Imperial Twilight, Dawn of Nations

The first shot of the Ukrainian War was fired in 1775 and heard around the world almost simultaneously with Brexit’s earliest intimations then appearing over the horizon. The fusillade and the portent of rebellious Massachusetts exacerbated a multiplicity of antecedent factors unleashing parallel processes of imperial disintegration and proliferation of nation-states that over two and a half centuries reordered the exercise of international power and authority under the dominant doctrinal allegiance not of communism, anarchism, syndicalism, democracy, capitalism, socialism, liberalism, nihilism, terrorism, theocratic utopianism or any other less or more ephemeral creed or ideology, but of nationalism, strengthened, multiplied and expanded carried on the shoulders of the nation-states of the modern world.

Writing in 1991, Sir Isaiah Berlin asserted that it was not an overstatement to say that nationalism “is one of the most powerful, in some regions the most powerful, single movement at work in the world today; and some of those who failed to foresee this development have paid for it with their liberty, indeed with their lives”.[1] This comment has been confirmed by the appalling violence that during these past two and a half centuries has attended the political achievements brought about by the disintegration of empires and the birth of nations. The Bersiap killings during the Indonesian National Revolution of 1945-46 claimed over 30,000 lives. The November 1945 battle of Surabaya engaged 120,000 Indonesians fighting against 20,000 British and Dutch troops at the cost of 1300 Indonesians and 600 European casualties. Algerian independence claimed the lives of 28,000 French soldiers, 6000 European civilians, and from 300,000 to 1,500,000 Algerians. The United States succeeded in defeating the threatened secession by the Confederate states at the cost of 618,000 casualties.

In 1783 the thirteen rebellious American states emerged victorious from the formative struggle to abandon their imperial cradle and crawl into a world every known region of which was directly or indirectly under dynastic imperial suzerainty and the word international had not even been invented.[2] Things did not change much in the aftermath of the Napoleonic debacle when the 1815 Congress of Vienna was attended by over 200 delegations representing dukedoms, cantons, marquisates, kingdoms, margraviates, electorates, abbeys and principalities most of which had neither voice nor vote and the formal document that remade the international boundaries was signed by half a dozen statesmen representing the might and disposition of an imperial moment in which the presence of sovereign nation-states was scarcely seen, heard or acknowledged.[3]

Eric Hobsbawm estimated that in 1875, “in terms of international politics, i.e., of the calculations of governments and foreign ministries of Europe, the number of entities treated as sovereign states anywhere in the world was rather modest”. He then proposed a listing including such improbable candidates as Austria-Hungary, Morocco, Ethiopia, Liberia and the Ottoman empire alongside the less improbable collection of Latin American republics.[4] A more realistic indication of the prevailing imperialist dominance over the small number of sovereign nation-states is obtained by adding to Hobsbawm’s list the several fully-fledged imperial claimants de jure or de facto that he rather ambiguously includes as “sovereign nations” implying that they are not empires, but nation-states, such as Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, the United States of America, Germany, Russia, Italy, Persia, China and Japan that were soon to lose all their colonies and imperial possessions.[5] The number of nation-states then tended to accelerate and in 1920, at the conclusion of the Great War, forty-one modern nation-states appended their signatures to the Geneva Covenant that gave birth to the League of Nations; a number that increased to fifty-one when the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco in 1945, and 198 at present with eager aspirants lining up in Catalonia, Ukraine, Quebec, Kurdistan, Scotland, the Basque Country and other regions. What gives these numbers an especially weighty significance is the clarity of the nationalist quest and the immediate and apparently satisfying finality of its achievement. The means seem almost invariably to justify the end which is the attainment of the unqualified status of nation-state. The zeal and conviction of those who are prepared to risk their lives at the barricades is clear, what they demand is independence, even when all they will achieve is, as the Cuban revolutionary rhetoric proudly and loudly announced, the inalienable right to make their own mistakes.

As Isaiah Berlin observed, it would be incautious to ignore the political vitality responsible for this unprecedented cultural and social phenomenon that so fundamentally transformed international relations even securing a universality beyond the reach of Antonine or Spanish Counter-Reformation imperialisms. It is therefore of much interest that, with only the two unheralded exceptions of Moses Hess and Lord Acton, none of the towering intellects of the social disciplines predicted that human society would embrace so enthusiastically the creation of nation-states.[6] Nor was this considered particularly important by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intelligentsia, whose universalism probably owed as much to their traditional linguistic dependence on Latin and Greek as to the contemporary circumstance of imperial multicultural achievements. The moment was succinctly and accurately described by David Gress when he noted that “Nationalism was the social force that was not supposed to happen.”[7] Appalled by the proximity of the Seven Years War and inspired by impeccable moral principles and over-optimistic understandings of the human condition, the intelligentsia tended to be hostile to nationalisms, regarding them as principal obstacles to their plans for the elimination of war. Some of the best-known exponents of this approach were the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who advocated the drastic reduction of armies and elimination of imperial possessions as basic contributions to the achievement of perpetual peace on earth, with Kant adding that these policies would open the way for the implementation of the natural dictates of the human condition that would solve the problem by creating a world citizenship. At first Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his disciples followed the Enlightenment thinkers in deeming nationalism an expendable obstacle to their internationalism, a form of false consciousness that together with religion and parliamentary democracy would disappear with the overthrow of capitalism. Some national differences might remain, but they would be ethnic or local characteristics, unimportant compared with the worldwide solidarity of the working class.[8] The violent uprisings of the European mid-century prompted a reconsideration and the First Communist International was convened in 1864 followed by a Second in 1889, when L’Internationale was adopted as official anthem with lyrics making the new direction very clear,

C’est la lutte finale

Groupons-nous, et demain

L’Internationale

Sera le genre humain

A third Communist International was convened in 1919, still upholding the internationalist cause notwithstanding the widespread failure of proletarian solidarity to stem the massive numbers of volunteers and conscripts who marched to fight in the Great War. Notwithstanding Stalin’s opposition to international adventures in general and Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” ideology in particular, communist internationalism reached a high tide in 1936 with the organisation of the International Brigades that recruited over 35,000 volunteers in fifty-three countries to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Trotsky’s internationalism was already damaged by the catastrophic failure of the 1919–1923 uprisings in Hungary, Slovakia, Bavaria, the Ruhr and Bulgaria, and Franco’s victory in Spain confirmed Stalin’s faith in the practicality of his “socialism in one country” approach. The resulting change of direction was swift and dramatic; Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico by an NKVD agent, the Comintern was dissolved and, most symbolically significant, a new anthem was commissioned for the USSR and L’Internationale formally demoted.

The violent intent of the revolutionary internationalisms differed essentially from the motivations of the numerous successful supranational initiatives that prospered and multiplied over the past two centuries probably because unlike many of their twenty-first-century NGO progeny, they refrained from encroaching on matters affecting the independence and sovereignty of the nation-states. Foremost among these are the Missions to Seamen (1856), the International Telegraph Union (1865), the Friends Foreign Missions Association (1868), the Universal Postal Union (1874), the YMCA (1844), the YWCA (1855), the Red Cross (1863), the Salvation Army (1878), Caritas (1897), Lions International (1917) and Boy Scouts (1908). Even closer to the Kantian ideal and with commendable good intentions the Ghent Institute of International Law (1873) and the Hague 1899 Peace Conference appeared for a brief moment to be moving towards fulfilling the hopes of the sage by abolishing war using morally immaculate means such as arbitrations and armaments limitations, only for these projects to be dashed ominously by the brutal eloquence of reality when scarcely a few weeks after the conclusion of the conference Great Britain went to war against the South African Boers.   

In his now famous conversazioni paper on “The First Person Plural”, Roger Scruton asserts that “Political order … depends upon the existence of a community that identifies itself as ‘we’.”[9] He then adds that “the first person plural is the precondition of democratic politics, and must be safeguarded at all costs, since the price of losing it, I believe, is social disintegration”.[10] But Ernest Gellner goes beyond, describes nationalism as “a philosophy of the book” and further, that it is essentially “the general imposition of a high culture on society … It means the generalized diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technical communication.”[11] This is not easy to accept because, of all the internationalist doctrines, beliefs and ideologies, nationalism is the one that enters the arena without the encumbrance of venerable texts and the lettered approval of the contemporary intelligentsia. Supporters of economic and political liberalism can trace their conviction to readings of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman had to say on these subjects, while an adherence to Marxism-Leninism presupposes at least a modicum of familiarity with the writings of Marx and Lenin. The same can be asserted about Christian Democrats sheltering in academic groves hospitable to Jacques Maritain, or passionate ecologically correct anarchists assiduously studying the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Prince Kropotkin and Henry David Thoreau. Common to all these ideological alignments is the existence of printed guidance on the best way to address complex social, political, and economic problems of consequence.

Not so the nationalisms that from their earliest inception draw their sustenance from the overwhelmingly practical facts of birthing from that particular woman, on that particular soil, using that particular language, and embraced by that particular language and its myths, legends and folkloric shibboleths, all conditions largely corresponding to what the nineteenth century founding practitioners of the all-encompassing Geisteswissenschaften identified as crucial foundations of the traditional community then being obliterated by the relentless advance of an industrial modernity that was neither culture-specific nor haphazard, but responded to changes imposed by the influential Glorious and Industrial Revolutions of the English people. These major events pushed human society into an inexorable transition from traditional Gemeinschaft communities to modern Gesellschaft associations leaving behind forever the formative experience of millenarian pre-industrial existence when village life was comparable with that of stands of trees, with individuals being born, producing, consuming, procreating, dying and being buried within walking distance. Or as Tönnies explained, in Gemeinschaft human beings “remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors.” [12]

The dissipation of the sense of security, status clarity and expectations of the Gemeinschaft community had consequences and as industrial modernity progressed humanity endeavoured to fill the chasm with countless ingenious devices echoing the sociability of the lost community with sporting and social clubs, choral groups, craft societies, brass bands, gardening groups, guilds, less or more exotic cults, hobbies and political parties. The problem was that all these attempts are necessarily flawed by unrelieved partiality as each can only address a sliver of the vanished all-embracing Gemeinschaft imperative certainty of belonging. It is now clear that “in the modern nationalist age, national units are the preferred, favoured object of identification and willed adherence” [13], the only ones that can deliver what Scruton lucidly describes as the first person plural dimension of modern society emphatically located within a whole nation as bearer of sovereign and central object of loyalty and collective solidarity.[14] These robust echoes of a traditional community deeply rooted in the native soil are at the heart of the nation-states now exercising authority and power over every region of our minutely explored and mapped globe, each immensely proud of its flag, its national anthem, its very own soccer or basketball team, its historical heritage, constitutional arrangements, and national airline. More, in our modern world a home, a motorcar, or a piece of land cannot be purchased without documentation; a marriage is not possible without identity papers; boundaries cannot be crossed without a passport and an individual cannot legally exist without a birth certificate nor be legally deceased without another official certificate and all these and a myriad of other similar documents can only be legitimately issued by the nation-state. Vastly more important, each nation-state is peopled by citizens or subjects readily prepared to go to battle in defence of these distinctive and clearly perceived attributes and privileges of a secure fatherland. To deprive an individual citizen of documentation would bring matters disturbingly close to the sacramental strictures of Christian excommunication while distancing this unintended consequence very far indeed from Kant’s over-optimistic hopes of enlisting the natural inclinations of the human condition to abolish wars by creating a cosmopolitan world citizenship.

This all-encompassing nature of nationalisms has not been overlooked and Gellner

wheels in the big gun to remind us that just as “Durkheim taught that in religious worship society adores its own camouflaged image. In a nationalistic age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage.”[15] While even more incisively, Greenfeld asserts that “To say that nationalism is the modern religion has become a cliché” but adding that although it is an essentially secular form of consciousness, nationalism tends to “sacralize” the secular obscuring the importance of the transcendental concerns at the heart of great religions undermining their authority, concluding that “Though instrumental in the development of nationalism, religion now exists on its sufferance and serves mainly as a tool for the promotion of nationalist ends, not vice versa.”[16]

Complicating things further, it is possible that the disinclination of the nation-states to tolerate supra-national dominion or intrusion may be an unintended consequence of their formative egalitarian response to the often violent social and political disorder caused by the dissolution of the stratified traditional society. Such an experience may have generated a particular affinity with contemporary popular democratic aspirations and even, as Gellner indicates in his memorable quip, contribute to the new social reality “acclaimed as Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” which in fact turned out to be “Bureaucracy, Mobility and Nationality.” [17]

The world-wide prevalence of today’s nation-states is as clear as the disappearance of empires and the failure of latter-day pseudo-imperial attempts ranging from the USSR and Yugoslavia to the ramshackle bureaucratic European Union to rule over nations increasingly conscious of their democratic responsibility to attend to their independent governance and the defence of their sovereignty.

Transformations as immense as the one experienced by our world during the past two and a half centuries do not easily lend themselves to hasty conclusions or predictions. What seems probable is that the cacophony generated by one hundred and ninety-eight very active nation-states endeavouring independently to reorder their respective international circumstance voicing their national concerns and expectations, jockeying for positions of advantage, making and breaking accords and associations, loudly declaring loyalties, enmities and hesitations when confronted with a multiplicity of conflagrations will not cease overnight. This general disposition would appear to make it increasingly difficult for any imperial project to prosper making our time indeed one of twilight of empires and dawn of nations.

Claudio Véliz is Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and Emeritus Professor of History at Boston University.

[1] Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind, An Anthology of Essays, Eds, Henry Hardy & Roger Hausheer, London, 1997, p. 585; originally published as “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism”, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, New York, 1991.

[2] When changing reality proves unhelpful, language often comes to the rescue. Noting that neither the concept nor the appropriate term existed at the time of Lexington, Jeremy Bentham took the plunge and about 1780 mistakenly translated the ius gentium of the Romans as “international law” implying that the rules contained in it were sufficiently analogous to municipal law to justify the application of the term, Hidemi Suganami, “A Note on the Origin of the word international”, British Journal of International Studies, vol.4, No.3; also Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, London, 1977, pp. 35-36.

[3] The signatories were Prince Metternich on behalf of Austria-Hungary, Viscount Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, for Britain, Tsar Alexander for Russia, Prince Karl von Hardenberg for Prussia, the Marquis Gomez de Labrador for Spain and Prince de Talleyrand for France. Spain refused to sign in 1815, but relented and signed two years later.

[4] By 1815 seven Latin American countries had already declared their independence or were engaged in open war against Spain that without exception concluded with the final military victories of Maipú,(1818) in Chile, and Ayacucho,(1824) in Peru. Liberia is not included in Hobsbawm’s listing because of its dependence on a special relationship with the United States. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914, London, 1987, pp. 23-24.

[5] Morocco and Ethiopia were centenarian empires. As for the word imperialism, Hobsbawm notes that “it first became part of the political vocabulary during the 1890s in the course of the arguments about colonial conquest … that is when it acquired the economic dimension which, as a concept, it has never since lost. Emperors and empires were old, but imperialism was quite new. The word (which does not occur in the writings of Karl Marx, who died in 1883) first entered politics in Britain in the 1780s, and was still regarded as a neologism at the end of that decade.” Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, pp.59-60.

[6] Berlin observes that the only exception known to him is that of “the underrated Moses Hess, who, in 1862, in his book Rome and Jerusalem, affirmed that the Jews had the historic mission of uniting communism and nationality. But this was exhortation rather than prophecy, and the book remained virtually unread save by Zionists of a later day.” Berlin, Proper Study, pp. 587-588. This is slightly unfair to Lord Acton who in the 1860s wrote forcefully describing nationalism as the “most recent and unattractive offspring of democracy … its contempt for history and worship of the masses.”, but who did not anticipate the massive proliferation of the modern nation-state. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, A Study in Conscience and Politics, ICS, San Francisco, 1993, pp. 83-87.

[7] David Gress, From Plato to Nato. The Idea of the West and Its Opponents, New York, 1998, p. 319. 

[9] Roger Scruton, “The First Person Plural”, The Worth of Nations, The Boston, Melbourne, Oxford Conversazioni on Culture and Society, Boston University, 1993, p. 82.

[10] Roger Scruton, The Need for Nations, London, 2004, p. 10

[12] Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, London, 1972, pp. 74-76; Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887, Leipzig, 1935, trans Charles Loomis, Community and Society, New York, 1963, p. 192.

[13] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983, p. 54.

[14] About this, Liah Greenfeld forcefully writes that nationalism “subsumes related phenomena of national identity (or nationality) and consciousness, and collectivities (sic) based on them – nations … represent what may be called the “fundamental identity”, the one that is believed to define the very essence of the individual”, Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism and the Mind, Essays on Modern Culture, Oxford, 2006, pp.69-70.

[15] Gellner, Nations, pp. 56-57.

[16] Greenfeld, Nationalism, pp. 69, 91-92; J.R. Llobera, The God of Modernity, The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, London, 1994.

[17] Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book. The Structure of Human History, London, 1988, p. 211.