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Nationalism and Culture

"Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent." Ernest Gellner

Paul DUMOUCHEL

If you visit the Flemish painter Pierre Paul Rubens's house in Antwerp you will find in the kitchen, close to a window an interesting small painting. It is not by Rubens himself, but by some unknown artist of the same period. It depicts a battlefield where two armies of a few hundred men are marching toward each other. The soldiers walk abreast in rectangular formations, eight to ten rows deep while behind them cannons are firing. The battlefield is situated on a low plain. To one side of this plain there is a hill that leads to a higher plateau where various groups of peasants are looking at what is going on below. One lonely man is sitting with his dog beside him, further away a family is having a picnic. All of them are watching the war, but they do not seem much more concerned about what is happening below than we are by an open-air performance or a festival. Whatever is going on there, it seems that neither their life nor their future is at stake, or if it is, they must feel there is very little they can do about it. This painting may give a misleading view of what warfare was like in the early 17th century, though perhaps not an entirely misleading one. However that may be, it draws our attention to a relatively important aspect of the relation between rulers and those they rule before the rise of nationalism: they do not belong to the same world. The peasants are interested in the issue of the battle that is going on in the plain below. It will have consequences on their lives, but they are not participants. The powers that are and those that will be do not need their agreement. They require nothing from them but to be subservient.

Ernest Gellner at the beginning of his classic Nations and Nationalism (1983) defines nationalism as "a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones and in particular that ethnic boundaries... should not separate the power holders from the rest."1) The painting in Rubens's kitchen reminds us of a time when the ethnic origin of one's ruler was not an issue. Provinces were sold. They could also be acquired either by marriage or by conquest. They did not need to be inherited. Legitimacy was not something that concerned everyone and especially it did not require any similarity between the rulers and the ruled. Rulers changed, populations remained. The inhabitants were more or less lucky with their new masters, but it did not really matter whether or not subject and sovereign shared the same nationality, language or ethnic group.2) In the Western World the first issue that became important in terms of similarity between rulers and ruled was religion. In 1555 the Peace of Augsburg established the principle, one prince, one religion. From then on, in Europe at least, people should practice the same religion as their ruler or vice versa. However all that the Peace of Augsburg really did was to transform into an international norm what already was common practice in many countries. More that half a century earlier in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, the 'Catholic Monarchs', had ordered the Jewish population of Spain either to convert or leave the country. The Spanish policy of discrimination against religious or religiously tainted communities continued for more than a century until 1609 when Philip III expulsed the Moriscos, the descendants of converted Muslims. At that point the goal had been achieved; there was no religious minority left in Spain.3)

According to Heather Rae in State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples, the discriminatory policy of Ferdinand and Isabella is an early example of the homogenization of peoples, a process that, she considers, has historically been central in modern state building.4) It is important to note that the homogenization of peoples is a real process, not just a question of representation. Expulsing the Jews and Moriscos from Spain changed the world and not only how people looked at it. Homogenization is not just a question of beliefs and representation. It is a process through which peoples are really made similar. The expression the "homogenization of peoples" is in one way selfexplanatory. It refers to the process through which the population of a given state is made homogenous, all the same, along a certain dimension. It the case of early modern Spain that dimension was religion, Catholicism. For more than a century the Spanish state forcefully converted, expulsed or even executed and exterminated individuals and groups that were religiously deviant. However, the expression also lacks in specificity. It is clear that in many other respects, for example language, family relations, inheritance, property laws, or eating habits, Basque, Catalans, Castillans, or Aragonese, the populations of the various provinces of Spain, could be as different as they wished. Their similarity along those other dimensions was not required. Clearly homogenization is a selective process, one that is compatible with the existence of huge differences within the 'homogenized' population. This selective character of the homogenization process raises the question of the choice of the dimension along which similarity should be established.

The homogenization of peoples also creates between them and their rulers what logicians describe as a reciprocal relation. By definition, if you are similar to me then I am similar to you. In the context of 'state identity', that is to say when the homogenized dimension is viewed as essential to the definition of the State, it leads to an interesting consequence. Whatever reason may have pushed Ferdinand and Isabella, the 'Catholic Monarchs', to embark upon such a method of state building their initiative gave their homogenized subjects a claim against them and their descendants. From then on, no non-Catholic king could rule Spain.5) The similarity between the ruler and the ruled is a two way street. The homogenization of peoples implies that there is some dimension along which the rulers should be similar to those they rule, either they should belong to the same ethnic group, practice the same religion, speak the same language, have been born on the same territory, etc. Homogenization determines at least one dimension along which sovereigns and subjects have to be similar.

As the example of early modern Spain clearly indicates, the homogenization of peoples is a type of policy, a method of state building that predates the rise of nationalism as such. However recent definitions and analysis of nations as "imagined communities"6) or as "invented traditions"7) all suggest that nations should be seen as the result of a form of homogenization of peoples. What is the particularity of this type of homogenization? The most evident answer is that it is homogenization along the dimension of culture. What makes this answer interesting is that it is nearly perfectly uninformative. Let me explain, culture is such a vague and ill-defined term that to say, 'nations are the result of the homogenization of a population along the dimension of culture', is pretty much equivalent to saying 'nations are the result of the homogenization of a population along some dimension or other'. Uninformative as it may sound at first, that I believe is approximately right. Culture can mean just about anything and that is precisely what nationalism is about, just about anything. Nations are populations which are (or have been) homogenized along one or another politically relevant dimension. Given this it is not surprising that the homogenization of peoples predates the existence of nations and the rise of nationalism. Homogenization is what gives rise to nations. It is likely that the goal of Ferdinand and Isabellla or of Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes was not to give birth to the Spanish or French nation, but to consolidate their power. At first nation building was an accidental rather than explicit process. Explicit nation building came later, when rulers and their rivals recognized (however obscurely) that homogenization was a wonderful way to consolidate political power.

Religious intolerance or systematic discrimination is a demand for homogeneity along one well-defined dimension. Everyone should be Catholic, Muslim, Shinto or whatever. National homogeneity is both much more general and non-specific. It is not only that when we try to enumerate national traits we usually either list platitudes, the British love monarchy, the Japanese are hard working, or prejudices, the French are arrogant, but mainly that, for the purpose of nation building any difference is a potential candidate for homogenization. That is to say, there is no characteristic present within the population that cannot be used as a standard for homogenization. It can be drinking habits, ethnic origin, religion, language, political values, or physical characteristics like hair or skin color. This has two important consequences at least. The first is that different nations can construct their unity around diverse types of shared characteristics. For example, ethnic nationalism is founded on real or imagined common origin, a nearly biological, apparently natural characteristic. Civic nationalism for its part is based on political values which in principle are open to everyone irrespective of his or her ethnic origin. The second consequence is that in principle there is nothing that cannot be taken as a target of national homogenization. There is nothing that cannot be transformed into a symbol, made into a fundamental requirement of what it is to be American, Japanese or Swede.8)

It is against this background, I believe, that we must consider the question of multiculturalism. At first sight it may seem that multiculturalism is an obstacle to national homogenization inasmuch as it constitutes a requirement of diversity. To some extent this is true, and historically it is the way that many authors like John Stuart Mill 9) or more recently David Miller10), have understood multiculturalism or rather multiculturalism in reverse. That is to say, it is how they view the requirement of national homogeneity. According to them, national homogeneity excludes multiculturalism. Nonetheless the world is not quite that simple. The problem is that national homogeneity is consistent with important differences in terms of wealth, political power, education or even culture. The requirement that there be homogeneity between the rulers and the ruled and among the ruled along some politically relevant dimension does not exclude the existence of differences along many other dimensions. Homogenization does not take place along all dimensions, and the political problem of multiculturalism is why and under what conditions is cultural diversity politically relevant? Why does the presence of culturally different groups constitute a danger or a difficulty for national homogeneity if class difference or religion does not? Actually, both sometimes do, but not always. Difference in religion or in social class between rulers and ruled can also reduce the legitimacy of a sovereign. The first thing to note then is that multiculturalism is not always a problem for national homogeneity. There are conditions under which a form of national multiculturalism is possible. Given this, the second step in our inquiry, it seems, would be to distinguish different types of multiculturalism and then to see in relation to national homogenization if they all present similar problems. In the remainder of this paper I will address the second but not the third question and will offer a tentative classification of types of multiculturalism.

This classification takes into account two dimensions or criteria. One that is etiological or causal. This criterion is interested in how the multicultural situation came about. What are its causes? The second criterion is political. It centers on the type of political response that is offered to the multicultural situation, because this political response is in some respects constitutive of the situation itself. Using these two criteria it is possible to identify at least seven major types of multicultural situations, which we can name national, imperial, this second types divides into two sub-categories, assimilatory and unequal multiculturalism, egalitarian, colonial, economic multiculturalism and finally what I will call administrative multiculturalism.

The American melting pot is probably the best known example of national multiculturalism, and national multiculturalism is typical of countries that have been built on immigration or of countries that have once been population colonies. It is characterized by what are often called hyphenated identities, Italian-American, Korean-American, etc. Agents identify themselves politically as American and culturally as Italian, Greek, Pakistani, Cuban, or whatever their origin happens to be. Central to national multiculturalism is the fact that it considers culture as a private affair. Hyphenated identities are not public political identities but private individual identities. It may be argued that hyphenated identities really are group identities, but this is only true in as much as these groups are viewed as voluntary associations. Hyphenated identities, unlike other types of cultural identities, can be freely abandoned or chosen. For example, a Chinese-American cannot change who her parents are nor can she easily modify her physical characteristics, but she can certainly abandon that cultural identity and become more of a WASP (White-Anglo-Saxon- Protestant) than any descendants of the Founding Fathers. National multiculturalism is essentially an individualistic form of multiculturalism and politically it is nationalistic rather than multicultural. It is made possible by a shared political culture in which the diverse cultural and ethnic origins of the population constitute an important element. Some may want to argue that national multiculturalism is not a form of multiculturalism at all because it reduces the cultural origins of individuals to a private affair that is politically irrelevant and does not recognize any minority rights. However such a conclusion only makes sense within the context of a normative theory of multiculturalism. Socially, in countries like Canada and the United States national multiculturalism corresponds to situations where many minorities cohabit and has proven an excellent way to create solidarity and national commitment in a population of diverse ethnic and cultural origins.11)

The second form of multiculturalism is what may be called imperial multiculturalism. Empires constitute by definition multicultural situations. An empire is a political arrangement where members of one ethnic and cultural group dominate over other members of the polity who are deemed to belong to different ethnic, national or cultural groups. However, imperial powers can adopt toward dominated cultures and peoples different policies. One is a policy of assimilation that does not recognize any value to the local culture but aims to the contrary at replacing it. This corresponds pretty well to the attitude of Japan after the annexation of Korea12) and at some point in history such was also the policy of Britain towards French Canada. Even though policies of assimilation aim at destroying multiculturalism, it is notorious that historically such policies have often failed. It therefore defines a perhaps unstable, but nonetheless sometimes long lived type of multicultural situation. It constitutes a sub-category of imperial multiculturalism and can be called assimilatory imperialism. Another possible attitude towards dominated cultures is that which the British government usually adopted towards the various parts of its empire: what has been called Indirect Rule. That is to say, to govern the empire with the help of the various local elites. Thus Britain often consolidated its power by sharing the government of its overseas possessions with the traditional local political class. This is also, to some extent, how the Ottoman Empire functioned through the system of millet that allowed every minority to preserve its own laws and customs as long as it paid a monetary and military tribute to the Empire. Such imperial policies can lead to a form of multiculturalism that is characterized by the lack of equality between the different cultures and may be called unequal multiculturalism. For example in 19th century Canada it was better to be British than Irish, better to be Irish than French, and better to be French than to come from one of the First Nations. Indirect Rule entails some measure of protection and preservation of local culture, but cultural policies will tend to reflect the power relationships within the empire. It is likely that historically imperial multiculturalism in one form or the other has been the most important type of multiculturalism but, with the rise of nationalism throughout the nineteen and twentieth centuries and the disappearance of empires during the second half of the latter century, it not clear what importance it still has today.

Closely related to imperial multiculturalism are what may be called egalitarian multiculturalism and colonial multiculturalism. Both forms usually correspond to possible evolutions of what used to be imperial situations, as is for example the case with the bilingual bicultural policy of the Canadian government. From the mid-nineteenth century at least the claim of two equal nations in one country played a central role in Canada's march toward independence from British rule. Another example of egalitarian multiculturalism is Belgium. Contrary to national multiculturalism egalitarian multiculturalism does not reduce culture to a private affair. To the opposite it depends on institutions whose specific goal is to protect the cultural differences between the various cultural groups that make up the polity and to promote cultural equality. It is interesting that in egalitarian multiculturalism different cultural groups, especially minority groups, are often subject to what may be called a "national temptation": the feeling that the evolution towards political autonomy is not yet complete and that national independence remains the final objective. This feeling is often fuelled by the belief, whether true or false, that the central clause of cultural equality is not being respected.

Colonial multiculturalism also evolves from imperial situations, but from situations where the hierarchical difference between the cultures in presence were judged important, and especially from situations where there were great differences of political power between the groups. A clear example of colonial multiculturalism is the situation of First Nations in Canada. They demand and are given special rights on the basis of their cultural difference, but these rights do not make them equal partners within the Canadian Confederation, contrary to the case of French Canadians under the bilingual bicultural policy of the Federal government. Rather these rights confine them to the role and status of minorities that have special privileges, advantages, obligations and handicaps that are not common to all citizens. Colonial multiculturalism thus retains the lack of equality typical of imperial unequal multiculturalism and usually continues to carry on what may be seen as a form of indirect rule.

The one but last form of multiculturalism in our typology may be called economic multiculturalism. Good examples of this are the situation of North Africans in France or of the Turkish minority in Germany and in Austria and that of Latin American immigrants in the United States. These people are economic migrants. They come looking for work and a better income, part of which they often send back to their country of origin where their family has remained. At the individual subjective level the problem which often arises is to what extent they should integrate the polity and culture of their adoptive country? At the collective or group level the problem arises demographically so to speak, the fact is that once migrants have reached a certain number they inevitably change the local social and cultural landscape. This inevitably creates cultural and ethnic diversity and tension. Economic multiculturalism is a policy of dealing with the problems this situation creates as they arise rather than planning ahead and evolving a principled policy. In that sense economic multiculturalism is essentially reactive and can be viewed as a failure of national multiculturalism. It reveals a country's inability to privatize cultural origin by developing a shared political culture that is irrespective of ethnic, cultural and religious affiliation. It also corresponds to refusing the central elements of egalitarian and colonial multiculturalism that distribute rights and give protection to diverse cultural minorities.

The last form of multiculturalism could be called, for lack of a better term, administrative multiculturalism. This type of multiculturalism is often found in Africa and it is typical of post-colonial situations. The reason why the territory of a French, British or other Western Power colony would be this or that size and include some people rather than others often had very little to do with the history of the local populations. It depended instead on the interests and on rivalry between colonial powers. When decolonization took place the universally recognized rule was that the new independent countries had to respect existing borders. This in many ways was the fundamental requirement of their acceptance within the international community.13) That is to say independence came at the price of having to live within the borders imposed by the colonial powers. In just about no cases, Somalia being the most notable exception, were borders changed in order to accommodate linguistic and cultural groups which found themselves as a consequence divided into many different countries. I propose to call this administrative multiculturalism because it is the result of colonial administration but not of colonization in the sense of population colonies. The political response to administrative multiculturalism has been diverse. However, one of the most frequent has been civil war.

Notes
1) E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (New York: Cornell University Press, 1983).
2) For an extensive discussion of this issue see E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
3) It is interesting that Moriscos, like conversos (descendants of converted Jews) were not really religious minorities. Officially at least these people were converted to Catholicism, they were nonetheless still considered as different.
4) Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge U. Press, 2002).
5) It should be remembered that in the past in Spain not only Muslims and Jews have lived under Catholic kings, but Catholics had also lived under Muslims rulers.
6) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
7) E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge U. Press, 1992).
8) This does not exclude of course, as Hobsbawm (1990) rightly points out, that some characteristic are better than others to successfully carry out national homogenization.
9) John Stuart Mill, On Representative Government.
10) David Miller, On Nationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
11) On this issue see W. Norman, "Justice and Political Stability in the Multicultural State. Lessons from Theory and Practice in Canada," in Elbaz M. & D. Helly (eds.), Mondialisation, citoyenneteet multiculturalisme (Quebec/Paris: Presses de l'Universite Laval/l'Harmattan, 2000), pp. 93-110.
12) E. Oguma, A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-images (D. Askew, trd.) (Melbourne: Transpacific Press, 2002).
13) On this issue, see Hironaka A., Neverending Wars. The International Community, Weak States, and the Perpetuation of Civil War (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), see especially pages 12-18.