Nationalism and the Left. posted by Richard Seymour

I'd like to enter some comments on the position of the Alliance of Workers' Liberty on Arab nationalism. I'd equally like to discuss Tom Nairn's commitment to Scottish nationalism. But I'm not going to. Instead, this:

In 1848, revolution broke out in Paris and flashed across Europe. Existing German governments were swept away and the liberals came to power.
The revolutionaries quickly organised elections in the Confederation, including Austria, and a national parliament duly assembled at Frankfurt. After much deliberation the deputies voted through a list of fundamental rights and established a German constitution along classical liberal lines. But they were unable to gain control over the armies of the two leading states, Austria and Prussia. This proved decisive. By the autumn of 1848, the monarchs and generals of the two states had recovered their nerve. They refused to accept the new constitution, and, after a wave of radical-democratic revolutionary activity swept across Germany the following spring, they forcibly dissolved the Frankfurt Parliament and sent its deputies home. The revolution was over. The Confederation was re-established, and the leading revolutionaries were arrested, imprisoned or forced into exile. The following decade has been widely seen by historians as a period of deep reaction, when liberal values and civic freedoms were crushed under the iron heel of German authoritarianism.
Many historians have regarded the defeat of the 1848 revolution as a crucial event in modern German history - the moment, in the historian A.J.P. Taylor's famous phrase, when "German history reached its turning point and failed to turn". Yet Germany did not embark on a straight or undeviating path [tautology] towards aggressive nationalism and political dictatorship after 1848. There were to be many avoidable twists and turns along the way. To begin with, the fortunes of the liberals had undergone a dramatic transformation once more by the beginning of the 1860s. Far from being a complete return to the old order, the post-revolutionary settlement had sought to appease many of the liberals' demands while stopping short of granting either national unification or parliamentary sovereignty. Trial by jury in an open court, equality before the law, freedom of business enterprise, abolition of the most objectionable forms of state censorship of literature and the press, the right of assembly and association, and much more, were in place almost everywhere in Germany by the end of the 1860s. And, crucially, many states had instituted representative assemblies in which elected deputies had freedom of debate and enjoyed at least some rights over legislation and the raising of state revenues.
It was precisely the last right that that the resurgent liberals used in Prussia in 1862 to block the raising of taxes until the army was brought under the control of the legislature, as it had, fatally, not been in 1848. This posed a serious threat to the funding of the Prussian military machine. In order to deal with the crisis, the Prussian King appointed the man who was to become the dominant figure in German politics for the next thirty years - Otto von Bismarck. By this time the liberals had correctly decided that there was no chance of Germany uniting, as in 1848, in a nation-state that included German-speaking Austria. That would have meant the break-up of the Habsburg monarchy, which included huge swathes of territory, from Hungary to Northern Italy, that lay outside the boundaries of the German confederation, and included many millions of people who spoke languages other than German. But the liberals also considered that following the unification of Italy in 1859-60, their time had come. If the Italians had managed to create their own nation-state, then surely the Germans would be able to do so as well. (Richard J Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 2004, pp 4-6).

Nationalism, then, is an ideology emerging directly from the Enlightenment and liberalism. Against the confederate of vicinities in an empire, the liberals counterposed the nation-state, a community of people who spoke the same language, were immersed in the same culture and had shared historical roots. It should be less surprising, then, that there are liberals prepared to defend relatively stale visions of nationalism in the 21st Century. That is, those liberals (like David Goodhart, editor of Prospect; and Billy Bragg) who pretend that there is something to 'reclaim' in the idea of Englishness are indulging precisely in the liberal idea that there is such a shared community, however polyglot, that is capable of creating a discrete national culture. That culture can be multi-racial is not a rebuke to nationalism - why, even African or Carribean Britons can wave the St George's Cross today.

I suggested before that we should not miss the liberatory potential of nationalism; we shouldn't either forget what is oppressive in its movement. Although Hitler drew on the cult of Otto von Bismarck as the 'strong leader' that Germany so transparently lacked after 1918, his ideological appeal resided in his call to a romantic liberal ideal as much as anything else - a true Bismarck would have restored the Habsburgs and built a pre-modern empire of tributaries and vassalages. It is striking that many German liberals were won to Italian Fascism, while much of the liberal bourgeoisie was taken by the Nazi cult of manly violence. (See Bernd Weisbrod, "Violence and Sacrafice: Imagining the Nation in Weimar Germany", in Hans Mommsen (ed), The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918-1945, 2002, pp 5-21; also, Wolfgang Schieder, "Fatal Attraction: The German Right and Italian Fascism", in Ibid, pp 39-57).

Nationalism emerges from the modern predicament. It is nowhere near a good enough solution, but it should not be mistaken for a pre-modern throw-back or an irrationalist response to capitalist dynamism. It is the informing background of most liberal journos and commentators today. It is increasingly the horizon of political discourse, and Marxists will have to define an attitude to it that is neither precious nor that of a sap.