Modi-led BJP winning a majority as a single party, For speeches, see: Staff, “Want to free country from infiltrators: PM Modi on Citizenship Bill in Assam,” India Today, February 9, 2019, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/ want-to-free-country-from-infiltrators-pm-modi-on-citizenship-bill-in-assam1452111-2019-02-09; Staff, “In first speech on Article 370, PM Modi talks development in J&K,” India Today, August 9, 2019, https:// www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pm-narendramodi-speech-article-370-highlights-development-agenda-jammu-kashmirladakh-1578882-2019-08-08; ET bureau, “Narendra Modi vows to send criminal ­politicians behind bars,” The Economic Times, April 22, 2014, https://economictimes. indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/narendra-modi-vows-to-send-criminalpoliticians-behind-bars/articleshow/34066952.cms; ANI, “Those accusing me in Rafale deal are weakening Indian security forces: Narendra Modi,” The Economic Times, January 01, 2019, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/those-accusingme-in-rafale-deal-are-weakening-indian-security-forces-narendra-modi/articleshow/ 67337521.cms?from=mdr; Azeem Samar and Imtiaz Ahmad, “18th Amendment turned centre into a pauper,” The News, March 31, 2019; Staff, “Imran takes opp to task for 42 

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a mandate which hasn’t been won by any other single party in the past 30 years, the traditions of parliamentary democracy appear to have been weakened. Especially in recent years, with a reinforced electoral mandate in 2019, there are greater concerns that Indian parliamentary democracy is morphing into a form of presidential governance based on a cult of personality.43 The prominence of such personality-led politics in Indian democracy could have radical consequences for the society and may incur a cost on long-standing parliamentary traditions, institutions, and indeed their long-term legitimacy. Unfortunately, the opposition is no less characterised by such tendencies, so the ascendance of Modi’s cult in the public consciousness has met with minimal resistance.44 Under the premiership of Narendra Modi, India is already showing alarming signs of chauvinistic authoritarianism.45 Political decisions made by the government on the social rights of some of its citizens catapulted concerns about creeping religious majoritarianism in India onto the global stage. One such decision concerns the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) exercise in the Assam province, wherein people who cannot provide legal documents pertaining to their residency before the mass exodus from then East Pakistan in 1971 to India following the Pakistani civil war cannot be considered as indigenous peoples of India, and thus calling him ‘selected’,” Daily Times, June 30, 2019, https://dailytimes.com. pk/421041/imrantakes-opp-to-task-for-calling-him-selected/; Staff, “Those manufactured in the nursery of ­military dictatorship calling me ‘selected’, says Imran Khan,” Business Standard, June 29, 2019, https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/those-manufactured-in-thenursery-of-military-dictatorship-calling-me-selected-says-imran-khan-119062900839_1. html; Naveed Siddiqui, “‘Wish I could follow President Xi’s example and put 500 corrupt people in Pakistan in jail’, says PM Imran,” Dawn, October 08, 2019, https://www.dawn. com/news/1509698. 43 Sadanand Dhume, “Does Modi Threaten Indian Democracy?,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-modi-threaten-indian-democracy-11559256676. 44 Diwaker, “Hero-worship is a sure road to eventual dictatorship: Ambedkar’s warning for the Indian media,” Caravan Magazine, June 2, 2019, https://caravanmagazine.in/media/ hero-worship-is-a-sure-road-to-eventual-dictatorship-ambedkars-warning. 45 Ravi Agrawal and Kathryn Salam, “Is India becoming more like China?,” Foreign Policy Magazine, October 22, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/is-indiabecoming-more-like-china-south-asia-kashmir-criticism-malaysia-turkey/; Pankaj Mishra, “The west’s self-proclaimed custodians of democracy failed to notice it rotting away,” The Guardian, September 20, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ sep/20/west-democracy-narendra-modi-donald-trump-america.

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their state is placed in bureaucratic limbo, with the potential for being classified as stateless.46 As most of these individuals are Muslims, the exercise has been interpreted as a testing ground for a country-wide citizenship project based on religious lines.47 The second decision pertains to the revocation of constitutional clauses which establish India’s relationship with the parts of the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir that it controls, particularly its autonomous status within the Indian federation, leading observers to share concerns about decaying democratic institutions in India.48 Pakistan, on the other hand, has a long history of military interventions and, when it is allowed to function, a parliamentary democracy that is quasi-feudal. Notwithstanding the three successive elections since 2008, Pakistan still functions as a quasi-feudal and security state with power mobility operating at both levels — horizontal and vertical — between prominent national institutions.49 Since 2010, the 18th amendment to the 1973 constitution, which transferred significant powers (including dissolving Parliament) from the presidency to the Parliament and Prime Minister, providing the bedrock of the parliamentary form of governance in Pakistan. Nonetheless, the amendment has come under increasing criticism from various quarters, including the Khan-led

K. Anis Ahmed, “Why is India making its own people stateless?,” New York Times, September 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/opinion/india-assam-statelessbengalis-muslim.html; Grant Wyeth, “The NRC and India’s Unfinished Partition,” The Diplomat, October 03, 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/10/the-nrc-and-indiasunfinished-partition/. 47 Murali Krishnan, “India’s BJP wants citizenship bill to counter mistakes in Assam’s NRC,” Deutsche Welle, November 11, 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/indias-bjp-wantscitizenship-bill-to-counter-mistakes-in-assams-nrc/a-50791488; Ruhi Nayak, “Flirting with authoritarianism,” Harvard Political Review, November 1, 2019, https://harvard politics.com/world/flirting-with-authoritarianism/. 48 Malik Sajad, “A Wedding under curfew,” New York Times, November 9, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/opinion/kashmir-curfew.html; Hafsa Kanjwal, “The day the story of Kashmir changed forever,” Al Jazeera, October 24, 2019, https:// www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/day-story-kashmir-changed-191024074602559.html. 49 Hassan Gardezi and Jamil Rashid, Pakistan: The Roots of Dictatorship (London: Zed Books, 1983); Haris Khalique, “How power works in Pakistan,” New York Times, July 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/opinion/pakistan-sharif-khan.html. 46 

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government.50 However, much as in India, the opposition is equally to blame for undermining the Parliament. In fact, it could be said that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party led by Khan simply broke the monopoly of these parties.51 Additionally, while Parliamentary democracy remains in a fragile state in Pakistan, the government led by Imran Khan is credited with making substantial progress, at least in the realm of foreign policy. In the past decade or so, the institution was left in the hands of the state bureaucracy and military, yet with Khan’s political ascendancy and charisma, there are conspicuous signs of vibrancy and introspection in Pakistan’s foreign policy.52 However, notwithstanding these early achievements, there are ominous signs of a growing authoritarian clampdown by Khan’s government on dissent, free speech, and the impartiality of national institutions.53 Significantly, the political interests of the old political elite in the national institutions are also trying to undermine the Khan-led government, which is counter-productive and tends to drive the ruling party towards more authoritarian political behaviour.54

Conclusion Despite their European origins, Schmitt’s conceptualisations of political community, democracy, and sovereignty have resonance with the form Zahid Hussain, “Debating 18th amendment,” Dawn, February 6, 2019, https://www. dawn.com/news/1462145. 51 Christophe Jaffrelot, “Imran Khan, the army’s choice,” The Nation Magazine, September 4, 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/imran-khan-the-armys-choice/. 52 Charlie Campbell, “Cricket hero Imran Khan led Pakistan’s team to victory. As a ­politician, he’s riding a populist wave,” Time Magazine, June 28, 2018, https://time. com/5324713/imran-khan-pakistan-prime-minister/; Staff, “No more external wars for Pakistan: Imran Khan,” Newsweek Pakistan, November 15, 2019. 53 Adnan Aamir, “Pakistan on the brink of civil dictatorship,” Lowy Institute, July 15, 2019, https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/pakistan-brink-civil-dictatorship; Mahfuz Anam, “Silencing expression,” Dawn, August 4, 2019, https://www.dawn.com/news/1498003. 54 Correspondent, “Price hike conspiracy against govt: PM Imran Khan,” The News, November 16, 2019, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/569459-price-hike-conspiracyagainst-govt-pm; Saleh Zaafir, Mumtaz Alvi and Agencies, “Bureaucracy, politics, media riddled with mafias: PM Imran Khan,” The News, November 12, 2019, https://www.thenews. com.pk/print/553912-bureaucracy-politics-media-riddled-with-mafias-pm-imran. 50 

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of politics and discourse exercised in India and Pakistan polities. Significantly, the remarkable applicability of Schmitt’s ideas to describing the South Asian political context may be rooted in the colonial logics and ethnic theories of pre-partition British India, which like Schmitt’s work, were deeply imbibed with the ideas of European ethnonationalist traditions. The contemporary brands of nationalism promoted by Khan and Modi ensure that Schmitt’s concepts continue to resonate in the politics of both nations to this today. Schmittian concepts regarding the construction of the communal identity, the imperative to preserve one’s form of life, and the necessity to establish a political dispensation which reflects a specific idea of the will of the people (itself defined in exclusive ways), have had consequences particularly as India is reshaping itself through Hindutva nationalism and Pakistan has sought to strengthen its Islamic nationalism as a bulwark against its Other. As the tabulated discourses illustrate, the discourses which are consistently operationalised by Modi and Khan appear to come straight out of the Schmittian playbook. Both leaders organised their rhetoric to construct a cult of personality and an authoritarian approach to politics. Both leaders insinuate to their people that they alone are the last protectors of their political realms, which are constituted around a distinctive set of notions pertaining to national identity and religion, territorial and ideological security of the state, centralisation of power, and sovereignty of one party or person overall national institutions. Conservative nationalist ideas expressed by these leaders are progressively entering the political consciousness of their people. Both leaders thrive on the populist charm established by their unceasing castigation of corrupt politicians who compromised national security, their concern for the poor and downtrodden of the society, their anger at the unequal distribution of wealth and resources in their midst, their rage at the submerging of their distinctive religious, national identity in the wave of late modern multiculturalism, and their indignation at the lack of recognition and acceptance of their religious identity internationally. With each identityconstitutive speech act, both leaders aim to consolidate their power and strengthen their base at the cost of human rights, diversity, minorities, and the impartiality of national institutions. In the previous century, the world witnessed the consequences of nationalisms based upon absolutist ideas and the horror and mayhem they incur upon their people. In terms of the wider consequence of this drive

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to religious nationalism by both nations, the future appears to hold significant risks. With the arsenal of weapons they possess, including nuclear weapons, as well as large populations socialised in crude and inherently confrontational nationalist ideas predicated upon religion and religious Othering, any confrontation beyond the threshold of normative inter-state violence is very likely to result in a catastrophic outcome.

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Chapter 5

Nationalism as a Site of Contestation for Political Legitimacy in Thailand Bavo Stevens Department of Political Science, McGill University, Canada Faculty of Political Science, Ubon Ratchathani University, Thailand

Thailand has often oscillated between various forms of nationalism. It has been dominated by forms of royalist nationalism in the mid-­ nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries, modernist forms of nationalism, and more recently by competing notions of political legitimacy as previously disenfranchised Thais have found self-actualisation in politics. Through an extensive literature review of recent scholarship and analysis of major political events and discourses of political legitimacy in Thailand since 2001, this chapter examines the evolution of nationalism in Thailand, retrieving how common themes of morality, progress, and “civilisation” have persisted across various iterations.

Introduction: Nationalism and Political Legitimacy Since the mid-nineteenth century, Thailand has experienced various ­iterations of nationalism, giving Thailand the appearance of tumultuous political development. Yet, I argue that a common theme across these various forms of nationalism is that nationalism has long been a site of contestation for political legitimacy in Thailand. The persistent use of the 91

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language of morality and virtue, assertions that politics must be about honesty, conducted by khon di — or good persons — who embody kwampenthai — or Thai-ness — have acted as affirmations for the claims to power of various groups. Crucially, these claims are not only made and contested by political elites, but also by Thai citizens who practice their national identity in their daily lives. Different understandings of what it means to be Thai help explain political polarisation in Thailand and reveal a complex story of how elites have used these identities for self-­ aggrandisement and how citizens — especially in the past 20 years — have appropriated, contested, and introduced their own national identities. This chapter presents an overview of the development of nationalism in Thailand focussing on how nationalism has been a site of contestation for political legitimacy. Nations offer a meaningful framework to interpret social, economic, and political life.1 Members are conferred with certain rights and obligations towards each other and the nation, and they are political significant because they reflect beliefs on the use and merits of power. Classical accounts of nationalism, however, place undue focus on the historical origins of nations and their content.2 Nations are not monolithic structures solely driven by elites. Rather, nations are the result of practices in everyday life, while the growing political consciousness of publics around the world are, in turn, changing nationalist discourses, often along lines of political legitimacy. In other words, in classical nationalism studies the questions of the “when” and “what” of a nation come at the expense of the “how” and “where.” It creates the impression that nations are fixed, and that nationalism simply waxes and wanes in intensity.3 But the nation only exists as practised: national identity is constantly informed, challenged, appropriated, and reinvented by members of that nation, through state institutions, as well as popular culture and through the routine and Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter (London: Routledge, 2007). Marco Antonisch, “Nations and nationalism” in John Agnew, Virginie Mamadouh, Anna J. Secor, Joanne Sharp (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). 3 Brubaker, Rogers, “Rethinking nationhood: Nation as institutionalized form, practical category, contingent event”. Contention 4, no. 1 (1994): 3–14; Atsuko Ichijo and Gordana Uzelac, “Introduction” in When is the Nation? Towards an understanding of theories of nationalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005). 1  2 

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­ undane habits of daily life.4 Indeed, nationalism would have little power m if people did not believe nations are politically significant. Nor would such movements be sustainable without active participation of its members. The role of political legitimacy should not be discounted in discussions of nationalism. Popular sovereignty is regarded as one of the driving forces behind the rise of nationalism in Europe in the early nineteenth century.5 By acknowledging that the authority of government is derived from the people following the French and American revolutions, it became “necessary to define what is the populace: self-government requires a community that is to be the self.”6 Anderson similarly argues that despite the inequality that may exist within nations “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”7 Liah Greenfeld takes this to the point of arguing that elements of democracy are logically implied in nationalism, since it presupposes members of a nation are equal sovereigns.8 It is therefore unsurprising that nationalism is concerned with establishing and maintaining political legitimacy.9 Anthony Smith’s definition of nationalism as “an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of self-government and independence on behalf of a group” emphasises consent of rule and sovereignty.10 The (il)legitimacy of a government furthermore depends on how well a government or ruler’s actions fit within the norms of society,11 “a series of tacitly understood norms, rules, and procedures that, on the basis of rights and obligations, Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). Eric Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 6 Eugene Kamenka, “Political nationalism — the evolution of the idea,” in Eugene Kamenka (Ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 14. 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso: London, 2006), 7. 8 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 9 Umut Özkırımlı, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). 10 Anthony Smith, Chose People: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 171. 11 Peter Stillman, “The concept of legitimacy,” Polity (1974): vol 7, no. 1, 32–56. 4  5 

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establish the appropriate and inappropriate ways for the acquisition of state power — thereby enabling the one to judge the legitimacy or otherwise of specific institutions and acts in this regard.”12 Elites seek to legitimatise their exercise of power and control while the politically significant public seek to define their subordination in acceptable terms. Because of legitimacy’s potential to influence performance and outcome, the normative element is crucial, especially in light of its many referent objects.13

A History of Thai Nationalism Thai political leaders have acted as political entrepreneurs using nationalism and national identity to support their political ambitions.14 These entrepreneurs have used narratives that draw from a perennial past, media in the form of books, music, and radio programmes, as well as discursive symbols such as flags and medals to create a sense of collective belonging in the form of kwampenthai — “Thai-ness,” a form of unity and Thai solidarity.15 Pavin Chachavalpongpun, however, argues that the language of unity is primarily used by political elites “to nurture obedient citizens” and consolidate power.16 The discourse on Thai-ness has been used by right-wing intellectuals to promote a hierarchical political order where loyalty to the nation entails loyalty to the monarchy.17 Those that upset this unity and its order risk being labelled as un-Thai. Muthiah Alagappa, “The anatomy of legitimacy,” in Muthiah Alagappa (Ed.) Legitimacy in Southeast Asia: The Quest for Moral Authority (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 13. 13 Ibid., 30. 14 Stithorn Thananithichot, “Understanding Thai nationalism and ethnic identity,” Journal of Asian and African Studies (2011): vol 46, no. 3, 250–263. 15 Karin Zackari, “Violence on the periphery of the Thai state and nationhood” in Bettina Koch (Ed.), State Terror, State Violence, Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016) State Terror, State Violence. Staat-Souvernäität — Nation (Beiträge zu aktuellen Staatdiskussion) (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016), 73. Throughout the chapter I used italicisation for transliterated words and phrases from Thai to English. 16 Pavin Chachavalpongpun, “‘Unity’ as a discourse in Thailand’s polarized politics,” in Daljit Singh, Southeast Asian Affairs 2010 (Singapore: ISEAS, 2010): 334. 17 Saichol Sattayanurak. The Construction of Mainstream Though on “Thainess” and the “Truth” Constructed by “Thainess,” PhD Diss., (Chiang Mai: Chiang Mai University, 2005). 12 

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Ruling elites in Thailand have used different and competing views of nationalism to buttress their control over the country.18 It is an observation that aligns with those of historian Chris Baker, who argues that Thailand has been ruled by a series of flexible oligarchies centred around factions within and between the monarchy, military, and bureaucracy.19 Nationalism in Thailand has therefore largely been interpreted as a tool of political elites from across the political spectrum. The early Kings of House Chakri, established in 1782 with Bangkok as its seat of power, borrowed heavily from the ideas and methods of empires in India and China to legitimise their hold on the Siamese throne. Thongchai Winichakul argues that the creation of the Thai “­geo-body” — the territorialisation of Siam — spurred the development of Thai nationalism in the midnineteenth century.20 The monarchy encouraged Thai nationalism in order to avoid encroachment by colonial powers and to bypass powerful elites.21 Though European colonial powers represented a threat to Siamese independence, Europe also became a model of “progress” and “civilisation” that the Chakri Kings attempted to emulate.22 Reforms by King Mongkut (Rama IV) and Chulalongkorn (Rama V) solidified the monarchy’s political power, but also led to calls for constitutionalism in the late nineteenth century.23 King Chulalongkorn initially argued that limiting his power would erode his ability to maintain Siam’s independence. Later, however, he argued that Siamese kingship was incompatible with Western norms of popular sovereignty.24

Andreas Sturm, The King’s Nation: A Study of the Emergence and Development of Nation and Nationalism in Thailand, PhD Diss., (London: London School of Economics, 2006). 19 Rogers Brubaker, “Rethinking nationhood.” 20 This chapter uses the Thai convention of referring to Thai scholars by their first name. For non-Thai scholars, this chapter uses the scholar’s last name. 21 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1995). 22 Kanjana Hubik Thepboriruk, “Dear sisters: Propaganda, fashion, and the corporeal nation under Phibunsongkhram,” Southeast Asian Studies (2019): 233–258. 23 The Siamese and Thai Kings of House Chakri are also referred in chronological order of their reign. Thus, King Mongkut, the fourth Chakri King, is also referred to as Rama IV, while his son, King Chulalongkorn, is referred to as Rama V. The current King, King Vajiralongkorn is Rama X. 24 Federico Ferrara, “Unfished business: The contagion of conflict over a century of Thai political development,” in Good Coup Gone Bad: Thailand’s Political Development since 18 

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While the Siamese court was attempting to stop the encroachment of Western powers, authorities in Bangkok engaged in their own colonial ambitions.25 Like European colonial powers, Siam’s colonial practices were based on the idea that there were civilisationally advanced (those in the city) and backward (those in rural areas) peoples, and the vision of a progressive Thai civilisation animated the discourses of modernisers in the court.26 As early as 1786, Siam claimed suzerainty over the Malay Muslim sultanate of Patani, annexing it in 1909 as part of the AngloSiamese treaty.27 The erasure of the Lao identity and “invention” of Isan Thai further illustrates the extent of the Siamese colonial project.28 References to Lao people were omitted or replaced with the word Thai over time in official documents and by 1899 references to Lao as a separate “race” or distinct group had disappeared.29 Such historical revisionism might give the appearance of an ethnically and culturally homogenous Thai state, but the country has always been home to diverse ethnic groups.30 In 1932, a group of foreign-educated military officers and civil servants, known as the Khana Ratsadon (People’s Party), staged a coup d’état that ended the country’s absolute monarchy. The first principles spelled out by People’s Party included the introduction of freedom and equal rights, with “supreme power” vested in the people rather than the King. But due to tensions between the civilian and military factions of the Khana Ratsadon, the coup became less concerned with democracy and Thaksin’s Fall in (Pavin Chachavalpongpun Ed.) (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014), 23. 25 There’s still some debate about using colonialism as a framework to understand Siam’s territorial ambitions. 26 Zackari, 74. 27 Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, “The shifting battleground: Peace dialogue in Thailand’s Malay-Muslim South,” in Michael J Montesano, Terence Chong, Mark Heng (Eds.), After the Coup: The National Council for Peace and Order Era and the Future of Thailand (Singapore: ISEAS — Yusof Ishak Institute, 2019), 142. 28 The word “Isan” is derived from Pali, meaning “Northeast.” Today Isan refers to a collection of provinces in the North-eastern part of the country. The region is the country’s most populous and poorest. 29 Akiko Iijima, “The invention of ‘Isan’ History,” Journal of the Siam Society (2018): 172–200. 30 David Strefcukss, “An ‘ethnic’ reading of ‘Thai’ history in the twilight of the century-old official ‘Thai’ national model,” South East Asia Research (2012): 305–327.

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more concerned with limiting royal power.31 The lack of clear ideological direction and active participation from the masses meant that coup leaders were hesitant to depose the monarchy entirely, as it retained significant symbolic power. As a consequence, the monarchy remained in place as a culturally significant institution. Even though concerted efforts were made to enhance the prestige of the monarchy, politics continued to be dominated by the People’s Party, various factions of which were still at the helm of the Thai state until 1957. When Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram took power in 1938, he promoted a form of nationalism that emphasised racial homogeneity and modernisation based on an idealized and glorified past.32 Phibun, along with his chief ideologue Luang Wichit Wathakan, promoted a state ideology called ratthaniyom (Cultural Mandates) designed to “civilise” Thai people and encourage daily practices that would steer the country towards national greatness.33 These practices included guidance on etiquette, diet, language, and even the kind of houses people should live in. Dress played an important part in this endeavour. Women, for instance, were expected to grow out their hair, wear sarong-style wrap skirts (instead of traditional pantaloons), and cease baring their chests.34 The country’s name was changed from Siam to Thailand, a national anthem was adopted, and people were encouraged to avoid using identity-distinguishing terms like Isan Thai or Central Thai.35 A great admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, Phibun actively sought to centralise power within himself. He expected strict obedience, only allowing for “decisions from above” to initiate changes in Thai society. A vigorous propaganda campaign glorified Phibun as “the Bruce Reynolds, “Phibun Songkhram and Thai nationalism in the Fascist era,” European Journal of East Asian Studies (2018): 99–134. 32 Ibid., 100–101, 107. 33 Thamsook Numnonda, “Pibulsonkgram’s Thai nation building programme during the Japanese military presence, 1941–1945,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (1978): 235. 34 Thepboriruk, 241. 35 Phibun’s nationalism project was in many respects a contradictory project. On the one hand, Phibun appealed to the masses based on a perennial and imagined past while attempting to ‘civilise’ Thai citizens through the adoption of certain Western customs. As Phibun tried to centralise power around himself, he simultaneously tried to displace the monarchy criticising it for having centralised power in the past. See Sturm, The King’s Nation, 165; Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993); Tak Chaloemtriana Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2007). 31 

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Leader” (phunam) of the nation. Newspapers published slogans such as “Believe in and follow the Leader” and the “Nation will survive if we believe in Pibulsongkram”; families were encouraged to hang a picture of the Prime Minister in their homes and audience members in theatres and cinemas were urged to bow when a picture of the leader was projected.36 While Phibun’s ratthaniyom programme ended in 1944, he left behind a template for future military strongmen. The language of civilisation and morality that shaped Phibun’s programme was echoed by his successors. However, future leaders relied more heavily on the symbolic power of the monarchy to prop up their own legitimacy. Phibun’s erstwhile partner, Sarit Thanarat, did not create a state ideology to build the political and cultural capital needed to legitimise power. Rather, as Sarit sought to solidify control, he saw the monarchy as a more potent source of legitimacy than elections or constitutionalism.37 Instead of a system where the masses profess loyalty to the state, Sarit pushed for a form of nationalism that drew on political loyalty to the King and monarchy,38 a model of governance sometimes referred to as “Thai-style democracy” and which has been described as “Platonic guardianship with Buddhist characteristics.”39 Sarit’s endeavours were largely successful. From the 1970s to the mid-2000s Thai nationalism became entrenched in the monarchy and specifically King Bhumibol, who increasingly came to be seen as a symbol of the nation, “more legitimate than any government, elected or otherwise.”40 Sarit and his successors, along with the monarchy, used national symbols to powerfully illustrate the power and prestige of the royal family.41 Ceremonies, imageries, and symbols were used to hark back to a primordial past reifying the King as the father of the nation. It became widely accepted practice for the monarchy to bestow legitimacy Numnoda, 237. Ferrara, 17–46. See p. 98, note 33. 38 Chaloemtriana, Thailand, 92–93. 39 Federico Ferrara, The Political Development of Modern Thailand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6. 40 Craig J. Reynolds, “Nation and state in histories of nation-building, with special reference to Thailand,” in Wang Gungwu (Ed.), Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), 25. 41 Jack Fong, “Sacred nationalism: The Thai monarchy and primordial nation construction,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2009): 673–696. 36  37 

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on governments, democratic or otherwise. A royal endorsement has been a necessary condition for the success of every coup since the late 1970s.42 The power of the monarchy arguably reached its zenith when Prime Minister General Suchinda Kraprayoon and opposition leader MajorGeneral Chamlong Srimuang prostrated before the King on live television following violent clashes in 1992.43 Due to the constant emphasis on the monarchy, Thailand did not develop a form of nationalism based on a popular movement where sovereignty was based on the people.44 The structure of Thai nationalism, with the King and monarchy at the apex, created explicit and implicit hierarchies of power. The King and the monarchy, as the embodiment of the nation, remained above the political fray. The power of the King and the monarchy has often been captured through Thailand’s own conception of charisma — barami — a kind of karmic frame that imbues a person with charisma and virtue.45 Establishment elites have used the language of virtue and morality to justify their own claims to power. The use of the phrase khon di (good persons) is particularly telling. Daena Funahashi argues that to a certain segment of Thai society, khon di refers to those that possess a mental immunity to economic interests and party politics, and consequently can ensure “good governance.”46 A khon di is someone who protects the James Ockey, “Monarch, monarchy, succession and stability in Thailand,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint (2005): 121.   For instance, during the 1981 coup attempt against then Prime Minister General Prem Tinsulanonda, King Bhumibol quickly left Bangkok and joined Prem in Khorat. Although he did not give a public comment on the coup, the lack of an endorsement and his physical proximity to Prem was enough to doom the coup. 43 Fong, 692. 44 Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker Thailand’s Crisis (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2000), 177. 45 Serhat Ünaldi, “Working towards the monarchy and its discontents: Anti-royal Graffiti in Downtown Bangkok,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2013): 381; Peter Jackson, “Virtual divinity: A 21st-century discourse of Thai Royal influence,” in Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand, (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010); Patrick Jory, “The Vessantara Jataka, Barami, and the Bodhisatta — Kings: The origin and spread of a Thai concept of power,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2009): 36–78. 46 Daena Funahashi, “Rule by good people: Health governance and the violence of moral authority in Thailand,” Cultural Anthropology (2016): 108. 42 

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country and is loyal to the monarchy, nation, and religion, and one who follows the guidance of the King.47 But the term has also become euphemistic for unelected officials, particularly military officers, who capture state power via a coup d’état. So, when King Vajiralonkorn urged Thais to vote for khon di the night before the election in 2019, the message was clear to Thai voters: vote for the military aligned party.48 While the monarchy and its allies were portrayed as virtuous and upstanding, politicians, while more frequently than not opposition politicians were portrayed as immoral. As Thongchai puts it, the language of Thai politics over the past decades has revolved around four discourses: “(i) politicians are extremely corrupt; (ii) politicians come to power by vote-buying; (iii) an election does not equal democracy; and (iv) democracy means a moral, ethical rule.”49 These frames — particularly that of the corrupt politician — have been used by the military and royalists to justify attacks against political opponents. The military is unquestionably the institution most affected by this form of monarchical nationalism. Starting with Sarit, it developed a symbiotic relationship with the monarchy that has led to its eventual transformation it into a “monarchised military.”50 Paul Chambers and Napisa Waitoolkiat note that the Ministry of Defence sets safeguarding the monarchy as its most important duty and recognises the monarchy as the country’s paramount institution.51 Military officers likewise wear pins and medals to signal their loyalty and closeness to the monarchy. Some of these are traditional medals, but informal pins are equally potent. General Apirat Kongsompong, former Commander in Chief of the Royal Thai Army, has been photographed on several occasions wearing a pin with the image of Prince Dipangkorn, King Vajiralongkorn’s son. Because of the implied proximity of khon di to the monarchy, military officers have ­performed the virtues of khon di. General Prayuth, for instance, has been Thannapat Jarernpanit, “The contenstation of “good politics”: Explaining conflict and polarisation in Thailand,” Asian Studies Review (2019): 664. 48 “‘Support good people to rule this country’, says King of Thailand on even of election,” Prachatai, March, 24, 2019, https://prachatai.com/english/node/7990. 49 Thongchai Winichakul, “Toppling democracy,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2008): 11–37. 50 Paul Chambers and Naipsa Waitoolkiat, “The resilience of monarchised military in Thailand,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2016): 1–20. 51 Chambers and Waitoolkiat, 4. 47 

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careful to describe his 2014 coup as a personal sacrifice and necessary evil. In a 2018 Time interview, for instance, Prayuth stated that he believed the nation had been pushed to “the brink of destruction” and that the coup was the only way to avoid potential causalities.52 The discursive relationship between the monarchy and the military has been influential in both directions, however. The military’s strategic culture has been heavily influenced by King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) discourse about safeguarding Siam’s independence from Western colonialism through diplomacy. These narratives suggest that “monarchy is seen as having played a central role in the survival and security of the Thai state” by the military.53 The military has prioritised the protection of the monarchy, obedience of the people, and rule by a hierarchy of khon di over what it identifies as Western values, values that it believes are incompatible with Thailand.54 In contrast, persons who upset this balance of power are vilified and cast as demons, trolls, and even animals due to their supposed threats to the Thai state, the monarchy, and religion.55

Crises of Legitimacy In the early 2000s, Thailand appeared to be on a path towards sustainable democratisation. From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, the military adopted a more traditional role, focussing on defence and external security issues rather than domestic political issues. Various reforms were introduced that appeared to increase civilian oversight of the military, ending (among other things) military support for political parties and ­candidates.56 All of this eventually culminated in the 1997 Constitution, Charlie Campbell, “Exclusive: Thailand PM Prayuth Chan-ocha on turning to China over the U.S.,” Time, June 21, 2018, http://time.com/5318224/exclusive-primeminister-prayuth-chan-ocha-thailand-interview/. 53 Gregory Raymond, Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2018), 91. 54 Anonymous, “Anti-royalism in Thailand since 2006: Ideological shifts and resistance,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2018): 1–32. 55 Siwach Sripokangkul and Mark S. Cogan, “Political demonology, dehumanization, and contemporary Thai politics,” Asia-Pacific Social Science Review (2019): 115–129. 56 Felix Heidux, “From guardians to democrats? Attempts to explain change and continuity in the civil–military relations of post-authoritarian Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines,” The Pacific Review (2011): 264. 52 

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which led to democratic rule in the country. Although the constitution was an elite-dominated project, it nevertheless paved the way for greater political participation and mobilisation for the country’s urban and rural poor.57 In 2001 Thaksin Shinawatra, a former police lieutenant-colonel and telecommunications magnate, was elected Thailand’s first prime minister under the new 1997 constitution. Thaksin’s election transformed Thailand’s political landscape. Thaksin significantly changed how political parties operate. His Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT) borrowed campaigning strategies from the United States, adopting corporate marketing techniques such as “branding” to make its campaign more compelling.58 Furthermore, Thaksin and the TRT developed an electoral platform designed to appeal to rural voters, including universal health care and an agrarian debt reduction scheme. To his supporters, Thaksin was a legitimate political figure that delivered on campaign promises. During their five years in office, Thaksin and the TRT implemented his proposed universal healthcare scheme, took decisive (albeit controversial) action in “the war against drugs,” and fought rural poverty through initiatives like an agrarian debt relief scheme The party’s electoral success showed rural citizens that their vote had real political consequences. He had an emotional appeal because he was a “national leader who did not tell [his supporters] it was their patriotic duty to accept their station in life.”59 The conservative elite felt threatened by Thaksin’s growing electoral and political clout as he cast himself as the enemy of old politics, implicitly challenging the notion that the monarchy could be the only object of political loyalty.60 As Viengrat Nethipo notes, when Thaksin claimed in 2006 that his legitimacy was upheld by 19 million votes, he was implying that the source of legitimate power in Thailand had shifted.61 Tamada Yoshifumi, Myths and Realities: The Democratization of Thai Politics (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2008); Duncan McCargo, “Democracy under stress in Thaksin’s Thailand,” Journal of Democracy (2002): 112–126. 58 Kevin Hewison, “Thaksin Shinawatra and the reshaping of Thai politics,” Contemporary Politics (2010): vol 13, no. 4, 122. 59 Ferrara, 2014. 60 Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, “Thaksin’s populism,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2008): 81. 61 Viengrat Nethipo, “Thailand’s politics of decentralization: Reform and resistance before and after the May 2014 coup” in After the Coup: The National Council for Peace and Order Era and the Future of Thailand (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2019), 237. 57 

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Despite significant electoral success, Thaksin met growing opposition from parts of the middle and upper classes, who felt increasingly threatened by his “populist” policies and anti-establishment rhetoric. Starting in early 2005, a series of large anti-Thaksin demonstrations took place in the capital, some attracting thousands of people, led by a coalition known as the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), which later evolved in the People’s Democratic Reform Committee often popularly referred to as the “Yellow Shirts” movement.62 Since 2005, Thai politics has been plagued colour-coded protests between the “Yellow Shirts” and “Red Shirts”; yellow referring broadly to the royalist and military establishment and its supporters, and red to the rural and urban poor. Foreign media has often painted the Yellow and Red shirt camps as monolithic entities run by a cabal of elites within each camp. However, each camp included a number of different interests. The “Yellow Shirts,” while associated with the monarchy, military, and bureaucracy, have been supported at various points by professional organisations, state enterprise unions, religious groups, NGOs, networks of small farmers, and urban middle-class individuals. The “Red Shirts” have consisted of a loser collation of pro-Thaksin supporters, pro-democracy groups, and anti-military protestors. Kongkirati persuasively argues that the tensions between the yellow and red shirts are driven by competing notions of nationhood and political legitimacy between the two rival political camps.63 Polarisation in Thailand is not an understudied phenomenon. As early as 1996, Anek Laothamatas argued that Thailand was home to two democracies, one characterised by stereotypically poor and uneducated voters who use democracy for short-term gain and a second characterised by educated urban middle-class voters that viewed democracy in terms of ideology, policy, and competence.64 Anek’s argument, although black and white, underscores the political, social, and economic inequalities that Oliver Pye and Wolfram Schaffar, “The 2006 anti-Thaksin movement in Thailand: An analysis,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2008): 40. 63 Prajak Kongkirati, “From illiberal democracy to military authoritarianism: Intra-elite struggle and mass-based conflict in deeply polarized Thailand,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2016): 24–40. 64 Anek Laothamatas, “A tale of two democracies: Conflicting perceptions of elections and democracy in Thailand,” in The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996). 62 

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have formed in Thailand in the past decades. It is worth highlighting that elites would have been unable to maintain the massive size and duration of the protests by simply activating their support networks or through vote-buying. Instead, these protests were sustained by genuine concerns and interests.65 As Aim Sinpeng argues, often these concerns were that large segments of Thai society were being excluded from the political process.66 Crucially, these inequalities are not just economic. Like their yellow shirt counterparts, red shirts aspire to be upwardly mobile and to play an active part in the national and global economy as well as capitalist consumption.67 As Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker point out, it is when inequality in income and wealth “breed other kinds of inequality which become built into the structure of society and the attitudes of its members” that discontent brews.68 The complexity of political concerns about inequality is also reflected in the discourse of both the Yellow and Red Shirt camps. The anti-Thaksin movement formed in the mid-2000s, the PAD, created a large and sustained movement against Thaksin’s government. Though it has at various points employed a vertical and unified organisational style, it has also been described as having a “diffuse issued-based politics” agenda because of the diverse groups associated with it.69 The PAD portrayed itself as standing up for “honest politics,” using the discourse of good governance and upholding a moral political society. It likewise upheld the constitutional monarchy, strongly opposing those it believed wanted to change the monarchy’s status.70 To Thannapat, the “Yellow Shirt” movement was Oliver Pye and Wolfram Schaffar, “The 2006 anti-Thaksin movement in Thailand: An analysis,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (2008): 38–61; Björn Dressel, “When notions of legitimacy conflict: The case of Thailand,” Politics and Policy (2010): 445–469. 66 Aim Sinpeng, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021). 67 Claudio Sopranzetti, “Burning red desires: Isan migrants and the politics of desire in contemporary Thailand,” South East Asia Research (2012): 365. 68 Phonngpaichit, Pasuk, and Chris Baker, “Introduction: Inequality and oligarchy,” in Unequal Thailand: Aspects of Income, Wealth and Power (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 16. 69 Naruemon Thabchumpon, “Contending political networks: A study of the “Yellow Shirts” and “Red Shirts” in Thailand’s politics,” Southeast Asian Studies (2016): 98. 70 Thabchumpon, 100–103. 65 

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built on “a belief in the nature of royal power through charisma (merit/ goodness) of the King [Bhumibol] (as the supreme good man), and ­morality in Buddhism.”71 Though the “Yellow Shirt” protestors were mostly from the middle and upper classes, the movement was quite diverse. The People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), which organised the 2013 protests that led to the coup against Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra (Thaksin Shinawatra’s sister), is an excellent example of the diversity of nationalist-monarchical views and concerns. Though seen as interchangeable, the PDRC attempted to differentiate itself from the PAD. Firstly, though royal symbols were a dominant feature of PAD rallies from the start, PDRC associated itself more closely to the nation, and was more active in using standard symbols like the national flag. The PDRC did so in large part to prevent the monarchy from becoming “contaminated” by politics. Anusorn Unno also found that the socio-economic backgrounds of the PDRC protestors were different the PAD, noting that the PDRC “challenged the cliché that rural people vote government in only for the urban middle class to overthrow them.”72

Conclusion At first glance, nationalism appears to have had a tumultuous development in Thailand, vacillating between periods of royal, military, and state pre-eminence. But a consistent thread across the forms of nationalism pushed by the monarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, by Phibun and later Sarit, to the monarchy in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century, to the clashing notions of political legitimacy since the mid2000s, has been the language of morality. The use of terms khon di (good persons) or the appropriation of archaic terms like prai (peasants) still sits at the centre of nationalistic discourse in Thailand today. During the large Red Shirt protests of 2010 that blocked one of Bangkok’s upmarket districts, protestors actively appropriated language Jarernpanit, 661. Ansuron Unno, “‘We the southerners come to protect the nation and the king’: Southerners’ political rise and regional nationalism in Thailand,” in After the Coup: The National Council for Peace and Order Era and the Future of Thailand (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2019), 79. 71  72 

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and symbols customarily considered distasteful. For example, in response to the yellow plastic clappers used during PAD rallies, Red Shirt protestors used red feet-clappers, adding shock value since feet are considered dirty and offensive in Thai culture. Red Shirt protestors also re-­ appropriated the archaic Thai word prai — meaning uneducated peasant or serf — by using it self-referentially.73 The use of ambiguous phrases to express dissatisfaction with the monarchy was also common. Perhaps more daring was the use of explicit anti-royal graffiti at some protest sites.74 These actions might appear small, but they point to an attempt by the Red Shirts to redefine the cultural norms that placed them at the bottom of Thailand’s social hierarchy.75 Red shirts protestors also used slogans such as “kumaeng” (“I came by my goddamned self”) that emphasised that protestors came out of their own volition and not because they were paid by a nefarious agent.76 Music also played an important role: many songs used during the 2011 protests drew heavily from luk thung and mor lam folk music traditions, and contrasted immoral urban life with that of the idyllic village. The more recent youth protests in 2020 and 2021 suggest that nationalism is developing further in the country. Protests initially kicked off after the Future Forward Party was dissolved by the Constitutional Court in 2020. Future Forward won significant support with Thailand’s younger voters, who were attracted by the party’s willingness to challenge some of the country’s core narratives. But while the dissolution of the party initially spurred the protests, they quickly expanded in scope. Calls to dissolve parliament, rewrite the country’s constitution, and to end the harassment of protestors took centre stage. And, in stark contrast to earlier protest movements in the 2000s and 2010s, there was increasing criticism against the monarchy. The protests creatively and openly demanded reforms to the monarchy that would curtail its significant political and economic power.77 In response to these calls, authorities have responded James Buchanan, “Translating Thailand’s protests: An analysis of red shirt rhetoric,” Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies (2013): 60–80. 74 Ünaldi, 379. 75 Buchanan, 2013. 76 Tausig, Benjamin. Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 77 Duncan McCargo, “Disruptors’ dilemma? Thailand’s 2020 Gen Z protests,” Critical Asian Studies (2021): 1–17. 73 

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to the protests with heavy police action and using the country’s strict lese majeste laws. According to the Thai non-governmental organisation iLaw, since August 2020 there have been at least 44 lese majeste cases in the country, 24 of which are related to the youth protests.78 It is unclear at this point what the consequences of these protests will be. Regardless of whether the demands of the protestors will be met or not, it is clear they are disrupting some of the core royal nationalist narratives. Even just a few years ago, it would be surprising to hear direct criticism against the monarchy, especially in a country where portraits of the King and other members of the royal family are still omnipresent. But the protests over the past two years suggest the younger generation is trying to redefine and reassert what it means to be Thai. In fact, catchphrases such as “the nation is the people” and “decrease Thainess, increase humanness” suggest that space is being created for a new kind of national identity.79 Legitimacy in the political representation of national sovereignty lies at the core of Thai nationalism. Its multiple nationalist trends, crucially, struggle over the legitimacy of their claims to represent the needs and virtues of the nation. Underneath this superficial struggle, however, lies a rather old question of nationalism, one that was key to one of the earliest nationalist phenomena, Bonapartisme, the populist national republican dictatorship established by Napoleon and then recreated by Napoleon III. That is: can national sovereignty be invested in a noble hero that represents the virtues and needs of the nation, without reference to popular will and sovereignty, or does the constitution of the nation ultimately lie with its constituents and how they define the nation and its norms?

“Compilation of Section 112 of the criminal code (Lèse-majesté) cases during the s­ tudent — Radsadorn (the people) uprising since 2020,” iLaw, accessed May 21, 2021, https://freedom.ilaw.or.th/en/node/885. 79 Pasit Wongngamdee, “From ‘being Thai’ to ‘being human’: Thailand’s protests and redefining the nation,” New Mandala, accessed May 21, 2021, https://www.newmandala. org/from-being-thai-to-being-human-thailands-protests-and-redefining-the-nation/. 78 

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Chapter 6

The Co-Production of Civic Nationalist Conflict: Spain and Catalonia Javier Carbonell Castañer University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK

How are nations and nationalism reproduced? This chapter looks at the co-production of nationalisms in the case of Spain, where conflict between majority and minority nationalisms is very prominent. By employing discourse analysis to explore the events of the autumn of 2017 that were part of the Catalan secessionist challenge, the chapter aims to show how, as discursive formations, nations are reproduced through the clash between different nationalist projects. Lacking an objective reality to hold on to, these movements associate themselves with positive values and frame competing projects with their negative’s correlates. In doing so, they reinforce the tendency of competing nationalism to imitate them, resulting in the reproduction of nationalism as a principle for political action and social organisation. This chapter will explore a concrete example of this process by addressing how both Catalan and Spanish nationalisms employed civic nationalism and the binary democracy/authoritarianism to frame their confrontations.

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Introduction How are the boundaries of the nation reproduced? How do states face secessionist challenges? In this chapter, I will argue that the nationalist tensions that we see across many parts of the world are intrinsic to the nature of nationalism itself. Since nations are not objective facts of reality, but discursive formations, it is the clash between different nationalist projects (particularly majority vs minority nationalisms) what allows them to be reproduced. By looking at the specific clash of Catalan and Spanish nationalism we can see how these projects associated themselves with values positively regarded in their specific societies and identified the competing project with negative values. Nationalist disputes tend to be conceived as conflict along ethnic lines, however, it can be particularly severe when civic conceptions of the nation are confronted. In this case study, the binary democracy/authoritarianism has been a central tool employed by both nationalisms, while ethnic features played a secondary role. Interestingly, this civic binary already assumes preconceived delimitations of the sovereign community. The conflict around the Catalan case is an excellent example of how intrastate nationalist disputes can make ostensibly different nationalist projects more similar to each other due to their common aim to differentiate themselves. By claiming the language of civic nationalism and democracy, both projects provided incentives for the other national project to do the same. The result of this process of competing civic nationalisms is not only the reinforcement of both nationalist projects but also the increase in polarisation and the breakdown of previously established norms of ­political behaviour. Spain is a particularly interesting case in this regard because the history of its democratic transition is also the history of the evolution of competing nationalisms. During most of its recent democratic period, Spain has displayed — in comparison to other Western countries — r­elatively little nationalism with respect to anti-international and anti-immigration attitudes.1 This is not to suggest that nationalism in Spain is inexistent — it is very much alive, particularly since the rise of far-right party Vox — but rather to observe that national tensions have been focussed on delimiting the boundaries of the nation. Spanish and Catalan nationalism have become Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. 1 

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more explicit and present through confrontation with each other, as opposed to confrontation with immigration or supranational entities. At no point was this more evident than during the events of Autumn 2017. These events constituted the high point of the political turmoil surrounding Catalonia that has been taking place since 2012, popularly known as the “Procés.” The highlights of this conflict included the declaration of Catalonia as a sovereign subject (later declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court) and the organisation of a mock referendum in 2014. In 2017, the Catalan government organised another illegal referendum on October 1st, leading the police to prevent it from taking place and resulting in scenes of violence. Later, the parliament of Catalonia declared independence and the Spanish Senate approved the application of Article 155, which suspended the autonomy of Catalonia. Catalan leaders fled the country, a judicial process against those who remained started, and regional elections were held in December. These series of events provide a case study of the co-production of nationalism because the opposition between two governments and two nationalisms became the central axis of politics during that period. The focus of the chapter is on the political articulations of the nation made by relevant political actors (mainly the Spanish and the Catalan governments). Drawing on poststructuralist conceptualisations, I consider nation-states to be discursive formations that shape the way we speak and understand reality, thus, the best-suited method to study them is discourse analysis.2 Therefore, this chapter will explore the clash of discourses between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic nationalisms through the examination of manifestos, official documents and politicians’ speeches.3 I will first explore the evolution and main tenets of both nationalist discourses followed by an exploration into how they have confronted each other during the events of Autumn 2017.4 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998 [1992]); Cynthia Weber, “Performative states,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 1 (1998): 77–95; Kevin C. Dunn and Iver B. Neumann, “Discourse analysis” in Kevin C. Dunn and Iver B. Neumann (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology (London: Routledge, 2016), 262. 3 Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006), 17–32. 4 Given space constraints, the analysis will not be an exposition of the totality of the conflict nor of the evolution of the population’s attitudes. This implies that neither possible 2 

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Spanish Nationalism The marriage between Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile at the end of the fifteenth century is the event that marks, in the current Spanish imaginary, the beginning of the Spanish nation. However, several historical narratives place the beginning even further, coinciding with the starting point of the “Reconquista” at the hands of Pelagius of Asturias. Although the Catholic Monarchs were married, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon preserved their legal and traditional institutions, with the monarchy constituting a personal and dynastic union. After the War of the Spanish Succession, King Philip V implemented the “Bourbonic Reforms” by which the institutions and privileges of the territories of the Crown of Aragon were eliminated and a centralised state was implemented. Modern Spanish nationalism, however, emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, linked to the socio-economic modernisation of the country. This modernisation was “a relatively slow process generating considerable tensions and asymmetries that stimulated regional nationalism.”5 Given that the Spanish nation-building process was weak, it failed to replicate the French unification policies in culturally and linguistically diverse regions.6 This enabled regional nationalism to take hold in some of these regions, such as Catalonia and the Basque country. The centre-periphery tensions became a main source of national conflict in Spain, with Spanish nationalism oscillating between a more liberal, civic nationalism that was open to granting certain autonomy to regions such as Catalonia and “National-Catholicism […] which sought to impose by authoritarian means a uniform nationalization.”7 The tension between these two understandings of Spain played an important role in the ­breakout of the Civil War. Later, the dictatorship of General Franco actively repressed political dissent as well as the language and culture of non-Spanish speaking regions. alternative states against which Spain is constituted (i.e. Basque state) nor the alternative states against which the project of Catalan nationalists constitutes itself will be addressed. 5 Balfour and Quiroga, Reinvention of Spain, 8. 6 Juan José Linz, “Early state-building and late peripheral nationalism against the state: The case of Spain,” in Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan (Eds.) Building States and Nations (London: SAGE, 1973), 32–109; Laia Balcells, “Mass schooling and Catalan nationalism,” Nations and Ethnic Politics 19, no. 4 (2013): 467–486. 7 Balfour and Quiroga, Reinvention of Spain, 10; Diego Muro and Alejando Quiroga, “Building the Spanish Nation: The centre-periphery dialectic,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 4, no. 2 (2004): 18–37.

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The identification of Spanish nationalism with the Francoist regime delegitimised its claims and eroded its image for those sectors of society that longed for democracy. The transition to democracy acts as the touchstone of contemporary Spanish nation as the moment where previously confronted “Two Spains” reconciled into creating a modern and pro-European democracy.8 Parties from all across the political spectrum reached a compromise and chose an ambiguous formula to define the Spanish nation in the Constitution of 1978 (Article 2): “The Constitution is based on the indivisible unity of the Spanish Nation, common and indivisible Fatherland of all Spaniards. The right to autonomy for the nationalities and regions which constitute it and of solidarity among them is acknowledged and guaranteed.”9 Thus, the term “nation” is reserved for Spain, but this nation includes “regions” and “nationalities” whose autonomy is guaranteed. The Constitution also sanctioned the existence of Autonomous Communities, which established the possibility to construct quasi-federal regions. The decades after the democratic transition have witnessed the increasing devolution of competencies from the central government to the autonomous regions at the same time as the model of the Autonomous Communities has been accepted by large sectors of the population and fully embraced by mainstream right and left parties.10 Although popular attitudes that see non-Castilian languages as useless reminiscence of the past continue to exist, at the level of party rhetoric, Spain’s linguistic and cultural diversity is recognised and cherished. We can distinguish four main characteristics of Spanish nationalism. First, Spanish nationalism, as many other majority nationalisms do, hides its own nationalistic component. Second, despite important differences between right and left-wing parties, mainstream articulations of the Spanish nation have been “de-ethnicised,” that is, Spain is described in civic nationalism terms. Third, despite differences regarding the content of the nation, mainstream Spanish nationalism still defends the position that sovereignty resides only in the Spanish people and not in any Balfour and Quiroga, Reinvention of Spain, 115. Constitución Española, 1978, https://www.boe.es/legislacion/documentos/Constitucion CASTELLANO.pdf. 10 Xosé Núñez Seixas, “What is Spanish nationalism today? From legitimacy crisis to unfulfilled renovation (1975–2000),” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 5 (2001): 719–752, 732. 8  9 

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subgroup of it. Lastly, Spanish nationalism has associated itself with the defence of the Constitution, of democracy and of peace. Due to the negative image that explicit claims to Spanish nationalism have in post-Francoist Spain, the Socialist party has sought to balance between two conceptions of the nation. On the one hand, most of its members avoided nationalism and its related terminology in favour of a denationalised understanding of Spain that employs terms like “constitutional patriotism,” “democracy,” “state,” or simply “Spain” in order to stress that the link between all Spanish citizens is a civic one.11 On the other hand, mainly Catalan and Basque Socialists, define Spain as a “nation of nations” and argue for some form of asymmetric federalism, particularly with regard to symbolic issues.12 The right, on the other side, has always understood Spain as forming only one nation. However, it has slowly evolved from defending a very uniform conception of Spain, to a full discursive embrace of the Autonomous Communities and regional diversity.13 This, however, was coupled with an aggressive and hyperbolic attitude against minority nationalisms. In fact, the word “nationalist,” with deep provincial, ethnic and violent connotations, is reserved almost exclusively to speak about regional nationalists and never about mainstream parties. This tendency was reinforced by the fight against Basque nationalist terrorist group ETA. The term anti-independence parties use to describe themselves is that of “constitutionalists” which elides the national character of their discourse and puts forward their defence of democracy and peaceful coexistence (“convivencia”).14 The sanctioning of the Spanish nation in the Constitution has allowed the right-wing Popular Party — which was ruling at the time — to avoid explicit references to ethnic or historic justifications in order to oppose Catalan nationalism during the Procés in its political discourse. In its electoral manifestos for the 2015 and 2016 elections, for instance, historical references are completely absent and the reasons why Spain is Ibid., 736. Ibid., 739. 13 Balfour and Quiroga, Reinvention of Spain, 99. 14 Coree Brown Swan and Daniel Cetrà, “Why stay together? State nationalism and justifications for state unity in Spain and the UK,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 26, no. 1 (2020): 46–65, 47. 11 

12 

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considered “a great nation” are that “we have managed to construct unity from our differences” and that “we are proud to belong to a country with a variety of official languages.”15 Moreover, the role of the Constitution is central in defining Spanish reality, particularly as the culmination point of the democratic transition: “The Constitution allowed Spain to transform itself from a backward-looking social and economic country to a consolidated democracy” and “its values continue to be valid today.”16 In fact, “the unity of the Spanish Nation is a constitutional principle upon which our well-being is based.”17 It is no surprise, then, that secessionist challenges, as they call into question the whole constitutional and democratic system, must be fiercely opposed. The main reason for this defence of the Constitution is, of course, that it sanctions a particular delimitation of the boundaries of the sovereign community. Although Article 2 might be ambiguous regarding the national character of Spain, Article 1.2 leaves no room for interpretation: “National sovereignty belongs to the Spanish people, from whom all state powers emanate.” Thus, even though mainstream Spanish nationalism might have de-ethnicised many of its claims, abandoned the term “nation” altogether or even defined Spain as a “nation of nations,” what it has not done is abandon a specific delimitation of the boundaries of the sovereign subject which apply only to the whole of the current Spanish population and not to any subgroup within it.18 No matter how it is conceived, Spain remains sovereign. Even in the cases of those parties, such as post-­ communist coalition Izquierda Unida and populist party Podemos, which defend the right to self-determination for any region that wishes to secede, it is not clear if that referendum would be conceived as a right of a sovereign entity or a political decision taken by the sovereign central government, as it was the case with Scotland or Quebec.

Partido Popular, Seguir avanzando. Programa electoral para las elecciones generales de 2016, 2016, 139, 131. https://hipertextual.com/2016/06/programa-electoral-pp-2016. All original texts (both in Spanish and in Catalan) were translated by the author. 16 Ibid., 140. 17 Ibid., 139. 18 “El PSOE aparca la plurinacionalidad en su propuesta para buscar consenso,” El Pais, January 12, 2018, https://elpais.com/politica/2018/01/11/actualidad/1515689207_153314. html; Núñez Seixas, “Spanish nationalism today,” 740. 15 

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Catalan Nationalism Catalan nationalists trace back the origins of the Catalan nation to the “Marca Hispánica,” the trans-Pyrenean province of Charlemagne’s empire. The area was later ruled by the Counts of Barcelona who were integrated into the Crown of Aragon. Despite the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs the region preserved some degree of political autonomy. The year 1714 is acknowledged as the defeat of Catalonia in the War of Succession, the suppression of its institutions and the start of the decadence of culture in Catalan. Catalan linguistic and cultural revival (Renaixença) took place in the mid nineteenth century and the first modern Catalan nationalist party, the Conservative “Regionalist League of Catalonia” was founded in 1901. Catalonia was one of the most industrialised areas and Catalan nationalists saw themselves as the main promoters of modernisation in Spain.19 A certain form of self-rule was established between 1914 and 1925 (Mancomunitat) and again between 1932 and 1937 (Autonomía) but both were eliminated by the right-wing dictatorships of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) and Francisco Franco (1939–1975). During Franco’s dictatorship, “linguistic and cultural repression proceeded alongside political repression” and Catalan nationalism was considered a key element of democratic anti-Francoist opposition.20 This period crystallised the link between Catalan nationalism and democracy in the Catalan nationalist imaginary. In fact, two of the fathers of the Spanish constitution were Catalan and Catalans voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Carta Magna.21 Since the arrival of democracy in 1978, Catalan nationalist parties have always either ruled or been part of governing coalitions of the Catalan government. Their discourse was based on four main pillars: modernisation, promotion of democracy, nationalism of the rich (as the saying goes: “Spain steals from us” “Espanya ens roba”) and protection of the Catalan language (by making it the only language of instruction in

Josep Fontana, La formació d’una identitat: Una historia de Catalunya (Vic: Eumo Editorial, 2014), 316. 20 Daniel Cetrà, Nationalism, Liberalism and Language in Catalonia and Flanders (Switzerland: Palgrave, 2019), 76. 21 “Cataluña, más entusiasta que Madrid,” El País, 2013, December 1, https://elpais.com/ politica/2013/12/01/actualidad/1385925248_451113.html. 19 

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all public schools).22 However, despite its long presence in the regional government, Catalan nationalism is by no means hegemonic inside Catalonia. Catalanist parties have received an average of 47% of the vote since the 1980s and only 44.7% of the Catalans considered Catalonia a nation in 2006.23 Moreover, nationalist sentiment has remained fairly stable over the last decades with just under 40% of the Catalans declaring they feel only Catalan or more Catalan than Spanish.24 Thus, the Procés did not increase the support for nationalist parties, nor did it substantially change national sentiment in Catalonia. Its main effect has been to increase support for independence among that half of the population that already agreed with the national definition of Catalonia. In national terms, Catalonia is split in two. In September 2012, at the height of the economic depression in Spain, a massive demonstration took place under the motto “Catalonia, new state in Europe” and the Catalan government, who had previously not defended independence, changed its discourse and initiated the clash with the central government. With the explosion of the Procés, the economic and the linguistic elements have paved the way to a debate more centred around political issues. In a similar fashion to Spanish nationalism, there has been an effort to avoid the language of ethnic nationalism and to adopt the discourse of civic nationalism and democracy. One of the most repeated mottos of the Catalan nationalists, which was also used by Catalan president Carles Puigdemont as the subtitle to his book on the Procés, is “This is about democracy” (“Això va de democràcia”). Nevertheless, also similarly to Spanish parties, democratic rights are predicated on a preconceived notion of the boundaries of the nation. Such articulation was explicit in the motto of the 2010 demonstration against the Constitutional Court’s decision to declare the governing document of the region unconstitutional (Estatut): “We are a nation. We decide.”

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, Nationalism of the Rich. Discourses and Strategies of Separatist Parties in Catalonia, Flanders, Northern Italy (London: Routledge, 2018). 23 Roger Senserrich, “Seguimos en el mismo sitio,” Politikon, accessed July 25, 2017, https:// politikon.es/2017/12/22/seguimos-en-el-mismo-sitio/; “Un 44,7% de catalanes piensa que Cataluña es una nación, un 40,4%, que es una región,” Las Provincias, February 23, 2006, https://www.lasprovincias.es/pg060223/actualidad/espana/200602/23/RC-catalunya.html. 24 “El sentimiento nacionalista en Cataluña, según el CIS,” El Mundo, September 10, 2015, https://www.elmundo.es/grafico/cataluna/2015/09/10/55f15d60e2704e38728b4577.html. 22 

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Nationhood is grounded on a particular history and traditions, and in the existence of certain distinctive characteristics. Thus, in January 2013, the Catalan Parliament declared that “the self-government of Catalonia is founded on the historic rights of the people of Catalonia, on its secular institutions and on the Catalan juridical tradition.”25 It then proceeded to “make effective the exercise to the right to self-determination” by declaring that “the people of Catalonia are, for reasons of democratic legitimacy, a political subject and legally sovereign.”26 As is the case with Spanish nationalism, Catalan nationalism is decidedly pro-European, as epitomised by the 2012 demonstration’s motto “Catalonia, new state in Europe.” Spain is the relevant Other vis-à-vis which Catalan identity is defined. Catalan nationalists, thus, read the union with the rest of Spain and very particularly the Francoist period as one of oppression of their national identity and value the democratic transition as the beginning of a process of self-expression and self-rule as a nation. Upon the 2017 declaration of independence, the Catalan parliament affirmed that “Catalonia restores its full sovereignty, which was lost” and becomes an “independent and sovereign state.”27 As we will see in the following section this element of democracy as national self-expression will become fundamental in the clash with Spain.

Nationalist Conflict The basic idea in both Spanish and Catalan nationalism is the allocation of sovereignty to a specific group of people, a group composed of all the citizens of the current boundaries of the Spanish state, or a group c­ omposed of all the citizens in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia. The existence of these realities is first stated and then the right to self-determination is derived from such existence. No matter how diverse or civic it is in its depiction, Catalan nationalism justifies the existence of one national reality through the employment of references to a specific history, particular characteristics and traditions, their own language, inter alia. Many sectors Parlament de Catalunya, “Declaración de soberanía y del derecho a decidir del pueblo de Cataluña,” January 23, 2013 https://www.parlament.cat/document/intrade/7217, 2. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Ibid., 2, 4. 25 

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of Spanish nationalism, particularly from the right, also use such arguments in favour of justifying the Spanish national r­ eality. However, since the Spanish nation is constitutionalised, defenders of Spanish nationalism often employ arguments based on a defence of the already existing state’s status quo, de-ethnicise their justifications regarding the existence of the Spanish community and even appear to mute the concept of nation altogether. However, in both cases, a specific delimitation of the boundaries of the sovereign community is assumed. Neither nationalism proposes the radically democratic option of asking each and every individual if they wish to belong to the sovereign community or not. Referendums are always conceived as the right of an already sovereign community to separate from or to remain in a state. They are not referendums on the sovereign community itself. According to Catalan nationalism, in a hypothetical referendum in Catalonia, those towns or individuals (most probably Barcelona and its metropolitan area) who voted against independence would not be allowed to remain part of the Spanish state because the relevant sovereign community is Catalonia as a whole, not certain areas within it or individual people.28 Similarly, in a hypothetical referendum regarding the independence of Catalonia voted by the whole of Spain, even if voters in the area of Catalonia voted overwhelmingly for independence, if the total result was favourable to remain, then Catalonia would have to remain. Nevertheless, the problem with assuming a specific boundary of the sovereign community is that, as we can see with the example of Catalonia, disagreements may arise. Several national claims are made at the same time over the same territory and the same population and all employ or assume similar arguments based on history, cultural characteristics and political will. Why is the border here and not there? Why does it include these people and exclude those? Adopting a term from democratic theory, we could call this the “boundary problem.”29 The law of the referendum does accept that the Valley of Aran, a northeastern county in Catalonia that speaks its own language, is sovereign. However, this is because Aran is considered as a different nation to Catalonia. As the polemic surrounding Tabarnia showed, Catalan nationalists would not admit the same treatment to non-independentist areas of Catalonia such as the coastal counties of Tarragona and Barcelona because these are considered to be included in the boundaries of the Catalan nation. 29 Sarah Song, “The boundary problem in democratic theory: Why the demos should be bounded by the state,” International Theory 4, no. 1 (2012): 39–68. 28 

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The boundary problem cannot be solved through any objective claim. Some states are composed of vast territories, and some are smaller than a city, some states encompass large populations while others just a few thousand people. History, language, and culture are not monolithic entities that point teleologically to the formation of a specific nation, but are transformed, reinvented, and manipulated by nationalist movements in order to support the claims of their nation-building projects.30 Scholars have attempted to explain nationalist conflict by reference to factors such as industrialisation, globalisation, elite-behaviour, cultural diversity, power resources, etc.31 Although these elements are fundamental, I wish to argue that national disputes are inherent to nationalism itself because there is a fundamental contingency regarding where the state’s Self ends and where the Self of other states begins. It is this fundamental openness which allows any boundary to be continuously challenged. Although it may seem paradoxical, according to the relational nature of identity, these challenges are precisely what allows the hegemonic identity project to reproduce itself. Lacking “objective” ways of defining the political community, it is the clash of equally arbitrary conceptions of the boundaries of the community which determine the hegemonic boundaries. This is done through a continuous process of “othering”.32 Each nationalist project, seeking to establish the boundaries of a sovereign community, contests other national projects by linking its Self with features regarded positively by the people it targets, and associating competing national projects with the negative correlates of those features. The Catalan case is particularly fascinating because the main binaries employed to perform the process of othering are strikingly similar in both Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Umut Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition (Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 31 Astrid Barrio and Juan Rodríguez Teruel. “Reducing the gap between leaders and voters? Elite polarization, outbidding competition, and the rise of secessionism in Catalonia,” Ethnic & Racial Studies 40, no. 10 (2017): 1776–1794; Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and grievance in Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers 56 (2004): 563–95; Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism and politics in Eastern Europe,” New Left Review 189 (1991): 127–143; Andreas Wimmer, Lars-Erick Cederman, and Brian Min, “Ethnic politics and armed conflict: A configurational analysis of a new global data set,” American Sociological Review 74, no. 2 (2009): 316–337. 32 Hansen, Security, 33. 30 

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nationalisms’ discourses. The binary authoritarian/democratic is the main framework through which moral worth is allocated to the opposing national project. However, neither Spanish nor Catalan nationalists call into question the transparency of the elections, nor the funding of the ­parties even though both governments have been involved in massive ­corruption scandals. Accusations of authoritarianism have always been associated with the rights of the sovereign community. As we saw in the first section, for “constitutionalists” the unity of Spain is intrinsically associated with the defence of the Constitution, which (because it is one of its principles) entails a defence of democracy. This articulation was clearly expressed by the Constitutional Court of Spain when it overrode the declaration of sovereignty of the Parliament of Catalonia of 2013: If in the current Constitutional order only the Spanish people are sovereign and if it is in an exclusive and indivisible manner, then no public power can attribute the quality of sovereign to any other subject ... or to any fraction of that people. An act that affirms the condition of “political subject” of the people of an Autonomous Community implies the simultaneous negation of national sovereignty which, according to the Constitution, resides exclusively in the totality of the Spanish people.33

If, as the Constitutional Court ruled, sovereignty is exclusive and indivisible, then an option that demands to exercise self-determination in just a fraction of the people constitutes a threat. This threat is not only to a particular aspect of national sovereignty or a threat to national sovereignty in just a specific part of the territory but it is a threat to the whole national sovereignty in itself. In August 2016, when Mariano Rajoy presented his candidature to renew his term as President of Spain, he articulated a similar understanding of sovereignty “Spain suffers an explicit threat to its territorial integrity, to the equality among Spaniards and to its coexistence (‘convivencia’). What we are facing is the liquidation of the national sovereignty and of the respect for the law, which is the

Tribunal Constitucional “Sentencia contra la Resolución del Parlamento de Cataluña 5/X, de 23 de enero de 2013,” March 25, 2014, https://www.tribunalconstitucional.es/ NotasDePrensaDocumentos/NP_2014_026/2013-01389STC.pdf, 29. 33 

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democratic expression of that sovereign will.”34 Moreover, in Rajoy’s view, the sovereignty of the Spanish people cannot be questioned, not even by the Spanish parliament: Nobody can take away from the Spanish people their right to decide their future. Neither the government, nor this chamber nor any other power of the state can do it. In sum, gentlemen, our first duty — that of the government and this Parliament — is to preserve the national sovereignty ... [and] it is not up to the government to interpret that unity, but to defend it as it is understood by the Constitution and the Spaniards.35

The framing of the Catalan pro-independence movement as lawbreaking and threatening functions hand in hand with its depiction as authoritarian, ethnic-based and even “supremacist.”36 Criticism of a biased public Catalan television, of the indoctrination of children in public schools, of the discrimination of Spanish-speakers and of creating an environment where anti-independence supporters fear to speak up are common in accounts of the Catalan secessionist movement.37 Similarly, independentists have depicted Spain as an authoritarian state. Catalan nationalists bring back the memory of the Francoist era to connect their struggle with a historical fight for democracy and depict the “indivisible union of Spain” as a remnant of the dictatorship. As Dalle Mulle argues, In the [independentist] party’s discourse, Spain’s purported lack of democracy is not so much linked to the malfunctioning of the political system, but rather to the lack of recognition of the Catalan nation as a constituent unit of the country endowed with a right to self-determination. In other words, Spain’s anti-democratic character does not derive from democratic theory itself — which is silent about the boundaries of the

Mariano Rajoy, “Discurso de investidura,” August 30, 2016, http://www.congreso.es/ public_oficiales/L12/CONG/DS/PL/DSCD-12-PL-3.PDF, 29. 35 Ibid., 14–15. 36 Xosé Núñez Seixas, Suspiros de España: El nacionalismo español 1808–2018 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2019), 420. 37 Daniel Gascón, El golpe posmoderno (Madrid: Debate, 2018), 30. 34 

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self-governing community (Dahl, 1982: 98) — but rather hinges on the principle of national self-determination.38

The term “self-determination,” in fact, was seldom employed by proindependence parties, being substituted by the vaguer “right to decide,” which stresses its democratic appeal. If Catalonia has a democratic “right to decide” then the institution that prevents this right from being fulfilled is acting authoritatively and disobedience is justified. In the context of the polarisation that took place at the time, such a way of thinking allowed the Catalan nationalist parties to pass a law in the Catalan parliament calling for a referendum which violated the usual legislative procedures employed in parliament (such as allowing enough time to opposition ­parties to present amendments) and was clearly breaking the law. The Spanish government read the passing of this law as part of the general threat to the state posed by the secessionists. Rajoy clearly exposed this alarmist position when he commented on the events in the Catalan parliament: “There are people in Spain who wish to liquidate the Constitution, eliminate national sovereignty, the principle of legality, and the rule of law.”39 The framing of the issue as such a dangerous security threat allowed many to construct it as a coup d’état. On the 7th of September, one day after passing the Law of the Referendum, ABC, a major Conservative newspaper, opened its edition with the title “Coup d’état in the Parliament [of Catalonia].”40 In addition, El Mundo and La Razón headlined their first pages “The hijack of democracy.”41 In the same vein, Albert Rivera, leader of the Liberal party Ciudadanos also stated that “The first objective for Ciudadanos is to stop the coup against democracy.”42 Prominent members of the Socialist party also articulated a clear security threat: former Minister of Foreign Affairs and current EU

Dalle Mulle, Nationalism of the Rich, 39. Mariano Rajoy, “Intervention at Spanish Parliament,” September 13, 2017, http://www. lamoncloa.gob.es/presidente/actividades/Paginas/2017/130917rajoycongreso.aspx. 40 “Front Page,” ABC, September 7, 2017, https://www.lasportadas.es/d/20170907/101/ABC. 41 “Front Page,” El Mundo, September 7, 2017, https://www.lasportadas.es/d/20170907/108/ El-Mundo; “Front Page,” La Razón, September 7, 2017, https://www.lasportadas.es/d/ 20170907/102/La-Razón. 42 Albert Rivera, “Remarks to the press,” October 10, 2017, https://www.abc.es/espana/ abci-rivera-golpe-estado-esta-5604264419001-20171010020046_video.html. 38  39 

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High Representative Josep Borrell affirmed that “In Catalonia, there is a coup d’état by a neo-dictatorial regime.”43 Framing the secessionist movement as such a dangerous security threat enabled the Spanish state to take exceptional measures which it would not have been able to implement otherwise.44 For instance, the government mobilised around 6,000 policemen to stop the voting on the 1st of October.45 On the day of the referendum, the police tried to evict several voting centres and when the population resisted, they responded with violence.46 Since anti-independence citizens abstained, support for independence was very high (90.18%) but participation was very low (43%).47 After some back and forth between the Spanish and Catalan presidents, the Catalan parliament unequivocally declared the independence of Catalonia on the 27th of October. That same day, the Spanish parliament approved the application of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution which suspended the autonomy of Catalonia. Puigdemont and several other ­members of his government fled to Belgium, and the Spanish government deposed all Catalan leaders, arrested key figures, took control of the regional administration, and called for regional elections. Continuing with the democracy/authoritarian binary, Spanish newspapers expressed a triumphalist discourse: ABC titled “Spain beheads the coup,” La Razón opened with “Law against rebellion,” and El País wrote on the cover “The state suffocates the insurrection.”48 By contrast, many Catalan secessionists claimed that the enforcement of Article 155 was the Josep Borrell, “Remarks on a book presentation,” September 20, 2017, https://elpais. com/politica/2017/09/19/actualidad/1505848516_015773.html. 44 Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998). 45 “El despliegue policial por el 1-O costó 87 millones de euros,” Público, January 18, 2018, https://www.publico.es/politica/despliegue-policial-1-costo-87-millones.html. 46 Àlex Tort, “1 de octubre, cronología de un día atronador,” La Vanguardia, September 20, 2018, https://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20180930/452090607153/cronologia-diaatronador-1-octubre.html. 47 “Gana la abstención: el 58% de los catalanes no votó,” El Plural, October 2, 2017, https:// www.elplural.com/politica/gana-la-abstencion-el-58-de-los-catalanes-no-voto_110674102. 48 “Front Page,” ABC, October 28, 2017, https://www.lasportadas.es/d/20171028/101/ ABC; “Front Page,” La Razón, October 28, 2017, https://www.lasportadas.es/d/20170907/ 102/La-Razón; “Front Page,” El País, October 28, 2017, https://www.­lasportadas. es/d/20171028/103/El-Pa%C3%ADs. 43 

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real coup d’état against democracy.49 Puigdemont said that “the party that governs Spain has implemented fascism again” and member of the Catalan government Toni Comín said to the Spanish government: “You are Francoists and fear democracy.”50 Another consequence enabled by the strong securitisation of the conflict was the start of the judicial process against the Catalan leaders. The Attorney General accused the Catalan government, the Parliament’s Bureau and two civil society leaders of embezzlement of public funds, sedition and rebellion. After two years, the courts finally sentenced the Catalan leaders to 9–13 years of prison for the crimes of embezzlement of funds and sedition, rejecting the accusation of rebellion. Both sides used the discourse of civic nationalism and democracy to undermine the nature of the other’s project and to establish a red line that had to be respected: national self-determination. This demanded a referendum for one side and rejected it for the other. However, as democratic self-determination can only be exercised over an already defined sovereign community the use of the civic nationalism discourse is related to three factors. First, the shared common ground between anti- and proindependence supporters on the same values, particularly those regarding democracy and Europe. In fact, survey data show that Catalan and Spanish identity holders differ in their territorial organisation preferences but agree on most other social values.51 Second, this common ground provided an incentive to both actors to claim issue-ownership of the values of democracy, modernity and Europeanness. The ontological lack of a way to settle a boundary of demos pushes different actors to associate their national project with those other values positively regarded among the population in dispute. In the Catalan case, therefore, debates revolved around disputing the meaning of shared values rather than about opposing different values. Both “El PDeCAT ve un golpe de Estado contra Catalunya en la aplicación del artículo 155,” La Vanguardia, October 21, 2017, https://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20171021/ 432234411277/pdecat-golpe-estado-articulo-155-constitucion.html. 50 Carles Puigdemont, “Speech in Brussels,” 2017, https://www.elplural.com/autonomias/ cataluna/puigdemont-desatado-afirma-que-el-fascismo-ha-vuelto-a-espana_113971102; Toni Comín, “Speech in Brussels,” 2017, https://www.abc.es/espana/abci-toni-comingobierno-rajoy-5671054767001-20171207013009_video.html. 51 Javier Padilla, Javier Carbonell and Kilian Wirthwein, “How do supranational, national, and local identities mix? The case of Spain,” Nations and Nationalism (forthcoming). 49 

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nationalisms appealed to different elements of liberal democracy. Due to the memory of the Civil War and ETA, the important element of democracy for Spanish nationalism is that of peace. That is, of a peaceful interchange of ideas within a set of rules (legal framework). The breaking of the law amounts to breaking those rules and setting a precedent for others to also break the rules and that can derive in violent actions. That is why the notion of “coexistence” (‘convivencia’) played such an important role in the discourse of Spanish nationalism. For Catalan nationalists, the main role of democracy is the expression of popular will through voting, that is about national self-determination. If the legal framework prevents that from happening, then it is justified to break it. This helps explain their strong emphasis on the articulation of self-determination as “the right to decide.”52 Third, the different actions taken by the political actors (breaking the law, suspending the autonomy of a region, sending 6,000 policemen, unilaterally declaring independence, severe conflicts in the streets, etc.) clearly broke away from previously established norms of political ­behaviour. The framing of the other side’s actions as security threats to democracy and their own as democracy-protecting measures allowed their policies to be accepted by their voters in a way that would have been unthinkable decades ago.53 The result of this conflict between civic nationalisms has been a further reinforcement of national identities and the crystallisation of a polarised political field. Catalan nationalist parties won the 2017 and 2021 regional elections. Moreover, groups of protesters blockaded streets and highways and filled Catalan public spaces with yellow ribbons as a protest regarding the jailed Catalan leaders. Spanish nationalist sentiment has also been clearly reinforced. Spain’s national day saw massive ­demonstrations in support of the unity of Spain. For the first time, these demonstrations occurred throughout the country and not just in Barcelona.

This could also be applied to the European dimension, where one side associated Europe with modernity and the other with unity. 53 I am not arguing that both sides bare the exact same degree of moral responsibility as I am not evaluating these actions from a normative point of view. I simply wish to point to a common dynamic that is significantly present on both sides (although to varying degrees). 52 

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That day, El Mundo opened its front page with “Spain’s pride.”54 Moreover, in a clear mirror of the common practice of hanging pro-­ independence flags by pro-independence supporters, Spanish flags were exposed on balconies all over Spanish cities. Ciudadanos, a party born from the anti-independence movement, was the most voted party in the 2017 Catalan elections. 2018 also saw the emergence of Vox, a far-right party that expresses a very aggressive and explicit Spanish nationalism and which achieved impressive results in the elections of November 2019. In 2019 new elections took place because Catalan parties decided not to support the government. In sum, nationalist clashes continue to define Spanish politics and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion Spain is a unique case in the of study the co-production of nationalism through the confrontation of majority and minority nationalisms. Both Spanish and Catalan nationalisms, regardless of their more or less explicit grounding in history, language and culture, affirm the existence of a sovereign community whose right to self-determination cannot be violated. Since the boundaries of these communities are fundamentally contingent, these national projects associate themselves with democracy and the others with authoritarianism in order to give themselves moral worth. However, as we have seen, their conceptions of authoritarianism and democracy rely precisely on an already existing definition of the boundaries of the sovereign community. This conflict reached its height during the events of Autumn 2017 and has continued to mark Spanish politics to this day. By way of concluding this chapter, I would like to offer two general reflections triggered by this case. The first reflection is that these disputes cannot be solved. Contestation of the boundaries of the community is the norm because in order for the Self to exist there has to be an Other against which identity is constantly reproduced.55 Our current national communities are not natural but contingent and it is precisely the different “Front Page,” El Mundo, October 28, 2017, https://www.lasportadas.es/d/20171030/108/ El-Mundo. 55 William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 54 

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practices of “othering” that reproduce the hegemonic boundaries of these communities.56 Moreover, democracy is unable to solve nationalist clashes because, as Dahl argued, democratic theory is silent about the demos or sovereign community.57 This is not to say that there is no way to address the boundary problem but that solutions are always partial, temporary and dependent on the will and strength of different actors and on the political and social context of the conflict. There is no final resolution, but only temporary patches to a never-ending problem. Referendums, legal regulations, political claims, symbolic concessions, federal structures, etc. are all political instruments that can be used to either exacerbate or tame never-ending nationalist conflict. The second is that the nationalist disputes in Catalonia speak to the problematic rise of civic nationalism. Both nationalisms employ a discourse based on appeals to liberal democracy and both have grounds for these appeals: the peaceful change of the status quo through legal means for Spanish nationalism and the importance of voting to decide on political choices for Catalan nationalism. Both nationalisms cherish ­ ­cultural diversity, modernity, Europeanism, openness and pacificism. This similarity, and apparent normative parallelism is not surprising given that they are entangled in a process of imitation and differentiation that co-­ constitutes them as rival legitimate projects. Yet, the consequences of these competing civic nationalisms have been imprisonment, illegal ­referendums, suspension of the autonomy, breaking of the law, conflicts in the streets, polarisation, etc. As Bernard Yack has argued, civic nationalism does not necessarily entail a better form of politics.58 In fact, civic nationalism, or rather its discourses, has been widely used by far-right parties to defend essentialised and exclusive national identities against foreigners who do not or cannot uphold liberal values.59 Although the clash reached high levels of intensity in Spain, competing civic majority and civic minority Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London, New York: Routledge, 2004). 57 Robert A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 58 Bernard Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 38–39. 59 Daphne Halikiopoulou, Steven Mock and Sofia Vasilopoulou, “The civic zeitgeist: Nationalism and liberal values in the European radical right,” Nations and Nationalism 19 no. 1 (2013): 107–127. 56 

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n­ ationalisms have been common in well-established democracies such as Canada, the UK or Belgium. In a moment when ethnic nationalism is on the rise globally, it should be noted that civic nationalism is as well.60 And that is not necessarily a cause for celebration.

Laura Silver, Moira Fagan, Aidan Connaughton and Mara Mordecai, “Views about national identity becoming more inclusive in U.S., Western Europe,” Pew Research Center, May 5, 2021, sec. Global Trends and Attitudes, https://www.pewresearch.org/ global/2021/05/05/views-about-national-identity-becoming-more-inclusive-in-us-westerneurope/. 60 

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Chapter 7

The Return of the Rising Sun? The National and International Dimensions of Japan’s Contemporary Nationalism Daniel Rueda Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

For most of the post-war period, Japan has opted for a pragmatic pacifism and a US-dependent foreign policy. But recent changes in the international arena, along with a new domestic political context, seem to have paved the way for a nationalist turn. In the last decade, Shinzo Abe and the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party have articulated a new form of nationalism that is fundamentally different from that which characterised Japan’s imperialist past. This chapter examines the resurgence of Japanese nationalism by analysing both its national and international dimensions. It argues that this movement is not only related to a national identity crisis and a concrete political strategy but also to the dramatic rise of China and to a conflict-prone region in an increasingly multipolar world.

Introduction One of the most characteristic features of today’s international order is the proliferation of nationalist movements and strongmen leaders. Japan, a country located in what might be defined as one of the most tenses 131

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g­eopolitical hotspots of our era,1 could hardly be an exception to this trend. After decades of a reluctant and antimilitaristic foreign policy derived from the outcome of the Second World War and the consequent alliance with the United States, Japanese nationalism is back to the fore. The role of China and other regional actors has been underlined as a key factor by authors such as Caroline Rose,2 Paul J. Smith,3 and Shogo Suzuki.4 Contrarily, for some commentators, Japan’s nationalism since 1945 has been exclusively related to national and domestic factors such as the spread of Japanese pop-culture,5 the strategic needs of conservative political leaders,6 technologic and economic national success,7 or xenophobic attitudes towards minorities.8 Yet this international-domestic comparison is in fact a false dilemma: nationalism is rarely, if ever, a one-dimensional political position affected by only one or the other. This chapter starts from the assumption that nationalism is a comprehensive worldview that includes both national and international elements. This means accepting that the nationalist turn experienced by several countries cannot be understood without a specific examination of their respective specific circumstances. In consequence, the national and international dimensions of Japan’s contemporary nationalism are analysed as correlated phenomena. This dual approach, distinguished from analyses Yang Xiyu, “Geopolitical hotspot issues in Northeastern Asia and transformation of international order,” China Institute of International Studies, 2017, http://www.ciis.org.cn/ english/2017-12/08/content_40098538.htm. 2 Caroline Rose, “‘Patriotism is not taboo’: Nationalism in China and Japan and implications for Sino–Japanese relations,” Japan Forum, vol. 12, no. 2 (2000), 169–181. 3 Paul J. Smith, “China-Japan relations and the future geopolitics of East Asia,” Asian Affairs: An American Review, 2009, vol 35, issue 4, 230–256. 4 Shogo Suzuki, “The rise of the Chinese ‘Other’ in Japan’s construction of identity: Is China a focal point of Japanese nationalism?,” The Pacific Review, 2015, vol 28, issue 1, 95–116. 5 Koichi Iwabuchi, “‘Soft’ nationalism and narcissism: Japanese popular culture goes global,” Asian Studies Review, 2002, 26:4, 447–469. 6 Stephen Robert Nagy, “Nationalism, domestic politics, and the Japan economic rejuvenation,” East Asia (2014), 2014, vol 31, 5–21. 7 Morris Low, “Displaying the future: Techno‐nationalism and the rise of the consumer in postwar Japan,” History and Technology, 2003, 19:3, 197–209. 8 Rumi Sakamoto, “‘Koreans, go home!’ Internet nationalism in contemporary Japan as a digitally mediated subculture,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2011, vol 9, issue 10 number 2, 1–21. 1 

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that tend to focus only on one of the two dimensions, is particularly suited for a country whose national affairs have been shaped by international interventions and conflicts since the second half of the nineteenth century.9 This chapter focusses on Japan’s contemporary nationalism, promoted by Junichiro Koizumi at the beginning of this century and consolidated by his political mentee Shinzo Abe. The fact that they are the most popular Japanese Prime Ministers in the past two decades demonstrates that their project has been at least partly successful.10 To avoid Westerncentric perspectives and misleading analogies, this analysis begins with an analysis of the specific and distinctive character of Japanese nationalism. This analysis is divided into two sections. The first explores Japanese nationalism in its national context. The nationalist resurgence orchestrated by Koizumi and Abe emerges in a context of national identity crisis and seeks to articulate new political cleavages. It addresses traditional rightwing demands while at the same time adopting a pragmatic approach and a moderate tone. Such rhetoric is critically examined in order to show how it promotes a type of nationalism that is more ideologically charged than it might seem at first, as well as its role as a competitive electoral strategy. The second section focusses on the international dimensions of this narrative by identifying three key factors behind Japan’s nationalist turn. First and foremost, the dramatic ascendance of China, a nation whose relationship with Japan has been historically problematic and whose challenges over sovereignty in the East China Sea make distrust between the two countries practically inevitable. The second factor is uncertainty regarding the US-Japan relationship in the Trump era and the role of the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, in promoting nationalism overseas. Finally, this chapter considers the emergence of a multipolar world and East Asian regional dynamics. Bert Edström, “The Yoshida Doctrine in unchartered waters,” in Bert Edström (Ed.), Japan’s Foreign Policy in Transition: The Way Forward for Japan as an International Actor in a World in Flux (Stockholm: Institute for Security and Development Policy, 2011). 10 Yukio Maeda, “Public opinion and the Abe cabinet: Alternating valence and position issues” in Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, Ethan Scheiner, Daniel M. Smith (Eds.) Japan Decides 2017: The Japanese General Election (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 9 

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Rearticulating Nationalist Discourses: A New Answer to a Persistent Identity Crisis Japan’s national identity issues are old as the modern Japanese nation. Of course, inasmuch as the construction of a national identity is always a politically contested and challenging process, there’s no country that is truly free of national identity issues. Yet as several historians have pointed out, Japan’s situation since the Meiji Restoration (1868), the foundational moment of the modern Japanese nation, is particularly problematic.11,12 The building of the Japanese nation was an accelerated process consisting of the difficult task of amalgamating native traditions and myths with Western advances. This was always accompanied by a sense of ­ethnic uniqueness that dates back from the Edo Period (1603–1868).13 Western countries were considered role models whose innovations could be put to work to guarantee Japan’s autonomy and international power projection, to the point that the idea of Datsu-A Ron (Leaving Asia) gained prominence among political elites.14 The period of rising isolationism and ultranationalism that followed culminated in a brutal war against China (1937–1945) and a confrontation against the great Western powers. After the Second World War, both Japanese nationalism and militarism were marginalised. The Yoshida Doctrine, formulated by the first post-war Japanese Prime Minister, Shigeru Yoshida (head of the government from 1946 to 1947 and from 1948 to 1954), became the basis of the new national identity. The doctrine was based on two fundamental assumptions. The first is the idea that Japan’s uniqueness and international prominence would now be based on and driven by economic success. The second is the notion that national security and geopolitical strategies Christopher Harding, Japan Story. In Search of a Nation: From 1850 to Present (London: Allen Lane Books, 2018). 12 David L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). 13 Eiko Ikegami, “Citizenship and national identity in early Meiji Japan, 1868–1889: A comparative assessment,” International Review of History, 1995, vol 40, Issue S3, 185–122. 14 It is interesting to note how the contemporary Japanese right shares both this idea of national uniqueness and the reluctance towards the idea of their country being part of Asia. See: Kiichiro Arai and Miwa Nakajo, “Survey of candidates’ policy preferences,” in Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, Ethan Scheiner, Daniel M. Smith (Eds.) Japan Decides 2017: The Japanese General Election (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 11 

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should rely on the United States, including allowing only for a self-limited national military, later known as the Self-Defence Force. The consensus around the Yoshida Doctrine began to be openly ­contested within the Liberal Democratic Party15 at the beginning of the twenty-first century. There are several reasons for this shift, the most significant including the trade war with the United States in the 1980s (eagerly supported by Donald Trump),16 the economic stagnation prevalent since the 1990s (a period that known as “The Lost Decade”), the end of the Cold War and its capacity to articulate and structure international alliances, the Gulf War (a conflict that sparked heated debates in Tokyo),17 the US-led War on Terror, and China’s resurgence. The two pillars of the Yoshida Doctrine, economic strength and geopolitical neutralism, were therefore under scrutiny. The end of the twentieth century had left Japan with mounting concerns about emerging diplomatic, political, and identity issues, particularly China’s resurgence and the end of Japanese competitiveness, that substantially challenged and even contradicted the vision of national identity upheld by the Yoshida Doctrine. Japan thus entered the twenty-first century facing a new identity crisis. In reality, the end of the Yoshida period could be seen as the conclusion of a precarious (though long-standing) consensus that was sustained by a very concrete historical context. However, the Yoshida Doctrine left an important mark on Japanese public opinion, especially concerning antimilitarism, which is still today tied to the US–Japan special relationship.18 However, such lasting influence would prove to be asymmetric, for it is today embraced mostly by the Japanese left, with the government increasingly contesting the old terms of this military relationship.19 The LDP has been the majority party in Japan almost continuously since 1955. Only between 1993 and 1994 and between 2009 and 2012 it was out of power. 16 Jim Tankersley and Mark Landler, “Trump’s love for tariffs began in Japan’s 80s boom,” The New York Times, May 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/politics/ china-trade-donald-trump.html. 17 Tang Siew Man, “Japan’s grand strategic shift from Yoshida to Koizumi: Reflections on Japan’s strategic focus in the 21st century,” Akademika, 2007, vol 70, no. 1, 117–136. 18 Byron Tau, “Abe’s window of time for amending Japan’s pacifist constitution narrows,” The Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/abes-windowof-time-for-amending-japans-pacifist-constitution-narrows-1534075201. 19 Christopher Harding, Japan Story. In Search of a Nation: From 1850 to Present (London: Allen Lane Books, 2018). 15 

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Junichiro Koizumi was the political figure in charge of articulating a new paradigm of national identity. As a conservative politician, he did so by shifting the party line towards a more assertive and revisionist foreign policy, however, without abandoning pragmatism and the pro-American position. His election was perceived in Beijing as a dangerous rightist turn in Japanese politics,20 and his term in office would prove to be a source of tensions for China–Japan relations. Koizumi’s rise symbolised a sort of “return of the oppressed” to the leadership of the LDP. As some historians have noted, he symbolises the revival of the so-called Gaullist tradition of the Japanese right.21 This faction was marginalised within the party in the 1950s because of its revisionist attitude towards the post-war settlement and its insistence that Japan needed to achieve international greatness again. According to Christopher Hughes, “Koizumi represented the resurgence of the LDP’s revisionist wing and was followed by two even stronger revisionists, Abe and Taro Aso.”22 Koizumi’s project was certainly appealing for the nationalist right but ended up reproducing the precariousness that has historically characterised Japan’s national identity. This is because his approach proved to be too contradictory: on the one hand, Koizumi made hardnationalist gestures, including annual pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine,23 and bolstered the alliance with the United States, paving the way for the dispatch of Japanese troops to a foreign country for the first time since the Second World War. Shinzo Abe, Koizumi’s political protégé, served as Prime Minister 2012–2020 and also held the post briefly between 2006 and 2007. He was elected after a period of political instability (between 2000 and 2012, there were nine different Prime Ministers in Japan) that prepared the ground for a strong and authoritative leader. In 2019 he became the second-longest-serving Richard McGregor, Asia’s Reckoning. The Struggle for Global Dominance (London: Allen Lane Books, 2017). 21 H.D.P. Envall, “Transforming security politics: Koizumi Jun’ichiro and the Gaullist tradition in Japan,” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2008. 22 Christopher W. Hughes, “Japan’s grand strategic shift. From the Yoshida doctrine to an Abe Doctrine?,” in Strategic Asia 2017–18. Power, Ideas, and Military Strategy in the Asia-Pacific (Washington: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2017), vol 10. 23 The Yasukuni Shrine is a Shinto shrine that commemorates Japanese militaries that died in conflict since 1868, thus including those who fought during the Sino-Japanese wars. For this reason, it is highly controversial both in Japan and in countries such as China and South Korea. 20 

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Prime Minister in post-war Japan. Abe claims to want to end what he refers to as “the post-war regime.”24 His political goal is to articulate a Japanese identity based on the national resurgence and international assertiveness after decades of subordination, which has led to comparisons with Vladimir Putin.25 He has promoted the so-called Abe Doctrine based on a more assertive foreign policy and a commitment to military rebuilding.26 Most of Abe’s core ideas were outlined in his 2007 book Towards a Beautiful Country: My Vision for Japan, a work that, according to Michal Kolmas, envisages a new Japan “that has succeeded in detaching itself from its post-war torpor in foreign and security policy and whose society no longer feels united under the anti-militarist banner.”27 This chapter focusses the analysis on Shinzo Abe, which remains of great relevance as the basis of contemporary Japanese nationalism after the succession to the premiership of his deputy Yoshihide Suga in 2020 on a platform to continue Abe’s economic policies remilitarisation and revision of Article 9 of the constitution. Abe’s tenure coincided with the rise of Uyoku dantai (“Right-wing groups”)28 such as Ganbare Nippon! (Hang in there, Japan!) and Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), whose members include Shinzo Abe and almost 300 Japanese National Diet members.29 These dispersed organisations seek to restore Japan’s alleged glorious past by promoting nationalism and military strength. The highly influential Nippon Kaigi overtly pushes for a revision of the post-war alliance with the United States and a return to an assertive and, if necessary aggressive foreign policy.30 Abe, and his successor from 2020, Yoshihide Suga, defend some of the central demands of these groups, such as the revision of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which restricts Japan’s war potential. Sven Saaler, “Nationalism and history in contemporary Japan” in Jeff Kingston (Ed.) Asian nationalisms reconsidered (London: Routledge, 2015). 25 Gilbert Rozman, “Japan-Russia relations under Abe and Putin: Progress and prospects,” in Japan-Russia Relations. Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance (Washington: Sasakawa USA, 2016). 26 Hughes, “Japan’s grand strategic shift.” 27 Michal Kolmas, National Identity and Japanese Revisionism: Abe Shinzō’s Vision of a Beautiful Japan and Its Limits (New York: Routledge, 2019). 28 Despite their name they might be better described as far-right ultra-nationalist organisations. 29 Tawara Yoshifumi, “What is the aim of Nippon Kaigi, the ultra-right organization that supports Japan’s Abe administration?,” The Asia Pacific Journal, 2017, vol 15, issue 21, 1–23. 30 David McNeill, “Nippon Kaigi and the radical conservative project to take back Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2015, vol 13, issue 50, 1–5. 24 

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Contrary to his mentor, Shinzo Abe came to power in a rather favourable context for a nationalist revival. By 2012 the rise of China was not a projection anymore but an indisputable reality. At the same time threatening North Korean long-range rockets were at the centre of the political agenda, giving Abe the opportunity to show an assertive stance against the new North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Moreover, after the aforementioned period of political volatility, Abe could reasonably foresee a time of stability and medium-term projects. Finally, 2012 also represents the end of the so-called “Lost Twenty Years,” a period of economic crisis and stagnation that has been a crucial national concern since 1990 and which Abe sought to tackle with a series of economic reforms.31 Several large-scale surveys in Japan indicate a rather favourable view of constitutional revision32 as well as a negative public attitude towards China33 and South Korea.34 Shinzō Abe has shown both an understanding of this national mood and an ability to promote a reformed vision of national identity that meets right-wing nationalist demands while at the same time avoiding radical stances that would inevitably be associated with Japan’s imperialist past.

Strategies of Domestic Nationalist Ideological Domination One of the main obstacles when analysing contemporary nationalism is that it is generally not presented as such. This contrasts with the period prior to the Second World War, inasmuch as this conflict represented a A project that is referred to as ‘Abenomics’. See: “Abe’s Master Plan,” The Economist, May 18, 2013, https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578044-shinzo-abe-hasvision-prosperous-and-patriotic-japan-economics-looks-better. 32 CFR, “Japanese public attitudes in Constitutional revision”; Council on Foreign Relations, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/interactive/japan-constitution/public-attitudes-onrevision. 33 Jesse Johnson, “Record high 85% of Japanese view China unfavourably, despite ­improving ties between Beijing and Tokyo,” Japan Times, September 30, 2019, https:// www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/09/30/national/record-high-85-japanese-view-chinaunfavorably-despite-improving-ties-beijing-tokyo/#.Xb3Y1ej7SM8. 34 Robin Harding and Edward White, “Divided by history: Why Japan-South Korea ties have soured,” Financial Times, October 24, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/13a3ff9af3ed-11e9-a79c-bc9acae3b654. 31 

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clear and traumatic turning point in the history of nationalist ideas. Japan is certainly not an exception in this late modern panorama, for its nationalist turn was and remains consistently portrayed by Shinzo Abe and his allies, including Suga, as a moderate and realistic project that only seeks to normalise the nation’s affairs. This part of the chapter argues that Abe’s rhetoric established, despite its seemingly moderate nature, a form of ideological domination that conceals certain aspects of this form of contemporary nationalism. Following the work of Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn, ideological domination is defined as the series of ideological mechanisms that are employed to legitimise and maintain a certain political project.35 Such a project is, in this case, a nationalist resurgence, a polemic programme in a country that has embraced pacifism and self-restriction. The point of departure is not that the LDP and its leader are somehow hiding their “true intentions” but rather that their ideology, in order to become a successful and legitimate political project, needs to be filtered through a series of mainstreaming mechanisms of legitimation. This is due not only to the potential concerns of Japan’s neighbours and allies but also to Japan’s “fear of itself.”36 First of all, Shinzo Abe employs the mechanism of inevitability, defined by Therborn as the act of presenting a political project as the only rational option, thereby marginalising potential alternatives.37 Abe has continuously stated that in the new international context and especially given the rise of China, rearmament and a certain degree of autonomy are the only rational alternative possible.38 According to him, the revision of Article 9 is “crucially important as it will decide the future of Japan’s security.”39 Yet remilitarisation and geopolitical assertiveness are not the only way in which Japan can adapt to the times. As Hughes has shown, since 1945, several strategic options had been debated in Japan: neutralism, Göran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980). 36 Eugene A. Matthews, “Japan’s new nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, 2003, vol 82, no 6, 74–90. 37 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. 38 Florentino Rodao, La soledad del país vulnerable. Japón desde 1945 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2019). 39 Michael Hoffman, “Abe repeats goal of revising Article 9 in speech to SDF’s top brass,” Japan Times, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/09/03/national/politics-diplomacy/ abe-repeats-goal-revising-article-9-speech-sdfs-top-brass/#.Xb3gm-j7SM9. 35 

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autonomy, revisionism, Gaullism, and internationalism.40 The latest is propounded by the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ), the second-largest political force of the country and the main opponent to constitutional revision, and yet such an option is consistently downplayed by the LDP who considers it unrealistic.41 Secondly, Abe’s nationalist discourse is marked by a claim to popular representation. This consists of the assumption that the political leader understands the interests of his citizens (or of his nation) better than the political alternatives.42 Shinzo Abe often portrays himself as a connoisseur of Japan’s modern history. As an enthusiastic proponent of historical revisionism, he has played a central role in several organisations that promote an alternative view of Japan’s imperial past.43 He presents himself as a leader that understands his nation and that can bring Japan back to its normal state, essentially condemning the post-war settlement described above as a historical anomaly.44 He and his allies claim to grasp the truth of Japan’s essence and thus can reinstate it and represent the nation, unlike other political forces that adhere to the Yoshida Doctrine. This is the political move by which Abe’s nationalism can be presented as a mere move towards natural normalisation. Finally, the last mechanism employed by Shinzo Abe is existential fear. Therborn defines it as the mechanism used when there is a possible political alternative that needs to be slandered by the leading political project.45 In Abe’s discourse, fear is directed towards the two main rivals in the region: China and North Korea, and linked to the framing of political opponents as unwilling and unable to contain these threats. Abe’s tough stance towards North Korea was a polarising issue during the 2017 elections,46 a symptom of how in the last few years, the nationalist Hughes, “Japan’s grand strategic shift.” Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, Ethan Scheiner, and Daniel M. Smith, “Introduction: Abe on a roll at the polls,” in Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, Ethan Scheiner, and Daniel M. Smith (Eds.) Japan Decides 2017: The Japanese General Election (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 42 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. 43 Sven Saaler, “Nationalism and history in contemporary Japan.” 44 Florentino Rodao, La soledad del país vulnerable. Japón desde 1945 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2019). 45 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. 46 Yasuhiro Izumikawa, “The North Korea factor in the 2017 election,” in Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, Ethan Scheiner, and Daniel M. Smith (Eds.) Japan Decides 2017: The Japanese General Election (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 40  41 

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revival has become an important political cleavage and key paradigm in Japan. The LDP’s nationalist comeback is presented as a project to which the only alternative is an exposed and vulnerable Japan, fuelling fear of Chinese resurgence and the unpredictability of the North Korean threat. According to Shinzo Abe, his political project is essentially to prepare against such threats.47

China as Nationalist Antagonist If one asked Japanese nationalists which country poses the biggest existential threat to their fatherland, their answer would be straightforward: the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The relationship between the two countries is complex: there is much mutual distrust, but they also share economic interests48 and a common history rich in key cultural, economic, and political interactions.49 However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the situation has been steadily deteriorating, and today Beijing and Tokyo seem to be embarking upon a new chapter in their troubled history. Sino-Japanese relations under the government led by Koizumi are considered by some as a mostly wasted decade in diplomatic terms.50 This was only a logical consequence of the LDP shifting towards revisionism, as symbolised by Koizumi becoming the first Japanese Prime Minister to annually visit the Yasukuni Shrine. Despite Shinzo Abe’s pragmatic approach to China–Japan relations, the PRC is becoming a major catalyst for Japanese nationalism. As Shogo Suzuki notes, for Japanese nationalists today’s China is comparable to the United States during the 1950s: a powerful nation that threatens Japan’s autonomy and humiliates a weak country by demanding unfair diplomatic and economic concessions.51 Moreover, while Japan’s nationalism is restrained by the country’s history, Florentino Rodao, La soledad del país vulnerable. Japón desde 1945 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2019). 48 This is why the relationship is often described as being “politically cold but economically hot.” See: June Teufel, “China and Japan: ‘Hot economics, cold politics’,” Orbis, 2013, vol 58, issue 3 (2014), 326–341. 49 Jian Yang, “Of interest and distrust: Understanding China’s policy towards Japan,” 2007, China: An International Journal, vol 5, no. 2, 250–275. 50 Yang Bojiang, “Redefining Sino‐Japanese relations after Koizumi,” The Washington Quarterly, 2006, vol 29, issue 4, 129–137. 51 Suzuki, “The rise of the Chinese ‘Other’ in Japan’s construction of identity.” 47 

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the opposite is true in the case of China. Indeed, Beijing proclaims that after the so-called Century of Humiliation (1849–1949), in which the country was forced to make major concessions to imperialist powers, including Japan, China has the right to become a powerful country again.52 Japanese nationalists will continue to perceive Beijing as their main antagonist as long as tensions between both countries remain or increase. This is due to various reasons. First of all, current geopolitical tensions between Japan and China are not solely the result of historical issues or political decisions. Rather, they are the result of a clash of key strategic interests between China’s and Japan’s sphere of interests as articulated by the successive government over the last two decades. The East China Sea, bordered by China, Taiwan, and Japan, is a key space for both nations in terms of trade and security. It is also the location of important natural resources such as natural gas and oil, a crucial factor for China, which counts oil as one of its main imports, as well as for resource-poor Japan. In fact, there is already an example of this kind of confrontation: the conflict over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu Islands for the Chinese), a group of small islands in the East China Sea. They were annexed by Japan in 1895 during the First Sino-Japanese War and occupied by the United States between 1945 and 1971 when they were returned to Japan. This dispute has sparked nationalist rhetoric and mobilisation on both sides since the beginning of the twenty-first ­ ­century.53 In 2013, Shinzo Abe stated that “it would be natural [for Japan] to expel by force if the Chinese were to make a landing.”54 This situation generated massive protests in China. According to Richard McGregor, “anti-­Japanese rallies were among the most widespread demonstrations in ­modern Chinese history.”55 William A. Callahan, “National insecurities: Humiliation, salvation, and Chinese nationalism,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2004, vol 29, no. 2, 199–218. 53 Yasuhiro Matsuda, “How to understand China’s assertiveness since 2009: Hypotheses and policy implications” in Strategic Japan. China-Japan Relations and the Future Geopolitics of East Asia (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). 54 Teddy Ng, “Japan PM issues warning to Beijing over Diaoyu Islands,” South China Morning Post, April 23, 2013, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1221250/ japan-pm-issues-warning-beijing-over-diaoyu-islands. 55 John Darwin Van Fleet, “‘Asia’s reckoning: China, Japan, and the fate of US power in the pacific century’ by Richard McGregor,” Asian Review of Books, December 19, 2018, 52 

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Although during the post-war period, the United States was the main antagonist for Japanese right-wing nationalists,56 China remained their historic enemy. This is not only due to historical events but also to unsettled issues of historical memory. As aforementioned, the post-war East Asian settlement was politically very different from that seen in Europe. In Korea, China, and Japan, narratives surrounding the conflicts that took place from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War were never settled and mutually condemned. The outcome of the conflict was a contest between incommensurable and incompatible national narratives that persists today. Shinzo Abe is eager to defend his version of the facts, even when that means triggering heated reactions in Seoul and Beijing.57 This is not exclusive of Abe: in Japan, the account of the multiple wars in which the Empire of Japan participated is one of the most polarising political issues since the post-war beginning of democracy.58 This means that stirring up unsolved historical topics between Japan and China is a positional issue that the Japanese right considers a legitimate discursive strategy.59 Finally, China is likely to persist as Japan’s antagonist for identityrelated motives. In order to articulate the new Japanese national identity, Shinzo Abe and his associates have engaged in the process of Othering China. Japan, a liberal and peaceful democracy, often contrasts itself to China, a powerful but dictatorial, aggressive, and nationalist regime. Beijing is thus portrayed as Japan’s natural nemesis, for it represents everything Tokyo allegedly stands against. This frame appears to have permeated all sides of the political spectrum, inasmuch as “Japan’s relations https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/asias-reckoning-china-japan-and-the-fate-ofus-power-in-the-pacific-century-by-richard-mcgregor/. 56 William E. Rapp, “Past its prime? The future of the US-Japan alliance,” Parameters, 2004, vol 34, issue 2, 104–121. 57 Christopher Hughes, Japan’s Foreign and Security Policy Under the ‘Abe Doctrine’: New Dynamism or New Dead End? (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2015). 58 Christopher Harding, Japan Story. In Search of a Nation: From 1850 to Present (London: Allen Lane Books, 2018). 59 Lorenzo de Sio defines positional issues as political stances that are divisive and polarising but can provide electoral advantage. See: Lorenzo de Sio, 2010, “Beyond ‘position’ and ‘valence’: A unified framework for the analysis of political issues,” EUI working papers, EUI, October 2010. https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/14814/ RSCAS_2010_83.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y.

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with China have become a nationalist focal point for both Left and Right, insofar as both sides demand that Japan resist China to protect Japanese national interests.”60

Trump as a Promoter of Nationalism One of the main challenges to the liberal international economic order is paradoxically the country that fostered its emergence, the United States. During Trump’s tenure 2016–2021, some of the key tenets that characterised the international system were challenged by its formerly foremost proponent. This results from the fact that Trump and his closest aides are influenced by paleoconservative and other New Right forms of conservatism that promote transactionalism and zero-sum nationalism as the key institutions of international relations, rather than multilateralism. What are the consequences of Donald Trump’s tenure for this trilateral relation? While since the 1949 revolution, China has undoubtedly been an opponent, and increasingly a rival, for the United States (with a period of “unnatural intimacy” during Richard Nixon’s presidency),61 under Trump, it has clearly been raised to being its main antagonist both economically and geopolitically. Inasmuch as the United States and China are, respectively, the world’s mightiest state and the one that intends to become its successor, the confrontation is likely to become a structural cleavage that will shape the near future.62 The fact that China is now the most important threat for Washington means that Japan, the United States’ closest ally in the region, will probably play an important role in the ­coming years and decades. This also means that Washington will almost certainly push for Japan to be more assertive. Trump even suggested that Japan (and South Korea) might need nuclear weapons, a long-standing demand in some nationalist circles.63

Suzuki, “The rise of the Chinese ‘Other’ in Japan’s construction of identity.” The definition of the US–Japan alliance as a form of “unnatural intimacy” was developed by American diplomat George Kennan in the late seventies. See: George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977). 62 Graham Allison, Destined for War. Can America and China Escape the Thucydides’s Trap? (London: Scribe, 2017). 63 Mark Fitzpatrick, “How Japan could go nuclear,” Foreign Affairs, October 3, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2019-10-03/how-japan-could-go-nuclear. 60  61 

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This situation could lead to new attempts to revise Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, as well as to the growing normalisation of nationalist leaders such as Shinzo Abe. After all, there are historical precedents: in the late 1950s, the United States resuscitated the political career of Nobusuke Kishi (who happens to be Shinzo Abe’s grandfather), a nationalist accused of committing war crimes because at the height of the Cold War, he was seen as a competent political figure that would be assertive against the Soviet Union. It is not difficult to imagine a similar promotion of overtly nationalistic Japanese leaders who could firmly counter Chinese ambitions in the East China Sea and act as a pro-US counterbalance in East Asia. If that is the case, Shinzo Abe might turn out to be too moderate for such purposes.64 Donald Trump additionally boosted Abe’s nationalism by maintaining his alienating attitude towards America’s long-standing allies. Trump provoked unrest in the European Union, prompting projects regarding the creation of a European army and thereby unwittingly contributing to renewed European self-awareness in security. Moreover, in 2018, Trump made a series of remarks about Japan and its trade relationship with the USfr1 that raised alarms in Tokyo.65 Consequently, Shinzo Abe advocated the need for a revision of the current form of the US-Japanese alliance, though neither he nor his Minister for Foreign Affairs, Toshimitsu Motegi, went as far as calling for the end of the special relationship with Washington. Trump’s pseudo-isolationist foreign policy, along with his idea that the United States spends too many resources protecting its allies,66 could have paved the way for adjustments in the relationship while maintaining the historical alliance. This was hinted at by Abe himself in 2015, when, during a speech before the American Congress, he proposed a more autonomous and stronger Japan as a way of guaranteeing the effectiveness

Other contemporary nationalist political figures such as Yuriko Koike or Tadae Katubo could be more suited to play the role of Japanese nationalist hawks. 65 Daniel Hurst, “A brewing US-Japan trade war?,” The Diplomat, June 7, 2018, https:// thediplomat.com/2018/06/a-brewing-us-japan-trade-war/. 66 Anna Fifield, “Donald Trump says U.S. is bankrolling Asian allies’ defense. That’s not really true,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/30/donald-trump-says-u-s-is-bankrolling-asian-alliesdefense-thats-not-really-true/. 64 

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of the alliance.67 Should a nationalist with the same grievances and objectives return to the White House, these considerations will return to the fore and inevitably impact the US-Japanese alliance as well as the development of Japanese nationalism.

East Asia: A Region Ripe for Nationalisms It has become a commonplace to say that we are moving towards a multipolar world. But we might in fact be heading towards the emergence of different regional orders without a clear centre.68 As Amitav Acharya argues, prior to 1945, the multipolar world was mainly a Euro-centric world, whereas the near future heralds a more decentralised and regionalised system that he defines as multiplex rather than multipolar.69 East Asia, a region that includes Russia’s Far East, North Korea, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan, is one of these emerging regional systems and is becoming a geopolitical hotspot. Back in 2003, when the end of the post-Cold War order became a possibility, Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver defined the East Asia region as “a great power complex” in which different powerful states converge, making coexistence difficult.70 Although at the end of the twentieth century, some commentators pointed to the development of regional organisations (such as ASEAN or APEC) as a possible resolution to this stress.71 This no longer seems to be a realistic long-term solution. Japan’s imperial past has strained relations with its neighbours. To a certain extent, this is due to the aforementioned importance of conflicts over historical memory in the region. Furthermore, the contemporary “Full text of Abe’s speech before U.S. Congress,” Japan Times, April 30, 2015, https:// www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/04/30/national/politics-diplomacy/full-text-abesspeech-u-s-congress/#.Xb3oq-j7SM8. 68 Robert Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin Random House, 2018). 69 Amitav Acharya, “After liberal hegemony: The advent of a multiplex world order,” Ethics & International Affairs, 2017, vol 31, no. 3, 271–285. 70 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 71 See, for example, Suisheng Zhao, Power Competition in East Asia: From the Old Chinese World Order to Post-Cold War Regional Multipolarity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 67 

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Japanese refusal to address this history, strengthened by Abe, has been especially important in shaping Japan’s relationship with North Korea, South Korea, and China. The role of historical memory debates in shaping international affairs has been well studied by Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain, who point to East Asia as a key example of this type of dynamics.72 These historical issues continue to matter not only because of debates surrounding victims and past actions but also because they are key to how nationalists respond to the challenges Japan faces with its neighbours concerning territorial and other disputes. Though relations with Russia improved in recent years and the relationship between Abe and Putin is good,73 important issues remain unresolved. Even though the main dispute between the two countries concerns sovereignty over the Kuril Islands (seized by the Soviet Union in 1945), Japanese sanctions in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea in 2014 have become a new source of conflict. It is important to note that to a large extent, Russia–Japan relations today are deeply influenced — and indeed shaped — by the rise of China. While Tokyo fears a Sino-Russian alignment, a rapprochement between Japan and Russia predicated on the need to contain the new hegemon is a possibility that cannot be ruled out.74 The Korean peninsula represents another diplomatic challenge for Japan. Once again, historical memory plays a central role. The Korean Empire was annexed by Japan in 1910, giving rise to a colonial and tyrannical rule based on cultural cleansing, strict racial hierarchy, and violent repression. Both North Korea and South Korea have integrated into their respective national identities a historical resentment against the Japanese. Despite American attempts to bring together its two main allies in East Asia, the relationship between South Korea and Japan remains fraught, especially due to the debate over the history of “comfort women” — sexual slaves captured by Japan during the war. The existence of the issue was only acknowledged by Shinzō Abe in 2007 after constant pressure

Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Sain, Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 2010). 73 Gilbert Rozman, Japan-Russia Relations. Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance (Washington: Sasakawa USA, 2016). 74 Stephen Blank, “Russia and Japan: Can two-plus-two equal more than four?,” Asia Pacific Bulletin, 2014, number 250, 3–5. 72 

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from Washington, though this did not diffuse the acrimony.75 In 2011, the South Korean government placed a statue commemorating comfort women in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, which reignited the debate. Apart from this historical confrontation, Japan and South Korea maintain a territorial dispute over the Liancourt Rocks, a group of islets between their respective territories.76 This international quarrel has found domestic nationalist expression in the emergence of Japanese far-right groups fomenting hatred against the Korean minority, mainly composed of Zainichi Koreans.77 These groups are, however, only the most worrying expression of Japanese xenophobic attitudes towards Koreans, as this minority faces discrimination in the form of both institutional racism and sporadic microaggressions.78 Nationalist figures such as Suzuki Yoshiyuki or Makoto Sakurai have been relatively successful in gaining support by inciting hatred against Korean residents.79 North Korea is considered a major security threat by Tokyo.80 The relationship has, of course, been problematic since the establishment of the Communist regime, but it seriously deteriorated at the end of the 1970s when North Korea abducted 17 Japanese citizens.81 The Japanese government was reluctant to act at first, leading to virulent reactions. Finally, in 2002 Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea to promote normalisation. Hiroshi Tanaka, the man in charge of organising the meeting, which included a Japanese apology for its wartime crimes, received death Justin McCurry, “Japan rejects US calls for apology over ‘comfort women’,” The Guardian, July 31, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/31/usa.japan. 76 Kiyoshi Takenaka, “Japan’s Abe renews call on South Korea to keep promises to mend ties,” Reuters, October 24, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-southkorea/japansabe-renews-call-on-south-korea-to-keep-promises-to-mend-ties-idUSKBN1X308N. 77 In Japanese, zainichi (在日) means “Japan resident.” Zainichi Koreans are long-term Korean residents of Japan whose presence goes back to the period in which Korea was under Japanese rule (1910–1945). 78 Young-Min Cho, “Koreans in Japan: A struggle for acceptance,” Law School International Immersion Program Papers, 2016, No. 2 (2016). 79 Kenichiro Ito, “Anti-Korean sentiment and hate speech in the current Japan: A report from the street,” Procedia Environmental Sciences, 2014, vol 20, 434–443. 80 Richard McGregor, Asia’s Reckoning. The Struggle for Global Dominance (London: Allen Lane Books, 2017). 81 Robert S. Boynton, “North-Korea’s abduction project,” New Yorker, December 21, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/north-koreas-abduction-project. 75 

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threats, and a bomb was planted in front of his residence in Tokyo. This act was justified and defended by Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo at the time and who still remains a prominent nationalist figure.82 Shinzo Abe, however, effected a key diplomatic shift: besides insisting on the urgent need to make North Korea abandon its nuclear program, he additionally took a more aggressive stance regarding the abductions. Finally, the relationship with Taiwan (the Republic of China) is not immune from these dynamics. The island was ceded to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War (1895) and was occupied as a colony until 1945, a period when the Empire of Japan invested in the island and made important economic and technological improvements. After the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, the Republic of China (ROC) was recognised by Japan as the legitimate government of China. Though diplomatic relations with the PRC were established in 1972, Japan and its American ally still stand today as the main defenders of Taiwan. However, issues such as the conflict over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands (named Diaoyutai Islands by Taiwan) and control of fishing waters remain significant diplomatic obstacles. These regional dynamics, along with the abovementioned rise of China and American hesitation over its alliances, cannot but boost the attractiveness of nationalist politics in East Asian countries. To Shinzo Abe should be added other assertive regional leaders such as Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Tsai Ing-wen, and Vladimir Putin. Moreover, it is important to take into account that in South Korea, a country currently governed by the rather moderate and liberal Moon Jae-in, the second-largest political force, the Korea Liberty Party, overtly embraces right-wing nationalism.

Conclusions The triumph of Shinzo Abe’s nationalist project is not yet complete. However, both Japan’s domestic political context and recent changes in the regional and world order suggest that there is scope for it. The success of his approach and his relatively strong position, particularly a length of Ishihara is the author of the popular book ‘The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals’ (1989), which he co-authored with Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony. The authors argue that Japan should be less hesitant and more independent from the United States. 82 

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tenure without precedent for Japanese politicians in the last few decades, indicate that the dominating role of nationalism in Japanese politics is likely to persist, even if it remains a divisive issue. Moreover, both the regional and the global order are shifting in a way that is empowering nationalist leaders across East Asia. East Asian nationalisms are, to a certain degree, mutually constitutive and thrive by challenging issues of historical memory that go beyond their countries and continuously reignite heated debates. Further, there are few palliatives available. In the absence of a regional integration project, a shared ­diplomatic culture, and institutions, the impact of long-lasting territorial disputes, along with the incapacity (or lack of will) of the United States to promote alliances in the region, it is fair to assume that any further entrenchment of nationalism might produce the political conditions for greater challenges and hostilities. The spectacular rise of China and the palingenetic mindset of its government, with its promotion of a rebirth of China’s regional and global power, represent the greatest opportunity for Japanese nationalism. Yet Japanese nationalists still face several important challenges, starting with a citizenry that shows reluctance towards rearmament and militarism after decades of a minimalist defence posture. Furthermore, despite the fact that Washington seems eager to grant more autonomy to its allies, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative grand strategy coming from the LDP other than extending the special relationship. In the absence of any regional arrangements capable of countering China, Japan may have to choose between accepting Washington’s hegemony and going further into its nationalist turn.

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Part III

Liminality and Identity in Late Modern Nationalism

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B1948

Governing Asia

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© 2023 World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1142/9781800611542_0009

Chapter 8

Nation, Minority and Nationalism: A Sociological Perspective on How Ethiopian Jews Construct and Configure Identity Abrham Yohannes Gebremichael Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS), Universitätsstr. 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany

This chapter explores two key questions in the broader enquiry into what a nation is. Firstly, it examines how the Beta Israel community reflect diverse national identities depending on the context and how they construct and configure their social identity. This minority group, which lived in Ethiopia for two centuries before leaving for Israel in the 1980s, was able to maintain its “salient” features and reserve in-group sentiments while at the same time integrating into these two societies. Secondly, this chapter investigates how an individual within the social group moves upward into dominant groups, moves downward, selectively utilising its categorisations to move in both directions. Finally, analysis explores how others in the social group attempt to intensify the social bond with ideas, discourse and organised movements to strengthen in-group sentiment. These findings firstly challenge the assumptions of singular identity inherent in nationalism, and secondly highlight and retrieve the role played by the individual’s own struggles and strategies of identity-making in negotiating their social inscription. 153

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National Identities: Groups, Minority Groups and Individuals in Time and Space Concepts such as ethnicity, nation and national identities receive tremendous attention in political discussions. There are many rebel fighters, political and intellectual elites and activists throughout the world who claim to represent the rights of ethnic groups or nations. However, there are also several ongoing debates among scholars concerning the fluidity of these topics and their all-important definitions of identity. In response, this chapter proposes a theoretical exploration of these concepts before proceeding to the empirical part. Firstly, it addresses the core question of what a nation is. Is it the product of nationalism,1 “ethno-symbolism,”2 “invented tradition,”3 or the product of all three? Secondly, in a contribution to the broader question of what a nation is, it explores the difference between ethnic belonging and nation through analysis of the case of the Beta Israel community and their group as well as individual negotiation of identity. From a classical perspective on the concept of nation, Ernest Renan characterised it as “grand solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices.”4 Similarly, Stalin described it as a “common psychological make-up manifested in common culture,”5 while Max Weber described it as “a community of sentiment.”6 However, these three definitions have limits. First, they do not address how the “nation” has come into existence. Rather they attempt to define what it is by focussing on the manifestation of its presence after it comes to existence. Second, the idea of “grand solidarity,” “common psychological make-up” or “community of sentiment” is often taken for granted because all “nations” or otherwise discretely defined social groups in the world have different political, ­religious and cultural positions that stratify each into subgroups. Later conceptualisations of nation draw heavily on classical interpretations such Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Anthony Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1st edition (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2009). 3 Eric Hobsbawm, ed., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 4 Ernest Renan, M. F. N. Giglioli, and Dick Howard, What Is a Nation? And Other Political Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 5 Anthony Smith et al., Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 1994). 6 Ibid. 1  2 

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as Benedict Anderson’s “imagined political community,”7 or Margaret Moore’s “imaginative acknowledgement.” For Moore nation is “invented” and relies on identification with national symbols that claim to essentialise the symbols of the nation. Thus “nations are not only political formations, but also systems of cultural representation whereby national identity is continually re-produced through discursive action.”8 If a nation is not a natural phenomenon, but rather a social construction and an imagined political community, it becomes vital to consider Ernest Gellner’s view of the “nation as a fabrication of nationalism.”9 In this view, the ideological foundation of nationalist discourse can be launched by political elites or intellectuals, but it does not mean that they are creating, literally fabricating something new to offer as a national history. Rather, we are looking at a process of historicisation where they select applicable historical figures, historical facts, “mass culture” that can be construed as common symbols, myths, values and stories, which are then politicised as markers of the primordial roots of the group. Then, as Gellner remarks, nationalism “is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”10 As these political principles are disseminated to the public and are acknowledged by its claimed constituency, they foster group sentiment and finally ground national movements rooted in the birth of a nation.11 Contrary to this, Brubaker’s conceptualisation rejects the presumption of “collectivity” and argues that the “Group” functions as a seemingly unproblematic, taken-for-granted concept, apparently in no need of scrutiny or explication. Therefore, we tend to take for granted not only the concept of “group,” but also “groups,” the putative things-in-the-world to which the concept refers.”12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. edition (London, New York: Verso Books, 2006). 8 Margaret Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism (Oxford, New York: OUP Oxford, 2001), 52. 9 Thomas H Eriksen, “Ernest Gellner and the multicultural mess” in Siniŝa Maleŝević and Mark Haugaard, eds., Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought, 1st edition (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 170, 171. 10 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1. 11 Ernst B. Haas, “What is nationalism and why should we study it?” International Organization 40, no. 3 (1986): 707–744. 12 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8. 7 

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Brubaker elaborates that concepts of ethnicity, race, nation and other putative identities are deployed by way of reification, which is a social process and an intellectual practice that restates and rearticulates the existence of the nation. However, his conclusion on reification can be seen as an overstatement: social reality is an ontological question and as social scientists, it is not our place to dismiss what people believe is real. Rather, as R. D. Laing remarked, “collective representations come to be experienced as things, exterior to anyone. They take on the force and character of partial autonomous realities, with their own way of life. A social norm may come to impose an oppressive obligation on everyone, although few people feel it be their own.”13 Therefore, Groups or society create knowledge, rules, norms, symbols and reality and they interact, include and exclude individuals or groups, as a result, members are willing to die for “the group” in war, for the honour and values of “the nation” and the independence and rights of the group. Therefore, before rejecting their existence, it is better to focus on the dynamics and practice of these concepts.14 After considering these problematic interpretations of the nation, the question emerges: what is the difference between ethnic group and nation? Sinisa Malesevic described an ethnic group as a synonym for ethnicity and defined it as “a distinct cultural property of a particular collectivity: sharing common descent, language, religion, lifestyle, etc.”15 However, this definition is a more general one and it is problematic to differentiate it from a nation, as nationalist discourse uses the same description for the nation too. In reality, ethnicity is a vague concept because it varies depending on the exact historical and political context of the polity, which is not necessarily a nation. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1990), 65. 14 Margaret Gilbert and Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy Margaret Gilbert, A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society (Oxford: OUP, 2006); Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World (Oxford University Press, 2013); Tiziana Andina, An Ontology for Social Reality, trans. Sarah De Sanctis, 1st edition, 2016 edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 15 Siniša Malešević, “Ethnicity in time and space: A conceptual analysis,” Critical Sociology 37, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 67–82. 13 

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Nation can be understood as a universalistic term, but one must place the exact context of ethnicity in perspective. For instance, in the U.S., it is commonly linked to ancestry, while in Eastern Europe, it often refers to nationality or language. In Africa, it is more ambiguous because language and religion can be salient in some cases but are frequently unrelated to today’s polities. Meanwhile, there are groups in the “same ethnicity” but with different religious affiliations. Therefore, it is essential to consider the exact historical and political context of the discussed polity and its claims. Similarly, Calhoun also considers ethnicity as “an extension of kinship” that mediates between “kinship and nationality,” and “reflects the internal culture of certain lines of intergroup relationships.”16 However, ethnicity becomes critical when different groups live in the same territory and must therefore negotiate a context of plural ethnic identities.17 Accordingly, in such cases, the construction of the “one nation” necessitates that a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual community with a distinct political, social and cultural hierarchy be overthrown by a dominant culture or group. Furthermore, the frame of ethnicity is formed or intensified in a context of plural ethic identities, and in such cases nationalist discourses commonly oppress minority cultures and groups in the name of achieving unity or oneness. Cultures are, however, unstable entities that function at different social levels. Here culture is used as a volatile signifier that enables different and divergent ways of talking about human activity for a variety of purposes. The concept of culture is an instrument that is more or less convenient to us as living figures and its practice and meanings continue to change as thinkers have hoped to “do” different things with it and it also holds features that are learned, shared, largely responsible for group differences and accountable to make individuals into complete persons to that specific context of society. Accordingly, cultural identity is continually produced within the transmitters of “similarity and dissimilarity.”18 Their meanings are constantly altered, so any given assumed “national culture” is understood, misunderstood, interpreted and acted upon differently by various social groups. This could be the state, ethnic groups, Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997). Ibid., 29. 18 Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and cultural studies: Is that all there is?” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity, 1st edition (London, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1996). 16  17 

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classes and communities, who may perceive the national identity in ­divergent ways.19 The supposed “national identity” is therefore a means of amalgamating and unifying cultural diversities to a “singularity.” Consequently, Moore concludes that we should comprehend groups’ unity or identity to be the consequence of “discursive power that covers over difference,” rather than thinking of nations and national cultures as a “whole,” and nations are marked by deep internal divisions and differences that hold different social, cultural, religious, ethnic groups so that a unified national identity has to be constructed through the narrative of the nation’ by which stories, images, symbols, and rituals represent “shared” meanings of nationhood that smashed and crashed many historical facts, groups, languages in the name of unity. The inscripted national culture therefore holds experiences and histories that transmit stories, literature, music, poems and popular culture,20 that can be propagated through micro and macro interactions within society’s subgroups that endow with meaning and interpretation according to their group. Furthermore, minority groups develop more complex dynamics in negotiation “national” identity.21 When groups within the “nation” play Moore, 40. Ibid., 51. 21 The term minority group is an ambiguous term to understand. Depending on the context, it could mean any subordinate group whose members have significantly less power over their lives because of their racial, ethnic, gender, or religious affiliation than members of a dominant or majority group. However, this definition has limitations. First, it assumes that the so-called majority and minority are homogenous and that the minority group has no hierarchy. Zhidas Daskalovski citing Francesco Capotorti in 1979, proposed a definition consisting of a “group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members — being nationals of the state — possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language.” If we consider the “numerical inferior” part in the case of gender, females are not numerically inferior but historically disadvantaged and blacks are a majority in South Africa numerals but inferior politically, culturally and historically. Daskalovski then included the definition of the formed working group organised by the UNCHR in 1978 to draft a declaration on the rights of members of minorities presented by Jules Deschenes to the Sub-Commission in 1985: “A group of citizens of a State, constituting a numerical minority and in a non-dominant position in that State, endowed with ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics which differ from those of the majority of the 19  20 

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minor roles in political, social, cultural, and historical participation in “national” affairs, grasping the delimitation of the group’s national sentiments or “national culture” is equivocal, as they can and do develop ingroup sentiments. Consequently, politicians or intellectuals in these minority groups often select specific aspects of nationalist discourses and deploy them to demonstrate their belonging to the dominant “nation” while maintaining alternative narratives that intensify unity within the minority in-group. On occasion, these discourses may even propel an idea that contradicts the “Meta nationalist discourses,” which may prompt the formation of another “nation.” Brubaker argues that “not all group-­ making projects succeed and those that do succeed (more or less) do so in part as a result of the cultural and psychological materials they have to work with. These materials include not only, or especially, ‘deep’, longuedurée cultural structures such as the mythomoteurs highlighted by Armstrong and Smith, but also the moderately durable ways of thinking and feeling that represent ‘middle-range’ legacies of historical experience and political action.”22 The greatest challenge in studying nationalism is to avoid nationalism’s assumption that nations, ethnic groups and communities are internally and perennially consistent. That is: endowed with clear boundaries, collective actors with a common purpose, while disregarding individuals as passive entities who imbibe or absorb the ideas, propaganda and ideological narrative of nationalists. However, this conclusion raises vital questions, particularly why people accept nationalist ideas, discourses or even participate in national population, having a sense of solidarity with one another, motivated, if only implicitly, by a collective will to survive and whose aim is to achieve equality with the majority in fact and in law.” However, this definition, like the previous one, takes numerical value as the key criterion to define minority and also takes ethnic, cultural, religious or linguistic categories as additional criteria to distinguish the group from majority group(s). However, the boundaries of ethnic, cultural, and religious concepts in the real world are vague and it is not possible to determine what the boundary for someone’s ethnic identities should include without appeal to official national discourse. In this chapter, I use the concept “Minority group” to mean a “group” admitting the expected social division between them and which has a minor role in political, social, cultural, and historical participation in “national” affairs. Zhidas Daskalovski, Minorities in Nation-Building Processes: A View from Theories of Egalitarian Liberalism (Skopje: Fridrich Ebert Stiftung, 2005), 29. 22 John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 13.

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movements. To address this, it is important to approach the question from the inside out, which necessitates examination of the following social dynamics. First, the extent of an individual’s personal commitment to the group including its rules, obligations or cultural norms. Second, the extent of frameworks for joint commitment, which concerns the factors promoting the connectedness that holds the group intact, be it culture, language, religion, primordiality or civic norms and laws.23 The third dynamic concerns the hierarchies and social divisions within the group, from elites to subaltern divisions of the in-group, such as women, clan, or lineage.24 Lastly, when there are two or more contradicting group discourses in the same territory such as ethnic group discourse (cultural or historical) different from the national discourse. These four dynamics influence each individual’s actions and decisions. Moreover, despite their social identities, immediate individual action and decision are the result of social relationships between individuals and groups, even if the identification process could be the result of imposition or inclusion and exclusion processes. This does not mean, however, that individuals are passive vessels. For example, as one of several available types of social identity, national identity always features social categories and social relations that demarcate boundaries depending on the context. Specifically, even though individuals claim to belong to a nation and states have specific requirements to grant nationality, it is likely that an individual’s national identity goes beyond its officialisation. Depending on the context, one must appeal to different categories like language, ancestry, culture, sentiment, ethnicity, territory and political loyalty, race and religion to prove or disprove national belonging. This means that it is vital to account for the reasons why individuals join such groups. It is helpful to consequently consider three theories that analyse the dynamics between individuals and groups. The first is the social identity theory developed by Henri Tajfel where a “group which people belonged to holds an important source of pride and self-esteem.” Since “groups give individuals a sense of social identity, a sense of belonging meaning and purpose to the social world as a result people associate themselves with groups.” Therefore, “through belonging to Gilbert, Joint Commitment, 32. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, “‘Minorities-in-minorities’ in South Asian societies: Between politics of diversity and politics of difference,” in Samir Kumar Das (Ed.) Minorities in Europe and South Asia (2010): 106. 23  24 

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different groups, the individual acquires a social identity, which defines the particular place he occupies in society,” that is: he stays in the group “only if given positive self-esteem.”25 The second is the self-categorisation theory by Onorato and Turner, which proposes that “the self should not be equated with an enduring personality structure because the self is not always experienced in terms of personality or individual differences.”26 The theory draws a distinction between personal identities, which contain three inputs: the personal self, the relational identity, and social identity. Personal identity refers to “me” versus “not me” categorisations …. “all the attributes that come to the fore when the perceiver makes interpersonal comparisons with other in-group members,” which means that an individual not only compares themselves with the outside individuals but within too.27 The third theory, developed by Portes and Zhou, is the segmented assimilation theory which suggests that since each society is “stratified and unequal,” this is true for minority groups too, and as a result member of migrant group follow different “segments” of cultural assimilation depending on education, gender, mainstream language attainment, or social or economic potential. The theory suggests that, as result of these circumstances or factors within the group, any contemporary immigrants and their offspring observed follow three possible patterns of adaptation to the new environment or society that is different segments of assimilation depending on individual educational level, gender, mainstream language attainment, social or economic potential. These three possible paths of assimilation that immigrants may take are, firstly, classical assimilation Henri Tajfel, “Individuals and groups in social psychology,” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 18, no. 2 (1979): 183–190. 26 Rina S. Onorato and John C. Turner, “Fluidity in the self-concept: The shift from ­personal to social identity,” European Journal of Social Psychology 34, no. 3 (2004): 257–278; John C. Turner, “Towards a cognitive redefinition of the social group,” in Henri Tajfel, ed., Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John C. Turner, “Social identification and psychological group formation,” in Henri Tajfel, Colin Fraser, and Joseph Maria Franciscus Jaspars, eds., The Social Dimension: Volume 1: European Developments in Social Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1984); John C. Turner, Rediscovering the Social Group: A SelfCategorization Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); John C. Turner et al., “Self and collective: Cognition and social context,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20, no. 5 (October 1, 1994): 454–463. 27 Onorato and Turner, 259. 25 

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theory, which is increasing acculturation into the dominant culture ending up in complete assimilation or upward mobility culturally and economically. The second is downward assimilation, which relegates migrants economically and culturally into the urban underclass and subcultures concurrently with poverty. The second type is more common because of race-related resistance by the majority group, which makes immigrants unable to fit in the dominant group and culture. This produces resistance, usually in the form of an alternate memory, culture, and destiny that is specific to the in-group and sometimes expressly contrary to the majority. The third is selective acculturation, which is the deliberate preservation of the immigrant community’s culture, values, and memories, yet accompanied by economic integration to the majority. However, these type of assimilation needs strong intercultural coherence among the group members and strong cultural and human capital.28 Of course, we are living in a nation-centric world and an individual’s national identity and ethnic identities are not the choices of the individual but given at birth by society or community.29 Nonetheless, individual sentiments and cultural and social affiliation should be considered in order to identify the individual’s belonging. Particularly, in the context of many contesting national, ethnic sentiments, discourse and political rivalries, individuals specially in minority groups tend to move within the spectrum from involving into the meta-national narratives to stand against it. However, these demarcations become enormous not only because of cultural difference, skin colour, and deep-seated prejudices, or not being able to fit in primordial national bonds, but also persistent social, economic Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Chapel Hill: University of California Press); Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Origins and destinies: Immigration to the United States since World War II,” Sociological Forum 9, no. 4 (December 1, 1994): 583–621; Min Zhou, “Segmented assimilation: Issues, controversies, and recent research on the new second generation,” International Migration Review 31, no. 4 (December 1, 1997): 975–1008; Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III, “Growing up American: The adaptation of Vietnamese adolescents in the United States,” New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998; James S. Coleman, “Social capital in the creation of human capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (January 1, 1988): S95–120; Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, “The new second generation: Segmented assimilation and its variants,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530, no. 1 (November 1, 1993): 74–96. 29 Siniša Malešević, Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 21. 28 

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inequalities,30 followed by loss of confidence in institutions and the formation of in-group identities with other similar groups. However, as the scenarios discussed above indicate, each individual within the group faces different opportunities and impediments to be included and excluded in the supposed group. Social and political factors thus influence each individual’s actions and decisions depending on time and space. At the same time, individual’s intentions despite their social identities being the result of social relationships between individuals and groups, the identification process could be the result of the imposition of inclusion and exclusion processes (for instance being considered as an ethnic minority) but this does not mean that individuals are passive vessels during these processes. Rather, they remain to some extent active agents. For instance, as one kind of social identity, national identity has many social categories and social relations to demarcate the boundaries depending on the context they compare and contrast these “criteria” or “criterion.”31 To be precise, despite the fact that people claim to belong to a nation and states place requirements on being eligible for legal nationality, national identity goes further than what official papers affirm. This means that, depending on the context, one can set different categories like language, ancestry, culture, sentiment, ethnicity, territory, and political loyalty, race, and religion to approve or disprove national belonging. It is therefore essential to observe at specific times and places how individuals specifically associate themselves to groups and cultivate sentiments towards specific groups and vice versa.

Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia and Israel Ethiopian Jews practice a form of pre-Talmudic Judaism different from the leading practices of the larger Jewish religious community. This minority group lived in Ethiopia for two centuries and played a significant role in the political, cultural and economic life of the country. Like the rest of Ethiopian society, they were engaged in common trades like farming, ironwork and other crafts. They were a patriarchal society and the rule of the priests was unquestionably part of every aspect of life. The Beta Israel community also played an important role in the courts of royal Ethiopian Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 63. Onorato and Turner, 260.

30  31 

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dynasties by holding positions with and against the kings. At one point they even had their own kings, worked with Ethiopian Christian kings and even had “dynastic marriages” with them, though at other times they took positions against Ethiopian kings and fought wars against them.32 In the fifteenth century, the community lost their lands as a result of war with the Christian kings and therefore had to become craftsmen who held distinct social positions in the economy. The unwritten law, a “Lex non Scripta” so to speak, that prescribed that only Christians may inherit land, especially in the northern part of the country, forced the community to live far from the cities and government-controlled territories.33 Despite such structural separations, Ethiopian Jews considered themselves as Ethiopians and were considered as such by other dominant groups. Crucially they also held ethnic identities that intersected with these boundaries depending on their language. That is, an Ethiopian Jew that spoke Amharic would consider himself as belonging to the Amhara Ethnic group, while a Tigrigna-speaking Ethiopian Jew would consider himself Tigray. In addition, the Amharic and Tigrigna-speaking majorities played a major role in the history of Ethiopia and take symbolic and political credit for its existence. As a result, the symbolic and actual power struggles between these groups are also reflected within the Amharic and Tigrigna speaking Ethiopian Jewish community. To understand the identity structure of this community, it is necessary to revisit aspects of Ethiopian nationalism itself. Alemseged describes Ethiopia’s state and nation-building process, which was at the centre of a “grand design of cultural homogenisation and centralisation, as “Amharanisnation,” which became an article of faith in state-and nationbuilding processes in Ethiopia.”34 Following, Belachew Gebrewold remarks that “there is mistrust between various ethnic groups such as Oromo, Tigray, Amhara.”35 In another key referent of Ethiopian national identity, the victory at the 1896 Battle of Adwa against an Italian campaign to colonise Ethiopia reinvigorated sentiments of nationhood and Tudor Parfitt and Emanuela Trevisan Semi, The Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel: Studies on Ethiopian Jews (Hove: Psychology Press, 1999), 81. 33 They were not the only minority group who lost the right to inherit land. Being Muslim, the Falasha Mure, Agew, and others were also unable to own land. 34 Alemseged Abbay, “Nationalism in historic Ethiopia,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 16, no. 3–4 (December 16, 2010): 286. 35 Belachew Gebrewold, “Ethiopian nationalism: An ideology to transcend all odds,” Africa Spectrum 44, no. 1 (April 1, 2009): 94. 32 

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pan-Africanism. In these, the idea of never having been colonised played a vital role in Ethiopian nationalism, and furthermore influenced key ­features of black identity movements throughout the world. The national discourse also features historical pride at being descendants of King Solomon, from which it infers key markers of identity such as being the “nation of God” and, even more importantly in its otherwise nonChristian East African setting, being an “island of Christianity.” Ethiopian Jews included themselves in these narratives, sharing cultural practices such as language, songs and traditions to the extent that, except for their religion, in all other aspects they proclaimed their Ethiopianness. In the 1980s Ethiopian Jews left for Israel as they came to be considered by the state of Israel as part of the Jewish diaspora and were included in the Law of Return. Here again, to understand the new environment in which the identity of Ethiopian Jews had to be negotiated, it is useful to briefly explore the key discourses of Israeli nationalism. As a nationalism, Zionism also has its own features, and despite being modern and relatively young, it has built strong sentimental ties among its in-groups. Suzman explained this national sentiment and its inception as follows. Theodor Herzl as the founding father of modern Jewish nationalism wrote that the safety of the Jewish people depends on having a state and land of their own. Not satisfied with writing a book, in 1897, Herzl mobilised and organised a group of Jewish delegates to the Inaugural Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. There he founded the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) with a goal to create a state for the Jewish people in the land of Palestine that would strengthen the collaboration between international Jewish organisations, develop the cultural and national consciousness of Jewish communities, and work towards the settlement and strengthening of Jewish communities in Palestine.36 Rotenstreich similarly argued that the “special relationship between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel was conceived in the traditional religious context as a relationship based on a promise from God as destiny and the overcoming of the exile. The first two components have a clear religious connection, referring as they do to the particular relation between the people and the divine.”37

M. Suzman, Ethnic Nationalism and State Power: The Rise of Irish Nationalism, Afrikaner Nationalism and Zionism (Basingstoke: Springer, 2016), 46. 37 Nathan Rotenstreich, Zionism: Past and Present (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 47. 36 

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Therefore, despite their long stay in Ethiopia and speaking Amharic and Tigrigna as first language, Zionism was the central reason for Ethiopian Jews to return to their homeland, as their name when they were in Ethiopia implies “Beta Israel,” that is: “home of Israel.” After their arrival, however, their new homeland offered new social, cultural, economic, racial and political difficulties for this community. As Kaplan explained, the Ethiopian Jews’ experience of Israeli integration was not only limited to material and economic inequality, and their resistance was not against these inequalities alone, but it was an imposition of ideological combination. From their perspective, Israeli society controls the economy and with it comes the power relation of symbolic production which means that their domination of the material forces of production is replicated at the level of ideas in their domination of the ideological sector of society, culture, religion, education, and media to propagate their values.38 This means that after the community arrived in Israel, mainstream Israeli society expected the community to integrate or assimilate into the Israeli melting pot. However, this idea of “integration or assimilation is based on a power relationship: since there is already an assumed national culture, this community was expected to dissolve into the cultural hegemony” and expected to be part of the one nation. This ‘oneness’ entails requirements such as members of the community needing to change their name, language, social structures, values and religious rituals. But, as discussed, any group is stratified, and these stratifications create advantaged and disadvantaged groups within a community. Recent data shows that by the end of 2018 there were 148,700 Israelis of Ethiopian origin residents in Israel, of which 87,000 were born in Ethiopia and lived in Israel for more than 30 years, and 61,700 were born in Israel. After 30 years in Israel, the Ethiopian Jews are one of the least privileged communities in Israeli society, compared to average Israeli income, employment and education. Social inequality is clear in problems with housing (39%), finances (35%), the negative attitudes of other Israelis (31%) and cultural differences (22%).39 Considerable differences also remain concerning occupations and wages, particularly among Steven B. Kaplan, The Beta Israel: Falasha in Ethiopia: From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century (NYU Press, 1992), 120. 39 Judith King, Noam Fischman, and Abraham Wolde-Tsadick, “Twenty Years Later: A Survey of Ethiopian Immigrants Who Have Lived in Israel for Two Decades or More” (Jerusalem, Israel: Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, 2012). 38 

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college graduates. Statistics also show that although “the rate of employed persons is 83.6%, these are usually junior positions. Only 9.3% of those are working in white-collar jobs, compared with 23% of Arabs, 33% of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, 38% of second-generation Mizrahim, 52% of third-generation Israelis and 59% of second-generation Ashkenazim.”40 There are, furthermore, further aspects of social inequality for Israelis of Ethiopian origin in fields such as education and employment, with large gaps in education levels between Ethiopian-Israelis and the general Israeli population. In 2010, 2,200 Ethiopian-Israelis were in higher education, which accounts for 9.0% of Ethiopian-Israeli individuals aged 20–29, against a rate of 24.7% for the general population. Likewise, poverty rates are much higher among Ethiopian-Israeli families and children than among families of other Israelis: 41% compared to 15% for the general population. However, it increases in cases of children with a figure of 49% that is almost double compared to 24% for the general population. By another measure, the number of people who utilise Social Services, 63.3% of Ethiopian Israelis registered with social service departments because of economic hardship (78%) and family integration difficulties (57%). This is very high compared to the general population rate of 15.8%.41 A common explanation for the causes behind these social, economic and cultural inequalities is that Ethiopian-Israelis were uneducated and came from very rural societies. However, it is necessary to critically reconsider some of the important factors considered above in the light of this specific discourse of inequality. Since their arrival, the community underwent scrutiny informed by their categorisation as a primitive Other that must be civilised by modern Israeli society to create a hegemonic culture. This power relationship causes the community to question the value of keeping and transferring their traditions or customs and rituals of religious activities to their children, especially since in the new environment it loses its value as the result of its capacity to mark them as secondclass citizens. This imposition puts the community in a disadvantaged position and contributes to social inequality by creating a discourse that frames this community as useless to society (as incapable of employment “The Ethiopian Population in Israel,” accessed July 4, 2021. https://www.cbs.gov.il/en/ mediarelease/Pages/2019/The-Ethiopian-Population-in-Israel.aspx. 41 King, Fischman, and Wolde-Tsadick, “Twenty Years Later,” 34. 40 

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or state responsibilities) and dependent on the rest of Israeli society (through state welfare) until they integrate or lose their background heritage. Shira Offer warns that “Ethiopian Israelis have lower returns from education compared to other ethnic groups, possibly the result of discrimination in the labour market. The persisting gap in educational and occupational attainment between Jews of Eastern and Western origin suggests that Ethiopian Israelis might be at risk of becoming a marginalised group within the Jewish population,”42 raising the concern “that a new form of stratification, one based not only on ethnic origin but also on race, will emerge.”43

Conclusion: On Nationalism, Nationalities and Ethiopian Jews In the analysis of the Beta Israel offered in this chapter, three identities have come to shape one another. Their mutual and constitutive configurations, negotiations, imbrications and history are vital to considering the historical journeys of their identities and their future, as well as how they discursively produce and reproduce one another. Firstly, Israel society is commonly seen as Jewish by religion, white, Hebrew-speaking, and considers itself to be “modern” as well as the “Nation of God.” Secondly, Ethiopian society, whose identity is commonly circumscribed by a combination of Christianity, speaking Amharic or Tigrigna, tradition and belief in being the “nation of God.” The third is the Beta Israel community who speak Amharic, Tigrigna and Hebrew, and practice Judaism. This specific articulation of identity is distinct from that of Ethiopian Christians, and yet is very close to it in its distinction from western Judaism while, yet again distinguished from it by greater religious closeness with western Judaism. An individual Ethiopian Jew interacts with different social groups throughout his life, starting with a family, his ­community, Tigrayan or Amhara depending on his ethnic background, then as an Ethiopian. After travelling to Israel, they interact with different Israel communities. However, other factors should be considered when integration is discussed such as educational background, gender, Shira Offer, “The socio-economic integration of the Ethiopian community in Israel,” International Migration 42, no. 3 (2004): 29–55. 43 Offer, 34. 42 

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economic factors and age, since these factors affect individuals’ ability to integrate into Israel society or move downward, possibly coping through strengthened in-group commitment. The group lived and is still lives in and among two dominant societies, but this does not mean that they have completely assimilated nor, conversely, that they have not changed. After leaving for Israel, they would have undergone a process of integration that includes the acquisition of the Hebrew language and legal Israeli citizenship, followed by the establishment of two-way obligations between the state and the individual such as tax, education, or protection. This is followed by social, cultural and political participation which can cause the development of a sense of belonging built around sharing a common culture, history, enemy and goals.44 However, though it is not as easy in practice as it might appear. Firstly, the host society is itself diverse, featuring different agents with different agendas that cut cross many social divisions. Secondly, the new group has its own memories as well as historical, cultural, and religious features that will keep in-group sentiment strong even after emigration. Thirdly, there are further stratifications within the in-group that have significant impacts on integration. A key instance is the divide between educated and uneducated migrants, a division that allows some to more easily become fluent in Hebrew and thus attain higher education, leaving others with no Hebrew language skills, making them less able to integrate into Israeli society. This makes them more likely to stick to past memories of Ethiopia when socialising with individuals in similar situations, eventually strengthening in-group relations and identity as time passes. Stigmatisation has also played a key role. Ethiopian Jewish communities were seen upon arrival not only as primitive, but also as a community carrying numerous communicable diseases.45 Because of this perception, the Israel ministry of health discarded their blood from blood donation banks for the following 12 years, which was interpreted by the community as racial discrimination. Although there had long been institutional racism Irene Bloemraad, Anna Korteweg, and Gökçe Yurdakul, “Citizenship and immigration: Multiculturalism, assimilation, and challenges to the nation-state,” Annual Review of Sociology 34, no. 1 (2008): 156, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134608. 45 Stephen A. Berger, Tiberio Schwartz, and Dan Michaeli, “Infectious disease among Ethiopian immigrants in Israel,” Archives of Internal Medicine 149, no. 1 (January 1, 1989): 117–119. 44 

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towards them, the blood affair was a moment of truth for the Ethiopian Jews and a crucial landmark in the process of their becoming an ethnic group within the Israel society.46 In the 1990s, Larana et al. estimated the situation thus: “many of the members of the community deal with cultural, dignity, rights, discrimination and recognition” and estimated that these “are directly or indirectly related to identity and identity politics.”47 In reaction to this racism, the young Ethiopian Israeli generation associates itself with “hip hop music, reggae music and performative blackness with an obsession with Tupac Shakur manifested through Ethiopian young girls’ and boys’ drawings.”48 Through this cultural identification with an international aspect of black culture, this group assembles Ethiopian and Israeli features of national identities that can be portrayed publicly, symbolically as well as culturally and, most of all, of which they can be proud. For example, if someone talks about Ethiopia being an old civilisation, never being colonised and being the only and first country to defeat European colonial invasion, which are some of the key historical discourses of Ethiopian nationalism, an Ethiopian Jew will feel oneness with Ethiopian Christians. At the same time, the same person will feel the same sentiment when a topic such as Jews being God’s chosen people or the Seven-Day War is raised. It is not only contemporary Israeli racism that causes Ethiopian Jews to go back in history and seek Ethiopian national sentiments. Rather, there is also a kind of diasporic dynamic at work, powered by a collective discourse about “the home of our forefathers.” Two key Ethiopian heroes help illustrate this argument. Queen Yodit Gudit is portrayed in the Ethiopian Christian community as a non-Christian queen who demolished churches and destroyed the Axum dynasty.49 Though regarded as a villain in mainstream Ethiopian history, according to Ethiopian Jewish tradition she is the Ethiopian Jew who conquered a centuries-long civilisation, Don Seeman, “‘One people, one blood’: Public health, political violence, and HIV in an Ethiopian-Israeli setting,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 23, no. 2 (June 1, 1999): 150. 47 Alberto Melucci et al., “New social movements: From ideology to identity,” Theory and Methods, 1994. 48 Gabriella Djerrahian, “Black matters: Young Ethiopian Jews and race in Israel” (Ph.D., Canada, McGill University, Canada), 107, accessed July 4, 2021. https://www.proquest. com/docview/2510191456/abstract/4ED40C7427FA4D9CPQ/1. 49 Knud Tage Andersen, “The queen of the Habasha in Ethiopian history, tradition and chronology,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 63, no. 1 (January 2000): 31. 46 

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dynasty and ruled the whole country.50 Conversely, the history of King Tewodros II, who was emperor of Ethiopia from 1855 till 1868 and was the first to attempt to modernise the country,51 is read in heroic terms by Amhara speakers. However, because he came from the Gondar area where Ethiopian Jews community lived, he is also held up as a hero by Amharicspeaking Ethiopian Jews too, who claim that his heroism also runs in their blood. Since he killed himself rather than surrender to the British, he is observed in Ethiopian national narratives as a national hero and his story can be heard in traditional and modern musical performances and folkloric tales that are also shared by Amharic-speaking Jewish community. The cultural and historical oneness of the Ethiopian Jewish community is in flux. Its identity-making and claims to identity and belonging specifically depend on the context of inscription, meaning that an Ethiopian Jew can be Ethiopian, Israeli and Amhara depending on the discursive context and the identity that dominates it. However, this identity formation will not stop here: depending on the group’s internal dynamics, internal and external situation, and on the abilities of the group’s elite to foster group sentiment, they will continue to configure new identities in the future. Self, identity, belonging, groups, ethnicity and nationality. These concepts are intertwined and cannot be studied exclusively. They also are socially constructed concepts that emerge through the process of socialisation at micro and macro-level, yet they maintain their particularity in time and space. As this chapter illustrates, the concept of one “nation” is problematic because there are always groups within a group. In this regard, the Ethiopian Jewish community is evolving through time and space, but not only as a group, but also as sub-groups and individuals, all of which are faced by and have to participate in the constant negotiation of their identity. As Gellner remarks, a nation is a product of nationalist ideologies that contain selected historical events and principles, which in practice means that much of the identity construction of a group depends on how its elites interpret and politicise events, history and challenges. It is vital, however, as we consider identity, its construction and politicisation, to remember that there is always an individual negotiating, framing and restating their situation and identity. Kaplan, The Beta Israel, 199. Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), 31. 50  51 

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Chapter 9

Manufacturing National Heroes: Cosmonauts and Post-Soviet Identity in Putin’s Russia Julie Patarin-Jossec Saint Petersburg State University, Ulitsa Chaykovskogo 28, Sankt-Peterburg, 191123, Russia

This chapter discusses how the production of cosmonaut heroes in contemporary Russia is both gendered and contingent upon the symbolic resources of heroism in the Russian government. In doing so, the sociology of “the right stuff” in Russia reflects how many contemporary nationalisms are primarily a historical process and require a focus on embodiment processes and daily practices. Through the evolution of the institutional system and gender identities from the USSR to the Russian Federation, it also highlights that Russian nationalism, as expressed in its human space programme, includes construction of an Otherness conveying representations of nationhood and manhood. As a long-term instrument of national leadership and claim to great power status, human spaceflight allows for a dynamic reading of national heroism and encourages further reflections about the roles of embodiment and collective memory in national identity-building.

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Introduction In the Spring 2019,1 the director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, proclaimed that “the ‘space is beyond politics’ formula [was] no longer working […] Space [was] the quintessence of politics […], the demonstration of a country’s technological power and an opportunity to show what it is capable of.”2 Known for his controversial media comments, in this instance Rogozin broke with the traditional narrative adopted after the Cold War, which defended spaceflight as a field of disinterested cooperation and scientific diplomacy. Spaceflight remains a long-time symbol of Russian political, technological, and economic achievement. In the two past decades, human spaceflight became increasingly international including Russians because of its costs, the need for cooperation in case of danger in outer space, and cooperation agreements developed since the Cold War. Yet, space programmes remain ruled by national leadership agendas. In the context of international spaceflight, Russian leadership partly results from its temporary monopoly in the transportation of crewmembers to the International Space Station (ISS), which has made all other space agencies involved in ISS dependent on Russian launch infrastructure between 2011 and 2021. At 10:57 a.m. Greenwich time, NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis STS-135 landed on runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Centre. After 30 years of the Shuttle space programme, its retirement marked an adjournment of American transportation autonomy in human spaceflight. As the only remaining vehicle able to carry crews to the ISS (which since 1998 brings together Canada, Japan, Russia, the United States, and member-States of the European space agency), use of the Russian Soyuz vehicle led to mandatory training in Russian facilities (Star City, Moscow oblast) for international astronauts, preparing them for spaceflight according to methods inherited from the Soviet period. Among large-scales disorders in various state-led sectors, the space industry greatly suffered from the dismantlement of the USSR. From 1992 it has been plagued by a drastic diminution of its public budget, I wish to express special thanks to Jean-François Clervoy, Jean-Jacques Dordain, and David Shayler for their help in gathering original data about the Mir space station programme for this chapter. 2 “Russia’s PM to hold meeting on Roscosmos space corporation’s development,” Tass News Agency, June 13, 2019, https://tass.com/science/1063529. 1 

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increasing corruption, progressive loss of highly qualified personnel, competition in the global market for satellite and other heavy-lift space services, and difficult reconstruction of its supply chains.3 Upon taking office in 2000, and increasingly over the past decade, Vladimir Putin has emphasised the space sector (and especially human spaceflight) as a national priority, both as a key piece of Soviet heritage and the presumed role of the space sector in economic growth. This can be illustrated with the important reorganisation of Russian space industries and companies launched in 2014,4 the development of new launch systems (Angara rocket, Orel spacecraft) or the building of a new cosmodrome (Vostochny, Amur oblast) aiming at the Russian rocket launch independence from Kazakhstan where Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s main space launch site, is located since the breakup of the USSR. In addition to economic difficulties, the collapse of the URSS also produced the disruption of symbolic and institutional frames of national identity, in which both gender and nation contribute to the construction of Self and Otherness. As expressed in the Russian human space programme, Soviet rituals resulting from the cult of the first space heroes, symbols of pioneering and bravery, and imagery of otherness in space race contexts contribute to portray the Russian nation to this day. Understanding the role of the human space programme in contemporary Russia therefore requires a focus on the evolution of its gendered identities after 1992. The formation of a national identity needs the deployment and establishment of shared values and collective narratives. In the case of the As illustrated by the management of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Soviet period is characterised by a division of the expertise among republics in various sectors, including in the space industries. This model based on mutual dependency led to a production of different parts of a same engine or of space facilities across the countries, which led to major difficulties in the organisation of the post-Soviet Russian space sector. 4 In 2014, a presidential “ukaz” (decree) required the creation of ORKK, state-led industrial cluster aiming to gather all Russian space companies, industries and organisations, and to reform the production and management of those entities. ORKK edited guidelines regarding the manufacture, the test, the delivery, and the modernisation of space technologies, while corruption, lack of funding, and loss of qualification were increasingly weakening Russian parts on the global space market — and while the Russian programme accumulated several launch failures during the early 2000s. In the two first decades following 1992, the Russian space programme depended from an interdepartmental committee (in addition to the Academy of sciences, it then gathered ministries of Defence, Health, and Aviation). 3 

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human space programme, national belonging relies on traditions that celebrate an idealised Soviet past. However, this relationship with history appears to be gendered, particularly as the cosmonaut training process comprises the embodiment of a particular definition of masculinity. Partly because those rituals and traditions were generated by the first (male) cosmonauts, and partly because they aim to celebrate fearless bravery, disregard for danger and service to the Motherland, they come to epitomise the celebration of virile attributes translated in training trials, including resistance to pain, physical strength, and docility. Nationalism can be heuristically analysed through a microsociological perspective. Nationalism is expressed in daily practices, implicit social norms, and the collective imagination that frames identity-building processes. For research looking to understand mechanisms of national belonging and representation, the manufacture of space heroes provides a window into the role of embodiment in Russian claims to great power status. Based on three-year ethnographic fieldwork including interviews with crewmembers and space policymakers,5 as well as research in archives,6 this chapter discusses three dimensions of the building of national figures in contemporary Russia. These include remembering heroes of the Soviet past and the embodiment of national rituals, the reproduction of national myths based on masculine domination; and recognition of cosmonauts as national heroes that play a part in the Russian government’s affairs. In so doing, this sociology of “the right stuff” in Russia reflects how many contemporary nationalisms are primarily a historical process and require In total, more than a hundred of interviews have been realised between August 2015 and October 2018, with representatives from all counterparts of the ISS programme including 37 crewmembers (3 women, 34 men). All the interviewees have been pseudonymised according to their space agency belonging. Letters are used for crewmembers, numbers for officials and engineers (NASA A, ESA 1, and so on). The fieldwork realised in Russia, including interviews, ethnography and archives, were located in Moscow (Roscosmos headquarters, Russian Academy of science, Museum of cosmonautics), the Moscow region (the “TsPK” training centre in Star City, the “Tsup” control centre and industries in Korolev), Zvenigorod (Russian academy of sciences, Moscow oblast) and Saint Petersburg (Federation of cosmonautics, airfields in Leningrad oblast). 6 Archives of the Soviet academy of sciences (where part of declassified documentation about the Soviet human space program is conserved) have been consulted between 2017 and 2018. 5 

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a focus on carnal embodiment — including gender norms and the capacity for the exercise of power held by cosmonauts in the political sphere.

Nationalism as a Historical Process: Embedding and Ritualising Soviet Memory The Soviet space programme did not lose many cosmonauts in flight, but a key death was that of Vladimir M. Komarov on April 24, 1967. At that time, the Soviet regime was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. As part of this celebration, Leonid Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party since April 1966) requested a new achievement: the first spacewalk with an exchange of vehicles between two crews in outer space. Thus far, the Soviet space programme had accumulated several pioneering flights (first crewed flight, first human to fly, first woman, first spacewalk, first flight with multiple crew). Ten years earlier, the launch of the second artificial satellite ever sent into space (Sputnik-2) carrying the first ever terrestrial being into space, the dog Laika, commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Revolution. Demonstrating the technical, scientific, economic, and political supremacy of the regime, the space programme was the greatest symbol of Soviet power. However, as preparations for Komarov’s 1967 flight proceeded, an inspection commission identified technical issues that could compromise the flight. Brezhnev emphasised the importance of the project, and the few who advocated postponing the mission were either demoted or dismissed.7 Vladimir Komarov launched as scheduled and died after an odyssey of predictable and predicted technical failures. Two mechanisms explain the political stakes at play for the Soviet human space program, as illustrated in this example. Firstly, the technological achievements of spaceflight illustrated the superiority and the effectiveness of the Socialist regime in engineering and technological development.8 Since the first human spaceflight in 1961, the apparatus of Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, Starman: The Truth behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (New York, NY: Walker Books, 2011). 8 See also Slava Gerovitch, “Perestroika of the history of technology and science in the USSR: Changes in the discourse,” Technology and Culture (1996): 102–134; Slava Gerovitch, Soviet Space Mythologies. Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). 7 

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Soviet propaganda actively contributed to developing a veritable heritage of cosmonautics across the territories of the USSR.9 Space exploration was integrated into the social and political frame of the Soviet regime to such an extent that the launch of Sputnik-1 is referred to as the “relaunch of socialism.”10 Secondly, spaceflight may have mattered less for the socialist regime than the cosmonauts themselves, who incarnated the “New Soviet Man” as developed under Stalin: serving the Motherland, disciplined, and part of a system overcoming individualities. While both sides of the Iron Curtain fostered strategies for space exploration, the risky nature of spaceflight led to restricting cosmonaut selection to military pilots already accustomed to managing uncertain flight conditions. Those pilots retained physical and moral dispositions resulting from their military background, such as service to the State.11 In the late 1950s, cosmonauts were predominantly selected according to their attitude regarding authority. As underlined in the historical literature, Soviet cosmonauts embodied a fundamental symbolic function within Soviet society: […] the figure of the Soviet cosmonaut […] was simultaneously part of the machinery of science, technology, and industry that allowed the Soviet Union to achieve many impressive feats in the early years of the space race and a constituent of the machinery of public relations, critical to creating a global wave of popular enthusiasm for Soviet exploits.12

Vladimir Sadym, “Propaganda of the historical and cultural heritage of cosmonautics. The experience of Russian regional non-governmental organizations,” in Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Rüthers and Carmen Scheide (Eds.) Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies (New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2011). 10 Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Rüthers, Carmen Scheide, eds., Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 11 This background is translated into the spacecrafts construction: While Soviet pilots are asked to fit the spacecraft machine and are easily replaceable in a mechanic system which illustrates the function of Soviet citizens in the post-revolutionary society, Western pilots are primarily selected for their flight abilities rather than for their disciplinary relation to the hierarchy. 12 James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, “Cosmic contradictions: Popular enthusiasm and secrecy in the soviet space program,” in Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Emphasis in the original text. 9 

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The first Soviet cosmonauts acted therefore as “ideological prototypes” whose achievements allowed to the Soviet population to “develop a sense of what living under communism could look like.”13 Consequently, Soviet propaganda used large-scale technological projects including space programmes as symbols of “socialist and communist construction.”14 All national identities depend on the practice of rituals that contribute to collective memory and collective belonging. Such rituals allow a State structure to exercise a certain dynamic order despite institutional crises. In the case of post-Soviet reconstruction, characterised by social and democratic instabilities, rituals honouring heroes of an idealised glorious past constitute a bond with a historical narrative through the re-enactment of traditions. The past is constantly looked as reincorporated in the present, the present as a repetition. What characterises [tradition] is not only the fact that it is transmitted but the way it is transmitted. […] the word tradition […] names the act of transmission rather than what is transmitted.15

In the early 2020s, astronaut training in Russia is still based on rituals that celebrate this Soviet heritage — especially celebrating major pioneering figures including Yuri Gagarin as part of a cult of personalities developed in the USSR. In this vein, many traditions used in the training are re-enactments of Gagarin’s actions before his flight in 1961: Planting a tree in the park of the cosmodrome before a first flight, urinating on the bus wheel en route to the launch pad, watching Vladimir Motyl’s Jay Bergman, “Valerii Chkalov: Soviet pilot as new Soviet man,” Journal of Contemporary History, 1998, 135–152. Also cited in Gerovitch, 2015, Soviet Space Mythologies, 50. 14 Gerovitch, Soviet Space Mythologies. The central role of technological challenges in the Communist Party’s programme was part of larger rhetoric where technical construction was coupled with political building. Being part of the Soyuz machine meant being “inside a propaganda machine,” as part of the “man-machine” metaphor that was key to Soviet discourse on building a Communist future and society. See also Slava Gerovitch, “Lovehate for man-machine metaphors in Soviet physiology: From Pavlov to “physiological cybernetics’,” Science in Context (2002): vol 15 no. 2, 339–374; “‘New Soviet Man’ inside machine: Human engineering, spacecraft design, and the construction of communism,” Osiris (2007): vol 22, no. 1, 135–157. 15 Gérard Lenclud, “La tradition n’est plus ce qu’elle était,” Terrain vol 9, October 1987: 111–112. My translation from French. 13 

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“The White Sun of the Desert,” singing Soviet anthems, and laying red flowers in Red Square where memorials to space pioneers lie a few meters from the Lenin Mausoleum. Elevated to the level of superstitions, these traditions are consistently repeated: “[w]e have been doing that for such a long time that we cannot let those traditions die.”16 However, Soviet space rituals are not only about sustaining Russian collective memory. In the era of the Russian transportation monopoly, with the Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft as the only vehicle certified to fly crews to ISS since the retirement of NASA’s Shuttle, this process of national memorialisation included Western astronauts. Indeed, the Soyuz monopoly means that crews from Russia’s partners (Canada, members of the European Space Agency, Japan, and the US) follow intensive training in Star City and are launched from Russian facilities. Therefore, flying in space includes becoming part of traditions that regenerate and re-enact “the historical experience of late socialism.”17 Moreover, it means that Western astronauts are part of an embodiment of virtue that, while celebrating post-Soviet Russia as a leading space power, creates tension between international cooperation and nationalism. More than a national identity-making process, these Soviet rituals led to the internationalisation of a national narrative on which Russia has capitalised since 1992 — unlike most other former Soviet states that, with few exceptions, ­developed new national narratives.18 Repeated for half a century, these spacefaring rituals cultivate myths that lionise Soviet leadership in space exploration, and consequently, the political and scientific leadership of the regime. Such a symbolic economy supporting national narratives in an international context contributes to maintaining Russian domination in terms of social representations and methods of training. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned internationalisation of the Russian narrative through training also constructs a Russian heroism that is set in relation to Western rival models of spacefaring heroism. Since the Apollo-Soyuz programme was inaugurated in 1975, ­cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was framed Fieldwork notebook: Roscosmos 4, Moscow (Russia), February 27, 2018. Marian Viorel Anastasoaie, « Politique du temps, régime d’historicité et subjectivité en URSS, » Temporalités (2015): vol 22 Online. 18 Jonathan Brunstedt, “Building a Pan-Soviet past: The Soviet War Cult and the turn away from ethnic particularism,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (2011): vol 38, issue 2, 149–171. 16  17 

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by long-term partnerships. When, in June 1998, the Russian Valeri Ryumin was assigned to fly to Mir on the NASA Shuttle (STS-91), it was initially to make the case for the retirement of Soviet-era space station Mir and pave the way for a new international programme, the ISS. Instead, Ryumin recommended the continuation of Mir operations. NASA officials did not respond positively to this strategy as the ISS project critically necessitated Russia as a core partner. Tensions mounted within the Russian space administration. On one hand, the Russian federal space agency (formerly “RKA,”19 before becoming the Roscosmos state company in 2015) was willing to pursue a partnership with NASA; on the other hand, many state officials and engineers advocated keeping Mir in orbit as a symbol of Russian space autonomy. While the government could not afford two space station programmes, Mir ultimately gave way to the ISS. This was interpreted by some officials and engineers as an ungainly selling out of Russian space policy in a period of instability.20 The arguments in favour of Mir illustrate how nationalist strategies draw on the normative legitimacy of historical discourses. Since Russia was a pioneering space-faring nation, it had to retain leadership, and hence had to give preference to domestic programmes. By criticising the American call to decommission Mir due to its increasingly apparent ­obsolescence, or by controlling foreign activities aboard Mir including American and European experiments,21 the Russian authorities, then still firmly rooted in the Soviet experience, contributed to a narrative of independent Russian cosmonautics that did not need foreign advice. Rossijskoe Kosmičeskoe Agentstva. Many of the key figures and workers involved in the management of Mir had served in the programme for years, including before 1992. While changes caused by the collapse of the URSS were already sources of instability, Mir turned out to incarnate an idealised past, in addition to its role justifying prestigious positions occupied by many officials and engineers that the station’s retirement would compromise. 21 As a European astronaut explained: “[…] When I was flying aboard Mir, I always had to ask to Russians. Our [European] scientists had to explain to Russians what we wanted to do, and the Russians would answer ‘yes, that is interesting’, or ‘that’s not interesting, we already did that before’. We didn’t really have to ask for their approval since we were paying, but still, we had to convince them.” Interview ESA E, March 4, 2016, in Paris. Another example illustrates this control: in 1997, the NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger suggested to allow American astronauts to be officially in charge of a Mir segment. This was not well received by Russian partners, which led to the spreading of a bad reputation around Linenger. Fieldwork notebook, ESA D, May 29, 2017. 19  20 

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Human spaceflight training rituals and pride in long-term expertise illustrate how “Russianness” and its definition of heroism rely on using Soviet space history. It furthermore highlights how this national identitymaking process establishes that Western values disregard (if not disrespect) traditions. Consequently, Russian cosmonauts become heroes the moment they respect the rituals and fully embody a cherished heritage. Such national narratives and the collective memory on which they rely are not gender-neutral. While contemporary Russian political discourses convey a fixed national Self and “Russianness” as white ­ and heterosexual, set in contrast against the decadence of a securitised Other conveying neoliberal Western values.22 Soviet rituals and training methods do not only forge national heroes as heroic incarnations of history; they forge masculine heroes, in a process where the (re)production of nationhood implies specific representations of manhood and womanhood.23

Nationalism as a Gender Construction: The Sex of Space Heroes On April 9, 1961, Soviet Air Force pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly above the Earth’s atmosphere. A total of 572 people have travelled to space since then; among them 64 women.24 Human spaceflight has always been a matter of domination regarding sex, class, and race, while astronauts and cosmonauts25 mainly perpetuate the dominance of a heteronormative part of the human population (men, white, and heterosexual). As mentioned in the first section, early Soviet cosmonauts were selected on the basis of their attitude regarding authority. In addition, their physical characteristics were central as they were required to fit Dean Cooper-Cunningham, “What’s sexuality got to do with it?” (contribution to a conference, 2019). 23 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997). 24 Four Soviets or Russians, two Western Europeans, 50 North Americans, 2 Japanese, 2 Canadians, 1 Chinese, one South-Korean, and 2 space tourists (British and Iranian American citizens). 25 “Astronaut” refers to all the non-Russian (“cosmonaut”) or Chinese (“taikonaut”) crewmembers. 22 

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the — notoriously restrictive — ergonomic features of the Soyuz vehicle. Height and weight therefore became key criteria in the selection, leading to a methodology based on the adaptability of bodies to the machine, rather than on the flexibility of technology to bodies. From the earliest stages of the human space programme, these bodily criteria were based on ideal-types and measurements for men. Inevitably, this led to structurally unequal opportunities for women who, even once selected, had (have) to use suits and tools designed for the average male user. Soviet training methods were thus an integral part of a gendered education process that forges the bodies and minds of crewmembers. These bodies fit the masculine ideotype, which is emphasised in the selection, training, and flight process. As in military training, cosmonaut training includes the embodiment and celebration of values and social representations of what being a hero means: brave, brotherly, and virile. In doing so, athletic skills and moral abilities become indistinguishable.26 Brave, brotherly, and virile: the model of masculinity expressed in cosmonaut training is largely organised around pain, resistance to which is a requirement to self-realisation as a professional cosmonaut and hero. Pain or physical danger remain omnipresent in the daily routine of crewmembers, especially when they work outside the space station.27 Yet, pain as a requirement to self-realisation is a peculiarity of Russian methods. Indeed, medical and psychological tests used at the dawn of human space exploration, such as spinning stools designed to induce vomiting, were quickly abandoned in Western space agencies (including NASA and the European Space Agency) precisely because of their harshness. The Russian space programme did not, however, and its pain resilience trials can now be considered its distinguishing trademark.

Loic Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 27 The case of spacewalks illustrates this feature: being immersed in an environment where temperatures fluctuate between –200°C and 200°C against which the spacesuits (fairly flexible and bulky) withstand, working in full sunlight or in complete darkness for six to ten hours continuously, being hoisting from one part of module to another, taking great care to be constantly attached to not being adrift in the void, and demonstrating skills with slightly convenient gloves. Besides dehydration and exhaustion, deep joints and frozen ends, some crewmembers lose some of their nails as their hands are solicited during the activity. 26 

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Why is acceptance and submission to pain so common and institutionalised in contemporary Russia? Once again, the answer is to be found in how the Soviet Union historically categorised such resilience. As a Western astronaut summarised in an interview: [...] to be a hero, in Russia, you have to suffer. You can’t be a hero if it’s easy, it doesn’t work. So, sometimes, you suffer as hell during the survival training, and it could really be done otherwise. [...] But somehow, it is accepted by everyone, because if you go in space, you have to pay: if you want to be a hero, you must have suffered. Otherwise, that’s fake.28

Risks are therefore accepted as “rites of passage” that should not be questioned. Through rituals, traditions, and the maintenance of methods created during the Soviet period, cosmonauts’ bodies become both the condition of the symbolic national order and a key support for gendered social identities. Becoming a hero according to cosmonaut training necessitates incarnating Soviet heritage and to develop the virile qualities upon which the Russian leadership relies in space. In this context, virility is not only a sort of “spiritual truth,”29 but the framework of a national elite. Upon completing their training, crewmembers would have withstood survival training in extremely cold or hot temperatures, they would have vomited on rotating stools, and they would have endured spacesuit tests in a hyperbolic chamber — all of it together in a spirit of virile brotherhood.30 They would also have sung Soviet anthems, walked the halls of Star City where portraits of male Soviet space pioneers hang, and urinated on the bus wheel before launch to commemorate Gagarin’s preflight ritual.31 Moreover, because these shared experiences build an esprit de corps based on carnal and sexualised dynamics, they would have felt that they Interview: ESA R, in Mérignac (France), June 6, 2018. Donna Haraway, Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais (Paris: Exils Éditeur, 2007), 149. 30 Highlighting the formative symbolism associated with these tests in his autobiography, retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly recounts the pain suffered in these tests, and how Russian staff would respond to crewmembers complains saying “if you cannot withstand pain here, how will you be able to withstand it in space?” Scott Kelly, Mon odyssée dans l’espace. 340 jours en orbite (Paris: Éditions Les Arènes, 2018), 425. 31 Since 1961, one only one woman would have taken part in this ritual. 28  29 

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had become real men, proud to serve and represent the nation in its greatest technological achievements. For a social theory of heroism, becoming a hero and being recognised as such is a political process inherently linked to gender,32 and inseparable from the frame of the nation-state. “Masculinity” refers to values related to virile attributes as understood in a cultural frame. In addition to willingness to wear uniforms, endurance, courage, bravery, self-discipline, audacity, brotherhood, or even esprit de corps, are defined as part of a social construction of virility inherited from modern military discipline, where the monopoly of violence, its exercise, and obedience to hierarchy form the foundation of men’s identity.33 In this education, “virility” appears reified by reference to the “femininity” it tends to exclude, and it results in the general attributes of “a man” according to ideotypes (­incarnated in fantasy types through the eras: the duellist, the soldier, the adventurer, and the “New Soviet Man”).34 In body and mind, cosmonaut training forms “the man [as] the sex who risks his life and who […] self-­ accomplishes” in service of the State.35 This implies that gender and nation are deeply related. In this relationship, the bond between citizenship, state service and masculinity is only one dimension among others.36 Indeed, scholars no longer treat gender and nation as two disconnected social systems of representation, hierarchy and reification. Whether through sexual violence,37 the role of gendered Kristian Frisk, “What makes a hero? Theorising the social structuring of heroism,” Sociology (2019): 87–103. 33 See among others: Michel Foucault, « L’incorporation de l’hôpital dans la technologie moderne, » Hermès (1988): 30–40; Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Paul Higate and John Hopton, “War, militarism, and masculinities,” in Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Robert W. Connell (Eds.) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005); George L. Mosse, L’image de l’homme moderne: l’invention de la virilité moderne (Paris: Agora, 1999). 34 Mosse, L’image de l’homme. 35 Haraway, Manifeste Cyborg, 150. 36 Peter Beattie, “Measures of manhood: Honor, enlisted army service, and slavery’s decline in Brazil, 1850–1890,” in Matthew C. Gutman (Ed.) Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Pinar Selek, Service militaire en Turquie et construction de la classe de sexe dominante. Devenir homme en rampant (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014). 37 Wendy Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism (2000): vol 6, issue 4, 563–590; Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and nationalism: 32 

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representations in nationalist mythologies and the reproduction of power relations,38 the targeting of women in colonial times to build support for the exercise of state power,39 the role of sexuality in national imaginaries,40 or even linking feminist mobilisation to nationalism,41 gender and nation appear as consubstantial and co-constitutive in their Othering processes.42 This consubstantiality can result in a gendered division of roles in the construction of a nation, the defence of identified national interests against “the Other,” and the consequent production of a sense of belonging.43 This is important because discussing the gender dynamics of Russian nationalism as expressed in the cosmonaut training requires acknowledging that representations of men and women frame the symbolic construction of the power of a nation-state.44 In the Soviet Union, gender led to a sexualised division of roles in the construction of communism,45 sometimes with an ambiguous link to gender and sexuality in the making of nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (2000): vol 21, issue 2, 242–269. Sometimes interweaved with racialisation: Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History. Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016 [1986]). 38 Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation; Sonia Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Cinthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2014). 39 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial And Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 40 Nick Skilton, “Mining, masculinity, and morality: Understanding the Australian national imaginary through iconic labour,” in Jon Mulholland, Nicola Montagna, Erin SandersMcDonagh (Eds.) Gendering Nationalism: Intersections of Nation, Gender, and Sexuality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 41 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Verso, 2016). 42 Koen Slootmaeckers, “Nationalism as competing masculinities: Homophobia as a technology of othering for hetero- and homonationalism,” Theory and Society (2019): vol 48, 239–265. 43 Lucia Direnberger, “Faire naître une nation moderne. Genre, orientalisme et hétéronationalisme en Iran au 19e siècle”, Raisons politiques, vol 69, 2: 101–127; Catherine Achin and alii., Sexes, genre et politique (Paris: Economica, 2007). 44 Leora Auslander, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, “Le genre de la nation et le genre de l’État,” Clio: Femmes, Genre et Histoire (2000). https://doi.org/10.4000/clio.161. 45 Sarah Ashwin, “Introduction: Gender, state and society in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia,” in Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London:

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women’s emancipation in their service to the State.46 The dismantlement of the URSS deprived women of Soviet policies that encouraged their involvement in the public sphere and workplace.47 After 1991, the former Soviet republics promoted new hierarchisations of gender in their reconstruction processes.48 In particular, motherhood was relegated back to the private space, which led men to re-endorse the traditional patriarchal functions that were assured by the Soviet State,49 and expressed in men’s military service.50 The Yeltsin administration featured an increasing politicisation of gender, while the search for a post-Soviet Russian national identity relied on the search for “tradition” and pre-Soviet cultural origins.51 As a consequence, a “re-emergence of masculinity” characterised the dawn of the Russian Federation, encouraged by both the collapse of the Soviet institutional system and by new national imaginaries framed by gender roles.52 Yet, the academic literature linking nation and gender commonly either invisibilises men in focussing on women or reify manhood and womanhood as stable categories.53 Emphasising the rituals, standards and methods used in the international training in Russia, this chapter attempts a dynamic apprehension of masculinity building. Indeed, the “flaunting of a masculine corporal capital” does not only take the “explicit form of

Routledge, 2000); Taylor Douglas Northtrop, Veiled Empire. Gender & Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 46 Paula Michaels, “Motherhood, Patriotism, and Ethnicity: Soviet Kazakhstan and the 1936 Abortion Ban,” Feminist Studies (2001): vol 27, no. 2, 307–333. 47 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A ComparativeHistorical Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 48 Juliette Cleuziou and Lucia Direnberger, “Gender and nation in post-Soviet Central Asia: From national narratives to women’s practices,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity (2016): 195–206. 49 Sergey Kukhterin, “Fathers and patriarchs in communist and post-communist Russia,” in Gender, State And Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2000). 50 Ashwin, “Introduction.” 51 Deniz Kandiyoti, “The politics of gender and the Soviet paradox: Neither colonized, nor modern,” Central Asian Survey (2007): issue 26, no. 4, 601–623. 52 Elena Meshcherkina, “New Russian men: Masculinity regained?” in Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2000). 53 Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo,” 566; Rada Iveković and Julie Mostov, From Gender to Nation (Delhi: Zubaan, 2004).

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strength and violence,”54 and hence is not only fully expressed in its ­exercise (as in the army). As introduced above, masculine capital falls within values (endurance, bravery, and so on) that individuals embed in the training. This embodiment is not only necessary as a condition of membership: it is primarily a process through which trainees learn to make sense of their body, self, and environment as incorporated in the manifestation of common representations of masculinity.55 The embodiment of values leading to gender identities in State representation require that practices be institutionalised and codified practices repeatedly over time. This is why traditions retain central roles in cosmonaut training despite the transition from USSR to Russian Federation. If a minority of women succeed in being selected and trained in the Russian cosmonaut corps, they follow an embodiment process based on gendered norms –– as is the case in the post-Soviet army.56 Doing so, cosmonauts demonstrate how national heroes incarnate a masculine model deeply rooted in the construction of the Russian nation, where masculine body models serve the representation of the State.57

Nationalism as a Circulation of Capitals: Cosmonauts and Political Power Becoming a cosmonaut and a national hero implies various recognitions, including from the government. The trajectories of cosmonauts following their flight(s) usually involve three main forms of recognitions and involvement in the political sphere: Receiving the medal of “Hero of the Russian Federation,” accessing a status implying participation in State events, and acquiring official functions within the government. Those forms of State recognition lead to the cosmonaut being transformed into national figure as part of the permanent post-Soviet Russian state building Loic Wacquant, Corps et âme: Carnet ethnographique d’un apprenti boxeur (Paris: Agone, 2004), 234. 55 Wacquant, Corps et âme. 56 Lucia Direnberger, “Representations of armed women in Soviet and post-Soviet Tajikistan: Describing and restricting women’s agency,” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies (2016), issue 17. https://doi.org/10.4000/pipss.4249. 57 See also Sikata Banerjee, “Inventing a muscular global India: History, masculinity, and nation in Mangal Pandey: The rising,” in Gendering Nationalism: Intersections of Nation, Gender, and Sexuality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 54 

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process. Such adoption into the political sphere draws on collective memory and imaginaries of spaceflight as well as gender discipline. However, what does being a national hero in Putin’s Russia mean in practice? National pride is the cornerstone of the cosmonaut profession. As in the Soviet era, human spaceflight assumes a symbolic function with political virtues in contemporary Russia. Just as Yuri Gagarin received various recognitions from the Communist Party, the Kremlin still pursues a route to recognition that begins with medals. The highest form of state recognition in Russia is the medal of Hero of the Russian Federation, preceded by the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union, a recognition that is systematically granted to Russians that fly to space. The crews that flew before and after the 1991 putsch are thus distinguished by the medal they received.58 From the launch of the ISS programme in 1998, all Russians that have flown as part of this programme have received this honour.59 Being a medallist means becoming a government official, which involves regular participation in government events (including national ceremonies), placing cosmonauts’ legitimacy at the service of increasing the reputation of political authorities and, sometimes, becoming an honoured citizen of their birth cities, which involves regular participation in political ceremonies rarely related to spaceflight. Beyond involvement in politics, some cosmonauts take up functions in major government institutions. Their political recognition and their status as Hero medallists allow them to become actively involved in government affairs and accumulate important institutional capital.60 Although moving to a career in politics is also common for former astronauts in other countries, the Russian case is distinguished by the very specific implications of their status as national heroes. Though only four Soviet or Russian women have ever been selected for spaceflight, and as of the time of writing only three have flown, all Four citizens detain both Soviet and Russian Hero medals, including one cosmonaut (Sergey K. Krikalev). 59 Nevertheless, cosmonaut as a social status and a role model in the Soviet society has, with the emergence of the Russian Federation, lost some of its material attributes. 60 For an analysis of the spreading of institutional capital across new categories of actors in Russia since the 1980s and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, see Carole Sigman, “1991 et l’accumulation du capital institutionnel: le cas des dirigeants des clubs politiques informels,” Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest (2011): issue 42, no. 3, 39–64. 58 

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four seat as representatives in the Duma, the Lower House of the Russian Parliament, starting with Valentina Tereshkova.61 Being the first woman in space, from 2000 she remained one of Vladimir Putin’s closest representatives. Being a national hero invariably means becoming part of the President’s sphere of influence: regardless of their occupation, those ­recognised as national heroes for their bravery and their dedication to their country serve as resources of legitimation for regime policies and discourses, particularly those that praise Russian political supremacy. The regime may have changed from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. However, the political transition did not change the symbolic and economic importance of the space programme in Russia. In the 1990s it served the interests of state reconstruction after the Soviet breakup, playing an important role in the reorganisation of political power in postSoviet Russia. After 1991, the new federal State lost an important part of its capacity as an apparatus of decision and administration due to severe financial restrictions. It forfeited some of its means of control and policy instruments, first and foremost the strategic sectors of the economy, including the space industry. Partly thanks to oil income, the 2000s witnessed a “return” of the Russian State to a dominant position in the organisation of domestic affairs.62 With Vladimir Putin’s arrival to power, a “vertical” centralised system of public administration started to emerge, leading to major changes in many sectors of activity including the space sector, the rationalisation of its industries, the transformation of space public entities into State companies, and central decision-making regarding national sovereignty and leadership on the international space stage.63 This vertical power structure For comparison: Five NASA astronauts have chaired at the U.S. Senate (including John Glenn, first American astronaut), five European astronauts had or have a function within a ministry of their government or at the European Parliament, two out of the eight Canadian astronauts have important state responsibilities (including one became Governor of Canada in 2017, and one Brazilian astronaut is named Minister of science and technology in January 2019. 62 Carole Sigman, “‘Retour de l’État’ et formes de domination en Russie. Le cas de l’enseignement supérieur,” Revue française de science politique (2016): vol 66, no. 6, 915–936. 63 Terms first used within the federal executive, “vertical of power” refers to measures implementing the Centre’s authority towards regions and economic powers across the territory of the former Soviet Russia, which acquired a relative autonomy under Boris Yeltsin (see Sigman, “Retour de l’État”). 61 

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partly relies on a system of regular formal and informal meetings where determinant actors of various fields (experts-consultants, members of the administration or actors involved in the Kremlin’s sphere of influence) are gathered to discuss and implement strategies in the economic, scientific or industrial fields.64 When they concern the space sector, these issue-based “politburos” can involve former cosmonauts such as Duma representative Valentina Tereshkova. Two main dynamics highlight the role that cosmonauts and the human spaceflight programme play in the Russian political sphere. Firstly, the symbolic capital of cosmonauts serves political power by representing the government at various levels of involvement and hierarchy, from recognition as national heroes to retraining as State officials. Secondly, the reorganisation of Russian politics and the development of “vertical power” itself relies upon the symbolic capital detained by national heroes. Being a cosmonaut does not therefore only imply representing State achievements in the technical and economic spheres. It also involves devotion and public service in the domestic political sphere. This service to the Russian state covers a continuum of positions and political involvement determined by the politicisation of the figure of the cosmonaut inherited from Soviet myths. The process through which cosmonauts enter politics or are involved in governmental events, in addition to serving the State as other national heroes, remains strongly related to the social value accorded to cosmonauts and their symbolic function as national heroes.

Conclusion The celebration of national heroes as the incarnation of Soviet heritage and a model of masculinity is an essential element of post-Soviet identity politics. This chapter has shown how the Russian human space programme is an important and representative field for the sociology of gender and of nationalism. It has examined the symbolic roots of Russian contemporary nationalism and its historical, gender and political dynamics as expressed in the specific case of cosmonauts. National narratives See the example of the “economic Politburo” under the administrations of D. Medvedev and V. Putin in Olga Kryshtanovskaia, “Formats of Russian state power,” Russian Politics and Law (2012): vol 50, issue 3, 7–17. 64 

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framing collective memory and belonging, the construction of this specific idea of manhood, and the political use of the symbolic resources of cosmonauts are the three dynamics that allow this analysis to retrieve the manufacture of national space heroes in Russia. In focussing on concrete practices (Soviet rituals, trials and methods of the training, occupation in state institutions), the chapter offers and advocates an incarnated, hence dynamic, microsociology of national identity. Nationalism embraces various dimensions expressed in daily practices beyond explicit political positioning. This is inextricably related to intersectional power relationships including gender. The making of national heroes remains at the crossroads of identity politics, gender, and nationalism in a post-Soviet Russia struggling with its past. More than framing national belonging,65 gender is here revealed to act as a core mechanism in the building and sustaining of a nationalist political elite whose legitimacy depends on representing national supremacy. Focussing on the specific micro practices of identity and power of cosmonaut training reveals the intricacy of body models and national identity,66 and the reinforcement of gender power relations by national imaginaries based on Soviet space fantasies. The heroic masculinities explored in this chapter, as socially constructed and reproduced through training, trials and ceremonies contribute to nationhood and are rooted and embedded in both national narratives and policies. This analysis can be found in further studies emphasising the bond between nationalist claims and models of masculinity — as in the cases of Fascist Italy, or the Serbian-Albanian conflict in Kosovo — where the defence of the nation required the defence of masculine reproduction and the reification of gendered social roles.67 In addition to being a long-term instrument of national leadership and prestige, human space programmes are also a frequent instrument of political authoritarianism and isolationist political discourses.68 At the Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation. For an exemplary study of how the defence of borders, nation-State building process, and national belonging are interconnected with race and sex distinctions, see Nira YuvalDavis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (London: Sage, 2011). 67 Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo.” 68 For an illustration of this regarding nationalism autonomy and independency in the European human space programme, see Julie Patarin-Jossec, “Materializing sovereignty: European space industries in the Europeanization-Nationalism nexus,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies (2020): vol 28, no. 2, 1–12. 65  66 

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2016 U.S. presidential election for example, the only candidate to present a space strategy was Donald Trump.69 This illustrates how outer space remains a field to prove national supremacy: leading in space affairs goes along with leading on the international stage, promoting nationalist strategies and pride. Even as national leadership in space affairs remains a priority for Russia for symbolic and economic motives, human spaceflight also remains a central issue in some former Soviet republics through their former roles in the Soviet space programme. Because Ukraine and Kazakhstan had strategic functions in the division of labour among Soviet republics in the management of the space programme (Kazakhstan hosts the only ­cosmodrome for human spaceflight at Baikonur, still used; Ukrainian industries are responsible for the delivery of key parts of rockets engines), both remain economically bound to the Russian Federation. Especially in the Ukrainian case, such bonds feed into broader struggles while the postSoviet building process of the country is guided by strong opposition to the Kremlin. As a French ethnographer with international fieldwork partly located in Russia (and mostly composed of men), my analysis of the articulation of gender representations and national identity resulted from my experience in the field — where access to information and informants often depended on sexist misconceptions, if not my sexualisation by informants according to a fantasised idea of French womanhood.70 Such experiences not only highlight how gender and nationalism relate as a research object, but also how these same mechanisms influence the production of ethnographic data and the circulation of academic knowledge. Revealing that gender plays such an important role at the very heart of nationalism points to the need to systematically consider gender as a core dimension of nationalist discourses. This chapter would therefore encourage further reflection on the mechanisms of struggles and resistance in national identity-building based on embodiment and collective memory.

“Trump’s opportunity in space,” Corsicana Daily Sun, December 16, 2016, http://www. corsicanadailysun.com/opinion/trump-s-opportunity-in-space/article_2f86c762-c3e211e6-b3b7-83a6abc2772d.html. 70 Julie Patarin-Jossec, “Un tabou résilient. Des violences sexistes dans la pratique ­ethnographique et son enseignement,” Terrains/Théories, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/ teth.2833. 69 

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Chapter 10

Responding to Failed Nationalist State-Building: Anglophone Secessionism in Cameroon Ruth Mireille Manga Edimo IRIC, University of Yaoundé II, Cameroon

Secessionist movements are challenging the nation-building process that the Cameroonian State has been engaged in since the early 1960s. This national identity crisis is frequently attributed to the political history of Cameroon, the international politics of the region, and the political opportunism of English-speakers Cameroonians in the North–West and South–West regions. This chapter, however, turns to an interactive approach between state and society to analyse the crisis as a problem of postcolonial nation-building policy. Drawing on systems modelling and classical social contract theory, the analysis develops a post-structural approach to analysing the impact of Cameroon’s nation-building policies. Specifically, the relational process embedded in the postcolonial state’s nationalism and that of Anglophone secessionism are teased out in order to explain the failure of nation-building policies. It is found that by seeking to create a homogeneous unitary “republic,” the Cameroonian postcolonial state has unintendingly created windows of opportunity for secessionism and separatism, particularly through rejection of its identity

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policies and criticism of its governance. These are the two strands that account for the rise of Cameroonian Anglophone nationalism.1

Introduction In the 1970s, English-speaking Cameroonians began to raise demands for autonomy and separatism. This followed from the decision by the postcolonial state’s authorities to change the form of the state from the form of a federal republic into that of a “unitary republic.”2 Anglophone elites regarded this act as an attempt to destroy the federal constitution, alleging that the “unitary state,” just like the Republic of Cameroon itself, should never have happened.3 These nationalist discourses took greater and more defined shape during the democratisation process in the 1990s and were mostly articulated by the political organisation called Southern Cameroons National Council (SCNC). However, arguments on secessionism and separatism resurfaced in the Cameroonian transnational public space in October 2016 with significantly different dimensions when Englishspeaking lawyers and teachers reintroduced the question through highlevel grievances centred in the North–West and South–West regions of Cameroon, denunciating their working conditions and the invasion of the regions by French-speaking citizens from the rest of the mostly Francophone country. Whereas the Anglophone question is not new in the political science literature, previous approaches using history, mobilisation theory, international legal perspectives and geopolitics in the African context, authors have eluded the conceptual dimension of these grievances and demands. These, vitally, can help locate the question in the context of broader discussions on nationalism, nation-building and identity in postcolonial contexts. This chapter turns to a critical perspective on postcolonial nationalism to deconstruct Anglophone secessionism and insert it in the broader context of postcolonial nationalism and statehood. Doing so makes it possible My deep-felt thanks go to the editors of this book. Without their patience and huge ­support, nothing would have been possible. 2 Piet Konings and Francis B. Nyamndjog, “The Anglophone problem in Cameroon,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 35, no. 2 (June, 1997): 207–229. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S0022278X97002401. 3 Ibid. 1 

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to elucidate the theoretical relationship that links postcolonial nationalism to secessionism. The perspective departs from structural explanations while taking them further by adding particularly post-structural elements that examine nation-building initiatives, policies, and practices as a complex, “unfinished” and “negotiated” political process between the administrative, cultural policies of the state and individual citizens.4 By taking these phenomena beyond structural explanations, this chapter brings in and examines various forms of reactive postcolonial nationalisms that occur within the state. Specifically, this entails examining the political process through which postcolonial state policies confront socio-cultural individual and collective identities in and through its attempts to colonise minority Anglophone cultures. Such a perspective is vital because, as introduced and discussed below, Cameroon’s peculiar colonial history has resulted in very different regimes of governance and identity. Crucially, its unusual experience resists generalisations as to the possible unintended consequences of postcolonial nationalism and its application as policy,5 making it a case that keeps falling “in-between.” This chapter underlines the “hybrid character” of nationalities that confronts the postcolonial state. This is not only analytically useful, allowing for accounts of the identity “imperfections” that are present when confronted with the sought-after homogenous national identity type, but furthermore has the conceptual consequence of further eroding the prevailing modern view and, most importantly for this ­analysis the expectation, that nation-states hold “political and national units as congruent.”6 Analysis of Anglophone secessionist discourses in Cameroon highlights the policy aspects of the process of postcolonial nation-building by disclosing their symbolic relationships with governmental administrative authorities that unsuccessfully strive to fix a single stable and unique national identity. Consequently, the chapter interrogates the way the Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5 For a succinct account of the unintended consequences of postcolonial nationalism, see Lowell L. Barrington, “Nationalism & Independence” and Joshua B. Forrest, “Nationalism in Postcolonial States,” both in Lowell L. Barrington (ed.), After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2003). 6 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 1. 4 

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Anglophone peripheral nationalism deploys historical and policy discourses, while also drawing from various postmodern and socio-economic arguments.7 How, then, is it possible to understand the relationship between state’s nationalism and peripheral nationalism? The answer lies in defining nationalism as both a political and a policy process which includes modern Western arguments on nation-state building, liberal principles of citizenship and participation. In other words, we are looking at literally making the nation.8 Consequently, this chapter treats postcolonial nationalism as a policy problem. This chapter’s focus on actors’ discourses aims to uncover the poststructural dimension of nationalist policy. Drawing on David Easton’s model of political life,9 this chapter thus explores and draws insights on how the periphery of the state’s national identity, Anglophone in this case, politically responds to the state’s policies promotion of its postcolonial nationalism. This approach also informs this chapter’s methodological choices. In approaching the discourses examined, think tank reports and policy papers help account for the two different types of nationalism in the Cameroon postcolonial state, Centralist Francophone and Federalist Anglophone. Discursive data was selected using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, with which secessionist discourses were retrieved from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and online newspapers. This chapter makes the use of a couple of hundred “Anglophone” secessionist posts on YouTube with a particular emphasis on the discourses put forward by political leaders. This research strategy further contributes to highlight the tricky political relationship, context and background that links Anglophone secessionism in Cameroon to the state’s postcolonial nationalism as a consequence of its failure to build one homogeneous unitary nation-state. Furthermore, it is possible to additionally consider Cameroon as a case-study in postcolonial nationalist policies that seek to address the “hybrid” cultural dimension of nationalism which includes both culture On this concept read: Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8 Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2004). 9 See David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1965). 7 

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and political transactions between the state’s level bureaucracy and civil society.10 The progressive liberalisation Cameroonian of political life that begun in the 1990s allowed Anglophone secessionist and protests movements in Cameroon to grow and gain more significance.11 Indeed, drawing on the opening up of political life and its consequences, as well as ­pointing to earlier regimes, discourses advanced by protesters and secessionists have been based on the argument that the regime’s 1972 decision to transform the previous Federal Republic into the United Republic of Cameroon was unconstitutional, as the change was not supported by a referendum.12 Likewise, they argue that the later renaming of Cameroon as the Republic of Cameroon should not have happened without common agreement between both Francophone and Anglophone populations. This reflects a sentiment of marginalisation, exploitation, and unwilling assimilation by a Francophone-dominated state and population. Crucially, besides identity, it raises a question of political consent and governance as a key political driver, as Anglophone secessionism is, through such claims, articulating a critique of truth and legitimacy in the process of governance, state formation and nation building. The 1970s and 1980s saw crucial moments in the consolidation of this articulation that finally found outlets in the 1990s, as the third wave of democratisation processes in Africa came to centre on local cultures of political participation and protests by elements of civil societies. This also explains why, even though the Anglophone protest movement and its arguments are rooted in the 1970s, it is only during the 1990s that English-Speaking elites openly addressed the subordinate position of Anglophones and laid the first claims for self-determination and autonomy. This movement initially focussed on a return to the federal state, against which central ­governmental authorities have persistently refused to discuss any constitutional reform. Secessionism here, has moreover been an interactive political process where the claims of the Anglophone civil society have constantly been reintroduced as the consequence of the governmental policy attempting to consolidate both the concept of the Cameroonian republic and the nation-state. Anglophone secessionist movements See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 1994). See the 1990 Cameroon Law on Free Association and Freedom of Expression. http:// www.sinotables.com/wp-content/uploads/LiberteAssociationCamerounLois1990_1999. pdf, retrieved on July 7, 2021. 12 Piet Konings and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, “The Anglophone problem in Cameroon.” 10  11 

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themselves point to the emergence of the so-called “Ambazonian war” or the “Anglophone crisis” as the result of critical failures by nation-building public policies. This means that understanding this crisis necessitates exploring the close connections not only between the actions of government and social reactions, but also between public policies and local translations of concepts and practices of citizenship. Though simmering for some time, the issue was reintroduced to Cameroonian public political space in November 2016. It took the form of socio-professional grievances expressed by lawyers from the South– and North–West regions, where Cameroon common law is implemented. Though this might appear peculiar, it is an interesting elite expression of how structures of colonial and postcolonial hegemony have come to express their capacity to shape society and political space. This is because Cameroon’s statehood is deeply shaped by the different political, colonial, and cultural territorial divisions that only in the late twentieth century came together into one nation-state. The Anglophone groups being part of the Cameroonian nation is the result of the UK being given a mandate over the North–Western regions of the former German colony of Kamerun in 1922 by the League of Nations. The mandate, kept this territory, known as British Cameroons, as part of the British Empire until the referendum of 1961, which united Southern Cameroons (the Northern Cameroons voted to join Nigeria) as one the territorial and cultural pieces of the emerging postcolonial state of Cameroon. This means that Cameroon has undergone multiple modern political transfers of technologies of government and governance during and after the colonial rule, which had to be appropriated and were eventually used for nation-building purposes. This complex set of identity markers and governance apparatuses included two official languages, two legal systems, and different forms of local governance. However, the political process of unification that followed has always appeared particularly difficult path from the perspective of the political leadership and policy necessary to build a new postcolonial Cameroonian nation-state. The following two sections explore this issue from two perspectives: firstly, the claims of the Anglophone secessionists, and the manners in which they are articulated and relate to specific grievances. The second section then confronts these against the attempts of the Cameroonian state to enact nationalist policies in successive attempts to unify and homogenise the country.

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Postcolonial Nationalism and Secessionism in Anglophone Cameroon In the context of this analysis, nationalism is conceptualised as the political process through which Cameroon engaged in its nation-building process after the end of French and British colonial rule. It includes policies and cultural philosophies that it implemented when trying to stitch together the British and French territorial parcels it inherited from the colonial empires as a single unitary state. This was attempted on the basis of the western model ideal of the nation-state. The task was a huge technical and administrative challenge for the postcolonial Cameroonian state which, in various forms, has faced Anglophone secessionist claims ever since. While this brought huge political and cultural challenges, it unintentionally embedded in nationality the collective right of control over the country’s territory, resources, as well as symbols.13 Well-illustrated in Rousseau’s concepts of “popular sovereignty” and the “general will” of the people, the postcolonial process here explored came to place “social legitimacy” and “consent of the governed” as two variables of the nationbuilding process at the social level.14 This section illustrates and explores this politico-cultural process while highlighting the socio-cultural dimension of the tricky relationship that puts postcolonial nationalism and secessionism as interdependent politico-cultural phenomena. This complex relationship is brought about through various modes of symbolic transactions of values and political symbols between States postcolonial policies and Anglophones citizens taking place through policies, cultures, and participation. We have re-designed the David Easton political system’ analysis to emphasise the complexity of that politico-social cultural reality. Figure 1 summarises in schematic form how Anglophone secessionism, the State’s postcolonial nationalist efforts, institutions, and other agents, and responses to their practices interact around, outside, and beyond structured relations of state institutions. These interactions, which result in the indirect confrontation of two different political models of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins of Long-distance Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 14 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes. Five vols., Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, and Jean Starobinski, et al., eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959, 1995). 13 

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202  Global Nationalism French model of governance

British model of governance

National environment

International environment

͚dŚĞďůĂĐŬďŽdž͛

Secessionist discourses against one unified Cameroonian nation-state

Peripheral nationalism / Anglophone secessionism

Governmental Agents & Institutions

Nationalist discourses and policies striving for structural transformation of citizenships into one homogeneous national identity

Citizenship struggles with postcolonial institutions and individual identities

State’s postcolonial nationalism

&ĞĞĚďĂĐŬƉƌŽĐĞƐƐ

Figure 1:    Interactions in and around Cameroonian postcolonial state nationalism. Source: The author, based on David Easton’s Model.

governance (based on the earlier French and British models) reveal nationalism as a set of socio-cultural and identity conflicts encompassing human cultural and social interactions. These interactions play a key role in defining and shaping the complex relationships that link Cameroonian Anglophone postcolonial nationalism and the state’s own postcolonial nationalist institutions and policies. Retrieving Anglophone secessionist discourses from the Anglophone problem literature and this chapter’s study of social media data has shown evidence of such disruptive cultural and political relationships, particularly at the social and individual levels of collective identity. At the social level of collective identity, Anglophone nationalism is identified as a struggle against Cameroonian postcolonial nationalist policies that are regarded as an attempt to colonise a minority cultural identity. At the individual social level, it takes the form of more radicalised forms of resistance articulated as claims around “difference” and conjugated as discourses of “separatism,” “independence,” and “autonomy,” which are in turn shaped differently through various forms of information and communication technologies.

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Piet Könings and Nathan Jua have advanced various reasons that account for the specific shape of Anglophone nationalisms and their discursive expressions in the public sphere.15 Among these they highlight “the lack of consensus” in establishing the centralised state of Cameroon in 1972, the “unserved” common national objectives of both English and French-speaking Cameroonian, the absence of a shared vision on what the Cameroonian State should be,16 and a “centralised, authoritarian and totalising power which has marginalised Anglophone identities.”17 While such arguments support the theoretical argument on the role of absent social legitimacy and citizens’ consent as drivers of peripheral forms of postcolonial nationalism beyond cultural or ethnic identity, they also raise the issue as a distinct problem of policy. Anglophone secessionists argue that as in far as State policymaking process and deliberation are concerned, they are only involved as second-class citizens.18 Furthermore, they claim that they have been “Francophonised,”19 deprived of liberty, and even recolonised, while being at the same time marginalised from state governance. As they result of this, they took advantage of the liberal opportunities opened up in the 1990s to confront, and therefore claim, their demands for more inclusion and participation in political affairs. Similarly, they embraced the technological opportunities in communications and dissemination provided by democratisation to openly contest their “subordinate” social and cultural position within Cameroonian society. Whereas their earlier protests turned around the “trivialisation” of the British cultural model of education that they inherited from colonisation and the standardisation of the baccalaureate French system, later Anglophone secessionist discourses have since rejected all forms of French assimilationist policies. While initially putting forward claims for Anglophone national institutions modelled on the basis of their British-influenced culture, activism on the ground eventually surpassed the boycott of classrooms and workspaces to encompass demands for Piet Könings and Nantang Jua, “The occupation of the Anglophone public space. Anglophone nationalism in Cameroon,” Cahiers d’études africaines (2004): 609–634. 16 Piet Konings and Francis B. Nyamndjong, “The Anglophone problem in Cameroon.” Piet Könings, Negotiating an Anglophone Identity. A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon (Leiden: Brill NV, 2003). 17 Könings, 2003, 102. 18 Könings and Nyamnjoh, 2003, 192. 19 See Piet Könings and Nantang Jua, 2004, 609–634. 15 

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wholesale rationalisation of British and French cultural policies inherited from colonisation within the country.20 Thus, the movements that begun as protests by Anglophone lawyers and teachers in October 2016 were the expression of the radicalisation of an historical struggle. This is not one of physical battles, military violence and deaths, but rather one concerning grievances that betray the presence of ever more radicalised cultural arguments that are visible in the growing demands for the withdrawal of French-speaking citizens and customs from Anglophone regions of the country and the improvement of Anglophone working conditions. It includes the high-levels tensions between the government and various Anglophone civil society groups and actors that led to lockdowns of schools, ghost towns, the boycott of elections and the many other challenges to national institutions. Ultimately, these actions had suspended sociocultural interactions between the policies of the postcolonial state and Anglophones at the local level. Indeed, we are looking at a context where Anglophone citizens have enacted nationalist discourses and claims that go beyond the identity assumptions inherent in the territorial identity assumed by the Cameroonian state to denounce the imposition of civil law in “their regions.”21 Though initially enacted by lawyers of the region who criticised ignorance of common law in juridical systems, downstream expressions of this struggle have unveiled the role played by social medias and virtual public spheres as political spaces for the expression of radicalised politico-cultural discourses. Protesting Anglophone lawyers complained that “[everything] was done as if Cameroon was a civil law country.”22 They criticised the state’s postcolonial nationalism which they viewed as a “top-down process in which the ruler dictates.”23 In their view, civil law inherited from French Könings, 1997. In that cultural battle, Anglophone lawyers requested that the Organisation for the Harmonisation in Africa of Business Law, of which Cameroon is a signatory since 1995, give more consideration to that part of the Cameroonian culture. 22 From a lawyer spokesperson of the protest movement, a common law barrister in Bamenda and secessionist leader whom interview can be accessed on Africanews on July 27, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2NtaD4Hwsg, retrieved July 7, 2021. 23 Harmony Bobga video, Facebook, retrieved on June 30, 2019. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=y2NtaD4Hwsg. Video published on YouTube on November 11, 2016, retrieved July 7, 2021. 20  21 

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rule had since operated as a form of oppression, with its detailed prearranged provisions largely contrasting with the flexibility of common law established by British colonisation in the Anglophone parts of the country. Fascinatingly, while their complaints describe the contrast between civil and common legal systems, they clearly also bleed into cultural norms themselves. For example, the way Anglophone lawyers advocated their preference for their legal legacy was couched in terms of how it was “more dynamic and inclusive” regarding “the common conscience of the society and needs (that can be) tested over time.”24 More structured and coherent, this form of Anglophone nationalism has been the subject of efforts by the central government to respond to some issues, particularly the rationalisation of the use of languages and representation of Anglophones in the administration.25 It is worth remarking, however, that by this time, Anglophone claims had extended to schools and universities where disgruntled youths joined the movement en masse. Observation of this development not only exemplifies the structural dimension of postcolonial nationalism, but additionally brings in human, socio-cultural and symbolic interactions which set “social legitimacy” and “concerned of governed” as significant post-structural political variables of postcolonial nationalism. Going beyond the ethnic dimension of culture, it inserts transferred modern cultures as elements of postcolonial nation-state cultural stability or instability. And finally, it substantiates the view that the nation-building process is a socio-political negotiation between the policy-implementing administrative structures of the state and society.

Anglophone Secessionism as Reaction to the Failure of Unitary Cameroonian Nation Building Anglophone secessionism is used loosely, including in the previous section, to refer to the grievances of Anglophone Cameroonians, not least because figures in government use this term disparagingly. However, it is worth highlighting that Anglophone secessionism can refer specifically to the more radical forms of Anglophone nationalism that, since 1990s, have Harmony Bobga video, YouTube, November 11, 2016. The government report is available online at https://www.voanews.com/africa/lawyersteachers-cameroon-strike-more-english-anglophone-regions, retrieved July 27, 2019. 24  25 

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sought actual secession rather than merely a return to a federal Cameroon. First organised around the SCNC during the 1990s, it variously took the forms of Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium (CACSC), which focussed on the above-mentioned issues of lawyers and teachers, and the Southern Cameroons Ambazonia Consortium United Front, which in 2017 declared independence from the Cameroons government as the Interim Government of Ambazonia and has since been engaged in civil campaigns against the central government, which have at times spilled over into violent conflict with Cameroonian forces.26 Including a plethora of demands on reshaping their relationship with the state, ranging from autonomy, through independence, to a return to federalism, this Anglophone nationalism rejects both a dominating French approach to governance and administration, as well as French culture, structures and language. In sum, they reject the Cameroonian state in its current form and seek the creation of either a new form of statehood or some form of greater autonomy. While their claims lack coherence, appear dispersed and oriented around specific constituencies and grievances, their presence in virtual spaces denotes and indeed supports a significant heterogeneity. In many ways, in these spaces, clashes between the two nationalisms and the nation-building process in particular, occur as a symbolic cultural battle over the meaning and identity of the postcolonial state. In fact, this type of confrontation disputes more vividly the political structures, impositions and stability of national identity as both a modern and postmodern ­product. It furthermore shows evidence of the gradual and heavily resisted degeneration of Anglophone civic and cultural identities, while it also roughly and inconsistently raises the issue of a particular cultural spatiality as evident in the territoriality shaping calls for an Ambazonian Anglophone space. Crucially, it makes evident both the failure of the Cameroonian postcolonial state to culturally govern and discipline ­individuals and their cultural relations, and the ways in which the state is losing its modern politico-cultural battle over the meaning and composition of Cameroonian citizenship. Analysis of online videos in this research demonstrated the extent of these radical Anglophone secessionist discourses. Further, it highlighted how the online growth of the Anglophone movement in the online ­transnational public space featured multiple dislocated and inconsistent « L’Etat camerounais est le seul fossoyeur de notre Constitution », Le Monde.fr, January 24, 2017, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2017/01/24/l-etat-camerounaisest-le-seul-fossoyeur-de-notre-constitution_5068409_3212.html. 26 

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Figure 2:    Anglophone citizens “judgements” and “sensitivity” towards the Anglophone crisis reports on YouTube. Source: Author’s own graphic, based on publics comments on YouTube responding to 300 media reports on the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon. YouTube.com, retrieved July 29, 2019.

struggles towards a homogeneous Anglophone identity. While content analysis of their discourses unveils some homogeneity in both cultural resistance and the rejection of postcolonial policies, it is important to point out this occurs against the background of heavily fragmented hybrid Anglophone identities.27 Located between the denial of secular power, challenge to the political regime, and contestation of other aspects of French culture such as French school examinations, the discourses analysed consistently bleed out into a distinct struggle for legitimacy, leadership, and political power within the undeniably hybrid cultural context of nation-building politics. Exploring the context of how ordinary Anglophone citizens react to these radical secessionist discourses as publics, Figure 2 summarises the emotional relationships as featured in the radicalised form of the Anglophone virtual nationalist struggle. Multiple public spheres of those discourses are available on Facebook and YouTube, which can be found by researching terms such as “Anglophone crisis,” “Ambazonian war.” See for instance: the following Facebook Page’s link: “I Stand with Anglophones,” https://www.facebook.com/southerncameroonpeople, retrieved July 22, 2019. 27 

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The graphic representation of the use of emotive terms in Figure 2 is helpful in revealing two key trends. Firstly, it shows that the issue of the Anglophones should be seen as more than the radicalisation of a struggle between Anglophone nationalists and the postcolonial government, suggesting that there are deep personal and individual-level connotations that are, furthermore, normatively weighed at both levels. Secondly, Figure 2 reveals the embeddedness of the identity crisis in individual processes of legitimation and de-legitimation of modern nation-state cultural policies. While this relates to nationalist struggles happening in the transnational public sphere of the internet, it revolves around Anglophone nationalism as a conceptual idea that, while rejecting the specific identitymaking proposed by the Cameroonian nation-state, nevertheless remains linked to it through modern cultural products embedded in it. In other words, both nationalisms appear to be trading on the same types of normative, identity and governance claims. In other words, the question of the Cameroonian Anglophones goes beyond identity discourses, cultural homogeneity and relates more specifically to struggles over the place of the Cameroonian hybrid identity, which as a result discursively integrates both the struggles against structural identities and absorbs perspectives that appear to reach towards a more distinctly postmodern (in the sense of reaching beyond the classical single-nation state) idea of identity. This complex perspective, which is more complex that Anglophones versus Francophones, and indeed points to a struggle over whether a hybrid Cameroon is possible at all, is confirmed by content analysis performed for this research and summarised in the word cloud in Figure 3. The content analysis shows that there are various “hybrid” nationalist attempts to conceptualise specific territories and transpose personal group emblems, flags, and anthems into multiple virtual political spaces. These spaces are led by self-proclaimed community leaders of Anglophone communities. Furthermore, it shows that this public sphere is dominated by a set of rejections of the categories promoted by the state, added to by classical keywords of state challenge, where state-challenging terms, such as “independent,” “independence,” “free,” “freedom,” “sovereign,” and “sovereignty” appear frequently in their political discourses. The hybrid conceptualisation of citizenship which refers to either “Ambazonian citizens” or “Amba boys,”28 also engages virtual Anglophone One of the self-styled names for Cameroonian English-Speakers.

28 

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Figure 3:    Dimensions of radical secessionist Anglophone discourses on YouTube. Source: Author’s own graphic, based on publics comments on YouTube responding to 300 media reports on the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon. YouTube.com, retrieved July 29, 2019.

YouTube activists which follow the war activities of self-proclaimed ­leaders identified as “Army Generals.”29 While this virtual dislocation of Anglophone nationalisms displays “hybrid” forms of political identities, the postcolonial French and English languages remain the key cultural currency of the nationalist struggle.30 These frames nevertheless feature cultural paradoxes. While Anglophone nationalism indicates the presence of various cultural axes of tension between different social worlds, the struggle navigates between various hybrid national identities and several distinct social contexts and categories. Nationalist discourses are meant to speak to governmental agents and structures, while nevertheless also playing a role in leading a virtual population of supporters. A good example of this communication strategy are the audio messages of the Ambazonian self-declared “Field Marshall of the Red Dragons” (referring an armed rebel group). Often disseminated on YouTube. They are addressed to “all the people of the Republic” as well as “the ministry of Defence in Yaoundé” and even “the presidency at Yaoundé.” Interestingly, they act as all-round declarations of position, addressing “My people of Ambazonia,” while giving symbolic instructions to “all commanders in Ambazonia.” They restate one of the rebel frames of governance, with frequent allusions to the many divisions They are the Spokesmen of the virtual struggle; they take the pledge to “free” the “land” and people from such “Ambazonia” while pretending to protect and defend them. 30 Such as the use of “pidgin English” employed by nationalist leaders to express their political intentions. 29 

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among Ambazonian protesters, rebels, breakaway authorities and other pretenders: “the Field marshal and the entire Red Dragons are under the authority of the interim government, those abroad should stop saying nonsense and join us on the battlefield instead of sowing confusion among Ambazonians.”31 These new Anglophone leaders clearly struggle to establish their legitimacy. They seek to gain the trust of their constructed and imagined citizenry in cyberspace, which has the impact of transforming their nationalism into various dislocated and not always compatible socio-­ cultural identities shored up and undermined at the same time by elements of trust and denials, legitimacy and delegitimisation, all in the context of poor relations with the central government, failed Francophone assimilation policies from the centre and growing grievances in the periphery. This means, crucially, that nationalism itself can and does become a permanently renegotiated political as well as cultural identity as articulated in and between members of society. The Ambazonia war provides a significant illustration of the sociocultural sites where the postcolonial nation-building policy crisis occurs and finds expression. Secessionist discourses share some similarities with the above-explored broader Anglophone nationalist discourses. However, grievances and challenges on democracy, political alternance, leadership, injustice, tribalism, and poverty remind us that their cultural divorce from the postcolonial state’s French nationalist approach crosses into other dimensions. However, the radical focus on separatism and the creation of a new separate Anglophone state raises new and different forms of cultural and political disruptions that are of harder resolution, as deradicalisation of these grievances is difficult to achieve. Finally, the state’s postcolonial nationalism is being confronted by ever more significant challenges to its discourses on the nature of nation-state.

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter, we asked the question how to understand the complex relationship between postcolonial nationalism and secessionism. This chapter answered the question by designing a theoretical toolkit Address by “Field Marshall of the Red Dragons,” uploaded October 10, 2019, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHemviiqn5Q, retrieved July 7, 2021. 31 

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that drew on a re-designed version of David Easton’s model of the political life and the claims in Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty. These were then examined through a critical perspective on postcolonial nationalism that treated identity and sovereignty, and particularly the link between the two, as a constructed relationship that could and did take various forms. The results show that postcolonial nationalism and secessionism share a complex politico-structural and post-structural relationship which may result either in successful identity negotiation, or an unattainable cultural negotiation on homogeneity or homogenisation. Characterised as a form of peripheral nationalism, secessionist discourses borrow symbolic values and identity from different social worlds, not least that of their perceived oppressors. It is both connected to the state’s postcolonial policies and its political socio-economic governance of territorial identities. It was also shown how secessionist discourses, like the legitimacy of the state itself, rely on a balance of concern and social legitimacy. In that sense, it would appear that it operates as a permanent politico-cultural negotiation between state policies and citizens, which immediately points to the critical variable of the extent to which such policies and their specific contents can allow for an inclusive dimension. Moreover, postcolonial nationalism in its postmodern dimensions draws heavily on individual evaluations of policy, and thus also on individual values and collective norms as well as the emotions they produce. Crucially, they act as core elements in the social construction of the peace and stability of the political process embedded in the nation-building process. In that specific sense, fragmentation is a key characteristic underlined by the analysis here offered, as is the insight nothing truly happens as an impersonal socio-economic action. Finally, this chapter adds demonstration to the view that nationalism is not an exclusively ethnic or communitarian category, showing that its construction relies on links and differentiations across multiple social levels. In the case of Cameroon, an identity signifier such as language is but a single, if important and symbolically valuable, element in the construction of complex ideas of the self and its relationship with the state and its policy.

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Governing Asia

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Chapter 11

Tribalism and National Identity in Qatar: History and Emerging Trends Zarqa Parvez School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Stockton Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK

Tribe and tribalism have been central to the study of Arab Gulf States. Tribe was a central social and political institution in the Gulf region before the formation of modern state. Tribe was more than a name: it was a way of life. In the modern society of the Gulf, after state transformations and the emergence of new social institutions, tribe has changed as a political and social entity to a mere form of tradition and identity. Tribal symbols are commonly seen in Qatar’s national identity discourse, in national day celebrations and in other identity projects. This chapter discusses the instrumental and selective usage of tribalism by the Gulf state of Qatar in attempting to nationalise the tribe, to create a unique national identity and to strengthen local and international legitimacy. It focusses on the discourse of badu/hadhar and how it translates into national projects and identity discourse in Qatar, and the changes and developments that, after the blockade, have challenged and re-shaped this discourse.

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Introduction Tribe and tribalism are key terms when studying Arab Gulf States. In the post-modern state Gulf society, the concept of tribe has changed from being a political and social entity to a mere form of tradition and a tenet of identity. In Qatar’s case, this is evident in the tribal symbols seen in Qatar’s national identity discourse and in other identity projects. This chapter focusses on the “tribe,” both as a concept and as institution, its evolution since the modern state formation, and its paradoxical role in national identity construction. The aim is to contribute to the study of nationalism in the Gulf region by analysing the role of subnational groups and the selective use of their culture and identity in creating nationalist narratives. It will discuss the instrumental usage of tribe in the region as an attempt to nationalise the tribe and strengthen local and international legitimacy. The chapter will particularly focus on the discourse around of badu/hadhar tribes (nomad/sedentary) how it translates in national projects and identity discourses in Qatar specifically after the blockade and how these have challenged and re-shaped this discourse on badu/hadhar.

Tribe and Tribalism in the Gulf The literature on the complex issue of national identity is somewhat limited in these fairly young Gulf States. The challenge has been the construction of a unique and unifying national identity amidst the multi-layered identities present in these States, which include religious, ethnic, and tribal identities. National identity formation is therefore in its initial stages in these countries, and it is being pulled in all directions, giving rise to concepts such as “political tribalism,”1 which has shifted both the concept and structure of the present-day tribe. In order to de-construct some narratives and provide a framework for understanding tribes and their role in the modern Gulf States, a starting point is to analyse and critique the lack of literature on the topic of tribe within the region and highlight the gaps and trends within this literature. The six Gulf States (UAE, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain) have transformed within the span of a century due to the Khaldoun Nassan Al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective (London: Routledge, 2012). 1 

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discovery of oil and subsequently becoming independent states.2 They have witnessed fast-paced economic development and changing demographics, which have not been matched by an equally paced social and societal development. The relevance of the tribe to the modern Gulf States is central here. In the pre-independence era, all of these states relied on the tribe as a key political unit due to the lack of state structures, and the political and social fabric that we know today. Tribe was therefore the main political, social, and economic institution upon which the m ­ embers’ survival and livelihoods depended. The nomadic tribes known as Bedouin had several homelands called Dirah,3 and the sedentary tribes Hadhar dwelled in the cities and villages. Each tribe had its own identity, customs, linguistic accent and history, in which its members took pride. In this sense, each tribe was a nation in itself. It is therefore understandable why the existence of tribes in the modern state could pose a threat to the contemporary centralised government with one head of State. Post-independence, each state engaged with state formation processes similar to the European state models of centralised government and state institutions. Tribes were divided across borders and the local monarch and head of the state replaced the authority of the tribal leaders.4 The young Gulf States, therefore, had to undergo several major changes at an unconventionally fast pace. There were some attempts to create a national consciousness through the development of national radio stations, TV channels, national songs, and conferences, all seeking to instil a sense of national unity and distinctiveness. Overall, however, amidst all of these economic and political developments, national identity formation remained vague, lacking a clear direction and philosophical grounds. Anthropological studies on the Gulf region commonly view identity politics from the rigid lenses of tribe and tribalism, without fully addressing the meaning and role of tribe. Others may take a reductionist approach to the concept of “tribe” in the region, often overlooking the evolution of the tribe since state independence. The starting point in defining the tribe and its place in the modern State in the Gulf is to consider the concept of “State” in the Middle Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman (London: Routledge, 2016). 3 Donald Powell Cole, Bedouins of the Empty Quarter (London: Routledge, 2017). 4 “Society of Qatar,” Fanack.com, accessed July 5, 2021, https://fanack.com/qatar/societyof-qatar/. 2 

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Eastern world. Scholars like Nazih Ayubi propose that the modern Arab state should be studied through a conceptual framework that avoids orientalist and fundamentalist approaches, but at the same time maintains the specificity and uniqueness of the region. He further notes that Arab States in the Middle East should neither be studied from a presumed perspective of socio-philosophical individualism, which has not yet been developed in these countries, nor in the light of imagined culture which is assumed to be unchanging.5 The modern Arab State developed much later than its European predecessors, and it is this late State formation that accounted for the weakness of the Arab State. Adham Saouli attributes this weakness of the modern Arab state to the absence of (1) an industrial revolution, (2) a class system with class hegemony, (3) a Gramscian historic bloc, and (4) a clear concept of the “state.”6 This chapter follows a similar approach whilst analysing the concept of “Tribe” and its evolution in the Gulf. In order to see the link between tribe, tribalism, and national identity politics in the Gulf region, it is necessary to begin by defining the term “tribe” itself. Donald P. Cole7 has notably shed light on this crucial institution and concept. His work highlighted the originality and contextual understanding of the largest and most significant historical Bedouin tribes of Eastern Arabia — Al Murrah. However, most of the contemporary scholarship on the tribe by Western scholars rarely takes into consideration the work of Middle Eastern scholars. Consequently, such work has contributed to the rather superficial and orientalist view of Middle Eastern Tribes in general, rather than the “tribe” as an institution in itself. As Al-Shawi points out, “The coincidence of tribal social organisation and pastoral nomadism in arid environments eventually yielded a materialist and adaptive understanding of the tribe.”8 Tribes were viewed as an “adaptive social form specifically configured to socially and politically organize people distributed across the vast territories required for pastoral nomadism on the arid Arabian Peninsula.”9 However, in Western studies, Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, New edition (London: Continnuum-3PL, 1996). 6 Adham Saouli, The Arab State: Dilemmas of Late Formation (London, New York: Routledge, 2011). 7 Cole, Bedouins of the Empty Quarter. 8 A. Hadi Alshawi and Andrew Gardner, “Tribalism, identity and citizenship in contemporary Qatar,” Anthropology of the Middle East 8, no. 2 (December 1, 2013): 46–59. 9 Alshawi and Gardner, 49. 5 

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rarely does one see recognition of the complexity and evolution of diverse social, political and economic structures within the tribes. Tribe as a term has been used differently in different languages; it was first mentioned in English literature in the twelfth century. Although “tribe” as a concept has existed since the pre-modern era, the “tribe” has always evolved and developed, both as a concept and as an institution. In the Gulf case, the Arabic term Qabila implies a specific lineage, culture and language, which has certain history but is also subject to change and evolution.10 E. E. Evans-Pritchard defines tribe in the following way: A tribe is the largest community which considers that disputes between its members should be settled by arbitration and that it ought to combine against other communities of the same kind and against foreigners. In these two respects there is no larger political group than the tribe and all smaller political groups are sections of it.11

However, I view this as a reductionist definition of a much more complicated, historical, ancient and meaningful concept. I therefore propose an alternative definition: tribe is a group of people who share common lineage, history and memory prior to modern state building. Tribes, whether pastoral nomadic or sedentary, have shared an identity which encompasses memories of survival, mode of life, a specific culture, social and political organisation as well as independent tribal leadership. The tribe was historically a nation in itself and in the modern-day State, if a tribe were to conduct itself as did in the pre-statehood times, it would be viewed as a microstate within a state. The characteristics of the tribe in the definition above are applicable to the Gulf’s historical experience of tribalism, and in some ways to the political and social structure that exists today. Tribes are built on segmentary lineage systems, which is why a common ancestry is a key characteristic of the institution of the tribe. This lineage system is explained by Pritchard as the basis of the organisational and political rationale of the tribes. In his anthropological study of Tribes in South Sudan, he explains Daniel Martin Varisco, “Metaphors and sacred history: The genealogy of Muhammad and the Arab ‘tribe’,” Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 3 (1995): 139. 11 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1902–1973. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Philadelphia, Franklin Classics, 1940). 10 

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that tribes and tribesmen take pride in their independence and differentiations from other tribes. The members of a particular tribe are usually proud of their tribal lineage and even “consider it superior to other tribes. Each tribe has within it a dominant clan, which furnishes a kinship framework on which the political aggregate is built up. Each also regulates independently its age-set organization.”12 From this analysis, it is apparent that independence and separate political leadership is an inherent feature of tribes, whether in Sudan or in the Gulf States. The Bedouin saying of “I’m against my brothers; my brothers and me against my cousins; my cousins and me against strangers” sums up the social organisation, and to a certain extent, the political outlook of the tribal society. Therefore, when the Gulf States were divided through the demarcation of borders, the institution of the tribe presented a potential obstacle to central governance as it added a layer of identity that could challenge the notion of a unified, homogenous national identity. Although the lineage system of the tribe remains in place today, the leadership structure, and the political and social governance has significantly changed and evolved in the modern state in the Gulf. How and why then is the tribe still relevant? Why are tribal names still highlighted as central to one’s identity in the modern Gulf States? How has the “tribe” changed and what kinds of tribal solidarity remain? Ibn Khaldun’s Al Muaqdimmah has been foundational in answering some of these questions,13 but his work has been used only selectively in light of contemporary developments in the modern State and society, and particularly in the evolution of how tribe is regarded. Khaldun’s concept of the tribal bond was ‘Assabiyah, translated as solidarity, cohesion and loyalty. His writings can be read as predicting that the relevance of the ‘Assabiyah would diminish after a period of sustained economic and urban development in Gulf societies. The question is what kind of ‘Assabiyah remains today? Can economic prosperity really diminish the social bond between tribes that have a long history of group survival and who have passed on these historical bonds through generations? The ‘Assabiyah has changed and evolved, and although tribal links and ties still exist, they have been manipulated by the State and tribal leaders themselves, and they have been selectively used by tribe members to Evans-Pritchard, 13. Mahmoud Dhaouadi, “Ibn Khaldun: The founding father of eastern sociology,” International Sociology 5, no. 3 (September 1, 1990): 319–335. 12 

13 

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best serve their modern lifestyles in the modern state. Thus KhaldOun Naqeeb argues that modern day politics in the Gulf region can in fact be explained as a form of “Political Tribalism.” According to this school of thought, the modern State in the Gulf encourages tribalism by favouring certain tribes over others. Moreover, by assigning them significant political and economic positions, society is divided according to tribal affiliations.14 The same ‘Assabiya which can pose a threat to State power is instead manipulated and used by the State. The transition to modern statehood with western style institutions in the Gulf States took place after independence and after the discovery of oil in the 1930s. State transformation in the region was a result of power consolidation and formalisation of leadership, which centred on existing tribal leaders. It is therefore necessary to understand that tribes in each part of the world may share common characteristics in terms of structures and organisation, but essentially each region also has its own specific contextual realities, which influence tribal organisation, values, relations, and politics. In the Gulf region “tribe” has to be considered through the lenses of “Badu” and “Hadhar” (nomadic/sedentary), the definitions of which will be discussed in the following section. As Donald Cole, J. E Peterson,15 A. N Longva,16 and Rosemarie Zahlan17 explain that pre-state society in Arabia was a decentralised one. Modern state building, on the other hand, sought to create a more centralised society with a central government in a Western-style state model. This meant a drastic change for tribes who had previously lived in accordance with their physical environment and geography, which, to a large extent, determined their movement, lifestyle and survival mechanisms, especially for the Bedouin tribes. Prior to this, the tribal leadership was held by the tribal shaykh, who either inherited the power or won it through his personal traits and efforts. Before the state transformation process, certain shaykhs gained additional power due to the support of the British. They gave certain shaykhs the title of “Trucial Shaykhs.” During Al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula. J. E. Peterson, “The emergence of nation-states in the Arabian Peninsula,” GeoJournal 13, no. 3 (1986): 197–200. 16 Anh Nga Longva, “Nationalism in pre-modern guise: The discourse on Hadhar and Badu in Kuwait,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 38, no. 2 (May 2006): 171. 17 Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States. 14  15 

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independence, these Shaykhs adopted the title of hakim (ruler) and Emir “combining the attributes of ruler, commander and prince.”18 It is evident from the above that the process of state transformation was built on and carried with it tribal elements that existed prior to the creation of modern state. However, the remaining Shaykhs of the tribe saw their power and functions diminishing over time due to a clearly established hierarchal power structure that placed the Emir as the head of the state, and in some ways head of all other Shaykhs. Although these tribal shaykhs were given a degree of power and recognition by being admitted to either the shura council or unofficial majlis, their power was essentially limited. The tribe as a social and political organisation transformed after the creation of modern states in Eastern Arabia, and the idea and concept of tribe was used as a tool for maintaining political and leadership stability, as well as remaining as a key a part of identity politics. J.E Peterson argues that modern Gulf States incorporated into their ­governments certain elements based on tribal customs. He highlights specifically the idea of majlis, a public session where the individual citizen is “granted access to the Ruler and has an opportunity for immediate redress of his grievances,” and shura, a consultation with tribal notables “formally incorporated into most of the area’s governments through provisions for consultative or legislative assemblies.”19 Although these are generic elements of tribal political structure and organisation, the extent to which these are actually incorporated into ­modern government varies. Gulf states often involve tribal leaders and community notables in in the legislative structure, but the power and authority of shura remains unclear. In most Gulf countries, the shura remains under the full control of the government, and specifically the Emir, who has absolute power as the monarch and head of state. In countries like Kuwait — a constitutional monarchy with a parliament — the governance system allows room for limited debate and partial opposition. However, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have shura councils with limited functions and powers, though these can be dissolved at any time by the ruling monarch. In this regard, it can be seen that selective elements of the tribe are incorporated in the modern governance structure of the Gulf States, showing the evolution of the tribe as a political, structural, and social concept. 18  19 

Peterson, “The Emergence of nation-states in the Arabian Peninsula.” Peterson, 199.

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Badu and Hadhar State building and transformation in the Gulf States brought forth a crucial aspect of the history of the region, the dichotomy between the badu (local pronunciation for Bedouin-nomad) and hadhar (sedentary) tribes. This duality has been a central theme of the concept of Tribe in Eastern Arabia and the related cultural ideology. However, in many instances of nation building and national identity creation, the construction of badu/hadhar as separate categories with distinct cultures has served to divide more than unite citizens. Much of the scholarly literature as well as present national identity projects focus on Bedouin identity in almost mythological terms to highlight a deep-rooted history and to strengthen both internal and international legitimacy. Anh Nga Longva explains that many studies speak of “Bedouin” as groups, constituencies, or social or political actors, “without clarifying what lies in the term and without asking by what criteria this category is defined or how it differs from other, non-Bedouin categories.”20 In modern Gulf societies ascription and self-ascription of badu and hadhar identities are contextual rather than absolute and are therefore often contested. The lines between badu and hadhar have become somewhat blurred. Laila Prager suggests Bedouin “meant to designate tribal groups who are scattered all over the Arab World and who were once characterized by their nomadic life.”21 Originally, the term Badu was linked to a specific way of life linked with a nomadic lifestyle and with pastoral activities such as herding of sheep and camels as the main source of economic activities and sustenance. According to Cole, Prager, Longva and Al Nakib, most Bedouin tribes in Eastern Arabia do not follow this pastoral lifestyle or nomadic mode of life anymore, and hence the term “Badu” needs modification when applied. In contrast to Badu, Hadhar denotes a sedentary lifestyle and a settled urban population. In historical narratives, and in commonly held social perceptions in Gulf States, Bedouins were for a long time considered conservative and economically less advantaged, with a more modest way of life. However, after most Bedouins settled in towns and villages, and became part of the same Longva, “Nationalism in pre-modern guise,” 171. Laila Prager, “Reshaping tribal identities in the contemporary Arab world: Politics, (self-) representation and the construction of Bedouin history,” Nomadic Peoples 18, no. 2 (2014): 10–15. 20  21 

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education system and lifestyle as the hadhar, what remains as the main marker of difference between a badu and a hadhar? Cole in his article “Where have the Bedouin Gone” explains that in the present “Bedouin” refers less to a way of life and more than to an identity.22 Bedouin as a concept is representative of the fast-paced t­ransformation of the previously rural and tribal societies of the Gulf. Although, the Bedouin lifestyle has dramatically changed and assimilated with the Hadhar communities, certain traditions, such as distinct dialects, specific poetry, folklores, traditional songs, camel racing, and a keen interest and knowledge of their kinship and lineage distinguishes them from other tribes and families. The hadhar families of Arab and non-Arab background share a similar dialect and musical traditions, and do not emphasise the role of ancestors as often or with the same degree of pride that the Bedouin do. For example, in Qatar, two of the largest Bedouin tribes, Al Hajri, and Al-Marri23 have a distinctively different accent compared with Hadhar families, which by default allows one to recognise their family origin. Both tribes are proud of this distinction and pass it on to their children as heritage and cultural value. Cole denotes this trend as the emergence of “ethnicity” replacing “tribal identities of the past.”24 In many ways, the ongoing debate and focus on the Bedouin highlights the identity dilemma within these countries. That is: as they engage with modern national identity construction amidst multiple cultural influences, the balance between tradition and modernity becomes complex to negotiate. In highly cosmopolitan and rapidly growing multi-cultural Gulf societies like Qatar, Bedouins represent the link with the historical past, connection with one’s ancestors, and an exclusive identity based on tribal links and international cultural legitimacy. This tribal identity, highlighted mainly through the Bedouin identity, also helps distinguish the citizens from the majority expatriates of Arab and non-Arab ethnicities; in other words, it becomes the marker of an identity that is uniquely Qatari, regardless of whether or not it is equally representative of every Qatari citizen. Donald P. Cole, “Where have the Bedouin gone?,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2003): 235–267. 23 “‫ شلونش‬, ‫ شلونج‬, ‫ شلونس‬, ‫‘ ”لهجات العرب القديمة ( شلونك‬The Ancient Arab Dialects’ Qatarshares. com, accessed November 13, 2019. http://www.qatarshares.com/vb/archive/index.php/t372707.html. 24 Cole, “Where have the Bedouin gone?,” 19. 22 

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Consequently, the Bedouin identity has been highlighted and re-­ constructed through a number of measures including national songs, the official dialect of local TV channels like Al-Rayyan,25 cultural practices, dress code, and national day practices. Prime examples of these are national songs, which are written in Bedouin poetry and sung in Bedouin style. Thus, songs, which were traditionally common to Bedouin tribes, have now been crystallised or co-opted as official national songs.26 Similarly, the State also integrates the cultural practices of hadhar tribes through national festivals such as the Dhow Festival.27 Although this appears to be an attempt to integrate both cultures and acknowledge the importance of the two groups to the country’s national identity, it has often had the opposite effect. This marked distinction between the Badu and Hadhar is now greater than it previously was due to daily reminders and official state discourse. National identity in Qatar is political, as it is elsewhere. The project of national identity construction in Qatar appeals to a deep-rooted past, which would in turn prove Qatar’s resilience, legitimacy and strength at both regional and international levels. Tribal identity is a key resource in this project of national identity construction. As a result, the Bedouin identity as we now know it has undergone numerous changes and the version, we see today is in many ways a modified. diluted and selected version for the purpose of promoting heritage and tradition within a national context. The term “Bedouin” is often equated with tribal, however not all tribes are nomadic. The selective usage of the term and its linkage with the concept of tribe highlights a significant shift in the meaning of tribe. As Prager points out, in many of the Gulf States “a discourse on the revival of cultural heritage has increasingly gained prominence, in which Bedouin ‘culture(s)’ play(s) a prominent role.”28 During the 1990s, after the consolidation of the early state and the start of the nation-building process, state-sponsored construction of national heritage in Gulf States promoted certain versions of Bedouin “‫المباشر البث‬.” n.d. ‫الرئيسية‬. Main channel, ‘live broadcast’ accessed November 9, 2019. https://www.alrayyan.tv/. 26 ‫شيالت يا مطوعين الصعايب‬. ‘Sheilat, mutawa’in al-Suaib (name of traditional song) YouTube, accessed November 13, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhFe8qJQ8ws. 27 “Katara 10th traditional Dhow festival.” Katara, accessed April 24, 2021. https://www. katara.net/en/whats-on/events/katara-10th-traditional--dhow-festival. 28 Prager, “Reshaping tribal identities in the contemporary Arab World,” 3. 25 

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culture and identity as a connection with the past. Khalaf (2002) and Cole (2003) point out that since the 1990s, There has been an increase in cultural activities where the Bedouin component figures prominently, such as camel and horse races (Khalaf 1999; Prager 2012); the staging of Bedouin marriage performances for a public audience (Khalaf 2002); museum exhibitions; or cultural radio programs featuring Bedouin topics.29

Bedouins themselves have taken part in articulating their identities through social media, writings, poems and more. This has allowed them to somehow be participants in the State-sponsored national identity and heritage project. As a result of this, “Bedouin identities are negotiated, acknowledged, contested and re-evaluated.”30 The emergent sense of Bedouin-ness is sometimes a genuine effort to provide a pluralistic perspective to the unwritten and not very well-known history of Bedouin tribes, but in other cases it involves an over- simplification of a more complicated history of the region and the country, respectively. In Qatar, such heritage and identity projects have become prominent over the last two decades. Identity projects, museums and heritage building have been part of the state project to promote a unique Qatari identity through discourses on Badu/hadhar.

The Qatari Brand; Tribalism and Identity in Qatar Tribalism is therefore present and prevalent in Qatar, as it is in rest of the Gulf States. However, the nature of tribalism has changed and evolved along with political events and changing social norms. Tribalism has received a lot of bad press from those who equate it to primeval forces and construct it as being opposed to modernity. The foundation of tribalism is social security and survival, which ultimately creates group solidarity. Group solidarity is at the heart of national identity as well as it is constructed upon feelings of belonging to a larger group and entity. It can therefore be the state’s ally in building a cohesive national identity. 29  30 

Cole, “Where have the Bedouin gone?,” 256. Ibid., 258.

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However, challenges arise when certain tribes are favoured over others and the non-tribal sectors of the society are encouraged to “perform” the tribe. This takes away the credibility and originality of the concept and history of tribal affiliations. Hadi Al Shawi and Andrew Gardner (2013) analysed the vitality of contemporary tribalism in Qatar and raised the question: Why does tribalism in Qatar persevere? Of course, the particular pastoral/nomadic mode of production that defined tribalism is no longer valid in the modern societies of the Gulf.31 Despite the fact that modern Qatari history and lifestyle is characterised by sedentarisation, tribalism and tribal identities (mainly of nomadic tribes) have been highlighted in State discourse of identity and history. Anthropological models of group identity based on tribes differ from the framework of national identity vis-à-vis citizenship. Indeed, these concepts are constructed be antithetical. However, perhaps we should ask ourselves if they really are that far apart. In other words, is the modern state of citizens just a large tribe? According to Ibn Khaldoun, hardship, shared moral order and strong leadership can enhance the bonds of tribal kinship. As noted above, Khaldoun argued that the bond of ‘Asabiyyah would be weakened by “removal of hardships and luxuries with a sedentary urban lifestyle.”32 The resurgence of tribalism in Qatar and other Gulf states appears to contradict this claim. In Qatar, the tribe has become a key tool to create a specific form of national identity, which is both inclusive and exclusive. It is a new form of tribalism, which does not fit into the previous categorisation and conceptualisation of the tribe. Tribalism implies prioritising kinship loyalties and favouring one’s own tribesmen.33 In modern states, tribal loyalties have shifted to the state. This implies a new form of tribalism, which is fully compatible with modernity and uses tribal history as a state-building mechanism. This new form of tribalism is reflected in Miriam Cooke’s book “Tribal Modern.” Cooke explains how the Gulf States have created their own unique “brand” to benchmark its own unique identity, one rooted in a tribal past but at the same time connected to modern reality. Richard Tapper, “Tribalism in Middle Eastern States: A twenty-first century anachronism?,” Middle East Centre (blog), July 11, 2018, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/07/11/ tribalism-in-middle-eastern-states-a-twenty-first-century-anachronism/. 32 Alshawi and Gardner, “Tribalism, identity and citizenship in contemporary Qatar,” 51. 33 Tapper, “Tribalism in Middle Eastern States.” 31 

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Cooke presents a more positive view of the concept of tribes which makes it more relevant to modern concepts of identity and state building processes. She quotes Huesken arguing that “it is necessary to get away from the understanding of tribes as some sort of a medieval form of social organization. Instead, we need to emphasise the process of innovation, inventiveness, vitality and persistence in our analysis of tribal political organization and politicians.”34 This new form of tribalism can be explained through “invented traditions” as explained by Eric Hobsbawm. The Gulf nations invent traditions not because “old ways are no longer available or viable, but because they are deliberately not used or adapted.”35 Qatar takes pride in the tribal past and history of unification, and it has created an “imagined” tribal past. This falls in the category of invented traditions. The emphasis on a shared imagined tribal past provides the regime with a symbolic “nationally legible cultural capital” with an emphasis on tribal purity.36 In Qatar, national identity is engineered through state-led development and social and cultural institutions delivered through national identity projects. The Qatar National Vision 2030 scheme articulates in its social pillar the goal of promoting a particular national identity: “Preserve Qatar’s national heritage and enhance Arab and Islamic values and identity.”37 The Qatar national vision 2030 has set guiding principles for a particular set of cultural values and tribal heritage preservation which is highlighted and carried through various institutions within the country. The prime example of such an institution is the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA).38 QMA views itself as an “instigator for the creation generation [with] an ambition that [it] will deliver together as a group of museums and heritage sites to help fulfil the cultural goals of the 2030 Qatar National Vision.”39 QMA heads various other museums within Qatar Miriam Cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley: California University Press, 2014). 35 Ibid., 68. 36 Ibid. 37 General Secretariat for Development Planning. “Qatar national vision 2030.” Government Communications Office, August 01, 2019, accessed April 24, 2021. https:// www.gco.gov.qa/en/about-qatar/national-vision2030/. 38 “Our Purpose.” Qatar Museums, accessed April 24, 2021. https://www.qm.org.qa/en/ our-purpose. 39 Ibid. 34 

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Figure 1:    The National Museum of Qatar. Source: Davide Mauro, Wikimedia Commons.

including the Orientalist Museum, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Qatar and more. Museums are crucial state institutions and play a key role in defining and marketing national identity along the lines of new tribalism. The National Museum of Qatar (Figure 1), designed by French architect Jean Nouvel,40 is called the “Desert Rose.” It reflects Qatar’s chosen narrative of Bedouin cultures and the re-construction of this culture in the modern narratives to remind the citizens of their glorious tribal past and showcase to the world the rich tribal heritage of the country. The few historical events chosen showcase a neat transition from a Bedouin ­lifestyle in the desert to a modern-day urban life. These constructions often use a reductionist approach to the life of Bedouin tribes, but they also highlight aspects of Bedouin life that are considered worthy of “National Museum of Qatar.” 2019. Ateliers Jean Nouvel, accessed November 11, 2019. http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/projects/musee-national-du-qatar/. 40 

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remembrance and commemoration. The Qatar National Museum, therefore, is both a tool and outcome of national identity creation and efforts to instil national consciousness in the citizens. The National Museum of Qatar41 has been designed to embody a combination of traditional/tribal and modern values, so is a prime example of the “Qatari brand.” The exhibitions and events hosted by the museum will provide an image of Qatar’s ancestors, its heritage and its past. The museum, it is claimed, will “give voice to Qatar’s heritage whilst celebrating its future.”42 Projects such as these showcase a carefully crafted and specifically designed heritage and strong sense of distinct national identity. The projection and selective re-imagination of Bedouin history may be useful for promoting a global understanding of Qatar’s history, but it may not be fully relevant to non-Bedouin groups or to Bedouins themselves who have a different history to that which is being presented by the state. Another event where the impact of tribalism can be clearly seen is the National Day celebrations. Qatar’s national day was officially changed from 3rd September to 18th December. 18th December marks the commemoration of Qatar’s unification in 1878 under Sheikh Jassim. “Qatar’s National Day is about honouring the heroes, leaders and people who built this country” it is claimed.43 The change of the national day denotes a focus on leaders, the past, and tribal unity. This event has become a true mark of national identity celebrated through a series of events in December, which often begin a week before 18th December. The entirety of the national day celebrations is designed to commemorate and invoke a strong sense of patriotism. The national day ­celebrations are centred on “Darb Al-Saai,” which means “Routes of the messenger.” This symbolises the men whom Sheikh Jassim bin Mohammed, the founder of Qatar, entrusted with his message and ­directions. The concept of Darb Al-Saai is to exhibit these traits and ­characteristics through conducting activities such as camel riding, horse riding, shooting, poetry reading and other activities that reflect “the Qatari

“The Heartbeat of our heritage.” The Museum, accessed April 24, 2021. https://nmoq. org.qa/the-museum. 42 Cooke, Tribal Modern, 81. 43 Dracula, “Qatar National Day: Why 18th December?” Qatar Living, September 25, 2014, accessed April 24, 2021. https://www.qatarliving.com/forum/qatari-culture/posts/ qatar-national-day-why-18th-december. 41 

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and local culture and national identity.”44 In addition to this, the national day previously encouraged the performance of the idea of tribal identity through highlighting tribal celebrations in form of ‘Ardah (tribal dance unique to each tribe). These separate tribal dance performances have been replaced by one unified performance by all tribes after the recent blockade against Qatar.45 Alshawi, who is a member of Al-Murrah tribe, one of the largest Bedouin tribes in Qatar, explains how the contemporary Qatari history is the “assemblage of tribes and tribal belonging in flux.”46 The term tribal mostly implies Bedouin tribes, despite the existence of large hadhar tribes and other non-tribal Qatari population originating either from Iran, Yemen or other countries in the region. However, increasingly the non-tribal population is performing the idea of tribe by following a certain pattern of created traditions and showcasing this on various occasions. This is usually done through “elections, National Day celebrations, and the social prerequisites by which access to the state and its resources is achieved: individuals are increasingly called upon to express and utilize the consanguineal linkages of tribe.”47 For example, families which were not organised as tribes historically and do not share a common lineage, descent and history have used their family names to perform the idea of tribe like any Bedouin/Sedentary tribe does. The well-known families of Al-Emadi and Al-Mulla48 are examples of some of the families of non-tribal backgrounds that are increasingly following the performance of tribe. In this case of these constructed tribal identities, the state employs the tribe as a conceptual tool to create and promote a certain version of national identity which abides by a shared set of values and created t­raditions, some borrowed from the past and some re-invented as ­tribal-modern culture. In this sense, the state is tribalising the nation. This is done through promoting Dracula. “Qatar National Day: Why 18th December?” “One-year blockade against Qatar: Revisiting the identity in Qatar between tribal and national,” Through Nawal’s Eye, October 26, 2018, accessed April 24, 2021. https:// nawalaqeel.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/one-year-blockade-against-qatar-revisitingthe-identity-in-qatar-between-tribal-and-national/. 46 Alshawi and Gardner, “Tribalism, identity and citizenship in contemporary Qatar,” 54. 47 Ibid. 48 “‫ “ مجلس الخالقي‬.‫أصول العوائل القطرية‏‏‬. Creative Council “Qatari Family Origins”, accessed November 14, 2019. http://www.al-khulaqi.com/threads/10686/#.XcxT7OczbOQ. 44  45 

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the performance of tribalism via certain characteristics, including that of last names, tribal dances (Ardah), political and economic power, language and dress codes. Interestingly, despite the fact the Hadhar tribes are also tribes of significant power and certain distinct traditions, what is increasingly considered to be tribal are related to Bedouin tribal characteristics and symbols.

The Blockade, Social Media and Evolution of the “Tribe” Peterson claims that tribal politics is constantly changing and the formation of new tribes in modern times is possible. He gives the example of the Balush tribe, which originates from Balushistan in Iran and Pakistan, many members of which migrated to Oman, Qatar, and other Gulf states forming a tribal unit like their Arab neighbours.49 Similarly, change can occur within a tribe; under the leadership of a Shaykh, the internal dynamics of the tribe may strengthen or weaken and the size of dirah (range) may expand. However, recent developments in Qatar indicate that the tribe has not only changed, but also evolved under the influence of the modern state. Although the cultural, historical and social aspects of the tribe are celebrated, the strong leadership of the shaykh has been placed under greater scrutiny, subject to state control. The authority of a tribal leader at times can conflict with the authority of the state head, the Emir. This has been dealt with by the individual states through the creation of an exclusive national identity which is rooted in tribal identity but goes beyond the realm of the tribe, by creating a bigger and unified tribe: The State. This development could be observed during the period in which Qatar was blockaded by the neighbouring states of UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain after June 2016. The blockade demanded Qatar change its foreign policy outlook and meet the conditions set by the blockading countries. At the beginning of the Gulf Crisis, a military intervention in Qatar appeared possible. As the blockading countries failed to achieve their initial motives, they tried to use tribal affiliations of the cross-border tribes in the region J. E. Peterson, “Tribes and politics in Eastern Arabia,” Middle East Journal 31, no. 3 (1977): 197. 49 

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to stir rebellion. This was evident in the case of the Al-Murrah tribe, which originates from Saudi Arabia but includes clans such as Al Athba which are indigenous to Qatar. The Shaykh Al-Qabila (head of tribe), who resides in Saudi Arabia, asked the tribesmen of the tribe to support King Salman, rather than the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim. In response, breaking with historical tradition, the Al Murrah announced their allegiance to Sheikh Tamim,50 declaring their loyalties to the state rather than to the head of tribe. This would appear to suggest that the State has replaced the Tribe as the primary social and political organisation; the new tribe is the State. This was neatly reflected in the use of the Twitter hashtag #‫( قبيلتناـقطر‬Our Tribe is Qatar). One of the oldest and strongest tribes in the region had, for the first time, displayed a new sense of solidarity, replacing older forms of leadership with a new national version of leadership. The evolution of the “tribe” was obvious. It is also to be noted that during the blockade, in order to show solidarity to the Qatari state and unity of the citizens, everybody changed their last names on Twitter to (‫)القطري‬. This demonstrated a new sense of national identity replacing the older version of identity based on tribal affiliation and last names. The blockade thus highlighted the importance of social media in the present world and how it can challenge historical and traditional narratives on culture, history, identity, and politics. Twitter was used for various purposes, amongst which were the use of personal accounts and tweets to participate in the re-negotiation of tribal identity in relation with the State. The Saudi channel Al Arabiya launched a documentary about the Al-Marri tribe,51 focussing on the origin of the tribe from Saudi Arabia; this appeared to be an attempt to use the tribe as an antagonising factor against Qatar. One of the most prominent Twitter and social media figures in Qatar during the blockade was Abdullah Al-Marri,52 who is a writer and editor for Al Arab newspaper. He was attacked on Twitter for not being a real “Al Murra tribe renews loyalty to Emir.” June 2017. The Peninsula Qatar, accessed November 11, 2019. https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/18/06/2017/Al-Murra-triberenews-loyalty-to-Emir. 51 ‫وثائقي خاص عن آل مرة تبثه العربية‬. AlArabiya, accessed November 13, 2019. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9qTOrUxcYkM. 52 Account ‫عبدالله بن حمد العذبة‬Verified. “‫@( عبدالله بن حمد العذبة‬A_AlAthbah).” Twitter. Twitter, June 26, 2017. https://twitter.com/A_AlAthbah. 50 

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“Al-Marri” due to his support for the Qatari leadership rather than to his tribal affiliation in Saudi Arabia. Abdullah offered an alternative perspective of his identity as being Al-Marri but belonging to Qatar. Thus, from his perspective, his national identity could not be separated from his tribal identity. He used a combination of assertive statements, historical narrative, and national ideology along with humour to defy the attacks on his identity and the efforts to use cross boundary tribal ties to stir rebellion in Qatar. Another prominent figure who rose to prominence during the Gulf Crisis is Dr. Nayef bin Nahar.53 As an academic, he used both his personal identity and academic position as well as social media and mainstream media platforms to engage in a debate on the relationship between tribe and national identity.54 According to these debates and discussions, a new discourse on identity has emerged, one that does not view tribe as central to national identity, but rather as a more personal form of identity. Through this brief analysis of these trends, one can conclude that the concept of “Tribe” and “Tribal Identity” has evolved in Qatar; it has become a source of identity but not a way of life. It has been used as a tool by the states in the Gulf to create national consciousness, unite people, strengthen legitimacy, and promote a certain version of national identity.

Conclusion Tribe at its core represents the concept of group loyalty and solidarity. However, with the development of modern states and centralised state systems, the political elite has engaged in constructing national collectivities. This is partly because the challenges posed by the modern world, whether political, social or economic, cannot be solved through individual tribal structures. As the world becomes more inter-connected and political systems become more complex, it becomes necessary for tribes to coalesce into a single nation. However, transforming tribes with separate identities into one nation is a complicated task. The Gulf States have used tribal identity as a branding strategy for their new national identities; this multi-layered identity incorporates and Account ‫ نايف بن نهار‬.‫د‬Verified. “‫ نايف بن نهار‬.‫@( د‬binnahar85).” Twitter. Twitter, July 15, 2017. https://twitter.com/binnahar85. 54 “‫برامج حوارية — القبلية في الخليج العربي والتوظيف السياسي‬.” YouTube, October 06, 2017, accessed April 25, 2021. https://youtu.be/AhbWFXFq6Uw. 53 

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performs the idea of tribe even within the largely non-tribal populations. The recent events surrounding the blockade in Qatar have revealed how tribe can be used as a political tool. Tribe can be used as a tool in creating national identity, as seen in Qatar during the Gulf blockade. A tribe is a living, changing and evolving political entity. In Qatar the tribe has become a framework around which several elements of the society are structured and marketed to the world as uniquely local. The culture of subnational groups such as the tribe, therefore, can both inform modern national identity in the Gulf, whilst also presenting a threat to the larger collective identity. Alternatively, the attempt to homogenise tribal identities can present a threat to the very concept of tribe and its unique identity. The challenge for modern Gulf States, therefore, is to find a way of ­balancing the unity of the state with the preservation of unique tribal identities.

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Index

A Abascal, Santiago, 50 Abe, Shinzo, 131, 133, 136–143, 145, 147, 149 accelerationist wing, 55 Acharya, Amitav, 146 Alain de Benoist, 55 Al-Emadi, 229 Alemseged, Abbay, 164 Al-Marri, Abdullah, 231–232 Al-Mulla, 229 Al Naqeeb, Khaldoun, 219 Al-Rayyan, 223 Alshawi, AH, 229 Al Shawi, Hadi, 225 Alt-Right, 16 Amhara, 164, 168, 171 Amharanisnation, 164 Anderson, Benedict, 25, 93, 155 Anglophone nationalism, 196, 202, 205–206, 208–209 Anglophone secessionism, 195–196, 198–199, 201, 205

Anglophone secessionist discourses, 197, 202–203, 206 anti-Thaksin movement, 104 Apirat Kongsompong, 100 Arab Gulf States, 213–214 Aso, Taro, 136 Autumn 2017, 111, 127 Ayubi, Nazih, 216 B Babones, Salvatore, 6 badu/hadhar, 214 Baker, Chris, 95, 104 Bannon, Steve, 5, 30–31, 58 Barrès, Maurice, 52–53, 55–56, 64 Bedouin identity, 221–224, 227–230 Beta Israel community, 153–154, 163, 168 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 74–75, 80–81, 84 bin Nahar, Nayef (Dr.), 232 birth-culture, 5, 53, 56, 59, 62 Bismarckian nationalism, 52 235

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236  Global Nationalism

Bismark, 64 Bonaparte, Charles-Louis Napoléon, 64 Bonapartisme, 107 Borrell, Josep, 124 boundary problem, 119–120, 128 Bourbonic Reforms, 112 Brexit, 4, 16, 18, 24, 51, 57, 60–61 Brezhnev, Leonid, 177 British colonisation, 205 British Conservative, 63 British Empire, 41, 74, 200 British India, 74, 88 British Raj, 71–72 Brubaker, Rogers, 6, 155–156, 159 C Calhoun, Craig, 157 Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium (CACSC), 206 Cameroon common law, 200 Cameroonian Anglophone postcolonial nationalism, 202 Carta Magna, 116 Casa Pound, 61 Catalan nationalism, 116–119, 127–128 Catalan secessionist movement, 122 Centralist Francophone, 198 Century of Humiliation, 142 Chacko, Priya, 31 Chambers, Paul, 100 Chamlong, Srimuang, 99 Chatterjee, Partha, 41 Chinese Communist Revolution, 149 Chrysoloras, Nikos, 18–19 Chulalongkorn (King Rama V), 101 civic nationalism, 109–110, 112–113, 117, 125–126, 128–129 civilisationalism, 6 civil war, 126

b4463-Index.indd 236

classical assimilation theory, 161 classical nationalism, 92 classical social contract theory, 195 Cold War, 135, 145, 174 Cole, Donald P., 216, 219 collective consciousness, 20 collective identity, 233 collective jouissance, 8 commercial nationalism, 27–28 Communist Party, 189 consent of the governed, 201 conservative nationalism, 69–70, 73, 77 Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ), 140 contemporary global politics, 69 contemporary Japanese nationalism, 137 contemporary populist politics, 6 Cooke, Miriam, 225–226 Crane George, 32, 37 Cross, Tim, 18 cultural belonging, 55 cultural hegemony, 166 cultural homogeneity, 9, 13, 208 cultural homogenisation, 164 cultural identity, 157 cultural ideology, 221 cultural nationalism, 29, 51 D Dalle Mulle, Emmanuel, 122 Datsu-A Ron, 134 Desai, Radhika, 29–30 developmental nationalism, 27, 29 discourse analysis, 109, 111 downward assimilation, 162 Drolet, Jean-François, 5 E Easton, David, 198, 201, 211 Eberle, Jakub, 15

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Index  237

economic nationalism, 27, 30–32 Edo Period, 134 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 51, 58 ETA, 114, 126 ethic identities, 157 Ethiopian national, 164 Ethiopian nationalism, 164–165, 170 ethnic group discourse, 160 ethnic identities, 157, 162, 164 ethnic identity, 203 ethnic nationalism, 129 European ethnonationalist traditions, 88 European fascism, 4 European space agency, 174, 180, 183 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 217 F fake news, 60 fantasy, 3, 8, 13–21 Farage, Nigel, 16, 57, 60 Far Right, 61–62 Fascism, 54 Fascist Italy, 192 Fascist Man, 54 Fascist nationalism, 50, 53–54 Federalist Anglophone, 198 Ferdinand II of Aragon, 112 Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram, 98 Fink, Bruce, 11 First Sino-Japanese War, 142, 149 Forza Nuova, 61 Foster, Robert, 28 Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA), 71–72 Franco, Francisco, 53, 112, 116 Francoist era, 122 Francophonised, 203 Fratelli d’Italia, 50, 61

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French assimilationist policies, 203 Freud’s Group Psychology, 12 Freud, Sigmund, 11 Future Forward Party, 106 G Gagarin, Yuri, 179, 182, 184, 189 Ganbare Nippon, 137 Gandhi, Indira, 74 Gardner, Andrew, 225 Gebrewold, Belachew, 164 Gellner, Ernest, 9–10, 21, 25, 27, 155, 171 general will, 201 generation identity, 50, 56, 61 genocide, 3 geopolitics, 53 Gilpin, Robert, 30 global economic order, 43 global political economy, 25 globalisation, 23, 24, 47, 49, 120 globalism, 58 globalist, 63 Gove, Michael, 60 Greenfeld, Liah, 93 Gulf blockade, 233 Gulf States, 215, 218–221, 223, 232 Gulf War, 135 H hadhar, 221–222 Hechter, Michael, 25, 27 hegemonic culture, 167 hegemony, 216 Herzl, Theodor, 165 Hindutva ideology, 81 Hindutva nationalism, 73, 88 Hitler, Adolf, 53, 97 Hobsbawm, Eric, 226 homogeneous community, 15 Hughes, Christopher, 136, 139 Hunter, Emma, 45

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238  Global Nationalism

I identitarianism, 5 identity crisis, 131, 133–135 identity discourses, 214 identity politics, 77, 170, 192 imperial universalism, 57 individualism, 216 industrialisation, 10, 120 Interim Government of Ambazonia, 206 International Space Station (ISS), 174 intra-nation economic inequality, 42 invented traditions, 226 Iron Curtain, 178 Isabella I of Castile, 112 Ishihara, Shintaro, 149 Israeli nationalism, 165 International Space Station (ISS), 180–181, 189 Izquierda Unida, 115 J Japanese nationalism, 131–134, 141, 146, 150 Japan’s contemporary nationalism, 133 jouissance, 3, 17–20, 22 K Kaplan, Steven B., 166 Kemal, Mustafa, 53 Khaldoun, Ibn, 218, 225 Khana Ratsadon (People’s Party), 96 Khan, Imran, 69, 71–72, 74–76, 79, 82, 87–88 Khittasangkha, Plaek (better known as Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram), 97 Kim Jong-un, 138, 149 King Salman, 231

b4463-Index.indd 238

King Tewodros II, 171 Kishi, Nobusuke, 145 KKK, 61 Koizumi, Junichiro, 133, 136, 141, 148 Kojève, Alexandre, 24 Kolmas, Michal, 137 Komarov, Vladimir M., 177 Kongkirati, Prajak, 103 Korea Liberty Party, 149 Kpessa, Michael, 44 Kraprayoon, Suchinda, 99 kwampenthai, 92, 94 Kwok Kian-Woon, 34 L Lacanian psychoanalysis, 21 Lacanian split subjectivity, 15 Lacan, JAcques, 11 Laing, Ronald David, 156 language, 11 Laothamatas, Anek, 103 League of Nations, 200 Leave, 16, 57 Leave.EU, 61 Lee Hsien Loong, 35, 37–38, 40, 42 Lee Kuan Yew, 33–35 Lega, 61, 63 Le Pen, Marine, 5, 50–51, 61, 64 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 131, 135–136, 139–141, 150 liberal internationalism, 57–58, 61–62 liberal modernity, 57, 64 liberalism, 51, 57–59, 61, 64–65 libtards, 60 Longva, Anh Nga, 219, 221 l’uomo fascista, 54 M Malesevic, Sinisa, 156 Mariam, Ali, 34

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Index  239

masculinity, 176, 183, 185, 187–188, 191–192 material nationalism, 24–25, 37, 43 Maurras, Charles, 53, 64 Mayall, James, 46 McGregor, Richard, 142 Meiji Restoration, 134 Middle Eastern Tribes, 216 Min Zhou, 161 mobilisation theory, 196 modern Gulf States, 233 modern national identity construction, 222 Modi, Narendra, 31, 58, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 77, 79, 81, 84–85, 88 Moon Jae-in, 149 Moore, Margaret, 155, 158 Motegi, Toshimitsu, 145 Motyl, Vladimir, 179 multi-racialism, 42 Mussolini, Benito, 53–54, 97

nation-building politics, 23, 35, 207, 221 nation-building process, 201, 205–206, 211 nationhood, 23–27, 29–31, 33–35, 38–39, 41, 43–44, 118, 158, 164, 173, 182, 192 nation/state, 7–10, 12–15, 17, 20–21, 26 nation/state subjectivity, 13 Nazi Germany, 16 Nehruvian Secularism, 73 neoliberal economics, 49 new Nationalism, 62 new Nationalist movements, 60 New Right, 5, 31, 49–51, 53, 56–65, 144 New Soviet Man, 185 new tribalism, 227 Nippon Kaigi, 137 Nisar, Saqib, 76 Nyerere, Julius, 45

N Nairn, Tom, 25, 27 NASA, 174, 180–181, 183 Nathan Jua, 203 nation/state, 33 national culture, 61, 166 National Democratic Alliance (NDA), 84 national discourse, 160 national identity, 155, 158, 160, 162–163, 224–226, 228–230, 232–233 national identity construction, 214, 223 national identity creation, 221 national ideology, 232 national-populism, 6, 15 national security, 134 national sovereignty, 115, 121–123 national subjectivity, 14, 19

O objective resolution, 81 Offer, Shira, 168 Onorato, Rina S., 161 ontology, 3, 4, 7–9, 11–13, 17, 21 Orbán, Viktor Mihály, 50–51, 58 othering, 20, 120, 128, 143, 186 otherness, 173, 175 Our Tribe is Qatar, 231

b4463-Index.indd 239

P Pakistani civil war, 85 Panama files, 76 Panama papers, 75 Pavin Chachavalpongpun, 94 Pelagius of Asturias, 112 People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), 103–106 People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), 105

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240  Global Nationalism

People’s Republic of China (PRC), 141 pessimism, 64 Peterson, J. E., 219–220, 230 Peterson, Rosemarie, 219 Philip V of Spain, 112 Phongpaichit, Pasuk, 104 Piet Könings, 203 Podemos, 115 political community, 83 political legitimacy, 9, 91–93, 103, 105 political tribalism, 214, 219 popular party, 114 popular sovereignty, 93, 95, 201 Portes, Alejandro, 161 post-Cold War, 24 postcolonial government, 208 postcolonial nationalism, 196–198, 201, 203–205, 210–211 postcolonial nation-building policy, 195, 197, 210 postcolonial state, 195, 197–198, 200, 204, 206, 210 post-cultural nationhood, 23 post-nationalism, 47 post-Soviet identity politics, 191 post-war, 26, 29 Prager, Cole, 221 Prager, Laila, 221 Prayut Chan-o-cha, 100–101 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 54, 116 Procés, 111, 114, 117 Puigdemont, Carles, 117, 124–125 Putin, Vladimir, 51, 58, 63, 137, 147, 149, 175, 189–190 Q Qatari identity, 224 Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), 226 Qatar National Vision 2030 scheme, 226 Queen Yodit Gudit, 170

b4463-Index.indd 240

R Rajoy, Mariano, 121–123 ratthaniyom, 97–98 reactionary internationalism, 57, 59 re-design, 201 Red Shirt, 103–106 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 50 religious communalism, 73 Renan, Ernest, 154 Republican, 63 Republic of Cameroon, 196, 199 Republic of China (ROC), 149 Rivera, Albert, 123 Rogozin, Dmitry, 174 Rose, Caroline, 132 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 165 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 201 royalist nationalism, 91 Russian collective memory, 180 Russian contemporary nationalism, 191 Russian federal space agency, 181 Russian Federation, 187–190, 193 Russian nationalism, 173, 186 Ryumin, Valeri, 181 S Sakurai, Makoto, 148 Salvini, Matteo, 50, 57–58, 60–61, 64 Saouli, Adham, 216 Sarit Thanarat, 98, 100 Schmitt, Carl, 69–71, 73–74, 77–78, 82–83, 87–88 secessionism, 197, 201, 210–211 secessionist movement, 124 Second World War, 132, 134, 136, 138, 143 segmented assimilation theory, 161 selective acculturation, 162 self-categorisation theory, 161 Self-Defence Force, 135 SG50, 34–36, 38, 40, 42

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Index  241

Sharif, Nawaz, 76 Sheikh Jassim bin Mohammed, 228 Singapore Armed Forces Recreation Association (SAFRA), 38 Sinpeng, Aim, 104 Smith, Anthony D., 25, 37, 93 Smith, Paul J., 132 social identity theory, 153, 160–161, 163 social justice warriors (SJWs), 60 social legitimacy, 201 Southern Cameroons National Council (SCNC), 196, 206 sovereign community, 75, 110, 115, 119–121, 125, 127–128, 208 sovereign legitimacy, 17 sovereignty, 13, 17, 69–70, 72–73, 87–88, 118, 121, 208 Soviet heritage, 175, 179, 184, 191 Soviet human space program, 177 Soviet propaganda, 178, 179 Spanish nationalism, 110, 112–115, 117–119, 126–128 Stalinist USSR, 16 Stalin, Joseph, 154, 178 state building, 226 statehood, 34 Stavrakakis, Yanni, 12, 18–19 Steffak, Jens, 51 Strauss, Leo, 24 Suga, Yoshihide, 137, 139 Suzuki, Shogo, 132, 141 Symbolic Order, 13 T Tajfel, Henri, 160 Tanaka, Hiroshi, 148 Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), 87 Tereshkova, Valentina, 190–191 Thai nationalism, 94–95, 98–99, 107 Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT), 102 Thaksin Shinawatra, 102–104

b4463-Index.indd 241

The Other, 20 Therborn, Göran, 139 Tigrayan, 168 tribal identity, 223, 229, 232 tribalism, 213–217, 224–226, 228, 230 tribal politics, 230 tribe, 213–221, 231–233 Trump, Donald, 4, 24, 50–51, 60–61, 64, 133, 135, 144–145, 193 Tsai Ing-wen, 149 Turner, John C., 161 U ujamaa, 45 UKIP, 16, 61 unconsciousness, 11 United Russia Party, 63 Unno, Anusorn, 105 URSS, 187 USfr1, 145 US-Japanese alliance, 145 USSR, 173–175, 178–179, 188 V Velayutham, Selvaraj, 43 Verhaeghe, Paul, 11 von Bismarck, Otto, 52 Vote Leave, 16, 61 Vox, 57, 110 W Waitoolkiat, Napisa, 100 War of Succession, 116 War of the Spanish Succession, 112 War on Terror, 135 Weber, Max, 154 white guilt, 60 Wichit Wathakan, Luang, 97 Williams, Michael C., 5 World Zionist Organisation (WZO), 165 WWII, 5

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242  Global Nationalism

X xenophobia, 3 Xi Jinping, 58, 63–64, 84, 149 Y yellow shirt, 103–105 Yingluck Shinawatra, 105

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Yoshida Doctrine, 134–135, 140 Yoshida, Shigeru, 134 Yoshiyuki, Suzuki, 148 Young, Crawford, 44 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 12, 18

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