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Nationalism is an ideology that largely arose as a result of the Westphalian Peace of 1648 and the subsequent development over the next 150 years of the modern state system. Both a result as well as a cause of state formation, this ideology had less to do with the form or structure that states took for themselves than with the collective sense of identity on which they attempted to base it. That collective sense of identity transformed a term that in ancient times had been used pejoratively to refer to people born outside the empire and thus barbarian into a word that described what made the people belonging to state formations so unique and special. In its modern formulation, then, the state, or institutional structure of governance, and the nation, or sense of belonging it inspires and is based on, are ideally considered as a relationship that is or was preordained or fated, ideally allowing the state and the nation to feel to their citizens as mere reflections of one another.

However, there was nothing preordained or inevitable about it. If the world now contains as many as 5,000 nationalities, it possesses no more 195 independent, sovereign states, which suggests that the process of creating states out of deep senses of community and solidarity that express themselves as nations is a long and complicated one. Quite apart from the difficulty of creating states by themselves, the process by which they become bound to an ideology that legitimates them by defining that state’s collective sense of shared identity takes a considerable amount of time to accomplish and an even greater amount of labor to maintain. In many instances, the first to develop is the formation of a mutual sense of identity among a particular people, whether due to shared ethnicity, religion, language, history, race, land, or customs, and then follows the desire to secure a territorial space where those bound by that collective sense of selfhood can live out their identity as a sovereign people. The ideology of nationalism thus provides a kind of adhesive that holds the two other components of state and nation together, eventually allowing nation-states to reach out beyond themselves to form empires.

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It is important to remember, however, that this process of state-making required much more than mere force to allow states to establish and secure themselves and their societies. Even if the social theorist Max Weber once defined the state as no more than that agency within society which possesses a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence, they also had to employ various cultural as well as social, political, military, and legal instruments to consolidate their sovereignty and turn themselves into an object of supreme loyalty. Among such instruments, none was more important than the development of a narrative to explain the common history of the nation. But this creation or origin narrative then had to be linked to a still more elemental foundation myth both to elaborate the purpose of the nation itself and to define the national character thus achieved as in some sense ahistorical or timeless. Such cultural inventions would be impossible to sustain, however, if they had not also been reinforced by the construction of new patterns of ritual and symbolism to express and reinforce them and of new ceremonial occasions to memorialize them. What was being honored on such occasions was the sacred worldview of the nation itself, its place in the overall scheme of things, which helps explain why nationalism has often developed in close relationship with religion. For many citizens, nationalism can and does serve as a complement to religion, for others an alternative to religion, and for still others a compelling substitute for it.

The two readings for this chapter deal with different dimensions of nationalism and the nationalist imaginary. The anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s classic study of nations is built on the somewhat startling assumption that before nations can be understood either as political or legal constructions, they need to be conceived as, in the title of his most famous book, “imagined communities.” But the possibility of conceptualizing nations as “imagined” depended historically on the abandonment of several other conceptions. The first notion that had to be discarded was the belief that access to the truth is possible only through certain ancient, literary languages—Latin for Christians, Arabic for Muslims, Sanskrit for Hindus, Mandarin for Chinese, etc. The second was the dynastic assumption that society needs to be organized around monarchs who derive their right to rule, and by extension, their special access to the truth, by divine dispensation. And the third notion that had to be relinquished was the conviction that such a hierarchical order could only be guaranteed if time and thus history remained subject to divine or ecclesiastical calendars rather than ordinary temporal ones. Once these more traditional conceptions or imaginaries of world order collapsed, brought on as much as anything, Anderson believes, by the creation of print journalism and its reliance on the secular calendar of daily experience, the way was open to see what kind of fictive logics could be created to explain the nature of the nation-state itself.

Anderson conceives of nations as imagined in four different ways. First, they are imagined because they are “invisible,” and they are invisible because no one has ever known or could know all of the individuals who make up the national collectivity they call their own. Second, they are “limited” because the boundaries other than geographical that define nations in the minds of their citizens are impossible to represent adequately even by legal instruments. Third, they are “sovereign” in the sense that they mark a value or significance that exceeds the possibilities of expression and can only be fully be felt both as a privilege and an entitlement. And, fourth and finally, they are “communal” in a way that is self-validating. That is, they express a sense of solidarity, what Anderson describes as “a deep, horizontal comradeship,” that in times of national peril or pride can unify almost every citizen of the state.

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This makes nations, with their semi-sacred ideology of nationhood and its implied ethic of heroic self-sacrifice, susceptible to two different kinds of pathologies. The first has been described by another eminent anthropologist included in this volume, Arjun Appadurai, as “vivisectionist” because it refers to the temptation to dismember parts of the body of the state itself, as in genocide, whenever citizens feel threatened by what they sense as different, or diseased, or treacherous. The second he calls “verificationist” in that it encourages the state to purge itself, as in racial profiling, of any element that is felt to be impure or incomplete. At its best, nationalism has provided many throughout the world with a system of beliefs to house their deepest needs for community and self- esteem; at its worst, it has fed the appetite for almost continuous violence and war throughout the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries and has led to unimaginable suffering and despair.

But some might well ask whether this seemingly Western notion of nationhood fits all the people of the world. While artifice and imagination play crucial roles in the construction of most national identities, it may be that for many non-Western and formerly colonized people some of their misery as citizens may have been caused by having to imagine their difference, even exclusion, from the image propagated by the West of a nationally coherent state. For many of those peoples who have had to wrest their sense of communal identity out of post-colonial struggles with foreign oppressors, their collective sense of themselves may well be derived from imagining their difference from the centralized forms of national identity propagated by the modernized West. At the same time, such invented identities can also operate at the transnational as well as the national level. For example, the regional entity now known as “Southeast Asia” did not even exist until after World War II, when the United States decided to turn an area that had never been conquered or unified before into a regional bulwark for the defense of democracy against Communist expansionism. This conversion of Southeast Asia into a new “imagined reality” was accomplished politically and militarily by the creation of the SEATO pact (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), but in order for this new regional designation to gain credibility and validity, it subsequently required in addition the creation of a whole new academic field of study and research known as “Southeast Asian Studies,” the renaming of thousands of formerly different peoples as “Southeast Asians,” and the training of countless specialists called “Southeast Asianists” in the traditions, languages, and customs of these immensely varied peoples who over the centuries had populated this newly invented transnational region of the world.

The selection by Liah Greenfeld affords extraordinary insight into the special appeal of nationalism by exploring in further detail the historical development of the Western idea of “nation.” As the Latin term for something born, the term “nation” was originally applied by ancient Romans to foreigners coming from the same region whose status was considered beneath their own. The association of the term “nation” with inferiors began to change when in the early Middle Ages when it was employed favorably to describe groups of students from similar regions coming to study at institutions like the University of Paris. Conferring on students a “national” identity had no other function than to indicate their place of origin and was immediately relinquished upon their return to their own homeland. Nonetheless, the term began to take on a second meaning when it became evident that students coming from the same region seemed to share similar opinions in scholastic debate and other student activities. Thus what was once a term employed to designate a community of origin now began to reflect something more like a community of opinion and shared ways of

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thinking. But it wasn’t until students from the same nation were asked to serve as representatives at church councils and other ecclesiastical functions that these two notions of nation took a quantum leap forward. Suddenly national identity acquired a new hierarchical status conferring authority and prestige that allowed its bearers to be considered members of a special elite. But it was only when the term’s new hierarchical status as referring to a special, prestigious elite was extended four centuries later in England and in Holland to the entire population of a country and identified with the word “people” that the modern transformation of the notion of the nation was ultimately complete. Now the “nation” became synonymous with all the citizens of a country and at the same time invested those same citizens with the privilege of representing symbolically the sovereignty associated with the state.

In time, the spread of nationalism in Europe was to produce a new age of imperialism based on the interest of states in extending their spheres of influence through the creation of colonies designed to rule over other people for the sake of exploiting their resources and labor. While colonialism in the West actually began as early as the 16th century with the formation of early world trade, it didn’t achieve its fullest expression until the later nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Such nationalist expansionism, at least in Europe, was typically justified by the claim that the so- called mother country was motivated chiefly to extend the benefits of “civilization” to those who presumably lacked any, but this seemingly benign, even idealistic, presumption was simply a mask that concealed a reality that was very different.

Take Africa, for example, where few areas before 1880 were politically ruled by Europeans even if Europeans had made their commercial presence known centuries earlier. By 1913, however, just over 30 years later, Europeans ruled all but four of the forty territorial states in Africa, and by the 1930s colonial rule had spread to 84.6% of the world’s population. Even if imperial rule may have had some beneficial effects in places like India under the British Commonwealth, it was based on monstrous hypocrisy and led to unspeakable suffering. The Polish writer, Joseph Conrad, got it right when he entitled his great novel of 1901 Heart of Darkness. Having experienced firsthand the horrors of colonialism in the Congo whose literal owner, King Leopold II of Belgium, had permitted the slaughter of literally half his subjects, the country’s entire population, in a 20-year period, Conrad described imperialism as a crime: “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale. . . . The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; . . . and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . . .” This idea at the back imperialism that served as a justification, a rationalization, an excuse for whatever the colonizer wanted to do, possessed, Conrad added, “no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

The potential for this same kind of hypocrisy lay at the heart of another ideological practice sponsored by Western imperialism known as “Orientalism.” Originally created as a term to identify the professional and academic study of the culture, societies, and traditions of the so-called Orient, it soon came to be associated in a much more general way, as Edward W. Said points out in the final selection in this chapter, with the styles of thinking, feeling, and acting supposedly characteristic of the tens of millions of people who inhabited these enormous areas of the world with their thousands

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of cultures. But when this habit of simplification and stereotyping in turn gave way to discursive practices of describing, defining, dictating, and ruling over the Orient, then “Orientalism” itself was turned into an ideological instrument of domination and control that masked its motives under the disguise of altruism and cosmopolitanism.

The study of such discursive practices, in which Said’s Orientalism played an important part, was associated with a kind of intellectual revolution that led to the study, as we shall see in Chapter 12, of colonialism and post-colonialism. This revolution was devoted to the attempt to bring the mind, so to speak, into the light by treating many of its operations as something accessible to investigation through study of the discursive or communicative modes by which the mind represents itself to itself. Examining the mind through the techniques by which it seeks to present itself as it wishes to be known, as it intends to be seen as much as understood, requires an interrogation of the assumptions and preconditions not of what people say but of what enables them to say it. The questions to be asked are what empowers their discourse, and how does it work in the interests of such goals as domination and subordination, subversion and containment, manipulation and disguise. Discourse analysis, as this kind of inquiry has come to be termed, and by means of which Said’s Orientalism came to be viewed as a pioneering study not only in the history of Western imperialism but also of post-colonialism, thus focuses on the relationship between discourse, communication, power, inequality, and positionality.

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Introduction [Imagined Communities]

Benedict Anderson

Perhaps without being much noticed yet, a fundamental transformation in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements is upon us. Its most visible signs are the recent wars between Vietnam, Cambodia and China. These wars are of world-historical importance because they are the first to occur between regimes whose independence and revolutionary credentials are undeniable, and because none of the belligerents has made more than the most perfunctory attempts to justify the bloodshed in-terms of a recognizable Marxist theoretical perspective. While it was still just possible to interpret the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969, and the Soviet military interventions in Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1980) in terms of—according to taste—‘social imperialism’, ‘defending socialism,’ etc., no one, I imagine, seriously believes that such vocabularies have much bearing on what has occurred in Indochina.

If the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia in December 1978 and January 1979 represented the first large-scale conventional war waged by one revolutionary Marxist regime against another,l China’s assault on Vietnam in February rapidly confirmed the precedent. Only the most trusting would dare wager that in the declining years of this century any significant outbreak of inter- state hostilities will necessarily find the USSR and the PRC—let alone the smaller socialist states— supporting, or fighting on, the same side. Who can be confident that Yugoslavia and Albania will not one day come to blows? Those variegated groups who seek a withdrawal of the Red Army from its encampments in Eastern Europe should remind themselves of the degree to which its overwhelming presence has, since 1945, ruled out armed conflict between the region’s Marxist regimes.

Such considerations serve to underline the fact that since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms—the Peoples Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and so forth—and, in so doing, has grounded itself firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the prerevolutionary past. Conversely, the fact that the Soviet Union shares with the

From Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson. Copyright © 1991 by Verso. Reprinted by permission.

1 This formulation is chosen simply to emphasize the scale and the style of the fighting, not to assign blame. To avoid possible misunderstanding, it should be said that the December 1978 invasion grew out of armed clashes between partisans of the two revolutionary movements going back possibly as far as 1971. After April 1977 border raids, initiated by the Cambodians, but quickly followed by the Vietnamese grew in size and scope, culminating in the major Vietnamese incursion of December 1977. None of these raids, however, aimed at overthrowing enemy regimes or occupying large territories, nor were the numbers of troops involved comparable to those deployed in December 1978. The controversy over the causes of the war is most thoughtfully pursued in: Stephen P. Heder, ‘The Kampuchean-Vietnamese Conflict,’ in David W. P. Elliott, ed., The Third Indochina Conflict, pp. 21–67; Anthony Barnett, ‘Inter-Communist Conflicts and Vietnam,’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian of Scholars, 11: 4 (October–December 1979), pp. 2–9; and Laura Summers, ‘In Matters of War and Socialism Anthony Barnett would Shame and Honour Kampuchea Too Much,’ ibid., pp. 10–18.

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United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the rare distinction of refusing nationality in its naming suggests that it is as much the legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century internationalist order.2

Eric Hobsbawm is perfectly correct in stating that Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance, i.e., nationalist. There is nothing to suggest that this trend will not continue.3 Nor is the tendency confined to the socialist world. Almost every year the United Nations admits new members. And many ‘old nations,’ once thought fully consolidated, find themselves challenged by ‘sub’-nationalisms within their borders—nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding this subness one happy day. The reality is quite plain: the ‘end of the era of nationalism’, so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.

But if the facts are clear, their explanation remains a matter of long-standing dispute. Nation, nationality, nationalism—all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyse. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre. Hugh Seton-Watson, author of far the best and most comprehensive English-language text on nationalism, and heir to a vast tradition of liberal historiography and social science, sadly observes: ‘Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no “scientific definition” of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists.’4 Tom Nairn, author of the path-breaking The Break-up of Britain, and heir to the scarcely less vast tradition of Marxist historiography and social science, candidly remarks: ‘The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.’5 But even this confession is somewhat misleading, insofar as it can be taken to imply the regrettable outcome of a long, self-conscious search for theoretical clarity. It would be more exact to say that nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted. How else to explain Marx’s failure to explicate the crucial adjective in his memorable formulation of 1848: ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’?6 How else to account for the use, for over a century, of the concept ‘national bourgeoisie’ without any serious attempt to justify theoretically the relevance of the adjective? Why is this segmentation of the bourgeoisie—a world-class insofar as it is defined in terms of the relations of production—theoretically significant?

The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the ‘anomaly’ of nationalism. My sense is that on this topic both Marxist and liberal theory have become etiolated in a late Ptolemaic effort to ‘save the phenomena’; and that a reorientation of perspective in, as it were, a Copernican spirit is urgently required. My point of departure is

2 Anyone who has doubts about the UK’s claims to such parity with the USSR should ask himself what nationality its name denotes: Great Brito-Irish?

3 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Some Reflections on “The Break-up of Britain”’, New Left Review, 105 (September– October 1977), p. 13. 4 See his Nations and States, p. 5. Emphasis added. 5 See his ‘The Modern Janus’, New Left Review, 94 (November–December 1975), p. 3. This essay is included unchanged in

The Break-up of Britain as chapter 9 (pp. 329–63). 6 Karl Marx and Friedtich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in the Selected Works, 1, p. 45. Emphasis added. In any

theoretical exegesis, the words ‘of course’ should flash red lights before the transported reader.

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that nationality or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century7 was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became ‘modular,’ capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments.

Concepts and Definitions

Before addressing the questions raised above, it seems advisable to consider briefly the concept of ‘nation’ and offer a workable definition. Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept—in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender—vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis. (3) The ‘political’ power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers. This ‘emptiness’ easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension. Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is ‘no there there’. It is characteristic that even so sympathetic a student of nationalism as Tom Nairn can nonetheless write that: ‘“Nationalism” is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as “neurosis” in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, 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 for societies) and largely incurable.’8

Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostasize the existence of Nationalism- with-a-big-N (rather as one might Age-with-a-capital-A) and then to classify ‘it’ as an ideology. (Note that if everyone has an age, Age is merely an analytical expression.) It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’.

7 As Aira Kemilainen notes, the twin ‘founding fathers’ of academic scholarship on nationalism, Hans Khon and Carleton Hayes, argued persuasively for this dating. Their conclusions have, I think, not been seriously disputed except by nationalist ideologues in particular countries. Kemiläinen also observes that the word ‘nationalism’ did not come into wide general use until the end of the nineteenth century. It did not occur, for example, in many standard nineteenth century lexicons. If Adam Smith conjured with the wealth of ‘nations,’ he meant by the term no more than ‘societies’ or ‘states.’ Aira Kemiläinen, Nationalism, pp. 10, 33, and 48–49.

8 The Break-up of Britain, p. 359.

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In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.9 Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that ‘Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.’10 With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’11 The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that ‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically—as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction ‘society.’ We may today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien régime as a class; but surely it was imagined this way only very late.12 To the question ‘Who is the Comte de X?’ the normal answer would have been, not ‘a member of the aristocracy,’ but ‘the lord of X,’ ‘the uncle of the Baronne de Y,’ or ‘a client of the Duc de Z.’

The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.

It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.

Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal

9 Cf. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 5: ‘All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.’ We may translate ‘consider themselves’ as ‘imagine themselves.’

10 Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ in OEuvres Complètes, 1, p. 892. He adds ‘tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres due Miki an XIIIe siècle. Il n’y a pas en France dix familles qui puissent fournir la preuve d’une origine franque . . .’

11 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, p. 169. Emphasis added. 12 Hobsbawm, for example, ‘fixes’ it by saying that in 1789 it numbered about 400,000 in a population of 23,000,000. (See his The

Age of Revolution, p. 78). But would this statistical picture of the noblesse have been imaginable under the ancien régime?

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comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.

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From Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity

LiAh GreenfeLd

This book is an attempt to understand the world in which we live. Its fundamental premise is that nationalism lies at the basis of this world. To grasp its significance, one has to explain nationalism.

The word “nationalism” is used here as an umbrella term under which are subsumed the related phenomena of national identity (or nationality) and consciousness, and collectivities based on them—nations; occasionally it is employed to refer to the articulate ideology on which national identity and consciousness rest, though not—unless specified—to the politically activist, xenophobic variety of national patriotism, which it frequently designates.

The specific questions which the book addresses are why and how nationalism emerged, why and how it was transformed in the process of transfer from one society to another, and why and how different forms of national identity and consciousness became translated into institutional practices and patterns of culture, molding the social and political structures of societies which defined themselves as nations. To answer these questions, I focus on five major societies which were the first to do so: England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States of America.

The Definition of Nationalism

The specificity of nationalism, that which distinguishes nationality from other types of identity, derives from the fact that nationalism locates the source of individual identity within a “people,” which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity. The “people” is the mass of a population whose boundaries and nature are defined in various ways, but which is usually perceived as larger than any concrete community and always as fundamentally homogeneous, and only superficially divided by the lines of status, class, locality, and in some cases even ethnicity. This specificity is conceptual. The only foundation of nationalism as such, the only condition, that is, without which no nationalism is possible, is an idea; nationalism is a particular perspective or a style of thought. The idea which lies at the core of nationalism is the idea of the “nation.”

The Origins of the Idea of the “Nation”

To understand the nature of the idea of the “nation,’’ it might be helpful to examine the semantic permutations which eventually resulted in it, as we follow the history of the word. The early stages

NATIONALISM: FIVE ROADS TO MODERNITY by Liah Greenfeld, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1992 by Liah Greenfeld.

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of this history were traced by the Italian scholar Guido Zernatto. The origin of the word is to be found in the Latin natio—something born. The initial concept was derogatory: in Rome the name natio was reserved for groups of foreigners coming from the same geographical region, whose status— because they were foreigners—was below that of the Roman citizens. This concept was thus similar in meaning to the Greek ta ethne, also used to designate foreigners and, specifically, heathens, and to the Hebrew amamim, which referred to those who did not belong to the chosen monotheistic people. The word had other meanings as well, but they were less common, and this one—a group of foreigners united by place of origin—for a long time remained its primary implication.

In this sense, of a group of foreigners united by place of origin, the word “nation” was applied to the communities of students coming to several universities shared by Western Christendom from loosely—geographically or linguistically—related regions. For example, there were four nations in the University of Paris, the great center of theological learning: “l’honorable nation de France,” “la fidèle nation de Picardie,” “la vénérable nation de Normandie,” and “la constante nation de Germanie.” The “nation de France” included all students coming from France, Italy, and Spain; that of “Germanie,” those from England and Germany; the Picard “nation” was reserved for the Dutch; and the Norman, for those from the Northeast. It is important to note that the students had a national identity only in their status as students (that is, in most cases, while residing abroad); this identity was immediately shed when their studies were completed and they returned home. While applied in this setting, the word “nation,” on the one hand, lost its derogatory connotation, and on the other, acquired an additional meaning. Owing to the specific structure of university life at the time, the communities of students functioned as support groups or unions and, as they regularly took sides in scholastic disputations, also developed common opinions. As a result, the word “nation” came to mean more than a community of origin: it referred now to the community of opinion and purpose.

As universities sent representatives to adjudicate grave ecclesiastical questions at the Church Councils, the word underwent yet another transformation. Since the late thirteenth century, starting at the Council of Lyon in 1274, the new concept—“nation” as a community of opinion—was applied to the parties of the “ecclesiastical republic.” But the individuals who composed them, the spokesmen of various intraecclesiastical approaches, were also representatives of secular and religious potentates. And so the word “nation” acquired another meaning, that of representatives of cultural and political authority, or a political, cultural, and then social elite. Zernatto cites Montesquieu, Joseph de Maistre, and Schopenhauer to demonstrate how late this was still the accepted significance of the word. It is impossible to mistake its meaning in the famous passage from Esprit des lois: “Sous les deux premières races on assembla souvent la nation, c’est à dire, les seigneurs et les évêques; il n’était point des communes.”

The Zigzag Pattern of Semantic Change

At this point, where Zernatto’s story breaks off, we may pause to take a closer look at it. To an extent, the history of the word “nation” allows us to anticipate the analysis employed in much of the book. The successive changes in meaning combine into a pattern which, for the sake of

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formality, we shall call “the zigzag pattern of semantic change.” At each stage of this development, the meaning of the word, which comes with a certain semantic baggage, evolves out of usage in a particular situation. The available conventional concept is applied within new circumstances, to certain aspects of which it corresponds. However, aspects of the new situation, which were absent in the situation in which the conventional concept evolved, become cognitively associated with it, resulting in a duality of meaning. The meaning of the original concept is gradually obscured, and the new one emerges as conventional. When the word is used again in a new situation, it is likely to be used in this new meaning, and so on and so forth. (This pattern is depicted in Figure 9.1.)

The process of semantic transformation is constantly redirected by structural (situational) constraints which form the new concepts (meanings of the word); at the same time, the structural constraints are conceptualized, interpreted, or defined in terms of the concepts (the definition of the situation changes as the concepts evolve), which thereby orient action. The social potency and psychological effects of this orientation vary in accordance with the sphere of the concept’s applicability and its relative centrality in the actor’s overall existence. A student in a medieval university, defined as a member of one or another nation, might derive therefrom an idea of the quarters he was supposed to be lodged in, people he was likely to associate with most closely, and some specific opinions he was expected to hold in the course of the few years his studies lasted. Otherwise his “national” identity, probably, did not have much impact on his self-image or behavior; outside the narrow sphere of the university, the concept had no applicability. The influence of the

Situation 1

Situation 2

Situation 3

Conventional meaning 1

Conventional meaning 2

Conventional meaning 3

Conventional meaning 4

Etc.

FIGURE 9.1 The zigzag pattern of semantic change.

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equally transient “national” identity on a participant at a Church Council could be more profound. Membership in a nation defined him as a person of very high status, the impact of such definition on one’s self-perception could be permanent, and the lingering memory of nationality could affect the person’s conduct far beyond conciliar deliberations, even if his nation no longer existed.

From “Rabble” to “Nation”

The applicability of the idea of the nation and its potency increased a thousandfold as the meaning of the word was transformed again. At a certain point in history—to be precise, in early sixteenth-century England—the word “nation” in its conciliar meaning of “an elite’’ was applied to the population of the country and made synonymous with the word “people.” This semantic transformation signaled the emergence of the first nation in the world, in the sense in which the word is understood today, and launched the era of nationalism. The stark significance of this conceptual revolution was highlighted by the fact that, while the general referent of the word “people” prior to its nationalization was the population of a region, specifically it applied to the lower classes and was most frequently used in the sense of “rabble” or “plebs.” The equation of the two concepts implied the elevation of the populace to the position of an (at first specifically political) elite. As a synonym of the “nation”—an elite—the “people” lost its derogatory connotation and, now denoting an eminently positive entity, acquired the meaning of the bearer of sovereignty, the basis of political solidarity, and the supreme object of loyalty. A tremendous change of attitude, which it later reinforced, had to precede such redefinition of the situation, for with it members of all orders of the society identified with the group, from which earlier the better placed of them could only wish to dissociate themselves. What brought this change about in the first place, and then again and again, as national identity replaced other types in one country after another, is, in every particular case, the first issue to be accounted for, and it will be the focus of discussion in several chapters of the book.

National identity in its distinctive modern sense is, therefore, an identity which derives from membership in a “people,” the fundamental characteristic of which is that it is defined as a “nation.” Every member of the “people” thus interpreted partakes in its superior, elite quality, and it is in consequence that a stratified national population is perceived as essentially homogeneous, and the lines of status and class as superficial. This principle lies at the basis of all nationalisms and justifies viewing them as expressions of the same general phenomenon. Apart from it, different nationalisms share little. The national populations—diversely termed “peoples,” “nations,” and “nationalities”— are defined in many ways, and the criteria of membership in them vary. The multiformity which results is the source of the conceptually evasive, Protean nature of nationalism and the cause of the perennial frustration of its students, vainly trying to define it with the help of one or another “objective” factor, all of which are rendered relevant to the problem only if the national principle happens to be applied to them. The definition of nationalism proposed here recognizes it as an “emergent phenomenon,” that is, a phenomenon whose nature—as well as the possibilities of its development and the possibilities of the development of the elements of which it is composed—is determined not by the character of its elements, but by a certain organizing principle which makes these elements into a unity and imparts to them a special significance.

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There are important exceptions to every relationship in terms of which nationalism has ever been interpreted—whether with common territory or common language, statehood or shared traditions, history or race. None of these relationships has proved inevitable. But from the definition proposed above, it follows not only that such exceptions are to be expected, but that nationalism does not have to be related to any of these factors, though as a rule it is related to at least some of them. In other words, nationalism is not necessarily a form of particularism. It is a political ideology (or a class of political ideologies deriving from the same basic principle), and as such it does not have to be identified with any particular community. A nation coextensive with humanity is in no way a contradiction in terms. The United States of the World, which will perhaps exist in the future, with sovereignty vested in the population, and the various segments of the latter regarded as equal, would be a nation in the strict sense of the word within the framework of nationalism. The United States of America represents an approximation to precisely this state of affairs.

The Emergence of Particularistic Nationalisms

As it is, however, nationalism is the most common and salient form of particularism in the modern world. Moreover, if compared with the forms of particularism it has replaced, it is a particularly effective (or, depending on one’s viewpoint, pernicious) form of particularism, because, as every individual derives his or her identity from membership in the community, the sense of commitment to it and its collective goals is much more widespread. In a world divided into particular communities, national identity tends to be associated and confounded with a community’s sense of uniqueness and the qualities contributing to it. These qualities (social, political, cultural in the narrow sense, or ethnic) therefore acquire a great significance in the formation of every specific nationalism. The association between the nationality of a community and its uniqueness represents the next and last transformation in the meaning of the “nation’’ and may be deduced from the zigzag pattern of semantic (and by implication social) change.

The word “nation” which, in its conciliar and at the time prevalent meaning of an elite, was applied to the population of a specific country (England) became cognitively associated with the existing (political, territorial, and ethnic) connotations of a population and a country. While the interpretation of the latter in terms of the concept “nation” modified their significance, the concept “nation” was also transformed and—as it carried over the connotations of a population and a country, which were consistent with it—came to mean “a sovereign people.” This new meaning replaced that of “an elite” initially only in England. As we may judge from Montesquieu’s definition, elsewhere the older meaning long remained dominant, but it was, eventually, supplanted.

The word “nation,” meaning “sovereign people,” was now applied to other populations and countries which, like the first nation, naturally had some political, territorial, and/or ethnic qualities to distinguish them, and became associated with such geo-political and ethnic baggage. As a result of this association, “nation” changed its meaning once again, coming to signify “a unique sovereign people.” (These changes are shown in Figure 9.2.) The last transformation may be considered responsible for the conceptual confusion reigning in the theories of nationalism. The new concept of the nation in most cases eclipsed the one immediately preceding it, as the latter eclipsed those from

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which it descended, but, significantly, this did not happen everywhere. Because of the persistence and, as we shall see, in certain places development and extension of structural conditions responsible for the evolution of the original, non-particularistic idea of the nation, the two concepts now coexist.

The term “nation” applied to both conceals important differences. The emergence of the more recent concept signified a profound transformation in the nature of nationalism, and the two concepts under one name reflect two radically different forms of the phenomenon (which means both two radically different forms of national identity and consciousness, and two radically different types of national collectivities—nations).

Types of Nationalism

The two branches of nationalism are obviously related in a significant way, but are grounded in different values and develop for different reasons. They also give rise to dissimilar patterns of social behavior, culture, and political institutions, often conceptualized as expressions of unlike “national characters.”

FIGURE 9.2 The transformation of the idea of the nation.

Nation = a group of foreigners

Nation = a community of opinion

Nation = an elite

Nation = a sovereign people

Nation = a unique people

Medieval universities

Church councils

Population of England

Other countries and peoples

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Perhaps the most important difference concerns the relationship between nationalism and democracy. The location of sovereignty within the people and the recognition of the fundamental equality among its various strata, which constitute the essence of the modern national idea, are at the same time the basic tenets of democracy. Democracy was born with the sense of nationality. The two are inherently linked, and neither can be fully understood apart from this connection. Nationalism was the form in which democracy appeared in the world, contained in the idea of the nation as a butterfly in a cocoon. Originally, nationalism developed as democracy; where the conditions of such original development persisted, the identity between the two was maintained. But as nationalism spread in different conditions and the emphasis in the idea of the nation moved from the sovereign character to the uniqueness of the people, the original equivalence between it and democratic principles was lost. One implication of this, which should be emphasized, is that democracy may not be exportable. It may be an inherent predisposition in certain nations (inherent in their very definition as nations—that is, the original national concept), yet entirely alien to others, and the ability to adopt and develop it in the latter may require a change of identity.

The emergence of the original (in principle, non-particularistic) idea of the nation as a sovereign people was, evidently, predicated on a transformation in the character of the relevant population, which suggested the symbolic elevation of the “people” and its definition as a political elite, in other words, on a profound change in structural conditions. The emergence of the ensuing, particularistic, concept resulted from the application of the original idea to conditions which did not necessarily undergo such transformation. It was the other, in the original concept accidental, connotations of people and country which prompted and made possible such application. In both instances, the adoption of the idea of the nation implied symbolic elevation of the populace (and therefore the creation of a new social order, a new structural reality). But while in the former case the idea was inspired by the structural context which preceded its formation—the people acting in some way as a political elite, and actually exercising sovereignty—in the latter case the sequence of events was the opposite: the importation of the idea of popular sovereignty—as part and parcel of the idea of the nation—initiated the transformation in the social and political structure.

As it did so, the nature of sovereignty was inevitably reinterpreted. The observable sovereignty of the people (its nationality) in the former case could only mean that some individuals, who were of the people, exercised sovereignty. The idea of the nation (which implied sovereignty of the people) acknowledged this experience and rationalized it. The national principle that emerged was individualistic: sovereignty of the people was the implication of the actual sovereignty of individuals; it was because these individuals (of the people) actually exercised sovereignty that they were members of a nation. The theoretical sovereignty of the people in the latter case, by contrast, was an implication of the people’s uniqueness, its very being a distinct people, because this was the meaning of the nation, and the nation was, by definition, sovereign. The national principle was collectivistic; it reflected the collective being. Collectivistic ideologies are inherently authoritarian, for, when the collectivity is seen in unitary terms, it tends to assume the character of a collective individual possessed of a single will, and someone is bound to be its interpreter. The reification of a community introduces (or preserves) fundamental inequality between those of its few members who are qualified to interpret the collective will and the many who have no such qualifications; the select few dictate to the masses who must obey.

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These two dissimilar interpretations of popular sovereignty underlie the basic types of nationalism, which one may classify as individualistic-libertarian and collectivistic-authoritarian. In addition, nationalism may be distinguished according to criteria of membership in the national collectivity, which may be either “civic,” that is, identical with citizenship, or “ethnic.” In the former case, nationality is at least in principle open and voluntaristic; it can and sometimes must be acquired. In the latter, it is believed to be inherent—one can neither acquire it if one does not have it, nor change it if one does; it has nothing to do with individual will, but constitutes a genetic characteristic. Individualistic nationalism cannot be but civic, but civic nationalism can also be collectivistic. More often, though, collectivistic nationalism takes on the form of ethnic particularism, while ethnic nationalism is necessarily collectivistic. (These concepts are summarized in Figure 9.3.)

It must be kept in mind, of course, that these are only categories which serve to pinpoint certain characteristic tendencies within different—specific—nationalisms. They should be regarded as models which can be approximated, but are unlikely to be fully realized. In reality, obviously, the most common type is a mixed one. But the compositions of the mixtures vary significantly enough to justify their classification in these terms and render it a useful analytical tool.

Type I Void

Type II Type III

Civic Ethnic

Individualistic-libertarian

Collectivistic-authoritarian

FIGURE 9.3 Types of nationalism.

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Orientalism

edwArd w. sAid

Introduction

I.

On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975–1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that “it had once seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval.” He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.

Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic “Oriental”

Introduction to Orientalism by Edward W. Said, copyright © 1978 by Edward W. Said. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.

It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still throughout the many pages that follow) that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with “the Orient” as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological t-’’distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social, descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A little later in this introduction I shall deal with the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly construed a “field” as this.

The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated—traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This

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is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.

Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the Franco-British involvement in the Orient and—until the period of American ascendancy after World War II—the involvement of every other European and Atlantic power. To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands,” an Oriental professorate, a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use—the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. My point is that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early nineteenth century had really meant only India and the Bible lands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident (British, French, or American), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist.

It should be said at once that even with the generous number of books and authors that I examine, there is a much larger number that I simply have had to leave out. My argument, however, depends neither upon an exhaustive catalogue of texts dealing with the Orient nor upon a clearly delimited set of texts, authors, and ideas that together make up the Orientalist canon. I have depended instead upon a different methodological alternative—whose backbone in a sense is the set of historical generalizations I have so far been making in this Introduction—and it is these I want now to discuss in more analytical detail.

II

I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities —such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” ‘are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

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Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. When Disraeli said in his novel Tancred that the East was a career, he meant that to be interested in the East was something bright young Westerners would find to be an all- consuming passion; he should not be interpreted as saying that the East was only a career for Westerners. There were—and are— cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real”‘ Orient. My point is that Disraeli’s statement about the East refers mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.

A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the Orient was created—or, as I call it, “Orientalized”—and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and Western Dominance? The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental. There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental.” My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.

This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be). Nevertheless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a

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created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied—indeed, made truly productive—the statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture.

Gramsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far. Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter.

In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character. Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections. If we can point to great Orientalist works of genuine scholarship like Silvestre de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe or Edward William Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, we need also to note that Renan’s and Gobineau’s racial ideas came out of the same

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impulse, as did a great many Victorian pornographic novels (see the analysis by Steven Marcus of “The Lustful Turk”).

And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientalism is the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material—about which who could deny that they were shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism, and the like, dogmatic views of “the Oriental” as a kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction?—or the much more varied work produced by almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient. In a sense the two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material: in both instances one would have to deal with pioneers in the field like William Jones, with great artists like Nerval or Flaubert. And why would it not be possible to employ both perspectives together, or one after the other? Isn’t there an obvious danger of distortion (of precisely the kind that academic Orientalism has always been prone to) if either too general or too specific a level of description is maintained systematically?

My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus. In trying to deal with these problems I have tried to deal with three main aspects of my own contemporary reality that seem to me to point the way out of the methodological or perspectival difficulties I have been discussing, difficulties that might force one, in the first instance, into writing a coarse polemic on so unacceptably general a level of description as not to be worth the effort, or in the second instance, into writing so detailed and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general lines of force informing the field, giving it its special cogency. How then to recognize individuality and to reconcile it with its intelligent, and by no means passive or merely dictatorial, general and hegemonic context?

C H A P T E R T E N

Global War in the Twentieth Century

183

If there is any certainty that unites most victims of war, and more specifically mass or total war, it is that no one who hasn’t experienced it can possibly understand it. In its devastations and deprivations and degradations, it is simply incomparable. And so it has been for the two world wars of the twentieth century and their many offshoots. War on this scale does not end with the fatalities; in some ways, it just begins there. Apart from the ten empires that were destroyed by these two world wars and the more than 100 million deaths and nearly twice that number of wounded, there were many more millions of deaths caused by war-related famine and diseases, the tens of millions of refugees they generated and the populations they uprooted, along with the social and psychological violence inflicted on combatants and non-combatants alike.

But this is only the beginning of the catalogue of the casualties, casualties that have come from the conflicts generated by these wars. Think of how many hot wars followed in the wake of these two world wars—to name only the most obvious, the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1954-1975), the Persian Gulf War (1990-91), the Afghan War (2001-present), and the Iraq War (2003-2011), and then couple that with the number of victims of the Communist and Socialist Revolutions (there are no figures for twentieth-century Democratic Revolutions) that estimates have put at close to another 100 million, and the list of casualties multiplies exponentially.

World War I (1914-1918) was the first mass war that was no longer confined to the battlefield and enlisted the energies of all the nations involved. It was caused by alliances generated by nationalism—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy vs. Britain, France, Russia, and eventually the United States—and succeeded in destroying no less than seven empires. Nations were essentially fighting over their imperial roles that were defined by territorial shifts in boundaries, colonial possessions, and military power. Neither side sought massive consequences but both sides were devastated by a war of attrition. Defined by the double line of trenches that eventually extended

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from the Swiss border to the North Sea and that during three-and-a-half years never moved more than ten miles in either direction, World War I left 16 million dead and at least 21 million wounded. It moreover decimated an entire generation of young men on both sides and debased every abstraction that could have sustained and dignified their suffering. The American novelist Ernest Hemingway put it perfectly in the words of his protagonist, Fredric Henry, who confessed in A Farewell to Arms, “I was always embarrassed by the word sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat but to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”

World War II (1941-1945) was another issue altogether. Though in some respects merely the continuation, after a 20-year suspension, of World War I, the Second World War was a struggle not merely over territory and resources but also over who should control them and at what price to others—political, economic, social, cultural, emotional. World War II was a conflict that sought the reordering of nearly the entire globe. It thus ranged over all the oceans and continents and caused catastrophic physical and human destruction, almost doubling the number of fatalities from World War I, bankrupting Germany, Japan, Italy, and England, driving the broken Soviet economy into a still more brutal dictatorship, and paving the way in 1949 for the Communist takeover in China. The only country that came out of the war stronger than before it began was the United States, which then set out to create a military empire of its own in the postwar era that now numbers nearly 800 overseas military bases. If the Japanese intention was to create an empire in East, Southeast, and South Asia that reached the Western Hemisphere, the German objective was to reorder demographically almost the entire Eurasian landmass by slaughtering, sterilizing, and enslaving tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. This new empire was intended to extend across Europe to the Middle East as well as to Africa and the West.

Among many other developments, World War II reordered the theater of war itself by turning civilians rather than the military into its principal targets. This policy was first inaugurated by Germany during the Blitz beginning in September 1940, when German bombers raided London for 57 consecutive nights and continued this assault from the air until May of the next year. England was eventually to retaliate a year later, to be followed by the Americans, when it commenced the systematic bombing first of German industry and then of German cities to disable the economy and break civilian morale. But the Americans were to adopt this policy themselves with even greater zeal against the Japanese when, late in the war, they proceeded to firebomb with napalm no less than 67 cities.

Still more horrific damage was done to traditional, even military, values by the invention of two new forms of destruction in World War II. The first was the industrialization of murder known as the Holocaust that was directed against whole peoples simply as a punishment for in effect having been born. Its targets were principally Jews, some six million of whom either perished at the hands of firing squads, or in the ovens of the death camps, or were worked to death, but it should not be forgotten that the Germans also exterminated something on the order of another 10 million souls that included Roma (or gypsies), Ethnic Poles, Ukrainian and Belarusian Slavs, Soviet POWs, the disabled, Freemasons, Slovenes, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. To many people around the world, this holocaust of merciless destruction—the Jews termed it the Shoah--seemed to augur

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the introduction of an entirely new kind of evil in the world that left virtually all of its survivors, as well as untold millions of its witnesses, wondering how such malevolence and cruelty could be countenanced by a just God or, in fact, any God at all.

But the Holocaust was not the only form of destruction introduced in World War II that seemed to redefine the terms of warfare and the scale of justice. This second source of evil was located in the power of the atom and its ability to be used not only to obliterate whole cities in the blink of an eye but to leave radioactive fallout that could keep killing and deforming people for generations. The atomic bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 killed 90,000 people outright and another 200,000 within five years because of the lasting health effects of the radiation received by survivors. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan three days later was actually intended to be 40% more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb because it was made of plutonium rather than uranium but, due to the fact that many school children had already been evaluated from the city before it was released, the initial blast killed only 40,000 people immediately and another 140,000 within five years. While such events as these produced psychological as well as physical aftereffects from which the Japanese people are still struggling to overcome, it should not be forgotten that nuclear power has now become hundreds of times more lethal than the destruction first visited on Japan, and the recent weaponization of still more unconventional arms like biological pathogens, chemical compounds, cyber warfare , and even nanotechnological devices have expanded the destructive geometry of warfare yet further.

The first reading in this chapter comes from one of the very best books written on World War I entitled The Great War in Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. The second comes from one of the very best books written on the entire twentieth century entitled Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm. Fussell’s aim in this selection is to explain how human memory could function at all in the face of scenes and experiences that expressed so vividly the ghastly disproportion between the altruistic ends for which World War I was supposedly fought and the horrific means that were employed to pursue them. His answer was that the only way that the human mind could recall such painful memories was by viewing them ironically, as Ernest Hemingway did in A Farewell to Arms. If Hemingway had just given way to his bitterness and disgust, it would simply have been swept up in the general sense of disbelief, horror, and despair that threatened to overwhelm anyone who tried to give vent to their feelings. But by relying instead on the understatement of irony, Hemingway was able not only to keep himself from being overwhelmed by these feelings but to find enough distance from them to render the monstrous spectacle of disproportion between means and ends that occasioned them. Not only was irony more capable of identifying, drawing forth, and lending significance to a perception that might otherwise simply have merged in the general stream of outrage; irony was also more capable at the same time of registering the sense of innocence and idealism that had been shattered in the process.

The selection from Eric Hobsbawm, drawn from his chapter on “The Age of Total War,” seeks to assess the impact of this entire era on humanity itself. If the 20th century was, as Hobsbawm elsewhere describes in his book, “the cruelest, and most bestial, century in the history of human records,” this was partly because total war was turned on all people, military and civilians alike. It was also partly because total war brought a new impersonality to killing itself by relying so completely on technology and thus enabling the war’s greatest cruelties to be performed in the name

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of modern systems and mechanical routines rather of ancient enmities and traditional rivalries. Add to this the human displacements caused outside of Europe where, as in India alone, decolonization produced another 15 million refugees, or the Korean War, which left 5 million Koreans homeless, and one can begin to appreciate why war in the twentieth century has been so catastrophic.

Nor is it without significance that many of the twentieth century’s wars involved terrible miscalculations. Germany, for example, never guessed that Britain would come to the defense of Belgium in 1914. Against overwhelming evidence, Stalin also kept himself in denial of the possibility that Hitler was preparing to invade Russia in 1941. In similar fashion, the Americans and the Japanese continuously misread each other’s intentions and capacities before the beginning of the War in the Pacific and the U.S. never failed to anticipate that the Chinese would enter the Korean war in 1950, producing a dangerous stalemate that has now lasted more than 60 years.

The consequences of global war in the century just past were shattering enough in themselves, but they continue to reverberate in the present century. The destabilization of the Middle East is in no small measure due to the redrawing of the boundaries of regimes after World War I that left their people in arbitrarily contrived and deeply volatile autocratic state formations that paid no attention to the historic bonds or politics of religion, region, tribe, clan, or ethnicity. The breakup of the Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War left no less than 27 countries spanning its southern border to fend for themselves amidst feuds, hatreds, conflicts, and jealousies that go back centuries. And now, particularly as America has begun on a number of fronts to yield world leadership, great powers from China and Russia to India, Iran, and even Turkey are in the midst of reassessing their priorities and ambitions on a global scale. As a result, many of the countries of the world are like them turning themselves into giant security states designed essentially to protect themselves against adversaries of every kind, whether real or imagined.

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A Satire of Circumstance: Irony and Memory from The Great War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell

The innocent army fully attained the knowledge of good and evil at the Somme on July 1, 1916. That moment, one of the most interesting in the whole long history of human disillusion, can stand as the type of all the ironic actions of the war. What could remain of confidence in Divine assistance once it was known what Haig wrote his wife just before the attack: “I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help”? “The wire has never been so well cut,” he confided to his diary, “nor the artillery preparation so thorough.” His hopes were those of every man. Private E. C. Stanley recalls: “I was very pleased when I heard that my battalion would be in the attack. I thought this would be the last battle of the war and I didn’t want to miss it. I remember writing to my mother, telling her I would be home for the August Bank Holiday,” Even the weather cooperated to intensify the irony, just as during the summer of 1914. “On the first of July,” Sassoon says, “the weather, after an early morning mist, was of the kind commonly called heavenly.” Thirteen years after that day Henry Williamson recalled it vividly:

I see men arising and walking forward; and I go forward with them, in a glassy delirium wherein some seem to pause, with bowed heads, and sink carefully to their knees, and roll slowly over, and lie still. Others roll and roll, and scream and grip my legs in uttermost fear, and I have to struggle to break away, while the dust and earth on my tunic changes from grey to red.

And I go on with aching feet, up and down across ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the ruins of the first and second, and after a while the fourth blunders into the remnants of the others, and we begin to run forward to catch up with the barrage, gasping and sweating, in bunches, anyhow, every bit of the months of drill and rehearsal forgotten, for who could have imagined that the “Big Push” was going to be this?

What assists Williamson’s recall is precisely the ironic pattern which subsequent vision has laid over the events. In reading memoirs of the war one notices the same phenomenon over and over. By applying to the past a paradigm of ironic action, a rememberer is enabled to locate, draw forth and finally shape into significance an event or a moment which otherwise would merge without meaning into the general undifferentiated stream.

From The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, copyright © 1975 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

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This mechanism of irony-assisted recall is well illustrated by the writing of Private Alfred M. Hale. He was a genteel, delicate, monumentally incompetent middle-aged batman, known somewhat patronizingly as “our Mr. Hale” in the Royal Flying Corps installations where he served. Four years after the war, he composed a 658-page memoir of his agonies and humiliations, dwelling on his palpable unfitness for any kind of military life and on the constant ironic gap between what was expected of him and what he could perform. At one camp it was his job to heat water for the officers’ ablutions. At the same time, he was strictly forbidden to gather fuel for heating water, since the only source of fuel was the lumber of numerous derelict barracks in the camp. Frustrated almost to madness by this conflict of obligations, by the abuse now from one set of officers for the insufficiently heated water, now from another for his tearing up and incinerating the barracks piece by piece, Hale confesses to an anxiety fully as agonizing as that faced by troops in an assault. “Heating water,” he remembers, “was a sort of punishment for every sin I have ever committed, I should say.” Writing his aggrieved memoir, he knows that he is dwelling excessively on his water- heating problems, incontinently returning to them again and again. He tries to break away and resume his narrative: “I said I was going to turn to other matters.” But it is exactly the irony of his former situation that keeps calling him back: “In truth it is the irony of things, as they were in those days, that has forced me back on my tracks, as it has a habit of doing, whenever writing of what I then went through.”

Another private, Gunner Charles Bricknall, recalling the war many years later, likewise behaves as if his understanding of the irony attending events is what enables him to recall them. He was in an artillery battery being relieved by a new unit fresh from England:

There was a long road leading to the front line which the Germans occasionally shelled, and the shells used to drop plonk in the middle of it. This new unit assembled right by the wood ready to go into action in the night.

What rises to the surface of Bricknall’s memory is the hopes and illusions of the newcomers:

They was all spick and span, buttons polished and all the rest of it.

He tries to help:

We spoke to a few of the chaps before going up and told them about the Germans shelling the road, but of course they was not in charge, so up they went and the result was they all got blown up.

Contemplating this ironic issue, Bricknall is moved to an almost Dickensian reiterative rhetoric:

Ho, what a disaster! We had to go shooting lame horses, putting the dead to the side of the road, what a disaster, which could have been avoided if only the officers had gone into action the hard way [i.e., overland, avoiding the road]. That was something I shall never forget.

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It is the if only rather than the slaughter that helps Bricknall “never forget” this. A slaughter by itself is too commonplace for notice. When it makes an ironic point it becomes memorable.

Bricknall was a simple man from Walsall, Staffordshire, who died in 1968 at the age of 76. He was, his son tells me, “a man; a real man; a real soldier from Walsall.” Sir Geoffrey Keynes, on the other hand, John Maynard’s brother, was a highly sophisticated scholar, surgeon, author, editor, book collector, and bibliographer, with honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Reading. In 1968 he recalled an incident of January 26, 1916. A German shell landed near a British artillery battery and killed five officers, including the major commanding, who were standing in a group. “I attended as best I could to each of them,” he remembers, “but all were terribly mutilated and were dead or dying.” He then wonders why he remembers so clearly this relatively minor event: “Far greater tragedies were happening elsewhere all the time. The long, drawn-out horrors of Passchendaele were to take place not far away.” It is, he concludes, the small ironic detail of the major’s dead dog that enables him to “see these things as clearly today as if they had just happened”: “The pattern of war is shaped in the individual mind by small individual experiences, and I can see these things as clearly today as if they had just happened, down to the body of the major’s terrier bitch . . . lying near her master.”

In gathering material for his book The First Day on the Somme in 1970, Martin Middlebrook took pains to interview as many of the survivors as he could find. They too use the pattern of irony to achieve their “strongest recollections.” Thus Private E. T. Radband: “My strongest recollection: all those grand-looking cavalrymen, ready mounted to follow the breakthrough. What a hope!” And Corporal J. H. Tansley: “One’s revulsion to the ghastly horrors of war was submerged in the belief that this war was to end all wars and Utopia would arise. What an illusion!”

“There are some contrasts war produces,” says Hugh Quigley, “which art would esteem hackneyed or inherently false.” And, we can add, which the art of memory organizes into little ironic vignettes, satires of circumstance more shocking, even, than Hardy’s. Here is one from Blunden’s Undertones of War:

A young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea [in the trench] as I passed one warm afternoon. Wishing him a good tea, I went along three fire bays; one shell dropped without warning behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and I thought all was as lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from that place recalled me; the shell had burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobbers of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer?

And irony engenders worse irony:

At this moment while he looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance- corporal’s brother came round the traverse.

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Another example, again of an ironic family tragedy. Here the narrator is Max Plowman, author (under the pseudonym “Mark VII”) of the memoir A Subaltern on the Somme (1928). The commanding officer of the front-line company in which Plowman is serving has received “a piteous appeal,” a letter from “two or three influential people in a Northern town, setting forth the case of a mother nearly demented because she has had two of her three sons killed in the trenches since July 1 [1916], and is in mortal fear of what may happen to the sole surviving member of the family, a boy in our company named Stream.” The authors of this letter ask if anything can be done. The company commander “is helpless at the moment, but he has shown the letter to the colonel, who promises to see what can be done next time we are out.” The reader will be able to construct the rest of the episode himself. A few days later “Sergeant Brown . . . comes to the mouth of the dug-out to report that a big shell dropped right in the trench, killing one man, though who it was he doesn’t yet know: the body was blown to pieces. No one else was hurt.”

The irony which memory associates with the events, little as well as great, of the First World War has become an inseparable element of the general vision of war in our time. Sergeant Croft’s ironic patrol in Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) is one emblem of that vision. The unspeakable agonies endured by the patrol in order to win—as it imagines—the whole campaign take place while the battle is being easily won elsewhere. The patrol’s contribution (“sacrifice,” it would have been called thirty years earlier) has not been needed at all. As Polack puts it: “We broke our ass for nothin’.”

There is continuity too in a favorite ironic scene which the Great War contributes to the Second. A terribly injured man is “comforted” by a friend unaware of the real ghastliness of the friend’s wounds. The classic Great War scene of this kind is a real “scene”: it is Scene 3, Act III, of R. C. Sherriff’s play of 1928, Journey’s End, which had the amazing run of 594 performances at the Savoy Theater. The dying young Second Lieutenant James Raleigh (played by the twenty-eight-year-old Maurice Evans) is carried down into the orderly-room dugout to be ministered to by his old public- school football idol, Captain Dennis Stanhope:

RALEIGH. Something—hit me in the back—knocked me clean over—sort of— winded me— I’m all right now. (He tries to rise)

STANHOPE. Steady, old boy. Just lie there quietly for a bit. RALEIGH. I’ll be better if I get up and walk about. It happened once before— I got kicked in

just the same place at Rugger; it—it soon wore off. It—it just numbs you for a bit. STANHOPE. I’m going to have you taken away. RALEIGH. Away? Where? STANHOPE. Down to the dressing-station—then hospital—then home. (He smiles) You’ve got

a Blighty one, Jimmy. (There is quiet in the dug-out for a time. Stanhope sits with one hand on Raleigh’s arm, and Raleigh lies very still. Presently he speaks again—hardly above a whisper)

Dennis— STANHOPE. Yes, old boy? RALEIGH. Could we have a light? It’s—it’s so frightfully dark and cold.

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STANHOPE. (rising) Sure! I’ll bring a candle and get another blanket. (Stanhope goes out R, and Raleigh is alone, very still and quiet. . . . A tiny sound comes from where Raleigh is lying—something between a sob and a moan; his L hand drops to the floor. Stanhope comes back with a blanket. He takes a candle from the table and carries it to Raleigh’s bed. He puts it on the box beside Raleigh and speaks cheerfully)

Is that better, Jimmy? (Raleigh makes no sign) Jimmy—

The most conspicuous modern beneficiary of this memorable scene is Joseph Heller. Alfred Kazin has accurately distinguished the heart of Catch-22 from the distracting vaudeville surrounding it: “The impressive emotion in Catch-22,” he says, “is not ‘black humor,’ the ‘totally absurd’ . . . but horror. Whenever the book veers back to its primal scene, a bombardier’s evisceration in a plane being smashed by flak, a scene given us directly and piteously, we recognize what makes Catch-22 disturbing.” What makes it disturbing, Kazin decides, is the book’s implying, by its Absurd farce, that in the last third of the twentieth century, after the heaping of violence upon violence, it is no longer possible to “ ‘describe war’ in traditional literary ways.” But what is notable about Heller’s “primal scene” is that it does “describe war” in exactly a traditional literary way. It replays Sherriff’s scene and retains all its Great War irony.

Heller’s unforgettable scene projects a terrible dynamics of horror, terrified tenderness, and irony. Yossarian has gone to the tail of the plane to help the wounded gunner, the “kid” Snowden: “Snowden was lying on his back on the floor with his legs stretched out, still burdened cumbersomely by his flak suit, his flak helmet, his parachute harness and his Mae West. . . . The wound Yossarian saw was in the outside of Snowden’s thigh.” It was “as large and deep as a football, it seemed.” Yossarian masters his panic and revulsion and sets to work with a tourniquet. “He worked with simulated skill and composure, feeling Snowden’s lack-luster gaze resting upon him.” Cutting away Snowden’s trouser-leg, Yossarian is pleased to discover that the wound “was not nearly as large as football, but as long and wide as his hand. . . . A long sigh of relief escaped slowly through Yossarian’s mouth when he saw that Snowden was not in danger of dying. The blood was already coagulating inside the wound, and it was simply a matter of bandaging him up and keeping him calm until the plane landed.”

Cheered by these hopes, Yossarian goes to work “with renewed confidence and optimism.” He competently sprinkles sulfanilimide into the wound as he has been taught and binds it up, making “the whole thing fast with a tidy square knot. It was a good bandage, he knew, and he sat back on his heels with pride . . . and grinned at Snowden with spontaneous friendliness.” It is time for ironic reversal to begin:

“I’m cold,” Snowden moaned. “I’m cold.” You’re going to be all right, kid,” Yossatian assured him, patting his arm comfortingly.

“Everything’s under control.” Snowden shook his head feebly. “I’m cold,” he repeated, with eyes as dull and blind as

stone. “I’m cold.” “There, there,” said Yossarian. . . . “There, there. . . .”

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And soon everything proves to be not under control at all:

Snowden kept shaking his head and pointed at last, with just the barest movement of his chin, down toward his armpit. . . . Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out.

Yossarian “wondered how in the world to begin to save him.”

“I’m cold,” Snowden whimpered. “I’m cold.” “There, there,” Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. “There,

there.”

And the scene ends with Yossarian covering the still whimpering Snowden with the nearest thing he can find to a shroud:

“I’m cold,” Snowden said. “I’m cold.” “There, there,” said Yossarian. “There, there.” He pulled the rip cord of Snowden’s

parachute and covered his body with the white nylon sheets. “I’m cold.” “There, there.”

This “primal scene” works because it is undeniably horrible, but its irony, its dynamics of hope abridged, is what makes it haunt the memory. It embodies the contemporary equivalent of the experience offered by the first day on the Somme, and like that archetypal original, it can stand as a virtual allegory of political and social cognition in our time. I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.

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The Age of Total War

eric Hobsbawm

It remains to assess the human impact of the era of wars, and its human costs. The sheer mass of casualties, to which we have already referred, are only one part of these. Curiously enough, except, for understandable reasons, in the USSR, the much smaller figures of the First World War were to make a much greater impact than the vast quantities of the Second World War, as witness the much greater prominence of memorials and the cult of the fallen of the First World War. The Second World War produced no equivalent to the monuments to ‘the unknown soldier’, and after it the celebration of ‘armistice day’ (the anniversary of 11 November 1918) gradually lost its inter-war solemnity. Perhaps ten million dead hit those who had never expected such sacrifice more brutally than fifty-four millions hit those who have already once experienced war as massacre.

Certainly both the totality of the war efforts and the determination on both sides to wage war without limit and at whatever cost, made its mark. Without it, the growing brutality and inhumanity of the twentieth century is difficult to explain. About this rising curve of barbarism after 1914 there is unfortunately, no serious doubt. By the early twentieth century, torture had officially been ended throughout Western Europe. Since 1945 we have once again accustomed ourselves, without much revulsion, to its use in at least one third of the member-states of the United nations, including some of the oldest and most civilized (Peters, 1985).

The growth of brutalization was due not so much to the release of the latent potential for cruelty and violence in the human being, which war naturally legitimizes, although this certainly emerged after the First World War among a certain type of ex-servicemen (veterans), especially in the strong- arm or killer squads and ‘Free Corps’ on the nationalist ultra-Right. Why should men who had killed and seen their friends killed and mangled, hesitate to kill and brutalize the enemies of a good cause?

One major reason was the strange democratisation of war. Total conflicts turned into ‘people’s wars’, both because civilians and civilian life became the proper, and sometimes the main, targets of strategy, and because in democratic wars, as in democratic politics, adversaries are naturally demonized in order to make them properly hateful or at least despicable. Wars conducted on both sides by professionals, or specialists, especially those of similar social standing, do not exclude mutual respect and acceptance of rules, or even chivalry. Violence has its rules. This was still evident among fighter pilots in air forces in both wars, as witness Jean Renoir’s pacifist film about the First World War, La Grande Illusion. Professionals of politics and diplomacy, when untrammeled by the demands of votes or newspapers, can declare war or negotiate peace with no hard feelings about the other side, like boxers who shake hands before they come out fighting, and drink with each other after the fight. But the total wars of our century were far removed from the Bismarckian

“The Age of Total War” from Age of Extremes: 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm, copyright © 1994 by Eric Hobsbawm. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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or eighteenth-century pattern. No war in which mass national feelings are mobilized can be as limited as aristocratic wars. And, it must be said, in the Second World War the nature of Hitler’s regime and the behaviour of the Germans, including the old non-Nazi German army, in eastern Europe, was such as to justify a good deal of demonization.

Another reason, however, was the new impersonality of warfare, which turned killing and maiming into the remote consequence of pushing a button or moving a lever. Technology made its victims invisible, as people eviscerated by bayonets, or seen through the sights of firearms could not be. Opposite the permanently fixed guns of the western front were not men but statistics not even real, but hypothetical statistics, as the ‘body-counts’ of enemy casualties during US Vietnam War showed. Far below the aerial bombers were not people about to be burned and eviscerated, but targets. Mild young men, who would certainly not have wished to plunge a bayonet in the belly of any pregnant village girl, could far more easily drop high explosive on London or Berlin, or nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. Hard-working German bureaucrats who would certainly have found it repugnant to drive starving Jews into abattoirs themselves, could work out the railway timetables for a regular supply of death-trains to Polish extermination camps with less sense of personal involvement. The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities.

So the world accustomed itself to the compulsory expulsion and killing on an astronomic scale, phenomena so unfamiliar that new words had to be invented for them: ‘stateless’ (‘apatride’) or ‘genocide’. The First World War led to the killing of an uncounted number of Armenians by Turkey the most usual figure is 1.5 millions which can count as the first modern attempt to eliminate an entire population. It was later followed by the belter-known Nazi mass-killing of about five million Jews the numbers remain in dispute. (Hilberg, 1985). One First World War and the Russian revolution forced millions to move as refugees, or by compulsory ‘exchanges of populations’ between states, which amounted to the same. A total of 1.3 million Greeks were repatriated to Greece, mainly from Turkey; 400,000 Turks were decanted into the state which claimed them; some 200,000 Bulgarians moved into the diminished territory bearing their national name; while 1.5 or perhaps 2 million Russian nationals, escaping from the Russian revolution or on the losing side of the Russian civil war, found themselves homeless. It was mainly for these rather than the 320,000 Armenians fleeing genocide, that a new document was invented for those who, in an increasingly bureaucratized world, had no bureaucratic existence in any state: the so-called Nansen passport of the League of Nations, named after the great Norwegian arctic explorer who made himself a second career as a friend to the friendless. At a rough guess the years 1914 22 generated between four and five million refugees.

This first flood of human jetsam was as nothing to that which followed the Second World War, or to the inhumanity with which they were treated. It has been estimated that by May 1945 there were perhaps 40.5 million uprooted people in Europe, excluding non-German forced labourers and Germans who fled before the advancing Soviet armies (Kulischer, 1948, pp. 253 73). About thirteen million Germans were expelled from the parts of Germany annexed by Poland and the USSR, from Czechoslovakia and parts of south-eastern Europe where they had long been settled (Holborn, p. 363). They were taken in by the new German Federal Republic, which offered a home and citizenship to any German who returned there, as the new state of Israel offered a ‘right of return’ to any Jew.

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When, but in an epoch of mass flight, could such offers by states have been seriously made? Of the 11,332,700 ‘displaced persons’ of various nationalities found in Germany by the victorious armies in 1945, ten millions soon returned to their homelands – but half of these were compelled to do so against their will (Jacobmeyer, 1986).

These were only the refugees of Europe. The decolonization of India in 1947 created fifteen million of them, forced to cross the new frontiers between India and Pakistan “(in both directions), without counting the two millions killed in the accompanying civil strife. The Korean War, another by-product of The Second World War, produced perhaps five million displaced Koreans. After the establishment of Israel – yet another of the war’s after-effects — about 1.3 million Palestinians were registered with the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNWRA); conversely by the early 1960s 1.2 million Jews had migrated to Israel, the majority of these also as refugees. In short, the global human catastrophe unleashed by the Second World War is almost certainly the largest in human history. Not the least tragic aspect of this catastrophe is that humanity has learned to live in a world in which killing, torture and mass exile have become everyday experiences which we no longer notice.

Looking back on the thirty-one years from the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo to the unconditional surrender of Japan, they must be seen as an era of havoc comparable to the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century in German history. And Sarajevo – the first Sarajevo – certainly marked the beginning of a general age of catastrophe and crisis in the affairs of the world, which is the subject of this and the next four chapters. Nevertheless, in the memory of the generations after 1945, the Thirty-one Years’ War did not leave behind the same sort of memory as its more localised seventeenth-century predecessor.

This is partly because it formed a single era of war only in the historians’ perspective. For those who lived through it, it was experienced as two distinct though connected wars, separated by an ‘inter-war’ period without overt hostilities, ranging from thirteen years for Japan (whose second war began in Manchuria in 1931) to twenty-three years for the USA (which did not enter the Second World War until December 1941). However, it is also because each of these wars had its own historical character and profile. Both were episodes of carnage without parallel, leaving behind the technological nightmare images that haunted the nights and days of the next generation: poison gas and aerial bombardment after 1918, the mushroom cloud of nuclear destruction after 1945. Both ended in breakdown and – as we shall see in the next chapter — social revolution over large regions of Europe and Asia. Both left the belligerents exhausted and enfeebled, except for the USA, which emerged from both undamaged and enriched, as the economic lord of the world. And yet, how striking the differences! The First World War solved nothing. Such hopes as it generated – of a peaceful and democratic world of nationstates under the League of Nations; of a return to the world economy of 1913; even (among those who hailed the Russian Revolution) of world capitalism overthrown within years or months by a rising of the oppressed, I were soon disappointed. The past was beyond reach, the future postponed, the present bitter, except for a few fleeting years in the mid-1920s. The Second World War actually produced solutions, at least for decades. The dramatic social and economic problems of capitalism in its Age of entered its Golden Age; Western political democracy, backed by an extraordinary improvement in material life, was stable; war was banished to the Third World. On the other side, even revolution appeared to have found its way forward. The

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old colonial empires vanished or were shortly destined to go. A consortium of communist states, organized around the Soviet Union, now transformed into a superpower, seemed ready to compete in the race for economic growth with the West. This proved to be an illusion, but not until the 1960s did it begin to vanish. As we can now see, even the international scene was stabilized, though it did not seem so. Unlike after the Great War, the former enemies – Germany and Japan – reintegrated into the (Western) world economy, and the new enemies – the USA and the USSR – never actually came to blows.

Even the revolutions which ended both wars were quite different. Those after the First World War were, as we shall see, rooted in a revulsion against what most people who lived through it, had increasingly seen as a pointless slaughter. They were revolutions against the war. The revolutions after the Second World War grew out of the popular participation in a world struggle against enemies – Germany, Japan, more generally imperialism – which, however terrible, those who took part in it felt to be just. And yet, like the two World Wars, the two sorts of post-war revolution can be seen in the historian’s perspective as a single process. To this we must now turn.