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It is sometimes useful to distinguish nationalism from patriotism. Nationalism often carries overtones of aggression, exclusivity, and/or xenophobia that patriotism doesn't. A 1971 article by Jacques Godechot embodies the distinction in its title: "Nation, patrie, nationalisme et patriotisme en France au XVIIIe siècle."
Godechot is cited by Rogers Brubaker in Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) for the argument that French nationalism, as opposed to patriotism, emerged only in 1792 with the revolutionary wars. Before that, "nationalism existed neither as a 'blind and exclusive preference for all that belongs to the nation' nor as a 'demand in favor of subject nationalities.'" [1] According to Godechot, "it is...absurd to speak of French nationalism during the first years of the Revolution; patriotism is an entirely different thing." [2]
Patriotism was certainly in evidence long before the Revolution. I've lately been dipping into Jay Smith's 2011 book on 'the beast of the Gévaudan,' a notorious predatory animal (or animals) that ravaged a remote part of south-central France in the mid-1760s.[3] In two separate episodes, two people -- a shepherd boy and a middle-aged woman -- stood up to the beast when it attacked rather than running away, thereby becoming not only local but national heroes. The king, Louis XV, rewarded them monetarily, and the boy, theretofore illiterate, was given an education at state expense and went on to a successful military career (abbreviated prematurely by his death in 1785).
Smith writes:
Their feats [i.e., the feats of the boy and the woman] were folded into a potent cultural initiative evident in many corners of French public life in the 1760s. In the wake of a disheartening war [i.e., the Seven Years' War], many writers -- government propagandists, historians, educators, moralists, journalists, novelists, and pamphleteers -- worked to boost national morale and encourage new sentiments of national pride. Their project grew out of the hardening conviction that even "subaltern heroes," or persons of inferior status, could rise to the level of patriotic paragon, and it reflected the belief that a French identity based on proud sentiments of honor should inspire "patriotic enthusiasm" throughout the "mass of the nation." [4]
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Notes
1. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p.8, quoting Godechot, "Nation, patrie..." in Annales historiques de la Révolution française v. 206 (1971).
2. Godechot, "Nation, patrie...", p.498, as quoted in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p.193 n.28.
3. Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (2011).
4. Ibid., p.160 (endnote omitted).
"I don’t think people carry around with them a fixed ideology. I think the majority of people, they’re going about their business, going about their lives. They just want to make sure that we’re making progress. And that’s going to be my top priority over the next couple of years."
-- President Obama, at today's press conference
The majority of Americans may not "carry around with them a fixed ideology," but they do carry around some powerful, if usually unarticulated, assumptions and beliefs. These stem from America's history and the mythical narratives and images that have become firm, one might even say fixed, elements of the national psyche. Without positing some historically-derived, widely shared political impulses ("ideas" would be perhaps too formal a word), it is hard to understand why so many Americans are susceptible (and have been susceptible for a long time) to rhetoric about "tax-and-spend liberals," "big government," "government interfering in our lives," "a government takeover of health care," etc. etc., when such rhetoric masks the facts that the U.S. taxes its citizens less than most other 'developed' countries and that its welfare provisions are less generous than those of most other 'developed' countries.
Why is the phrase "class warfare" such a toxic label in U.S. political discourse that it can be trotted out at a moment's notice to delegitimize attempts to address income and wealth inequality, which has grown to frightening and obscene levels in this country over the last 30 or so years? Why can struggling and economically hard-pressed voters be persuaded to vote for candidates who, far from proposing solutions to their problems, talk in the same breath about reining in spending and creating jobs (without bothering to explain how it is possible to do both simultaneously) and who spout slogans like "take back the government" without bothering to explain what that means? How was Ronald Reagan, a professional actor devoid of any notable grasp of issues, able to build an enormously successful career by uttering slogans like "let's get the government off our backs"? It's hard to answer these questions without positing a shared mythology holding that the genius of the American people lies in self-reliance, entrepreneurial initiative, and sheer determination to overcome all odds, and that this genius can only fully flourish and work its magic when the evil entity called "the government" located in that alien place called "Washington DC" removes its dead hand from individuals and corporations and allows them to mobilize the creative energies which, once unleashed, can assure that the U.S. remains, in the rather astoundingly hyperbolic albeit no doubt sincere words of several candidates in their victory speeches, "the greatest country ever known in the history of the world" [sic].
Today's issue:
Did nationalism -- or proto-nationalist sentiment -- exist in late-medieval and early-modern Europe?
No, says Daniel Nexon:
"Early modern European politics...lacked a fundamental feature of contemporary politics: nationalism. The tight connection between nation and the state represented by the ideal of 'national self-determination' simply did not exist in dynastic agglomerations.... Local identities remained far more important than the still inchoate notions of patria or nation.... Dynasts might, often through propaganda, argue that their dynastic interests and the interests of their holdings were synonymous. Sometimes they succeeded, but there was nothing obvious about the harmony of dynastic ambitions and the interests of a kingdom or principality. As J.H. Shennan remarks, 'We should beware of misinterpreting aspects of the consolidation of princely authority in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as evidence of proto-national sentiment.' " [1]
Yes, says Norman Housley:
"...the extent to which the members of Europe's political communities felt united by national feeling in the late Middle Ages remains hotly disputed.... Bernard Guenée provided a useful analytical framework for the ways in which national sentiment developed. Nomenclature (Francia, Alemania, Polonia, and so on), a common language, a sense of geographical cohesion, shared religious traditions (above all, 'national' saints), and the consciousness of a common history, were all important motors for national feeling; while for the historian, they form indices for the strength of that feeling at any given point. Thus, for Guenée, 'the fact that neither the states nor the subjects of the duke of Burgundy had a common name was more of a threat to Charles the Bold than the policies of Louis XI'.... Guenée and others have also placed emphasis on dynastic continuity, administrative advances, a sense of resentment against privileged and intrusive foreigners, and above all the homogenizing burden of war, as contributory factors in the growth of national feelings. Some historians, including myself, believe that the result was a national sentiment of considerable vigour, which was closely bound up with the development of European statehood." [2]
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1. Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe (Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 94-95.
2. Norman Housley, "Pro deo et patria mori: Sanctified Patriotism in Europe, 1400-1600," in P. Contamine, ed., War and Competition Between States (Clarendon Press/Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 225-226.
From a column published under Nicolas Sarkozy's name in Le Monde in early December (my trans.):
"I say to my Muslim compatriots that I will do everything so that they can feel that they are citizens like all others, enjoying the same rights to live in accord with their faith, to practice their religion with the same freedom and dignity. I will fight against all forms of discrimination.
"But I also want to tell them that in our country, where Christian civilization [la civilisation chrétienne] has left a deep trace, where the values of the Republic are an integral part of our national identity, anything which could appear as a challenge launched at that heritage and those values would doom to failure the establishment of an Islam in France which, without renouncing any of its essentials [sans rien renier de ce qui le fonde], could travel the path to inclusion in our social and civic compacts [note: this is a very loose translation of the last phrase of the passage: aura su trouver en lui-même les voies par lesquelles il s'inclura sans heurt dans notre pacte social et notre pacte civique]."
Wearing the full veil has become a hot-button issue in France, but the reasons may not be immediately obvious to many of those who don't live there. If countries can be said to have ideas of themselves, then assimilationism, the notion that Frenchness is a matter primarily of culture rather than birth, is an element of France's idea of itself. And "culture" here implies acceptance of certain substantive principles. Note, in the BBC article linked above, the French immigration minister's reference to "the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," acceptance of which is considered, at least in this official view, part of what it means to be French.
I recently had a conversation with the sociologist Rogers Brubaker (ah, the pleasures of name-dropping), and afterward I took a quick re-look at his book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992), which I had read a long time ago. The book brings out, among other things, what Brubaker calls "the weakness of the ethnic moment and the correlative strength of the assimilationist moment in French self-understanding" and the way in which Frenchness has been defined "in social and political rather than ethnic terms, as a matter of social becoming rather than intrinsic being" (p.112). For his bio and more recent books, click here.
P.s. Two relevant blog posts: here (from last July) and here.
Roger Cohen in today's NYT is worried about the pendulum in the U.S. swinging too far in the direction of big government. We need change, according to Cohen, but we don't need to emulate the European "nanny states" which make it more "attractive" to be unemployed than employed. As if that were the problem right now -- people who have lost their jobs finding it more "attractive" to be unemployed! I'm not sure what parallel universe Roger Cohen is inhabiting, but it's a weird one.
Obama, Mr. Cohen says, must be careful to avoid his "French temptation" by not moving too much in the direction of étatisme. Mr. Cohen's historical clock seems to have stopped in 1983 or thereabouts, when capital flight "forced" François Mitterand to make a U-turn in his economic policies, thereby abandoning the platform on which he won the 1981 French presidential elections. Obama, for better or worse, is not Mitterand, and the differences in national versions of capitalism are rooted in structural factors that, again for better or worse, will not and cannot be changed by any U.S. president's actions and proposals, no matter how far-reaching. Well, let me amend that: by the actions of any U.S. president who actually is able to get elected. If Dennis Kucinich were president rather than Barack Obama, then perhaps -- perhaps -- the NYT could publish a column like this and not wind up embarrassed. However, Kucinich is not president, and the column is, for the most part, rather embarrassing.
Cohen waxes eloquent about the U.S. national mythology of boundless opportunity and the capacity for re-invention and innovation. "Americans are always, in their imaginations, at the new frontier." Cohen does not seem to realize that this is a mythology; to be sure, it has some (rather tenuous) basis in fact, but basically it is a creed rather than a roadmap to effective governing, especially in the midst of an economic crisis. National myths are important, but they should never be confused with accurate pictures of (or guides to dealing with) reality, which is always more messy. There really is no "French temptation" worth speaking of. It's a figment of Mr. Cohen's imagination and of the far more overheated imaginations of Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh, and their epigones.
reify [from the Latin res (thing) + -fy]: to treat (an abstraction) as substantially existing, or as a concrete material object.
As the dictionary suggests, to reify is to thing-ify: to treat what is not a thing as a thing. (This is the sense the word carries in Marx's definition of commodity fetishism: reification of persons, anthropomorphizing of things.) In academic writing, however, "reify" and "reification" have become vague, almost catch-all terms of disapproval, used to indicate disagreement with whatever the author doesn't like.
So many examples of this usage are available that to single out one is unfair, but there is one example that's fresh in my mind. Recently I was glancing through an article that draws on Marxian work in international relations "to recast the socio-historical conditions of emergence and diffusion of the modern national form" (F.G. Dufour, "Social-property Regimes and the Uneven and Combined Development of Nationalist Practices," European Journal of International Relations 13:4 [2007], pp.583-604).
This article says there's a need to "move beyond the reification of a collective domestic identity" (p.588). I'm pulling this phrase out of context, because to supply the context would be rather tedious. But it is illustrative, I think, of the basic procedure: take an abstraction, assert that it's being reified, and you have a criticism that's often difficult if not impossible to refute, because it usually boils down to "I don't like the way scholar X is using this concept."
In a comment on this earlier post, 'bro' suggested adding a sentence to McCain's line that Americans make history: "And then we run screaming out of the room, get trashed, go to sleep, and wake up with no memory of what happened."
This was meant humorously, of course, but it points to a non-humorous issue, namely the function of collective forgetting, which is perhaps best understood not as literally blotting out certain painful parts of a national past but as agreeing to "bracket" them. More than a century ago, the historian Ernest Renan, in his lecture "What Is a Nation?," observed that "the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things...." More recently, Anthony Marx has put it this way: "Nations drink at the fountain of Lethe, clearing their memories, before their rebirth in the Hades of modernity." (Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism [2003], pp.29-30)
"War made the state, and the state made war." The late Charles Tilly's adage neatly captures some of the dynamics at work in the formation of states in late-medieval and early modern Europe. As Tilly himself recognized, the slogan does not embrace all the complexities involved or the fact that there was no single, unilinear path to sovereign statehood. Still, it points to the synergy that sometimes existed between war-making and state-building in early modern Europe: embryonic "states" -- meaning a variety of polities, including "composite monarchies" and other forms -- that managed to extract resources effectively were able to build armies, often largely composed of mercenaries; the armies often made further extraction of resources easier, with those revenues in turn strengthening nascent bureaucracies. Luck and the quality of leadership, among other things, played a considerable role in determining which "states" succeeded, but Tilly's factors were important.
What about the contemporary 'developing world'? Does Tilly's thesis apply there in the same way as it does to the history of state formation in Europe and elsewhere? Yes and no, according to Brian Taylor and Roxana Botea in their article "Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the Contemporary Third World," International Studies Review, March 2008, pp.27-56.
They observe that the quasi-Darwinian logic of competition in early modern Europe, where weak polities were often swallowed up by stronger ones, no longer holds in a world where the norm against conquest is widely observed and "state death" (T. Fazal's phrase) is almost nonexistent. Consequently, weak states persist, and war often weakens them further.
This is what happened in Afghanistan, one of the two main cases the authors examine. Although the article contains some large-N evidence about the relation between state strength and ethnic fractionalization, most of the article is a comparative analysis of Afghanistan and Vietnam, third-world countries that "experienced multiple, lengthy, and deadly armed conflicts with a significant external component" (p.28). Why did decades of war drastically weaken the Afghan state but strengthen the Vietnamese one? The authors argue that there were two elements present in Vietnam that were missing in Afghanistan: (1) ethnic homogeneity and (2) a unifying revolutionary ideology, or more specifically "a revolutionary movement that successfully combined nationalism with communist ideology and state-building strategies" (p.48).
Ethnic homogeneity in Vietnam meant that the problems of national identity and cohesion were already half-solved or three-quarters solved, in contrast to Afghanistan, where ethnic and tribal fragmentation never allowed the formation of a real sense of national identity, and where more than a quarter-century of war (from 1978 to the present) only deepened the divisions. And while the Vietnamese Communists melded nationalism and the transnational ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in the service of statism, the Taliban's "neo-fundamentalist" Islamic worldview worked against effective state-building (p.48). Moreover, unlike the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, the Taliban, both before and after their seizure of power in 1996, relied heavily on external funding sources (plus smuggling and the opium trade) for much of their revenue.
In sum, war is apparently no longer an effective path to state-building, except under quite unusual circumstances, e.g. Vietnam. One hopes that this will in turn contribute to a continuing decline in the overall amount of armed violence in the world, as would-be state-builders come to realize that war usually hinders rather than furthers their aims.
p.s. (added 10/25/12): see also this post.
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