Imagined Communities

Förra veckans korta inlägg om nationalism fick mig att börja bläddra i Benedict Andersons klassiker Imagined Communties [1983]. Nedanstående stycke tycks mig vara den mest koncisa formuleringen av kärnan i hans teori.

Man bör ha i åtanke att Anderson inte menar att det endast är nationen som är en ”föreställd gemenskap”. Alla gemenskaper som är så stora att det är omöjligt för medlemmarna att personligen känna majoriteten av de övriga i gruppen är föreställda gemenskaper. Dess motsats är inte äkta, sanna eller verkliga gemenskaper, utan konkreta: sådana gemenskaper där alla medlemmar står mer eller mindre i personlig relation till varandra. Nationen är bara en form bland andra möjliga föreställda gemenskaper. Varför och hur idén om nationell gemenskap kom att växa fram är ämnet för Andersons teori, som fokuserar på tryckkonsten, folkspråkens utveckling, och om hur det skrivna ordet möjliggör en föreställd gemenskap läsarna emellan. Förklaringen till nationalismen står att finna här: om det är skriftlig kommunikation som möjliggör en stor vid föreställd gemenskap, så kommer språkliga gränser generellt också bli gemenskapens gränser.

If the expansion of bureaucratic middle classes was a relatively even phenomenon, occurring at comparable rates in both advanced and backward states of Europe, the rise of commercial and industrial bourgeoisies was of course highly uneven – massive and rapid in some places, slow and stunted in others. But no matter where, this ‘rise’ has to be understood in its relationship to vernacular print-capitalism.

The pre-bourgeois ruling classes generated their cohesions in some sense outside language, or at least outside print-language. If the ruler of Siam took a Malay noblewoman as a concubine, or if the King of England married a Spanish princess – did they ever talk seriously together? Solidarities were the products of kinship, clientship, and personal loyalties. ‘French’ nobles could assist ‘English’ kings against ‘French’ monarchs, not on the basis of shared language or culture, but, Machiavellian calculations aside, of shared kinsmen and friendships. The relatively small size of traditional aristocracies, their fixed political bases, and the personalization of political relations implied by sexual intercourse and inheritance, meant that their cohesions as classes were as much concrete as imagined. An illiterate nobility could still act as a nobility.

But the bourgeoisie? Here was a class which, figuratively speaking, came into being as a class only in so many replications. Factory-owner in Lille was connected to factory-owner in Lyon only by reverberation. They had no necessary reason to know of one another’s existence; they did not typically marry each other’s daughters or inherit each other’s property. But they did come to visualize in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language. For an illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely imaginable. Thus in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis. But in a nineteenth-century Europe in which Latin had been defeated by vernacular print-capitalism for something like two centuries, these solidarities had an outermost stretch limited by vernacular legibilities. To put it another way, one can sleep with anyone, but one can only read some people’s words.

Benedict Anderson (2006), Imagined Communities (London & New York: Verso), s. 76-77.

Angående nationalism

Dagens Under Strecket bjuder på trevlig och välskriven essä om nationalism. Men jag undrar om inte Cecilia Åse missar huvudfrågan:

En viktig fråga att ställa är vad de nationella känslorna egentligen bottnar i. Vad består det nationellas känslomässiga dragningskraft av? Jag tror att den hänger ihop med att det nationella många gånger uppfattas som något som överskrider oss själva, som går utöver våra liv just nu. Nationen binder ihop generationer och symboliserar ett slags transcendens eller överskridande. Upplevelsen verkar vara att det nationella sätter oss i förbindelse med något ”större”, något som kan ge tillvaron mening och sammanhang även i svåra stunder.

Så är det nog, men den verkligt intressanta frågan är väl varför just det nationella är den enhet med vilken de flesta i vår tidsålder identifierar sig, snarare än någon annan enhet – en snävare grupp, eller vidare grupp, eller en enhet av annan social karaktär, säg klass – som lika väl hade kunnat tillgodose behovet av att ge sammanhang och förbindelse med något ”större” än en själv.

Som jag tidigare antytt så instämmer jag med Ernest Gellners krassa sociologiska och ekonomiska svar på den frågan. Men viktigare i sammanhanget: Jag tror att så fort man börjar fundera på frågan varför det nationella har blivit en sådan central enhet – ja, på varför den ens har uppkommit som kategori – så undergräver det den förklaringsmodell som Cecilia Åse för fram i sin text. Hon kontrasterar Benedict Andersons teori om nationalism som grundat på delade erfarenheter – vilka åstadkoms genom att vi konsumerar samma media, vilka talar till en stor mängd sinsemellan obekanta människor och därigenom skapar ett föreställt ”vi” – mot en teori som säger att ”nationell samhörighet skapas [...] snarare genom delade känslor än genom delade erfararenheter”. Vår mediekonsumtion är inte längre lika homogen som den en gång var, vi delar inte längre samma ”nationella tidsrum”. Istället framstår känslor som är det centrala. Nationell gemenskap ”skapas och återskapas genom kollektiva nationella känslor och känsloyttringar, genom övertygelsen om att andra känner som jag känner”. Vad vi delar är snarast ett ”nationellt känslorum”.

Är det bara jag som anar något lurt här? Att vi delar ett nationellt känslorum, att vi delar känslor och förväntar oss att dela känslor med varandra på detta plan – är inte det just ett uppseendeväckande fenomen som vi vill att en teori om nationalism ska kunna förklara? För att upprepa poängen angående ”det nationellas känslomässiga dragningskraft”: När Cecilia Åse vill förklara detta så är hon inte uttömmande: andra enheter än det nationella skulle kunna fylla de emotionella behoven. Vad vi letar efter är just en teori som förklarar varför det nationella kom att fylla denna funktion. Att förklara nationell gemenskap utifrån kollektiva känslor är då cirkulärt. Den enda vägen ut är en tämligen simplistisk teori som säger att de nationella känslorna har manipulerats fram ovanifrån:

Olika typer av nationella evenemang eller spektakel har iscensatts och förts ut till invånarna. Det handlar om sådant som tävlingar eller omskrivna prisutdelningar, till exempel Nobelfesten, stora sporthändelser, kungliga bröllop eller sorgemanifestationer i samband med nationella trauman.

Här skulle jag gärna börja ironisera, men jag nöjer mig med en mer akademisk ton: under vilka betingelser är sådana saker alls tänkbara? vad krävs för att det ska gå att genomföra och rent faktiskt nå ut till befolkningen? under vilka förutsättningar kommer idén om en nationell identitet överhuvudtaget slå an en ton hos det stora flertalet? är det möjligt att några sportsliga jippon kan forma människors omedelbara uppfattningar om social ontologi och moraliska gemenskaper? Kort sagt, en teori om nationalism som inte berör tryckkonst, industrialisering, modernitet, och allmän läskunnighet – dvs en teori som helt förbiser Benedict Anderson och Ernest Gellner – är inte att ta på allvar.

Vad nationalism är

När det idag är nationaldag så ska vi naturligtvis påminna oss om den svenska historien och kulturen, samt prisa den nationella gemenskapen. Men om man är samhällsvetenskapligt lagd så kan det också vara på sin plats att påminna sig om vad nationalism egentligen är. Eller åtminstone om vad Ernest Gellner ansåg att det var:

Sir Henry Maine’s famous formula – from status to contract – has been taken by many to offer the most succinct summary of the nature of the transition to modern society. But it seems to me that he might just as well have said from status to culture. Agrarian society is indeed largely a stable system of ascribed statuses: but culture, with its richly differentiated and almost endless nuances, is used to underwrite, render visible and reinforce those statuses. Its subtle differences mark off social positions. It helps make them legitimate by causing them to be deeply internalized, and it eliminates friction by making them highly conspicuous. But shared culture does not create wide-ranging bonds, and does not underwrite political boundaries.

Modern man enjoys, or suffers from, no such rigid and reinforced ascribed status. He makes his own position, not by a single contract, but by a vast multiplicity of minor contracts with his fellows. In order to negotiate and articulate these contracts, he must speak in the same idiom as his numerous partners. A large, anonymous and mobile mass of individuals, negotiating countless contracts with each other, is obliged to share a culture. They must learn to follow the same rules in articulating their terms. Cultural nuance no longer symbolizes status, for the status is no longer given: but a shared, standardized culture indicates the eligibility and ability of participants to take part in this open market of negotiable, specific statuses, to be effective members of the same collectivity.

So a shared high culture (i.e. one whose members have been trained by an educational system to formulate and understand context-free messages in a shared idiom) becomes enormously important. It is no longer the privilege of a limited clerical or legal stratum; instead, it is a precondition of any social participation at all, of moral citizenship.

It is this new importance of a shared culture which makes men into nationalists: the congruence between their own culture and that of the political, economic and educational bureaucracies which surround them, becomes the most important single fact of their lives. They must be concerned with that congruence, with its achievement or its protection: and this turns them into nationalists. Their first political concern must be that they are members of a political unit which identifies with their idiom, ensures its perpetuation, employment, defence. That is what nationalism is.

Ernest Gellner (1994), Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers), s. vii-viii.

Halal-hippien och George Orwells ”Notes on Nationalism”

Pernilla Ouis artikel i senaste Axess om ”halal-hippiens paradox” är intressant.

Den mest djupgående och fundamentala ideologiska paradox jag stött på är nog att Michel Foucault stödde den islamiska revolutionen i Iran. Jag kan inte nog understryka min förundran över detta.     [. . .]

[Han stödde] den islamiska revolutionen och Khomeini, som praktiserade exakt det han kritiserade så briljant: det våldsamma utövandet av makt mot dem som skiljer sig från normen.      [. . .]

Jag kallar Foucaults arv för halal-hippiens paradox. I sin iver att kritiskt ifrågasätta det västerländska moderna projektet, kolonialismens historia och förtrycket av ”den Andre”, är halal-hippien angelägen om att omfamna denna Andre med hull och hår, utan att uppfatta att just denna omhuldade Andre kan utöva precis samma mekanismer av förtryck, fast då inom sin egen grupp.

Hur ska man förstå denna typ av fenomen? Hur kunde Foucault hylla mullorna i Iran? Hur tänker Andreas Malm när han stödjer Hizbollah? Ett möjligt sätt att försöka förstå mekanismerna bakom är att läsa Svante Nordins Nittonhundratalet: En biografi, en i mitt tycke superb bok. Men nu vill jag framförallt uppmärksamma George Orwells ”Notes on Nationalism” (1945). (Jag har tidigare citerat Orwells skeptiska hållning gentemot Andreas Malm . . .)

Vad Orwell där beskriver är inte nationalism i vanlig mening, utan helt enkelt en osund identifikation med en viss rörelse, klass, grupp, land eller institution  i största allmänhet (Orwells främsta exempel är kommunismen samt politisk katolicism). Han beskriver där några mentala drag som är typiska för människor med ett ”nationalistiskt” mindset: Obsession, Instability (of object of loyalty), Indifference to Reality.

Den som mest har bäring på Foucault och Malm gäller instability, mer specifikt: ”transference of loyalty”. Exemplet är Chesterton vars katolicism fick honom att ständigt hylla Frankrike och Italien:

In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

Lite senare i texten återkommer Orwell till samma fenomen och då med en psykologisk förklaring av det.

[For] an intellectual, transference [of loyalty] has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience.

Lord Acton om nationalism

På Online Library of Liberty finns en del texter av Lord Acton tillgängliga. Bland annat Nationality (Ur The History of Freedom and Other Essays, 1907).

Texten inleds:

Whenever great intellectual cultivation has been combined with that suffering which is inseparable from extensive changes in the condition of the people, men of speculative or imaginative genius have sought in the contemplation of an ideal society a remedy, or at least a consolation, for evils which they were practically unable to remove.

En av huvudpoängerna med texten är att beskriva uppkomsten av nationalism som politisk idé och kraft i Europa. Den för-nationalistiska eran beskrivs såhär:

In the old European system, the rights of nationalities were neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the people. The interest of the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated the frontiers; and the administration was conducted generally without any reference to popular desires. Where all liberties were suppressed, the claims of national independence were necessarily ignored, and a princess, in the words of Fénelon, carried a monarchy in her wedding portion. The eighteenth century acquiesced in this oblivion of corporate rights on the Continent, for the absolutists cared only for the State, and the liberals only for the individual. The Church, the nobles, and the nation had no place in the popular theories of the age; and they devised none in their own defence, for they were not openly attacked. The aristocracy retained its privileges, and the Church her property; and the dynastic interest, which overruled the natural inclination of the nations and destroyed their independence, nevertheless maintained their integrity. The national sentiment was not wounded in its most sensitive part. To dispossess a sovereign of his hereditary crown, and to annex his dominions, would have been held to inflict an injury upon all monarchies, and to furnish their subjects with a dangerous example, by depriving royalty of its inviolable character. In time of war, as there was no national cause at stake, there was no attempt to rouse national feeling. The courtesy of the rulers towards each other was proportionate to the contempt for the lower orders. Compliments passed between the commanders of hostile armies; there was no bitterness, and no excitement; battles were fought with the pomp and pride of a parade.

Maktpolitik var ofta en familjeaffär. Det fanns dock ett undantag:

Poland did not possess those securities for stability which were supplied by dynastic connections and the theory of legitimacy, wherever a crown could be obtained by marriage or inheritance. A monarch without royal blood, a crown bestowed by the nation, were an anomaly and an outrage in that age of dynastic absolutism. The country was excluded from the European system by the nature of its institutions.

Det var dynastiernas behandling av Polen som blev startskottet för nationalismen som politisk kraft.

[The] neighbours at last appointed an instrument for the final demolition of the Polish State. Till then no nation had been deprived of its political existence by the Christian Powers, and whatever disregard had been shown for national interests and sympathies, some care had been taken to conceal the wrong by a hypocritical perversion of law. But the partition of Poland was an act of wanton violence, committed in open defiance not only of popular feeling but of public law. For the first time in modern history a great State was suppressed, and a whole nation divided among its enemies.

This famous measure, the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism, awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right into an aspiration, and a sentiment into a political claim. “No wise or honest man,” wrote Edmund Burke, “can approve of that partition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it to all countries at some future time.”1 Thenceforward there was a nation demanding to be united in a State,—a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again; and, for the first time, a cry was heard that the arrangement of States was unjust—that their limits were unnatural, and that a whole people was deprived of its right to constitute an independent community. Before that claim could be efficiently asserted against the overwhelming power of its opponents,—before it gained energy, after the last partition, to overcome the influence of long habits of submission, and of the contempt which previous disorders had brought upon Poland,—the ancient European system was in ruins, and a new world was rising in its place.

[...]

For true republicanism is the principle of self-government in the whole and in all the parts. In an extensive country, it can prevail only by the union of several independent communities in a single confederacy, as in Greece, in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, and in America; so that a large republic not founded on the federal principle must result in the government of a single city, like Rome and Paris, and, in a less degree, Athens, Berne, and Amsterdam; or, in other words, a great democracy must either sacrifice self-government to unity, or preserve it by federalism.

The France of history fell together with the French State, which was the growth of centuries. The old sovereignty was destroyed. The local authorities were looked upon with aversion and alarm. The new central authority needed to be established on a new principle of unity. The state of nature, which was the ideal of society, was made the basis of the nation; descent was put in the place of tradition, and the French people was regarded as a physical product: an ethnological, not historic, unit. It was assumed that a unity existed separate from the representation and the government, wholly independent of the past, and capable at any moment of expressing or of changing its mind. In the words of Sieyès, it was no longer France, but some unknown country to which the nation was transported. The central power possessed authority, inasmuch as it obeyed the whole, and no divergence was permitted from the universal sentiment. This power, endowed with volition, was personified in the Republic One and Indivisible. The title signified that a part could not speak or act for the whole,—that there was a power supreme over the State, distinct from, and independent of, its members; and it expressed, for the first time in history, the notion of an abstract nationality.

[...]

Roman Gaul had so thoroughly adopted the ideas of absolute authority and undistinguished equality during the five centuries between Cæsar and Clovis, that the people could never be reconciled to the new system. Feudalism remained a foreign importation, and the feudal aristocracy an alien race, and the common people of France sought protection against both in the Roman jurisprudence and the power of the crown. The development of absolute monarchy by the help of democracy is the one constant character of French history. The royal power, feudal at first, and limited by the immunities and the great vassals, became more popular as it grew more absolute; while the suppression of aristocracy, the removal of the intermediate authorities, was so particularly the object of the nation, that it was more energetically accomplished after the fall of the throne. The monarchy which had been engaged from the thirteenth century in curbing the nobles, was at last thrust aside by the democracy, because it was too dilatory in the work, and was unable to deny its own origin and effectually ruin the class from which it sprang. All those things which constitute the peculiar character of the French Revolution,—the demand for equality, the hatred of nobility and feudalism, and of the Church which was connected with them, the constant reference to pagan examples, the suppression of monarchy, the new code of law, the breach with tradition, and the substitution of an ideal system for everything that had proceeded from the mixture and mutual action of the races,— all these exhibit the common type of a reaction against the effects of the Frankish invasion. The hatred of royalty was less than the hatred of aristocracy; privileges were more detested than tyranny; and the king perished because of the origin of his authority rather than because of its abuse.

[...]

Beginning by a protest against the dominion of race over race, its mildest and least-developed form, it grew into a condemnation of every State that included different races, and finally became the complete and consistent theory, that the State and the nation must be co-extensive. “It is,” says Mr. Mill, “in general a necessary condition of free institutions, that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”

The outward historical progress of this idea from an indefinite aspiration to be the keystone of a political system, may be traced in the life of the man who gave to it the element in which its strength resides,—Giuseppe Mazzini. He found Carbonarism impotent against the measures of the governments, and resolved to give new life to the liberal movement by transferring it to the ground of nationality. Exile is the nursery of nationality, as oppression is the school of liberalism; and Mazzini conceived the idea of Young Italy when he was a refugee at Marseilles.

[...]

Mot slutet av essän kommer en huvudpoäng som Acton är känd för, och som bland annat förts vidare av Hayek. Nämligen att en stat byggd på en enhetssträvande nationalism aldrig kan bevara friheten; att individen alltid kommer offras till förmån för det gemensamma. Det finns två idéer om förhållandet mellan stat och nation.

These two views of nationality, corresponding to the French and to the English systems, are connected in name only, and are in reality the opposite extremes of political thought. [det förstnämda systemet:]
The nation is here an ideal unit founded on the race, in defiance of the modifying action of external causes, of tradition, and of existing rights. It overrules the rights and wishes of the inhabitants, absorbing their divergent interests in a fictitious unity; sacrifices their several inclinations and duties to the higher claim of nationality, and crushes all natural rights and all established liberties for the purpose of vindicating itself. Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.

”Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority”. Dessa begränsningar av den offentliga makten finns inte den nationalistiska staten. En mångfald av nationaliteter i en stat är vad friheten kräver. Denna andra form

… is distinguished from the other, because it tends to diversity and not to uniformity, to harmony and not to unity; because it aims not at an arbitrary change, but at careful respect for the existing conditions of political life, and because it obeys the laws and results of history, not the aspirations of an ideal future. While the theory of unity makes the nation a source of despotism and revolution, the theory of liberty regards it as the bulwark of self-government, and the foremost limit to the excessive power of the State. Private rights, which are sacrificed to the unity, are preserved by the union of nations. No power can so efficiently resist the tendencies of centralisation, of corruption, and of absolutism, as that community which is the vastest that can be included in a State, which imposes on its members a consistent similarity of character, interest, and opinion, and which arrests the action of the sovereign by the influence of a divided patriotism. The presence of different nations under the same sovereignty is similar in its effect to the independence of the Church in the State. It provides against the servility which flourishes under the shadow of a single authority, by balancing interests, multiplying associations, and giving to the subject the restraint and support of a combined opinion. In the same way it promotes independence by forming definite groups of public opinion, and by affording a great source and centre of political sentiments, and of notions of duty not derived from the sovereign will. Liberty provokes diversity, and diversity preserves liberty by supplying the means of organisation. All those portions of law which govern the relations of men with each other, and regulate social life, are the varying result of national custom and the creation of private society. In these things, therefore, the several nations will differ from each other; for they themselves have produced them, and they do not owe them to the State which rules them all. This diversity in the same State is a firm barrier against the intrusion of the government beyond the political sphere which is common to all into the social department which escapes legislation and is ruled by spontaneous laws. This sort of interference is characteristic of an absolute government, and is sure to provoke a reaction, and finally a remedy. That intolerance of social freedom which is natural to absolutism is sure to find a corrective in the national diversities, which no other force could so efficiently provide. The co-existence of several nations under the same State is a test, as well as the best security of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism.

[...]

Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow-men. The difference between the two unites mankind not only by the benefits it confers on those who live together, but because it connects society either by a political or a national bond, gives to every people an interest in its neighbours, either because they are under the same government or because they are of the same race, and thus promotes the interests of humanity, of civilisation, and of religion.

[...] The difference between nationality and the State is exhibited in the nature of patriotic attachment. Our connection with the race is merely natural or physical, whilst our duties to the political nation are ethical. One is a community of affections and instincts infinitely important and powerful in savage life, but pertaining more to the animal than to the civilised man; the other is an authority governing by laws, imposing obligations, and giving a moral sanction and character to the natural relations

[...]

The greatest adversary of the rights of nationality is the modern theory of nationality. By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence. According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilisation in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence.