The article does not say ethno-nationalism is good but it admits that it is
here to stay for some more time. It also talks about why Americans cannot
understand this in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Dilip Deka
==============================================================
From the International Herald Tribune
ETHNO-NATIONALISM
The clash of peoples
By Jerry Z. Muller
Published: February 29, 2008
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Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans
generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. They also find
ethno-nationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social
scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of
nature but of culture, and ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group
identities rather than cosmopolitanism.
But none of this will make ethno-nationalism go away. Immigrants to the
United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country
and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in
lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries,
political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal
claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of
nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic
separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is
apt to remain ugly.
A familiar and influential narrative of 20th-century European history argues
that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter,
the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually
abandoned it. In the postwar decades, West Europeans enmeshed themselves in a
web of trans-national institutions, culminating in the European Union. After
the fall of the Soviet empire, that transnational framework spread eastward to
encompass most of the Continent. Europeans entered a post-national era, which
was not only a good thing in itself but also a model for other regions.
Nationalism, in this view, had been a tragic detour on the road to a peaceful
liberal democratic order.
Yet the experience of the hundreds of Africans and Asians who perish each
year trying to get into Europe by landing on the coast of Spain or Italy
reveals that Europe's frontiers are not so open. And a survey would show that
whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single
overwhelmingly dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one of
those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other
words - where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict
citizenship laws - in Europe the "separatist project" has not so much vanished
as triumphed. Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects
ethno-nationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately after World War
II. European stability during the Cold War era was in fact due partly to the
widespread fulfillment of the ethno-nationalist project.
Although the term "ethnic cleansing" has come into English usage only
recently, its verbal correlates in Czech, French, German, and Polish go back
much further. Much of the history of 20th century Europe, in fact, has been a
painful, drawn-out process of ethnic disaggregation. The breakup of Yugoslavia
was simply the last act of a long play. But the plot of that play - the
disaggregation of peoples and the triumph of ethno-nationalism in modern Europe
- is rarely recognized, and so a story whose significance is comparable to the
spread of democracy or capitalism remains largely unknown and unappreciated.
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When the European overseas empires dissolved, meanwhile, they left behind a
patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns of
settlement and whose internal populations were ethnically mixed. It is wishful
thinking to suppose that these boundaries will be permanent. As societies in
the former colonial world modernize, becoming more urban, literate, and
politically mobilized, the forces that gave rise to ethno-nationalism and
ethnic disaggregation in Europe are apt to drive events there, too.
This unfortunate reality creates dilemmas for advocates of humanitarian
intervention, because making and keeping peace between groups that have come to
hate and fear one another is likely to require costly ongoing military missions
rather than relatively cheap temporary ones. When communal violence escalates
to ethnic cleansing, moreover, the return of large numbers of refugees to their
place of origin after a cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and
even undesirable, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of conflict
down the road. Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such
intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at
least it deals with the problem at issue.
Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the
contingent elements of group identity - the extent to which national
consciousness is culturally and politically manufactured by ideologists and
politicians. They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined
communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the
concept of its power. It is true, of course, that ethno-national identity is
never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim. Yet it would be a
mistake to think that because nationalism is partly constructed it is therefore
fragile or infinitely malleable. Ethno-nationalism was not a chance detour in
European history: it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human
spirit that are heightened by the process of modern state creation, it is a
crucial source of both solidarity and enmity, and in one form or another, it
will remain for many generations to come. One can only profit from
facing it directly.
Jerry Muller is professor of history at the Catholic University of America.
his most recent book is "The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European
Thought." This article is drawn from an essay in the March/April issue of
Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.
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