Postmortem Report

by Tomislav Sunic

  Nationalism is entering today the third phase of its history, and similar to a heady Hydra and howling Hecuba it is again displaying its unpredictable character. Must it be creative in violence only? Ethnic wars are already raging in Northern Ireland, in the land of Basques, in Corsica, let alone in Yugoslavia, where two opposing nationalisms are tearing Versailles Europe apart and showering the treaty successors with embarrassing and revisionist questions.

  There are different nationalisms in different countries and they all have a different meaning. Nationalism can appear on the right; it does, however, appear on the left. It can be reactionary and progressive, but in all cases, it cannot exist unless it has its dialectical Other. German nationalism of the 19th century could not have flourished had Germany not been confronted by the aggressive French Jacobinism; modern English nationalism could not have taken off had it not been haunted by assertive Prussia. Each nationalism must have its Feindbild, its image of the evil, because nationalism is by definition the locus of political polarity in which the distinction between the foe and friend, between hostis and amicus, is brought to its deadly paroxysm. Consequently, it is no small wonder that intra-ethnic, let alone inter-ethnic, wars (like the one raging today between Croats and Serbs) are also the most savage ones, with each side vilifying, demonizing, and praying for the total destruction of the other.

  In addition, side by side with its positive founding myths, each nationalism must resort to its negative mythology, which in times of pending national disasters sustains its people in the fight with the enemy. In order to energize younger generations Polish nationalists will resurrect their dead from the Katyn, the Germans their buried from Silesia and Sudetenland; Croats will create their iconography on their postwar mass graveyards, Serbs their hagiography out of their war-camp victims. Body counts, aided by modern statistics and abetted by high-tech earth excavators, will be completed by mundane metaphors that usually tend to inflate one’s own victimology and deflate that of the enemy. German nationalists call Poles Polacks, and French chauvinists call Germans Boches. Who can deny that racial and ethnic slurs are among the most common and picturesque of weapons used by nationalists worldwide?

  Nationalism is not a generic concept, and liberal ideologues are often wrong when they reduce European nationalism to one conceptual category. What needs to be underlined is that there are exclusive and inclusive nationalisms, just as there are exclusive and inclusive racisms. Central Europeans, generally, make a very fine distinction between inclusive Jacobin state-determined (staatsgebunden) unitary nationalism vis-à-vis the soil-culture-blood determined (volksgebunden) nationalism of Central and Eastern Europe. Jacobin nationalism is by nature centralistic; it aims at global democracy, and it has found today its valiant, albeit unwitting, standard-bearer in George Bush’s ecumenical one-worldism. Ironically, a drive towards unitary French nationalism existed before the Jacobins were even born, and it was the product of a peculiar geopolitical location that subsequently gave birth to the modern French state. Richelieu, or Louis XIV, were as much Jacobins in this sense as their secular successors Saint-Just, Gambetta, or De Gaulle. In France, today, whichever side one looks — left, right, center — the answer is always Jacobinism. In a similar vein, in England, the Tudors and Cromwell acted as unitary nationalists in their liquidations and genocides — ad majorem Dei gloriam — of the Cornish and Irish and a host of other ethnic groups. Churchill and other 20th-century English leaders successfully saved Great Britain in 1940 by appealing to unitary nationalism, although their words would have found little appeal today among Scots and Irish.

  Contrary to widespread beliefs, the word “nationalism”, (Nazionalismus) was rarely used in National Socialist Germany. German nationalists in the 1920’s and 30’s popularized, instead, such derivatives as Volkstum, Volksheit, or Voelkisch, words that are etymologically affiliated with the word Deutsch and that were, during the Nazi rule, synonymously used with the word rassisch (racial). The word Volk came into German usage with J. G. Fichte in the early 19th century, when Germany belatedly began to consolidate its state consciousness. The word Volk must not be lightly equated with the Latin or English populus (people). As an irony of history, even the meaning of the word “people” in the English language is further blurred by its polymorphous significance. People can mean an organic whole, similar to Volk, although it has increasingly come to be associated with an aggregate of atomized individuals. Ironically, the German idea of the Volk and the Slavic idea of narodi have much in common; and indeed, each group can perfectly well understand, often with deadly consequences, each other’s national aspirations. It is no small wonder that in the German and Slavic political vocabulary the concept of federalism and democracy will acquire a radically different meaning than in linguistically homogeneous England, France, or America.

  By ostensibly putting aside its racist past, yet by pushing its universalist message to the extreme, the West paradoxically shows that it is no less racist today than it was yesterday.

  French and English nationalisms lack a solid territorial dimension, and their founding myths lie elsewhere. Over the course of their history, due to their colonial holdings, these countries have acted both as European and non-European nations — which explains, particularly in the light of massive non-European immigration — why their elites find it difficult to argue for their strong ethnic identity. Continental European nationalism, and specifically the German idea of Volksheit, is by contrast the product of a set of geographic circumstances unparalleled in France or England. In France and England, the people were created out of the existence of the state. In Germany and Continental Europe, nationalism has manifested itself primarily as a cultural phenomenon of frequently stateless peoples. In Germany, Poland, Romania, etc., poets and writers created the national consciousness of their peoples; in France, princes created state consciousness. Popular figures in Central Europe — like Herder or Father Jahn in Germany, Sandor Petofy in Hungary, Ljudevit Gaj in Croatia, Vuk Karadzic in Serbia, or Taras Shevchenko in the Ukraine — played a crucial role in laying the foundation of the modern state for their respective peoples. Quite different was the story of nationalism in France where légistes created the unitary French state by suppressing regionalism in the French Hexagon. Similarly, in England, the role of nation-state builders fell to merchants and to maritime companies, which, aided by buccaneers, brought wealth for the English crown. Interestingly, during the Battle of Britain, Churchill even toyed with the idea of transferring Downing Street and Westminster Palace to the heartland of America — a gesture that in Central Europe would have amounted to national suicide.

  Like America, France first became a state, and in turn set the stage for the molding of the French people of different tribes; by contrast, Germans have always been a stateless yet compact people. The history of France is essentially the history of genocide, in which French rulers from the Capétians to the Bourbons, all the way down to modern Jacobins, meticulously carried out destruction of Occitans, Vendeans, Bretons, Franche-Comté, etc. Suppression of regionalism and nativism has been one of the major hallmarks of French acculturation, with the latest attempt being to Frenchify Arabs from the Maghreb countries. Today, France is paying the price for its egalitarian and universalist dreams. On the one hand, it is trying to impose universal values and laws on the masses of Third World immigrants; on the other, it must daily proclaim the principle of self-determination for its multiracial social layers. If one puts things in historical perspective, everything presages that France has become a prime candidate for sparking off racial warfare all over Europe.

  Looking at Germany and its East European glacis, a sharp eye immediately discovers a fluid area of levitating borders, “seasonal states”, yet strong culturally and historically minded peoples. Central and Eastern European have a long ethnic and historical memory, but their borders fall short of clean-cut ethnographic lines. Germany, for instance, offers a view of an open and poorly defined st
ate yet at the same time it is a closed community. By contrast, Jacobin France, functionalist-minded England, and America are geographically closed states, but open societies. Nationalism in these countries has always been inclusive and has invariably displayed globalist and imperialistic pretensions, notably by spreading its unitary message to disparate peoples worldwide.

  Geographic location has also affected the ethnopsychology of European peoples. An average German is essentially a peasant; his psychologic cast and conduct are corporal and telluric. A German displays great courtesy but lacks politeness, and like most peasants he usually exhibits heavy-handed (schwerfällig) and frequently awkward approaches to social relations. By contrast, a French-man, irrespective of his ideological stripe and social background, is always a petty bourgeois; he is full of manners and stylishness but also full of pretensions. Unlike a German nationalist, a Frenchman displays a surfeit of manners but lacks courtesy. Even the most ignorant foreign tourist who goes to Germany and France will notice something foggy and unpredictable about Germans, while at the same time he will be gratified by the German sense of professional correctness and absolute honesty. By contrast, the body language and mannerisms of the French, as appealing as they may be, frequently leave one perplexed and disappointed.

  In the course of their ethnogeneses, languages gave final veneer to their respective peoples. The German language is an organic language that branches off into eternity; it is also the richest European language. The French language, similar to a great extent to English, is an opaque language spun more by context than by flexion. As idiomatic languages, French and English are ideal for maritime and seaport activities. Over the course of history the French sabir and “pidgin” English proved to be astounding homogenizing agents as well as handy acculturative vectors for the English and French drives toward universalism. Subsequently, English and French became universal languages, in contrast to German, which never spread out beyond the East European marshlands.

  The German idea of the Reich was for centuries perfectly adapted to the open plains of Europe, which housed diverse and closely knit communities. Neither the Habsburgs nor the Brandenburgs ever attempted to assimilate or annihilate the non-Germanic peoples within their jurisdiction as the French and English did within theirs. The Danube monarchy, despite its shortcomings, was a stable society, proven by its five hundred years of existence. During the First and Second Reich, principalities, towns, and villages within the bounds of the Austrian and Prussian lands had a large amount of self-government that frequently made them vulnerable to French, Swedish, and English imperial ambitions.

  German Volksheit is an aristocratic as well as a democratic notion, since traditionally the relations between domestic aristocracy and the German people have been organic. Unlike France or England, Germany never experimented with foreign slavery. In Germany, ethnic differences between the local aristocracy and the German people are minimal; by contrast, in France, Spain, and England the aristocracy has usually recruited from the Northern European leadership class and not the masses at large. Incidentally, even now, despite the exactions of the French Revolution, one can see more racial differences between a French aristocrat and an average Frenchman than between a German aristocrat and a German peasant. In Germany, the relationship between the elites and the commoners has always been rooted in the holistic environment, and as a result Germany has remained a society barely in need of an elaborate social contract; it has based social relationships on horizontal hierarchy and corporate structure, buttressed in addition by the idea of “equality among the equals.” By contrast, French and English society can be defined as vertically hierarchical and highly stratified; consequently, it should not be surprising that French and English racisms were among the most virulent in the world. It is also worth recalling that the first eugenic and racial laws in this century were not passed in Germany, but in liberal America and England.

  Political scientists will one day ponder why the most glaring egalitarian impulses appear in France and America, two countries which, until recently, practiced the most glaring forms of racism. Are we witnessing today a peculiar form of remorse or national-masochism, or simply an egalitarian form of inclusive racism? Inclusive nationalism and racism, that manifest themselves in universalism and globalism, attempt to delete the difference between the foreigner and the native, although in reality the foreigner is always forced to accept the legal superstructure of his now “repented” white masters. By ostensibly putting aside its racist past, yet by pushing its universalist message to the extreme, the West paradoxically shows that it is no less racist today than it was yesterday. An elitist like Vilfredo Pareto wrote that liberal systems in decline seem to worry more about the pedigree of their dogs than the pedigree of their offspring. And a leftist, Serge Latouche, has recently written how liberal racists, while brandishing their ethnic national masochism, force liberal values and liberal legal provisions upon their “decorative coloreds.”

  Peoples and ethnic groups are like boughs and petals; they grow and decay, but seldom resurrect. France and England may evoke their glorious past, but this past will invariably have to be adjusted to their new ethnically fractured reality. Lithuania was, several centuries ago, a gigantic continental empire; today it is a speck on the map. The obscure Moscow in the 15th century became the center of the future Russian steamroller because other principalities, such as Suzdal or Novgorod, fantasized more about aesthetics than power politics. Great calamities, such as wars and famines, may be harbingers of a nation’s collapse, but license and demographic suicide can also determine the outcome of human drama. Post-ideological Europe will soon discover that it cannot forever depend on the whims of technocratic elites who are in search of the chimera of the “common European market.” As always, the meaning of carnal soil and precious blood will spring forth from those who best know how to impose their destiny on those who have already decided to relinquish theirs. Or to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, when a people abandons politics, this does not mean the end of politics; it simply means the end of a weaker people.

  Woodrow Wilson’s Defeat in Yugoslavia: The End of a Multicultural Utopia

  Es sollte zugleich die Ansicht wachsen, dass ein dritter Weltkrieg, wenn auch nicht unwahrscheinlich, so doch nicht unvermeidlich ist.

  — Ernst Jünger, Über die Linie, 1950

  The violent breakup of Yugoslavia illustrates the growing difficulty of theorizing about the future of multi-ethnic states. Who would have predicted that Yugoslavia, which until recently had been hailed as a “model multi-ethnic socialist state,” would come to an end, only seventy-three years after it was created!

  Predictably, the much-vaunted liberal models for multi-ethnic states, such as “power sharing”, or “consociationalism”, will have little attraction in an environment in which different ethnic groups can no longer live together.1 Whether their wish for independence, even when supported by the majority of their ethnic voters, will be welcomed by multi-ethnic America or the multinational United Nations, remains to be seen. Slovenia’s, Croatia’s, and Bosnia’s self-proclaimed and bloody departure from Yugoslavia had little legally binding value, so long as they did not receive the blessing of the U.S.

  The American belief that the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe would miraculously bypass the Yalta-drawn borders and bring about the “end of history”, needs to be revised. To applaud the end of communism, yet to sermonize about the inviolability of European borders that were drawn in 1919 by Versailles treaty architects, and then in 1945, by their Yalta successors, does not sound very convincing. If America is ready today to adapt itself to a new post-communist reality, it follows that it should also accept a new geopolitical reality. One must not rule out the possibility that American and Atlantic fantasies about multi-ethnic and economic integration may be paralleled by a further Central and East European slide into disintegration, calling into question the security of the entire European continent.

  I. Yugoslav C
ivil War or a Serbian War of Aggression?

  Since June 1991 the American administration has viewed the conflict in the former Yugoslavia as a “civil war” pitting secessionist Croatia against the Yugoslav center, Serbia. To call the war in the former Yugoslavia “civil” was quite in line with American globalist rhetoric. In the eyes of the American media, a “civil war” was taking place within the internationally recognized Yugoslav state. American geopolitical concerns also played a role. Washington was not willing to shrug off a country it had helped create in 1919, and that it provided for decades with all the necessary legitimacy and legality. Both as a Serbian-dominated monarchy, and later as Tito’s communist non-aligned pseudo-federation, Yugoslavia enjoyed an excellent relationship with America. In addition, Yugoslavia was a full member of various international organizations and regimes, including the United Nations. Also, from the sociological point of view, multi-ethnic America could not dismiss a country that in many instances was a smaller replica of the American melting pot. If Croatia is allowed to walk away, why not tomorrow allow Southern California or Arizona to merge with Mexico? From historical and demographic perspectives, nobody can prevent today’s or tomorrow’s Mexican Americans from invoking similar “democratic rights to self-determination.”