Ethnic nationalism a formidable force

Jerry Z. Muller

is professor of history at the Catholic University of America

Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. They also find ethno-nationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to portray it as a product not of nature but of culture. Ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.

But none of this will make ethno-nationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit in with their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. We see the persistence of ethnic politics throughout the world - in Kenya, in Serbia and Kosovo, in Turkey and Iraq.

The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states usually has been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. That's the irony: that the way modern states are created actually heightens ethnic politics. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.

The way 20th-century European history is often told, nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the postwar decades, Western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union. After the fall of the Soviet empire, that framework spread eastward to encompass most of the continent. Europeans entered a post-national era - not only a good thing in itself, but also a model for other regions. Nationalism, in this view, had been a tragic detour on the road to a peaceful liberal democratic order.

Yet hundreds of Africans and Asians perish each year trying to get into Europe by landing on the coast of Spain or Italy - which suggests that Europe's frontiers are not so open. And a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two - and one of them, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other words - where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict citizenship laws - in Europe the "separatist project" has not so much vanished as triumphed.

Far from being obsolete in 1945, in many respects ethno-nationalism was at its height in the years after World War II. European stability during the Cold War era was due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the ethno-nationalist project.

Although the term

ethnic cleansing

has come into English usage only recently, its verbal correlates in Czech, French, German and Polish go back much further. Much of the history of 20th-century Europe, in fact, has been a painful, drawn-out process of ethnic disaggregation. The breakup of Yugoslavia was simply the last act of a long play.

But the plot of that play is rarely recognized, and so a story whose significance is comparable to the spread of democracy or capitalism remains largely unknown and unappreciated.

When the European overseas empires dissolved, they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns of settlement and whose populations were ethnically mixed. It is wishful thinking to suppose these boundaries will be permanent.

As societies in the former colonial world modernize, becoming more urban, literate and politically mobilized, the forces that gave rise to ethno-nationalism and ethnic disaggregation in Europe are apt to drive events there, too.

This unfortunate reality creates dilemmas for advocates of humanitarian intervention, because making and keeping peace between groups that have come to hate and fear one another is likely to require costly, long-term military missions rather than relatively cheap, temporary ones. When communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover, it is often impractical for large numbers of refugees to return to their place of origin after a cease-fire, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of conflict.

Partition may thus be the most humane, lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem.

Contemporary social scientists tend to stress that national consciousness is manufactured by ideologists and politicians. True, ethnic identity or ethnic nationalism is never as natural or unavoidable as nationalists claim. Yet it would be a mistake to think that it is therefore any less real. Ethno-nationalism was not a chance detour in European history; it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit. These propensities are, as mentioned, only heightened by the way modern states are created. It is a crucial source of both solidarity

and

enmity, and in one form or another it will remain for many generations to come. One can only profit from facing it directly.