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1989: Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Nairn–Hobsbawm Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Ronald Beiner
Ronald Beiner
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, (Toronto).
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Abstract

With the astonishing resurgence of nationalism in various parts of Europe subsequent of the end of the Cold War, attention has once again been focused on the normative issues posed by the politics of nationalism. This article wresdes with some of these normative issues by reviewing a profund theoretical dialogue conducted between two British neo-Marxists, Tom Nairn and Eric Hobsbawm, going back to the 1970s. The article also gives some attention to Ernest Gellner's sociology of nationalism, which heavily influences Nairn's sociological understanding of nationalism (though Gellner in no way shares Nairn's enthusiasm for neo-nationalist movements). The article concludes, in response to Gellner, that no amount of sociology can relieve us of the obligation to engage at the normative level with the challenges posed by nationalism.

L'etonnante remontee du nationalisme dans plusieurs regions de l'Europe invite a reprendre Tetude des questions normatives poshes par les politiques a l'endroit du nationalisme. D'ou l'interet de reprendre le debat theorique des annees 70 entre deux neomarxistes anglais, Tom Nairn et Eric Hobsbawm. Ernest Gellner sera mentionne en tant qu'il a fortement influencé Nairn, encore qu'il ait etc loin de Penthousiasme nationaliste de ce dernier. La conclusion, réponse a Gellner, est qu'aucun apport sociologique ne dispensera de Pobligatdon de discuter au plan des valeurs les problemes posés par le nationalisme.

Seit dem Ende des Kalten Kriegs gewinnt der Nationalisms in weiten Teilen Europas an Zulauf und das Interesse gilt erneut der normativen Problematik nationals taatlicher Politiken. Dieser Beitrag geht ein paar althergebrachte normative Fragestellungen an, in dem er die theoretische Debatte der 1970er Jahre zweier britischer Neomarxisten, Tom Nairn und Eric Hobsbawm, neu beleuchtet. Er widmet sich außerdem Ernest Gellners nationalstaatlicher Soziologie, die Nairns Verstandnis vom Nationalstaat stark beeinflut hat (wenngleich Gellner keineswegs Nairns Begeisterung fiir die jüngere nationalstaatche Bewegung teilt). Der Aufsatz schließt mit den Worten, daß in Antwort auf Gellner ein soziologischer Ansatz auf keinen Fall die normativen Untersuchungen des Nationalismus und seiner Herausforderungen ersetzen kann.

Type
Notes Critiques
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , May 1999 , pp. 171 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1999

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References

(1) Nairn, Tom, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2nd expanded ed. (London: New Left Books, 1981)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric, Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain’, New Left Review 105 (09/10 1977), 3–23Google Scholar. For a very instructive and insightful account of Nairn's intellectual career, see Cocks, Joan, Fetishizing Ethnicity, Locality, Nationality: The Curious Case of Tom Nairn, Theory and Event, Vol. 1, no. 3 (1997)Google Scholar.

(2) For critical discussion of Hobsbawm, see Nairn, Tom, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), 40–42, 47–56Google Scholar, 148. Cf. Anderson, Benedict, Introduction, in Balakrishnan, Gopal (ed.) Mapping the Nation, (London: Verso, 1996), p. 13.Google Scholar

(3) Ernest Gellner suggests that the very fact of Nairn's sensitivity to nationalism proves that there is little real content to his residual Marxism: see Nationalism, or the new confessions of a justified Edinburgh sinner, in Gellner, E., Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 265–266.Google Scholar

(4) The thesis is nicely summarized as follows: ‘The general process of industrialisation has consistently rendered all the factors of nationality (ethnic, linguistic, physiognomic, sometimes religious) more, rather than less, important. In one sense, all 1989 showed was that this is continuing: command-economy failures in the East have generated an overdue reaction which like others before it has to assume a primarily nationalist form. In other words, nationalism […] is no counter-current or side eddy, interfering with the majestic mainstream of Progress: nationalism is the mainstream’ (Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, p. 48).

(5) Nairn, Tom, Internationalism and the Second Coming, in Balakrishnan, (ed.), Mapping the Nation, 267–280Google Scholar; for a lengthier statement of the same argument, see Internationalism: A Critique, in Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, 25–46.

(6) Nairn, Internationalism and the Second Coming, p. 270. Cf. Faces of Nationalism, 41–42: ‘internationalism and nationalism are, in a curious way, perfectly twin ideologies, They are parts of a single, overall, modern thought-world [.…] Even the most beserk chauvinist is a sort of “internationalist”—a fact recorded in the “ism” of his nationalism’.

(7) Nairn, Internationalism and the Second Coming, 269–270.

(8) Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, 49, 48.

(9) Nairn, Internationalism and the Second Coming p. 272. The quotation is from Hobsbawm's 1977 review essay on Nairn (see note 1 above). Hence Nairn's judgment: internationalists knew defeat was coming ‘well before 1989’.

(10) Ibid., p. 273.

(11) Ibid.

(12) Hobsbawm, Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain’, 7–8.

(13) Ibid., p. 7: ‘nationalists […] are by definition unconcerned with anything except their private collective’; p. 9: ‘nationalism by definition subordinates all other interests to those of its specific “nation”’; p. 11: nationalism's place in the socialism vs. capitalism nexus ‘is of no significance to nationalists, who do not care what this relationship is, so long as Ruritanians (or whoever) acquire sovereign statehood as a nation’.

(14) Hobsbawm, E.J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 185Google Scholar. One of the illustrations offered by Hobsbawm is the relationship of the Slovakian nation to its ethnic-Hungarian minority (ibid., 185–186); another is the relationship of the Québécois nation to minorities in Quebec (Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain’, p. 8, n. 9).

(15) Hobsbawm, Eric J., Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today, in Balakrishnan, (ed.), Mapping the Nation, p. 260.Google Scholar

(16) Ibid., p. 259.

(17) Ibid., p. 261.

(18) Ibid., p. 265.

(19) Ibid., p. 261.

(20) Ibid., p. 262.

(21) Ibid., p. 264.

(22) Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, p. 62; the quotation is from Anderson, Benedict, The New World Disorder, New Left Review 193 (05/06 1992), 5.Google Scholar

(23) Nairn, Internationalism and the Second Coming, 277–279. One would like to know how Nairn would answer Hobsbawm's question of why one should desire ‘the division of the Indo-Burmese-Chinese frontier region into twenty separate sovereign “nation-states”’, (Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain’, p. 13).

(24) For a more general argument by Hobsbawm on the perils of identity politics, see Identity Politics and the Left, New Left Review 217 (05/06 1996), 38–47.Google Scholar

(25) Nairn, Internationalism and the Second Coming, p. 272. Cf. Faces of Nationalism, p. 51: ‘The alternative to antagonistic, ethnically biased development was never in fact cosmopolitan growth or “internationalism”. It could only have been one form or another of empire’.

(26) Nairn, Internationalism and the Second Coming, 271–272. According to Nairn, internationalist intellectuals are typically ‘metropolitan’ creatures, with their own metropolitan interests at stake. See Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, 48–49: internationalism is the ideology of Enlightenment elites, ‘the ideology most consonant with their location and class interests […]. In practice, this ideology has of course served the big battalions’.

(27) Walzer, Michael, The New Tribalism: Notes on a Difficult Problem, in Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Beiner, Ronald (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 205Google Scholar. Interestingly, nationalists too can harbour a nostalgia for imperialism. At the end of his essay, The First Person Plural (Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Beiner, 279–293), Roger Scruton switches from a defense of English nationalism to an appeal for a return to the age of empires.

(28) On Britain as a (domestic) empire, see Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 74–75.

(29) Nairn, Internationalism and the Second Coming, p. 272.

(30) Still, his response to Yugoslavia seems a bit flippant: ‘The post-Yugoslav war has given a momentary boost to old-style Atlantic Leftism, but I doubt it will last long’ (ibid., p. 275).

(31) Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, p. 160.

(32) Gellner, Ernest, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), P. 31.Google Scholar Cf. note 35 below.

(33) Gellner, Ernest, The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class, in Balakrishnan, (ed.), Mapping the Nation, 111–112.Google Scholar

(34) The same conclusion is implicit in the last line of Hobsbawm's ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today’.

(35) Gellner, The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation, p. 112. Cf. 126–127: ‘Nationalism can now be tamed […]. Finally, with the coming of generalized affluence and the diminution of cultural distance through late industrialization and a universal market and standardized lifestyle, there comes a certain diminution of intensity of national sentiment. That […] is the trajectory one would naturally expect’. Also, p. 131–132, where Gellner explicitly applies his model to post-1989 Europe: the Russian Empire managed to avoid the fate of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires (or at least to defer this fate) by submitting its population to an even more overwhelming ideology than nationalism; however as soon as Marxism lost its credibility as a secular religion, nationalism emerged from its post-1917 (and in the case of satellite states, post-1945: cf. p. 138) cryogenic state. Gellner explains that one can't be sure whether the outcome will be ethnic conflict at its worst or ‘that stage of diminished ethnic hatred which, one hopes, goes with very advanced industrialization’ because when these societies resume their suspended nationalisms, frozen until 1989, it's hard to determine at which of the various stages of his typology this resumption will occur (cf. the passage cited in note 32 above).

(36) Gellner, The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation, p. 115.

(37) The fact that Nairn is not orthodoxly nationalist is easy to document. For one thing, he is too schooled in Gellner's sociology to take nationalist dogmas at face value. He is obviously committed to Scottish nationalist aspirations over ‘metropolitan’ England; at the same time, he is, like most Scottish and other European nationalists, enthusiastic about the European Community. But more fundamentally, he is sceptical of the classical nationalist vision of a world parcelled neatly into culturally homogeneous states, each monopolizing sovereignty within a medium-sized territory. Nairn is as interested in autonomous city-states as he is in more conventional nation-states. (See Faces of Nationalism, 133–149; Internationalism and the Second Coming, 277–279.) His hope is for a ‘new nationalist system’, a new order of political communities consisting of ‘bastards, mongrels, odd interstices, and breathing spaces, as well as 100 per cent isomorphs like Slovenia and Poland […] any such system will need its buffers, zones of confluence, no-man's lands, and enclaves in order to function tolerably at all. Andorra, the Isle of Man, Sarajevo Singapore, and Gibraltar may be as important in it as the more neatly theorizable ethnic building blocks’ (Internationalism and the Second Coming, p. 277). Such a new nationalism would also engender a ‘new style of internationalism’: ‘The old internationalism was often uncomfortably close to “all-the-same-ism”. I feel confident that this will never be said of post-1989 nationalism. Internationalism will find a far more natural foothold there as a moderating tendency of the system, rather than as a futile holding operation against its realization' (ibid.).

(38) Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, p. 7.

(39) Nairn is by no means uncritical of Gellner. See, for instance, the critical remarks in Faces of Nationalism, p. 9 (which must be taken not just as criticism of Gellner but also in large measure as self-criticism): ‘modernisation theory [is subject to the suspicion that it is] simply over-rational and “bloodless” as an explanation for processes in which so much unreason is typically manifested, and so much literal blood has been spilt. It leaves too much out; it accounts for the material or vested interests in nationalism rather than its “spell”. It is articulated around high-cultural politics rather than low-cultural glamour and popular identity.… [Gellnerite modernisation theory] reacts against earlier nonsense about nationalism being a tale of Dark Gods and resurgent tribalism by stressing how much of it is novel, unprecedented and forced from the press of modernity. Correct as this is, one may doubt whether it is sufficient for analysing the resultant brew’. Here Nairn aptly cites a similar judgment by Perry Anderson in a luminous essay on Weber and Gellner: ‘Gellner's theory of nationalism might be described as immoderately materialist. For what it plainly neglects is the overpowering dimension of collective meaning that modern nationalism has always involved: that is, not its functionality for industry, but its fulfilment of identity […]. Whereas Weber was so bewitched by the spell of nationalism that he was never able to theorize it, Gellner has theorized nationalism without detecting the spell. What was tragic fate for the one becomes prosaic function for the other’ (Weber, Max and Gellner, Ernest: Science, Politics, Enchantment, in Anderson, P., A Zone of Engagement [London: Verso, 1992], 205–206).Google Scholar

(40) Greenfeld, Liah, The Worth of Nations: Some Economic Implications of Nationalism, Critical Review Vol. 9, No. 4 (Fall 1995), 556.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(41) In his review of Nairn (see note 3 above), p. 275, Gellner acknowledges that Scottish nationalism ‘did not seem to fit the theory’, viz the modernization theory that he and Nairn share. The account he goes on to offer (275–276) is much more crudely reductionist than any likely to be furnished by Nairn.

(42) Gellner, Spectacles and Predicaments, 266, 267. Gellner of course refers in this context to his eternal nemesis among students of nationalism, Elie Kedourie.

(43) This raises interesting questions about a possible tension between Nairn's ‘first-order’ political commitment (as a Scottish nationalist) and his ‘second-order’ Gellner-inspired functionalist explanation of nationalism. (Consider, for instance, Faces of Nationalism, p. 51: ‘It couldn't have been otherwise’). Is being a nationalist existentially consistent with believing that nationalism is causally determined by industrialization, etc.?