The Emergence of Nationalism

Excerpts from the book, The Struggle for India’s Soul: Nationalism and the Fate of Democracy by the author published by 

by Shashi Tharoor

Few concepts have gone through as many transformations of connotation as nationalism. The word itself, in English, goes back in common usage only to 1844, though it is argued that the proposition that “the English people were a nation” dawned with the Tudors in the late 15th century. In ancient Rome, the word “nation”—natio—actually meant “litter”, as in a cat’s progeny, and referred to foreigners and migrants who were deemed sub-human by Roman citizens, but the term gradually lost its implications of contempt and began to refer to a community of shared opinion.1 The Latin roots ‘natio’ and ‘natus’ (both come from ‘nascor’ or ‘I am born’, whose perfect form is ‘natus sum’, I have been born) point to the fact that to the ancient Romans, ‘natio’ was merely a group of people who were associated by birth conditions—typically of a larger tribe, or a confederacy bestowed by blood, but of those who were not worthy of being deemed Roman citizens. Interestingly, a ‘natio’ had a specific size dimension to it. ‘Natio’ was larger than a family, but smaller than a clan (‘stirps’) and smaller than a people (‘gens’). Cicero talks of Jews and Syrians as ‘nationes natae servituti’ (“people born to servitude”).

“Nation” began to be used in the mid-19th century as a synonym for devotion to one’s country, for advocating its national spirit or aspirations, but in the days of vast empires—the British, the French, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian—this was not necessarily a reputable sentiment, since to be a nationalist was to be against the empire of which one’s nation was a part. Nationalism rested on an expressed desire for national unity and independence, and this could only be achieved by extracting one’s nation from the imperium; not surprisingly, nationalism was looked askance at by the prevailing orthodoxy of the age. There were important differences, though, between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, on the one hand, that were consciously multi-ethnic, and the British and the French, who were explicitly developing nationalist models and ideologies at home while imposing their imperiums abroad. Little African and Asian children in Senegal or Vietnam were taught by the French Empire to dutifully recite “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois,” “Our ancestors the Gauls”. Assimilation was the name of the imperial game, and it worked both ways; Queen Victoria was, after all, Empress of India. But these were for public consumption; the reality, for a colonial subject, was of racial separation and racial hierarchy.

Historically, the French and American revolutions in the late 18th century were the first to challenge the nation-eroding sweep of the mighty empires that had hitherto been imagined to be the acme of political organization. (The Haitian revolution followed soon after, at the start of the nineteenth century.) While the Americans unseated the British empire that was still in the process of establishing itself around the world, the French defenestrated their own king, challenging the very notion of divine right that had legitimized monarchy and its territorial ambitions. After a few years of floundering as a collection of colonies united only by their determination to be rid of British rule, the Americans inaugurated a new idea of nationhood born of a unified people with common political and economic interests, under a system combining democracy with capitalism. Modern-day nationalism was born.

Both these revolutions inspired the emergence of nationalism as a worldwide phenomenon in the mid-19th century, starting with the ideas of German Romanticism, the ferment of the revolutions of 1848, the reunification of Italy by Garibaldi, Cavour and Mazzini, and of Germany by Bismarck, and taking in the new countries of Latin America along the way. These featured the familiar elements of people’s attachment to their native land and soil, the traditional cultural heritage inherited from their parents, and allegiance to the established authorities ruling their homelands, and converted them into a newly-defined loyalty to a nation-state. (Interestingly enough, the attempts by arch-conservatives like Metternich to suppress nationalisms where they arose point to an important historical irony: that modern liberalism was unthinkable without nationalism.)

It was only with the First World War, and the collapse of two large empires in Europe, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian, that nationalism became seen as a broadly admirable concept, standing heroically for the freedom, self-determination, independence, unity and prosperity of subject peoples. A number of newly-free nations were spawned in Europe in this heady burst of nationalist fervour. The idea of nationalism was given a renewed fillip and universal applicability after the Second World War, with the freedom of a large number of hitherto colonized countries in the so-called Third World, whose liberation from subjugation under the imperialist yoke marked the second heyday of nationalism, this time of the anti-colonial variety.

But the failures and limitations of many of the nation-states born in the twentieth century, and the descent of several into chaos, corruption and dictatorship (and in a few cases, their own internal conflicts over nationality and nationalistic disputes over territory with neighbouring countries, leading to violence, civil war and even fragmentation), made nationalism less heroic in many eyes by the last quarter of the century. The concept seemed a veneer, a cloak to mask venality, tyranny and exploitation under the garb of self-determination. And the emergence of globalization after 1980 created a world in which nationalism also seemed less necessary, an impediment even, in the march of prosperity made possible by the satellite communications revolution, jet travel, the ease of moving millions across the world with the pulse of a cursor or the click of a mouse. In the globalized world, nationalism seemed somehow less important at a time when nations were giving up more and more of their sovereignty to achieve greater prosperity.

The profound disillusionment with nationalism—the doctrine, after all, of the likes of Hitler and Mussolini—at the end of the Second World War may have helped created the great age of globalism that reached its apogee in the three decades after 1980. Certainly nationalism, after ripping apart Europe for half a century, lost some of its appeal, and prompted the establishment of international economic, military, and political organizations such as NATO, the European Coal and Steel Community (1952–2002), Euratom, the Common Market, later known as the European Economic Community, and finally the European Union, which began to acquire some of the trappings of a supranational entity. Writers like Francis Fukuyama advanced the idea at the end of the Cold War that conflict would no longer be driven by the competition of great powers and nations: the “end of history” meant that the fundamental issues had been settled. It was possible to speak of subsuming nationalism in a larger internationalist project: even the reunification of Germany in 1990 was welcomed by those who had previously feared German unity, because German nationalism had been tamed by its subordination to the European project. The dissolution of the nation-state may not have seemed in prospect, but its dilution certainly was.

The setbacks endured by the globalization experiment with the recession of 2008–09, followed by the rise of ethno-nationalist populism in a startling number of countries in the second decade of the 21st century, has given nationalism another burst of relevance. There were two precursors to this development: the advent and spread of neo-liberalism, and the backlash in developed countries to globalization. The former saw the dominance, in the world’s macro-economic thinking, of what became known as the “Washington Consensus”, whose custodians were not just the governments of the US and its allies but also international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. The latter, the backlash against globalization, reflected the crumbling of that consensus at its very source.

The doctrine of neoliberalism is commonly attributed to the economist Friedrich von Hayek, hailed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as their inspiration, whose impact on economic policy in the era of globalization, thanks also to the dissemination of his ideas by acolytes like Milton Friedman, was immense. Hayek’s was a philosophy that went beyond economics, for he conceived of society itself, in the British writer Stephen Metcalf’s brilliant summary, “as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties)…. [Hayek’s neoliberalism] was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.”3 Hayek constructed neoliberalism as sufficient unto itself: the deregulated market would function as the over-arching “mind” that would govern and direct all human affairs, protecting individuals against the excesses of governments, whose only job was to keep the market free. Individuals would of course act in their economic self-interest, but the product of their choices would lead to better results than governments could craft through policy interventions.

Rampant economic growth and what was dubbed (by Alan Greenspan) as the “irrational exuberance” of the 1990s, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, led the world into a period of widespread financial deregulation and privatization, expanding free trade, the creation of businesses whose supply-chains cut across many countries, and a worldwide illusion of rising prosperity. Neoliberalism came into its own, privileging a heady cocktail of free-market policies, including deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers, eliminating price controls, establishing global supply chains, rampant privatization, and the reduction or abandonment of state welfare for the poor, often accompanied by austerity measures to bring fiscal policies in line with what Western ratings agencies wanted to see.

But the seeming success of economic globalization also facilitated the illusion of the “end of history” (seen as the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism), the heedless and hubristic military adventurism of the “global war on terror”, including disastrously unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, which displaced nearly 20 million people (among the largest refugee crises in modern history), all of which in turn led to the market crash, and an unprecedented level of inequality and suffering among the working-class of the developed world. The top 1% of the global population came to own half the world’s wealth, while the bottom 70% had less than 3%. With the Great Recession that began in 2008–09 and political convulsions in a number of countries, what Metcalf calls “the militant parochialism of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America”4 was the result, as was rising ethno-nationalism, populist authoritarianism, and illiberal democracy in a slew of countries. As Metcalf puts it, “There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in which we find ourselves; between the market as unique discloser of value and guardian of liberty, and our current descent into post-truth and illiberalism.”

As the writer Tyler Stiem explains, the problem was that neoliberalism’s pretensions of universalism and over-idealization of the market ignored the deep inequality that existed between and within nations: “Applied as a broad, one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing impoverished and traumatised post-Soviet and postcolonial nations (as well as increasingly multicultural countries in the west, with complicated histories of their own), neoliberalism couldn’t help but be disastrous for many people”. In June 2016, three economists in the IMF’s Research Department officially and openly questioned neo-liberalism in a prominent paper. While praising aspects of the neoliberal agenda—the poverty alleviation made possible by the expansion of global trade, the transfer of technology to developing economies and the “more efficient provision of services” resulting from the privatization of state-owned enterprises—the authors concluded that the benefits of increased growth “seem fairly difficult to establish”, that inequality increased as a result of neoliberal policies, and that this in turn hurt the level and sustainability of growth.

Interesting recent research by Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals used states and global institutions—the United Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law—to insulate financial markets against sovereign states, resist political change, and stave off turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice.8 Far from discarding the regulatory state, Slobodian says, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, he suggests, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, unrelenting change, and social injustice that accompanied it. A backlash was inevitable.

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© Shashi Tharoor, 2021

Shashi Tharoor is a former UN under-secretary-general, a Congress MP in India, the author of twenty-three books, and the recipient of literary awards including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Financial Times Book of the Year.