Must-Read: Tony Judt (1994): The New Old Nationalism

Must-Read: Tony Judt (1994): The New Old Nationalism: “Québecois today have few of the grievances expressed thirty years ago, when the region was economically depressed and its language and culture in decline…

…The educated francophone population is no longer so afraid of losing its children to an English-speaking world…. And yet nationalism in Quebec is a very real thing, drawing on past grievances that, as Ignatieff writes, “do not cease to be actual, just because they are in the past.” Everywhere he goes, at least within the nationalist orbit, people tell him the same thing: “We just want to be at home, with ourselves… a majority in our own place.” If that is what nationalism means in a French-speaking province of federal Canada, one of the world’s more fortunate places and with little to fear, then the prospects for nonterritorial, state-sharing, overlapping cultural nationalisms of a liberal (or any other) kind seem slim indeed. If the electors of the Italian Northern League don’t feel “at home in their own place” with Sicilians, what hope is there for Greeks and Macedonians, Slovaks and Hungarians, Estonians and Russians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Israelis and Palestinians?

In the words of Daniel Bell, “Nationalism is potent because it recapitulates psychologically the family structure. There is authority for protection and there is identification and warmth.” If this is so, then it is here to stay…. There is no reassuringly convergent relationship between international economic trends and domestic political practices. The liberal interlude of the past two centuries has been confined to a few fortunate peoples and places. That interlude, the world of the European Enlightenment, rested upon an optimistic universalism which bequeathed us both liberalism and socialism, competing versions of a progressive, emancipatory project. The demise of socialism is for many people a cause for optimism; but it is also a reminder that liberalism, too, may be mortal.

As Michael Ignatieff notes, it may be that liberal civilization “runs deeply against the human grain and is only achieved and sustained by the most unremitting struggle against human nature.” If that is true, and if nationalist particularism is the more familiar mold into which most human beings pour themselves, then we need to learn not only how to understand it but also when and by what criteria to encourage or curtail its aspirations. Some multinational states will continue to survive and thrive, their citizens finding security not in common ethnic affinities but in the rule of law and its recognition and enforcement of individual rights and duties. This will probably be the case for Great Britain, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, and others besides. However, these may not be readily exportable models….

The one option that scholars and diplomats alike do not now have is to ignore the problem of nationalism, or call it something else and pass by on the other side. For many people today, nationalism tells the most convincing story about their condition—more realistic than socialism, more immediately reassuring than liberalism. One reason for this is that nationalists acknowledge, indeed thrive upon, the apparent incompatibility of competing claims and values…. The unequal and conflicted division of the world into nations and peoples is not about to wither and shrivel or be overcome by goodwill or progress. The revolutions of 1789 and 1917 were born of the benevolent illusion that such untidy and unpleasing features of our world are transient and of secondary importance in the great scheme of things. The revolutions of 1989 and their aftermath offer a timely opportunity to think again.