Nationalism

"Kedourie was one of the first thinkers to really lay out what ‘nationalism’ was. Before Kedourie, and even since, academics have often treated nationalism either as a response to certain events, like broad technological developments and some version of modernity, or as something natural, almost God-given. Kedourie sets out a core, ideas-based definition of nationalism and describes how it grew in very special political circumstances. This book is very much a history of ideas. It’s centred on this period in Germany, in the late 18th and 19th century, when many thinkers were working in the spirit of Immanuel Kant and his notion about individual self-determination and self-emancipation. Post-Kantians took those concepts into thinking about Germany and German society, and other European societies as well, especially France. And they came close to developing an idea about nationalism, which is basically the idea of nationalism that we have around us today. When we talk about nationalism, the way we define it, it basically comes down to how Kedourie defines its birth and growth in this period. It comes back to this idea that an individual can only become free, can only become himself or herself, if he or she is part of a natural collective, and that natural collective is the nation; a society itself can only be free if it is formed as a nation. The state constructs to which many belonged to before the age of nationalism were often empires and sprawling kingdoms, and there were strong roles for non-nation institutions like the Catholic Church, which was much more internationalist than nationalist. Basically, what these nationalist thinkers wanted to do was to come up with an organic, metaphysical idea that freedom is only possible if you are part of a nation. If you’re not part of nation, you cannot be free, you cannot be yourself. He’s not sympathetic to it at all. He’s very much against it, he’s very much against nationalism, not just as an idea, but as it manifested itself in many type of policies at the time when he was writing, which was from the 1950s to the 1980s. He had an interesting background himself. He was an Iraqi Jew, born in Baghdad. He later came to the UK, attended an Alliance française school and became a British citizen—so not exactly the CV of a nationalist. He was a famous professor at the London School of Economics and one who wasn’t afraid of courting controversy. He was the bête noire of those in the post-war and post-independence period who were sympathetic to nationalism, perhaps not in Britain but in the Arab world. “At the heart of economic nationalism is the belief that our economic behaviour expresses an inherited cultural essence that is unique to us” Kedourie actually did his dissertation at Oxford, but it was refused by some leading historians at the time who thought he was too critical of Arab nationalism. From then on Kedourie held grudges against people behind what he called “the Chatham House version” of the Middle East, the conventional wisdom at the time that this part of the world needed a good dose of nationalism and everything bad there was a consequence of the British empire. I think you can say that Kedourie appreciated the British Empire, partly because it prevented this nasty dynamic that you can get when you found nation states and start to develop nationalist thought. He wrote a lot about Arab nationalism and he wrote a lot about what he considered to be the mistakes of the British government and the British elite in supporting Arab nationalism. He was very much an anti-nationalist. I don’t think that comes through very strongly in his book, but it’s there, for sure. Absolutely. At the time when he was writing, and especially when he was researching this book, the economic consequences of independence in the Arab world, but also in Asia and Africa, had started to show. And it was already absolutely clear that the economic policies that followed nationalist sentiments, that to a large extent constituted the independence movement, basically led these countries into poor economic development. And they led to very difficult relations within and between states, even civil wars. That was certainly part of his broader thinking. But, in the book, he doesn’t lay out specific economic policies. He talks about a pre-nationalism type of economic structure, especially in Europe, in the sense that, if some version of natural law existed, you had rights—also economic rights like property rights and indemnity rights—regardless of under what king, empire or nation-state you lived. These were obligations that every ruler had to obey. You had competing systems of contract law. And you weren’t forced to work just with one set of law because you were in a territory where one state had established a dominating legal philosophy. What is far more important in Kedourie’s book is his definition of nationalism. It is, in all its complexity, a notion about how you can only be and become free and become yourself if you are part of a nation, that you can only be natural in your essence, as an individual, as long as you are part of a greater whole, a nationally and culturally defined state. Without that, the individual is nothing—she is just lost. And this is, in my view, also the essence of economic nationalism—it’s the idea that the economy cannot work unless every economic agent is part of a nationally defined economic structure. And in that spirit, I would say that economic nationalism, like nationalism, is inseparable from state power and the hunger for it. The economic nationalist strives for economic sovereignty and is hostile to becoming economically dependent on others—that is, relying on others for the supply of goods and services, capital, technology and human talent. At the heart of economic nationalism is the belief that our economic behaviour expresses an inherited cultural essence that is unique to us. Without it, we would be unfree and no more than servants to a foreign master."