Understanding Contemporary Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Olexander Hryb
of a liberal society, if equal opportunities are provided for all members of that society. A similar approach was suggested by Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka’s liberal theory of minority rights argues for “freedom within minority groups and equality between minority and majority groups” (Kymlicka 1995, 152). However, as Judith Lichtenberg argued, this poses the difficult question of whether the state may or must privilege certain cultural practices, and disadvantage others, in the interests of social unity. Indeed, how liberal can nationalism be within or beyond state borders? And if it can provide cultural equality within a state and internationally, which is a moral prerequisite of liberal nationalism, then how different would such nationalism be from a cosmopolitan perspective? If the answer to the latter question proves difficult, Lichtenberg believes that liberal nationalism might be hard to distinguish from cosmopolitan-ism (Lichtenberg 19991, 167-88). In fact, it is difficult to disagree with such an argument precisely because nationalism is understood as relating to a single culture in a single state. So, is there any “good” nationalism that is possible or necessary? In order to address this question, it is useful to consider the relationship between democracy and nationalism on the one hand, and patriotism and nationalism on the other hand.
It is easy to observe that both contemporary democracy and nationalism became potent movements at approximately the same time, after the French Revolution, when a new concept of nation was born, within which it was people who possessed the right of sovereignty, and not the rulers as before. So, despite the popular, but mistaken, belief that democracy has nothing in common with nationalism or at least with “bad” nationalism—scholars cannot ignore the fact that, in one way or another, there must be an important correlation between the two.
Jürgen Habermas has argued that the modern state solved two important problems by its unique fusion of state institutions and the homogenizing idea of the nation. The national state established a democratic mode of legitimation, and it provided a new and more abstract form of social integration. This, however, caused an uneasy tension between a nationalist and a republican self-understanding of national society. According to Habermas, the fate of democracy depends on which of these self-understandings dominates (1996, 281-294). The normative conclusion drawn from the European history of nation-states should therefore be simple: to get rid of that ambivalent potential of nationalism, which was originally the vehicle for its success, and to replace it with constitutional patriotism. Habermas admits, however, that in comparison with nationalism, constitutional patriotism appears too thin to hold societies together. He uses, as an example, the United States which, in his view, is the prototype of a country which is united by a civic patriotism that is ultimately self-defeating: for, as he argues, “surging fundamentalism and terrorism (such as in Oklahoma [the 1995 bombing]) are alarming signs that the safety curtain of a civil religion, interpreting a constitutional history of two hundred years, may be about to break” (Habermas 1996, 290).
Jack Snyder proposed an “elite-persuasion” theory of nationalism to explain the relationship between democratization and nationalist conflict. Snyder argues that democratization produces nationalism in the early stages of democracy building, when national elites use nationalism for their own self-interests in order to organize masses behind them for the tasks of war and economic development. Snyder explains the use of nationalism by national elites, historically first in Western Europe and later in Eastern Europe, as related, not to the logic of industrialization as Gellner argued, but to the weakness of political institutions at the time. Therefore, his elite-persuasion theory rests on the assumption that nationalism is an expression of weak developing democracies, “a disease of the transition” and that “proper” political institutions solve this problem of democratic growth (Snyder 2000, 352).
David Held argued in favor of cosmopolitan democracy, but he admits that nationalism was a critical force in the development of the democratic nation-state. According to Held, nationalism has been closely linked to the administrative unification of the state because the conditions involved in the creation of nationalism were often also the conditions that generated the modern state. Contrary to Snyder, who argues that mature democracies overcome the problem of nationalism, Held notes that “the importance of nation-state and nationalism, territorial independence, and the desire to establish or regain or maintain ‘sovereignty’ does not seem to have diminished in recent times” (Held 1995, 94). This is, in his view, connected to the fact that even liberal democracies, or perhaps liberal democracies most of all, need to maintain a common national identity in order to ensure the coordination of policy, mass mobilization and state legitimacy.
Two other important questions should be discussed here: is national consciousness a derivative of nationalism, or is the reverse the case? The “modernist” claim that nations were invented to meet the need of industrial society for a culturally homogeneous and literate environment logically implies that national identity is a consequence of this invention. However, as Philip Schlesinger notes, “Nationalism ... tends to carry the sense of a community mobilized in the pursuit of a collective interest.” However, national identity “may be invoked as a point of reference without necessarily being nationalistic” (Schlesinger 1987, 253).
There are, of course, historical periods when the construction of a national identity may be part of a nationalist program; however, national identity is not necessarily identical to nationalism as such. In other words, national identity and nationalism are different aspects of a more general phenomenon. It would be logical to assume that nationalism is only a part of national identity and that the latter does not have to be nationalistic. Just as national identity may contain other beliefs and myths, it can contain nationalism as a political principle or, as “modernists” would insist, nationalism as a myth. For instance, Gellner claims that:
Nationalism—the principle of homogeneous cultural units as the foundations of political life, and the obligatory cultural unity of rulers and ruled—is indeed inscribed neither in the nature of things, nor in the hearts of men, nor in the preconditions of social life in general, and the contention that it is so inscribed is a falsehood which nationalist doctrine has succeeded in presenting as self-evident. (Gellner 1983, 125)
Primordialists would argue, however, that the basis of nationalism is much more deeply rooted in the human belief of common ancestry (territorially defined) and destiny. For instance, Smith argues that: “Though nationalism as theory and ideology is quite modern (dating from the late eighteenth century in Europe), the identities on which it feeds and builds are either ancient and persistent, or preserved in memories and symbols that, given the right conditions, can serve as models for nation-creating nationalism” (Smith 1984, 289). In some sense, the set of these identities, memories and symbols can correspond to the belief system that we call patriotism. Gellner recognized nationalism as a species of patriotism distinguished by a few very important features: homogeneity, literacy, and anonymity (Gellner 1983, 138). However, as Morris Janovitz has pointed out, patriotism is as old as settled communities (Janovitz 1983).
It is also the case that nationalism as an ideology and doctrine habitually employs various myths as a means of subjugating the masses. As Hobsbawm notes: “Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation (Renan)’” (Hobsbawm 1990, 12).
Nationalists themselves are conscious of their usage of myths. For instance, Benito Mussolini argued that “Our myth is the greatness of the nation.”1 The same idea was expressed by the founder of Ukrainian integral nationalism, Dmytro Dontzov, who wrote in 1923 that each nation has and needs a myth for its own reinforcement (Dontzov 1966). We can conclude therefore that myth in nationalist ideology is required as a tool of mass mobilization. This function is not consistent with either modernist or primordialist conceptions of the transition to the era of nations and nationalism. As Anthony Smith has argued:
There can be no real ‘nation’ without its tacit myth of origins and descent, which defines the fictive kinship basis of the nation and explains the network of affective ties and sentiments. Indeed, together with the historical memories of successive generations of members, myths of descent furnish the cognitive maps and mobilizing moralities of nations as they struggle to win and maintain recognition today (Smith 1988b, 14).
When