Do South Africans Exist?. Ivor Chipkin
consciousness was not necessarily a member of a high culture.
Gellner’s treatment of the nation is subject to an even more important critique. On his terms, an agro-literate society is necessarily a heterogeneous culture – it ‘secretes, engenders, elaborates cultural differentiations within itself’ (Gellner, 1999: 103) – whereas industrial societies are attendant on cultural homogenisation. Gellner adduces this from the technical requirements of an advanced industrial economy: (a) the need for communication among people irrespective of social position or rank, and (b) the decomposition of stable, ascribed roles in favour of occupational effectiveness and hence social mobility.
One of the key features of South Africa, however, was that apartheid society engendered, elaborated, produced and reproduced social heterogeneity as a condition of industrialisation. This was the centrepiece, for example, of the theory of ‘Colonialism of a Special Type’. It suggested that, on the one hand, ‘white South Africa’ resembled an advanced capitalist state and industrial society; while on the other hand, ‘non-white South Africa’ had all the features of a colony. Famously, it concluded that ‘non-white South Africa is the colony of white South Africa itself’ (SACP [1962], cited in Wolpe, 1989: 62). Relying on an analysis of migrant labour and its centrality to the profitability of the gold-mining sector, Marxist historians and sociologists argued that industrialisation happened by tying black South Africans to an oppressive and poverty-stricken agricultural society. Rather than create a homogenous culture, industrialisation in South Africa reproduced an agro-tribal society in its midst.
Immanuel Wallerstein, for his part, goes so far as to suggest that this is the normal state of affairs for capitalist industrialisation. Capitalists, he proposes, benefit by having the cost level of labour subsidised by an income or subsistence from agricultural production. Capitalism does not necessarily presuppose the dissolution of extended or clan societies and hence the homogenisation of culture (Wallerstein, 1991: 109; 130–31). Hence, the nation qua homogenous high culture cannot be read from the logic of (capitalist) industrialisation.
The age of revolution
There is an important intuition behind the periodisation of the nation to the late eighteenth century. Something happens to the nation qua cultural community during this period. At stake is the advent of democracy as a principle of government and political community. For the first time, the political community refers to ‘the people’, in whom political sovereignty resides. If the people are the nation and democracy refers to a system of government of and by ‘the people’, then the nation is the logical home for democratic government.
Jurgen Habermas, for example, sees in the nation a revolutionary attempt at democratisation. Where democracies on the Western model appeared, he argues, they did so in the form of the nation state (Habermas, 2001: 62). This is because the nation state fulfilled the preconditions for democratic self-control: self-governance, the demos, consent, representation and popular sovereignty (p. 61). The sovereign will was taken to be the will of the nation.
Benedict Anderson hints obliquely at this rupture, though he does not integrate it into his own analysis. Hence, he situates his discussion of nations in accounts of either popular movements for democracy (in France, America, Hungary and Spain) or dynastic responses to them. He defines the nation as a political community, and generates one of its key features – that it is sovereign – from a time when the ‘gage and emblem of … freedom is the sovereign state’ (Anderson, 1991: 7). Yet, for all that, Anderson does not reflect on the idea of the nation in relation to the idea of democracy – this despite their historical contemporaneity. Eric Hobsbawm (1999), in contrast, wants the modern concept of the nation to be understood in relation to the ‘Age of Revolution’ – to the period, that is, of revolutionary democrats. Hobsbawm’s analysis is curious, however, for not drawing its own logical conclusions.
He traces the genealogy of the term nation and concludes that in its peculiarly modern sense three elements were related: people, territory and state. These terms were articulated quite differently by nationalists, on the one hand, and by revolutionary democrats, on the other. The results were distinct concepts of the nation. In the first case, nationalists appealed to a pre-existing community seeking sovereignty in its own state. This community spoke the same language and/or shared the same customs, but was generally endowed with certain moral qualities that distinguished it from other groups. In the other case, revolutionary democrats conceived the sovereign people simply as comprising those citizens who governed themselves. Therefore, relative to the state, ‘the people’ were nothing more than a congress of citizens, but relative to humanity they constituted a specific demos, i.e. a nation. Hobsbawm discusses the nation of nationalists as an ‘ethnic’ community, and that of revolutionary democratics as a ‘body of citizens’. ‘There was no logical connection’, he argues, however, ‘between the body of citizens of a territorial state on the one hand, and the identification of a “nation” on ethnic, linguistic or other grounds or of other characteristics which allowed collective recognition of group membership’ (Hobsbawm, 1999: 19; emphasis added).
In other words, Hobsbawm argues that the nation, defined as an ethnic community, was logically unrelated to the nation qua body of citizens (bearers of political rights). In this respect, Hobsbawm echoes a distinction that has become commonplace today between ethnic and civic nationalism. Yet even on his own terms, Hobsbawm cannot really account for the tenacity of the ethnic variable in the constitution of the body of citizens. If the nation of revolutionary democrats had anything in common with that of their nationalist counterparts, he suggests, it was not the element of ethnicity or language. What characterised the nation was that it was a community of common interest rather than being linguistically or otherwise homogenous. He notes, for example, that the French Republic had no difficulty electing an Anglo-American, Thomas Paine, to its National Convention. Moreover, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars added to the French nation territories and peoples that could not on any ethnic criteria be deemed French. ‘We cannot, therefore, read into the revolutionary “nation”’, he tells us, ‘anything like the later nationalist programme of establishing nation states for bodies defined in terms of … ethnicity, common language, religion, territory and common historical memories’ (Hobsbawm, 1999: 20).
Yet Hobsbawm concedes that for most Jacobins ‘a Frenchman who did not speak French was suspect’ and, moreover, that the ‘ethno-linguistic criterion of nationality was often accepted’ (Hobsbawm, 1999: 21). He states in this regard – and the remark is important – that:
it was not the native use of the French language that made a person French – how could it be when the Revolution itself spent so much of its time proving how few people in France actually used it? – but the willingness to acquire this, among the other liberties, laws and common characteristics of the free people of France (p. 21; emphasis added).
We can leave Hobsbawm here. He has, ironically, given us all the elements needed to continue with our argument. In particular, he introduces a new variable that completes the logical relation between nationalism and democracy. What he says above is that willingness to acquire French was deemed a condition of being ‘free’. Or, rather, free citizens were those that spoke French. Now, if the body of citizens is the nation, and those citizens that are free are French, then the nation is free when it is French. Even more simply: if freedom is included in the definition of being a citizen, and speaking French is a condition of freedom, then the body of citizens is also the body of the French nation. Here the linguistic/ethnic criterion is not logically unrelated to citizenship: it is the logical condition of it.
When we consider the nation qua imagined community in the light of the age of democracy, then its peculiarly modern features become apparent. Firstly and most importantly, the nation is a democratic community, which is its abstract form. As such, it refers to a community of citizens. Modern political theorists understand by this term a political subject having civic rights (equality before the law; personal liberty; freedom of speech, belief and opinion; the right to property; and the right to contract with another), political rights (the right to elect and to be elected, and the right to participate in government), and even socio-economic rights (equal access to health care and the regulation of work), where these rights are deemed to announce themselves from human nature (Gaille,