Straight to the point

Someone once called nationalism the most contradictory of all political ideas. If it can lead straight to the gas chambers, it can also free you from oppressive imperial powers. For every Franco or Modi there is a George Washington or Mahatma Gandhi. Nationalism can salvage cultures and languages at risk of extinction, but it can also boast of their supremacy over all others. As the most successful revolutionary movement of the modern age, it has allowed disregarded nations to break on to the world stage; it has also been a form of spiritual introversion which drives them back inside their own psyches.

Some nationalists look fondly to a past utopia before the colonial invader pitched up on their shores. There were patriotic Irish scholars in the 18th century who claimed that Irish was probably the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. One shouldn’t, however, be misled by this archaic impulse. Nationalism is a thoroughly modern ideology, which stretches back no more than about two and a half centuries. It was only around then that Europe was seized by the novel idea that to be a nation entailed having one’s own political state. There was a direct hook-up between the ethnic and the political. Human beings (which didn’t for this purpose include women) had the right to self-determination not just as people but as peoples. A crucial hyphen was inserted between the words “nation” and “state”, and a new phenomenon came into existence.

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There were problems with this revolutionary notion. For one thing, almost all so-called nations were ethnically hybrid, with the odd exception such as China, so why shouldn’t each of these ethnic groups have its own state? For another thing, nations at the time were defined largely by imperialism and colonialism. These sovereign powers played a major part in drawing up the frontiers between territories, mostly in their own material interests, so wasn’t revolutionary nationalism just an inverted mirror of its antagonist? Anyway, by what mystical logic did being Tibetan or Peruvian automatically afford you the right to your own political state? There were, to be sure, forms of so-called civic nationalism for which being Peruvian meant simply being a citizen of Peru whatever your ethnic origin, and this was to be the foundation upon which most nations were constructed; but the Romantic desire to affirm your difference, uniqueness and possible superiority as a people never lost its grip, and has recently been active on the streets of Britain.

In a long historical perspective, this summer’s rioting happened because a section of the British working class had imbibed all too well the propaganda of its social superiors. For a world of empires and dynasties to give way to one of autonomous nation-states, a seismic cultural transformation was required. People who previously thought of themselves in concrete terms as tenants of a feudal landowner and more abstractly as loyal servants of the monarch had to learn how to become French or British or Portuguese citizens. Their identities had to be remoulded and reoriented. Some of the British were rich and powerful while others were semi-destitute, but there was a bond between them — Britishness — which seemed to render such divisions irrelevant. Rich and poor could forget their quarrels and unite in the face of a demonised outsider. This, needless to say, could prove highly convenient for the rich. All social classes could come together against a common enemy, and in Britain both the French and the Irish have traditionally served this function. What also proved vital to the nation’s sense of shared identity was Protestantism, which was sadly lacking in both France and Ireland.

The problem is that this robust national identity, which answered well enough at the time to the needs of mercantile and industrial capitalism, is less and less capable of doing so under current conditions. Capitalism is now a global phenomenon, and along with it the labour market. National unity is still politically and culturally imperative, but it is increasingly out of step with the contemporary global marketplace. Culture and the economy are out of sync. This, of course, is often the case, since culture usually changes with glacial slowness while the economy can shift in an instant. But this difference has been intensified by the transition from national to transnational capitalism. Working people whose mentality has been moulded by centuries of allegiance to king and country are now being implicitly asked to acknowledge the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants haven’t robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. There are no exclusively British values which outsiders can’t or won’t share. You have been sold a fantasy by a national state in whose interests it was for you to buy this illusion, but which has transformed its nature while you have remained the same.

What you can’t accept is that transnational capitalism doesn’t care about culture or skin colour or what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden as long as it has someone to squeeze a profit out of. It is as woke in its own way as a Guardian editorial. It is the most impeccably liberal of set-ups, welcoming Malaysians to Denmark and Danes to Malaysia if this will suit its economic purposes. No mode of production has been more culture-blind. Unlike some of those who live under its rule, it is largely indifferent to questions of identity, including national or ethnic identity, since identity is a straitjacket which stops you from being mobile and adaptable. Only adolescents obsess about who they are. There are no natives any longer; instead, everyone is an expatriate, some of whom cling to the mirage of a mono-cultural country which vanished decades ago but which they still like to think of as home.

There has always been a conflict in modern capitalism between its drive for political unity and its economic plurality. As Marx points out in The Communist Manifesto, it is the most hybrid, mongrelised of life-forms, restlessly overriding boundaries, pitching bizarrely different phenomena together, mixing opposites and toppling hierarchies. Yet this diversity at the level of the marketplace must be sustained by unity at the level of the state. If we are anarchists in the shopping mall, we must be responsible citizens in the pew, classroom, polling booth or family hearth. This isn’t a contradiction that the current system is capable of resolving, any more than it can reconcile the need for cultural cohesion at home with great tides of migration surging in from abroad.

Marxism offered working people an alternative to chauvinism. It was known as internationalism, which means that a lorry driver in Sheffield has more in common with a waiter in Seoul than he has with the millionaire proprietor of his company. Such internationally based identities aren’t an illusion — think of being a Roman Catholic — but they are harder to sustain than more local ones, given that human beings are bodily creatures bound to a particular spot. Only a tiny number of zealots are likely to throw themselves on the barricades shouting “Long Live the European Union!”, let alone “Up With World Government!” How do you develop forms of consciousness which correspond to a globalised world? This has been no problem at the level of popular culture, where Taylor Swift is as much a universal commodity as money, but there are older forms of such culture to do with national pride, resentment and fear of the Other which don’t take so easily to such cosmopolitanism. The more certain citizens feel most at home in the VIP lounge of airports, the more certain others will wrap themselves defensively in the Union flag.

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Some of those who recently threw bricks at the police showed the anger and frustration of a neglected underclass, while some of them just hated foreigners and wanted to beat them up. The grotesque irony of the former’s behaviour is plain: who do you target if you are poor, humiliated, excluded and without a future? Why, the only social group (refugees) who are even poorer, more excluded and more humiliated than you are. In this sense, the centuries spent breeding patriotism and loyalty to the Empire in the common people have had a certain pay-off. The Empire was built among other things on the conviction that people of a certain culture and skin-colour were inferior to the British, a conviction that was inculcated into millions of ordinary Brits who were looking for someone to feel superior to. It’s no surprise that some of their descendants should harbour similar sentiments about Afghans and Syrians, not least when they refuse to stay obediently in their far-flung domains but have the impudence to come knocking on your door.

Our rulers look with genuine horror on the burning of hotels and the battering of the police, but they should also feel relieved that this explosion of rage isn’t directed at themselves. For it is they, after all, who run the system which causes great masses of men and women to feel that they don’t really matter. This, to be sure, is no excuse for trying to incinerate immigrants. You can feel rejected without throwing in your lot with a lout like Tommy Robinson. What the government, media and legal system don’t dare to acknowledge, however, is that this experience of rejection is entirely justified — and that unless it is addressed, the rioting will break out again.

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