Indians, Naipaul wrote, are tormented by a ‘sense of wrongness’ because they feel ‘they are uniquely gifted’. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the Bengali scholar and an influential commentator on India in the 1960s and 1970s, claimed that ‘cringe and hate’ had been ‘the motto of the Indian people under British rule’. He warned against the volatile ‘anti-Western nationalism’ of apparently Westernized Indians; he had seen, he claimed, too many ‘Hindu tadpoles shedding their Western tails and becoming Hindu frogs’.
Both Naipaul and Chaudhuri generalized wildly about India, assessing a vast and diverse country through the inferiority complex of an upper-caste minority. However, their obsessive mapping of the high-born Hindu’s id created a useful – and increasingly very recognizable – meme of intellectual insecurity, confusion and belligerence. And, as it happens, thwarted Indians seeking private and national redemption are by no means unique.
Many other elites struggling with projects of national emulation also contend that they are uniquely gifted, accomplished and superior, morally and spiritually, to the West. ‘We will strive to be leaders,’ Vladimir Putin announced in December 2013, of Russia’s new role in the world. Nothing less would do for ‘a state like Russia, with its great history and culture, with many centuries of experience not of so-called tolerance, neutered and barren, but of the real organic life of different peoples existing together within the framework of a single state’.
Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping outlines a ‘China Dream’ to re-establish his nation as a great power on a par with America: a vision in which he and his party are the representatives of a 5,000-year-old civilization, inoculated against Western political ideals of individual freedom and democracy. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounces Turkish journalists and academics as fifth columnists of the West, speaks of Islam as ‘Europe’s indigenous religion’ from ‘Andalusia to the Ottomans’, and vows to protect the domes of European mosques ‘against all the hands that reach out to harm them’. No one, he promises, ‘will be able to stop’ Islam from growing into ‘a huge tree of justice in the centre of Europe’.
Chronic anti-Westernism might partly explain the tub-thumping by Indian, Russian, Chinese and Turkish elites. But many countries in the West are also obsessed with patriotic education, reverence for national symbols and icons, and the uniqueness of national culture and history; they, too, sound the alarm against various internal and external enemies. Far-right parties in France, Austria, Holland, Germany and the United Kingdom openly admire Putin’s resolve to re-create ‘organic’ life in a ‘single state’. Ethnic-racial nationalism surges in England. In the United States, the mere presence of a black man in the White House inflamed white supremacism. ‘Israel,’ wrote David Grossman in 2016, ‘is being sucked ever deeper into a mythological, religious and tribal narrative.’
Back in 1993, the suggestion from Gianfranco Miglio, the ‘theorist’ of Italy’s Northern League, that ‘civilized’ Europe should deploy the atavistic nationalism of ‘barbarian’ Europe (the East) as a ‘frontier guard to block the Muslim invasion’ would have seemed preposterous. Today, the demagogues ruling Hungary and Poland claim to be the sentinels of a Christian Europe in a parody of their actual role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As it happens, no European country stokes ideological xenophobia today more than the one to which Rousseau advised ‘an exclusive love of country’ and the necessity of national strength and character: Poland.
In another ironic twist of history, the idolatry of the nationalistic state, the ‘coldest of all cold monsters’, as Nietzsche called it, has intensified in Enlightened France. While conducting its own ‘war on terror’, the French government seems to be trying to invent Rousseau’s Sparta: using such political and cultural technologies as national history, national flag, national education, and the imaginary unity of national language, to project the image of a homogenized national community.
Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated world, of the Western European eighteenth-century dream of a universally secular, materialist and peaceful civilization.
Louis Vuitton in Borneo
The triumphs of capitalist imperialism in the nineteenth century had fulfilled on a grand scale Voltaire’s dream of a worldwide materialist civilization knit together by rational self-interest. This pioneering intellectual and commercial entrepreneur proved to be, in Nietzsche’s assessment, the ‘representative of the victorious, ruling classes and their valuations’.
A typical later example was the inhabitant of London, who in 1914, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, could ‘order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth … he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world’. This blessed citizen of an empire, who was best positioned to make money in globalized markets, ‘regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement’. To him, ‘the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries’ seemed to have no influence on social and economic life. The extensive conflagrations of the early twentieth century, during which racial and national identity was repeatedly valued more than economic rationality, shattered this illusion. As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.’
In the late twentieth century, however, the old dream of economic internationalism was revived on a much grander scale after Communism, the illegitimate child of Enlightenment rationalism, suffered a shattering loss of state power and legitimacy in Russia and Eastern Europe. The financialization of capitalism seemed to realize Voltaire’s dream of the stock exchange as the embodiment of humanity, which, however religiously or ethnically diverse, spoke the unifying language of money. The establishment of the European Union (EU) seemed to vindicate Nicolas de Condorcet, who had insisted that Europe formed a single society. And the universalist religion of human rights seemed to be replacing the old language of justice and equality within sovereign nation states.
The ‘magic of the market’, in the exuberant phrase of the Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf, seemed to be bringing about the homogenization of all human societies. As Louis Vuitton opened in Borneo, and the Chinese turned into the biggest consumers of French wines, it seemed only a matter of time before the love of luxury was followed by the rule of law, the enhanced use of critical reason, and the expansion of individual freedom.
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Today, however, this vision of universal uplift seems another example of intellectuals and technocrats confusing their private interest with public interest, their own socio-economic mobility as members of a lucky and arbitrarily chosen elite with general welfare. Nowhere does the evidence of moral misery accumulate faster than in the so-called public sphere. The setting for opinion and argument originally created in France’s eighteenth-century salons by face to face relations, individual reason and urbane civility, is now defined, in its digital incarnation, by racists, misogynists and lynch mobs, often anonymous.
In the absence of reasoned debate, conspiracy theories and downright lies abound, and even gain broad credence: it was while peddling one of them, ‘Obama is a foreign-born Muslim’, that Donald Trump rose to political prominence. Lynch mobs, assassins and mass shooters thrive in a climate where many people can think only in terms of the categories of friends and foes, sectarian loyalty or treason. The world of mutual tolerance envisaged by cosmopolitan elites from the Enlightenment onwards exists within a few metropolises and university campuses; and even these rarefied spaces are shrinking. The world at large – from the United States to India – manifests a fierce politics of identity built on historical injuries and fear of internal and external enemies.
In its mildest forms in Catalonia, Sc
otland and Hong Kong, nationalism is again the means to establish and reinforce collective identity, to designate what ‘we’ are like and how we differ from ‘them’, if not to dictate the stern political consequences – exclusion, expulsion, discipline – for those categorized as ‘them’. The extraordinary outbreak of anti-immigrant racism in England after the referendum on Brexit in June 2016 seemed to confirm Rousseau’s assertion that ‘every patriot hates foreigners; they are only men, and nothing to him.’
Yet again, the Genevan seems to have been more perceptive than his metropolitan detractors in casting doubt on the universalist and cosmopolitan ideals of commercial society, and in understanding the emotional appeal of rejecting them. Rousseau, darkly aware that wounded honour and the desire for glory and recognition drive human beings more than economic motives, did not live to witness the nationalistic backlash to cosmopolitan civilization. But his own critique, and its resonant echoes in Germany, are key to understanding why mythological, religious and tribal narratives are being scripted in the age of neo-liberal individualism, and indeed why the inquiry into early modern thought and the interrogation of the present require a common framework.
The First Angry Young Nationalists
Between 1770 and 1815 a galaxy of German thinkers and artists, almost all readers of Rousseau, responded to the then emergent commercial and cosmopolitan society; and their response set a pattern of the greatest importance for the history of politics and culture. It started with assertions of spiritual superiority and an aesthetic ideology, mutated over time into ethnic and cultural nationalism, and, finally, into an existential politics of survival. All the diverse movements of German Idealism that transformed the world of thought – from Sturm und Drang to Romanticism to the Marxist dialectic – originally emerged out of the resentment and defensive disdain of isolated German intellectuals, which Rousseau’s rhetoric justified and reinforced.
Feeling marginalized by the sophisticated socio-economic order emerging in Western Europe, and its aggressive rationalism and individualism, these young men started to idealize what they took to be the true Volk, an organic national community united by a distinctive language, ways of thought, shared traditions, and a collective memory enshrined in folklore and fable. In contrast to the Rights of Man, and the Atlantic West’s notion of the abstract universal individual equipped with reason, the Germans offered a vision of human beings defined in all their modes of thinking, feeling and acting by their membership of a cultural community. This elaborate theory of collective identity and nativist salvation eventually proved more appealing and useful to other latecomers to history than the Enlightenment’s abstract notions of individualist rationalism.
Not surprisingly, it was the near-exclusive creation of Germans in provincial towns among whom Rousseau’s elegant denunciations of Parisian society and celebration of simple folk found their most receptive and grateful audience. Doomed to political backwardness, they were condescended to not only by the French (Voltaire thought the German language useful for ‘soldiers and horses; it is only necessary when you are on the road’), but also by their own Francophile elites, such as Frederick of Prussia, who appointed an inept Frenchman to head the Royal Library in Berlin over the heads of the philosopher Lessing and the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, arguing that the salary of 1,000 thalers was too much for a German. As Herder asked sarcastically, who needs ‘a fatherland or any kinship relations’ when we can all be ‘philanthropic citizens of the world?… The princes speak French, and soon everybody will follow their example, and then, behold, perfect bliss.’
The Rousseau-reading Germans countered the cosmopolitan ideals of commerce, luxury and metropolitan urbanity with Kultur. They claimed that Kultur, the preserve of lowly but profound native burgers, pastors and professors, was a higher achievement than a French Zivilisation built around court society. For Kultur combined the nurturing and education of the individual soul (Bildung) with the growth of national culture. Starting with Herder and Goethe, prodigiously talented German literati elaborated, for the first time in history, a national identity founded on aesthetic achievement and spiritual eminence.
The invasion and occupation of German-speaking lands by Napoleon, the child of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, then helped transform cultural Romanticism into a nationalistic passion. In yet another world-defining pattern, the German myth of the Volk as a repository of profound traditional values, and the opposition between German Kultur and French Zivilisation, was deepened by the disgrace of submission to foreigners. The writer Johann Joseph von Görres claimed that when ‘Germany lay in deep humiliation, when its princes became servants, the nobility scurried after foreign honours … [and] the learned worshipped imported idols, it was the people alone … which stayed true to itself’. Assuming the voice of the ancestors who had fallen in the ‘holy battle for freedom of religion and faith’, Fichte declared to his compatriots:
So that this spirit may gain the freedom to develop itself and grow up to an independent existence – for this reason our blood has been spilt. It is for you to give meaning and justification to the sacrifice by elevating this spirit to the world domination for which it has been appointed.
Subjugated and dishonoured Germany came to generate that strange compound we have subsequently seen in many countries: harmless nostalgia for the past glories of the ‘people’, combined with a lethal fantasy of their magnificent restoration. Cults of the Volk did not cease to seduce, and mislead, in the second half of the nineteenth century, even as Germany consolidated its political unity and Bismarck’s Second Reich frenetically pursued industrialization. German nationalists defined themselves even more desperately and superciliously against the ideals and achievements of France and Britain. Joseph Conrad was among those who recoiled from the ‘promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans among effete Asians and barbarous niggers.’
But few of the many anxious observers of Germany saw that German patriots had added to an older inferiority complex before the advanced West a tormenting ambivalence about their own rising materialist civilization. For them, it became an existential necessity, no less, to condemn Zivilisation for its materialism and soullessness while upholding Germany’s profound moral and spiritual Kultur. They gave an earlier German idealism about culture a political edge and racial complexion by arguing that the Volk, once cleansed of cosmopolitan Jews, would return society to primal wholeness; it could abolish the intellectual and political antagonisms of modernity, and put an end to alienation and atomization.
It was through these inner deflections in Germany that, as the historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote, ‘the national idea was raised to the sphere of religion and the eternal’. Socially maladjusted scholars, literary writers, composers and painters competed to articulate the primacy of the Volk, connecting it increasingly to the inferiority of the Jew. Even Thomas Mann, whose writings reflect a fundamentally ironic view of German society, came to believe during the First World War that German Kultur had to be protected against Western Zivilisation, and the false and superficial cosmopolitanism of its German devotees.
These included Mann’s own brother, Heinrich, confirming the profoundly intimate nature of the enemy. Mann was later reconciled with his brother. Among many other Germans, however, personal struggles to adjust to a daunting modern world, which usually ended in failure, confusion and drift, deepened the yearning for an uncomplicated belief. The simple ‘people’ came to appear to many of these disorientated men the natural guardian of virtues that had been lost among city-dwellers: weren’t the Volk spontaneous, unpretentious and immune to the contagion of modernity? Weren’t they opposed to devious money-grubbing Jews and the effete, sophisticated ruling classes that chased after alien gods?
Thus, a single trend in German thought dating back to the eighteenth century became toxic. The Volk, expeditiously conflated after 1918 with
a purified race, began to seem a magical antidote to the spiritual disorientation induced by modernity, and some of the most intelligent and sensitive Germans were inebriated by it. In 1933, as the Nazi Party moved ever closer to supreme power, the poet Gottfried Benn confided to a friend:
Metropolis, industrialization, intellectualism, all the shadows that the age had cast over my thoughts, all the powers of the century that I confronted in my production, there are moments when this entire tormented life drops away and nothing is left but the plain, the expanse, the seasons, simple words – the Volk.
This exhausted and resentful state of mind prepared the ground for the authoritarian state; it was the basic condition of possibility for the uncanny avant-gardist who, while resurrecting symbols of Germany’s glorious past, outlined a glorious vision of the future in which the German Volk would triumph in the international racial struggle. He offered his followers escape from failure and self-loathing, and release into quasi-erotic fantasies of a near-permanent supremacy: a Thousand-Year Reich, no less. It is no accident that the psychology of ressentiment, first articulated by Rousseau, was embodied and elaborated by German ‘strangers’.
The Making of Cultural Nationalism (and Its Built-in Contradictions)
To understand why cosmopolitan civilization based on individual self-interest has turned out to be a perilous experiment rather than a secure accomplishment, and why nationalism remains its inseparable twin, we must return to Herder, one of Rousseau’s most influential disciples. Like Rousseau, he felt personally affronted by the snobbish intellectualism that presumed to tell other people how to live. But Herder went much further than his teacher. Rousseau’s patriotism was basically inward-looking, inspired by what he took to be the civic ideals of Sparta. Herder, while struggling with the Enlightenment’s quasi-aristocratic culture and universalist claims, insisted on a showy separatism, based on the idea of a vital German culture rooted in region and language.
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