The Disease of Nationalism

 Well, India and Pakistan appear to have backed down for now from the military conflict last weekend that seemed poised momentarily to spiral out of control. But that doesn't exactly mean we should relax. Strangely, last weekend read to many of us as almost a slow news cycle—but it really shouldn't have. Two of the world's nuclear-armed powers were—for twenty-four hours at least—fighting an actual hot war. And, as Noah Smith pointed out on his Substack, that means that four of the world's nuclear-armed powers are now engaged in some sort of active military conflict (Israel, Russia, India, and Pakistan). 

We are definitely living this week, then, amidst the "chafe and jar / of nuclear war," as Robert Lowell put it. If we aren't quite "talking our extinction to death" this time—the way people did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Lowell—perhaps we should be. It is weird that we have become inured to the risk of nuclear conflict—and barely bat an eye when two nuclear-armed powers are suddenly at each other's throats, if they are far enough away—because—really—the threat it poses is as grave as ever; and the underlying causes that risk its outbreak seem just as present as they were seventy years ago. 

What strikes me as most troubling of all about the three active wars implicating four of the world's nuclear-armed powers, which Smith mentions—is that all involve ongoing disputes that extend back at least as far as the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis itself. Not only is the risk of nuclear war as great now as it was then—but we're also still fighting over exactly the same things. Go back seventy years, and India and Pakistan were already disputing their borders; Israel and the Palestinians were fighting over rival land claims; and Russia was still exercising imperial hegemony over Ukraine. 

And in every case, the root of the conflict seems to trace back to the same core ideology: nationalism. That is—as Ernest Gellner defines it in a classic work on the subject—the belief that political boundaries should correspond to ethnic or linguistic ones. And while some persist in seeing this belief as a fundamentally innocuous one—Gellner points out that it almost inevitably leads to violence of the sort we are seeing in these four nuclear-armed powers. Why? Because every political state in fact contains ethnic minorities. No state, therefore, ever has actually corresponded perfectly to an ethnic boundary. 

What is a nationalistic state to do, then, with the parts of its population that do not correspond to its ethnic self-image? It appears to have two options: either assimilation or forced population transfer (i.e., "ethnic cleansing"). What is it to do—in the contrasting scenario—when populations who do correspond to its ethnic self-image are not presently located within its political boundaries? Here again—options are limited. The default one for a nationalistic state appears to be to make war to forcibly annex the territory occupied by its co-ethnics, and incorporate them whether they will or no into the purported ethnic homeland. 

I don't see any way out of the various conflicts listed above, then, unless people are willing to partially abandon the nationalistic idea. In its place, countries need to focus on the only political ideal that matters: regardless of ethnicity, people need to be able to exercise political rights within their country of residence. No state in the world will actually correspond to ethnic boundaries, ever. It's time to give up on that blood-thirsty idea. So, the only way to secure the sort of self-determination that the nationalistic ideology vaguely gestures toward is to ensure that minorities have political representation and rights within each country. 

Gellner would not necessarily disagree with this proposal for the voluntary abandonment of nationalistic ideology. But he was not particularly optimistic that it would be possible. His theory regards nationalism as all-but inevitable under modern conditions. Countries that experience industrialization universally require a state with an educational apparatus as the only functional political unit (the "entropic" state of the economy first makes people anonymous, then the schools make them Frenchmen, to paraphrase the theory). The country-spanning educational system then tends to create the shared culture, according to Gellner, that is then mistaken for a pre-existing "nation" (which, in fact, was nothing before the modern educational bureaucracy made it such). 

The irony of nationalism, then—in Gellner's telling—is that it constantly hearkens back to a pre-industrial ideal of the "folk tradition," etc.—but it does so in bad faith. Because in reality, nationalism is itself a byproduct of industrial modernity. Under pre-modern conditions, by contrast, people identify themselves by village, clan, guild, etc. It is only in an industrial economy—requiring constant economic growth and innovation—that people need some basis other than vocation or place to define their sense of collective identity; since vocation and place have both become fluid under modern conditions. 

The educational system supplies them with that—according to Gellner. Now, under its mantle, they can define themselves by the shared "culture" which the schools themselves create. A "nation" is born here—rather than being "reawakened," as the nationalists falsely believe, like some sleeping giant. 

Gellner did not seem to believe, then, that modern states were likely to cast off the disease of nationalism entirely. The ideology is too interwoven with the conditions of industrial modernity itself for that. But he did prophesy, toward the close of his classic monograph on the subject, that nationalism would become attenuated over time. "The sharpness of nationalist conflict may be expected to diminish," he predicted—in part because industrial societies tend to stabilize economically over time. The crises of identity and displacement sparked by earlier industrialism and economic growth become less acute—and so people need nationalism less. 

And yet, if we look at our current world, fifty years after Gellner wrote—it does not in fact appear that his prophecy was correct. Nationalism had not become attenuated. If anything, it is more virulent than ever. No conflict caused by territorial nationalism appears closer to resolution now than it did fifty years ago. Why is this happening? Why wasn't Gellner's prediction of a more benign future for industrial societies fulfilled? 

Possibly, the answer is: because industrial economies have not actually stabilized, as he predicted. Economic growth and innovation have not become less disruptive to people's lives in the last fifty years. While there was a period in the mid-twentieth century when it appeared that they might—when social democracy had reduced economic disparities and stabilized the constant upheaval of capitalistic "creative destruction"—we no longer live in that world. Our world is one in which technological changes do indeed promise to bring more radical upheavals which could displace the population. 

And if so, then the need is more acute than ever for an educational system that provides people with no permanent sense of vocation—but rather which trains them in a general, multipurpose "high culture," which they can then use to adopt the range of professional masks they will have to don in their protean careers. And these conditions—however essential to maintain the rapid pace of economic growth and innovation we have come to demand, according to Gellner—are ripe breeding grounds for nationalism. When people's professional lives become so protean, they turn even more to the general "culture" that has been inculcated in them as the only possible source of stability and identity in an "entropic" world. 

Such, at least, is Gellner's hypothesis. 

Nationalism becomes most prominent and virulent of all, however—in Gellner's telling—when this type of industrial innovation and growth generates a vast influx of new wealth that is at first unevenly distributed. If the "have-nots" under such a scenario can identify the "haves" as belonging somehow to a different "nation"—as representing "alien rule" or "foreign domination"—then the conditions are particularly ripe for nationalistic conflict. 

And so, by the same token, if you can reduce the chasm of wealth spawned by industrialization, and stabilize the process of economic growth and innovation—presumably, then, one can indeed cut down over time on nationalist conflict. 

But if you don't—if, instead, you do the opposite, by encouraging the maximum amount of economic displacement and disruption—if you prevent people from ever re-forming any coherent or stable sense of identity based around vocation or place, because you are constantly uprooting them and forcing them to train for radically different professions, or else simply starve, because you are perpetually shifting the technological and economic basis for people's livelihoods—then people will once again reach for "nationalism" as the only way the re-establish some sense of collective identity. 

I have often been struck, in this regard, by the seeming paradox of how a virulent self-declared "nationalist" like J.D. Vance reconciles his pseudo-"traditionalist" ideology with his accelerationist stance on technological change. After all, Vance is constantly talking about reestablishing a sense of identity rooted in "place." It's a key watchword of his whole sinister "blood and soil" ideology. And yet, at the same time, he is also going around trying to accelerate AI development and criticizing European countries for putting the most basic guardrails around this technology, even as it threatens a new wave of economic displacement. 

But perhaps—if we follow Gellner's analysis—there is really no paradox here at all. Perhaps this is what nationalists have always done. Perhaps this is what nationalism is all about. As an ideology, it seeks to create a fictional and invented sense of collective identity in order to substitute for the real-world communities that industrial modernity is destroying. The contradictions in J.D. Vance's official ideology, then, are only the same ones that appear in all nationalisms. As Gellner writes: 

[N]ationalist ideology suffers from pervasive false consciousness. [.... I]t claims to protect an old folk society while in fact helping to build up an anonymous mass society. [...] It preaches and defends continuity, but owes everything to a decisive and unutterably profound break in human history. [...] Its self-image and its true nature are inversely related, with an ironic neatness seldom equalled even by other successful ideologies.

Indeed, the point is borne out when we compare, say, a genuine traditionalist like the newly-elected Pope Leo XIV to an ersatz traditionalist like J.D. Vance. The new pope has said his chosen pontifical name was an intended homage to Leo XIII's "Rerum Novarum," which established many of the doctrines of modern Catholic social teaching. The new pope says that he wishes to emulate Leo XIII by updating these doctrines for the AI age. The same principles of protecting workers in the face of technological displacement and rapid economic change, he says, should govern Catholic social teaching today. 

Contrast this concern, on Pope Leo's part, with the people dispossessed and abandoned by modern technological change, with J.D. Vance's "Tech Right" plans to speed up AI development, eliminate all guardrails for the technology, and rapidly expedite the transformation of the modern job market. J.D. Vance may talk about a sense of "place" and "tradition"—but in reality, his nationalism benefits from uprooting workers and turning them into an anonymous surplus army of displaced labor, who will then have no choice but to turn to the mythologies of "nationalism" in order to secure a sense of identity. 

Gellner shows in his book how early industrialism creates a set of "alienated, uprooted, wandering populations" (as he puts it) displaced by technological change—the "Wanderratten" Heine once wrote about, in a prophetic poem that described the arrival of the early proletariat. Now, a genuine traditionalist would have some concern with trying to shield these populations from the forces of change and displacement that force them to "wander" in the first place. A fake traditionalist, though, and real nationalist like Vance does the opposite—they seek to turn the world into "Wanderratten" so that they can become faceless storm troopers for the nationalist revolution. 

Until we manage to slow the pace of disruptions from economic change—then; until we make our economy more humane and less disruptive of people's sense of identity and social continuity—then we can expect the disease of nationalism to remain just as virulent as ever. And if this disease continues to afflict even the nuclear-armed powers of the world—as we saw above—then the day may come when we run out of repeat-chances to get this right—since nationalistic conflict may one day spell the doom of us all.