By Allen Myers
Phrases like "ancient hatreds" and reminders that World War I was sparked by national conflicts in the Balkans have accompanied much of the establishment media coverage of recent events in Serbia and Kosova — just as they did the earlier war in Bosnia. The implication is that nationalism and national hatreds are almost human nature, and that they will be with us for more or less as long as there are separate nations.
However, while the present strength of nationalism is undeniable, understanding its history allows for a more optimistic perspective.
Nations, in the modern sense of a people with a common territory, language, culture and economy, didn't exist in antiquity. Many countries in Europe, for example, developed a common language only in the 18th or even 19th centuries.
Capitalism created modern nations in the course of meeting its own needs for a broad, unified market (for both commodities and labour power), in contrast to the stunted markets and isolation of feudalism. The ideology of the rising capitalists was nationalism.
Nationalism enabled the new capitalist class to mobilise broader social forces against feudalism, but it was always a false ideology. According to nationalism, "we" — all members of the nation — share overriding common interests: "we are all in this together". In reality, we aren't all in anything together: members of the same nation have quite different and conflicting interests, according to the class they belong to.
Of course, when most capitalists weren't hugely more wealthy than the workers they exploited, nationalism was not so obviously false. But as class conflicts developed along with capitalism itself, nationalism was more clearly exposed as simply a tool for deluding working people, a means of persuading them to subordinate their real, class, interests to an imagined common interest with the capitalists.
Paradoxically, this discrediting of nationalism can cause it to become still more malignant. Unable to point to plausible national common interests, nationalists are reduced to scapegoating — that is, to basing nationalism on hostility to some other nation or nationality, which is blamed for the nation's problems.
Well-meaning liberal opinion generally rejects openly aggressive or chauvinistic nationalism, but it tends to be taken in by the "polite" nationalism that underlies it — accepting, for example, arguments for economic protection or restriction of immigration that are based on the assumption that "we are all in this together". Socialists reject such policies for what they are: the defence of the interests of "national" capitalists.
Capitalism creates nations out of greed, not the noble-sounding motives it tries to associate with nationalism. Consequently, most of the nation-states it created contained larger or smaller minority nationalities.
The ruling capitalists, in order to maximise their scope for profit at minimum cost, deny the democratic right of other nations to self-determination. Capitalists of the majority nationality can use their political power to give themselves advantages against competitors from the minority. They may try to force minorities to use the majority language and/or abandon any customs that cut across creation of the largest possible market. At the same time, workers of a minority nationality can often be paid lower wages.
Oppression of a nation in this way may cause its people to rally around nationalism as a means of self-defence. As an ideology which proclaims that national interests outweigh class interests, even such defensive nationalism is a false view of the world.
But the nationalism of an oppressed nation, unlike other nationalism, has a democratic aspect that is deserving of support: the nationalism of the oppressed is, in its content, a demand that their nation receive its right to be treated as an equal. Socialists support this democratic demand, without, however, putting any confidence in leaders of a national movement who represent capitalist forces.
The nationalism of the oppressed is opposed by many liberals and some socialists, who identify it with nationalism in general and fail to look at the real differences in content.
It does no good, however, to lecture people who are oppressed because of their nationality that nationalism "divides people of good will" or "divides the working class". Only when they are no longer nationally oppressed will those workers be able to see clearly how much of what is wrong in their lives is due to their class oppression. It then becomes realistically possible for them to join the struggle for socialism and an end to all forms of oppression.
In regard to the current war in Kosova, some on the left are citing real or imagined failures of the Kosova Liberation Army as a reason not to support the Kosovar people's right to self-determination. This is a mistake, even if the various charges against the KLA are true.
It is, of course, important for the Kosovars to have the best possible leadership in their struggle against oppression — and such a leadership cannot be a pro-capitalist one. But a nation's democratic right to self-determination cannot be made conditional on the nation as a whole, or its working class, selecting a leadership that is "adequate" according to the standards of outsiders.
The ending of national oppression is a precondition for the construction of a labour movement that is strong enough to win a struggle for socialism. "Socialists" who support a movement against national oppression only if it is born explicitly socialist are no use in the struggle against either national oppression or capitalism.