The Retribalization of the Modern World: How the Revival of

Ancient Sentiments Leads to Persisting Nationalist and

Ethnic Conflicts

Daniel Chirot

Ab Imperio, 3/2008, pp. 23-46 (Article)

Published by Ab Imperio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2008.0029

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/561285/summary

Access provided at 20 Aug 2019 20:29 GMT from Stockholms universitet

 Ab Imperio, 3/2008

Daniel CHIROT

THE RETRIBALIZATION OF THE MODERN WORLD:

HOW THE REVIVAL OF ANCIENT SENTIMENTS
LEADS TO PERSISTING NATIONALIST AND ETHNIC
CONFLICTS

Most of the best scholars who wrote about theories of nationalism in

the last third of the twentieth century disliked it, and most current writing
on this subject follows their lead. The process of demeaning nationalism,
however, has led to a serious underestimation of its persistent power and
its common corollary, ethnic conflict.
Eric Hobsbawm, the preeminent Marxist historian of our times, fol-
lowed a well-established tradition that interpreted nationalism as a kind of
false consciousness foisted on populations by the bourgeoisie and hoped
that it could be replaced by working-class international solidarity. Hob-
sbawm’s writing has been far more nuanced than that of most other Marx-
ists, but he nevertheless made his dislike of nationalism clear, and analyzed
it as an obsolete bourgeois phenomenon destined to go away.1 In various
essays, Marxist theoreticians Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein were
more direct in associating official nationalism, racism, and various kinds
of ethnic-based politics as efforts to mislead the working classes.2 In their
1
Eric J. Hobsbawm. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge, 1992.
2
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.
London, 1991.
23
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
view, this was just another way for the world capitalist system to avoid the
inevitable day of revolution.
Benedict Anderson’s criticism of nationalism was more subtle.3 He
found some merit in the anticolonial ideology of Latin American elites that
led to wars of independence against Spain, and of subsequent anticolonial
nationalism in general. But he viewed Western nationalism, considered by
most other theorists to be the original source of modern nationalism, with
undisguised contempt, particularly the English version. Furthermore, his
catchy title, “Imagined Communities,” cleverly dismissed the whole phe-
nomenon of nationalism as artificial. His constructionist theory only seemed
to claim that nationalism is a social artifact rather than a biological one based
on real blood ties, and that this is what “imagined” meant. Actually, hardly
any serious scholar would disagree, and other leading theorists such as John
Breuilly4 and Ernest Gellner5 agreed. The word “imagined,” however, slyly
suggested something artificial that can be created quickly with manipulated
“print capitalism,” and therefore, something that can be undone because it
is merely “imagined.” This, I believe, was an effective way of demeaning
the twentieth century’s most powerful ideological current, and led to the
proliferation of a theoretical tradition that sees all social phenomena as
“imagined.” Of course, they all are in some sense since they are created
by human thought, but saying this about nationalism misses reasons for its
power and persistence and opens the way for underestimating the genuine
strength of closely related ethnic politics. Calls for ethnic solidarity make
claims that the ethnic community is based on shared kinship, even if that is
also partly or even largely fictitious. Both nationalism and ethnic solidarity
nevertheless answer some very strong needs of most people in the modern
world, and whether or not theorists like it, most who feel it deeply hardly
think it is just “imagined.”
Defenders of Anderson’s theory correctly point out that he never ex-
plicitly equated “imagined” with “unreal.” Anderson certainly accepted the
reality of nationalist sentiments. In a revealing interview with Alexander
Semyonov published in the journal Ab Imperio, Anderson said, “Without
my really intending this... Imagined Communities is today read by many
people as the onset of the ‘cultural turn’ and a forerunner of postmodernist
thinking. But this view of the book is quite misleading. Much of it is firmly
3
Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. Revised and expanded edition. London,
1991.
4
John Breuilly. Nationalism and the State. Chicago, 1994.
5
Ernest Gellner. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, 1983.
24
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
historicist-structuralist.”6 In the same interview, however, Anderson also
said, “I too think nations exist. But they exist in a manner that is closer to
the way that Emma Bovary and Ivan Karamazov exist rather than that of the
Eiffel Tower.”7 For someone who views himself as much a literary critic as
a political scientist, that is a rather stunning comment. To what extent Flau-
bert’s Madame Bovary or Dostoevsky’ Brothers Karamazov reflect social
reality or influenced political and social opinions after they were published
is something worth discussing. But these were fictional characters in novels,
whereas the Eiffel Tower is a real construction. Therefore, ultimately, for
Anderson, nations are real because they are fictions that reflect a kind of
reality, but fictions nevertheless, unlike the political and material structures
that underpin states. That is why his seeming surprise about being interpreted
as a postmodernist rings a bit hollow, and why his many postmodernist fol-
lowers have correctly interpreted his intentions.
The acclaim bestowed on Imagined Communities obscured some other
major problems in Anderson’s analysis that are shared with more explicitly
Marxist theories of nationalism. He began his book by asking himself why
there was a war between Vietnam and Cambodia in 1978-1979. He blamed
the French who artificially created new kinds of state-centered nationalism
in their colony of Indochina. Anderson never asked why the Khmer Rouge
regime was so bloody, or why communist revolutionaries in Southeast Asia,
as elsewhere, so successfully used nationalism and xenophobic ethnic pride
to legitimize their rule, and actually seemed to believe their own propaganda.
Instead he claimed they just “inherited” (as he put it) the wiring of the old
states they replaced.8 Nor in his other writings on Southeast Asia that are
so critical of various non-Marxist regimes has there ever been even a hint
of criticism of the communist states, except inasmuch as they perpetuated
some prerevolutionary aspects of their rule.9
We know that wherever communist regimes gained a strong measure of
legitimacy it was primarily because of their nationalism. This was as true
in Southeast Asia as in the Soviet Union (with Russian nationalism), Cuba,
China, Romania, Albania, or North Korea. Anderson can only meet this fact
with a contemptuous sneer that mocks nationalism. After all, his other most
6
Alexander Semyonov and Benedict Anderson. Interview with Benedict Anderson. We
Study Empires as We Do Dinosaurs; Nations, Nationalism, and Empire in a Critical
Perspective // Ab Imperio. 2003. No. 3. Pp. 57-73. Here P. 64.
7
Ibid. P. 63.
8
Anderson. Imagined Communities. P. 160.
9
Benedict Anderson. The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the
World. London, 1998.
25
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
famous phrase, that nationalism is the product of “print capitalism,” raises
questions about why in noncapitalist communist societies it played such an
important role. As we will see, even the notion that “print” was necessary can
be questioned because stories about ethnic origins and kinship that closely
resembled modern nationalism were around thousands of years ago. Yet,
it is important for Anderson to stress “print capitalism” because in a sense
it absolves communist revolutionaries of the repression and wars they let
loose on behalf of their nationalisms, and lays the blame, instead, on what
they inherited and failed to eradicate.
This is not to deny that there is something particularly modern about the
contemporary form of nationalism, or that political elites used intellectuals
and various kinds of media to propagate it. Ernest Gellner,10 who also mocked
some of the aspects of nationalism, at least stressed the fact that modern
nationalism is an essential force needed to keep states functioning. Both
economically and politically, without a common culture, usually a common
dominant language, sometimes a common religion, but at the very least a
common way of working together and a unifying ideology, the modern state
cannot meet the challenges presented by its more unified neighbors. States
whose various culturally defined groups lack a common nationalism have
been the great disasters of the last half of the twentieth century: Yugoslavia,
Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, a few (but interest-
ingly, not most) parts of India, some parts of the former Soviet Union, and
most sub-Saharan African countries ranging from giants like the Sudan and
Congo to much smaller examples like Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau. Nor
should this come as a surprise, since the catastrophes of the earlier twenti-
eth century were partly the result of the failure of multinational empires to
absorb their many different culturally defined communities into a national
whole. The Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in particular failed dramatically
to create a unifying sense of nationalism. This not only led to their collapse,
but left legacies of violent conflict that have persisted to our own times.11
The ethnic cleansings, massacres, and wars that have resulted led Rogers
Brubaker12 to call the most dramatic outcomes an “unmixing” of different
ethnic populations that had previously lived together under imperial rule.
But just because there is a form of nationalism that is tied to modern
states trying to turn themselves into nation-states legitimized by a sense of
10
Gellner. Nations and Nationalism.
11
Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (Eds.). After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and
Nation-Building. Boulder, 1997.
12
Rogers Brubaker. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge, 1996.
26
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
shared community and culture, this hardly means that the sentiments that
lie behind the urge to create communal bonds are in any sense new.
We have to ask why nationalism is so powerful if it is something foisted
on people by self-interested elites whose primary goal is only to strengthen
the states they dominate and to perpetuate their own power. Why, after so
many awful wars, genocides, and ethnic cleansings in the twentieth century,
do both nationalism and ethnic consciousness continue to thrive, and if
anything, seem to be growing in intensity?
From the beginning of human societies, deeply rooted feelings of group
solidarity were required to provide the basis for cooperation in the face of
constant challenges from other human groups and from the ever-changing
natural environment. At first it was kinship, and when the size of groups
grew, common cultural habits became a proxy for direct kinship. This is
what Emile Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity.”13 In passing, it is worth
noting that his terminology was as ideologically determined as Anderson’s,
or most other prominent social theoreticians. “Organic” for modern sounded
better in an intellectual milieu dominated by worries about the disintegration
of social bonds produced by modernity, even though Durkheim’s descrip-
tion of modern society as a set of differentiated parts all working together
sounds more like a machine than the smaller, more closely kin-based social
groupings he called primitive. These might have been called more “organic,”
except that this would then have defeated his ideological goal of “scientifi-
cally” showing how modern societies could become more integrated in ways
that did not ask for a return to primitive conditions.
All bands, clans, villages, tribes, and eventually chieftainships and
states needed some kind of binding ideology, and these evolved from real
to somewhat fictionalized kinship, particularly as successful political units
absorbed ever larger groups around their original cores. Modern national-
ism is nothing but a further iteration of this tendency to claim some kind of
kinship among large numbers of people living in a particular state.
Religious belief, always part of the cultural baggage holding societies
together in spiritual kinship also evolved from locally based (or what have
been variously called animist, shamanistic, or pagan) religions to so-called
world religions, that is, typically, those fostered by imperial structures try-
ing to create some sense of unity among disparate conquered tribes and
peoples.

13
Emile Durkheim. The Division of Labor in Society. New York, 1984 [Original 2nd
edition, 1897].
27
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
Nationalisms everywhere have tried to combine these various elements
of older forms of solidarity to hold together larger societies, and where they
have failed to unite most populations within a state, that has led to bitter
internal ethnic, regional, and religious conflicts. Taking too functionalist a
view of this, the way Gellner did, misses the point that human beings need
to feel part of supportive groups to be secure, and this is so ingrained in us
that it cannot be avoided. Alone, we are weak and helpless. If our group, at
any level, is under threat, we react with alarm and cling more resolutely to
social formations capable of protecting us. When it is successful, national-
ism can meet that need, and when it is not, the unleashed passions leading
to internal conflicts within states go far beyond mere practical issues.
Nationalism actually existed in many ancient states. No better docu-
mented example exists than the ancient, but constructed (or as Anderson
would have it “imagined”) community of Jews whose invented history and
genealogy are spelled out in their Bible. Contemporary archaeological find-
ings suggest that there was no Egyptian exile, no Exodus and wandering in
the Sinai, and no great kingdom of David and Solomon. Rather, the Bible
pieced together bits of old legends about leaders of small tribes with a set
of religious exhortations and laws demanding complete obedience to the
Jewish God. This was done mostly in the seventh century BCE, with later
additions. The political geography in the Bible ascribed to more ancient
times fits very well with the era in which it came into existence, not with
prior periods. The Jews were probably Canaanites who gradually adopted
and eventually codified their new religion, and in the process created a
new nation that became a real one. Their fictitious history was written as
the word of their God, and turned into what most of them believed to be a
true account of their past. That would explain the constant exhortation to
exterminate so many of their neighbors, especially the Canaanites, whose
religious practices may originally have been similar, but whose continu-
ing polytheistic practices threatened the monopoly of belief demanded by
Yahweh (an Anglicized transliteration of the original Hebrew YHWH). The
whole story, amended later on to fit with ongoing political events, strives to
explain why the chosen people suffered so many political catastrophes. It was
because they failed to follow the strict laws demanding complete devotion
to their God, and did not eliminate Canaanite religious practices sufficiently.
Thus, the frequent Biblical calls for purification and genocide make perfect
sense, and the Bible worked brilliantly to create a nation that has survived
in various forms until, two and a half millennia later, it was recreated as an
intensely modern nation state. (This rather contentious version of Biblical
28
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
history is spelled out in the two volumes written by Israel Finkelstein and
Neil Asher Silberman.14) There is no doubt that modern Zionism was a reac-
tion to the rise of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe, itself a
product of the intensification of modern European nationalism, but the idea
of a Jewish nation itself is much older and obviously predates both print
and capitalism, though much of its longevity indeed can be ascribed to the
genius of the written Biblical text created by devout intellectuals.
There were many other ancient examples. Reading Thucydides’s ac-
count of the Peloponnesian Wars it is hard to miss the fact that the Greek
City-States were small nations that enjoyed a sense of patriotism and mass
solidarity, at least among their free citizens, and that this closely parallels
modern nationalism.15 The same was true of the Roman Republic until it
was well on its way to becoming a great empire.16 This was the basis of An-
thony Smith’s exemplary work claiming that many of the nations of Eurasia
had an ancient ethnic origin. Though his work has been mischaracterized
as “primordialist,” he does not believe in the kind of biological origin of
nations often used by nationalist writers to justify their own nation’s supe-
riority and right to treat others within their state who are not deemed to be
of indigenous blood as inferiors who do not belong. Smith’s work does not
even deny that ethnonationalist identities are created and legitimized by
various historical mythologies; his claim, however, is that this has not been
an exclusively modern phenomenon.17
The seeming disjunction between more ancient and modern forms of
nationalism is resolved by noting that in most of the highly populated regions
of the world there was a long period of history during which older versions
of nationalism did indeed become much less common. This was because
of the rise of larger kingdoms and empires that took over so many different
cultural spaces that integration into a common culture was neither possible
nor even necessary under the political conditions of premodern empires.
Elites and masses became effectively disconnected from each other because
of enormous gaps in social habits, ways of thinking, wealth, and even spatial
location. (See, for example, Barkey18 on the history of the Ottoman Empire
14
Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed. New York, 2001;
Idem. David and Solomon. New York, 2006.
15
Thucydides. Translated by Rex Warner. History of the Peloponnesian War. London,
1972; Donald Kagan. The Peloponnesian War. London, 2003.
16
Adrian Goldsworthy. Caesar: Life of a Colossus. New Haven, 2006. Pp. 10-29.
17
Anthony D. Smith. The Ethnic Origin of Nations. Oxford, 1986.
18
Karen Barkey. Empire of Differences. New York, 2008.
29
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
that thrived by allowing diversity until this strategy no longer worked in
the age of rising nationalism in the nineteenth century.)
As another of many examples we can cite Egypt. There probably was a
sense of mass Egyptian nationalism for a long time, especially from the time
of the New Kingdom in the sixteenth century BCE and for the next thousand
years because the various dynasties ruled over the same space, and society
experienced great economic and cultural continuity.19 Eventually, however,
after periods of foreign rule under Assyrians and Persians, Egypt came un-
der the rule of Greek Macedonians who ruled it for almost three centuries.
The Ptolemies who governed from the Greek-speaking, cosmopolitan city
of Alexandria left traditional religious practices in place for the sake of
keeping the population politically quiet, but ordinary Egyptians could no
longer associate their own culture with that of the ruling state. According
to Plutarch, the first of the Ptolemaic rulers to actually learn the language
of the common people, ancient Egyptian (which has survived as the ritual
language of Christian Egyptian Copts) was the very last of these rulers, the
famous Cleopatra VII, lover of Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony.20 Before her,
for almost three centuries the Ptolemaic kings and queens did not even take
the trouble to learn the language of most of their subjects. There followed
a long period of Roman and Byzantine rule, and a drastic religious change
when Egypt was Christianized. By the time of the Arab conquest in the
seventh century, there was little will to resist either foreign occupation or ac-
culturation. Even then, gradual Islamization and Arabization were followed
by a very long period of foreign domination by various Turkic and Kurdish
dynasties, by Mamelukes, Ottoman Turks, an Albanian royal dynasty, and
finally British domination.21 So, modern Egyptian nationalism developed
very much along the lines proposed by Anderson and Gellner, as an anti-
imperialist ideology led by intellectuals and officials exposed to Western
European education and historical example, hoping to unite their masses in
a revolutionary transformation. This nationalism combined a sense of both
Egyptian and Arab identity that has created a whole new set of myths and
emotions inspired by a sense of common identity and strongly reinforced by
mass education and a grand nationalist modernization project.22 That Egypt,
19
Bruce G. Trigger, B. J. Kemp, D. O’Connor, and A. B. Lloyd. Ancient Egypt: A Social
History. Cambridge, 1983.
20
Adrian Goldsworthy. Caesar: Life of a Colossus. New Haven, 2006. P. 438.
21
Afaf Lutfi Sayyid-Marsot. A History of Egypt: From the Arab Conquest to the Present.
Cambridge, 2007.
22
Adeed Dawisha. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair.
Princeton, 2003. Pp. 135-159.
30
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
ruled for so long by foreigners, was changed by the development of mass
nationalism in the twentieth century does not mean, however, that there had
not been something similar, a kind of cultural communal identity, thousands
of years earlier. In between, the masses of Egyptian peasants obviously held
on to important identities and sources of social support from their religion,
their village, and their family, but probably not through any great sense of
identity with whatever state elite happened to be ruling them. Therefore,
unlike today, they could not be mobilized to resist foreign domination of
their state, or for any other grand purpose.
We can find similar modern transformations throughout the world, even
where some variety of nationalism is very old. Writing about premod-
ern China and Japan, for example, Reischauer and Fairbank labeled the
combination of ethnocentrism and loyalty to a common cultural model as
“culturalism” rather than modern “nationalism.”23 The difference between
that and modern nationalism until the nineteenth century for Japan and the
early twentieth century in China was that this common sentiment was shared
by an elite, literate, bureaucratic neo-Confucian class in China and an elite
warrior class in Japan, but was not part of any mass support for the state as
such. The existence of a culturally aware and united elite class in China and
Japan, as well as in neo-Confucian Vietnam and Korea, contributed greatly
to the ability of these societies to rapidly develop a more modern, mass
nationalism in the twentieth century. Thus the modern forms of nationalism
were built on older and related, though more limited elite equivalents. Soci-
ologist Gi-Wook Shin has shown how in Korea this elite kind of culturally
based nationalism existed long before the twentieth century, but it was the
emergence of Japan as a great power, and eventually as the colonial master
of Korea, that stimulated both a revival of interest in Korean tradition and
a mass movement that adopted an ethnic, blood-based kind of nationalism
that has come to view the Korean nation as a large, anciently solidary family
deserving a united state. Both North and South Korea share this sentiment
and both have claimed to be the legitimate representatives of that ethnic,
supposedly blood-based, ancient nationalism.24
The modern state provides so many necessary benefits, jobs, economic
investments, education, pensions, law courts, and protection from domes-
tic criminals and foreign invaders, as well as emotional satisfaction and a
sense of community that having it ruled by foreigners, or those considered
23
Edwin O. Resichauer and John K. Fairbank. East Asia: The Great Tradition. Boston,
1960. Pp. 290-292; 617-618.
24
Gi-Wook Shin. Ethnic Nationalism in Korea. Stanford, 2006.
31
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
to belong to different cultural communities, has become at best disturb-
ing, and at worst, intolerable. This is not a new sentiment as it was pres-
ent in the past in tribal societies and small states, but it was a feeling that
waned during the period of large agrarian empires when states were not
expected to deliver much of anything except reasonable security, and
provoked uprisings only when they overtaxed their peasants so much that
these were threatened with famine, or failed to protect their subjects from
overly destructive wars.
During those times, religion was also an important source of comfort, but
underneath the vast expanse of great “world religions,” Islam, Christianity,
Buddhism, for a time Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism, it was local practices,
local saints and preachers, local Sufi orders for Islam, and local interpreta-
tions of the major religious traditions that provided most of this comfort.
Usually, empires and kingdoms were content to let the superficial unity of
the official religion suffice, even if there were, in practice, many local vari-
ants. It was when the imperial authorities interfered too much with local
practices that local preferences asserted themselves, and led to religious civil
wars that made unity impossible. Not since the late Roman Empire in the
fifth century have most Christians lived in one state or practiced a single,
more or less united form of their religion; and not since the breakup of the
Umayyad Caliphate in the eighth century have most Muslims lived in one
state theoretically unified by a single version of their religion, though in
fact there were religious conflicts and revolts provoked by conflicting local
interests almost from the beginning of Islam.25
Why is it important to remember all this if we try to understand the con-
tinuing power and dangers of contemporary nationalism? Because it reminds
us that the sentiments that produced modern nationalism are very deeply
rooted. They only seemed to wane during the long age of agrarian kingdoms
and empires in which states were relatively superficial entities floating on
top of subject populations. At the local level, people were forced to rely on
more regional loyalties and small communities for most of their social needs,
and had few emotional ties to their larger states’ elites. That is why ruling
dynasties and clans could change and regions could be exchanged between
states without provoking much local protest. (Imagine the outcry today if
a part of France were given to England because of a marital arrangement
between the British royal family and the president of France’s daughter!
Such a possibility is absurd, but it was not in the high Middle Ages when
25
Jonathan P. Berkey. The Formation of Islam. Cambridge, 2003. Pp. 83-90.
32
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
the royal families of France and England had more in common with each
other than with their peasant subjects.)
An interesting example of the difference between imperial and national-
ist ideologies occurred as late as 1809 when the Russian Empire annexed
Finland from Sweden. The Russian Christian Orthodox Tsar, Alexander I,
assured the Finnish Estates, composed of Swedish-speaking (not Finnish-
speaking) elites with some representatives of the Finnish peasantry, that he
would grant them full property rights, religious freedom as Lutherans, and
autonomy. He addressed them, naturally, in the international language of
that time, French.26 How different this was from what was going on by the
end of the nineteenth century when the Russian Empire was trying to force-
fully Russify its diverse peoples and Finnish nationalism was increasingly
hostile to being ruled by foreign Russians.
The structure of political life in the world created by the spread of
Western colonialism, industrialization, and the rise of mass education made
impossible the separation between state elites and the masses they ruled.
There is no longer any viable alternative form of social solidarity capable
of replacing state-centered nationalism, both as a way of making the state
and economy work and as a way of providing necessary social support for
populations. Perhaps one day there will be a different kind of world politi-
cal structure, but that is not close to happening. International working class
solidarity proved to be a myth that did not result in changing the loyalty
of working classes. Third World solidarity proved to be as weak, except at
expensive international gatherings that expended a lot of useless verbiage.27
The idea that multinational corporations can replace state-centered national-
ism, either in real power or as an emotionally satisfying way of promoting
solidarity, is a figment of some commentators’ imaginations. International
Muslim solidarity is going to prove as weak a reed as did more limited pan-
Arab nationalism. Perhaps the European Union will create a new, broader
nationalism within Europe, though even that is doubtful, particularly since
the European Union has been unable to forge a common foreign policy or
even decide exactly what its boundaries should be. If it ever does happen, it
would only mean that a pan-European nationalism has replaced more local,
older nationalisms, but without a common language, a common religion, or a
common shared history Europe is right now no more solidary than the large
empires that ruled Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.
26
Fred Singleton. A Short History of Finland. Cambridge, 1989. Pp. 64-65.
27
See, for example, Robert Malley. The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution,
and the Turn to Islam. Berkeley, 1996.
33
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
A common economy is a first step toward creating a common nationalism,
but it is hardly sufficient by itself because it does not build a shared sense
of kinship to which everyone must cling for protection against competing
outsiders and dangerous internal minorities. As we will see below, the
EU’s most likely route to promoting a real sense of European nationalism
is to set up closed boundaries against new sets of outsiders, primarily im-
migrants and Muslims.
Liah Greenfeld has captured this very well in her assertion that national-
ism is the highest and most powerful kind of political identity in the modern
world.28 This means that competition between nation-states will continue,
and in certain dire circumstances, lead to violent conflict. It also implies that
those culturally defined groups that, for whatever reason, feel they are not
in a state that supports their community will not accept its nationalism and
will retain the potential to revolt as well as remain vulnerable to persecution
and perhaps even expulsion. It is a waste of time to decry nationalism’s
negative and dangerous by-products without also admitting that it provides
such powerful benefits when it works properly that it cannot be wished away
or dismissed as a mere short-term artifact of recent history.
When the nation-state fails to deliver the desired benefits to a region or
group within the state that identifies itself as a culturally distinct community,
the stage is set for ethnic conflict. This is even more the case if there are
various groups within the same state competing for scarce resources that can
be obtained only if one’s own group happens to control the state’s machinery.
It does not really matter whether the distinction between groups is based on
a historical mythology that identifies one community as “indigenous” and
the others as “invaders,” or “immigrants,” or whether at some time in the
past there was no real conflict. Once cultural boundaries are established,
or as Anderson would say, “imagined,” they are there, and become all the
stronger and more likely to lead to conflict if communal identities are rooted
in a particular region that is occupied by a discontented ethnic majority.29
The many ethnic conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, Burma,
Indonesia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Spain, Russia, India, Lebanon, and so on
are exactly this. People who have been living together for relatively long
periods of time, but with long-held different ethnic or national identities,
can rapidly turn against each other in moments of political or economic
crisis, and once conflict has become violent, it is both difficult and time
consuming to put the pieces back together. This is the case today in such
28
Liah Greenfeld. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, 1992.
29
Monica D. Toft. The Geography of Ethnic Violence. Princeton, 2003.
34
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
disparate places as the breakaway parts of Georgia, Iraq, Kashmir, Bosnia,
Cyprus, and Sudan.
A recent example much in the news is the separation of Ossetians and
Georgians in South Ossetia. They had been living together, while maintaining
distinct languages, for centuries, and there was a fair amount of mixing. In the
very late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Georgian nationalists
led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, began to claim that Ossetians were newcomers
who “had arrived only 600 years ago” and who were “tools of the Soviet
Union.” Then, when Georgia became independent with Gamsakhurdia as
its first president, discriminatory policies were instituted against Ossetians,
and the two communities began to irrevocably break apart.30 The rest, as
the saying goes, is history.
The emotional importance of what seem to outsiders to be absurdly minor
issues or grotesque historical fabrications reminds us of how a sense of com-
munal solidarity extends well beyond simple material interests. Our feelings
of honor, worthiness, and purpose are tied to such associations, and deeply
influence our view of those outside the community. Closely associated to this
is the fear of extinction that “our” people, “our” cause, “our” culture, or “our”
history may not survive. This fear will elicit the most violent and extreme
reactions because it threatens to kill the social group we hope will eternally
outlive our own individual lives.31 Slobodan Milosevic, for example, was
a master of making Serbs fearful about what would happen to them if they
failed to maintain an ethnically pure Greater Serbia, as was his Croatian
counter part Franjo Tudjman who did the same for Croats. Thus, for Serbs,
the largely fabricated but emotionally powerful and widely accepted story
of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 has served as a rallying point for the entire
nation, despite its obviously destructive and impractical consequences.32 The
fervor of South Koreans and Japanese defending their rights to insignificant,
uninhabited islands claimed by both nations is another example,33 as are
countless others around the world. Not all of these lead to wars, of course.
But when real interests, or the sense of threat about what is at stake is great

30
Ellen Barry. As Soviet Union Dissolved, Enclave’s Fabric Unraveled: Ethnic Rifts in
South Ossetia // New York Times. 2008. September 7. P. A8.
31
Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley. Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention
of Mass Political Murder. Princeton, 2006. Pp. 58-65.
32
Tim Judah. The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Haven,
1997.
33
Sang-Hun Choe. Desolate Dots in the Sea Stir Deep Emotions as South Korea Resists
a Japanese Claim // New York Times. 2008. August 31. P. 6.
35
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
enough, then conflicting historical myths of different nations take on the
power to provoke extreme violence and make accommodation impossible.
One of the most intractable of these is the bitter conflict between Israeli
Jews and Palestinian Arabs over control of places deemed holy because of
ancient religious events, such as parts of Hebron or Jerusalem. One of lesser
intensity, but surprising durability despite the seeming absurdity of the issue,
is the continuing diplomatic conflict between Greece and Macedonia over
the name of Macedonia. Greek nationalists, supported by their government,
are furious about the use of that name by a majority Slavic speaking state
(with a contentious Albanian minority) because they claim unbroken eth-
nic descent from ancient Greece to the present, and Alexander the Great’s
Macedonia was part of the Hellenic world. Thus, the existence of a state with
that name seems to them to threaten the unity of Greece. Slavic-speaking
Macedonian nationalists, on the contrary, sometimes go so far as to claim
that the ancient Macedonians, including Alexander, were not Greek at all,
but some distinct ethnic group whose descendants predominate in modern
Macedonia.34 Both claims are historically ridiculous, as any follower of con-
structivist theories of nationalism would gladly point out. Both the current
Republic of Macedonia and the Greek adjoining province of that name have
for millennia experienced countless migrations, religious changes, ethnic
mixing, and political turmoil. By the time of the late Ottoman Empire they
were among the most heterogeneous, ethnically and religiously diverse parts
of Europe. A scholar who pointed that out in the 1990s, however, received
death threats and Cambridge University Press refused to publish her book
because Greek nationalists promised violent retribution.35
There is no need to continue with examples that could be produced
from most parts of the world. The constructivists, the Marxists skeptics, the
many scholars who decry the destructive effects of ethnonationalism and
emphasize its mythical, seemingly artificial nature are partly correct. They
miss the point, however, that such sentiments are not just modern creations,
but correspond instead to very strong and common sentiments, even if the
institutional nature of these feelings has changed in recent times. There-
fore, exposing their seeming artificiality, the fictitious nature of the myths
on which most are based, and the fact that they are so easily manipulated
in times of crisis by political entrepreneurs does very little to lessen their
power and potential for creating long-lasting violent conflicts.
34
Loring M. Danforth. The Macedonian Conflict. Princeton, 1995. Pp. 28-55.
35
Anastasia N. Karakasidou. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood
in Greek Macedonia 1870-1990. Chicago, 1997.
36
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
Myths of racial purity as justification for the persecution of supposedly
alien minorities contributed to massacres in Rwanda, Burundi, and Cambo-
dia, as well as, of course, to the rise of a particularly vicious form of modern
anti-Semitism in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The historical reality is actually even worse than this because there is
good evidence that all strong nationalisms are based on violent conflict with
either internal minorities who come to be viewed as dangerous interlopers
who threaten the “national” or “ethnic” dominant group, or with external state
enemies, and usually, both. Establishing boundaries that define the in-group
and exclude others strengthens communal solidarity. It is easy enough to
blame unscrupulous political leaders who manipulate such sentiments, such
as Paul Brass,36 or on a larger scale, John Breuilly;37 but the repetition, over
and over, of such ideological ethnic or ethnoreligious boundaries in many
parts of the world suggests that something more is at work.
There is a venerable tradition of separating “civic” from “ethnic”
nationalism. Hans Kohn’s classic book on nationalism38 led to the wide-
spread idea that there was a “Western” (mainly English, American, and
French) version that was essentially good because it allowed various
cultural groups to be integrated into emerging nations, and an “Eastern”
European (including German and Russian) version that relied on ethnicity
and notions of race. The latter led to Nazism and terrible ethnic war, while
the former was progressive. A more recent version of this was proposed by
Liah Greenfeld39 who ascribed the difference to founding nationalist myths.
“Good” American and English nationalism relied on tolerant stories that
stressed how citizens could overcome their differences and come together
in an enlightened and democratic union, while “bad” German and Russian
nationalisms were based on resentful and bitter dislike of the West and thus
naturally led to brutal ethnic prejudice, dictatorship, and aggressive policies
toward neighbors. France was placed more or less on the “Western” side,
though with some reservations.
Even leaving aside the brutal nature of British and French colonial rule
in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it is doubtful that
many scholars still believe in this dichotomy, though some version persists
in the American neoconservative justification for their country’s aggressive
36
Paul Brass. Theft of an Idol. Princeton, 1997.
37
Breuilly. Nationalism and the State.
38
Hans Kohn. The Idea of Nationalism, A Study in its Origins and Background. New
York, 1944.
39
Greenfeld. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.
37
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
nationalism in the early twenty-first century. The issue is not, however, just
what nationalist ideologues use to justify their nation’s foreign policy or to
proclaim its unique goodness. The reality of how modern states took old-
fashioned tribalism, ethnic defensiveness, religious passions, and cultural
boundaries to create nationalist fervor can tell us a lot about why dangerous
nationalism persists, why it is so often ethnic even if definitions of ethnicity
are fluid, and why it is unlikely to be replaced by more benign forms of
solidarity as the primary basis of political solidarity in the modern world.
In two highly original books, political scientist Anthony Marx blew apart
the story of the benign “Western” or “civic” notion of Anglo-American and
French nationalism. In his study of race relations in South Africa, Brazil, and
the United States,40 he pointed out that what welded the United States back
together after its bitter Civil War, and created America’s contemporary, mod-
ern form of nationalism was an agreement among whites to exclude blacks
from full citizenship, to stigmatize them, and thus to draw ethnic boundaries
around what was considered genuinely “American.” This racial exclusivity
only gradually extended its boundaries to include various southern and
eastern European immigrants, and only after World War II did it incorporate
nonwhite minorities. In his study of Western European nationalism, Marx41
showed that England defined its nascent state-centered nationalism in the
sixteenth and seventeenth century, and well into the nineteenth, as anti-Ca-
tholicism. Catholics were associated with foreign influence, and not accepted
as equal citizens. This had a lasting effect in that it ultimately prevented
the integration of Ireland, but it helped solidify English nationalism. As for
France, in the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it
made rejection of Protestantism the cornerstone of rising French national-
ism. Thus, these three kinds of quintessentially “civic” nationalisms hardly
began this way, but rather developed with very explicitly defined internal
ethnic and religious boundaries that excluded minorities and associated the
nation with the dominant cultural group in highly defensive and conflictual
ways that led to severe, brutal repression of those excluded.
There is good evidence that modern nationalism, like ethnic particular-
ism and what used to be called tribalism, are all produced and reinforced by
similar perceptions of threat from the outside. To be sure, original solidarity
between close kin may be more than that, and some sort of sympathetic
feeling for those who share common cultural traits need not be produced by
40
Anthony W. Marx. Making Race and Nation. New York, 1998.
41
Anthony W. Marx. Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. New York,
2003.
38
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
any defensive reaction. Nevertheless, strong unity that encompasses many
more people than in our immediate families or than among those we can
directly know in our daily interactions goes far beyond this and does seem
to need perceived enemies in order to be consolidated.
We know that states first developed about five thousand to six thousand
years ago in the Middle East, and subsequently in several parts of the world
where crowded, fertile valleys experienced population growth that signifi-
cantly increased the competition for land, but where it was difficult for those
living there to escape to less crowded environments. Intense competition led
to almost permanent warfare, and the warrior elites that emerged became
the rulers of the new states. In return for their protection and ability to me-
diate within their communities to solve disputes, they became the kings,
aristocrats, and priests of these new states and appropriated the surpluses
that raised their standards of living well above those they ruled.42 Since
brute force is an expensive way to maintain social cohesion, elites tried to
create an ideological basis for solidarity. Religion served this purpose to
some extent, but of course recreating a sense of common kinship between
ruled and rulers, even if it was fabricated, could be as useful, or even more
so. In small states such as the Greek cities, or in the Judean kingdom, this
meant differentiating the society from outsiders, setting up boundaries that
excluded dangerous and hostile “others” from “us,” and emphasizing that
it was “us” against “them.” It was, in short, a perpetuation of tribal solidari-
ties that had united pre-state groups against their enemies. In conditions of
permanent threat from the outside because of predatory warfare, this could
sustain sentiments akin to patriotism, as communal unity was the only pos-
sible defense against the ravages of constant strife.43 In small states, like those
of the Jews who wrote the Bible, or in exceptionally stable, geographically
bounded ones like Egypt, this common loyalty that can be called a form of
ancient nationalism could be maintained and consolidated throughout the
whole population.
The problem, as already discussed, was that the most successful of these
early small states turned into larger empires ruling over ever more hetero-
geneous societies. Maintaining a sense of common identity became too dif-

42
Robert L. Carneiro. A Theory of the Origin of the State // Science 1970. Vol. 169.
No. 3947. Pp. 733-738; Idem. Political Expansion as an Expression of the Principle of
Competitive Exclusion // Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service (Eds.). Origins of the
State. Philadelphia, 1978. Pp. 205-223.
43
Elman R. Service. Origins of the State and Civilization. New York, 1975; Timothy
Earle. How Chiefs Come to Power. Stanford, 1997.
39
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
ficult, and eventually as various groups of conquerors took them over, one
group of exploiters from outside came to seem much like any other. Trying
to unify empires by fostering a common “world” religion was one strategy
for increasing legitimacy. So was the creation of a culturally unified bureau-
cracy. But this usually did not work in large imperial states in the long run
except in China. When the western part of the Roman Empire broke apart,
its pieces fell into what were essentially primitive chiefdoms (hierarchical
societies with ruling warrior elites but without permanent bureaucracies or
very strong state machines), each ruled by local thugs whose behavior was
little better than gang leaders involved in endless, anarchic warfare. It was
out of this structure that European feudalism was born, and states eventu-
ally recreated.44 This kind of fragmentation was the danger faced by every
empire until the rise of the modern state.
It is not necessary to go through the long process that created modern
European states to show that endless wars combined with technological prog-
ress led to the strengthening of those states that managed to survive.45 This
is where better communications, particularly print, and increasing literacy
played a key role as it became possible to promote ideologies of fictitious
kinship uniting all of the people in some states, most notably, early modern
England and France. As we have seen, that meant uniting people against
internal enemies, not simply external ones, and by defining those excluded
as dangerous others beholden to foreign interests.
What the modern state discovered in promoting the new nationalism
was essentially a rediscovery of something very old, the tribalism that had
legitimized pre-state societies and had persisted in small early chiefdoms
and states. The new nationalism therefore carried with it all of the violent
and exclusionary traits that had always characterized tribal solidarity and
the early states formed out of tribal societies.
Failure to draw boundaries and clearly define foreign and domestic en-
emies could be fatal to the establishment of national sentiments; therefore, as
growing numbers of states around the world realized the importance of pro-
moting nationalism to solidify themselves, retribalization proceeded apace.
Not only German and Russian but also all other forms of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century nationalism have shared this characteristic. They thrived
44
Michel Rouche. The Carolingian “Renewal” // Robert Fossier (Ed.). The Cambridge
Illustrated History of the Middle Ages 350-950. Cambridge, 1989. Pp. 419-434.
45
Charles Tilly and Gabriel Ardant. The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe.
Princeton, 1975; Charles Tilly. Coercion, Capital, and European States. Cambridge,
1990.
40
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
by identifying external and internal enemies, drawing cultural boundaries
around themselves to defend their communities, and making war.
In an illuminating study of Latin American militarism, sociologist Miguel
Centeno found that compared to Europe, Latin American states have spent
much less on their militaries. This has been mostly because they have faced
far fewer external threats. There have been interstate wars, but fewer, and
most on a lesser scale than in Europe. Therefore, even though Latin America
has had numerous military regimes, its armies were used more for internal
repression than for international conflicts. For this, widespread universal
drafts and strengthening of state bureaucracies to support big armies were
not necessary, and neither was mobilization of whole populations.46 This
accounts for the failure of most Latin American states to fully integrate their
populations, for their exceptionally high degree of inequality, and for the
bureaucratic weakness of most of their governments. There are two unfor-
tunate conclusions to draw from this comparison: first, not going to war and
not having menacing external enemies does little to promote internal peace
and unity; and second, the strong nationalism that developed in Europe was
partly a function of constant warfare or preparation for the next war.
This explains why creating fear of “the others,” either external enemies
or internal minorities, is so useful in promoting nationalist fervor. Otto von
Bismarck understood this well as he was faced with masses largely unin-
terested in German unification.47 War and fear of other powers as well as
fear of disintegration by internal, anti-German forces such as Catholics and
socialists, became the basis of Bismarck’s promotion of German nation-
alism, and ultimately created the paranoia that contributed to both World
War I and World War II.48 But German nationalism was not unusual in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. All of the Western, Cen-
tral, and Eastern European states tried to promote nationalism and adopted
fantastic, xenophobic historical narratives to justify themselves.49 Anderson,
Hobsbawm, and others are right about that; where they err is in thinking
that somehow the sentiments and emotions behind such stories were new
and might soon be replaced by something else. Only the institutional scope

46
Miguel A. Centeno. Blood and Debt: War and the Nation State in Latin America.
University Park, 2002.
47
Theodore S. Hamerow. The Social Foundations of German Unification 1858-1871.
Princeton, 1969. Pp. 359-399.
48
Fritz Stern. The Failure of Illiberalism. New York, 1972. Pp. 47-57.
49
Patrick J. Geary. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton,
2002.
41
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
of this nationalism was original. In attempting to encompass such large
masses in ways that resembled traditional tribalism more closely than the
elite ideologies that had been promoted by empires, nationalists were ap-
pealing to very ancient, strong sentiments.
Communist leaders from Stalin to Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, and Fidel
Castro understood this as well, and successfully translated their hatred of
foreign and domestic threats into intensely felt nationalism. In Stalin and
Pol Pot’s cases this also included deadly persecution of ethnic minorities.50
That is not to say that these leaders were hypocrites who did not believe
their own nationalist obsessions. On the contrary, their own deep personal
convictions made them all the more effective and brutal, and the more re-
alistically they could portray the threat to their national communities, the
more legitimate their rule became, despite all of the horrors they inflicted
on their own people.
We should not forget how widespread such nationalism really is in na-
tions that feel threatened or are engaged in direct conflict with internal and
external enemies perceived to be very dangerous. The combination of war,
paranoia, and fear about the survival of the nation was once again displayed
in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and in
Russia as Vladimir Putin rallied his nation by using the fear of Chechens,
and more recently, Western intervention. Another important contemporary
case is China, a country whose ruling Communist Party has increasingly
substituted intense nationalism and resentment of foreigners for its waning
socialist fervor, and in so doing, struck a powerful strain of Chinese public
opinion.51 It is possible to go through many other contemporary cases, but
even without an exhaustive list, the point is abundantly clear.
It is true that there has been a substantial body of social science literature,
and even popular commentary, suggesting that nationalism is a spent force
and that we may be entering an age of new empires. But in fact the most
carefully thought-out versions of such arguments do not foresee the end of
nationalism. Deepak Lal’s In Praise of Empires52 is a well-reasoned and
moderate neoconservative call for the careful weighing of national interests

50
Amir Weiner. Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bol-
shevik Revolution. Princeton, 2001; Ben Kiernan. The Pol Pot Regime. New Haven,
1996.
51
Yinan He. Remembering and Forgetting the War: Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction,
and Sino-Japanese Relations 1950-2006 // History and Memory. 2007. Vol. 19. No. 2
(Fall/Winter). Pp. 43-74.
52
Deepak Lal. In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order. New York, 2004.
42
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
and cultural differences. The United States, he argues, has the obligation to
maintain order in the global system, and as such should develop a kind of
imperial outlook and staff of officials similar to the ones the British had in
the nineteenth century when they enforced global order. Americans, however,
can do it better, he argues, by being less racist, but they should abandon
the obsession to overmoralize and promote American-style democracy and
be more rationally pragmatic. Empire in his terminology is not the kind of
direct rule imposed by the British colonial state on foreign societies, but a
kind of benign stewardship of the international system. Recent events make
it appear questionable that the world will accept such unilateral policing
of the system by the United Sates, or any other single power, and it is even
unclear whether America has the economic, military, or political strength
to be an “imperial” power in even this limited sense. Whatever happens,
there is no sign at all that nationalism and the interests of nation-states are
on the wane.
Michael Mandelbaum’s The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as
the World’s Government in the 21st Century is a more liberal version of the
same argument.53 It does not call for a new American Empire as such, but
agrees that without an American commitment to keep economic and politi-
cal order in the world, globalization can turn out badly. By now, however,
it has become obvious that there was much wishful thinking in both Lal and
Mandelbaum’s books. American nationalism and arrogance are not substi-
tutes for international cooperation that will have to come through careful
mediation of competing nationalist interests between various global and
regional powers. What is more likely to emerge in the twenty-first century,
if we are fortunate, is the kind of balance of power arrangement that briefly
existed in Europe for about four decades from 1871 to 1914. Unfortunately,
that arrangement was also based on competing nationalisms, it included
some imperial structures that were hotbeds of ethnic conflicts, and it came
to a disastrous end with World War I.54 Perhaps the world can do better now,
though that remains to be seen.
In two widely read books, Amy Chua has emphasized something quite
different. Globalization and the rise of an American Empire have actually
exacerbated ethnic conflict in much of the world, and produced growing
xenophobia, intolerance, and narrow nationalism in the United States. The
benefits of globalization have been unevenly distributed, and especially
53
Michael Mandelbaum. The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s
Government in the 21st Century. New York, 2005.
54
George F. Kennan. The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. Princeton, 1979.
43
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
in poorer countries, there has been a tendency for certain entrepreneurial
minorities to capture a disproportionate share of the gains, thus provoking
increased ethnic hatreds. Chua emphasizes the fact that the single most suc-
cessful example of breaking down narrow nationalist borders, the European
Union, has actually hardened its boundaries against non-Europeans, and even
as old conflicts between European nations have decreased, hostility to im-
migrants and the perception of danger from the outside have increased.55
Nationalism is neither a spent force nor any less dangerous than it ever
was. The antiquity of the feelings that lie behind it belie any notion that it
is somehow a fairly recent creation, and therefore, one that is likely at any
time soon to become obsolete. Where it was weak during the age of agrarian
states, that was because states were ruled by culturally distant elites who
cared little about the welfare of most of their people and who did not need
their support. Since such imperial states are impossible today, and the state
is such an important source of potential benefits, weak nationalist feelings
leave states divided and in conditions of endless internal conflict. Competing
clans, tribes, and ethnicities in weakly nationalist states fight against each
other in bitter struggles for control of their states because allowing other
communities to control government puts them at too much risk of being
marginalized and excluded from education, jobs, and full citizenship rights.
Being in a state ruled by others who define one’s own group as marginal
is also emotionally terribly disturbing because it demeans one’s own com-
munity and very existence. Strong nationalism, however, presents as great a
danger because it encourages bellicose attitudes toward competing nations,
and intense distrust and potential persecution of those internal groups deemed
disloyal to the nation.
The rise of religious extremism in the Islamic world, while it may seem
to belie this claim, is itself an indicator of the economic and political failure
of modernizing nationalism in most of the Arab world as well as in Afghani-
stan and Pakistan. In Iran, Islamic radicalism is the strong face of Persian
nationalism. This hardly means that nationalism is a spent force. Islamic
radicalism is, rather, a manifestation of the desperate struggle by various
groups to control their state by appealing to religion and hoping to attract
support from the wider Muslim world. This is certain to lead to more wars
and the rise of stronger nationalisms that will replace the failed, more secular
versions that were represented in the twentieth century by the Ba’ath, by
Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and quite unsuccessfully by the last Shah of Iran, all

Amy Chua. World on Fire. New York, 2003; Idem. Day of Empire. New York, 2007.
55

Pp. 286-342.
44
 Ab Imperio, 3/2008
of whom attempted to modernize their societies along Western lines while
reducing the influence of religion and local ethnic or tribal divisions. (See
Tim McDaniel’s interesting comparison between the Shah’s failure to suc-
cessfully modernize Iran and the similar failure of the Romanovs. Violent,
radical revolutions in 1917 and 1978-79 resulted, and both ultimately shifted
the basis of their legitimacy from some form of internationalism to Russian
and Persian nationalism.56) Thus, the outcome of the rise of Islamic radical-
ism will ultimately create stronger local nationalisms in competition with
each other, and even greater hostility toward minorities and foreigners.57
To those who know that communal bonds, whether based on real, or more
commonly fictitious, kinship are an essential part of the human condition,
that they have always been accompanied by fear and hostility to outsiders,
and that modern nationalism is but one new iteration of such sentiments, the
persistence of nationalist and ethnic conflicts in the modern world should
not comes as a surprise.

SUMMARY

Дэниел Широ считает, что большинство теоретиков наций и нацио-

нализма негативно относились к описываемым ими феноменам, и это
неизбежно вело к преуменьшению силы национализма и значимости
этнических конфликтов в современном мире. С этой точки зрения он
рассматривает подходы Э. Хобсбаума (и марксистской традиции, до
Валлерстайна и Балибара), Б. Андерсона (подчеркивая те коннотации
“воображаемого сообщества”, которые лишают его социальной ре-
альности, и указывая на отсутствие объяснения жестокого характера
национальных/этнических конфликтов и идеологически мотивиро-
ванную привязку национализма к капитализму), Э. Геллнера и др.
Широ говорит о наличии разных форм национализма, которые есть
конкретно-исторические выражения всегда присутствующего в истории
базового стремления человеческих коллективов к ощущению групповой
солидарности. Этот тезис в статье подкрепляется примерами из истории
древних цивилизаций (евреев, греков, римлян, египтян, китайцев и

56
Tim McDaniel. Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran.
Princeton, 1991.
57
For the instructive Algerian example, see Robert Malley. The Call from Algeria: Third
Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam. Berkeley, 1996. See also Adeed Dawisha.
Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. Princeton,
2003.
45
D. Chirot, The Retribalization of the Modern World
японцев и т.д.). Широ солидарен с Э. Смитом, удревнившим историю
этнонациональных идентичностей. Империи временно лишали значе-
ния старые формы национальной солидарности, а модерный национа-
лизм возникал на новых эпистемологических и идейных основаниях и
в новых социальных и политических условиях, но на основе старых,
архаичных, сантиментов. По сей день национальное государство
остается единственной стабильной и реальной формой коллективной
лояльности и политической идентичности. Поэтому насильственный
конфликт – неизбежное следствие ситуации, при которой национальное
государство не удовлетворяет некую живущую в нем группу. В статье
с этой точки зрения разбираются современные этнические конфликты,
включая грузино-осетинский, конфликты в постсоветской бывшей
Югославии и др. Каким бы воображаемым ни представлялся нацио-
нализм, он порождает очень сильные реальные чувства, находящие
практически всегда реализацию в насилии (обоснования которого могут
быть разными). Ссылаясь на современную историографию, Широт
отвергает деление национализма на “гражданский” и “этнический”,
считая насилие важнейшим атрибутом национализма как такового.
Национализм не изжил себя и не сменится новой формой империи.
Вопреки имперскому самовосприятию части американской политиче-
ской элиты Широ видит перспективу в новом международном балансе
национальных интересов, который, возможно, снимет сохраняющуюся
высокую угрозу новых этнических конфликтов.

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