Benedict Anderson
The New World Disorder
It is quite possible that historians of the 2050s, looking back into our now closing century, will pick out, as one deep tectonic movement stretching across more than two centuries, the disintegration of the great polyethnic, polyglot, and often polyreligious monarchical empires built up so painfully in mediaeval and early modern times. In most cases the disintegration was accompanied by great violence, and was often followed by decades of civil and interstate wars. In the 1770s the first nation-state was born in North America out of armed resistance to imperial Britain, but it was inwardly so divided that it subsequently endured the bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century. Out of the prolonged collapse of the Spanish Empire between 1810 and 1830 came the brutal despotisms, rebellions and civil strife that have plagued Latin America until our own time. As a result of the Great War of 1914--1918 the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires blew up, leaving in their wake a congeries of small, weak, and generally unstable nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Near East. 3
The fall of the Ch’ing Empire in 1911 opened two generations of civil wars in China. Partition in British India, massive interethnic violence in Sri Lanka, the Thirty Years War in Vietnam, the continuing civil strife in Northern Ireland, the bloody collapse of the Ethiopian Empire, the horrors in Uganda and Zaire-----all in differing ways can be seen as outcomes of the same long process. Seeming to counteract this tectonic movement-----which involved, of course, liberation as much as disintegration-----was Communism in its early internationalist form. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in the very heart of the evaporated Romanov empire permitted Lenin and his associates to reassemble many of the pieces of that empire during the early 1920 s. But the Soviet Union did not regard itself as a huge new nation-state, rather as a sort of model for a future in which nationalism as a political principle would be finally superseded. Indeed, for a time, under the centralized control of a multiethnic and militant Communist Party, nationalism was reduced generally to a politically insignificant ‘cultural’ ethnicity. This phase, however, did not last very long. Reeling under the ferocious onslaught of Hitler’s armies, Stalin and his associates discovered that encouraging nationalism was crucial to the war effort. In a famous speech delivered on 7 November 1941 , the CPSU’S general secretary urged his listeners thus: ‘Let the manly images of our great ancestors Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoi, Kuzma Minin, Dmitri Pozharsky, Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutusov inspire you in 1 this war.’ Prosperous Europe has today forgotten how much it owes both to Stalin and to Russian nationalism for the destruction of the Nazi empire. But in the war’s aftermath, it proved implausible to add the communized states of Eastern Europe to the USSR, and thus began a pluralization of Communist states bearing national names. After Eastern Europe came Yugoslavia, North Korea, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In 1979 the first, and, it may well be, the last, wars between Communist states broke out, as Vietnam invaded Cambodia and China invaded Vietnam. A historical logic was already visible, if then generally unnoticed. Nationalism could be halted, but not permanently restrained or superseded. So that, during the 1980s, Stalin’s empire was just as surely imploding as Churchill’s had done. Meanwhile, also in the aftermath of World War II, the bourgeois colonial empires of France, Britain, Holland, Belgium, and even This text is a revised and expanded version of a talk recorded by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Ithaca, NY on 5 December 1991. 1 Aleksandr Nevsky defeated the Swedish army on the banks of the Neva in 1240; Dmitri Donskoi routed the Mongols on the banks of the Don in 1380; Kuzma Minin and Dmitri Pozharsky expelled the Poles from Moscow in 1612, leading to the founding of the Romanov dynasty; Aleksandr Suvorov was Catherine the Great’s outstanding general; Mikhail Kutusov-----thanks to Tolstoy’s energetic promotion----was widely regarded as Napoleon’s successful antagonist in 1812. In another speech of that year, Stalin spoke more broadly of the Germans as ‘a people devoid of conscience and honour, a people with the morals of beasts, [who] have the impudence to call for the destruction of the Great Russian Nation, the Nation of Plekhanov, of Lenin, of Belinsky, Chernychevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Gorky and Chekhov, of Pavlov and Chechinov . . . and of Kutusov.’ 4
Portugal collapsed, creating by the end of the 1970s a United Nations with four times the membership that had made up the pioneering League of Nations half a century earlier. The last reincarnation of a pre-modern empire is China, where Mao Tse-tung, taking leaves out of the books of both Stalin and the Sons of Heaven, attempted heroically to create a socialist state on imperial foundations. But it was named The People’s Republic of China, and thus represented from the start a forlorn attempt to stretch the short, tight skin of nationalism over a vast multiethnic, multireligious, multilinguistic imperium. One is reminded of France in the 1950 s, which still included Algeria as a part of the metropole, and which fought a horrifically brutal-----and futile-----war to keep things that way. It is thus quite possible that Mao’s empire too will crumble, at least at the edges. Taiwan is already effectively independent. Tibet may well follow, and perhaps China’s Turkic and Mongol zones in due 2 course. There is no reason to think that late empires die more peacefully than their predecessors, or that the aftermaths of their dying are any less tormented. Dangerous Fancies
In what perspective does it make sense to reflect on all of this? There are, I believe, four misconceptions which ought to be discarded from the outset. The first is that what is going on is ‘fragmentation’ and ‘disintegration’-----with all the menacing, pathological connotations these words bring with them. For this language makes us forget the decades or centuries of violence out of which Frankensteinian ‘integrated states’ such as the United Kingdom of 1900 , which included all of Ireland, were constructed. Should we not really regard such ‘integrations’ as pathological when we see how calmly The Irish Republic and the United Kingdom have coexisted since the former was established in 1921 -----after decades of often violent repression and resistance? Or when we observe the brutal warfare still continuing in ‘integrated’ Northern Ireland? Behind the language of ‘fragmentation’ lies always a Panglossian conservatism that likes to imagine that every status quo is nicely normal. The second prejudice, which is related to, and grows partly out of the first, has to do with the relationship between capitalism, markets, and state size. Unreflecting commentators-----on the Left and on the Right -----frequently assume that ‘small’ countries, with limited resources in raw materials and labour, are somehow not ‘real’ countries or are ‘barely’ viable in the face of the industrial giants and the exigencies of the world capitalist economy. This kind of thinking goes back to early modern mercantilism, and was given additional force in the late eighteenth century by the American nationalist Alexander Hamilton, and in the mid nineteenth century by the German nationalist Friedrich 2
To be sure, the Han form the vast majority of China’s population, and this demographic weight should militate against successful separatisms. But one should not forget the history of political fissiparousness among the Han themselves. In the last 150 years China has been much longer divided than unified. 5
List, who argued for ‘big’ nation-states on the grounds that only these had sufficiently large internal markets to permit ‘economic sovereignty’ and a seriously competitive place in an industrializing world. But revisionist students of political economy have for some time been arguing that in a highly interconnected world economy it is quite often small, ethnically and religiously homogeneous countries that do best. In Europe they point to The Netherlands and Finland, Norway and Austria by comparison with Italy, France and the United Kingdom. In Asia they refer us to South Korea and Thailand, Singapore and Japan, by comparison with India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka or Pakistan. The argument is quite simple at bottom. It is that in such small, homogeneous countries the sense of national solidarity is especially strong, making it easier for political and economic leaders to ask for sacrifices without expensive coercion, to develop smoother industrial relations, and effectively to seek specialized niches in the international division of labour. Conversely, domestically troubled giants like the United States or India face enormous political difficulties in bending and renovating the national economy in the contemporary environment. The third fancy is that ‘transnational corporations’ have somehow made nationalism obsolete. After all, people say, we see General Electric abandoning high-wage America to locate its new plants in labourcheap Venezuela and Zambia, as well as hiring Venezuelans and Zambians as local managers. This view, however, overlooks the obvious facts that the effective controllers of General Electric are overwhelmingly American citizens, live in America, are active politically in America, and can be quite antagonistic to Japanese, or German, or French ‘transnationals’. Their indifference to the plight of American workers is not at all new, and is in fact easier to get away with because of the vast size of the United States. The fourth prejudice is that there is some inscrutable connection between capitalism and ‘peace’, such that the ‘free market’ is instinctively juxtaposed not merely to the command economy but to war. This idea flies flatly in the face of all the historical evidence. No country fought more wars in the nineteenth century than ‘free trade’ Britain. No country has fought more wars in the second half of the twentieth century than would-be free-market America. Both World Wars were instigated by capitalist giants. All four fancies are not merely profoundly conservative. To the extent that powerful leaders in big countries actually believe them, they are dangerous, for they have the cumulative effect of encouraging such people to imagine that they stand for progress and peace, while their adversaries stand for ‘narrow’ nationalism, sectionalism, and often ‘terrorism’. In turn, this view encourages them to unleash the preponderant military power at their disposal to make their wishes prevail. A simple example is Indonesia’s bloody ‘integration’ of the old Portuguese colony of East Timor, which between 1975 and 1980 took the lives of one third of the local population. Today, in the face of ever bolder resistance to this ‘integration’, the regime in Jakarta prepares 6
for more repression against ‘disintegrationists’, ‘separatists’ and ‘antiIndonesian elements’. Everyone sensible knows that all significant violence would cease the minute Jakarta agreed to quit East Timor and leave its wretched and heroic people alone. Modern Imaginings
What, then, accounts for the driving power of nationalism and its much less respectable younger relation ‘ethnicity’? And how are the two related? Two common types of explanation quite clearly can not stand serious investigation. One is that they are the natural creatures of economic discontent and relative deprivation. It is true that many nationalist and ethnic movements build on, or exploit, such discontents. Yet these same discontents have also fired a wide variety of other, often competing, social movements-----socialist, communist, religious, millenarian, and so forth. Nonetheless, many of these competitors, for a variety of reasons, seem today to have lost their ideological power for the time being. Hence nationalism and ethnicity are very likely to move in to take their place. We are seeing a good deal of this ‘moving-in’ in today’s Eastern Europe, where once-staunch Stalinists are turning themselves into strident nationalists. The other explanation, typically propounded by the political leaders of nationalist and ethnic movements, is that they represent deep historical memories and traditional communities. In fact, however, such movements are distinctly modern imaginings, and none go back further than the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The truth is that it is precisely their modernity which gives nationalism and ethnicity such contemporary power. The two most significant factors generating nationalism and ethnicity are both linked closely to the rise of capitalism. They can be described summarily as mass communications and mass migrations. Up until the nineteenth century the vast majority of the people in even the most advanced states could neither read nor write, and for the most part lived and died near where their ancestors had lived and died before them. But capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism, changed all this, first in Europe and the Americas, later, and with increasing speed, around the rest of the world. Capitalism linked to the technology of printing had already created in early modern times an impressive production of books in vernacular languages. In the nineteenth century appeared the mass-oriented newspaper, consumed not merely by the book-reading middle classes but by the growing working classes, who, unlike their peasant forebears, had to be made literate to function effectively in factories and their new urban environments. Governments, intensely aware of the educated-manpower needs of capitalism and of their own conscriptbased, industrialized military machines, began developing modern school systems, with standardized textbooks, standardized curricula, and standardized examinations-----in the politically dominant vernaculars. (Imperialism quickly spread these structures and habits to the colonized territories.) In conjunction with the spread of the political doctrines of republicanism, liberalism and popular democracy, print 7
capitalism brought into being mass publics who began to imagine, through the media, a new type of community: the nation. In the twentieth century, with the development of radio and television, these impulses have been enormously reinforced, and stretch still further, in that their messages are accessible to people who do not have to be very literate in the dominant vernacular-----messages, furthermore, which have a colloquial, auditory and visual immediacy that print can scarcely match. Mass Migration and the World Market
Mass migration also took on a new character in early modern times in that it was stimulated less by disaster and war than by commerce and capitalism’s development of increasingly rapid and safe long-distance transportation. Over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries millions of minimally free Europeans and millions of enslaved Africans moved across the Atlantic to the Americas. In the nineteenth century there came an extraordinary market- and state-induced flow of non-Europeans from continent to continent. Chinese to California, Southeast Asia and Australia; Indians to South America, Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, followed by Armenians, Lebanese, Arabs, and so many others. In our own time the pace is fast, and likely to increase in speed, thanks to the train, the bus and the aeroplane: Koreans in Canada, Filipinos in Italy, Thais in Japan, Turks in Germany, West Indians in England, Algerians in France-----in their tens, if not hundreds of thousands. To be sure, many are ‘pushed’ by political repression in their homelands, but the great majority are ‘pulled’ by exactly that force-----the market-----which George Bush imagines as a force for peace and order, but all modern history shows to be the most deeply subversive institution that we know. Human bodies, though caught up in the vortex of the market, are not merely another form of commodity. As they follow in the wake of grain and gold, rubber and textiles, petrochemicals and silicon chips, they carry with them memories and customs, beliefs and eating habits, musics and sexual desires. And these human characteristics, which, in their places of origin, are usually borne lightly and unselfconsciously, assume quickly a drastically different salience in the diasporas of modern life. It is no accident that nationalism’s historical debut occurred in the Americas among the descendants of Scots and Castilians who shared language and religion with Scots and Spaniards in Europe, but who had rarely seen Scotland or Castile. The metropoles thought of them scornfully as ‘creoles’ or ‘colonials’-----as it were, non-European Europeans-----and this imposed, placeless, identity eventually fused with attachment to their non-European homes, to create the possibility of becoming Mexicans, Venezuelans and ‘Americans’. Such people, however, were peculiarly fortunate compared to their successors elsewhere. ‘Debased’ they might be in the eyes of the imperial metropole, but they were still more or less ‘white’, still spoke European languages, and still followed European religions. They could not be treated with the full brutality inflicted on Indians, Africans and Asians. Furthermore, they were following the market out of the metropole, not back into it. In the Americas they quickly made 8
themselves masters of the indigenous populations. (Following independence from the metropoles, they encouraged huge new immigrations from non-British and non-Spanish Europe to consolidate this domination and to promote accumulation in a labour-scarce environment). Afterwards, only in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa could their example be followed. In all later market migrations, people moved away from the periphery towards more inward centres, they had no choice but to be subordinated, and they were never regarded even as ‘debased Europeans’. The scale and speed of these modern market-driven migrations made any traditional form of gradual assimilation to the new environments very difficult. In the face of bewilderingly alien environments it was only to be expected that the migrants would turn to each other for moral and economic support-----and so they clustered in ghettoes small or large-----in Detroit, Berlin, Huddersfield, São Paolo, or Marseilles. More serious still, capitalism paradoxically also held them, in strange ways, in their homelands’ grip. For one thing, they could, in principle, easily go home, by the same ships, trains, buses and aeroplanes that had vacuumed them out of those homes in the first place. The telex, the telephone and the post office encouraged them to keep ‘in touch’, in a way unimaginable in earlier centuries. Hence many of them dreamed of circulatory migration rather than of finding a new permanent home, even if that was what, finally, they found themselves stuck with. But it was not only local and familial memories that they brought with them. Capitalism had its own way of helping them imagine a more mediated identity. We may recall the famous photograph of a Peloponnesian Gastarbeiter sitting mournfully in his tiny room in some anonymous German industrial town-----Stuttgart perhaps? The pitiful little room is bare of any decoration except a travel poster of the Parthenon, produced en masse by Lufthansa, with a subscription, in German, encouraging the gazer to take a Holiday in Sunny Greece. This Lufthansa Parthenon is transparently not a real memory for the melancholy worker. He has put it on his wall because he can read it as sign for ‘Greece’, and-----in his Stuttgart misery-----for an ‘ethnicity’ that only Stuttgart has encouraged him to imagine. On the other side, the mass appearance, in settled communities, of thousands of immigrants, did not, and will not, fail to produce its own ethnicizations. Le Pen’s neofascist movement in France finds its strongest support among two once visibly antagonistic groups: workers who used to be faithful supporters of the French Communist Party but whose rundown neighbourhoods are exactly where the poor immigrants are compelled to cluster; and former pied-noir (putatively ‘white’ colonial) elements who fled free Algeria in 1962 , and who despite their Maltese, Italian, Spanish and Levantine ancestries, feel themselves more than ever French. Neo-Nazis and skinheads behind the recent outrages in United Germany, the National Front in the United Kingdom, ‘White Power’ extremists in the United States----who advertize themselves ‘ethnically’ as the real Germans, English or Americans-----are also in part responses to the labour flows created on a mass scale by contemporary world capitalism. 9
Dangerous Convergences
There is still another way in which the market is making a special contribution to the new world disorder, and it intersects frequently with the upheavals sketched out above. In the early days of industrialism, the munitions industries in the advanced Western states operated largely outside the market. They typically had but a single customer, the state, produced commodities to customer specifications, charged administered prices, and were, because of imperial rivalries, usually surrounded with a wall of secrecy. But by the 1880s, some of these munitions giants, for example Armstrong in Britain and Krupp in Germany, had broken out of the state’s monopsonistic grip, and were building an infant world arms market. Characteristically, these conglomerates’ free-market customers were weak, peripheral and agrarian states which were incapable of constructing the high-tech metallurgical and chemical plants necessary for making modern weapons of their own on a mass scale. Thus British and American arms flowed to the recently independent states of South America, German weapons primarily to Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. For two basic reasons, this process picked up increasing speed after World War I. The first was the collapse of the Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman, Hohenzollern and Ch’ing empires, and the proliferation in the debris of a host of new, weak, agrarian nation-states, also completely incapable of self-armament. The second was the new speed with which weapons systems were becoming obsolete as the pace of invention accelerated: in one generation, aeroplanes, submarines, aircraft carriers, tanks and poison gas were all born. The great munitions industries were now in the business of supplying their core customers with the most advanced and expensive war machinery possible, but also selling off obsolescent, cheaper lines of goods on the world market. The logic behind these developments only deepened its thrust after World War II, as technological innovation picked up further speed, and as the number of weak, agrarian states proliferated. But two new conditions substantially aggravated the situation. On the one hand, as a result of the oil crisis of 1973 , the world saw for the first time immensely rich weak, agrarian states, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, which had the purchasing power to acquire ‘firstclass’ arms from the industrial cores. On the other hand, the onset of the Cold War pitted two superpowers in a global struggle fought largely through proxies in the periphery, precisely because the two powers were terrified by the prospect of a nuclear war between themselves. As a matter of state policy, military-assistance programmes on a vast scale developed, largely outside the international market, in that their beneficiaries’ bills were often paid for by the superpowers themselves. Hence the massive arms races of the 1960s, 1970 s and 1980s in the Near East, South, Southeast, and East Asia, Latin America, and even Africa. The character of superpower competition in the periphery also encouraged both sides to sell or grant quite sophisticated weapons to customer-clients who were not the leaderships of nationstates: guerrillas, rebels, terrorists and counter-terrorists, above all in zones where the rival superpower was hegemonic. We recall American operations against Soviet-influenced Afghanistan, Angola and 10
Cuba, and Soviet operations against American-influenced South Africa and various parts of Latin America. In a substantial number of such cases, superpower military support was provided to subgroups which, to a greater or lesser degree, defined themselves in nationalist, ethnic or racial terms. (The temptations were particularly great in Asia and Africa. There, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century imperialisms had forcibly ‘integrated’, within iron colonial cages, a huge variety of older polities, ethnolinguistic groups and religious 3 communities. The independent successor-states born after World War II were thus peculiarly vulnerable to external manipulation of ethnic sentiments.) The example of the superpowers was quickly followed by intermediary powers: small industrial countries such as France and Britain; and barely industrial states which enjoyed special relations with a superpower, such as Israel, or surplus wealth, such as Iran. Some at least of these states have been attempting to go nuclear despite the efforts of the existing nuclear club to maintain its exclusive membership. Finally, a substantial number of Third World states, incapable of producing sophisticated armaments themselves, have proved quite ready to divert arms received or bought from the cores to friendly opposition groups in neighbouring states with which they have serious bones to pick (for example, Tanzania’s military support of the opponents of Idi Amin, or India’s arming of the early Bengali rebellion against Old Pakistan). Up to a point, it is plausible to argue that the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union may to some extent reduce the flow of munitions around the world. But Moscow’s contribution to the flow was always substantially smaller than that of Washington, let alone of the West as a whole. Furthermore, it was largely statedirected and outside the market. At the same time, half a century of Cold War has created huge military-industrial complexes in the West, which will powerfully resist attempts to curb their reach, and for which the world arms market-----with its substantial new customers in Eastern Europe-----remains an irresistible magnet. Arms production itself has spread quite rapidly outside the old cores-----to Brazil and Argentina, Israel, India, China, even places like Thailand and Indonesia. It may even be that the decline in world fears of a major nuclear war will further stimulate the working of the market, in that the drive to sell may be less inhibited by large strategic and/or moral considerations. From the beginnings of nationalism, based as this culture was on an idea of popular sovereignty, it was accepted a priori that one central guarantor of the reality of that sovereignty was a national army. Even in such core industrial polities as Germany, France and Japan, however, these national armies soon played a central role in domestic 3
The eminent historian of Africa, Roland Oliver, describes the ‘partition’ of the continent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as ‘a ruthless act of political amalgamation, whereby something on the order of ten thousand units was reduced to a mere forty.’ 11
politics. In the weak peripheral states, militaries largely armed and trained from the outside were even more likely to turn inwards, as the nineteenth-century experience of Latin America shows. The world today is full of national armies that have never fought an external enemy, but continue to torment their own fellow-citizens. Among the many reasons for this introversion have been, especially in the ex-colonial periphery, the processes of decolonization itself, as well as the temptations posed by the general absence of countervailing domestic powers in poor, weak, and still heavily agrarian nations. In the first place, when the imperial powers began creating local militaries in the colonies, they trained them for purposes of domestic control. The Burma Rifles, for example, were destined to be deployed only in British Burma and against domestic Burmese resistance to British rule. In the second place, for obvious political reasons, they recruited on a heavily ethnicized basis, characteristically favouring backward and/or Christian minorities: ‘Martial Races’ in India, Ambonese in the Dutch Indies, Karens in Burma, Berbers in Algeria, Ibos in Nigeria, and so forth. The transfer of sovereignty therefore often created a fundamental and dangerous antagonism between an ethnic minority in control of the most powerful domestic organization, and majorities or pluralities that claimed state power on the basis of popular elections and representative government. Even where coups did not rapidly ensue, militaries were too important for the new national governments not to attempt to seize control of recruitment into the officer corps. Under the best of conditions-----that is, where some genuine conception of national representation in the military was adhered to-----majoritarianism usually threatened the hitherto powerful minorities inside the military with the long-term erosion of their ascendancy, and, perhaps, their ability to help their fellow ethnics in time of trouble. In other cases, such as in Latin America, recruitment to the officer corps was heavily biased on class and ethnic-racial lines, generally excluding ‘Indians’, and favouring creoles and mestizos from the middle and upper classes. Small wonder then that militaries have been extensively used in the periphery to maintain power structures which, despite nationalist rhetoric, have been profoundly ethnicized. Still less wonder that discontent and rebellion against such status quos should have also disposed themselves along ethnic, quasi-ethnic, or racial lines. Hence, despite the end of the Cold War, dangerous convergences that were already born in the last century show every sign of continuing to develop: market-led proliferation of weapons-systems, mythologization of militaries as sine qua non symbols and guarantors of national sovereignty, and ethnicization of officer corps. The Emergence of the Long-Distance Nationalist?
There are profoundly deep economic, social and cultural forces at work here, over which political leaderships even in advanced, ‘democratic’ states have only tangential control. To sense these forces one does not need to go outside Old Europe itself. As the crow flies, Belfast is less than 500 kilometres from London, but has been an armed 12
camp for the past twenty-five years, despite British use of the most sophisticated urban counter-insurgency methods against the IRA, and despite British leaders as aggressive as Margaret Thatcher. The IRA survives not only because of its local nationalist appeal and its ruthless methods, but because it has gained political and financial support in the United States and inside England, weapons on the international arms market, and training and intelligence from Libya and in the Near East. Belgrade is less than 1,000 kilometres from Berlin, capital of the most powerful state in Europe and hub of the European Community. But Berlin, the Community and the United States seem largely impotent in the face of the civil war destroying Old Yugoslavia. Belgrade is the headquarters of a putatively ‘national’ army which was and is disproportionately Serbian and is now being used for Serbian rather than Yugoslavian ends. Croat politicians, on the other hand, have been highly active on the world arms market, and draw substantial resources from emigrant Croat communities in various countries around the world. What these instances show is not at all that nationalism is obsolete. Rather, the vast migrations produced over the past 150 years by the market, as well as war and political oppression, have profoundly disrupted a once seemingly ‘natural’ coincidence of national sentiment with lifelong residence in fatherland or motherland. In this process ‘ethnicities’ have been engendered which follow nationalisms in historical order, but which are today also linked to such nationalisms in complex and often explosive ways. This is why some of the most strongly ‘Irish nationalist’ supporters of the IRA live out their lives as ‘ethnic Irish’ in the United States. The same goes for many Ukrainians settled in Toronto, Tamils in Melbourne, Jamaicans in London, Croats in Sydney, Jews in New York, Vietnamese in Los Angeles, and Turks in Berlin. It may well be that we are faced here with a new type of nationalist: the ‘long-distance nationalist’ one might perhaps call 4 him. For while technically a citizen of the state in which he comfortably lives, but to which he may feel little attachment, he finds it tempting to play identity politics by participating (via propaganda, money, weapons, any way but voting) in the conflicts of his imagined Heimat -----now only fax-time away. But this citizenshipless participation is inevitably non-responsible-----our hero will not have to answer for, or pay the price of, the long-distance politics he undertakes. He is also easy prey for shrewd political manipulators in his Heimat.
4
‘Him’ because this type of politics seems to attract males more than females. 13
