The burning problems of our times - such as the growing gap between the
South and the North, the need for general disarmament, the world
capitalist crisis, the threat of ecological catastrophe - are obviously of an
international character. They can hardly be solved on a local, regional or
national scale. However. at the same time as the world economv is
becoming more and more unified by multinational capitalism, a spectacu-
lar tide of nationalism is rising, in Europe and on a world scale, submerging
everything on its way.
While some national movements are emancipatory and progressive,
nationalism is very often a ’false solution’ to the economic, social, political
and ecological challenges of our times. Why then has it become so popular
in so many countries and areas of the world?
There is no easy explanation for this upsurge, but it could be helpful to
compare it with the parallel revival of religious feelings. The crisis of both
existing models of (instrumental) rationality - capitalist accumulation and
bureaucratic productivism - favours the development of non-rational
(sometimes irrational) reactions such as religion and nationalism. Of
course, both phenomena can also take progressive forms - as in national
liberation movements, or in liberation theology - but the regressive
tendencies (nationalist and/or religious intolerance) are quite formidable.
In many countries of the world religion tends to merge with nationalism,
infusing it with greater power of attraction and an aura of ’sacredness’: this
is the case with Catholicism in Poland and Croatia (as well as, in a different
context, Ireland), of Christian orthodoxy in Serbia and Russia, of conservative evangelism in the USA, of certain forms of Jewish orthodoxy in
Israel, of Islam in Libya and Iran. In other cases, religion and nationalism
are competing rivals or even forces in open conflict, as it is the case with
Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism in North Africa and the
Middle East.
In any case, nationalism has its own roots and does not depend neces-
sarily on religion in order to expand. How to explain its present rise? One
could perhaps consider the nationalist wave as a sort of reaction to the
growing internationalisation of the economy and (to a certain extent) of
culture, a struggle against the threat of homogenisation. It could also be
understood as a compensatory movement, trying to counterbalance the
decline of economic independence by reinforcing (sometimes to mon-
strous proportions) the ethical, political and cultural moments of the
national identity.
A similar (but different) hypothesis had been suggested by Theodor
Adorno in a conference in 1966 (on ’Education after Auschwitz’): if
nationalism is so aggressive ’it is because in the era of international
communication and supra-national blocs, it cannot really believe in itself,
and has no choice but to become outrageously excessive, if it wants to
persuade both itself and others of its substantive character.’’ [1] Of course. the
argument applies to a much greater degree to the situation in Europe in the
90s than in the 60s.
However, this and other general interpretations, although useful, can-
not quite explain the extraordinary diversity of the phenomenon, which
takes very different forms in different parts of the world. One has therefore
to examine the specific nature of nationalism in each of its multiple contexts,
in order to be able to understand its moving forces.
Let us begin with the region where this new nationalist tide is particularly
visible: Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR. An intelligent observer of
Eastern European politics has remarkably well summarized the events in
this part of the world:
The last remnants of solidarity between the nonemancipated nationalities in the ’belt of
mixed populations’ evaporated with the disappearance of a central despotic bureaucracy which had also served to gather together and divert from each other the diffuse hatreds and conflicting national claims. Now everybody was against everybody else, and most of all against their closest neighbours - the Slovaks against the Czechs, the Croats against the Serbs, the Ukrainians against the Poles. [2]
The most astonishing thing in this analysis is that it was not written a few
weeks ago: it is a passage from the well known book of Hanna Arendt on
the origins of totalitarianism, published in . . . 1951, which describes ’the
atmosphere of disintegration’ in Eastern Europe during the 20’s, i.e. after
the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Tsarist Empire
– the two ’despotic bureaucracies’ referred to in the above quotation.’
Incidentally, a similar assessment can be found also in Rosa Luxemburg’s notes on War and Nationalism from 1918: ’Nationalism is at the
moment a trump. From all sides nations and semi-nations appear and claim
their right to form a State. (. . .) At the nationalist Brocken it is now the
time of the Walpurgis night’.’ [3]
In other words: we have been drawn, in a large part of Europe, seventy
years back. . .
Let there be no misunderstanding: there is nothing regressive - on the
contrary - when (today, as in 1920) multinational empires, which had
become true ’prisons of peoples’, crumble and the oppressed nations
recover their liberty. To that extent, there is undeniably a democratic
moment in the national revival which took place since 1989 in Eastern
Europe and the USSR. Socialists and democrats cannot but rejoice when
the Soviet tanks leave East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the troops
of the KGB quit the Baltic countries, leaving these people to decide for
themselves their future, and freely choose unity, separation o r federation.
Unfortunately, not everything is so pleasant in this picture: the best and
the worst are inseparably mixed in these national movements. The best:
the democratic awakening of spoliated nations, the rediscovery of their
language and culture, the aspiration for freedom and popular sovereignty.
The worst: the awakening of chauvinistic nationalisms, of expansionisms,
of intolerances, of xenophobias; the awakening of old national quarrels,
hatred against the ’hereditary enemy’; the growth of authoritarian tendencies, leading to the oppression of one’s own national minorities; and
finally, the upsurge of fascist, semi-fascist and racist forms of nationalism,
in Russia (’Pamiat’), in Rumania, in Slovakia, in Croatia (neo-ustachi), in
Serbia (neo-chetniks), in the former DDR (neo-nazis), and elsewhere as
well. The eternal scapegoats of the past - Jews and Gypsies - are again
being selected as responsible for all the evils of society . . .
Paradoxically, this negative and sinister aspect, this ’return of the
suppressed’, this resurrection of the ancient national vendettas appears
nowhere in a more brutal and absurd form than in Yugoslavia - the only
one of the so-called ’socialist’ countries which had been able to escape
from the control of Moscow and to establish a relatively egalitarian
federation between its component nations. Anti-fascist solidarity between
the various nationalities, rooted in the Communist partisan fight of World-
War 11, has now left the stage, to be replaced by a savage bella omnia
contra omnes.
Of course, one can explain this paradox by several and complex eco-
nomic, cultural, political, religious and historical causes - without forget-
ting the heavy responsibility of the Serbian Stalino-nationalist regime of
Milosevic, who opened, by his policy of oppression against Kossovo’s
Albanians, the Pandora box of nationalisms in the country.’ [4] Nevertheless,
there remains an irreducible kernel of pure irrationality in this explosion of
hatred against the ’other’ - whose most dreadful expression is the policy of
’ethnic cleansing’ implemented by Serbian nationalist forces in Bosnia-
Hercegovina.
It is impossible to predict, for the moment, if the ’Yugoslav paradigm’ is
going to be followed by others, and if the present conflicts between Slovaks
and Czechs, Hungarians and Rumanians, Moldavians and Russians,
Azeris and Armenians, Georgians and Ossetians, Russians and Ukrainians, etc, etc, will or will not take the form of a general confrontation; and
if the dissolution of the ex-USSR willdr will not lead t o national wars (with
nuclear arms?) that would make the present conflict in Yugoslavia look
like a small incident. Anything can happen, and unfortunately the worst is
The reasons for this nationalist explosion, which is shaking practically
the whole former ’socialist bloc’, are, among others, the following:
1) The rebellion against decades of national discrimination and ’Great
Russian’ hegemonism. This is the most obvious motive behind national
movements, both in the ex-USSR and in its former ’satellites’. There is no
doubt that the annexation of the Baltic states during the Second World
War, or the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, left a
very deep imprint in the national consciousness of these countries. Once
the iron lid of Soviet occupation was lifted, it is understandable that a vast
nationalist upsurge would take place.
But this does not apply to Yugoslavia, an independent state which had
liberated itself from Soviet hegemony since 1948 . . .
2) According to the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch, ’where an old
regime disintegrates, where old social relations have become unstable,
amid the rise of general insecurity, belonging to a common language and
culture may become the only certainty in society . . .’. [5]
This helps to understand the parallel between present events and those
of the 20s, after the disintegration of the traditional Empires in Central and
Eastern Europe.
3) The collapse of the socialist ideas, values and images (including the
idea of ’proletarian internationalism’), as well as of working class culture,
discredited by so many years of bureaucratic manipulation, and identified
by very broad masses as the official doctrine of the ’ancien regime’.
Politics, like nature, hates a vacuum. No other rival political ideology had
such a powerful tradition and such ancient roots in popular culture as
nationalism - often combined, as we saw, with religion. Liberal individual-
ism of the Western kind, while attractive to the intelligentsia and the rising
new class of business men, had little appeal to the broad mass of the
population.
4) The desire of relatively advanced nations, regions or republics to cut
loose from poorer and relatively backward areas, in order to keep their
own resources for themselves, and to join, as quickly as possible, the
Western European Market. This applies particularly t o Slovenia and
Croatia, to the Baltic republics, and in general to the Western parts of the
ex-USSR (in relation to the Asiatic ones). A similar phenomena, by the
way, can also be found in Northern Italy (the rise of the so-called Lombard
Leagues).
To these main explanations, one has to add the manipulation of na-
tionalist feelings by neo-stalinist or neo-liberal elites trying to keep (or to
win back) their power: Azerbaijan, Russia, Serbia and Croatia are good
examples of this process.
Of what help, in so chaotic a situation, confronted with such a confused
maelstrom of territorial conflicts, historical claims, chauvinist exclusions
and liberating uprisings, can the analytic and political instruments of
Marxism be?
Marxism has the great advantage of a critical/rationa1, as well as
humanist/universal, standpoint. But it will remain disarmed in confronting
present developments, if it is not able to get rid of certain myths and
illusions which belong to its own tradition.
Among the myths, there is one which is particularly obnoxious: the idea
of a ’scientific’ and ’objective’ definition of the nation. Thanks to Stalin,
this dogma wrought havoc in the four continents, transforming theory into
a true Procrustrian bed, imposed by decree of the Political Bureau
(charged with verifying if this or that nation lived up or not to the
’objective’ criteria).
Happily, most Marxists dealing today with the national question have
understood quite well that the nations cannot be defined in purely objec-
tive terms (territory, language, economic unit, etc) -even if these are far
from being irrelevant - but that they are imagined communities (Benedict
Anderson), cultural creations (Eric Hobsbawm). Already in 1939 Trotsky
insisted, in a discussion with C.L.R. James about the Black question in
America, that ’on this matter an abstract criterion is not decisive, but the
historical consciousness, the feelings and impulses of a group are more
i m por t a n t ’. [6]
As far as illusions are concerned, there is one which can be found in
Marx himself and which haunts the reflections of the best Marxists from
Rosa Luxemburg until our own day: the imminent decline of nationalism
and of the nation-state, made anachronistic by the internationalisation of
the economy.
An attenuated version of this hypothesis can still be found in 1988, on
the eve of the most formidable nationalist wave in Europe since World War
II. In his book, otherwise excellent, on nations and nationalism since 1780,
Eric Hobsbawm risked the following diagnosis: ’while nobody can possibly
deny the growing and sometimes dramatic, impact of nationalist, or ethnic
politics, there is one major aspect in which the phenomenon today is
functionally different from the ’nationalism’ and the ’nations’ of nine-
teenth- and earlier twentieth-century history. It is no longer a major vector
of historical development’. In his opinion, ’the declining historical signifi-
cance of nationalism is today concealed . . . by the visible spread of ethnic/
linguistic agitation’. In other words: ’in spite of its evident prominence,
nationalism is historically less important. It is no longer, as it were, a global
political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and
earlier twentieth centuries. It is at most a complicating factor, or a catalyst
for other developments’. [7]
One would like to subscribe to this optimistic view of things (from the
standpoint of internationalist socialism), but one can hardly avoid the
impression that the great historian is taking his desires for reality. One does
not need to sympathize with nationalist ideologies in order to take into
account their growing influence in Europe. It is difficult to predict what is
going to happen during the next century, but now, and in the coming years,
it is impossible to consider the role of nationalism in Europe (and
elsewhere) as a minor or secondary factor.
Hobsbawm is more to the point when he shows the inadequacy of
nationalist ’solutions’, particularly in Eastern Europe. Unlike the nationalists, Marxists are convinced that national independence - although
necessary, in many cases - is far from sufficient to solve the basic economic,
social, ecological or political problems confronting the population. Particularly if we consider the new kind of economic (and therefore also
political) dependence of the recently emancipated nations towards Western finance.
Western European liberals often consider this Eastern nationalist explosion - and its xenophobic manifestations - as the product of ’under-
development’, of primitive semi-agrarian societies, of populations having
lived too long under ’Communism’ and lacking democratic experience.
Some even pretend that nationalism is only a plot of ex-communists (as in
Serbia, Bulgaria or Azerbaijan) to keep power. Western Europe is presented as a harmonious world, well beyond such irrational passions:
reconciled, the nations of this democratic and modern part of the continent
are quickly moving towards their integration in a united European
Community.
This idyllic image does not quite correspond to reality. It is an illusion, if
not a mystification, to claim that Western Europe is now ’beyond nationalism’, or that it has, as Ernest Gellner recently wrote, achieved ’Stage Five’
in the history of European nationalism, a ’relatively benign condition’
where ’economic and cultural convergence jointly diminish ethnic
hostilities’." [8]
National conflicts, nationalist feelings, and nationalist movements exist
also in Western Europe, and are growing. They belong basically to two
very different species:
1) the - usually progressive - movements for the rights of the national
minorities and/or oppressed nations: the Basque and Irish are only the
visible (and explosive) top of an iceberg, which includes Catalans and
Galicians, Scots and Welsh, Corsicans and Greek-Cypriots - and several
others.
2) xenophobic and racist nationalism, directed not so much against the
old ’enemy from outside’ (other European nations) but against the ’enemy
from inside’: the immigrant workers of Arab, African, Turkish, Kurd or
Eastern European origin (as well as, often, the Jewish or Gypsy minorities). The political expression of this development is the surprising rise of
nationalist parties and movements of semi-fascist, fascist or even nazi
character (in France, Austria, Belgium, Germany, etc) - representing
already 7 million voters in the European Community! - as well as the
murderous aggressions of skinheads and other racist bands. In Germany
alone in 1991, there have been more than 1,200 aggressions by racist thugs
against foreign immigrants (compared to 270 in 1990).’ [9]
It is true that racism is not identical to nationalism. But as Adorno
already emphasized at the above mentioned conference in 1966, ’the
awakening of nationalism is the most favourable climate’ for the upsurge of
racism and intolerance. [10] In its most radical and extreme forms, nationalism often turns into racism, by trying to ground national supremacy on
pseudo-biological criteria.
The main targets of Western European xenophobic nationalism were
until recently the immigrants from the South (particularly Africa and
Asia); the next victims will be - or are already, mainly in Germany - the
unfortunate immigrants from Eastern Europe, expelled from their countries by national conflicts or by the economic catastrophe resulting from
the brutal introduction of a market economy. After the Arab, the African
or the Turk, it is now the turn of the Pole, the Romanian or the Albanian to
become the scapegoat for Western racists/nationalists.
Mainstream Western European parties refuse to endorse racism, but
they share a sort of ’Western nationalism’ which leads to the exclusion of
immigrant workers from democratic rights (eg. to vote and to be elected)
and to the closure, as tightly as possible, of the EEC borders to non-
Western immigrants. Could it be that one day the European Community
will rebuild the Berlin Wall a little further to the East, and re-establish the
barriers of electrified barbed wire of the old ’Iron Curtain’, this time on the
Western side of the border?
As a matter of fact, the presence of the immigrants is only a pretext: they
constitute no more than 2% of the European Community’s population;
moreover, they were already there 15 or 20 years ago, without provoking
the same reactions. Why precisely now has this xenophobic wave taken
place? The economic crisis, unemployment and the degradation of living
conditions in the popular neighbourhoods are certainly among the main
factors.
But there is something deeper taking place in the political culture of
some popular layers: as in Eastern Europe, but in a different way, the
decline of socialist and class values, so long identified with the USSR and
the Communist Parties, make room for national/racism. From this standpoint, the rise of nationalist values has, in both parts of Europe, common
roots. To this one has to add, in the West, the disappointment with the
social-democratic management of the crisis, increasingly undistinguishable (with the exception of a few details) from the neo-liberal one. The
failure of social-democratic governments (or coalitions including such
parties) to confront the growing social inequalities, their adoption of the
conventional (bourgeois) economic wisdom, and their involvement in
various affairs of corruption (eg. in France and Italy) have paved the way
for all sorts of xenophobic ’populist’ movements. Thanks to the weakening
of the socialist culture, capitalism appears more and more as a ’natural’
system, as the only possible horizon, as the necessary form of production
and exchange; as a consequence, economic and social problems like
unemployment, poverty or urban insecurity are no longer attributed by
significant sections of the population to the disfunctions of capitalism, but
to the presence of immigrants and other ’foreigners’.
Progressive and reactionary forms of nationalism can also be found in
the so-called Third World (a term which has lost any meaning, since there
is no more any ’Second World’), i.e. in the dependent periphery of the
imperialist world system.
Several important emancipatory and progressive movements of national
liberation can be found today in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. But it
should be emphasised that most of these movements - like those in
Kurdistan, Eritrea, South Africa, Palestine, Timor, Sudan - are not
directly opposed to Western imperialism as such but rather to local forms
of national oppression. With the exception of the wave of popular protest
in the Arab world against the Gulf War, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist
nationalism seems to have lost much of its influence, to the profit of
basically reactionary and/or xenophobic movements like Islamic Funda-
mentalism, ethnico-linguistic and religious Communalism (India, Sri-
Lanka) and Tribalism.
Contradictory forms of nationalism co-exist also in Latin-America." [11]
The classic example of reactionary nationalism is the ’patriotic’ ideology of
military regimes - as in Argentina, Brazil or Chile in the 70’s and 80’s -
usually directed against the ghost of ’international communism’ and its
Latin-American ’subversive agents’. In the name of the ’Doctrine of
National Security’, every social protest, every leftist movement is de-
nounced as being ’of foreign inspiration’, or based on ’exotic doctrines
alien to our national tradition’. This conservative brand of cold-war
nationalism makes an extensive usage of national symbols (the banner, the
national anthem) and patriotic rhetoric, but it accepts without hesitation
US hegemony (’the American leadership of the Free World’). It may refer
to geo-politics in order to claim a sub-imperialist role of regional
hegemony - like the Brazilian military during the 70s -but this ambition
leads very seldom to an open conflict with rival Western powers, as in the
Argentinian war with Britain around the Malvinas/Falkland islands.
Middle-class populist nationalism, which had its peak during the 40s and
the 50s (Peronism in Argentina, the Peruvian APRA, ’getulismo’ in
Brazil, etc) is in decline and has come to terms with foreign capital. The
most obvious example is the present Peronist government in Argentina
(President Menem), which has systematically broken all the links with the
nationalist tradition of the movement and has followed very strictly the
instructions of the IMF. In some cases, like Mexico, the crisis of the
governmental populist movement (the PRI, Institutional Revolutionary
Party) leads to a split, and the formation of a new party. The Mexican PRD
(Revolutionary Democratic Party), led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas- the son
of former president Lazaro Cardenas, who expropriated the US oil com-
panies in Mexico during the 30s - aims at a renewal of the nationalist and
anti-imperialist tradition of the Mexican Revolution.
Revolutions in Latin America always had simultaneously a social and a
national content. This applies not only to the Mexican Revolution of
1910-11 or the Bolivian Revolution of 1953, but also to the more radical
(i.e. aiming at a socialist transformation) revolutions in Cuba (1959-61)
and Nicaragua (1979). Fidel Castro and his followers were inspired by the
struggle and the ideas of Jose Marti, the Jacobin, nationalist and anti-
imperialist leader of the insurrection against Spanish colonialism; and the
fighters of the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional) in
Nicaragua considered themselves as heirs to Augusto Sandino’s war of
national liberation against the US marines (1927-32). The struggle for
national independence and sovereignty, in confrontation with aggressive
US imperial policies, was a decisive component of the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutionary movements and of their popular support.
Today, the fight against foreign debt and the IMF policies has been the
main focus of progressive national feelings and anti-imperialist mobilisations in Latin America, taking the form of rallies, strikes, protests and
even mass riots. Thanks to the heavy requirements of the (strictly impossible) debt repayment, the IMF and the World Bank exert such a kind of
direct control (without precedent since the end of Spanish colonisation in
the 19th century!) over the economic and social policies of these countries
that their independence is often reduced to a fiction. The ’advisors’ and
’experts’ of the international financial institutions dictate to Latin American governments their rate of inflation, their budgetary cuts in education
and health, their wages policy and their tax structure. The popular struggle
against such outrageous forms of dependency, and against the repayment
of the foreign debt, is not only a ’nationalist’, but also an anti-systemic (to
use Immanuel Wallerstein’s useful concept) movement, by its opposition
to the logic of world capitalist finance. It has also a ’class’ component, by its
conflict with the local rulers - eager to comply with the policies of the IMF
and of the foreign banks.
It is not surprising that in some countries, like Brazil, Bolivia or Peru, it
is the labour movements, the unions and the leftist parties that lead the
fight against the repayment of the foreign debt: national and social
liberation are intimately linked in the consciousness of the most active
sections of the movement. Lula, the leader of the Brazilian Partido dos
Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) - 47% of the votes at the presidential
elections of 1989 -called for an immediate suspension of the payment and
the establishment of a public inquiry on the debt, in order to find out what3
ruled the country from 1964 to 1985). He also called for a common
initiative of the indebted countries, since none of them is strong enough to
confront the creditors alone.
How far can a single country - even a powerful one like Brazil or Mexico
– refuse the dictatorship of the World Bank and break the yoke of
imperialist domination? Can Latin-American unity, under popular leadership, constitute an alternative to the US plans of economic integration?
How to achieve national and social liberation in an underdeveloped
country without the economic or military support of an industrial power
like the USSR? How important are the contradictions between Europe,
Japan and the USA and could they be exploited by liberated peripheric
countries?
This and similar questions - which cannot be easily answered - are being
debated among progressive, socialist and anti-imperialist forces, in Latin-
America and elsewhere in the ex-Third World. They show that national
liberation is still a key issue at the periphery of the system, but also that
purely nationalist solutions are of limited value: the need for an internationalist strategy is perhaps better perceived now than in the past.
The example of Cuba seems to show that an independent country can, at
least during a limited amount of time, survive in confrontation with a US
blockade, a boycott by the world financial institutions and no support from
the ex-USSR. But in the longer run, the future of Cuba will depend on
developments in the other parts of Latin America.
During recent years, the various socialist, nationalist and anti-
imperialist forces in Latin America - including, among others, the Brazilian PT, the Nicaraguan FSLN, the Salvadorean FMLN (Farabundo
Marti Front of National Liberation), the Mexican PRD and the Cuban
Communist Party - feeling the need of an international (or at least
regional) coordination, have associated themselves in a united front,
called the Forum of Sao Paulo, which meets yearly and discusses common
perspectives. At the first conference of the Forum, in 1990, a document
was adopted, which presented the broad outlines of a common strategy for
national liberation in Latin America. First of all, it rejected the proposition
of ’American Integration’ proposed by US President Bush, denouncing it
as an attempt to ’completely open our national economies to the disloyal
and unequal competition of the imperialist economic apparatus, submitting entirely to its hegemony and destroying our productive structures, by
integrating them into a zone of free exchange led and organized by the US
economic interests’. The document opposes to this proposition of integration under imperialist domination, ’a new concept of continental unity and
integration’, based on the sovereignty and self-determination of Latin
America, the recovery of its historical and cultural identity and the
internationalist solidarity of its peoples. ’This presupposes the defence of
the Latin-American patrimony, an end to the flight and exportation of
capitals, a common and united policy towards the scourge of an unpayable
foreign debt, and the adoption of economic policies in benefit of the
majorities, able to combat the situation of misery in which millions of
Latin-Americans live’. [12]
Next to anti-imperialist nationalism, a different sort of emancipatory
nationalism has been developing in Latin America during the last years:
the movement of the indigenous nations for their rights. The debate
around the Fifth Centennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and
the Nobel Prize attributed to Rigoberta Menchu have given a greater
visibility to this indigenous struggle for the defence of their communities,
their land and their national culture against the oppression of the ruling
oligarchies (usually of Spanish descent).
These Indian movements, associations or political parties (like the
Tupac Katari Movement in Bolivia) - which usually are not limited to one
ethnic group (Quechuas, Aymaras, Mayas) but unite all the Indian communities in each country - develop a thorough criticism of Western
civilisation and its values (private property, individualism, commodity
production), in the name of the pre-capitalist (and pre-Columbian) indigenous traditions, and their communitarian culture. Their struggle has at the
same time, a national, social and ecological character.
While some organisations have a stronger ethnic component, and call
for the restoration of the old Indian nations and empires, most of those
movements fight for the recognition of the national and cultural rights of
the indigenous peoples, in coalition with other oppressed groups and
classes. One example of this is the continental-wide movement against the
official celebrations of the Fifth Centennial, called ’Five Hundred Years of
Indian, Black and Popular Resistance’, which had as one of its main aims
the solidarity with the struggles of the indigenous peoples. Of course,
there are very great differences between the indigenous nations of countries like Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia, where they constitute the majority
of the population, and the small surviving tribes of the Amazonian area.
While in the first case the national struggle is intimately linked to the social
one, and to the agrarian question (the struggle for land), in the second one
it is rather a matter of protection against the ethnocidal logic of
’civilisation’.
The resistance of trade-unionists, ecologists and Indian tribes against
the destructive development of agro-business may lead to common action,
as happened recently in the Brazilian Amazon area, with the constitution
of a Confederation of the Rain-forest Peoples, by initiative of the well
known trade-union and ecological leader Chico Mendes (recently killed by
land-owners).
Finally, there is a third form of progressive nationalism in Latin America
(and the US as well): Black nationalism, which is particularly important in
the Caribbean countries. Its historical roots can be found in the slave
rebellions, and in particular in the Haitian Revolution of 1791, led by
Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Black Jacobins. In a country like Brazil,
where the majority of the population is black or coloured, there have also
been slave revolts (like the Quilombo dos Palmares, a community of rebel
slaves during the eighteenth century). In our days, the main form of
Brazilian Black cultural resistance is religious, through the development of
Umbanda, a synchretic cult composed of African and Christian elements.
What should be the attitude of Marxists in relation to national conflicts?
Marxism is opposed to the nationalist ideology, but it does not ignore the
importance and legitimacy of democratic national rights.
This is why, during conflicts between Western imperial powers and
dependent countries of Asia, Africa or Latin-America, Marxists usually
defend the rights of the peripheric nations, and struggle against all forms of
imperial aggression (whatever their ’democratic’ or ’juridical’ cover) - but
this does not mean that they should give any kind of support to reactionary
military, religious or nationalist dictators of the Third World, like Gen.
Videla, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein or General Noriega . . .
As an internationalist world-view, Marxism - to be distinguished from
its multiple national-bureaucratic counterfeits - has the advantage of a
universalist and critical position, in contrast to the passions and intoxications of nationalist mythology. On the condition, however, that this
universalism does not remain abstract, grounded on the simple negation of
national particularity, but becomes a true ’concrete universal’ (Hegel),
able to incorporate, under the form of a dialectical Aufiebung, all the
richness of the particular.
Thanks to the concept of imperialism, Marxism is able to avoid the
pitfalls of the Eurocentric (or ’Western’) false universalism, which pretends to impose on all countries in the world (and particularly those on the
periphery), under the cover of ’civilisation’, the domination of the modern
bourgeois/industrial way of life: private property, market economy, unlimited economic expansion, productivism, utilitarianism, possessive individualism and instrumental rationality.
This does not mean that socialists ignore the universal value of certain
achievements of European culture since 1789, such as democracy and
human rights. It means only that they refuse the false dilemma between a
pretence ’Western’ universalism and the narrow-minded worship of
cultural differences.
For Marxism, the most important universal value is the liberation of
human beings from all forms of oppression, domination, alienation and
degradation. This is an utopian universality, in opposition to the ideological universalities which apologetically present the Western status quo as
being the accomplished human universal culture, the end of history, the
realisation of the absolute spirit. Only a critical universality of this kind,
looking towards an emancipated future, is able to overcome short-sighted
nationalisms, narrow culturalisms, ethnocentrisms.
Starting from this premise, how should Marxists react to the present
European national conflicts (or to Third-World communal strife)?
First of all, Marxism proposes a capital distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors and of the oppressed. Without adhering to any
nationalist ideology, Marxist socialism supports unreservedly the national
movement of the dominated and rejects without hesitation the ’Great
Power chauvinism’ of the ruling nation. This distinction is more than ever
justified and it operates like a precious compass to find one’s bearings in
the present tempest. But its use is made difficult by a well known
characteristic of modern nationalisms: each oppressed nation, as soon as
liberated (or even before), considers as its most urgent task to exercise an
analogous oppression over its own national minorities. Frequently, during
the present inter-ethnic conflicts, each side persecutes the minority belonging to the rival nation, while manipulating its own nationals on the
other side of the border (Yugoslavia is a good example in point).
We need therefore a universal criterion in order to disentangle the web
of the opposed and mutually exclusive claims. This criterion can only be
that - common to socialists and democrats - of the right of self-
determination (until separation) of each nation, that is, of each community
which considers itself as such. Indifferent to the myths of blood and soil,
and not recognising any purely religious or historical claims over a given
territory, this criterion has the immense advantage of referring itself only
to the universal principles of democracy and popular sovereignty, and of
taking into consideration only the concrete demographic realities of any
inhabited space.
This principle does not prevent socialists from defending the option
which seems to them the most desirable or the most progressive at a given
historical moment: state separation (independence), federation, confederation. The essential point is that the concerned nations and na-
tionalities should freely decide their own future.
This rule - incorporated by Lenin into the Marxist vocabulary - is more
than ever necessary. But, again, its application to the present national
conflicts - particularly in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR - is not always
easy. In many cases the interpenetration of the nationalities is such, that
any attempt to cut borders into this mosaic is fraught with perils. The
dream of national homogeneity inside the state, which haunts almost all
nationalisms, is a most dangerous perspective. As Eric Hobsbawm ob-
serves, in a sober historical reminder: ’The logical implication of trying to
create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each
inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion and extermination of minorities. Such was
and is the murderous reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial
version, although this was not fully demonstrated until the 1940s. [13]
Let us return to our initial paradox: at this strange nationalist end of the
century, the most urgent problems have, more than ever, an international
character. The search for a way out of the economic crisis of the ex-
’socialist bloc’, the question of the Third World’s debt, and imminent
ecological disaster - to mention only these three major examples- require
planetary solutions. Those of Capital are well known and perfectly organised on a world-scale: they have inevitably, in whatever place they have
been implemented, the same double result: make the rich even richer, and
the poor even poorer.
What alternatives exist to the totalitarian grip of ’really existing’ world
capitalism? The old pseudo-internationalism of the Stalinist Comintern, of
the followers of various ’Socialist Fatherlands’, is dead and buried. A new
internationalist alternative of the oppressed and exploited is badly needed.
It is from the fusion between the international socialist, democratic and
anti-imperialist tradition of the labour movement (still much alive among
revolutionaries of various tendencies, radical trade-unionists, left-
socialists, etc) and the new universalist culture of social movements like
ecology, feminism, anti-racism, and Third-world-solidarity that the internationalism of tomorrow will rise. This tendency may be a minority now,
but it is nevertheless the seed of a different future and the ultimate
guarantee against barbarism.
Notes
1. T. Adorno, Modeles critiques, Paris, Payot, 1984, p. 106
.
2. H. Arendt. The Burden of our time, London, Secker and Warburg, 1951, p. 267.
3. R. Luxemburg, ’Fragment iiber Krieg, nationale Frage und Revolution’, Die Russiche
Revolution, Frankfurt, Europaische Verlagsanstalt. 1963, p. 82.
4. See on this the remarkable essay by Catherine Samary, The fragmentation of Yugoslavia., Amsterdam, Notebooks for Study and Research, no. 19/20. 1992.
5. Quoted by Eric Hobsbawm in ’The Perils of the New Nationalism’. The Nation. 4
November 1991. p. 556.
6. L. Trotsky, On Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, New York. Pathfinder Press,
1978, p. 28.
7. E.Hobsbawm. Nation and Nationalism since 1780. Programme. Myth. Reality, Cambridge University Press. 1990. pp. 163, 170. 181.
8. E. Gellner, ’Nationalism and Politics in Eastern Europe’, New Left Review, No. 189,
October 1991. p. 131.
9. Bild am Sontag. January 26. 1992.
10. T. Adorno, op. cit.. p. 106.
11. I am referring more extensively to Latin America because I am more familiar with this area of the Third World.
12. Inprecor, no. 6. July 1990. p. 6.
13. Hobsbawm, Op. cit. . p. 133.