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(1) A feeling of belonging to the nation and (2) a corresponding political ideology which holds that the territorial and national unit should be allowed to co-exist in an autonomously congruent relationship. Nationalism is chameleon-like, for it can accommodate itself to such diverse socio-territorial backgrounds and contrasting environments as authoritarian collectivism (e.g. fascism and far right-wing movements) and democratic movements struggling against domination by another nation, state or empire. Consequently, it is not necessarily \'emancipatory\', although its central claim rests on its goal of securing social justice through attaining sovereignty over its own political homeland (Buchanan, 1991). Thus, nationalism draws upon the doctrine of self-determination, in which the nation considers itself to have a natural right to governance over its own affairs. However, an important political issue to emerge is whether the right to national self-determination can be secured without impinging upon the rights of those who do not belong to, or identify with, the nation that wishes to secede from a larger polity (Smith, 1999).
As Gellner (1983) has argued, nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialization or modernization but rather with their uneven diffusion. Originating in western Europe with the consolidation of nation-states, it later brought about the reorganization of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps of Europe, and has been the prime force in the political awakening of the Third World. However, nationalism takes a variety of forms, differing in their relationships to the nation and to those objective conditions which determine its opportunity to achieve or maintain the aim of home rule. On the one hand, there is a state nationalism, which reinforces or even exalts the idea of the nationstate. On behalf of the homeland-nation\'s myths and iconographies, state actions can be legitimized in both the domestic and the international arena by appealing to \'national unity\' and \'national interests\'. On the other hand, there is a variety of minority or substate nationalisms including: irredentist — borderland people striving for secession and unity with co-nationals in an adjacent state (see irredentism); anti-colonial — in which nationalist demands are based primarily, although not exclusively, on an ethnically heterogeneous people\'s common response to, and rejection of, colonial rule (see colonialism); and ethnic causes — where shared experience, culture and often language legitimize demands for home rule. The last category is associated particularly with the European experience (see also subsidiarity).
Until recently, conventional academic wisdom held that ethnic nationalism was destined to dissolve in the acid bath of modernity as a consequence of both the successful spatial spread of the centralized and uniform state and the homogenizing forces associated with modern society. However, far from being a spent force, the persistence of ethnic-based regional differences and their politicization has in a number of cases threatened the stability of many well-established western-democratic states and, in the case of state socialist federations, their very existence (see pluralism; federalism). The reasons offered for ethnic nationalism have tended to follow one of three lines of explanation.
The first emphasizes the importance of cultural markers — based on language, religion, ethnic background, kinship patterns etc. — as providing the automatic reference point for ethnoregional communities seeking security, survival and regeneration under conditions of socio-economic and political pressure to conform to a state-wide, nationalizing process. But this line of reasoning is too ready to assume that, for the ethnic region, cultural differences provide the most compelling basis upon which such politicization might occur, although there is no doubt that threats to community and the increased impersonalization of growing centralized and bureaucratic states can fuel the engines for political action.
The second approach, which has found much sympathy in Marxist writings, sees the politicization of ethnoregions as a reaction to historically formed peripheral predicaments, in which the spatial logic of capitalism generates discontinuous and disruptive patterns or waves, conferring advantages on some regions (see uneven development), while relegating minority ethnoregional communities to a marginal and subordinate status. Hechter (1975), for instance, sees ethnic regions as conditioned by the historical development of a culturally backward and economically exploited internal colony, while the state \'core\' ethnoregion, by accumulating capital from and inhibiting its flow into these regions, develops a more advanced and diversified economic base. Such core-periphery differences become institutionalized into a coextensive cultural division of labour, forming a basis for political mobilization along ethnoregional lines. Besides underestimating the emotional and cultural appeal of nationalism and its capacity to serve human needs better than instrumental groups and satisfactions, such a view does not account for the revival of nationalism in Europe since the 1960s: nor does it explain why ethnic nationalism can propel both relatively prosperous (e.g. Catalans, Basques, Croats, Latvians and Scots) and relatively poor (e.g. Kosovo Albanians, Kazakhs) peoples alike into political action.
The third perspective focuses on the spearheading role played by the ethnic intelligentsia in the \'discovery\' and politicization of the homeland nation. Their changing expectations in a state which may no longer be able to meet their material and status aspirations thrusts them to the forefront of the manufacture, organization and mass mobilization of nationalism. On this basis, time- and place-specific mechanisms and events (e.g. the potential for regional development, a flagging core economy or increased remoteness from government, the opening up of political opportunities to challenge the state) not only help us to understand why the ethnic intelligentsia are usually at the forefront but also highlight the key role that they play in popularizing the nationalist cause throughout the ethnoregion. (GES)
References and Suggested Reading Buchanan, A. 1991: Secession. The morality of political divorce from Port Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Brubaker, R. 1996: Nationalism reframed. Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gellner, E. 1983: Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hechter, M. 1975: Internal colonialism: the Celtic fringe in British national development 1536-1966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kymlicka, W., ed., 1999: Citizenship and diversity: theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, E. 1995: Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millar, D. 1995: On nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, A. 1998: Nationalism and modernity. London: Routledge. Smith, G.E., ed., 1995: Federalism: the multiethnic challenge. London: Longman. Smith, G.E. 1999: Sustainable federalism, democratisation and distributive justice. In W. Kymlicka, ed., Citizenship and diversity; theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, G.E., Law, V., Wilson, A. and Bohr, A. 1998: Nation-building in the post-Soviet borderlands. The politics of national identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tamir, Y. 1993: Liberal nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. |
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