Blood and Belonging Read Free

Western nation-states now define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity. One prominent exception is Germany.
    Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of the German principalities in 1806 unleashed a wave of German patriotic anger and Romantic polemic against the French ideal of the nation-state. The German Romantics argued that it was not the state that created the nation, as the Enlightenment believed, but the nation, its people, that created the state. What gave unity to the nation, what made it a home, a place of passionate attachment, was not the cold contrivance of shared rights but the people’s preexisting ethnic characteristics: their language, religion, customs, and traditions. The nation as Volk had begun its long and troubling career in European thought. All the peoples of nineteenth-century Europe under imperial subjection—the Poles and Baltic peoples under the Russian yoke, the Serbs under Turkish rule, the Croats under the Habsburgs—looked to the German ideal of ethnic nationalism when articulating their right to self-determination. When Germany achieved unification in 1871 and rose to world-power status, Germany’s achievement was a demonstration of the success of ethnic nationalism to all the “captive nations” of imperial Europe.
    Of these two types of nationalism, the civic has a greater claim to sociological realism. Most societies are not mono-ethnic; and even when they are, common ethnicity does not of itself obliterate division, because ethnicity is only one of the many claims on an individual’s loyalty. According to thecivic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community. This in turn assumes that national belonging can be a form of rational attachment.
    Ethnic nationalism claims, by contrast, that an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen. It is the national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community. This psychology of belonging may have greater depth than civic nationalism’s, but the sociology that accompanies it is a good deal less realistic. The fact, for example, that two Serbs share Serbian ethnic identity may unite them against Croats, but it will do nothing to stop them fighting each other over jobs, spouses, scarce resources, and so on. Common ethnicity by itself does not create social cohesion or community, and when it fails to do so, as it must, nationalist regimes are necessarily impelled toward maintaining unity by force rather than by consent. This is one reason why ethnic nationalist regimes are more authoritarian than democratic.
    They may also prove authoritarian because they are, in essence, a form of democracy conducted in the interests of the ethnic majority. Most of the new post–Cold War nation-states give lip service to the idea of a society of civic equals, and provide safeguards for minority rights. In reality, new nations like Serbia and Croatia, the Baltic states, the new Asian republics, have institutionalized ethnic majority domination. Ethnic nationalism is a particular temptation for those ethnic majorities—like the Baltic peoples and the Ukrainians—formerly ruled by the imperially backed Russian minority.
    It is sometimes argued that authoritarian ethnic nationalism takes root only where civic nationalism has never established itself. On this account, ethnic nationalism is flourishing in Eastern Europe because forty years of Communist single-party rule effectively destroyed whatever civic or democratic culture there once had been in the region. If so, it ought to be true that ethnic nationalism does not sink deep roots in societies with extensive democratic traditions. Unfortunately, this is not the case. European