No political myth in the twentieth century has proved more resilient, protean, and enduring than nationalism. A comprehensive and potentially aggressive constellation of symbols, emotions, and ideas, nationalism also offers a redemptive language of liberation for long-subjugated or humiliated groups. It would therefore be simply misleading to reduce nationalism to one ready-made interpretation. Conductor Leonard Bernstein used to say that whatever statement one makes about Gustav Mahler's music, the opposite is equally true. This is also the case with nationalism. It is often described as archaic, antimodern, traditionalist, in short reactionary. Other interpretations see it as a driving force of modernizing liberation, an ideology of collective emancipation, and a source of human dignity and pride. Overall, it can be said that nationalism “offers a kind of collective salvation drama derived from religious models and traditions, but given a new activist social and political form through political action, mobilization, and institutions.”93 Whatever one thinks of it, its ubiquitous presence at the end of the last century and the beginning of the new one is beyond any doubt. The problem, therefore, is to find ways to reconcile it with the democratic agenda. Once the nation becomes the master symbol of identitarian narratives, structures of power and regimes of knowledge are determined by who defines and how are defined the communalities perceived to represent the bedrock of that particular community of people. In other words, how can one tame that violent propensity which a Georgian political philosopher aptly called “the illiberal flesh of ethnicity”?94
The return of ethnocentric politics, especially during the 1990s, the agonizing search for roots, and the obsession with identity were major trends of the turn of the twenty-first century in Eastern Europe. They often collided with the inclusive, civic values advocated by former dissidents such Havel or Michnik. The post-Communist first wave of primordial passions and the appeals of the new exclusionary discourses remind us that neither the premises nor the outcomes of modernity have been universally accepted. As tragically demonstrated in the former Yugoslavia, the revival of this specific form of politics can prove noxious to civic-liberal development in the post-communist societies. In most of East and Central Europe ethno-nationalism has fundamentally altered the left-right ideological spectrum.
Usually, it was intellectuals who manufactured discourses that justified nationalist identifications and projections, then the mobilized masses gave these discourses the validation of practical realities. This is, to employ for a moment Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, a process of the naturalization of a nation-centered habitus, meaning a “system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles which generate and organize practices and representation.” This way, nationalism, understood as both structures of power and a regime of knowledge, is transformed into self-reproducing and self-referential reality. Nationalism becomes the “the obvious way of doing and thinking about things.”95 The community ordered in such fashion will not only be “known and imagined; it will also be deeply felt and acted out.”96 While in the 1960s nationalism appeared at least in the West as an extinct myth, the end of Communism and the new era of international ethnic conflict that followed the Cold War have made nationalism the main competitor to liberalism and civil society. Its most important strength comes precisely from its ability to compensate for the loss of certainties and to offer immediate explanations for failure, confusion, and discomfiture. Nationalism caters to painful collective anxieties, alleviates angst, and reduces the individual to the lowest common denominator: the simple fact of ethnic belonging. At its core lies a revivalist myth (or, to use Roger Griffin's term, a palingenetic one). As many scholars have shown, such a myth is “an archetype of human mythopoeia which can express itself in both secular and religious forms without being ‘derived’ from any particular source or tradition.” Its most important function is to provide the groups employing it in cultural and political practice with new sources of meaning and social function. The main danger inherent to its activation is that it can bring forth an “organically conceived nation to be cleansed of decadence and comprehensively renewed.”97
SPECTERS OF NATIONALISM
Romanian exiled writer Norman Manea, who survived the Holocaust as a teenager only to be later persecuted because of his Jewishness and nonconformist ideas under the Ceaușescu regime, gave a powerful description of this ethnocentric temptation as the main rival to the civic vision of the community associated with modernity and liberalism:
The increased nationalism all around the world, the dangerous conflicts among minorities in Eastern Europe, and the growing xenophobia in Western Europe emphasize again one of the main contradictions of our time, between centrifugal, cosmopolitan modernity and the centripetal need (or at least nostalgia) for belonging…. The modern world faces its solitude and its responsibilities without the artifice of a protective dependency or a fictive utopian coherence. Fundamentalist and separatist movements of all kinds, the return of a tribal mentality in so many human communities, are expressions of the need to reestablish a well-ordered cohesion which would protect the enclave against the assault of the unknown, of diversity, heterogeneity, and alienation.98
Ethnic nationalism appeals more often than not to primary instincts of unity and identification with one's own group: foreigners are often seen as vicious destabilizers, dishonest breakers of traditions, and agents of dissolution. Nationalism, indeed, sanctifies tradition, once described by Gilbert K. Chesterton as the “right to vote granted to the dead people.” Especially in times of social frustration, foreigners tend to be demonized and scapegoated. A Ukrainian nationalist, for instance, would see Russians (or Jews) as forever conspiring to undermine Ukraine's independence and prosperity. A Romanian would regard members of the Hungarian minority as belonging to a unified body perpetually involved in subversive and irredentist activities. A Croatian militant nationalist would never trust Serbs, while Serbian ethnic fundamentalists would invoke Croatia's alliance with Nazi Germany as an argument against trust and ethnic coexistence. Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian nationalisms are colored by the memory of the Soviet (and previously Russian) occupations of the Baltic states. National discourses not only preserve a sense of ethnic identity but also continuously “reinvent the tradition” (Hobsbawm), regenerate historical mythology, infuse an infrarational, transcendental content into the sense of national identity. During imperial collapse, nationalism becomes an ideological balm used to calm sentiments of despondency and rage.
With its shattered identities and wavering loyalties, the post-Communist world allowed delusional xenophobic fantasies to thrive and capture the imagination of millions of disaffected individuals. National homogenization became the battle cry of political elites, for whom unity and cohesion were the ultimate values. The Leninist exclusionary logic (“us” versus “them”) has been replaced by the nationalist vision, which sanctifies the ethnic in-group and demonizes “aliens.” Those who criticize this trend are immediately stigmatized as a “fifth column” made up of “inside enemies.” For the late Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, for instance, it was only the intellectuals supportive of the “national spirit and self-determination” who deserved the name of intelligentsia. All others, he maintained, were just Pharisees.99 The continuous invention of enemies and hatreds aggravates the climate of insecurity and makes many honest individuals despair about the future of their societies.