nation defined against the numerically dominant Hindus, correspondingly framed as the quintessence of a more monocultural Indian state—never mind the immense variety of regional and linguistic identities that crosscut either religious identity, or their centuries-old coexistence and cultural cross-fertilization.
The same fractal pattern has been repeated many times since independence from British rule, by separatist movements objecting to the domestic practices of postcolonial national states, exercising forms of “internal colonialism” on border areas and hinterlands (for whom internality was exactly the question) and deploying the same forms of governmentality. In seeking to replicate the techniques of colonial rule by institutionalizing states rather than abolishing them, the nationalist goal diverged from that of substantive decolonization. If the colonial regime’s structures of oppression were not simply to be reopened for business under new local management, yielding a new generation of authoritarian dictatorships and cultural chauvinists, a different logic of anticolonial struggle was imperative.
But should we object to a group’s self-identifying as a nation per se?
Where ethnicity is brutalized and culture decimated, it is callous to discount the value of ethnic pride, asserting the right to exist as such—not forgetting that cultural expression must include the right to redefine the practices of one’s own culture over time, in dialogue with multiple internal and external influences, rather than sanctifying a fixed tradition. In the colonial context, the defense of ethnic identity and cultural divergence from the dominant is a key component of resistance, with the caveat that it’s equally crucial to pay attention to who’s dictating the “correct” expression of culture and ethnicity. No culture is as homogeneous or static as the invented traditions of nationalism. Precolonial reality was dynamic, multifarious, and also horrible for some people. The decolonization of culture shouldn’t mean rewinding to a “pure” original condition but instead restoring the artificially stunted capacity freely to grow and evolve without forcible outside interference to constrict the space of potential.
In any case it’s possible to concede a strategic identity politics, evoked by the context of resistance, where the assertion of collective existence and demand for recognition functions as a stand against genocide, apartheid, systemic discrimination, or forced assimilation to a dominant norm.
Of course, defining any group as a nation is not without its own risks as the political stakes of identification rise, even if a community is culturally, linguistically, and genealogically distinct, with shared historical experience and aspirations. But here too it’s the specter of stateness—the pressure to establish your own, or to resist the aggression of someone else’s—that calls forth the enforcement of internal conformity, elimination of elements who fail or refuse to conform, and relentless policing of boundaries, including those of hereditary membership, for which task the control of female bodies, sexuality, and reproduction is essential.
What about the geographic boundaries? Aside from the unambiguous wrong of dispossession, indigenous land claims constitute an argument for a way of relating to place and biosphere that counteracts the ecologically destructive logic of late capitalist consumer society. Statehood aside, calls for sovereignty in this sense can amount to a way of securing spaces in which other logics can prevail and other modes of existence can be protected. Even if we hypothetically establish a connection between territory and ethnic identity, establishing a qualitative relationship of people to places, and places to identities, does not by definition require enforcing the separation of homogeneous categories of people assigned to fixed, exclusive plots of land.
Could collective demands for self-determination then be distinguished from the demand for a state? Nation-statehood was only one possible form that shared memories, visions, and social/place relations could take. In practice, “nation” has also been used as a blazon of symbolic solidarity, a committed choice of ethical affiliation. That it’s such a freighted word attests to the overriding force of nationalism, conceptually locking nation to state. The devil’s in the hyphen.
Is it possible then to conceptualize the liberation of nation from state, along with the liberation of people from occupation and exploitation? This is what classical anarchist thinkers such as Mikhail Bakunin and Gustav Landauer attempted to do during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, respectively. It’s also something contemporary solidarity activists may need to think about.
Bakunin saw Pan-Slavism as a vehicle of liberation against dynastic autocracy, imbuing a transnational identity with certain values that could resist tyranny and subjugation. Poland was then the democratic-republican battleground, and Russia’s village terrain the spiritual heartland. In the same way, radical democrats and antiauthoritarians were Francophiles in the 1790s and 1871, and Hispanophiles in the 1930s. In all these cases devotees of a principle embraced the people who were fighting for that principle, acknowledging their location on the shifting front line of an ongoing global struggle, while also imputing to them inherent ethnocultural traits that made them fit bearers of the struggle. But this would be to miss the moon for the finger pointing at the moon: a people could betray an ideal as well as defend it, and others, when their turn came, would then become the defenders.
For Bakunin, while rejecting the state, nationality remained an essential trait, both a “natural and social fact,” given that “every people and the smallest folk-unit has its own character, its own specific mode of existence, its own way of speaking, feeling, thinking, and acting; and it is this idiosyncrasy that constitutes the essence of nationality.”[2] In contrast, Rudolf Rocker argued that it was positional and contingent: “nation is not the cause, but the result of the state. It is the state that creates the nation, not the nation the state.” Moreover, he warned, in any talk of nationalism,
we must not forget that we are always dealing with the organised selfishness of privileged minorities which hide behind the skirts of the nation, hide behind the credulity of the masses. We speak of national interests, national capital, national spheres of interest, national honour, and national spirit; but we forget that behind all this there are hidden merely the selfish interests of power-loving politicians and money-loving business men for whom the nation is a convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their schemes for political power from the eyes of the world.
What he described was the state hijacking the credulous masses through the method of nationalism.[3]
Later Landauer tried to differentiate the folk or people, viewed in an almost spiritual sense, from the institutional mechanisms of the state.[4] The dangers here (as Rocker surely guessed) are obvious: it’s a slippery slope from the praise of a völkisch spirit to a mysticism of blood and soil, to chauvinism and fascism—especially when the state to be distinguished from the organic soul of the people was identified with modern bureaucracy and a liberal intelligentsia—likewise anathema for today’s populist right wing. But to transmute into fascism, a folk idea such as Landauer portrayed would have to augment its integral sense of connection to place and community with racial exceptionalism, supremacism, and xenophobia, and moreover to lure its nation back around to the cult of the state, to be embodied in its virile leader, its military strength, and the order and discipline through which its people were taught to find honor in serving it—all of which Landauer detested.
In the 1930s, anticolonial activists drew explicit parallels between the fascism on the rise within Europe and the imperialism that had long been exercised outside Europe’s borders. Both used the same authoritarian methods of supremacy, racializing a population in order to classify it as outside and below the paragon of the human. Elaborate hierarchies of being were necessary to justify systematically excluding groups from full status as rational agents, thereby protecting the principles of liberalism or Christianity from being forced into revealing their apparent contradiction with the imperial enterprise. Racialist logic provided the final, crucial ingredient in the toxic assemblage of capitalism plus state; without racism, the imperial project would have been insupportable according to the logic of the empires’ own domestic populations.
