Nationalism and Democracy

André Lecours, Luis Moreno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135168155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book sheds light on the complicated, multi-faceted relationship between nationalism and democracy by examining how nationalism in various periods and contexts shapes, or is shaped by, democratic practices or the lack thereof. This book examines nationalism's relationship with democracy using three approaches:

• 
  
  

• The challenge of democracy for sub-state nationalism: analyzing the circumstances under which sub-state nationalism is compatible with democracy, and assessing the democratic implications of various nationalist projects.

• 
  
  

• The impact of state nationalism on democratic practices: examining the implications of state nationalism for democracy, both in countries where liberal democratic principles and practices are well-established and where they are not.

• 
  
  

• Understanding how state nationalism affects democratization processes and what impact sub-state nationalism has in these contexts.

Featuring a range of case studies on Western, Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, African and the Middle East, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, nationalism and democracy.

Part I
Theoretical and conceptual discussion

1
Introduction

Tensions and paradoxes of a multifaceted relationship

Luis Moreno and André Lecours¹

Nationalism and democracy represent two of the most important processes and powerful ideas of contemporary politics.² Both as ideological forces and institutional programmes, nationalism and democracy have not always pulled in the same direction, although they both feature common claims to individuals and people. Nationalism sometimes appears to be fully congruent with democracy as it speaks of freedom, equality and progress, and galvanizes the positive energy of whole societies. At other times, nationalism and democracy seem almost antithetical, with the former producing mechanisms of exclusion and sentiments of intolerance, and the latter constraining its definition to instrumental mechanisms of a majoritarian representation. The relationship between nationalism and democracy is therefore not only multifaceted but also full of tensions and paradoxes.

Academic contributions dealing with the interaction between nationalism and democracy are as varied as the relationship between these two phenomena. Not only theoretical social scientists, but also political comparativists and experts on international relations have engaged in furthering our understanding of specific aspects of that relationship. Indeed both nationalism and democracy are packages of multiple components rather than discrete monolithic phenomena. Nationalism involves notions of collective identity, territorial mobilization and, very often, political and constitutional change. Democracy features, among others, notions of popular sovereignty and political participation. As a result of this multiplicity of foci and interests a doctrinal comprehensive coherence is unusual, although a number of academics have examined such a relationship as a unit of observation.³

Analysed from such an interrelated perspective, nationalism and democracy are processes which mutually reinforce themselves. Both are anchored in ideas of sovereignty and representative government. In their normative foundations nationalism and democracy challenge forms of political organization which are not legitimized by the people. From an historical standpoint, the apparently close and symbiotic relationship between nationalism and democracy has manifested itself in the development of state nationalism (or majority nationalism) in modern Europe, a process which is associated mainly with the outcomes of the English, American and French Revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In Europe, state or majority nationalism consolidated as a crucial element behind the political mobilization against absolute monarchy. In some instances it was an ideological claim used by dynamic sections of the bourgeoisie, as well as some rural classes, to combat the privileges of the aristocracy. The concept of citizenship, initiated by the English Revolution and grounded by the American and French Revolutions, played a central role in the shaping of state nationalism. Furthermore, the initial proposals of the French Revolution also vindicated democratic notions of liberty, equality and fraternity (solidarity). Later, nationalism became the organizational and ideational reference for movements that sought emancipation from a variety of political situations (e.g. the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires; the French, British and Spanish colonial empires; and the Soviet Union). In those contexts, nationalism seemed to be in perfect congruence with democracy, although it was not always the case. Let us remind ourselves that, as happened with France and the US, the liberal nationalism postulated by Giuseppe Mazzini had a vocation for state formation (Italian Risorgimento).⁴ However, there were other manifestations of undemocratic state nationalisms during the nineteenth century, such as Bismarck’s Germany or Romanov’s Russia.

Congruence between nationalism and democracy has been less evident when their institutional and political manifestations are analyzed ex post, or when they are assessed from diverse framings of interpretations. Taking the example of the French Revolution, let us remember that Jacobin advocates were precisely those who proclaimed their ideas and aspirations as centring on universal human rights. Nevertheless, in their efforts to promote universal justice, progress, reason, democracy and equality, the Jacobins came to see an irreconcilable conflict between the rights of the individual—viewed as a socially autonomous unit - and the traditional rights of social groups or collectives. Besides, Bonaparte’s cultural imperialism tried to instrumentalize French revolutionary values and aimed to impose such values by force all over Europe. Often, the nationalism which inspired the French Revolution was spuriously exploited to support dictatorships, or it was fostered for bellicose purposes. Nationalist resistance to the above mentioned empires sometimes resulted in the establishment of new political undemocratic regimes.

There also exists stateless or minority nationalism, particularly in plural polities.⁵ This type of nationalism—also labelled equivocally as ‘ethnic’⁶—has often come to reassert collective identities in the form of political mobilization for the decentralization of powers. Its claims are generally based on a lack of accommodation in the processes of state formation and nation-building carried out from the centres of their polities and, as a consequence, demands are put forward for self-government which can range from a degree of home rule to the establishment of a new independent state.

Nationalism has been associated with the worst episode in human history: the Holocaust. Recently it has also been considered the main culprit behind other events of destructive violence in the late years of the twentieth century (e.g. war in Yugoslavia or genocide in Rwanda). There are theoretical bases for explaining how nationalism can lead to outcomes that are in such contradiction with democratic principles and practices. After all, nationalism speaks to political power, and it necessarily involves mechanisms of differentiation and exclusion. The exercise of power in a nationalist context and the desire to differentiate one community from another can involve various types of references (e.g. language, culture, religion or ancestry) that may generate intolerance and/or conflict.

Organizational pluralism characterizes contemporary democracies. Robert Dahl has drawn attention to the existence of different societal interests and has thus theorized on the various interpretations of what the common good is. Within the ‘pluralistic game’, Dahl pointed to how in modern democracies individual equality among citizens is often replaced by a concurrential parity among groups or organizations of individuals. As concerns ethnic or national, it so often happens that ethnic or cultural bonds prevail upon those of a functional nature class or status—in the deployment of collective action.⁷

Crucial for the research carried out in the last decades on nationalism and democracy has been the pioneering work of social scientists, such as Stein Rokkan and Juan Linz, which focused on the territorial dimension of societal life. Rokkan focused on the structure of cleavages by means of scrutinizing the historical genesis and early processes of state formation, nation-building, mass democratization and social citizenship in his long-standing attempts to conceptualize his ‘model of Europe’.⁸ Linz studied in depth the development of modern nations and the crystallization of nationalism within the contemporary state. He also underscored the close linkage between nationalism and the languages upon which it operates, analyses that preceded recent ones on multiculturalism. Moreover, Linz advanced interpretations on primordialism in the case of stateless nationalism and the viability of the federal option regarding territorial accommodation with polities of a plural composition.⁹

How to institutionalize democracy is certainly the most controversial question concerning the adaptation of nationalism to the majoritarian principle. In this regard, the view of using a concept of democracy based purely in the arithmetical ‘majority’—also labelled as majoritarianism—has been criticized as ‘demoscepticism’. Indeed, democracy can be regarded as a much broader process than the establishment of mechanisms of popular representation such as the universal suffrage. As will be reviewed below these lines, also from a liberal perspective, democracy is to be considered more a question of quality than of quantity.¹⁰

Revitalization of analytical approaches

Beginning in the 1990s, a handful of political theorists concerned with the analysis of their most immediate social reality (Quebec and the Canadian Federation) challenged the traditional liberal view of justice and rights. They criticized the assumption that these ‘mainstream’ notions were always to be put in place in societies whose members were united by their attachment and loyalty to one single cultural and national community. They were foremost concerned with how collective rights could square with individual rights in the context of multicultural societies.¹¹ More broadly, they were interested in reconciling the realities of group and cultural belonging with the tenets and practices of liberalism. A main concern put forward by the advocates of the politics of recognition was for the collective rights in multicultural societies, which they postulate as fully compatible with political liberalism.¹² Initially the focus of political theorists was on rights and culture but, subsequently, they developed much broader normative views around the comprehensive interaction between nationalism and liberal democratic principles and practices.

This theoretical work on the compatibility of nationalism and liberal democracy did not represent the first consideration of democracy by scholars of nationalism. In fact, one could make the argument that democracy was always a central concern of the scholarship on nationalism and ethnic conflict. This was particularly visible in studies of nationalist and ethnic conflict in the developing world. In the 1970s and 1980s studies with an ambivalent assessment were published concerning countries which have also left their colonial past in contemporary times.¹³ This debate is ongoing, but the 1990s and 2000s literature on liberal nationalism seems to have helped the argument that the inclusion of ethnic identities in a population is not an absolute obstacle to democracy. Despite the fact that the politicization of ethnicity by political leaders and elites at times resulted in institutions that undermine democracy, the academic contributions of the last 20 years have aimed to provide coherence to the argument that ethnic identities ought not to be regarded as insurmountable obstacles for the consolidation of democracy.¹⁴ Indeed, the analysis of the politics of identity is an area of study of the foremost importance in order to explain and make interpretations of the processes of nationalist mobilization and conflict for the preservation of democratic political communities. After all, the politicization of the ethnic identity is the conditio sine qua non for the spread of nationalism.¹⁵

Modernization was regarded to have brought about the idea of an allembracing state national identity rooted in both cultural and civic axes. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, national state identities are openly questioned and have become problematic instead.¹⁶ While being corroded by the forces of globalization they are also subject to fragmentation, competition and overlapping elements of a multiple and diverse nature. In parallel, there is a noticeable strengthening of sub- and supra-state identities. The revival of ethnoterritorial identities has coincided with an increasing challenge to the centralist model of the unitary state. In plural polities, decentralization, federalization and subsidiarity seek to accommodate a response to the stimuli of the diversity or plurality of the polities involved. The latter comprise groups and countries with differences of identity, history, language or traditions, which are often reflected in different party systems, channels of elites’ representation or interests’ articulation. Both discontinuity and heterogeneity of societal contexts make it possible for collective identities to interact among themselves in a manner often unpredictable, something which can have deep implications for the relationship between nationalism and democracy.

Indeed, the revival of ethnoterritorial identities in multinational states—or those with a plural and multiple composition—has attracted growing attention from social scientists and researchers. The manifestation of ‘dual identities’, or other collective identities of a multiple n...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in nationalism and ethnicity
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Theoretical and conceptual discussion
• Part II Case studies
• Index