3. Diffusionism and the National Question

'The theory of nationalism represents Marxism's great historical failure.' With this stern indictment, Tom Nairn begins his essay 'The Modern Janus', an essay designed to explain this failure (which was 'inevitable', he says, but 'can now be understood') and to provide us at last with a truly adequate theory of nationalism.1 But the essay itself is a failure. The theory of nationalism which it attacks has not been widely held by Marxists since 1914. And Nairn's theory is anything but adequate. It is an attempt to construct a Marxist version of what is today the typical mainstream position: national struggles are not class struggles but are effects of an autonomous ideological force, nationalism, which diffused from Europe to the darker corners of the earth.2 Nairn's theory is diffusionist and idealist. But it has become very influential as a Marxist theory of nationalism, and as a theory which explains Third World liberation movements in terms of the ideology of diffusing capitalism (mislabelled 'uneven development'). For these reasons it warrants a detailed critique. The critique can also be generalized to most other theories of nationalism as an autonomous ideological force. And, as I will suggest in the concluding section of this chapter, it raises questions about a peculiarly elitist sector of neo-Marxist thought.

'The task of a theory of nationalism', according to Nairn, is 'to see the phenomenon as a whole'.3 Everything should be seen as a whole, of course, looked at from all points of view, and so on, but Nairn means to be taken literally. Nationalism for him is a whole phenomenon, a discrete process, a separate and autonomous force in history. Like the two-faced Roman god Janus, it has two aspects, one progressive and one reactionary, but these are merely facets of a single indivisible entity. This entity, nationalism, is not a form or part of class struggle nor even an outcome of class struggle, and viewing it as such has been the undoing of the Marxist theory of nationalism, the reason why it is 'Marxism's great historical failure' .4 Marxism, says Nairn quite correctly, remains wedded to the view that class struggle is the motor of history. Not so. says Nairn. Nationalism does not emerge from class struggle: it is an autonomous force. Nationalism and class struggle have jointly fashioned the modern world and. of the two. nationalism has been the more important factor. It has been, says Nairn, 'the dominant contradiction'.5

Class struggle is also, as it happens, two-sided (or, if you prefer, Janus-faced); and we can usually tell roughly who are the exploiters and who the exploited. But for Nairn the two faces of nationalism have nothing much to do with exploitation or contending classes. One face points forwards to an ill-defined sort of'liberation', something consisting mainly in freedom from 'domination'. The other points backwards to fascism.

Fascism, says Nairn, is one of the two faces of Janus. Nationalism is a single, whole phenomenon, and fascism is part of its very nature. Fascism is in fact the 'archetype' of nationalism.6 It is 'a central sector of the phenomenon'.7 It is therefore in some sense present in every national movement, every liberation struggle. It is literally part of the struggle.

No Vietnamese, Cuban, or indeed anyone else who has fought in or supported a national liberation struggle is likely to take kindly to a theory which brackets such struggles with Nazism and fascism, and which moreover insists that the class enemy is not the political enemy unless it is so by accident. And few Marxists anywhere will take kindly to a theory which relegates class struggle to a secondary role, which denies, as Nairn's does, that class struggle is the motor of historical change. Still, views of this sort are common in various sectors of progressive thought, even in certain corners of Marxist thought - in the advanced capitalist countries if nowhere else - and they cannot be dismissed out of hand and without comment. Nairn in fact defends his view with a reasoned, though faulty, argument, and it is important to examine that argument and refute it. I will try to do so in the following pages. Most of the attention will be devoted to the essay 'The Modern Janus'. This essay later reappeared as a chapter in Nairn's book TheBreak-Up of Britain, where it supplied theoretical ammunition for an argument to the effects that nationalist forces in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (among Protestants) are rising to success: are breaking up Britain.8 Some of our attention will also be devoted to other chapters of Nairn's book, not for the purpose of commenting on the national question in any part of the British Isles - that is not our concern in the present book - but because Nairn's theoretical position is elaborated in various parts of The Break-Up of Britain.

Nationalism and Diffusion

The first question to be asked about Nairn's theory, as about any theory of nationalism, is precisely what it deals with; what its subject matter is; what empirically identifiable entity or process it proposes to describe and explain. It is clear that Nairn wants to use the word 'nationalism' in primarily an ideological sense, as denoting such things as the ideas people have of the nation state, the psychological impulse to form an independent state, the political idea or doctrine which embodies that goal, and also a complex of truly deep psychological processes which Nairn associates with this idea, goal, and doctrine: processes which he labels with words like 'instinct', 'compulsion', and even 'dementia'. But Nairn is not concerned to construct a theory about the ideology (or ideologies) of nationalism as such, and his theory is not simply a topic in the history and geography of ideas. (Let it be noted that a theory about nationalist ideologies would in itself be a valid scientific contribution, provided it stopped short of explaining all the important phenomena of national struggle as mere effects of an ideological prime cause.) Nairn does indeed focus his attention mainly on matters of ideology and psychology but he moves smoothly and easily from this realm to a set of social and political processes which he clearly considers to be invariant effects of nationalist ideology. Nairn thus views his subject matter as embracing both a set of ideological processes and an entailed set of social and political processes, the former in some sense explaining the latter.

But his theory does not postulate ideology as a prime cause. Unlike many other theorists about nationalism, Nairn makes very clear what he considers to be the social - he calls them 'historical' - processes which engender nationalist ideology. The problem is that these processes have very little to do with matters of class, class struggle, or economic exploitation. Nairn reaches behind all such social, political, and economic facts to something more fundamental, something which he calls 'the crudest dilemma of modern history'. This is nothing less than the alleged diffusion of progress.

Nairn's concept of progress is completely in the classical tradition of Eurocentric diffusionism. He subscribes to the three basic tenets of this position and in fact uses them as tacit assumptions for his theory of nationalism. The first tenet holds that the important traits of progress, or civilization, or modernization, have always appeared first in Europe (or. for the present millennium, in Western Europe), that this pattern will apply in the future as it has in the past, and these traits of progress diffuse outwards from Europe to the rest of the world, arriving at any given place at a later date and often in damaged condition. The second tenet holds that these traits are ultimately matters of the ideological realm: they are 'ideas', 'inventions', and so on. and thus the priority of Europe is in the last analysis an intellectual priority, a matter of quicker and better thinking, or, as diffusionists since Max Weber have consistently expressed it, a matter of greater 'rationality'. The third tenet holds that centrifugal diffusion is the dominant process by which the European centre interacts with the extra-European periphery, and therefore that the outward spread of progress, modernization, civilization, and so on, is far more significant in every sense (including the moral one) than the centripetal processes, such as the infusion of surplus value, technology, and labour from the periphery to Europe. (In the old days colonialism was often justified with the diffusionist argument that no amount of wealth drawn out of the colonies could possibly repay the Europeans for their gift of 'civilization'.) The third tenet, in short, denies the importance of economic imperialism, past and present. What happens in the peripheral countries is not imperialism and underdevelopment but, on the contrary, progress and modernization.

Marx himself was something of a diffusionist, although he was less Eurocentric than any other European thinker of his time. But a survival of diffusionism into late-20th Century Marxist thought is something else entirely. Marx did not have access to information about extra-European civilizations, past and present: we do. Marx lived at a time and place where the most advanced thinkers still believed that agriculture, metal working, and even the human species itself had appeared first in Europe: we know better. In Marx's time, scholarly work was so entwined with Christianity that it seemed implausible that autonomous progress, or even rationality, would be found in non-Christian lands: we have sloughed off such prejudices. Today the Marxist tradition of thought has largely freed itself from Eurocentric diffusionism. though not entirely so (see Chapter 7 of this book), and if a Marxist proposes to defend such a diffusionist position today he or she must ground it, not in Marxism, but in conservative thought. This holds true most pointedly for Tom Nairn. His theory of nationalism owes more to Weberian theories of European rationality, along with more recent conservative theories of 'modernization', than it does to any tradition in Marxism. Let me now explain.

The key concept for an understanding of nationalism, according to Nairn, is uneven development. But Nairn gives this term a very special meaning. It is to be contrasted, first of all, with 'even development'. This too, has a special meaning. It does not carry the ordinary implication of geographical evenness or uniformity. Nairn is a diffusionist: development begins in Europe and spreads outwards; even development is simply smooth, even diffusion, with each part of the periphery acquiring the modernizing traits at the appropriate time. In sum: orderly progress on the periphery in a direction prefigured by the centre. Uneven development, by contrast, is, for Nairn, the condition which occurs when diffusion is disrupted, deflected, or frustrated; when peripheral regions are, as it were, anticipating the orderly, on-time arrival of the traits of modernization and development, but the traits fail to arrive.

Nairn says rather little about the causes of uneven development, that is, the reasons why diffusion fails to proceed as predicted and why peripheral regions experience the frustration of unsatisfied expectations. He blames it in part on the pernicious influence of the countries of advanced capitalism, whose domination of the peripheral countries, today as in the past, tends to hinder and distort their development. This is a familiar Marxist thesis, but what is important about Nairn's presentation of the thesis is the limited use he makes of it. There is some discussion of domination and dependency but scarcely any mention of exploitation or even, for that matter, colonialism. Occasionally peripheral countries are described as 'oppressed', but this seems to be merely a synonym for 'dominated', and to have little if anything to do with exploitation. But if exploitation is left out of the picture, we are no longer dealing with the Marxist theory of imperialism in any of its variants. This theory argues that peripheral societies, colonies and neocolonies, have experienced and are experiencing exploitation so severe that little or no development takes place; that the prevailing trend today may even be towards deepening underdevelopment. Nairn's model merely has the advanced countries exercising a political domination over the poor ones, a domination which somehow inhibits development but does not amount to a politico-military superstructure installed specifically for the purpose of maximising the possibilities for exploitation by companies based in the dominant countries - the classical Marxist model of the process.

The difference between the two models is quite fundamental, not least for Nairn's theory of nationalism. If exploitation is the basis of the process, we will look for, and find, a class of people in the dominated country who are exploited, and we would expect to find national liberation movements emerging with their roots in the exploited classes and with a very definite class struggle function: that of fighting against foreign rule not because foreigners 'dominate' but because they exploit. For Nairn, however, political domination seems to have no basis in exploitation. It seems to consist in nothing worse than a denial to the elite classes in the dominated society of the opportunities for greater wealth: for progress. In this model, the victims of uneven development are the elites of peripheral countries. These groups feel that their ambitions are being thwarted by external domination. But external domination is not even required by Nairn's model. In some peripheral countries there is merely envy of the more highly developed countries, and an impulse on the part of the elite to cut short the normal development process in an effort to catch up. In both cases, the elites feel a characteristic sense of frustration, and experience a characteristic reaction. This is nationalism.

Nationalism, then, emerges as a psychological frustration reaction on the part of the elites of backward countries to the trauma of uneven development. The reaction, according to Nairn, is 'emotional', 'instinctive', and 'irrational' (all references in this chapter are to The Break-Up of Britain unless otherwise indicated). Nationalism is

the pathology of modern development history, as inescapable as 'neurosis' in the individual, with . . . a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism . . .) (p. 359)

These psychological symptoms appear among the elite, who, in Nairn's theory, are the victims of uneven development. But irrationality, subjectivism, and the like, reappear at another point in the theory, and here they affect the masses. The elite cannot build an effective national movement, to win freedom from domination, without the participation of the masses. Nairn's 'masses' do not. however, play a leading, much less an intelligent, role in the nationalist process. They are 'mobilized' by the elite for the purpose of assembling the forces needed to win the struggle. Hence the movement is called by Nairn a 'populist' one: led by the elite, for its own purposes, but drawing in the masses as well. However, says Nairn, the masses can only be mobilized by resort to the subjective and the irrational.

Such mobilization can only proceed, in practice, via a popular mass still located culturally upon a far anterior level of development, upon the level of feudal or prefeudal peasant or 'folk' life. That is, upon a level of (almost literally) 'prehistoric' diversity in language, ethnic characteristics, social habits, and so on. This ancient and (in a more acceptable sense of the term) 'natural' force imposes its own constraints upon the whole process, lending it from the outset precisely that archaic and yet necessary colour, that primeval-seeming or instinctive aspect which marks it so unmistakeably. (p, 101)

And again:

[Nationalism] had to function through highly rhetorical forms, through a sentimental culture sufficiently accessible to the lower strata [The lower strata!] now being called to battle. This is why a romantic culture quite remote from Enlightenment rationalism always went hand in hand with the spread of nationalism. The new middle-class intelligentsia had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation had to be written in a language they understood ... It is unnecessary here to explore the process in detail. Everyone is familiar with its outline, and with much of its content. We all know how it spread from its West-European source, in concentric circles of upheaval and reaction: through Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and then across the other continents. Uniformed imperialism of the 1880-1945 variety was one episode in this larger history, as were its derivatives, anti-colonial wars and 'decolonization'. We have all studied the phenomena so consistently accompanying it: the 'rediscovery' or invention of national history, urban intellectuals invoking peasant virtues which they have experienced only through train windows on their summer holidays, schoolmasters painfully acquiring 'national' tongues spoken only in remote valleys, the infinity of forms assumed by the battle between scathing cosmopolitan modernists and emotional defenders of the Folk . . . and so on. (p. 340).

I have quoted Nairn at some length here because this passage tells us a great deal about his theory. The concrete postulate about the diffusion of nationalism ('concentric circles', etc.) will claim our attention later. The strange, even, for a Marxist, bizarre, descriptions (ordinary people are 'prehistoric', 'natural', 'primeval', colonialists are 'scathing cosmopolitan modernists' while those who fight against colonialism are 'emotional defenders of the Folk', etc.) will be passed over without comment. Here I want to call attention to Nairn's thesis that the masses do not enter history on their own, and for their own material - that is to say class - ends. They are led (or 'invited') into battle by the elite, spinning nationalist fairy-tales (the 'invention of national history', etc.). Therefore nationalism is not class struggle of the ordinary sort, pitting exploiters against exploited. Is it, then, the special sort of class struggle which takes place between competing bourgeois class communities, one peripheral and the other metropolitan? No, says Nairn, the peripheral elites are not, as the traditional Marxist argument would have it, being ground under by metropolitan capitalism, and fighting to preserve their class position and hopefully to rise. They are just suffering a sense of frustration. Their nationalism is basically the envy of someone looking over the wall into his neighbour's larger, more colourful, garden.

Naturally enough, Nairn's nationalism was invented in Europe. His model of origins has a literal centrepiece, a 'West-European source', an 'Anglo-French centre' (p. 98). At the end of the Napoleonic wars there emerged two modern nation states, Britain and France. Coincident with what Nairn calls 'the tidal wave of modernization' (pp. 96, 98, 338). 'transmitted outwards and onwards' (p. 99) in 'concentric circles' (pp. 98, 340), there spread also the idea of imitating the Western European nation state, an idea which, translated into practice, became national movements and nationalism. The first true nationalism arose in Germany and Italy, countries which Nairn, following Wallerstein (another diffusionist in our midst), calls 'semi-peripheral'. Then the tidal wave advanced 'through Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and across the other continents' (p. 340). Elsewhere in his book Nairn inserts Japan after eastern Europe and before 'the rest of the globe' (p. 98), but on the whole the geometry of the model remains internally consistent. This is helpful to a critic, because the model can be tested fairly easily by reference to particular dates and places: did the diffusing trait, nationalism, arrive at the expected time and in the expected manner? This is by no means the only basis for a criticism of Nairn's theory of nationalism, but it quickly reveals just how defective the theory is.

Germans and Italians were probably the inventors of the more important conservative theories of nationalism, but Germany and Italy were by no means the first countries to generate a national movement and enter the process of nationalism: that is, to struggle for state sovereignty through unification (as in these two cases) or through secession (as in most others). The German national movement had no palpable reality before the 1820s; the Italian, later still. By then national movements had arisen and triumphed in the United States (1783), Haiti (1804), and most of the Latin American mainland (c. 1820). And by the time unification had been achieved by Germany and Italy, a number of other countries, among them Greece and Belgium, had won their independence. Nairn's space-time model simply does not fit.

If we next trace the spread of national movements within Europe down through the 19th Century and into the 20th, there does, indeed, seem to be a broadly west-to-east spread, as required by Nairn's diffusion model, although exceptions like Greece, Belgium, and Norway, must be noted. But this space-time movement was not really associated with the process that Nairn puts forward as explanation. The bourgeois states which emerged in central and eastern Europe gained their independence not through a diffusion eastward of nationalism, along a slope of 'uneven development', but through a conjunction of two processes external to Nairn's theory. One was the defeat of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey in the First World War (something which had precious little to do with the frustration of the Bohemian and Croatian elites). The second was the Bolshevik revolution.

It would be idle to speculate about what the post-war map of Europe would have looked like had there been no Bolshevik revolution, with its echoes in Hungary and Germany. Certainly the danger of spreading revolution compelled the victorious powers to form, at Versailles and later, a band of bourgeois states in the buffer zone between Soviet Russia and capitalist France, states which were rather scientifically carved out so as to maximize their potential viability - in this case meaning safety from revolution - by minimizing ethnic complexity as much as possible without creating weak mini-states. Having said this, I have to concede that one sort of diffusion process was, indeed, involved in this overall process. This was the perfectly well-known spread of capitalism, and the brute necessity on the part of young bourgeois class-communities in oppressed areas of eastern Europe to strive for the establishment of a state in which no other class community would be able to prevent them from accumulating capital. But, as Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bauer could all agree, this necessity did not have to result in secession, and therefore the diffusion of capitalism was not at all the same thing as the diffusion of the nation state.

Let us now recall Nairn's 'tidal wave of modernization', which is supposed to have carried nationalism 'in concentric circles' out across the extra-European world. The word 'modernization' is, to begin with, very slippery. When Marxists apply this word to the colonial countries and the colonial period they ordinarily mean simply 'capitalism' (for. in the logic of historical materialism, capitalism is more 'modern' than feudalism). 'Modernization' does not at all imply, to Marxists, economic development, an industrial revolution, or a significant improvement in the lives of working people. Industry did not spread to colonies. The conditions of life in most colonies grew markedly worse during the colonial period: we think, for instance, of the increase in the frequency and severity of famines in India during the British occupation, the evident decline in life expectancy during that period, and so on.9 For Marxists, then, the word 'modernization', like the word 'development', describes a process that is now, in newly independent countries, just barely getting underway. So. to put it bluntly: there has been no 'tidal wave of modernization', no 'great shock-wave' (p. 338) or 'expanding wave' (p. 102) or 'march of Western Progress over the globe' (p. 337). Such things are cognitive models in an ideological universe which has no empirical reference, and are, moreover, much more than wrongheaded ideas: they are constructed myths, designed to persuade people of something that Marxists know to be false: that capitalism can bring progress and prosperity to the poor countries of the world.

Yet the idea of a 'tidal wave of modernization' is necessary to Nairn's theory. Nationalism for him is the mechanism which allowed countries to enter upon what he calls 'the forced march out of backwardness and dependency' (p. 343), hence to overcome uneven development and grow modern. No such 'forced march out of backwardness' has taken place in the world of former colonies, the world of peripheral nationalism, except in the case of socialist countries, a case which Nairn seems to disallow (he applies the word 'socialist' to no country other than Yugoslavia). Thus no tidal wave, and no Nairnian nationalism.

Diffusionist models cannot explain the space-time pattern of decolonization, much less peripheral-country nationalism in general. Among successfully decolonizing national liberation movements, the main sequence runs from Haiti to other parts of Latin America, to Ireland, to India, to Indonesia, and thereafter in a seemingly random space-time pattern across the rest of Asia. Africa, and the West Indies (excepting only a few not-yet-liberated colonies, like Puerto Rico and Namibia). As to the process behind this pattern, it is of course much too complex to epitomize in a sentence or two of description, but it reflects neither diffusion nor modernization. It reflects, in brief, the rise of classes which, suffering exploitation or marginalization under colonial rule, adopted nationalism as the central strategy to relieve themselves of these burdens, a strategy which, if not sufficient - witness the neocolonies of this world - was at the very least necessary. Ignoring this process entirely, Nairn gives us instead a model of the diffusion of an 'irrational' ideology and political movement, as though resistance to exploitation were itself irrational.

Nationalism and Fascism

The next problem for Nairn is to explain how nationalism, this irrational ideology borne outward from Europe on the 'tidal wave of modernization', came, somehow, to infect the core countries: Germany and Italy during the first part of the present century, and then other countries, most especially that bastion of world capitalism and beneficiary (not victim) of uneven development, the United Kingdom. (Let us recall, it is the nationalism of Scotland. Wales, and Northern Ireland that Nairn is mainly concerned to explain and defend.) Nairn harks back to the time when Germany and Italy were somewhat backward countries, in comparison to Britain and France, were countries in which, according to Nairn's theory, uneven development engendered nationalist movements. Then Nairn skips half a century or more, not pausing to explain how it was that nationalism persisted in these countries after unification had been accomplished and down through a long era of massive industrial development and rising prosperity, an era which saw Germany surpass France and nearly catch up with Britain in most economic spheres. Finally, says Nairn, the old nationalism of Germany and Italy effloresced into fascism. The transformation was, for him, quite natural. Fascism is nothing more than hypertrophied nationalism. It is the 'archetype' of nationalism, or nationalism 'carried to its "logical conclusion", as an autonomous mode of socio-political organization' (p. 347). It is nationalism writ large.

The exact mechanism by which quantity becomes quality, nationalism becomes fascism, is given meagre attention. Germany, Italy, and Japan (whose 'militarism' Nairn brackets with fascism) were late-developing countries of the semi-periphery, hence they had become nationalist in the usual Nairnian way. But, since they were semi-peripheral rather than peripheral, late-developing rather than underdeveloped, they managed to become strong states. Thus they acquired 'modern socio-economic institutions enabling them to mobilize and indoctrinate their masses effectively'. And thus 'these societies were able to realize the ideology of "nationalism" with unprecedented force' (p. 346). But something else seems to have been involved: a 'fear of "underdevelopment"'. a sense that their 'position remained precarious'.

In the first half of this century [Germany, Italy, and Japan] were confronted with the fact, or the immediate likelihood, of breakdown. For all of them this implied relegation: permanent confinement to the secondary, semi-peripheric status, exclusion from the core-area's 'place in the sun'. Physical or moral defeat, the menace of internal collapse, or (as they saw it) continued or renewed aggression by the central imperial powers - these were the motives that impelled them into a still more intensive form of nationalist mobilization, (p. 347)

that is. fascism. In commenting on this exposition, I will not dwell on the almost Hegelian way Nairn has of ascribing psychological properties to whole nations. Nor will I stress that this passage is full of factual errors. (For instance, that prior to the fascist era, there had been no 'defeat' for Italy and Japan, and no 'breakdown' for Japan.) There are, rather, two points to be made. First: while all scholars find some relationship between post-First World War traumas and the rise of fascism. Nairn's attempt to present the latter as, on the one hand, a psychological reaction and, on the other hand, a nationalist reaction, is far-fetched, and certainly not established as valid in the few sentences quoted above, the only argument provided. And second, if we add these sentences about the rise of fascism to Nairn's direct and simple equation of nationalism with fascism, we have an entire theory of fascism, albeit a theory presented with neither argument nor evidence. To explain fascism is not at all my intent in the present essay. But to show that fascism is something absolutely unrelated to national liberation struggles in oppressed countries, and only symptomatically related to nationalism in general, is a necessary part of the argument.

There is much disagreement about the relationship between fascism and nationalism. The problem is a muddle of conceptual difficulties, scholarly disagreements, and political differences. One reason why we shall not easily solve it is the fact that we have no very good theory of fascism itself. If we did. there would not be heated debates on the Left as to whether there is or is not a danger of fascism emerging in the liberal capitalist states, nor confusion as to whether contemporary gorilla regimes in countries like Chile, Guatemala, South Korea, Thailand, and so on. should be described as fascist. Another reason is the fact that nationalism is usually, but not always, a significant feature of fascist countries. To be specific, most but not all of these countries have tended to engage in expansionist national struggle and to evolve the corresponding ideological formulae which rationalize the conquest and subjugation of other territories and peoples. (Loyalty to the state is always, of course, emphasized, but to describe this ideological element, in isolation, as nationalist, or to find nationalism wherever ideology of this sort is displayed, is to employ a concept of nationalism so broad as to be useless, and at the same time much too narrow since it excludes all social and political processes implied in the concept of'national struggle', the characteristic Marxist synonym for'nationalism'.) Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal did not engage in expansionist adventures, apart from the usual campaigns to pacify portions of colonial territories. Italian fascism certainly had the classic features of expansionist nationalism, replete with the rhetoric of rebuilding the Roman Empire. But Mussolini's colonial expansion in Ethiopia and even Albania was not much more than a belated form of classical colonial imperialism, and the rhetoric may have been no more outrageous than the ideology of 'manifest destiny' in the United States and comparable ideologies of imperialism in Britain and France. Fascist Italy indeed displayed a racist and anti-semitic ideology (though perhaps not much more so than the United States at that time), but its main hatred was reserved, in a perversely logical way, for socialists. And. in any case, the assumption (made by Nairn among others) that racism and anti-semitism are somehow identifiable with nationalism is quite false. In national liberation struggles the belief-systems deal not with who is superior and who is inferior, but with who is free and who is not. In imperialist expansionism the belief-systems may indeed be nakedly racist but they may also be (superficially) egalitarian and democratic, as when the British public is assured by its leaders that the Empire is being enlarged in order to civilize the savages, or when the American public is assured that the Korean and Vietnam wars are aimed at preserving freedom and democracy in those lands. Nationalist movements may be progressive or reactionary; likewise their ideologies.

The really complex case is Nazism. It is quite true that one of the ideologies of nationalism, one of many, takes the form of a belief-system which justifies foreign conquest on grounds that the people to be conquered are inferior to the conqueror. Nazism certainly employed this formula, and used it to cover truly inhuman acts. But certain points need to be made, not to ameliorate but to assist in generalization. For one thing, the reference group was typically not the national category, 'Germans', but the pseudo-racial category. 'Aryans'. For another thing, a similar racist ideology and its attendant behaviour were far from uncommon during the course of colonial expansion. (Recall Aime Cesaire's comparison of colonialism and Nazism in Discourse on Colonialism.) Under colonialism in general. non-Europeans tended to be considered inferior or even subhuman, and whether they were genocidally massacred, enslaved, or merely subjected to colonial exploitation as wage labourers depended most of all on the interests and power of the colonizing country, not on differences of ideology.

Four things seem to me to be crucial here about the Nazi case. First, the 'inferior' people, hence the victims, were white and European. Second, genocidal massacre reached technological heights: the gas chambers at Auschwitz were incomparably more efficient than the US Cavalry at Wounded Knee. Third, race hate and genocide were being preached and practised in modern times, not in the bad old days of history. (But comparable ideas and acts, on a smaller scale, were still to be found in the colonial world, including Puerto Rico, in the Nazi period. And race hate was by no means absent in the democratic countries in this period: it is no accident that the American Nazis today make common cause with the Ku Klux Klan.) And fourth was the special holocaust visited upon the Jews.

There is one model in which all four of these features are at least schematically explained, and it does not derive them from nationalism. (Says Nairn: racism and anti-semitism are 'derivatives' of nationalism. Racism and anti-semitism are very, very old, as Nairn well knows, and nationalism in his theory goes back only to the last century. Another error and another contradiction.) In this alternative model, the central and crucial basis for Nazi ideology is the imperative of functionality in one historical context and towards one goal: defeating the ideologies of the communists and social democrats, this at a time when capitalism was in a state of collapse in Germany and revolution threatened. The ideological arguments and models had to convince the workers and petty bourgeoisie that the enemy was not the ruling class, in its public or private guise; the enemy was external to the society, and this enemy was the cause of all of Germany's ills. Translated into the subjective, emotive language needed to re-direct the passionate feelings of an already inflamed people away from hatred for capitalism and established authority, the message became one of blame and hatred for all those groups who could be identified as 'enemy', including the internal 'enemy', the Jews, and external 'enemies' comprising foreign governments, plotting to hold Germany in a permanent condition of poverty, and foreign peoples, enjoying prosperity on lands and resources stolen from their rightful owners, the Germans. I will not try to explain why German workers permitted themselves, for a time, to be persuaded by this ideology. I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Nazi ideology is much more plausibly explained in this model than in Nairn's theory, according to which everything is explained by invoking the prime cause and autonomous force of nationalism. It seems to me that Nazi expansionist nationalism should, itself, be explained by something more fundamental: the defensive class struggles of capitalism.

Much of the horror that was the Nazi epoch in Germany can be explained by invoking the Marxist theory of colonialism. The place to begin is with Lenin's theory about the causes of the First World War, a theory which asserted that the basic cause of this war was colonialism. To be more specific: (1) the new era of imperialism was one in which colonialism had become more crucial for capitalism than ever before; but (2) it was an era in which the whole world had already been claimed (partitioned) as colony or sphere of influence by one or another of the great capitalist powers; and therefore (3) it was an era which would be characterized by cannibalistic fighting among the powers for what Lenin described as the 'repartition of the world'. (See Chapter 5). Germany was thus fighting mainly to retain and to enlarge her colonial empire, and of course she failed.

But the ideology of colonialism cannot have disappeared after Versailles. It is likely, rather, to have grown still more intense during the post-war economic crisis. The boundaries of colonialist ideology are both broad and ill-defined. They comprise nearly all racism and much ethnocentrism. ideological elements which, as we well know, were marshalled in the service of colonialism over several centuries, although their origin is generally older. These elements do not clearly differentiate between the notions of'colony' and 'annexed territory', so that expansive German nationalism within Europe would be seen as having the same basic justification and purpose as expansive nationalism in Africa or the Pacific. Deployed in post-war Germany, this ideology becomes the argument that prosperity can indeed be regained, under capitalism, if Germany can succeed in annexing adjoining territories, surrogate colonies which, like colonies everywhere, will provide raw materials, markets, and. more generally, value, a part of which can filter down to the German working class and ameliorate their suffering. And of course the (non-German) people of these territories, like colonials elsewhere, are defined as inferior and in need of German 'tutelage' (the single most favoured noun in the colonialists' vocabulary). Thus the ideology of classical, capitalist colonialism is twisted and transformed into the Nazi ideology of expansive nationalism.

Following this line of thought a single step farther, we come upon an argument which may help to explain the Jewish holocaust. The Jews of Germany had many of the attributes of a colonial people. To begin with, they possessed resources which could be expropriated. This could be and was justified in quite typical colonialist terms, and the results of expropriation, like colonial spoliation elsewhere, would be seen as an increase in the wealth of other (non-Jewish) Germans. Second, the Jews were culturally just different enough from other Germans to permit racist ideology - already widely diffused in a country which had only recently owned colonies, and in which anti-semitism was chronic - to be directed forcefully at Jews. This would not only provide the rationalization for the expropriation of Jewish property, but it would, more significantly, permit the Jews to serve as the surrogate target for the German workers' hatred of capitalism (not capitalists but Je wish capitalists were to blame), for German hatred of the foreigners who. at Versailles, stole their wealth and caused their misery (the Jews were just sufficiently 'foreign' in culture to serve this surrogate role), and. finally, the Germans' need to have colonies and colonial subjects: 'natives'. Perhaps I should not say 'the Germans' need' and 'the Germans' hatred', because we are. after all. discussing a carefully manufactured ideology, that of Nazism. All of these roles created for the Jews in Nazi ideology were designed to fashion a substitute enemy in the class war.

Is fascism, then, the 'archetype' of nationalism? A 'central sector of the phenomenon' of nationalism? Nationalism carried to its 'logical conclusion'? (pp. 345-347.) Set aside the questions of theory for a moment and consider the real implications of this position. It requires us to believe that all national movements, including national liberation movements against colonialism, are intrinsically fascist. It requires us to believe that their source is ideology, not class exploitation and the oppression that is imposed, and resisted, in connection with exploitation. None of this is true, but it is all required by Nairn's theory. As to the theory itself. I have shown that it has no substance. National movements can have feudalist, bourgeois democratic, fascist, socialist, and other sorts of ideologies. Likewise the forces that oppose such movements. Fascist movements can make use of the politics of national aggrandizement, and even the politics of secessionism. But nationalism has no direct and close connection to fascism, and the problem of fascism cannot be solved within the theory of nationalism.

Neo-Nationalism and Counter-Diffusion

Nairn's theory-building efforts, like most serious contributions to the Marxist theory of nationalism, are anchored in a particular, concrete manifestation of the national question. Nairn is concerned with what he calls the 'neo-nationalist' movements of Scotland, Wales, and (Protestant) Northern Ireland, movements which in his view will bring about the 'break-up of Britain'. Nairn has a certain amount to say about the evolution of these movements and their present-day characteristics, but he knows that something more is needed if he is to persuade the Left to accept his two principal contentions: that these movements are. indeed, important and that they are progressive. He thinks the problem lies with the Marxist theory of nationalism, with its obsession with class struggle and its unrealistic contention that nationalism is a fading anachronism, a relic of the era of early capitalism and thus a force no longer powerful and no longer progressive. Departing from this position - an incorrect one. as I will show in the final section of the present chapter- he rebuilds the theory, not on the basis of class struggle but on the basis of a supposed frustration-reaction to 'uneven development'. As we have seen, this theory has no real evidential support, but it does at least construct a barely plausible model for the countries of the periphery and the 'semi-periphery' (Germany, etc.). Such countries are supposed to have acquired nationalism as a response to the 'tidal wave of modernization', the outward diffusion of progress. All very well. But how can Nairn then explain the return, the counter-diffusion, of nationalism from the periphery back to the centre, back to Britain, there to emerge as the new ('neo-') nationalist movements within its borders? One would now be swimming upstream against the current of diffusion. But how is this to be done? This question is perhaps the most important one we can ask about Nairn's theory. It is the put-up-or-shut-up question: here you have a theory and there you have a set of facts, facts about neo-nationalism. which the theory is supposed to explain, is designed to explain. Well. then, explain. But Nairn disappoints us. He has a separate explanation for each of the component parts of this problem: the return of nationalism to the nation states of Western Europe; the rise of neo-nationalism in Scotland; the rise of neo-nationalism in Wales; the (by Nairn) hopefully anticipated rise of neo-nationalism in the Protestant community of Ulster. These explanations have nothing much to do with one another and nothing at all to do with Nairn's central theory of nationalism. Scotland, we are told, is a 'unique' case (p. 110). 'a historical oddity' (p. 134), and Scottish neo-nationalism is 'sui generis', (p. 128). Nairn's explanation for the rise of neo-nationalism in Scotland is thoughtful and interesting, but it has nothing to do with Nairn's 'tidal wave' and the rest of his general theory. For Wales, we are told that Welsh 'cultural nationalism', itself unexplained, somehow turned into political nationalism, and matters are basically left at that. The discussion of Northern Ireland is so peculiar, and so full of danger signals for Marxist theory and practice, that I will treat it separately, though briefly, later in this chapter, but this case, too, is given its own private explanation. Even the general, underlying fact, the return (as Nairn has it) of nationalism to the core countries and thus to Britain, is explained in a way that has no connection to the general theory - if, indeed, we can call this particular construction an explanation. The closest we come to an explanation is in this passage:

'Uneven development' is not just the hard luck tale of poor countries. It dragged the wealthy ones in as well. Once the national state had been ideologized into 'nationalism' and turned into the new climate of world politics - the new received truth of political humanity - the core-areas themselves were bound to become nationalist. As the march-lands caught up in the later nineteenth century, as Germany, Italy, and Japan emerged into . . . extra-rapid industrialization . . . was it surprising that England and France developed their own forms of 'nationalism'? There resulted a struggle between founder-members and parvenus, where great-power nationalism was forged from the new notions and sentiments. In other words, 'uneven development' is a dialectic. The two sides involved continuously modify each other. Nationalism may have originated as a kind of'antithesis' to the 'thesis' of metropolitan domination. But it was rapidly, and inevitably, transmitted to the whole process, (p. 344)

In all this there is only one really empirical argument about the counter-diffusion of nationalism. It is the reasonable-sounding assertion that, if Germany, Italy, and Japan are compelled by virtue of their nationalism to go to war with Britain and France, then naturally ('was it surprising ...?') their antagonists would also become nationalist, and nationalism would thus diffuse across the battlelines from semi-periphery to core. But this is chop-logic. Wars have been with us a long time, and they have had no necessary relationship to nationalism. Bellicose attitudes may, indeed must, be transmitted from one warring side to the other unless they are there already, but not much else diffuses. Nazism did not diffuse at Stalingrad or fascism at Salerno. And so on. But there are other sorts of objections. For one thing, 'uneven development' does not enter the picture. For another thing, Nairn is here slipping into the argument an extraordinary new theory about 'great power nationalism'. It seems to have diffused from Germany, Italy, and Japan to the other great European states during the present century. Therefore, according to Nairn, there was no great power nationalism in Britain and France, not to mention Russia and Austria-Hungary, in earlier times, and the trait, moreover, came to these states by diffusion. And where, in all of this, is great power imperialism?

As for the rest of this passage, it adds no further explanation as to how nationalism seeped back into the core, offering instead a few rhetorical flourishes of the sort which, I regret to say, Marxists very often use to fill out incomplete arguments: invoking the word 'dialectic' to paper over gaps in reasoning and unresolved contradictions; lacing the text with argument-pushers like 'bound to' and 'inevitably' and 'was it surprising that . . . ?' (and elsewhere in Nairn's book a barrage of truly's' and 'of course's' and 'naturally's', along with the occasional 'any fool knows that'and'it is the simplest matter of historical fact . . . that'); and. more generally, reinforcing a simple and thin argument by expressing it in the most elegant and convoluted language, replete with obscure allusions, foreign words, and resounding though empty phrases like 'the new received truth of political humanity'. I lean on this point for two reasons. First: Nairn's theory as a whole is just this sort of thin argument fattened out by rhetoric. And second; the absence of a real, empirical explanation as to how peripheral nationalism, semi-peripheral nationalism, core-area nationalism, and inner-periphery 'neo-nationalism' all connect up together is both a glaring, perhaps fatal, weakrfess in the theory and also an invalidation of Nairn's most pretentious claim for the theory: that it brings all the forms of nationalism into a single explanation about a single, whole (though Janus-faced) phenomenon. We are left with the nationalism supposedly generated by uneven development and an altogether different sort of nationalism in the core countries. And these two categories are, themselves, taxonomically dubious. The first includes national liberation struggles but it also includes fascism. The second does not include imperialism.

I must dwell a bit more on this matter of counter-diffusion. Although Nairn says very little about the mechanisms by which nationalism returns from its home in the periphery to enter the core countries, he does, nonetheless, create a kind of mood in which this counter-diffusion seems almost natural. This mood-setting, which pervades the whole of Nairn's book, seems again to be derived (perhaps unwittingly) from classical Eurocentric diffusionism. Central to that perspective is what we may call 'the principle of ideological contagion', that is. the spread of ideas for no particular reason other than their innate infectiousness. The contagion occurs in both directions: centrifugally and centripetally, outwards and inwards. In the outward direction, it is the bestowal of modernizing, enlightening traits. Inwards, it tends to be identified with things savage and irrational. The schematic logic of this model, in its classical form, is as follows: since cultural evolution tends to occur at the (European) centre and spread centrifugally. the outer regions must always be more backward than the inner, because their culture must reflect an earlier stage in the evolutionary process. Therefore any counter-diffusion will be a passage of older and thus less civilized traits into the core. At any given time, there is a duality between core and periphery - each seen as a single region - which maps into space such familiar (and today mainly neo-Kantian) oppositions as reason and unreason (instinct, emotion), abstract and concrete, mind and body, science and sorcery, discipline and spontaneity, adult and child, sane and insane, progressive and stagnant ('traditional'), and of course civilized and primitive. Ideological contagion, then, is a passage of the one sort of trait from core to periphery and of the other sort from periphery to core.

Nairn employs a version of this model in his descriptions of the core and the periphery (plus 'semi-periphery') and the currents passing between them. The core, western Europe, is repeatedly described as 'rational', or with epithets denoting its intellectual stature: 'the rationalism of our Enlightenment heritage', 'the Enlightenment' (repeatedly used as an epithet for Western culture, as on p. 338:

'The Enlightenment was borne into wider reality' to the 'less-developed lands'), 'Western rationality' (p. 337), 'western-founded "progress"' (p. 361), the 'west-wind of progress' (p. 360), and so on. It is important that we keep in mind the fact that, for Nairn, 'the West', or the core, comprises only western Europe - perhaps only Britain and France. So Nairn's position, however ethnocentric and elitist it may be, seems not to be racist.

Nairn does not simply characterize the periphery as irrational, unenlightened. His description of peripheral culture is developed in three steps. First, we read about the peripheral regions before 'the spread of civilized progress'(p. 99) began to change them. Before the 1790s they were 'buried in feudal and absolutist slumber' (p. 96), in 'barbarism' (p. 108), their masses 'still located culturally upon a far anterior level . . . feudal or pre-feudal . . . archaic . . . primeval-seeming', etc. Notice, by the way, that Nairn is describing here the semi-peripheral Germany of Bach and the Italy of Vivaldi, along with Moghul India, Ming China, and the rest. Then the 'tidal wave' arrives (mainly. I infer, in the form of colonialism), along with the somewhat indefinite effects of uneven development. And finally, all of this produces an explosive reaction. One dimension of the reaction is nationalism, seen as a doctrine and policy, but the overall process is much deeper and wider. In one context Nairn identifies it with 'romanticism', which he describes as 'the search for inwardness, the trust in feeling or instinct, the attitude to "nature", the cult of the particular and mistrust of the "abstract", etc' (p. 104). In another context he employs a psychoanalytic analogy (or homology), likening the reaction to the forces of the unconscious which are unleashed in childhood; invoking concepts like 'regression', 'instinct', 'inwardness', 'dementia', and 'infantilism'; and describing the whole process as 'the pathology of modern developmental history', and as a manifestation of'the collective unconscious' (pp. 348-350). In all this Nairn is not simply attaching descriptors to the concept of nationalism; he is describing some underlying cultural force in these peripheral societies: he is characterizing the societies themselves, as in this passage:

The powers of the Id are far greater than was realized before Freud exposed them to theoretical view. In the same way, the energies contained in customary social structures were far greater than was understood, before the advent of nationalist mobilization stirred them up and released them from the old mould, (p. 349)

Having been thus stirred up and released, these savage forces then spread back and forth across the globe, and brought neo-nationalism to Great Britain.

The nationalism which came in this way to Britain is considered by Nairn to have lost most of its virulence. English nationalism is not described with terms like 'instinct' and 'irrationality'. It is civilized, mild, and rational. It is 'dignified' and 'politically inert'. It is nothing worse than a 'reverence for the overall nature' of British society.'a faith in the . . . system', an acceptance of 'a "way of life" basically worth defending' (pp. 42-44). Thus no dementia or infantilism. Nairn explains the peculiarities of English nationalism in terms of the gradual development over three centuries and more of a rather stable and well integrated society, one in which the class war has never grown to such proportions as to tear apart the social fabric. In fact, according to Nairn, there has never really been much class struggle in Britain. He describes this country with phrases like 'social cohesion' (p. 69) and writes of 'the English class-compromise' (p. 32), the 'deep class alliance' (p. 59) and, for present-day Britain, 'the frozen ice of the class struggle' (p. 59). I will not comment on this curious (for a Marxist) view of British society and history.101 need merely note Nairn's argument that the effects of steady economic decline in this cohesive society will be a kind of internal decomposition which, assisted by the external pressures of neo-nationalism in the British periphery, will bring about the 'break-up of Britain'. This will also, he hopes, lead to a break-up of the 'frozen ice' of class struggle, and thus, via nationalism, regenerate social progress in this part of the world. I need hardly add that this construction bears little resemblance to common-or-garden Marxism.

The relative stability of British society is not in dispute. Nairn attributes it, as do most Marxists and quite a few others (including most notably Hobson), to the extraordinary wealth which flowed to Britain from the Empire, wealth sufficient to ease the burden of exploitation just enough to keep social conflict from erupting into revolution. Hence the British working class permitted itself to be led into the occasional European war on behalf of the bourgeoisie, and in this sense succumbed to nationalism (as it also did in the faith-in-the-system sense discussed above, and as it will do, Nairn hopes, in still a third sense: a kind of resurrection of national will or purpose which may come, somehow, after the 'break-up'). But Nairn carries this argument about the effects of Empire too far in one direction and not far enough in another. Too far in that he thinks, wrongly, that it has led to a 'class alliance', a freezing of the class struggle. Not far enough in that Nairn quite fails to see that Empire - that is, British colonialism - was itself inseparable from nationalism.

Empire, for Nairn, is simply a given fact, something that produces certain effects on British society but does not call for analysis within his theory. It is, he says. 'uneven development' which 'generates these "given facts" of imperialism and nationalism' (p. 2In) (thereby giving further magical powers to 'uneven development'). But the growth of the British Empire was surely one of the really dramatic and significant cases of great power nationalism. It was, among many other things, genuine national struggle, in that it involved territorial expansion and the establishment of British colonial government over previously sovereign states and self-governing societies, its ideology was, among other things, an ideology of nationalism. If in certain periods it was less strident than some other nationalist ideologies, this mainly reflected the fact that colonial expansion brought self-evident rewards to many members of British society, who therefore needed less ideological prodding than would otherwise have been the case. Nairn, however, fails altogether to assimilate classical imperialism to the concept of nationalism. We recall that he attributes great power nationalism to the Germans and their allies in the two World Wars and imagines it to have infected a still-innocent Britain in that era. He does not consider as nationalism the continental and later overseas expansion of the United States, a process which was typically imperialist and was provided with a typical nationalist ideology, known as 'manifest destiny'. If all such cases of imperialism can be seen as expansive national struggle, or expansionist nationalism, then we have to see the resistance to such expansion, at least in the case of organized states, as defensive nationalism; and if this formulation is accepted, in its turn, then the nationalism of peripheral areas began much earlier than Nairn's theory requires and reflected the stark fact of invasion, not the crypto-psychology of frustration with uneven development. And, by the same token, the nationalism of countries like Britain proves to be older than and far removed from uneven development. British nationalism seems dignified and civilized to Nairn only because its more brutal and, yes, 'demented' aspects are completely ignored.

Nairn claims two prime virtues for his theory: that it explains all the many manifestations of nationalism in terms of a single, underlying process, uneven development; and that it places each case and country in a world perspective, avoiding what Nairn calls the 'country-by-country attitude' according to which each national movement is explained in terms of the internal and idiosyncratic history of that particular country. All of this is forgotten when Nairn turns to Northern Ireland. Now the analysis is exclusively, resolutely, idiosyncratic, as though Nairn were trying to will out of existence the larger forces, such as British imperial interests and those of multinational capitalism. And there is no recourse to uneven development. Indeed, Nairn readily concedes that Ulster has not suffered from uneven development. He does not try to explain how nationalist movements might (or might not) arise in the absence of this primal force, but rather presents, instead of an explanation, a taxonomy.

To begin with, there are what Nairn calls the 'mainstream of "backward" or "underdeveloped" societies anxious to catch up':

However, it has never been the case that this main current exhausts the meaning of nationalism. There have also been a number of what could be termed 'counter-currents' - examples of societies which have claimed national self-determination from a different, more advanced point in the development spectrum. These somewhat more developed social formations have struggled for independence against the'backward'nationalities around them . . . Impelled by the same underlying historical force . . . they represent none the less eddies in a contrary direction, (pp. 248-249)

That national movements have arisen in economically advanced areas is no secret: witness the cases of Belgium and Bohemia in the last century and Catalonia and Vizcaya today. But to place all such cases in a single category is to call for an explanation, not simply an allusion to 'counter-currents' and 'eddies'. No such explanation is offered, however, and we are left to infer that Northern Ireland has evolved into a nation, and deserves the right of self-determination, just because it belongs to the same category of phenomena as Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Catalonia, and so on.

The Ulster Protestant territories clearly belong to this group. And one must put the same question about them as about the other members of this rather marginal and select 'rich men's club'. Does it follow that they have no right to self-determination because they are (relatively) economically developed? (p. 249)

The question is of course rhetorical, since no one seems to have made such an accusation, but notice the strategic 'does it follow . . . ?' by which the assertion of membership in the class (or 'club') somehow automatically confers the right of self-determination.

Nairn next carves out a sub-category within the 'rich men's club' consisting of settler colonies. In this group he places Northern Ireland, 'White South Africa', Singapore, and Israel, and asserts that Israel and Northern Ireland have particularly much in common. Again we are left to infer that statements made about the class, or other attributes of its members, are, somehow, descriptive of Northern Ireland. For example, the settler colonies - including, mind you, 'White South Africa' - are described as

genuine, self-sustaining, middle-class societies . . : more or less complete social formations, capable of independence and self-defence, and with their own variety of nationalism . . . islands of relative over-development in relation to backward areas around them. (p. 188) . . . These settler-based bridgeheads of development defend an existing state against the 'backward hordes' surrounding them. They see themselves as custodians of a civilization which would 'go under' if they were politically assimilated to native society, (p. 189)

Then the comparison is made with Israel, which, says Nairn, 'for a quarter of a century . . . fought for independence against the less-developed Arab lands on all sides of it' (a distortion of history) and which, along with Protestant Ulster, 'can be accused by the more echt-\ooking [puristic] nationalists around them of being on somebody else's land' (p. 249). Thus, all-told, a series of judgments - some quite strange - about other countries and an inference that Northern Ireland acquires the same attributes by class membership. Not, one would think, a typical example of Marxist theory building.

The argument is not entirely limited to metaphor. Nairn ventures a few generalizations about the history of Northern Ireland in order to sketch in the picture of a genuine nation in the process of being formed.'' The society, he says, stems from alien settlement; that is, the Protestant community today is directly descended from settlers and thus forms a settler colony. The fact that Irish folk were there beforehand is neglected (reminding one of the way White South Africans try to erase from history the knowledge that the land they occupy had prior owners), and also neglected are the later histories of these indigenous Irish folk along with the fact that some, at least, of today's Protestants are descendants of converts (a common pattern in colonies everywhere).

Next Nairn alludes to the 'uneven development' visited upon southern Ireland during the 19th Century but not upon the north; and without trying to explain this fact he asserts that the north-south differential created at that time somehow established the inexorable logic of a boundary between northern and southern Ireland. No mention is made of the way British industrial capitalism extended itself to Belfast during the industrial revolution while the rest of Ireland was systematically de-industrialized, depopulated (to mobilize labour in England), and impoverished by an archetypically colonialist form of superexploitation, a process described by Marx and Engels and today well understood. Failing to deal with these processes, Nairn leaves the impression that Northern Ireland's economic development was self-generated, rather than an integral part of British industrialization. He is trying to refute the claim, so often heard from Ulster Protestants, that they are truly British, and the parallel claim, heard among Ulster Catholics (and many others), that all Ireland is one nation.

Meanwhile, in a 'standard tale of under-development, peasant [southern] Ireland was . . . dragged into modern existence by English industrialism and then forced to a nationalist self-mobilization against these same forces' (p. 228). It seems, then, that Irish nationalism was anti-industrial, not anti-British. The Irish resisted, according to Nairn, 'in the same way as and at the same time as the rest of under-developed Central and Eastern Europe' (p. 229), and obtained its independence in the same set of post-First-World-War boundary-making ceremonies. Nothing is said, therefore, about the explicitly colonial oppression and exploitation visited upon Ireland and not upon most of the other non-self-governing countries of Europe. And nothing about the powerful, mass based, and ultimately victorious nationalist movement. We are left to infer that independence was, instead, a casual decision by the British: the Republic of Ireland was just 'one in the interminable list making up this post-war settlement' (p. 229). Hence the boundary between north and south was quite natural. 'It corresponded ... to the "development gap"' (p. 229). So Northern Ireland and the Republic are natural and distinct spatial entities, with a natural (or at least sensible) boundary. The boundary does not, then, reflect the bitter rearguard efforts of retreating British imperialism to hold on to that one corner of Ireland from which it gained the most surplus value and in which it retained the most influence.

Nairn does not seem to believe that the British had any interest in, or anything much to do with, events in Ireland, until 'the escalating violence forced . . . London to break with the long British tradition of reluctant, last-minute intervention in Irish affairs' (p. 251). It was, he says, Protestant violence 'which brought the British army to Ulster' (p. 238). (But why, then, are there so many Catholic prisoners in Long Kesh?) Next a tear is shed for the Catholic minority in Ulster: 'Stranded on the wrong side of the boundary, the Catholic-nationalist minority joined the huge number of Europe's displaced persons and communities [which]. . . dotted the landscape from Fermanagh to the Black Sea' (p. 229).

Thus the picture of Northern Ireland in the 20th Century: the settler community now formed into the 'Protestant nationality' and into a 'Protestant nation' (p. 245), within a state possessing a historically natural boundary and yet plagued with a minority people who, far from being part of the nation, are merely 'displaced persons' whose misfortune it was to be 'stranded on the wrong side of the boundary'.

In the 1960s, says Nairn, the Catholic minority became 'restless' (p. 229). In earlier times there had been no nationalist movement among the Catholics because the two states in Ireland were seen to be 'equally odious'. When nationalism finally arose it did not have a material basis in national oppression or in the superexploitation of Catholic workers (something Nairn fails altogether to mention). Rather, this newly arising nationalism is a product of prosperity: of improving conditions. At this point Nairn introduces a different theory:

Ethnic conflicts do not arise naturally from the coexistence of different groups in one society ... It is when conditions improve and horizons enlarge that they become intolerable. For it is only then that the disadvantaged group feels the full constraints placed on it. (pp. 227-228)

Is it to be supposed, then, that hunger is only noticed when the pangs lessen? Now it is true, of course, that national movements emerge at times under conditions of rising prosperity, rising expectations, and so on. This was perhaps the typical background of bourgeois national movements in 19th Century Europe. But in our time, in the great majority of cases, national movements and national struggles are generated by exploitation and suffering: they constitute a class-based process in which - putting the matter summarily - exploitation by a foreign ruling class is resisted in the strategically logical way, by a struggle for independence, that is, a struggle for state power. This latter sort of process is not, however, acknowledged by Nairn, for whom national struggles are at root frustration reactions by the elite, and are therefore just a part of that mythical scenario, the 'revolution of rising expectations'. To assimilate typical national struggles to this scenario is to believe one of the most basic and dangerous components of conservative ideology: that exploitation and oppression are easing, not worsening, under capitalism.

Little more remains to be said about this curious cognitive map of Northern Ireland. Perhaps we need merely add that the Protestant community as a whole -not to mention its progressive sector - seems far less enthusiastic about secession than Nairn does. Nairn concedes this to be true, as hcmust, but edges around the contradiction with two arguments. He claims that the tendency of Ulster folk to identify with the British was somehow a voluntaristic choice made quite long ago, and for not very fundamental reasons; hence, by implication, a choice that can be easily revoked. And he tries in every possible way to minimize the closeness and importance of the relationship between Northern Ireland and England, past and present. He states that the British today, as in the past, have no interests at stake in Ulster. 'Partition was not a mere conspiracy of empire'. 'There is no "anti-imperialist" struggle going on' (p. 232). 'Great-power interests' are not involved. 'As a separate entity Northern Ireland has become quite useless' to Britain (p. 236). And, beyond that, capitalism as a whole 'has its interest in removing the mythic "frontiers" of racist dominance and inter-ethnic feuds, not in erecting them into actual map-boundaries and customs-posts' (p. 236). If these assertions are not transparently false, the reader may turn to the articles by Perrons and Anderson, cited previously, for a refutation. Only one comment is called for here.

The belief that capitalism is dissolving national frontiers and eliminating national (and racial) oppression is held by many Marxists besides Tom Nairn. And it is wrong. The empirical evidence against it is self-evident. Have any frontiers been removed from the map of late? But what we are really dealing with, here as in all other manifestations of the national question and nationalism, is the state. National struggle is struggle for state power. And state power is as important to capitalism today as ever it was in the past. It is equally important to the working class. Therefore national struggles are not likely to lose their intensity for some time to come.

Neo-Marxism and the National Question

We are now, I think, in a position to assess Nairn's theory of nationalism as a whole. It is presented as an effort to correct the errors and transcend the limitations of the traditional Marxist theory, but the traditional theory itself is misunderstood.

Nairn's first error, which appears to stem mainly from an unfamiliarity with or misreading of post-1914 Marxist literature on nationalism, is to believe that the Marxist theory of nationalism associates national struggle with, and only with, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and that this theory therefore asserts that nationalism is important only during the period of young, rising capitalism, growing less important as capitalism matures. To be sure, this equation of nationalism with early or rising capitalism is to be found in most of the pre-1914 literature, and mainly because it is enshrined in Stalin's influential (!) essay of 1913, 'Marxism and the National Question', it is still believed by a few dogmatists today (See Chapter 5). But Marx and Engels themselves did not strictly equate nationalism with the bourgeoisie and the period of its rise. And Marxists at the time of the First World War became aware rather abruptly that nationalism was growing stronger and more politically important than ever. And Lenin, at that time and for that reason, provided a thorough and adequate explanation for the fact that nationalism does not decline but rather intensifies as capitalism matures into its monopoly or imperialist phase. And, finally, Marxists since that time have viewed the increasingly important national struggles, such as colonial liberation movements, as phenomena fully predicted by Marxist theory. (See Chapter 5). Therefore Nairn is quite wrong in asserting that Marxist theory consigns nationalism to the era of rising capitalism.

And being wrong in this matter, he is wrong in another: a proposition which is in a sense the enabling legislation for his own theory of nationalism. According to Nairn, the traditional Marxist theory, precisely because it predicted the decline of nationalism, has been discredited as a theory, and moreover cannot explain the newer forms of nationalism, such as the modern national movements in parts of Western Europe. Hence the need for a new and radically different theory, one which sees nationalism as a force autonomous from class struggle. But the premises are false, and thus also the conclusions.

Nairn's second basic criticism of the traditional theory is embodied in his denial that the processes of nationalism can be derived from the processes of class struggle. In part this reflects the error discussed above. But this error aside, Nairn does not present any analytic critique of the traditional argument that nationalism emerges from class processes and is a form of class struggle. (See Chapter 2 above.) Instead he unquestioningly accepts the basic assumption common to most conservative theories that something which we label 'nationalism' is a primitive existent, a given, to be accepted at the outset of any argument. This given, for Nairn, seems to be an ideological (or psychological) force. Although he finds its antecedents in something called 'uneven development' (not to be confused with the uneven development of ordinary Marxist discourse) he does not really try to explain the nature and characteristics of the force itself: it remains a given. In the traditional Marxist theory, all phenomena of nationalism, including the strictly ideological phenomena - and most certainly including the passionate and sometimes irrational attitudes associated so often with national struggle - all these are considered to be manifestations of class processes. (For, let us recall, there is passion and irrationality in all of class struggle, not least in the Paris commune, the storming of the Winter Palace, the conquest of Dien Bien Phu.) But Nairn does not even examine the arguments for a class basis to nationalist phenomena: he ignores them, and then merely assumes that nationalism is an autonomous force.

Still another dimension of the traditional theory is ignored by Nairn, although this must be accounted an error of commission, not omission. I refer to the fact that the traditional theory, and most of its variants, have carefully and systematically related the national question to exploitation. Indeed, Marxists have generally supported those national movements which seemed to have a basis in resistance to class exploitation and impoverishment and withheld support from, or supported only tactically, those movements whose political struggle did not have this concrete economic and class basis. Nairn builds a quaint model grounded in what he calls 'uneven development', one in which the process of exploitation - the extraction of surplus labour and surplus value - plays no part whatever. Instead, 'uneven development', or more properly the failure of an area to develop, is supposed to engender feelings of frustration, of envy, among the local elites, the local exploiters, who then somehow 'mobilize' the masses ('the lower strata') into a nationalist campaign. So Nairn's theory resembles conservative theories in what is perhaps their most important feature: it discusses nationalism without relating it to economic exploitation, and it deals with national oppression as in essence a psychological and cultural process and one which affects the elite and not in any important way the masses: oppression without exploitation.

But the indictment goes somewhat farther. Nairn asserts that his view of nationalism is basically the same as Lenin's, meaning that he, like Lenin, appreciates the power and historical importance of this force, hence supports some national movements instead of dismissing, ignoring, or attacking all such movements out-of-hand, as so many Marxists did in Lenin's time and some still do today. Nairn thinks, however, that Lenin's correct positions were not grounded in theory: they were merely, he says, 'pragmatic'. But Lenin's view of nationalism, as we will see in Chapter 4, was not at all what Nairn makes it out to have been. It was not pragmatic: on the contrary, Lenin brought the Marxist theory of nationalism to a new and higher level by associating national struggle with monopoly capitalism or imperialism. Nairn says nothing whatever about imperialism, except in the vague sense of'domination', 'subjugation', and unspecific 'oppression' - the sense used routinely by non-Marxists - and it is impossible to tell whether Nairn rejects Lenin's theory of imperialism or merely does not understand it. I do not refer here to the details of this theory, such as the hypothesis concerning capital export, but to the family of present-day models which are grounded in Lenin's basic proposition that imperialism is a process necessary to capitalism and one which engenders underdevelopment, superexploitation, and national oppression. (See Chapters 4 and 5). Nairn ignores all of this, and he fails to see (or remark) any connection between national struggles and imperialism, in terms of cause, character, or effect. Instead he deploys the quite antithetical theories of conservative social science, those which depict the impact of developed capitalism on peripheral countries as a 'modernizing' process, one which embodies an essentially psychological and, in a sense, moral process of maturation - reaching civilization and thus adulthood - and one which leads, if 'unevenly', to economic progress. It is no sin for a Marxist to make use of conservative theories, but to substitute them for the Marxist theories of class struggle and imperialism is something else altogether. Whether or not the outcome will be a 'Marxist' theory is quite beside the point. It will be a bad theory, and Nairn's is a case in point.

Nairn's theory fits firmly into a general tendency within modern Marxist thought. By 'tendency' I do not mean a political movement, although at times it seems as though the Marxists who make up this tendency are engaged in forming an international, neo-Marxist party whose members will be exclusively professional scholars and whose theoretical journals will somehow serve as so many revolutionary sparks. One of the identifying positions taken by this group of scholars is to view Marxism itself as a simple extension of the European Enlightenment. As a parallel, class struggle is viewed as merely one component in the steady upward stream of progressive social evolution, a process which emanated from some ancient or medieval source in European culture and ever since has grown and effloresced in Europe (or among Europeans), at the same time diffusing its fruits around the world.

On a more concrete level, this perspective tends to reject several specific tenets of Marxist theory (not to say Marxist practice). Most basic, perhaps, is its denial of the argument of The German Ideology to the effect that ideas, including the Enlightenment along with the entire realm of ideology, are not the prime movers of history. Next it denies, or forgets, that the masses are the makers of history. (For Tom Nairn, the intelligentsia and the elite are the main actors in nationalism. For Perry Anderson, Nairn's intellectual soulmate and former colleague at New Left Review, kings and statesmen were the main actors in European historical development.12) Finally, in this school of thought, exploitation tends to be a very abstract component of events - it cannot be ignored entirely thanks to Capital- and it is rarely seen, as Marx and Engels saw it, as a matter of suffering and oppression, and the prime source of resistance and thereafter social change.

On the level of practice, or the inspection of practice, these scholars tend to look down on most efforts in the real world to defeat capitalism. Some of them just do not accept the idea that there have been successful socialist revolutions anywhere in the world. Others are less extreme in their views. All, however, in consonance with the notion that socialism is merely the evolutionary extension of capitalism, and socialist thought merely the extension of Enlightenment thought, tend to undervalue the revolutionary accomplishments of the exploited classes in the Third World, at the same time underplaying the efficacy and even occasionally denying the existence of class struggle at the centre of the system.

Nairn, as I have said, belongs to this tradition. Class struggle at the centre is, in his view, 'frozen' into immobility. In the periphery there seem not to be socialist countries, and instead of the class struggle which presents itself as a national liberation struggle there is only a form of elitist, bourgeois nationalism, generated by envy and led - how could it be otherwise? - by the intelligentsia. Nairn's theory of nationalism thus falls within a larger and, on the whole, internally consistent body of neo-Marxist thought. The signature of this entire stream of scholars and scholarship is the denial that class struggle is the motor of history.

One final thought. The national liberation struggles of colonial and neocolonial nations are a form of nationalism which, I assume, every Marxist deems progressive. Let us then ask what relevance Nairn's theory of nationalism would have for such struggles - in Puerto Rico, Namibia, El Salvador, or anywhere else. This theory would, to begin with, bracket any such struggle with fascism. Second, it would deny or ignore the fact that such a struggle has a basis in exploitation and, more generally, imperialism. Third, it would find the interested sectors to be the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, not the working classes, these latter, in Nairn's theory, being merely 'mobilized' in a process he describes as 'populist'. And finally, Nairn's theory would flatly reject the ideological and political claim, which, I have no doubt, is made by every Marxist who participates in a national liberation struggle, that the quite realizable goal of that struggle is not to eliminate foreign-controlled capitalism and substitute it with a native equivalent, but to make a socialist revolution. For all these reasons, but mainly for the last one, Nairn's theory must be judged irrelevant.

Notes

1. T. Nairn, 'The Modern Janus', New Left Review 94 (1975).

2. See Chapter 1, note 9.

3. 'The Modern Janus' p. 5.

4. Ibid., p. 3.

5. Ibid., p. 21.

6. Ibid., p. 17.

7. Ibid., p. 16.

8. t. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (1977).

9. See B. N. Bhatia, Famines in India (1967).

10. See E. P. Thompson's essay, 'The Peculiarities of the English', in his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), for a fine, caustic critique of this vie w as it had been put forward in earlier writings by Nairn and Perry Anderson.

11. For a more true-to-life geography, see essays by two of my colleagues: Diane Perrons, 'Ireland and the Break-up of Britain', Antipode 11, 1 (1980), and James Anderson, 'Regions and Religions in Ireland: A Short Critique of the "Two Nations" Theory', ibid. I am discussing Nairn's factual assertions about Northern Ireland only as part of my critique of his theory of nationalism, not as an intervention in the debate about Northern Ireland, a subject that is beyond the scope of this book.

12. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolute State (1974).