Old new times:
the nationalist wave
in Eastern Europe
WE are living through paradoxical times: while in Western Europe supranational unity is being slowly but irreversibly established, in Eastern Europe multinational structures are being broken down into separate and often hosrile nation-states. Could it be, as Daniel Singer wrote in a recent article, that Capital is strangely working in two opposite directions: gradually obliterating the national frontiers in the West while reviving nationalism in the East.' In any case there is no doubt that a nationalist wave has come over the exU'SSR and the former so-called "socialist bloc", submerging everything on its tay.
A keen observer of Eastern Europe has perfectly summarized the events in his part of the world:
The last remnants of solidarity between the non-emancipated nationalities in the 'belt of against their closest neighbours — the Slovaks against the Czechs, the Croats against the
Serbs, the Ukrainians against the Poles.
The most astonishing thing in this analysis is that it was not written a few weeks ago. It is a passage from a well-known book by Hannah Arendt on the
62 International Marxist Review origins of totalitarianism published in...1951! It describes the "atmosphere of disintegration" in Eastern Europe during the 1920s, that after the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the Tsarist empire — the two "despotic bureaucracies" referred to in the above quotation.?
In other words, in parts of Europe we have been drawn backwards by serenty years. This too is part of the "globally negative" balance sheet of Stalinism.
Let there be no misunderstanding: in 1920, as today, there is nothing regressive — on the contrary! — when multinational empires, which had become true "prisons of the peoples" crumble and the oppressed nations recover their liberty. To that extent, there is undeniably a democratic moment in the national revival which has taken place since 1989 in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Socialists and democrats cannot but rejoice when the Soviet tanks leave East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the troops of the KGB quit the Baltic countries, leaying these peoples to decide by themselves their future, and freely choose unity, separation or federation.
A vast amount of Stalinist cynicism was needed in order to legitimize the annexation of Lithuania and Moldavia, the Russification of Ukraine or the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the name of "socialism" or "proletarian internationalism". This immense mystification is now finished, the gigantic institutionalized lie has been thrown in to the "dustbin of history" and the oppressed nations have recovered their rights. The sooner the better! Unfortunately not everything is so pleasant in this picture: the best and the worst are inseparably mixed in these national movements. The best: the democratic awakening of spoliated nations, the rediscovery of their language and culture, the aspiration for freedom and popular sovereignty. The worst: the awakening of chauvinistic nationalisms, of expansionisms, of intolerances, of xenophobias; the awakening of old national quarrels, of hatred against the "hereditary enemy"; the growth of hegemonist tendencies, leading to the oppression of one's own national minorities; and finally the upsurge of fascist, semi-fascist and racist forms of nationalism in Russia ("Pamiat"), in Romania, in Slovkia, in Croatia (neo-Ustashis), in Serbia (neo-Chetniks), in the former GDR (neo-Nazis). The eternal scapegoats of the past — Jews and Gypsies — are again being selected as responsible for all the evils of society. Paradoxically, this negative and sinister aspect, this "return of the suppressed", this resurrection of ancient national vendettas appears nowhere in a more brutal and absurd form than in Yugoslavia — the only one of the so-called "socialist" countries which has been able to escape from the control of Moscow and establish a relatively egalitarian federation between its compo-
Nationalist wave in Eastern Europe 63 nent nations. Anti-fascist solidarity between the various nationalities, rooted in the Communist partisan fight of the Second World War has now left the stage, to be replaced by a savage bella omnia contra omnes.
The perplexity in relation to this sudden unleashing of nationalist violence in Yugoslavia can be illustrated by the mistake of an otherwise clear-sighted and intelligent observer of the national movements, Eric Hobsbawm:
The Yugoslav revolution succeeded in preventing the nationalities within its state frontiers from massacring each other almost certainly for longer than ever before in their history, and though this achievement is now unfortunately crumbling, by the end of 1988 national tensions had not yet led to a single fatality.3
Of course, one can explain this paradox by several complex economic cul:ural, political, religious and historical causes — without forgetting the heavy responsibility of the Serbian Stalino-nationalist regime of Milosevic, which opened the Pandora's box of nationalisms in the country with this policy of oppression against the Kosovo Albanians.* Nevertheless, there remains an irreducible kernel of pure irrationality in this mutual explosion of hatred igainst the "other"
It is impossible to predict, for the moment, if the "Yugoslav paradigm" is going to be followed by others, and if the present conflicts between Slovaks and Czechs, Hungarians and Rumanians, Moldavians and Russians, Azeris and Armenians, Georgians and Ossetians, Russians and Ukrainians, etc, etc, ill or not take the form of a general confrontation; and if the dissolution of he ex-USSR will or not lead to national wars (with nuclear arms ?) that i ould make the present conflict in Yugoslavia look like a small incident. Anything can happen and unfortunately the worst is a distinct possibility.
Already in 1990, a Soviet socialist scholar, Mikhail Maliutin, suggested the following bleak perspective for the future:
The most probable variant is, in the West of the Soviet Union, a Latino-Americanization —
¡he appearance of banana republics — a "Lebanization" in the Caucasian and an "Afghanization" in Central Asia.
He added the following hopeful remark:
He should try everything possible to solve this problem as peacefully as possible. We think herefore that the secessions should take place as quickly as possible.
The reasons for this nationalist explosion, which is shaking practically the •hole ancient "socialist bloc" are, among others, the following: • The rebellion against decades of national discrimination and "Great Rusan" hegemonism. This is the most obvious motive behind the national movements, both in the ex-USSR and in its former satellites. But it does not
Where an old regime disintegrates, where old social relations have become unstable, amid the rise of general insecurity, belonging to a common language and culture may become the
This helps to understand the parallel between present events and those of the 1920s, after the disintegration of the traditional Empires in Central and
• The crisis and collapse of all "class" ideologies, cultures and values. Politics, like nature, hates a vacuum; and the individual in itself is not a sufficient value to hold together a society (even if liberals and post-moderns pretend so). In a situation where all socialist values disappear, discredited by half a century of bureaucratic corruption, people attach themselves to other trans-individual values, not compromised with the ancient authoritarian regime: religion and above all the nation (sometimes both, like in Poland).
• The desire of relatively advanced nations, regions or republics to cut losses from poorer and relatively backward areas, in order to keep their own resources for themselves, and to join, as quickly as possible, the Western
European market. This applies particularly to Slovenia and Croatia, to the
Baltic republics and in general to the Western parts of the ex-USSR (in rela-
• The manipulation of nationalist feelings by neo-Stalinist elites trying to keep (or win back) their power: Azerbaidjan, Serbia, Bulgaria are good examples in this point. To this one has of course to add the use of nationalist
Of what help can the analaytic and political instruments be in so chaotic a situation, confronted with such a confused maelstrom of territorial conflicts, historical claims, chauvinist exclusions and liberating uprisings?
As an internationalist world view, Marxism - distinguished from its multiple national-bureaucratic counterfeits — has the advantage of a universalist, rational and critical position, in contrast to the passions and intoxications of nationalist mythology. On condition however that this universalism does not remain abstract, grounded in the simple negation of national particularity but becomes a true "concrete universal" (Hegel), able to incorporate, in the form of a dialectical Aufhebung (transcendance), all the richness of the
Moreover, Marxism will remain disarmed confronted with the present developments if it is not able to get rid of certain myths and illusions which
64 International Marxist Review apply to Yugoslavia...
only certainty in society.
Eastern Europe.
tion to the Asiatic ones).
particular.
• According to the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch:
demagogy by the neo-liberal elites, like in Russia.
Nationalist wave in Eastern Europe 65 zelong to its own tradition.
Among the myths there is one which is particularly obnoxious: the idea of a "scientific" and "objective" definition of the nation. Thanks to Stalin, this jogma wrought havoc in the four continents, transforming them into a true Procrustean bed, imposed by decree of the Political Bureau (charged with *erifying whether this or that nation lived up to the "objective" criteria or rot). Happily, most of the Marxists dealing today with the national question have understood quite well that nations cannot be defined in purely objective erms (territory, language, economic unity, etc) - even if these are from zing irrelevant — but that they are imagined communities (Benedikt Anderion), cultural creations (Eric Hobsbawm). Already in 1939, Trotsky insisted, :. a discussion with CLR James about the Black question in American, that: On this matter an abstract criterion is not decisive, but the historical consciousness, the feelings and impulses of the group are more important.? As far as illusions are concerned, there is one that can be found in Marx -imself and which haunts the reflections of the best Marxists from Rosa Luxamburg to the present day: the imminent decline of nationalism and of the ration-state, made anachronistic by the internationalization of the economy. 3! an irony of history, an attenuated version of this hypothesis was again formulated in 1988, on the eve of the most formidable nationalist wave in Europe since the Second World War. In his otherwise excellent book, Eric Hobsbawm risked the following diagnostic: While nobody can possible deny the growing and sometimes dramatic impact of nationalist er ethnic politics, there is one major aspect in which the phenomenon today is functionally different from the "nationalism" and "nations" of nineteenth and earlier twentieth-century history. It is no longer a major vector of historical development. In his opinion "the declining historical significance of nationalism is today : encealed by the visible spread of ethnic/linguistic agitation". In other •ords: in spite of its evident prominence, nationalism is historically less important. It is no longer, * it were, a global political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. It is at most a complicating factor, or a catalyst for other ievelopments. Three years later, this prognostic already appears quite outdated. How far can Marxism provide us with a map to find out way in the sombre iyrinth of contradictory nationalist passions? First of all, Marxism propos:: a capital distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors and that of
66 International Marxist Review the oppressed. Without adhering to any nationalist ideology, Marxist socialism supports unreservedly the national movements of the dominated and rejects without hesitation the "Great Power chauvinism" of the ruling nation. This distinction is more than ever justified and it operates like a precious compass to find one's bearings in the present tempest. But using it is made difficult by a well-known characteristic of modern nationalisms: each oppressed nation, as soon as liberated (or even before), considers as its most urgent task to exercise an analogous oppression over its own national minorities. Frequently, during the present inter-ethnic conflicts, each side persecutes the minority belonging to the rival nation, while manipulating its own nationals of the other side of the border.
We need therefore a universal criterion in order to disentangle the web of the opposed and mutually exclusive claims. This criterion can only be that — common to socialist and to democrats — of the right to self-determination (up to separation) of each nation, that is of each community which considers itself as such. Indifferent to the myths of blood and soil, and not recognizing any purely religious or historical claims over a given territory, this criterion has the immense advantage of referring only to the universal principles of democracy and popular sovereignty, and of taking into consideration only the concrete demographic realities of any inhabited space.
This principle does not prevent socialists from defending the option which seems to them the most desirable or the most progressive at a a given historical moment: state separation (independence), federation, confederation. The essential is that the concerned nations and nationalities freely decide their own future. This rule — incorporated by Lenin into the Marxist vocabulary — is more than ever necessary. But again, its application to the present national conflicts in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR is not always easy. In many cases the interpenetration of nationalities is such that any attempt to cut borders into this mosaic is fraught with perils. The dream of national homogeneity inside the state, which haunts almost all nationalisms, is a most dangerous perspective. As Eric Hobsbawm observes in a sober historical reminder: The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion and extermination of minorities. Such was and is the murderous reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version, although this was not fully demonstrated until the 1940s.? For all these reasons, the Marxist position in relation to national conflicts should combine the intransigent defence of democratic rights of each nation,
nationality or national minority, without exception, with the irreducible political struggle against nationalist ideology, for the internationalist unity of the exploited and oppressed of all countries. Unlike the nationalists, Marxists are convinced that national independence — although necessary in many cases
— is not sufficient to solve the basic economic, social, ecological or political problems confronting the population.'° Particularly if we consider the new kind of economic (and therefore also political) dependence of recently emancipated nations on Western finance. As Daniel Singer ironically observed in
Could Orwell have imagined that the heir to Big Brother in that part of the world, though let us hope a provisional one, would be the International Monetary Fund?'
An heir whose powers are of a different kind but not one ounce less ruthless
There exist already, in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR, social movements or organizations which refuse the logic of nationalist exclusion, and struggle for democratic, ecological and socialist aims. Among others, one can mention the various anti-war movements in Yugoslavia (or should one say ex-
Yugoslavia?), progressive ecological movements, leftist trade-unionists, and new socialist forces (like the Workers' Party in the USSR) not linked to the old post-Stalinist apparatus. Some of them are aware that their cause transcends national or state borders, and are trying to cooperate with similar forces elsewhere. There is no need to stress that their struggle is difficult and for the moment very much against the stream. But they are nevertheless the seed of a different future and the ultimate guarantee against barbarism.
-. Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time, London, Secker and Warbuirg, 1951, p. 267.
:. Eric Hobsbawm, Nation and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 173. In a footnote added in 1989, he insisted again: though there have been deths since, the relative peacefulness — compared to some other national/ethnic conflicts in 1988-89 — is till worthy of note." Alas, two
• On the background of the present conflict, the best articles are those by Catherine Samary, published in IMR, International Viewpoint and Le Monde Diplomatique.
= Quoted by Eric Hobsbawm, "The Perils of the New Nationalism", The Nation, 4 November, a recent article:
than the old Politbureau.
Notes years later, not much remained of this peacefulness.
: International Viewpoint, No 183, 1990.
1991, p. 556.
Nationalist wave in Eastern Europe 67
... Daniel Singer, "West and East", The Nation, December 30, 1991.
68 International Marxist Review
7. Leon Trotsky, On Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, New York, Pathfinder Press,
1978, p. 28.
8. Eric Hobsbawm, op cit, pp 163, 170, 181.
9. Eric Hobsbawm, op cit, p. 133. See also p. 134 "The homogeneous territorial nation, could now be seen as a programme that could be realized only by barbarians, or at least by barbarian means."
10. See Livio Maitan's "Introduction" in IMR, No 9 (Vol 4 No 2), Autumn 1989.
11. Daniel Singer, "Boris the Brief?", The Nation, 20 January 1992.
LIVIO MAITAN