States and Nationalism in Europe since 1945

Malcolm Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134645572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An examination of the ceaseless controversies surrounding ideas of nation and nationalism, showing that they are very far from dead in twenty-first century Europe. Beginning by defining these terms and setting out theories and concepts clearly and concisely, this book analyses the impact of nationalism since the Second World War, covering themes including:
* the relationship of nationalism to the Cold War
* the re-emergence of demands by stateless nations
* European integration and globalisation
* immigration since the 1970s
* the effects of nationalism on the former Soviet Union and Eastern block.

1 The Cold War and nationalism

The Cold War is conventionally regarded as commencing with Churchill’s 1946 Fulton speech in which he coined the phrase ‘the Cold War’ and finishing with Gorbachev’s appointment in 1985 as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The ‘war’ was not of uniform intensity or bellicosity and three, somewhat arbitrarily defined, phases are commonly identified.

First, an intense, Stalinist phase (1946–53) in which military confrontation between the West and Soviet Communism was possible and to many seemed imminent. Second, a phase of peaceful coexistence and détente which emerged after Stalin’s death with Khruschev’s speech to the twentieth congress of the Communist Party in 1956 condemning the crimes of Stalin and the difficult but peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. This phase culminated in a major strategic arms limitation agreement but merged gradually into the third phase – a revival of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s, with the failure to proceed with the ratification of the second strategic arms limitation agreement, the deployment of Soviet SS-20s in Eastern Europe, the stationing of US Pershing II nuclear missiles in Western Europe, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and finally the Reagan ‘star wars’ project for establishing a defensive laser-based shield in space against Russian nuclear attack. This third phase was also characterised by super-power rivalry in the less developed world with direct military intervention by Russia in Afghanistan and wars by proxy in Africa.

These phases were characterised as much by the mood and atmosphere of international relations as by these iconic events. Events were not tidily distributed into the three phases, since the major event of the second phase was the Vietnam war. But, at the rhetorical level, the language was different; in the third phase, Ronald Reagan condemned the Soviet Union as ‘the evil empire’, a kind of phrase which no American President used in the second phase. No Soviet (or American) slogan emerged in the third phase to express the desire for mutual accommodation such as that of Khruschev in the second phase of ‘peaceful coexistence’.

However interpreted, these phases were far from clear-cut and certain ideological themes persisted through the whole period. These themes seemed both to transcend and to marginalise nationalism. The political elites of the USA and the USSR affected to believe that the Cold War was a confrontation of two radically different political and social projects based on incompatible economic systems. There could be no compromise, at the level of ideas, because the two were mutually exclusive even though the other side could be accepted as a fact of life and practical arrangements could be agreed to avoid military confrontations. Famous dissidents such as Nobel prize winners Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn on one side, Bertrand Russell and Sartre on the other, as well as obscure human rights militants in the communist regimes and peace movements in the western countries, bitterly contested this analysis. But they recognised (and condemned) the dominance of Cold War ideas and slogans.

None of the orthodox accounts of the Cold War consider nationalism’s importance. These accounts may be grouped under five broad headings:

• An ideological struggle between totalitarianism and liberalism

• A struggle between socialist and capitalist forms of economic organisation

• A traditional form of great power rivalry

• The need to expand the role of government in the West, to develop new mechanisms to avoid destructive economic competition, to minimise the role of communist parties and to continue the US domestic wartime consensus into the post-war world

• The expansionary nature of capitalism

• The determination of the Soviets to hold on to the territorial gains of World War II – military and ideological mobilisation for war was the only way of doing so

The neglect of nationalism is not because the super powers identified it with instability within their respective Cold War blocs. In the competition for influence in the non-aligned or less developed countries, a wholly pragmatic approach was adopted. Nationalism was designated as good or bad depending on whether the nationalists in question were prepared to accept the leadership of one or the other super power.

NATIONALISM AND UNIVERSALISM IN THE COLD WAR

Since Soviet control in central and Eastern Europe, compared with American in Western Europe, was much more direct, interventionist, and based on force, reactions to it were almost inevitable. Soviet domination was seriously challenged in Eastern Europe by the east Berlin disturbances of 1953, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague spring of 1968 and the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s. A complex mixture of misjudgements in government policy, popular reaction against oppressive police and political surveillance, material shortages and grievances, as well as nationalist sentiments, were involved in these events.

In the West, the most serious challenge after the 1940s to the solidarity of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the American-led coalition did not come from the communist parties, who were effectively isolated by the Cold War. But de Gaulle, a creative and idiosyncratic nationalist, and certain ‘neutralists’ took a view of French interests that did not always coincide with those of America. The left-wing neutralists and, to a degree, de Gaulle, encouraged a cultural anti-Americanism which pre-dated the Second World War and took forms such as opposition to the marketing of Coca Cola and to the domination of American films in France.⁹

National sentiment and nationalism were clearly present in these major challenges to the hegemony of the two dominant powers. The struggle for freedom from perceived foreign domination as well as specific short-term issues fuelled both kinds of revolt. All of these countries had been occupied or dominated by the Nazis with the consequence that the nationalist sentiments against alien rule engendered by this experience were still very much alive in the 1950s and 1960s. Serious efforts were made by the East European satellite regimes to control and even suppress them. In the West, nationalist ideology was discredited in favour of the rhetoric (and reality) of collective security, international cooperation and European integration. But nationalist sensibilities were expressed whenever a country was involved in armed conflict, such as France in Algeria (1954–62), Britain and France in Suez (1956), and Britain in the Falkland Islands (1982). Moreover, the phenomenon that Michael Billig has called banal nationalism, the everyday flagging of national symbols, images and references to the nation, persisted and flourished.¹⁰

But the dominant ideas and ideologies of the Cold War seemed, in broad terms, to ignore nationalist principles in favour of universalist claims. They relegated the national idea to, at best, a secondary role and even consigned nationalism to the dustbin of history. The basic question is whether the universalist claims of the free world and of international communism were incompatible with nationalism or were a vehicle for expressing Russian and American national ideas. The intellectual origins of the universalist claims go back to the political ideas of Europe and America in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. On the American side, the inalienable Rights of Man which included the rights to freedom and self-determination contained in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Preamble to the Constitution of 1787 were the basis of the American constitutional and political tradition.

These values, like those of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen at the beginning of the French Revolution, were couched in universal terms and were, in that context, those which other nations ought to adopt. The liberalism, constitutionalism and rights-based American tradition rested on axioms considered valid throughout the world. They formed the basis of American propaganda and war aims in both World Wars and were a major impetus behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 by the United Nations. The thrust of American anti-Soviet propaganda was that the Cold War was a struggle for freedom and human rights against those who wished to deny them by use of force and manipulation.

In the Russian case, there was an aggressive promotion of another universalism – scientific socialism. In the celebrated words of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 ‘all hitherto recorded history is the history of class struggle’; the class struggle would not end except through proletarian revolution and the triumph of socialism. The Soviet claim was based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism which, it was claimed, had universal validity. Capitalist regimes, despite a veneer of constitutional democracy and legal protection of individual rights, were based on exploitation by the holders of capital of the mass of the population. They denied genuine social and economic rights to the workers; and they were inevitably aggressive because of the structural contradictions of capitalism and because they were bound to try to destroy genuinely socialist regimes. A proletarian revolution would complete the process started by the bourgeois French Revolution and install a peaceful, conflict-free, socialist society. The Soviets therefore claimed to be the camp of peace and the defenders of true human emancipation and liberty.

The Second World War produced a situation in which American liberalism and Soviet communism became the internationally dominant forms of discourse, which influenced all the major actors in the international system. The entry of first the Soviet Union and then the United States into the Second World War had the effect of changing the content of propaganda in the war of ideas to defeat Nazi Germany. Churchillian rhetoric in the early phase of the war, when Britain stood alone against the axis powers, was essentially defensive – a struggle to defend a way of life, an empire, particular institutions and political independence against aggression and against a general threat of barbarism. This rhetoric was broadened to defend the interests of the occupied countries of Europe against oppression and to promote the cause of democracy, in order to sustain resistance to the Nazis in occupied Europe. Also he particularly emphasised the cause of freedom and democracy to appeal to American public opinion and to draw the United States into the War. This rhetoric was important to show to the British Commonwealth countries that they were fighting not merely to defend the ‘mother country’ but to promote a common cause. There is little doubt that Churchill and other members of the British elite considered that they were fighting against nationalism and a particularly odious form of it.

THE COMPONENTS OF SUPER-POWER NATIONALISM

Only a minority of Americans would identify themselves as nationalists; like the English, a majority regard themselves as patriots and regard foreigners as nationalists, in any clash with US interests. One recent author, Zelinsky, has, however, persuasively argued that given the ‘extraordinary nature of its inception’ America can show more of the ‘essential nature of nationalism than any other example’.¹¹ American nationalism (in the sense being used in this book) was forged in throwing off colonial rule and drawing up of a constitution based on general principles. It was consolidated by a civil war (1861–65), preventing the secession of the southern states, fostered by an extraordinary territorial expansion across the American continent (characterised as the ‘manifest destiny’ of the United States). Economic growth in the nineteenth century and an immense influx of people from Ireland and eastern and southern Europe who, far from being nostalgic for the old country, wanted fervently to become Americans consecrated the establishment of the United States as a great power.

This history has resulted in an exceptional self-confidence, the creation of a strong set of national sentiments among American citizens and adherence to national symbols by most Americans, even though some now see a fragmentation and undermining of this national solidarity by the assault from multiculturalism. The ‘American way’ became generally regarded as superior to that of other nations. The American federal government funded an Americanisation campaign in the 1920s characterised by a poster campaign in the inter-war period based on the slogan ‘There’s no way like the American way’; in this campaign, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were represented as the best representatives of the American way. The 1997 Commission on Immigration Reform recommended that a renewed Americanisation campaign be initiated for immigrants, which triggered both negative and positive responses reflecting two strands in American nationalism.

These two strands both embody attitudes of superiority towards the rest of the world. Both have historical roots going back to the birth of the Republic, but have acquired particular importance in the twentieth century. Since the rejection by the US Senate of the League of Nations in 1920, the omnipresent isolationist strand of American nationalism becomes dominant from time to time. Isolationism is the view that American should, as far as possible, avoid involvement in matters outside the western hemisphere on the grounds that such involvement is against American interests, will lead to pointless expenditure, the loss of American lives and the possible contamination of Americans by ‘un-American’ ideas and philosophies. Isolationism is often associated with what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics’,¹² that is to say the belief that foreign influences should be excluded from American life and that foreigners are constantly plotting to undermine the American way. This way of thinking, although often represented by the hyphenated Americans (Irish-, Polish-Americans, etc.), denounced by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of the twentieth century in favour of ‘hundred per cent Americans’, is often associated with an ethnic nationalism. This represents the American nation as derived from north European, particularly British stock, and the further removed from these roots, the less assilimable are immigrants. Legislation restricting immigration since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 has been strongly influenced by this tradition.

The second strand is that it is America’s destiny to be the first among nations, to show by example the superiority of the American way, and to assume a world leadership. This form of conventional wisdom held that free institutions, free enterprise, individualism, tolerance of diversity (often now called multiculturalism), separation of the churches and the state whilst adhering to Christian religious values, were the explanation of the rise of the greatest power and the most successful society ever known. The world therefore owes America respect and should follow American leadership. This situation is a burden for the United States because it involves the expenditure of energies, lives and money. Even adopted by successive American Presidents, it has often been difficult to mobilise a majority behind this view because large numbers of Americans have little interest in, or knowledge of, international affairs and indeed in matters outside their own state and locality.

In the post-1945 period, Senator Joseph McCarthy and President Kennedy can be regarded as emblematic figures of these two strands of American nationalism. The former led a notorious witch-hunt against communists and fellow travellers during the first period of the Cold War; he wielded great influence as chairman of two Senate sub-committees, which he used in his obsessive hunting down of communists and fellow travellers in American government and the media. His campaign was halted only when he accused the US Army, itself a powerful national symbol, of harbouring communists. By contrast, President Kennedy undertook, in his inaugural presidential address, to oppose any aggression by foreign (by implication communist) powers. He said that the United States would not permit the ‘undoing’ of human rights and, in a famous passage, that the nation would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe’ to ensure the survival of liberty. This way of thinking led to the beginning of the disastrous commitment in 1964 of American troops in Vietnam.

The dialectic between the isolationists and the ‘globalists’ is seen in the Congressional conflicts over international organisations, aid and solidarity; it also roughly coincides with the split between those who favour and those who oppose big government and heavy federal expenditure. The League of Nations and the United Nations were set up largely on American initiative but the weakness of the League of Nations was the direct result of American subsequent refusal to participate in it. The refusal of a hostile Congress, influenced by isolationist assumptions, to pay the dues owed by the United States to the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s has undermined the organisation. The reduction, in the case of sub-Saharan Africa to almost zero, of US foreign and military aid, except in the cases of Israel and Egypt, has contributed to instability in the world’s poorest countries.

The burden of the world role was borne more willingly during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was perceived as a direct military threat, and increased arms expenditure under Reagan (1980–8) was tolerated when Marxist insurrection threatened in Guatemala and Nicaragua (traditionally ‘America’s backyard’). There was also a marked tendency in Reagan to view the world as a struggle between good and evil: the former was represented by all that is best in America; the latter by secret conspiratorial meetings planning world domination, terrorism, drugs, alien contamination and massive influx of Latin immigrants.¹³ The obsessive search for an enemy since the end of the Cold War is partly a result of the necessity of finding a threat, credible to broad sections of the American public, to sustain a willingness to pay for supporting a world role. When such a threat is not present, there is marked reluctance to support the use of US troops abroad, as shown by the precipitate 1993 withdrawal from Somalia after the death of eighteen US soldiers shocked American opinion.

Both the isolationist and global role tendencies contain within them strong pressures towards requiring conformity on the part of American citizens. These pressures are normal features of the politics of nationalism. The unique mission of America is supported by a simple, banal, beliefs in the virtues of saluting the flag, ‘hailing the chief’ (the President and Commander-in-Chief), and in the self-evident superiority of American values. Presidents who took the responsibility for a global role during the Cold War, from Truman through Kennedy to Reagan, unquestionably regarded America as the leader of the ‘free world’. This rhetoric has continued, in a modified form, after the end of the Cold War with President Bush referring, on being elected, to America as ‘the world’s greatest nation’ and President Clinton to ‘the greatest nation in human history’. This continuing hymn to the glory and universal mission of America is designed to reinforce already existing beliefs and mobilise support for military action overseas such as the (very limited) interventions under both Bush, in the Middle East, and Clinton, in Kosovo. The rhetoric of sacrifice and valour in the service of the nation is necessary to underpin the global role of the USA.

The Russian trajectory has contrasted, in most respects, with the American. The expansion of Russia, from the modest beginnings of the late medieval Duchy of Muscovy, was greater than the American expansion. At its greatest extent in the nineteenth century, it stretched halfway round the world. But it was an empire built by war and conquest, and governed by autocratic tsars. Representative democracy did not take root in Russia until the 1990s and its future remains uncertain. The cement, which held the Russian people together before 1917, was not a democratic project but an autocratic administration and the Russian Orthodox Church. The tsarist autocracy was destroyed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the Soviet Communist Party persecuted orthodoxy,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Cold War and nationalism
• 2. Nationalism and minorities
• 3. European integration and globalisation
• 4. Nationalism and immigration
• 5. Nationalism and the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia
• 6. Irredentism and separatism
• 7. Democracy and nationalism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index