The nineteenth century is generally considered to be the century of Hegel, Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche, the century of revolutionary theories born and refined, the century of a belief in progress and of pessimism about unplanned byproducts of progress. But it was also the age which scattered the seeds of national awareness in Europe and elsewhere. In 1988, a Ukrainian-American scholar, Roman Szporluk, published Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List,¹ where he argued that the intellectuals’ fascination with socialism elevated Marx to the status of a major prophetic thinker, whereas more appropriately, Marx’s contemporary Friedrich List should have been so elevated because his formulations correspond better to twentieth-century realities than Marx’s theses about the stateless and nationless proletariat. “Between the individual and humanity stands the nation,” thundered Friedrich List as he developed a theory of national economic egoism which the Germans so radically implemented.

However selective List’s, and Szporluk’s, suggestions about nationalism may appear, they touch upon problems of continuing importance. Western Europe’s triumphant nationalisms have so permeated its democratic structures as to become virtually invisible, yet Western European states have displayed, in the 1990s, a nationalistic impatience with their immigrant populations arriving massively from the West’s former colonies. For the first time in modern history, Western Europe has acquired significant ethnic and religious minorities, of the kind that previously were confined to Central and Eastern Europe: too numerous to be quickly assimilated, too vocal not to occasion major controversies about the nature of German or French or British identity, not to speak of job competition.² In conditions of secularized society, a sense of grievance can reinforce nationalistic sentiments even in countries that feel secure in their identity, having experienced uninterrupted economic and cultural development for generations.

How First World states will deal with the economic egoism of which Friedrich List spoke remains to be seen. Elsewhere, as the murderous wars in Bosnia and Chechnya have demonstrated, poverty and the intransigency of leaders have limited rational solutions. The conflict in Northern Ireland indicates that even within the relatively affluent societies and within the sphere of influence of democratic culture, tribalism is a force to be reckoned with. Over the last hundred years in Europe and elsewhere, many territorial states transformed themselves into nation states under the influence of the idea of nationalism, shedding their minorities in the process. The minorities themselves formed new states or returned to their earlier sovereign status.³ The fall of the Soviet Union, fueled as it was by the dual powers of economy and nationalism,⁴ exacerbated ethnic tensions within the fragmenting empire of the Russians.

Americans have had a hard time understanding these processes because of the unique conditions in which the United States came into being.⁵ The American pattern of victories and defeats is very different from Europe’s. Try as they may, Americans have not been seriously injured by anyone. When they expanded, they did so quickly and in a territory that was sparsely populated and had no previous written history. Americans are neither survivalists nor expansionists, neither purposefully looking inward nor consciously expanding and exporting their influence. That does not mean that the United States has never engaged in imperial behavior. But in spite of having tried its hand at imperialism, it is perhaps the only country in the world where national allegiance can be built over a lifetime rather than over generations. These and other factors have made it difficult for Americans to grasp the ebb and flow of nationalism in the rest of the world.

The community of interpretation that exists at American universities in the 1990s has not treated the national question with the epistemological subtlety so often encountered in the discussions of society and its ills.⁶ There have been few attempts to distinguish between imperialistic nationalism and defensive nationalism poised to preserve traditions and identities. The imperial powers that controlled much of the world during the last two centuries often appear to be innocent of aggressive appropriations, whereas representatives of the colonized nations (including the mid-sized and small European nations) are assigned blame for the historical processes of which they are merely the tail end. Routinely, the two world wars are attributed to the “powder keg” of Eastern Europe rather than to the voracious imperialism of the great European powers. While it is standard today to link the French Revolution with nationalism (the Revolution made an appeal to a kingless people, thus invoking nationalist sentiments instead of subject loyalty)⁷ Lord Dalberg-Acton traced the rise of modern nationalism to the partitions of Poland, pointing out the pernicious results of “this famous measure, the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism [which] . . . deprived an entire people of its right to constitute an independent community.”⁸ He thus put the blame for the rise of nationalism on empires rather than on revolutions, an observation which deserves more credit than it has received. In direct opposition to Acton’s view, Elie Kedourie argued that the multiethnic European empires need not have been broken into nation states because the “historical consciousness” of the nations they encompassed was far from certifiable.⁹ Characteristically, he failed to acknowledge that within these multinational states, one nationality invariably prevailed and forced others into a relationship of colonial dependency. Kedourie’s argument is typically dismissive of the problems of nationalism. It also is ahistorical in its invocation of a static “historicity” of nations, and it tends to exonerate imperialism at the expense of nationalism. Books such as Nationalism in Eastern Europe¹⁰ are characteristic of another kind of rhetorical appropriation. They imply that self-identification based on nationality is a kind of shameful disease of which the guilty party should get rid as soon as possible, unless possessed of an adequate army and enough rhetorical wit to argue its case worldwide. Attempts to reassert a group identity are dealt a blow in the very title of such works, where they are taxonomized as negative phenomena before any evidence is ushered in. The nonfoundational methodologies now popular in academia treat nationalism as an unwelcome atavistic illusion, to be combated by caricatures or simplifications.¹¹ In Orientalism, Edward W. Said identified numerous scholars whose rhetoric was dismissive in this manner.¹² Implicit in such rhetoric is the assumption that while the powerless nations and ethnic groups are culpable by virtue of their separate identities, the taxonomer himself is wonderfully impartial. Needless to say, the smaller and struggling nations cannot compete against the hundreds and thousands of books that etch the condemnation of their identity onto the memory of the educated.¹³ The existing scholarship seems unable to encompass nationalism in all the varieties of its discourse, and has concentrated, patronizingly, on post-communist and/or nonwestern states and ethnic groups while ignoring its rise in the first world. One notable exception is Margaret Canovan, who pointed out that the “modern liberal democratic ideals depend for their plausibility on the collective power generated by national loyalties that are inconsistent with the ideals themselves . . . general humanitarian principles and projects presuppose a power base sustained by particular solidarity, while the maintenance of that power base contradicts the very principles it renders plausible.”¹⁴

There are different nationalisms, just as there are different countries and traditions and histories, and routinely to use the word in a generic sense serves the ideological interests of those who favor the uprooting of all but the strongest nationalisms in the world. The nationalism of the confident and stable ethnicities that are beneficiaries of centuries of secure accumulation of wealth is different in its aims and methods from the nationalism of those struggling to survive in a geographical territory whose sovereignty is contested. The group identity of ethnic elites differs from the identity of the unlettered masses who share only some elements of the complex mythology that is part of the nationalistic ideal. The manipulative and aggressive nationalisms are quite different from the weak, defensive, and reactive nationalisms which easily fall victim to the rhetorical appropriation of their adversaries, thus contributing to the situation mentioned earlier, namely, the imposition of “nationalistic guilt” on the politically weak nations while exonerating the power play initiated by the strong.

There are different nationalisms, and routinely to use the word in a generic sense serves the ideological interests of those who favor the uprooting of all but the strongest nationalisms in the world.

The American academic discourse has failed to develop a taxonomy capable of distinguishing between the efforts to know and cultivate one’s history and idealized traditions, and the efforts at self-assertion through conquest and suppression of other traditions. The abundant literature on Western imperialism underemphasizes the crucial role of national interest in modern imperial politics, and overemphasizes racism and economic exploitation.¹⁵ The functionalists make some useful distinctions but miss out on the core of nationalism. Karl Deutsch strips nationalism of its mythologies and memories, and treats it as a phenomenon of social exchange. Thus a nation is “a community of communication” operating in an everlasting present.¹⁶ Benedict Anderson seeks the roots of nationalism in literacy, by positing that literacy made possible “imagined communities” which did not exist in earlier times.¹⁷

All these perspectives on nationalism share an inability to deal with such “static” concepts as identity, continuity, and tradition. To gain insight into these one has to return to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationality theorists, from the German Romantics and the Central European patriots to President Woodrow Wilson. They invoked religion, geography, custom, and history in their discourse.¹⁸ Germany produced many of these theorists (as well as quite a few pathologies of nationalism, from J. G. Fichte to the National Socialists). The articulation of Italian nationalism by Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi succeeded in unifying Italy. Adam Mickiewicz and Lajos Kossuth were two Central European voices arguing against the pathologies of nationalism called empires; they advocated nation states at the time when empires were thriving and when national self-assertion of small and mid-sized nations seemed irrevocably suppressed in Europe. Mickiewicz and Kossuth were dismissed and excluded from the standard intellectual histories of Europe, even though their mediatory role was huge and much bloodshed could have been avoided had they been listened to.¹⁹ A popular and non-belligerent formulation of such “traditionalist” views appears in the various pronouncements of the United Nations and in publications of such international bodies as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. One such representative publication holds that a nation is a group of people who share the same history, customs, loyalties, and language (but not necessarily the same blood-lines, an important distinction which rightly dissociates nationalism from racism), and that nationalism consists in an awareness of this situation. This view of nationalism assumes that “humanity is naturally divided into nations, which are distinguishable from one another by their historically conditioned traits . . .” National self-government is thus the natural and legitimate form of government, and the nation-state is the most natural form of organization for human groups.²⁰ Prominently featured here is the Wilsonian approach which accepts the identity and the continuity of nations. Note the word “naturally” which implies a recognition of natural law.

Anthony D. Smith’s The Ethnic Origins of Nations articulates these concerns in a language of contemporary social science.²¹ Smith traces the development of modern awareness of national identity to what he calls ethnie, or the ethnic community predating modern nations and formed during military ventures and other significant undertakings of a group of people. The ethnie shares the same myth-symbol complex (mythomoreur). Nations are entities possessed of a common ethnie and a broadly developed mythomoreur. This mythological complex goes back to the times when group identity was being formed. At that time, literacy was a privilege of the few, and at first only those few were conversant with the myth-symbol complex, or rather with its early formulations. Its broad distribution in modern societies has undoubtedly been helped by mass literacy and technology: Benedict Anderson is correct in that regard. Social engineering and various attempts at promotion and suppression have seldom succeeded in influencing it in a radical way. A group of people has to display fortitude to keep and preserve its identity; the alternative is to sink into nonexistence as a group. The collective “flavor” of each such myth and symbol complex is sui generis, and hence the unique experience of feeling oneself part of a certain nation. The futility of forging “instant” nations such as the Yugoslav, Soviet, or Czecho-Slovak was due to the absence of a symbolic complex that members of these fake taxonomical groups might share. The failure of empires in modern times stems from the absence, in states created by conquest of the already existing nations, of a common body of memories and myths. Eric Hobsbawm has rightly noted that the leaders of empires exerted much effort to forge and reinforce such memories.²²

For such a symbolic complex to arise, a large group of people has to have sufficient leisure over long periods of time, and it has to produce writers who can articulate the national myth in literature. In the preindustrial age the lives of most people were too short and miserable to afford much psychological space for the creation of nations. This is one of the reasons why nationalism is a modern and postmodern phenomenon, why so many new nations have sprung up lately, and why the remaining empires are doomed to instability as the “natives” advance in literacy and material well-being.

Smith distinguishes between two types of premodern ethnie, lateral and vertical. The lateral possesses a myth-symbol complex that is aristocratic and intensive, and it develops among members of the elites sharing a set of loyalties and memories which in some way contribute to their self-aggrandizement and a sense of mission. The vertical ethnie is one in which “a single ethnic culture permeates in varying degrees most strata of the population.” The population of a certain geographical area shares the common cultural memories: songs, dances, art, and narratives. Certain elements of folklore may be compatible with the aristocratic myths, thus increasing the viability of a future nation. Incipient nations can regress into regionalism, with its cultivation of food and dance, song and dialect. The kind of folklore which only encompasses elements of entertainment is less compatible with the heroic myths of the nobility or the stories of achievement remembered by the upper classes. If national identity is based on a sense of virtue unrewarded (a common occurrence in the case of small nations), both “memory complexes” have to play upon that theme. The lateral ethnie creates among the masses of people a sense of belonging and continuity which are the scaffolding of national identity. The complex of myths, memories, and symbols which nations bring into being shapes their “constitutive political myth,” which in turn weighs heavily on their political culture.²³

Past wars seem to be crucial to the forging of national identity, regardless of whether they were won or lost. The memory of these wars is rhetorically refined by ethnic elites. It contributes to the lateral and vertical ethnie and thus to the sense of nationhood, but the patterns of behavior which various rhetorical accomplishments produce are vastly different. Those ethnic communities which have waged aggressive wars almost continuously throughout their history, and which have celebrated victories and defeats with equal vigor (e.g., the Russians), have an exceptionally well-developed sense of nationhood. The German sense of nationhood likewise seems to be traceable to the pugnacious history of the Teutons and their victorious self-assertion in the heart of the European continent. However, Germans dwell much less on defeat, and certainly do not exaggerate it out of proportion as Russians tend to do. An absence of wars seems to weaken the sense of nationhood over long periods of time: long is a key word here, and has to be taken in combination with other factors. The Swedes cherish their warrior past and the glories of their victories, even though their neighbors do not regard them as pugnacious. But a great many lost wars seem to have a similarly sustaining effect on nationhood. The Poles lost all wars they fought since the eighteenth century (with the exception of the Polish-Soviet war of 1920–21), but this continuous chain of national disasters did not make the Polish nationality “re-convert” itself back into ethnicity. The Ukrainian national identity has been greatly strengthened by the memory of the Soviet engineered famine of 1932–33, during which up to ten million Ukrainians lost their lives. In September 1993, the Ukrainian government organized famine celebrations to uplift the hearts—paradoxically, for the celebration was one of defeat. The Ukrainian mythological complex is obviously very different from those prevailing in first world countries. It is still in the process of formation, as Ukrainians regain the self-assurance which their Russian and, earlier, Polish colonial masters tried to take away from them. Armenians are a tiny group whose political misfortunes have not led to the extinction of their sense of nationhood, possessed as they are of a rich vertical and lateral ethnie. On the other hand, an excess of defeats may cause a potential national group to“retreat” into ethnicity. The Scots were so soundly defeated by the English at Culloden and elsewhere (militarily, linguistically, and religiously) that their sense of nationhood is unlikely to revive even though the production of tartans is big business.

Literature is a crucial building block, and also an expression of national identity. It is doubtful that an ethnic group could attain nationhood without having produced a number of writers who captured collective experience in novels, plays, poems. England is unthinkable not only without Shakespeare but also without the Venerable Bede. Of course, to create a rich literature, a great deal of self-confidence had to be imparted to members of society, and then to the writers. Such self-confidence usually comes from successful military ventures. Russia attained this tone of self-assurance only in the nineteenth century, in the writings of Leo Tolstoy. Before Tolstoy, Russian writers spoke with a nervous voice, and were always aware of a chip on their shoulder: a common situation among writers of struggling nations.

The attitudes toward victory and defeat vary greatly from nation to nation, based partly on patterns commemorated in literature. Imperial nations develop different methods of dealing with successes and failures than do those national groups which are too familiar with the taste of defeat. Then the “defeat-adjusted” nations may differ greatly depending on factors embedded in their traditions. One stark example has been the Polish and the Jewish attitude toward Auschwitz, which is a symbol of defeat for Poles and Jews. The misunderstanding reached its peak in the argument about the Carmelite Convent on Auschwitz grounds, which according to the Polish attitudes toward defeat was an appropriate response to what happened, while according to the Jewish attitudes toward defeat it was an inappropriate response. The Polish Catholic culture considers it appropriate to beautify the places where slaughter of human beings occurred. Hence the spontaneous placing of flowers in and around the bunker in which Saint Maximilian Kolbe died, and attempts to bring a measure of serenity to a locality where serenity was banned in so exceptional a fashion. Such moves may seem repugnant from a Judaic perspective. Some Jews see Auschwitz as damned in perpetuity so to speak, a place undeserving of prayers for the dead, one where the local inhabitants cannot be allowed to live a happy and normal life.

First World nations have experienced many victories, and their social responses and institutions reflect that fact. In the rest of the world, it is victories and defeats, or primarily defeats, that shape the people’s responses to problems. In commenting upon nations that have been less fortunate than the United States or most of Western Europe in logging in victories, the post-Enlightenment and postmodernist scholars tend to use the yardsticks of their own lateral ethnie: a clear case of aggressive nationalism or, to use Said’s term, cultural imperialism.²⁴ English nationalism generally thrives on the remembrance of victories which are commemorated in national celebrations. Irish nationalism generally commemorates defeats. Social mobilization in England can be achieved by allusions to past victories. Winston Churchill’s speech on Dunkirk (“ . . . We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans . . . we shall fight on the beaches . . .”²⁵) was an echo of the many past victories (none of them actually fought on English soil), whereas the Sinn Fein finds its adherents among those for whom the Easter rising of 1916 was a mobilizing event. For the Serbs, perhaps the most significant symbol of nationhood is the defeat at Kosovo Pole in 1389. For the Hungarians, one of the most significant events is the defeat at Mohacs in 1526. Just as personal histories influence a people’s reactions to various stimuli, so do the perceived histories of their national communities influence them. Among the peoples whose national memories are replete with disasters, social mobilization is achieved by different means than among those who remember their past triumphs “on the seas and oceans.” The small and insignificant nations of the world are possessed of historical memory that is structured differently from that of the British. There has been little recognition of such matters.

Defensive nationalism characterizes those “memory communities” which perceive themselves as being at risk, either because of their smallness (Lithuanians, Georgians, Chechens) or because their expansionist neighbors have threatened them. Those affected by it tend to look inward rather than outward, and consequently fail to develop successful ways of dealing with the outside world. Defensive nationalism is a means of resisting the encroachment of the hostile Other upon one’s identity, yet it is all too often interpreted, in the United States in particular, as xenophobia or anti-social behavior. Most of us have seen films and read stories displaying Central and Eastern European peasants as suspicious, hostile, and insensitive to the needs of others. Yet these peasants, as seen in films, have decades of suffering etched into their faces, of the kind that makes even the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath seem only temporarily inconvenienced. Only in a culture unable to distinguish between aggressive and defensive identities could such films resonate with approval.

Expansive nationalism looks outward rather than toward itself, and as a result it is less aware of its own chauvinism. It is not about to accept any grade sheets handed in by the international judges who themselves do not believe in absolute standards. It implements policies which amount to putting its best foot forward, so far as public opinion at home and abroad is concerned. The Goethe Institutes are a means of spreading good news about Germany abroad, and so are the offices of the British Council, Alliance Française, and the various cultural enterprises sponsored by Russians in the United States: exhibits, concerts, guest lectures, and conferences. The expansive nations spend part of their resources to attract foreigners as students and scholars in the field of the expansive nations’ myth complexes. Under the Soviets, Russians have been particularly solicitous in that regard, with the resulting growth of sympathetic interest in things Russian worldwide. In the 1990s, thousands of American students pay their own way to become directly exposed to the powerful mechanisms for self-promotion which the Russians have created and maintained at their universities. In 1945, Russian literary scholar Dmitrii Likhachev called for the creation of an entire “library of studies” of old Russian literature, so that a perception is created of the resplendent beginnings of old Russia.²⁶ In 1998, Likhachev can boast of having achieved his goal. There exists an entire library of works arguing that old Russia had a rich culture and was a unified country extending over a large territory. In a way similar to one outlined by Said’s Orientalism, these works encourage hostility to the minorities’ attempt to stress their own separate origins in territories claimed by the Russian Federation. As Hugh Seton-Watson remarked, a popular Russian song about “Volga, the Russian river” seems to be a propaganda ploy suppressing the fact that Volga is, in fact, a Turkic, or Tatar, river.²⁷ Mutatis mutandis, many Russians have adopted Carl Reim’s point of view: “Our Fatherland is a holy land. Our ancestors preserved it with their blood . . . This land, fertilized with the blood of heroes, is a holy heirloom, not one foot of which shall be robbed from us . . .”²⁸

A question may be asked, whence comes the energy spent on preserving the myths and symbols of nationalism? The drive for power may explain expansive nationalism, but what about the stubborn nationalism of the weak? In post-Soviet countries, nationalism is particularly difficult to explain within the framework of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment taxonomies. The Balts would have been much better off if they did not spend their energy on maintaining their separate identities. Their nationalist loyalties, indeed the loyalties of most small nations, seem to run counter to individual self-interest. The Russians would have welcomed the Russification of their minorities (like many other nationalists, Russians are not racists), yet these minorities resolutely refuse to dissolve themselves in the Russian nation.

I would like to submit that nationalism provides a way to cope with the problem of origins and identity which seems to engage the imagination of each and every generation. In modern and postmodern societies, the certainties of the past have been undermined by interpretations taught in schools and perpetuated in popular culture, while the intellectual elites have opted for a fragile proposition that we all live in perpetual uncertainty. But Richard Rorty’s cheerful nihilism and Jurgen Habermas’s conscious selection of standards have a short half-life in any society, let alone among the world’s insecure masses who yearn for a sense of identity. Modern mass education does not provide identity, while its “professional experts” tend to undermine the authorities of the past.

National identity does not necessarily reflect a desire for immortality or looking toward the future, as Smith contends.²⁹ Nor is it necessarily hostile to the Other. More often it is based on a desire to have a past, for the past is crucial to human dignity. In premodern European societies, this desire was met by religion, family, and the kingdom to which one belonged. Kingdoms disappeared, families got smaller, and religion has been removed from the public square. The family has almost ceased to serve as a “memory preserver” in conditions of universal literacy. Social mobility and financial independence destroyed the many-generational family which facilitated identification with the past and provided stable identity. Other ways of dealing with the problem had to be found, and nationalism is one such way.

The development of identity requires a measure of freedom. Thus, the representatives of defensive nationalisms spend their meager resources on resisting the dominating imperial powers at the expense of many other activities. This has been well stated by Romuald Traugutt, leader of the 1863 Polish rising against the tsarist empire. When asked why he joined the rising even though he was a bookish and timid man of a weak physical constitution, Traugutt answered: “God requires virtue of man, and virtue is much harder to attain in conditions of slavery than in liberty.”³⁰ Implied in Traugutt’s answer is the thought that in order to attain liberty, one first has to have political sovereignty. This is why the struggle for political independence of groups representing defensive nationalism is often looked upon with mistrust by American conservatives for whom group independence is a non-problem. They are looking for declarations and practices of liberty without understanding that to enjoy liberty, a society must first be free of foreign occupation.

Yet even in such brutal conditions as the struggle for political independence against empires, the spokesmen for defensive nationalisms have by and large displayed moderation and awareness of that later stage when society goes about to work on liberty in conditions of freedom. They have spoken about their nation’s democratic and liberal traditions suppressed by the occupiers. Thus the nationalists in Catalonia issued in 1924 an appeal to the League of Nations making a case for Catalonian autonomy, in which it was said that Catalonia’s Parliament was “the first in Europe and to it is due the first International Code of modern times.”³¹ Upon freeing themselves from Swedish domination, the Norwegians observed that “The common fund of nationalist sentiment in Norway is found to repose in democratic ideas.”³² The Poles lay claim to the liberal Constitution of May 3, 1791.³³ In the 1990s, the Chechens, a small nation of 1.2 million people, demonstrated an amazing steadfastness in observing democratic rules of the game in conditions that are among the least conducive to democracy.³⁴

In contrast, aggressive nationalisms tend to emphasize the military and other achievements of their respective nations. Lord Bolingbroke’s daily thanks to the Lord for being an Englishman are an apt caricature of this tendency.³⁵ In some French school textbooks of the nineteenth century, only the scientific achievements of the French were mentioned, thus making the impressionable children believe that the French were the absolute world leaders in science.³⁶ Under the Soviets, the Russians claimed to have invented everything, from the light bulb to the automobile. It is characteristic that the values which these claims take for granted are the values of secular modernity, rather than those of the religious past. This is a paradox of nationalism: it is one of modernity’s ways of dealing with the past.

The search for personal identity always returns to the past, and nationalism provides one such much-traveled road. The memory communities formed through class, professional association, or financial interest are too flimsy to satisfy. Marx wanted to divide us all into social classes, but the slogan “proletarians of all countries unite” hardly ever worked over the lifetime of a single individual, let alone sustaining the entire generations. It is true that identification with a current intellectual or political elite may give some narrow minority a sense of the lateral ethnie of which Smith spoke. But such identification works only for a small minority and not for the entire society. Into these conditions steps nationalism and offers an opportunity to define oneself as part of a continuum dedicated to a quasi-transcendent purpose.

Anderson was right in linking nationalism and literacy. Nationalism is a byproduct of literacy in the special circumstance of secular society. But Anderson simplified matters by dubbing that newfound social construct “an imagined community.” National communities are rooted in something more solid than the ability of the mind to imagine non-existing things. The spread of literacy put the aristocratic ethnie within reach of the lettered masses. What used to be the exclusive tradition of aristocrats became the property of shopkeepers, small farmers, and factory workers. Reinterpretations of that body of memories do of course proceed apace in any society, but that process is unlikely to destroy the essentials of the myth inscribed in literature and in the social habits and institutions. The real or imagined heroes of the past, who once inhabited only the memory of the small elites, now inhabit the minds of the people for whom family, religion, and political authority used to be the only social realities.

National heritage is a possession, and possessions are valued more by people who have few of them than by those who have an abundance of them. After 1989, Slovak nationalism seems stronger than that of the Czechs because the Slovaks, who played second fiddle in Czechoslovakia, acquired their own state for the first time in history (not counting the miserable try under the Nazis). As third world nations acquire literacy and emerge out of racist tribalism, a surge of nationalism within their borders seems all but inevitable. Virtually all elites of the world have preserved the lateral ethnie; indeed, possessing such common memories is a sine qua non of the formation of cohesive elites. As the masses of people in poor countries are taught to read and write, these ethnic memories will be reinforced by further dissemination. Poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “The poet remembers. If you kill him, another will be born. Deeds and debates will be transcribed on paper.”

Again, essential to the understanding of nationalism is the distinction between aggressive nationalism, or a desire to export identity and memory by political pressure and military violence, and inward-looking defensive nationalism whose cornered-animal characteristics are so often confused with aggression: “Cet animal est très méchant: quand l’on attaque, il se défend.” When Vladimir Zhirinovsky announces that Russia has been an empire and must so remain for her glory, he practices aggressive nationalism in its most blatant form, the kind of jingoism that for the English is a matter of the past. When the majority of Chechens in a tiny non-Russian republic of the Russian Federation take up arms and declare that Russian troops must get out of their land, they practice defensive nationalism at its purest. The failure to discriminate between these two fundamentally different types of nationalism has affected American scholarship and foreign policy in such a way as to make for us unnecessary enemies among nations who have been victims of empires. This failure is related to the “top-down approach,” i.e., to the imposition on the weak-voiced nations of a definition of nationalism forged by America’s elites. This high-handed approach makes the hostility to nationalism prevalent in academia appear to be an extension of its general hostility to tradition and rootedness. Unfortunately, American conservatives have failed conspicuously to understand and sympathize with the determination of the conquered nations to defend their past.

Nationalism may well be human nature’s revenge on the postmodern philosophical framework which denies the possibility of continuity and which tends to see past and present as fragmented and discontinuous. While communism and postmodernity have trivialized history or denied citizens access to it, nationalism demonstrates that human beings crave history and that history cannot be engineered out of their consciousness. Nationalism developed as one of the byproducts of desacralization of the universe, a process which has been going on in European cultures since the Age of Enlightenment. As religion ceased to provide the universal grid within which individuals positioned themselves, other taxonomies came forth, among them nationalism. The religious ingredient in nationalism is usually mediated by a sense of belonging to an earthly rather than otherworldly community, and the delicate balance between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s varies from nation to nation (here too past history is indicative of the present balance). The attempts to suppress nationalism in the conditions of a progressive secularization of society are probably futile. It also seems futile to attempt to channel the nationalistic impulse into folklore, as the Soviets tried to do, or automatically to impute xenophobia or chauvinism to the emerging new nations. More research into the varieties of nationalistic experience could help refine and civilize that universal drive for identity and continuity, and curb the features which the denouncers of nationalism are rightly eager to weaken or eliminate.

Ewa M. Thompson is Professor Emerita of Slavic Studies at Rice University.

1. Oxford, Eng., 1988. ↩︎
2. In the CIA-sponsored 1992 World Factbook, Germany was still listed as having zero minorities. The 1993 edition contains a correction: The World Factbook 1993 (Washington, D.C., 1993). ↩︎
3. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge, Eng., 1981). J. A. Froude’s opinion that nations have no right to liberty if they do not have enough power to defend it is characteristic of nineteenth-century imperial brutality. Jeffrey Arx, Progress and Pessimism (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 205. ↩︎
4. Hélène Carrère-d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations (New York, 1993). ↩︎
5. Michael Kamrnen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1 (1993), 1-43. ↩︎
6. Most unhelpful here is the confusion in the English language between nation and state, or citizenship and nationality. In Asia, Latin America and continental Europe, it is assumed that nationality has to do with the origins and cultural choices of a person, while citizenship indicates the civic choice made by that person of being a citizen of this or that political entity, such as a nation state or an empire. A lack of that distinction leads to such amusing statements by American journalists as that about Chechnya, where Russians are supposedly fighting other Russians; or that twenty million “Russians” died in World War 2. ↩︎
7. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944). ↩︎
8. John E. E. Dalberg-Acton, “Nationality,” Essays in the History of Liberty, Vol. 1 (Indianapolis, 1986), 413. ↩︎
9. Nationalism (London, 1961). ↩︎
10. Edited by Peter Sugar and Ivo Lederer (Seattle, 1969). ↩︎
11. Paul Hockenos’ Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Postcommunist Eastern Europe (London, 1993) represents advocacy rather than scholarship regarding the European states that have recently shed Soviet domination. ↩︎
12. 1979 (New York, 1994). ↩︎
13. Typical in that regard is Paul Johnson’s Modern Times (New York, 1983), which repeats virtually every negative cliche about Central and Eastern Europe.  ↩︎
14. Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory (Brookfield, 1996), 137. ↩︎
15. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1948); Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963); Philip D. Curtin, ed., Imperialism (New York, 1971). ↩︎
16. Nationalism and Social Communication (New York, 1953), 143. Also Katherine Verdery, “Ethnicity as Culture: Some Soviet-American Contrasts,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2 (1988). ↩︎
17. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).  ↩︎
18. J. G. Herder’s philosophy of history was fundamental to the theorizing about nationalism. J. G. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind [Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit, 1784-91], trans. Frank Manuel (Chicago, 1968). Among the useful surveys of approaches to nationalism, one should mention C. J. H. Hayes in The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931) and Boyd A. Shafer in Faces of Nationalism (New York, 1972). Salo W. Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion [1947] (New York, 1960) points to the importance of religious beliefs in the shaping of myth-symbol complexes of nationalism.  ↩︎
19. Louis L. Snyder, The Dynamics of Nationalism: Readings in Its Meaning and Development (Princeton, 1964), 229-33. ↩︎
20. Minority Rights: Problems, Parameters, and Patterns in the CSCE [Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe] Context (Washington, D.C., 1992), 1-2. ↩︎
21. Oxford, Eng., 1986. ↩︎
22. In The Invention of Tradition, Hobsbawm argued that nineteenth-century Germany and Great Britain supervised and encouraged the rise of nationalistic rituals of allegedly ancient origin, while in fact inventing them with a view to raising the prestige of the German and British empires, heightening the emotional attachment to them of their citizens, and making citizens subservient to the empires’ political goals. Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), 263-308. ↩︎
23. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 58. ↩︎
24. Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993).  ↩︎
25. House of Commons, June 4, 1940. ↩︎
26. “Grekov, V. D., akademik: Kultura Kievskoi Rusi,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, Nos. 1-2 (1945), 90. ↩︎
27. The Russian Empire, 1801-1917 (Oxford, Eng., 1967), 54. ↩︎
28. “On Developing a Patriotic and Monarchical Spirit,” [1911] in Louis Snyder, ed., The Dynamics of Nationalism, 167. ↩︎
29. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 211. ↩︎
30. Quoted in Arcana [Krakow], Vol. 2, No.1 [7] (January 1996), 167. ↩︎
31. The Dynamics of Nationalism, 240. ↩︎
32. Ibid., 243. ↩︎
33. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol. 1, 530 ff. ↩︎
34. My file on Reuter, UPI, and AP releases about the Russian Chechen war which started in December 1994 indicates that the Chechens have scrupulously avoided brutalizing prisoners-of-war. The same cannot be said for the Russians whose advantages in that war were overwhelming. However, upon regaining fragile independence in 1996, the tiny Chechnya was so devastated by Russian carpet bombing and artillery fire that criminality and kidnappings became an intractable problem while some in the leadership turned to Islamic fundamentalists for material sustenance. ↩︎
35. Henry St. John Bolingbroke, “Letter IV,” in The Dynamics of Nationalism, op. cit., 82-4. ↩︎
36. The Dynamics of Nationalism, 131. ↩︎