The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

56 The New York Review

Whose Nationalism?

Alan Ryan

Nationalism: A Short History
by Liah Greenfeld.
Brookings Institution,
152 pp., $24.99 (paper)

Reclaiming Patriotism
by Amitai Etzioni.
University of Virginia Press,
220 pp., $19.95

Why Nationalism
by Yael Tamir.
Princeton University Press,
205 pp., $24.95

In 1989, at the end of the cold war,
Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay on
“the end of history,” which he
expanded in 1992 into the best-
selling book of that name.^1 Even
then, skeptics were noisily dubi-
ous that history had come to an
end with the joint triumphs of lib-
eral democracy and a controlled
capitalist economy. Events proved
the skeptics right. Far from bring-
ing about an era of peaceful, if
boring, post-ideological politics,
the collapse of the Communist
bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989
and the Soviet Union in 1991 un-
leashed a surge of nationalist pas-
sion. The most alarming case for
European observers was the for-
mer Yugoslavia, which dissolved
into its component states, which
in turn were ravaged by genocidal
ethnic cleansing. It was as if the
ethnic hatreds of pre-1914 Eu-
rope had simply been repressed
after 1945 and then sprang back
into ugly life.
We perhaps should not have
been surprised. Decolonization in the
1950s and 1960s was driven more often
than not by movements of national
liberation, and even where these were
led by professed Marxists or marxisant
socialists, it was clear that nationalist
sentiments were what gave them mass
appeal. With the demise of the Soviet
Union and the discrediting of commu-
nism almost everywhere except China
and Cuba, what remains in the devel-
oping world is nationalism. Even in
China and Cuba, the Marxism seems
skin-deep and the nationalism heart-
felt. In Europe, nationalism had an evil
reputation after two world wars, which
explains a good deal of the impetus be-
hind the creation of the multinational
European Union. And yet most people
in most modern states have a strong
sense of national identity, even if it is
unclear just what constitutes it.
The three books under review have
one thing in common. They each re-
visit territory their authors have ex-
plored before, indeed a quarter of a
century before. Liah Greenfeld’s Na-
tionalism: A Short History returns to
themes she first discussed at greater
length in Nationalism: Five Roads to
Modernity (1992). The earlier book
received mixed reviews, but the ana-
lytical categories that she employed
have stood up well. Amitai Etzioni is
a familiar figure in the communitar-
ian movement, the loose grouping of
philosophers and social theorists who

emphasize our indebtedness to soci-

ety and repudiate what they see as the

extreme individualism of many forms

of liberalism. Unlike some communi-

tarians who see liberalism only as the

solvent of community cohesion, Etzi-

oni has always called himself a liberal

communitarian; his earlier work in-

sisted that we must not simply sacrifice

individual rights in the name of social

solidarity, and now he calls himself a

patriot rather than a nationalist.^2 Yael

Tamir published Liberal Nationalism

in 1993. She was one of the founders of

the Israeli Peace Now movement and

is a committed social democrat. Just

what liberal nationalism is remains a

question to be answered, but it is at any

rate clear that it is not “blood and soil”

nationalism, even though Tamir fol-

lows Isaiah Berlin in emphasizing the

importance of our attachments to place

and the indispensability of possessing a

culture we can call our own.

Greenfeld’s short history gets off to a

good counterintuitive start by invoking

five of Shakespeare’s historical plays,

beginning with Richard II and ending

with Richard III. Given Shakespeare’s

notorious unconcern with historical

accuracy, one might wonder what he

is doing in a sober book on national-

ism. The answer is that he is cited not

as an authority on the English civil

wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries, but as a voice expressing the

late- Elizabethan worldview: to know

what national sentiment was at the end

of the sixteenth century, read Shake-

speare. Greenfeld argues that the civil

wars had destroyed the old aristocracy,

leaving a vacuum of authority; filling

the vacuum was the task of a new na-

tional consciousness. The growth of

such a sentiment was not a given; it

might not have happened. Just what the

content of this new consciousness was,

besides a strong sense of the difference

between the English and all foreign-

ers, is not clear, but Greenfeld believes

it had powerful effects, of which the

most important was the creation of a

profoundly competitive spirit that en-

abled a small offshore island to take

on Spain, France, and other European

powers.

In Greenfeld’s view, the English

colonists took their national conscious-

ness to the future United States, which

would mean the English and American

varieties share the same quality of in-

dividualistic, civic nationalism. Most

importantly, nationalism brought with

it a sort of egalitarianism. National sen-

timent produced, or perhaps simply was

the expression, of a certain “we-ness.” If

all Englishmen shared the same national

identity, that was one way in which they

were all equal. It was the French rather

than the English who coined the term

“fraternity,” but the phenomenon was

initially English. We may doubt that

Henry V in real life addressed his sol-

diers as a “band of brothers,” but the

phrase evidently meant something to

Shakespeare’s audience, as it did to

viewers of Laurence Olivier’s film ver-

sion of Henry V during World War II.

How did the spirit of nationalism

spread? The greater part of National-

ism is devoted to answering that ques-

tion. The first port of call is naturally

France, where the modern spirit of na-

tionalism is often thought to have been

born in the heat of revolution. Green-

feld’s account reverses the familiar view:

certainly the French Revolution height-

ened national feeling, but it did not

beget it. That was a longer and slower

process: first, early in the eighteenth

century came an admiration, grudging

though it may have been, for English po-

litical and economic development, then

an Anglophobic reaction, when French

pride demanded that the English be

taken down a peg or two, as they were

during the American Revolution.

But French nationalism contained

the seeds of something very different

from English nationalism. Greenfeld

places English and American national-

ism on a spectrum that runs from in-

dividualist, voluntary civic nationalism

at one end to “ethnonationalism” at the

other, the latter being hereditary, non-

voluntary, and anti-individualistic. In

this classification, French nationalism

was in the beginning largely civic and

individualistic but became more collec-

tivist as the eighteenth century went on.

In contrast to Anglo-American nation-

alism, it subordinated the autonomous

individual to the one and indivisible

nation. It nonetheless remained volun-

tarist, in the sense that to be French is a

matter of committing yourself to being

French, and that is open to foreigners

under appropriate conditions. Con-

versely, one can cease to be French by

emigrating.

It was Russian nationalism that intro-

duced what became ethnonationalism.

Nationalism beyond England be-

gins in resentment—ressentiment is

Greenfeld’s term, reflecting its semi-

technical, sociological meaning,

which refers to the envy a society

may feel for the achievements of

some other society or societies.

Envy may result in two different

responses. The first is an attempt

to emulate the envied society; the

second is a denigration of it and

an assertion of the superiority

of the envious society. Because

France was culturally secure, re-

sentment was not an enduring

feature of French nationalism.

Russia was quite different. Emu-

lation proving impossible, Rus-

sians took refuge in asserting that

a spiritual Russian culture was

superior to Western European

rationalism. This made national

identity a natural, or biological,

rather than a political matter. The

impact in due course on German

racism, Greenfeld assumes, is ob-

vious enough.

With two centuries and doz-

ens of countries to cover, Green-

feld’s history of nationalism after the

French Revolution is inevitably sche-

matic. What will unnerve many read-

ers is her insistence that nationalism

is in essence democratic. One thinks

of the nationalism of the Baath Party

in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and wonders

whether “democratic” is quite the word

to use. Greenfeld has a case: if, as she

thinks, the essence of nationalism is

an insistence that each member of a

nation is, as far as membership goes,

equal to every other member, political

authority must rest on the collective

will of the people. That is one defini-

tion of democracy, according to which

even Saddam’s authority was that of an

authoritarian, perhaps even a totalitar-

ian, democrat, but a democrat of a sort.

Nonetheless, the idea that a brutal

military dictatorship is in any sense

democratic sticks in the throat. Sad-

dam may have held periodic elections

to boost his authority, but his gov-

ernment was essentially one of brute

force. The strongest sense of national

identity in Iraq was exhibited by the

Kurds, who had no desire to be part of

an Iraqi nation. Indeed, Iraq is a very

good example of the difficulty of decid-

ing who is and who isn’t entitled to self-

determination. How many “nations”

does Iraq contain?

Apart from a paragraph or two re-

minding us that ethnic nationalism in

its Nazi form was a moral, political, and

humanitarian catastrophe, Greenfeld

is substantially nonjudgmental. All of

Thornton Dial: Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together, 2003

Indianapolis Museum of Art

(^1) The End of History and the Last Man
(Free Press, 1992).
(^2) See his The Spirit of Community:
Rights, Responsibilities, and the Com-
munitarian Agenda (Crown, 1993).