Interrogating the Nation

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Interrogating the NationAuthor(s): Shiv VisvanathanSource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 38, No. 23 (Jun. 7-13, 2003), pp. 2295-2302Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4413658

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nterrogatingh at ion

What is a 'nation'? What does the word 'nationstate' connote? Beginningfrom earlydebates on nationalism and the nation state, the word 'nation' has shifted, coming to

acquire at one and the same time, an expanding meaning and an ambivalence. Literatureand the differentsocial sciences, on the other hand, have exposed the nature of evil,

depictingthe nation as a genre of violence. A study of Europeanand African works showshow the creation of nation has beenfraught with a marginalisationof other groups

andvoices, with pain and suffering.Literatureand language, this article suggests, must once

again become tools to plumb the banality of evil that is inherent in the nation state.New 'thought experiments'must seek to challenge the politics of the nation,

leading to a reinvention and a new beginning.

SHIVVISVANATHAN

ama bookworm. love the smell ofbooks,

the textureof

bindings.ButI ama bookwormwho believesthat extscanbe genocidal, hatmanyof the ideas that ead to murder nd

violenceareborn irst n antiseptic rimers, atechisms f civicswhich tell you to love god andcountry.The interestinghingaboutbooks s that heytell you what o remember. uch booksarealso actsof forgetting.Theseprimers ontainwhatRaymondWilliamcalledkey words[Williams1985]. I want to explorethecareerof a keyterm nationalism nd ts double,ethnicity.I want o do it idiosyncratically.wantto tell you whyI dislikethe word and I also wish to explorewhatits possibleuses are.I consider he essay a frameworkor exorcism.

Whenyou read historybooks, the word nation smells ofmonuments ndcommemorativetamps. t reeksof sacrifice,of

incense o deadheroes.The ideaof thenationseemsto burrowitshugeroots nto he consciousness f a societygoingdeep ntotime.Itsmacksof togetherness,ixities,boundaries.As nation-

state, t is one of greatactorsof 19thand20thcenturypolitics.It remindsus of the great eaders ike Sukarno,Nasser,Mao,Nehru,Neyerere,Mandela,Ho Chi Minh.Thepast s honouredin amber.The nationsuggeststhe strengthof community, hesense of us, of togetherness, f gemeinschaftand geselschaftwoventogether. t providesa sense of identity,of who we areorshouldbe. Nationality Indian, s the markon thepassport,a saluteto theflag. It evokes a sense of time and of power.Anation-states marked y fixed boundaries ndby sovereignty,bythemonopoly f themeansof forcewithinadefined erritory.As individuals,we arecitizens,officiallydefinedparticipantsf

anofficiallydefinednation-state. ucha notion s clear cut andevery day. Everytime a child drawsa map,everytime he/shetakesa chalkandwriteshis/her ocation nthoseconcentric irclesofname,home,region,nation, ontinent, lobe,world,we knowourcosmos s intact. tis a worldwheredefinitionsdefine,mapsareclear,history esurgentnddemocracy omplete.This civics

primers still somewhere nside me. I amIndianandproud obe one. I still move in gloom when Indians ose their ritualmatches.Butsomewhere amnowtemptedotreason, ecession,dissent, oquarrelswiththeofficial discourseon the nation-stateand it is this I want to make textually explicit. Politically,ethically,aesthetically,ntellectually find thenotionof nationand nation-state isquietingand I would like to explainwhy.

The ideaof the nationbecameas bad social science,a civicscreatedby a governessand a panopticon.It was too stiffly

starched,oo

official,too definitional. t was a

grammarhat

didn't allow for the freeplayof language. t was syntacticallytolerablebutsemantically nliveable. tcorseted heidea of the

person,andseemed o reduce he lifeworlds nwhichwe lived.I remembermyfirstsense of censorshipwasnotwithpornog-

raphybut with nationalism. The Encyclopaedia Britannica mapsofIndiawouldcomestampedwith This s not heofficialversion

approvedby GOI'.A hugeblack or violet blotch would coverthe dotted ines of controlbetween India and Pakistan.Thosedotted ines werefascinating.We werelearningaboutosmosisin thescienceclass,of membraneswhere iquidsmoved n onedirection. wondered f the borderwas osmotic.I redrew he

mapas a fencewithgatesto letpeople n andout.I cutpotatoestorestamphepagewithmyofficial marks.Suddenlyhedotted

linesseemed o beathread,weaving ndiaand Pakistanogether.I remember he firsttime I went to Karachi.TariqBanuri,a

Harvard eturned athan roveus around heuniversity ampus.He said, lastweek therewas violence here and a 1000roundsof fire wereexchangedbetween two rival factions and thenadded no one died. It tells you therewas not a pathanamongthem . tremindedmeof our nationalist ssassins, hegloriousBengali-Bihariheroes who shot at the Viceroy and alwaysmissed.

We went to thehotel and thereceptionist reetedus warmly.The nextmorninghe approachedmefor a favour.He askedmeto post some letters n India,to his cousins,sir as he putit.I agreedandsaid don'tworry, willputthestamps .Hereplied

Ialreadyhavethemhere .Thatnight heywere more entative

knocks,all withletters orposting,addressed ndready.At thelast minute,anothercame running aying will you send this

telegram o Patna?It is my niece's nikah . t made one feel

strange.The eveningbefore,we went for a walk and decidedtoeat'pan'.Thepanshophada familiarooking igure.Heturnedout to be from Kerala.I asked him what he was doing here.

'Business,saarbusiness',he said.The worldof politicsseemedeven furtherawaytill he askedme whether knewanyoneattheembassy, omplaininghat he clerkswereverycorrupt.Ournationalism eemedtoconsistof border-crossings, reciprocityof opposites.The idea became even moreendearingwhen a

colleague old me thatJinnah ntended o settle n Bombayafterretirement. hefatherof thepartitionakingwalks in Bombay

Economicand PoliticalWeekly June7, 20032295



appealed to me. Now every walk was a border crossing. Both

boundaries and nations seemed quaintly suspect.It is the ambivalence of nationality and the nation-state that

I need to capture. I wish Right and Left would leave it alone.

The Left thought it was a bourgeois concept which meant it had

little that was sensible, to say on it. The Right thought they had

copyrighted the concept, which made it paranoidanddreary.My

angst came from my love for cricket. I spent hours building lists

of ideal Pakistaniand Indian teams. After a while the names would

blur andI would have a composite team brilliant in every nuance.You wondered what Partition was about and you wished one

Saqlain 'ulta' could bring it all together. Even our togethernessin matchfixing, ethnically explained, added to it. One kept feeling

nationality led to bad social science but was also bad myth. It

was notjust that I was ambivalent to the idea of the nation-state

but that nation-state had an ambivalence built into it. It soughtto create a fixity of identities, territories around what were

kaleidoscopic entities. What I plan to do in the rest of the essayis to elaborate the rebus nature of the concept and put a price

tag to it. We return to the library.

II

The history of the debates on nationalism and the nation-state

captured n such classic texts as those of Gellner and Hobsbawm

unravelthe ambivalence of the idea of nation and its duck-rabbit

status. In early phases, nationalism was seen as primordial,

something whose roots went back in time, something woven

deeply into the history of a community. It was seen as something

objective, a link between a community, a culture and a territorial

map. But attempts to establish an objective criteria for nation

failed. Such a congruency between people, history, territorywas

easy at the level of definition but problematic at the level of

reality. The taxonomic clarity of definitions confronted various

kindsofhybridity, of monsters which made Eric Hobsbawm wish

that nationwatchingwas as simple asbirdwatching [Hobsbawm

1992:5].The ambivalence of the word nation begins at the etymological

level. The word nation begins its invidious career in Latin. The

word natio referred to something born. It referred to a group of

foreignerswhose status, because they were foreigners, was below

that of Romans. The word nation also referred to communities

of students coming from a particular region to the great univer-

sities of the west. In fact, students had an identity only insofar

as they were students [Greenfield 1992]. The structure of uni-

versity life revolved around nations of students. As a result, the

word nation came to mean more than a community of origins,it referred to a community of opinion and purpose. But it was

restrictednotion confined to theuniversity ,theworld of Abelard.

By the sixteenth century rather than referring to an elite groupof students, the word nation expanded to include a people, a

population. National identity now derived from membership in

a people and finally nation referred to a unique people or a

unique sovereign people. And it is the trajectory of definitionsthat became problematic. The nation, instead of being an open

category, threatensto become anexclusionary process. The seeds

of ambivalence and violence are rooted here and it steps from

- The idea of citizenship as a static entity

- The problematic nature of identity- The positivism between territory and a people and the fixityof boundaries- The genocidal nature of the exclusionary process

III

One gets the following kind of picture in terms of the literature

as seen in the diagram below.

The constructivist phase was a hard-headed one. The logic of

the nation-state is recognised as an invention but an invention

with potent consequences. Nations are disciplinary myths. Theyare no longer romantic creations, awakening a long dominant

culture.They

constitute thelogical requirement

of an industrial

system. As Gellner remarks, it is not nationalism that creates

homogeneity; homogeneity is a 'inescapable imperative of a

nationalist-industrial system'.In fact, the problem of taxonomic clarity became not only a

source of confusion but of violence. One wished to make com-

munities and localities conform to a priori definitions. It led to

a 'Pol Pottism' of policy. If reality did not conform to official

definitions and theory, then reality should be cleansed till it

conforms. It is a small matter that 2-3 million people would be

eliminated in 3-4 months. It is this fetishism of cleansing that

lead to a revisionist historyembodied in thewritingsof Anderson,Hobsbawm and others. Now suddenly nationalism is no longer

primordial,and soaked in history. Itappearsrecent, it is a project

and what is worse it is an invention. In fact, nationalism ratherthanembodying history,always got itsfacts crooked.ThistemptedErnst Renan to make it a part of the definition. He claimed,

getting history wrong is a part of being a nation. (quotedHobsbawm 1992:12).

The modernidea of the citizen portrayedhim as a loyal creature

who was located in an industrial way of life. Citizenship in the

industrial world needed a coherent sense of itself which simul-

taneously fragmentsthe world around t. In fact, the modern idea

of the citizen has a perpetual problemwith the stranger, he other,a hostility to all those ways of life who do not qualify for its

passport. The problem of citizenship and the ironic richness of

political theory derives from this ambivalence to a set of mobile

Romantics-Positivists Constructivists Post-ModernPolitics

H Kohn E Gellner Z Bauman ambivalence)Ideaof Nationalism Nations and Nationalism Modernitynd Ambivalence

ManuelCastells (Shrinkage)CarletonB Hayes E Hobsbawm 'TheRise of the NetworkSociety'HistoricalEvolution f ModernNationalism Nations and Nationalism ince 1870 The Literarymagination

B Anderson 1 DubravkaUgresicImaginedCommunities TheCultureof Lies

2 EavanBoland

ObjectLessons3 AndreBrink

Reinventinga Continent4 ChristaWolf

Parting romPhantoms

2296 Economic and Political Weekly June 7, 2003



Figure 1

globalisation displaced

\. / nomad / \ exileNationState \

Citizen

diaspora / migrant

ethnicity

refugee

others.The diagramn figure captures he problematic f citi-

zenshipbetweenethnicityandglobalisation.If citizenshipwith thepassport nd theflag is the identityof

those who fit official definitions, he sense of 'homelessness'marks hose outside it. We have as the moveablestrangerhe

followingcategories exile,migrant,efugee,diasporic, omad,displaced.Each of thesecategorieswere embodiments f mar-

ginalitywhichenrichandchallenge hecentrality f citizenship.It is outof thesemargins nd ts dialecticwith the officialcivicsof citizenship,hatmodernpolitical heoryderives ts richness.The ambivalence f citizenshipadds to the violence of nation

building.A combination f simplisticclassificationcombinedwith hewill todominancersocialengineeringeads oviolence,evengenocide.WhatI wish to emphasises thatviolence s nota pathologyof nationbuildingandcitizenshipbut arisesoutofthenormalogic of citizenship.Violence s onlytheunravellingof the relationbetween the fixity of the citizen,his normalcyand tsinteraction iththemoveable,mobile,displacedmarginsof the nation. The 'stranger', he processof nationbuilding

encounterss not a citizen froma far-away and, a potentialenemy.He is someone who for classificatory easonshas notbeen officially llowed nto the worldof citizenship Bauman1993].

The oldest and most old-fashioned ategory s that of exile.The exile is the citizenwho sits awayfrom home writingand

thinkingbouthome.19thcentury olitical heoryromBakunin,Marx,KropotkinndLeninwas the creation f exiles. The exileis citizen withouta home,seekingto redefinehome so he canreturn o it. But themigrants an individualwhohasleft hometo createa new home.The discourseof sociology,of ethnicity,of citizenship,he dreamsof themeltingpotcentrearoundhowto make hemigrant thomein the new world.A lot of politicsis about urninghemigrant s ethnic nto a citizen.If Europeanpoliticalheorywas argely hecreation fexiles,American ocialsciencecentred round hemigrant.But neither hemigrantnorexilecanquite apturehestatelessness nddespair f therefugee.Therefugee s a displacedperson,a creaturewho is betweenhomes ndmight e condemnedo thatperpetualtate fliminality.The Vietnameseboatpeopleare an outstanding ontemporaryexample.Yearsago, Foucault n his Madnessand Civilizationtalkedof the madpeoplewhowereputout to seain shipswhichhad to stay away from land. The mad, at that time, wereunclassifiablend otheysailed n the shipoffools ,perpetuallyat sea andawayfrom the 'normalcy'of land. The boatpeopleare henewshipof foolsperpetuallyt seabecause ewcountrieswish to absorb heminto the normalcyof citizenship. f exile,

the refugee, the migrant reflect the travails of displacement and

citizenship, the diaspora reflects a coming home. But it is a

coming homewhich carries ts own form of violence. The diasporais at home in the new world. It is home away from home. Its

violence comes in relation to its old home. The diasporic who

is an ideal citizen of home II isproblematic

for home I and

problematic in two ways. He feels a nostalgia, even a guilt for

the world he has abandoned and frozen in time. The diasporicas ideal citizen in home I is the prime feeder of terrorist and

secessionist movements at home I. He is the exponent of longdistance nationalism. One can cite immediately the role of the

Irish in America, the Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora and its fundingof LTTEor of Sikhs inCalifornia andOttawafundingthe violence

of the Khalistan movement. The diasporic as expert can also bea source of violence because he then chooses to determine who

is suffering and who shall progress in his valorised discoursesof his home in the Third World. Of course, blending with the

two is the good diasporic sending remittances and dreams of

utopia back home. The violence and dynamics of citizenship

operates around the outsider outside the home. Exile, migrant,refugee, diaspora are all citizens outside official territory. But

there is also the dynamics of violence within territory.The fixity of boundary that the nation-state requires and its

definition of the 'normalcy' of citizenship cannot cope with

nomads, tribals,gypsies, pastoralgroups. Thefixity of citizenshipfinds the nomad intolerable. The nomadism of the above kindis a strange kind of rootlessness or even 'homelessness' to theofficial residency of citizenship. The nomad is at home in theworld but he carries his home across the world, thus violatingthe taxonomy of citizenship. These mobile communities threatennot only citizenship but the modern development projectreflect-

ing the social contract between science and the state. These

persons are refractoryto the ideals of citizenship and the devel-

opmental process andoften become its first victims [Parsuramanand Unnikrishanan 2000]. These mobile groups demand a sen-

sitivity to ecology as an aspect of citizenship. In mobility of this

kind, the violence of citizenship comes from depriving them ofa way of life which does not suit the official. Thus pastoralismis often discouraged because it is a way of life that does not

recognise official boundaries and crosses them innocently in the

pursuit of subsistence.

But there is a second group of mobile men who areperpetuallydisplaced not out of a need to travel. Their homelessness comesfrom being perpetually uprooted by large development projectsbe it roads, thermal stations, mining enterprises or large dams.These are marginals whose ways of life are destroyed because

Economic and Political Weekly June 7, 2003 2297



they cannot be accommodatednto the official discourseon

progress.As peasants, stribals,heyare hepast hat tscitizenshavealready ived out andthusdeserve to be abandoned.t isobsolescenceorforgetting f a differentkind.Today,Indiahasmore nternal efugees romdevelopment rojects han romallthe wars it has foughtsince independence.

Ethnicity mergesoutof thecuspbetween herelation etweenthe citizenandthoseofficiallydefinedas 'outsider', stranger',or 'marginal'.But, it emergesnot purelyfrom the logic of

citizenship nddevelopment, utfromthe structure f electorallogic, fromthenormalcyof majority-minorityolitics.In fact,one has to recognise his - the logic of genocidalstemsfromthe ogicof democraticoliticswithin henation-statearadigm.MahmoodMamdanimakes hisargumentuccinctlyn hisstudyof the Rwandanmassacre.The strugglebegan as a series ofelectoral ontestswhich edtoapolarisation etween heBatutsiand the Bahutu,whichgradually et the stage for a pogrom.Mamdani bserves hat wheremajority-minorityelationsgetfetishisedntopermanentrtefacts,neitherminority rmajoritycan createstableregimes Mamdani,1996, p.34).

MichaelMannmade hispointwithmoredevastatinghorough-ness in a recentarticle, n NewLeftReview.Mannobserves hatwhilegenocidalviolencemightbe banal oday,scholarshiptillsees it as a pathology, anunfortunatenterruptionf the realstructuralendenciesof the 20thcentury Mann,1999,p.18).It took the work of scholars ike Leo Kuper o show thatthe

monopolyof violence thatthe modern tatecommandsover a

territory createdboththe powerand the desire for genocide(Mann,1999, p 19). But Manngoes beyondthesepioneeringinsightsto arguethe structural ink betweendemocracyand

genocide.He observes hat hestandardhibbolethshat hemoreauthoritarian state,the morelikely it is to commitgenocideis not true. If one looks at it empirically,democracieshave a

strangeaffinityfor genocide.Mannmakes hreepoints.He argues hatdemocracieshould

be seen processually.Manyof themappear table and mono-

ethnic odaybut his'clarity' nd tabilitywasacquiredver ime.Infact,thehomogeneity ndstabilityof thesedemocracieswasa creationof violence - either of forcedassimilation, orced

migrationor genocide[Mann1999:22].Mannclaims that theideaof organic ationalism ,nwhichapopulations excludedto the pointof murderousleansinghas beenone of Europe'scontributionsomodernity.Of ourse, nce henationscleansed,itrequiresittle urther iolence.Impeccablyiberalnation-statescan bloomabove the mass gravesof the cleansed in US, inAustralia,nGermany andeventuallyperhaps erbia. Liberaldemocracieshave also committedcleansing- amounting o

genocide n the colonialcontext.Whereverdemocracyhas tri-

umphed, t has often been tingedwithethniccleansing.Oncecleansed, he scenarioof liberaldemocracys easy to playout

[Mann1999:26].Thishyphenationf nation-state nd iberaldemocracy aises

a set of problemsfor Third World democracies which aremulticulturaln a fluidway. In the European ase, the makingof a nation-stateequired thniccleansingas a riteof passage.The logic of minority-majorityelations reezes and preemptspolitical scripts.ThirdWorld nationsneed differentoptionswhich possiblyexist in the ordinary itualsof interactionordistancebetween these communities. The logic of culturalrelations ndthelogicof politicsneednotbe identical.Culturalrelationsandsolutionsusingthe logic of food, caste,linguisticdiversity,marriage,estival,taboo,vocation,public nteractioncanprovidea richrepertoiref cosmopolitanism,olerance,hat

politicsneedsto capture nly minimally.Culture anallowfor

contradictoryrends ndcounter-trendsf cosmopolitanismnd

parochialismwhichcreatesa complexweave.Politics, n elec-toralsense,needs to minimallymimic this as thecreativecon-fusion,as the old IndianCongresspartydid.

Once we tryto createa one-to-onecorrespondenceetweenethnicgroupsandpolitics, there is a dangerof pogromsand

genocide.There s a need for modelsbeyondthe simplicityofliberaldemocracywhichproducesmulticulturalisms anafter-

thought.The multiculturalismt constructss alwaysafterthefact of ethnic cleansing and reflects relations with groupswhichno longer threaten he regime. Multiculturalismmightmodifyuniversity yllabi,it does not threaten he constitutionor theregime.

IV

Thelogic of thenation-states thus coercive n its normalcy.Butthe newnormalcy f thenation-state as becomeeven more

problematic iven hechanging ature fwar.Theclassicorevenconstructivistmodel of thenation-state ealised hehappyreci-

procitybetween force and the nation-state s an organisation.As MichaelMannobserves themilitary unctionof the nation

hasexploded.Around1,700statesabsorbed erhaps percentof theGNP n peacetime,10percent in war ime.By 1760thishadrisento between15 and 25 percent,by 1810, to between25 and35 percent. Mannadds hat these1810 extractions reidentical o those of the twoworldwarsandto thehighestratesin theworldtoday,those of IsraelandIraq Mann1993:117].Thestructure f waralsoencouragedn generala deepeningofeconomicplanningndawidening fthenationalwelfare ystems.

Underlying his reciprocitys a certainkindof civitas,withits accompanying ategoriesof civility (Figure2).

Theideaof thenation-statereatedbotha senseof the insiderand heoutsider, f insideandoutside.Securityafterall was the

protectionof the inside from outside forces. Its complement

foreignpolicywasoneof thefirstdistinctactivitiesof the nation-state.MaryKaldor aspointed ut that he new warshavebrokenor blurred he distinctionsbetweencivilian/military, oreign/domestic, nside/outside o crucial o theconceptualpoliticsofthe nation-state.

Low intensitywarfare ombined he local andthe global in

interestingways.A localisedwarwhether nBurundi r Kosovo

acquired ganglionof internationalonnectionswhichobscuredtherelation between xternaland nternal, etweenaggression(attacksromoutside)and epressionattacksromwithin) .Withit went a frameworkwhich discriminatedbetween external

barbaritynddomesticcivility,combatant ndnon-combatant,

Site Estimates

Afghanistan 10,00,000Armenia 10,00,000Soviet Russia 70,00,000Germany 60,00,000India-Pakistan artition 10,00,000Rwanda 10,00,000Bosnia 2,00,000Cambodia 30,00,000Indonesia 9,00,000Bangladesh 30,00,000Nigeria IBOS) 10,00,000Angola 5,00,000Liberia 1,50,000Sudan 15,00,000

2298 Economic and PoliticalWeekly June7, 2003



Figure2: Civitas of Distinctions

Local globalInside outside

Civilian combatant

Foreign domestic \Soldier criminal

Warpeace

and soldier, policeman, mercenary and criminal and even war

and peace [Kaldor 1999:29]More critically, the nation-state lost its text-book marker of

possessing the monopoly of the means of violence within a

defined territory. It was a monopoly which was eroded from

above and below. Global alliances limited a nation'sability

to

wage war unilaterally. The privatisation of warfare with

the presence of assorted groups undermined sovereignty from

below.

Thirdlythere was achange in the political economy of violence

which was even more fundamental. The old Gellnerian model

of the nation-stateas providing the framework for modernity was

no longer operative. The old wars fed off national organisationand the industrialsystem. But in them the mode of warfare was

secondary to the mode of production. Now warfare as a systemhas acquired its autonomy.

What marked these new wars was what Kaldor, following

Thompson, dubs its 'exterminist character'. In the earlier wars,there was mass killing but a lot of it was an unintended con-

sequence of war rather han an end in itself. The new wars, saysKaldor, are genocidal wars which seek the systematic extermi-

nation of populations. This was true of Rwanda or Bosnia. The

new wars alter the nature of nationalism as an emancipatory

project [Shaw 2000:175].

MaryKaldor n heressay on the new nationalism observes that

unlike early nationalisms which tended to be unifying and

centralising, the new nationalism is creating smaller and smaller

economic and political units. The former Yugoslavia initially

disintegrated nto five parts.Then Croatiawas divided into two.

Bosnia-Herzegovina has been carved up three ways and the

negotiators in Geneva proposed as many as ten homogenous

provinces [Kaldor 1999:16].

Secondlynationalism,ratherthan eingan deology, aworldview

is now a repertoireof instrumentalist actics available to facelesspoliticians and bureaucrats to enter power games. Earlier

nationalisms were associated with ideological positions; theywere linkedto democraticor statistprojects.The new nationalism

has very little ideological content; it is primarily about identity(ibid).

Thirdlythe new nationalism seems to be committed to a careerof continuous war and violence. It is, as Kaldor observes, not

the wareconomy of the statist military-industrialcomplexes butof a loose but lethal combination of mercenaries, ex-soldiers,

petty criminals, and self-seeking politicians tied together in

sharedwebof complicityor warcrimesand a sharednterestin reproducinghe sources of wealthand crime .

There is also a dispersal n the numberof actors and anescalation n the natureof violence. Mamdani ommenting nRwandaobserved unlike he holocaust, his genocidewas notcarriedout overyears,but months only three. 'It wasn't usta smallgroup hatkilled and moved'explaineda politicalcom-missar n the police. 'Because the genocidewas so extensive,therewere killers n every locality- fromministers o peasants- for it to happen n so shorta time andon such a large-scale.Unlikein Germany,wherethe holocaustwas mainlythe work

of state unctionaries,n Rwandaherewas anattemptoinvolvetheentireBahutu opulation. houghplannedromabove, t wasexecutedbysectionsof the civilianpopulation.t was as if everyattemptwas madeto involve everyone,so there wouldbe noone left to pointa finger. [Mamdanil996:19].The speed ofviolencewassomething hatwouldmake even Virilioblanche.The Nazis, mostly as professionalseliminatedJews, gypsies,polessystematicallyveraperiodof five to sixyears. nRwandaandKampucheaver a million wereeliminatedn the spanofthreemonths.There was also a difference in the culture ofviolence.

In his Blood and Belonging,Michael Ignatieffmarksthedifference between Kurdishguerrillasand those at Bosnian

checkpoints.Inastateless

ocietyof

Kurdistan,verymalewho

reaches dolescence etsagun.Carrying weapon implymeansa boyhas ceasedto be a child andmustbehave ikea man. 'Theaccentofmeaningntheculture f thegunstresses esponsibility,sobrietyandtragicduty'.Guns arefired whentheyneed to be.On the contrarymost Europeans ince 1945, included n theBalkanshave lived in societies where the stateenjoyeda mo-

nopolyof legitimateviolence. As the statesbrokedown,so didthemonopoly. For omeEuropeanmales hechaos hatresultedfrom this collapse ... offeredthe chance of enteringan erotic

paradisewhere all is permitted.Hence the semi-sexual,semi-

pornographic un cultureof the checkpoints.For young mentherewas an irresistible roticchargeof holdinglethalpowerin yourhandsandusingit to terrorise he helpless [Ignatieff

1994:141].Thegenocide hatsemergingmustbe seenwithin hestructural

framework f the UN. Wheredoes the UN stand n relation oviolence?LeoKupernGenocide omplainshat t is thestructureof the UN thatallows this orgy of violence to continue,even

validating t. Kuperaddsthat the UN as a systemof nations

appearsorecognise hisde factoright.Kuper xamines hecasesof genocide nBurundi,nIdi Amin'sUganda,nCambodia ndshows hat neachcasetheUNwatched heviolenceasaspectaclewithout ntervening. t was only when the dictator nvadeda

foreigncountry, hatthe logic of intervention nd usticecould

prevail.Partof the reasonas U Thant andotherUN officials

pointout is that he UN reflects hehegemonyof current ation-states andtherefore rownson secession. In fact bothUN and

the OAU have oftenlegitimated he violence in Africaby stilldealingofficiallywithdictatorsnCongo,Rwanda.TheUN itselfis caught n the furtherronythateven if secessionhappens,tinsistsit happensalongdistinctly erritorialines.Theintegrityof originalborders ven in Yugoslaviaremainedntact.Federa-tions haveto disintegrate longthe lines of theiroriginalcon-stituentunits.

Wehaveshown onceptually owthe ogicofviolenceoperatesatevery evel of the nationalprocess.Whatwe now askis whatis thelevel of genocide nnumbers n the 20thcentury?MichaelMannhas observed hat t is about60 million.Theprocessofaccountingtself s arevelation.Myfactsare ncomplete utevenan incompleteaccount s devastating nough.

Economicand PoliticalWeekly June7, 2003 2299



v

My objection to the nation-state thus reduced itself to a one-

point programme- a critique of violence. I should also state that

I am not approaching the currently topical question about the

growing irrelevanceof thenation-stateas a resultof globalisationand the simultaneity of finance capital. My approach is more a

way to temper the violence of the nation-state and my selection

of responses is personal. I move away from social science to a

set of literarywritings which deal with the nation-stateandissuesof honour,memoryandidentity. Iwantto consider a set of nations

(South Africa, Ireland, Croatia and Germany) each of which I

see as a metaphor for violence and a site for its reflection.

DubravkaUgresic is a Croatianwriter in exile, currently ivingin Amsterdam.Her The Cultureof Lies is an examination of the

everyday violence of a nationalism [Ugresic 1998]. She quotesthe Yugoslav writer Danielo Kis as stating nationalism is the

ideology of the banal .Centraltonationalism is the seductiveness

of Kitsch. The nation today is not to be visualised as a salad

bowl, a mosaic, a melting pot, or a prison house. The only

metaphor hatcapturesits hysterical power and its hyperactivismis kitsch. At the core of kitsch is a populism that centres around

what Kis calls the gingerbread-heart culture , whichpours

the

icing of sentimentality over the cold reality of war. The keyrelation s notmaster/slave but executioner andvictim. Both sides

are potentially executioners and both sides, for all their depre-dations, see themselves as victims.

One of the biggest casualties of nationalism and the nation-

state becomes the idea of memory. Ugresic argues the nation-

state creates two forms of terror - the terror by rememberingand the terror by forgetting. Writing about Croatia, Ugresic

captures change through linguistic markers. Overnight a new

system of valuesgets createdby areversalof signs. Badsuddenlybecomes good, left becomes right.The old flag, the coat of arms,the namesof streets have been removed andreplacedby the new.

Wordsget revalorised. What were once good words - Partisan ,

left wing , communists - now get negatively marked,Yugoslavia suffered from a gestalt shift between two forms

of Kitsch - communist and nationalist. It was a paradigm shift

between two cultures of the lie. The real battle between the two

paradigms is what Ugresic calls the battle for the territoryof

collective memory [Ugresicl998:228]. Nationalism has to work

doubly hard at its one great therapeutic exercise, the productionand reproductionof public enemies. What operates throughthis

topography is nostalgia. Ugresic notes nostalgia is not subjecttocontrol, it is a subversive activity which works with fragments,scents, touch, sound, melody, colour, its territory is absence ...

The strategies of its activity are deceit, capriciousness, subver-

sion, suddenness, shock and surprise. Nostalgia knows no hier-

archy of values, the 'material' it deals with is not divided into

good or bad, acceptable and unacceptable, clever and stupid; onthe contrary some silliness is often its favourite choice . As

a phenomenon, its mechanism resembles what neuro-psycholo-

gists have dubbed the phantom limb [Ugresicl998:230]. The

erasure of fifty years produces a loss, a reaching out for a

vanished culture of everyday life-jokes, objects, pop music,

language, humour.Populism, cliche, kitsch combine with guns,

grenades, murder,rapeand ethnic cleansing to annihilate butone

thing - memory .

Ugresic's analysis is not merely psychological, it focuses not

just on cliche but the linguistic tropes that are symptomatic of

this world. Two in particular need to be mentioned. The first

is palindromic evil of nationalism. A palindrome is a word or

sentence that reads the same whether it is read forwards or

backwards. Here cliche acquires the quality of occult where

protests from both side read identically. Truth is on our side

- they shout from right to left. Truth is on our side - they soughtfrom left to right. But they are killing us - comes the cry from

left to right. But they are killing us - comes the cry from rightto left. [Ugresicl998:27]. The palindrome, the author reminds

us is also called the devil's verse. To this devil's trope, Ugresicadds the rhetorical figure of antonomasia. It is a substitutive

tactic, an act of hyphenation, where the memory of one eventis used to invoke or supportthe other.Ugresic sites two examplesof the description of Vukovar - The Croatian Hiroshima or

of the labelling Croatian president as Tudjman,the Croatian

George Washington . She notes that the frequent use of this

figure in the Croatian media can be read also as a symptom of

the malfunctioning of the Croatianstate formation mechanism .

Such rhetorical efforts point out not only to the touching-up of

thepresident's autobiographybutthatsucha distortion egitimiseslies, and the creation of an inauthentic collective identity.

Ugresic shows that dissenters and particularly woman have a

traumatic time in this 'paranoid communication system'. She

recounts a story of a demonstration by women in the autumn

of 1991.Theyprotested against

the warshouting

we are women

not nationalities . But what one saw on television the next daywas pictures of Serbian mothers joyfully sending their sons to

the army [Ugresic 1998:120]. Ugresic adds that even dissent has

its own hierarchy. Insofar as Yugo-men (whether the commu-

nist,post-communist ornew democraticmodel) daresay anythingin public, they become 'dissidents', 'victims of the system''Croatian Havels' or 'Croatian Rushdies'. If the women do the

same, they are labelled only whores .

Ugresic argues that the battle between ethnicities is reinforced

by the violence between men and women. She feels the destruc-

tion of national stereotypes needs also the questioning of gender

stereotypes. The Croatiancase, she argues, is the transpositionto the political level of the frustrations of the Yugoman. Yet she

is sensitive to the broadercontexts of economy, of globalisation.One anecdote will suffice to vouch for her sensitivity. When

the war in former Yugoslavia began, many people thought of

going abroad, and discussed where they might go and where it

was possible togo, toAmerica,Europe,AustraliaorNew Zealand.

Remembering the best of the accessible worlds, which was not

,(nor could it be) determined by frontiers, or countries, or ide-

ologies, a child suggested 'Mum, let's emigrate to McDonald's'.

In 'Object Lessons', Eavan Boland pursues for Ireland what

Ugresic does for Croatia. If Ugresic is more linguistic in her

analyses, Boland, a poet, follows her literary inclinations. Both

realise the quicksilver nature of change and its problematicrelation to memory. Boland writes, There are parts of Europe... where minorities, even nations, jostle in the same squaremile.

Change a language, turn a signpost, rename a village and a

previous identity becomes a figment, a hostage to persistenceand stubborn recall.

Boland's essays attempt o understand heinterrelationbetween

Irishpoetry and Irishnationalism. She begins by describing Irish

nationalism as a process where a watered down picture stood

for the original. As the Femians delved into terror, a drawingroom version of nationalism, a genteel mix of nostalgia and

sentiment, of Irish harps and Celtic crosses was created.

Irish nationalism reworked itself from these drawing room

landscapes in the poetry of Dennis Kavanagh, W B Yeats and

in the writings of James Joyce. But as a genre of writing Irish

poetry was still bardic, masculine and coercively public. Eavan




Boland scrutinises both the poetry of a nation and the relation

of a poet to a nation. She examines the history of her familyand the process of her growth as a poet. She senses both the

exhilaration and irony of it.

Irish.If I could notremembera country,I could at leastimaginea nation ... Imagination.The word itself has the poignance of

opposites.Byimagininganation,I wasbeginning heveryprocess,awakening he very faculty which was bringingme into conflictwith t. I wasbuildinga strengthwhich would discover a weakness

in these images [Boland 1996:57].Boland states the problem starkly. The issue between an artist

and a nation is not a faith but a self. The creative self must be

complex andearned;the national self is ardentand singular, bentto the collective and determined to serve it [Boland 1996:58].

Boland describes herfascination withpoetry, sensing its magic.But as she moves from the act of consumption to creation, she

discovers that the magical world of Irishpoetry has no place forher. The Irish nation in Irish poetry was not available to her.Boland felt like a 'primitive' with a PhD in anthropology, an

unwelcome intrusion. Not only is Irish poetry male and bardic,it uses women as its basic motif. The women in these poemswere often passive, decorative, raised emblematic status. This

wasespecially

true where the woman and idea of nation were

mixed, where the nation became a woman and the woman took

a national posture. To Boland these passive and simplifiedwomen seemed a corruption .She observes that the association

of feminine and thenational was not an Irishmonopoly. She cites

Charles de Gaulle statement that the emotional side of him

imaginesFrance liketheprincess inthefairytale, or theMadonnaof theFrescoes . She notes astutely that the power of nationhood

tends to edit the reality of womanhood. Once the idea of nation

influences the perception of a woman, then the idea of woman

is suddenly and inevitably simplified. She can no longer have

complex feelings and aspirations. She becomes the passiveprojection of a national idea , a dehumanised ornament. For

Boland, nationalism becomes a coloniser of the categories of the

imagination.Itpre-emptedacertain kind of future bypoliticisingcertainrealities anddevaluing others. To those it recognised and

it approved,it offered majorroles in history. To others, bit parts

only. Women were thus objects of poetry and the arrival of a

woman poet becomes a species of insubordination .Boland remarks thatJames Joyce was the exception and part

of his subversive power arose from breaking the traditional

linkagesbetweenwomanhood,motherhoodand theidea of Ireland.Bolandrealises thatwoman might sin in the opposite direction.

One needs to maintain the dialogue between womanhood andnationhood but make it more creative and open-ended. Shedifferentiates between poetry and ideology by noting ideology(and isms) are unambiguous, while poetry is not . It is in thiscontext thatshe disagrees with some of the feminists she admires.

She challenges Adrienne Rich's idea of separatismof the femaleexperience. Separatistthinking tempts her to regardthe whole

poetic pastas patriarchalbetrayal ... above all, it encourages herto feminise her perceptions rather than humanise her feminity.Such a process demands dialogicity which separatism does notallow. It is such a dialogicity that she sees in Anna Akhmatova's

poem [Boland 1996:149]. When Akhmatova's son Lev Gumilevis arrestedby Stalin, the poet spends agonising hours queuingoutside Leningrad prison waiting to meet him. She writes

And if ever in this country she should wantTo build me a monumentI consent to that honourButonlyon conditionhat hey

Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:

My last links with that were broken long ago,Nor by the stump in the Royal GardensWhere an inconsolable young shade is seeking meBut here, where I stood for three hundred hoursAnd where they never, never opened the doors for meLest in blessed death I should ever forgetThe grinding scream of the Black Marias,The hideous clanging gate, the oldWoman

wailinglike a wounded beast.

The genius of Akhmatova lay in welding private grief and

public woe and its precisely this sense of personal pain, of the

erotic that women return o the exhausted metaphorsof the nation

and to Irish poetry. There is a double subversion that Boland

attempts.She uses the idea of womanhood to show the desiccation

of the idea of the nation and then warns of a feminism thatmightturnintolerant and exclusive if it mimics the intolerance of the

nation.

I summon ChristaWolf, the Germanwriter as my next dissenter

[Wolf 1997]. Wolf, a leftist from GDR and a dissenter finds

herself dissenting again with the picture of a unified Germany.The idea of a unified Germany presents a picture of sanity, orderand strength, a triumph of western values and the free market

where West and East is one.ChristaWolf argues that German unity is a forced one. To use

a metaphorfrom Ugresic, East and West are like two halves ofdifferent photographs pretending to be one. It is at this moment

she engages in a debate about Germany with Habermas, Bolland other intellectuals. ForWolf, the violence of the nation-state

might begin not in the moment of defeat but on the allegedoccasion of victory. Her fears arenot about what Germanymightdo to Europe but what the different Germany's might do to each

other. The notion of Germanunity was far more attractive when

the country was divided. It offered a potential idea of the wholewhich might redeem the German past. The new Germany is

however based on the desiccated andgrim unity of industrialism.Wolf goes on to add the opening of the Stasi files prevents the

kind of philosophical scrutinyof Germanyone needs today. Onlyin Germany today can a set of files substitute for an act of

conscience. Thecomparison with the TruthCommission in South

Africa is inevitable. There, an archive was created out of acts

of confession and conscience. A nation healed or sought therapythrough an encounter between two parts. The discovery of theStasi files creates a witch hunt of suspicion where suspicioncondemns the innocent without redeeming the suspects. Propos-

ing a philosophical encounter Wolf suggests

Not only in the Eastbut also in the West of Germany,which wasdividedbyarigorous ecuritysystemand was tornapartnternally,adaptationswere made to the mentalityandculture of the super-powers hatdominated n each of the twofragmentary tates.These

adaptationshave left their marks,and have led East and WestGermans to develop different identities. Decades of living withaborder hatsplits upone's countryand causes intenseoppositionbetween the two halves is limitingto thoughton both sides. Thedual nationhoodof Germanyhas affected both populations in-

wardly. It has created an intellectual and emotional bias in theEast and in the West, which among other things has led bothcountries, n theirdifferentways, to distancethemselves fromthe

potentialof their radition nthe unifiedGerman ulture hatexistedbefore.

What Wolf suggests playfully and constructively is that Ger-

many is a hypothesis presented as a fait accompli. West andEasthave lived differently andneed to know each other.Wolf suggestsa new draftconstitution forGermanyof democratically composed

EconomicandPoliticalWeekly June7, 2003 2301



states.Shementions hatwhen he deawas irstmooted rassrootsgroupsdiscussed it passionately.Such ideas were howeverabandonedn the haste for unification.What was lost in the

processwas a chance o involve EastGermans n a largescaleconstitutional ebate hatwouldhave edthem odevelopamodelof patriotism ased on the constitution . his abandonmentf

democracy as mpoverishedhe deaofGermany. heWest eelsthat he East s ungratefulndEastbehaves ikea defeated ribethat has lost its institutions.

Wolfs work becomes a reflection on historyand an earlywarning ystem.She quotesAnne Seghersreflectionson the

trajectory f Germannationhood.Seghersnotes thatGermandemands or nationhoodwerenever madeconjointlywith de-mands for social justice. The needs of justice were alwayssmothered ythose whoappropriatedhenation orthemselves.Thistrajectoryorgesas it were the chainof misfortune, isasterand crime that has draggedGermany nto ruin. The signs are

already here.GDR is seen todayas an unconstitutionaltate,

assignedo therealmof evil. What hisdoes is to blockhistorical

thinking utmorebanally acilitate hemass scaleappropriationof the property f GDR citizens.

VII havebeen summoninghis set of writers o show the kind

of thoughtexperimentswe need to create.Europe,Africa canserveasmetaphors,euristics or thenation-states fSouthAsia.I have no policy suggestions o make. All I wish to suggestisthat hesocialscienceof thenationmustseektoescape tscurrentideas of order.Social sciences have no reallanguage o under-standcategoriesof pain,evil andsuffering.The languageand

metaphorsorthis ies in literature.t s literaturehathasgraspedthe natureof evil, shown the nation as a genreof violence. Itis toliterature nd anguagewe mustreturn oplumb hebanalityof evil resident n the nation-state.

There s a secondsubversivepossibility.The encounterbe-

tweenwomenand he nationat warhas shown hatwomenalongwith childrenare the mainvictims of war. But the encounterbetweenfeminismandthe nation-state s a patriarchalystemhas to be doublysubversive.Thedialogue howsthat hemythsof masculinity aveimpoverished ationhood. hepassive deaof the nationas motherland lso hides,conceals he real voicesof pain.Feminismcan restorecreative deas of unity,identityto the nation.And yet feminism as creativewritingcan guardagainsteminismbecomingikenationalism,n deologywithoutthe opennessthatcreativity whether n writingor politics-

requires.Whatwe needdesperately re a set of thought xperi-ments hatallowthepoliticsof thenation o invent tselfbeyondthe currentmpasse.M3

Addressfor correspondence:[email protected]

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Carlton,B Hayes (1931): TheHistoricalEvolutionof ModernNationalism,Smith, New York.

Christa,Wolf (1997): Parting rom Phantoms,Universityof ChicagoPress,Chicago.

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State Formation',New LeftReview,No 216, March-April,3-36.

Manuel,Castells (1998): TheEnd of the Millennium,Blackwell, Oxford.

Mary, Kaldor(1999):New and Old Wars, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Martin,Shaw

(2000):'The

ContemporaryMode of Warfare?

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Theory of New Wars', Review of InternationalPolitical Economy,Vol 7, No 1, Spring2000, pp 171-80.

Michel, Foucault(1973): Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanityin the Age of Reason, Vintage, New York.

Michael, Mann (1993): 'Nation States in Europe and Other Continents,

Diversifying, DevelopingNot Dying', Daedalus,Vol 122,No 3, Summer

1993, 115-40.- (1999): 'The DarkSide of Democracy:The Modern Traditionof Ethnic

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Michael,Ignatieff(1994): Blood and Belonging, VintageBooks, London.- (1997): The Warrior'sHonor, MetropolitanBooks, New York.

Parsuraman,andP V Unnikrishnan2000):IndiaDisastersReport:Towardsa Policy Initiative,OxfordUniversityPress, New Delhi.

Shiv, Visvanathan 2001): 'The GrandSociology of Manuell Castells' inJohan Mueller Nico Cloete and Shirin Badat (ed) Challenges of

Globalisation,Capetown,Maskew Miller, Longman, p 35-49.Raymond,Williams 1985):Keywords:A Vocabulary f CultureandSociety,

OxfordUniversityPress, Oxford.

Zygmunt, Bauman (1993): Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity Press,

Cambridge.

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