A Study of Nationalism and its relevance in Muslim States.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
NATIONALISM 2
THE BASIC CONCEPT OF NATION 2
BIRTH OF THE CONCEPT OF "NATION" DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 4
COMMON LANGUAGE 4
COMMON CULTURE 4
COMMON HISTORY 5
COMMON RELIGION 5
THE BASIC CONCEPT OF NATIONALISM 5
NATIONALISM A DISTINCT IDEOLOGY 6
TYPES OF NATIONALISM 7
CIVIC NATIONALISM 8
ETHNIC NATIONALISM 8
IRREDENTISM 9
EXPANSIONIST NATIONALISM 9
RADICAL OR REVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISM 9
FASCISM 9
STATELESS NATIONALISM 9
ETHNOCENTRISM 11
ORIGIN OF NATIONALISM 11
THIRD WORLD NATIONALISM 14
CULTURAL NATIONALISM 24
EUROPEAN NATIONALISM " ENGLISH PURITANISM AND NATIONALISM 25
EUROPEAN NATIONALISM " FRENCH NATIONALISM 26
European Nationalism " The 1848 Revolutionary Wave 27
ASIAN AND AFRICAN NATIONALISM 29
Asian and African Nationalism " The New Nations 30
ASIAN AND AFRICAN NATIONALISM " POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES 31
NATIONALISM IN WORLD WAR I 32
TWO KINDS OF NATIONALISM 32
NATIONALISM IN GERMANY 33
NATIONALISM IN ITALY 33
NATIONALISM IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY 33
NATIONALISM IN RUSSIA 34
NATIONALISM IN FRANCE 34
NATIONALISM IN BRITAIN 34
CAN NATIONALISM SOLVE THE CHALLENGES FACING PAKISTAN? 35
THE PROHIBITION OF NATIONALISM 36
NATIONALISM WITH ITS POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ASPECTS 37
TYPE OF NATIONALISM BRINGING ABOUT SOLIDARITY 39
NATIONALISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA DEVELOPED FROM THREE SOURCES 42
INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS 42
WESTERN EDUCATION 42
SOCIAL RADICALS 43
SOURCES FROM QURAN & HADITH FOR CREATING THE ISLAMIC STATE / UMMAH 43
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ISLAM AND OTHER RELIGIONS LIES IN THE FOLLOWING FACT 46
BENEFITS OF SACRED ISLAMIC NATIONALITY 47
NATIONALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF 48
DEMOCRACY 48
ARISTOTLE 49
JAMES MADISON 51
THE IRONY OF MADISON'S THOUGHT FOR DEMOCRACY 55
THE BENEFICENT FACE OF NATIONALISM 57
NATIONALISM PROMOTES DEMOCRACY 57
NATIONALISM ENCOURAGES SELF-DETERMINATION 58
NATIONALISM ALLOWS FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 58
NATIONALISM ALLOWS DIVERSITY 58
NATIONALISM AS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE
NATIONALISM CAN LEAD TO INSECURITY 59
NATIONALISM LEADS TO A FEELING OF SUPERIORITY 59
NATIONALISM MAY LEAD TO XENOPHOBIA 59
NATIONALISM IS JINGOISTIC 60
NATIONALISM CAN BE AGGRESSIVE 60
THE LACK OF FIT BETWEEN STATES AND NATION 60
CAHLLENGES TO NATIONALISM 61
CONCLUSION 64
BIBLIOGRAPHY 66
INTRODUCTION
NATIONALISM
Nationalism is a bond between people that is based upon family, clan or tribal ties. Nationalism arises among people when the predominant thought they carry is that of achieving domination. It starts from the family, where one member asserts his authority to achieve leadership in the affair of the family. Once this is achieved, the individual extends his leadership to the wider family. In this way, the families would also try to achieve leadership in the community they reside in. The next stage is that of tribes competing with each other, all trying to dominate others in order to enjoy the privileges and the prestige that comes with this authority. This breeds arrogance and ignorance along with extreme pride.
Nationalism cannot unite the people because it is based on quest for leadership. This quest for leadership creates a power struggle between the people and this leads to conflicts among various strata of society. Another drawback of nationalism is that it gives a rise to racism. This is expected if people are allowed to compete with each other on the basis of their race. Some whites, for example, may see themselves as superior to the blacks, or vice-versa, leading to polarization of the races and a divided society.
The spiritual bond among non-Muslims is a grouping of people based on their 'religious belief' which is not a comprehensive belief covering every aspect of life. An example of a spiritual bond is when people identify with each other on the basis of being a Christian, a Hindu or a Jew. Islam is not classed among these as it is a Deen rather than a religion. The term Deen comprehensively takes on the meaning as "A complete way of life". This spiritual bond does not unite people on issues other than matters of belief and worships; hence it is limited and cannot be the basis of any complete unity.
THE BASIC CONCEPT OF NATION
A nation is a body of people who share a real or imagined common history, culture, language or ethnic origin, which typically inhabit a particular country or territory. The development and conceptualization of the nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, although nationalists would trace nations into the past along uninterrupted lines of historical narrative. Politically, the term nation means a body of people who feel them to be naturally linked together by certain affinities which are so strong for them that they can live happily together, are disappointed when disunited.
Though "nation" is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of "nation" coincides with the political concept of "state" are called nation states.
According to E. Renan (1882) and M. Weber (1970) purely voluntaristic definition,
"A nation is any group of people aspiring to a common political state-like organization. If such a group of people succeeds in forming a state, the loyalties of the group members might be "civic" (as opposed to "ethnic") in nature."
BIRTH OF THE CONCEPT OF "NATION" DURING
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The concept of nation (both political and cultural) as we understand it today, i.e. as a basically political notion, emerges around the end of the 18th century and coincides with the end of the Ancient Régime. At that time, the first solid theoretical formulations of the nation occur and are applied in concrete political demands like the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Since, the ideas of political nation and cultural nation have evolved intertwined. Nevertheless, the term "nation", derived from Latin, existed before with other meanings.
The term Nation has two distinct meanings: The political nation, used in the domains of international law and politics is the political subjects which exerts the political sovereignty of a democratic state. The cultural nation is a sociological or ideological concept, which is more subjective and ambiguous in its meaning than the political nation. The cultural nation can roughly be defined as a community of people with certain common cultural features, which are ethically or politically relevant to them. In a broader sense, nation is also sometimes used to refer to a number of other things: State, country, territory or inhabitants of the former, people, among others.
COMMON LANGUAGE
A language is the primary ingredient in the making of a nation. Without a common language a nation cannot evolve. A common Culture, a common History is dependent on Language. Also to deal with everyday affairs within a group of people living in a specified boundary need a common mean of communication to trade and socialize. Thus even if a group of people sharing common Language, Culture and History may live in different countries but would still consider themselves attached to their respective nations as long as they share the same language.
COMMON CULTURE
Many nations are constructed around the idea of a shared culture, the national culture. The national culture can be assumed to be shared with previous generations, and includes a cultural heritage from these generations. As with the common ancestry, this identification of past culture with present culture may be largely symbolic. The archaeological site of Stonehenge for instance is owned and managed by English Heritage, although no 'English' people or state existed when it was constructed, 4 000 to 5 000 years ago. Other nations have similarly appropriated ancient archaeological sites, literature, art, and even entire civilizations as 'national heritage'.
COMMON HISTORY
A nation can be constructed around a common history i.e. chronologically recorded events in the past, their ancestors have gone through.
COMMON RELIGION
Religion is sometimes used as a defining factor for a nation, although some nationalist movements de-emphasize it as a divisive factor, such as in Ireland where The Republic of Ireland has a majority of Catholics and Northern Ireland holding a majority of Protestants, de-emphasizing religion as a factor of National Identity in Ireland is largely unsuccessful. Again it is the fact that the religion is shared, that makes it national. It may not be exclusive: several nations define themselves partly as Catholic although the religion itself is Universalist. Some religions are specific to one ethnic group, notably Judaism. Nevertheless, the Zionist movement generally avoided a religious definition of the 'Jewish people', preferring an ethnic and cultural definition. Since Judaism is a religion, people can become a Jew by religious conversion, which in turn can facilitate their obtaining Israeli citizenship. Jews in Israel who convert to other religions do not thereby lose Israeli citizenship, although their national identity might then be questioned by others.
THE BASIC CONCEPT OF NATIONALISM
The term "nationalism" is generally used to describe two phenomena:
) The attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity
2) The actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination.
> The first point raises the questions about the concept of nation (or national identity), which is often defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and while an individual's membership in a nation is often regarded as involuntary, it is sometimes regarded as voluntary.
> The second point raises questions about whether self-determination must be understood as involving having full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or whether something less is required.
NATIONALISM A DISTINCT IDEOLOGY
Nationalism refers to an ideology, a sentiment, a form of culture, or a social movement that focuses on the nation. It is a type of collectivism emphasizing the collective of a specific nation. While there is significant debate over the historical origins of nations, nearly all specialists accept that nationalism, at least as an ideology and social movement is a modern phenomenon originating in Europe. Precisely where and when it emerged is difficult to determine, but its development is closely related to that of the modern state and the push for popular sovereignty that came to a head with the French Revolution in the late 18th century. Since that time, nationalism has become one of the most significant political and social forces in history, perhaps most notably as a major influence or cause of World War I and especially World War II with the rise of fascism, a radical and authoritarian nationalist ideology
As an ideology, nationalism holds that 'the people' in the doctrine of popular sovereignty is the nation, and that as a result only nation-states founded on the principle of national self-determination are legitimate. Since most states are multinational, or at least home to more than one group claiming national status, in many cases nationalist pursuit of self-determination has caused conflict between people and states including war, (both external and domestic), secession; and in extreme cases, genocide.
Nationalism is a strong social phenomenon in the world as national flags, national anthems and national divisions are examples of 'banal' nationalism that is often mentally unconscious. Moreover, some scholars argue that nationalism as a sentiment or form of culture, sometimes described as 'nationality' to avoid the ideology's tarnished reputation, is the social foundation of modern society. Industrialization, democratization, and support for economic redistribution have all been at least partly attributed to the shared social context and solidarity that nationalism provides. Even though nationalism ultimately is based on supporting one's own nation, nationalists of different states may perfectly well cooperate among each other as to support the ultimate worldwide belief that all groups of nationalities have the right to have their own states.
Nationalism has long been ignored as a topic in political philosophy, written off as a relic from bygone times. It has only recently come into the focus of philosophical debate, partly in consequence of rather spectacular and troubling nationalist clashes, like those in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet republics. The surge of nationalism usually presents a morally ambivalent and for this reason often fascinating picture. "National awakenings" and struggles for political independence are often both heroic and inhumanly cruel; the formation of a recognizably national state often responds to deep popular sentiment, but can and does sometimes bring in its wake inhuman consequences, including violent expulsion and "cleansing" of non-nationals, all the way to organized mass murder. The moral debate on nationalism reflects a deep moral tension between solidarity with oppressed national groups on the one hand and repulsion in the face of crimes perpetrated in the name of nationalism on the other. Moreover, the issue of nationalism points to a wider domain of problems having to do with the treatment of ethnic and cultural differences within a democratic polity, which are arguably among the most pressing problems of contemporary political theory.
In recent years the focus of the debate about nationalism has shifted towards issues in international justice, probably in response to changes on the international scene: bloody nationalist wars such as those in the former Yugoslavia have become less conspicuous, whereas the issues of terrorism, of "clash of civilizations" and of hegemony in the international order have come to occupy public attention.
TYPES OF NATIONALISM
Nationalism may manifest itself as part of official state ideology or as a popular (non-state) movement and may be expressed along civic ethnic, cultural, religious or ideological lines. These self-definitions of the nation are used to classify types of nationalism. However, such categories are not mutually exclusive and many nationalist movements combine some or all of these elements to varying degrees. Nationalist movements can also be classified by other criteria, such as scale and location.
Some political theorists make the case that any distinction between forms of nationalism is false. In all forms of nationalism, the populations believe that they share some kind of common culture. A main reason why such typology can be considered false is that it attempts to bend the fairly simple concept of nationalism to explain its many manifestations or interpretations. Arguably, all "types" of nationalism merely refer to different ways academics throughout the years have tried to define nationalism. This school of thought accepts that nationalism is simply the desire of a nation to self-determine.
CIVIC NATIONALISM
Civic nationalism defines the nation as an association of people with equal and shared political rights, and allegiance to similar political procedures. According to the principles of civic nationalism the nation is not based on common ethnic ancestry, but is a political entity, whose core is not ethnicity? This civic concept of nationalism is exemplified by Ernest Renan in his lecture in 1882 "Where is the nation?" where he defined the nation as a "daily plebiscite dependent on the will of its people to continue living together".
ETHNIC NATIONALISM
Ethnic nationalism is based on the hereditary connections of people. Ethnic nationalism specifically seeks to unite all people of a certain ethnicity heritage together. Ethnic nationalism does not seek to include people of other ethnicities.
IRREDENTISM
Irredentism is a form of nationalism promoting the annexation of territories, which have or previously had members of the nation residing within them, to a state which comprises most or all of the nation's members.
EXPANSIONIST NATIONALISM
Expansionist nationalism promoted spreading the nation's members to new territories; usually on the claimed basis that existing territory which the nation has resided in is too small or is not able to physically or economically sustain the nation's population.
RADICAL OR REVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISM
Many nationalist movements in the world are dedicated to national liberation, in the view that their nations are being persecuted by other nations and thus need to exercise self-determination by liberating themselves from the accused persecutors. Anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninism is closely tied with this ideology, and practical examples include Stalin's early work Marxism and the National Question and his Socialism in One Country edict, which declares that nationalism can be used in an internationalist context i.e. fighting for national liberation without racial or religious divisions.
FASCISM
Fascism is an authoritarian nationalist ideology which promotes national revolution, national collectivism, a totalitarian state, and irredentism or expansionism to unify and allow the growth of a nation. Fascists often promote ethnic nationalism but also have promoted cultural nationalism including cultural assimilation of people outside a specific ethnic group.
STATELESS NATIONALISM
With the establishment of a nation-state, the primary goal of any nationalist movement has been achieved. However, nationalism does not disappear but remains a political force within the nation, and inspires political parties and movements. The development of state nationalism leads to the development of stateless nationalism movements that feel oppressed by the mainstream nationalistic conception of the nation - such as the "eternal Spain", "La Grande France" - and aspire at setting up their own state either within the nation state or a state of its own.
Stateless Nationalists in this sense typically campaign for:
> Defending from strengthening national unity, including campaigns for national salvation in times of crisis.
> Confronting nation state policies that attempt to impose a model of political behavior from the top.
> Unlike state nationalism, it is more open to foreign influences. Influenced by civic liberalism stateless nationalists reject the extreme xenophobia of state nationalist parties.
> Attempting to make borders flexible so as to collaborate with neighboring territories sharing common interests.
> Redefining the national territory which is considered part of the national homeland. This is called irredentism from the Italian movement Italia irredentism.
> Small nations cannot survive unless they are opened to foreign trade so that they reject economic nationalism of nation states.
The term 'nationalism' is also used by extension, or as a metaphor, to describe movements which promote a group identity of some kind. This use is especially common in the United States, and includes Black Nationalism and white nationalism in a cultural sense. They may overlap with nationalism in the classic sense, including black secessionist movements and pan-Africanism
The emotions can be purely negative: a shared sense of threat can unify the nation. However, dramatic events, such as defeat in war, can qualitatively affect national identity and attitudes to non-national groups. The defeat of Germany in World War I, and the perceived humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles, economic crisis and hyperinflation, created a climate for xenophobia, revanchist, and the rise of Nazism. The solid bourgeois patriotism of the pre-1914 years, with the Kaiser as national father-figure, was no longer relevant.
ETHNOCENTRISM
Nationalism does not necessarily imply a belief in the superiority of one ethnicity over others, but some people believe that some so-called nationalists support ethnocentric protectionism or ethnocentric supremacy. Studies have yielded evidence that such behavior may be derived from innate preferences in humans from infancy.
In the USA for example, non-indigenous ethnocentric nationalist movements exist for both so-called "black" and "white" peoples. These forms of "nationalism" often promote or glorify foreign nations that they believe can serve as an example for their own nation, see Anglophobia or Afro centrism.
Explicit biological race theory was influential from the end of the 19th century. Nationalist and Fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century often appealed to these theories. The National Socialist ideology was amongst the most comprehensively "racial" ideologies: the concept of "race" influenced aspects of policy in Nazi Germany. In the 21st century the term "race" is no longer regarded by many people as a meaningful term to describe the range of human phenotype clusters; the term ethnocentrism is a more accurate and meaningful term.
Ethnic cleansing is often seen as both a nationalist and ethnocentrism phenomenon. It is part of nationalist logic that the state is reserved for one nation, but not all nationalist nation-states expel their minorities.
ORIGIN OF NATIONALISM
Recent general theory has looked at underlying issues, and above all the question of which came first, nations or nationalism. Nationalist activists see themselves as representing a pre-existing nation, and the primordial's theory of nationalism agrees. It sees nations, or at least ethnic groups, as a social reality dating back twenty thousand years.
The modernist theories imply that until around 1800, almost no-one had more than local loyalties. National identity and unity were originally imposed from above, by European states, because they were necessary to modernize economy and society. In this theory, nationalist conflicts are an unintended side-effect. For example, Ernest Gellner argued that nations are a by-product of industrialization Modernization theorists sees such things as the printing press and capitalism as necessary conditions for nationalism. Unfortunately, this theory falls short of addressing all nationalist efforts, including the Flemings repulsion of the French in the 14th century, or any nationalist efforts against empires before 1800.
Anthony D. Smith proposed a synthesis of primordial's and modernist views now commonly referred to as an ethno-symbolist approach. According to Smith, the preconditions for the formation of a nation are as follows:
> A fixed homeland (current or historical)
> High autonomy
> Hostile surroundings
> Memories of battles
> Sacred centers
> Languages and scripts
> Special customs
> Historical records and thinking
Those preconditions may create powerful common mythology. Therefore, the mythic homeland is in reality more important for the national identity than the actual territory occupied by the nation. Smith also posits that nations are formed through the inclusion of the whole populace (not just elites), constitution of legal and political institutions, nationalist ideology, international recognition and drawing up of borders.
One of these poisonous concepts that stigmatize the Prophet's (saws) Ummah is Nationalism. It is a dangerous concept that has become the emotional basis for the state of the Ummah today and one, which visibly fortifies the division among those who profess to believe in the same ideology. Furthermore, the Muslims identify themselves as Turkish, Arab, African and Pakistani. If this is not enough, Muslims are further sub-divided within each country or continent. For example, in Pakistan people are classed as Punjabis, Sindhis, Balauchis and Pathans. This fragmentation continues to gain momentum amongst the Muslims.
The Muslim Ummah was never confronted with such a dilemma in the past during Islamic rule. They never suffered from disunity, widespread oppression, stagnation in science and technology and certainly not from the internal conflicts that we have witnessed this century like the Iran-Iraq war. So what has gone wrong with the Muslims this century? Why are there so many feuds between them and why are they seen to be fighting each other? What has caused their weakness and how will they ever recover from the present stagnation?
There are many factors that contributed to the present state of affairs, but some of the main ones are the abandonment of the Arabic language as the language of understanding Islam correctly and performing Ijtihad, the absorption of foreign cultures and thus the abandonment of Islamic beliefs, the gradual loss of central authority over some of the provinces, and the rise of Nationalism since the 19th Century.
Nationalism did not arise in the Muslim world naturally, nor did it come about in response to any hardships faced by the people, nor due to the frustration did they feel when Europe started to dominate the world after the industrial revolution. Rather, nationalism was implanted in the minds of the Muslims through a well thought out scheme by the European powers, after their failure to destroy the Islamic State by force.
The concept of nationalism is very large and cannot be understood without studying the way humans identify and relate to each other in society. This study will enable a differentiation to be made between various forms of grouping and nationalism. Human beings can identify or group together on the basis of:
* Love of a particular land or a country - patriotism
* Tribe, lineage or race - nationalism
* Religion - mere spiritual rituals
* Faith or Aqeedah - creed
THIRD WORLD NATIONALISM
The first Marxist to recognize the significance of Third World national liberation movements was Lenin. His analysis of imperialism demonstrated the "colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world's population by an insignificant minority of the richest and advanced capitalist countries" and showed that this enslavement would inevitably provoke a wave of revolts and wars of liberation. What Lenin envisaged was a world alliance between the proletarian revolution, principally in the west, and the national liberation movements, principally in the east, to crush imperialism in a pincer movement. He insisted therefore that it was of the utmost importance for Communists to support these nationalist movements, especially in struggles against their "own" imperialism.
At the same time Lenin realized that this strategy carried with it the danger of blurring the Marxist distinction "between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class". Lenin's theses on this question at the Second Congress of the Comintern, therefore, stressed the following:
... the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist coloring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries ... The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.
Lenin also warned against "the deception systematically practiced by the imperialist powers" of setting up states which were formally politically independent, but economically and militarily wholly dependent. His conclusion was that:
Under present-day international conditions there is no salvation for dependent and weak nations except in a union of Soviet republics ... Complete victory over capitalism cannot be won unless the proletariat and following it, the mass of working people in all countries and nations throughout the world voluntarily strive for alliance and unity.
Under Stalin, however, the policy of the Comintern, dictated by the need to win friends for the Soviet Union, proceeded in precisely the direction warned against by Lenin. The classic case, of course, was China, where the Chinese Communist Party not only entered the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang party, but also accepted a prohibition on criticizing the principles of Sun Yat-sen, its founder, and handed its own membership list over to the Kuomintang leadership. Chiang Kai-shek was made an honorary member of the Communist International.
The process of giving bourgeois nationalist movements a "communist coloring" and merging Communism with bourgeois nationalism received a further intensification after the Second World War, when selective support for national liberation movements in the opposing camp became an important element in the Soviet Union's global power struggle with the United States. By the 1950s and 1960s a situation had been reached where, on the one hand, almost every nationalist regime and movement in the Third World called itself "socialist" and many claimed to be "Marxist", while on the other hand large sections of the left in the advanced ...
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The process of giving bourgeois nationalist movements a "communist coloring" and merging Communism with bourgeois nationalism received a further intensification after the Second World War, when selective support for national liberation movements in the opposing camp became an important element in the Soviet Union's global power struggle with the United States. By the 1950s and 1960s a situation had been reached where, on the one hand, almost every nationalist regime and movement in the Third World called itself "socialist" and many claimed to be "Marxist", while on the other hand large sections of the left in the advanced countries, including the non-Stalinist left and including some of Trotskyist lineage, had come to regard the national liberation movements and the socialist revolution as practically synonymous.
Precisely because they are nationalist these liberation movements are so diverse in their practice and theory that no one of them can serve for the purposes of analysis as "representative" of the rest (as the SPD could for the Second International). At the same time an account of all or even a number of the ideological systems arising from these movements is ruled out on grounds of space. What is proposed, therefore, is to examine Third World nationalist "Marxism" in terms of what has been a central theme for almost all its incarnations - guerrilla war for national independence - and to do so with special reference to China and Cuba, the two "purest" cases of this type of revolution. They have the added interest that Maoism began within Stalinism proper, developed its own independent strategy and then broke with Russia after it had achieved power, whereas Castroism began as non-Communist and non-Marxist, only moving into the Soviet camp and adopting a "Marxist" ideology after it had achieved power. This procedure, inadequate as it is, should nonetheless be sufficient to reveal the essence of this kind of "Marxism", its class basis.
Guerrilla warfare involves, in the first place, a relocation of the centre of the revolutionary struggle from the town to the countryside. The first "Marxist" to take this step was Mao and he did it in response to the crushing of the Chinese working class by the Kuomintang in 1927. The motive was to save the remnants of the Chinese Communist Party from Chiang Kai-Shek's reign of terror in the cities and this led Mao first to Kiangsi, and then, when this was attacked in force, on the incredible Long March to Yenan in the north west, one of the most backward and remote parts of China. This practical consideration, the greater difficulty experienced by the army and police in tracking down revolutionaries in the countryside, has remained of prime importance for advocates of guerrilla war. Thus Che Guevara, after commenting that "illegal workers' movements face enormous dangers", writes: "The situation in the open country is not so difficult. There, in places beyond the reach of the repressive forces, the inhabitants can be supported by armed guerrillas."
However, guerrilla warfare involves not only a shift in the location of the struggle but also a shift in its social content. The worker cannot become a guerrilla without ceasing to be a worker, and for the working class as a whole or even a substantial proportion of it rural guerrilla warfare is an evident impossibility. Which social class, then, is to replace the working class as the agent of revolution? The principal answer of the theorists of guerrilla war is: the peasantry.
More than enough has already been said in the first part of this book to show that such a substitution of the peasantry for the proletariat is incompatible with Marxism, but it is worthwhile stressing that in no way is this just a matter of contradicting Marx's (and Lenin's) specific judgments' on the revolutionary capacities of the peasants. For Marxism, as we have shown, the proletariat is fundamental. The working class is not the instrument of the revolution; on the contrary the revolution is the instrument of the working class, for the working class alone is linked to and embodies the forces and relations of production which can carry humanity forward to a higher, classless, stage of society.
Thus, just as it was impossible to insert socialism in one country into Marxism without necessitating a whole series of subsequent revisions, so the theory of peasant socialist revolution demolishes the entire structure of historical materialism. The peasant is the product not of capitalist but of pine-capitalist relations of production. If the peasantry is the socialist class then socialist revolution should have been possible at any time in the past thousand years. Capitalism and the industrial revolution would be unnecessary stages in human history and the determining role played by the development of the forces of production would be done away with completely. All that is needed is will power and correct ideas.
Precisely this notion manifests itself in the arguments of the Maoists, and their intellectual fellow travellers such as Charles Bettelheim, that socialism can be constructed in China or elsewhere however backward and impoverished the economic starting point, provided the political leadership is correct. It appears also in the Castro-Guevara-Debray position that it is not necessary to wait for the objective conditions of revolution to mature, because the revolutionaries (guerrillas) can, themselves, create them. The result is not Marxist materialism but rampant idealism.
One attempt to get round this problem, essayed by those such as Mao who felt some ideological loyalty to the Marxist tradition (refracted through Stalinism), was to speak always of "proletarian leadership" of the peasantry, But since the proletariat played no role at all in the Chinese Revolution ("it is hoped", wrote Mao in 1949, "that workers and employees in all trades will continue to work and that business will operate as usual" this could only mean leadership by the "proletarian" party. And since the Chinese Communist Party had practically no working class-members, this in turn could only mean leadership by "proletarian" ideology. Once again we are back to idealism. Ideology, detached from its social base, is transferred onto another social class and supposedly remoulds it.
In fact extreme idealism and its vulgar version, the "great man" theory, permeates Maoism. Examples range from the notion that the Soviet Union changed from the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the change of leadership from Stalin to Krushchev, to the use of the terminology of class (bourgeois, landowner, and so on) as moral labels, to the absurd cult of "Mao Tse-tung thought" and the cult of Mao himself, "the great helmsman", "the sun that never sets".
It is important to note that whereas the cult of Stalin arose only after he was in power, the cult of Mao dates from before the conquest of power. This is because the revolutionary working class will tolerate no mystical leader cult and so Stalin had to smash the working class before he could impose his rule upon it, whereas peasant-based revolts typically view their leaders as semi-divine. Indeed one has only to think of the cults of Kim Ii Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and others to see that this crude idealism is not only a common feature of national liberation "Marxisms" but also a characteristic they share with openly non-Marxist nationalist movements (witness Gandhi, and the cult of Sun Yat-sen in the Kuomintang).
Marx is here stood on his head. It is not social being that determines social consciousness, but social consciousness (leadership) that determines social being. If the theorists of peasant guerrilla war were consistent, they would renounce Marxism altogether. Indeed if the central claims of these theorists - that guerrilla war is the road to socialism - are true, then Marxism is refuted in its most basic propositions. However, setting aside for the moment the idea that China, Cuba, Vietnam and so on are socialist, the idealist character of guerrilla-ist theories suggests immediately that the relationship between the guerrilla army and the peasantry is not at all what is claimed: for idealism itself has social roots - the existence of classes or strata who, living off the labour of others, come to believe it is their ideas that are the key to society.
To elucidate this problem it is necessary to return to Marx's analysis of the French peasantry in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into main-fold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse ... In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their modes of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name ... They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.
Marx has here put his finger on the fundamental characteristic of the peasantry, determined by the social conditions of its existence - its incapacity for self-emancipation. The peasantry can fight, and does so with extraordinary ferocity, but it cannot become the ruling class of society. The village can defeat the city in any number of battles, but it cannot win the war, for the village cannot run the city and that is where the productive forces are located. This was true of Wat Tyler in 1381, of Emiliano Zapata in Mexico, and of the countless peasant revolts that recur throughout Chinese history. To cohere into a national political force the peasantry requires the leadership of an external urban-formed class, or section of a class. For Lenin, Marx and Trotsky this leadership was to be the working class, not by "going to the countryside" but by fighting to overthrow the state in the cities. For Mao, Castro, Guevara and others, it was the cadres and command of the guerrilla army, who was drawn (and could only be drawn) almost exclusively from the urban intelligentsia.
What is the relationship between the leadership and the peasantry in the guerrilla war? First of all the rank and file of the guerrilla army will be overwhelmingly peasant in composition but only a tiny minority of the peasantry will participate in this way (in Cuba Castro's armed forces were a few thousand at most; in China the numbers were huge - 300,000 at the beginning of the Long March, 20,000 at its end, several million at the high point of the war - but still only a tiny fraction of China's 500 million peasants). The fact that the essence of guerrilla warfare is mobility and hit-and-run tactics makes this unavoidable.
And these same tactics ensure that the peasant guerrilla ceases to be a peasant and becomes a professional soldier, his actions and ideology detached from their class origin and remolded under military discipline by the middle class army command. The relationship is thus quite different from that between workers and intellectuals in a Leninist party, where the worker members remain workers and where the participation of intellectuals, necessary as it is, is conditional on their acceptance of the standpoint and discipline of the proletarian struggle.
The relation of the guerrilla army to the peasantry as a whole is also quite different from the relationship between the Leninist party and the working class. The latter is concerned to lead the working class as a whole in a struggle to realize working class interests. The former is concerned to act on behalf of the mass of the peasantry. The guerrilla army needs the support of the peasantry certainly and in return offers assistance, protection, and the bait of land reform. Guevara, unwittingly, gave a pure expression to the idealist elitism inherent in the strategy of guerrilla war:
We have already described the guerrilla fighter as one who shares the longing of the people for liberation and who, once peaceful means are exhausted, initiates the fight and converts himself into an armed vanguard of the people. From the very beginning of the struggle he has the intention of destroying an unjust order and therefore an intention, more or less hidden, to replace the old with something new. We have also said already that in ... almost all countries with deficient economic development it is the countryside that offers ideal conditions for the fight. Therefore the foundation of the social structure that the guerrilla fighter will build begins with changes in the ownership of agrarian property.
First comes the guerrilla fighter with his ideals of a just social order, "a true priest of reform" as Guevara calls him; second the choice of terrain on military grounds; third the programme of agrarian reform. Guevara continues:
The peasant must always be helped technically, economically, morally and culturally. The guerrilla fighter will be a sort of guiding angel who has fallen into the zone, helping the poor always and bothering the rich as little as possible in the first phases of the war.
Similarly Mao's Red Army was under strict instructions in its dealing with the peasantry to: "Be courteous and help out when you can. Return all borrowed articles. Replace all damaged articles ... Pay for all articles purchased etc." What has to be grasped here is the power relationship between peasant and guerrilla that makes these moral injunctions necessary because in reality it is a continual temptation to behave otherwise. Imagine any workers' organization, when sending its members to the factory gates, giving the orders: "No mugging of the workers. No forcing them to buy our paper!"
The real basis of this elitism is not just the superior culture of the guerrilla command, nor even its possession of arms, but a divergence in class aims. The fundamental class aim of the peasantry is possession of the land. The fundamental aim of the revolutionary intelligentsia who form the guerrilla leadership is the capture of state power to achieve national liberation. The latter uses the former to propel itself, and not the peasantry, into power. This is applied to the army and party of Mao is shown by the way in which the Chinese Communist Party continually held back the spontaneous peasant struggle for land in order to maintain the national coalition in the war against Japan.
The struggle of an oppressed nation for liberation, whether it is against formal colonial status as in Algeria or against a regime that is a client for imperialism as in Cuba, is progressive and must be supported, but it remains essentially a bourgeois democratic task. The nation state is the product of capitalism, and the mission of the proletariat is to overcome the division of the world into states. Consequently Marxist support for national liberation differs in motivation and method from bourgeois and petty bourgeois support. For the latter national liberation is a struggle to establish its territory, its own corner of the globe to rule, and is therefore regarded as an overriding end in itself, around which all "national" classes should unite. For Marxists national liberation is only a means, a struggle to clear away national oppression since this constitutes an obstacle to the voluntary unification of the international working class in an eventual "union of workers' republics". It is therefore a struggle in which the proletariat must retain its class independence in order to carry the revolution beyond the social and national resting place with which the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie will be content, in a process of permanent revolution.
From what we have seen it is clear that the strategy of guerrilla war (except as an ancillary to the workers' revolution) is incompatible with this proletarian internationalist perspective, and it is equally clear from their theory and their practice that none of the Third World nationalist "Marxists" have succeeded in transcending the nationalist position. This, apart from all other arguments, indicates that the class basis of their "Marxism" is not the proletariat but the petty bourgeoisie.
One further aspect of the problem remains to be considered. Once achieved, national liberation (if it is not transcended in international revolution) must be consolidated and maintained in the arena of fiercely competitive world capitalism. The petty bourgeois guerrilla elite propelled to power by peasant war thus finds itself in essentially the same position as the Bolshevik elite after the destruction of the working class in the Civil War, with the difference that it is not organically linked to the world working class through an international revolutionary party. Therefore it has no choice but the Stalinist option, the struggle for economic growth through the accumulation of capital, based on the exploitation of the workers and a peasant, which in turn means it must consolidate itself as a new ruling class.
In this situation two things happen. Firstly the cult of the noble guerrilla sacrificing himself for his people becomes transformed into an ideology of working class (and peasant) self-sacrifice for the nation. Socialism becomes a doctrine of asceticism (dignified in the west by Bettelheim and others, as a critique of economism). Secondly, the seemingly radical, fluid structures of the nationalist revolution settle into the Stalinist mould of the bureaucratic one-party state. The parallelism of Third World nationalism and Soviet Stalinism is thus more than a matter of shared ideological and organisational origins (present in China but not in Cuba), or necessary dependence on Russian aid (the case in Cuba but not in China since the early l960s), it comes from a common class situation and common economic tasks.
In order to conclude. Third World nationalist "Marxism", like Kautskyism and Stalinism, is in its origins an ideology not of proletarian revolution but of a section of the petty bourgeoisie which stands between labour and capital. In the case of Kautskyism and Stalinism it was the labour movement bureaucracy which had raised itself above its working-class base. In Third World nationalism it is the middle class intelligentsia oppressed by imperialism. Unlike Kautskyism and Stalinism it has a certain "revolutionary" content where the task of national liberation remains to be achieved. Like Stalinism in Russia and East Europe (but not Kautskyism or Stalinism in the west) it is able under certain conditions to transform itself into the ruling class. As an ideology it is, in formal terms, much further from Marxism than either Kautskyism or Stalinism, and could only be accepted as a Marxism, or a version of Marxism because of the prior work of Stalinism in burying the genuine tradition under a mountain of distortion, and because of the extreme weakness of proletarian Marxism in the 1950s and 1960s.
Thus, for all their differences, Kautskyism, Stalinism and Third World nationalism have much in common - above all a commitment to the national state (nationalism and state ownership) and rejection of the self-emancipation of the working class. These are features, arrived at by a different historical route, which Engels as far back as Anti-During analyzed as key characteristics of the ultimate stage of capitalist development:
The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.
What has happened, therefore, to these "Marxism's" is that in abandoning the class positions of the proletariat they have ended up supporting the next stage of capitalism.
We have now completed our survey of the principal transformations of Marxism since Marx's death, and can return to our starting point - the authentic Marxist tradition.
Nationalism is a modern movement. Throughout history people have been attached to their native soil, to the traditions of their parents, and to established territorial authorities; but it was not until the end of the 18th century that nationalism began to be a generally recognized sentiment molding public and private life and one of the great, if not the greatest, single determining factors of modern history. Because of its dynamic vitality and its all-pervading character, nationalism is often thought to be very old; sometimes it is mistakenly regarded as a permanent factor in political behavior. Actually, the American and French revolutions may be regarded as its first powerful manifestations. After penetrating the new countries of Latin America it spread in the early 19th century to central Europe and from there, toward the middle of the century, to eastern and southeastern Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century nationalism flowered in the ancient lands of Asia and Africa. Thus the 19th century has been called the age of nationalism in Europe, while the 20th century has witnessed the rise and struggle of powerful national movements throughout Asia and Africa.
IDENTIFICATION OF STATE AND PEOPLE
Nationalism, translated into world politics, implies the identification of the state or nation with the people-or at least the desirability of determining the extent of the state according to ethnographic principles. In the age of nationalism, but only in the age of nationalism, the principle was generally recognized that each nationality should form a state-its state-and that the state should include all members of that nationality. Formerly states, or territories under one administration, were not delineated by nationality. Men did not give their loyalty to the nation-state but to other, different forms of political organization: the city-state, the feudal fief and its lord, the dynastic state, the religious group, or the sect. The nation-state was nonexistent during the greater part of history, and for a very long time it was not even regarded as an ideal. In the first 15 centuries of the Christian era, the ideal was the universal world-state, not loyalty to any separate political entity. The Roman Empire had set the great example, which survived not only in the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages but also in the concept of the res publica Christiana ("Christian republic" or community) and in its later secularized form of a united world civilization.
As political allegiance, before the age of nationalism, was not determined by nationality, so civilization was not thought of as nationally determined. During the Middle Ages civilization was looked upon as determined religiously; for all the different nationalities of Christendom as well as for those of Islam there was but one civilization-Christian or Muslim-and but one language of culture-Latin (or Greek) or Arabic (or Persian). Later, in the periods of the Renaissance and of Classicism, it was the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations that became a universal norm, valid for all peoples and all times. Still later, French civilization was accepted throughout Europe as the valid civilization for educated people of all nationalities. It was only at the end of the 18th century that, for the first time, civilization was considered to be determined by nationality. It was then that the principle was put forward that a man could be educated only in his own mother tongue, not in languages of other civilizations and other times, whether they were classical languages or the literary creations of other peoples who had reached a high degree of civilization.
CULTURAL NATIONALISM
From the end of the 18th century on, the nationalization of education and public life went hand in hand with the nationalization of states and political loyalties. Poets and scholars began to emphasize cultural nationalism first. They reformed the mother tongue, elevated it to the rank of a literary language, and delved deep into the national past. Thus they prepared the foundations for the political claims for national statehood soon to be raised by the people in whom they had kindled the spirit.
Before the 18th century there had been evidences of national feeling among certain groups at certain periods, especially in times of stress and conflict. The rise of national feeling to major political importance was encouraged by a number of complex developments: the creation of large, centralized states ruled by absolute monarchs who destroyed the old feudal allegiances; the secularization of life and of education, which fostered the vernacular languages and weakened the ties of church and sect; the growth of commerce, which demanded larger territorial units to allow scope for the dynamic spirit of the rising middle classes and their
capitalistic enterprise. This large, unified territorial state, with its political and economic centralization, became imbued in the 18th century with a new spirit-an emotional fervor similar to that of religious movements in earlier periods. Under the influence of the new theories of the sovereignty of the people and the rights of man, the people replaced the king as the centre of the nation. No longer was the king the nation or the state; the state had become the people's state, a national state a fatherland. State became identified with nation, as civilization became identified with national civilization.
That development ran counter to the conceptions that had dominated political thought for the preceding 2,000 years. Hitherto man had commonly stressed the general and the universal and had regarded unity as the desirable goal. Nationalism stressed the particular and parochial, the differences, and the national individualities. Those tendencies became more pronounced as nationalism developed. Its less attractive characteristics were not at first apparent. In the 17th and 18th centuries the common standards of Western civilization, the regard for the universally human, the faith in reason (one and the same everywhere) as well as in common sense, the survival of Christian and Stoic traditions-all of these were still too strong to allow nationalism to develop fully and to disrupt society. Thus nationalism in its beginning was thought to be compatible with cosmopolitan convictions and with a general love of mankind, especially in western Europe and North America.
EUROPEAN NATIONALISM " ENGLISH PURITANISM
AND NATIONALISM
The first full manifestation of modern nationalism occurred in 17th-century England, in the Puritan revolution. England had become the leading nation in scientific spirit, in commercial enterprise, in political thought and activity. Swelled by an immense confidence in the new age, the English people felt upon their shoulders the mission of history, a sense that they were at a great turning point from which a new true reformation and a new liberty would start. In the English revolution an optimistic humanism merged with Calvinist ethics; the influence of the Old Testament gave form to the new nationalism by identifying the English people with ancient Israel.
The new message, carried by the new people not only for England but for all mankind, was expressed in the writings of John Milton, in whose famous vision the idea of liberty was seen spreading from Britain, "celebrated for endless ages as a soil most genial to the growth of liberty" to all the corners of the earth.
Surrounded by congregated multitudes, I now imagine that . . . I behold the nations of the earth recovering that liberty which they so long had lost; and that the people of this island are . . . disseminating the blessings of civilization and freedom among cities, kingdoms and nations.
English nationalism then was thus much nearer to its religious matrix than later nationalisms that rose after secularization had made greater progress. The nationalism of the 18th century shared with it, however, its enthusiasm for liberty, its humanitarian character, its emphasis upon the individual and his rights and upon the human community as above all national divisions. The rise of English nationalism coincided with the rise of the English trading middle classes. It found its final expression in John Locke's political philosophy, and it was in that form that it influenced American and French nationalism in the following century.
American nationalism was a typical product of the 18th century. British settlers in North America were influenced partly by the traditions of the Puritan revolution and the ideas of Locke and partly by the new rational interpretation given to English liberty by contemporary French philosophers. American settlers became a nation engaged in a fight for liberty and individual rights. They based that fight on current political thought, especially as expressed by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. It was a liberal and humanitarian nationalism that regarded America as in the vanguard of mankind on its march to greater liberty, equality, and happiness for all. The ideas of the 18th century found their first political realization in the Declaration of Independence and in the birth of the American nation. Their deep influence was felt in the French Revolution.
EUROPEAN NATIONALISM " FRENCH NATIONALISM
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had prepared the soil for the growth of French nationalism by his stress on popular sovereignty and the general cooperation of all in forming the national will, and also by his regard for the common people as the true depository of civilization.
The nationalism of the French Revolution was more than that: it was the triumphant expression of a rational faith in common humanity and liberal progress. The famous slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity" and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were thought valid not only for the French people but for all peoples. Individual liberty, human equality, fraternity of all peoples: these were the common cornerstones of all liberal and democratic nationalism. Under their inspiration new rituals were developed that partly took the place of the old religious feast days, rites, and ceremonies: festivals and flags, music and poetry, national holidays and patriotic sermons. In the most varied forms, nationalism permeated all manifestations of life. As in America, the rise of French nationalism produced a new phenomenon in the art of warfare: the nation in arms. In America and in France, citizen armies, untrained but filled with a new fervor, proved superior to highly trained professional armies that fought without the incentive of nationalism. The revolutionary French nationalism stressed free individual decision in the formation of nations. Nations were constituted by an act of self-determination of their members. The plebiscite became the instrument whereby the will of the nation was expressed. In America as well as in revolutionary France, nationalism meant the adherence to a universal progressive idea, looking toward a common future of freedom and equality, not toward a past characterized by authoritarianism and inequality.
Napoleon's armies spread the spirit of nationalism throughout Europe and even into the Near East, while at the same time, across the Atlantic, it aroused the Latin Americans. But Napoleon's yoke of conquest turned the nationalism of the Europeans against France. In Germany the struggle was led by writers and intellectuals, who rejected all the principles upon which the American and the French revolutions had been based as well as the liberal and humanitarian aspects of nationalism.
European Nationalism " The 1848 Revolutionary Wave
German nationalism began to stress instinct against reason; the power of historical tradition against rational attempts at progress and a more just order; the historical differences between nations rather than their common aspirations. The French Revolution, liberalism, and equality were regarded as a brief aberration, against which the eternal foundations of societal order would prevail.
That German interpretation was shown to be false by the developments of the 19th century. Liberal nationalism reasserted itself and affected more and more people: the rising middle class and the new proletariat. The revolutionary wave of 1848, the year of "the spring of the peoples," seemed to realize the hopes of nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, who had devoted his life to the unification of the Italian nation by democratic means and to the brotherhood of all free nations. Though his immediate hopes were disappointed, the 12 years from 1859 to 1871 brought the unification of Italy and Romania, both with the help of Napoleon III, and of Germany; at the same time the 1860s saw great progress in liberalism, even in Russia and Spain. The victorious trend of liberal nationalism, however, was reversed in Germany by Bismarck. He unified Germany on a conservative and authoritarian basis and defeated German liberalism. The German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine against the will of the inhabitants was contrary to the idea of nationalism as based upon the free will of man. The people of Alsace-Lorraine were held to be German by objective factors, by race, independent of their will or of their allegiance to any nationality of their choice.
In the second half of the 19th century, nationalism disintegrated the supranational states of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman sultans, both of which were based upon prenational loyalties. In Russia, the penetration of nationalism produced two opposing schools of thought. Some nationalists proposed a westernized Russia, associated with the progressive, liberal forces of the rest of Europe. Others stressed the distinctive character of Russia and Russianism, its independent and different destiny based upon its autocratic and orthodox past. These Slavophiles, similar to and influenced by German romantic thinkers, saw Russia as a future savior of a West undermined by liberalism and the heritage of the American and French revolutions.
One of the consequences of World War I was the triumph of nationalism in central and eastern Europe. From the ruins of the Habsburg and Romanov empires emerged the new nation-states of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Romania. Those states in turn, however, were to be strained and ravaged by their own internal nationality conflicts and by nationalistic disputes over territory with their neighbors.
Russian nationalism was in part suppressed after Lenin's victory in 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over the old empire of the tsars. But the Bolsheviks also claimed the leadership of the world Communist movement, which was to become an instrument of the national policies of the Russians. During World War II Stalin appealed to nationalism and patriotism in rallying the Russians against foreign invaders. After the war he found nationalism one of the strongest obstacles to the expansion of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. National communism, as it was called, became a divisive force in the Soviet bloc. In 1948 Tito, the Communist leader of Yugoslavia was denounced by Moscow as a nationalist and a renegade; nationalism was a strong factor in the rebellious movements in Poland and Hungary in the fall of 1956; and subsequently its influence was also felt in Romania and Czechoslovakia and again in Poland in 1980.
ASIAN AND AFRICAN NATIONALISM
Nationalism began to appear in Asia and Africa after World War I. It produced such leaders as Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, Sad Pasha Zaghul in Egypt, Ibn Sa?ud in the Arabian Peninsula, Mahatma Gandhi in India, and Sun Yat-sen in China. Ataturk succeeded in replacing the medieval structure of the Islamic monarchy with a revitalized and modernized secular republic in 1923. Demands for Arab unity were frustrated in Africa and Asia by British imperialism and in Africa by French imperialism. Yet Britain may have shown a gift for accommodation with the new forces by helping to create an independent Egypt (1922; completely, 1936) and Iraq (1932) and displayed a similar spirit in India, where the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 to promote a liberal nationalism inspired by the British model, became more radical after 1918. Japan, influenced by Germany, used modern industrial techniques in the service of a more authoritarian nationalism.
Asian and African Nationalism " The New Nations
The progress of nationalism in Asia and Africa is reflected in the histories of the League of Nations after World War I and of the United Nations after World War II. The Treaty of Versailles, which provided for the constitution of the League of Nations, also reduced the empires of the defeated Central Powers, mainly Germany and Turkey. The league distributed Germany's African colonies as mandates to Great Britain, France, Belgium, and South Africa, and its Pacific possessions to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand under various classifications according to their expectations of achieving independence. Among the League's original members, there were only five Asian countries (China, India, Japan, Thailand, and Iran) and two African countries (Liberia and South Africa), and it added only three Asian countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey) and two African countries (Egypt and Ethiopia) before it was dissolved in 1946. Of the mandated territories under the League's control, only Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria achieved independence during its lifetime.
Of the original 51 members of the United Nations in 1945, eight were Asian (China, India, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey) and four were African (the same as in the League). By 1980, 35 years after its founding, the United Nations had added more than 100 member nations, most of them Asian and African. Whereas Asian and African nations had never totaled even one-third of the membership in the League, they came to represent more than one-half of the membership of the United Nations. Of these new Asian and African nations, several had been created, entirely or in part, from mandated territories.
After World War II, India, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma, and Malaya (Malaysia) in Asia, and Ghana in Africa achieved independence peacefully from the British Commonwealth, as did the Philippines from the United States. Other territories had to fight hard for their independence in bitter colonial wars, as in French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and French North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria). Communism recruited supporters from within the ranks of the new nationalist movements in Asia and Africa, first by helping them in their struggles against Western capitalist powers, and later, after independence was achieved, by competing with Western capitalism in extending financial and technical aid. Chinese nationalism under Chiang Kai-shek during World War II was diminished with the takeover of the Chinese Communists. But Chinese Communism soon began to drift away from supranational Communism, as the European Communist countries had earlier. By the late 1960s Russian and Chinese mutual recriminations revealed a Chinese nationalism in which Mao Tse-tung had risen to share the place of honor with Lenin. As Chinese Communism turned further and further inward, its influence on new Asian and African nations waned.
ASIAN AND AFRICAN NATIONALISM " POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES
Ambitions among new Asian and African nations clashed. The complex politics of the United Nations illustrated the problems of the new nationalism. The struggle with Dutch colonialism that brought the establishment of Indonesia continued with the UN mediation of the dispute over West Irian (Irian Jaya). In the Suez crisis of 1956, UN forces intervened between those of Egypt and Israel. Continuing troubles in the Middle East, beginning with the establishment of Israel and including inter-Arab state disputes brought on by the establishment of the United Arab Republic, concerned the UN. Other crises involving the UN included: the India-Pakistan dispute over Jammu and Kashmir; the Korean partition and subsequent war; the four-year intervention in the Congo; the struggle of Greece and Turkey over newly independent Cyprus; and Indonesian and Philippine objection to the inclusion of Sarawak and Sabah (North Borneo) in newly formed Malaysia.
Many new nations, all sharing the same pride in independence, faced difficulties. As a result of inadequate preparation for self-rule, the first five years of independence in the Congo passed with no semblance of a stable government. The problem of widely different peoples and languages was exemplified in Nigeria, where an uncounted population included an uncounted number of tribes (at least 150, with three major divisions) that used an uncounted number of languages (more than 100 language and dialect clusters). The question of whether the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir should go with Muslim Pakistan or Hindu India lasted for more than 20 years after the India Independence Act became effective in 1949. Desperate economic competition caused trouble, as in Israel where the much-needed waters of the Jordan River kept it in constant dispute with its water-hungry Arab neighbors.
In Europe the spirit of nationalism appeared to wane after World War II with the establishment of international economic, military, and political organizations such as NATO, the European Coal and Steel Community, EURATOM, and the Common Market. But the policies pursued by France under Pres. Charles de Gaulle and the problem of a divided Germany showed that the appeal of the nation-state was still very much alive
NATIONALISM IN WORLD WAR I
TWO KINDS OF NATIONALISM
There were two kinds of nationalism in 19th Century Europe:
(i) The desire of subject peoples for independence -
It led to a series of national struggles for independence among the Balkan peoples. Other powers got involved and caused much instability.
(ii) The desire of independent nations for dominance and prestige -
As the powers try to dominate each other in Europe, their rivalries may be regarded as one of the causes of the First World War.
NATIONALISM IN GERMANY
Germany was united in 1871 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War, and she rapidly became the strongest economic and military power in Europe. From 1871 to 1890, Germany wanted to preserve her hegemony in Europe by forming a series of peaceful alliances with other powers. After 1890, Germany was more aggressive. She wanted to build up her influence in every part of the world. German foreign policy in these years was best expressed by the term 'Weltpolitik' (World Politics). Because German ambitions were extended to many parts of the globe, Germany came into serious conflicts with all other major powers of Europe (except Austria-Hungary) from 1890 to 1914.
NATIONALISM IN ITALY
Italy was unified in 1870. She was barely powerful enough to be counted as a great power. Her parliamentary system was corrupt and inefficient. Her industrial progress was slow. But Italy had great territorial ambitions. She wanted Tunis and Tripoli in northern Africa. This brought her into conflicts with France because Tunis was adjacent to the French colony, Algeria, and was long regarded by France as French sphere of influence. Italy also wanted Italia Irredentism--Trieste, Trentio and Tyrol. Although the majority of the people in these places were Italians, they were kept under the rule of the Dual Monarchy . Thus Italy came into serious conflicts with Austria-Hungary.
NATIONALISM IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
Austria-Hungary was established as the Dual Monarchy in 1867. The Dual Monarchy ruled over a large empire consisting of many nationalities, but only the Austrians (racially they were German) and the Hungarians had the right to rule. The other nationalities Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Rumanians and Poles resented their loss of political freedom. They desired for political independence. Thus the policy of the Dual Monarchy was to suppress the nationalist movements both inside and outside the empire. The particular object of the Dual Monarchy was to gain political control over the Balkan Peninsula, where nationalist movements were rife and were always giving encouragement to the nationalist movements within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The centre of the nationalist movements in the Balkans was Serbia. Serbia always hoped to unite with the Serbs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire so as to create a large Serbian state. Therefore the first enemy of Austria-Hungary from 1871 to 1914 was Serbia. Besides Serbia, Austria-Hungary also hated Russia because Russia, being a Slav country, always backed up Serbia in any Austro-Serbian disputes.
NATIONALISM IN RUSSIA
Russia was the largest and most populous country in Europe. It extended from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to those of the Black Sea and from the Baltic Sea eastwards to the Pacific Ocean. Two thirds of her people were Slavs. She was still territorially ambitious. She wanted to expand in all directions. In 1870, Russia broke the Treaty of Paris (see below) and renewed her aggression in the Balkans. Thus, her territorial ambitions clashed with the interests of Austria-Hungary and Britain. However, Russia did not retreat. Being a 'landlocked' state, she wanted to acquire warm water ports in the Balkans (e.g. Constantinople). Moreover, as most of the Balkan peoples were of the Slavic race, Russia could claim to be the protector of her brother races in her expansion.
NATIONALISM IN FRANCE
France had been the dominant power in Europe for centuries. Napoleon I and Napoleon III had attempted to dominate Europe. In 1871, France was defeated by Germany. She had to lose two provinces: Alsace and Lorraine. She also needed to pay heavy indemnities. From 1871 onwards, France's greatest ambition was to recover Alsace and Lorraine from Germany. She also wanted to prevent another defeat by Germany, to recover her national prestige by acquiring overseas colonies (e.g. Morocco) and to make diplomatic alliances with other important powers in Europe.
NATIONALISM IN BRITAIN
In 1870 Britain was the most industrially advanced country in Europe. She also possessed the largest overseas empire and the largest navy in the world. She did not want to trouble herself with the continental affairs of Europe. Her main concern was to preserve her overseas empire and her overseas trade by maintaining a large navy. Before 1890, her chief enemies were France and Russia. The colonial interests of France often clashed with those of Britain . (Britain and France had colonial rivalries in Asia and Africa--for example, India, Burma, Thailand, Egypt.)
Russia's interest in the Balkan area also alarmed Britain, as British naval interests in the Mediterranean Sea would be immediately threatened. After 1890, as Germany went on increasing her naval strength and threatened British naval supremacy and the British overseas interests, she became Britain's chief enemy.
CAN NATIONALISM SOLVE THE CHALLENGES
FACING PAKISTAN?
What does being a Pakistani, an Arab, a Turk or an American have to say about the issues facing governments and the people? Does nationalism have an answer about how the state should raise funds and how it is allowed to spend them, does it define the rights of the ruler and the rights of ruled, does it provide a framework of how to deal with other nations. When the matter is considered carefully nationalism does not answer any of these questions. Nationalism provides no laws or rules, criteria for right or wrong or a direction for issues facing life.
Muslims are increasingly aware that nationalism has kept Pakistan and the other nations in the Muslim world firmly under the influence of the West. The lack of solutions that deal with the business of state has led politicians to imitate western solutions. The attempts to implement democracy, looking to the UN to solve disputes and enslavement to the IMF are direct results of the vacuum of solutions caused by those that based their politics on nationalism. This is why the well-established political parties in Pakistan have no answers as they take nationalism as one of their root ideas. They are easily manipulated by the outside powers as they are forced to imitate their ideas without any thought.
Nationalism cannot deal with the current crisis facing Pakistan. Empty slogans based within a nationalistic framework like "roti, kapra, makan" ring hollow to the millions displaced in tribal areas. What is required now is for Muslims of Pakistan to get to the root of the problem.
Political ineptitude, greedy politicians selling the interests of people for personal gain, economic instability, daily suicide bombings and foreign inspired militancy have brought Pakistan to the brink of destruction.
Muslims in Pakistan are rightly concerned about the situation. This has led some to call for more assertive Pakistani nationalism to save the country. The question that must be asked is can nationalism save Pakistan? If not what's the alternative?
Nationalism is an extension of the family or tribal bond - where the relationship between people is based upon the fact that they are members of a particular tribe or people. This concept has been expanded to entire races and nation states. Arab nationalism which today is largely a spent force dominated the political scene in the countries like Egypt, Syria and Iraq for decades. Today nationalism and patriotism in Pakistan are being aroused because the very existence of Pakistan is under threat.
Some in Pakistan believe by re-asserting Pakistani nationalism and making it the basis of society they can keep Pakistan intact and bring progress in economy, education, societal relationships and even international relations. This belief has to be to be examined.
THE PROHIBITION OF NATIONALISM
Nationalism is a concept alien to Islam because it calls for unity based on family and tribalistic ties, whereas Islam binds people together on the Aqeedah and Emaan. That is, belief in Allah (swt) and His Messenger (saws).
Therefore grouping together on tribalistic lines is clearly forbidden. It is narrated by Abu Dawud that the Messenger of Allah (saws) said, "He is not one of us who calls for 'asabiyyah, (nationalism) or who fights for 'asabiyyah or who dies for 'asabiyyah." And in another hadith, the Messenger of Allah (saws) referring to nationalism, racism, and patriotism said "Leave it, it is rotten". [Muslim and Bukhari]
The Messenger of Allah (saws) also said, "The Muslims are like a body, if one part of the body hurts, rest of the body will also suffer" [Muslim] meaning that the Muslims, whether they are of Chinese, African, or Arabian or European origin, are one Ummah and they cannot be separated from each other. Furthermore, Allah (swt) says: "The faithful are but brothers..." [Qur'an 49: 10]. No nationalistic ties should ever break their unity. That is the beauty of Islam.
NATIONALISM WITH ITS POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ASPECTS
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
O mankind, We have created you male and female, and have made you peoples and tribes, that you may know each other... (49:13)
that is, so that you may know social relationships and help one another, not so that you may feel antipathy and show enmity to each other.
¨The principle of knowing one another and helping each other
To explain the principle of knowing one another and helping each other declared by the verse, I say:
An army is divided into army corps, an army corps into regiments, a regiment into battalions, a battalion into squadrons or companies and a company into squads, so that the duties of each soldier and the relationships between the members of the whole army may be established, and the army may perform a general task under the principle of mutual assistance, and that the nation may be guarded against the assaults of enemies. The division of an army into different parts is not for the purpose that the parts should compete with each other or feel enmity against each other, or that they should oppose each other. It is just in the same way that the Muslim nation is like a large army, divided into peoples and tribes. But they have numerous common factors and values which require their unity: for example, their Creator is one, their Provider is one, their Prophet is one, their Book is one, their country is one, the direction or the center toward which they turn in worship is one, and so on to thousands of other factors of unity!
Since, then, all these common factors or values require unity and mutual love, the division into peoples and tribes is for mutual acquaintance and assistance, not for mutual dislike and enmity.
¨Nationalism gives some satisfaction albeit it encourages self-pride, and it produces a power albeit sometimes improper.
Nationalism or ethnic differences have been given great momentum in this century. It is particularly the intriguing mischief-makers of Europe who excite nationalist feelings among Muslim communities in order to divide them up and swallow them up one by one.
Nationalism gives some satisfaction albeit it encourages self-pride, and it produces a power albeit sometimes improper. For this reason, it is not proper to advise those engaged in social life to give up the idea of nationalism. But there are two kinds of nationalism: one negative, ominous, harmful, which is fed through swallowing up others and sustained through enmity against others. This kind of nationalism is the cause of mutual antagonism and discord, so it is disapproved and rejected by both and Qur'an the Prophet, as in the hadith, Islam has forbidden the national (tribal) zealotry of the Age of Ignorance. (Sahih al-Bukhari, 'Ahkam,' 4, Sunan Abu Dawud, 'Sunna,' 5)
The Qur'an is explicit on the point as in the verse:
When those who disbelieve set in their hearts zealotry, the tribalism of the Age of Ignorance, then God sent down His peace and reassurance upon His Messenger and the believers, and fastened to them the word of self-restraint and God-fearing to which they have better right and of which they are worthy; and God has knowledge of everything. (48:26)
The sacred and positive Islamic nationalism does not leave room for the need of any negative partisan nationalism. I wonder what nation in the world has a population of more than one billion so as to enable any nationalist to have as many brothers, eternal brothers, as the number of the Muslims.
The negative partisan variety of nationalism has caused much harm during history both to the principle of Islamic unity and to Muslim peoples.
The negative partisan variety of nationalism has caused much harm during history both to the principle of Islamic unity and to Muslim peoples. For example, the Umayyads gave some preference to Arab nationalities in their government and thereby both offended other Muslims and themselves suffered many misfortunes. Also, the European nations went too far in nationalism in this century, whence the long-standing ominous enmity between the French and German peoples and the dreadful destruction of the World War - which showed how harmful to mankind negative nationalism is. And, in our history, as in the Kingdom of Babylon destroyed through the division of the tribes which constituted the kingdom, many groups or societies were formed, at the beginning of the second constitutional period of the Ottoman State, by minorities, particularly by the Greeks and Armenians. What befell the Ottoman State thereafter and the lot of those who were swallowed by foreigners illustrate the harm of negative nationalism.
The national or tribal conflict between Muslim peoples or communities is so great a misfortune that it is like exposure to the biting of a snake in order to avoid the biting of a fly. At a time when the Western powers resembling huge dragons lie in wait for an opportunity to attack us in order to satisfy their insatiable greed, it is very harmful even to our national integrity to nourish hostility and take sides, because of national differences, against our citizens in the eastern cities and co-religionists among our southern neighbors. There is not a justifiable excuse to feel enmity against our co-religionists in the south, from where the light of the Qur'an and the radiance of Islam came to us; besides, the national conflict between Muslim peoples means to help the Western enemies.
Enmity against our southern co-religionists may result in enmity towards the Qur'an and Islam, which in fact, means a treachery to both the worldly life and hereafter of all the citizens. To destroy the cornerstones of the two worlds - this and the next - under the pretext of serving the social life through nationalism or patriotism is stupidity, not nationalism or patriotism.
TYPE OF NATIONALISM BRINGING
ABOUT SOLIDARITY
The other kind of nationalism is that which is positive and, arising from the intrinsic requirements of social life, brings about mutual assistance and solidarity, produces a beneficial power and causes the Islamic brotherhood to be stronger.
This kind of nationalism should serve Islam and build a stronghold to protect it; it should not take the place of Islam. For the brotherhood desired and established by Islam is manifold and counts in both the Intermediate and Eternal Worlds. It is because of this that, however strong a nationalist brotherhood is, it can be only as strong as a single aspect of the Islamic brotherhood, so to substitute it for the Islamic brotherhood is as foolish an act as replacing the diamonds in a citadel with some stones from that citadel.
So, children of that country who are followers of the Qur'an! You have carried, not for six hundred years but for a thousand years, since the time of the 'Abbasids, the flag of the Wise Qur'an, over the three continents and challenged the entire world. You have made your national feelings and solidarity a stronghold to protect Islam, and, repelling the dreadful assaults of the whole world, you have been included in the meaning of the verse,
God will bring a people He loves, and who love Him, humble towards believers, stern towards unbelievers, striving in the way of God, and fearing not the reproach of any reproaches. (5:54)
You should now be afraid of, and refrain from, being led by the deceitful instigations of Europe, being included in the meaning of the first part of the verse mentioned above,
O you who believe! Whosoever of you turns from his religion...
A reality worthy of note: The Turks are more in number in the world Muslim population than any other people, and all of the Turkish people, wherever they are in the world, are Muslims. They are not, unlike other peoples, divided into two groups, as Muslims and non-Muslims. Although the smallest communities are even divided into two groups, all of the Turkish peoples are Muslims and some Turkish communities, like the Hungarians, who did not accept Islam, have lost their Turkish identity.
O Turkish brother! You should, more than anyone else, be careful! Your nationality is blended with Islam, being inseparable from it. If you separate them, you will be lost! All your past accomplishments form a pride for you and an honorable record of your services to Islam. As it is impossible for any power on earth to remove this record, do not, yourself, remove it from your heart!..
¨The progress of Asian peoples is possible through religion
The awakening peoples of Asia follow the idea of nationalism in blind imitation of Europe and sacrifice many sacred things for its sake. However, just like a suit which, though of the same kind of cloth, is not fit for everybody, or just as an old prayer leader is not made to wear clothes suitable for dancing the tango, so should each people aspire to an authentic style: if Europe is like a market-place or barracks, Asia is like an arable field or a mosque. A businessman may go to dance but a farmer not. The conditions of barracks are not the same as those of a mosque.
* Also, the appearance of the majority of the Prophets in Asia while the philosophers usually emerge in Europe is a sign from the eternal Destiny that the vitality and progress of Asian peoples is possible through religion and spirituality. Philosophy and science should support religion; they should not be substituted for it.
* Second, indifference to religion, after false comparison of Islam with Christianity, is a grave mistake. It should, instead, be carefully noted that Europe is devoted to its religion, that some Western leaders like Wilson, Lloyd George and Venizelos are as fanatically devoted to their religion as a priest.
* Third, the comparison of Islam with Christianity is a false one, since Europe progressed when it reformed its religion. Besides, religion caused internal wars in Europe for three hundred years and became a means in the hands of despotic rulers and priests to crush the poor and common people and intellectuals. But in Islam, as witnessed by history, religious devotion caused an internal war only once, and whenever Muslims have followed Islam earnestly, as in the case of the Islamic state of Andalusia, that greatest teacher of Renaissance Europe, they realized much greater progress than their contemporaries. Whenever they, by contrast, have been indifferent to religion, they have declined and fallen to a miserable state.
* Further, with its numerous principles of compassion such as the obligation of giving the prescribed alms (zakat) and the prohibition of interest, Islam protects the poor and common people, and it regards - through its many warnings like Will you not exercise your reason? Will they not contemplate and reflect? Do they not ponder? - Intellect and science as proofs for its truths, and protects men of sciences and encourages them to further and further researches. It is thus the citadel of the poor and of the scientists. For this reason, it can never be justifiable to regret being a Muslim.
NATIONALISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA DEVELOPED FROM THREE SOURCES
Nationalism--organized political movements which had as their goal the restoration of their country's independence. More moderate nationalist movements appeared in those countries with liberal colonial governments while more radical nationalist movements developed in countries with repressive colonial governments.
Nationalism in Southeast Asia developed from three sources: 1, indigenous religions; 2, western education; and 3, contact with social radicals such as socialists and communists.
INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS
In Burma the earliest nationalist movement was led by Buddhists who established the Young Man's Buddhist Association in 1906. They wanted to revitalize Buddhism in Burma, reducing Western influence.
In Indonesia, Muslims were the first to organize a nationalist political party, Sarekat Islam (1912). Sarekat Islam sought to bring all Indonesian Muslims together under its banner of reformist Muslim ideas. It was the first mass political party to appear in Southeast Asia.
WESTERN EDUCATION
In Burma the new Western educated elite worked with Buddhist monks and with other Burmese. In 1935 students at the University of Rangoon formed the Dobayma Asiyone, the "We Burman" society. The members of the Dobayma Asiyone called themselves "Thakins" (Master). Many Thakins, Aung San, U Nu, and Ne Win, would become political leaders in independent Burma.
In the Philippines the Western educated leaders first fought against Spain, but later worked with the United States.
In Malaya, educated Malays were brought into the civil service. Throughout the colonial period, they worked closely with their British rulers.
In Indonesia a small group of Indonesians, educated in Dutch schools, formed the P.N.I., the Indonesian Nationalist party, in 1927. The party was forced underground by the Dutch and its leaders exiled.
In Indochina, nationalist activity was confined to Vietnam. Many Western educated Vietnamese were encouraged to identify with the French. Others formed small, generally moderate, political groups, but these organizations were never allowed to become important.
SOCIAL RADICALS
The communists in Burma tended to be badly split. They have had little impact on Burmese society.
The P.K.I., the Indonesian Communist Party, was founded in 1920. Its major impact came after independence, in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was destroyed by the Indonesian army in 1965.
Despite French repression, the Vietnamese communists became the leading nationalists, taking control of the nationalist movement in the 1930s.
Nationalism was a successful activity in Southeast Asia. All of the countries in the region were independent by 1965, and, in most cases, nationalist leaders were the first of the region's independent heads of state.
SOURCES FROM QURAN & HADITH
FOR CREATING THE ISLAMIC STATE / UMMAH
We must give up the idea of nationalism because it is exactly what is dividing us. Quran says not to be divided, and several hadeeth talk against the disease of nationalism. Is the word of Allah and the messenger of Allah not enough for us? If we take a look at current problems of Ummah, among other problems, it is obvious that we're divided, and therefore weak.
The Quran Says:
Q.3:103
"And hold fast, all of you together, to the Rope of Allah (i.e. this Qur'an), and be not divided among yourselves, and remember Allah's Favour on you, for you were enemies one to another but He joined your hearts together, so that, by His Grace, you became brethren (in Islamic Faith), and you were on the brink of a pit of Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus Allâh makes His Ayât (proofs, evidences, verses, lessons, signs, revelations, etc.,) clear to you, that you may be guided."
Q.3:105
"And be not as those who divided and differed among themselves after the clear proofs had come to them. It is they for whom there is an awful torment."
"But people have cut off their affair (of unity), between them, into sects: Each party rejoices in that which is with itself."
Q.30:32
"Those who SPLIT up their religion, and become mere sects each party rejoicing in that which is with itself!"
Q.42:13: "......that ye should remain steadfast in religion and make no DIVISIONS therein....."
The Quran's verses are ordering and warning us not to be divided, split up, or form sects out of the religion. We're created into so many different beautiful races, and cultures so that we KNOW each other, NOT get divided into many different countries, etc.
Nationalism is also a way of disuniting the UMMAH. As currently seen in the world, we are over FIFTY-FIVE MUSLIM COUNTRIES AND GROWING! There should only be ONE Muslim country (Khilafah).
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ISLAM AND OTHER RELIGIONS LIES IN THE FOLLOWING FACT
Islam is founded upon pure monotheism, denying any intermediary or intermediate causal creative or formative effect in the universe. Whereas, Christianity admits, on account of ascribing to God a son or begetting, influences of this sort, it allows saints and elders certain partnership in the manifestation of God's sovereignty over the creation, and this aspect of their way is included in the meaning of the verse:
They have taken as lords beside God their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were commanded to serve but One God. There is no god but He, be He glorified from their associating partners with Him. (9:31)
Because the Christians who rise to the highest of worldly posts can remain Christians, they even become, like Wilson, the late American president, bigoted Christians and still preserve their egotism. But Muslims who hold high office should renounce egotism and pride in order to be good Muslims, since Islam is based on pure monotheism. For this reason, those who are not able to preserve their piety either become indifferent to religion or even lose their faith.
¨To those who go to extremes in negative nationalism and separatism, I say:
First, the surface of the earth, primarily including our country, has been the stage for many changes and emigrations, and once the center of the Islamic administration was formed in this country, many of the other peoples, like moths to a light, flocked to it to settle. Since those people have intermingled, it is impossible to determine their national origins except by reading the Supreme Guarded Tablet. That being so, it is meaningless and harmful to build a society and our attitudes on nationalism. That is also why one of the leaders of those who support racial separation, indeed one who avowed great indifference to religion, had to acknowledge: 'If a people are of the same religion and speak the same language, they constitute a nation.' In order to determine national identity, the factors to take into consideration are language, religion and a (geographical) land. The existence of all these three elements together at the same time means the strength of the national structure; however, the lack of any one factor does not exclude the possibility of a strong national identity and sentiment.
BENEFITS OF SACRED ISLAMIC NATIONALITY
Second, of hundreds of benefits which the sacred Islamic nationality has given to the social life of the children of this country, I will cite only two examples:
* The factor which has enabled this Muslim state to survive, despite its population of only twenty or thirty millions, to maintain its vitality and existence, in the face of all the great powers of Europe is the conviction:
'If I die, I will die a martyr; if I survive, I will survive as a holy warrior of Islam'. This conviction comes from the light of the Qur'an and is enjoyed by the army of this state. Equipped with this conviction, that army has welcomed death with a perfect enthusiasm and terrified Europe for centuries. What else on earth could inculcate such a sublime quality of self-sacrifice in the minds of the soldiers; make them single-minded and pure-hearted? What kind of nationalistic zeal can be substituted for it and cause a soldier to sacrifice his life and all he has for its sake?
* Whenever the dragons - the great powers - of Europe have afflicted this Muslim state with a misfortune, it has deeply affected and shaken the whole Muslim world. And the imperialist powers who governed Muslim lands usually felt, for fear of the Muslim revolts in those lands, compelled to restrain their urge to attack this state. What other force can be pointed to as a substitute for that continual spiritual support (Muslim brotherhood) which it is impossible to regard as trivial? So, those who offer that mighty spiritual support should not be offended by projecting a negative nationalism and patriotism which cause us to be indifferent to other Muslims.
¨Patriotism should embrace, at least, the great majority of people
To those who offer patriotism as an argument for negative nationalism, I would like to say: If you feel a sincere love and affection for this nation, your national and patriotic zeal should be of a kind to embrace the great majority of the people. Otherwise, if it only serves to enhance, briefly, the social life of a small minority who live carelessly of Divine commandments, bringing unpitying disadvantage to the majority, it is neither nationalism nor patriotism - and those who follow this way do not deserve our compassion. Any patriotic zeal coming from negative nationalism may benefit at most two out of eight citizens. While these two may benefit from that kind of patriotic zeal, which, in fact, they do not deserve, the other six are neglected: the old, the ill, the afflicted, the weak, the children, and pious individuals seeking light, consolation and well-being, not in this world, but in the intermediate and other worlds for which they labor, and these individuals need the help of people blessed with public-spiritedness and compassion. What sort of patriotism is it that allows the light of such individuals to be put out, their consolation to be removed? Where is the fellow-feeling for the whole nation? Where is self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation?
It is not permitted, nor is it proper, to despair of God's Mercy. I hope that God Almighty will not ruin, because of some temporary setbacks, the mighty community of the citizens of this country and their magnificent army which He appointed as the bearer of the 'flag' of the Qur'an and employed in its service for a thousand years. He will again enable them to disseminate the light of the Qur'an everywhere, and thereby continue to perform their essential duty.
NATIONALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF
DEMOCRACY
There is an inherent tension between democracy and nationalism leans toward the sentimental and volitional. Its inclination is to mold citizens' hearts and souls while fogging their capacity for critical reflection. It nurtures intense communal ties that inevitably foreclose or limit possibilities for difference and choice. Moreover, as it is usually understood, legitimate democracy requires these same capacities for critical reflection, difference, and free choice. Can, then, democracy and nationalism is compatible?
Professor Nodia's argument is that they can. Indeed, his implication is that some measure of nationalism serves to promote a deep civic virtue without which democracy itself could not subsist The response to Professor Nodia offered in this essay argues that nationalism and the powerful civic virtue it promotes all to easily overwhelm the capacities of the citizenry for legitimate democracy. Claims that the potent forces of nationalism can be sufficiently domesticated for democratic purposes must be viewed with suspicion Thinner and more bloodless mechanisms of civic virtue are to be preferred.
At least since Aristotle, students of democracy have recognized the irony that enduring democracies seem to require an undemocratic foundation. Democracy suggests unconstrained citizen rule, for example, but an enduring democracy must in fact constrain citizens from ruling in a manner that would endanger democracy itself. Any constraints on citizens' rule {demo's krait}, however, can hardly be called "democratic." Yet, would democracy subsist without those constraints on citizens (sometimes called "rights") and on their government (sometimes called "constitutions") that preserve democratic procedures themselves?
Probably not on this point there exists little dispute among democratic theorists. There remains dispute, however, about the legitimate grounds for these sorts of constraints. The classic argument finds grounds for such constraint in a "common good" that references a substantive community of citizens. Hence, essential to the classic argument is the premise that democracy requires a vital and cohesive community in view of the common good.
ARISTOTLE
Aristotle's Politics outlines one such classic conception of democracy. It begins with a fundamental division between true governments and false governments along an analytical line determined by the common good. In true governments, sovereigns govern in pursuit of this good. In false governments, sovereigns govern in pursuit of their own desires. The exterior forms of true and false governments may be the same. Monarchy, rule by one, is a true government when the single sovereign pursues the common good. If the single sovereign does not rule for the common good then such rule is, in contrast, the false government Aristotle calls "tyranny." True democracy (politeia) is government by the many citizens wherein each seeks to enact the common good.1 false democracy, according to Aristotle, occurs when the many individuals pursue self-interest rather than the common good.
For Aristotle, true democracy stands forever on the verge of devolution into false democracy. Of all forms of government, he argued, democracy is most prone to such decay. Sovereignty residing in many individual citizens, opportunities are multiplied for the virus of self-interest to infect and spread. The common good is easily lost. Furthermore, because so many sovereigns are involved, democracy when false is the most difficult form of government to bring back to pursuit of the common good. A working, true democracy, thus, requires powerful means to keep citizens' focus on the common good and to weaken the centrifugal pull of individual interests.
Accordingly, Aristotle elaborated what becomes a time-honored list of mechanisms necessary and useful for legitimate democracy; each item in the listing works (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) to canalize the sovereignty of citizens in order to preserve democracy itself. The list, of course, is familiar to almost everyone, since it is repeated in so many versions in the history of political thought. Democracy, it is claimed, needs a small but intense community. Democratic politics should be relatively homogenous in tastes, values, ideology, and wants. Indeed, one of the chief reasons behind Aristotle's dislike of democracies in general was his belief that democracies lack the stability of harmonious, differentiated parts and demand the enforcement of a pervasive sameness among citizens in order to work. So, naturally, there should exist no sharp conflicts within the community in class, ethnicity, occupation, or religion. Citizens should be encouraged to perceive the priority of the community over their individuality, and the priority of the common good over self-interest. Indeed, individuality, whether one's own or another's, should be perceived in corporate fashion as different parts of a larger whole. Frequent and active participation in the affairs of the polity, moreover, would be helpful to refresh the political bonds between citizens and between each citizen and the common good. Patriotism, ethno-centrism, and nationalism are obviously advantageous. Laws should be sanctified by tradition and a constitution such that rapid, political changes are avoided.
A powerful civic virtue is created by such mechanisms, such that democracy can be trusted to remain true. By its character, the argument goes; the government of democracy is a weak one. There being insufficient external authority in democratic government to impel citizen adherence, citizens must be disciplined within their own hearts to pursue the common good. As Aristotle put it:
The best laws, though sanctioned by every citizen of the state, will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution, if the laws are democratically, democratically. . . .2
Without the insinuation of civic virtue by these means learned long ago from Aristotle, democracy would surely devolve into its false version.
False democracy, moreover, is the first step on a slippery path of devolution, according to the classical argument. False democracy, or rule by the many in pursuit of self-interest, becomes anarchy literally, for Aristotle, a political vacuum begging for immediate order. A vacuum of authority in a democratic culture breeds demagogues and demagogues become tyrants. Any collapse of true democracy slides quickly into tyranny. Clearly, for the classic understanding of democracy, there is a profound imperative at work within their concern for the common good in democracies.
JAMES MADISON
The problem with the classic argument for common good constraints on democracy is that the powerful civic virtue created likely undercuts democracy's ostensible legitimacy. Consider a democratically governed polis as imagined by Aristotle. Do the citizens' truly rule? Are citizens free to govern as they deliberately and reasonably choose?
Usually, answering such questions begs the old debate about positive freedom and negative freedom, wherein those who like Aristotle will claim that his bios politicos is the condition through which human happiness can be achieved. And, since happiness is the whole ball of wax, then "guiding" citizens' choice toward the common good with this powerful civic virtue only enhances and does not undercut citizens' free ruler does it?
One of the more interesting historical manifestations of the debate about the legitimacy of common good constraints on popular sovereignty occurred during the so-called "framing" of the government of the United States. Although the intellectual lines of the debate were somewhat muddy these being practical politicians it was the Anti-Federalists who tended to champion the Aristotelian understanding of democracy. Against Aristotelian common good and civic virtue were James Madison and the Federalist proponents of the 1787 constitution.
The Anti-Federalists, people like Luther Martin and Richard Henry Lee, recognized the endemic potential for republics to slide into anarchy and then into tyranny. To enable any vaguely democratic government to work, appealing to classical authors and Montesquieu, the Anti-Federalists emphasized that government must have its basis in local, small, and intense communities. Such communities alone were capable of tempering the self-interestedness of citizens in order that the vision of the common good might be sustained. More strongly committed to democratic ideas than the Federalists, the Anti-Federalists saw civic virtue as necessary glue for democracy's operation. Civic virtue educated and tamed the passions of individual citizens rendering them fit to govern. As might be expected, unlike the Federalists, the Anti-Federalists tended to emphasize the importance of religion, of local patriotism, and of common values.
In contrast, Madison and the Federalists placed a greater premium on individual liberty and feared the smothering effect of intense communities. For this reason, where the Anti-Federalists sought to constrain democracy internally, by educating the hearts and souls of citizens through civic virtue, the Federalists sought to constrain democracy externally, by placing limits on anarchical or tyrannical extremes of citizen behavior through laws supported by the coercive power of the central government. As one well-known scholar of the period puts it . . .
It is no surprise that the framers rejected the classical case for the small state. Madison was hostile to the "spirit of locality" in general, not only in the states. Small communities afforded the individual less power, less mastery, and, hence, less liberty than do large states. Moreover, the small community lays hold of the affections of the individual and leads him to accept the very restraints on his interest and liberty that are inherent in smallness. The classics urged the small state in part because it might encourage the individual to limit and rule his private passions. Madison rejected such states because he rejected that sort of restraint. Small communities limit opportunities and meddle with the soul.3
There is an Hobbes an ambiance about such thinking. The Federalists judged that the political community was incapable of overcoming selfish passions and individual interests. The pursuit of such passions and interests would derive inevitably from the free choices of human beings possessed of liberty. For the Anti-Federalists' solution to work, Madison reasoned in Federalist #10, it would require a civic virtue that overwhelmed liberty itself and that was too high a price, even for obtaining democracy. For Madison, "the first object of government" was preserving "the diversity of faculties among men."4 The classic constraint of democracy that utilized a common good inculcated by civic virtue endangered this "first object." Overt, lawlike constraints on the democratic spirit enforced by the coercive power of government were preferable to the tacit and insidious mechanisms of civic virtue. Laws and similar formal procedures are promulgated widely, are subject to deliberation and public review, and are thus objects exterior to the sensibilities that are able to be accepted or resisted in the minds and hearts of citizens. Exterior constraints, furthermore, create walls of an arena within which pluralism and citizen difference are granted "free" expression. Madison wanted exactly this.
At the heart of such reasoning, is a pragmatic appreciation of pluralism and liberty. Anticipating the utilitarianism of the political economists and drawing from the same Scottish Enlightenment sources that inspired them, Madison wished to design a system of competing individual passions such that a transcendent political rationality would result. As he reasoned in a well-known phrase, "ambition must be made to counteract ambition."5 From the interplay of many differing and conflicting individual interests and passions, checked only in the extreme by efficacious laws, results an harmonious calculus. Those same individualized passions that otherwise may endanger a republic are regulated by their own competition such that the system itself is rational and ordered.6
There is a kinship here, too, with the utilitarian notion of the free market of ideas. Good policy will out, thought Madison, from the interplay of free individuals each engaged in what Madison's confidant, Thomas Jefferson, called "the pursuit of happiness." The polity succeeds by promoting and protecting the diversity of interests and the liberty of individual citizens. Civic virtue is limited to rather insipid values like tolerance and civility. Those undemocratic elements that preserve the democratic spirit itself, in Madison's case, have the character of public laws buttressed by the strong arm of a vigorous, but limited, government.
Nationality itself, however, regardless of national character, is an important element in creating the civic virtue that binds citizen to polis in Aristotle's estimation. Nationality is exclusive and sharply distinguishes those within a national community from those without it. It is also comprehensive, touching each member of the community and imposing a blanket of sameness over each and shared by all and, thereby, paving over one level of those spaces of difference between citizens which distinguish the borders of their autonomy. Most importantly, though, nationality grips the hearts of citizens with intensity sufficient to replace the passions of self-interest. Nation, patria, can be loved by citizens as if it were one's father. In such a view, the common good could be identified, not with the banality of mere common interests, but with an enduring, transcendent, and person-like life. That life, moreover, is embodied in the symbolic and tangible worlds of everyday existence: in land, language, ancestry, religion, history, custom, culture, and so forth.7 National passions, therefore, within the Aristotelian vein, offer extraordinarily potent media for the civic virtue that is believed so necessary for viable democracy.
It might be expected, given this estimation of nationalism, that the sides between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists would be clearly drawn. Madison, who recoils from intense community, might be expected to recoil as well from nationalism. The Anti-Federalists, accordingly, given their appreciation of the civic virtue/common good solution to the problem of democracy, might be expected to embrace the glue of nationalism. Curiously, however, things are somewhat reversed. The issue is basically one of size.
Madison and the Federalists believed that a participatory government based on popular sovereignty would be prey to parochial loyalties and their corresponding narrow prejudices. A vigorous national government was needed to balance and regulate these local loyalties. Supplementing that national government, in addition, was needed an overarching national loyalty. This results in an odd nationalism. It was to be nationalism of the head, rather than of the heart. An ardent critic of passions in politics, Madison believed that a bloodless and rational nationalism could be derived from overlapping individual interests. Speaking precisely to this thin nationalism, Madison noted in his famous Federalist #10:
The operations of the national government . . . falling less immediately under the observations of the mass of citizens, the benefits derived from it will chiefly be perceived and attended to by speculative men. Relating to more general interests, they will be less apt to come home to the feelings of the people; and, in proportion, less likely to inspire an habitual sense of obligation, and an active sentiment of attachment.8
The Anti-Federalists, however, perhaps owing to their keener appreciation of civic virtue itself, doubted the Federalists' ability to create such a bloodless nationalism. The Anti-Federalists judged that citizen attachment to nation would rival that of local loyalties in passion and intensity. Herein, of course, lay the danger. Even more than Madison, the Anti-Federalists feared what has come to be called the "tyranny of the majority." In Madison's analysis, such a tyranny resulted from a confluence of individual interests. For the Anti-Federalists, however, the feared tyranny resulted more from sentiments. In creating a national sentiment, the Anti-Federalists argued, the Federalists were laying the groundwork for the emergence of a "tyranny greater than any king."9 All the power of local loyalties would be concentrated to great effect at the level of nation. No medium of civic virtue, especially not nationalism, could be bloodless. Security for individual liberty could only be protected by the promotion of diverse local communities. No individual citizen, it was reasoned, could stand against the enormous potency of the sentiments of a national polity. Resistance was only possible in communities of a much smaller scale. Without the possibility of such resistance, the Anti-Federalists reasoned, democracy was not possible, and tyranny was inevitable.
THE IRONY OF MADISON'S THOUGHT FOR DEMOCRACY
Clearly a mixed message results from this analysis of the value of nationalism for democracy. Madison's fear of the intensity of the glue of local ties is intriguing. As anyone familiar with the so-called politics of a small community can attest, it is seldom politics at all. Small scale and intense communities seem to engender clan-like leadership structures wherein the space (or individual liberty) needed for politics is closed. The sort of authoritarian governing that results is not only not conducive for democracy, it cannot even be called politics.11 Realizing this and drawing upon his own considerable analysis of the failures of previous participatory governments in history, Madison was convinced that only a politics of competitive interests coupled with nationalism could maximize and secure the basic liberty that was necessary for legitimate participatory government.
In retrospect, however. The Anti-Federalists' fears conceding Madison's solution to the problem of democracy and nationalism have proven to be warranted. The arrangements of the 1787 constitution have worked in conjunction with other factors peculiar to the history of the United States to yield a potent nationalistic civic virtue that potentially confirms the Anti-Federalists' fears. As early as the era of Jackson, for example. Foreign visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville were writing with concern about the inordinate nationalism found here.12 Tocqueville associates the emergence of this nationalism with the tastes of the majority of citizens enforced by the market-like operation of the "open society" and America's democratic culture. Tocqueville oft cited "tyranny of the majority" that he discovered in Jackson an America is really more akin to Adam Smith's "invisible hand." This realization offers an insight into an irony in Madison's thought that was overlooked by the Anti-Federalists.
That irony is that the admixture of market-like mechanisms and nationalism that Madison promoted can foment a more thoroughgoing civic virtue than anything imagined by Aristotle or the Anti-Federalists. The "market" at stake in this, of course, goes far beyond economics. In Madison s own estimation it is a market of interests, of ideas. of values, of tastes of fashions and so on. And, like all markets, the results of these forces are given normative value. Markets are "fair," the claim goes; they are "free," "natural." "Harmonious," and even "ineluctable." Mixing such market-like mechanisms with nationalism weaves a singular civic virtue that binds citizens' hearts and souls in the manner of nationalism's sentimentality, while demanding citizens' rational approval by invoking the normative claims made by all markets. The final fabric of this weave is a civic virtue that is scarcely resistible.
Madison's own fears of intense civic virtue come back to bear on the results of his own thinking at this point. His argument in the Federalist Papers was that a totalizing civic virtue would undercut the possibility of the rationality in politics that was required for legitimate participatory government. It would also eliminate the range of difference and pluralism among the citizenry that he believed to be the motor of civilization and of responsible politics. The famous tenth Federalist paper is illustrative. Madison did not wish to destroy factions; he wanted a permanent system of diverse countervailing factions designed to secure space for the differences among citizens that enabled and promoted liberty. Sadly, the conjunction of nationalism with markets that he proposed to maintain such a system, has worked in a wholly opposite direction to create a monolithic and near totalizing civic virtue that imperils the very legitimacy Madison sought to preserve. All of which signals, once again the inherent tension between democracy and nationalism.
Three points can be concluded from the muddle of these arguments. First, Madison offers telling criticism of common good\civic virtue solutions to the problem of democracy. External, formal, public laws are preferable to the tacit controls on democracy offered by civic virtue. To be sure, some minimum civic virtue is necessary to engender support for law, but that civic virtue ought to be limited to values like tolerance, procedural due process, and pluralist equality. Second, nationalism probably cannot be made sufficiently thin and bloodless such that it might serve as the medium for inculcating the indicated values. This means, it seems that nationalism endangers the legitimacy and durability of democracy. Hence, third, the Anti-Federalists' insistence on much smaller communities for the working of democracy makes much sense. While Madison was correct in being fearful of the potential of small communities to smother the autonomy of individuals that is necessary for democracy, the Anti-Federalists were correct to perceive that a nation-state coupled with nationalism is no less likely and is even more capable of such tyranny.
Contrary to Professor Nodia's thinking, it does not see that nationalism can be sufficiently domesticated for democracy's purposes.
THE BENEFICENT FACE OF NATIONALISM
Most scholars agree that in its philosophical and historical genesis nationalisms was a positive force. It has number of positive beneficial effects. These are as under following:
> NATIONALISM PROMOTES DEMOCRACY
One analyst points out that through nationalism the concept of popular sovereignty replace the concept of divinely or historically appointed ruler, the concept of citizen replaces the concept of subject. In short nationalism promotes the idea that political power legitimately resides with the people and that governs exercise that power only as the agents of the people.
> NATIONALISM ENCOURAGES SELF-DETERMINATION
In modern times the notion that nationalism ought to be able to preserve their culture and govern them according to their own customs, has become widely accepted. The English utilitarian philosopher Juan Stuart mill (1860-1873) argued that where the sentiment of nationality exists, there is prime facie case for utility of all the members of nationality under the government to themselves apart.
> NATIONALISM ALLOWS FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Many scholars see nationalism as both facilitator and product of nationalism. Nationalism created lager political units in which commerce could expand. The prohibition of interstate tariffs and the control of interstate commerce by the national government in 1787. American constitution is an example of this kind of development. Further as modernization and industrialization and urbanization broke down the old parochial loyalties of the masses. They needed a new focus and a new nation state.
> NATIONALISM ALLOWS DIVERSITY
A related argument is that regional or world political organization might lead to an amalgamation of cultures or worse the suppression of the cultural uniqueness of the weak by the strong. Diversity of culture and government also promotes experimentation. Democracy, it could be said was an experiment in America in 1776, and it might not have occurred in a world system.
NATIONALISM AS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE
The troubled fact of nationalism: despite its possible good many contend that nationalism has become primarily a destructive force.
> NATIONALISM CAN LEAD TO INSECURITY
Because we identify with ourselves as the "we group" "we tend to consider the "they group" as aliens. Our sense of responsibility of even human carriage for the "they" is limited. This is an especially pronounced effect of the American national experience. Isolationism was a standard sanctioned by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that lasted for a century and a half. It was retreated somewhat but isolationist impulse still can be left. Some forty percent of Americans still favors a fortress American foreign policy.
Domestically, Americans accept the principle that they have a responsibility to their least fortunate citizen. The social welfare budget in the United States is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and they engage in countless acts of charity. A wave kills thousands of Bangladesh, an earthquake killed a million in china, and decease and hunger debilitate millions in Africa and Asia.
> NATIONALISM LEADS TO A FEELING OF SUPERIORITY
It is a small step from feeling different and liking your group to feeling superior. At its extreme this manifestation festered in Nazi Germany. The German nation or race was at the top of the ladder which descended downward to where at the bottom, Slavic peoples were to be kept as virtual and expandable slaves in segregated and degrading conditions and gems and gypsies were non people and social vermin to be exterminated.
> NATIONALISM MAY LEAD TO XENOPHOBIA
Xenophobia is a suspicion or fear of other nationalities. this belief that other nationalities are hostile is widespread and leads to world tension. Xenophobia is also related to regular disruptions as alien residents are expelled from our country to another. Whether the South Asia, Nigerian in Ghana banning or expelling aliens has caused human misery and conflict between the host country and the they - group's country of origin. As the international migration of labor increases this cause of conflict is likely to become more pronounced.
> NATIONALISM IS JINGOISTIC
Too often nationalism lead to jingoistic, the belief that your country can do no wrong. It combines with patriotism or love of country to the point that Stephen Decatur can say to our applause.
> NATIONALISM CAN BE AGGRESSIVE
Feeling the xenophobia, superiority, jingoism and messianic can easily lead to aggressive behavior. Again Hitler's Germany and the supposed destiny of its Aryan super race to be master of the world in an especially wrong example. But there are many others. Nationalism has become a major factor in aggressiveness of the United States. The Soviet Union and to lesser degree china had led each of these powers to expand colonize and try to dominate its neighbors.
> THE LACK OF FIT BETWEEN STATES AND NATION
Nation and states often do not coincide the concept of a nation state in which ethnic and political boundaries are the same is more ideal than real. In fact most states are not ethnically unified and many nations are not politically united or independent. This lack of fit between nation and states is significant source of international and domestic tension and conflict. There are two basic disruptive patterns:
One state, multiple nations
2. One nation, multiple states
CAHLLENGES TO NATIONALISM
The biological and mystical conception of nationalism possesses the formidable weapon of assuring its adherence that they alone have a world historical mission to fulfill and that by implication, their actions in world politics must be just. A typical but certainly not exclusive representative of this point of view was Senator Albert J. Beveridge, who in 1900 while arguing for the annexation of the Philippine Islands by the United States asserted that the American nation had been closed to lea in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace.
Nationalism grew steadily in the last two hundred years to reinforce the identification of the individual with the state. The process of political socialization carried out by the family, schools, and peer groups taught the citizens the inescapable lesson that loyalty to the state fulfills not only an ideological but also a pragmatic purpose. For it is the state that in return for obedience to its law provides innumerable concrete services. Thus citizen allegiance and govt efficiency in the performance of its function are mutually supportive. The rise of modern states that were based o a strong nationalistic sentiment was a logical historic response to the industrial revolution. But in the nation state is coming under increasing attack from three quarters: the advance of military technology, the rise of supernatural organizations and the growing role of transactional ideological, religious and functional and political movements. In the 1950s many analysts pointed out the increasing military vulnerability of the state. Hertz foresaw the transformation of the international system into a condition dominated by conflicting regional alliances. Some years later, seeing the impact of decolonization, Hertz gradually abandoned his notion of the demise of the state. Yet as long as the economic and military viability of many of the new states remains in question, the image of bipolar and tripolar international system remains some validity. In a future time, George Orwell's 1984 scenaion may indeed materialize and our earth may be dominated by three superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.
Assuming the hallmark of national sovereignty is the rigorous application of the doctrine of non intervention in the affairs of one state by another the development of super national organization poses the second problem for the future of presumably impermeable nation states. Among the democracies of the west, notably those of Europe super national collaboration to achieve shared goals in the fields of economic development, health, and education is proceeding swiftly. Member states of super national organization with policy making and policy implementation powers. Such as European community And Nordic council employ the argument that their sovereignty remains unaffected because they have delegated governmental authority to the international civil servants who staff the executive bodies of these organizations. In a legal sense this argument merits respect but the politics of interdependence have eroded the absolutist quality of the concept of sovergnty and are likely to create rivals for the nation state as the sole focus of political loyalty.
Transactional political movements of the twentieth century, such as fascism and communism prevent a third formidable challenge to nationalism. The "new order" or the German national socialists led by Adolf Hitler (1889- 1945)castigated the liberal nineteenth century version of the nation state and called for the formation of a hierarchical European system dominated by what Hitler considered a biologically select race committed to an ideology of purity and power. In accordance with this objective, the elite guard of the Nazi movement organized non-German units through throughout occupied Europe and sought to use them as the basis for a new practorian taste whose military despotism would sound the death knell of the conventional European nation states was cataclysmic war from which humankind has yet to recover materially and from which it may never recover spiritually.
Marxism- from a very different angle also sought to challenge the nation state and nationalism. In the communist manifesto Karl Marx and Fredric heagle rejected nationalism, viewing it as an instrument of the bourgeois class to divide workers across the national frontiers. Although Joseph Stalin modified this ideological doctrine by making this soviet policy in 1928 a policy of socialism in one country and also by appealing to the historic force of Russian nationalism during the great war with Germany, orthodox, Marxists continue to this day to treat the nation state as a category of history that is designed to serve the interests of capitalism and that is doomed to disappearance once working classes everywhere rise to power.
On the tactical level however revolutionary communist movement have readily espoused the cause of nationalism and have sought to align themselves with anticiolonial forces in the third world. For example the support of the coalition of nationalist forces such as popular movement for the liberation of Angola (MPLA) has been an integral part of soviet policy. Demands for political self determination in Eastern Europe on the other hand, tend to receive a markedly different response. Ruling eastern European communist parties subscribe rather to the doctrine of proletarian solidarity "and accept an obligation to combat presumed counter revolutionary tendencies within their block. Under the leadership of soviet union, the members of the Warsaw pact occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968in order to limit revisionist Czech liberalism and by extension Czech nationalism.
The polish events of 1980-81 reflected yet another powerful example of the gradual fusion between nationalism and communist. The attempt of polish workers, peasants, and students was aimed towards the objective of achieving communism with a polish face.
In 1976, on the occasion of the twenty fifth congress of the communist party of the soviet union and the subsequent meeting f the European communist leaders in east Berlin, the hard line of "proletarian solidarity" was softened somewhat, much to the satisfaction of the leaders of communist parties in France Italy and Spain, who assert that their parties must formulate their policies reflecting the diversity of their national settings rather than blanket guidance. From Moscow moreover national communism is still in evidence in Eastern Europe Hungarian history books continue to refer Hungarian border with Romania as a historical injustice and Romanian scholars continue to remind their readers of some Romanian provinces that were lost to the soviet union in194. When confronted to national fervor in the form of unresolved frontier disputes, the plea of proletarian solidarity begins to weaken in appeal.
Despite the threat of multidimensional warfare, the rise of super national organization, the challenges of expansionist fascism and the partial success of communism as transitional political movement, nationalism remains a vibrant force in world affairs and a solid point of entry into the web of motives surrounding foreign policy decision making.
CONCLUSION
The philosophy of nationalism nowadays does not concern itself much with the aggressive and dangerous form of invidious nationalism that often occupies center stage in the news and in sociological research. Although this pernicious form can be of significant instrumental value mobilizing oppressed people and giving them a sense of dignity, its moral costs are usually taken by philosophers to outweigh its benefits.Nationalist-minded philosophers distance themselves from such aggressive nationalisms and mainly seek to construct and defend very moderate versions; these have therefore come to be the main focus of recent philosophical debate.
In presenting the claims that nationalists defend, we have started from more radical ones and have moved towards liberal nationalist alternatives. In examining the argument for these claims, we have first presented metaphysically demanding communitarian arguments, resting upon deep communitarian assumptions about culture, such as the premise that the ethno-cultural nation is universally the central and most important community for each human individual. This is an interesting and respectable claim, but its plausibility has not yet been established. The moral debate about nationalism has resulted in various weakening of the cultural arguments, proposed by liberal nationalists, which render the arguments less ambitious but much more plausible. Having abandoned the old nationalist ideal of a state owned by its dominant ethno-cultural group, liberal nationalists have become receptive to the idea that identification with a plurality of cultures and communities is important for a person's social identity. They have equally become sensitive to transnational issues and more willing to embrace a partly cosmopolitan perspective.
Liberal nationalism has also brought to the fore more modest, less philosophically or metaphysically charged arguments grounded in the concerns of justice. These stress the practical importance of ethno-cultural membership, various rights to redress injustice, democratic rights of political association and the role that ethno-cultural ties and associations can play in promoting just social arrangements. Liberal cultureless such as Kymlicka have proposed minimal and pluralistic versions of nationalism built around such arguments. In these minimal versions, the project of building classical nation-states is moderated or abandoned and replaced by a more sensitive form of national identity which can thrive in a multicultural society. This new project, however, might demand a further widening of moral perspectives. Given the experiences of the twentieth century, one can safely assume that culturally plural states divided into isolated and closed sub-communities glued together only by arrangements of mere modus vivendi are inherently unstable. Stability might therefore require that the plural society envisioned by liberal cultureless promote quite intense interaction between cultural groups in order to forestall mistrust, to reduce prejudice and to create a solid basis for cohabitation. On the other hand, once membership in multiple cultures and communities is admitted as legitimate, social groups will spread beyond the borders of a single state (e.g. groups bound by religious or racial ties) as well as within them, thus creating an opening for at least a minimal cosmopolitan perspective. The internal dialectic of the concern for ethno-cultural identity might thus lead to pluralistic and potentially cosmopolitan political arrangements that are rather distant from what was classically understood as nationalism
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NATIONALISM