the nation develops from its most basic unit of organisation. Herder draws an
egalitarian and non-authoritarian conclusion from this: elites cannot create nations,
and they must not impose their wills on individuals, but rather individuals must be
free to develop themselves. Like the growth of an oak tree from an acorn, national
development must come from ‘within’. The difficulty with Herder’s argument is
that the family inevitably has paternalistic, if not patriarchal, overtones, and
derivation of the nation from the family is problematic, for citizenship involves
relationships with people you have never met and will never meet. Ethnic nationalism
embodies all the limitedness of the family without preserving its positive features
as a small-scale, ‘face-to-face’ community, based, at its best, on ties of affection.Socialism and nationalism: Marx and Engels
Marx and Engels make various comments on nationalism in the Communist
Manifesto: responding to the charge that communists want to abolish the nation-
state Marx and Engels argue that the workers have no nation of their own, and
that national divisions have become increasingly irrelevant as capitalism has
developed – the capitalists have created a single world bound together by free trade.
Marx and Engels were ‘collectivists’, but the historically significant ‘collective’ was
the working class, as the most advanced, and first ‘truly revolutionary’, class.
Although they avoid using the language of morality, believing that moral beliefs
are the product of existing (capitalist) society, and the task is to create a new society,
it is possible to discern a moral message in their work: the task is to create a classless
society in which human beings recognise their common humanity. In his early work,
Marx called this ‘species consciousness’. So the historical task is to develop
(proletarian) class consciousness, and the ultimate moral aim is to overcome human
alienation. This appears to leave little room for nationalism.
Marx and Engels do, however, argue that during the revolutionary phase the
workers must ‘make themselves into a nation’: ‘since the proletariat must first of
all acquire supremacy, must rise to be thenational class, must constitute itself the
nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word’
(Marx and Engels, 1967: 23). During what they call the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ it is necessary to take hold of the state and use it both to defeat counter-
revolutionaries and to transform the relations of production. But this is a temporary
phase, and just as the aim is for the state ‘to lose its political character’, that is, its
coercive character, so it is necessary that the nation lose what might be termed its
‘particular’ character – in the latter phases of the process the national revolutions
will become international. Because Marx and Engels said very little about what a
classless society – or world – would look like, it is unclear what place nationalist
consciousness would have in such a society, or world. Cultural differences would
not necessarily disappear, but they could not determine the distribution of resources.
Nonetheless, even if the future of nationalism is unclear, nationalist consciousness
does play a role in the revolutionary period, and broadly speaking Marx and Engels
argued that if nationalist movements serve the class struggle, then they should be
supported. More specifically, they maintained:266 Part 2 Classical ideologies