Abstract
Craig Calhoun's study of the nation state is a welcome antidote or corrective to much of the enthusiasm that has accompanied the academic debate about globalization, the porous boundaries of the state, the notion of flexible citizenship and the aspiration that we could travel or live anywhere as a matter of personal choice. In retrospect, 9/11 killed many cherished aspirations including the belief that we could live in a borderless world. The current limitations on mobility and migration in a world of enclave societies also raise searching questions with respect to the possibilities of a Kantian cosmopolitan dream. Calhoun argues that in factual terms nations and nationalism are not disappearing in a global world and that both are in fact more prominent with globalization. In addition, as he says on page one, ‘Nationalism is not a moral mistake’.
The early chapters of this volume are very much concerned with the problem of defining nationalism. Calhoun takes us through many of the well known positions in this debate. One such confrontation was between Ernest Gellner who argued that nationalism makes nations and not vice versa and Anthony Smith who defended the view that ethnic identity (or ethnie) is one historically continuous component of nationalism and that modern nationalism involved the bureaucratization of an aristocratic ethnie. Calhoun comes down on the side of Benedict Anderson who coined the phrase ‘imagined political community’ to describe in the first instance Anderson's experience of postcolonial nationalism in Asia, especially in Indonesia's struggle for independence. For Calhoun, nationalism is a ‘discursive formation’ namely ‘a way of speaking that shapes our consciousness’ but ‘is implicated in the widespread if problematic treatment of societies as bounded, integral, wholes with distinct identities, cultures and institutions’ (p. 40). This discussion of various ways of treating nationalism in the social sciences is only a prelude to the more substantive issues of citizenship, nationalism, membership and democracy.
Much of the real substance of this book is contained in chapter six which is essentially a long review article of Hans Kohn's influential The Idea of Nationalism (1944). Kohn had stressed the important relationship between nationalism, liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism, making the now famous distinction between civic (or good) nationalism and ethnic (or bad) nationalism. This distinction had strong Orientalist connotations since bad or illiberal nationalism was associated with the East, while civic nationalism grew out of the cosmopolitan legacy of Stoicism and the Enlightenment, and it embraced individualism and the rule of law. Civic nationalism represented the democratic traditions of England, France and the United States, where a national framework for citizenship did not lead inevitably to an exclusionary politics.
Kohn, who had been born in 1891 in Prague and grew up in a prosperous cosmopolitan culture, was influenced by Martin Buber and the idea of ‘cultural Zionism’ against Theodore Herzl's statist and secular vision of Jewish nationalism. Kohn and his associates stressed the idea that a spiritual renewal of Judaism must not involve domination of Arabs by the Jewish settlements in Palestine. It was against the background of the rise of fascism that Kohn emphasised the differences between ethical and ethnic nationalism in which fascism transmuted nationalism into irrational racism and imperialism. Germany became the European example of ethnic nationalism because, given the political divisions among Germans, a unified language and culture became all important, and secondly because the agrarian elites and peasantry represented a traditional opposition bourgeois institutions were weak.
Kohn is important to Calhoun's account of nationalism because Kohn recognised very clearly that ordinary people typically need a sense of belonging and identity, and a sense of being rooted in a landscape. The dream of cosmopolitan governance needs to take these nationalist sentiments seriously when considering the possibilities of a more united world. The political task is how to achieve cosmopolitanism that does not ignore or suppress deeply felt cultural and language differences. Various intellectual traditions have emerged that attempt to address the conundrum between particularity and universalism in terms of multiculturalism (Charles Taylor), constitutional patriotism (Jürgen Habermas), patriotism (Maurizio Viroli) and postnational or multicultural citizenship (Will Kymlicka).
It is not self-evident that Calhoun has any neat solutions to these troublesome issues and we should probably not expect any. He makes three fundamental points and all are valid. First, he wants to insist on what I take to be an absolutely fundamental sociological argument about nationalism, namely that ‘nationalism is a reminder that democracy depends on solidarity’ (p. 166), and that this solidarity is typically nationalist. Secondly, not every form of nationalism is pernicious and nationalism has been combined successfully with democracy and citizenship. Thirdly, to paraphrase the final sentence of this study, seeking to bypass nationalism in pursuit of a rational universalism may reflect a dangerous illusion.
Each of these arguments is important. But readers of this book will probably entertain at least two minor criticisms. As with all collections of articles (even where they have been thoroughly revised) there is considerable repetition and overlap between the chapters. In addition, the book would have been more coherent if chapter six on Kohn's account of liberal nationalism had come at the front and not the rear of the book. A second criticism is that, given the sub-title of this study, there is in fact relatively little on cosmopolitanism, but we should be pleased to observe that according to footnote 9 on page 208, his Cosmopolitanism and Belonging is forthcoming.