Reviews four books on nationalism: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, by Liah Greenfeld; Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, by Michael Ignatieff; The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism, by William Pfaff; and Liberal Nationalism, by Yael Tamir
Kymlicka, Will
NATIONALISM: FIVE ROADS TO MODERNITY, by Liah Greenfeld. Harvard University Press, 1992. 581 pp. $44.95, cloth; $19.95, paper. BLOOD AND BELONGING: JOURNEYS INTO THE NEW NATIONALISM, by Michael...
...Examples of cultural nationalism include the Quebecois or the Flemish in Belgium...
...This is obvious in decisions regarding the language of schools, courts and government services...
...Why would elites accept an ideal that viewed the people "as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity...
...Seeking photographs or film/video footage of Irving Howe for PBS documentary on his life, including lectures he gave, symposiums he attended, awards he received, or home movies of him...
...Yet at other times, Tamir implies that it is a positive good that states express a national identity, and that existing liberal democracies should do more to develop the "cultural essence of the state...
...Most of these countries have a strong sense of national identity that is nonethnic...
...These demands are evidence not of growing nationalism, although some paranoid critics have suggested this, but of a new, more pluralistic conception of integration within the American nation...
...This is a sensible account of the value of national identity, similar to the view of many nineteenth-century liberals...
...Actions performed in a cultural context are "endowed with additional meaning" because they can be seen both as acts of individual achievement and as contributions to the development of one's culture...
...On this view, state expression of a national identity is more regrettable than desirable, but since it is unavoidable, justice requires that we compensate national minorities for disadvantages this creates, and protect them from pressures to assimilate...
...Why is the state needed for people to "share a language, memorize their past, cherish their heroes, live a fulfilling national life...
...Much of the nationalist conflict around the world is the result of attempts by majority nations to coercively assimilate national minorities...
...But consider virtually any country in Latin America...
...It is a legal requirement for children to learn the English language and American history in schools, and all levels of WINTER • 1995 • 131 Books American government have insisted that there is a legitimate governmental interest in promoting a common language...
...The book was written to accompany a BBC series of the same name, broadcast on PBS last year, which is worth watching...
...Without this public component, the existence of a nation as a distinct social unit would be jeopardized...
...But that puts the cart before the horse, since nationalist movements predated, and helped cause, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union...
...But the feeling of national identity underlying those groups preceded the collapse of communism...
...This is not necessarily wrong or oppressive...
...Paul Hollander, Dept...
...However, Greenfeld insists that the national idea arose before modernization, in response to more contingent factors...
...North Americans often overlook this fact, because they fail to distinguish immigrants from national minorities...
...The motivation of Quebecois, Latvian, Flemish, Kurdish, or Slovak nationalists is not a fear of being excluded from a larger nation on ethnic grounds, but a desire to maintain themselves as separate nations...
...She argues that it first arose in England in the early sixteenth century, adopted by Henry VIII to support his battle with Rome and then by Parliament in its battle with James I. Similarly, she argues, the emergence of nationalism in France, Russia, Germany, and the United States all predated industrialization...
...She is not addressing the modern-day question of how to understand conflict between two or more groups whose national identities are already firmly rooted...
...Pfaff and Ignatieff also overlook the fact that "civic" nationalism has a cultural component...
...She does not address how these national ideals became diffused to the masses or why national minorities have held on to their identity, despite powerful economic and political incentives to join larger nations...
...If we focus on territorial nations rather than immigrants we can see that nationalism has been a constant factor of twentieth-century history...
...When writing please note where you saw the notice about the study...
...The American government does require immigrants to swear allegiance to the Constitution, but it also requires them to learn the English language and American history...
...But the ability to make these choices depends on "the presence of a cultural context," so that individual liberty is dependent on membership in a cultural community...
...Given the centrality of the state to modern life, a group without such language rights will face enormous pressures to assimilate...
...Why shouldn't the Kurds be happy to be members of the Turkish nation...
...It banned the speaking of Indian languages in school and forced Puerto Rican and Hawaiian schools to use English rather than Spanish or Hawaiian...
...So na130 • DISSENT Books tionalism will not arise if immigrant groups are guaranteed equal civil and political rights...
...Peru and Brazil, for example, are extraordinarily multiethnic societies, granting equal citizenship to whites, blacks, Indians, and Asians...
...What matters are not symbols, but the facts on the ground—whether a national minority has sufficient control over decisions regarding language, education, immigration, and economic development to ensure its long-term viability...
...An immigrant group will adopt a nationalist agenda only if it is prevented from integrating into the mainstream society, through mandatory segregation and legal discrimination...
...136 • DISSENT Books national cultures...
...The violence in Kurdistan—one of the longest-running nationalist conflicts in the world—is not ethnic exclusion, but the forcible inclusion of a national minority into a larger national group...
...Tamir starts from the liberal assumption that people are capable of making autonomous choices about their aims in life...
...Since Indians will be treated as equal citizens of the American nation, just as Kurds will be equal citizens of the Turkish nation, what harm is done by abolishing their separate institutions and forcing them to join the larger nation...
...Dennis Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses (third edition), Transaction Publishers, 1995...
...Consider the fate of Indian tribes and Chicanos in the American southwest...
...But her argument is not very clear...
...Pfaff offers no explanation of this...
...And learning a common language and shared history helps ensure that immigrants are not disadvantaged in the mainstream economy or polity...
...Indeed, as Ernest Gellner noted, once we recognize the inevitable links between state and culture, the question is not so much why nationalist movements arise, but why there aren't more of them...
...WINTER • 1995 • 137...
...Princeton University Press, 1993...
...The exact form of self-determination, she argues, is not important...
...Tamir's theory provides no way to resolve these conflicts, in part because she provides no clear basis for judging whether nationalist politics are a necessity to be minimized or a virtue to be promoted...
...The problem is precisely its attempt to force Kurds to see themselves as Turks...
...They are multilingual citizens of the world whose ambitions took them beyond their countries' borders, and for whom borders are largely irrelevant...
...They are rarely satisfied with individual civil and political rights...
...To treat ethnic exclusiveness as the sole, or even main, source of nationalist conflict is a striking mistake...
...For further informatin, contact Prof...
...This aggression is often rationalized precisely on the grounds that the majority nation is nonethnic...
...We will pay a fee for any material used...
...Pfaff and Ignatieff treat nationalism as a matter of either political principle (civic nationalism) or ethnic descent (ethnic nationalism...
...There are few examples in this century of national minorities—that is, national groups who share a state with larger national groups— voluntarily assimilating into the larger society...
...In most nationalist conflicts over devolution of powers, boundaries, political representation, language rights, and so on, the ambitions of nationalists far exceed what is required to ensure the continued existence of the nation as a distinct society...
...After all, the common culture that American immigrants must integrate into is capacious, leaving ample room for the expression of a particular ethnic or religious identity...
...Elites traditionally tried to dissociate themselves as much as possible from "the plebs" or "the rabble...
...Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993...
...Ignatieff an expatriate Canadian living in England...
...Greenfeld does touch on this issue at the end of her book...
...Modern economies required a literate, educated work force, which in turn required integrating the lower classes into a common culture, through standardized public education...
...Simon and Schuster, 1993...
...And it is only half-true of immigrants...
...This is obviously false of native-born Americans, whose citizenship has nothing to do with their political beliefs...
...21.00, cloth...
...Cultural membership is a precondition of autonomous moral 134 • DISSENT Books choices...
...Ignatieff's book includes an account of his journeys to Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Ukraine, Quebec, Germany, and Ulster, and his talks with the people affected, from workers and students to nationalist rebels and government ministers...
...She says that the "yearning for self-determination" is to see political institutions as "carriers of the national identity...
...The explicit aim was to make these groups see themselves as members of the American nation, not as members of a separate and self-governing nation...
...Ethnic nationalism is exclusive, civic nationalism is inclusive...
...But insofar as both civic and ethnic nationalisms are cultural phenomena, any plausible account of national identity must examine people's attachment to their culture, which Pfaff and Ignatieff largely ignore...
...Mitchell Cohen, The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and the Hidden God, Princeton University Press, 1994...
...How then did they come to identify with the people...
...In my view, it is a mistake to make a virtue out of necessity...
...They know that this uprooting will only be successful if they adapt to their new country, including learning its language and customs...
...These variations are crucial to understanding why some nationalisms are peaceful, liberal, and democratic, while others are xenophobic, authoritarian, and expansionist...
...Pfaff and Ignatieff are right to insist on the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism...
...For an explanation of nationalism, however, readers must look elsewhere...
...The great virtue of Yael Tamir's book—one of the few full-length philosophical discussions of nationalism—is that she tackles this question head on...
...BLOOD AND BELONGING: JOURNEYS INTO THE NEW NATIONALISM, by Michael Ignatieff...
...The inadequacy of the immigrant model for national minorities is clear even in North America...
...If it lacks these rights and powers, its long-term viability is in grave jeopardy...
...Moreover, states often encourage immigrants (or migrants from other parts of the country) to settle in lands traditionally held by national minorities, reducing them to a minority even within their historic territory...
...Both Ignatieff and Pfaff argue that only civic nationalism is compatible with liberalism, democracy, and peace...
...Yet they all increase the public expression of the national culture and promote national identification with the state...
...Please contact Emily Shapiro at Riverside Film Productions, 132 W. 21st Street, NY, NY, 10011, Tel...
...Lewis A. Coser, ed., On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination, by Everett C. Hughes, the University of Chicago Press, 1994...
...Similarly, both misinterpret the nature of nationalist conflict...
...To be sure, the disintegration of the state made violence more likely, by leaving groups at each other's mercy...
...She argues that national identity has remained strong in the modern era because its emphasis on the importance of "the people" provides a source of dignity to all individuals, whatever their class...
...But that is not true of non-immigrant minorities—groups whose historic homeland has been incorporated into a larger state, through colonization, conquest, or voluntary federation...
...For this reason, the appearance of these four books is welcome...
...They say that membership in a civic nation is based, not on descent or culture, but on allegiance to the political principles of democracy and freedom...
...On this view, political arrangements "should reflect the unique character and draw on the history, the culture, the language, and at times the religion of the national group, thereby enabling its members to regard it as their own...
...Nicolaus Mills, ed., Arguing Immigration: The Debate Over the Changing Face of America, Simon and Schuster, 1994...
...Greenfeld reminds us of the contingent origins of nations, but she doesn't explain their tenacious persistence...
...Confronted by nationalists who care deeply about borders, and indeed who often wish to redraw them so as to create smaller political units, many cosmopolitan liberals feel threatened and confused...
...Robert Heilbroner, Visions of the Future: The Distant Past, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, Oxford University Press, 1995...
...The weakness of their explanations for the tenacity of national identity should not be surprising...
...For the historical origins of nationalism, Liah Greenfeld's book is a useful starting point...
...Unfortunately, much of what they offer on nationalism obscures as much as it reveals...
...This is particularly true of Michael Ignatieff 's Blood and Belonging and William Pfaff's The Wrath of Nations...
...and shared membership in a culture promotes a sense of belonging and relationships of mutual recognition...
...12.00, paper...
...Sean Wilentz and Paul E. Johnson, The Kingdom of Matthias, Oxford University Press, 1994...
...But although the interviews are interesting, Ignatieff's analysis of the events or feelings he encounters is seriously flawed...
...194 pp...
...They want self-government, either through regional autonomy or complete secession...
...He is a good interviewer, and their stories are often compelling...
...The point is that both ethnic and civic nationalisms have a cultural component...
...At the heart of both books is the distinction between "ethnic" and "civic" nationalism...
...Civic nations can be military dictatorships as easily as liberal democracies...
...For the same reason, they provide no real explanation of why people value their national identity...
...This is true even of proponents of a more "multicultural" America, since they are primarily demanding greater accommodation of ethnic identity within mainstream institutions...
...Tamir is an Israeli philosopher, and the book reflects her attempt to reconcile Zionist convictions with the liberal belief in individual rights and personal autonomy...
...Decisions regarding immigration and naturalization also affect the viability of national cultures...
...The argument here is not about the survival of the culture, but about the desire for political affirmation of self-identity and the desire to have a sense of ownership of government through one's nation...
...Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, University of Notre Dame Press, 1994...
...Moreover, unlike liberals in the nineteenth century or the 1950s, liberals today no longer are confident that history is on the side of cosmopolitanism...
...But (as she admits), this doesn't explain why any particular national identity is important, or why people aren't willing to abandon their original identity for another national identity that also would guarantee them dignity...
...To understand this, we need a clearer account of why national identity matters to people...
...LIBERAL NATIONALISM, by Yael Tamir...
...22.00, cloth...
...The result is an impressive but also daunting work of scholarship...
...Tamir then argues that expressing one's cultural identity requires some degree of "national self-determination...
...Since national majorities have historically been very reluctant to accept the demands of national minorities, the result is long-standing national divisions, sometimes flaring into violence...
...Her narrative ends at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by which time national ideals had been entrenched in the five countries she examines...
...Yet, she notes, this raises a puzzle, for nations are defined in terms of "the people" —the mass of population in a territory, including the members of different classes and occupations...
...But that is clearly wrong...
...In places, Tamir implies that state involvement is simply unavoidable...
...The problem is not that Turkey refuses to accept Kurds as Turkish citizens...
...This, she argues, does not require that each nation have its own sovereign "nation-state," which is in any event impossible...
...If a national group has full language rights and control over immigration, education, and resource development policy, then its long-term viability is secured...
...In short, although there are virtually no cases of immigrants becoming nationalists, there are also few recent cases of national minorities accepting assimilation...
...Being able to express one's cultural identity is important for many reasons...
...Some nations define their culture in ethnic and religious terms, others do not...
...The boundaries of state and nation rarely if ever coincide perfectly, so viewing the state as the possession of a particular national group can only alienate WINTER • 1995 • 135 Books minority groups...
...These books do tell us something about the psychology of cosmopolitan liberals at the end of the twentieth century...
...Pfaff is an expatriate American columnist for the International Herald Tribune living in France...
...It's essential to see that this aggressive expansionism was quite consistent with civic nationalism...
...Queries For a study of the persistence and change of political attitudes and commitments I would like to hear from people who at any time in their lives sympathized with either the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, Vietnam, Sandinista Nicaragua, or other similar systems...
...Turkey refuses to accept that Kurds are a separate national group (the government calls them "mountain Turks"), and until 1990 banned the use of the Kurdish language in an attempt to coercively assimilate the Kurds...
...I suspect that only specialists will want to wade through the twenty pages detailing the various orders of the French aristocracy or the nine-page synopsis of an obscure work by the German Romantic Carl Moritz...
...After all, the aim was to turn Indians and native Hawaiians into American citizens, with the same rights as other American citizens...
...If people can collectively express their religious identity through freedom of association while still maintaining a strict separation of church and state, why shouldn't we maintain a separation of state and nation...
...In short, there are many ways that government decisions play a crucial role in sustaining Recent and Forthcoming Books by Dissent Editors Paul Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, Delacorte, 1994...
...Tamir begins by noting that nations—civic or ethnic—are cultures that provide their members with meaningful ways of life across the full spectrum of human activity (economic, political, educational, recreational, religious, and so on...
...This is a familiar distinction, but Ignatieff and Pfaff badly misinterpret it...
...In fact, nationalist conflict is often caused by attempts by civic nationalists to forcibly incorporate national minorities...
...Yet there is nothing "necessarily democratic" about them...
...These legal requirements of gaining citizenship are intended to integrate immigrants into the common culture...
...Tamir would like states to be more explicit about affirming a national identity—for example, entrenching an official language in their constitution...
...Ignatieff explains the affirmation of national identity in Eastern Europe as a response to the power vacuum created by the collapse of communism...
...Immigrants choose to leave their original culture and homeland and move to a new country...
...Consider the Kurds...
...But even if people have such a primordial desire, why does this take the form of a bond to their national community, rather than their church, city, or workplace...
...24.95, cloth...
...So if national minorities do not wish to assimilate, they must struggle to gain those rights and powers, either through secession or regional autonomy...
...Ignatieff also misinterprets the relation between nationalism and democracy...
...Immigration can strengthen a national group, so long as the numbers are regulated and immigrants are encouraged (or required) to learn the nation's language and history...
...Ethnic" nations, like Germany, define membership in terms of shared descent, so that people of a different racial or ethnic group (for example, Turkish guest-workers in Germany) cannot acquire citizenship no matter how long they live in the country...
...Decisions about public holidays and school curricula also typically reflect and help perpetuate a particular national culture...
...The failure of liberalism to understand nationalism is directly related to its failure to acknowledge these unavoidable connections between state and culture...
...256 pp...
...The myth that the state can simply be based on democratic principles, without supporting a particular national identity or culture, has made it impossible to see why national minorities are so keen on forming or maintaining political units in which they are a majority...
...Why isn't freedom of speech and association sufficient to allow people to express their cultural identity...
...What matters is that the culture have some "public expression...
...Groups that are incorporated into a larger state not because they left their homeland and moved there, but because their homeland was conquered or annexed, often develop a distinct national consciousness, even though they may be free to assimilate...
...Over time, individuals can put these cultural contexts themselves in question and choose which culture they wish to live in...
...They do not think of themselves as separate nations alongside the mainstream society and do not seek to establish their own autonomous homelands and selfgoverning political institutions...
...She rightly argues that the state cannot avoid expressing a cultural identity when it adopts official languages and public holidays...
...But if immigrants in a multination state integrate into the majority culture, then national minorities will be increasingly outnumbered and so increasingly powerless in political life...
...In each case, the idea of "the nation" served the interests of a particular elite group— such as the French and Russian nobility in their battle with absolutist monarchs, or the German intellectuals in their desire for social acceptance...
...263 pp...
...Pfaff says that national identity reflects a "primordial" desire for "community...
...Why is cultural membership important...
...Instead, the right to develop one's national culture can be ensured by autonomy within multination states, through mechanisms such as federalism or consociational democracy...
...They define membership in terms of participation in a common culture, open to all, rather than on ethnic grounds...
...These are the sorts of groups giving rise to nationalist conflict in Europe...
...The shift from an ethnic to a cultural conception of the nation in these cases has been a slow and painful one, but it is now firmly entrenched in citizenship laws and public opinion...
...Ignatieff calls these "ethnic" nationalisms...
...Of course, the way culture is interpreted varies from nation to nation...
...Cultural nationalism defines the nation in terms of a common culture, and the aim of the nationalist movement is to protect the survival of that culture...
...Unfortunately, since Pfaff and Ignatieff downplay the cultural component of nationalism, they shed no light on the variations in how culture is interpreted...
...This is not a criticism of her book, which succeeds admirably in the task it sets...
...Civic nationalism in the United States has historically justified the conquering and colonizing of national minorities and the 132 • DISSENT Books coercive imposition of English-language courts and schools...
...But it would be an even more serious mistake to ignore the ways in which states necessarily privilege particular national cultures...
...Both the Quebecois and the Flemish accept immigrants as full members of the nation, so long as they learn the language and history of the society...
...They present themselves as having seen through the myths of nationalism, but they propagate their own mythical conception of civic nationalism as inherently good, peaceful, and democratic...
...These groups resisted (often violently) the assimilationist policies, and today a measure of self-government is granted to each group...
...The same process has occurred in America...
...According to Greenfeld, the national idea first arose among elites, rather than the middle or lower classes...
...But it is unclear why liberals should see the political expression of national identity as a virtue to be promoted...
...I am interested in both the sources of the original attraction these systems exercised and the reassessments of such attitudes in more recent years...
...Dennis Wrong, The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society, Free Press, 1994...
...Yet nationalism remains poorly understood, and Western leaders have been continually caught off guard by nationalist movements abroad, or indeed within their borders...
...Each book has some redeeming features...
...These books provide revealing examples of the sense of anxiety and confusion engulfing cosmopolitan liberals today...
...WINTER • 1995 • 133 Books Some recent theorists have argued that "nation-building" was a functional requirement of modernization...
...The state must be seen as equally belonging to all people who are governed by it, regardless of their nationality...
...212-242-3005...
...Following Anthony Smith, we can call these "organizational cultures," to signify that they form institutionally integrated societies, not simply lifestyle subgroups or advocacy movements within a society...
...Membership in the American nation, just as in the Quebecois nation, involves participation in a common culture...
...THE WRATH OF NATIONS: CIVILIZATION AND THE FURIES OF NATIONALISM, by William Pfaff...
...However, virtually every claim they make about this distinction—and its relationship to culture, violence, and democracy—is overstated...
...Pfaff has some interesting things to say about the deleterious impact of nationalist ideas in Asia and Africa...
...Civic" nations, like the United States, are in principle open to anyone who lives in the territory...
...A striking fact of twentieth-century history is the tenacity with which ethno-national groups have maintained their distinct identity, institutions, and desire for self-government...
...They automatically acquire citizenship by descent, and cannot be stripped of it if they turn out to be fundamentalists or fascists...
...Hence the state should serve an "expressive" role, actively reflecting a particular national identity in its symbols and institutions...
...For example, Ignatieff equates "ethnic" nationalism with "cultural" nationalism...
...The value of national identity, then, is tied to the value of cultural membership...
...Tamir's last chapter is entitled "Making A Virtue Out of Necessity," which captures the two strands in her thought...
...The American government forcibly incorporated Indian tribes, native Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans into the American state, and then attempted to coercively assimilate each group into the common American culture...
...Greenfeld is addressing the question of why feudal elites abandoned their traditional prenational identity for a national identity...
...Since Tamir defines nations as the bearers of distinct cultures, she construes the right to national self-determination as the right to ensure the continued existence and development of that distinct culture...
...But even in a country like the United States, which avoids this symbolic trapping of nationalism, the problem for national minorities remains...
...of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003...
...Tamir's defense of nationalist politics rests heavily on this claim regarding the need for the "public expression" of a culture...
...This is true even in states that consciously avoid an "expressive" role...
...The Quebecois, Indian tribes, Puerto Ricans, and native Hawaiians have all fought for (and gained) some measure of selfgovernment and local autonomy...
...They argue that ethnic nationalism is the cause of nationalist conflict, because of its ethnic exclusiveness...
...He claims that civic nationalism is "necessarily democratic, since it vests sovereignty in all of the people...
...Immigrant groups rarely give rise to nationalist movements...
...Greenfeld tracks the rise of the word "nation" and its correlates ("people," "country") with meticulous care, showing when they came into usage in each country, by whom, for what purposes...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
