Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  Ethnic nationalism claims, by contrast, that an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen. It is the national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community. This psychology of belonging may have greater depth than civic nationalism’s, but the sociology that accompanies it is a good deal less realistic. The fact, for example, that two Serbs share Serbian ethnic identity may unite them against Croats, but it will do nothing to stop them fighting each other over jobs, spouses, scarce resources, and so on. Common ethnicity by itself does not create social cohesion or community, and when it fails to do so, as it must, nationalist regimes are necessarily impelled toward maintaining unity by force rather than by consent. This is one reason why ethnic nationalist regimes are more authoritarian than democratic.

  They may also prove authoritarian because they are, in essence, a form of democracy conducted in the interests of the ethnic majority. Most of the new post–Cold War nation-states give lip service to the idea of a society of civic equals, and provide safeguards for minority rights. In reality, new nations like Serbia and Croatia, the Baltic states, the new Asian republics, have institutionalized ethnic majority domination. Ethnic nationalism is a particular temptation for those ethnic majorities—like the Baltic peoples and the Ukrainians—formerly ruled by the imperially backed Russian minority.

  It is sometimes argued that authoritarian ethnic nationalism takes root only where civic nationalism has never established itself. On this account, ethnic nationalism is flourishing in Eastern Europe because forty years of Communist single-party rule effectively destroyed whatever civic or democratic culture there once had been in the region. If so, it ought to be true that ethnic nationalism does not sink deep roots in societies with extensive democratic traditions. Unfortunately, this is not the case. European racism is a form of white ethnic nationalism— indeed, it is a revolt against civic nationalism itself, against the very idea of a nation based on citizenship rather than ethnicity. This revolt is gaining ground in states like Britain, Italy, France, Germany, and Spain with ample, if varying, degrees of democratic experience.

  There is also a host of examples—Northern Ireland, India, and Canada, to name three—where ethnic nationalism flourishes within states formally committed to civic democracy. In Northern Ireland, between 1920 and 1972, the Loyalist Protestant majority used the British parliamentary system to maintain a comprehensive form of majoritarian tyranny against the Catholic minority. Being steeped in the British democratic and legal tradition did nothing to stop Loyalists from bending democracy to nationalist ends. In India, forty-five years of civic democracy have barely contained the ethnic and religious nationalisms that are currently tearing the country’s federal system apart. In Canada, the picture is more optimistic, but the analytical point is the same. Full inclusion within a federal democratic system has not abated the force of Quebecois nationalism.

  In all these places, the fundamental appeal of ethnic nationalism is as a rationale for ethnic majority rule, for keeping one’s enemies in their place or for overturning some legacy of cultural subordination. In the nations of Eastern Europe, ethnic nationalism offers something more. For when the Soviet empire and its satellite regimes collapsed, the nation-state structures of the region also collapsed, leaving hundreds of ethnic groups at the mercy of each other. Since none of these groups had the slightest experience of conciliating their disagreements by democratic discussion, violence or force became their arbiter. Nationalist rhetoric swept through these regions like wildfire because it provided warlords and gunmen with a vocabulary of opportunistic self-justification. In the fear and panic which swept the ruins of the Communist states, people began to ask: So who will protect me now? Faced with a situation of political and economic chaos, people wanted to know whom to trust, and whom to call their own. Ethnic nationalism provided an answer that was intuitively obvious: Only trust those of your own blood.

  BELONGING

  If nationalism legitimizes an appeal to blood loyalty and, in turn, blood sacrifice, it can do so persuasively only if it seems to appeal to people’s better natures, and not just to their worst instincts. Since killing is not a business to be taken lightly, it must be done for a reason that makes its perpetrator think well of himself. If violence is to be legitimated, it must be in the name of all that is best in a people, and what is better than their love of home?

  Nationalists are supremely sentimental. Kitsch is the natural aesthetic of an ethnic “cleanser.” There is no killer on either side of the checkpoints who will not pause, between firing at his enemies, to sing a nostalgic song or even recite a few lines of some ethnic epic. The latent purpose of such sentimentality is to imply that one is in the grip of a love greater than reason, stronger than the will, a love akin to fate and destiny. Such a love assists the belief that it is fate, however tragic, that obliges you to kill.

  Stripped of such sentimentality, what, then, is this belonging, and the need for it, which nationalism seems to satisfy so successfully? When nationalists claim that national belonging is the overridingly important form of all belonging, they mean that there is no other form of belonging—to your family, work, or friends—that is secure if you do not have a nation to protect you. This is what warrants sacrifice on the nation’s behalf. Without a nation’s protection, everything that an individual values can be rendered worthless. Belonging, on this account, is first and foremost protection from violence. Where you belong is where you are safe; and where you are safe is where you belong. If nationalism is persuasive because it warrants violence, it is also persuasive because it offers protection from violence. The warlord is his people’s protector; if he kills, he does so in defense of the noblest cause: the protection of the innocent.

  But belonging also means being recognized and being understood. As Isaiah Berlin has written in Two Concepts of Liberty, when I am among my own people, “they understand me, as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me a sense of being somebody in the world.” To belong is to understand the tacit codes of the people you live with; it is to know that you will be understood without having to explain yourself. People, in short, “speak your language.” This is why, incidentally, the protection and defense of a nation’s language is such a deeply emotional nationalist cause, for it is language, more than land and history, that provides the essential form of belonging, which is to be understood. One can, of course, be understood in languages and in countries other than one’s own; one can find belonging even in exile. But the nationalist claim is that full belonging, the warm sensation that people understand not merely what you say but what you mean, can come only when you are among your own people in your native land.

  COSMOPOLITANISM AND PRIVILEGE

  Anyone whose father was born in Russia, whose mother was born in England, whose education was in America, and whose working life has been spent in Canada, Great Britain, and France, cannot be expected to be much of an ethnic nationalist. If anyone has a claim to being a cosmopolitan, it must be me. I wish I spoke more languages than I do, I wish I had lived in more nations than I have, and I wish that more people understood that expatriation is not exile: it is merely the belonging of those who choose their home rather than inherit it.

  For many years, I believed that the tide was running in favor of cosmopolitans like me. There seemed so many of us, for one thing. There were at least a dozen world cities— gigantic, multi-ethnic melting pots that provided a home for expatriates, exiles, migrants, and transients of all kinds. For the urban professional populations of these major cities, a post-national state of mind was simply taken for granted. People in these places did not bother about the passports of the people they worked or lived with; they did not care about the country-of-origin label on the goods they bought; they simply assumed that in constructing their own way of life they would borrow from the customs of every nation they happened to admire. Cosmopolitans made a positive ethic out of cultural borrowing: in culture, exogamy was
better than endogamy, and promiscuity was better than provincialism.

  There was nothing new in itself about this cosmopolitan ethic. We have lived with a global economy since 1700, and many of the world’s major cities have been global entrepôts for centuries. A global market has been limiting the sovereignty and freedom of maneuver of nation-states at least since Adam Smith first constructed a theory of the phenomenon at the outset of the age of nationalism in 1776. A global market in ideas and cultural forms has existed at least since the Enlightenment republic of letters. Rootless cosmopolitans have existed as a social type in the big imperial cities for centuries.

  Two features, however, distinguish the big-city cosmopolitanism of our era from what has gone before. First of all is its social and racial diffusion. Twentieth-century democracy and unprecedented postwar prosperity have extended the privileges of cosmopolitanism from a small white moneyed male elite to a substantial minority of the population of the nation-states of the developed world. Suddenly, there are a lot of us about, and our sense of sharing a post-nationalist consciousness has been mightily reinforced by cheap air travel and telecommunications.

  The second obvious change is that the global market we live in is no longer ordered by a stable imperial system. For two hundred years, the global expansion of capitalism was shaped by the territorial ambitions and policing authority of a succession of imperial powers, the British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Soviet and American joint imperium after the Second World War. Since 1989, we have entered the first era of global cosmopolitanism in which there is no framework of imperial order.

  There have been three great reorderings of the nation-state system of Europe in this century: at Versailles in 1918, when the new nations of Eastern Europe were created from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires; at Yalta in 1945, when Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill allocated the nation-states of Western and Eastern Europe to two spheres of influence; and between 1989 and 1991, when the Soviet empire and the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed. What distinguishes the third of these is that it has occurred without any imperial settlement whatever. No treaty exists to regulate the conflict between the territorial integrity of nation-states in Eastern Europe and the right to self-determination of the peoples within them. For every resolution of this conflict by civilized divorce, Czech-style, there have been a dozen armed conflicts. The basic reason is obvious enough: the imperial police have departed.

  The Americans may be the last remaining superpower, but they are not an imperial power: their authority is exercised in the defense of exclusively national interests, not in the maintenance of an imperial system of global order. As a result, large sections of Africa, Eastern Europe, Soviet Asia, Latin America, and the Near East no longer come within any clearly defined sphere of imperial or great-power influence. This means that huge sections of the world’s population have won the “right of self-determination” on the cruelest possible terms: they have been simply left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, their nation-states are collapsing, as in Somalia and in many other nations of Africa. In crucial zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire—notably the Balkans—populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to. Small wonder, then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.

  Globalism in a post-imperial age permits a post-nationalist consciousness only for those cosmopolitans who are lucky enough to live in the wealthy West. It has brought chaos and violence for the many small peoples too weak to establish defensible states of their own. The Bosnian Muslims are perhaps the most dramatic example of a people who turned in vain to more powerful neighbors to protect them. The people of Sarajevo were true cosmopolitans, fierce believers in ethnic heterogeneity. But they lacked either a reliable imperial protector or a state of their own to guarantee peace among contending ethnicities.

  What has happened in Bosnia must give pause to anyone who believes in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted. Though we have passed into a post-imperial age, we have not moved to a post-nationalist age, and I cannot see how we will ever do so. The cosmopolitan order of the great cities—London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris—depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation-state. When this order breaks down, as it did during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, it becomes apparent that civilized, cosmopolitan multi-ethnic cities have as great a propensity for ethnic warfare as any Eastern European country.

  In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation states to provide security and civility for their citizens. In that sense alone, I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives. At the very least, cosmopolitan disdain and astonishment at the ferocity with which people will fight to win a nation-state of their own is misplaced. They are, after all, only fighting for a privilege cosmopolitans have long taken for granted.

  SIX JOURNEYS

  There is only so much that can be said about nationalism in general. It is not one thing in many disguises but many things in many disguises; nationalist principles can have dreadful consequences in one place, and innocuous or positive ones in another place. Context is all. I wanted to see nationalism in as many of its guises as possible. But where was I to go?

  The itinerary I chose was personal, but, I hoped, not arbitrary. I chose places I had lived in, cared about, and knew enough about to believe that they could illustrate certain central themes.

  I began my journey in Yugoslavia, because I had lived there for two years as a child and knew it well enough in Tito’s heyday to be astonished that it should have been the place where the infamous phrase “ethnic cleansing” was coined. The thirty-five years of Tito’s rule did not seem to me just an interlude of peace in an interminable history of Balkan inter-ethnic warfare. In the Yugoslavia I had loved, Croats, Serbs, and Muslims had lived as neighbors. What, then, had turned neighbors into enemies? How exactly had nationalist paranoia torn apart the structure of inter-ethnic accommodation and produced the new order of partitioned, ethnically homogeneous states?

  My next journey was to Germany, the nation which both invented ethnic nationalism under the Romantics and then disgraced it under Hitler, and which now is struggling to contain ethnic nationalism in its modern Western European form: the white racist youth gang. Postwar Germany thinks of itself as a civic democracy, yet its citizenship laws remain defined by ethnicity. It is the society in Europe most tormented by the choice between succumbing to its ethnic nationalist past and building a civic nationalist future.

  Of the fifteen successor states of the Soviet empire, Ukraine is the largest: a nuclear superpower getting its first experience of national independence and discovering how difficult it is to dig itself out of centuries of Russian rule. It was a natural choice of destination for a journey into the ruins of the former Soviet empire. But there was a personal reason for choosing Ukraine. My grandparents and great-grandparents were Russian landowners who owned an estate in Ukraine. What better way, I thought, to explore the deep interpenetration of Ukrainian and Russian identity than to return to that estate and to see how my ancestors were now remembered in a new state.

  The same personal agenda led me to choose Quebec, where those same Russian grandparents ended their lives in exile. The nationalism I know best, the one that has torn my country—Canada—apart for thirty years, is Quebecois. Here is a nationalism in a modern, developed, and democratic society, a demand for cultural and linguistic self-determination that raises a fundamental issue—e
qually relevant to Scotland and Catalonia—if you already are a nation and enjoy substantial autonomy, why do you need an independent state of your own?

  Since nationalism is so often called a form of tribalism, Quebec also offered an opportunity to observe how tribal and national consciousness interact among an aboriginal people of northern Quebec, the Cree, who have adopted the language of national self-determination to confront Quebec’s plans for economic development in the north. How, in turn, do Quebec nationalists confront a nationalist challenge within?

  As a Crimean Tatar nationalist told me in Ukraine, only a man who has no mother knows what a mother means. Only a man without a state knows what a nation-state means. Of the many stateless peoples in the world—from the Crimean Tatars to the Palestinians—the most numerous are the Kurds. The creation of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, by the Gulf War armies of the West, allowed me to see for myself how limited autonomy and self-rule have transformed a people who have never had a home of their own. In the Kurdish struggle for a homeland, they have had to fight against four of the most virulent secular and religious nationalisms of the twentieth century: Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Hafez Assad’s Syria. Can their own national struggle finally bring the Kurds together? In other words, can nationalism create a nation?

  My final journey took me back to consider the fraying national identity of my adopted country, the British Isles. Where better to observe this identity under stress than in the streets of Belfast, where for seventy-five years the Protestant Loyalist community has been defending its right to be British against the most violent nationalist movement in Western Europe, the IRA? What exactly is Loyalism loyal to? Is it a cargo cult of Britishness, or is it a mirror in which the British can see the distorted image of who they really are? Coming home to the fierce Britishness of Ulster allowed me to confront the central conceit that cosmopolitans everywhere, and the British in particular, have about the tide of ethnic nationalism destroying the fixed landmarks of the Cold War world: everyone else is a fanatic, everyone but us is a nationalist. If patriotism, as Samuel Johnson remarked, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, so post-nationalism and its accompanying disdain for the nationalist emotions of others may be the last refuge of the cosmopolitan.