Today, like other such movements elsewhere in Western Europe, this nationalist tendency in France is profoundly defensive, even to a degree isolationist. It is focused on defending the “traditional” national culture and ethnicity (that is to say, as in the United States, the established ethnic mixture bequeathed in part by previous generations of immigration) against new immigration, new forms of culture, and new economic patterns. This form of nationalism shades easily into various forms of “skinhead” violence.
But this violence too is both portrayed and felt by its exponents as a matter not of aggression or expansion, but of the defense of vital collective interests: using ferocious measures to defend the national core community, jobs, law and order, and so on, against aliens. They are not really dreaming of marching off to recover Breslau for Germany, or Lvov for Poland. And this reflects not only ideology, international reality, and contemporary culture, but also prudence, and strong and bitter historical memories that permeate European society. Kicking immigrants on street corners is a rather less formidable proposition than marching off to fight a war.
At present, it seems unlikely that this French antithesis could come to power, at least for a good many years to come. For an intriguing example of a nationalist antithesis that has succeeded, India is a good place to look. There too, as in France and the United States, the Indian state and elites after 1947 put forward a civic nationalist thesis about India to the Indian public and the world. Unlike in France and the United States, this thesis was fostered under foreign imperial rule, but much of its content was the same: India as a secular democracy—indeed, “the world’s largest democracy”—dedicated to progress and human rights, and with equal rights and opportunities for all its citizens. For some three decades after independence, closely associated with this Indian civic “creed” was also a moderate, nontotalitarian form of socialist economics. Internationally, this was associated with a desire to provide enlightened leadership for the former colonial world in its struggle against Western hegemony and neo-colonialism.
This democratic civic nationalism has been associated above all with the name of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party, which he led (and which at the time of this writing was led by the widow of his grandson, who, in a testimony to the openness of this tradition, is Italian by birth). However, from the start, even the Congress Party harbored elements of a nationalist “antithesis,” based on an idea of India not as a civic, but as a religious, cultural, and to some extent ethnic community. Outside the Congress Party, much more extreme variants were represented by a variety of Hindu political groups, often tinged with fascistic beliefs and modes of organization, which eventually came together to form the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which from 1998 to 2004 led India’s federal government.
As in the French and American nationalist antitheses, this nationalist tradition rejects the openness and universalism of the Nehruite civic nationalist creed in favor of a vision of India as a closed cultural community; in this case, of Hindus. It therefore explicitly or implicitly excludes Muslims, Christians, and others from the “true” Indian political nation. Unlike other such movements, it has become dedicated to modern economic growth and openness (largely because of its desire to challenge China for the role of the Asian great power), and enjoys great support among the Indian diaspora in the United States, but it greatly dislikes the more ostentatiously Westernized and secular elites in India itself. Like the “antithetical” tendencies in France and the United States in the past, it can have a very violent edge in dealing with minorities that are seen as threatening the interests and control of the “core” community—as demonstrated in a long tradition of bloody communal riots and pogroms.77
As with their analogues in the United States, Hindu nationalists have, over the years, come to accept considerable elements of Indian civic nationalism. These include what seems to have become a genuine attachment to basic democratic practice—albeit a specifically Indian kind of “herrenvolk (master race) democracy,” in the form of rule by a dominant religious group rather than a race or ethnicity. This partial merger of civic and religious nationalism was certainly not true at the time of independence. In the decades since, leaders of the BJP have seemingly come to recognize that democracy, or at least constitutionalism, is the only system that can hold a country like India together. They also see India’s status as a democracy as an integral part of the Indian national greatness of which they are so proud—and not least Indian superiority to the hated Pakistan and the feared China.
The second resemblance to the United States is the complex relationship between this tradition and ethnicity. The roots of the BJP remain chiefly among the Hindi-speaking Hindus of North India, usually of the upper and middling castes. But after some weak attempts to make Hindi the Indian national language—abandoned in the face of stiff resistance from South India—the BJP now seems to have settled for a vision of India based on Hindu nationalism, democracy, economic success and military pride. Neither of the Indian nationalisms therefore is an ethnic one—which just shows the limited relevance of models of nationalism drawn from the “classic” ethnic nationalisms of central Europe for the study of much of the rest of the world.
From Herrenvolk Democracy to Civilizational Empire
This attachment to democracy and the universalist principles of the “American Creed” has in turn played a central role in America’s ability to transcend its racist past and transform itself from a herrenvolk (master race) democracy, based on rigid and savagely oppressive rules of racial exclusion and superiority, into a great “civilizational empire.” A highly symbolic—but also highly conflicted—moment in this transformation was Barack Obama’s election as the first black president of the United States in 2008.
The former European national visions of great missions and callings all had a certain guiding image before their inner eyes: that of the Roman Empire. This is a parallel that also has a long history in American thought, and which has spread enormously in the U.S. public debate as a result of America’s emergence as the world’s only superpower.78 Like China and the early Islamic caliphates, Rome not only united many different ethnicities under one language and culture, its legacy continued to shape the history and character of Europe long after the Roman empire itself passed away. These empires were not just states, but whole civilizations, transcending racial and ethnic divisions within their borders and projecting their cultural influence far beyond their frontiers in space and time.
As civilizational empires, they are to be distinguished both from purely military empires like the Mongols, and also from European seaborne herrenvolk empires, which while undoubtedly transformative of many cultures and societies, also drew a sharp and ruthless dividing line between the master European races and their dark-skinned subject peoples. The Soviet ambition was also that of a civilizational empire: to create a new kind of civilized man, multiethnic in origin but speaking one language and bound by one culture, which in turn would spread beyond the borders of the Soviet Union to influence all mankind.
The sheer size of the United States, its economic dynamism, and its ability to assimilate huge numbers of alien (white) immigrants to its creed and culture have always given America certain features of such an empire. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared early in the twentieth century: “We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people.”79
Beyond its borders, the tremendous economic success of the United States and the vitality of its culture also created an informal version of such a civilizational empire. This was shown in the way in which admiration for the United States helped to undermine the belief in Communism and the Soviet Union in Russia’s younger elites in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In terms of the global reach of its “hard” and “soft” power—of American fleets, American language, American food, American popular culture, and American versions of economics—the United States today does indeed match the civilizational empires of the past.
In the past
, however, U.S. aspirations to play the role of a civilizational empire were long crippled by racism, and this was recognized by many Americans, even if they did not speak in imperial terms. The intense, specifically Southern racism of Woodrow Wilson, for example, deeply compromised his liberal internationalism in the eyes of the Japanese and many other nonwhite peoples of the world in his own time and since.80 As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1943, “our racial pride is incompatible with our responsibilities in the world community. If we do not succeed in chastening it, we shall fail in our task.” Gunnar Myrdal’s great work of 1944, An American Dilemma, was also motivated in part by anxiety at the way in which racism at home was weakening the American struggle against totalitarianism.81
During the early years of the cold war, a realization of the way in which domestic treatment of blacks undermined U.S. power and influence in the struggle with Communism was a very major factor in the decision of the American national elites to eliminate the public face of this racism in the 1950s and 1960s.82 Much earlier, Abraham Lincoln had warned that slavery weakened America’s world democratic mission by exposing her to the charge of hypocrisy.83
When comparing the contemporary United States to other great civilizations of the past, it is vitally important to make a distinction between racism and cultural prejudice. The Han Chinese harbored strong prejudices against “barbarians,” both beyond and within their frontiers, but these prejudices ceased when these “barbarians” successfully learned the Chinese language and culture, adopted the official Confucian ideology (if they aspired to join the elites), and thus became Chinese. A central requirement of civilizational empire is a willingness to replace qualifications for membership based on race and ethnic origin with ones based on language, creed, and culture: something that was formally achieved by the Roman Empire with the grant of citizenship to all its free subjects in 212 AD.
Unlike blacks, Native Americans, or Chinese in the America of the past (and of course in the other West European seaborne empires), barbarians could always be assimilated by the elites of the great empires of Asia. Hence the fact that so many of the great Russian aristocratic names are of Tartar or Circassian origin: Yussupov, Nabokov, Kochubey, Turgenev. Lenin, of course, was a complete ethnic hodge-podge, but also culturally speaking entirely Russian. The Chinese chief minister who led the revolt of 755 AD that wrecked the early T’ang dynasty, An Lu-Shan, was a sinified Turk from Central Asia; the greatest T’ang poet, Li Po, was also most probably of Turkic origin.84
The principle that “one drop of blood” made you black, and therefore excluded you—whatever your education, property, military valor, or even beauty—from joining or intermarrying with the dominant people and its ruling class would have been simply impossible for these states. So too would the elaborate racial codings of Dutch colonial Java, New Orleans, Brazil, or the West Indies (quadroon, octaroon, mulatto, and so forth). Such rules would have made the expansion of these empires impossible (to be fair, of course, the cultural differences between Han Chinese and Miao, or Russians and Bashkirs, were also vastly less than those between white Americans and red Indians, or newly enslaved blacks).85
These civilizational empires accepted into their elites anyone who accepted their culture, but they retained intense hostility to internal groups—like the Jews in Russia—who were seen either as rejecting that culture or as infiltrating and subverting it for their own national ends. Like the United States today, they were also strongly hostile to those external “barbarian” peoples who rejected their culture. Indeed, the entire official identity and ideology of these empires was largely built around the distinctions between themselves and the barbarian “other.”
The public elites of America today conform rather closely to this historical pattern of real racial diversity coupled with intense cultural conformity in certain key areas: worship of the creed and the official imperial gods. Thus the presenters on CNN, picked for their racial diversity, are in fact diverse only in the color of their skin. They represent a real breakthrough of equality in terms of outward race, but certainly not of culture or even in any real sense of ethnicity. Their presence is a real celebration of America’s civilizational achievement—and is, consciously or unconsciously, intended to be seen as such.
Tremendously positive changes in this regard have occurred in the United States over the past two generations. A striking example of this is public attitudes toward marriage between whites and blacks—like the one that produced Barack Obama. In 1963, 64 percent of Americans believed in the maintenance of laws against such marriages, which did indeed still exist in many states. In 1998 only 13 percent believed that there should be such laws—even though a rather higher proportion expressed private unease about interracial “dating.”86 Moreover Republicans and Democrats were both equally committed to the legality of interracial marriage.
Racist attitudes still remain deeply embedded in the white South and in the Republican Party. However, they have also had to become modified and coded, usually expressed through policies that are not ostensibly racist (especially regarding welfare, immigration, crime, and the “war on drugs”) rather than directly. If they had retained their old crude frankness, then it seems likely that, far from helping to make the Republicans the normal “party of government” in the United States from 1968 to their defeat in 2008 (holding the presidency for 24 years to the Democrats’ 12), it would in fact have turned them into pariahs and doomed them to minority status. This is demonstrated by the speed with which the Republican Party forced Trent Lott to resign as Senate majority leader in December 2002 after he publicly praised the segregationist campaign for president of Strom Thurmond in 1948.87
Nor has this transformation been simply the work of liberals. On the contrary, a key role has been played by institutions with great right-wing and nationalist prestige: the military, certain Hollywood directors and actors, and some of the evangelical churches. Even in the white South there has been a development from prejudice based on the color of one’s skin to one based on culture (though these two prejudices are deeply entwined).88 Starting in the 1990s, some of the leading figures and journals of the Christian Right made what seems to be a sincere effort in this regard, with Ralph Reed apologizing for the past racism of the evangelical churches, and Charisma and New Man magazines both publishing articles on successful interracial marriages.89 The prominent black appointments to George W. Bush’s administration therefore were by no means just tokenism. They did mark a real and very positive change of heart.
In the evangelical religious field, a pioneering role was played by the so-called televangelists, who have used mass media to appeal to a wider audience than ever before. Starting with Billy Graham, several of these figures have made a point not only of reaching out to different races, but of including blacks and others in their church choirs, where the cameras would be sure to pick them up. Graham in particular has been very supportive of a number of black causes.90
One reason for this has been their own version of America’s move from herrenvolk democracy to civilizational empire—for although from a deeply Southern conservative background in North Carolina, Graham was both passionately devoted to the cause of anti-Communism, and well aware of the ammunition that American racism gave to Communist appeals in the “Third World.” His move to a form of bland multiracialism also formed part of a shift on his part away from overt and hardline fundamentalism and towards a form of bland ecumenism that made him acceptable to Eisenhower and later presidents and turned him into “a sort of informal national chaplain.”91
Moreover, Graham and many of the other televangelists have deliberately aimed at audiences in the developing world; and in the age of globalization, it is no longer possible to keep a missionary appeal abroad completely separate from behavior at home, especially since within the United States some have also set out to woo Latino immigrants away from Catholicism. Some of the Pentecostalists had already begun to reach out to blacks in the 1950s and 1960s.92
In oth
er words, blacks and others who conform to certain forms of respectable behavior—including patriotism and religious practice—are now regarded even by most conservative nationalist white Americans as part of the American “folk,” in Walter Russell Mead’s phrase.93 General Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are genuinely accepted as good Americans, though of course only by what black radicals would call “acting white”—in other words, accepting the culture, creed, and gods of the civilizational empire.
Of great importance in this shift have been three other institutions with great prestige in the South, and to a lesser extent the “heartland” more generally: the military, the sports industry, and the patriotic and macho strain in Hollywood. Thus in stages beginning in the 1940s, the U.S. military has deliberately turned itself into the most genuinely multiracial of all U.S. institutions, and one where blacks and others can advance to the highest ranks without having accusations of unfair preference thrown at them.94 Starting with Truman’s decision to desegregate the military in 1948, this development has been encouraged by all U.S. presidents, with the conscious intention of strengthening America’s civilizational appeal to “colored” peoples tempted by Communism.95
For the military, this has increasingly become a matter of necessity as well as ideology. After the military abandoned conscription in the wake of Vietnam, it became highly dependent on low-income groups for its recruits—among whom the racial minorities are overrepresented. More recently, military service has even become a way for American immigrants (including illegal immigrants) to gain early citizenship—a practice that recalls late imperial Rome.
The military also remains deeply mindful of the bitter racial tensions that split the troops in Vietnam, when (thanks to class bias in the conscription system) an army containing a very high proportion of blacks was commanded by an officer corps that was overwhelmingly white. During the attempt in 2003 to get the Supreme Court to rule against racial preference in higher education, a key part in this played by “friend of the court” briefs filed by senior retired military officers, who argued that the well-being of the armed forces requires a large pool of black university graduates to provide officer material.
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