by Graham Lister

“Nationalism has no special relationship to political justice; but neither does it have a particular relationship to injustice. The most obvious thing about it is, after all, that it exists…and there are no objective criteria of what is a nation – but its subjective power is compelling. A nation, therefore, said Renan, is a great solidarity founded on a consciousness of sacrifice made in the past and on willingness to make further ones in the future”.

Bernard Crick from In Defence of Politics.

Nationalism has a rancid stench. It has been thought pivotal to some of the worse horrors of recent human history, yet it will not go away. If, as a character from Joyce’s Ulysses suggests, “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” then one of the most persistent phantoms haunting our nightly terrors is nationalism, particularly in the conditions of our freshly constructed ‘global’ village, built primarily through the medium of neoliberalism (the most successful ideology in history).

In the UK thinkers as wildly different as the ‘deep-blue’ conservative Roger Scruton and the Marxian theorist of nationalism (and Scottish nationalist) Tom Nairn both write with perceptive insights into the phenomena of nations and nationalism. Like any other ism, nationalism has its own internal spectrum. And due to its overall plasticity nationalism is hard to place within any conventional political axiality. It can take almost any political form and find support from anywhere in the ideological firmament – witness the radical-chic associated with various decolonization struggles – or indeed the burbling of the blessed Saint Michel (of Foucault) over the exciting new ‘political spirituality’ unleashed by the Iranian revolutionaries. However, some forms of nationalism are generally considered to have been radio-actively toxic.

Approximately eighty years ago, events occurred, which were obscure at the time, from whose dire consequences the world has not yet totally recovered. The location was Munich, capital of the historic Kingdom of Bavaria and second city of the recently formed all-German Reich. The time was five years after the end of World War I, when this new would-be imperial state had been defeated, and then both punished harshly and utterly humbled by the victors. What was to become the most extreme currency inflation in history had begun. By that autumn the Reichsbank would be issuing 100-trillion-mark notes; it took a pocketful of them to buy a US dollar.

In the stygian murkiness, reckless and despairing forces multiplied. Munich was their favoured venue, combining as it did comparative economic backwardness, cultural vivacity and a particularism as yet incompletely reconciled to German unity. Many Bavarians perceived the latter as a form of domination; distrustful and resentful of the centralism of the Weimar Republic as much as its supposed leftism and openness to ‘Jewish influences’. One upshot of this was that all-German nationalism assumed an especially shrill and raucous form there. Immediately after the war an independent Bavarian Soviet Republic had been proclaimed under the leadership of the socialist Kurt Eisner, deposing the native Wittelsbach monarchy and calling on the other German states to follow its revolutionary example. The call was not answered, and the regime endured for only a few months [to be replaced by Ernst Toller’s even briefer Bavarian Soviet Republic - Ed]. What it did succeed in doing was to arouse the fear of death among the predominantly conservative cadres of the stately old capital on the Isar, as well as in Bavaria’s 80 percent Catholic countryside.

The significance of that milieu for the rise of German Fascism has been underlined in a remarkable study by David Large, W” title=“Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich”>Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich. His title comes from Stephan George’s poem on the city, evoking the Frauenkirche or Kirk of Our Lady, in sight of whose spires alone the true Münchner feels at home on a “soil as yet untouched by bane, in the town of folk and youth”. Within its charmed walls amiable ghosts from the past still walked in broad daylight, and blessed or consecrated the present. Later on, Thomas Mann, perhaps the greatest of Munich writers, was to give a bitterly antithetic representation of those same ghosts. Are they not also the darkly medieval spirit of ‘Kaisersaschern’ in “Doktor Faustus” - the well of the Devil himself, whose waters flow through Adrian Leverkühn’s hypnotic music before driving him to madness and death?

While Berlin was becoming one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities Munich slid irresistibly into provincialism. Among those drawn to the Bavarian capital was would-be architect Adolf Hitler. Originally a draft-dodger from the Hapsburg Empire, he joined the Bavarian army instead and became a trench-messenger during the war. We know why he liked Munich. “A heartfelt love seized me for this city”, he wrote in the 1920s, “... what a difference from Vienna! I grew sick to my stomach when I even thought back on that Babylon of races … Most of all I was attracted by this wonderful marriage of primordial power and fine artistic mood ... [which] remains inseparably bound up with the development of my own life”. The terms are interesting. Much later on ‘primordial’ became the customary term for theories ascribing an ethnic or pre-modern foundation to nineteenth-and twentieth-century nation-states. The artistic mood was that of a mind capable of imagining national community along just such lines - through the hypnotic rear-view mirror of feigned retrospect and mythology.

Hitler returned from the Bavarian army in 1919 as a ‘political education agent’ - effectively a political snitch paid to infiltrate new political organizations and report back to the authorities. One of these was a small gang of (mainly) war veterans calling itself the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or Workers’ Party. It numbered only a few dozen but was seen as having anti-Bolshevik ‘potential’. The bosses encouraged their agent to join and help fund and then lead it; and a few months later it was able to stage a successful mass meeting in the Hofbräuhaus, a city-centre beer-cellar. There something astounding happened.

The sickly-looking Austrian spoke for the first time before a large audience, announcing the movement’s new twenty-five-point radical programme while his fellow-members held opponents at bay with truncheons and well-aimed beer-mugs. The platform included nationalization of trusts and the confiscation of war profits, but that was not what gripped the listeners. It was the voice itself - a raucous, snarling furnace-blast from some scarcely human region, sounding indeed like the echo of primordial will, over-riding every doubt, uncertainty and liberal scruple. The Workers’ Party (later the National-Socialist Party, or ‘Nazis’ for short in the Munich vernacular) had made its mark. Its leader wrote afterwards: “When I finally closed the meeting, I was not alone in thinking that a wolf had been born that was destined to break into the herd of deceivers and misleaders of the people”.

In time that wolf was to come within measurable distance of continental domination. But as Large argues, the womb it gestated in was Munich, and it was with good reason that Hitler insisted this city was the spiritual home of the Third Reich. After its monstrous birth, the NSDAP grew into a mass movement capable of taking over the whole city-centre for its first rally in January 1923. Some months previously, Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Party had leapt into power following the march on Rome, and pressure mounted for a comparable coup in Bavaria. Now supported by significant parts of the Munich establishment, the Nazis planned a three-day political carnival to culminate on Sunday, 28 January. Conservative historian Karl Alexander von Müller attended its main event, and published a memoir about it. He recalled how “the hot breath of hypnotic mass enthusiasm” attained its unexampled climax as Hitler led his entourage through the shouting masses:

“He passed very close to me and I saw this was a different person from the one I had met here and there in private houses: his narrow, pale features were concentrated in wrath, cold flames leapt from his piercing eyes, which seemed to search left and right for possible enemies, as if to cast them down. Was it the mass audience that gave him this uncanny power? Or did he empower the audience with his own inner strength?”

This was the first of the ‘Party Days’ which, after 1933, were turned into great state and media occasions. The best known is that of 1934, filmed by régime cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl as Triumph of the Will. But the triumphalist path was laid eleven years before, when the party occupied and defended its original lair against rivals and opponents, with the connivance of a local élite more afraid of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and a heartless capitalism than of those claiming to voice ancestral blood and instinct.

What was the source of the latter’s hypnotic power? On a personal level the physical voice was obviously important. Innumerable commentators would remark, like Müller, on Hitler’s insignificance and ordinariness. But part of his authority must have lain in the sheer contrast between these features and his vocal cords. When he projected his voice in public it was as if the ‘wolf’ was released, its power bizarrely amplified by the banality of the source. As McLuhan observed in the 1960s, the voice was coincidentally appropriate to the new communication age just then being inaugurated by radio.

“Where Ghosts Walked” throws more light upon one specific and important factor in the equation. Large’s emphasis on Bavaria suggests how the specific toxins of German nationalism arose partly out of a fierce, sometimes almost irresolvable, tension between locality and centralized power. Detestation of Berlin and Prussia was endemic among Bavarians, and heartily reciprocated in the Prussian counter-myth of Munich as a hicksville of beer-swilling cretins, mediocre painters and slaves to the crucifix. In fact, there were Nazis who despaired of Hitler’s obsession with the South - at one point Goebbels even proposed expelling “the petit-bourgeois Hitler” from the movement unless he shook off its pernicious influence. But what the Austrian ‘outsider’ may have instinctively grasped was the fruitfulness of that very tension. The wide disparities of Germany - a loose collection of smaller kingdoms until only one generation previously - could only be fused effectively together by a violently addictive ideology, through beliefs imbued with the force of traditional religion, plus the most modern media-techniques. And the materials for this forging process were most conspicuously present in Munich.

The Wilhelmine Reich had been a hastily-assembled and ramshackle structure, still haunted by the shades of mediaevalism. Its defeat in 1918 and the subsequent crazy economic landslides of 1922–23 and 1929 fostered a special sort of disorientation, where these ghosts were at once reanimated, quite unreconciled to the new Republic, and yet had nowhere to retreat to. In Large’s account, Bavarian separatism haunted every moment of Munich politics - yet almost no one really wanted to risk a return to the Wittelsbach monarchy. But at the same time the Nazis dangled a heady escape-route before those caught in this dilemma: they suggested that Bayern could become the font of true ‘Germanness’, within which rural backwardness would be magically changed into universal mission - into a redemptive crusade to fuse province with Reich, then Germany with the world. The biological science of the period supposedly guaranteed the deal. And now the contract was enunciated by a voice unleashed from some outer - or was it inner? - exultant darkness, the clamorous shriek of Beelzebub himself.

A wider historical and theoretical problem is also implicitly addressed by Large’s argument. In most accounts of the development of nationalism, the processes of Italian and German unification have figured in a highly favourable light. Liberal and left-leaning histories generally critical of ‘narrow nationalism’ have viewed the late nineteenth-century Italian and German states with approval - indisputably progressive victories over ‘feudalism’, the bringing together of non-viable petty statelets. Does not such ‘modernisation’ in some way prefigure present day demands, when again, nation-states ought to be effectively dissolving themselves and joining up into regional blocks such as the EU rather than stasis or breaking up (such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the USSR have -and possibly they will be joined by the UK and Belgium)?

But there was always an awkward downside to the bland vision of ‘progressive nationalism’ in these cases, and it is here that “Where Ghosts Walked” has most relevance. Regrettably, both these great and exemplary unification projects ended in Fascism. Indeed they invented the beast. Was this just bad luck? Anything but, however we must reinterpret the rise of Hitlerism more circumspectly and with more careful attention to its particular regional and national roots. After he got out of Munich, Thomas Mann denounced the degeneration of his city’s culture into “high-flown, wishy-washy cant, full of mystical euphoria with hyphenated prefixes like race- and folk- and fellowship-”, but he failed to underline sufficiently how the cant responded to the profound moral failure of the Wilhelmine state. Similarly, Italian Fascism - with equally strong regional roots, a comparable charismatic chieftain and quasi-military organization - demolished Risorgimento Liberalism and the Savoy monarchy by ‘marching on Rome’ (or, more exactly, by threatening to).

In both situations, hastily created state-unions had dissolved a host of older countries - city and princely states, early-modern or even mediaeval kingdoms - in a way intended to be final, and which indeed still appeared so in the circumstances of the 1920s. In that imperialist or big-state world very few thought seriously of returning to the Dukedom of Tuscany, or the kingdom of Piedmont, to Hanover, Bremen city-state or Bavaria. And yet liberal-progressive unity, the grandly proclaimed wider identity, had clearly foundered. What way out was there but a drastic reformulation of that identity along hyper-reactionary illiberal-populist lines, emphasizing the things either denied or side-lined by the former unity regimes? But such emphasis demanded an oneiric or even inebriate style, since in conditions of crisis only the headiest concoction had a hope of transcending the gross regional/national contrasts still alive over both territories.

It should also be remembered that high-flown mystical and esoteric euphoria about the Volk gained an added electrical charge from the conversion-process itself. This is what Hitler and Mussolini counted on, and it becomes much more visible on the smaller scale. A Lombard or a Sicilian, a Rhinelander or a Bavarian who bought into being ‘Italian’ or ‘German’ in their new fantasized sense would almost certainly do so to excess. Repression of one identity-format is best achieved by fanatical embrace of another - something that was quite familiar in Britain, in Welsh, Irish and Scottish conditions. In the post-World War I era the available formula for such non-democratic ‘rebirth’ was provided by the mythology of crude Social Darwinism and other ancillary notions - ideas then quite widely held, we should not forget, in the UK, France and America as well. In fact they were pretty influential in the British Labour Party, as typified in the early career of Harold Laski. A recent biography has demonstrated to what an astonishing extent the early life of both Laski and his wife Frida Kerry was dominated by the eugenics movement.

However, another lesson in Large’s story is the sheer complexity of the conditions needed to generate disaster on that scale. In other circumstances the same ideas led to quite different consequences - or, as in Britain, just evaporated in the face of new challenges. Blaming such catastrophes on ‘nationalism’ alone is as much use as blaming a violent storm on the weather (as such). Tom Nairn” title=“W”>W, in particular, is one thinker who has developed a framework for comparatively examining some of these twentieth-century cataclysms, thus producing a tentative outline of their origins which depend, in fact, upon a wide range of necessary conditions. These, Nairn suggests, can be assembled, fortunately, only by exceptional means, and even then temporarily. A wide range of unusual and highly atypical precipitating factors, beyond nationalism per se, are needed for the disastrous societal ‘explosions’ which have brought about genocidal pandemonium, and closer-range studies like “Where Ghosts Walked” or Ben Kiernan’s The Pol Pot Regime make this a lot more obvious.

If one comparatively examines some twentieth-century cataclysms, then a tentative list of the range of causal factors, according to Nairn’s conceptual scheme, might look something like this:

Nationalism (ethno-linguistic/racial)

Identity trauma (defeat, lateness, deformation/inorganic formation)

Landslide crisis (socio-economic catastrophe)

Missionary ideology (life-or-death conviction/imminent emergency)

External threat (real/imagined)

Rurality (peasantry or recent transition)

One-party state (totalitarianism)

Uniformed mobilization

In a more distant or superficial perspective ‘nationalism’ - in the sense of ethnic or racial nationalism - has often been made the main, or even the sole, cause of such disasters. Argument then goes round in inescapable circles. If ethno-nationalist politics is always responsible for the horror, and (as most broad-brush analysts tend also to believe) is ‘inescapable’ and recurrent, then history settles down into the sad business of waiting for ‘the next time’, and doing one’s (probably futile) best to exorcise fate in advance by promoting multiculturalism etc. But ,actually, this is little more than headline-history, in the service of a rather shallow world-view.

Nairn has suggested the most salient ideological feature of such crises is obviously some form of nationalist belief, which is presumably why it gets seized on as the guilty culprit. However, its critical impact has been inseparable from two accompanying conditions: a structural ‘identity’ cramp or developmental antagonism, and a recent or ongoing ‘landslide’ or societal shock instilling deep personal fears - a sense of the societal earth actually giving way. Large gives a vivid idea of how these functioned in 1920s Bavaria. Two other examples can be used here, we know what the equivalents were: for Cambodians, an historical dread of disappearance, followed closely by being carpet-bombed ‘into the Stone Age’; for the ex-Yugoslavs, the repressed inheritance of Greater-Serb identity, reanimated in circumstances of both rapid political (state) and economic collapse.

Yet even these conditions might not have generated catastrophes without some or all of the other factors indicated in the framework outlined above as the ‘missionary’ or crusading mentality capable of turning national aspiration into a version of imperialism, and an associated ‘foreign foe’ used to foster such paranoia. Psychologically, the two things have usually been linked together by the fixed idea of ‘life or death’ - that is, the immediacy of the threat to communal existence (in which individuals feel a personal stake) that appears sustainable only by an external drive against those bent on the people’s subjugation, or worse their death.

It is also seems significant that uniforms figure prominently in most situations of this kind: they are a way of both legitimating and advertising violently radical aims. Hence either military or para-military formations have canalized and taken over most ethnic violence, and the biggest offenders have been, not surprisingly, those of the state - with Indian ‘communalist’ violence as the most important exception. But ‘the state’ in most cases has meant ‘the Party’: all such cataclysms have also been struggles either to obtain one-party autocracy (Germany) or to reinforce and preserve it (Cambodia, Greater Serbia/Yugoslavia and Rwanda). The Party in turn can function only through an autocratic Leader.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that this complex reconfiguration of ethno-nationalism has normally had a powerfully rural or small-town foundation. This has often tended to be overlooked, partly through misunderstanding of the all-powerful German example. It is easy for modern commentators to forget just how rural the Germany of Hitler and Heidegger was, above all the South Germany portrayed in Large’s book. He depicts what today cannot help seeming a largely different and lost Central European world. As he is careful to underline in the Epilogue, the wolf’s lair of Nazism was far removed indeed from today’s Munich, one of the greatest industrial conurbations in Europe. Back in the 1920s it was still the overgrown, easy-going ‘county-town’ of a largely peasant culture. Cambodia of the 1970s and Rwanda of the 1990s were virtually 100 per cent peasant nations. At the moment of Yugoslav collapse, both Bosnia and Serbia remained far less touched by a process of halting industrialization than many outside observers realized - is this not why they were able to produce a ‘village war’?

This element may also help us towards a tentative general chronology of ethno-nationalist disaster. Such explosions seem to have been intimately linked to the moment of rural-urban transition - ‘moment’ here meaning not ‘instant’ but a developmental/historical phase, possibly multi-generational in duration and yet with a determinable beginning and end. In it wolves like Mussolini, Hitler, Milosevic, and Pol Pot were born. They were products less of the countryside and peasant culture than of the new lairs of forced passage, in which ancient attitudes and reflexes conducted a survival-battle against modernity, of necessity emotionally violent and rooted in an over-idealized past. These were also among the ‘ghosts’ of Large’s book, and sometimes they won, for a time. But if some of them are still around, or pending, at least we can see they are not inscribed in human nature or history or indeed in nationalism as a political phenomena. All their baleful presence implies is that the ‘moment’, in the complex sense outlined - modernization, urbanization and their up-dated descendant ‘globalization’ - is itself far from over.

How then might this analysis be extended and wider issues related to it? Firstly, much of the same background conditions seem to be part of other disastrous social spasms – namely the revolutions in what became the USSR and China. Economically underdeveloped, largely quasi-agrarian societies (almost nothing of a genuine industrial proletariat existed in Russia at the time of the revolution – ditto China). So were these occulted nationalist phenomena? Unlikely. However, structurally within these events the intra-societal bourgeoisie (and ‘other enemies of the people’ like the wider inter-societal bourgeoisie), can replace the radical threat to the life and well-being of the ‘at risk’ community. The source and identity of the threat is malleable.

At this point, though, differences seem to emerge – is not Communism a predominately forward-looking, ‘jam tomorrow’ style ideology whilst Fascism is essentially a backwards-looking ‘defensive’ ideology? This leads to the interesting debate about what Fascism is. Was Fascism a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary phenomenon - were Fascist movements ideologically coherent or inchoate? This question has always been the central dividing-line in the serious literature about it, perhaps best illustrated by the differing approaches and perspectives in the, relatively recently published work of Michael Mann (Fascists) and Robert Paxton, (Anatomy of Fascism) - with the former in the counter-revolutionary camp and the latter in the revolutionary school. As I fear I have already tested the patience of any reader I will not go into details of the debate other than to suggest why cannot it be both? All ideologies have an ‘internal spectrum’. Hayek and Rawls are both liberal thinkers yet represent different branches of the liberal tradition. And the idea of Norwegian social democracy and the regime of North Korea both being ‘socialist hellholes’ is only for the hard of thinking that believe Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck to be political philosophers. What is it, structurally, about nearly all significant ideologies that allows them to have such flexibility of interpretation from a nexus of common assumptions such that they are, at best, semi-coherent?

My own thoughts are that political ideologies have, at least, two related functions. Firstly they are tacit attempts to descriptively model underlying social realities and thus find the most salient ontological features of human societies. Secondly they are also prescriptive – given that, say the unencumbered self and the volitionality ‘free-floating’ individual, is the cardinal ontological commitment of liberal theory (what it thinks is really ‘real’), what then follows is an attempt at promoting what is thought to be a deep-truth of the human condition, such that our constructed social-reality best matches the underlying putative realities. But the models are very low in their resolution of all of the complexities of human affairs, thus how one transcribes them into prescriptive norms and values, policy ideas etc., is very much open to interpretation. Equally to have real socio-cultural traction all ideologies must be quite broad-brush phenomena such that a wide cross-section can broadly agree on where the somewhat fuzzy boundaries between their ideas and other rival ideas lie. If an ideology is hyper-prescriptive in its demarcation criterion it probably isn’t going to have very much of a future or to be perpetually marginal.

My own view is that Fascism is a heterogeneous phenomenon. Its general outer form is hyper-reactionary ‘defensive’ conservatism and, as such, often picks up the detritus of history simply because it is antediluvian, ipso facto, it is worthy. Witness for example the obsession of many prominent Nazis with matters ‘esoteric’ and the occult - so much so that official units were established to investigate such nonsense (some things really are best left in the dustbin of history). But within such a framework of hyper-reaction there is a rational kernel (I use the word rational with caution) lurking within. It is this; if society is so rotten that an extreme reaction is indispensable to correct its trajectory, then it is not conceptually incoherent to extend the logic of such ideas to think a revolutionary societal ‘reboot’ (to vivifying effect) is necessitated by such circumstances. Thus, both impulses are contained in what might be termed ‘revolutionary reactionarism’. In fact utopian visions and dystopian fears often feed from each other in a dialectical dance of amplification and mutual reinforcement:

“...This was a ‘moment of madness’ - a revolutionary, romantic moment when an entire society seems to be up for grabs. In these moments, fundamental change appears irresistible for a brief moment, all seems possible, all within reach. Across time, people who get caught up in moments of madness imagine that their own ‘radiant vision’ is at hand: a workers’ paradise, a grass-roots democracy, fraternié-egalité-liberté, or the Second Coming of Jesus. The utopian imagination is – suddenly, powerfully, briefly – inflamed by the immediate prospects of radical change, by visions of an apocalypse now”.

Historian Stephen O’Leary describing the ‘Great Awakening’ of the 1700s

Are the Elysian fields in sight? Or their next door neighbour ‘the best of all possible worlds’ after one or two simple, or is that simple-minded, manoeuvres? Of course, at this juncture the issue of what ontological commitments about the true realities of human affairs revolutionary Fascism makes must be considered. Here we turn to Aristotelian issues of political mereology – what is the proper relationship between the parts and whole in the polis? And the parallel question of who or what is a proper, legitimate, part of the polis? The parts can be members of a family and the whole the family as such, or individuals and the state, or states and a federal authority etc.

Fascism and communism both seek a form of ‘ontological fusion’ – that in one bound any space or differentiation between the parts and whole is effectively abolished, by fiat, in an act of both vaulting ambition and stunning folly. In Communism the proletariat embodies everyone, it is the whole and parts fused into a single homogeneous political subject (and don’t dare disagree, they have ways of dealing with counter-revolutionaries), and in Fascism the site of fusion becomes ‘the Volk’ or the nation. And are not such temptations also pregnant within radical Islam and the concept of Ummah Wahida in the Qur’an (the doctrine of “One Community” unified under Islamic law and piety)? Are we not in the territories mapped by Eric Voegelin in his schemata of ‘political theologies’?

The apple of utopian impulses always contains the worm of totalitarian temptation. The outer form might be class conflict, the nation, the body of believers, or indeed just about anything. But that such temptations will permanently remain a possibility, so long as organised political communities exist, does not mean that the sometime seductive siren call should be answered in the affirmative. Catastrophe awaits those that heed the call and land upon the island of Anthemoessa mistaking it for Schlaraffenland, no matter how they may be dressed. Nationalism need not end in such disastrous voyages.