What keeps ethnic and racial tension within bounds in the world’s successful modern multi-ethnic societies is a state strong enough to make its authority respected. This remains true even in Northern Ireland. Despite the fact that British institutions do not command equal respect from both communities, the British state still manages, just, to hold the ring. What saves the province from becoming Bosnia is nothing more than the British Army, policemen who do their jobs, and courts that convict upon evidence.
There is a larger moral to be drawn from this. The only reliable antidote to ethnic nationalism turns out to be civic nationalism, because the only guarantee that ethnic groups will live side by side in peace is shared loyalty to a state strong enough, fair enough, equitable enough to command their obedience.
THE HUNGRY AND THE SATED
I end my journey where I started, thinking about the relation between arguments and consequences, between nationalist good intentions and nationalist violence. A rationalist tends to believe that what people do results from what they say they intend. Thus when nationalists say violence is warranted in self-defense and in seeking self-determination, a rationalist concludes that this is why violence occurs.
I am no longer so sure. So often, it seemed to me, the violence happened first, and the nationalist excuses came afterward. The insensate destruction of Vukovar by both sides, for example, struck me as a perfect example of this. The nationalist rhetoric in that instance is best understood as an excuse for what happened, not as an explanation for what occurred.
Everywhere I’ve been, nationalism is most violent where the group you are defining yourself against most closely resembles you. A rational explanation of conflict would predict the reverse to be the case. To outsiders at least, Ulstermen look and sound like Irishmen, just as Serbs look and sound like Croats—yet the very similarity is what pushes them to define themselves as polar opposites. Since Cain and Abel, we have known that hatred between brothers is more ferocious than hatred between strangers. We say tritely that this is so because hatred is a form of love turned against itself. Or that we hate most deeply what we recognize as kin. Or that violence is the ultimate denial of an affiliation we cannot bear. None of this will do. There are puzzles which no theory of nationalism, no theory of the narcissism of minor difference, can resolve. After you have been to the waste-lands of the new world order, particularly to those fields of graves marked with numberless wooden crosses, you feel stunned into silence by a deficit of moral explanation.
In his essay “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” Theodor Adorno says, in passing, “Nationalism no longer quite believes in itself.” There was a bewildering insincerity and inauthenticity to nationalist rhetoric everywhere I went, as if the people who mouthed nationalist slogans were aware, somewhere inside, of the implausibility of their own words. Serbs who, in one breath, would tell you that all Croats were Ustashe beasts would, in the next, recall the happy days when they lived with them in peace. In this divided consciousness, the plane of abstract fantasy and the plane of direct experience were never allowed to intersect. Nationalism’s chief function as a system of moral rhetoric is to ensure this compartmentalization and in so doing to deaden the conscience. Yet it never entirely works. The very people who absorb such generalizations with such apparently unthinking zeal often still hear the inner voice which tells them that, actually, in their own experience, these generalizations are false. Yet if most people hear this inner voice, few seem able to act upon it. The authority of nationalist rhetoric is such that most people actively censor the testimony of their own experience.
Nationalism is a form of speech which shouts, not merely so that it will be heard, but so that it will believe itself. It is almost as if the quotient of crude historical fiction, violent moral exaggeration, ludicrous caricature of the enemy is in direct proportion to the degree to which the speaker is himself aware that it is all really a pack of lies. But such insincerity may be a functional requirement of a language that is burdened with the task of insisting upon such a high volume of untruths. The nationalist vision of an ethnically pure state, for example, has the task of convincing ordinary people to disregard stubbornly adverse sociological realities, like the fact that most societies are not and have never been ethnically pure. The nationalist leaders’ call to ardent communitarian fellow feeling has to triumph over the evidence, plain to every one of his listeners, that no modern society can beat to the rhythm of a single national will. That such fantasies do take hold of large numbers of people is a testament to the deep longing such people have to escape the stubborn realities of life.
Nationalism on this reading, therefore, is a language of fantasy and escape. In many cases—Serbia is a flagrant example—nationalist politics is a full-scale, collective escape from the realities of social backwardness. Instead of facing up to the reality of being a poor, primitive, third-rate economy on the periphery of Europe, it is infinitely more attractive to listen to speeches about the heroic and tragic Serbian destiny and to fantasize about the final defeat of her historic enemies.
The political systems of all societies—advanced and backward, developed and undeveloped—are prey to the lure to fantasy, and the only reliable antidote is the cold bath of economic, political, or military disaster. Even then, societies cannot awaken from nationalist fantasy unless they have a political system that enables them to remove the fantasists. Societies with an adequate democratic tradition have proven themselves vulnerable to the politics of fantasy. But a democratic system at least provides for the punishment of fantasists whose lies catch up with them. Yet not even democracy is a reliable antidote to nationalism. The electoral survival of nationalist demagogues like Serbia’s Milošević leads one to conclude that even in a nominal democracy like Serbia, those who distract and divert people from reality usually enjoy greater political longevity than those who tell the truth.
These themes—fantasy, insincerity, and inauthenticity— take us somewhat deeper in understanding the relation between nationalist argument and nationalist violence. We can begin to see how nationalist rhetoric rewrites and re-creates the real world, turning it into a delusional realm of noble causes, tragic sacrifice, and cruel necessity. Yet there is a further element to add to the picture.
As everyone can see on his television screen, most nationalist violence is perpetrated by a small minority of males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Some are psychopaths but most are perfectly sane. Until I had spent some time at the checkpoints of the new world order, until I had encountered my quotient of young males intoxicated by the power of the guns on their hips, I had not understood how deeply pleasurable it is to have the power of life and death in your hands. It is a characteristic liberal error to suppose that everyone hates and fears violence. I met lots of young men who loved the ruins, loved the destruction, loved the power that came from the barrels of their guns.
Perhaps liberals have not understood the force of male resentment that has been accumulated through centuries of gradual European pacification. The history of our civilization is the history of the confiscation of the means of violence by the state. But it is an achievement that an irreducible core of young males has always resented. Liberals have not reckoned with the male loathing of peace and domesticity or with the anger of young males at the modern state’s confiscation of their weapons. One of the hidden rationales behind nationalist revolts is that they tap into this deeper substratum of male resentment at the civility and order of the modern state itself. For it seems obvious that the state’s order is the order of the father, and that nationalism is the rebellion of the sons. How else are we to account for the staggering gratuitousness and bestiality of nationalist violence, its constant overstepping of the bounds of either military logic or legitimate self-defense, unless we give some room in our account for the possibility that nationalism exists to warrant and legitimize the son’s vengeance against the father.
My journeys have also made me rethink the nature of belon
ging. Any expatriate is bound to have moments of wishing for a more complete national belonging. But I have been to places where belonging is so strong, so intense that I now recoil from it in fear. The rational core of such fear is that there is a deep connection between violence and belonging. The more strongly you feel the bonds of belonging to your own group, the more hostile, the more violent will your feelings be toward outsiders. You can’t have this intensity of belonging without violence, because belonging of this intensity molds the individual conscience: if a nation gives people a reason to sacrifice themselves, it also gives them a reason to kill.
Throughout my travels, I kept remembering the scene in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet is whispering to herself on the balcony in her nightgown, unaware that Romeo is in the shadows listening. She is struggling to understand what it means for her, a Capulet, to fall in love with a Montague. Suddenly she exclaims,
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name?
In the front lines of Bosnia, in the housing projects of Loyalist and Republican Belfast, in all the places where the tribal gangsters—the Montagues and Capulets of our day— are enforcing the laws of ethnic loyalty, there are Juliets and Romeos who still cry out, “Oh, let me not be a Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Catholic, or Protestant. Let me be only myself.”
Being only yourself is what ethnic nationalism will not allow. When people come, by terror or exaltation, to think of themselves as patriots first, individuals second, they have embarked on a path of ethical abdication.
Yet everywhere, in Belfast, in Belgrade and Zagreb, in Lvov, in Quebec and Kurdistan, I encountered men and women, often proud patriots, who have stubbornly resisted embarking on that path. Their first loyalty has remained to themselves. Their first cause is not the nation but the defense of their right to choose their own frontiers for their belonging.
But such people are an embattled minority. The world is run not by skeptics and ironists but by gunmen and true believers, and the new world they are bequeathing to the next century already seems a more violent and desperate place than I could ever have imagined. If I had supposed, as the Cold War came to an end, that the new world might be ruled by philosophers and poets, it was because I believed, foolishly, that the precarious civility and order of the states in which I live must be what all people rationally desire. Now I am not so sure. I began the journey as a liberal, and I end as one, but I cannot help thinking that liberal civilization—the rule of laws, not men, of argument in place of force, of compromise in place of violence—runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature. The liberal virtues—tolerance, compromise, reason—remain as valuable as ever, but they cannot be preached to those who are mad with fear or mad with vengeance. In any case, preaching always rings hollow. We must be prepared to defend them by force, and the failure of the sated, cosmopolitan nations to do so has left the hungry nations sick with contempt for us.
Between the hungry and the sated nations, there is an impassable barrier of incomprehension. I’ve lived all my life in sated nation-states, in places that have no outstanding border disputes, are no longer ruled by foreigners or oppressors, are masters in their own house. Sated people can afford to be cosmopolitan; sated people can afford the luxury of condescending to the passions of the hungry. But among the Crimean Tatars, the Kurds, and the Crees, I met the hungry ones, peoples whose very survival will remain at risk until they achieve self-determination, whether in their own nation-state or in someone else’s.
What’s wrong with the world is not nationalism itself. Every people must have a home, every such hunger must be assuaged. What’s wrong is the kind of nation, the kind of home that nationalists want to create and the means they use to seek their ends. Wherever I went, I found a struggle going on between those who still believe that a nation should be a home to all, and race, color, religion, and creed should be no bar to belonging, and those who want their nation to be home only to their own. It’s the battle between the civic and the ethnic nation. I know which side I’m on. I also know which side, right now, happens to be winning.
FURTHER READING
NATIONS AND NATIONALISM
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Cornell, 1983.
Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Harvard, 1993.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1870. Cambridge, 1990.
Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism. Blackwell, 1993.
Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Nevada, 1993.
YUGOSLAVIA
Drakulič, Slavenka. Balkan Express. Norton, 1993.
Garde, Paul. Vie et Mort de la Yougoslavie. Fayard, 1992.
Glenny, Misha. The Fall of Yugoslavia. Viking Penguin, 1993.
Magas, Branka. The Destruction of Yugoslavia. Verso, 1993.
Rupnik, Jacques, ed. De Sarajevo à Sarajevo. Editions Complexe, 1993.
Thompson, Mark. A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia. Pantheon, 1992.
GERMANY
Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Harvard, 1992.
Craig, Gordon. The Germans. Putnam, 1982.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “The Great Migration,” Granta 42, 1992.
Hughes, Michael. Nationalism and Society: Germany, 1800–1945. Edward Arnold, 1988.
McElvoy, Anne. The Saddled Cow. Faber, 1992.
Pulzer, Peter. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. Harvard, 1988.
Schneider, Peter. The German Comedy: Scenes of Life after the Wall. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.
UKRAINE
Armstrong, John. Ukrainian Nationalism. Columbia, 1980.
Kravchenko, Bodgan. Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. Oxford, 1985.
Motyl, Alexander, ed. Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities. Columbia, 1992.
Rudnytsky, Ivan L. The Role of Ukraine in Modern History. Harvard, 1987.
QUEBEC
Dodge, William. Boundaries of Identity. Lester Publishing, 1992.
Graham, Ron. The French Quarter. Macfarlane, Walter and Ross, 1992.
Richler, Mordecai. O Canada, O Quebec. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Russell, Peter. Constitutional Odyssey. Toronto, 1992.
Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, 1992.
Trudeau, Pierre. Federalism and the French Canadians. Macmillan, 1968.
KURDISTAN
Bulloch, John, and Harvey Morris. No Friends but the Mountains.Viking, 1992.
Kreyenbroek, Philip G., and Stefan Sperl. The Kurds. Routledge, 1991.
Laizer, Sheri. Into Kurdistan. Zed, 1991.
Makiya, Kanan. Cruelty and Silence. Norton, 1993.
NORTHERN IRELAND
Aughey, Arthur. Under Siege. St. Martin’s, 1989.
Bardon, Jonathan. A History of Ulster. Black Staff, 1992.
Beattie, Geoffrey. We Are the People. Heinemann, 1992.
Colley, Linda. Britons. Yale, 1992.
Foster, Roy. Modern Ireland. Penguin, 1988.
Parker, Tony. May the Lord in His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast. Cape, 1993.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must plead guilty to a deception. The book is written as if I had been traveling alone. In fact, there were never fewer than five people accompanying me at all times, to make the BBC films that go with this book. Without their companionship, I am sure the book would never have been possible.
My thanks to Alan Yentob for commissioning the television series, and to his successor, Michael Jackson, for supporting it throughout. My gratitude to P
at Ferns of Primedia and to Geraint Telfan Davies of BBC Wales for conceiving the series in the first place, to Phil George of BBC Wales for leading the team throughout, and to Michael Chaplin of BBC Wales for lending the project his influence. In the Cardiff office, Tessa Hughes, Val Turner, and Marian Williams made the travel arrangements and provided essential logistical support. On the road, three excellent cameramen, Brian McDairmant, Andrew Carchrae, and Jacek Petrycki came up with the images. Jeff North, Bob Jones, Tony Meering, and Patrick Boland recorded the sound. Ian Moss, Lawrence Gardner, Ralph MacDonald, and Mike Carling served as camera assistants. Colin Thomas and Tim Lambert were the directors and producers of three films apiece, and the final shape of the films is as much their work as mine. Many of the ideas in this book began in their heads.
In all these journeys, I depended heavily on my translators, researchers, and fixers. In Ukraine, Lina Pomerantsev; in Germany, Elfi Pallis; in Quebec, Françoise Lemaitre Auger; in Kurdistan, Sheri Laizer; in Northern Ireland, Mary Carson; in Croatia, Alan Birimac and Mark Thompson, whose fine book on the collapse of Yugoslavia influenced my whole view of the area; in Serbia, Lazar Stojanović and Suzana Jovanović.
Portions of the text first appeared—in different form—in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Observer, and Granta.
Finally, my thanks to Martha Caute and Suzanne Webber of BBC Books and to Jonathan Burnham of Chatto for driving this book through a series of publication deadlines we all thought were impossible.
I cannot begin to convey my gratitude to everyone involved. There are few pleasures to match a happy division of labor.
INDEX
Adorno, Theodor, 68, 71, 306
Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), 272
anti-Semitism, 89, 123
Arkan. See Raznjatović,Željko (a.k.a. Arkan)
Blood and Belonging Page 29
