The Lure of Nationalism
March
5, 2014 | 0904 GMT
Stratfor
Nationalism
is in the air. The scholars may talk about universal
values and the need to combat all forms of determinism
and essentialism. The media may see the world through
the prism of universal human rights. The global elite
may meet at Davos and proclaim the ability to engineer a
liberal order that can defeat what it sees as primordial
divisions. And yet nationalism -- as well
as other exclusivist tendencies such as tribalism and
sectarianism -- manages to survive and prosper.
Nationalism
is alive and well throughout East Asia, where modern
states united by race and ethnicity, such as China,
Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, contest not lofty
ideas but zero-sum geography -- that is, lines on the blue water map of the Pacific
Basin. The advance of military technology (fighter
jets, ballistic missiles, surveillance satellites,
warships) has created a new geography of strategic
competition between two great world civilizations, those
of China and India. The Middle East has experienced less
a democratic revolution than a crisis of
central authority, in which ethnic, tribal, religious
and sectarian identities have become more important than
ever in modern times. In Europe, the steady decline of
the European Union, originating in a half-decade-long
economic crisis, has led gradually to the resurgence of
national identities and right-wing, anti-immigrant
movements. In the heart of Africa we see fighting and
the fear of ethnic cleansing based on religious and
tribal identities in the Central African Republic and
South Sudan. Clearly, the scholarly, journalistic and
business elites are speaking a different language than
large elements of the masses worldwide.
The
elite vision of a world in which a universal identity
would vanquish narrower ones was a product of the end of
the Cold War and the onset of the communications
revolution. The Cold War's conclusion fostered the hope
that a democratic universalism would make increasing
headway, now that ideological battles were a thing of
the past. The communications revolution that followed --
that is, the dynamic development of the Internet,
smartphones, social media and more frequent and cheaper
air transport links -- was believed to be an additional
force for global unity.
But
technology is value-neutral. It can be a force for
division as well as for integration. The more that
people of different origins and values come in contact
with one another, the more they become aware of not just
how similar they are, but of how different they are.
Proximity, whether real or virtual, can ignite the
deepest animosities.
And
so can freedom.
"Freedom"
is a sacred cow in the American political lexicon. But
freedom can unleash not just the power of the
individual, but also the power of the group. For as
people become liberated from oppression they become
aware not just of a prideful self-identity, but also of
a prideful ethnic or sectarian identity. Americans
assume that other people's experience of freedom will
necessarily mirror their own, but that is a conceit more
than an analysis.
In
this vein, the immediate post-Cold War era constituted
an interlude of naive assumptions. Perhaps the most
obscure but telling of those naive assumptions was the
easy conventional wisdom in the early 1990s that what
the Middle East required was commercial mass media -- a
media relatively free of government constraints, which
would dilute the region's anti-Western attitudes and its
political, ethnic and religious divides, especially
those between Arabs and Israelis. If only the
dictatorial regimes controlled less of what people
thought, then the Middle East would be more
peaceful. More freedom, in other words. Well, such
mass media did come into being. By the standards of the
region's past, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were
independent networks modeled in style and sophistication
after American ones. But their points of view -- in
their Arabic language broadcasts, at least -- turned out
to be extremely hostile to Western and Israeli
interests, perhaps more so than the government channels
they replaced. For the new networks reflected the narrow
attitudes of their culture just as American networks
do.
There
is another element to the communications revolution to
which elites are blind. Elites, by definition, are often
brilliant and attractive-looking people who, because of
their own sophistication and social confidence, welcome
cosmopolitanism in all its aspects. For they are never
insecure in the midst of exotic environments. But most
people in this world are not brilliant, not terribly
attractive and therefore not confident. Their lives are
full of struggle. So they naturally take refuge in
family, community, religion or some form of solidarity
group. And in an era when mass communication
technologies foster a vulgarized assault on traditional
values -- whether directly or indirectly, knowingly or
unknowingly -- the sense of alienation among the masses
intensifies, leading them deeper into such exclusivist
beliefs.
So
it is not an accident that there is now a resurgence of
Orthodox Judaism and evangelical Christianity in the
United States, just as there is a resurgence of
ideological Islam across the Greater Middle East.
Whether it is trashy mass culture in America or
relentless Westernization in the Muslim world, people
require an ethical and a spiritual anchor against the
forces of technological alienation. In Asia, perhaps the
most technologically modernized region on the globe,
nationalism helps to fill this void. For nationalism is
modernism writ large. As people who do not retreat back
into religion lose their literal faith in God and thus
their belief in individual immortality, they take refuge
in what the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called a
"collective immortality."
Europe
is, after a fashion, a more severe example of this
phenomenon because in Europe, we have a cosmopolitan
global elite that actually runs an empire-of-sorts: the
European Union. And so the rise of anti-EU, right-wing
tendencies demonstrates not only a cultural,
but also a direct political hostility to such elite
rule. The EU leaders and bureaucracy long ago made the
calculation that nationalism was dead and that the
European masses, after two world wars, wanted nothing so
much as a respite from divisive forces. But the masses
may increasingly require an anchor in history,
nationalism and religious identity that protects them
against the bland universalism and increasing (albeit
exaggerated) Islamization of the continent that the EU
has thus far delivered.
Though,
while globalization may have sparked a certain
alienation that leads to a return of nationalism, that
does not mean this new nationalism will be as intense
and intoxicating as the kind that ravished Europe in
previous centuries. Nationalism may return, but in a far
more nuanced state -- a result of the very globalization
that caused it in the first place. Indeed, there may
currently be a rebalancing taking place in terms of
personal and communal identities, for we are all not
simply indistinguishable individuals bumping into each
other in a global meeting hall. We have linguistic,
cultural, ethnic and religious attributes that are very
much a part of who we are, and which set us apart from
others.
So
the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and
between universalism and exclusivism, must continue.
Soon after the Berlin Wall collapsed, anticipating a
degree of global unity, Milosz observed, "our bond of
being born in the same time, thus being contemporaries,
is already stronger than that of being born in the same
country." Will, in fact, the bond of time overcome the
bond of blood or narrow belief? It is this question that
towers above us
all.
No comments:
Post a Comment