Nationalism: A Short History 0815737025, 9780815737025

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LIAH GREENFELD

N A T I O N A L I S M A Short History

NATI O NA LI S M

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M S I L A N O I A Short History T NA

 

LIAH GREENFELD

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS

Washington, D.C.

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Copyright © 2019 the brookings institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 www.brookings.edu All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press. The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and publication on important issues of domestic and foreign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring the highest quality independent research and analysis to bear on current and emerging policy problems. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Greenfeld, Liah, author. Title: Nationalism / Liah Greenfeld. Description: Washington, D.C. : Brookings Institution Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019001456 (print) | LCCN 2019006375 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815737025 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815737018 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815737025 (ebk.) Subjects: LCSH: Nationalism—History. Classification: LCC JC311 (ebook) | LCC JC311 .G7148 2019 (print) | DDC 320.5409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001456 987654321 Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Composition by Elliott Beard

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BEFORE EQUALITY

1

ONE

E M E R G E N C E O F N AT I O N A L I S M

13

Sixteenth-century En­gland—Wars of the Roses—why nationalism—dignity—democracy—Protestant Reformation—the Bible—competitiveness imported with the idea of the nation—capitalism—science T WO

THE LAUNCHING SITE

33

Eighteenth-century France—ressentiment— Enlightenment—revolution—political spectrum: left and right THREE

SPREADING

57

The United States—Russia—the three types

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Contents

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FOUR

T H E G R E AT T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

85

Types of democracy—the rise of ideology—the many names of nationalism—German influence— Romantic social philosophy—totalitarianism and racism—the Jewish question—nationalism between left and right in the twentieth century FIVE

G L O B A L I Z AT I O N O F N AT I O N A L I S M



115

AND THE RISE OF ASIA

Civilization—crossing civilizational boundaries—Japan, China, and India CONCLUSION 131 NOTES 135 INDEX 143

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INTRODUCTION

BEFORE EQUALITY

In a relatively stable society that has not experienced a war or a violent regime transformation in more than a hundred years, such as the United States of America, it is difficult to imagine that the world could be different from the way it is today. It is difficult to imagine that it could be fundamentally different, even in societies that have lived through wars and violent regime transformations within living memory of some of its members. But history teaches us that the world of human experience—­our reality—­can be, not that long ago was, and in some contemporary societies still is fundamentally different from the one in which most of the readers of this book may be presumed to live. “Fundamental difference,” in this context, is the difference at the core of the existential experience—­in the things for which people strive and which make them suffer, in the essence of their values and perceptions of good and evil. It is sobering to contemplate that the great majority of societies in human history existed for relatively short periods, not more than 1

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a few dozens of generations (if we regard a generation as twenty-­five years). Some of these short-­lived societies disappeared without a trace, or with only archaeological evidence of their existence. Some were great powers in their day—­think of the Athens city-­state, or of the Assyrian, Babylonian, or Persian empires—­that left obvious traces, and were survived by cognate populations. But only three populations preserved their cultural integrity—­their identity and core values—­in the intervening 2,500 years: the Chinese, the Indians, and the Jews. Contemporary Athenians may be biological descendants of those who lived in the city in the fifth century BCE, but they are activated by completely different motives, espouse beliefs that have nothing in common with those of their ancestors, and experience life in ways that these ancestors would not possibly understand. One does not have to go back millennia to see that societies and their fundamental values rise and fall, and often fall soon after rising. Think about modern history: the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over the Arab Middle East and parts of southern Europe between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries, is no more. Only Turkey preserves its memory, but the values of Turkey and the existential experiences of its citizens are not those of Ottoman society. The equally great and powerful Austro-­Hungarian Empire, which existed for barely a century and disintegrated at the same time as its Ottoman neighbor, is hardly remembered at all. And what about the Soviet Union? Could anyone have predicted that it would last only seventy years? It was the subject of a special academic discipline: a prominent university could no more do without Sovietology than without biology or geology—­like the globe or life, the Soviet Union was considered eternal. Yet oh, how the mighty have fallen! Such social short-­sightedness is natural, and on the whole salubrious. It would be distressing to constantly keep in mind a “memento mori” for one’s own society that frames one’s life. It is the

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Before Equality

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anchor for all of our aspirations for ourselves and our children, our everyday plans, our work and leisure activities—­and if it disintegrates, all these disintegrate with it. Yet this short-­sightedness prevents us from realizing that our world is just one among many possible, and possibly existing, worlds. There is nothing natural in the values that define it; ultimately, these values—­what we value, what we consider good and just—­are a historical accident, shaped by choices that our society made at some point in its formation. The United States of America is a young society: there have been barely ten generations of Americans. But for a human individual, 242 years is a very long time. We believe our society must endure forever, and think nothing of endangering it. We consider the most trivial details of the American way of life, such as moving one’s head up and down to signify “yes” and side to side to signify “no,” to be natural, simply human. We might be amused to learn that it is equally possible to nod our heads for “no” and shake them for “yes”—­as, for instance, is customary in Bulgaria. And when it comes to our core ideals of equality and respect owed to every human being, a mere suggestion that these ideals may be denied arouses our wrath. We firmly believe that the purpose of humanity is to realize these ideals, we measure other societies by how well their institutions accord with these ideals, and we constantly demand of our own institutions a more perfect accordance with them, never satisfied with the current state of affairs. But in 1776, the declaration that “all men are created equal” was revolutionary; it would have appeared absurd, preposterous to the vast majority of people then alive. Even today, the reason why three billion people in Southeast Asia do not find this declaration strange is only because it has become a cultural trope, thanks to a world hegemony of Western nations that has lasted for a quarter of a millennium. A cultural trope, however, is not a value or even a belief: it is simply a statement that has been repeated without question so often that it arouses no reaction whatsoever.

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It does not require much effort to prove how little equality mattered, even in the West, where it is a core value today. Certainly, neither Plato nor Aristotle—­the putative founders of Western political philosophy, who indeed articulated the values of Athens, the nominal birthplace of democracy—­considered equality an ideal. In general, they had a low opinion of it. For Plato, the ideal city was the aristocratic republic, governed by men who were naturally superior to those they ruled, and therefore based on insurmountable inequality. The closer to equality a polity moved, the closer it came to tyranny—­indeed, only one step separated democracy and tyranny.1 Aristotle thought that equality was justice among those who belonged to the same category with respect to a certain quality—­ most important, perhaps, the capacity to rule over others—­and that inequality was justice among those who belonged to different categories. There was no presupposition that “all men are created equal.” On the contrary, society was fundamentally inegalitarian, as people naturally differed in their capacities. There were natural slaves and natural masters, for instance, and the sexes naturally differed in their leadership abilities and intelligence. In Aristotle’s just society, only people within specific subcategories would be treated equally: women like other women, but not like men; slaves like other slaves, but not like the freeborn; barbarians like other barbarians, but not like fluent speakers of Greek, and so on.2 Aristotle had a better opinion of democracy than Plato did. He placed it below aristocracy, which was an ideal less consistent with justice than monarchy, but nevertheless he considered it to be the least evil of the commonly observable political regimes, much preferable to tyranny and even oligarchy. But it clearly was not the greater equality of the Athenian regime that made him prefer it to these latter. Aristotle felt no need to discuss to any extent the fact that the demos, or the citizenry in Athens, was limited to native-­born free males, or to examine the marked inequality of rights and opportunity between Athenian citizens and immigrants such as himself. Being allowed

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Before Equality

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to move to Athens evidently was a privilege in itself, even if it came with economic and political restrictions. Immigrants and citizens belonged to different categories, and the inequality between these categories was perfectly just. The less philosophical Romans also did not think that inequality was in any way opposed to justice. Like the Athenians, they also drew a sharp distinction between Roman citizens—­the people of Rome—­and the communities of foreigners who came to Rome in search of a better life. It was possible but difficult for foreigners to acquire Roman citizenship. In general, communities of foreigners were treated with explicit contempt. To say that they were seen as second-­class citizens would give a wrong idea of the attitude toward them because they were not citizens at all; rather, they were regarded as subhuman. There was no question of anything approximating equality between them and the dignified populus Romanus. A common derogatory term for these communities of foreigners, which were not part of the Roman people even though they resided in the midst of the Roman people, was “litter,” as in the product of animal breeding. Remarkably, the Latin word for litter was natio—­“nation.” It is true that the ideal of equality, much as we understand it today, appears in the Hebrew Bible, a century before Plato. But so long as it existed in Hebrew alone, it affected only the practices of a small desert-­dwelling community. The Hebrew Bible would not be widely read until the sixteenth century CE, when translated into En­glish. In the fifteen centuries after Christianity adopted it, the text was open only to the few men learned in the classical tongues, and in many ways the circumstances in which Christianity developed—­in particular, its association with the political interests of imperial Rome—­modified its influence. The great empire spread the message of Christianity by fire and sword, and zealously preserved all the inequalities inherent in its social constitution. When Islam, the third monotheistic religion, emerged in the seventh cen-

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tury CE, it was tied to a grand project of conquest and also spread inequality as its fundamental social principle. To the ancient implementations of the principle of inequality—­ believed in all its expressions to reflect the will of the Creator—­ Christian and Muslim societies added a notable new one: the inequality of religious communities. Pagan communities were not allowed to exist, their members converted to the ruling monotheistic creed and their beliefs were suppressed, but the earlier monotheistic faiths—­Judaism in Christian societies, and both Judaism and Christianity in Muslim ones—­generally were tolerated. When we characterize a society as tolerant today, we use the term approvingly: tolerance, religious and cultural, is considered a virtue. But as Jewish communities in particular learned from their long and sad experience, to be tolerated is precarious, and toleration has nothing in common with equality. Toleration connoted fundamental inequality of the tolerated communities with the community of the dominant religion. The religious minority existed on the sufferance of the latter; the tolerated status could be revoked at any moment, was purchased with exorbitant special taxes, and constantly had to be nurtured by additional “voluntary” donations and services levied on the community and ready agreement to unceasing demands for irregular contributions, no matter how hurtful. Complete reversals of the policy of toleration—­such as in “the most Catholic” Spanish kingdom at the end of the fifteenth century, where Jews were ordered to convert immediately or be expelled and dispossessed—­were rare. But in virtually every Christian society with a Jewish community, including many in which the Jewish presence predated the Christian one, toleration was interrupted periodically by wholesale robbery at the hands of the rulers and outbursts of mass violence that the rulers often regarded as natural and excusable—­even if they did not encourage and participate in it outright. In comparison, the toleration policies of the Ottoman Empire,

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Before Equality

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also based on the fundamental inequality of the Muslim and the two other monotheistic communities, were positively magnanimous. Although the protected (dhimmi) populations of Christians and Jews naturally were considered inferior, subjected to special taxation, prevented from holding important public office, and paid for the offices they could hold at a lower rate than Muslims, otherwise they were left alone. To the extent that the concept of citizenship applied to the regime, non-­Muslims were indeed second-­class citizens, but they did not live in constant dread on that account,3 as did Jewish communities in Christian Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Inequality thus could be more or less benign, but it was the ruling organizational principle of virtually every known society. Embodied in the social institutions—­the ways of thinking and acting4 —­that perpetuated it across all spheres of life, it was self-­ evident. The two great traditions that made up the monotheistic world, Christianity and Islam, held it up as the will of God, and this attribution to the divine intelligence made it by definition unquestionable. In Western Christendom, on which our subject requires us to focus, the will of God expressed itself in the structure of the society of orders. The community of the faithful (which did not include its resident Jews) was divided into three hierarchically arranged orders of humanity. At the top was the small (2–5 percent of the whole) military order of the nobility—­bellatores, whose function was to defend the community. Below it was the priestly order—­the clergy, oratores, who mediated between the community and God. The lowest and by far most numerous order was that of the people—­the commons, the laboring masses, laboratores—­ whose task was to provide for themselves and the two upper orders. These orders were connected by their faith, but otherwise their identities were separate. The orders of the nobility and the people differed as species of life differ; they were mutually exclusive. It was no more possible to move from one to another than to be born

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a chicken and grow up to be a horse, or the other way around. In fact, it was firmly believed that these orders of humanity differed in their physical nature. Their blood was different—­red among the people, blue among the nobility. Evidence to the contrary did not count for much. The order of the clergy was open to both the nobility and the people: it drew members of the upper clergy from the former and members of the lower clergy from the latter. It was possible, in principle, for a humble village priest to become a prince of the church. But members of this seemingly connecting order were celibate. It did not reproduce itself physically and did not send new members back to the nobility and the people. In effect, therefore, the society of orders allowed no social mobility; unlike in societies such as ours, its members were not interchangeable. Members of the nobility, on the one hand, and of the people on the other, were fundamentally equal within their own orders. Though there were gradations within the nobility, ­a prince, for example, was merely first among equals, primus inter pares, a­ nd it was possible for one of its members to reach a higher grade, most often through marriage or royal gift. Otherwise a paradigmatic medieval kingdom, France was a notable exception to the rule of equality among the nobility. From early on, its royal lineage was a separate order. Royal princes were fundamentally unequal to the rest of the nobility, as the French royal house differed from the rest of the nobility qualitatively, by the nature of its blood, which was believed to be translucent. This quality was testament to the French royal family’s special calling, its election by God; this belief, which later spread throughout Western Europe, was at the root of the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Within the people, by contrast, stratification was mostly horizontal: there was little sense in the mobility across its numerous suborders. But their essential equality was obscured by the dissimilarity of privileges and habits, and they generally kept to themselves. Moreover, even the fundamental equality within orders was not complete, because

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Before Equality

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women in each were subordinate to men and vastly inferior in their rights. Yet it goes without saying that women of the nobility were as superior to women of the people as was true of their male counterparts. No greater common identity or feeling of sisterhood could be presumed among them than among them and females of another animal species. The inequality between the nobility and the people in effect paralleled that between humans and domestic animals. It generally was not a matter of wealth versus poverty, and was expressed less in their standard of living than in the nature of their lives. Both orders were subject to the same outside forces, such as bad harvests, ravages of disease, and war; the same percentage of noble and common women died in childbirth and the same percentage of their babies did not survive their first year; very likely, a much greater percentage of noblemen than of commoners were killed or maimed on battlefields. In the end, to quote Thomas Hobbes, all of these medieval lives were nasty, brutish, and short—­though the En­glish philosopher thought so only of life outside society, having had no experience of the society of orders, which in early sixteenth-­century En­gland had been replaced and forgotten. Yet even within the narrow bounds of the enjoyable or simply livable lives they could have, their existential experiences were so different as to be incomparable. Even when food was plentiful, they ate different foods; even when they had proper clothes, what was proper was different for different classes; the languages they spoke, though mutually understandable to an extent, were different; they had different joys and sorrows and could not identify or sympathize with each other. Until recently, this was the state of affairs in Western Europe—­ which nonetheless was the first to change it. It prevailed, with a few exceptions, until the late eighteenth century. Madame Du Châtelet, the translator into French of Newton’s Principia and the longtime friend of Voltaire, “had no scruples about undressing in the

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presence of her manservants, being unable to convince herself that these lackeys were real flesh-­and-­blood men!” Alexis de Tocqueville was evidently appalled by this fact when he recounted it in The Old Regime and the French Revolution in 1856.5 Only a hundred years earlier, however, the leading lights of the French Enlightenment, the authors of the Encyclopédie, had waxed poetic in its pages about “harmonious inequality” and had devoted fifteen pages to the nobility and only two to the people.6 In 1779, one of its coeditors, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, asked: “Is a great effort of philosophy necessary to understand that in society, and especially in a large state, it is indispensable to have rank defined by clear distinctions, that if virtue and talent alone have a claim to our true homage, the superiority of birth and position commands our deference and our respect . . . ? And how could men of letters envy or misconstrue the so legitimate prerogatives of other estates?”7 This was in France, the leading continental society, which ten years later would proclaim its commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity! According to Tocqueville, however, French passion for inequality only increased before it gave way to this contrary creed.8 By that time, of course, the authors of the American Declaration of Independence had held it self-­evident that all men are created equal. Today, we tend to see this astonishing statement critically. Why, we ask accusingly, did they say only “men,” instead of “men and women”? We also are upset that they meant only white men, though they did not say so explicitly. But it is important to remember how far from self-­evident even this insufficient (from our point of view) statement was in the newly minted United States, and how shockingly new the perspective it reflected—­and projected—­ appeared to its contemporaries. At the end of the eighteenth century—­not long ago, in historical terms—­the idea of equality was strange and foreign to the overwhelming majority of humanity. Today, to the overwhelming majority, it appears natural. Where did it come from? Why have we been so quickly

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Before Equality

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convinced? What has been responsible for this veritable revolution in our minds? The answer is nationalism. The value of equality—­the cornerstone of the American system of beliefs—­ is the essential value of nationalism. Nationalism transformed Western societies into nations, and in doing so made equality a core Western value. Even among Western societies, the American society is unique, indeed exceptional, because its population was national from its earliest origins. This can be said of no other society: populations of other societies went through numerous social (cultural) permutations before becoming populations of nations. For this reason, it is harder for Americans to place their fundamental values in a comparative perspective and realize their historical—­that is, unnecessary—­character. That is why, in other words, Americans are committed to equality more passionately than any other people. Some nations, especially those of Southeast Asia, consider it much less of a value. Still, the history of nationalism essentially is the history of the march of equality across the world: the history of how it conquered in some places and stumbled in others, and of the myriad positive and negative ways it has affected our lives and changed humanity’s existential experience. The details of this history, that is, the description of its cases, could fill libraries. Each society in which nationalism developed has its own history of nationalism, and the ways in which inequality was replaced by equality—­or withstood its assault. Yet equality is a recent value; when measured in historical time, the history of nationalism is indeed short.

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ONE

E M E R G E N C E O F N AT I O N A L I S M

Sixteenth-century En­gland—Wars of the Roses— why nationalism—dignity—democracy—Protestant Reformation—the Bible—competitiveness imported with the idea of the nation—capitalism—science

Everything new in history is a result of an accident. Nationalism is no exception; its existence could not have been predicted, and it might as well not have emerged. This does not mean that it cannot be explained. In retrospect, we can make perfect sense of it, considering the circumstances in which it appeared. We can see how and why, in these circumstances, it would make sense, alongside many other things that also might have made sense but did not happen. History—and therefore sociology, political science, and all the disciplines that rely on history for support—can go no further than this. William Shakespeare’s cycle of five historical plays, from Richard II, Henry IV (I and II), Henry V, Henry VI (I and II), through to Richard III, best describes the events that created the circum13

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stances in which nationalism emerged. These plays, which should be required reading for all social scientists, analyze with remarkable perspicacity the elements that distinguish our modern world (in which Shakespeare already lived, though his protagonists yet had not) from the premodern one it replaced. In his brilliant analysis, Shakespeare projected onto the beginning of the fifteenth century the ideas of nation and equality that would distinguish modernity, even though these ideas would not appear until the turn of that century. But one can easily forgive this anachronism, which was required by the overarching plot and by the time in which Shakespeare himself lived. In light of how precocious his understanding was and how correctly he identified the features that separated modern society from its predecessor, any such problems are of comparatively little consequence. The plays followed the development of the quarrel between the Lancaster and York branches of the En­glish royal family of Plantagenets, which led to the protracted armed conflict over the crown known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487). The dispute, in fact, had begun half a century earlier during the Hundred Years’ War between the Plantagenets and their royal cousins in the Valois family of France, fought for the control of the French crown, a conflict that had ended only in 1453. The quarreling royals were naturally supported in their exploits by groups of lesser nobles; as a result, the En­glish upper order, which was small to begin with, spent decades engaged in self-destruction. By the last battle of the Wars of the Roses (described by Shakespeare in Richard III), this order was effectively wiped out. So were all direct Plantagenets. The new Tudor dynasty, indirectly related to the Lancaster line, assumed the crown; the first Tudor king, Henry VII, who diplomatically married a princess from the House of York, had to recruit his aristocracy from below. This remarkable, unpredictable chain of events set in motion an unprecedented and inconceivable (to the existing feudal consciousness) process of massive social mobility.

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Emergence of Nationalism

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The society of orders, as mentioned, was based on the presupposition that the upper and lower orders were different species of humanity, utterly unlike each other even to the color of blood in their veins. They coexisted but were no more compatible than chickens and horses. Now that the blue-blooded order had been physically exterminated, the red-blooded sons of butchers (such as Cardinal Wolsey) and of smiths (such as Thomas Cromwell) ascended to positions and were treated in ways that were as difficult to justify as riding a chicken or expecting eggs from a horse. Yet the new Henrician aristocracy needed to justify these positions and treatment. Instead of claiming that all of the new aristocracy were lost children of dead princes, they declared that the En­glish people was a nation. Not only did this make the bewildering situation of the new aristocracy understandable and legitimate, it also reinforced the originating trend from which it resulted, normalizing social mobility, and reconstructed the previously hierarchical society on the basis of equality. How could an equation of two terms, people and nation, a linguistic event, produce so powerful a social transformation? A bit of semantic history, related to contingent changes in the meaning of “nation,” will help answer this question. As mentioned earlier, the Latin word natio—something born, in the sense of a litter of animals—was a term of contempt applied to communities of foreigners, not Roman citizens, in Rome. Many centuries after Rome fell, far into the Middle Ages, universities, which essentially were Christian institutions, were formed in Western Europe. Wherever they were located, their students were foreigners in the university cities. By that time, the derogatory connotation of the term natio had been forgotten, as written documents could not convey the attitude of contempt that attached to the word, leaving to it only the neutral sense of a community of foreigners. The students of medieval universities were thus quartered together in groups called “nations.” At the great center of theological learning,

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the University of Paris, these small communities of foreigners were classified in accordance with their general geographic origins. The university had four such “nations”: the nation from France, which included those from the greater part of France and from the lands that would become Italy, Spain, and Portugal; the nation from Germany, consisting of students from En­gland and some western German principalities; the nation from Normandy, which united those from France’s northwest coast; and the nation from Picardy, reserved for those from the Low Countries. Sharing common quarters and their studies, such university nations became bands of friends and developed common opinions, which they defended in scholastic disputations. Thus the word “nation” acquired an additional meaning—that of a community of opinion—which gradually eclipsed that of a community of foreigners. From the Church Council of Lyon in 1274, this new concept— nation as a community of opinion—was applied to the parties at the Church Councils, discussing questions of grave ecclesiastical import. These conciliar nations, unlike the university ones, consisted of influential, high-placed men who represented the religious and secular powers of the time. Applied in this context, the meaning of “nation” changed again, becoming the term for the decision-making elite. This was the accepted meaning of “nation” in continental Europe until the mid-eighteenth century at least. When it was used, however infrequently, it applied only to the nobility. Some European territories—those of German principalities, according to Martin Luther, or France, according to Montesquieu—had such nations, in the sense of elites, under their princes. In others, such as Wallachia (in present-day Romania), it was said, “there was no nation, only a people.”1 The word “people,” in this sense, referred to the lower social strata, the common order of laboratores; its synonyms were “rabble” and “plebs.” With this understanding, to declare that the En­glish people were a nation was to stand the world on its head. Yet in the circum-

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stances that En­gland’s new aristocracy faced, this idea sounded convincing. Their upward mobility was a good experience for them, and they needed to rationalize it, to make it both understandable and legitimate. In the framework of the hierarchical society of orders, which separated the red-blooded people from the blue-blooded “nation” of the nobility by an unbridgeable gap, it could not be either understandable or legitimate. So the En­glish aristocracy chose to forge the two separate communities, each with its own exclusive identity, into one inclusive community of identity, and made members of the people and of the noble “nation” interchangeable, and thus fundamentally equal. Once the people and the elite shared a common identity, families were no longer bound to their current place in the social hierarchy, which appeared temporary and accidental. Social stratification became fluid: depending on will, ability, and chance, individuals could move up and down society as if on a ladder. This was a revolution in the imagination, in consciousness. But the institutions, which are none but ways of thinking and acting, could not tarry in their transformation: for all intents and purposes, the change was instantaneous. By the 1530s—within one generation of its emergence—the new image of reality had spread throughout the En­glish society and affected behavior in every sphere of life. The presupposition of fundamental equality in the inclusive community—of shared identity, implied in the definition of the people as a nation—had several vital implications. It is hard to rank them in order of significance. We may start with the one that was to shape the American experience: individual freedom. One was no longer born into a social position or personal identity but had the right to (in fact, had to) choose one for oneself. The decision no longer belonged to God; one became one’s own maker. With this notion, appreciation for the individual human being, human creativity, increased tremendously. There was dignity in simply being human; one could take pride in one’s humanity. The modern idea

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of the individual as an autonomous agent emerged from this mindset. (Émile Durkheim, therefore, was right when he claimed that the individual was created by modern society, that, in other words, societies had existed for millennia without individuals.)2 Simultaneously and necessarily, God became much less important, and the world of living experience came to occupy a far greater place in human concerns than ever before. The process of secularization was set in motion, reinforcing the appreciation for the individual and, specifically, greatly increasing the value of human life. The authority of the nation, as an elite, to make decisions regarding the political and religious positions of the population for which it was responsible was now presumed to belong to the population in its entirety. As God gradually assumed less importance in people’s lives, this authority soon was regarded as supreme authority, or sovereignty. Before, sovereignty had belonged to God exclusively, but the old ways of thinking were ceding ground to the idea of popular sovereignty. Fundamental equality in sharing popular sovereignty—that is, sharing in the self-government of the community—further added to the dignity of national membership (and national identity), beyond even the dignity of presumed equality. To be a member of the people was itself an honor. Until that point, the people had been a contemptible plebeian community, yet now it was an eminently respectable entity, an object of eager commitment and even worship. Such a society, whose institutions were organized on the basis of the equation of people and nation, on fundamental equality combined with popular sovereignty and reverence for the people as a whole, was by definition a democratic society, even if it was not described in those exact words. A democracy stressing individual freedom is liberal democracy. In sixteenth-century En­gland, it was simply called “nation.” The consciousness of most En­glish people at that time, the way they envisioned and experienced reality five hundred years ago, was national consciousness. This consciousness was democratic, specifi-

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cally, liberal democratic; that is, individualistic. This in no way precluded them from being passionately devoted to their nation to the point of risking their lives for it. Their principled individualism was a product of their nationalism, not at all an expression of natural egoism or self-preoccupation. (In fact, self-preoccupation, so characteristic of societies such as ours, was an expression of nationalism, and not only where nationalism was individualistic.) National consciousness focused on this secular world to the near exclusion of all concern with the transcendental spheres. In this sense, it was essentially secular. It would be wrong, however, to interpret this secularism as lacking in spirituality or in any way “disenchanted.” In the framework of nationalism, secular reality was the sphere of the sacred, the source of all meaning, and the inspiration for visionary ideals and ardent worship. Paradoxically, as secularization brought the sacred down to earth and made God irrelevant, En­ glish nationalism was greatly helped by a contemporary religious development: the Protestant Reformation. A general European phenomenon, the Reformation was independent from the events that brought forth nationalism in En­ gland, but it coincided with and reinforced the dignity of national identity and national consciousness with its principles of popular sovereignty and fundamental equality of membership in the community. Its main contribution to national consciousness was the idea of the priesthood of all believers, which implied and resulted in the translation of the Hebrew Bible into the vernacular and encouraged literacy among the En­glish population. The Bible placed before the eyes of its new readers—new, because the Bible was the first book they read and because they had never read it before—the model of God’s people, which was a dignified community of equals, each man individually worthy of and bound in a covenant with the Maker of the Universe. God’s people was evidently a nation, as the En­glish then understood the term, which meant that it was God’s will to organize things that way, however much the Roman

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Catholic priests attempted to conceal this. Indeed, in the En­glish translation, the Hebrew word for the people of Israel was rendered as “nation,” as were the other words with which the original text described this people’s territory and neighbors. The word “nation” obviously did not exist in the Bible, and even in the fourth-century Latin Vulgate translation, natio was used infrequently and often not in the context in which “nation” appeared in the En­glish text. In this manner, the En­glish translation presented the Bible through the lens of national consciousness. The King James version, which completed a century of translations, not only finally transmitted to Christian believers but strengthened the message of dignity, equality, and freedom within the ancient text of the Old Testament. The reading itself of the Bible also reinforced the sense of dignity and equality inherent in nationalism, independent of the nature of the text. It was dignifying to have the word of God delivered to one directly in one’s own tongue, without any specially appointed mediator (who was presumed to be worthier and smarter than oneself) and irrespective of one’s social position. As a result, one’s social position lost much of its identity-defining power. It was surely not what they did when otherwise engaged that defined God’s interlocutors. And in their right to communicate with God directly, all En­glishmen were now equal. The Reformation also helped establish the principle of national sovereignty. It was asserted explicitly in the 1533 Parliamentary Act of Appeals, issued to help Henry VIII divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon—who happened to be aunt to the Holy Roman emperor Charles V and therefore on excellent terms with Pope Clement VII—and marry his lady love of the moment. This seemingly private affair was of great public significance. Queen Catherine was past her child-bearing years, during which she had managed to produce only one living child, of female sex, and a male heir was at stake. But the pope would not grant the divorce. The Act of Appeals declared that the pope had no right to meddle in

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the business of the En­glish king, because En­gland (spelled Englond in the act, as the uncertain En­glish orthography of the day had it) was a sovereign community that answered to no foreign power, or “empire” (spelled Impire, this being the first time the Latin word imperium was En­glished). Declared an empire, En­gland separated itself from Rome; in the circumstances, this meant joining the forces of the Reformation, even though the motive for this fateful step was entirely mundane. Without the Reformation, the En­glish separation from Rome could not have happened, because it would have left the little kingdom isolated and surrounded by Catholic powers intent on tearing it apart under the pretext of teaching it the norms of religious correctness. With the Reformation engulfing all of Western Europe, the nation calling itself an “empire” faced Catholic powers too preoccupied with internal religious strife to pay attention to matters beyond their borders, and automatically acquired allies that were ready to help it should the need arise. Thus, ironically, “empire” originally stood for national sovereignty—self-determination of a population, or freedom from foreign intervention. Used in the context of and as a justification for the separation from Rome, the term served to rearrange relations between European powers on the basis of this new principle. Perhaps even more ironically, as En­gland and then Britain extended its “empire” in the centuries that followed, it likewise extended the sphere of national consciousness, spreading the liberating and empowering principles of fundamental equality of membership and popular sovereignty. The British Empire thus was itself the main inspiration for numerous national liberation movements, contributing to them in more ways than one. Had it not existed, there would be no nations to liberate. The dignity implied in national membership, or nationality, as we would say today, made national populations deeply invested in the dignity of the nation as a whole. This national dignity was expressed, above all, in international prestige—the relative standing

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of one’s nation among other nations, and their regard for it—which made national consciousness (nationalism) inherently competitive. From their earliest days, nations have engaged in a never-ending race for respect. En­gland was the first nation. In the sixteenth century, national consciousness existed nowhere else, no other society was a nation, and no other people cared how foreigners regarded the societies of orders in which the people were a despised, expendable rabble. But the En­glish did not know that. Their conversion to nationalism was, like any inner conversion, a total replacement of one faith by another. They no longer could see and experience reality but through the lens of national consciousness, and therefore they imagined they were surrounded by other nations, and thus by competitors. The French and the Italians, they believed, regarded themselves as more cultured than the En­glish; the Dutch and the Germans supposedly claimed to be more prosperous and astute in business; the Spanish appeared to tout their superiority as explorers and navigators. The En­glish regarded these imagined pretenses as personal insults and were determined to prove them all wrong. En­gland’s touchiness, empirically unjustified but perfectly understandable in the framework of nationalism, changed the world. To protect their national dignity, the En­glish began to compete. They challenged their European neighbors to combat in every area in which comparisons were possible, and these neighbors, bewildered by the strange behavior of a kingdom that until recently had seemed to be a normal European feudal community, had to engage with them. But none of these neighbors had the competitive motivation that actuated the En­glish. Instead of competing, they could only watch in amazement as the little En­gland of 1500—a peripheral European principality, exhausted by internecine fighting, rough in manners, and as poor in natural resources as it was in learning, emerged as a great leading power, the center of attention and an object of emulation for other great powers, in the span of a century. The Puritan Rebellion of the mid-1600s, in itself an as-

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sertion of nationalism against the spirit of divine right monarchy that informed the actions of the foreign (Scottish) kings who had inherited the En­glish throne not knowing that they were invited to govern a nation, seemed to interrupt En­gland’s ascent, but only made it more assured. By 1700, in every respect, En­gland had raced far ahead of the rest of Western Europe, pulling it behind to the position of hegemony that only today is coming to an end. Among the by-products of this competition without competitors, this determined En­glish national effort to win the admiration of the world, were two defining features of modernity: capitalism and science. “Capitalism” is a word of Dutch extraction: in the sixteenth century, during the Dutch fiscal revolution, “capitalist” meant a person taxable at the highest rate—one with a lot of money. In politics, “capitalism” throughout the twentieth century was used as an equivalent of ancient (Platonian/Aristotelian) oligarchy—the regime of the rich. In conditions of constant social mobility, implied in nationalism because of its core principle of fundamental equality of membership, this political interpretation made no sense. As an economic concept, however, capitalism is highly meaningful: it refers specifically to the modern economy, an economy of a distinct type characteristic only of the Age of Nationalism. In contrast to earlier economies, which, however different in other respects, had all been oriented to subsistence, capitalist economy is oriented to growth. The primary goal of economic activity, in the framework of capitalist economy, is the increase of wealth, not the comfort wealth can bring. In the framework of capitalism, one does not work to live; one lives to work. Max Weber, in his famous attempt to account for this momentous reorientation of economic activity (which is, of necessity, the activity of the majority of the population), pointed out the essential irrationality of the modern economic attitude.3 Such an irrational attitude on the part of so many people at once could only persist, Weber thought, if something else provided for it a rationale higher than life itself.

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Weber’s hypothesis was that this higher rationale, which induced people to increase the profits of their labor without increasing their enjoyment of these profits, was the psychological need the Protestant (specifically, Calvinist) dogma of predestination created among the adherents of certain varieties of the reformed religion to convince oneself of the certainty of one’s salvation. Constant profit was the proof of God’s constant favor; it was for such proof, Weber’s argument went, that millions worked tirelessly without stopping to savor the fruits of their labors. This ingenious hypothesis was contradicted by evidence. The rationale for the capitalist economy, instead, was provided by nationalism. The crucial case, which allows us to adjudicate between Protestantism and nationalism as explanations for the rise of the distinctive modern economy, is that of the Dutch Republic. Constituted by the seven provinces in the Low Countries united to revolt against the Spanish crown, to which they belonged as a result of a complicated inheritance, the republic sided with the Reformation and, like En­gland, embraced Calvinism. In the late sixteenth century, it experienced astonishing economic growth, emerging as the first world economic hegemon. This precocious development led some economic historians to consider it the first modern economy.4 The Dutch Republic’s very impressive growth, however, gave way to an equally protracted absolute decline some half a century later, just as usually happened to subsistence-oriented economies. In distinction to the En­glish, who, as Weber stressed, institutionalized economic irrationality, the Dutch acted perfectly rationally. Having worked very hard for a time and accumulated a lot of wealth, they then stopped accumulating and spent it. For this reason, Weber did not include the Dutch Republic among the cases he discussed in The Protestant Ethic, and limited his discussion of Calvinism to En­ gland. Yet the logic of his argument that orientation to growth was the product of Calvinism, in particular, required that the Dutch Republic reorient itself to growth to the same extent as the En­glish

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did. In other words, Weber’s argument was contradicted by the case of the Dutch Republic. In terms of conditions for economic growth, the Dutch Republic of the 1500s was far better positioned than En­gland was for the so-called economic “takeoff.” It underwent the fiscal revolution earlier, it progressed further in its initial accumulation, it had higher labor productivity and wages and more advanced urbanization. But it lacked the cause for the reorientation to growth: without nationalism, it had no motivation to compete. Instead, the Dutch, astute businessmen that they were, remained believing Christians. They worried about the eternal salvation of their souls and could not understand what motivated the En­glish, their fellow Calvinists and natural allies in the fight for the true faith, which was the only fight worth fighting, to be so hostile to them over trifling economic matters. What did it matter who was catching more herring or had more transportation business in such and such a year? At En­gland’s instigation, the Dutch Republic fought four Anglo-Dutch Trade Wars, and every time the Dutch thought that God was using En­ gland as a rod to punish them for being so rich. That it was competition for international prestige that reoriented economic activity in En­gland—and thus nationalism that produced the modern economy—is proven not only by the comparison between En­gland and the Dutch Republic but by the history of the process of the reorientation to growth itself. The signs of such reorientation among En­gland’s economic actors appear as soon as nationalism does: the spirit driving economic activity becomes competitive, assertive, and clearly nationalistic early in the 1500s. The most dramatic example of this spirit is foreign trade. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, En­glish foreign trade was dominated by the merchants of the (German) Hanseatic League. The Hanseatics had been granted special privileges by En­glish kings from Richard II to Henry VIII, who turned to them in hours of financial need. Their Kontor, or main trading post, in London was

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at the Steelyard, the site of London’s standard weighing balance. Moreover, their centrality in the En­glish economy was such that the name of the En­glish currency, the pound sterling, may have been derived from the word “Easterlings”—the nickname given to German merchants in En­gland. The privileges of the Hanseatics in En­gland reflected their wealth and their capacity to finance the En­glish crown, but these privileges also were the source of this capacity, which perpetuated the league’s superiority over the native merchants. No group of En­glish merchants could hope to compete with the league while these privileges lasted, and unless a community of interest was perceived to exist between the struggling En­glish merchants and the crown, the Hanseatics’ privileges would not be revoked. Once En­gland was defined as a nation, both the merchants and the crown felt they had a community of interest— even though such a perception was not in the objective interests of either the merchants or of the crown. In 1505, Henry VII granted an extensive charter of privileges to a fellowship of cloth merchants with chapters in several En­ glish port cities and incorporated them as the Company of Merchants Adventurers. The fellowship, which had existed since the thirteenth century as a loose organization similar to the Hanseatic League or the Dutch trading companies, became the first national trading company in the sense of being centralized in fact as well as in principle. From 1564, its members called themselves “Merchants Adventurers of En­gland.” Like the Hanseatic League and other organizations of the time, the Merchants Adventurers sought to monopolize the trade in which they were engaged. However, unlike other trading companies, which were satisfied with procuring privileges from the rulers of the countries in which they traded, En­gland’s Merchants Adventurers sought above all to secure the support of their own rulers. In addition, they accepted only nativeborn En­glishmen as members, and insisted on their marrying En­ glish women.

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The commercial policies of the En­glish state were not consistent until the reign of Elizabeth I in the second half of the century. Henry VII favored the En­glish merchants over foreigners and imposed a heavy penalty on the Hanseatic merchants for selling cloth in the traditional market of the Merchants Adventurers. Henry VIII, who was constantly in financial straits, might have been willing to help the Hanseatic League strengthen its position in En­ gland. By that time the Merchants Adventurers were exporting twice as much cloth (the main En­glish manufacture) as the Hansa. En­glish nationalists considered this unsatisfactory. They exaggerated the share of the Hanseatics and complained that the share of the En­glish merchants was too small. Under Edward VI, Henry’s successor, they set out to terminate the Hanseatic privileges. The initiative came from Sir Thomas Gresham, who, for “the publique good oth’Nation,”5 founded both London’s Royal Exchange and Gresham College, which cradled En­glish science, later leading to the creation of the Royal Society. As the financial agent of Edward VI in Antwerp, Gresham was entrusted with liquidating debts that Henry VIII had left to his minor son, and was determined to do so without further loans from foreigners. If the Merchants Adventurers, already a formidable economic organization, no longer had to compete with the Hanseatic League, they could be relied on for the necessary funds. In 1552 the crown revoked the special privileges of the league merchants, putting them under the heavy duties imposed on all other foreign merchants. The export trade of the Merchants Adventurers increased dramatically as a result, but its members’ individual situations did not necessarily improve, because much of the company’s profits from that point on went into financing the state. The arrangement clearly was in the interest of nationalists, but unless both the Merchants Adventurers and the crown also identified their interests with those of the nation—its dignity and financial independence—it could be argued that they acted against their interests.

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Queen Mary Tudor, a fervent Catholic and thus not a nationalist, reinstated some of the privileges of the Hansa. But the accession of her sister Elizabeth four years later marked the beginning of En­gland’s uninterrupted economic ascendancy. Gresham was the queen’s financial adviser, and she followed unswervingly his counsel “not to restore Steelyard [the Hansa] to their usurped privileges; to come in as small debt as you can beyond seas; to keep up your credit, and especially with your own merchants, for it is they must stand by you at all events in your necessity.”6 A nationalist educated and guided the state, and nationalism became an explicit foundation of the state economic policy. By 1558 the Merchants Adventurers dominated the cloth export trade. When the revolt of the Netherlands destabilized their traditional market, they invaded the Hanseatics’ traditional market. Unlike the En­glish merchants, the Hansa towns were allied in name only, and, given an opportunity to advance their particular interests at the expense of the league, members would take it. In 1564 the Merchants Adventurers of En­gland (flaunting their identity) were allowed to trade in Hamburg. Four years later, against the opposition of the league, Hamburg offered them a tenyear contract of privileges as extensive as those that the Hanseatic merchants had once held in En­gland. In 1597 an imperial decree exiled the Merchants Adventurers from the territory of the Holy Roman (German) Empire as a monopoly. In response, Elizabeth exiled the Hanseatic merchants from En­gland, giving En­glish merchants complete control of the lucrative En­glish cloth export trade. This was a victory for the nationalist principle in commerce. As the economic historian G. B. Hotchkiss wrote: It may truly be argued that this bold and brilliant period of En­ glish history . . . incubated great schemes that were later to enrich the nation. Out of it came the great East India Company . . . and the companies formed to colonize America. But these enterprises brought no dividends for a long time to come. . . . [These] were

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lean years for most of the people who lived through them. Prices were high and many workers were unemployed. The triumph of the principle of En­glish trade by En­glishmen was a fine thing for En­glish patriotism, but it brought no immediate gains to En­glish purses.7

Although purses suffered, plays of the period poked fun at foreign merchants, Germans in particular, and celebrated the En­ glish victory over the Hanseatics. Competitiveness was all. For the En­glish, everything became relative: if they did better than their (significant) others, the price at which this relative advantage came mattered little. Because there was no finish line in this competition (since there was always a possibility that somebody else would do better), the En­glish had to do better and better. They had to expand their markets and their industry. They could not stop. They had a rationale above economic rationality. In the process, they created the modern economy oriented to growth (nationalism would sustain it)—capitalism. The same concern for national dignity that made the En­ glish nation economically competitive and produced the modern economy also made it culturally competitive. Among other extraordinary cultural achievements, this produced a new form of intellectual activity—modern science. Science can be defined as an activity oriented to understanding empirical reality; as such, it has existed for thousands of years in numerous societies. The distinguishing feature of modern science is that it is oriented to— and capable of—sustained growth of this understanding. It is the only activity, besides economic activity, known to be consistently progressive. The En­glish chose the economy as an arena of competition for international prestige and respect because of the individualistic character of En­glish nationalism. The centrality of the individual among national values made the activity of the vast majority of individuals a natural focus. Economic nationalism, therefore, emerged in En­gland as early as nationalism; it was an obvious

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refraction of the national consciousness in the consciousness of the economically active masses. The reason behind En­gland’s choice of science was different. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, according to Erasmus, there were five or six erudite people in London; according to John Leland, there was one “slender” library.8 A few decades later, En­gland was emerging as a cultural powerhouse: it had a secular vernacular literature in a language that was created alongside it, and by the end of that same century it had produced William Shakespeare. After that, En­glish literature was seen as one of the world’s greatest literatures. An entirely new class emerged—the class of intellectuals, whose main preoccupation was to do research and write chronicles, treatises, poems, novels, and plays in En­glish about En­gland. This class of authors and scholars included En­ glishmen from every walk of life. They were fully aware that they were creating this magnificent new culture from scratch, that they were its “beginners” and had little to rely on in the manner of En­ glish letters. They also knew that in classical learning—which is what learning was at the time—En­gland was no match for France and Italy. Therefore, in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, already in the sixteenth century the En­glish identified with the moderns. To accept the authority of the ancients would mean admitting En­gland’s cultural inferiority. Unwilling to do so, the En­glish espoused a primitive cultural relativism, arguing that what was good for one period and society was not necessarily good for another. The spirit, or genius, of the En­glish nation required different intellectual fare from the one that satisfied “ruinous Athens or decayed Rome”9 —as well as the contemporary imitators of these long-gone cultural centers—and thus there was no reason for En­gland to compete in that antiquated arena. In their choice of allegiance, some of the most respected French and Italian humanists of the period supported the En­glish. These intellectuals also believed that three recent technological inven-

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tions—the printing press, firearms, and the compass—immediately translated soft power into hard power and gave the moderns a decisive advantage over the ancients. But the En­glish likely would have opted for science as the main area of cultural competition even without this support. Science was a modern, new, activity: apart from the few practicing scientists, it had not been of interest to anyone before. With so few achievements to date, a culturally backward En­gland could compete in it effectively. Science’s ability to contribute to the dignity of the nation—which none of En­gland’s neighbors at the time cared to consider—prompted En­ gland to throw behind it the might of general social approbation. Since the early seventeenth century, and throughout the turbulent years of the Puritan Rebellion, the En­glish lay public celebrated both science and scientists. Immediately after the Restoration, the royalty did as well. Science became a magnet for talent, a direct road to status, attracting the best people. En­gland’s Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge—the first scientific institution in the world—was formed in 1660 to promote science and its contributors, and was admired and envied by every scientist in the world. Science began to develop steadily. Though it began as a sign of En­glish cultural specificity, it soon became the proof of their superiority. Before long, foreigners were singing dithyrambs to “the penetrating and truly unusual ability” of “the remarkable” En­glishmen in science. A German correspondent of the Royal Society promised humbly: “[If] Germany can contribute nothing else of note to your British ocean, we offer unfailing memory of benefits received; and such as they are our writings when they appear in time to come shall testify to the En­glish springs from which we drank our fill.”10 This attitude, obviously, changed when nationalism, and competition for dignity, spread to the continent (where it reached Germany in the early nineteenth century). The spectacular success of En­gland/Britain in everything its nationalist motivation

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propelled it to undertake and its momentous rise to superpower status naturally led other emerging nations to focus on the areas in which the first nation challenged them to compete. But while economic competition could be avoided—for instance, as in the case of Russia, if stupendous military strength offered an alternative—science became the measure of native intelligence, and it was impossible to claim national dignity without excelling in it. No one would willingly admit that one’s nation was less intelligent than another. This consideration spurred the development of science in societies whose nationalism grew and remained strong. Of course, nationalism as such is also conducive to the development of science. Its focus on this world turns attention to empirical reality, and makes knowledge about it valuable in a sense that exceeds its instrumental importance. If the empirical reality is believed to be highly meaningful in its own right, or in fact the source of all meaning, then its exploration becomes the search for meaning par excellence, combining the roles of philosophy and theology. This conclusion would undoubtedly be reached at a certain point in the spread of nationalism over the last half millennium. Yet it is equally clear that science would not have developed as fast and would not have reached the awesome stage at which we find it today had it not been able to contribute to En­glish national dignity.

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TWO

THE LAUNCHING SITE

Eighteenth-century France—ressentiment—Enlightenment— revolution—political spectrum: left and right

For two centuries, En­ gland, which in the meantime became Britain and an empire in yet another new, once again changed, modern sense of the dominion of one nation over others, was the only nation in the world. En­glish people, of course, did not think so: they thought that the world was naturally divided into nations (just as we think today), and believed they were surrounded by similar sovereign communities of inclusive identity. But this was not so. Until at least the eighteenth century, such national consciousness existed only among those who identified as members of the British nation—which by that time included the people of the greater British Isles and, notably, the British colonists of North America. The attitude toward En­gland on the European continent began changing much earlier. The neighbors of the small island country could not help noticing the transformation in its dealings 33

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with those beyond its borders, its disregard of traditional modes of action, its strange initiatives, its systematic challenging of the established norms and the European power structure. Above all, they could not help noticing the transformation in the standing of En­gland, its rapid rise in power, which may be compared to the rise of China in our day and which was out of all proportion to its size, resources, and influence in the very recent past. In 1588, the defeat of the Spanish Armada—the navy of the greatest maritime power of the time—by a scarce handful of En­glish ships took the rulers of the continental powers by surprise, but after that it was clear to all who thought of such matters that En­gland had to be watched. From that point on, one way or another, whatever happened in En­ gland would affect the fate of all. France, an early center of En­gland-watching from its position across the En­glish Channel, followed the erstwhile thorn in its side with more than benign curiosity, perhaps because the destruction of the Spanish fleet was as much in France’s interest as it was in En­ gland’s, or because the leader of French Protestants, who regarded the En­glish as natural friends, would soon be the popular French king Henry IV, formerly of Navarre. In fact, already in the seventeenth century, En­gland was becoming a model for France. As early as 1615, it was pointed to as such in economic matters by Antoine de Montchrétien in his Traicté de l’oeconomie politique. The title of this treatise, incidentally, contains the first use of the term “political economy,” justifying the proud assertion of Montchrétien’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century compatriots that the discipline of political economy was born in France. Montchrétien had spent several years in En­gland, and the profound influence that En­gland had had on him made the text unusual for a French author in more ways than one. In that time, and for a long time thereafter, economic activities were considered of no interest or importance to any person of honor. Yet Montchrétien insisted that the economy of a polity was at least as important as military conquest: while

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conquest augmented its territory, political economy increased its wealth. The Traicté, moreover, was preoccupied with the general good of the French population. Public utility, Montchrétien advised the young King Louis XIII (Henry IV’s son) and the Queen Regent, to whom his work was dedicated, should be the central care of those “called to the government of states.”1 This counsel, which implicitly reduced the royal addressees to the position of servants to the community, was a bold statement to make to those who ruled by divine right. Its message was reinforced by replacing the already familiar expression of oeconomies royales, used in regard to the management of the royal household, with oeconomie politique—it was not the ruler’s private property that was in question. Finally, the treatise was pugnaciously competitive in spirit, especially with En­gland. Montchrétien was primarily concerned with the relative standing of the French economy and its dependence on others. This dependence, he believed, was intolerable; his position was clearly nationalistic. (Additionally, Montchrétien was fiercely antiforeign, even to the point of regarding immigrants into France as foreigners—a sharp difference of opinion from those of his En­ glish contemporaries.) Similar precocious economic nationalism later in the seventeenth century inspired the policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the great minister of finances of Louis XIV, inaugurating the French tradition of dirigisme, or state intervention in the economy. But it was indeed an economic nationalism before nationalism, for Colbert was by no means a nationalist in any other respect, and its impact was strictly limited. In his efforts to encourage native French commerce and industry, Colbert too followed the example of En­gland, not least in his ideas of cross-Atlantic colonization. Seventeenth-century France imitated En­glish ways in other than economic matters as well, the most important instance of this sincerest form of flattery being the founding of the Académie des Sciences, which was established just four years after the Royal Society

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and with comparatively little preparation. The most bizarre imitation, however, was the 1656 transformation of the Bicêtre prison to the south of Paris into a public hospital with a special ward for the insane. The model for this new French institution was London’s Bedlam—the world’s first hospital, in the sense of a medical institution—which by the mid-1500s had been established specifically to address the public health problem caused by a new mental illness, requiring a new, duly invented name: madness. Madness was a functional mental disease; several centuries later, we would recognize it as schizophrenia and affective disorders. In the seventeenth century, every sightseeing itinerary for French travelers in En­gland was sure to include Bedlam. Madness, not observed anywhere else at the time and indeed called “the En­glish malady,” was one of En­ gland’s top curiosities. In France it would be unknown until the end of the eighteenth century. Only an indiscriminate appreciation for all things En­glish could account for the transformation of a prison into a hospital for inmates afflicted by an illness that did not exist. Paris had to have its own Bedlam. Did the French of that time think it unfair that En­gland had a disease all to itself? Nationalism, however, though imported from En­gland, did not spread through simple imitation. As it did not truly appear in France until several decades into the eighteenth century, later authors could claim that, despite occasional enthusiasms for things En­glish, France did not “discover” its island neighbor until after the Glorious Revolution, the time between 1688 and the birth of French nationalism serving as the necessary period of gestation. What attracted the French attention in En­gland at that point was the robust health of its aristocracy, in sharp contrast to the enfeebled condition of its French counterpart. In the main, French nobility of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries could trace its origins to venerable Crusaderera roots. Most of it was the so-called noblesse de race—“race,” unlike today, meaning a particular old bloodline or family. But

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it was generally impoverished, unable to recover economically because of the attitude of dérogeance—in which a nobleman who engaged in any gainful activity lost his honor—and worn out by futile struggles against the absolutist monarchy. The French crown was determined to deprive the upper stratum of the French society of orders of any social function and real influence, making its social superiority completely dependent on the king. This latter problem was the more important of the two. Poverty was indeed a problem for the French nobility. A full 17 percent were classed as untaxed “paupers,” and led as wretched an existence as the poorest of peasants; by contrast, fewer than 1 percent, or 250 families, could be characterized as rich by virtue of being in the top four of the twenty-two categories into which the 1695 poll tax regulations divided the population. Yet it was the rich, the aristocracy near the king, who found their existence particularly oppressive. During the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, in the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century, the aristocracy was already going through an identity crisis, which grew increasingly acute under Louis XV. The privileged economic situation of the aristocrats exacerbated rather than eased their psychological distress. In fact, they saw money as an enemy, and were intensely opposed to the few commoners (who to them appeared many) whom the absolute monarchs allowed to earn their way up. The problem of aristocrats was status anxiety, the constant threat to their exclusive position on the top. The aristocracy, said the Duc de Saint-Simon, whose memoirs depicted in detail “the cruel state to which the late government reduced the order,” was daily subjected to a tormenting “anguish of the mind.” His contemporary and fellow-sufferer Jean de La Bruyère summed up the situation of the nobility as a whole: “A nobleman, if he lives at home in his province, lives free but without substance [in poverty]; if he lives at court, he is taken care of but enslaved.”2 A twentieth-century historian of the French nobility even thought to compare this privileged stratum

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to the least secure, most persecuted, and most humiliated group in Christian Europe—an indignity below which it was impossible to descend. By the time of the Revolution, he said, the nobility had become “a marginal minority in the French society, under sentence . . . in 1789 nobles were the kingdom’s Jews.”3 This is certainly an exaggeration. But the constant threat to the aristocratic status, undermined by the loss of political influence, the swelling of ranks of the nobility, and the inflation of titles (which now could be bought for money and made noblesse de race legally equal to the status of a low-born tradesman who had accumulated enough of it), and the contemptuous attitude of the crown, had dire consequences for a society whose elite was affected in this manner. In the eighteenth century, the nobility was prepared to renounce the formal dignity, which concealed the lack of actual dignity, and ready to reorganize and redefine itself. In doing so, it discovered the idea of the nation across the En­glish Channel. This idea was one of several devices that members of the order used to protect themselves from further assault. Once advanced, however, it acquired a life of its own, which its aristocratic champions could not control. The “anguish of the mind” of the French elite was the major factor in the development of the French national consciousness and the emergence of the French nation. It made the aristocracy sympathetic to the idea of the “people” as the bearer of sovereignty and a fundamentally positive entity. This revolution in attitudes was a logical outcome of the situation in which the nobility found itself by the end of the seventeenth century. Its once-exclusive privileges were becoming less exclusive; it had as little political influence as any other group in the population; it perceived itself as “degraded,” reduced to the “people.” The nobility had two ways to reclaim its fading status: to dissociate itself unequivocally from the people, or to redefine the people so that being of it was an honor rather than a disgrace. The nobility never committed itself entirely to either

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solution, pursuing both all through the eighteenth century. But the second solution, the idea of the nation, had important advantages over the first, and it is not surprising that in the end it was the one that triumphed. It came with its own stratification, reflecting a new hierarchy of values. Within the community defined as a nation, status was based on service to the nation: in other words, merit. Unlike the conflicting criteria of birth and wealth, merit was self-justifiable, and the status it conferred was open to all within the nobility as well as those aspiring to enter it. In En­gland, the “nation” had already become the ultimate source of authority and the object of supreme devotion. Imported into France, it became the symbol around which opposition to the crown could rally and in the name of which the righting of wrongs could be legitimately and righteously demanded.4 The importation of the En­glish idea of nation to France both caused and signaled a dramatic alteration in the meaning of French identity, and soon changed the reality of the French polity. As the historian Simon Schama has written, “Suddenly subjects were told they had become Citizens; an aggregate of subjects held in place by injustice and intimidation had become a Nation.”5 The French, however, grafted the En­glish concept of the nation onto a body of indigenous traditions, which gave it a unique twist and led the French nation away from its original example. The hybrid concept that resulted was further modified by a peculiar tension, a sense of inadequacy in the incipient French national consciousness—a sense of inadequacy that had been introduced into it by the first nationalists who compared France with En­gland and stressed the latter’s superiority. En­gland was the only nation at the time, and it emphasized its nationality. It also offered the unusual spectacle of an almost instantaneous transformation from a peripheral backward society torn by internal conflict into the greatest economic and political power in Europe, stable, proud, and enlightened, a formidable

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presence. For a time, around the middle of the eighteenth century, En­gland was an object of general admiration in France, as seen in Voltaire’s En­glish Letters (also called Philosophical) and in the popularity of En­glish gardens and tea. For the French, the corollary of this admiration was unremitting self-criticism; some westwardlooking Frenchmen found little, if anything, to be proud of in their native land, so much so that sometimes they would rather not consider themselves a part of it. And yet these were the architects of the French national consciousness, and it was the nationality of En­ gland, the “constitution” that made it a nation, the political culture and institutions of a free people, that excited their admiration. The foundations of En­glish nationalism—the reinterpretation of the idea of the people to imply the basic equality of the great and the small, the glowing symbols of civil and political liberty—became the values of the French opinion-leaders. To Voltaire, En­gland was a better model for France than France’s traditional model, Rome. The difference, he felt, that gave “the advantage entirely to” En­gland was that “the outcome of the civil wars in Rome was slavery, while that of the troubles in En­gland liberty.” Only En­gland had been able to “limit the power of kings by resisting them, and .  .  . by joint efforts, has at last established that wise government where the prince is all-­powerful to do good, and, at the same time, restrained from doing evil, where the nobles are great without insolence and without vassals, and where the people participate in government without confusion.” Voltaire recognized that the liberty and strength of En­ gland rested on respect for the people, the “plebeians,” who in some crucial respect were treated as equal to the lords.6 Montesquieu’s opinions on En­gland differed from Voltaire’s in emphasis only. Indeed, to Montesquieu, En­gland was the model of the free state, even though the idea was as much French as it was En­glish. But the En­glish constitution guaranteed political liberty because it placed checks on the exercise of power, while in France liberty

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had given way to absolutism. This implied that the rights of the En­glish aristocracy were never infringed upon (Montesquieu did not remember the Wars of the Roses) and respect for the privileges of the nobility ensured the nobility’s interest in the liberty of all: In a state there are always persons distinguished by their birth, riches or honors: But were they to be confounded with the common people, and to have only the weight of a single vote like the rest, the common liberty would be their slavery, and they would have no interest in supporting it. . . . The share they have therefore in the legislature ought to be proportioned to the other advantages they have in the state; which happens only when they form a body that has a right to put a stop to the enterprises of the people, as the people has a right to put a stop to theirs.

This, Montesquieu thought, was the situation in En­gland. The nobility’s unchallenged preeminence did not prevent the feeling of fellowship between it and the people; in fact, it was conducive to it. “Those dignities, which make the fundamental part of the constitution, are more fixed than elsewhere,” he argued, “but on the other hand, the great in this country of liberty, are nearer upon the level with the people; their ranks are more separated, and their persons are more confounded.”7 The dignity of the elite (whether plebeian or patrician in origin), the strength of the state, and nationality all appeared to be interrelated. Spokesmen of the French elite thus pointed to the example of En­gland and popularized the idea of the nation in the hope that France would become a nation, too. “We need a nation,” declared a certain Philippe Grouvelle in 1879, “and the Nation will be born”: where there is a will, there is a way. The example of En­gland only accelerated the process of the symbolic elevation of the French people. This process may have been inspired by structural changes within French society, which in themselves had been caused by the absolute monarchy’s efforts to subdue its unruly ancient nobility,

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but it was because of En­gland that the French became worshippers of the nation. From the start, the French nation was seen as godlike. Like God, it was an abstraction, a supreme rational being, obviously an object of worship but on the whole left undefined. In a monotheistic society such as France, two supreme deities could not coexist. The erection of a new cult, therefore, demanded that the old one be destroyed. The iconoclastic tendencies of the French elite before the French Revolution, specifically its intense anticlericalism, may have stemmed from this imperative. The concept of the nation, imported from En­gland, was therefore transformed. What had been a politically charged metaphor, a name for the association of free, rational individuals, turned into a superhuman collective person. In France, the “nation” inexorably tended toward abstraction and reification. To some extent, this tendency was the result of the sequence of the development of the French national consciousness. If in En­gland the term “nation” was a title given to a story, in France the title existed long before the story was written. France, or at least its spokesmen, had wanted to be a nation before it became one. The French elite adopted the idea of the nation not to acknowledge the social and political structural changes that would necessitate or justify the application of the term to the French population (as happened in En­gland) but because adopting it might help the elite out of its predicament. There was nothing in reality to constrain the imagination of aspiring nationalists, no nation out there to impose its image on their consciousness. The nature of the needs that the idea of the nation addressed in each country determined the ideal relationship between individuals and the political community as a whole, and had important repercussions for the political culture it helped to create. In En­ gland, the dignity of the individuals who composed it dignified the collective body and justified calling it a “nation.” But in France, it was the dignity of the whole that restored dignity to those who

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claimed membership in it. In En­gland, the liberty of the individuals who composed it made the nation free, whereas in France, the liberty of the nation constituted the freedom of the individuals. In En­gland, the source of authority was the individual, a thinking, autonomous human being; individuals delegated their authority to representatives, and thus empowered the nation. In France, it was the nation from which authority emanated, and it empowered individuals. The French nation was born as a collective individual with attributes of its own, and the human individuals within it naturally partook of those attributes: it was presumed, therefore, to have a will and interests of its own, independent of the heterogeneous wills and interests of human individuals. This inevitably called into being a special group of persons, distinguished by their ability to divine the national (general) will and interests. This group was superior to the rest of the national community, and thus an aristocracy. If the original En­glish nationalism was individualistic, the French nationalism was collectivistic. The idea of the nation took root in France around 1750. It became an integral part of the elite discourse and effected a profound change in mentality. Shortly thereafter, it changed its original meaning. Two developments contributed to this change. The first development was the reclamation of nationality from the nobility and the expansion of the nation. The former aspect was perhaps a sign of the elite’s impatience with the status quo, seen in its unconscious decision to substitute a change in the cognitive model of reality for an actual change in reality (which would be much more difficult to achieve). The latter aspect made the concept of nationality more inclusive, but eventually excluded the hereditary aristocracy and discredited the aristocratic position. As the elite converted to national identity, the preoccupation with status and the power struggle within the country were partially (and, during the Revolution, completely) eclipsed by the concern for international precedence: this was the second development. The factor

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that most strongly reinforced the incipient collectivism of French nationalism, however, was France’s competition with and changed attitude toward En­gland. After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, it became clear that France had lost its predominance in Europe. This was highlighted by En­gland’s spectacular rise to centrality, as France ceded to En­ gland the position of leadership it had held in the seventeenth century. As the elite came to identify with the political community as a whole, this changed relationship increasingly bothered its members. French national patriotism was expressed in the burning desire to restore France’s superiority over En­gland. There were two possible ways to achieve this outcome. One was to introduce liberal reforms and make France a nation similar to the En­glish; the other was to degrade the rival power. Some of the older philosophes, most notably Voltaire and Montesquieu, took the first position. Their approach was based on a firm sense of self-confidence, the conviction that France could easily learn from and then surpass its model and competitor. This self-confidence was at the basis of the mid-century admiration of En­gland among the educated French. Comfortable in this self-esteem, they held no grudge against En­ gland because they were sure that soon there would be no grudge to hold. “We are in many things the disciples of En­gland,” wrote Voltaire, “we shall end up by being equals of our masters.”8 But this proved to be more difficult than expected, and Anglophilia gradually gave way to Anglophobia. The French aristocratic and intellectual elite in the second half of the eighteenth century found itself in a position which, from a sociological point of view, was a perfect breeding ground for ressentiment.9 Drawn into competition with En­gland by its decision to adopt the En­glish national idea as its model and by its desire to regain lost status, France lacked the necessary social conditions to implement this model. As a result, equality with En­gland, let alone superiority to it, was impossible. France was perceived as es-

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sentially comparable, equal to En­gland, and at the same time was clearly inferior to it. The aristocratic-intellectual elite in France— whose members now identified their status with that of France as a whole—experienced this national inferiority personally. Early French nationalist thought displayed unmistakable characteristics of ressentiment. Significantly, these characteristics were more salient in the professedly liberal (progressive and nationalistic) thought of the period than in the genuinely conservative thought that rejected En­glish values outright and refused to admit that France was in any way comparable to its successful neighbor. French liberals who resented En­gland nonetheless shared En­glish values, at least in name. France saw itself as a liberal nation. The rejection of the En­glish model was expressed in the transvaluation of these values but also in their emphatic appropriation. In the hands of the luminaries who forged the French national consciousness, the concepts of nation, liberty, and equality acquired entirely different meanings—sometimes diametrically opposed to the En­glish meanings—yet these concepts remained tied to each other and idolized. They were affirmed in the “solemn” and explicit Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, such as was never thought of in En­gland; its proud slogan of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) became the symbol of France. As a nation, France was committed to and worshipped this holy trinity. But, as often as not, the idea of the nation (the people as a self-governing elite) was replaced by the ideal of national unity; equality was exchanged for uniformity (and obedience to the “aristocracy,” who had special access to the will of the nation); and liberty came to mean the sovereignty of the national will free from constraint by either another sovereign or any of its (dissenting) members. The inclusiveness of identity—the fraternity of all Frenchmen—remained, but collectivity overshadowed the individual, and individual rights, which never before had been articulated with such circumstance, were pushed into the background.

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Opinions that were both expressly liberal and Anglophobe became increasingly prevalent in the latter part of the century. They were especially influential in the 1780s and their notable advocates included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Encyclopédie coeditor Denis Diderot, and the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. Rousseau was adamant that En­gland should not be regarded as a model. In The Government of Poland, he counseled his Polish audience (the landed magnates who had not yet learned to consider their peasants as human beings): “Your constitution is superior to Great Britain,” for En­gland had already “lost its freedom.” He could only “record my astonishment at the irresponsibility and lack of caution, the stupidity even, of the En­glish.” In En­gland, as he noted in the Social Contract, “the use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them.”10 The main reason for En­gland’s loss of freedom was economic expansion. Commercial interests had ousted the sacred flame of liberty from the En­glish hearts and nothing but greed reigned therein. Aristocratic contempt for the nouveaux riches, which among the more methodical intellectuals turned into a consuming hatred of money itself, fused with the resentment toward En­gland. En­ gland, in the opinion of late eighteenth-century philosophes, was a capitalist society. This French view gave the term “capitalism” a new, political, and emphatically negative meaning, which it has preserved to date and which has contributed to the modern difficulty of understanding capitalism as an economic phenomenon. So reinforced, by the 1770s France’s Anglophobia was becoming bellicose. En­gland needed nothing so much as a good thrashing. But, wrote the philosopher Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, for instance, En­gland itself was preparing its own downfall: Moved by the desire to augment their riches and extend their empire, [the En­glish] consult nothing but their avarice and ambition. . . . En­gland, mistress of the seas, has nothing to fear from strangers. It is her own great power, her over-vast colonies, and

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her over-extended commerce that she has to beware of. Perhaps she needs to experience disgrace in order to conserve the greatest of her assets, that is, her liberty; but who can assure that it will know how to profit from a disgrace that will offend her avarice and her ambition?11

The temptation to test this, and at least participate in disgracing (and hopefully beating) En­gland, was irresistible. This was one reason for the French involvement in the American War of Independence. Burgeoning French nationalism also was behind another major eighteenth-century development, which we often fail to connect to the history of nationalism: the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Usually seen as a general European movement of thought, the Enlightenment in fact had three distinct trends reflecting three different eighteenth-century cultures: British (specifically, Scottish), French, and German. The German Enlightenment was a fashionable importation, mostly from France, encouraged by several absolutist German monarchs, above all by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Indeed, the greatest of the German Enlightenment philosophers, Immanuel Kant, defined Enlightenment simply as “the century of Frederick.”12 The Enlightenment in Britain and in France, by contrast, involved two related but original currents of thinking about human affairs. In both cases, these currents expressed the underlying national consciousness; as a result, their differences reflected the differences between the two nationalisms. The British Enlightenment was to a large extent a philosophy of science, but its motivation was to extend science—which at that time existed only as physics, the science of matter—to humanity. Its representative thinkers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, called themselves moral philosophers because they regarded humanity as moral reality, “moral” at that time meaning “distinctly human,” what today we mean by “social.” In effect, they attempted to create an empirical social science. Their ontological presuppositions, like those of

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the late seventeenth-century En­glish thinkers, were those of the original En­glish nationalism. They were ontological individualists, and therefore universalists, who believed that the individual (created by God in his own image, as a rational being) came before society, and that societies were organized in accordance with human nature, which was the same everywhere, particularly the nature of human reason or the mind. By contrast, Enlightenment philosophy in France, a clear departure from the French philosophy of the previous century, was based on different presuppositions and pursued different goals. French philosophes also admired science (among other things, because it was respected in Britain and made intellectuals there respectable) and stressed reason as fundamental to social organization. But the reason they praised was not the reason that interested their British counterparts, who tried to understand human cognitive faculties. French Enlightenment thinkers saw reason as the possession of a select few, the elite of intelligence (which they believed they represented). From the French perspective, reason was not subject to the weaknesses that authors such as John Locke and David Hume analyzed in Britain. Instead, those who possessed it were capable of perceiving truths that ordinary humans could not see, and thus were able to assess objectively the advantages and disadvantages of various social arrangements and lead the community in the objectively right direction. These French thinkers were moral philosophers, too, but their philosophy was moral in the sense of being normative. Their (superior) rationality made them able to discern the true will and interests of the nation and tell the rest of its members how they should live their lives. The French Enlightenment articulated the emerging French national consciousness, transforming it into a sophisticated political philosophical position. Its rationalist theoretical model, ready to be put into practice, would have tremendous influence over thinkers to come. It influenced even the thought of the founders of the new American republic—

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whose national consciousness, derived from the original En­glish source, was naturally individualistic and much older than that of the French. Its imprint still appears in the social sciences (political science and sociology) as they are taught in the United States. Of far greater significance, obviously, was the French Enlightenment’s immediate political effect at home. It brought into being a new kind of political event: revolution as a conscious, intentional attempt to transform the social order on the basis of a theoretical model.13 Over the course of the French Revolution, this theoretical model was simplified into an ideology—an easily understood and unlikely to be misinterpreted presentation of political principles, aimed at political persuasion and indoctrination. Thus ideological politics also owe their existence to nationalism. The French Revolution in many ways inaugurated the Age of Nationalism, making the originally En­glish ideas pan-European. This pivotal event was above all the first collective expression of national consciousness in France. The revolution, inspired by nationalism, attacked the prenational form of the social order—the ancien régime—and the social consciousness on which it was based. The social consciousness of the old regime was religious, monarchical, and hierarchical, presupposing the obedience of the secular world to divine authority, the fundamental differences of nature between social strata, and corresponding differences in rights between them. In distinction, national consciousness was secular, democratic, and egalitarian, presupposing popular sovereignty and an egalitarian community of identity, inclusive of the entire population. Thus the revolution inaugurated the age of democracy on the European continent, spreading it as much by fire and sword as by the power of Enlightenment ideas. At the same time, it was as certainly, and in a very profound sense, a product of an aristocratic reaction. At its vanguard stood the leading sector of the nobility, the aristocratic/intellectual elite, whose members had been the main propagators of nationalism throughout the eighteenth cen-

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tury. It was placed there by its status-inconsistency, or anomie. In France, the chief reason for adopting the idea of the nation—which was to become the basis of social and political solidarity, and of the identity of every Frenchman—was the fact that the idea of national patriotism offered a means of resolving the existential crisis of the French elite. The idea of the nation elevated the selfish interests of the aristocracy and turned their fight to protect their privileges into a moral crusade. It turned reactionaries into revolutionaries— transformed them, indeed, into ardent idealists—without making them any less reactionary or, for that matter, any more liberal. Then, as now, liberal democracy was not the only alternative to the despotism of an “old regime.” Democracy could as well be authoritarian. The little man could be respected only in the name of the little man, but trampled upon, overtaxed, starved, guillotined, and otherwise tormented in the name of thousands of lofty ideals, including certain interpretations of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But the idea of the nation—the symbolic elevation of the people to an elite—had been imported directly from En­gland, where liberty still meant individual liberty and equality meant equality across society. Moreover, for a significant number of people in France, the arguments of ideologues made no sense but these En­glish ideas had a strong appeal; in their simplicity, they saw nothing but these ideas in the arguments of ideologues. They pronounced the same words, but proclaimed different principles, and yet the flame of French national patriotism burned in the breasts of them all. While the elite agonized, French people learned to read. The elite generalized its “anguish of the mind,” transforming it into a noble indignation over “tyrannies” of all sorts, coupled with a fiery nationalism. In the process, the elite gave the masses food for thought and forged the weapons with which they would be armed. As the elite, moved by interests peculiar to itself, was drawn to nationalism, the rest of the literate and semiliterate population in France—the denizens of the cities, the “bourgeoisie” or middle

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class—also discovered that their personal destinies depended on the existence of the nation. They too were striving now to help it become happy and great. If the nationalism of the elite originated in the belief that things had changed for the worse, and the desire to arrest this development, to prop and protect its threatened but still superior status, that of the bourgeoisie was aroused by the previously unimaginable possibility of improving its own. In a nation, the bourgeoisie could be much more than it was allowed to be in a society of orders. A new prospect of dignity opened before it. With the development of the national consciousness, the French middle classes found themselves in a potentially advantageous situation, and their members wished to take full advantage of it. They welcomed the nationalization of identity and were receptive to the thought of being active members of a political community. Within a nation, they would have the guaranteed ability to exert influence on public policy, and secure respect for themselves as individuals, that is, liberty and equality in the En­glish sense of these words. The En­glish model appealed to them and they subscribed to it willingly. Unlike the aristocratic and intellectual elite, however, the middle classes focused on conditions within France. As a result, France’s relative loss in status to En­gland was at best of secondary importance for middle-class nationalism, and it was fueled much less by wounded pride and a desire to get even. Anti-En­glish, and generally antiforeign, sentiment was conspicuously absent from the cahiers de doléances, the notebooks of grievances, which members of the Third Estate (the order of the common people) were asked to submit together with representatives of other orders in preparation for the meeting of the Estates General just before the revolution. This set of circumstances may help explain why French Anglophobia was half-hearted and short-lived and why ressentiment, which is based on a sense of self-doubt and would become such a dominant force in the formation of other nationalisms (as in Russia and Germany), only briefly appeared in France and soon was re-

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placed by a renewed confidence in this time in the national superiority of France to all its neighbors. France, the Grande Nation, set the example for the world to follow in destroying its old regime and embodied the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It would be the leader of the new democratic world, just as it had been the leader of the Christian world since the time of the Crusades. The example of the French Revolution—the collective self-­ affirmation of the French nation—proved to be extremely influential. It framed the European political imagination of the next century, and to date, in the West, the political spectrum of imaginable ideological positions exists within the arbitrary bounds that the revolution set in its early days. Indeed, the left-to-right spectrum of ideological positions dates to the establishment of the National Assembly in the summer and fall of 1789. The National Assembly began as the assembly of the Third Estate—its chosen name reflecting the same republican and secular thinking that was so clearly symbolized in the motto of the revolution and captured the essence of the new national consciousness. It was formed from the inclusive nature of the community, the fundamental equality of all its members, and the right of every member to participate in its government. Nonetheless, it is interesting that the representatives of the Third Estate, who were all notables, if not nobles, and thus members of the privileged strata, chose to identify themselves with an entirely new entity—the nation. In En­gland, when the word “nation” first came into general usage in the sixteenth century, it was synonymous with the word “people,” and it was this equation that made the nation an inclusive community of identity. But in the France of 1789, the word “people” still had the connotation of lower-class rabble, and the revolutionaries in the Assembly were reluctant to openly declare themselves representatives of the uneducated, uncouth masses. In the National Assembly, in which the Third Estate was soon joined by the clerical and noble orders, groups with similar views

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(in this sense, parties) seated themselves apart from those with which they differed. Eventually, the members’ ideological positions became identified with their seating arrangements in the old royal riding academy that housed the Assembly in the fall of 1789. The radicals—the “National Party,” led, oddly, by the aristocratic Comte de Mirabeau and the Marquis de Lafayette—who believed that all the vestiges of the prenational order had to be swept aside, became known as the left. The moderates, who thought that some elements of the old order (such as religion, or, however redefined, monarchy) were integral to the French nation and therefore should be kept, were labeled the right. Notably, those in the middle or the center, who did not make up their mind one way or the other, were called “the swamp.” It is vital to remember that both those of the left and those of the right were nationalists; by the time of the revolution, the French political elite had all been converted to the new national consciousness. Even the hapless Louis XVI, who became heir to the throne only because of the untimely death of his father and two elder brothers, was a nationalist, educated entirely in the spirit of the Enlightenment. His cousin Prince Philippe d’Orléans chose to be known as Philippe-Égalité, and even the socalled Monarchists in the Assembly, led by the commoner Jacques Necker, wanted to reform the monarchy on the line of the British national model. All the delegates thus represented the new force of nationalism. The terms “left” and “right,” in revolutionary politics, stood for radical and moderate forms of nationalism. Radical nationalists, specifically, were more eager to equate the nation and the people. The left nationalism, therefore, could be called populism.14 The radicals, for whom the first order of business was the destruction of the old order, had a clear agenda; they were naturally more activist, and acted. The reform-minded moderates mostly reacted to the radicals’ actions and tried to restrain them. This behavior identified the left with the revolution and the right with reaction. As a result, the left came to represent orientation toward

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the future, change for the better, progress, and the right was associated with conservatism, efforts to hold on to the past. The French Revolution was inspired by nationalism; it represented the triumph of national consciousness, and the conversion of the French to its ideals. Because this consciousness was a result of a conversion, it shared aspects with the parallel religious experience in that it appeared to the converts as the only true, natural consciousness. The newness of nationalism thus disappeared from the sight of the participants, and they were no longer aware that it had shaped the political positions of both the radicals (the left) and the moderates (the right). The British observers of the revolution, who had been converted to the new consciousness since the sixteenth century, and British colonists in America, who had brought it with them to the New World, were also oblivious to that. And thus the left and the right became cognitively separated from nationalism, the different forms of which (radical and moderate) they represented. Nationalism redefined the good and the just. It now appeared patently unjust, unnatural, and evil if a social order did not correspond to the way a nation was supposed to be organized—as a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members, an inclusive community of identity. Every relic of such injustice demanded immediate correction; it could not be tolerated. The demand for such immediate correction and every action taken to promote it was natural and good, while every effort to slow it down was unnatural and evil. In accordance with the Tocqueville effect,15 the quicker the pace of change, the less tolerance there was for the remaining traces of the prenational past. History itself, it seemed, demanded that politics and society be reconstructed in accordance with national—that is, egalitarian and respectful of popular sovereignty, or in other words democratic—consciousness. All other views, including insufficient ardor in defending the new values and less than utter reprobation of the old ones, appeared unconscionable. This transformation of consciousness has been reflected in sev-

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eral tropes that have framed our thinking to date: all change is progress, desire for change is progressive, progressive is good, clinging to the past is bad, conservative is clinging to the past, reaction to change is bad, conservative is reactionary is bad; the left is progressive, the right is reactionary and conservative; the left follows the direction of history, the right opposes it; in sum, the left is good, the right is bad. One can see these tropes in the fact that parties of the left have never found it difficult to identify themselves as of the left, while those of the right often have been reluctant to class themselves with the right. In politics, “left” became a term of approbation and “right” of opprobrium. At the same time, the specific meanings of “progressive” and “conservative,” of “the direction of history” and “reaction,” have changed repeatedly, and nationalism’s connection with all modern political agendas has disappeared from view.

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THREE

SPREADING

The United States—Russia—the three types

There is only one first nation—En­gland, where national consciousness and the phenomenon of nationalism were born. But France, La Grande Nation, though responsible for launching nationalism on its worldwide career, shares the honor of being second with two others: the United States of America and Russia. Indeed, America’s young society is nonetheless one of the oldest nations on Earth, and the only one without a prenational history. Its social consciousness was never anything but national consciousness, and all the changes within it occurred in the framework of nationalism. The development of the American nation and of American nationalism is a direct continuation of the process begun in the sixteenth century in En­gland and carried to the other side of the Atlantic in En­glish minds—for it is in people’s minds that nationalism has been, to this very day, developing. This unbroken continuity between En­glish and American nationalisms is not contradicted by America’s beginnings as a colo57

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nial society; the fact that America was the first colonial society to assert a separate national identity actually proves the point. In a sharp distinction to the French Revolution, the American War of Independence was no revolution at all: none of the American republic’s Founding Fathers intended to restructure the existing social order on the model of an ideology that differed from the thinking of their erstwhile British brethren. They simply wanted their rights as members of the British nation (their “rights of En­ glishmen,” as they put it, before cutting the phrase to the “rights of men”) recognized. To reassert their En­glish/British nationhood, they had to drop the nation’s name. This, insofar as the United States is concerned, was the most significant change that resulted from the events of 1776. From then on, the En­glish individualistic and civic nationalism existed in two independent nations, the British and the American. It has been the fate of the American nation, said Richard Hofstadter, “not to have an ideology but to be one.”1 In the United States, at the outset, the only thing certain about the American society—which had not yet developed more objective attributes such as territory, resources, institutions, and character—was that it was a nation. In every other case, nationalism has been dependent on and shaped by preexisting social circumstances; in the American case, nationalism was the most important independent factor shaping social circumstances. The idea of the nation emerged in an old, traditional society, different from the ideal image that the concept implied. Subsequently, in all other circumstances but that of the British settlement in America, this ideal image was imported into social environments whose reality contradicted it. In the uneven battle between the nascent principle and the established ways of life, the principle always had to adjust. But in America, there was almost no social reality other than the one the settlers brought with them in their minds. (The settlers did not perceive the realities that existed as such—or if they did, they saw those realities as

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something to be changed.) The only constraints they faced were symbolic. To be sure, a new society was soon formed. Economic opportunities, or their scarcity, bred interests and structural relations that had little to do with the ideal of national community. But this ideal was nevertheless a given. Whereas in older societies, the novel idea acted on the obdurate reality, in America the new reality acted on the stubborn internalized idea. The national idea had a transformative effect on the reality of each society it encountered, but in older societies the idea itself was affected by the counterpressure of institutions and traditions from the prenational past. In the American case, however, the idea of the nation—the national consciousness—was a much more potent factor in the formation of the national society, even though it undoubtedly also was modified by the independently emerging reality. Contrary to the accepted opinion, in a certain—analytical—sense, the American nation is an ideal nation. Its national element has been challenged by the fewest counterinfluences; it is a purer example of a national community than any other. It follows that the history of nationalism in America—or the American episode in the history of nationalism in general—is the history of the American society. It is an account of how a unique society, including even its geopolitical framework, was molded by national identity; the seed population consisted of members of a nation who brought the conviction of their nationality with them to a new continent. Though it is brief in comparison to that of most other societies, existing or extinct, the nature of this short history does not allow us to dwell on any part of American history as such. The only point addressed here is that all of it to date is a reflection, however mediated by other factors, of the psychological dynamics of individualistic and civic nationalism. The En­glish idea of the nation symbolically elevated the common people to the position of an elite, which in theory made every individual the sole legitimate representative of his or her own interests and an equal participant

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in the political life of the community. It was grounded in the values of reason, equality, and individual liberty. The nation of an individual was the community within which one could participate and realize one’s liberty, whose interests were fully one’s own interests (because one could influence them), and in which one had true, unencumbered membership. Any obstacle that might prevent a nation’s member from completely realizing one’s national rights justified the withdrawal of one’s loyalty or demanded protest. The option of exit 2 was very rarely exercised, since, however incomplete the realization of such rights in the United States, no other society has ever offered better possibilities for it. Thus American history proceeded by fits and starts of protest. From the outset, Americans did not conceive of a nation, or a people, or a state, in terms of a unitary entity, a collective individual. Until academic political science emerged in the twentieth century, these concepts were never reified; they remained, as in En­gland (but more conspicuously), collective designations for associations of individuals. It is a singular feature of the political language of revolutionary America that in it, the word “people” is used, as a rule, in the plural—the paradigmatic example being the opening “We the People of the United States” of the Preamble to the Constitution. The location of the sovereignty within this plural “people” divided sovereignty. A “nation,” as in the original En­glish conception, was a community of sovereign members. Its own sovereignty was composite, not unitary; it was derived from theirs. Therefore, any nation, in principle, was a federal structure in the sense that it was based on its members’ good faith (from the Latin foedus—treaty, derived from fides—faith) in one another, or a social contract. The moral primacy of the individuals, the parties to the contract, and the artificial character of societies (social compacts), were made explicit and insisted upon. The separation from Britain implied universalization of En­ glish values. Americans pledged themselves, far more openly and

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unambiguously than the En­glish did before them, to universal liberty. This universalism removed from individualism all of the traditional restraints that were still present in En­gland. Universal self-government meant the self-government—that is, independence—of each individual. (At the outset, only Christian European men qualified as individuals in this context, but eventually these qualifications would be dropped.) Yet this national commitment to individual liberty was a colossal obstacle to national unity. In principle, to carry the ideal of self-government to its logical conclusion, every individual was a nation in his or her own right. In practical terms, at the moment of independence one could easily think of thirteen American nations. The very nationality of the American consciousness, the uncompromising commitment of Americans to the purified principles of original nationalism, for a long time prevented them from forming a consensus regarding the geopolitical referent itself of American national loyalty—leaving open the question of what was, or whether there was, the American nation. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the westward territorial and population push, the massive immigration, and changes in the economic profile of the population in the northern states worked clandestinely to form a sense of American national unity. But it is important to keep in mind that, until the Civil War settled the issue, the forces that could (and eventually did) bring the United States to the brink of geographic disintegration were at least as strong as those that fostered this sense. America’s imperfect geographic integration promoted pluralism of the ways of life. Yet this was an ally, rather than a foe, of American national unity. Pluralism was a guarantor of America’s promise and increased one’s sense of freedom. This hopeful, future-oriented attitude was the basis of the American national patriotism, taught through history, literary anthologies, national heroes and symbols, and even arithmetic—a belief that, more than any other nation,

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the United States deserved a passionate commitment. As Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America: [Americans] are separated from all other nations by a feeling of pride. For the last fifty years no pains have been spared to convince the inhabitants of the United States that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people . . . hence they conceive a high opinion of their superiority and are not very remote from believing themselves to be a distinct species of mankind.3

No doubt, this pride, which increased and sustained the dignity that nationalism gave to each individual’s personal identity, contributed tremendously to the strength of American nationalism—that is, the loyalty of Americans to their nation—and the stability of American society, even as its uncompromising idealism threatened to destabilize it. As long as the geopolitical framework of the nation remained ambiguous, one could choose political secession, geographic separation, or internal reform and protest as ways to deal with the discontent generated by the inevitable contradictions between American ideals and reality. Once these geopolitical boundaries were fixed, with group secession ruled out and geographic separation within the system no longer possible, individuals channeled their discontent into protest or withdrawal into privacy. Both of these options undermine national commitment, and therefore unity. Thus American nationalism remains the main source of social cohesion in the United States and the main stimulant of unrest in it. The rigidity of loyalty to the national ideals of liberty and equality, as well as its laxity, endangers the nation; yet this loyalty preserves it. In the United States, the maxim “My country, right or wrong” is wrong: it betrays the ideals. But the alternative principle—“My country, right or wrong! When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right!”—is unrealistic, and sets one onto a frustrating project that may lead to disaffection. For all its

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problems, however, millions of people still knock at the doors of this country, while emigration from it, which one would expect to be substantial, given how much discontent with it is being constantly publicly expressed, remains astonishingly rare. Russian nationalism was conceived in 1698. We can say this with some certainty because there is no doubt as to its paternity: the father was Peter the Great; and none as to the moment of insemination: after the czar’s visit to Western Europe, where he personally met with William III in London, and, upon his return having also personally chopped several heads off the elite military (Streltsy) mutineers who opposed him in the name of his traditionalist sister Sofia, immediately proceeded to convert his subjects into Europeans. In En­gland, the czar had learned of the wonders the adoption of national ideas could do to the prestige of a geopolitical entity. He was ambitious, and wished to increase the prestige of the geopolitical entity that belonged to him (in the sense that, as its lord and master, he was free to do with it what he fancied). As a geopolitical entity, Russia was very young: so named, it existed only since the middle of the seventeenth century. It had come about through a colossal enlargement by conquest of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, or Muscovy. Muscovy had originated in 1283 as a tiny principality (with Moscow a small trading post) in the Moscow River Basin. It was established by Daniel, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, who himself was the prince of the slightly larger principality of Vladimir-Suzdal. Daniel at once seized a number of adjacent sovereign territories. His son Yuri, with the help of his wife’s brother, Uzbeg Khan of the Golden Horde—the Mongol overlord of all the Slavic principalities of Kievan Rus’, united between 882 and 1240 in a loose federation under Viking (Scandinavian) leadership—achieved control of Vladimir-Suzdal. Yuri’s son and the Khan’s nephew Ivan I (nicknamed Kalita, “moneybag”) was the Mongol tax collector in Rus’ territories; among other

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things, he helped quell the rebellion of a rival Slavic principality, Tver’, against Mongol rule. This helped him to acquire more of the formerly Kievan territories. More important, Ivan had the seat of the Orthodox metropolitan moved from Kiev, first to Vladimir and then to Moscow, making Moscow the religious center of the Christian Orthodox Slavic principalities. The Orthodox metropolitan called himself the metropolitan of all Rus’ (vseya Rusi). Now that the metropolitan was seated in Moscow, the Moscow grand dukes also began calling themselves by the same title, thereby laying a symbolic claim to rule over the entire territory of the defunct federation to which they were related only very indirectly. The understanding they reached with the Muslim overlords, despite a rebellion under Dmitry Donskoi in 1380, aided them in expanding throughout the fourteenth century. Principalities, such as Nizhny Novgorod in 1392, were simply gifted to the Moscow princes by the Khans as a reward for services rendered. By the end of the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” in 1480, Muscovy was able to assert control over most of the former Rus’ territories, annexing the Republic of Novgorod (Novgorod the Great, not to be confused with Nizhny Novgorod) in 1478. Ivan III, called Ivan the Great (who ruled between 1462 and 1505), was the first grand duke to call himself a czar (albeit only in his correspondence). This term, derived from the Church Slavonic for Caesar, was the local equivalent both of emperor and khan. Under him, the territory of the duchy, already many times larger than the principality of the early fourteenth century, tripled in size. At the time of his death, its territory was 2.5 million square kilometers (km2), the largest of any European state. By his marriage to a Byzantine princess, Ivan the Great became an in-law of the ruler of the Second Rome, Constantinople, which raised the possibility that Muscovy would become the Third Rome—an idea that Russian nationalists would cherish several centuries later. In the sixteenth century, under Ivan III’s grandson, Ivan IV—

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the Terrible—the Grand Duchy of Moscow became Russian Czardom (Tsarstvo Russkoye). Ivan IV was the first of his name to be crowned czar. He was then sixteen; two weeks later, he married a girl from the Romanov family, the first czaritsa. In title, he therefore made himself the equal of emperors. During his reign (1547–84), he added to his holdings the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, and began the conquest of Siberia, which increased his territory to more than 4 million km2—nearly the size of the Indian subcontinent. This was certainly an empire in the modern sense of a centralized and exploitative dominion over territories acquired by conquest and colonized without respect for the customs, language, and religion of the conquered populations. Like himself, Ivan’s imperialism appeared terrible even by standards of the time: his methods included genocidal slaughter of native populations, brutalization, and systematic rape, and certainly provoked terror. A small incident from his western campaign illustrates his decisive approach. In 1563, during the Livonian War, he captured the Polish-Lithuanian town of Polotsk, which was home to several hundred Jews. When asked what to do with them—for obviously, the Jews would not be treated the same as the rest of the town’s population—he responded: “Baptize [them] in the river [Dvina]; those who refuse, drown.” As could be expected, most refused and were duly drowned. A year later, Ivan decided that it was time to put some fear of God into the boyars, the native aristocracy of his day. This aristocracy—in addition to some old families of Muscovite nobility, such as Ivan’s Romanov in-laws, who had served the grand dukes since at least the time of Ivan III—consisted of the princes of the annexed principalities of Kievan Rus’ and descendants of converted Lithuanian or Tatar-Mongol rulers of conquered territories, who could trace their lineages to either Grand Duke Gediminas or Genghis Khan. These princes, whose fathers or grandfathers were actual rulers of sovereign domains, periodically attempted to assert

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their dignity, proving a nuisance to the short-tempered czar. He threatened to abdicate and leave them to their own devices unless given absolute power. The boyars, a seemingly arrogant but on the whole meek lot, agreed out of fright. The result was the establishment of autocracy—centralization of power in the hands of one person, supported by specially created military and bureaucratic structures (such as the secret police), the formation of an alternative nobility from among the czar’s servitors, personally beholden to the autocrat, tying peasants to the land in the manner of late Middle Ages serfdom of Western Europe, which in Russia would evolve into chattel slavery—and, literally, the eradication of every source of independence from the czar’s colossal territory. This huge autocratic multiethnic empire with an enslaved people was the framework in which the society we know as Russia would develop. After a succession crisis during the “Time of Troubles” (1598–1613), the descendants of Ivan’s Romanov wife assumed power. Under the second Romanov czar, Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, the czardom acquired its current name, Russia, but otherwise remained faithful to the model set by its terrible founder and the imperialist traditions of his predecessors. A nation it was not. The autocrat Peter, however, wanted his nobility to think as if it were, and his wish was their command. Despite some childish attempts at resistance in the very beginning, they all soon learned at least to mouth the new words he taught them, if not to think and feel in the new terms that these words were supposed to convey. A precocious minority, however, did develop the new consciousness. The idea of collective dignity in which the new words invited them to share appealed to them, and they became invested in this dignity. This dignity of the Russian nation and state was entirely attributable to the czar’s impressive personality and achievements, in particular his modernization of the military, creation of the navy, and victorious campaigns waged against reputed military leaders.

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Peter’s Russia, a generation earlier regarded in Western Europe as a large but irrelevant hunting preserve of bearded, caftan-wearing, drunken barbarians, suddenly emerged as a major challenger of the leading Western powers. It had colossal resources, was developing rapidly, and clearly was determined to be reckoned with. Much like the rise of China in the late twentieth century, the rise of Petrine Russia in the beginning of the eighteenth century changed the European concept of the “world”; it was impossible not to notice and respect it. Those in the front ranks of the czar’s followers felt this change in Western attitudes, and begged him to assume the title of emperor (Imperator). The Senate, which Peter also had created, declared that Peter brought “the State of All Russias into . . . [a] strong and worthy condition, and His subject people into . . . fame in the eyes of the whole world solely through His guidance.”4 Especially important in this was the Swedish (or the Great Northern) War of the early 1700s. In one of the first books in the new Russian script and using the new vocabulary (both also introduced by Peter—there was no written Russian before this time), The Discourse on the said war, the author Peter Shafirov wrote: The past times are not like the present, for then the Swedes thought of us differently. . . . And that not only the Swedes, but also other and remote peoples, always felt jealousy and hatred toward the Russian people, and attempted to keep the latter in the earlier ignorance, especially in the military and naval arts. This is clear from . . . the history of the past centuries. . . . You may conclude what was the eternal hostility of these neighbors even at the cradle of Russia’s fame . . . all the more now, when the Lord God [made Russia] so famous, that those, who, it seems, were the fear of all Europe, were defeated by us. And I can say, that no one is so feared as we are.

For raising Russia into “such a lofty condition,” thanks, besides God, were owed to “the wise government and indefatigable labors of our All-merciful Czar and Lord, who established and trained in

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Russia a regular army, which did not exist before, and built a navy, of which only a name was known in Russia in the past.”5 Of course, this eternal hostility of remote (that is, Western, more advanced from the Russian point of view, and selected by Russia as its model) peoples was a product of Shafirov’s fertile imagination. Nobody was jealous of the “Russian” people, for the simple reason of not being aware of their existence. Nobody attempted to keep them in ignorance—before Peter, they had done a good job in this regard themselves. But this resentful imagination, blaming national inferiority on others, would become a central element in Russian national consciousness and in most nationalisms of the Russian type, which have proliferated since the nineteenth century. Such nationalisms interpreted the value of equality, which had been imported with the idea of the nation, not as equality among the nation’s individual members but as the equality of the nation to its model nations. The desire to be accepted as an equal, as essentially alike, determined the ideal national identity, while the nagging understanding that one’s nation was not the equal of the model nations from the start defined the relationship with these significant others as that of envy and projected envy. In Russia, both implications—the dependence of the gratifying sense of dignity on being noticed and accepted by the West, and the explanation of the distressing feeling of inferiority to it by the West’s refusal to recognize Russia as equal and give it its due out of malice and envy because Russia ostensibly threatened the West’s superiority—were evident before the first quarter of the eighteenth century was over, that is, in the very first years of Russian nationalism. In 1721, Count Golovkin declared in a speech that His Majesty led his loyal subjects “into the theater of glory in front of the whole world, and, so to speak, from nonexistence into being, and into the society of political nations, as is known not only to us, but to all the world.”6 Four years later, Bishop Feofan Prokopovich eulogized Peter in a dramatic obituary as one

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who resurrected Russia as if from the dead and raised it to such power and glory, or rather the one who gave birth [to] and brought it up . . . whom nobody in the world expected to appear in you [Russia], and when he appeared the world was astonished. He found in you but a feeble power and turned it into a strong one like a stone, adamant. . . . When he destroyed those who attacked us, he broke those who wished us ill and filling the lips of envy, ordered the world to glorify himself . . . he spread your might and glory to the shores of the ocean, to the limits of your advantage. .  .  . He left us, but not as paupers and wretched: the immense riches of his power and glory . . . remain with us. As he made his own Russia, so it will be . . . glorious all over the world . . . glorious forever.7

On Peter’s death, there were few Russian nationalists, but Russian nationalism was already beginning to exhibit certain distinctive characteristics. These were to become reinforced under Peter’s eighteenth-century successors. The contribution of Empress Catherine II, also recognized as “Great” in her lifetime, who ruled Russia between 1762 and 1796, was second only to Peter’s. By the end of her reign, nationalism (although still confined to a narrow elite consisting of nobility and educated commoners) had reached critical mass. From there it developed without royal support, and even allowed the elite to oppose royal autocracy in the name of the nation. Yet Catherine fostered this critical mass with truly maternal care—and, unlike Peter, though she enabled both Russia’s military development and ceaseless expansion, her focus was the development of Russian culture. “Peter gave Russians bodies,” wrote the gentleman-poet M. M. Kheraskov, “and Catherine—souls.”8 Unlike Peter, who wished his subjects to acquire the national consciousness of citizens for purely instrumental reasons—so that they would be better subjects— Catherine actually had national consciousness. Although she took her job as the Russian empress seriously, she was a German princess, and like most German princes of the period admired the French

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Enlightenment. Like her unfortunate French counterpart Louis XVI, she was educated in the spirit of collectivistic/civic nationalism, one that was not at all dependent on birth. Thus she easily made the colossal empire dropped into her lap with other goodies associated with her marriage to the Russian heir apparent the object of her sincerely fervent national sentiment. Her “philosophical frame of mind” impressed Voltaire, who confessed she was his “passion dominante.” She corresponded with him and the Encyclopedists— in fact, she sponsored the Russian translation of the Encyclopédie, banned in France—and was proud to be considered a reine patriote. Under her, the number of secular educational institutions, which first appeared on Peter’s command in the beginning of the eighteenth century, increased dramatically. They nurtured a new upper class, the intelligentsia, that would be of paramount importance to Russia in the years to come. Though it was mostly composed of the nobility at the outset, from the start it was open to talent of any extraction. Soon it constituted an alternative aristocracy that vied for authority with the simultaneously emerging bureaucratic class of functionaries of the state, similarly educated and recruited from the same strata of origin. Their class ethos, also nationalistic, was foremost an ethos of state employees and not of liberal arts, and thus differed from that of the intelligentsia. This created several similar but semi-independent currents of nationalism in Russia, represented by two different and also semi-independent elites that sometimes supported and sometimes opposed each other. Russian nationalism of the nineteenth century appeared exceedingly complex, but in fact it was no more complex than any other. An able governess of the Russian intelligentsia, if not its mother, Catherine wished to see in it a genuine cultural elite. She encouraged its members, many of whom owned populated estates and had no need of gainful employment, to employ their energies productively. She wanted them to write poetry—and, indeed, the first flourishing of Russian poetry, which would become such a central

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part of Russian culture in the nineteenth century, happened under her care. She wanted them to write for the periodical press, as intellectuals did in En­gland and France—under her, the periodical press, which had barely existed before, proliferated and came of age. Catherine herself personally sponsored numerous publications and wrote anonymously for some of them. She exposed the new class to the ideas of the Enlightenment and then inspired these enlightened subjects with stirring nationalistic speeches. It is hard to exaggerate the effect of hearing “Freedom—you, the soul of all,” pronounced with conviction by the autocrat of All Russias; the elevation experienced by her forcibly “civilized” captive audience can only be imagined. In her official addresses and edicts, she insisted that Russia was a nation, that it was a great nation, and that her own dignity depended on the dignity of the nation. “The glory of the country,” she declared, “creates my glory,” and “God forbid that after [her labors were finished] any Nation on Earth should be more just and consequently should flourish more than Russia; otherwise the intention of OUR Laws would be totally frustrated; an Unhappiness which I do not wish to survive.”9 Clearly, the glory and the happiness of the empress depended on the relative rather than the absolute value: it was not enough that Russia be just and flourishing, what was truly important was that it be more just and flourishing than any other nation. Her subjects, however, she suggested, could feel dignified enough by being members of this nation as it was already. In the preamble to the 1785 Charter on Liberty of the Nobility, she wrote: The All-Russian Empire in the World is distinguished by the expanse of the lands in its possession . . . comprising within its borders 165 longitudes [and] 32 latitudes. . . . In true glory and majesty of the Empire [WE] enjoy the fruits, and know the results of the actions of the obedient, courageous, fearless, enterprising, and mighty Russian people, OUR subject, . . . [whose] labors and love of Fatherland together tend primarily to the general good.10

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Such preambles were both edifying and dignifying. By the end of the decade, the elite of St. Petersburg and Moscow were convinced of their nationality. Catherine the Great’s success in cultivating national consciousness in the top echelon of her subject people, however, had an unintended effect: the brightest of its members no longer found 165 longitudes and 32 latitudes sufficient for their sense of dignity. They felt embarrassed by the fact that this vast expanse was ruled autocratically, and was equally known for its prodigious natural resources and for its cultural backwardness. The chief virtue of the mighty Russian people was obedience, and most members of the Russian nation were slaves who could be bought and sold by a tiny minority, an arrangement that surely looked barbaric to the nations whose admiration Russians craved. Moreover, the only two Russians who were respected (rather than just feared) abroad were its two enlightened despots—with the added humiliation that one of them was German. In short, as soon as the Russian elite acquired the sense of dignity that came with nationalism, diligently fostered by their Western-oriented rulers, this dignity was grievously wounded by the realization that the Russian nation was hopelessly inferior to its chosen models. Much of Russia’s internal history since that moment can be explained by the exigencies of its relations with these models, its significant others, and all the history of Russia’s foreign relations can be explained by this sense of inferiority with regard to the West. Not every attempt to introduce nationalism from above is successful. The remarkable success of Peter and Catherine the Great cannot be explained solely by the autocratic power they wielded over their subjects, however much this concentration of power may have helped. Far more important was the fact that the circumstances of the Russian elite—both the one that existed at Peter I’s accession and the one that was transformed by his actions and those of his successors throughout the eighteenth century—made this

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elite responsive to the appeal of nationalism. Such responsiveness cannot be expected in every case. Though very different in origin and in nature, the Russian elite from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries was in the condition of status-­inconsistency (anomie) similar to that of the French nobility. The dignity associated with the status of the boyars, specifically, could not be sustained under the czarist autocratic rule. Even before they gave Ivan the Terrible absolute power (an absolutism far more literal than that of France, where it existed more in word than in deed), these previously sovereign princes had been beaten into the ground by the Muscovite rulers. Ivan instituted an alternative nobility—­ dvoryane (from members, or servants, in the dvor, the czar’s household or court/courtyard)—these undermined the exclusivity and dignity of the boyar status. By the eighteenth century, the alternative had replaced the original elite. Yet the situation of the dvoryane was in no way better. Their servitude was naturally relaxed during the Time of Troubles (though without a corresponding increase in security) and did not fully return to the rigors of Ivan’s time under the first Romanovs, but Peter the Great put an end to the freedom of their privileged lifestyle by rigidly connecting noble status with military or state service. Every male born to a noble family, regardless of rank, had to begin at the bottom of this career ladder. At the same time, he opened the nobility to those who were able to rise on the basis of merit. Not only did this undermine the exclusivity of the old nobility, it also raised the expectations of children born noble while in no way guaranteeing that these expectations would be fulfilled. Russia’s unhappy upper class rode this roller-coaster throughout the eighteenth century. The discipline was less strict under Peter’s immediate successors, and Catherine opened a new venue of status by tying respectability to education. But all this time, the personal dignity of any member of the hereditary elite depended on the degree to which one satisfied the sovereign. That is, this was so

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until the nobility exchanged its estate identity for national identity and acquired national consciousness. Even the Autocrat of All Russias could not deprive one of the dignity of national identity. Despite possible associations with the ruler, national dignity did not depend on a czar. It did not depend on service, either—one would share in it even if one did not serve—but national consciousness gave service a new significance. Many were glad to serve because their service contributed to the national dignity and became an expression of their freedom. Nationalism appealed to the nobility, to Russia’s cultural elite, because it promised to make their dignity secure. They converted to it ardently and irrevocably, never doubting their new identity and the new reality it implied. This would be their problem. Nationalism allowed the Russian elite to escape their anomie, from which they suffered because an aristocracy was inconsistent with autocracy. Having reimagined themselves as a national elite (and Russia as a nation), they made the existence of both conditional on the service to the nation, thereby making their social status dependent on their own conduct. Unfortunately for them, while this made them secure in their identity and dignity within Russia, it linked both inseparably to Russia’s standing in the world, and specifically to the respect it would command from the Western societies the architects of Russian nationalism chose as models and against which the Russian elite, therefore, had to compare itself. Nationalism implied the adoption of Western cultural standards— not merely the supposedly universal moral standards of equality and freedom but also the standards of general cultural development and “civilization” (as then defined, in particular, in France) as reflected in a nation’s scientific and literary achievements, the appearance of its cities and their denizens, the quality of its roads, and the like. The early Russian nationalists encountered these standards on their travels. Judged by these standards, the Russian nation could not but appear barbarous and backward, undeserv-

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ing of the respect of the enlightened, “civilized” portion of humanity. In the eyes of Russia’s own nationalists, their nation was inferior and shameful. Thus the Russian elite replaced one kind of insupportable psychological distress by another, the distress caused by status-inconsistency by the one caused by national inferiority. Their response was ressentiment. Ressentiment is resentment based on envy that cannot be acted on immediately, and thus is experienced continuously. The longer one remains envious, the deeper ressentiment becomes and the more profound its psychological and cultural effects will be. The envy that is most likely to produce ressentiment is existential envy, the desire of the other’s existential condition; that is, the desire to be like the other. It is preconditioned on the assumption that fundamentally one is like the other to begin with; such envy is possible only among presumed equals; the clearest example on the individual level is sibling rivalry. On the collective level, in monotheistic societies, existential envy (and ressentiment) was manifested in Christian and Muslim communities’ envy of the Jews—a sibling rivalry of Abrahamic religions over God’s favor, harking back to the story of Cain and Abel—which has made anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism such a central thread in the history of monotheistic civilization. But within Christian and Muslim communities, the conditions for existential envy did not exist: the social structure within religious communities was so profoundly inegalitarian that to aspire to be like an upper-class group was similar to envying birds for being able to fly. Nationalism created the assumption of fundamental equality among groups within first the Christian and later within all monotheistic communities. Christianity and Islam chose Judaism as their model, and competed with it for the favor of God on the assumption that they would surpass it. Likewise, the architects of new (and imported) nationalism, beginning with France, chose the source of the importation as the model, initially accepting its superiority on the assumption that, being

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essentially equal, they would soon surpass it in realizing its (borrowed) national ideals. The difficulty in becoming like the collective significant other resulted in ressentiment, and ressentiment, which transformed envy into hatred, led to the transformation of the chosen model into the antimodel and spurred active hostility toward it. In France, ressentiment was both fleeting and contained. France (that is, the carriers of the French national consciousness) aspired to be like En­gland in becoming a nation too, in the sense of adhering to the national ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But in terms of its standing among the world (or European) powers, its cultural achievements—and, specifically, the actual recognition of these achievements by other communities, including En­gland— the French were quite content to remain themselves and saw little, in En­gland or anywhere, to provoke their existential envy. Moreover, as a nation, France soon reasserted its superiority to its chosen model so effectively that for two centuries, historians believed that France was the mother of the ideals and ideas that it had in fact imported from across the Channel. The architects of Russian nationalism, by contrast, had no foundation for their national selfconfidence but the fear that their nation inspired. There was little dignity in this, and their ressentiment became the psychological mainspring of Russian national consciousness—to which every feature of the latter can be traced, and which continues to shape Russia’s history and conduct on the world stage. The history of Russian nationalism therefore has a special place in the history of nationalism in general, because it is the first example of a nationalism shaped by ressentiment. Within the monotheistic civilization, ressentiment would become the main mechanism for constructing nationalisms, and would be responsible for the most common type of nationalism within it—the collectivistic/ethnic type. The stages in the evolution of Russian nationalism can be summarized as follows. The Russian elite was attracted to national iden-

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tity because this identity could provide it with the basis for status and self-esteem that noble identity failed to provide. The ability of the national identity to do this depended on the successful development of national pride. But the growth of national pride, which initially had flourished because of Russia’s triumphant rise in the beginning of the eighteenth century, was in later years impaired by the proximity—the very existence—of the West. Russians could not separate themselves from the West and return to the times when its existence was a matter of indifference to them. It was Russia’s originally successful incorporation into the West that gave its patriots the first reasons for national pride, and it was before the eyes of the West that they experienced it. The West was therefore an integral, indelible part of the Russian national consciousness. If the West did not exist, there was no reason for Russia to be a nation. Russians looked at themselves through the eyes of the West, and Western approbation was a necessary condition for their national self-esteem. Yet the West was superior; Russians believed that it looked down on them. How could they build up national pride despite the Western superiority? There were three ways to do so. The first was to become like the West, to imitate it. This route was predicated on the optimistic belief that Russia could do so with relative ease, and most of the eighteenth-century creators of national consciousness subscribed to this position at one time or another. If equality with the West was impossible, then it could be seen as unnecessary. The second response was to define the West as an inappropriate model for Russia. Although the West had merits of its own, Russia was unique and incomparable to it, and therefore it would go its own unrelated way. This was cultural relativism—a transient and inadequate position because it defied the purpose that had called it into being. National self-esteem depended on comparability to the West. The third and most viable response was to reject the West because it was evil—ressentiment. Like cultural relativism, res-

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sentiment was based on the recognition of Russia’s absolute impotence in the competition with the West; unlike cultural relativism, it was a creative sentiment, constantly generating and fermenting new sentiments and ideas. Because Russians had few indigenous resources to provide them with building blocks, pure ressentiment expressed in hatred could not furnish the basis for national pride and help construct a durable national identity. Thus, unable to tear themselves away from the West and efface its image from their consciousness, but having nothing to oppose to it, they defined the West as the antimodel, and built an ideal image of Russia in direct opposition to it. Russia would still be measured by the same standards as the West—it defined Western values as universal—but it was much better than the West. For every Western vice, it had a virtue. For what appeared as a virtue in the West, it had a Russian virtue in reality. If it was impossible to see these Russian virtues in the apparent world of political institutions and cultural and economic achievements, this was because the apparent world was a world of appearances and shadows, while the virtues shone in the world of the really real—the realm of the spirit. From early post-Petrine days, Russian patriots were most embarrassed by their country’s political reality: the lack of liberty, equality, respect for the individual. It was this difference in the fundamental relation to man that militated most conspicuously against the moral canon of the West. It was also the political reality that, in Russia, appeared to be the most immune to change. This was the eighteenth century. The West, for Russia, was Enlightenment-era France. En­gland loomed vaguely on the Russian mental horizon, as France was determined to emulate and surpass its model, in the process giving En­glish national values the explicit and articulate expression they had never had in the place of their birth. Other European societies, especially neighboring Germany, for Russia were but imperfect reflections of France, while America—the Land of Liberty, in the Russian conscious-

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ness—bordered on the imaginary, an ideal construction, an embodiment of a principle. Yet the principle remained the same. The thinking individual—the common man endowed with reason, and thus partaking in the nature of the Deity—was the measure of moral good. Rationality, the reason of the thinking individual, necessitated liberty and equality. Russia did not have liberty and equality, and so it revolted against rationality, rejecting both the thinking individual and the responsible faculty. Reason referred to articulation, delimitation, and reserve; Russians had opposed to it the inexpressible, the unlimited, the hyperbolic. Reason had to do with calculation, reflection, predictability; its opposing values were spontaneity, the unexpectable, the unmeasurable. By their very nature, these qualities were vague; it was much clearer what they were not than what they were. They became the qualities of the enigmatic Russian soul. In the beginning, these qualities were found as rarely in Russia as anywhere else, but they coalesced during the mental exercise of posing antitheses to the existing Western virtues in which Russia felt particularly deficient. The inventors of the Russian soul so wanted to believe in it that the idea, embodied in the national character, became a central component of the culture that was emerging around it. It recommended itself, above all, by being irrefutable. Russians claimed that the Russian soul was superior to the Western reason: how was it possible to deny a national superiority that expressed itself in the world beyond the apparent? The stages of this complex evolution (from the first realization of Russia’s inferiority, through optimistic acceptance of the challenge and different varieties of withdrawal from it—cultural relativism and pure ressentiment—to the transvaluation of values) cannot be clearly separated and organized chronologically. They have coexisted and overlapped. The creators of the Russian national consciousness oscillated among positions, as if testing the powers of every possible remedy, but eventually they converged on the

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final stage of transvaluation. The rejection of reason implied that liberty and equality, its corollaries in political culture, would have to be reevaluated and reinterpreted. Although Russian nationalists agreed that the concepts denote great moral virtues, they refused to see in Western institutions their true embodiment. Western liberty and equality, they argued, were not real liberty and equality. It was not entirely clear what these “real” forms were, but the pivot of the reinterpretation has been easy to establish. Individual reason stifles and constrains inner spiritual forces, and every expression of this limiting rationality in economic or political institutions contributes to the enslavement of the soul. The real freedom is inner freedom; the only equality that is meaningful is equality of the souls. But before the transvaluation of the Western canon could crystallize as the Russian national consciousness, one final step had to be taken. The backwardness of Russia meant the immaturity and underachievement of its “civilization” by Western standards. Russian patriots connected the abomination of reason with too much civilization—a misfortune they were spared—and interpreted the latter as separation from the vital primeval forces, the blood and soil, which Russia had in plenty. This mind-set turned backwardness into a guarantee of greatness and led to the elite’s discovery (or invention) of the “people,” which then determined the criteria of membership in the nation and its definition as an ethnic community. The architects of Russian nationalism linked the spiritual virtues of the Russian soul to these vital forces. The “people,” which the elite would make the central object of collective worship (thereby making Russian nationalism a paradigmatic example of populism), was a mental construct, the conclusion of a syllogism. The soul—the sign of Russianness—derived from blood and soil. The toiling people, the serfs, had nothing but blood and soil, to which they were tied. Therefore, their soul—their Russian nationality—was the purest. A corollary of this conclusion was that those

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who were not of this blood and soil could not possibly have the Russian soul, and thus could not be Russian. Thus, as the eighteenth century ended, the world had four nations, or societies regarded as such by their most influential members. These four nations represented the three types of nationalism, the only options that existed until nationalism reached beyond the monotheistic civilization. The original nationalism, developed in En­gland/Britain and the United States of America, was of the individualistic/civic type. In it, the nation was an association of rational and self-governing individuals. Thus, free to construct their own lives, they were equal in their fundamental characteristics. Membership in the nation was in principle voluntary, dependent on one’s willingness to share in the rights and duties of one’s fellow members: one could leave or acquire it at will; in other words, nationality equaled citizenship. Such, at least, were the ideals of this type. Needless to say, the norms of the surrounding world, which necessarily impinged on the national consciousness of the early nationalists, militated against them, and prevented these ideals from being realized at once. At that time and for a long time thereafter, individuals in certain categories were denied the right of self-government—in some cases because they were believed to be insufficiently rational, in others for other reasons—and therefore were neither free nor equal. But these ideals nevertheless were the central element of the reality in the two nations, and constantly operated to bring social institutions (that is, established ways of thinking and acting) into a closer relationship with themselves. The second type of nationalism, adopted in France, was collectivistic/civic. In its framework, the nation was seen as a collective individual with its own characteristics and will, which it imposed on its individual members. The members, in turn, were regarded rather as members of an organism and not as autonomous actors.

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Yet the long record of French cultural eminence (the memory of the lingua franca spoken during the Crusades was not yet extinct) and the immense prestige of French institutions in the centuries before France became a nation naturally led the architects of the French national consciousness to stress the achievements, and not the ascriptive characteristics, of the nation. Although one and indivisible, it was not constituted by “blood.” National membership, therefore, as in the original En­glish nationalism, was voluntary: one was welcome to become French if one admired France and embraced the national values. If one did not, the late eighteenthcentury attitude to émigrés demonstrated that one could easily be un-Frenched. Neither possibility existed in the framework of the third, collectivistic/ethnic type of nationalism that evolved in Russia. In this case, too, the nation was conceived as a collective individual, with all the implied consequences for the treatment of human individuals. However, in contrast to collectivistic/civic nationalism, it was also believed to be physically—or, rather, biologically—constituted. In other words, it was seen as a natural grouping, analogous to an animal species. It was a product of physical characteristics, somehow connected to the original environment and transmitted by blood. (In the mind of the architects of the Russian national consciousness, this original environment was the colossal territory of Catherinian Russia, even though they knew that much of this territory had been acquired in their living memory.) Soon, in Germany, such a natural grouping would be called a “race”—and it is ironic that in Russia, as well as in Germany, the all-defining race came from stressing the importance of the hidden, inner spirit. National identity, conceived as a race, was completely independent of individual volition; membership in a nation, therefore, could be neither acquired (if one was not born with it) nor lost (if one was). Whereas the individualistic/civic type of nationalism consistently affirmed the human individual as an autonomous agent, and the

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collectivistic/civic one denied the individual autonomy in its collectivism but affirmed it in its civic character, the collectivistic/ ethnic nationalism consistently denied the individual right to selfgovernment and freedom in shaping one’s destiny. For all that nationalism raised the individual to a near-divine status, as one’s own maker and one’s own master, this last form—the most common type in the monotheistic civilization—reduced the individual to the position of an organism in an animal species, entirely determined by the natural group to which it had been born.

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FOUR

T H E G R E AT T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

Types of democracy—the rise of ideology—the many names of nationalism—German influence—Romantic social philosophy—totalitarianism and racism—the Jewish question— nationalism between left and right in the twentieth century

Nationalism, it bears repeating, implies democracy. The fundamental principles of democracy are the principles of popular sovereignty and of the fundamental equality of membership (or fraternity) in the community. Nationalism made them the moral and political canon of the modern world, so much so that we believe them today to be natural, hard-wired into the human brain, and their increasing implementation around the globe an inevitable feature of human progress. Every nation—a community based on the principles of popular sovereignty and fundamental equality of membership—is a democracy by definition. But, as discussed in chapter 3, nationalism (in the monotheistic civilization) exists in three different types, and these different types interpret and implement the principles of popular sovereignty and fundamental equal85

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ity of membership differently. This necessarily results in different types of democracy. The basic distinction in this context is that between liberal and authoritarian democracies, corresponding to the difference between individualistic and collectivistic (civic or ethnic) nationalisms. The institutions (ways of thinking and acting) of liberal democracies safeguard the rights of individuals above all—the freedom of the individual to choose a way of life and to take part in the self-governance (that is, similar choices) of the community. As implementations of individualistic nationalism—specifically, of the concept of the nation as a voluntary association of individuals—liberal democracies by logical necessity are majoritarian. The choices, and thus the will and the interests, of the nation are those of the numerical majority of its constituent individuals. By contrast, collectivistic nationalisms—which conceive of the nation as an indivisible collective individual, reified and personified as a higher being with a will and interests of its own, independent of those of the human individuals composing it—require a specially designated elite, presumably of intelligence or virtue, capable of divining the will and interests of the nation. The authority of such elites reflects their innate characteristics. It can be recognized by acclamation, but does not result from election. Indeed, the rank and file of the nation are not qualified to elect national leaders; they can only acclaim them. The unelected authoritarian leadership of collectivistic nations is representative of the national will (and thus popular sovereignty) to the same extent as the elected leadership of individualistic nations, but in a different way. Instead of representing the national will in the sense of the will of the majority of individuals in the nation (which assumes that individuals are autonomous agents who know what they want), such leadership represents the national will (which it alone can divine) to the rest of the nation, who are assumed not to know it. The difference between authoritarian and liberal democracies is

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rooted in the definition of the nation. Individualistic nationalisms see the nation as an association of individual autonomous agents, and collectivistic nationalisms see it as a collective individual. Although each of them would tend to see the other as false, both liberal and authoritarian democracies are genuine democracies, just as individualistic and collectivistic nationalisms are both genuine nationalisms. The principles they are based on are the same, but these same principles lend themselves to various interpretations. The situation is further complicated because individualistic nationalisms, as a result of their respect for the individual, allow collectivistic (and anti-individualistic) views to proliferate and, in time, may change their character, and consequently the character of the democracy associated with them. It is also complicated in the case of collectivistic/civic nationalisms because of the built-in tug-of-war between their civic component (which assumes the voluntary nature of membership in the nation, and thus individual freedom) and their collectivistic component (which presupposes that the individual is but a member of a higher, more significant organism, thus negating individual agency). The least problematic in this respect—in the sense of being the easiest to understand—is the collectivistic/ethnic type of nationalism. This type consistently rejects the individual as an autonomous social actor and does not allow for freedom of thought and the proliferation of opposing or heterodox ideas. Democracy within collectivistic/ethnic nationalism is always authoritarian and is extremely unlikely to change. It may, however, appear to be changeable because of the words its architects use to refer to it. Collectivistic/ethnic nationalisms are based on ressentiment and the transvaluation of values imported from their chosen models. During such transvaluation, they are likely to adopt new names for the resulting inverted values and turn the original nomenclature into derogatory terms. For this reason, in many collectivistic/ethnic national consciousnesses, by the nineteenth century

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the word “democracy” had already acquired an ambivalent meaning. One spoke of “true” (good) and “false” (bad) democracies. Specifically, liberal democracies, characteristic of the model Western nations (such as Britain and France) that had become antimodels, were defined as false. The authoritarian democracies that developed on the basis of collectivistic/ethnic nationalism were qualified as “socialist” or “communist”—and simply referred to as socialism and communism. Both terms, in fact, had emerged early in the development of nationalism in France and stood originally for collectivistic nationalism as such. It was easy to equate the people or the nation, defined as a sovereign community of inclusive identity and seen as the supreme object of loyalty and commitment, with the society or the community as such. Where the people or the nation were reified, it was natural to reify community and society. Later in the nineteenth century, collectivistic/ethnic nationalists embraced these terms; nationalists in Germany had the greatest international influence of all others. But before moving on to this new major influence on the global history of nationalism, it must be stressed that, as words, socialism and communism—no less than populism, and just like liberalism—are synonyms of nationalism, and, as phenomena (ideologies, political and economic regimes), they are implications and products of nationalism. As such, they are all equally, though differently, democratic. Thus, for instance, the Cold War, seen as a conflict between the two opposed worldviews of liberalism and communism, must be understood as a nationalist conflict—a conflict, above all, between two very powerful nations with opposed national interests but with essentially the same worldview. In terms of vocabulary, it was German nationalism that unquestionably had the greatest influence on national consciousness everywhere. Even neologisms that emerged in En­glish or French, such as socialism and communism, spread in much of the world in German packaging—and with German national baggage. As

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a result, the sway of German ideology, still deeply affecting intellectuals everywhere in the world, is exceptionally broad, which makes German nationalism another central case for discussion. Specifically, the architects of German nationalism contributed to the history of nationalism by articulating the ideas of nationalism in abstract terms unconnected to any particular nationalism. Thus they obscured the connection between modern ideological systems and nationalism, while at the same time reflecting the national consciousness characteristic of the collectivistic and ethnic type of nationalism. Even more specifically, they pursued the implications of this type of nationalism to their logical conclusions, greatly contributing to their historical realization by institutionalizing them in ways of thinking and then acting. In doing so, they bequeathed to the world two of the most dangerous expressions of the national—and therefore democratic, modern—worldview: totalitarianism (an implication of collectivistic nationalism) and racism (an implication of ethnic nationalism). Unlike En­glish, French, or Russian nationalism, German nationalism owed its creation to middle-class intellectuals rather than to the aristocracy. For several reasons, the aristocracy of the many German states was generally satisfied with its situation, and it was the middle-class intellectuals (Bildungsbürger, or “educated bourgeoisie”) who experienced anomie, pushing them to redefine their social situation and seek a new identity. Many in this group, a creation of German universities, were recruited from the lower classes, but as a whole, the group was supposed to enjoy higher status than the uneducated members of the bourgeoisie. Education was virtually the only avenue of upward mobility in the static German society. Even in the eighteenth century, German society did not recognize social mobility, long after it was normal in En­gland and common in France. This rendered the Bildungsbürger marginal: they did not belong to any of the accepted social categories. The situation worsened in the late eighteenth century. The En-

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lightenment, which was the dominant philosophical movement in many prominent German states, most notably Prussia—spreading national consciousness long before any interest in nationalism existed there—placed intellect at the top of the value hierarchy, boosted the self-esteem of intellectuals, and encouraged their aspirations for exalted places in society. This led to the overproduction of intellectuals and a consequent decline in employment opportunities for them. Caught in the state of trained unemployability, often poor and always unhappy, some of the Bildungsbürger turned not against the unaccepting social arrangements but against the Enlightenment itself. The result of this change of heart was Romanticism. Romanticism prepared the conceptual mold of the specifically German national consciousness. To a significant extent, this explains German nationalism’s general ethnic and collectivistic character, as well as many of its particular features. A central aspect of the romantic mentality was its anti-Western—mostly anti-French, but also anti-En­glish—stance. The German Enlightenment accepted the European ideal and saw France and En­gland as models. Yet even its representatives resented their French counterparts, because French men of letters stole the attentions of what was rightfully the audience of the German authors. Romanticism turned this understandable jealousy into a matter of principle. It redefined France and En­gland as antimodels and rejected the Western ideal as evil. In other words, it was a worldview of ressentiment. For a long time, the romantics focused their attention on the private sphere, leaving the political implications of their philosophy unarticulated. Even though it would have been in their interest that the German states (or any one of them) be redefined as a nation—for this would have made intellectuals equal to the aristocracy and secured the dignity they were denied in the society of orders—they did not demand such a redefinition. That would have been futile: nationalism was completely out of tune with the

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mood of the ruling elite and such influential groups as the nobility and the bureaucracies, and so romantic intellectuals were not nationalist. The French invasion, specifically the defeat of Prussia, changed their attitude. The initial effect of the news of revolution in France was to reinvigorate cosmopolitan sentiments in Germany. At first, most German romantic intellectuals admired the French, and rejoiced at the promise of the revolution to topple social hierarchies everywhere. The attempts of the French to fulfill their promises, however, did not bring the Bildungsbürger the benefits that they desired. In some important cases, it threatened their personal interests. At the same time, the French invasion offered the intellectuals an extraordinary opportunity to identify with the ruling elite (and thus at least symbolically elevate their status) and made the elite sympathetic to such efforts of fraternization. As the French attacked the German ruling elite, the romantics presented the cause of the ruling elite as the “German cause,” and virtually overnight turned into German nationalists. German rulers, especially in Prussia, welcomed the efforts of the native intellectuals they had once ignored, and used nationalism as a tool to ward off the French menace. Because the Enlightenment and its representatives in Germany—the romantics’ chief competitors for the attention of the German-speaking public—were discredited by the association with the French Revolution (the child of the Enlightenment), the romantics were left in charge of shaping German national consciousness and were able to define it in the terms of a romantic worldview. Romanticism combined certain elements of Enlightenment philosophy, such as a firm belief in the natural superiority of men of letters and contempt for religious dogma, with the elements of a potent contemporaneous religious movement that also opposed dogma: Pietism. Pietism was a form of mysticism. Its central characteristic was emotionalism; it was “a religion of the heart” that was suspicious of reason, claiming that reason impaired man’s ability

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to enter into a direct mystical union with the Savior. Many of the original creators of Romanticism came from Pietist homes, studied in Pietist schools, or were exposed to Pietism otherwise, and so it was a natural turn for them. Romanticism secularized the Pietist tradition and was able to perpetuate it in an environment that was less and less attuned to religion. The romantics’ rejection of the Enlightenment, first and foremost, was the rejection of the individual as the bearer of reason and, therefore, an autonomous agent. The emphasis on reason and individual autonomy, romantics believed, separated men from their true social nature and rendered them marginal, unattached, and unhappy. An autonomous individual was thus necessarily alienated from himself, and denied what romantics considered true individuality—which they equated, paradoxically, with the totality of human nature. It followed that the only true individuals were communities, and men could only recover their alienated selves and become “whole” by losing themselves in these communities. Because the sphere of their activity as intellectuals was essentially defined by language, the romantics insisted that communities of language were true moral individuals and fundamental units of humanity. But language, they held, had a material basis. It was determined by blood ties—or, as these ties were later to be called, race. (At the end of the eighteenth century, a science of race, anthropology, emerged in Germany; the world still accepts and thinks of race in the German terms invented then.) When, under the impact of the French Revolution and the subsequent French invasion, romantic philosophy was “nationalized,” the idea of the “nation” was reinterpreted as such a natural community, created by race and language. Thus, in the framework of German nationalism, the nation was defined not only as a collective individual, as it was in France, but also, as in Russia, as an ethnic community, membership in which was believed to be naturally determined and could be neither acquired nor lost.

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All the basic propositions of Romanticism can be interpreted (and could be used) as defense mechanisms against the fear of, or pain of experiencing, failure in a society based on the rational (and national) principles of the Enlightenment. The constitutive ideas of this way of thought, such as cultural relativism, totality, individuality, and the exaltation of emotion, provided psychological insurance and amortization of sorts. By denying the superiority of reason and posing equally legitimate alternatives to it, or by denying the legitimacy of reason altogether, romantics reduced the pain of the actual or possible failure to demonstrate such superiority and protected their self-respect. Already the proto-romantic Johann Gottfried Herder argued that it was impossible to consider reason the universal principle or standard of achievement and to judge one culture by the standards of another. Comparison was irrelevant; what mattered was how “whole” the culture was, how true to its own nature, how harmonious with its “individuality.”1 Thus the “totality” of a culture was its “individuality.” The degree to which the culture expressed this individuality and fulfilled itself was the only criterion by which it could be judged, as it was also its mission and purpose. Whatever its nature, the more fully it was acted out, the better the culture was. Wholesomeness of self-expression (authenticity) became synonymous with moral soundness; suppression (or control) of parts of one’s nature was equated with unsoundness or corruption. The same principle applied to art, language, any part of culture, and—most important— to the individual. Simultaneously, a criterion other than the degree of fulfillment of inner capabilities was applied to all cultures, as well as parts of culture and individuals. Cultures differed in the ways in which they provided possibilities of expression for the various faculties of man: his “undivided soul,” the harmonious coexistence of feelings and senses alongside reason. In this context, “totality,” in some disregard of “individuality,” acquired the meaning of such an undivided soul, “the whole man.” This tenet would

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become one of the central ideals of Romanticism and would reappear in a number of unexpected contexts—including the work of Karl Marx—throughout the nineteenth century. Friedrich Schlegel declared: “Individuality is precisely what is original and eternal in man; personality does not matter much.”2 “Individuals mean less to me than of old,” confessed Friedrich Hölderlin in 1793. “My love is the human race—not, of course, the corrupt, servile, idle race that we too often meet. . . . I love the race of the centuries to come.”3 In redefining “totality” and “individuality,” romantics seemed to dispense with the actually existing—and naturally imperfect—individuals. A bias, any bias, was unnatural, for it injured totality. But to combine perfect rationality with equally perfect emotionalism was tricky, and so the impartiality of the romantics was short-lived. Starting from the proposition that reason was but one natural endowment of humanity, a part of nature and a component of totality, they swiftly proceeded to viewing reason as unnatural and an impediment to totality. Reason, for them, became the means of dissecting, compartmentalizing the “whole man,” to the point of being the weapon of alienation. Societies and cultures that were based on or highly valued reason institutionalized and promoted such crippling dissection. Cultural relativism was replaced by the new absolute standards of judgment. The absolute devaluation of reason and exaltation of its opposite, the irrational, unthinking feeling, was the most characteristic and direct expression of the romantics’ rejection of the society that had failed the middle-class intellectuals. They established a new orthodoxy; first advocating the cause of totality and the “whole” man, they ended up excluding a substantial portion of human nature, effectively “decapitating” humanity. Society and politics were not at the center of the romantics’ attention: they saw these as too mundane. Yet they laid the groundwork for a portentous social philosophy. Like everything else in the

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romantic worldview, this social philosophy reflected the Bildungsbürger’s intense dislike of the society that appeared to neglect them, and embodied the principles of totality and individuality. Herder first articulated its basic tenets: the individuality of each society, he argued, arose out of its material conditions. By placing a society in a specific environment, God provided a particular principle around which the society was organized. The material conditions were not chosen but given, and the moral perfection of a society, like that of an individual, involved abandoning itself to its nature determined by these given circumstances. “The concept of existence and perfection is one and the same,” agreed his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. All romantics concurred in this adulation of necessity. Curiously, this principle did not apply to modern or “enlightened” society—at the time represented by France, En­gland, and Prussia. This society put a premium on reason, but this was not interpreted as a reflection of its material conditions. The reality of the modern society was not viewed as a sign of its peculiar perfection. Instead, modern society was considered an aberration, an exception among human societies. Past societies, which did not value reason, were “organic,” little affected by the division of labor, and had a cohesive community of “whole” men. In modern society, the unholy effect of reason was to divide the community and to split man, making him a pale shadow of himself. Reason weakened emotions and separated the heart from the head, the rulers from the people, and mental from physical labor. Fear and greed replaced community, and chimerical freedoms, such as in En­gland, concealed real slavery. In early societies, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote, men could be “everything, poets, philosophers, surveyors, legislators, musicians, warriors,” but in modern society the division of labor created “half-thinkers and half-feelers; moralists who are not doers, epic poets who are not heroes, orators who are not administrators, artistic legislators who are not artists.”4 This view reverberated through the early writings of Marx, particularly in his 1843

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“Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” and the classic formulation of historical materialism, in which communism as the realization of history and a political stance makes its appearance—his 1846 “German Ideology.” The romantics’ indictment of “enlightened” society was a generalization of their personal experience in it. The Enlightenment’s unfulfilled promise to them led them to think that reason separated man from community. A society that venerated reason isolated men and was unnatural and unhappy. In contrast to this unnatural society, the romantics presented their image of an ideal natural community that would put an end to isolation, leave no one and nothing out, but gather all within its iron embrace. In short, they envisioned a totalitarian society. A double confusion supported the notion that totalitarianism was a natural state of man. First, they failed to distinguish between a concrete society and social reality in general, and second, they conflated society, social reality, and the (national) state. In the early nineteenth century, Adam Heinrich Müller, the political philosopher of Romanticism par excellence, gave this view an authoritative formulation. Müller used the word “state” synonymously with “society,” “social life,” “civil life,” “civil existence,” and the like; this state, he pronounced, was “the total of the civil life itself.” Man was a social being who needed to live within society; human existence had never been possible outside of society. Naturally, there had never been an age in which the state did not exist, and so the state was human nature itself: The state is entirely autonomous; independent of human caprice and invention, it arises directly and immediately from where man himself comes from—from Nature—from God, the ancients said. . . . Man cannot be thought of outside the state . . . the state is the embodiment of all the needs of the heart, the spirit and the body . . . [man] is not conceivable other than in the state . . . there is nothing human outside the state.5

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If “the state” meant “social reality,” this impassioned prose did little more than repeat an innocuous sociological truism. But it was quickly transformed into a justification for a moral and political imperative. To be true to one’s nature, or individuality and totality, was the purpose of human existence and thus a matter of ethical conduct. A man who did not feel one with society was not an individual and was not “whole.” And since “the state,” or “society,” meant at the same time a particular state or society—the natural community of race and language, or fatherland—only a complete fusion with the existence of a particular state would qualify one as a true human being. Man’s individuality was impossible without drowning one’s personality in the individuality of the state. States too were individuals, living, willing organisms in themselves. “The state is a person like the individual,” said Novalis.6 “What man is to himself the state is to men.” “It is the intimate association of all physical and spiritual needs, of the whole physical and spiritual wealth, of the total internal and external life of a nation into a great, energetic, infinitely active and living whole,” insisted Müller. The purpose of the state was to preserve its individuality. If one understood the organic, living nature of the state, one could not conceivably desire to change any particular state. “If one regards the state as a great individual encompassing all the small individuals,” believed Müller, “then one understands that human society cannot be conceived except as an august and complete personality—and one will never wish to subject the inward and outward peculiarities of the state, the form of its constitution to arbitrary speculation.” Moved by its exalted purpose, the state could not tolerate independence, indifference, or insufficient enthusiasm on the part of its constituent individuals. On these grounds, Müller defended the medieval state, justly intolerant of “anything which was exempted from its authority,” and wondered:

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How is it . . . possible . . . to tolerate . . . a domestic virtue which is entirely opposed to civil virtue . . . an inclination of the heart which is completely antagonistic to external obligations, a science whose work is contrary to all nationality, a religion of indolence, of cowardice and of isolated interest, which completely destroy the energetic spirit of political life? This is worse than the state within the state.7

There was to be no distinction between the private and public spheres, between the personal and the political, no corner where an individual could rest from the intensity of his civic life. These nebulous effusions of romantic literati had an exact (in the sense of both very similar and rigorously argued) parallel within the bastions of scholarly learning. Venerable professors of philosophy who never openly renounced reason, but redefined it out of existence, backed the collectivistic totalitarian view of the state with their formidable authority and fortified it with the iron (though somewhat idiosyncratic) logic that was the just foundation of their fame. Although Kant’s position on this matter was ambivalent, no ambivalence characterized the theory of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For him, the state was an organism, an “ethical totality,” and the only vehicle through which the true individuality of any particular human being—that is, one’s humanity—could be expressed. It was “the achievement of all, the absolutely accomplished fact, wherein individuals find their essential nature expressed and where their particular existence is simply and solely a consciousness of their own universality.”8 Like the romantics proper, Hegel advocated total integration of the interests of the individual with those of the collective: in a society or an age that allowed particular interests to exist, the individual was alienated from his true (social) nature, and thus from his own self. Marx turned Hegel on his head by replacing the state with economic class as the ethical totality through which particular human beings could express their essential nature, but human individuals were still denied agency and

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autonomy. If their consciousness did not reflect the consciousness of their class, it was false consciousness. As his early writings and letters confirm, young Marx was a passionate German nationalist; his thinking, like German nationalism itself, was clearly molded by Romanticism, and as such was both totalitarian and racist. But the fundamental expression of German racism was anti-Semitism—indeed, this was the original form of racism—and Marx was a Jew. Psychologically, this was an extremely uncomfortable situation. German lands, where Christianity developed relatively late, were home to a violent anti-Jewish sentiment, which had been demonstrated as early as the time of the First Crusade. This sentiment had been systemically institutionalized by numerous linguistic tropes and transmitted through religious education and ritual. Thus it was ingrained in the prenational consciousness, and when German consciousness was nationalized it was easy to refocus anti-Jewish sentiment on Jews as a race. Nationalism, moreover, added new grievances to the religious complaint of “Christ-killing.” The deep ressentiment of the romantics toward the Enlightenment in its nationalized form focused first on France, and later on En­gland and the West as a whole. But from the outset, the Jews were defined as a separate race, rather than a part of the German nation. The French had attempted to emancipate them, and therefore they were seen as the beneficiaries of German humiliation. For these reasons, the Jews came to personify Western liberalism, individualism, and capitalism. Their allegedly vile nature, in accordance with the principles of romantic philosophy, was seen as a reflection of their blood or biological constitution, not their religion; thus there was no hope that they would ever change for the better. To stress the racial (rather than religious) nature of German anti-­Jewish sentiment, a new German word was invented: Antisemitismus. Marx had internalized the German national consciousness, with its sense of resentment and inferiority with regard to the

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West—in his phrasing, the “modern” or “advanced” nations of France and En­gland. Like other Germans of his generation, he also had accepted the paradox that the Jews, though an “Asiatic folk,” alien to Europe, were the personification of the West and all the evil associated with the latter. A baptized Jew himself, he nevertheless excluded Jews from the national communities in which they resided, and ascribed to them a separate nationality quite independent of their religious affiliation, for, in the framework of German nationalism, neither baptism nor atheism affected it. Racist antiSemitism made being German patriots and sharing in the values of German nationalism psychologically very problematic for Jews. Marx’s theory of history, the philosophy underlying Marxist socialist ideology, while keeping intact the underlying ideas of German nationalism—specifically, its Manichaean vision and its ideas of good and evil with their respective carriers—represented it in the form which solved, or rather eliminated, the Jewish problem. Nations were replaced by classes. National rivalry was economized and represented as the class struggle between the proletariat and capital. But the incarnation of capital, the evil in the Marxist scheme, remained the West. Therefore it was the West—its riches, power, and pretended liberties, with their accompanying sense of superiority—that was doomed. The bright future belonged to the proletariat, which (whatever else it was) was the anti-West. German Romanticism was an existential orientation. Provoked by the experiences of its creators, the romantic vision helped them cope with these experiences, transforming reality in the process. In the late eighteenth century, the romantic mentality, racist and totalitarian at its core, was contained within a narrow intellectual circle. However, because Romanticism was the mold of German nationalism, both racism and totalitarianism became political forces shaping German history when German nationalism emerged on the cusp of the nineteenth century. At the same time, German abstract thought, which obscured its own particularistic origin and

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yet reflected it, was in fact a metamorphosed German nationalism that also informed a number of modern political ideologies, including socialism, communism, and fascism, that would define the political possibilities in much of the world. These ideologies, in turn, would inform numerous new nationalisms, serving as vehicles that carried national consciousness first to the rest of Europe in the nineteenth century and later into the Middle East, the monotheistic parts of Asia, and Africa. They would even affect existing nations, such as Russia and the United States, which incorporated these ideologies into their original nationalisms—a factor that to this day confuses and significantly complicates the understanding of motivations for political action, especially in the United States. Nevertheless, the consciousness embodied in all these ideologies is national, and therefore democratic, consciousness, even though this is often hidden from view. Whether characterized as of the left or of the right, they all project the view of social reality as composed of sovereign communities of fundamentally equal members, and all uphold the principles of equality and popular sovereignty. Obviously, not all nationalisms that have emerged in the past two centuries have been affected: En­gland and France remained important alternative models throughout this period. But for the majority of newer nations, the German influence was paramount. It was not uniform, depending chiefly on whether the indigenous conditions favored the development of collectivistic/civic or of collectivistic/ethnic nationalism (very few newer nationalisms were of the individualistic type), which in turn depended on the early nationalists’ sense of cultural inferiority and the importance in their thinking of ressentiment. When the sense of cultural inferiority and ressentiment dominated, ethnic nationalism developed. In the absence of this sense and, therefore, existential envy, the nationalism that developed was civic; racism had no appeal to the architects of the new national consciousness, and their importation from Germany was limited to the totalitarian aspiration. It

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should be noted that the classification of the influencing ideology as left or right did not reflect whether the imported totalitarianism was racist or not, and had no effect on which form of collectivistic nationalism was adopted. In 1848, when Marx was penning his famous manifesto, he felt that a specter was haunting Europe. Marx thought it was the specter of communism—but since then, it has become evident that it was the specter of nationalism: the period went down in history as “the Spring of the Nations.” It is not hard to understand why Marx mistook one for the other. In the century and a half that followed the birth of German nationalism, nothing affected so many people so deeply as did two German socialist traditions: Marxism on the left and the Volk-ish tradition (which culminated in National Socialism) on the right. The supposition that an internationalist doctrine, conceived by a Jew and carried on by scores and scores of other Jews, which called on proletarians of all countries to unite, may have something in common with the most horrible variety of militant and xenophobic nationalism, driven by anti-Semitism, seems preposterous. Yet the two are nonetheless kin: they come from the same parentage and were products of the same upbringing. National Socialism descended in a direct line from the romantic nationalism of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. It added little to this existing body of thought, but sharpened, articulated, brought into focus, and strengthened several central tendencies in it. It tended to represent modern Western reality in essentially economic (rather than political and cultural) terms— because it viewed aspects of politics and culture as reflections of the unnatural economic structure—and chose capitalism as the specific target of its attack on Western society. It represented the conflict between values (those of the West it opposed and the ones it opposed to them) that were embodied in two antagonistic econo-

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mies, Western capitalism and German socialism, as a reflection of a deeper racial antagonism. It made the Jews its paramount enemy, anti-Semitism its principal motive, and liberation of the world from the Jews its ultimate goal. Finally, it evoked the authority of science and brought science to bear on and support the view of social reality it presented, as well as the moral message it derived from this presentation. It defined racism, and specifically anti-Semitism, as disinterested, objective positions imposed by material reality, and anyone who subscribed to these positions was absolved of all personal responsibility. Otherwise, National Socialism preserved the romantic matrix intact. In Marxism, too, capitalism became the essential aspect of the evil modern reality. It also presented its conclusions as scientific, and retained both the perspective and the aspirations of romantic nationalism. And though it was neither racist nor explicitly anti-Semitic, racist anti-Semitism was the central source of inspiration for it. Though the two traditions are believed to be essentially contradictory, it is a matter of scholarly consensus that both produced totalitarian political ideologies and regimes. The source of their totalitarianism has not been well understood. Tracing totalitarian mentality back to the situation of German romantic and idealist philosophers, as the previous section has done, presents one explanation. Originally articulated by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century intellectuals as the desire for the absolute identity of individuality and totality, totalitarianism (as a philosophy, ideology, or sentiment) is nonetheless at its root a psychological reaction to the variety of nationalism, modernity, and democracy that all emphasize individual freedom. It is the radical and, in its psychological nature, “reactionary” form of modern collectivism—reacting, within the conditions of a secular egalitarian society, against the idea of the individual as an autonomous actor. This implies the denial of the ideal of liberty (as unnatural and antisocial), the rejection of individual freedom, and the in-

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sistence that the individual must be subjugated to the collective as a matter of principle, not merely in overt behavior but also (and especially) in thought and feeling. As a form of consciousness, it spread widely in the nineteenth century, traveling together with collectivistic (most often ethnic) nationalism and, significantly, the spectrum of political positions conceived in terms of “left” and “right”—tropes that had been inherited from the French Revolution and conceptually disconnected from nationalism. As mentioned earlier, these tropes—in which the left stood, paradoxically, for the politically and morally right, and the right stood for the immoral and politically wrong—had originated as a distinction between radical nationalism and moderate nationalism. Consequently, the left was identified with the progressive and the right with the conservative. But precisely because they were tropes, they were taken as statements of self-evident (that is, fundamental) truth, and as such have been used as explanatory concepts. Totalitarianism proved impossible to locate neatly in this political spectrum, which made it difficult to explain and made totalitarian political reality extremely confusing for observers who did not take nationalism into consideration. Throughout the nineteenth century, the political categories of “left” and “right” generally were inapplicable to individualistic nations. En­gland, the original nation, broke with the past more decisively and much earlier than any other society, and was inherently forward-looking and geared for change. It did not need to articulate its national attitudes in elaborate ideologies. It was definitely on the side of progress, but defined progress mostly in economic, scientific, and technological terms. The modern economy—the economy oriented to growth, or “capitalism”—which constantly increased the wealth of the nation, was a product of this understanding of progress. In collectivistic nations, by contrast, progress was defined in terms of social justice, the equal share of all the members in the collective pie, however stationary. The orientation

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to this goal still goes by the names of “socialism” and “communism,” that is, of radical (left) forms of collectivistic nationalism. Though fundamentally political, this orientation from the start implied opposition to private property and those who owned it, and to the pursuit of profit in the abstract. Thus socialism became identified with anticapitalism, which made capitalism as an economic system and its political correlate, liberalism (as the doctrine of individual freedom and equality of opportunity) both antisocialism, and therefore of the right. This phase in the relationship of left, right, and nationalism stemmed from Marx’s reinterpretation of the struggle between nations for national prestige as the fundamentally economic class struggle between the proletariat or the working class (for Marx, embodied by Germany) and the moneyed capitalist class, or capital (for Marx, represented by France and En­ gland).9 This Marxist reinterpretation had a particular effect in Russia. The Russian revolution of 1917, which occupied in the twentiethcentury Western imagination a place similar to that held by the French Revolution in the imagination of the nineteenth century, was called the (Great October) Socialist Revolution, and its declared antagonist was capitalism. The categories of “left” and “right” in this conflict continued to resonate with the intelligentsia in Western Europe, as well as in the United States, for America’s educated elites disliked capitalism for their own reasons. But the inspiration behind the Russian revolution was, again, nationalism, which the sympathizers from abroad failed to notice. Vladimir Lenin, in particular, was quite clear that the task of the revolution was to redeem the honor of the Russian nation—proving that, rather than being stuck in deep feudalism, Russia was the most progressive nation of all.10 The immediate ancestor of Lenin’s party was the movement of worshippers of the people—Narodniks, rendered “Populists” in En­glish; the people (narod) in question was the Russian people, which was defined by blood. However, Russia

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ruled over a huge empire, and it was not in the interest of Russian nationalists (socialists as they were) to give it up. Therefore, to advance Russia’s national agenda, they had to co-opt the left in the numerous non-Russian nations within Russia’s imperial dominions. In “the country of victorious socialism,” as the Soviet empire was called, nationality (whether Russian, Georgian, or other) defined by blood, as a race, was the most important social category. Only nationality, not class or religion, was inscribed in the internal passport of every Soviet citizen. But, ostensibly, the Soviet Union stood for internationalism. The triumph of National Socialism in Germany was not referred to as a revolution, though it certainly was such by definition, presupposing and achieving a radical transformation of the entire social and political order in accordance with an explicit ideological blueprint. This socialist revolution was responsible for the association of both left and right with socialism; for a while, these terms applied only to varieties within it. The choice of the Jewish people as the enemy of German socialism and the systemic violence of its anti-Semitism apart, there was little difference between German and Russian nationalisms—both belonged to the collectivistic/ ethnic, and therefore racist, type—and, consequently, between their varieties of socialism. Joseph Goebbels, in fact, originally considered the sobriquet “National Bolshevism” for the German movement, but it sounded too obviously borrowed. Instead, National Socialists depicted both Bolshevism in the East and capitalism in the West as Jewish inventions, deployed by the Jews in the interest of achieving world domination, and professed undying hatred of both.11 In the eyes of the world (or, at least, Western intelligentsia), the Soviet Union was the country of the left, the geopolitical embodiment of the left vision. Consequently, the confrontation of the two socialist (that is, collectivistic nationalist) regimes logically placed both German socialism and nationalism, which in the German

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case was explicitly acknowledged and emphasized (while in the Russian case it was only implicit and rhetorically concealed) on the right. Still, the very concept of socialism of the right was awkward: it undermined too many political tropes. Thus it was systematically occluded: its opponents took care never to spell out the acronym “Nazism,” and chose to group the phenomena to which it referred not with socialism but as a variety of a contemporary political movement: fascism. The name of this movement, derived from the Latin fasces (Italian fasci), a word used in ancient Rome for a ceremonial bundle of rods symbolizing the power of the magistrate, in no way disclosed its nature. Remarkably, in Italy, fasci was originally used for syndicates, political organizations equivalent to guilds or trade unions. Moreover, the founder and acclaimed leader of the Revolutionary Fascist Party (which later became the National Fascist Party of Italy and stood at the helm of the Italian Social Republic), Benito Mussolini, was a prominent socialist—the editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s newspaper Avanti!—before becoming a fascist leader. In fact, he was a hereditary socialist: named after a socialist (the Mexican president Benito Juárez) by a socialist father, who naturally was also an Italian nationalist. Mussolini broke with the Italian socialists because of the party’s opposition to Italy’s participation in World War I, but he certainly admired Lenin much more than he would ever admire Adolf Hitler.12 A gulf separated fascism from Nazism, which reflected the profound difference between Italian and German nationalisms. Both were collectivistic, and thus had a tendency toward socialism, but Italian nationalism was civic and German nationalism was ethnic (or racist). Fascism, in other words, did not imply racism. One of the greatest heroes of World War II, who managed to save the lives of some six thousand Jewish children, women, and men in occupied Budapest, spiriting them out of the clutches of Adolf Eichmann, was the Italian fascist Giorgio Perlasca. He accomplished

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this with the help of the representative of fascist Spain, Ángel Sanz Briz (“the Angel of Budapest”). When asked, long after the war, why he, a fascist, had risked his life to save Jews, he said, “I was neither a fascist nor an anti-fascist, I was an anti-Nazi.”13 The word “fascism,” however, conveniently for socialists of the left, concealed all this. The tropes that organize our reality were preserved: socialism is good, therefore it is of the left; National Socialism is bad and, as such, of the right; therefore, it is fascism and not socialism. Remarkably, during the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41, when the German regime was considered a friend to the Soviet Union, the latter referred to the regime of the former as “National Socialism.” Evgenia Ginzburg, in the description of her horrific experiences in the gulag in the era when Joseph Stalin’s purges were in full force, shows how obvious the subterfuge was even to the barely educated jailers responsible for the obligatory “polit-information” in the camps. No friend of the Soviet Union could be called a fascist, obviously.14 At the same time, it was Italian nationalism, as imagined by Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini, that was responsible for the transformation of totalitarianism into a political ideology. The inventor of the term “totalitarianism,” Giovanni Amendola, educated as a philosopher, recognized the German roots of Mussolini’s position (of which he was critical), and in 1923 he used the term to stress the antiliberal implications of the fascist agenda. But fascist ideologues eagerly embraced the neologism. They used it to characterize both their spirit and the ideal fascist state, and proudly admitted that their aspiration was for “total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals.”15 When Mussolini, expressing his aspiration to leave no sphere of life outside the state, insisted on harnessing every human activity to its political needs—“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shock-brigades

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of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess”—he was clearly referencing Soviet ideas.16 But these ideas were taken straight out of the rhapsodic cogitations of Adam Müller, as mentioned earlier. Totalitarianism, the suppression of the individual, and thus antiliberalism (with liberalism understood in the “classical” or original nineteenth-century En­glish form), was the essence of the paradigmatic fascist regimes in both Italy and Spain. It is wrong, in other words, to oppose fascism to democracy, as general discourse almost invariably does: fascism is only opposed to individualism, thus to liberal democracy. Throughout the nineteenth century in both Italy and Spain, national consciousness—the image of reality as composed of sovereign communities of fundamentally equal members—remained unattached to the geopolitical frameworks of the Italian and Spanish states. Both were cases of unsuccessful, aborted nationalism. Fascism, in both cases, was state nationalism—an attempt to attach national consciousness (which had its adherence in both societies) to the polity, to impose a geopolitically focused nationalism from above. As emphatically a form of nationalism, fascism was democratic by definition, but the democracy it implied, as frequently elsewhere, was authoritarian democracy. As a result, fascism, like totalitarianism, cannot be neatly situated within the left-to-right political spectrum. Scholarship has long recognized it as “neither left nor right.”17 By the interwar period, the various totalitarianisms—represented by different forms of self-identified socialism (Marxist and national), communism, and fascism—clashed. The Spanish Civil War was the framework in which this confrontation began, and Barcelona—“Europe’s Second Moscow”—was the site of some of its defining events. Spain’s civil war was a touchstone for the ideological commitments of the left-leaning intelligentsia outside the Soviet Union. They had not been able (or invited) to spend their enthusiasms in the vast expanses of Eurasia, fighting for socialism

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at the alleged place of its birth, but they heeded Moscow’s call to fight fascism on the Iberian Peninsula. What they found there, however, was far from clear-cut. The war between the Republicans and the fascists was not a struggle between left and right; even less was it a conflict between good and evil. George Orwell described this confusing state of affairs in Homage to Catalonia. In Barcelona, the left fought the left at least as much as it fought the right. Orwell went to Spain to fight fascism but soon discovered that the main enemy were the Moscow-backed communists. For them, the rest of the antifascist forces on the left were Trotskyist, which was the same as or even worse than fascist. Indeed, Orwell faced prosecution (which then meant execution) on the charge of Trotskyism, and the Moscow-supported communists made a concerted effort to smear the Catalan anarchists and the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) as fascist sympathizers and backers. For these alleged crimes, POUM leader Andreu Nin was tortured and murdered on Moscow’s orders.18 “Left” and “right” did not begin to capture the complexity of the situation. The Spanish Civil War was further complicated by the fact that all the parties involved ostensibly were fighting for the very same values. They all swore by the cardinal principles of nationalism and democracy, popular sovereignty and fundamental equality; they all claimed to represent “the people,” the working masses, the downtrodden. It was impossible to choose rationally among them. Orwell, at least, recognized that the sympathies of rankand-file fascists were the same as of the rank-and-file people of the left (just as he equally detested fascist and communist ideologies, insofar as both were totalitarian). “Roughly speaking,” he wrote in 1937, “I would say that Fascism has a great appeal for certain simple and decent people who genuinely want to see justice done to the working class and do not see that they are being used as tools by the big capitalists.”19 This obviously could be said of simi-

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lar people among Marxists: after all, being used as tools in the interests of one colossal exploiter—the state—was different only in the sense that it was far more difficult to escape the clutches of one supremely powerful master than it was to slip though the fingers of several whose powers were mutually limited. To add to this complexity, the ideology of the Marxist left in all its varieties, just as of the fascist right, was collectivistic and authoritarian: the individual counted for little, and under all circumstances was subjugated to the general will, divined by the leaders. The victory of either side, therefore, would result in a dictatorship, for authoritarian democracies easily transform into dictatorships. But one party to the conflict, the anarchists, represented national consciousness in its individualistic form: their ideals were freedom and equality in freedom. In this, the anarchists differed from other parties on the left at least as much as they differed from fascists. Whatever their being of the left meant, under the combined assault of the left and the right, these lonely defenders of liberty in Catalonia were ultimately defeated. It remains unclear until today which of the two major combatants in Spain, the fascists or the communists, were more vicious. Insofar as history is written by the victors, fascism has been defeated everywhere, and communism still exercises significant appeal, today one would tend to say fascism. But it is no doubt significant that in 1984, Orwell gave his fictional totalitarian ideology the patently left-wing name for modern (nationalist) collectivism—Ingsoc, that is, En­glish Socialism. The eventual defeat (or fading) of fascism implied the abortion of geopolitically focused nationalism in Italy and Spain yet again. In Spain, ironically, its main legacy has been the energized nationalisms in the Basque Country and Catalonia, suppressed under the rule of Francisco Franco. By historical association, Basque and Catalan nationalists consider their movements to represent the vanguard of principled antifascism, but since fascism is

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so ill-understood and simply stands for right-wing (or immoral) politics, it is not clear which principles they oppose to it. In the meantime, the world around them has no memory of the Spanish Civil War; therefore, the separatist passions in these Western European enclaves have no meaning for it. The situation of these antifascist Western nationalist movements is complicated by the fact that after World War II, nationalism in general was identified with resistance to change, conservatism, reaction, a hankering for the imaginary good old days—in short, with the right, and therefore as evil. Of course, this was not straightforward either. After the Allied victory in World War II, faced with the reality of the Holocaust and embarrassed by the West’s de facto acquiescence to it, Western intelligentsia desperately desired to be on the side of the good. The intelligentsia blamed acquiescence to the Holocaust on classical liberalism, with its stress on individual freedom, which implied the right to be indifferent to the suffering of others and the right to use one’s strengths to outcompete the weaker. This position now appeared woefully inadequate, in fact not so different from fascism (standing for National Socialism, and therefore confused with racism) itself. Specifically, in the United States, this response dramatically increased the appeal of Marxism, socialism, communism, and anticapitalism in general, prompting leading sectors of the intelligentsia to self-identify as the left. At the same time, nationalism as such (that is, not a particular type of nationalism) was associated with gore and brutal primeval instincts, and defined as the opposite of the progressive direction of history. For some forty years, nationalism was banished from discourse (among others, academic) and considered completely irrelevant to the life of nations.20 History equaled progress and was perceived by the majority of intellectuals as leftward oriented—just as Marx had originally predicted—toward inter- and, in effect, trans­nationalism.

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Paradoxically, inside the United States, this shift in mentality coincided with growing concern with the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, as well as other groups underrepresented in the elites—women above all—which had been classed by their physical or genetic characteristics. These groups were presumed to be separate (in this sense, exclusive) but inclusive (that is, cutting through lines of status and class) communities of natural identity, parallel to the ways in which exclusive, ethnic nations were imagined in the framework of collectivistic-ethnic nationalisms, such as German and Russian. They all were presumed to be opposed to and suffering under the privileged or majority group, another naturally (biologically) constituted inclusive community of identity—­ that of white heterosexual males. (Interestingly, the Jewish people, whose genocidal persecution lay at the root of this concern with the suffering of the oppressed, was not included among the suffering minorities.) In addition, the left-leaning intelligentsia’s predilection for transcending the retrograde national loyalties coexisted with sympathy for national liberation movements and revolutions—nationalism, or the struggle for national sovereignty—in what emerged after the war as the developing world, or “third world.” The standard-bearers of third world nationalism were regularly educated in Moscow’s Peoples’ Friendship University, founded in early 1960 and named after Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated leader of the Congolese National Movement. The Soviet Union backed this nationalism politically and militarily; a certain form of Marxism, as a result, was the medium through which national consciousness first reached the populations in Africa and some parts of Asia. From the late 1970s, beginning with Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the mantle of Marxism was sometimes discarded and nationalism, though essentially secular, increasingly was clothed in religious garb. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the discreditation of Marxism as an ideology brought

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this rhetorical conversion to a conclusion: Islam replaced Marxism. But because it also was viewed as anti-imperialism and anticolonialism (even in areas, such as the Middle East, never included in Western colonial empires), nationalism in Africa and (Muslim) parts of Asia continued to enjoy widespread support in the West and lost none of its legitimacy.

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FIVE

G L O B A L I Z AT I O N O F N AT I O N A L I S M AND THE RISE OF ASIA

Civilization—crossing civilizational boundaries—Japan, China, and India

The spread of nationalism—that is, of the secular national consciousness focused on this world and the distribution of dignity within it—under the name of Islam unquestionably has been an important aspect of the history of nationalism in the past halfcentury. But it has not been its most important aspect. This pride of place is reserved for the final break of this mode of thinking, previously contained within the limits of our—that is, monotheistic—civilization through these limits: its globalization. The monotheistic civilization, usually inappropriately called “Western” in the West, and elsewhere within its confines (Russia, eastern and southern Europe, South America) seen as the world civilization, is in fact one of three civilizations that today provide the frameworks for the existing cultures. Although the monotheistic civilization is undoubtedly the largest of these frameworks, about half of humanity lives within the other two, the Chinese and Indian civilizations. 115

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Characterizing a civilization as the framework within which individual cultures exist—as, for instance, both of the larger Christian and Muslim cultures exist within the framework of monotheistic civilization—implies that these individual cultures share the same characteristic first principles. In some fundamental sense, people within them think alike about life and have mutually understandable existential experiences. Cultures that belong to different civilizations, by contrast, have fundamentally different existential attitudes. In fact, civilizations are the fundamental divisions within humanity. Contrary to the still persisting view (which originated, as mentioned earlier, in Germany), these divisions are cultural, not racial, and cultural phenomena in no way reflect biological or genetic characteristics of human populations. As cultural effects ultimately are exercised on the level of individuals (compared with biological heredity, which can be examined only on the population level), physical group characteristics such as skin color or sex have no logical connection to culture and thus are totally irrelevant to the discussion of the aspects or forms of culture, including issues of identity—national identity among others. Civilization is the highest level on which the cultural process happens. As the outer layer of culture, it affects all layers and levels beneath and inside it. These inner layers span all the cultural processes, from cultures that unite groups of societies of the same historical origin, religious tradition, and language, through the characteristic cultures of individual, lower-level autonomous units (such as principalities and nations), down through stratificationdefined subcultures and institutions (which, remember, are merely patterned ways of thinking and acting in particular spheres), and finally to the individualized cultural process within the innermost cultural layer—the mind.1 Civilizations are thus the most durable continuous cultural processes. Indeed, each of the three civilizations existing today has lasted between five and six millennia, and none of the ones that had existed before lasted less than seven hun-

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dred years. This continuity is the product of the codification of the civilizational (first) principles in the written language, which lets them be transmitted consistently over many generations and extensive areas. These codified first principles distinguish between civilizations and make them self-sufficient; as a result, they also make civilizations irrelevant and indifferent to each other. A civilization’s first principles help it resist cross-civilizational influences and obstruct regular processes of cultural diffusion from outside a civilization into it. At the same time, for cultures that do not have a civilizational framework (that is, cultures without indigenous or adopted codified first principles), civilizations exercise an almost magnetic attraction. Codified civilizational principles easily diffuse within populations that have none of their own, so that even militarily superior and conquering “uncivilized” cultures are absorbed within the conquered “civilized” culture. This is what happened several times in China, for instance, where successive “barbarian” conquerors were absorbed into the Chinese culture. Much more spectacularly, because of the reversed relative size of the conquering power and the conquered carriers of the civilizational principles, this is what also happened in the case of the Roman destruction of the small and already conquered (though never subdued) province of Judea. The ultimate result of the dispersion of the surviving remnant of the Jewish population was the spread of the peculiar Jewish religion of One God—monotheism—and the appropriation of its first principles as codified in the sixth century BCE redaction of the Hebrew Bible in the form of Christianity throughout the Greco-Roman world. In the fourth century CE, Christianity was adopted by Rome as its imperial creed, and within a few centuries, the expansion of monotheistic civilization made it territorially and demographically at least the equal of its Chinese and Indian contemporaries. As monotheism continued to spread also in the form of Islam, it would equal both the Chinese and Indian civilizations taken together.

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Throughout the last two millennia of its existence, monotheistic civilization has been far more aggressive as a whole than either the Chinese or the Indian civilization. This drive may have stemmed from the original cultures that the monotheistic civilization attracted (Greek, Roman, Arabian), in which war had become the privileged way of life rather than the last resort for protecting the ways of life. Moreover, the monotheistic beliefs that these cultures adopted and which became fundamental for them and shaped their identities were not indigenous to them; thus they were not self-sufficient and needed repeated confirmation. The Chinese and Indian civilizations, by contrast, spread primarily through language and cultural precept, and remained mostly contained within the limits they had reached by the time that monotheistic civilization began to expand. In the first 1,500 years, this expansion was driven by religious (Christian and Muslim) proselytism. Though supported by the force of arms, it succeeded for cultural reasons (that is, the magnetism of codified first principles) because arms alone were powerless to promote monotheism in populations that already had codified first principles. It is astonishing how few inroads monotheistic civilization made into India, even though Islam has repeatedly invaded the space of the Indian civilization and parts of it were for centuries under Muslim rule. But in the past five hundred years, as monotheistic civilization expanded to the Western Hemisphere and most of Africa (and it is the addition of South American and African populations that made it the most populous of the three), much of this civilizational expansion was motivated by, and at the same time spread, national consciousness. It is also significant that as a major factor in shaping individual and group identities in India, dividing Indians’ political commitments, and pitting Muslim Indians against the huge majority of others, Islam emerged only when absorbed into national consciousness. Until the middle of the twentieth century, nationalism developed almost exclusively within the monotheistic civilization. The

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only nation outside it was Japan. While everywhere within the monotheistic civilization and the cultures it absorbed, nationalism, once it was created in En­gland, was imported into one society after another by indigenous agents (the first nationalists) in willing imitation of Western nations chosen as models, in Japan it was a clearly unwanted export. This circumstance resulted in different psychological dynamics that necessarily affected the character of the nationalism that developed in Japan. Societies within the monotheistic civilization (like those within the Chinese civilization, of which Japan is a part, or the ones within the Indian civilization), however different in specifics, were and are fundamentally similar and mutually understandable thanks to their shared first principles. Like siblings or close cousins in a family, they have been relevant to each other, constantly within each other’s sphere of observation, constantly compared with and evaluated against each other. As the logic based on the principle of no contradiction, implied by monotheism and privileged in the monotheistic civilization, encourages quantitative rather than qualitative comparisons, shared standards made some societies within it necessarily appear (to themselves and to others) superior and some inferior, better and worse than others, necessarily leading (1) some to wish to be like those whose superiority could not be denied, and (2) those that were near equals with claims to superiority to incessantly challenge each other. The unceasing conflict between Christianity and Islam, and between rising and falling powers within Christianity and Islam, stems from this psychological dynamic. The constant hostility toward the Jews has already been mentioned. This dynamic does not exist in the Chinese and Indian civilizational spheres. Neither sphere privileges the logic of no contradiction in the way that it is privileged in the monotheistic civilization. As a result, these spheres encourage qualitative comparisons—with an added difference that, in the case of the Chinese civilization, the early dominance of the Chinese Empire made challenges to its

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evident superiority rare, if not altogether impossible. For more than two thousand years, the Middle Kingdom was an accepted hegemon within its “world”; no societies in the monotheistic civilization had anything comparable to such hegemony. Nationalism vastly increased the numbers of those who cared about the relative status of their geopolitical units by transforming these units from the patrimony of a few (or few thousand) individuals to inclusive communities of identity, by dignifying the personal identities of millions, and by making this personal dignity dependent on the dignity of such communities. It suddenly made millions of people now personally invested in the prestige of their communities’ desire to be like the recognizably superior communities to which they did not belong, and frustrated by their inability to become like them—all of which set in motion the dynamics of ressentiment. But Japan never wanted to be like the West. Its elite never wanted Japan to be anything but itself. Though it was not entirely self-sufficient in its identity—having never denied its cultural participation in the Chinese civilizational sphere—it was entirely free of existential envy. Although it recognized China’s priority, it was certain of its own excellence and, if anything, looked down on the rest of humanity. The West was essentially irrelevant to it, held no significance for it, and was not a part of its world. Whatever Japan knew of Western societies was enough to convince it to regard them as barbarians, with utter contempt. As late as 1825, when Western powers (Russia, Britain, the United States) were eyeing Japan as a possible addition to their overseas dominions, an influential Japanese historian stated: The earth in the firmament appears to be perfectly round, without edges or corners. However, everything exists in its natural bodily form, and our Divine Land is situated at the top of the earth. Thus, although it is not an extensive country spatially, it reigns over all quarters of the world, for it has never once changed its dynasty or its form of sovereignty. The various countries of the

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West correspond to the feet and legs of the body. That is why their ships come from afar to visit Japan. As for the land amidst the seas which the Western barbarians call America, it occupies the hindmost region of the earth; thus, its people are stupid and simple, and are incapable of doing things.2

This analogical argument, stressing continuity and integrity of identity, may seem preposterous in comparison with the monotheistic civilization’s logical ones, which tend to stress material power. Yet to call it “primitive” would be to disregard the millennia of cultural sophistication behind it and repeat the terrible mistakes that the West made in the nineteenth century, which culminated in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Against the background of several millennia of culture, the recent entries into the continuous cultural process in Europe and America (the United States, remember, at that time was not yet fifty years old) could not but appear entirely uncivilized. Japan did not reject outright everything that the monotheistic civilization exported. Common people, for instance, proved receptive to the message of sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries. But because the logic of no contradiction was just one of the possible systems of consistency in terms of which (unlike us) they could think, they received Christianity without necessarily converting to it. Christianity simply became an option among many other beliefs that one could turn to on appropriate occasions and, when inappropriate, abandon altogether without much psychological distress. Something of this nature happened with nationalism as well. Nationalism was introduced to Japan in 1853 at the point of a gun, or rather of the cannons on Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships,” which soon would be followed by other Western nations’ warships. Japan, at that time armed only with swords (for the use of firearms had been forbidden there since the late sixteenth century), was not in a position to refuse the offering, though, unlike the threats that accompanied it, made unconsciously.

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Members of the second tier of its upper class, the samurai, understood they were being taught a valuable lesson. However offended by or unhappy they were with their unwitting teachers, they decided to learn it. Under the circumstances, it was impossible to defend the dignity of Japan and its way of life (in which the samurai were major stakeholders) unless they adopted the Western invaders’ aggressive political attitude and developed their technology. The attitude was competitive nationalism. To adopt it in regard to the outside world necessitated a thorough reorganization of social relations inside Japan, above all by introducing the governing democratic principles of nationalism: the fundamental equality of membership and popular sovereignty. Obviously, as elsewhere, these principles were reinterpreted and implemented in accordance with the prenational indigenous culture. But the prenational culture in Japan was far more different from the cultures where nationalism originated than anywhere that nationalism had traveled before. As with Christianity earlier, Japan did not convert to nationalism—did not replace its earlier vision of reality with national consciousness and earlier identities within it with one inclusive national identity—but added these new consciousness and identity to the previously existing ones. This was reflected in the motto of early Japanese nationalism, “Western knowledge, Eastern values.” As a result, specifically, though the shogunate and the daimyo upper class were abolished, Japanese nationalism did not set great store on internal equality. What mattered was the equality of standards in relations among nations, and the fundamental equality of membership was interpreted as the participation of all the members of the nation equally in the national project of ensuring the dignity of Japan. The paramount dedication to this collective dignity explained Japan’s intense competitiveness in the international arena. The Japanese proved excellent and fast learners. Within fifteen years of its introduction, they had a clear understanding of na-

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tional consciousness and created an extensive vocabulary for its expression. The new concepts captured the essence of Western ideas, which in the regions of their birth were often obscured by the etymologies of the words chosen to denote them for historical reasons. The nation, for example, was rendered as kokumin—“the people of the country.” Likewise, kyōsō—“running and fighting”—openly conveyed the aggressive meaning of international competition, the primary goal of which was to undermine the opponent rather than demonstrate the excellence of the home team (as suggested by the sportive Western terms derived from Latin with their emphasis on togetherness and agreement). Another twenty years later, within barely one generation, Japan was a nation and had emerged as a major contender in the race for economic and military supremacy in which great Western nations were engaged. Notably, despite its size and severe lack of natural resources, it did so before the United States too entered these competitions in earnest. In 1894, the Japanese “dwarf” (wa) challenged the Qing Empire for influence in the Korean Peninsula, and forced the giant China to sue for peace. The full impact of that astounding victory wouldn’t be realized until the end of the twentieth century. Ten years later, Japan went a major step further: it attacked and defeated the Western military colossus—Russia. A genie was out of the bottle. The Americans, too impatient to think before acting, appeared to have released—in fact, created—a force that would prove impossible to control. Characteristically naïve, they would remain oblivious to their responsibility for this. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in late 1941, the American leadership seemed to sincerely believe that the attack was unprovoked, to be blamed entirely on Japanese nationalism. But who was responsible for Japanese nationalism? If any in the United States had been aware of the humiliation their nation had inflicted on Japan in 1853—barging in on a country that wished nothing from the world but to be left alone, then forcing on it the intolerable “unequal treaties,” to drag it out

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of its self-imposed isolation—by 1941 they had completely forgotten their own complicity. With the American historical memory still so short, how could Americans empathize with a people who regarded the relevant past in terms of millennia, and believe that it would patiently wait for eighty-eight years to respond to a provocation? Yet, throughout this period, Japan did nothing that it had not learned from the West. At the turn of the twentieth century, when 1941 was far ahead, the spectacular self-assertion of the newly minted nation of Japan, however, had opened a new page in the history of nationalism. It triggered the process of nationalism’s globalization, its break into China and India. Chinese national consciousness dates back to the defeat of China at the hands of Japan in 1895. It was reinforced by the subsequent victory of the small Asian nation over “the great White Power” (as the people of Southeast Asia called Russia), celebrated throughout the region, which also catalyzed nationalism in India. China’s much advertised these days “century of humiliation” was the century of humiliation by Japan. Unlike the Western powers—which spent the nineteenth century nibbling at the sides of what Napoleon called “the sleeping giant, waiting to be awakened,” which disregarded them as a giant animal might disregard annoying mosquitoes—Japan was always a significant other for China. As the site of the Eastern Capital of the World, it owed the Middle Kingdom filial respect and obedience. Yet Japan not only disobeyed but was blatant in its disrespect—and when the heavens did not fall, this undermined China’s self-respect, and woke up the proverbial giant. Much as in Japan itself forty years earlier, the members of Chinese elites who took this affront personally were not prone to ressentiment. Instead of nursing their envy (which, under the circumstances, would have been preposterous), they immediately took action, and decided to investigate the sources of the great empire’s weakness and learn what had made their former subordinate so mighty. Many of the brightest Chinese intellectu-

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als chose Japan as a model, went there to study, and actively began to import into China the new consciousness that had actuated its rise—nationalism. They adopted the new Japanese vocabulary (developed for nationalist discourse) wholesale, and with it the Japanese insight into and interpretation of nationalism. This interpretation fit China well and was adopted with little modification. As in Japan, the cognitively tolerant nature of Chinese civilization, not limited by logic, allowed national consciousness to be incorporated among other forms of consciousness that had been added to the Chinese culture over its long history. They coexisted, like segments of a whole, alongside and without replacing each other. The psychological dynamics of Japanese nationalism (which, as mentioned, significantly differed from the psychological dynamics of the monotheistic civilization’s nationalism) was inherited by Chinese nationalism as well: collective dignity was paramount, equality meant above all international equality and equal duty of all members to contribute to the dignity of the nation, while equality among the members mattered relatively little.3 Within hardly more than a decade from the beginning of these Chinese educational journeys to Japan, China had developed a Nationalist Movement (Guomindang).4 All its leaders had spent time in Japan to learn the new ways of nationalism. Within about two decades, the Guomindang had a rival—the communist movement, led by Mao Zedong, a young intellectual from a peasant background (not a rarity in China). This competing movement was modeled on the Bolsheviks in Russia (the RKPb, the Russian Communist/Bolshevik Party), which by that time were installed as the government within the one-party system, different from autocracy only in name. Like this Russian model, the Chinese communist movement was essentially nationalist. In the Russian case, the communist movement could not explicitly self-identify as national because it was in the Russian national interest to preserve its empire, at least half of which consisted of non-Russians and which

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could not be “Russified” because of the ethnic character of Russian nationalism. The Chinese communists, for their part, did not selfidentify as national because they needed to differentiate themselves from the Guomindang. The two movements fought to preside over the Chinese nationalist project, but the project was the same for both: a sovereign and dignified China. Given Japan’s agenda regarding China’s sovereignty at the time, they united in fighting it at least as often as they sought to undermine each other. Eventually, though, Mao got the upper hand, and the national project proceeded under the communist banner. Both movements, however, represented only an elite sector, a tiny percentage of the Chinese population. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Chinese people were not engaged. No community can be transformed into a nation by decree: nationalisms imposed by the state, as the examples of Italy and Spain demonstrate, are likely to be failed nationalisms even where abstract national consciousness is widespread, and even abstract national consciousness spreads only where an interest in it exists. In Europe, nationalism added dignity to the identity of every human being by making this world the sphere of the sacred, demoting God and elevating humanity. But in China, where this world always has been the sphere of the sacred and individual dignity reflected one’s educational achievement, it could not have such an effect. The conditions in Japan also differed greatly from those in China. In Japan, the nationalist elite were the samurai, a clearly defined class that had cultivated a unique ethic of service, maintained military discipline, and had a strong sense of authority. The samurai class also was unusually large in proportion to the population, around 7 percent (perhaps one samurai for every fourteen or fifteen Japanese). There was no such class in China. Although Chinese early nationalists were members of the elite by right of their education, they were a minority in the elite as a whole—a minority within its middling ranks, to be precise, belonging neither to the top of-

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ficialdom nor to the vastly larger lower officialdom that mixed with the people and was an extension of it. The ruling class was essentially a bureaucracy; like all bureaucracies, it was internally stratified, had no unifying ethos or lifestyle, and was made even more amorphous by the sprawl of the empire and the gigantic size of the population it regulated. Its relationship with and influence over the people could not be compared to that between the samurai and the people of Japan, from whom the former could claim uniform obedience. In China, even after the nationalists gained influence, rose to positions of top leadership (as happened when the communists assumed power in 1949), and had all the means of official propaganda in their hands, they did not have the power to impose their consciousness on the vast masses physically under their control. The ideals of the Chinese leadership remained irrelevant for the masses because the masses had nothing to do with the dignity or international prestige of China, and vice versa. In China, the government was responsible for those under it, while private individuals were responsible for their families. Moreover, social status, and thus dignity, depended entirely on education. Scholars enjoyed high status, while peasants and those engaged in business were looked down upon. The masses, by their very nature, could not contribute to the dignity of the nation; they were, in effect, culturally prevented from doing so. After Mao Zedong’s death, his successor Deng Xiaoping’s turn toward capitalism changed this. The change of economic policy implied a revolution in the communist leadership’s attitude toward economic activity. It made the economic classes, previously denied dignity by Chinese traditions disparaging money-making, main shareholders in the collective dignity of the nation, and finally welcomed them into the dignified circle of contributors to the nation’s glory. The speed and enthusiasm with which hundreds of millions of Chinese responded to the call of their rulers—which this time was an invitation rather

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than an order—to join in the common national project took the world by surprise. Nobody expected China to go nationalistic all of a sudden. Its immediate economic competitiveness, if at all noticed as something new, was interpreted as a part of global secular trends. But the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the carefully rehearsed symbolism of which could not be mistaken, announced clearly what China was competing for. This most recent significant change in the history of nationalism has opened a new page in human history. The Chinese colossus (with India, traditionally passive, close on its heels) has announced its candidacy for global hegemony. The rule of the West is at an end. It is not simply that the political map of the world must be redrawn: the world will radically change because the hegemonic values will be different. Within a generation, the destinies of humanity will be decided by the relations between China and India. It is an open question whether either superpower will try to impose its values on the rest of mankind, as the West has consistently attempted to do. Perhaps they will be more permissive in their government. The fact remains that the world’s value hierarchy is changing. As the case of Japan demonstrated, the importation of nationalism from one civilization into another will likely significantly affect the nature of nationalism. It is already clear, for instance, that even though the original civilizational framework (of Christianity or Islam) dictated that individual dignity, which is paramount for the sense of life satisfaction in a nation, depends not only on a nation’s international prestige but also on the implementation of the egalitarian principle within it, in both Japan and China only international prestige matters. As long as the collective dignity is preserved, Japan and China apparently consent to live with higher degrees of inequality inside their societies. Inequality, in their framework, is not identified with injustice. This, among other things, makes for far less division in these nations than in the West: while they

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are intensely competitive in the international arena, they are not competitive inside. Egalitarianism, essential for the sense of inclusive identity in the West, is not a cardinal principle of Japanese or Chinese nationalisms. It would be hard to underestimate the effects of this difference in the very nature of nationalism on international politics—or the destiny of the world.

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CONCLUSION

And so, in 2008, this short history of nationalism ends. Nothing of similar magnitude has happened in the decade since then, even though from close up this decade has seemed extremely eventful. For now, the story of the development of nationalism and its transformations concludes with the globalization of nationalism into other civilizations. As the media headlines of the past several years illustrate, nationalism is far from receding into the past, and all sorts of things can happen to it in the future. But historians, and all those who rely on history for their data, should not trade in predictions. At present, nationalism is the defining factor of our world: it defines the existential experience—the manner in which we envision, experience, and think about reality—within the monotheistic civilization and significantly influences it within others. It virtually determines our politics, inside nations and in the world in general; it is critical in shaping our economies. Our stratification systems change in accordance with its dictates, as does the role of religion 131

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in our lives, and it is reflected, above all else, in our cultural creativity narrowly defined. To make sense of the surprises that appear in the news cycles of recent days, months, and years, we must understand this formative, existential influence of nationalism. The strengthening or weakening of national sentiment in different groups, the unexpected election of a particular candidate to the highest office in a nation, the changes in conventional attitudes toward regional integration or immigration, the appearance of new political and economic players on the world or national scene—all of these are not changes in the nature of nationalism, and therefore are not truly part of its history (though they may significantly affect the histories of particular nations), but rather are markers on the regular, predictable chart of its natural expression. In this sense, they are analogous to blips in the chart of a person’s heartbeat, brought about by a sudden excitement or the effects of an occasional cold. Because nationalism is all around us, it is poorly understood. It is always easier to understand aspects of reality that one can observe from the outside. In fact, because the understanding of empirical phenomena necessarily depends on comparison, we must step outside national consciousness to compare it to forms of consciousness that are alien to us, to understand it. In other words, we must subject our core beliefs and values to a thorough objective analysis, which is very difficult to do. Because this is so difficult, some social theorists, on whom the public relies for making sense of the world in which we live, tend to dismiss nationalism. They either define it as an expression of human animality, one that will weaken naturally as people become more sophisticated, or deduce its imminent disappearance from the (presumed) constant and irreversible evolutionary trend toward the increasing, ultimately global, size of the human community. Indeed, for almost two centuries—almost half as long as nationalism has existed—its disappearance has been continuously predicted. The stridency of these predictions fre-

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quently corresponds to surges of nationalism in places previously unaffected by it or to its especially energetic resurgence in places where it has long been institutionalized. Thus, during the “Spring of the Nations” in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Communist Manifesto assured its readers that capitalism was erasing national loyalties among the owners of the means of production and laborers alike. Today, in the face of Brexit, “white nationalism,” and nationalism in Asia, sociology departments around the United States are initiating courses in “transnational” or “global” sociology, arguing against the error of “methodological nationalism” that equates nations with societies. But nationalism is above all else national consciousness, as the author hopes this short history has made clear. Nationalism’s tremendous effect on us would not be negated even if it were not focused on the geopolitical frameworks we recognize as nations of today and defined as sovereign communities of fundamentally equal members (that is, as nations) today’s subnational or transnational communities, or the world itself. The appeal of national consciousness lies in the dignity with which it endows the personal identity of every one of its carriers; consequently, the choice as to which community to define as one’s “nation” depends on the dignity capital or dignity quotient of the communities among which one chooses, that is, on how much a community can contribute to one’s personal dignity. The chief reason for the emergence of the European Union, for instance, was not an evolutionary trend toward greater unification of humanity but the fact that some people among the elites thought it would add considerably to the dignity of the members of core European nations. (In certain cases, it has—to those of Germany, whose German identity after the Holo­caust marked its bearers with indignity, and to small minorities from the “knowledge classes” in other countries, whose opportunities for self-realization were enhanced by the larger common space.) But on the whole, these people miscalculated. A Euro-

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pean identity could not add dignity to masses of ordinary British, French, Italian, or Dutch citizens because it was Britain, France, Italy, and the Netherlands that made Europe dignified in the first place. This state of affairs helps explain the perennial weakness of the EU, Brexit, and the resurgence of nationalism in leading European nations—and the same logic applies to all other cases. Insofar as national consciousness only recently acquired about three billion enthusiastic initiates—close to half the human ­population—­it is unlikely that nationalism will be transcended any time soon. But everything that has a beginning is likely to have an end, which means that at some point in a distant future it probably will end. This future is not foreseeable at present, making it possible to predict with justifiable assurance only that when nationalism does end, it would not be for the reasons given by those who predict the end of nationalism today. Predictions, however, are not within the author’s mandate. The task of this short history has been limited to setting the record straight so far.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. See Plato, Republic. For good reason, Plato ranks highly among the enemies of the kind of society we consider just. See Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1945). 2. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics. 3. One may note that as late as 1876 this was not much different from the State of New Hampshire, which subscribed to the principle that “all men are created equal” but denied its Jewish citizens the right to vote until 1877. 4. This is Émile Durkheim’s precise and comprehensive definition of “institutions”; see, in particular, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982). 5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 183. 6. Encyclopédie, “Noblesse,” vol XI, pp. 166–81; “Peuple,” vol. XII, pp. 475–76. 7. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Histoire des membres de l’Académie

135

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Notes to Pages 10–31

(Paris: chez Panckoucke et Moutard, 1779), vol. I, preface, pp. xxxii– xxxiii (Darnton’s translation). 8. Tocqueville, The Old Regime. CHAPTER

ONE

1. Guido Zernatto, “Nation: The History of a Word,” Review of Politics 6, no. 3 (1944), pp. 351–66. 2. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964). 3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1930). 4. Jan De Vries and A. M. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5. A line from a contemporary poem, probably by Joseph Glanvill, about Gresham College. 6. Gresham’s letter to the queen, quoted in G. B. Hotchkiss, “Introduction,” in John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (1601; New York University Press, 1931), p. 41. For a detailed discussion of the emergence of capitalism in En­gland, see Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 1. 7. Hotchkiss, “Introduction,” in Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce, p. 82. 8. Lewis Einstein, Tudor Ideals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), p. 318. 9. Gabriel Harvey, The Works of Gabriel Harvey, edited by A. B. Grosart (London; Hazel et al., 1884), vol. I, p. 123. On En­gland’s intellectual development following the emergence of national consciousness, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 67–86. 10. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, eds., The Correspondence of Henry Oldemburg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966–1973), vol. II,

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Letter 361, December 13, 1664, p. 337; Letter 364, January 12, 1665, p. 345. CHAPTER

TWO

1. Antoine de Montchrétien, Traicté de l’oeconomie politique (Paris: Plon, 1889), p. 4. 2. Duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs, trans. B. St. John (Akron, Ohio: St. Dunstan Society, 1901), vol. I, pp. 295, 328; Jean La Bruyère, Les Caractères (Paris: chez Lefevre, 1843), vol. I, p. 303. 3. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 1. 4. The details of this complicated story can be found in Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992). 5. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 859. 6. Voltaire, Lettres anglaises (Utrecht: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1964), Letter 8, pp. 49–50. 7. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1945), book XI, chap. 6 (“De la constitution d’Angleterre”), pp. 163–74. The En­glish edition used is the first American edition (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1802). 8. Voltaire to Mme d’Epinay, July 6, 1766, in Correspondance complète (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–77), vol. XXX, p. 299. 9. An attitude of existential envy toward someone (an individual or a group) to whom the subject presumes oneself to be fundamentally equal, while simultaneously perceiving that one is in fact inferior. Likely to lead to aggressive behavior and/or to the “transvaluation of values”: the reinterpretation of the object of envy’s merits in order to represent one’s inferiority as a virtue. See also chapter 3, regarding Russia, and chapter 4, regarding Germany.

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Notes to Pages 46–68

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Government of Poland (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1972), pp. 40–41, 36; 32, 36; The Social Contract (London: Everyman’s Library, 1952), p. 78. 11. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, De l’ étude . . . , vol. XII in Collection complete des oeuvres de l’Abbe de Mably (Paris: Desbriere, 1794–95), pp. 238, 240. 12. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” (1784), trans. H. B. Nisbet, in Kant’s Political Writings, edited by H. Reiss (Cambridge University Press, 1970). 13. See Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la révolution [The Old Regime and the Revolution] (1856), on the role of intellectuals in bringing about the French Revolution. 14. In En­glish, see in particular James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (London: Routledge, 1998). 15. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1981). CHAPTER

THREE

1. Richard Hofstadter, quoted in Hans Kohn, American Nationalism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1957), p. 13. 2. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press, 1970). 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), vol. I, p. 410. 4. Polnoie sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii s 1649 goda (PSZ). Emphasis added. 5. PSZ, no. 2315, vol. IV, p. 588; no. 3890, vol. VI, pp. 486–93; and no. 3840, vol. VI, pp. 444–45; P. P. Shafirov, Rassuzhdenie (1717), in A Discourse Concerning the Just Causes of the War between Sweden and Russia: 1700–1721 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1973), pp. 73–77. Emphasis added.

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6. PSZ, no. 3840, 1721, p. 445. Emphasis added. 7. Feofan Prokopovich, “Slovo na pogrebenie” (1725), in Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Clarence A. Manning (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1951), vol. 1, pp. 25–26. 8. Quoted in Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility: A Study Based on the Materials of the Legislative Commission of 1767 (Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 189. 9. Catherine II, Zapiski (St. Petersburg, 1907), p. 626; and Nakaz y eio imperatorskavo velichestva Yekateriny Vtoroy (St. Petersburg: Akademia Nauk, 1770). 10. PSZ, no. 11.598, 1762, vol. XVI, pp. 12–13. CHAPTER

FOUR

1. For a detailed discussion of the romantic philosophy, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992), chap. 4. 2. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments (University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 247. 3. Quoted in G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), p. 240. 4. J. G. Herder, Sämtliche Werke (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), vol. VIII, p. 261. 5. Adam Müller, “Elements of Politics,” Lecture 2, in The Political Thought of the German Romantics, edited by H. S. Reiss (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), pp. 144, 154, 155, 146. 6. Quoted in Hans Kohn, “Romanticism and German Nationalism,” Review of Politics 12 (1950), pp. 443–72, at p. 448. 7. Quotations from Müller above are, seriatim, quoted in Kohn, “Romanticism and German Nationalism,” p. 466, and “Elements of Politics,” pp. 158, 148. 8. Hegel quoted in Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 132.

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Notes to Pages 105–112

9. Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843), in Marx-Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), vol. 3, pp. 17–18; and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ibid., vol. 3. 10. Vladimir I. Lenin, in particular, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902), trans Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (New York: Penguin, 1990). 11. See Nazi Ideology before 1933: A Documentation, edited and translated by B. M. Lane and L. J. Rupp (Manchester University Press, 1978). 12. On Mussolini the socialist, see Jacob Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 1981). 13. Enrico Deaglio, La banalità del bene: Storia di Giorgio Perlasca (Roma: Feltrinelli, 2013). 14. Evgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 1967), book 2, chap. 12. 15. Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 73. 16. Quoted in Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 249. Some claim the declaration is of Bolshevik derivation. 17. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton University Press, 1995). 18. One can read about this in Miquel Berga, Reading Orwell Today (Barcelona: BREUS, 2016); and Colm Tóibín, Orwell and Barcelona (Barcelona: BREUS, 2014). 19. Quoted in Tóibín, Orwell and Barcelona, p. 78. 20. This is the period between the publication of Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (1944) and the 1983 books by Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) and Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism) that made nationalism a subject for academic discussion again.

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Notes to Pages 116–125 CHAPTER

141

FIVE

1. Liah Greenfeld, Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 2013). 2. Aizawa Seishisai, Shinron [New proposals] (1825), in Sources of Japanese Tradition, edited by Ryusaku Tsunoda, W. Theodore, and Donald Keene, vol. 2 (Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 89. 3. Unlike other statements in this book, statements about Chinese nationalism, a newer and less explored phenomenon, should be taken as hypotheses. 4. The exact translation of the Chinese character 党 (tang or dang) is “section,” which can be rendered as both “party” and “movement.”

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INDEX

Académie des Sciences, 35–36 Afghanistan, Soviet invasion of, 113 Africa: monotheism in, 118; nationalism in, 113–14 Age of Nationalism, 49 Amendola, Giovanni, 108 Anarchists, 110–11 Anti-Semitism, 99, 102–03, 106–08, 112, 133 Aristotle, 4 Asia, nationalism in, 113–14, 133 Athens (ancient), 4–5 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 2 Authoritarian democracies, 86–88, 109, 111 Authority, delegating, 42–43 Autocracy, 66, 72–74, 125

Bible, 5, 19–20 Birth country, nationalism based on, 82–83. See also Collectivist/ ethnic nationalism Bolsheviks in Russia, 125 Brexit, 133–34 Britain. See England Calvinism, 24 Capitalism, 23–25, 46, 102–04, 106, 127 Catherine II (empress of Russia), 69–72 Catherine of Aragon (queen of England), 20 Change as progress, 55 Charles V (Holy Roman emperor), 20

143

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144

Index

Charter on Liberty of the Nobility (Russia), 71–72 China and Chinese civilization: absorption of conquering civilizations, 117; capitalism in, 127; communism in, 125–26; cultural integrity of, 2; early regional dominance of, 119–20; elite of, 126–27; and globalization, 117–20, 124–29; Japanese relations, 124–25; monotheistic civilizations vs., 117–21; national consciousness of, 124–26; nationalism in, 125–29; Olympics (2008), 128 Christianity: ancient Rome, effect on, 117; and anti-Semitism, 99; and Bible, 5, 19–20; cultural continuity of, 115–16; on equality, 5–7; forced conversion of Jews and Pagans, 6, 65; Islam, conflict with, 119; and Japanese civilization, 121; predestination and profit from labor, 24; and Protestant Reformation, 19–21, 24; rivalry with and envy of Judaism, 75; social hierarchy within, 7–9; spread of, 117; tolerance of, 6–7 Church Council of Lyon (1274), 16 Civic nationalism. See Collectivist/ civic nationalism; Individualistic/civic nationalism Civilizations as cultural processes, 115–17 Classical learning, English vs. European mastery of, 30 Class struggle, 100, 105

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Clement VII (pope), 20 Clergy, 7–8 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 35 Cold War, 88. See also Soviet Union Collectivism, 103–04, 111 Collectivist/civic nationalism: and authoritarian democracies, 86–87; and Catherine the Great, 70; causes of, 101–02; in France, 42–45, 81–83; in Italy, 107; lack of autonomy of individual in, 82–83; as second type of nationalism, 81–82 Collectivist/ethnic nationalism: and authoritarian democracies, 87–88; causes of, 76, 101–02; in Germany, 90, 107; lack of autonomy of individual in, 87; in Russia, 72, 82; and socialism, 104; as third type of nationalism, 82 Commoners: English, 7–10, 15–18, 40; French, 38, 52; German, 105. See also Society of orders Communism: in China, 125–26; Marx on, 96, 102; as nationalism, 88, 105; and Spanish civil war, 110–11 Communities of identity, 33, 113, 120 Communities of language, 92 Communities of opinion, 16 Competitiveness: among nations, 128–29; cultural, 29–32; between France and England, 44–45; for international prestige, 21–23, 25–29; between

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Index Japan and United States, 122; between Russia and Europe, 71, 77–78 Conservatism, 54–55, 104, 112 Constitution, English, 40–41 Constitution, U.S., 60 Creativity, 17–18, 132 Cultural inferiority, 101 Cultural integrity, preservation of, 2 Cultural processes, civilizations as, 115–17 Cultural relativism, 30, 77–79, 94 Cultural tropes, 3, 55, 104 Culture: competition and achievements, 29–32; continuity among civilizations, 115–17; individuality, expression of, 93–94; race vs., 116; Russian cultivation of, 69–71, 79; and tolerance, 6–7 Declaration of Independence, 10 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 45 Democracy: ancient philosophers on, 4; authoritarian, 86–88, 109, 111; fascism as, 109; and French Revolution, 49, 54; and individual freedom, 18–19; nationalism’s role in, 85; types of, 85–88 Deng Xiaoping, 127 Developing world, 113 Dictatorships, 111 Diderot, Denis, 46 Dignity: and Bible, 20; of Chinese nation, 127; of communities, 120, 133; and cultural competi-

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145

tion, 29, 31–32; of English, 22, 32, 41; and equality/inequality, 125, 128; French nobles’ lack of, 38; of individuals, 17–20, 126–28; and national membership, 18–19, 21–22, 42–43; of Russian, 65–66, 71–74; through national consciousness, 133 Division of labor, 95 Du Châtelet, Madame, 9–10 Durkheim, Émile, 18 Dutch Republic. See Netherlands Economic nationalism, 29–30, 35 Education, 70–71, 73, 89–90 Edward VI (king of England), 27 Egalitarianism, 49, 75, 103, 128–29 Elite and nobility: Chinese, 126– 27; English, 7–10, 15–17, 41; French, 8–9, 36–42, 45, 49–53; German, 89; Japanese, 120, 122, 126–27; Russian, 65–66, 70, 72–74, 76–77. See also Society of orders Elizabeth I (queen of England), 27, 28 Emergence of nationalism, 13–32; and Bible, 19–20; and capitalism, 23–25; and competitiveness, 21–23, 25–29, 31–32; and democracy, 18; dignity and autonomy, 17–20, 29, 32; and Protestant Reformation, 19–21, 24; and scientific advancement, 23, 29–32; and sixteenth-century England, 13–23; and Wars of the Roses, 14–15

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146

Index

Emotionalism, 91–92, 94 Empire, 21 Encyclopédie, 10, 70 England: Act of Appeals (1533), 20; and Brexit, 133–34; commoners in, 7–10, 15–18, 40; competition with France, 44–45; competition with world, 21–23, 25–29; constitution of, 40–41; cultural achievements in, 29–32; early trade with Germany, 25–29; emergence of nationalism in, 13–23, 81; Enlightenment in, 47–48; Hundred Years’ War, 14; individualistic nationalism in, 42–43, 48; influence in America, 57–60; influence in France, 34–36, 39–42; influence in Russia, 62; literature and intellectual pursuits in, 30; national consciousness of, 18–23, 30; nobility of, 7–10, 15–17, 41; and Protestant Reformation, 19–21; Puritan Rebellion (1600s), 22–23; ressentiment toward, 44–47; rise in power, 33–34, 39–40; Royal Society of London, 31; Spanish Armada, defeat of (1588), 34; Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), 14–15 Enlightenment, 10, 47–50, 89–92, 95–96 Envy, 68, 74–78, 101, 120. See also Ressentiment Equality: among nations, 68, 75–76, 122, 125; and anarchists, 111; ancient philosophers on, 4–5; Bible on, 5; as cultural

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trope, 3; and democracy, 85–86; and envy, 75; and French Revolution, 52; and monotheistic societies, 5–7; and national membership, 18, 54; national unity vs., 45; and Protestant Reformation, 19–20; as revolutionary idea, 3, 10–11, 18; Russian rejection of Western ideals, 79–80; and shared identity, 17; within social classes, 4, 8–10, 15; and tolerance, 6–7; as value of nationalism, 60 Erasmus, Desiderius, 30 Ethnic communities, 80–83, 92, 113. See also Collectivist/ethnic nationalism Europe: ancient, 4–7; and Brexit, 133–34; early universities in, 15–16; European Union membership, dignity provided by, 133–34; Protestant Reformation in, 19–21, 24; society of orders in, 7–10; Spring of the Nations, 102, 133. See also specific countries Existential envy, 75–76, 101, 120 Existential experience: among society of orders, 9; and civilizations, 116; influence of nationalism, 131–32; and nationalism, 1–2, 11, 131–32; and Romanticism, 100 Fascism, 107–12 Firearms, 118, 121 France: Académie des Sciences, 35–36; and American War of

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Index Independence, 47; collectivist/ civic type nationalism in, 42–45, 70, 81–83; commoners in, 38, 52; competition with England, 44–45; English influence in, 34–36, 39–42; and Enlightenment, 10, 48–49; French Revolution, 49–54, 91; influence in Russia, 70–71, 78; invasion of Prussia, 91; launching of nationalism in, 34–44; national consciousness of, 38–40, 42, 48–54, 82; nobility in, 8–9, 36–42, 45, 49–53; ressentiment toward England, 44–46, 51, 75–76 Frederick the Great (king of Prussia), 47 Gender, 4, 8–10, 61 Gentile, Giovanni, 108 Germany: commoners in, 105; dignity provided by EU membership, 133; early trade with England, 25–29; and Enlightenment, 47, 89–92; French invasion of, 91; and Holocaust, 107–08, 112, 133; international influence of, 88–91; national consciousness of, 88–90, 99–101; National Socialism in, 106–07; Nazism in, 107–08; Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939–40), 108; race and racism in, 82, 92, 99–100, 106; Romanticism in, 90–92, 100–101 Ginzburg, Evgenia, 108 Globalization, 115–29; and China, 117–20, 124–29; civilizations as

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147

cultural processes, 115–17; history of, 11; and India, 118, 128; and Japan, 119–27; predictions for, 131–34; values hierarchy, changes to, 128–29 Global sociology, 133 Goebbels, Joseph, 106 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 95 Golovkin, Count, 68 Great Britain. See England Great societies, longevity of, 1–3 Gresham, Thomas, 27 Grouvelle, Philippe, 41 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 98 Henry IV (king of France), 34 Henry VII (king of England), 26–27 Henry VIII (king of England), 20, 27 Herder, John Gottfried, 93, 95 Hobbes, Thomas, 9 Hofstadter, Richard, 58 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 94 Holocaust, 107–08, 112, 133 Hotchkiss, G. B., 28–29 Hume, David, 47 Hundred Years’ War, 14 Identity: of American nation, 58–59, 113; communities of, 33, 113, 120; dignity provided by nationalism, 133–34; of French nation, 39, 43, 45; of German nation, 82, 89; of Japanese nation, 120–22; national, 2, 19, 68; and physical characteristics, 116;

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148

Index

Identity (cont.) preservation of cultural integrity, 2; of Russian nation, 68, 74, 77–78; and social position, 17, 20 India and Indian civilization: and globalization, 128; monotheistic civilizations vs., 117–21; nationalism’s rise in, 124; preservation of cultural integrity, 2 Individual freedom, 17–20, 103–05, 112 Individualism: collectivism vs., 103–04; expression of, 93–94; fascism in opposition to, 109; and liberal democracy, 18–20; and Romantics, 92–93; unity vs., 61; values of, 29 Individualistic/civic nationalism: autonomy of individual in, 82–83; in England, 57–60, 81; and liberal democracies, 86–87; as original and first type of nationalism, 81; in United States, 57–60, 81, 82 Individuality, 92–98, 103 Intellectual class, 30 International prestige, 21–23, 25–29, 105, 128 Iran, Islamic Revolution in, 113 Islam: Christianity, conflict with, 119; cultural continuity of, 115–16; on equality, 5–7; Marxism replaced by, 113–14; rivalry with and envy of Judaism, 75; spread of, 117; tolerance of, 6–7 Italy: fascism in, 107; national consciousness of, 109, 126; totalitarianism in, 108–09

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Ivan III (czar of Russia), 64 Ivan IV (czar of Russia), 64–65 Japan and Japanese civilization: attack on Pearl Harbor, 123–24; Chinese in Korean Peninsula challenged by, 123–25; and Christianity, 121; early rejection of nationalism in, 119–21; elite of, 126–27; and equality, 122; national consciousness of, 112; rise of nationalism in, 122–26; Russia defeated by (1905), 124; United States forcing nationalism upon, 121–23 Jesuit missionaries, 121 Jews and Judaism: ancient Rome, effect on, 117; on equality, 5; forced conversions to Christianity, 6, 65; and Holocaust, 107–08, 112, 133; preservation of cultural integrity, 2; ressentiment and envy toward, 75; tolerance of, 6–7. See also AntiSemitism Kant, Immanuel, 47, 98 Kheraskov, M. M., 69 Labor, profits as proof of God’s favor, 24 La Bruyère, Jean de, 37 Lafayette, Marquis de, 53 Language: and continuity of civilizations, 117–18; cultural achievement in England, 30; differences among society of orders, 9; and race, 92

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Index Launching of nationalism, 33–55; eighteenth-century France, 34–44; Enlightenment, 47–50; French Revolution, 49–54; political spectrum, 50–55; ressentiment toward England, 44–47, 51 The left. See Political spectrum Leland, John, 30 Lenin, Vladimir, 105 Liberal democracies, 86–88, 109 Liberalism, 105, 112 Liberty: in England, 43, 46, 50–51; in France, 40–41, 43, 45; in Russia, lack of, 78–80; socialist rejection of, 103; in United States, 60–62; as value of nationalism, 60 Literacy, 19–20, 50 Literature and intellectual pursuits in England, 30 Louis XIII (king of France), 35 Louis XIV (king of France), 35, 37, 44 Louis XV (king of France), 37 Louis XVI (king of France), 53, 70 Luther, Martin, 16 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 46–47 Mao Zedong, 125–27 Marat, Jean-Paul, 46 Marx, Karl, 95–96, 98–100, 102, 105; Communist Manifesto, 133 Marxism, 102–03, 111–14 Mary Tudor (queen of England), 28 Materialism, 96 Mental illness, 36

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149

Middle class, 50–51, 89–90, 95 Migration, 4–5, 15 Military: in early England, 7; in Japan, 123, 126; in Russia, 32, 66–69, 73 Mirabeau, Comte de, 53 Monotheistic societies: Chinese and Indian civilizations vs., 117–21; conflict among, 119; democracies in, 85–86; and equality, 5–7; existential envy among, 75; and globalization, 115; individuality vs., 18–19; and nationalism, 83, 113, 118–19, 131; ressentiment among, 76; spread of, 117–18; toleration of, 6 Montchrétien, Antoine de: Traicté de l’oeconomie politique, 34–35 Montesquieu, 16, 40–41 Moral philosophy, 47–48 Müller, Adam Heinrich, 96–98, 109 Mussolini, Benito, 107, 108–09 Mysticism, 91–92 Nation: defined, 5, 15–16, 52; term used in Bible, 20 National consciousness: in Africa and Asia, 113, 118; in China, 124–26; as competitive, 22; in England, 18–23, 30; in France, 38–40, 42, 48–54, 82; Germany’s international influence on, 88–90, 99–101; in Italy and Spain, 109, 126; in Japan, 112; objective analysis of, 132–33; in Russia, 68–69, 74, 76–80, 82; in United States, 48–49, 57, 59

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150

Index

Nationalism: emergence of, 13–32; globalization of, 115–29; and individualism, 19–20; launching of, 33–55; predictions for, 131–34; spread of, 57–83; transformation of, 85–114. See also Collectivist/civic nationalism; Collectivist/ethnic nationalism; Individualistic/civic nationalism National Socialism, 102–06, 108 National unity, 45, 61 Nazism, 107–08 Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939–40), 108 Necker, Jacques, 53 Netherlands: and capitalism, 23–25; and Protestant Reformation, 24 Nin, Andreu, 110 Oligarchies, 23 Olympics (2008), 118 d’Orléans, Philippe, 53 Orwell, George: Homage to Catalonia, 110; 1984, 111 Ottoman Empire, 2, 6–7 Pagans, 6 Patriotism, 29, 44, 50, 61–62 Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 123–24 Perlasca, Giorgio, 107–08 Perry, Matthew, 121 Peter the Great (czar of Russia), 62, 66–69 Pietism, 91–92 Plato, 4 Pluralism, 61–63 Political economy, 34–35 Political spectrum, 52–55, 104–07, 109–10

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Popular sovereignty, 18–19, 21, 49–51, 54, 85–86 Populism, 53, 80 Predestination, 24 Predictions for nationalism, 131–34 Progressiveness, 55, 104, 112 Prokopovich, Feofan, 68 Protestant Reformation, 19–21, 24 Protesting, 60, 62 Puritan Rebellion (1600s), 22–23 Race and racism: anti-Semitism, 99, 102–03, 106–08, 112, 133; creation of concept, 82, 92; culture vs., 116; and Declaration of Independence, 10; and equality, 61; as ethnic nationalism, 89; in Germany, 82, 92, 99–100; minority rights, 113; and national identity, 82; white nationalism, 133 Rationality, 79–81 Reason: and Enlightenment, 48, 95–96; German rejection of, 92–94; mysticism vs., 91–92; Russian rejection of, 79–80; as value of nationalism, 60 Reformation, 19–21, 24 Religion. See Monotheistic societies; specific religions Religious tolerance, 6–7 Ressentiment: among monotheistic societies, 75; of collectivistic/ ethnic nationalisms, 75, 87–88, 101; of communities of identity, 120; of Germany, 90; of Russia, 75–78; toward England, 44–47, 51, 75–76

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Index The right. See Political spectrum Romantic social philosophy, 90–101 Rome (ancient), 5, 40, 117 Rond d’Alembert, Jean le, 10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Social Contract, 46 Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, 31 Russia: collectivist/ethnic nationalism in, 72, 82; cultural cultivation in, 69–71, 79; dignity of, 66, 71; early expansion of, 62–66; English influence in, 62; envy of other western nations, 68, 74–78; as ethnic community, 80–81; French influence in, 70–71, 78; influence in China, 125; Japanese defeat of (1905), 124; national consciousness of, 68–69, 74, 76–80, 82; nobility of, 65–66, 70, 72–74, 76–77; revolution (1917), 105; socialism in, 105–07; Swedish War (early 1700s), 67. See also Soviet Union Saint-Simon, Duc de, 37 Samurai, 122, 126–27 Sanz Briz, Ángel, 108 Schlegel, Friedrich, 94 Science, 23, 29–32, 47 Secularization, 18–19 Self-expression, 93–94 Shafirov, Peter, 67–68 Shakespeare, William, 13–14, 30 Slavery, 4 Smith, Adam, 47

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Socialism: clashes among types of, 109–10; as collectivistic nationalism, 88; and fascism, 107–10; in Germany, 100–105, 106–07; and left and right political spectrum, 104–07; in Russia, 105–07 Social justice, 104 Social mobility, 8, 14, 17, 89 Social science, 47–49 Society of orders, 7–10, 15–17, 36–38, 59–60. See also Commoners; Elite and nobility Sovereignty, 18–21, 60 Soviet Union: Afghanistan, invasion of, 113; and Cold War, 108; fall of, 2; Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939–40), 108; socialism in, 105–07; support for third world nationalism, 113. See also Russia Spain: Armada, English defeat of, 34; civil war in, 109–12; Dutch revolt against, 24; national consciousness of, 109, 126; religious tolerance in, 6; totalitarianism in, 109 Spread of nationalism, 57–83; and Russia, 62–81; types of nationalism resulting from, 81–83; and United States, 57–62 Spring of the Nations, 102, 133 Stalin, Joseph, 108 State: individuality of, 97; as social reality, 96–97 Subsistence economies, 23–24 Swedish War (early 1700s), 67 Technological innovations, 30–31 Third world nationalism, 113

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Index

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 54; Democracy in America, 62; The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 10 Tolerance, 6–7 Totalitarianism: as collectivistic nationalism, 89; of German nationalism, 99–100; in Italy, 108–09; and romantic social philosophy, 96–103; in Spain, 109 Transformation of nationalism, 85–114; anti-Semitism, 99–100, 102–03; and democracy types, 85–88; and fascism, 107–12; German influence in, 88–92, 101–02; and left and right political spectrum, 101–02, 104–07, 109–10; and National Socialism, 102–06; and racism, 89, 92, 99–100; and rise of ideology, 100–102; and Romantic social philosophy, 90–99; and totalitarianism, 89, 96, 99–100, 103 Transnational sociology, 133 Trotskyism, 110 Turkey, cultural integrity of, 2 United States: and Cold War, 108; English influence in, 57–60; and equality, 10–11; French influence in, 48–49; history of nationalism in, 59–60; as ideal nation, 58–59; individualistic/

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civic type nationalism in, 57–60, 81, 82; Japanese relations, 121–23; minority rights in, 113; national consciousness of, 48–49, 57, 59; nationalism as value of, 11; national unity, threats to, 61–63; Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 123–24; pluralism in, 61–63; War of Independence, 47, 58; as young society, 3 Universalism, 61 Universities forming communities of learning, 15–16 Upward mobility. See Social mobility Values: of equality, 3–4, 11, 60; hierarchy, changes to, 128–29; of human life, 18; of individualism, 29; of individual liberty, 60; of intellect, 90; and preservation of cultural integrity, 2; of reason, 60; Russian rejection of Western ideals, 78–80; socialism vs. capitalism, 102–03 Voltaire, 40, 44, 70 Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), 14–15 Weber, Max, 23–25; The Protestant Ethic, 24 White nationalism, 133 William III (king of England), 62 World War II, 107–08, 112, 123–24, 133

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N

ationalism has re-emerged as a potent force in world affairs— sometimes as a positive aspiration, sometimes as hatred and bigotry. But what is nationalism? Hasn’t nationalism always been an aspect of the human experience? These are among the questions Liah Greenfeld answers in her new book. Greenfeld traces the development of the idea that the people within a given geographical boundary constituted a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members—a nation. She explains how this novel idea gave rise to an inclusive political identity of all people regardless of economic or social standing and an extensive system of modern values—what we now call nationalism. Greenfeld traces the history of nationalism with fascinating accounts of how the concept of nationhood migrated from England to France, then to Russia and the United States, and eventually to much of the rest of the world, culminating most recently with the arrival of nationalism in China. During the twentieth century, nationalism was associated with the extremism of fascism, Nazism, and communism. The idea of nationalism fell into widespread disrepute after World War II—especially in the West— where it remained for several decades. But, as Greenfeld notes, nationalism still “is the defining factor of the world in which we live.” Greenfeld recounts with clarity the history of nationalism, corrects misperceptions about that past, and suggests that nationalism is likely to stick around for a while—but refuses to predict just how long that while will be.

L I A H G R E E N F E L D is university professor and professor of sociology,

political science, and anthropology at Boston University. She is the author, among other works, of a trilogy on nationalism and the modern experience, including Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity; The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth; and Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, published by Harvard University Press. brookings institution press Washington, D.C. www.brookings.edu/press Cover design: Elliott Beard Cover image: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo