A Tom Nairn Essay
The following appeared in The Observer. The Guardian (Pre-1997 Fulltext); Manchester; Nov 12, 1995
Nationalism is not the enemy. The threat to world peace
comes from a failure of democracy, not old ethnic allegiances.
Last weekend, while Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv, Ernest
Gellner died suddenly in Prague. I would love to have known what the founder
of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism would have thought of the Israeli
leader's untimely death and the forces of Zionism that brought it about.
I am one of many researchers in this area who feel the loss of Gellner
deeply and personally. He was a lovable, contentious man who dominated an
essentially contentious field of thought. Three months ago, when the
University of Edinburgh decided to adopt a one-year postgraduate course
called Nationalism Studies, he warned me it might mean trouble and he was
right.
`Master of Nats Degree!' squawked the Express, predicting political storms
over the appalling waste of public money. The award of a parchment was
itself clearly offensive. It is one thing to teach classes in the subject
(as Professor Anthony Smith and his colleagues have been doing for years at
Gellner's old university, the London School of Economics), but quite another
to award a degree in infamy. The Daily Mail pointed out with due indignation
that yours truly, a man with a Marxist past, would soon be compounding
infamy by lecturing students on nationalism. `Little more than political
propaganda at public expense,' snarled Tory MP Phil Gallie.
The main assumption behind such wildly deranged reactions is that one single
genie, `nationalism', was released from history's bottle around 1989, and is
now stalking (or soon will be stalking) everyone's land. The threat is to
the whole world or, more portentously, to the International Order. However,
the attention tends persistently to be on locations such as Bosnia and
Rwanda, or on personalities like Vladimir Zhirinovsky (rather than, say, on
Slovenia and Eritrea, or Vaclav Havel).
Politics are, so to speak, defaulting back to nationality after the blessed
Cold War era when they were regulated by `-isms', and therefore
intelligible. Universal blueprints have given way to the old ethnic
patchwork of homo sapiens. Unless restrained and shown the error of their
native ways, people will revert to their true selves, which now tends to
mean as aborigines of whichever culture, faith or blood group they were born
into. The true content of the postmodern turns out to be the prehistoric.
Gellner used to call the above the Dark Gods theory. Courtesy of W.B. Yeats,
another good title might be the Rough Beast theory: whoever is out there
slouching towards us out of the post-2000 darkness, he is mean, he is
backward, and it is time he was chained up again. There is only one problem
with this popular view: does he exist at all? Gellner denounced the Rough
Beast as a delusion in the 1960s, the time when he laid the foundations for
a modern understanding of nationalism by pointing out that it is not really
about the past. It is about the difficult transition to modernity, a process
in which people often have to recreate a more suitable past for themselves.
To become modern (or postmodern) beings, they need a new identity, and to
get that they must re-imagine their community as being (and always having
been) worthy of the change.
Thus new nations and pasts are `invented' " but not by whim or arbitrarily.
However cruel and uneven, modern development is inescapable and all
societies are called to opt into it in their own way " predominantly the way
of separate or independent growth. Where such development is abruptly
reimposed " as in eastern Europe after 1989 " nationalism becomes as
inevitable as it was at earlier stages of modernisation.
A good example is the one best covered by recent journalistic comment.
BBC2's amazing five-part series, The Death of Yugoslavia, recently gave non-
specialists a unique chance to look back over the intricate causation of the
conflict in Bosnia. The earlier coverage had been inevitably governed by
preconceived ideas, and notably by the Dark God stereotype of nationalism.
Now, the protagonists have been allowed to speak for themselves. Worried
about judgment day, they rushed before the cameras to spill their own
version of the beans. By skilful editing and combining these interviews with
news or archive footage, the programmes have, without obtrusive commentary,
furnished a context for a more informed judgment of the post-Yugoslavia
wars.
What emerged most plainly is indeed how utterly useless the Dark God theory
is as any sort of explanation. Nationality politics were bound to reassert
themselves after the failure of a multi-ethnic state. However, what made
this reversion to nature catastrophic was not nationalism as such, but the
preceding and continuing failure of democracy. The ethnic brand of
nationalism triumphed because the civic one (Gellner's preferred model in
his last book, Conditions of Liberty) was scarcely given a chance.
Many in Yugoslavia may have wanted a multi-national society to continue, but
for years practically none of them had had even a vestigial belief in the
political or economic apparatus administering it. When the latter foundered,
the result was not liberated ethnic nature revenging itself on a
multi-ethnic old regime; it has been far more like the old regime obtaining
a savage posthumous revenge over its constituent nations. Gellner was not
denying the existence of rough nationalistic beasts. His own Czech-Jewish
family had suffered the attentions of an earlier generation of them in the
1930s. However, he enjoyed nothing so much as ridiculing the `fakelore' they
use as an alibi, the myths of blood and pure descent. It is simply untrue
that nationality was `repressed' under Titoism, any more than it was in the
old USSR or other parts of the Communist imperium. A kind of castrated
nationalism was, if anything, over-cultivated in a cultural sense, carefully
segregated from politics and economics. Visits to the Peoples' Democracies
were never rendered hellish by uniform Marxism and statistics alone:
interminable folk-dancers, National Museum visits and orations in carefully
resurrected national tongues all played their part. In that context,
`ethnicity' acquired a quite specific meaning which it is foolish to
generalise or identify with humanity. The eastern dictatorships `saved' it
as something harmless and compensatory; when they abruptly dissolved it was
left intact, but now, without a democratic leaven, anything but harmless.
So the Dark God's return was showy and sanguinary " but also transient, and
not necessarily typical of the new way of the world. Because nationalism
remains inseparable from modernisation, it does not follow that its ethnic
strain must remain dominant, or that Yigal Amir, Rabin's assassin, is a
portent of the coming millennium. In Gellnerian terms, the eastern drama as
a whole appears as one specific and transient conjuncture within what used
to be the Socialist World " a move from ideological autocracy towards
(eventually) assorted forms of democratic-national identity. As in the
ex-USSR, the Balkan threat has come where autocracy did not give way to a
new nation-state project, but used a retrograde version of ethnicity to
maintain itself in life.
Gellner's office in Prague looked northwards towards Zizkov Hill, a view
which encapsulated the things that most interested and infuriated him. It
was dominated by the Czech National Memorial and the outsize equestrian
statue of the blind Bohemian military hero, General Jan Zizkov. Gellner
understood nationalism so well partly because he was brought up in it, and
returned home to it in the year of the Czech-Slovak split (of which he
heartily approved).
The National Memorial had also been used by the Communists to pretend they
were the true inheritors of Czech nationhood. Klement Gottwald, the `Czech
Lenin', was embalmed there for some years after his death in 1953, until the
air-conditioning failed and the mouldy cadaver had to be furtively smuggled
out. So from where Ernest sat (occasionally cursing his portable
word-processor), there was a daily reminder of another example of how vulgar
autocracy, fake ethnicity and Stalin's big stick had fused together to form
a uniquely dire parody of modernity.
I always felt that what mattered most about modern history was in that room.
The thought of never entering it again, never hearing Ernest's walking stick
thumping up the corridor, or the latest low jokes about Socialism, Slovaks
or Californian professors, fills me with desolation. One consolation is that
he seems to have been irrepressible and in no way diminished, right to the
end. Certainly, conversations last year showed the same mixture of
disrespect, malicious humour, deep insight and spiky, somewhat conservative,
rectitude as 20 years before.
As for the academic study of nationalism, those trying to develop it along
the lines he established so well always felt it was a kind of personal
tribute to him, in Edinburgh as in Prague. Even more so now. His influence
has already effaced that of the petty critics and diehards I mentioned to
begin with.
Tom Nairn, an author and journalist, lectures on sociology at Edinburgh
University.
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