Jihad vs. McWorld (27 page)

A
MONG THE FORGES
that animate modern Jihad, religion may be at once the most noble and the most toxic, but none is so prominent as nationalism, according to Walter Russell Mead and many others “the most powerful political force on earth today.”
⁵
The trouble is, those who agree on nationalism’s potency do not agree on its meaning. There is old nationalism and new nationalism, good nationalism and bad nationalism, civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism, nationalism as the forge of great states and nationalism as their coffin, East European nationalism (arrayed against external empires [Turkish, Russian, Austrian]) and West European nationalism (arrayed against parochial forces inhibiting nation building), the nationalism of the liberal nation-state and the nationalism of
ethnie:
of parochial politics and tribalism.
⁶

As a moment in the antimodern life of Jihad, nationalism suggests narrowness, antagonism, and divisiveness and seems to exist in a primarily negative form—ethnic and cultural particularism that aims at busting up the nation-state and flinging aside multicultural wholes in the name of monocultural fragments. Free traders and One McWorlders use nationalism as a scathing pejorative denoting a fractious and anticosmopolitan tribalism, reeking of bloody fraternalism and equally toxic doses of the parochial and the primitive.

Yet this is to distort what is in fact a far more dialectical conception of the nationalist idea in history. While it may seem to undermine integral states today, nationalism once helped fashion the states that forged the Enlightenment. As a consequence, it gained considerable momentum and a modernizing cachet of its own with the rationalistic (if often irrational) revolutions spawned by the Enlightenment in France, America, and Germany. The aspiration to a “liberal nationalism” that united the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty and equality with the communitarian ideals of fraternity and solidarity motivated the Jacobins and the American founders alike, and permitted peoples bound by culture and history nonetheless to fashion
constitutions founded on rights and reason. The Greek revolt against Ottoman rule that drew Lord Byron to his epiphanic demise in 1824, for example, gained decisive support from English romantics and English liberals because national self-determination was perceived as the condition for the progress of liberty and liberty was understood to be nationalism’s noblest aspiration. No less a liberal than J. S. Mill had established what he saw as a necessary linkage between liberty and national identity, echoing Rousseau’s assertion that only an integral nation could sustain a republican constitution.
⁷
Liberal and romantic nationalists from Herder to Mazzini subscribed at once to a religion of humanity deifying a single, cosmopolitan conception of human nature
and
a vigorous nationality: in Mazzini’s arching rhetoric “nationality is the role assigned by God to each people in the work of humanity.”
⁸

During a brief grace period (in the French Revolution and its aftermath) when
patriotism
meant love of fellow citizens no less than love of country (Rousseau), and
la patrie
referred to the democratic republic no less than to the nation, this splendid amalgam of individualist ideals and communitarian identity politics—a synthesis of the religion of humanity and the secular story of nations—appeared to make it possible for reason to set down roots and thereby secure legal personhood in a grounded identity of nationalist flesh and cultural blood. Particularism and cosmopolitanism were joined in a French ideology of progress and revolution, and the true cosmopolitan was, as Paul Hazard recognized, “someone who thought à la française.”
⁹
This understanding of the nation made possible the creation of a constitutional state under the sovereignty of a “people”
(Volk, gens, peuple
, or
nation)
—the nation-state—which in turn offered the legal groundwork for democracy. To the extent our modern democratic institutions are tied to the idea of the nation-state, it has been a legacy of precisely this alliance between nationalism and liberalism.

The marriage was, however, a peculiar one, a partnership defined from the outset by disequilibrium. And if, initially, history played along and the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the stabilization of aspiring liberal nation-states in Canada and America (and in a certain manner France) as well as their rise in Italy and Prussia, by the end of the century liberalism and nationalism were
becoming unstuck. Although the marriage was premised on the essential compatibility of freedom and parochial identity, in the cases of America, France, and Canada, pluralism was built into national identity, providing the indispensable glue. But in Italy, Germany, Greece, and the Balkans, it was not, and in time the marriage failed with particularly disastrous consequences. In Eric Hobsbawm’s description, toward the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism had “mutated from a concept associated with liberalism and the left, into a chauvinist, imperialist and xenophobic movement of the right… the radical right.”
¹⁰

The passing of liberal nationalism as a historical experiment was not the end of its career as social theory, however. The argument for the inclusionist liberal ideal of nationalism is made to this day by idealists who find in legal personhood too thin and abstract a basis for identity yet regard the actual record of historicist nationalism as too bloody and exclusionist to be made a basis for equal citizenship. Ortega y Gasset pointed out in the 1920s during a period of empire busting and “nationalist” aspirations that preceded the balkanization of the East—a period not unlike our own—that nationalism, having won its integrating national victories, was bound to change its strategy: “In periods of consolidation,” Ortega observed, “nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania.”
¹¹
In our own well-consolidated era, while the new nationalism does seem to have become a kind of toxic mania for deconstructing states, there are still voices urging the inclusionist model. Yael Tamir thus believes that “the liberal tradition, with its respect for personal autonomy, reflection and choice, and the national tradition, with its emphasis on belonging, loyalty and solidarity, although generally seen as mutually exclusive, can indeed accommodate one another;” for, she is sure, history notwithstanding, “embeddedness and choice are not necessarily antithetical.”
¹²

Not perhaps necessarily: but in history all too frequently. The aspiration to dialectic has in this century more often than not been contradicted by the reality. Liberty and fraternity were brother constructs of the French revolution, but like Cain and Abel were born to strife. Embeddedness means, if not exactly subjugation to an extended communal identity, membership in entities that constrain
choice. J. S. Mill to the contrary, sturdy old oaks don’t fly—as Edmund Burke might have reminded him; for Burke knew that “men are not tied together to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”
¹³
Rousseau to the contrary, butterflies cannot grow roots any more than contractually bound legal persons can nurture affection. As any naturalized citizen can attest, to choose one’s roots is not the same as being rooted by birth or blood. A voluntary membership may bring with it a special sense of appreciation—“I have become an American!”—but it cannot provide the sense of ascriptive identity that belongs to the native: “I
am
an American.” If “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” centered in a common language that permits the imagining of a common past, liberty and inclusiveness are at best likely to be contingent features of its landscape, and are at worst likely to be seen as inimical.
¹⁴

In his seminal study in social anthropology
Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft)
, the nineteenth-century sociologist Ferdinand Toennies concluded that the requisites of traditional blood and clan communities tended inevitably to yield to the requisites of voluntary and contractual societies in an evolution that pointed only forward; an evolution away from tradition, religion, and mystery toward contract, secularism, and rationality whose final destination could only be what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world. The yearning for a reconstructed and remystified community was both fostered and contradicted by modern society’s cold rationalism, just as more recently Jihad has been both fostered and contradicted by McWorld’s postmodernity.

Indeed, by the end of the last century the experiment with liberal nationalism, though it perdured in France and America, had largely failed elsewhere, displaced by Ortega’s “mania” for fragmentation. Empire had made nationalism more rabid and parochially oppositional and capitalism had driven it away from liberal individuals—agents of the bourgeois market—toward blood brothers: heirs to imagined ancient clans. Modernity meant modernization, which meant the aggressive expansion of practical mentalities of rationalization, bureaucratization, and secularization. These conditions in turn not only disenchanted and demythologized the world, but increasingly created a psychology of being in which individual self
determination and commercial consumption displaced community identity and group belonging. The consumer is perhaps modernity’s most notable achievement and the consumer is finally a solitary being. While Joel Kotkin—stretching metaphor to the breaking point—has pretended to find newfangled “tribes” in the peoples who run McWorld’s economic infrastructure (e.g., Jews, Japanese, Indians, Brits, and Americans
[sic!])
, buyers and sellers are not particularly well understood by being cast as blood-brother parochials.
¹⁵

Many postmoderns have tried to reinvent community in the pallid face of contract relations. They all use history, but as Eric Hobsbawm noticed, “history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin-addiction,” and since “in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past,” where necessary “it can always be invented.”
¹⁶
Community too is often a contrivance of willed grievances, drawing on an invented past. “Most Hungarians,” Tony Judt suggests, “did not know that their nation had been born in AD 896 until late-nineteenth-century patriots told them so.”
¹⁷
That version of multiculturalism that infiltrates the pluralist “many” with a new ideology of, say, white Protestant or African-American monoculture offers one example of fictive historical communities—Max Weber’s myths of common descent—invented to serve the need for a modern political base for group identity. Ethnic “nationalism” offers another far more toxic instance. Polish editor and social theorist Adam Michnik notes wryly that in Poland, putatively free of ethnic problems, “we can produce a Polish-Lithuanian conflict, a Polish-Belorussian conflict and a Polish-Ukrainian conflict, to say nothing of a Polish-German quarrel in Oppeln, a pogrom against the gypsies in Mlawa and an anti-Semitic campaign in a country which has virtually no Jews.”
¹⁸
In matters of nationalism, necessity apparently remains the mother of invention.

More than a hundred years ago, Marx had observed that the breaking of feudal bonds by modern capitalism had decisively fragmented traditional community. He spoke of the sundering of all bonds and prophesied ongoing cultural meltdown: “All that is solid,” he warned, “melts into air.”
¹⁹
A half century later modernist anxieties had become popularized, so that one of American playwright William Saroyan’s characters could repeat over and over again in the
prewar stage classic
The Time of Your Life
, “no foundation, all the way down the line,” and expect full sympathy from audiences already exasperated by modernity even before it had produced the Holocaust and the atomic bomb.

In Germany they did not just whine about it: reacting against what they took to be the stultifying leveling
(gleichschaltung)
of bourgeois society, the Nazi party revived medieval myths of Teuton morality (a feudal version of family values) and of Germanic identity (ironically reaching back not just to a second Empire of the German Nation but a first quite non-German Roman Empire). Eventually, it rode to power on a reactive ideology of grievance dressed up in the claims of an invented past in a manner not so different from the one currently being fashioned by the far Right in France, Italy, and the United States as well as, once again, in Germany. That the Nazis managed only to further the annihilation of intermediate associations of the kind that had once made genuine community feasible was an ironic compliment to their own unintentional complicity in the modernization they reviled. The irony is repeated today in the stellar rise and rapid fall of Silvio Berlusconi in Italian politics: a global corporate media mogul who owns Italy’s premier AC Milan soccer team, using his media-made preeminence to give demagogic voice to the very parochial constituencies his media world is systematically destroying; and then being brought down by media-driven charges of corruption that make him look like any other politician. The same irony is visible in the startling juxtaposition in the new reunified Germany of heavy metal rock rhythms that are MTV’s specialty and punk lyrics of which the young Goebbels might have been proud. Here is a piece of reactionary Jihad all decked out in the metered hip-hop of McWorld, as written by the German band Final Stage: