Who we are: a history of popular nationalism

¶ … History of Popular Nationalism

Wiebe, Robert. Who we are: A history of popular nationalism. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2001.

Nationalist movements, particularly by liberal and socialist thinkers, have often been decried as irrational and as forms of primitive tribalism, in contrast to the presumably more reasonable philosophies of rationalism and internationalism. Many writers have hoped that nationalism, in the wake of globalization and the collapse of international cultural borders facilitated through technology, will simply go away. Yet according to Robert Wiebe in his book Who we are: A history of popular nationalism, nationalism has refused to 'go away' not because it is inherently "atavistic, fanatic, xenophobic, blind, bloody" but "because kinship is an essential aspect of human aspirations (Wiebe 5). "Nationalism is the desire among people who believe they share a common ancestry and a common destiny to live under their own government on land sacred to their history. Nationalism expresses an aspiration with a political objective. Behind that aspiration lies a sense of kinship that is simultaneously fictional and real -- that is, culturally created, as all kin systems are, yet based in some measure on an overlapping of customs, histories, and genealogies" (Wiebe 5).

Paradoxically, the ideal of universalism is uniquely provincial, says Wiebe, a product of the liberal modern intelligentsia, who have not known the yearning for security and physical sustenance that only a homeland can provide. Marginalized people in Eastern Europe and Africa, in contrast, have been sustained by nationalism, despite being beset by militarist and colonialist forces, the latter of whom often used a supposedly universal philosophy of 'rationalism' and the transcendent superiority of their worldview as a justification for their actions. Ideals of ethnicity and nationalism, according to Wiebe, are a necessary solution to the problems of displacement and oppression by outsiders: they provide intellectual unity and foster the ability to escape from oppression. Only through kinship have people been able to work effectively and to create a discernable culture as a response to oppressive, universalist forces like European colonialism and Soviet domination. "In each of the three primary contexts for nationalist movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- people in migration, people in fear of cultural disintegration, and people in search of freedom -- kinship holds out the prospect of a closer connection, a deeper trust, a surer protection than alternative ties seem capable of providing" (Wiebe 5).

To show that nationalism is not inherently good or bad, Wiebe selects a wide array of different nationalist case studies, both positive and negative. Wiebe believes that nationalism has been tainted, understandably to some degree, because of the fears generated by Nazis, which cloaked its murderous, anti-Semitic intentions with the rhetoric of German nationalism. But Nazism was, in fact, an internationalist movement of expansion, much like the expansionist aims of the Soviet state. Similarly, what is most feared today is not Islamic nationalism, but rather Islamic fundamentalist internationalism, the result of the Arab Muslim world's "shallow-rooted, kleptocratic" authorities that preside over disenfranchised "impoverished Moslem populations" with little sense of national loyalty (Wiebe 204). In his conclusion, Wiebe argues for a weaker nation state with more deeply-rooted local and less expansionistic ties as the antidote to the negative effects of nationalism.

At the end of Wiebe's preface to his book, he writes: "my hope is not that you will come to like nationalism -- I am not its advocate -- but that you will come to see it as so thoroughly human that no simple judgment does it justice" (Wiebe xvii). However, while Wiebe may be fair in reproaching most American's poor sense of history and lack of appreciation for the power of regional nationalism to affect politics around the globe, naturalizing nationalism as simply and uncomplicatedly human seems troubling, since it essentially leaves the observer powerless to stop its negative forces. Wiebe wants nationalism to be channeled in a positive fashion, yet history would seem to suggest that it has proved to be such a potent force it cannot easily be contained. Wiebe praises Irish nationalism, for example, for sustaining the Irish through oppression in America, where so many immigrated after the famine. Irish resistance to British control may certainly seem valid -- yet it cannot be denied that Irish nationalism has also been used as a justification for terrorism in the 20th century (Wiebe 25).