Nationalism

Nationalism is one of the strongest forces in the modern world. It has united people and freed them from foreign rule, but it has also divided them and led to bitter wars. To understand it we first need to ask a simple question. What is a nation? A nation is a large group of people who believe that they belong together and who want to govern themselves.

A nation is not a family, and it is not a tribe. In a family every member knows the others in person. In a tribe people are linked by ties of marriage and descent. But a citizen never meets most of their fellow citizens and need not share any descent with them.

So what holds a nation together? People once thought it was a common language, religion or descent. But no single feature is found in every nation. Canada has both English and French speakers. India has many languages and many religions. A nation is therefore best described as an "imagined community". This phrase was made famous by Benedict Anderson. He argued that print, newspapers and a shared written language let strangers picture themselves as one people. A nation is held together not by face-to-face acquaintance but by the shared beliefs and hopes of its members.

A useful way to grasp this:

• A nation is "imagined" because even the smallest nation's members will never meet most of their fellow citizens. Yet each carries an image of their communion.
• It is a "community" because the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. This holds regardless of the inequalities within it.
• An older but still-quoted view came from the French thinker Ernest Renan, who in his 1882 lecture "What is a Nation?" called the nation "a daily plebiscite": its existence rests on the continuing consent and shared will of its people, not on race or language.

Four things bind a nation together.

The first is shared belief. A nation is like a team. A team exists only because its members think of themselves as one group, and a nation is the same.

The second is a sense of history. A nation sees itself as stretching back into the past and reaching into the future. Indian nationalists drew on the country's long civilisation to build this sense.

The third is attachment to a territory. People who see themselves as a nation speak of a homeland and feel a deep bond with its land, rivers and mountains.

The fourth is shared political ideals. Members of a nation share a vision of the state they want to build, and they agree on values such as democracy and equality.

Should a nation be built on a common religion or language? Many people think so. But a democracy is wiser to build the nation on shared political values instead. There are two reasons for this:

• Every major religion contains many sects that read its texts differently, so forcing one religious identity on everyone would be oppressive.
• Most societies hold many religions and languages, so insisting on a single one would shut some groups out.

For these reasons a democracy should ask its people to be loyal to a shared set of values rather than to one religion, race or language.

A nation claims a right that other groups do not. This is the right to self-determination. In nineteenth-century Europe people believed in the idea of "one culture, one state": that every people with its own language and culture should have its own sovereign state.

• After the First World War this principle was placed at the centre of the peace settlement. US President Woodrow Wilson built it into his Fourteen Points (1918), and the post-war treaties (above all the Treaty of Versailles, 1919) used it to redraw the map of Europe and break up the old Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires into "nation-states".
• The result was painful. Borders almost never matched neat cultural lines. New states still contained large minorities. Millions were displaced in population transfers. Minorities left on the "wrong" side of a border became victims of discrimination and violence.
• It proved impossible to give every cultural group its own state, because there are far more cultural groups in the world than there can be viable states.

So the idea has been rethought. The right to self-determination is now read mainly as a right to democratic government and cultural protection within an existing state, rather than an automatic right to secede and form a new one. Breaking away is treated as a last resort, not the normal meaning of the right.

Once we drop the idea of one culture and one state, we must find ways for many cultures to live well together. The Indian Constitution gives minorities specific protections rather than vague goodwill:

• Any section of citizens with a distinct language, script or culture has the right to conserve it (Article 29(1)). No citizen can be denied admission to a state-aided educational institution on grounds of religion, race, caste or language (Article 29(2)).
• All minorities, whether based on religion or language, have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice (Article 30(1)). The state cannot discriminate against minority institutions when granting aid (Article 30(2)).
• A "minority" here is judged state-wise, not for India as a whole. A group that is less than half of a state's population counts as a linguistic or religious minority in that state. This was settled in T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka (2002).

Some groups may still demand a separate state, but most claims can be met by making the existing state more democratic and equal. Three ideas point in the same direction:

• Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian, and the first Asian, to win the Nobel Prize (1913). In his lectures and essays collected as Nationalism (1917), he warned against a narrow, aggressive nationalism.
• He held that patriotism must never be placed above humanity, and his refusal to worship the nation as the highest ideal is a recurring theme.
• Each person also has many identities at once (gender, religion, language and region). A healthy democracy lets people express all of them. That way, no single identity needs to harden into a demand for a separate state.

Not every modern ideology accepted the nation as the natural unit of loyalty. Marxism offered the sharpest rival view. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set it out in The Communist Manifesto (1848), a short pamphlet written for the Communist League. The Manifesto argued that history is driven by class struggle, the conflict between those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labour. In the famous closing call, "Workers of the world, unite!", it asked workers everywhere to see their class, not their nation, as their true community.

This outlook is called internationalism. The Manifesto declared that "the working men have no country", meaning that a factory worker in one country shares more with a worker abroad than with the factory owner at home. Engels, a factory owner's son who studied working-class life in industrial England, was Marx's lifelong collaborator and co-author. Their approach is often labelled scientific socialism, to mark it off from the earlier utopian socialists such as Robert Owen, a reformer who built model communities rather than a theory of class conflict.

It helps to keep the main names apart:

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: co-authors of The Communist Manifesto (1848), founders of scientific socialism.
• Robert Owen: a utopian socialist, known for model factory communities, not for the Manifesto.
• Emile Durkheim and Max Weber: founding sociologists, not Marx's collaborators.