Variants of Nationalism, Some Poisonous and Some Benign—How do we Draw the Line?

At a time when ethno-nationalists appropriate the idea of nationalism it is important to propagate and sustain other healthier forms of nationalism

Historically nationalism, for all its undoubted achievements, has wreaked havoc in some countries and at some junctures. We are now going through a time when it is raging and burning again. In this short essay I discuss this in the context of the history of nationalism particularly in India, USA and Germany. The nation-state became the predominant political unit in Europe after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Many scholars, particularly in developing countries, blame the narrow western concept of the jingoistic nation-state for much of its depredations.

More than a century back Rabindranath Tagore in his 1916 lectures in Japan (later published as a book titled Nationalism) was trenchant in his criticism of the western nation-state ‘with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, …its mock thunders of patriotic bragging’, and how it stokes a national conceit that makes society lose its moral balance. (His satirical reference to ‘pious hymns’ reminds one of the irony of history that after one of his songs was adopted as the national anthem of India, today if you do not stand up from your seat when it is played publicly in India, you may be arrested by one of the agents of the Indian nation-state).

In thinking about the positive basis of nationalism for post-colonial India, Tagore and Gandhi found the nation-state of European history—characterized by a singular social, usually ethnic or linguistic, homogenizing principle, militarized borders and mobilization against ‘enemies’ both external and internal—unacceptable and unsuitable for India’s diverse and heterogeneous society. Their idea of India was not monolithic state-centric, but pluralistic and community- or society-centric.

By the way, the singular social homogenizing principle mentioned above is not just western, it is also one of the basic tenets of Chinese civilization. The sinologist W.J.F Jenner in his book The Tyranny of History describes this basic tenet as ‘that uniformity is inherently desirable, that there should be only one empire, one culture, one script, one tradition’. In contrast, India, particularly in the historical perspective of Tagore, Nehru and their followers, has celebrated the diversity of Indian civilization. The current ruling cultural-political dispensation of RSS-BJP in India wants to displace that idea of India with the homogenizing principle of a Hindu-supremacist nation-state characterized by a ‘one nation, one everything’ motto. Their earlier ideological leaders (particularly Savarkar and Golwalkar) had expressed open admiration for the ‘efficient’ Nazi system of mobilizing and organizing the German nation.

The European scholar of nationalism who has shown the most sensitivity to the socio-cultural particularities in the construction or ‘imagination’ of national consciousness in different parts of the world was Benedict Anderson. But, as Partha Chatterjee has pointed out in a critique of Anderson’s classic book Imagined Communities, “the most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited…on a difference with the ‘modular’ forms propagated by the modern West (as suggested by Anderson)”.

Chatterjee in later work has pointed out the different imaginations of the nation in different linguistic communities in different parts of India. For example, in Maharashtra in western India the nationalist imagination was shaped by the legend of the historic victories of an iconic Hindu warrior-ruler (Shivaji) against Muslim rule in the 17^th century. The proximity of this imagination to the RSS-BJP idea of the Hindu nation-state hostile to the Muslims is quite clear. It is not a coincidence that some of the early ideological leaders of RSS were from this region. In contrast in Tamil Nadu in south India national consciousness was developed mainly through the Tamil language, and the anti-Brahmin Dravidian movement in the early to middle part of the 20^th century challenged the north Indian Hindu nationalism. Its main leader E.V. Ramasamy (commonly known as Periyar) attacked the latter for its identification with the Hindu religion, Brahmin caste, Sanskrit language (later Hindi, which is derived from it) and patriarchal subordination of women.

The Tagore-Nehru pluralistic idea claimed that in the amorphous composite culture of India it is possible to discern a pattern of unity in diversity. This, after the death of Tagore and Gandhi and under the leadership of Nehru and Ambedkar, formed in some way the foundation of a liberal, largely but not fully federal, constitutional order that the Indian nation-state gave itself in 1950. The liberal state was to provide a unifying structure in a divided society. The nationalism that this nation-state evoked is that of ‘civic nationalism’, far apart from ethnic or religious nationalism. It is not that civic nationalism was firmly established immediately after the constitution started operation, but it achieved widespread legitimacy as an anchor of everyday civic practice in a diverse democracy and as a continuing public educational and aspirational goal. (Some of the politician-practitioners, however, erred in preaching religious tolerance among the majority community but unscrupulously pandering to or allying with minority communalists, thereby giving a handle to the majority communalists).

Among democratic nations the United States was a pioneer in making pluralism and liberal constitutional values the basis of nationalism. After the near-decimation of the indigenous population, a country without much historical memory essentially became a nation of immigrants. In 1973 Hannah Arendt, when asked about the United States in an interview on French television, said: “This country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, …these citizens are united only by one thing—and that is a lot. That is, you become a citizen of the United States by simple consent to the Constitution”. Similarly, in a 2009 speech Barack Obama said: “One of the great strengths of the United States is…. we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values”, presumably as enshrined in the US Constitution.

In spite of the many grievous historical (and often racially motivated) lapses, this is a major example in history of what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls ‘constitutional patriotism’. This he opposes to the patriotism based on ‘blood and soil’ that had popular appeal in Germany—and which appeals to today’s ethnic nationalists (mobilized against immigrants in Europe and US, against religious minorities in India, Israel, Turkey or Indonesia), and which in history has been associated with a great deal of mayhem and devastation. Habermas has even argued that immigrants to a liberal democratic state need not assimilate into the host culture but only accept the principles of the country’s constitution. This means that multi-culturalism is acceptable as long as it is compatible with the basic human rights enshrined in a democratic constitution. (So a woman’s hijab is perfectly acceptable but genital mutilation or prohibition from going to school is not). The more permissive kind of multiculturalism—where all groups are allowed their peculiar cultural practices, however repugnant they may be from the liberal rights point of view (by one mocking description, this amounts to ‘liberalism for the liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals’)—is not acceptable under civic nationalism. This can diffuse some of the usual complaints of ethnic nationalists against culturally alien immigrants.

Some people say that the liberal pluralism of civic nationalism mainly appeals to the elite or the urban educated upper or middle class. This underestimates the degree of tolerance that prevails among the lower classes. In India, for example, there is a long folk-syncretic tradition, which grew out of the sedimentary layers formed by successive waves of social reform and rebellion (often collectively known as the Bhakti movement) over many centuries against the rigid Hindu Brahminical system in different regions of India, and out of the Sufi sects defying the rigidities of orthodox Islam. This tradition extolled inter-faith tolerance and pluralism among common people and is often evident in popular folk songs and theater.

It has also been pointed out that the idea of civic nationalism is often too abstract and legalistic and provides too thin a basis for political mobilization compared to the easy emotional or tribalistic appeal of ethnic nationalism, particularly in countries where liberal institutions or social practices are weak. This is quite possible. Liberal or even folk-syncretic traditions are sometimes too fragile to resist our primordial or visceral evolutionary defensive-aggressive urge to fight against ‘enemy’ minority groups that the ethnic nationalist majoritarian leaders are adept at whipping up. Various other forces unleashed by looming economic and cultural insecurity can also weaken the foundations of civic nationalism and there may be oscillations between forms of civic and ethnic nationalism in some contexts. Yael Tamir, an Israeli academic and politician, has cited German history as an example of such oscillations: “Following the German epic trail from the Enlightenment to romanticism, nationalism, fascism, Nazism, and finally to constitutional democracy and the current emergence of (ethnic) nationalism teaches us an important lesson about the oscillations of nations from ethnic to civic realities and back”. In the two cases of civic nationalism that I have discussed above, in US and in post-Independence India, we now see enough evidence of its fragility.

In thinking about how to fortify the resilience of civic nationalism in such situations, let me flag here only one or two factors. One relates to the toxic effect of hatemongering in social media even on a hitherto tolerant population. In India What’sApp is the primary social media where evoking among the Hindus selective historical memory of Muslim perfidy and spreading of misinformation and outright distortions of history are quite common. This may be behind the reported increase in survey evidence of falling Muslim trustworthiness among Hindu voters. I have seen a recent study in Austria of how at election time right-wing parties stoked the memory of Ottoman pillaging around Vienna in 1519 and 1683 and harvested votes more in the previously pillaged than in non-pillaged municipalities, in an area where there was no difference in anti-Muslim sentiment between the two kinds of municipalities before.

In the face of this one has to, of course, think of tightening regulations on hate speech in social media on the lines, say, of the Digital Services Act in the EU. One should note, however, that some social media companies are now going in the opposite direction wherever they can in the name of free speech, but primarily for making money as hate speech often goes viral.

There is also a difference between local-level and supralocal sources of information. In local communities sometimes people belonging to different ethnic groups live in relative harmony, but the toxic ‘information’ they get from supralocal sources agitates them. In Germany, for example, the anti-immigrant extreme right-wing party AfD is more popular in east Germany where there are much fewer immigrants than in other parts, so negative stories about immigrants are likely to be coming more from elsewhere. In any case it is important for local civic organizations to try to develop demonstrably independent news agencies that could over time earn the trust of local people to give them some immunity to the ‘virus’ of fake news.

In 1929 Albert Einstein in an interview called nationalism ‘an infantile disease, the measles of mankind’. Many contemporary cosmopolitan liberals are similarly skeptical, contemptuous or dismissive. But nationalism is too passionate and historically explosive an idea to be left for the demagogues to hijack it for their noxious purpose, in the absence of proactive social movements to stop that.