[Assam] ETHNO-NATIONALISM - The Clash of Peoples

[Dilip/Dil Deka]

The article does not say ethno-nationalism is good but it admits that it is here to stay for some more time. It also talks about why Americans cannot understand this in Europe, Asia and Africa.
  Dilip Deka
  ==============================================================
  From the International Herald Tribune
   
  ETHNO-NATIONALISM
  The clash of peoples    
  By Jerry Z. Muller 
  Published: February 29, 2008
  

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    Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. They also find ethno-nationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, and ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.



  But none of this will make ethno-nationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.
  A familiar and influential narrative of 20th-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the postwar decades, West Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of trans-national institutions, culminating in the European Union. After the fall of the Soviet empire, that transnational framework spread eastward to encompass most of the Continent. Europeans entered a post-national era, which was not only a good thing in itself but also a model for other regions. Nationalism, in this view, had been a tragic detour on the road to a peaceful liberal democratic order.
  Yet the experience of the hundreds of Africans and Asians who perish each year trying to get into Europe by landing on the coast of Spain or Italy reveals that Europe's frontiers are not so open. And a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other words - where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict citizenship laws - in Europe the "separatist project" has not so much vanished as triumphed. Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects ethno-nationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately after World War II. European stability during the Cold War era was in fact due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the ethno-nationalist project.
  Although the term "ethnic cleansing" has come into English usage only recently, its verbal correlates in Czech, French, German, and Polish go back much further. Much of the history of 20th century Europe, in fact, has been a painful, drawn-out process of ethnic disaggregation. The breakup of Yugoslavia was simply the last act of a long play. But the plot of that play - the disaggregation of peoples and the triumph of ethno-nationalism in modern Europe - is rarely recognized, and so a story whose significance is comparable to the spread of democracy or capitalism remains largely unknown and unappreciated.
      

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  When the European overseas empires dissolved, meanwhile, they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns of settlement and whose internal populations were ethnically mixed. It is wishful thinking to suppose that these boundaries will be permanent. As societies in the former colonial world modernize, becoming more urban, literate, and politically mobilized, the forces that gave rise to ethno-nationalism and ethnic disaggregation in Europe are apt to drive events there, too.
  This unfortunate reality creates dilemmas for advocates of humanitarian intervention, because making and keeping peace between groups that have come to hate and fear one another is likely to require costly ongoing military missions rather than relatively cheap temporary ones. When communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover, the return of large numbers of refugees to their place of origin after a cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even undesirable, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of conflict down the road. Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue.
  Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity - the extent to which national consciousness is culturally and politically manufactured by ideologists and politicians. They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power. It is true, of course, that ethno-national identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim. Yet it would be a mistake to think that because nationalism is partly constructed it is therefore fragile or infinitely malleable. Ethno-nationalism was not a chance detour in European history: it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit that are heightened by the process of modern state creation, it is a crucial source of both solidarity and enmity, and in one form or another, it will remain for many generations to come. One can only profit from
 facing it directly.
   
  Jerry Muller is professor of history at the Catholic University of America. his most recent book is "The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought." This article is drawn from an essay in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.