Rooted Cosmopolitanism

...should an independent Kurdistan arise, one would demand of it the same respect of minority rights Kurds should have been afforded in Iraq or Turkey...

...A national movement without social conceptions was an abstraction, and Zionism, like any national movement, could be good or bad depending on the society it fashioned...

...All of them generate ethnocentrism, a sense of collective uniqueness and exclusivity that can be found, for example, in the oppositions between Greek and barbaroi, between Jews and pagan idolaters, in the self-conception of the Chinese as the Middle Kingdom, and in the Arab-Moslem notion of Dar al-Islam...

...In a subsequent essay, Bourne argued that this thinking pointed toward "new concepts of the state, of nationality, of citizenship, of allegiance...

...The title of his 1862 tract—Rom und Jerusalem— was not incidental, for Mazzini had made essentially the same arguments, though with republicanism in the place of Hess's socialism...

...This baggage aside, "difference" is a vital historical and contemporary question in American and European societies...

...Let's take a contemporary example...

...Bourne spoke of a cloth of many threads, but he still spoke of a cloth...

...This begot huffy indignation, especially on the part of American Brahmins: why, these immigrants simply weren't becoming proper "Americans...

...In Marx's post-1848 paradigm, nationalism tends to be a superstructural device employed by the bourgeoisie in its pursuit of expanding markets abroad and domestic mastery...

...Unidevotionalists have their flag...

...They could not have come into being in earlier conditions, and will likely be transcended in the future...

...How shall we regard this individual...

...Societies are differentiated not only through productive relations but through language and culture, particularly national languages and cultures in the modern era...

...The latter proclaimed himself a "pure" nationalist and denounced his adversaries as "shaatnez," a mixture of wool and cotton proscribed in Jewish garments by religious orthodoxy...

...The worker's native air may be factory air, and not French or German or English, but when the worker demands rights, it will be in French or German or English...

...In Die Nationalittitenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1907) Otto Bauer argued that a nation is constituted by "common history as the effective cause, common culture and common descent as the means by which it produces its effects, a common language as the mediator of common culture, both its product and producer...

...But Marx did not go far enough, and he thereby encouraged an abstract proletarian internationalism in place of abstract bourgeois universalism...

...This was at odds with the radical universalism of Marx or Luxemburg (and with the expectation that the state would wither away...

...The agenda was not just a flag but a pacific world of free nations...

...I think it incumbent upon the left—and everyone else—to speak out forcefully on behalf of the Kurds...

...Here we may discern in Marx a problematic inheritance of Enlightenment rationalism...

...He continued: In reality we don't stand within two circles alone, but within many circles—as citizens of Palestine we stand in the circle of the Land of Israel, as Jews we stand in the circle of a nation that aspires to its homeland, as workers we stand in the circle of the working class, as sons of our generation we stand in the circle of modern history...

...I generally agree with the first point but think the second misconceived...

...By making a parallel between the producing and the speaking individual Marx—unintentionally—implies the essential point...

...The tolerance suggested is based on equivalence, not acceptance of difference: the play is entitled "Nathan the Wise," not "Nathan the Jew...

...Such onesidedness — no less than that of abstract universalism —frustrates democratic pluralism, which demands refusal of singular answers (to borrow again from Walzer...

...5 Lenin, of course, advocated the self-determination of nations, but his argument is a utilitarian one that, unlike Hess's and Mazzini's, grants no intrinsic value to national cultures...

...It must be readily conceded that ascribing to such a principle and practicing it are two different things...

...he is also a patriot of his canton...

...However, one can find in his writings on nationalism at least two paradigms, as Shlomo Avineri notes.' Before 1848 Marx believed that because of the universalizing tendencies of the capitalist market "national differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing" (The Communist Manifesto...

...Instead of a melting pot, Bourne envisioned "trans-nationality...

...Smith seeks a middle ground between Parmenides and Heraclitus...

...Missing is adequate meditation on the grounds of cultural diversity within a democratic society...

...Too often, the word "difference" is intoned indignantly without consideration of the "trans" of "transnationality," of the intersection of the hyphens Bourne — rightly — celebrated...

...It is gradually becoming clear that nationalist aspirations were sometimes mistaken for democratic ambitions by Western observers of the momentous events between 1989 and 1991...

...The friar tells Lessing's "Nathan the Wise": "You're a Christian soul...

...In both, nations and national cultures are viewed as historically created but, finally, as epiphenomena...

...3 When Jean Jaures rallied to the cause of the Dreyfusards, he refused to allow the right wing to be identified with "la nation," and concurrently demanded of the left that it make the French republic together with universal human values its cause...

...4 Hess, in response to Jew-hatred, espoused a socialist Jewish state as one link in an international chain of national redemptions...

...It is now evident how wrong they were, how much more complicated history has been...

...Production by an isolated individual outside society . . . is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other...

...In a trenchant passage in the Grundrisse he wrote: The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole...

...I do not mean to underestimate the murderous catastrophes wrought by nationalist fanaticism, especially in our century...

...they salute it...

...I would add that this ultimately meant resigning themselves to an important principle, one that is key to such domestication and to which I will presently return, that of the legitimacy of plural loyalties and therefore difference...

...The national raiment, in his formulation, had to be unsullied by foreign admixtures and universalistic notions such as socialism...

...Mazzini and Hess both proposed their peoples' independence as sparks for universal liberation and not solely as particularist enterprises...

...The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society...

...Perhaps I am not stretching the AustroMarxists' purposes too far if I suggest that they too accepted this principle by championing a class politics aimed at fashioning a federal socialist republic in which there would be systems of both territorial representation and national linguistic cultural—personal—autonomy...

...478 • DISSENT example, and it is a particularly thorny problem for the left...

...Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York and London: New York University Press, 1985...

...social democracy is not their priority...

...He accepts the modernity of nations but traces their origins as far back as antiquity in what he calls ethnie, at whose core is a complex of myths and symbols tied to "the characteristic forms or styles and genres of certain historical configurations of peoples...

...Marx was radically Heraclitian...

...It has also been a longstanding problem for the left, rooted in that troublesome dimension of the left's Enlightenment heritage to which I alluded when discussing Marx...

...In contrast to Parmenides, Heraclitus of Epheus held that "all things are in a state of flux...

...3 See the discussion of the relation between socialism, republicanism, and nationalism in K. Steven Vincent, Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoit Malon and French Reformist Socialism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 116...

...One can also find a notion of plural loyalty articulated by the left within a national movement, with the use, notably, of metaphors like Bourne's —threads and cloth...

...Not just forcefully, but honestly, which is impossible apart from advancing Kurdish national aspirations...

...Marx's ultimate vision is of a universal culture...

...5 One may oppose their programs, find them bleary eyed, illconceived, or historically deluded, but they cannot be classified as belligerent exclusivists...

...A "Parmenidean" approach discerns in nations something inherent in human existence, something primordial that makes historical reappearances in varied guises yet that is in some way essential...

...in the second paradigm, nationalism is sustained by capitalists, distracting proletarians from their class interests and leading to the intensification of conflicts among nations . 2 Despite their divergences, the two paradigms are linked by Marx's insistence that "workers have no country...

...Poor man should he become a UN official...

...The true democrat, maintained Greenberg, will seek not to destroy but to harmonize such differences...

...Their problem must be addressed in its specificity...

...As the European Community sought new modes of integration, nationalist virulence asserted itself in more than one of the previously communist lands...

...Rather, I want to argue against conceiving nationalism as an either/or proposition: either all its forms to be condemned or all its expressions to be sanctioned...

...Kurds sometimes define their aspirations as autonomy (within Iraq or Turkey), sometimes as independence...

...The truth became culpable...

...The left, historically, never came adequately to grips with nationalism, and was often confounded by its intransigence...

...Apart from circumstances in which nationalism served antiimperialist purposes, the left has tended to wishful anticipation of the dissipation of nations...

...Yet they grasped something that the more formidable mind did not...

...A useful historical model, as he notes, is religion, which, once a primary source of slaughter throughout Europe, was domesticated after its battered apostles reconciled themselves to multireligious societies and, consequently, to tolerance...

...I employ the word "difference" with some hesitation, because it is now encumbered by faddish, often vacuous, usages...

...The left, habitually, advanced two linked assertions about nations: that they are products of history and not embodiments of timeless collective essences...

...Kurds are oppressed as Kurds and not as members of generalized categories...

...David Ben-Gurion, then Labor's leader and later the first premier of Israel, proclaimed the very concept of shaatnez to be a deceit...

...Both possibilities are inherently perilous...

...Here we find a multidimensional conception of political society and human relations, one that implies an important democratic principle: the legitimacy of plural loyalties...

...Any assault on human rights had to be its charge, not solely proletarian interests narrowly defined...

...It is a good sign that it is now circling around nations and nationalism...

...entered World War I. It was a moment in which nativist prejudices against immigrants FALL • 1992 • 481 intensified considerably in this country...

...My point is simple: this is an oppressed nationality...

...It might seem that among today's advocates of multiculturalism a left has emerged that recognizes the problems I've been raising...

...We act" —Bourne's "we" was dominant Anglo-America— "as if we want Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed...

...480 • DISSENT To recognize the modernity of nations and to discard the notion that they incarnate timeless collective essences should not be translated simplistically into the proposition that nations and nationalism are nothing more than epiphenomena...

...As Marx wrote in his unfinished critique of Friedrich List (1845), "The nationality of the worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labor, free slavery, selfhuckstering...

...Michael Walzer has suggested what seems to me to be a sagacious alternative, that of domesticating nationalism's more dangerous impulses, seeking to integrate and counterbalance them within broader pluralistic frameworks...

...Among other things he should have said that individuals belong to greater wholes, not to a greater whole...

...In a world of resurgent nationalisms, and in an America debating multiculturalism, what is needed is the fashioning of a dialectical concept of rooted cosmopolitanism, which accepts a multiplicity of roots and branches and that rests on the legitimacy of plural loyalties, of standing in many circles, but with common ground...

...National cultural distinctions among workers were, objectively, secondary matters—at best...

...Nathan replies, "And well for us...

...He meant that change, "becoming," is illusion...

...Such discontents are the hobgoblins of what I'd call "unidevotionalists," those vigilant and anxious beings who are endlessly obsessed with litmus tests of absolute loyalty...

...What was at stake was the relation between culture and democracy...

...FALL • 1992 • 483...

...Yet I fear that too many votaries of multiculturalism have become unreflective celebrants of particularism, now that the working class has not fulfilled its universalizing mission...

...The most fruitful Marxist analyses of nationalism recognized just this...

...The assumption is like that of Herder: nature creates nations...

...It is difficult to imagine a more condescending posture...

...Consequently, its reemergence poses old quandaries anew...

...Although it is incorrect to speak of "nations" before, roughly, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and nationalism before the French revolution, national cultures and national consciousness take on an autonomy beyond their origins...

...But for my purposes here, it is the theoretical point that is most salient, together with the fact that it has direct implications for concepts of citizenship...

...Nations and nationalism had to be viewed as epiphenomena...

...For what makes me for you a Christian, makes yourself for me a Jew...

...He contrasted the FALL • 1992 • 479 Robinson Crusoe individual imagined by many capitalist ideologists with his own notion of "social individuals...

...Alas, their questions and answers, always so earnest, are ever easy...

...For them it is unimaginable that an individual might actually face moral dilemmas, might confront legitimate conflicts of fealty, might have to inquire of the rights and wrongs of contesting demands, might be compelled to assess the consequences of embracing this or that position...

...Which doesn't mean that they are easily harmonized...

...Although much of the left conceived the classless society as the melting pot of humanity, a striking alternative was formulated by an American radical not long before the U.S...

...For example, Eric Hobsbawm, one of the finest Marxist historians, wrote as recently as 1990: "The owl of Minerva, which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk...

...In his July 1916 essay, "Trans-national America," a young WASP named Randolph Bourne fashioned a remarkable retort...

...Whatever his "race," he feels a cultural and linguistic kinship to Italians in Italy...

...The "collective uniqueness" of a social entity is a problematic notion for Marxism, which ascribed the most salient features of human reality to social class and conceived the future to be embodied in a universal class whose interests represented those of humanity as a whole...

...By God, a better Christian never lived...

...In the socialist future, with human "prehistory" left behind, there would be a new social individual dwelling amid socialist humanity...

...As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had marked out for it," he wrote, "we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were thwarting our prophecies...

...Yet, there are and will be "differences" not assimilable to sweeping universalist prescriptions...

...See Shlomo Avineri, "Toward a Socialist Theory of Nationalism," Dissent, Fall 1990...

...Any movement which attempts to thwart the weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision...

...Greenberg took the example of an Italianspeaking Swiss citizen...

...Their national sentiments are legitimate, both intrinsically and as a response to oppression...

...Nothing would mediate between the individual and the human community writ large...

...Many of these newcomers were stirred by European events, often asserting bonds to their "old countries...

...Nationalists, like nationalisms, play different roles in different situations...

...Moreover, the apostle of Italian nationalism did not preach devotion to the nation alone but told his followers: "You are men before you are citizens...

...Just as an individual is not an abstract entity, neither are the social realities through which one individuates oneself...

...As Avineri points out, in Marx's own day at least one socialist, Moses Hess, argued that nations should be conceived as mediators between the person and humanity...

...Evidently, Leninist and Stalinist dominion led neither to a withering away nor to the successful repression of national sentiments...

...It couldn't be otherwise if workers are the universal class, have no country, and breathe only factory air as their native air...

...The proletariat's victory was to give birth to a classless society—the first truly universal society...

...This was articulated with acuity by one of 482 • DISSENT Ben-Gurion's colleagues, the American Labor Zionist thinker Hayim Greenberg, in his 1948 essay, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties...

...So, rather than a break between premodernity and modernity, Smith perceives a political transformation leading from ethnie towards notions of common citizenship...

...Now, few have been more incisive than Marx in criticizing bourgeois forms of abstract universalism, particularly concepts of the individual...

...Certainly, parallels to earlier discussions of national identity and culture can be found in the debates on multiculturalism...

...His government is neither French nor English nor German, it is capital...

...Instead of proposing a classless society that would negate or homogenize national cultures, he advocated a federal socialist state that would provide national minorities with cultural autonomy on a "personal" (that is, nonterritorial) basis...

...In the first paradigm, the natural course of capitalist development ought to lead to the withering away of nationalism...

...Much seems not to have been remade, but frozen or stunted or integrated and used by these regimes...

...In the West, an array of economic, political, and cultural transformations produced nations out of ethnie...

...2 On this point see Michel Lowy, "Marxists and the National Question," New Left Review, 96, March-April, 1976, p. 82...

...Like his Jewish counterpart, he saw the nation as a mediator between the individual and humanity...

...Shall we tell them that Westerners will support them so that in a future era they can embody Western leftist ideas of universal humanity (whatever those are nowadays...

...He declared—changing the metaphor—that unlike the right, the Zionist left stood not in one circle (that of nationalism) but in many circles, and "when we stand in two circles it isn't a question of standing in two separate areas, one moment in one and the next in another, but rather in what is common territory to both of them...

...Nations, on this account, are a distinct product of modernity...

...And we should add: if he is a she, she may well have keen allegiances to the women's movement...

...The difficulty is that this universal culture is something quite abstract...

...our women comrades stand in the circle of the working women's movement in its struggle for liberation...

...As a Swiss he owes fidelity to Switzerland...

...He reminds us that Parmenides, the ancient Eleatic, proposed that "what is, is...

...However, it is not true that all nationalists have had chauvinist views of the world and that all expressions of national sentiment represent particularist evil...

...The bloody unraveling of Yugoslavia has been the most potent example, and the fear remains that the former Soviet Union could become Yugoslavia writ large...

...Marx's famous quip about modernity, that "all that's solid melts into air," would seem an appropriate metaphor for the last two years, save for one aspect of the modern world: national consciousness...

...To stand in many circles is to accept the principle of plural loyalties...

...Thus Ernest Gellner, for instance, argues with characteristic erudition, in Nations and Nationalism (1983), that nations come of the transition from "agroliterate" to industrial societies, and Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities (1983), contends that however subjectively ancient nationalists perceive their nations to be, they are objectively modern...

...A Heraclitian perspective on nations would emphasize their historicity...

...This was "a weaving back and forth with other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors...

...It is true that neither Hess nor Mazzini elaborated their ideas with the trenchancy of the author of Capital...

...He hardly knows himself how many different loyalties he harbors in various degrees...

...And what should Kurds make of the part of the left that, preoccupied singularly by anti-imperialist indignation, draws attention to the Kurdish tragedy solely to indict American policy in the Gulf (as if Saddam Hussein would otherwise have been benevolent...

...His native air is neither French nor German nor English, it is factory air...

...At the same time, Western European integration has proven to be a complicated matter, resisted in some quarters and accompanied by xenophobic outbursts in others...

...Anthony Smith, in his thoughtful book The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987), elucidates them neatly by means of a (Greek) ontological twist...

...He went so far as to propose referring also to "English-Americans...

...Plural dimensions of human identity often don't rest easily with each other, and sometimes not at all...

...In later left-wing versions, membership in the universal class became the solvent of differences, on the way to a universal, classless society...

...For one example, a central current within the history of French socialism has been quite nationalist "when the nation in question represented the universal values of justice and progress" and anti-nationalist when "la nation" meant chauvinism and clericalism...

...If one asserts differences without conceptualizing the territory of multicultural exchange, one may reinvent just those particularist perils dreaded in nationalism by the historical left...

...National sentiment is one An earlier version of this essay was presented to a conference entitled "Toward a Civil Society: Common Dilemmas and Common Perspectives of the European and American Left," sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Washington, D.C., September 1991...

...and they should be regarded as epiphenomena, that is, as secondary (if often bothersome) matters...

...In short, the self-created rugged individualist is an ideological fiction...

...Earlier, during the cold war, both theorists of totalitarianism and Stalinists, each for their own reasons, tried to convince us that ideology was redesigning in its own image every nook and cranny of— and brain cell in—Soviet-style societies...

...Against the "thinly disguised panic which calls itself 'patriotism,' " he proposed celebrating as culturally invigorating the hyphen in Polish-American, Irish-American, JewishAmerican, German-American, and so on...

...It is as historically spurious as it is politically hazardous to homogenize nationalist movements and sentiments...

...they legitimate only particularisms, usually just their own...

...In the late 1920s and early 1930s the growing dominance of the Labor-left within the Zionist movement was threatened by the right-wing "Revisionists" led by Vladimir Jabotinsky...

...Or ought we accept, indeed value, the legitimacy of "pluralistsocial relationships, attachments, sentiments and loyalties...

...If he is Catholic he feels ties to Catholics around the world and in various regards accepts the "sovereignty" of the Vatican...

...As a bundle of prospective betrayals...

...The Kurds themselves do not have entirely clean historical hands...

...The Austro-Marxist position was expounded in a specific context: a debate inside a socialist movement within a multinational empire...

...A universal quality—reason—makes this identity of Christian and Jew possible...

...Consequently, Bauer avoided the class reductionism that leads to an esperanto vision of socialist culture—a vision no less one-sided than that of nationalists who cannot see beyond their own tongues...

...Considerable contemporary scholarship—not only of the left— addresses precisely these issues...