The Undivided Past Read online

  The contradictions, limitations, and uncertainties lingering around these new countries may also be explained in broader geopolitical terms, for they all came into being at the very moment when the nation-state as the primary unit of sovereign authority, and as a prime focus of collective identity, seemed to be increasingly in doubt and under siege. Charles Maier identifies such a trend as being discernible from the 1960s onward, and one that has become increasingly pronounced in recent decades as traditional notions of bounded and autonomous territoriality have been significantly eroded.116 The historical and geographical coincidence of political power and popular consciousness of affiliation—the conjuncture he believed to have been so fundamental during the heyday of the nation-state and national identities—have been seriously undermined as national sovereignty has been ceded to ever-proliferating supranational agencies and global organizations, ranging from the United Nations and the European Union to the IMF and the World Bank; as immigrants move back and forth across national boundaries in ever greater numbers, from Mexico to the United States and from eastern to western Europe; as media moguls and multinational banks and corporations have put themselves beyond the reach of national jurisdictions or regulation; as worldwide threats such as climate change and international terrorism demand transnational solutions; as heavy industry has been superseded by the new technologies of semiconductors and a global economy based on digital data transmission; and as information can cross the world immediately and instantaneously.117

  From this perspective, and despite the recent and unprecedented increase in their number to almost two hundred, nationstates and national identities are widely regarded as being among the most threatened species of the still-emerging post-Communist, postcolonial, and globalizing world. As Benedict Anderson has famously (and provocatively) argued, nations should not be seen as eternal and precisely defined units of territorial sovereignty and collective solidarity, but rather as “imagined communities”: as transient, provisional, ephemeral, made‑up associations, encompassing a multitude of shifting boundaries and subjective identities—but never for long. By these lights, there was (and is) nothing absolute, uniform, or immutable about the late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century European nation-state, or about those countries that have cropped up across and around the globe in the hundred years since. On the contrary, “the nation” was (and is) merely one temporary and contingent way of organizing, governing, and identifying large numbers of peoples, which rested (and rests) on the uncertain foundations of manufactured myths and invented traditions, and which was (and is) never as homogeneous or as unified as those earlier national historians (or later scholars such as Charles Maier) had been inclined to insist.118 From the 1970s onward, many historians, no longer concerned to reinforce national identity in the way that their predecessors had done, have gone about exploding these myths and undermining these traditions. Far from celebrating them as eternal verities, historians are now more likely to describe nations and the identities and loyalties they claim as contested, disaggregated, and disputed phenomena, and by approaching these once-hallowed subjects so skeptically, they are in their own way intensifying the crises of legitimacy and identity through which many countries, nations, and states are passing.119

  Taking the long view and a cosmopolitan perspective, it is clear that in recent times, nation-states and national identities have for the most part appeared, vanished, and reemerged so frequently and so variously as to cast serious doubt on nationality’s past and present claims to being some sort of platonic ideal of human affiliation or even the preeminent and most enduring form of human solidarity.120 There are multiethnic agglomerations, such as the United States, China, and post-Communist Russia, that are territorial empires presenting themselves as unitary nations.121 There are “old” and more recent European nations, such as Britain, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, but all of them face serious challenges to their identities from separatists or religious minorities or otherwise unassimilated groups or incomplete reunification (problems sometimes acknowledged bureaucratically, as with the establishment by President Sarkozy of France of the clumsily but revealingly entitled Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Codevelopment).122 There are the new—or re-created—nations in central and eastern Europe, and in Asia on the borders of Russia, whose cohesiveness and sustainability are far from certain. There are the artificial constructs of the Middle East, where in one symptomatic case, namely Iraq, identity “remains contested between Islamists, secularists and the military, and between ethnic Turks and Kurds.”123 There are the no less artificial constructs of Africa, where some nations scarcely hold together at all, and the former colonies in Asia and the older republics in Latin America, which are still struggling to find any shared sense of collective solidarity.124 There are former imperial dominions such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which have abandoned the traditional paradigm of “from colony to nation” and are now trying to include their native peoples in a new and more inclusive national narrative—with varying degrees of awareness and success. And so on…

  As Eric Hobsbawm noted in 1992, in words even more valid today, we live in “a world in which probably not much more than a dozen states out of some 180 can plausibly claim their citizens coincide in any real sense with a single ethnic or linguistic group.”125 Two conclusions follow. One is that few nations have ever aligned “in any real sense with a single ethnic or linguistic group”: it is too easy to exaggerate the homogeneity of nations and the solidarity of national identities in the decades before 1914, and it is even more mistaken to do so since. One must acknowledge there has never been a golden age of nation-states and national identities, even—indeed especially—today when there are more of them than ever before and when more of them are “failing” then ever before.126 A second conclusion is that the appearance of so many new nations and identities in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe has not been a belated “catching up” by the rest of the globe according to the pattern initially established in northern and western Europe before the First World War. The early twentieth century was not characterized by homologous nation-states and homogeneous national identities across the globe, nor is the early twenty-first century either. As the late Clifford Geertz rightly noted, “the illusion of a world paved from end to end with repeating units that is produced by the pictorial conventions of our political atlases … is just that—an illusion.”127 Can it, then, be seriously maintained that “the nation” is now (or has ever been?) the preeminent form of collective human identity?

  WHAT IS A NATION?

  In 1882, just over a decade after France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and less than ten years before the birth of Charles de Gaulle, another Frenchman, the theologian Ernest Renan, delivered a celebrated address at the Sorbonne entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” in which he took up several familiar definitions of nineteenth-century nationhood and national identity, and subjected all of them—except one—to a devastating critique. To begin with, he insisted, a nation was not the same thing as a race, since all modern nations were ethnically mixed: Germany was Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic, and even France was peopled by those of Celtic, Iberian, and Germanic ancestry. Nor, Renan went on, was a nation the same as its language: otherwise how could the separation of the United States from the United Kingdom, or the South American colonies from Spain, be accounted for—or, conversely, the unity of Switzerland despite its linguistic variety? Nor could a common religion be considered an essential, unifying national basis, since confessional boundaries and national boundaries rarely coincided or aligned. As for “common interests,” a customs union or Zollverein was scarcely the same thing as a “patria” or fatherland. And as for “geography,” the “living space” of nations, as embodied in their allegedly “natural frontiers,” had always been subject to change. Having demolished these inadequate definitions of nationhood, Renan advanced his own, and it bears a striking similarity to that w
hich de Gaulle would later espouse and evoke. A nation, Renan insisted, was above all a state of mind and an expression of the collective will: drawing from the past a shared “store of memories,” especially of “the sacrifices that have been made”; displaying in the present “the agreement, the desire to continue a life in common”; and in looking to the future, accepting and recognizing “the sacrifices the nation is prepared to make” again, as it has done before.128

  Before discussing the five faulty definitions of nationhood that he would debunk prior to advancing his own, Renan had bravely observed that “forgetting, and I would even say historical error, are an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and thus the advances in historical study are often threatening to a nationality.” (Eric Hobsbawm’s translation of the first part of this observation is more tellingly abrupt: “getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”)129 Renan was—rightly—of the view that most of the criteria by which nations could be defined were historically unconvincing or unsustainable, but he erred in supposing that his own alternative definition was somehow immune from the same problems. Shared memories, an agreed life in common, and a willingness to make future sacrifices: all these deemed by Renan to be more plausibly constitutive of the nation and of national identity can also be shown to be partial, limited, selective, and timebound, and they have been as much undermined by “advances in historical study” as the definitions Renan himself demolished. For if in one guise, history has often been the willing and complicit handmaid to the creation of national identities and the celebration of national consciousnesses, in another, more skeptical guise, it is the implacable enemy of the selective myths, the sanitized memories, and the carefully edited narratives that galvanize collective resolve and sustain national solidarities over time. As Sir Michael Howard has noted, history that challenges the comfortable assumptions and providential narratives of a shared group identity may be painful, but it is also a sign of maturity and wisdom, and this is as true for the solidarities of nations as for those of religions.130

  Yet like all the aggregations discussed here, religion and nation also differ markedly in their nature and their essence.131 Religious identities derive much of their appeal from their claims to universal rather than to particular truths, which are (at least in theory) applicable to everyone willing to convert and believe. Here, for example, is Saint Paul, asserting the claim of Christianity to encompass and override all lesser and alternative identities: “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” he observed, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Indeed, Christ’s final commission to the apostles was to “go forth and teach all nations.”132 By contrast, and indeed by definition, a nation sets out deliberately to exclude from its collective embrace all those who do not live within its boundaries (and on occasions also some of those who do), and since that means the vast majority of people, the result is that no nation, however large or rich or powerful or imperial, can ever comprise more than a minority of the human population. So while religious collectivities claim transnational, continental, or indeed global reach, and have done so across more than one millennium, national identities are much more local, particular, and temporally circumscribed. As such they are in many ways very different forms of collective human solidarity.133

  Such variety helps explain why identities are not like hats, which can only be worn one at a time, to the exclusion of any or all others. Most people in the past, like most people in the present, maintain several loyalties, attachments, and solidarities (of which religion and nation are but two) simultaneously, and any one of which might at any one time be foremost in their minds, as occasion suggested and circumstances required.134 Pace Ian Tyrrell, this means it is not at all self-evident that collective identities are now or have ever been “primarily national ones.” Only in those relatively recent and rare periods of total war have the claims of the nation (or at least the claims of something presented by its leaders as “the nation”) become paramount and overriding. Whatever politicians or magistrates may declare the demands and imperatives of the nation to be, day-to-day life for most people in most times is not dominated by these concerns. Indeed, in every “mature national community,” there is a “crisscrossing of loyalties” that make up the fabric of people’s individual and collective lives.135 In times of peace, national identity recedes, and other solidarities of loyalty, awareness, and calls to action may seem more compelling and more convincing. Among these are the alternative collectivities of class, gender, and race, which, unlike religion, are secular in their concerns, and unlike the nation, are (at least in principle) global in their reach. It is to these alternative identities that we now turn.136

  THREE

  Class

  Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history.

  —Mao Zedong,

  “Cast Away Illusions: Prepare for Struggle” (August 14, 1949), in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 4

  “Class” was perhaps overworked in the 1960s and 1970s, and it had become merely boring. It is a concept long past its sell-by date.

  —E. P. Thompson,

  “The Making of a Ruling Class,” Dissent (Summer 1993)

  ON AUGUST 28, 1844, two young intellectuals joined each other for drinks at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais-Royal in Paris. Their names were Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, and they had first met in Germany two years previously, but that “distinctly chilly” encounter had given no indication that one of the most portentous collaborations and influential literary friendships of modern times had just begun.1 Despite the hostile view they shared of the middle classes, both men came from quintessentially bourgeois backgrounds. Engels, born in 1820 in the Rhineland town of Barmen, was the son of a successful cotton-spinning entrepreneur who owned factories in Germany and Manchester, while Marx, who was two years older and another Rhinelander, was the son of a Jewish attorney who was also a vineyard owner. But by the time they joined each other at the café, both men had rebelled against their comfortable upbringings. Engels had been initiated into the cotton business, and had reluctantly undertaken compulsory Prussian military service, but he soon gravitated, via studies at Berlin University and his first prolonged period of residence in Manchester, overseeing family interests, toward radical politics, dissenting journalism, and Hegelian thought. Marx, meanwhile, having turned his back on the study of the law, completed a doctorate in philosophy, his thinking likewise influenced by Hegel, and had also taken up subversive newspaper writing, briefly editing the Cologne-based Rheinische Zeitung, until it was closed down by the Prussian authorities.2

  This second meeting between Marx and Engels was more agreeable than the chilly standoff their first had been, and in a mood of “cheerfulness and goodwill” they began a clutch of literary projects.3 The first, of which Engels was sole author, would be The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845. Drawing on his experiences in the family business in Manchester, he depicted the “shock city” of that decade as bitterly polarized between rapacious mill owners and exploited industrial workers. Engels believed this cleavage into “two great camps” was so deep that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat existed in a state of intransigent antagonism and perpetual conflict, and this description persuaded Marx that the alienated, impoverished industrial working class would become the instrument of a final transformative historical revolution.4 The second work, which Marx and Engels wrote together between 1845 and 1847, was The German Ideology, in which they developed the idea that social structures were the products of economic and technological forces, and that history should be understood as an unending struggle between different groups of people in different economic circumstances.5 Their third effort, also jointly authored, appeared early in the revolutionary year of 1848, when for a time it seemed as though traditional authority was collapsing across much of Europe, and was entitled the Manifesto of the Communist Party. “The history
of all hitherto existing society,” Marx and Engels confidently proclaimed, “is the history of class struggles,” and it was a history leading inexorably toward a revolutionary future in which the reviled bourgeoisie would be overthrown and cast aside: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” the authors concluded. “They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”6

  This rousing, bravura, fortissimo exhortation was written by Marx and Engels at the end of a remarkable period of collaboration, drawing upon a wide range of legal, historical, philosophical, sociological, theological, and political works in French, German, and English, from Hegel to Saint-Simon, Adam Smith to Feuerbach, Proudhon to Fourier.7 Of all those writings, The Communist Manifesto would most significantly influence the course of twentieth-century history, not just within Europe but also around the world. For in that crusading and coruscating polemic, Marx and Engels sought to provide the most complete and comprehensive analysis of past human identities, both on their own terms and as they related to those of the present, thereby also foretelling how the inherent conflict in these existing solidarities might—indeed, must—define the future. In predicting that all current bourgeois societies must eventually be vanquished by an energized, mobilized, and self-consciously revolutionary proletariat, Marx and Engels would eventually inspire legions of political activists in Europe, Asia, Africa, and both North and South America who dreamed of helping move history ahead toward the fulfillment that Marx and Engels had envisioned for it, by overthrowing the much-reviled bourgeoisie and ushering in the socialist utopia of a classless society. Marx and Engels would also influence two generations of Western scholars and academics, many of whom would espouse their view that the history of all human societies should indeed be understood and explained in terms of class identity and class struggle.