The Challenge of Nationalism

BY HIRENDRA NATH MUKERJEE, M.A. (Cal.) B.A., B.Litt. (Oxon.)

BAR-AT-LAW

(Lecturer, Andhra University)

I

The Austrian poet, Grillparzer, once remarked that ‘humanity, through nationality, returns to bestiality.’ To prophets of nationality like Mazzini, nationalism was the very breath of life stirring in a people; while to Acton, it seemed to be something sinister, whose course, he predicted, ‘will be marked by material and moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the interests of mankind.’ Acton was not far wrong if we take into account the post-war world, which exhibits the menace of opposing nationalisms to the unity or even the maintenance of civilisation. Despite Geneva and Locarno, and talks of European Customs Unions and armament protocols, and despite the contempt with which the idea of nationality is regarded by men like Tagore, it would be folly to forget that the problem of nationality and

of national jealousies is still far from a solution. ‘To refuse,’ said Lenin, referring to nationalism, ‘the thing that is, cannot be permitted; recognition forces itself.’ It would be blindness to ignore, for instance, that economic nationalism is a dominant feature of the world-today, that import ‘quotas,’ export bounties, subsidised railway rates to and penal railway rates from the frontiers, and a whole labyrinth of measures for the restriction of international exchanges, have been and are being elaborated by the civil services of different countries. A certain British economist, we hear, keeps a ‘tariff map’ of the world. He puts up along the many frontiers little paper walls varying in height to indicate the scale of the tariffs of each State. Europe, on his map, resembles, says John Strachey, nothing so much as the cross section of a prison with each nation cowering immured in its own little economic cell. Great Britain has become a protectionist country. Ottawa intended the isolation of the British Empire from the current of world trade–an intention that has been partly thwarted, not so much by the forces of economic internationalism, as by acute national rivalries within the Empire. International lending has come almost to a standstill. The United States Congress is in a frenzied nationalist mood. France and Germany are not exactly friendly. Starvation stalks in Eastern and Central Europe against a ground of bitter internecine hostility.

Nationalism has, indeed, become something like a new religion. The hooked cross of Germany, the statue of Italia, the eternal flame burning before the grave of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, are the symbols of worship. The ‘Buy British’ mood of Britain expresses, with less theatricality, the same spirit; the recent mass hysteria over the King’s Jubilee is another Anglo-Saxon variation on the same theme. One needs only a conversation with a young, ingenuous Italian fascist; one needs only to have been present at students’ meetings, even in pre-Hitler Germany, where the proceedings opened with the spirited singing of ‘Deutschland, uber alles,’ or to have read Moller van den Bruck’s ‘Germany’s Third Empire’ or Friedrich Sieburg’s ‘Germany, my country’; one needs only to have tramped the streets of Paris all day on July 14, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, to be persuaded of the strength and genuineness of nationalist fervour. It is not so difficult to understand the causes of Hitler’s amazing ascendancy, after one reads the report of a speech by Professor Naumann at a teachers’s conference at Cologne: ‘It may sound barbaric, but nevertheless it is true: Germany has an abundance of beautiful poems, splendid grammars and philosophical systems. Even if nothing new were added to it, we would have a treasure on which we could live for hundreds of years to come. But of Danzig or Vienna, or of the Saar district of Eupon, there is a great lack at present in Germany. For all that, Danzig and Vienna are at the moment more beautiful to us than a beautiful poem and more valuable than a clever book,–especially if the beautiful poem or the clever book were such that they could have been made as well in Paris or Poland.’ ¹ The Saar, which was a kind of barometer of German national prestige, is now part of the Fatherland, as a result of a memorable plebiscite which has been the high-water mark of recent German nationalism. But, as every newspaper reader knows, there is no lack in Europe today of ‘irredentas’ which are like so many powder magazines liable to be suddenly on fire. The Polish corridor, the district of Vilna, Upper Silesia and Macedonia, zones in dispute between Italy and Austria, between Italy and Jugo-Slavia, between Hungary and Roumania, between Hungary and Jugo-Slavia, between Italy and Greece–are all danger-spots where the light of peace finds it hard to penetrate. On top of all this, there are the claims of puissant nations to what are euphemistically called ‘places in the sun’–most notably, today, of Italy in Africa and of Japan in the Far East. It is no wonder, then, that the recurrent theme in contemporary politics is the problem of peace, which largely resolves itself into the problem of nationalism and its sinister corollary, imperialism.

II

The historical evolution of modern nationalism takes us little further than some 150 years. The peculiar conditions of England were responsible for its appearance there earlier than anywhere else. Henry VIII, hungering for matrimonial bliss, invoked it in the name of religion; Elizabeth, with her eye on overseas trade and the spoil of Spanish galleons, invoked it with incantations on ‘this precious stone, set in a silver sea.’ France before 1789 was little more than a congeries of Gascons, Provencals, Bretons, Normans, Alsatians and others; the defence of the Revolution against the alliance of crowned heads began French nationalism. German nationalism was created by Napoleon; Fichte’s ‘Addresses to the German Nation,’ which became the Bible of German patriotism, followed the battle of Jena and preceded the War of Liberation in 1813. Italians, oppressed and divided by priests, Bourbons and Hapsburgs, found a release in the hope, magistrally expressed by Mazzini, to lead the world again as they had done from the time of St. Francis to that of Michelangelo. Slav nationalism, pugnaciously prominent since 1848, claimed from the rest of the world a reverent acknowledgment of its primacy in mysticism and the not easily discernible wisdom which is supposed to be its concomitant.

Dostoevsky once said that every people must look upon itself as the, ‘God-bearing people’ in order to have any faith in its future. Danger lurks in this advice, for there is no knowing when a nation comes to believe in its monopoly of God’s wisdom, and if it does, its evangelical zeal may not be palatable to other peoples. To Mazzini, nationality was sacred, because God has written one line of his thought on the cradle of each nation.’ England, he decided, was to specialise in business and colonisation, Russia to civilise Asia, Poland to be the champion of the slavs; Germany was to think, France to act, and Italy to unite thought and action. A non–Italian, presumably, was expected to acquiesce, without demur, in the pre-eminent role assigned to Italy. Mazzini refused to Ireland a national mission of its own and therefore its claim to national independence; of Asia, he did not deign to think more than to consign her to the tender mercies of ‘civilisers’ from imperialist Britain and Czarist Russia. With all his desire to be fair as between different European nations, his predilection for his own continually broke out in rapturous panegyrics on the Italy that was to be.

In a recent Nazi book, ‘The Fundamentals of Anthropology’ by Professor Hermann Gauch, there occurs this astounding statement: ‘The non-Nordic is not a 100% human being; he is, in fact, not a human being at all, if compared with the animal, but merely an intermediary, a link. . . [he] comes next to the man-apes.’ Nothing very different, probably, was meant by Fichte when he said that ‘to have character and to be German undoubtedly mean the same.’ His ‘Addresses’ of 1807 begin by explaining the superiority of the German to all others, because he alone had a pure language. He forgot, Bertrand Russell points out with his inimitable irony, that the Russians, Turks and Chinese, not to mention the Eskimos and Hottentots, had also pure languages. Hitler’s henchmen today look upon race, not language, as the proof of German superiority; they are not without their forbears. Irish professors have written books to prove that Homer was an Irishman. French anthropologists have given archeological evidence that the Celts, not the Teutons, were the pioneers of civilisation in northern Europe. Houston Chamberlain, the mysterious Englishman who did not live to see himself canonised by the Nazi movement, argued at length that Dante was a German and Christ was not a Jew. Anglo-Indians have always emphasised race and, through Kipling, imperialist England has caught the infection. ²

A nation, as any text-book on politics will tell us, connotes a geographical group and a sentiment of solidarity. This sentiment has considerable affinities with the crowd spirit. In times of crisis, particularly, a nation behaves as a crowd does; the emotional tone of both is more or less similar: there is the same unreasoning love and hate, the same inflated egoism, the same de-individualising sense of absorption into a larger whole, the same thrill of a vaguely apprehended common purpose. The cheering crowds before Buckingham Palace on the day of the declaration of war on Germany, genuinely represented, for the time being, the entire British nation.

The sentiment of national solidarity may be due to a common language, a supposed common descent, a common culture and traditions, or common interests and common dangers. In the majority of cases, all these play a part in producing national sentiment, but however the sentiment is produced, it is the only essential to the existence of a nation. As Renan discovered, it is impossible to define nationality except in terms of the sense of nationality, which, obviously, is a reality. We think ourselves a nation, and we are a nation; ’tis thinking makes it so.’ But, of course, we do not think that way till the stage is set for it,–which accounts for the late emergence of nationalism in history. We must not forget that nationalism, as such, is not a bit more ‘natural’ than tribalism, clannishness or imperialism; we can shake it off when the material environment so demands. The authors and propagandists of modern nationalism have been the men of brains–and, this is important, of some means––belonging most often to the middle classes. The time had come for them to assert themselves and they did, through the medium, very largely, of nationalism that, fortunately, had in it elements which could powerfully attract the masses. Palacky, the great historian and nationalist of Bohemia, tells us ³ that if the ceiling of the room in which he and some of his friends were dining one night had collapsed, the Czech nationalist movement would have been destroyed; it was still of a small group and had not yet captured the masses. Equally illuminating tales–though Palacky’s conclusion is a little too sweeping–might be told of the beginnings of nationalism in many countries.

Nationalism, thus, is not instinctive with the masses, any more than with the classes. Most of us are nationalists, because our fathers have, consciously or unconsciously, drilled us into it. It never occurs to us to question the adoration of the flag or other national symbols. ‘This is because our mind is a social product; we repeat, without knowing it, the formulas and fantasies and frauds that are ‘of good repute.’ Nationalism, besides, is strong because it touches a genuine chord in our hearts; it strives, however clumsily, to satisfy our hunger for community. But its form and character have been determined by history, which clearly disproves its immutability; at critical junctures, for example, class interests have been found more powerful than considerations of national policy. The French emigres, we all know, helped Germany against France in 1792; the Russian middle classes allied themselves alternately with Germany and the Entente Powers against the Revolution; the ruling classes in the East who, for a time, welcomed Russian revolutionary propaganda as an aid in the struggle against European imperialism, later got alarmed at the danger to their own interests and opposed it bitterly. Nationality, of course, admits, in theory, no grades, no hierarchy of membership; but, as a matter of fact, the susceptibility of the helpless masses to propaganda which money controls, means in the last resort the dominance of a class. The smoke-screen of nationalism is so often put up, that the people may not notice the deception. It is a relief, therefore, to be able to know that nationalism is not an unchangeable element of our nature, that it is permissible to hope for a time, in the distant future maybe, when the inconvenient idiosyncrasies of locality will not hamper our common humanity.

But this should not blind us to the phenomenal power for good and for evil that nationalism commands today. For the present, at any rate, both tribalism and the antipodal position of cosmopolitanism are definitely unsatisfactory. We cannot afford to forget the lesson of the debacle of international socialism during the Great War. The Basle manifesto of 1912 became a dead letter two years later and erstwhile socialists flocked to fight under their national banners. A mere scratch discovered that they were still more in love with their nation than with the common cause of the workers of the world. We must not forget, on the other hand, the part played by love of country in the first great victory of socialism. The spectacle of Russian courtiers, generals, landowners, capitalists and merchants, the very men who claimed a monopoly of patriotism, invading their own country in a desperate effort to recover their profits, with the ubiquitous aid of the invading expeditions of half the world, did not a little to rally the masses of the people to fight for a socialism which meant also their national liberation. We must, in short, if we learn from history, discover an inter-nationalism which does better justice by the notion of the local community.

III

Over a sixth of the earth’s surface, in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, the national question is being tackled in a manner which alone promises to solve the problems of nationalism. The immoral gospel of the nation is one of the most lethal dangers of our age and it is, unhappily, on the forefront of the programmes of men like Mussolini land Hilter. In the U. S. S. R. nationalism is assigned a relative character; there is no question of a fulfillment of nationhood for its own sake, for the sake of its sublimity and its historic mission. With the achievement of socialism, nationalism as we know it will disappear; it is being taken into account at present only in order that the final goal may be more expeditiously reached. ⁴

Even the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union do not deny that its ‘national policies,’ the treatment, in other words, of former subject peoples of the Czarist empire, are one of its most notable successes. In one great gesture after the Revolution, the Union renounced all priorities and capitulations and concessions and privileges which the Czarist government had enjoyed in Asiatic countries along with the other Great Powers. Lenin expanded the slogan, ‘Proletarians of the world, unite,’ into ‘Proletarians of all countries, and oppressed peoples of all the world, unite!", and the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia was followed almost immediately by a proclamation to the Mohammedan workers of Russia and the East, calling on them to organise their national life in complete freedom and with the aid, whenever necessary, of the Russian proletariat. The banner of the Union dispensed with all national emblems–the lions, eagles and bears, the beasts of prey of the State–and showed, as symbols of the new evangel of labour, a sickle and hammer on a sun-lit globe framed in ears of corn, with interwoven ribbons bearing in different languages the motto: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’

Within the territory of the U. S. S. R. there are extremes, not only of climate but also of culture. But where the Czar’s Government had violently to repress scores of subject peoples, the Soviet Union has been able to encourage every ethnic group within its borders. The culturally advanced Ukrainian and the nomadic, illiterate Uzbek, the Great Russian and the gypsy, are equally free to develop their national personalities. Huge amounts have been spent for providing the basis for local industries in the national republics. Scores of races and millions of people were condemned under the pre-revolutionary system to what has been called ‘planned wardness.’ Bolsheviks, on the other hand, have begun to build a textile industry in Turkestan, where cotton can be grown, and under their fostering care, distant Caucasus is becoming an industrial centre. There has, then, been no remissness in recognising that it would be sheer hypocrisy to suggest that the Uzbek was ‘free’ to develop his culture if, in the absence of industrial equipment, he had to toil sixteen hours a day; he must have freedom of a very different sort from the freedom we all have ‘to own a Rolls and dine at the Ritz.’

Before the revolution, the language of the administration, the Courts and the government schools for the whole Empire, was Russian, though Russians formed no more than 43% of the population. There was, of course, one official religion, that of the Orthodox Church, and all non-Russians, in Asia and along the Volga, had no civil rights. Until 1905, it was illegal to print books in Ukrainian, White Russian and Lithuanian. Today in the U. S. S. R., with its 185 peoples and 147 languages, there is no imposed privilege for a people or for a language. Elaborate minority legislation assures to the minorities, among other things, their schools and the official employment of their own languages. For a number of languages, even alphabets had to be improvised. Local officials and members of economic bodies, if they happen to be outsiders, have got to learn the local language. There are now academies for issuing dictionaries, publishing institutions, libraries, theatres, museums, historical and scientific societies, in formerly barbarous tracts; the film and the wireless are steadily being requisitioned for the purpose of developing the languages. Since 1929, the Latin script has replaced, throughout the Union, the complicated Arabic, calculated, as it were, to prolong the cultural sleep of the Asiatic peoples; the way was led by Azerbaijan, the first Mohammedan state to renounce the Arabic script, even before Kemalist Turkey, and to adopt legislation for women’s emancipation. Moscow gypsies have issued the first wall-newspaper and staged the first play in their gypsy language. ‘Red Yurts’ and ‘Red kitabikas’ have been instituted in areas inhabited by nomads and semi-nomads,–transportable tents with which teacher and doctor and midwife and library go from camp to camp. ‘The mountain women’s huts’ work in a similar way in the Caucasian mountains and their remote and sequestered valleys.

The propaganda for women’s emancipation has been in full force since 1927; it was not possible earlier to make a frontal attack on age-long superstitions in some of the most ward tracts of the world. Before the Soviet could intervene, ‘unfaithful’ women were done to death by stoning. Many women, whose names we do not know, paid with their lives for laying aside the veil or for other modernising tendencies. It was not till the Communist Party was strong enough among the indigenous populations that it became possible to combat energetically the influence of the feudal landowner and the Mohammedan priesthoods with their ecclesiastical courts. Wife-purchase and rapine are now punishable offences; but, unlike in modern Turkey, there has been no direct legislation against the veil. Today in such advanced Mohammedan territories as the Crimea, one never sees the veil, though it still lurks in remote nooks of Central Asia. In recent years, more than 1500 women have been elected chairman of village soviets in the eastern Soviet states. The Supreme Court of Justice in Kazakistan had in 1932 a woman president; another was a member of the Council of People’s Commissars. The youth of the Mohammedan peoples, young men and women alike, are firmly treading the path of progress, and this has all been due to the remarkable success of the Union’s ‘Nationality policy.’ The freedom for national minorities has produced a high flower of culture; a new intellectual life is astir on sites where superstition and dark ecclesiastical reaction once reigned supreme.

IV

The welfare of different peoples, thus, is mutually compatible, but their power, with its cruel concomitant, competition, is not. Socialism, essentially international, provides, as the Russian example shows, an objective basis for co-operation instead of conflict between the peoples of the world. Capitalist states, on the other hand, as Mr. Hawtrey, himself a highly intelligent defender of capitalism, pointed out in his ‘Economic Aspects of Sovereignty,’ are always conscious that the gain of one country is necessarily loss to others, and its loss gain to them. Conflict, thus, is of the essence of the pursuit of power; the bellicosity of Fascism, whose idol is the nation-state, illustrates this to a fault. In the context of capitalism, it is impossible for nationalism to shake off its Jacobin heritage, and the insane forces of destruction will gambol freely with our fates. All the experience we can garner from history, past and present, tells us that Capitalism cannot lead us, as men like H. G. Wells seem fondly to hope, to world monopoly and so to peace, through gentle mergings of trusts and scientific federations of nations. It seems more probable that capitalist peace can only be established after a fight to the death among the great monopolist groups, it would be a desert peace, the dread sequel to the last supreme war of the world.

Nationalism has, indeed, still a work to accomplish among the colonial peoples. A worm is in the staff of the imperial powers, and it shall not be long before immense populations in Asia and Africa, that are today more or less their property, will find release from their bondage. But it is essential that there should be a conjunction of the forces of socialism and of nationalism, that there should be a relentless attack on that hydra-headed monster, imperialism, that the appeal of our liberation movement should be based, not alone on tribal community but on the wider community of social justice. It is doubtful if, in the absence of such conjunction, colonial peoples will be able to win; but even if they do, we shall see a crude repetition of the senseless disasters of present day nationalism–disputed irredentas, economic rivalries and their sinister concomitants. The Fascist tendency of idolising the nation-state as a mystical instrument that at once completes and transcends the individual, will be in the ascendant. No one dares dismiss lightly the significance of nationalism, so immense in its influence, so instinct with tradition. But nationalism is, after all, the modern counter-part of tribalism, and it would be suicidal to enthrone it in our world on the adamantine basis which Fascism intends to provide for it.

We have, thus, to avoid the Scylla of tribalism that ignores the demands of civilisation and the Charybdis of a cosmopolitanism that does not yet strike a sufficiently responsive chord in men’s hearts. We can only do this, if nationalism and internationalism are both placed on a definitely socialist basis. It is no good being vaguely humanitarian, being naively rhapsodic about the brotherhood of all men. A mere pacifism is bound to be scoffed at and overwhelmed in times of crisis. It would be salutary, therefore, to remember that the brotherhood of man is an ideal which can only be realised under a different social system, and that the urgent task of today is to do our best to hasten the advent of that system. It is imperative to think more of the brotherhood–the tangible unity of interests–of the workers of the world, of every nationality. Within the borders of a nation, besides, the national spirit can only be real, when we have put an end to the exploitation which divides fellow nationals into conflicting classes. It is for socialists to make men feel that socialism alone can reconcile the claims of nationalism with the claims of cosmopolitan loyalty.

The aim of all government must be welfare, not power, before we can hope for a progressive unification of the world. Capitalism with its gospel of power, its competitive national loyalties, blocks the path to a saner and happier order. It has had its hour, when it performed a great historic function; but now it is an encumbrance, its recurrent crises are longer and more acute, its periods of revival shorter and rarer. With nationalism, it has formed an alliance whose effect is disorder and disaster; it is an unholy alliance, for, who can deny that capitalist imperialism is trampling upon the patriotism of a dozen peoples? It seems to excite for its own purposes a brutal parody of Patriotism, a banal jingoism in the more powerful countries. We must, therefore, remember that capitalism, of which imperialism is the highest stage, represses on purpose the fullest development of nations which can conveniently be exploited, and keeps them, as the empire of the Tsars was kept, in a sort of planned wardness. Nationalism, if it deserves to claim our loyalty, must, then, be put on a socialist basis. We hope, indeed, for a time when nationalism, as we know it, shall be relegated to the museum of antiquities, when the cultural heritage of the race will be pooled in a human synthesis. That, however, is a distant ideal; none of us, perhaps, will live to see it in practice. For the moment, nationalism seems, from one angle, a colossal power for evil; from another, a tremendous power for good, if only it is allied with the struggle for a society where the conflict of classes will have ceased, where opportunity will be organised on the basis of the principle of equality. The hope of the world lies in this alliance between socialism and nationalism; the sole example of such an alliance is found to have released the creative energy of scores of neglected peoples in the U. S. S. R. Without it, the prospect for the future is uninviting, for, in that case; a Bertrand Russell aptly quotes from Milton to introduce his ‘Freedom and Organisation’.

‘Chaos umpire sits, And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns: next him high arbiter
Chance governs all.’

 ¹ ‘Berliner Borsenzeitung’ Dec. 20, 1933;quoted in ‘International Literature,’ No.4, 1934.

2 See Bertrand Russell’s ‘Freedom and Organisation’ (1934), and his article on ‘The Revolt against Reason’ in Political Quarterly Jan–March 1935.

3 C. J. H. Hayes, ‘Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism’ (Ed. 1931) P 294

4 In this section, I have borrowed heavily from Hans Kohn’s very valuable book on ‘Nationalism in the Soviet Union’ (Ed. 1933).