In a globalised era, even a country as big as America can feel small. Mark Mazower on why politicians such as Donald Trump are in fashion
The flags are flying, the anthems ring out. We live in the time of the homeland, of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and the Freedom party’s presidential candidate Norbert Hofer, fresh from his resounding victory in the first round of the Austrian presidential poll. Trump has called on Americans to resist “the false song of globalism”. “In a huge number of European countries, patriotic movements are surging vigorously,” was how Le Pen greeted news of Hofer’s victory last weekend. Nationalism is back like it never went out of fashion and, with it, the head-scratching, the puzzlement. How to explain the irrational, the commentators ask. Doesn’t the Brexit camp realise leaving the European Union is a crazy idea? Don’t Trump’s millions understand that he is promising the impossible?
There is still no better place to look for an answer than in a little polemic written more than 30 years ago. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) remains a classic effort to explain nationalism’s durability and to come to terms with the passions it can unleash. Nationalism, Anderson argued, is not an ancient phenomenon, nor did it emerge in Europe as most commentators seemed to think. Quite distinct from the dynastic appeals of Shakespeare’s Henry V — it is easy to forget that the battle-cry “God for Harry, England and Saint George” is uttered in the play by the king himself — modern nationalism originated, in Anderson’s view, around the time of the American wars of independence. From the outset, he says, it has been more than just another political “ism”, as its deployment of sacral idioms, of the idea of sacrifice and duty, shows. In fact its emergence is best understood in relation to religion, whose compelling power to motivate and inspire it often shares.
Donald Trump’s campaign too has been fuelled by the tropes of nationalism. There is the grievance that the country’s rightful place in the world has been jeopardised, and the confidence that all it takes is one man’s leadership to put that straight. There will be a new era and there is the nationalist’s promise of unity: “We will be unified, we will be one, we will be happy again” — in Trump’s case so hard to separate from the flexing of biceps and the belligerent talk home and abroad. This week’s foreign-policy speech was notable not for its policy details but for its defensive tone. America’s greatness, to read Trump, will return by doing less rather than more, and by protecting its own borders, not those of others — a shot across the bows to countries such as Ukraine, perhaps? And protecting its own workers, too: his campaign has tapped more successfully than any other into the country’s growing inequality and doubts about globalisation. Above all, there is the demand for respect, and the diagnosis of a problem — out-of-touch elites with their own agenda, not “the people’s”.
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Anderson, who died late last year, had an intuitive sympathy for nationalism’s anti-imperial origins. This was underpinned by his view of history, which was shaped by a rare and unfamiliar perspective. At the time of Imagined Communities’ publication, he was a political scientist at the centre of the small community of westerners working on Southeast Asia. Not only his training but also his family background had equipped him, in ways his posthumously published memoir A Life Beyond Boundaries makes clear, to understand nationalism’s extraordinary insurgent appeal.
A child of late empire, he was born in China in August 1936 in the southern city of Kunming, much closer to the borders with the Raj and French Indochina than to what is now called Beijing. His Anglo-Irish grandfather had served in India; his father was an officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, a revenue-collecting agency imposed during the opium wars. His mother was an upper-middle-class English woman; his first nurse was a French-speaking Vietnamese Catholic. Home was Ireland but a Protestant with his background was never likely to feel entirely at ease in the Republic and, in any case, family tradition pointed to schooling in England.
Indonesian nationalists in 1965 carrying bamboo weapons and hatchets in Java
He entered Eton on a scholarship and later read Classics at Cambridge. Here he developed into a resolute anti-imperialist, dismayed by the need to stand for the national anthem at the art-house cinema where he was embarking on a life-long love affair with Japanese culture through exposure to the work of Kurosawa and Ozu. England, too, became somewhere from which to escape. A chance acquaintance took him to a temporary job at Cornell University teaching political science — he had never before taught in his life, nor studied politics — and he ended up staying there until he retired.
When Anderson arrived at Cornell, the postwar expansion of universities had not really begun and the US remained in a state of almost 19th-century ignorance about the world. The term “Southeast Asia” was a recent coinage, essentially a product of second world war strategists. University departments were tiny and faculty had to cover vast amounts of ground.
The virtues of this situation, which professionalisation and the siloisation of academia have largely destroyed, were that one could roam across subjects without worrying about treading on someone else’s turf. Anderson could mix social science and literature, because in those days it was accepted that people who could speak the language had an advantage that no amount of “theory” could make up for. Unlike the European colonial powers, the Americans had no colonial archives of their own for this part of the world. But that too was an advantage because it encouraged the larger view; European scholars, by contrast, tended to bed down in their own particular patch.
But once the US began to see the cold war as a truly global struggle, money from foundations and government poured into academia, and “area studies” was born as a means of producing expertise about parts of the world the country thought it needed to understand. As a generalist, educated in a very different era, Anderson was alert to the drawbacks of area studies as well as their virtues. In particular, because they tend to draw boundaries around themselves, they can create pools of ignorance as well as expertise. South Asia was thus hived off from Southeast Asia, with unfortunate consequences for the study of both. Indonesia, Anderson’s own specialism, arguably suffered too — despite its outsized importance in the world — because in the postwar division of intellectual labour, east and south Asia loomed larger than territories between.
If one reason to nurture the study of far-flung parts of the world is geostrategic, there is another, much better reason to do this. As Anderson’s career suggests, often the most fertile insights into contemporary problems come not from those in the mainstream but from the more adventurous spirits who have charted their own intellectual course. Viewing the issue of nationalism from London, Washington or Berlin elicited one set of answers. Viewing it from the perspective of Jakarta elicited another. It gave Anderson an appreciation of the power of culture and belief, a view from the bottom up that often eluded more western-focused social scientists who took culture for granted and could not see the oddities of social custom and worldview that lay under their noses.
Another thing his Indonesian expertise taught him was the key importance of the colonial periphery in nationalism’s emergence. De-centring the usual story was one way of drawing attention to the relative historical novelty of the phenomenon, gleefully showing up the absurdity of all those European claims — themselves mostly the product of romantic 19th century historians — that their nation was rooted in some centuries-old tradition. Anderson was struck by Europeans’ deep need to believe in the antiquity of their national pasts. (Even French peasants, as another historian, Eugen Weber, reminds us, began thinking of themselves as French only rather recently.)
He was equally impressed by North Americans’ reluctance to think of their politics as national at all. To be sure, Ronald Reagan was speaking in 1980 about the need to “make America great again”. But it is only now, as Trump reprises the refrain in an anti-globalisation key, that we can see Americans embracing the nationalist’s sense of insurgency and liberation from an alien yoke that Anderson identified so long ago as one of its key characteristics. Under the globalisation juggernaut, we all feel small now, even the US, and this is perhaps the main difference between Reagan-era Republican tub-thumping and Trump’s.
The nation-state is basically no more than two centuries or so old, and in some places it is much younger than that. Yet the ideal of sovereign independence and political community it enshrines retains enormous appeal even in the face of the economic threat posed by globalisation. The new nationalisms seek to defend against this threat. The liberalisation of trade and capital flows may have started to equalise wealth across continents but they have brought a new degree of inequality within countries, eroded the prospects of middle-class life and finished off what was left of working-class communities in the old 19th-century industrial heartlands of the west in particular.
***
This is why today’s nationalist revival is so prominent in the west itself and why on both sides of the Atlantic the answer, if there is one, to the new sirens of nationalism will be found not in decrying it as a form of political idiocy — populism by another name — but rather in developing alternative visions of national wellbeing. In particular we need to recover the capacity to see the national and the international as necessary complements. The pro-European nationalist and the patriotic internationalist will then perhaps re-emerge as possibilities, rather than the contradictions-in-terms they presently seem.
Benedict Anderson
Ironically, it is the parties of the far-right in the EU that come closest to this — coalescing around the slogan of a “Europe of fatherlands”. The real problem is not so much with the idea as with what they in particular would do with it. Their version is heavy on anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric; the alternative is not European federalism but something that stresses economic rather than racial solidarity, a return to some form of role for national governments in long-range investment planning, and a return to fiscal instruments for economic recovery rather than the current total reliance on central banks. That too would be a form of nationalism, internationalist in spirit, ethnically inclusive rather than repressive, and — as it happens — much closer than anything currently on offer to the mix of policies that underpinned European integration in its early and highly successful decades.
In one of his last books, Under Three Flags (2005), Anderson turned his attention to the radical, mostly anarchist thinkers of the late 19th century who helped to shape the simultaneous emergence of movements for national independence around the globe. At a time when nationalism’s twin obsessions with community and sovereignty have a conservative tint, with the memory of fascism lurking in the background and racism never far away, it is valuable to be reminded of when things were very different, when nationalism was a means to bring people together rather than to keep them apart, when nationalists were radicals who believed in social equality and human progress, free trade and Europe, workers’ rights and the toppling of the mighty. “No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first,” Donald Trump reminded us this week. True, but the national interest is susceptible to many definitions and Anderson’s work reminds us that for many periods in nationalism’s long and chequered past, building bridges was often regarded as more in the national interest than building walls. And perhaps in the future, too.
Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University and author of ‘Governing the World: The History of an Idea’ (Penguin). ‘A Life Beyond Boundaries: A Memoir’ by Benedict Anderson (Verso £14.99/$24.95)
Dark time in America
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434850/dark-time-america
@ Laura:
We both were ” modified” today. is Ted a sexist?
My comment doesn’t show up. Ted, please post my comment.
@ bernard ross:
@ Laura:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/05/03/trump-rafael-cruz-body-of-christ-remarks-a-disgrace/
bernard ross Said:
I find this constant need to compare Trump to Nazis tiresome.
bernard ross Said:
It’s despicable that you would blame Jews for antisemitism. You sound like another self-hating Jew who blames other Jews for antisemitism because he wants to curry favor with white nationalists, Michael savage.
Populist Jews are as bad as leftist Jews.
@ bernard ross:
I have news for you, trump won’t implement these policies.
You’re voting for a guy on the basis of empty promises and of a history of expressing liberal views and donating to democrats up to the last midterm elections in 2014.
Recall also that just prior to entering the race, he denounced Pam Geller for “provoking” jihadist shooters during her Mohamed cartoon event in Texas. This was Trump’s instinctive response when he wasn’t looking to get the votes of the Republican base. That is who he really is.
@ bernard ross:
No, I don’t believe Trump supports the KKK. But it is revealing that they support him and that he and his followers don’t renounce the support of the KKK.
And BTW, Soros was a business partner with Trump.
Jews who are attempting to paint Trump as a nazi are very dangerous. They are engaging in the same type of blood libels directed against Israel… which comes mainly from the same leftist and anti zionist religious Jews. This sort of lie will blow back in their faces and the faces of other Jews. Luckily Trump knows Jews which would mitigate what would be a normal response to lies issued by a collective… hatred.
this is the only opportunity to get a sudden major paradigm shift and shift the global narrative away from treating muslim terror as individual criminal events rather than orchestrated murder completely related to the sick political military domination ideology of the islam mind control cult. Electing Trump can pave the way to the acceptance that Islam is NOT the bullshit religion of peace that all the leaders are lying about and putting us all in danger. this shift would be a great boon to Israel who has taken to uttering the same bullshit regarding Islam. The greatest threat to world stability is Islam and its adherents… they were always a threat but now they are gaining the capability and power to carry out the threats. There is a small window of opportunity to avoid conflagration and civil wars like what will certainly come to Sweden, EU and probably UK. Time is short to make the required major shift… ONLY TRUMP has identified the threat accurately.
The other issues are minor compared to that… just like when roosevelt and churchill realized that hitler was the greatest threat… and they realized tooooooooooo late!!!!!!!
Cruz is no longer relevant except as a spoiler… the important thing is to implement the Trump policy to ban muslim immigration which neither hillary nor cruz will implement.
Jews and jewish orgs which attack the america first policies give ammunition to nazis… now all the nazis will point to the Jews who want to flood the USA with muslims “like they did in europe”.
As usual, it is Jews who bring catastrophe on other Jews. Trumps america first policies are good for america and jews who stand for muslim immigration will end up at the end of the stick of anti semitism and possibly worse. the worst thing diaspora jews can do is demonstrate that the nazis are right when they say that the jews want to destroy the nation. Jews need to wake up from their lunatic dreams because folks will say you are with me or against me… and those folks will be right.
Laura Said:
do you really beleive that the guy who welcomed the orthodox conversion of his daughter and his orthodox Jewish grandchildren supports the KKK? Get real, you are starting to sound like the leftist nuts.
Much more dangerous are all those jews like ADL, soros, open borders who are vociferously supporting muslim flooding of europe and the US. Just like roosevelt and churchill allied with stalin against hitler I would have no problem with neo nazis agreeing with banning muslim immigration. I think that american jews are clueless, many did not experience or have relatives in the holocaust, they dont understand how serious is the danger to jews from muslims. For me, the most important priority is to keep muslims out and deport those here already as wherever they go anti semitism rises. It is muslim money which is funding the anti semitism on US campuses and funding the leftist orgs in their anti semitic campaigns. I beleive the ADL gets funding from those leftist orgs who are financed by muslims.
@ drjb:
If you understand the process then you know if no one gets 1237 then it can go to a brokered convention. That’s how Lincoln, Ike and Ford were nominated. Cruz is not delusional, he understands how the process works.
As for Cruz being hated, if one is judged by the enemies he makes, then being hated by trump’s drunken golf buddy who caved to Obama at every turn, is a badge of honor.
Of course the DC elite hate Cruz. He dared to call for accountability from the federal government. He dared to call out his own part members as “liars” on the Senate floor for reneging on promises to stop Obama’s agenda, most notably Obamacare. While Cruz was filibustering to stop Obamacare, not a single GOP coward backed him up.
Cruz doesn’t need Jewish family members in order to support Israel. His devout Christian faith that you mock, makes him a defender of the Jewish people and Israel.
I’m a proud Ted Cruz supporter.
@ honeybee:
I’m not saying they dominate his supporters, but there is a significant minority who indeed are neo nazis. I don’t see them being renounced by the rest.
KKK leader hates Ted Cruz, endorses trump. “Trump believes what we believe”
David Duke also endorsed trump, which trump refused to renounce and pretended he didn’t know who he was.
I told you folks that trump attracts these types. I’m being confronted by them on Twitter.
http://www.redstate.com/absentee/2016/04/30/kkk-leader-hates-ted-cruz-endorses-donald-trump-believes-believe-in./
@ Laura:
Hi Laura,
Of course Trump followers will include Jew haters just as much as Hillary followers will include Jew haters.
Hillary is, as far as Israel is concerned, an extension of Obama; the worst possible candidate. I don’t believe a word of what Cruz says but, judging on how he speaks of his chances of winning the nomination of his party, I would have to conclude that he is demented and detached from reality. He’s a liar hated by most who have ever worked with him.
Trump has a Jewish daughter (orthodox conversion) and Jewish grandchildren, extensive Jewish personal/business connections, and is from New York. I, as a Jew who supports Israel, would happily take my chances with him.
bernard ross Said:
I always say Israelis are much like Texan in their Patriotism. Flags every where and waved by smiling citizens.
One of your best post Yankee Boy.
the current nationalism is not the same as that described by this writer.
It is much more than a call against globalism and other very specific threats. In a time of threat and danger nationalism is increased to unite people against the threat. In this case it is more, it is a revolt against the ruling elite which not only controls the US but also the rest of the world. It is a revolt which assigns blame to that elite as an enemy of the people. An elite which has decimated the masses economy intentionally for their own self interest, an elite which has formed alliances with enemy ideologies, an elite which buys the media in order to deceive the citizenry, an elite which buys academia to produce lies to deceive the citizenry, an elite which buys NGO’s to play their lying tune, an elite which everywhere is flooding their borders with illegal criminals. What is happening has more in common with the french revolution than simple nationalism.
Trump has exposed the elite in action as they all jump up in unison to condemn his attack on their deceptive programs…. programs which are facilitated by the left and the right, the gop and the dems, murdoch and soros,the ADL, Jstreet,open borders… all part of the mind control of “big brother”
See, this is an example of bought academia intentionally lying to the public. Only an academic idiot or liar would pretend that being anti muslim is racist. Islam is an ideology, not a race nor ethnicity… it is a political, military ideology seeking physical domination over the globe using mind control techniques. It is no different than communism, fascism or nazism in its aims and methods to extend its domination. In fact, it is much more effective and much more of a danger. Those who seek to portray banning muslim immigration as racist are idiots or intentional liars, seeking to deceive the public and distract with red herrings.
Here is an example of a supposedly “Jewish” org which has crossed the red line, likely as a result of its donors,intentionally trying to deceive the public and IMO intentionally or naivly reinforcing the image of the Jewish 5th column by invoking irrelevant canards.
I see this as a very dangerous line crossed by an organization run by Jews, seeking Jewish donations, pretending to protect Jews but always defending those who teach their children that Jews are sons of apes and pigs…. defending those who have increased anti semitism wherever they go.
Only a lunatic Jew would call to a justifiably angry nation to ignore the calls to “america first” in todays times. Everywhere, in Europe and the US, the Jews are being identified as supporting the open borders invasion of honor killers who are raping and killing. In the end the muslim anti semites will join with the other anti semites to say it was all the Jooooooz fault… and perhaps they will be right. Jews in america seem unaware of the dangers of such behavior. Jews identifed with bolshevism, IMO, was a major cause of the rise of hitler and the holocaust. Germany was the most liberal euro nation prior for Jews, which is why many eastern european jews, from russia and the pale, immigrated there… like my own grandparents……. into the heart of the future beast. Israeli and diaspora Jews who spread narratives of Jewish evil and behave with disloyalty to their host nation should think again.
Only lunatic Jews would argue at this time against america first.
@ Laura:
I watched Trump on FXN ” Town Hall” meeting. When he mentioned his support of Israel he received resounding support.
Who, actually are these people tweeting you, could they be agent provocateurs ?
oldjerry Said:
I have just the cave for in the Chisos Mts. of West Texas along the Rio Grande. I can let you have it for a reasonable price.
oldjerry Said:
Go on Twitter. There are many.
@ Keli-A:
Since when is the system that created the greatest prosperity in world history “extremist”?
@ Keli-A:
They dominated during Reagan.
Since when is believing in the constitution ” far right”? I guess you consider our founding fathers, extremists.
Laura Said:
Your coalition of Evangelicals, constitutional conservatives??? and capitalist??? wing if it ever really existed were always a minority never really dominant in the Republican party and are so far off the mainstream American radar where they ever to gain real control in the Republican party they not only would lose every election but would make the Republican party so far to the right the party would never survive them.. America is not now and has never been a strictly conservative party and today as constituted the Democrats outnumber Republicans by 2-1 if not more.
You are choosing losers and myths of some ideals that have never been in American politics or political culture…. Screw Republicans and Democrats equally there is littler difference between the two in fact not how they call themselves.
@ Laura:
You will find Jew haters everywhere in all colors, shapes and politics. Right now the Left has a monopoly of these vermin and I for one see very little in Trump’s followers. To completely escape anti-Semitism one has to find an uninhabited cave in some wilderness.
Unfortunately, nationalism turns into anti-semitism. This is the most disturbing aspect of the trump movement. I’ve been noticing a segment of Trump followers are openly expressing Jew-hatred. I personally have been the recipient of their vile comments.
I do not want this element taking control of the Republican party. There will be no place for me in either party. Jews and Reagan conservatives will be marginalized.
I want the GOP to be returned to the Evangelicals, constitutional conservative and free market capitalist wing.
This is about the soul of the Republican party as well as the long term future of America. That is why I will either write-in Cruz or cynically vote for Hillary in November. I’m still holding out hope though, that there will be a brokered convention and Cruz will be chosen.
Zionism from its birth was and is a nationalist movement. In the 20th Century everyone in the west moved away from nationalism except for Israel which was always nationalistic.
Trump and LePen are now reversing course.