Toward a Socialist Theory of Nationalism

Toward a Socialist Theory of Nationalism

Of all the historical phenomena discussed by Karl Marx, his treatment of nationalism, nationalist movements, and the emergence of the nation-state is the least satisfactory. It also left a problematic heritage to the socialist movement, with a veritable “black hole” where a confrontation with one of the most potent social and political forces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should have been.

Marx never discussed nationalism in any systematic way, and what we have are a number of disjointed statements dealing with the issue, sometimes on a very general level, sometimes in response to specific historical events on which he had been commenting in newspaper articles. A careful study of these scattered references will show that  there are two distinct analyses of nationalism in Marx, one pre- and one post-1848. The pre-1848 I would like to call the premodern paradigm, the post-1848 the bourgeois paradigm.

The locus classicus for the premodern paradigm (Paradigm I) is to be found in The Communist Manifesto, where the universalizing power of the capitalist market is sketched by Marx in memorable and pithy language. This universalizing thrust, according to Marx, does away with everything that is particular, be it regional or national. The capitalist mode of production is to Marx the first to have

given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption. . . . To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question to all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed not only at home but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in the material, so also in the intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature . . . .

And furthermore:

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding to them.

Hence Marx’s famous dictum that “the workingmen have no country” and his postulate that in the future “the supremacy of the proletariat will make [these differences between the nations] vanish still further.” National differences thus are likened in this paradigm to other premodern traits, like local customs and dress: they are all due to disappear before the universalizing onslaught of the bourgeoisie and be even more perfectly integrated into a world-culture by the proletarian revolution.

It was this aspect of Paradigm I of Marx’s thoughts on nationalism that came to characterize the cosmopolitan and internationalist heritage of the socialist movement. Yet Marx himself subtly changed his views, though without ever admitting that he had done so. The experience of the revolutions of 1848-49, during which nationalism appeared as a major force for the first time, occasionally proving to be much stronger than class interests, was followed very closely by Marx as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and his journalistic writing of this period abounds with many insights into the emergence of, and clashes between, various national movements—in Germany and Italy, in Poland and Bohemia, in Hungary and Croatia. Obviously such a powerful force evidently changing and redrawing the map of Europe, reordering borders and state structures, could not any more be subsumed under the antiquated paradigm as a mere appendix of premodern economic formations, about to be swept into the dustbin of history by the universalizing forces of market capitalism.

What Marx developed after 1848-49, and mainly in response to the developments leading toward the unification of Germany and Italy, was Paradigm II—the explanation of nationalism as a modern superstructural expression of the bourgeois need for larger markets and territorial consolidation. In this paradigm, far from being an exotic and romantic, or romanticized, relic of the pre-industrial age, nationalism becomes (to use Eric Hobsbawm’s later phrase) a “building block” of capitalism.

Because of this, Marx now supports, for instrumentalist but not immanent reasons, the unification of Germany and Italy: whatever helps develop capitalism is, of course, ultimately hastening its demise. Furthermore, only in large, unified entities can the proletariat develop an adequate class consciousness and not be sidetracked into secondary efforts. Marx’s support for Prussia, for example, in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War was argued in terms of the instrumentality of this war toward Germany’s unification and as an important step in the development of industrialization, capitalism, and the ensuing strengthening of the working class. As one might imagine, such a view, overlooking the immediate causes of the war, did not always sit well with others within the radical movement, with its emphasis on ethical considerations and opposition to the kind of regime epitomized by Bismarck. Yet Marx never wavered from this instrumentalist approach, eschewing merely “moral” approaches.

It was therefore wholly consistent with the consequences of Paradigm II that Marx opposed the various national movements in Central and Eastern Europe of those people who tried to secede from the Austro-Hungarian Empire or achieve autonomy within it—mainly the Czechs and the Croatians. They, and other Slavonic groups, by trying to “Balkanize” the Hapsburg Empire, are “reactionary” in the sense that should they succeed, industrialization and economic development in Central and Eastern Europe will be slowed down, and hence the eventual victory of the proletariat will be hampered. Czechs, Croatians, and Serbs should not set up separate states but be integrated into the one, larger market of Germany-Austria. Similarly, Marx argued on another occasion, Denmark should be absorbed ultimately by Germany—and Mexico by the more developed and capitalist United States. What hastens capitalist development is “progressive,” what hinders it is “reactionary,” and should be opposed. Less developed areas and populations should be integrated into the more developed ones, and thus the Czechs, who have no bourgeoisie, will eventually be able to develop an industrial society only in connection with the German-Austrians. Nowhere in Marx is there any mention of a right to self-determination or support for “national liberation” as such.

This appears as a straightforward view, which, while wholly instrumental and devoid of any substantive assessment of nationalism, is consistent with Marx’s general view about the relations of “developed” to “nondeveloped” societies.

It could be argued that Polish independence was such a central platform for the European left in the nineteenth century that it would have been extremely difficult, if not politically impossible, for Marx to dissociate himself from it, regardless of whatever theoretical grounds he might have had that militated against Polish independence. But it appears that other considerations were at work—considerations related to an overall revolutionary strategy that eventually overruled Marx’s own theoretical considerations.

Ever since the failure of the 1848-49 revolutions, Marx became obsessed with the fear that a Czarist Russian military intervention might frustrate whatever gains a revolutionary movement would achieve in Western and Central Europe. This was not an imaginary or groundless fear: both from 1812 to 1814 and in 1848 and 1849, Russian military forces secured the victory of reactionary and conservative regimes in Europe—first against Napoleon and the heritage of the French Revolution, later against liberal uprisings in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. In both instances, the reactionary regimes in Europe were able to maintain or regain their hold on their people by calling on the Russians and thus tipping the balance of forces. In the 1850s, this fear of Russian intervention became one of Marx’s central concerns—and it was for this reason that he supported the independence of Poland. The very reemergence of an independent Poland would be a severe setback to Russia, and—this was central to Marx’s thinking—it would set up a buffer state between a weakened Russia and the West, thus making Russian counterrevolutionary intervention more difficult and less likely. It was for similar reasons of containing Russia that Marx in the 1860s and 1870s supported the British policy of propping up the Ottoman Empire: the emergence of Slavonic nation-states in the Balkans would greatly strengthen Russia, and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire would also bring Russia to Constantinople and the shores of the Bosphorus. This would greatly enhance Russia’s power to intervene and frustrate revolutionary developments in Europe. In this context Marx saw Pan-Slavism as a mere Russian imperial device, and hence opposed Czech and Serbian nationalism also because of their connection with Pan-Slav ideologies.

These views made Marx into a strange ally of British conservative politicians, who were basing their policies on the “Eastern Question” on an attempt to curb Russian influence in the Levant. This position also moved Marx in the wake of the initial Russian defeats in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 to postulate the possibility of a revolutionary situation in Russia and the eventual dissolution of the Czarist Empire, thus liberating the European revolutionary movement from the nightmare of another Russian counterrevolutionary military intervention.

By and large, however, the instrumentalist approach as expressed in the bourgeois paradigm (Paradigm II) remained dominant. It was to be summed up in perhaps the most succinct way by Trotsky, who maintained that “the national state is erected as the most convenient, profitable and normal arena for the play of capitalist relations.”

Yet in the process of the political struggles of the various socialist movements, especially in Eastern Europe, and the emergence, through civil war and outside intervention, of the Soviet state, this general theory and its proponents found themselves facing a recalcitrant political reality that pushed them in opposite directions. The conditions of the multi-ethnic Czarist Empire introduced into Lenin’s thought and revolutionary strategy the notion that all the nations of the old Empire would have—come the revolution—the right to self-determination and secession. Such a view, which still failed to define what is a nation, and basically had no grounding in Marx’s own thought, proved extremely difficult to maintain, given the vicissitudes of the political realities of the Bolshevik revolution—as the history of the Ukraine and the Transcaucasian republics would show in the years 1917-1923.

Even before this Lenin had to clarify his position on the national question within the socialist movement, for example in relation to such an issue as the place of the Jewish and Polish socialist parties within the structure of the overall Russian socialist movement. The details of Lenin’s controversy with the Jewish Socialist Bund, and to what degree it determined later Soviet attitudes to the Jewish question and to Zionism, do not need to detain us here. Suffice it to say that some of the more convoluted arguments used by Lenin and his followers, in combining highly theoretical constructs with crude political necessity, amply show how inadequate the legacy Marx left to his followers on the national issue really was.

Yet Lenin’s main contribution to the Marxian theory of nationalism and its adaptation to twentieth-century conditions appear in his theory of imperialism: it is here that he widens the scope of the Marxian Paradigm II and argues that nationalism appears not only with the emergence of capitalism but is intensified in the era of imperialist expansion to universal dimensions. In this process, however, nationalism dialectically becomes an anticapitalist force, as the national movements in the non-European colonies emerge as a response to the exploitation of the colonial people by the European capitalist powers. On the other hand, a “chauvinistic” form of nationalism appears within the imperialist societies themselves, in response to these national liberation movements.

This allows one author of a recent attempt at vindicating the Leninist position to maintain that the strength of Lenin’s views was due to his “leaving open the question of the nature and role of nationalism and its relationship with socialism.” The intent of this observation is obviously laudatory: it is, however, an admission of Lenin’s failure to develop a general theory of nationalism and its relationship to a Marxist socialist analysis.

Thus we find a number of Marxist theoreticians affiliated with different groups of the New Left admitting for the first time that Marx—and Marxism—never had a theory of nationalism, or that whatever theory on nationalism Marxism did develop was inadequate and utterly wrong. John Ehrenreich maintains, “It is time to admit that as Marxists we simply have no understanding of the phenomenon [of nationalism].” Calling his studies “a work of destruction,” Ehrenreich does not offer an alternative theory but hopes to stir up a debate and shock orthodox Marxists out of their complacent reiteration of pious platitudes about “proletarian internationalism.” Similarly, Regis Debray, in a long interview in which he tries to trace his disillusionment with Marxism, points out that the inadequacy of Marxist theory with regard to nationalism was the first issue that raised doubts in his mind about Marxism in general.

Nicos Poulantzas, apparently totally despairing of salvaging any Marxian component for a theory of nationalism, reverts to what appear as echoes of Levi-Strauss—but are ultimately a mere tautology—when he says, “Territory and tradition are inscribed in the underlying conceptual matrix of space and time,” and postulates a total autonomy of the state—via nationalism—from class structures.”

Horace Davis, on the other hand, tries in his studies to retain some of Lenin’s theses by arguing that although in general national liberation movements are “emancipatory,” there are cases in which a national struggle does not possess class components (as in some “classless tribal societies in Africa”), while on other occasions a national struggle becomes the struggle of all classes (as in the case of Castro). Although he admits that Lenin’s analysis of the class basis of nationalism is “in need of re-formulation,” the pattern emerging from Davis’s serious and detailed study is so fraught with reservations and exceptions as to verge on the incoherent. This leads another Marxist scholar, John Blaut, to argue that if one tries to tinker with the Leninist model the consequences leave Marxism with no adequate guidelines whatsoever for political action.

A versatile new chord was struck in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Marxist writers laboring under the impact of developments in Northern Ireland—and to a lesser degree the emergence of nationalist tendencies in Wales and Scotland (as well as in Quebec), which were associated with left-wing ideologies. Brian Jenkins and Gunter Minnerup argue that although Marxism has “converted progressives of all shades to the cosmopolitan dream of One World as the antidote to the nationalist fever,” it cannot anymore avoid admitting the autonomous power of nationalism in terms of class structure, nor the emancipatory power of nationalism as such, not as a mere adjunct of the class struggle:

Far from being the dark source of most modern evil, the nation state actually represents the pinnacle of human development in the field of political emancipation.

The common view that the nation state is an anachronism which has been long outstripped by the development of productive forces . . . [is shared] by bourgeois liberalism and Marxist socialism.

Such iconoclastic revisionism is shared by Tom Nairn, perhaps the most radical of the New Left thinkers on nationalism. In a number of publications he presents a complex—and perhaps confusing—picture of how to fit nationalism into Marxism. On the one hand, he calls nationalism “the pathology of modern development” and in a Marxist orthodox fashion sees it as traceable to economic factors—but in a novel way: nationalism is the outcome of the uneven development of capitalism (hence the “pathology”). Its sources are transnational in the sense that the upper classes of less developed societies, who are most directly hit by the unevenness of economic developments, succeed in sweeping with them the other classes of colonial societies into the national liberation movements. On the other hand, all nationalisms are reduced to this model, and therefore fascism and Castroism belong to the same category and are merely two facets, albeit with clearly distinguishable consequences, of the same “inherent unity,” however differently they are to be judged from the revolutionary point of view. For a Marxist scholar thus to claim, “Fascism is the archetype of nationalism” and yet support some forms of nationalism suggests an admission that nationalism has no fixed class matrix, and therefore Nairn still has to agree that the theory of nationalism is “Marxism’s greatest historical failure.” All this is then used to play around with the idea of advocating the break-up of Britain and the possible emergence of independent nation states on its Celtic fringe as being in tune with such a reading of Marxism.

Marxists . . . have to come to terms with the political fact of nationalism, and to define their attitudes towards its specific manifestations. Ever since Marx, this has for the most part and necessarily, been a matter not of theoretical principle (except for the Luxemburgian minority which tends to suspect nations en bloc) but of pragmatic judgment in changing circumstances. In principle, Marxists are neither for nor against independent statehood for any nation.

In the nineteenth century, Hobsbawm argues, the emergence of nationalism in Europe created the “building blocks” of capitalism— though even in Europe there have been cases of “Ruritarian” nationalism. In the twentieth century things have changed. First of all, the further development of capitalism, which needed national states in its first stage, now tends toward multinational developments, and the salience of nation-states decreases. The disintegration of the European empires has now totally divorced the link between anti-imperialism and national liberation movements, and opposition to neocolonialism is not a struggle for self-determination, which has already been achieved through decolonialization.

In this changed world, Hobsbawm argues, the nationalist movements—like those defended and advocated by Nairn—are very different from those of the nineteenth century: the classical nationalism of the nineteenth century aimed at uniting different provinces and regions into one nation-state and into one economic market. The new nationalisms of the second half of the twentieth century are not unifying but, on the contrary, aim at the fission of developed capitalist states (Britain, Spain) and as such are reactionary. This new nationalism leads to absurd concepts of national sovereignty that have nothing to do with Marxist principles. In a scathing set of commentaries on what has become a new fetishism of sovereignty, Hobsbawm writes,

The majority of the members of the United Nations is soon likely to consist of late twentiethcentury (Republican) equivalents of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen . . . .

Any speck in the Pacific can look forward to independence and a good time for its president, if it happens to possess a location for a naval base for which more solvent states will compete, a lucky gift of nature such as manganese, or merely enough beaches and pretty girls to become a tourist paradise. . . .

If the Seychelles can have a vote at the United Nations as good as Japan’s, then only the sky is the limit for the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands . . . .

Hobsbawm’s critique certainly restored to the debate its historical seriousness and extricated it from some of the narrower sectarian interests of some previous participants. Yet Hobsbawm was not able to suggest a fundamental Marxian attitude to nationalism beyond the merely instrumental approach postulated by Marx’s Paradigm II. The problem remained where it has been since Marx left his followers with his unwillingness to discuss nationalist phenomena on their own merits.

But just as one can find in Marx himself more differentiated views in some of his obiter dicta on literature (such as the excursus on the Greek classics in the Grundrisse, where Marx admits that they have validity beyond the concrete class structure that gave rise to their writing), so the socialist movement itself, both within the Marxist tradition and on its periphery, did bring up alternative, nonreductive models. Any attempt to revive interest in a socialist theory of nationalism must take these into account, and a few of these attempts will be mentioned here as the possible context within which a future debate about socialism and nationalism will have to take place.

In his views on nationalism, Hess was close to Mazzini’s thinking, which saw the nation as a laboratory for solidarity, as the fulcrum where human beings are educated to behave in nonegotistical ways, learning how to transcend their merely individual interests for the sake of communal other-directedness. Hess also viewed the national community as an element of mediation, and thus introduced a Hegelian theoretical dimension that was curiously lacking in Marx, for whom mediation was exclusively focused on class solidarity at a universal level—hardly the kind of concreteness called for by a Hegelian understanding of mediation. Moreover, with the victory of the proletariat and the abolition of class differences, even this aspect would be eliminated, with only a very abstract notion of humanity holding together all humankind. Hess, on the other hand, maintains,

Nationality (Nationalität) is the individuality of a people. It is this individuality, however, which is the activating element; just as humanity cannot be actual (wirklich) without distinct individuals, so it cannot be actual without distinct, specific nations and peoples (Nationen and Volksstamme). Like any other being, humanity cannot actualize itself without mediation, it needs the medium of the individuality.

To Hess, the revolution, which will abolish classes, will also abolish national conflicts— but not the existence of nations. Culture—mores, tradition—all have an autonomous existence related to class structure (as in the case of the uneven socioeconomic structure of the Jews in the Diaspora), but not exclusively reducible to it. The emancipation of subject nations is itself a cornerstone of the cause of proletarian revolution according to Hess, and while Marx envisages the disappearance of most nations into the larger economic units dominated by two or three European cultures, Hess postulates a postrevolutionary future in which all nations will be free and able to develop their own culture, and this will include even the smallest nation, whether it belongs to the Germanic or Romance race, to the Slavonic or Finnish, to the Celtic or the Semitic.

This is obviously an attractive project, and in the Austro-Hungarian context it tried also to supply a “third way” between German-speaking hegemonism and the xenophobic nationalism of the various nationalities of the empire, whose nationalist movements were calling for the break-up of the Dual Monarchy and the establishment of numerous nation-states on its ruins. The Austro-Marxist alternative was to preserve the old empire but transform it from a hegemonic structure of national and social subjection into a federation of national and cultural groups—a model for a truly internationalist socialism in which nations are not subsumed under each other but coexist in a pluralist structure. Bauer and his colleagues also envisaged that in such a socialist federative commonwealth there would be two tiers of representation: one territorial, the other national-linguistic. The first would deal with the obvious issues common to all citizens of the territory; the second, election to which would be reserved for members of each specific group, would deal with problems of education, language, culture, historical heritage, and so on. It was in this pluralistic system that the Austro-Marxists saw a guarantee against a hegemonism imposed by the economically stronger groups (like the German-Austrians) over the weaker and less developed national entities.

The impact of these ideas can, of course, be identified in different ways in such disparate areas as the Soviet nationalities policy, the Yugoslav model, socialist Zionism, and some aspects of Quebecois and Basque nationalism.

A nation is a historically evolved stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture.

One should obviously be careful not to advocate a revival of interest in Stalin, but this aspect of his thought should not altogether be forgotten, especially as it is so near in its openness to the Austro-Marxist pluralist approaches in realizing the autonomy of cultural dimensions. The tragedy of the matter, however, is that the repressive nature of the Soviet state vitiated the realization of this politically pluralist program.

The community of national life and destiny moves the hearts of the workers as strongly as it does that of any other member of society. He too loves his mother tongue, in which the sparse lullabies were sung to him, in which the spirit of his parents lived and created. He too loves his homeland, the people of his homeland, their manifold manners and traditions [Sitter]], their multicolored artifacts, the sky of his homeland and the fields and towns of his fatherland. He too carries the culture of his nation within himself: his being, his emotional life, is its being, its life.

The Second International overlooked, according to Arlosoroff, this aspect of the concrete consciousness of the working class and substituted for it an abstract universalism, which was never anchored in the praxis of the proletariat. Hence its brittleness in the face of the nationalist onslaught of the summer of 1914.

Arlosoroff further warns that if the newly organized socialist movement, trying to resurrect itself after the war, will not take into account this cultural content of the concrete consciousness of proletarian life, the working class may go somewhere else—to a movement or a leader who would address these issues. Bearing in mind that this was written in 1919, the prophetic force of this statement cannot be overlooked.

Nationalism relates to the particular, but this particular can be woven—as it has been by the Austro-Marxists—into the universal realm. It is a mode of human communication, perhaps the strongest mode because it relates directly to language, and modern communication is anchoring it even deeper in the concrete consciousness of human beings. For anyone thinking in communitarian terms, this is a veritable challenge.

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