REALLY EXISTING NATIONALISMS

REALLY EXISTING
NATIONALISMS

A Post-Communist View from
Marx and Engels

ERICA BENNER

This paperback edition published by Verso 2018

First published by Oxford University Press 1995

© Erica Benner 1995, 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-478-8

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The Library of Congress has Cataloged the First Edition as Follows:

Benner, Erica.

Really existing nationalisms : a post-communist view

from Marx and Engels / Erica Benner.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Nationalism and communism. I. Title.

HX550.N3B47          1995          320.5’4–dc20          95–20276

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 Y44

Acknowledgements

This book began life as a doctoral thesis written at Oxford University, where I benefited from the advice and support of many good people. My heartiest thanks are due to Mark Philp, whose calm lucidity saw this work through more peaks and troughs than I care to remember. Benedict Kingsbury and Steven Lukes encouraged me to pursue this topic at a time when others winced at the prospect of yet another volume on Marx. G. A. Cohen, David Miller, Adam Roberts, and the late John Vincent read early drafts of my work, making many helpful comments. Fred Halliday and Andrew Hurrell read most of what appears here. I am grateful for their criticisms and for the kinder things they had to say, and have tried to take the former into account in writing this final version. Two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press made some very shrewd remarks which I have also tried to address, although I’m aware that the result may still fall short of their expectations. Tim Barton, Dominic Byatt, and Anna Zaranko at Oxford University Press dealt patiently with my long-distance queries from Warsaw, while Janet Moth’s meticulous copy-editing ironed out some of my inconsistencies and stylistic quirks. I also want to thank Avi Shlaim, who boosted my morale on several occasions and offered valuable advice about publication.

Although I never inflicted any proof-reading tasks on my friends, this book could not have been written if they hadn’t been there. Much-appreciated moral support came at various times from Leticia Álvarez, David Cohen, Lakshmi Daniel, Peter Muller, Masa Okano, Andreas Osiander, Jérôme Pelletier, Regina Rowland, Mónica Serrano, Naoko Shimazu, Steve Welch, and Geoff Wiseman. A special round of thanks must go to Hawon Jang, whose warm friendship and word-processing skills helped to pull this work through at a critical moment.

Many of the arguments in my final chapter were sharpened through discussions with my husband, Brice Couturier. His strong convictions and often fierce disagreements forced me to think harder than I would have done without him; and his company made the scholarly life much sweeter.

My mother, Gretchen Benner, encouraged my efforts from start to finish. This book is dedicated to her and to the memory of my father, P. D. Benner.

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

1.NATIONALITY IN THE DIVIDED STATE

1.1.Three Concepts of the Nation

1.2.Political Philosophy: the Critique of Hegel

1.3.Theory of History: Class, State, and Nation

1.4.Theory of Political Action, or Why the Workers have no Vaterland

2.IDENTITIES IN CONFLICT

2.1.Natural and Social Sources of Warfare

2.2.Community, Freedom, and National Identity

2.3.The Rise of Ethnocentric Nationalism

3.EXPLAINING NATIONALISM

3.1.Elements of Theory

3.2.Liberal and Statist Nationalism in Germany

3.3.Principles and Interests in Foreign Policy

3.4.The Social Bases of Popular Nationalism

4.ETHICS AND REALPOLITIK IN THE NATIONAL POLICY, 1847–1849

4.1.The Theory behind the Policy

4.2.Criterion 1: International Reciprocity

4.3.Criterion 2: Social Reform

4.4.Criterion 3: Viability

5.RESCUING INTERNATIONALISM

5.1.Anti-colonial Nationalism outside Europe

5.2.Ireland and the Independence Question

5.3.Working-class Patriotism and the First International

6.THE REVENGE OF NATIONS, 1870–?

6.1.The Nationalizing of Socialism?

6.2.The Non-autonomy of Nationalism

6.3.Some Post-nationalist Fallacies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

CCHP | Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in MECW 3: 5–129. Referred to in the text by the more usual translation of the title, the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’.
CM | Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW 6: 477–519.
CSF | Marx, The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850, in David Fernbach (ed.), Surveys From Exile (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 35–142.
CWF | Marx, drafts of the Civil War in France, MECW 22: 435–551.
EB | Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MECW 11: 99–197.
EPMS | Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW 3: 229–48.
GI | Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW 5: 19–339.
GR | Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
IWA | International Working Men’s Association
JQ | Marx, On the Jewish Question, MECW 3: 148–74.
MEAW | Marx and Engels, Ausgewählte Werke in Sechs Bänden (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972).
MECW | Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 35 vols. (1–30, 40–5) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, and Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975– ).
MEI | Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978).
MEOC | Marx and Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).
MESC | Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975).
NRZ | Neue Rheinische Zeitung
NYDT | New York Daily Tribune
RCR | Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, MECW 11: 3–96.

Introduction

‘THE working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.’¹ For generations of Marxists this phrase, coined a century-and-a-half ago, remained the cornerstone of any acceptably revolutionary understanding of nationalism. In a postcommunist world riven by ethnic and national conflicts, Marx and Engels’ words are invoked—if they are remembered at all—only as an epitaph on one of the socialist movement’s most debilitating errors.

Marx and Engels’ failure to develop a systematic theory of nationalism is well known. The authors of the Communist Manifesto did produce what amount to volumes of writings on the national movements of their own day; and they were acutely aware that such movements might either advance their revolutionary project or thwart it, corroborate their theory of historical change or call its deepest premisses into question. But the polemical style of many of these writings has led some commentators to dismiss them as mere ‘hackwork’ infused, perhaps, with an admirable strain of political realism but still—in the words of a contemporary author—‘devoid of theoretical interest’.² Theoretical neglect appears a more damaging charge when it is linked with that of practical misjudgement. Marx and Engels’ expectation that nationalism would cease to exert a divisive influence in an era when the mass of people were increasingly alienated from the ruling representatives of their nation-states, and where capitalism was thought to be eroding old ethnic and national particularisms, has been confounded by events not readily explicable in terms of classical Marxist theory.

These considerations have led erstwhile socialists and their critics in the western world to reach a most unusual consensus: they agree that Marx and Engels’ theory is unsuitable as a guide either to explaining national phenomena or to political practice. This verdict has been defended with singular tenacity within the field of international relations. Among those whose daily occupation is to investigate the sources of conflict among nation-states and stateless nations, there arises a natural scepticism towards any body of thought which professes to herald the end of such conflict. It is less easy to explain the almost axiomatic dismissal of Marx and Engels’ thinking on national issues by other academic disciplines, particularly those which have helped to spawn a distinctive genre of Marxian scholarship in the last two decades. Economists, sociologists, philosophers, and political theorists have recently achieved at least a partial redemption of Marx’s ideas about morality, human nature, justice, and culture.³ Marx and Engels’ treatment of these subjects was as oblique and diffuse as their writings on national issues. Yet the era of Marxian reconstruction witnessed no comparably rigorous efforts to breathe new life and coherence into the founding fathers’ views on national identity and conflict. The handful of recent studies which direct attention toward some aspects of Marx and Engels’ thought on nationalism have done little to dislodge the ‘class-reductionist’ or ‘economic-determinist’ image of that thought which has, for generations, been imprinted on the minds of students throughout the English-speaking world.⁴

This work seeks to modify that image by clarifying the theoretical basis of Marx and Engels’ thinking on national issues. But I should make it clear that the argument developed here is not intended to support an insular ‘Marxist’ understanding of nationalism. Such an endeavour would, in all likelihood, be denied even a tepid welcome today, especially in those parts of the world where nationalism has recently helped to topple communist regimes which claimed Marx as their progenitor. My reasons for taking up this topic were sceptical rather than partisan. In the interests of balanced scholarship, I simply wanted to suggest that too many people had misread Marx and Engels in the light of political movements associated with their names. Such tendentious readings are by no means a monopoly of Marx’s critics. His fondest apologists are perhaps even more guilty of filtering their master’s arguments through rigid preconceptions about what an authentically ‘Marxist’ account requires. My first aim, then, is to unsettle these preconceptions, and to reopen the book on Marx and Engels’ ‘non-theory’ of nationalism.⁵ This enables me to propose a different reading of what the two men wrote on the subject, and to identify some neglected strands of thought that are less easy to dismiss than the views usually attributed to them.

In pursuing this revisionist task, I soon encountered a second set of problems which took me beyond the concern for a more judicious reading of the texts. As I reviewed the critical commentaries, it struck me that the grounds on which Marx and Engels’ views have been dismissed are often based on faulty assumptions about what constitutes an adequate understanding of nationalism. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has struggled to penetrate the fog surrounding discussions of national issues since the end of the Cold War. The ideological polarities of that period, following on earlier confrontations between revolutionaries and non-socialist governments, tended to set up a Maginot Line between all things national and all things Marxist. A series of artificial oppositions thereby became dogma as much for the European left as for the right: oppositions between nationalism and socialism, national and class ‘consciousness’, the rationalist and technological determinist claims behind ‘really existing socialism’ and the pre-rational, communitarian needs that are usually seen as the source of nationalism’s staying-power. These oppositions prevented many socialists and their fellow-travellers from understanding the force of nationalism, in communist states and elsewhere. But they also impoverished the understanding of liberals, democrats, and conservatives who wanted to defend the legitimate claims of nationalists against a coercive ‘internationalism’.

This suggests an intriguing possibility. If the standards invoked to criticize Marx and Engels’ views are themselves due for a critical reappraisal, then perhaps some of Marx and Engels’ arguments can highlight errors of contemporary thinking on nationalism, and help us work out a better account of the subject. My second aim is to show how this might be done. The remainder of this introduction foreshadows my approach to the tasks outlined here.

Commentators have usually associated the classical ‘Marxian’ (mis)understanding of nationalism with a few basic ideas: an ‘economic’ interpretation of history, postulating the dependence of all other aspects of human activity upon the productive ‘base’ of social life; the idea that the political, cultural, and doctrinal expressions of national identity and conflict are merely’ epiphenomena’ of polar class divisions, or the instruments of class rule; and finally, the belief that historical change is governed by universal ‘laws’ which enable those who discern them to forecast the future demise of national particularism. These building-blocks of the standard Marxian account of national issues carry distinctive explanatory implications. A strongly economic interpretation of history ties the formation of nations to the functional needs of specific economic systems, while paying sparser attention to the deeper cultural roots and political contexts which shape nationalist activity. The polar-class thesis explains the popular appeal of doctrines that uphold the value of national community as an effect of class domination, bearing little relation to the ‘real’ interests of most constituents. Finally, the laws-of-development argument directs explanatory attention away from the motives, intentions, policy preferences, perceptions, and misperceptions of nationalists and their opponents. Bypassing the complex political negotiations needed to resolve national conflicts, it assumes that those conflicts will in any case disappear through the relentless workings of world-historical—that is, economic—forces.

These explanatory positions, moreover, suggest a distinctive approach to evaluating nationalist programmes and adjudicating nationalist claims. Following the argument that nations are essentially transient economic units, observers are asked to appraise nation-making or nation-destroying activities according to ‘objective’, instrumental criteria of economic development. On this view, there is no morally compelling reason to consult the subjective wishes of a population seeking to form a new national community or break away from alien rule; the decisive question is whether, in the long run, nationalism will advance or retard economic development. At the same time, the laws-of-history outlook renders a principled approach to national issues largely redundant. If economic forces are bound to undermine the old communal boundaries and institutions which are the focuses of current national conflict, there may be no urgent need to defend the rights of national groups to self-determination, to discriminate among the more and less acceptable methods used to pursue nationalist ends, or to apply ethically consistent guidelines for promoting the durable settlement of national conflicts. Prescriptive efforts should concentrate instead on encouraging economic and social advancement, regardless of whether the desired advances come about through unwanted foreign intrusion or wreak havoc on cherished ways of life.

If these positions are viewed as the core of any faithfully Marxian account of national issues, we might be well advised to look elsewhere for help in answering the most pressing questions raised by nationalism today. At the end of the second millennium, it would be patently irrational to sit on an ethical fence while waiting for impersonal forces of development to wash away old national and ethnic antagonisms. It makes even less sense to ignore the profound motivational force of nationalist appeals, or to explain away that force as the effect of ruling-class manipulation. We want to understand better than we do the sense in which nationalism expresses an urge for identity within a wider community, or within a specific form of community. How intrinsic is this urge in human nature? To what range of different objects has it been, and might it be, directed? Does the national community, united and nurtured by a sovereign state, provide the best available means of satisfying this urge? Above all, perhaps, we ask these questions in the hope that they might help us to make consistent and well-grounded judgements about the national movements that confront us today. We want to understand nationalism because we must live with it and deal with it, relate it to and differentiate it from other types of claim that command public attention.

The first thesis put forward in this work is that Marx and Engels’ writings do contain strands of argument which address these questions, often in a fruitful way, and that their arguments are worth re-examining as we try to come to grips with nationalism in our own time. To find these arguments, however, we are obliged to put aside settled preconceptions about what a properly ‘Marxian’ account must look like. The breakdown of Cold War battle-lines, including those that once ran through western academies, greatly facilitates this task. Sympathetic exegetes of classical Marxism once faced a double danger. On the one hand, they risked repelling non-Marxist readers who unquestioningly identified the founders’ works with assorted movements launched in their name. On the other hand, they risked offending the orthodox if their reading strayed too far from a given academic or political party line. The flight of official Marxism from most of its old outposts makes it possible to take a fresh look at the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, pursuing this endeavour in a spirit of collaboration with other bodies of theory rather than one of mortal combat.

Previous efforts to open such a dialogue have been inhibited by the belief that Marx and Engels, like many of their followers, must have analysed national issues within a framework built around the elements of theory described above. In the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, the authors did stake out positions which reflect a narrowly ‘economistic’, polar-class analysis of nationalism. But a more subtle approach can also be found in both their theoretical and empirical writings, and this approach deserves closer attention than it has received in the past. By questioning the traditional economic-determinist and class-reductionist readings, I try below to relocate the theoretical basis of Marx and Engels’ views on nationalism within an action-guiding, strategic theory of politics.

Several features of this approach mark it off from more familiar interpretations of the authors’ views on nationalism, and may usefully be outlined here. First, its main explanatory emphasis is on human choice rather than economic determination, on the motives and intentions of nationalists rather than disembodied ‘laws’ of history. National movements are analysed as an array of variegated, strategic responses to broader global developments, and involve cultural and doctrinal conflicts which have to be worked out through hard political deliberation. Within this theory, second, Marx and Engels continue to treat class as the basic unit of analysis and framework for collective action. But the relations between class and nationalist aims, class and national ‘consciousness’, appear as far more complex and variable than the standard class-reductionist account allows. Finally, the analyses developed on these lines serve important prescriptive purposes. In explaining the causes of national conflict or the content of nationalist programmes, Marx and Engels also seek to guide actors towards a resolution of conflict, a considered choice of goals and policies, and a clearer view of the obstacles confronting them.

By treating nationalism as a form of politics, Marx and Engels’ writings draw attention to issues that are often pushed to the background in contemporary theoretical discussions of the subject. The authors have frequently been reproached for failing to develop a ‘general theory’ of nationalism, for failing to recognize the ‘independent’ motivating force of national ideals and interests, and for failing to see that the clash of national identities in the modern world is too deeply rooted in history and the human psyche to admit of any ordinary political resolution. But even if Marx and Engels did omit to do or see these things, it is by no means obvious that the omissions cited here represent ‘failures’ in their thinking. While the first task of this work is to show where critics have misread Marx and Engels, my second purpose is to suggest that many of their most cutting criticisms are grounded in flawed assumptions about what constitutes an adequate account of nationalism. These assumptions revolve around two claims: first, that nations possess a greater capacity than other human groupings to elicit strong loyalties and sacrifices from their members; and second, that nationalism derives its mobilizing power from the unique, intrinsic value people everywhere attach to their national identities. Taken by themselves, I do not think that these claims are always wrong. It is surely right to make them about some historical periods and political situations. What is doubtful, however, is the belief that the two claims tell us the most important things we need to know in order to understand nationalism and evaluate its demands. This standpoint breeds a welter of subsidiary assumptions which run through a great deal of academic and journalistic commentary, and which inform some of the stock objections to Marx and Engels. The appeal of nationalism is supposed to transcend political and social divisions in any single nation, and to mean the same things to most people. Since its sources are located in a pre-reflective attachment to identities given to people by birth and history, there is little need to refer to narrower political and material interests in explaining nationalism’s popularity. And since what is said to be at stake in national conflicts is that most tender and explosive part of the human make-up, ‘identity’—the desire to belong to an entity wider and more deeply rooted than myself, to be recognized by virtue of that belonging as someone worthy of respect, to put down my group’s rivals and win the praise of its allies—neither limited interests nor pallid reason can hope to compete with nationalist appeals, however virulent or self-defeating the latter may become.

These assumptions present a grim outlook for those who want to bring extremist forms of nationalism under the sobering influence of everyday politics. If national conflicts are essentially conflicts over identity, and if national identity is a unique, even primary value for most people most of the time, then it is hard indeed to see how such conflicts can be alleviated through the politics of bargaining, compromise, and clear-headed discussion. But our past and present experience of nationalism shows that this can be done, and that the process of pacifying national conflicts usually involves some revisions in the national identities that were asserted so vehemently in the heat of battle. Experience tells us—or should tell us—that except in conditions of extreme repression, there are usually several different nationalisms which claim to represent the same nation at the same time. Their programmes offer different definitions of their nation’s identity and purposes, and these definitions are often conflicting. Some nationalists are liberal and democratic; others are authoritarian, or worse. Some are eager to mend fences with neighbours; others are looking for a fight wherever they can find one. The assumptions I outlined above discourage attempts to draw these distinctions, because they insulate a general phenomenon called ‘nationalism’ from the more specific interests and values and political programmes that make it assume different forms. But if we minimize the differences between various nationalist programmes, placing undue emphasis on what is uniquely and universally national about nationalism, we also minimize our chances of formulating sound policies for coping with the diverse forms of really existing nationalism that confront us today.

Marx and Engels were rare among mid-nineteenth-century thinkers in adopting a politically discriminating view of nationalism. Almost all of their European contemporaries preferred large national units to small ones, and the idea that progress would not be served by the breakdown of large national states to satisfy the separatist demands of minorities was a commonplace of nineteenth-century reasoning. Apart from this ‘viability’ criterion, however, most people evaluated national movements against a simple political yardstick. To support nationalist aspirations for unity, autonomy, or independence was to support popular liberties against empire and absolutism. Before 1848, demands for national unity or freedom usually went hand in hand with demands for liberalization and republican government; the ‘nation’ was to become the sovereign people, in domestic affairs as well as vis-à-vis the outside world. For Herder, Mazzini, and other early authors of nationalist doctrine, the flourishing of national states was synonymous with the brotherhood of European nations. It scarcely occurred to these men that national aspirations might turn arrogant and exclusive, let alone that national aims might be achieved by authoritarian means and be invoked, after unification or independence, to throttle the freedoms of a nation’s own people. But Marx and Engels, as we will see, did recognize this danger. Their efforts to avert it remain instructive at a time when the ambivalent claims of nationalism are again clamouring for our attention.

Like most of Marx and Engels’ contemporaries, many nationalism-watchers before 1989 expected the end of repression in central and eastern Europe to bring on an era of unprecedented peace among liberated, liberalized nations in the region. Because national aspirations were so often expressed through anti-communist dissent, it seemed reasonable to think that all post-communist nationalism must be democratic and westward-looking. This easy assumption was confounded after the upheavals of 1989, just as the events of 1848 upset the Mazzinian equation between nationality and republican brotherhood. The years 1848–9 were a crossroads for nationalism in Europe, and for the development of Marx and Engels’ thinking on national issues. In Frankfurt, the first attempts to unify Germany on the basis of a liberal constitution were thwarted by groups which preferred to take an illiberal and conquering route to unification. Throughout the Habsburg empire, anti-imperial nationalists bullied minority ‘nationalities’ in their lands, while armies manned by those minorities sprang to defend the empire against their new-found national oppressors. In the wake of the failed revolutions, authoritarian governments all over the Continent began to jostle against their republican and democratic rivals for the right to wave the banner of ‘true’ nationality. This competition was the cradle of populist nationalism, which sought to arouse the unrefined fears and prejudices of the ‘common people’ in a bid to out-mobilize the opposition.

Marx and Engels watched all these events closely, making as good an attempt as anyone in their time—and a better one than most—to understand the differences between these new forms of national politics and the democratic, cooperative forms they had always supported. But they could not have grasped these differences if they had treated nationalism as a phenomenon sui generis, rather than analysing national movements as a variety of distinct political programmes based on conflicting social interests. By arguing that the success of particular programmes depended on more than a promise to appease ‘identities’—and that it may depend on making important compromises with other national and non-national movements—Marx and Engels were able to suggest policies aimed at restraining nationalism’s worst excesses. Their prescriptions did not find powerful enough followers to stem the growth of extremist nationalism in their own lifetimes; and no nineteenth-century doctrine can give all the guidance we need to cope with nationalism today. Nevertheless, we can learn a great deal by taking a second look at their efforts to grapple with questions that are back, once again, at the epicentre of politics.

The prescriptive strand of Marx and Engels’ analysis was grounded in a normative conception of human community and self-determination which, I suggest, served as the touchstone for their judgements on nationalism. This conception received its fullest expression in Marx’s early, pre-communist writings on philosophy and the state. It is often assumed that the ideas developed in these youthful works ceased to exert a strong influence over Marx and Engels’ later thinking, which allegedly focused on the ‘material’ basis of social struggles while neglecting the analysis of institutions and policies.⁶ I dissent from this view, arguing that the authors’ analyses of specific national movements appear more consistent and theoretically interesting when they are read against the backdrop of Marx’s early political ideas.

Building from the bottom up, Chapters 1 and 2 draw connections between the early and later theoretical works to lay down the broad foundations of Marx and Engels’ prescriptive, political approach to national issues. Chapter 1 locates the authors’ conception of nations and nationality within their theory of the state, and asks whether Marx and Engels acknowledged that certain attributes of national communities have origins distinct from those of class-based phenomena. Chapter 2 evaluates a widespread and damaging assumption: namely, that the authors lacked the theoretical resources needed to understand the sources, historical significance, and activating force of national identity. Drawing on both their ‘materialist’ theory of history and Marx’s earlier critiques, I ask, first, whether Marx and Engels offered a cogent account of the conditions in which virulent national particularisms might give way to political compromise and, second, whether their analysis of the domestic and international pressures that activate assertions of national identity might improve, in some respects, on other accounts of this process. I suggest that the activist, prescriptive dimensions of Marx and Engels’ theory yield different answers to these questions than the usual emphasis on economic or class determination.

The next three chapters trace the development of this political conception of nationality in the authors’ journalism, speeches, and writings on politics. Chapter 3 deals primarily with the explanatory aspects of Marx and Engels’ analyses of national movements. It examines how, in their writings on several European countries, the authors explained the relationship between class conflicts and nationalist programmes commanding transclass support; the impact of domestic social divisions on conceptions of a nation’s interests in the international arena; and the appeal of populist nationalism directed at the lower social orders. Chapter 4 tries to clarify the reasoning behind Marx and Engels’ policy prescriptions for the national conflicts that erupted in 1848–9. I reconsider the view that the authors furnished no consistent, ethically grounded criteria for evaluating nationalist claims, and identify rudiments of a prescriptive theory of nationalism which concurs with much mainstream democratic thinking today. My approach in these two chapters is thematic rather than strictly chronological, and involves some flexibility of movement between the early and later writings. Chapter 5 focuses exclusively on the theoretical developments embodied in Marx and Engels’ writings on colonialism, working-class internationalism, and war after 1848–9.

My first purpose in all these chapters is to show where previous commentators got Marx and Engels wrong, and to flesh out points in their argument which I think have an enduring relevance. But I also pursue my second aim throughout the book, suggesting that Marx and Engels displayed a more complete and nuanced understanding of the politics of nationality than many contemporary authors. I develop this claim at some length in Chapter 6, where I assess the strengths and weaknesses of Marx and Engels’ position in the light of nationalism’s tempestuous career since the 1870s. The greater part of the chapter considers what the authors’ arguments might contribute to our understanding of nationalism since the collapse of communism in 1989, both in central and eastern Europe and in the older liberal democracies. I discuss two sets of faulty assumptions about the contemporary appeal of extremist nationalism, labelling these ‘methodological nationalism’ and ‘liberal post-nationalism’, and argue that a sympathetic reappraisal of some of Marx and Engels’ arguments can help us to avoid the fallacies perpetrated by both.

Three further aspects of my treatment should be noted at the outset. The fastidious reader may already wonder, first, whether I intend to define more precisely what I mean when I refer to Marx and Engels’ views on ‘nationalism’ or ‘national issues’. The answer is that I will not offer a set of definitions or typologies in advance of exegesis, preferring to distinguish among various forms of nationalism and concepts of nationhood as these arise in my discussion of the texts. This preference stems not from conceptual laziness, but from a reasoned conviction that what is most interesting about Marx and Engels’ treatment of nations and nationalism is precisely that it suggests novel ways of conceptualizing these phenomena—defining them not in isolation from other aspects of social life, but within specific historical and social contexts.

Second, I do not intend to provide an exhaustive, country-by-country survey of the authors’ remarks on national issues. Since my main purpose is to identify and develop elements of a particular type of analysis that appears in Marx and Engels’ writings, I concentrate selectively on those writings which best exemplify that analysis. This method tends to produce what may appear as a somewhat lopsided emphasis on the political commentary written in the years 1848–9 and again after 1860, and on national movements in the authors’ native Germany. The decision to focus on certain periods and countries was guided by my concern to offer a fine-grained study of the seminal developments in Marx and Engels’ thought on national issues, rather than a general, chronologically ordered account of all their comments on the subject.⁷

Finally, the collaborative relationship between Marx and Engels poses special problems for an attempt to reconstruct a coherent theory from the authors’ scattered writings on national movements. Some key elements of the political approach elaborated here can be found in works co-authored by the two men after 1845. In their journalism and political commentary, however, Marx and Engels frequently concentrated on different regions and countries, framing their analyses in the light of quite distinct understandings of how their general theory should be applied to specific national issues. These differences often reflect an uneasy relationship between strands of that theory which encourage an economic-determinist or polar-class view of nationalism, and those which suggest the need for strategically oriented analyses of nationalist motives, doctrines, and actions. The latter approach was, as we will see in Chapters 3 through 5, pursued more consistently by Marx than by Engels, whose empirical analyses sometimes bear a close resemblance to the standard ‘Marxian’ approach outlined above. I try clearly to differentiate these positions as they appear in the texts, making no effort to integrate all of the authors’ statements into a full-blooded, unitary theory of nationalism. But since my aim is to redress the conventional emphasis on economy-centred and ‘reductionist’ aspects of Marx and Engels’ treatment, thereby excavating neglected elements of a more useful approach to national issues, I have deliberately subordinated the task of criticism to that of constructive and selective reinterpretation.

I have usually used available English translations, but referred to the German texts where this was necessary to support my interpretation. All italicized words in quotations appear thus in the original texts.

1

Nationality in the Divided State

MARX and Engels never defined their uses of the term ‘nation’ and its cognates, but there has been no dearth of attempts to locate these concepts within their general theories of society and the state. It is sometimes assumed that the fathers of ‘historical materialism’ regarded the nation qua historical entity and political ideal as a mere ‘epiphenomenon’ arising from, and serving to sustain, class relations of production. Prima facie, this seems a plausible conclusion to draw from a theory widely thought to situate politics, culture, and ideas in a category of phenomena explained ‘in the last instance’ by the material ‘basis’ of social life. Noting the central position assigned to classes in this framework, many commentators have concluded that Marx and Engels were theoretically equipped to explain nationalism only as an effect of ruling-class ideology, obscuring the ‘real’ international interests of workers.

This chapter begins to excavate a different conception of nations and nationality which cannot be grasped within a rigid base-superstructure modelling of Marx and Engels’ theory, and which owes as much to the democratic ideals of an older revolutionary discourse on the nation (Section 1.1) as it does to the authors’ ‘class-instrument’ theory of the state. The rudiments of this conception appear in Marx’s pre-communist writings. Here he treated the nation as a prescriptive concept, expressing an ideal of community based on democratic self-determination (Section 1.2). This concept was modified, but not abandoned, in Marx and Engels’ ‘materialist’ theory of history, where it was used to underscore the social and economic prerequisites for satisfactory forms of national community (Section 1.3). Its role in their action-guiding theory of politics, moreover, is essential to an understanding of Marx and Engels’ internationalist policies (Section 1.4). Each of these sets of ideas—the early political philosophy, the theory of history, and the theory of political action —was to have an important bearing on Marx and Engels’ analyses of specific national movements.

1.1. THREE CONCEPTS OF THE NATION

Much confusion about Marx and Engels’ views on nationality stems from the failure of many commentators to appreciate the significance of a basic, contextual fact. Marx and Engels were nineteenth-century German writers and activists. They were educated in Germany, gained their formative political experience there, and sought to influence events in their native country even after years of exile. The concepts which shaped their thinking about nations and nationalism were not entirely home-grown, but they were used by Germans in particular ways to evaluate social and political conditions specific to Germany. In the nineteenth century, moreover, no European language had yet developed the rich array of definitions and conceptual distinctions we find in the vocabulary of nationality today. The term ‘nationalism’ itself came into common use only towards the end of the century, when it referred specifically to imperial and xenophobic movements of the extreme right. None of Marx and Engels’ contemporaries devised theories to explain the relationship between such movements and democratically inspired demands for national independence, because no one in the mid-nineteenth century saw the two things as part of a single overarching phenomenon called ‘nationalism’. These constraints of time and place must be kept in mind if we want to avoid blaming Marx and Engels for not seeing what none of their contemporaries saw, and if we are to appreciate how much they did understand about the new politics of nationality.

When the young Marx first began to use the terms ‘nation’, ‘nationality’, and ‘state’ in his own writings, he was working within a conceptual and political setting quite different from that which prevailed across the border in France, or across the Channel in Britain. Both of these countries were politically unified at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and both had experienced revolutionary upheavals whose authors used the vocabulary of nationality in a partisan way, calling for downward transfers of sovereignty from the monarch to ‘the people’ or their parliamentary representatives. Germany in the same period had neither political unity nor an indigenous tradition of revolutionary-democratic discourse on the nation. Germans who wanted to use imported elements of that discourse to criticize their own absolutist monarchies therefore faced two kinds of difficulty. First, the popular ‘nation’ to which they appealed was still splintered into dozens of separate states and municipalities. Conventional German usage, second, still treated ‘nationality’ as an attribute of sovereign states rather than of sovereign, self-governing peoples. The words ‘state’ (Staat) and ‘nation’ (Nation) were often used interchangeably in German, as they still are in English, to refer to a body exercising sovereign authority within established territorial frontiers. But whereas the identity of state and nation in English, American, and French revolutionary usage was effected by putting the popular nation first, and subjecting the state to its sovereign will, the dominant German convention respected pre-revolutionary priorities. In the political and legal idiom that prevailed in the first half of the century, Nation remained an essentially descriptive, conservative concept, referring either to a person’s place of origin or to the actual locus of sovereignty in established states.

Most German intellectuals had embraced the revolutionary ideal of popular sovereignty in 1789, and many hailed Napoleon as their long-awaited liberator from German tyranny and semifeudal backwardness. Before long, however, the events of the Terror and Prussia’s humiliating wars against Napoleon dealt a serious blow to both republican fervour and Francophile sentiment in Germany. The political vocabulary of the French Revolution was intellectually discredited and, in some German states, officially censored for several decades into the nineteenth century. In this climate a new, distinctively Germanic concept of the nation began to gain wide currency. The seeds of what is now commonly called the ‘ethnic’ concept of the nation had been planted in the last years of the eighteenth century in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder conceived the nation as an organically evolving community of language and culture, not of blood-ties. Although he said almost nothing about the politics of nationality, he offered a roseate, pluralist vision of a Europe wherein each nation would realize its unique national ‘nature’ in harmony with all the rest.¹ In the heat of the Napoleonic Wars, a host of later writers and polemicists abandoned Herder’s irenic ideals while retaining his romantic and particularist view of nationality. Common descent and language rather than acquired culture were increasingly seen as the foundations of national community, while the inward-looking ideal of national purity was invoked against foreign influences and Germans who welcomed them.

This early ‘ethnic’ concept of the nation postulated an entity deeper and wider than the state which, unlike the popular-revolutionary conception, could provide a ready-made basis for national unity: a nationality of language and blood shared by Germans living under different political roofs. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the political implications of the concept remained outstandingly vague. The founding fathers of ethnic nationalism did not present their doctrine as a blueprint for German unity, let alone for constructing nation-states throughout Europe. Far from treating nationalism as a substantial political programme, their main concern was to rid Germany of a crippling inferiority complex which had started to show during the eighteenth century—when the cultural, political, and economic achievements of France and Britain were widely seen as superior to those of Germans—and which developed into neurosis after the Napoleonic invasions. Nor did ‘ethnic’ nationalists adopt a clear doctrinal position vis-à-vis competing statist and popular-revolutionary concepts of the nation. In the writings of Fichte, Arndt, Jahn, and other Romantics, the ‘natural’ essence of German nationality was sometimes tied to authoritarian institutions and hierarchical social structures, giving the concept a markedly conservative bent.² At the same time, Romantic nationalists claimed to venerate the common people or Volk as the purest repository of national characteristics, and many of them claimed to be good democrats. Such claims look spurious when they are held up against a liberal understanding of what democracy means. The ethnic concept left little room for individuals to assert their cultural preferences, let alone to question the authority of institutions to which they were organically bound by birth and blood. But since political repression inhibited the growth of liberal democratic ideas in Germany after 1815, there were few sceptics bold enough to pour cold water on the ethniccollectivist alternative. In any case, the Romantics’ poetic and metaphysical panegyrics to Volk and Nation looked more welcoming to ‘the people’ than absolutist traditions.

While those traditions were eroded during the course of the nineteenth century, the persistence of authoritarian institutions in Germany helped to keep alive the older conservative-statist language of nationality. With their shared authoritarian grammar and organic metaphors, statist and ethnic idioms were easy to cross-breed. But the latter did not become the dominant strain in German discourse on the nation until the twentieth century. In Marx and Engels’ lifetimes the main threat to democratic aspirations in Germany still came from above, and particularly from the Prussian state’s ruthless suppression of its critics, not from literary or populist appeals to ethnic nationality. Nevertheless, the intermingling of statist and ethnic elements meant that anyone who wanted to discuss concrete political aspects of nationality soon found himself thrashing about in muddy conceptual waters. When the question of German unification was first put to serious pan-Germanic discussion at sessions of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, delegates were conceptually ill prepared to cope with the obvious next question: namely, whether the boundaries of the projected nation-state should be decided on ethnic or political grounds. The problem was not just that delegates disagreed among themselves over which criterion to use. Many ran the different options together in their own speeches, unable to say with any clarity whether they thought a united Germany should include German-speakers currently living under non-German governments, or whether it should simply incorporate most of the traditionally Germanic states qua states. This confusion was reflected in increasingly ambiguous uses of the terms relating to nationality. At the turn of the century, romantically inclined Germans had begun to use the term Volk to designate the unique, pristine qualities of an ethnic collectivity; but the word was still more commonly used to refer simply to ‘the people’ as distinct from the higher social orders and rulers of the state, in the sense of the Latin populus. The plural Völker could refer to various ‘peoples’ differentiated either by language, descent, and history, or by the political fact of living under separate governments. But ethnic overtones were appearing more and more frequently in arguments defending the traditional, monarchical state. As demands for German unity mounted, traditionalists began to show a preference for the good Germanic words Volk and Vaterland whenever these could fill in for the Latin-derived ‘nation’ or ‘patria’.

These developments did not go unopposed, but the emerging alliance between statist and ethnic concepts of the nation added to the polemical difficulties which faced critics of the German status quo. The 1830s and 1840s saw the growth of new radical movements among intellectuals, artisans, and industrial workers, especially in south-western Germany. These groups wanted German unification as much as anyone. But the question of redrawing national boundaries was, for them, inseparable from the question of which people and what kind of institutions were to be sovereign within the German ‘nation’. The new radicals and democrats harked back to the old revolutionary discourse imported from France, pitting a third concept of the nation against ethnic and statist arguments. This concept identified the sovereign nation with the Volk, not in the ethnic sense attached to the word by Romantic writers, but in the democratic sense which gave the ‘people’ authority to elect or dissolve their own governments. The revolutionary implications of this usage were clear so long as German radicals had only to confront conservative-statist concepts of the nation. To nominate the Volk as the Nation was to call for democracy and the end of absolutism, just as the peuple = nation equation had helped to topple the ancien régime in France. It proved less easy for radicals to differentiate their vocabulary, and hence their political position, from the discourse of ethnic nationalists. Some of them tried to draw the line by simply avoiding sentimental references to the ‘Vaterland’, already a shibboleth of both conservatives and Romantics. This strategy had respectable roots in the cosmopolitan declarations made in the late eighteenth century by classical writers like Goethe, Lessing, Schelling, and Schiller who had repeatedly denied that they had or wanted a Vaterland, knew of any duty to be a German patriot, or saw any political implications of nationality.³ The Vaterland-spurning convention had deeper sources in the French Enlightenment. Voltaire himself had asked his countrymen, ‘Who really has a fatherland [patrie]?’ His answer: ‘He only who has a share in the natal soil or other property … and a share in political rights, forms a member of the community, and he only has a fatherland.’⁴

By taking up this theme in their own polemics, the new German radicals registered their protest against the social and political inequalities which continued to exclude most people from the ‘community’ that Germany would be. They also identified themselves with the cosmopolitan tradition of the German Enlightenment, and expressed a willingness to follow foreign political models in their struggle for democracy in Germany. Marx’s earliest writings place him squarely in this third strand of German discourse on the nation. His commitment to the democratic-revolutionary concept of the nation predated his commitment to communism, and it continued to influence his later thinking on national issues. By locating Marx’s views in this context, we may form a clearer idea of what we can and cannot reasonably expect to find in his and Engels’ writings on nationalism.

We should not, first of all, expect those writings to display the conceptual precision and objectivity we have come to expect in contemporary theoretical discussions of national issues. Clearly defined concepts relating to those issues simply weren’t available in mid-nineteenth century Germany; and there was no such thing as a politically neutral, descriptive vocabulary dealing with the subject. All three of the national concepts I have just outlined were loaded with partisan meaning, even if their users were not always aware of their political implications. The issues at stake in discussions of nationality were far too large and overheated to allow for much disinterested analysis. And for radicals like Marx and Engels, whose democratic conception of nationality was constantly on the defensive against formidable statist and ethnicnational opponents, neutrality on the national question would have meant political suicide even if it was possible.

Once we recall that the ‘national question’ was a deeply divisive one in nineteenth-century Germany, it also becomes clear that we shouldn’t expect Marx and Engels to treat nationalism as a phenomenon that could be analysed independently of the particular political movements which invoked it. The discourse of nationality did not appear to Marx and Engels as essentially one thing used in different ways. It was to them, and I shall argue that it still is, several different things expressed through only superficially similar concepts and requiring different responses. Marx and Engels were aware of the political costs that would be incurred by a failure to keep those concepts separate, by allowing the Volk of ethnic nationalism to absorb the democratic ‘people’ and the Nation of the authoritarian state to soak up the ethnic nationality of the Volk. The career of nationalism in the twentieth century should make us equally wary of efforts to minimize differences between various concepts of the nation, in the interests of either political neutrality or explanatory simplicity.

We can, however, expect to find a set of concerns in Marx and Engels’ writings which are seldom brought to the fore in contemporary theories of nationalism. Because of their partisan involvement in the politics of nationality from the 1840s onward, and because their experience in Germany showed that rival nationalisms can do battle within the same nation, Marx and Engels were preoccupied with a question that deserves further attention today: in what conditions do virulent, exclusive, and authoritarian forms of nationalism win the domestic battle against democratic, cooperative definitions of nationality—and what kind of politics might reverse this outcome? The rest of this chapter looks at Marx and Engels’ early attempts to formulate and address this question.

1.2. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: THE CRITIQUE OF HEGEL

Marx’s first systematic work on the state was his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. He wrote the Critique in 1843, twenty-three years after Hegel had published his manuscript. Marx was not yet a communist at this time; law and political philosophy still interested him more than political economy.

Hegel’s arguments included a highly sophisticated defence of the pre-revolutionary, statist concept of nationality against its republican and democratic assailants. A central claim of the Philosophy of Right was that the rise of competitive individualism in modern society threatened to destroy a deeper ethical order embedded in historically evolved laws and institutions. Hegel denounced the French revolutionaries’ rationalist ambition to create new constitutions carte blanche, sweeping away the accumulated achievements of long-established states. Such states, he insisted, were the essential vehicles for realizing a ‘rational’ form of life far richer than any envisaged by the abstract, one-dimensional ‘reason’ of the revolutionary Enlightenment. The assumption that a contract among individuals could replace the ‘absolutely divine principle of the state, together with its majesty and absolute authority’ was, in Hegel’s view, a recipe for social disintegration.⁵ For individuals want their political institutions to do more than give them the freedom to pursue their own, private ends, although Hegel saw the desire for a ‘private’ sphere of free activity as an ineluctable consequence of modern individuality. People also seek ‘unification’ with others, and only the historical, rationally ordered state can enable them to live a ‘universal life’ within a community they recognize as their own: it is only as a member of a state that ‘the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life’.⁶

Harking back to an ideal of the antique polis where the individual citizen was profoundly integrated with his community, the Philosophy of Right set out to show how existing institutions could be understood in such a way as to bridge the gulf between the private sphere and the ‘ethical’ state. Hegel’s statist prescriptions encouraged people to recognize the immanent ‘universality’ of their relationships without, however, sacrificing the personal freedoms unknown to ancient Athenians. Hegel designated ‘civil society’ as the realm of the private and particular, a creation of modern European individualism. People in civil society, he acknowledged, conceive themselves as bearers of rights against the state. These rights arise within the network of private transactions, largely of an economic character, which distinguishes civil society from the legal and political domain of public authority. Hegel described civil society as a ‘system of needs’ wherein ‘the independence, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all’.⁷ But this harmony remained vulnerable when it appeared as an unintended effect of aggregate interactions rather than the result of a conscious striving toward common ends. Individuals remained conscious of themselves only as private, self-interested beings as long as they participated exclusively in civil society, a condition which invited the ‘ethical degeneration’ of a social life not ‘held in check by the power of universality’.⁸ They become aware of their interdependence only, Hegel argued, as members of a particular state whose institutions reflect and promote their common life.

Hegel’s statist arguments were more hospitable to modern demands for freedom and participation than those of many German conservatives. Hegel understood that once modern individuals had begun to acquire a taste for private freedoms, state authorities could gain little by trying forcibly to repress independent movements within civil society. His solution was not to defend the old absolutist principle of legitimacy on which many German monarchs still staked their claims, but to attempt a philosophical reconciliation between the state and civil society by showing how existing institutions—the family, bureaucracy, representative Estates, and especially the hereditary monarchy—bound the two spheres together in an ‘organic’ unity. Hegel’s conciliatory intentions were reflected in the way he used the vocabulary of nationality. He used the word ‘nation’ not as a synonym for the sovereign powers of the state, but to denote all the state’s members regardless of their social status or political entitlements. The state rather than the ‘nation’ in this sense still exercised sovereign authority in the affairs of government. But the mentality and daily life of the ‘nation’ was so deeply enmeshed with the state’s particular institutions that it was impossible, according to Hegel, for the former to break off from the latter without mutilating itself. The state constituted all that was valuable in the personal and common life of its members: ‘the state, as the mind of a nation, is both the law permeating all relationships within the state and also … the manners and consciousness of its citizens.’⁹

But if Hegel implicitly criticized absolutist states which sought to suppress their subjects’ private rights, his fiercest criticisms were directed against radicals who brandished the inflammatory doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’ against absolutism. The ‘sovereignty of the people’, Hegel insisted, must refer to a quality that ‘the people’ could possess only through the mediating agency of the state. More precisely, it was appropriate to speak of the sovereignty of the people or the ‘nation’ only where the latter were ruled by a hereditary monarch who personified the state with all its distinctive attributes. Thus peoples living under republican or parliamentary governments ’are not sovereign peoples at all now that they have ceased to have rulers or supreme governments of their own’.¹⁰ Hegel decried the opposition posited by radicals between popular sovereignty and the sovereignty residing in the monarch as ‘one of the confused notions based on the wild idea of the “people” ’. Without a monarch and ‘the articulation of the whole [community] which is the indispensable … concomitant of monarchy, the people is a formless mass and no longer a state’.¹¹ It was obtuse, Hegel claimed, to think that ‘abstractions’ like the social contract or the historically rootless Rights of Man could substitute for the ‘genuine patriotism’ that sprang from people’s habitual recognition ‘that the community is one’s substantive groundwork and end’.¹²

Although Hegel shared the Romantics’ distaste for the ‘abstractions’ used in rationalist political discourse, his position was quite different from the ethno-nationalist argument that the state and ‘nation’ are constituted by pre-political characteristics of the Volk. For Hegel, it was the state’s laws and institutions which defined a nation, not the language or blood-ties of a ‘people’ which should define the constitution of a state. The ‘patriotic’ sentiments and cultural characteristics associated with nationality were, in Hegel’s scheme of things, largely the product of a shared history within particular states. Ethnic groups whose achievements had never been refined through a long historical process of state-making were ‘historyless’ peoples to Hegel. It was the experience of statehood, rather than the cultural or racial distinctiveness of a Volk, which enabled the latter to earn Hegel’s recognition as an ‘historical’ nation: that is, as a community able to make an important contribution to the progress of ‘reason’ in world history.¹³

Hegel denied that his purpose in the Philosophy of Right was to ‘construct the state as it ought to be’, or to depict any existing state as the highest possible embodiment of human reason. But in his efforts to show how the hereditary monarchy, civil service, and traditional Estates could be construed as ‘inherently rational’ institutions, Hegel was readily interpreted by German readers as an apologist for the political status quo. Soon after his death, Hegel’s conservative disciples found themselves faced by an opposing school of ‘Young Hegelians’ who turned the master’s dictum ‘the actual is rational’ into a plea for radical criticism of politics. In their youth both Marx and Engels were drawn into Young Hegelian circles expressing republican opposition to the feudal order of the Prussian state, and deploring those elements of Hegel’s doctrine which lent themselves to official application. Marx’s ideas on nations and nationality first took shape through his confrontation with Hegel’s statist arguments. A few years later, Marx also put forward some criticisms of what we now call the ‘ethnic’ concept of nationality. As we will see in Chapter 2, he recognized that the emerging alliance between this concept and statist claims might constitute a serious threat to democratic movements in Germany. In 1843, however, Marx was less a political activist than he was a student of philosophy; and whereas ethnic doctrines lacked any rigorous philosophical formulation, Hegel’s arguments posed a daunting intellectual challenge to German radicalism.

His Critique marked the young Marx’s departure from the republican mainstream of Young Hegelianism, and his movement towards a more radical democratic position. Hegel had identified demands for popular sovereignty with rampant individualism. He believed that ‘the people’ could assert their sovereign will only as separate, self-interested agents incapable of the kind of ethical conduct that was nurtured within long-established states.¹⁴ This argument implied that the demands of liberté were intrinsically at odds with republican fraternité. Marx, by contrast, conceived popular sovereignty as an ideal which reconciled demands for personal freedom with the modern individual’s equally strong desire for community with others. His quarrel with Hegel was not about the values of freedom versus the values of community; Marx would have seen this as a false opposition. His point was rather that the traditional forms of community defended by Hegel were no longer able to satisfy modern desires for richer, more inclusive kinds of common life. The demands for freedom in ‘civil society’ were not based only on narrow self-interest. People were also starting to demand the freedom to alter the hierarchical, exclusive foundations of older societies which prevented some people from recognizing others as full members of the same community.

Like Hegel, Marx sought to build on the achievements of modern individualism by describing an ideal social order that would enhance the individual’s freedom while maximizing his capacity for association with others. He dissented, however, from Hegel’s views about how existing institutions might be arranged so as to approximate such an ideal. A central theme of Marx’s later political thought is prefigured in an argument first developed in his Critique: the argument that the institutions and workings of the state arise from, and are in effect controlled by, relationships formed in civil society. Marx regarded the modern state as the product of a rift between the individual’s essentially social nature and his monadic life within civil society, not as its antidote. It was not the state which gave society the cohesive character Hegel wanted it to acquire, but the particularism and conflict endemic in civil society that were reflected in the state.

The form of Marx’s criticism owed much to Ludwig Feuerbach, who had earlier applied his ‘transformative’ method to expose the empirical shortcomings of Hegelian idealism. His ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s explanatory priorities took Marx beyond philosophical criticism, leading him to question the legitimacy of the institutions his predecessor had defended. Marx accepted Hegel’s distinction between state and society as an accurate description of contemporary life in Prussia, and shared his misgivings about the unchecked ‘egoism’ prevailing in civil society. But Marx argued that by attempting to justify the separation of state from society as a condition needed for the flourishing of both private and public life, Hegel was forced to mediate the gap with the very institutions—the Estates, bureaucracy, and monarchy—that already tended, on Marx’s view, to reinforce the power of sectional interests over ‘universality’. Far from transcending these particularisms in a higher unity, Hegel’s ‘rational’ state merely reflected and sanctioned existing social divisions. The state, Marx declared, is the ‘religious sphere of human life’:¹⁵ it is the ‘heaven’ of imagined community, which modern individuals idealize as a dim reflection of their own frustrated potential for deeper forms of association. Marx suggested that the arbitrary, mysterious character of the state could be seen most clearly in the institution of hereditary monarchy.¹⁶ In representing the monarch as a symbol of their shared traditions, his subjects may express a genuine longing for community with their compatriots. But that longing, Marx asserted, can’t be fulfilled in this way.

In his essay On the Jewish Question, written soon after the Critique, Marx extended his criticisms of traditional monarchies to democratic institutions where these coexisted, as he claimed they did in the United States, with a still-atomized realm of civil society. Here a community of equal citizens was supposed to counterbalance private egoism. But according to Marx, the individual remained ‘an imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality’.¹⁷ Hegel had not denied that community within the ‘rational’ state was partly imagined, the achievement of symbolism and education as well as of the bonds of material interest among individuals and corporations within society.¹⁸ The fact that community on a scale as large and impersonal as that of the nation or state must inevitably be imagined did not, in Hegel’s view, detract from the value it has for its members. On the contrary, the very ability to engage in empathetic imaginings on such a broad scale indicated, unlike the atavistic attachments of smaller primordial groups, a highly developed ethical sensibility. Marx accepted this position, but implied that Hegel’s apotheosis of the state crossed the line between constructive imagination and compensatory illusion. By endorsing Hegel’s description of civil society as the ‘material’ sphere of life but asserting its causal primacy over the ‘imaginary’ realm of the state, Marx suggested that non-illusory human consciousness—and the extent to which people apprehended or failed to apprehend their potential for free association with others—could only be grounded in concrete social relationships, not in the political institutions hovering above them. This argument, as we shall see below, enabled Marx to pursue a line of thinking which implicitly challenged Hegel’s rationale for exclusive national allegiances shaped by the prevailing system of sovereign, defensive states.¹⁹

Like Hegel before him, Marx saw language and descent as relatively unimportant in defining modern ‘national’ communities. He used the word ‘nationality’ (Nationalität) in two distinct ways in his early writings. The first usage echoed Hegel’s particular statist idiom: Nationalität was an abstract identity ascribed to a group of people by virtue of their membership in one state rather than another. Against this view ‘from above’, Marx introduced a second concept of nationality as seen from below, using the term to denote the ideal of political community based on popular sovereignty. This distinction is drawn boldly in the Critique, where Marx berates Hegel for refusing to recognize the second concept. In Hegel’s statist formulations, Marx protested, ‘the sovereignty of the people [Volks-Souveränität] is nationality: the sovereignty of the monarch is nationality, or the monarchical principle is nationality, which by itself and exclusively forms the sovereignty of a people’.²⁰

Hegel had argued that the ethical properties of a particular community could only be preserved in a world of many sovereign states: the members of each such entity must recognize the ‘otherness’ of entities beyond their own frontiers before they can fully appreciate the value of their own, state-bound life. By turning ‘its differentiating activity outward’, Hegel claimed, the state ‘establishes within itself the ideality of its subsisting inward differentiations’.²¹ This position led Hegel to expound his controversial ideas on war, which have sometimes been interpreted as an attempt to glorify inter-state conflict as a means of containing domestic frustrations.²² Marx did not suggest, in 1843, that the dissolution of national boundaries was a prerequisite for the flourishing of man’s ‘social’ essence. He did suggest, albeit obliquely, that absolute monarchy tended to reinforce barriers to international cooperation. ‘A people whose sovereignty consists solely in nationality’, he wrote—here invoking the first, statist sense of the word—‘has a monarch. Difference of nationality among peoples cannot be better established and expressed than by having different monarchs. The same cleft which separates one absolute individual from another separates these nationalities [Nationalitäten].’²³

Marx’s main concern here was to show that nationality in the statist sense must fall far short of Hegel’s ideal of community so long as the vast majority of people are excluded from the institutions that ostensibly define their nationhood. The idea that the antagonistic propensities of the inter-state system are tied to specific social structures, and not to the plurality of states as such, was elaborated only in Marx’s later writings. Yet by pursuing Hegel’s incompletely developed notion that the preconditions for building deeper ‘unities’ lay in civil society, Marx implicitly questioned the view that the expansion of imaginative sympathies must stop at the level of state or nation. Referring to civil society, Hegel had observed that here ‘at the standpoint of needs … what we have before us is the composite idea which we call man. This is the first time, and indeed properly speaking the only time, to speak of man in this sense.’²⁴ It is the ‘only time’ because in Hegel’s historical schema ‘man’, beyond the realm of civil society, undergoes two further phases of differentiation in accordance with the transcendental ‘Idea’: on the one hand assuming different roles within the organism of the state, and on the other as a plurality of states confronting one another in the international arena. Marx stripped this dialectic of its idealist trappings and took it a step further, arguing that the social and intersocietal particularisms endorsed by Hegel might yet be superseded by more substantial forms of community arising from the interdependence of human needs. This was to become a basic normative premiss of Marx’s internationalism.

In the passages cited above, Marx touched on another argument that he worked out more fully in his later writings. By identifying ‘nationality’ with the existing state, he suggested, Hegel conflated two distinct forms of ‘sovereignty’ associated with the national idea: the sovereignty of citizens in relation to their government, and that of one state in relation to others. Marx appealed again to the popular-democratic concept of nationality to underline the impoverishing political consequences of Hegel’s position, contrasting the citizen’s direct, spontaneous identification with the public life of Athens and Rome with the merely formal links between the modern state and private citoyen. ‘The Greeks (and Romans)’, he declared, ‘were national because and in so far as they were the sovereign peoples [das Souveräne Volk]. The Germans are sovereign because and in so far as they are national.’²⁵ Hegel’s statist view not only ignored the very real social divisions that prevented people from identifying ‘universally’ with the state. It also obliged him to rely on external conflicts as an important means of securing political allegiance. Marx pointed out that the ‘ideality’ of the state’s unity was realized only in times of external crisis and war or, in times of peace, through political repression.²⁶ In either situation, the appearance of unity had nothing to do with the conscious commitment of a state’s members. It depended, in fact, on denying them opportunities to express any political preferences of their own.

Here Marx had already begun to perceive a connection between aggressive nationalism and the absence of internal democracy. This perception was later developed into one of the guiding threads of his and Engels’ thinking on national issues. Since, according to Marx, Hegel had failed to demonstrate the ethical superiority of his preferred forms of internal social differentiation, he also lacked adequate grounds for the argument that separate, self-regarding states are needed to conserve the ethical vigour of particular societies. This condition appeared as necessary, he suggested, only where popular sovereignty had not become the basis of the state’s internal organization. If the state ceased to confront its own subjects as an imperious ‘external constraint … imposed on private life by “direct influence from above” ’,²⁷ Hegel’s rationale for preserving an analogous confrontation among states would no longer hold. Both internal and external ‘sovereignty’ would come to depend not primarily on external threats and self-assertion, but on internal, democratic self-affirmation.

Marx did not, then, dispute the descriptive validity of the historical, territorial concept of the nation in his pre-communist writings. He did insist that an evaluative distinction ought to be made between definitions of national identity and purpose that are imposed on people ‘from above’, and those which reflected the concerns of ordinary people in civil society. Nationality in this second sense could, Marx suggested, acquire substantive social content through an infusion of what he called ‘true democracy’. In democracy, he wrote, the ‘formal principle’ of national community ‘is at the same time the material principle’; in other words, democracy seeks to build community among ‘real human beings and the real people’ rather than setting them against the ‘abstract’ or formal unity of the state. Political ideals should be brought down to earth and directly address the concrete, ‘human’ needs found in civil society. This position led Marx to adumbrate the anti-statist precepts of his communist doctrine: ‘in true democracy’, he announced, ‘the political state disappears.’²⁸ In this context, Marx appears to have meant by ‘political state’ those institutions which he thought were particularly susceptible to personal appropriation and manipulation: the monarchy, the representative Estates, and Hegel’s privileged class of civil servants who treated the state as their own ‘private property’.²⁹ The democratic principles to which Marx subscribed in his youth were radical for their time; and by the time he wrote the Critique his conception of what ‘nationality’ ought to mean was already tied to the idea of popular self-determination, based on universal suffrage and far-reaching social reforms. To constitute a ‘national’ community in Marx’s strong sense, the people—all the people—must determine their conditions of association rather than allow conditions laid down by the state to determine them.

The idea that the state–society division arises from and serves the interests of a particular, dominant class remained undeveloped in Marx’s early writings. In his 1843 Critique, however, Marx was already groping towards the argument that the social tensions deplored by Hegel might not be the accidental product of individual caprice and competitiveness. Hegel had portrayed the social bellum omnium contra omnes as a malaise which afflicted society as a whole, benefiting no particular groups or individuals. It followed that all groups and individuals in society had equally good reason to welcome the mollifying influence he ascribed to the state. Marx’s ‘inversion’ of the state–society relationship drew him away from this conclusion. The state, he argued, could not be neutral in its dealings with civil society, since it derived such power as it had from sectional interests within that society. Far from constituting an independent source of authority over its citizens, the state was merely ‘supported impotence’ which ‘everywhere requires the guarantee of spheres which lie outside it’; it represented ‘not power over these supports but the power of the support’.³⁰ In order to sustain itself, Marx contended, the state must use its nominal ‘powers’ to serve the particular interests that confer them. He hinted at the specific character of those interests when he described the form of ‘patriotism’ preferred by Hegel as a ‘religion of private property’ projected on to the universal state.³¹

It was a short step from this pre-theoretical position to the argument, outlined by Marx at the end of 1843, that the conflicts rending modern society were not just the product of unruly particularism. They were now seen as fuelled, more fundamentally, by the unequal relations embodied in private property. Having turned Hegel’s state–society equation upside-down, Marx went on to analyse the structure of power within civil society itself. His class-based theory of the state grew out of his conclusion that among the sectional interests in society, some tend to dominate others; and those interests, in turn, tend to control the state. This argument gave a sharper edge to Marx’s critique of the ‘merely political’ forms of emancipation achieved by modern constitutions. In his essay On the Jewish Question Marx remained largely within Hegelian parameters: while hailing the advances made by republican and democratic movements over absolutism, he criticized the states created by such movements only for having failed to restrain ‘the egoistic spirit of civil society’.³² A few months later, Marx was able to ground his objections in the stronger argument that even the limited benefits of ‘political emancipation’ were distributed unevenly in society, since they derived ‘from the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and attains general domination’, so that a particular class, ‘proceeding from its particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society’.³³ This ‘partial revolution’ left a potentially explosive tension between the inclusive, egalitarian premisses of democratic constitutions and the social inequalities that they declined to address.

Viewed in the light of these proto-communist arguments, the prescriptive content of Marx’s early conception of ‘nationality’ appears considerably more radical than that of other democratic and republican concepts of the nation that have drawn on the legacies of the French and American revolutions.³⁴ First, the young Marx not only distinguished the restrictive ‘nationality’ of the state and its supporting elites from the wider national community found among the ‘people’; he also identified divisions within that people which gave rise to conflicting ideas about what, or who, constituted any single nation. This meant, second, that political and legal reforms—even those which extended equal rights of citizenship to all members of a society—could not suffice to give each class an equal stake in the nation. For the young Marx, the formation of a genuinely ‘national’ identity also depended on social reforms which would prevent the owners of property from systematically dominating the propertyless, in both the public and private spheres. These considerations informed the criteria Marx and Engels later applied in deciding when to support or oppose specific national movements.

In his early writings, Marx neither advised the outright removal of the state by a self-motivating society nor called for the transnational bonding of peoples. But he did insist that the social changes he advocated had to be viewed in a broadly European context: democratic movements in any single country would need the active support of sympathetic groups elsewhere. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, his co-editor at the left-leaning Rheinische Zeitung, Marx disavowed suprahistorical idealism as a means of combating current problems, and stressed the need to build on existing political movements and aspirations in the struggle for social change. ‘Nothing’, he wrote,

prevents us from participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting-point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them … We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish … We merely try to show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.³⁵

This was the basis on which Marx and Engels began to ‘participate’ in national and international politics from 1847 onwards. For Marx the task of philosophical criticism was precisely to elicit political action. To call upon people ‘to give up illusions about their condition is’, he wrote, ‘to call upon them to give up a condition which requires illusions’.³⁶

At this stage in his career, Marx located the social basis for revolution in the ‘practical needs’ of the people frustrated by existing arrangements. Like other radicals and democrats in his native Prussia, he expected the first impulse towards political change to come from the modernizing German bourgeoisie, whose demands for economic and political liberalization were growing louder and louder. But Marx was already looking beyond the immediate political tasks at hand towards a more profound transformation of civil society and its relations with the state. In the 1843 Introduction to his Critique, he substituted the proletariat for Hegel’s bureaucracy as the ‘universal class’ of modern society—the class which, in the Hegelian framework, best represents the concerns of society as a whole. But whereas Hegel’s class of civil servants was supposed to provide a positive link between state and society, the undisguised deprivation of Marx’s proletariat reflected and symbolized the ‘alienation’ of social man from his communal nature.³⁷ Hegel’s use of the category ‘universal class’ was modified by Marx in other ways. Hegel had portrayed the bureaucracy as a class able to embody society’s common interests on a permanent basis. Marx, by contrast, suggested that only in a particular historical context—the context of epochal change, or revolution—would the ‘universal’ significance of a given class coincide with its particular, historically allotted role. The proletariat would assume this role only in the declining stages of capitalism, after the bourgeoisie had enjoyed its own period of ‘universality’ in the fight against absolutism. Marx set himself most clearly apart from Hegel, however, by substituting the concept of ‘radical needs’ embodied in the proletariat for that of the universal ‘interest’ represented, ephemerally, in the interests of other epoch-making classes. ‘Radical needs’ for Marx were essentially human needs; they were not, like ‘interests’, formed in the alienated conditions of political and social conflict. This was why Marx saw the working-class struggle as the harbinger of human, and not merely proletarian, emancipation. However naïve this idea looks today, Marx’s distinction between ‘radical’ human needs and particular group interests came to have an important and fruitful bearing on his analysis of nationalism.

1.3. THEORY OF HISTORY: CLASS, STATE, AND NATION

Marx’s commitment to communism can be dated to around 1844 when, in his Paris Manuscripts, he identified private property as the source of man’s ‘alienation’ from his social nature. Engels had become involved in communist circles at a somewhat earlier date. It was in their second collaborative work, The German Ideology (1845–6), that the two men first achieved the synthetic theory of society and social change that came to be known as ‘historical materialism’. This theory rested on the proposition that the growth of human productive powers is the fundamental process underlying historical change, and that political, legal, and certain cultural phenomena can be explained only by reference to the ‘relations of production’ prevailing in a society.³⁸ These relations are embodied mainly in social classes, which arise from the division of labour in any society where those who own and control the means of production regularly appropriate the labour of a propertyless, productive class. According to historical materialism, history is propelled by a series of transitions or ‘revolutions’ from one mode of production—in European history, these included the slave-based, agrarian–feudal, and industrial capitalist forms of economy—to another. Revolutions occur when outdated relations of production unnecessarily restrict the optimal development of a society’s productive powers. Only particular classes, whose epochal roles are defined by their position in the productive process, can break the stalemate. Marx and Engels recognized that members of several different classes stood at the vanguard of most social revolutions. But in periods when the collective frustrations of a particular class coincided with more widespread frustrations in society, the latter were expected to lead the struggle to replace the old order with a new set of more productive social relations.

This theory of history, informed in part by Marx and Engels’ observations of social and political developments outside their native Germany, suggested a distinctive way of conceiving the state: as an instrument of the dominant class within society. In the German Ideology the authors described the modern state as ‘nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeoisie are compelled to adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests’.³⁹ The ‘abstract’ form of the class-state, apparently cut adrift from any social moorings, was still described as the specifically modern product of the gulf separating man’s species nature from his monadic existence in civil society. But this rift itself was now explained, more fundamentally, as a product of the division of labour initiated in early pre-capitalist societies. The following passage from the German Ideology illustrates the way in which its authors began to integrate Marx’s earlier conception of the state as an entity divorced from civil society, and reflecting the divisions within it, with the new ‘materialist’ argument that the state may be used by a particular class to dominate others:

The division of labour … implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual … and the common interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another … Out of this very contradiction between the particular and the common interests, the common interest assumes an independent form as the state, which is divorced from the real individual and collective interests, and at the same time as an illusory community, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration—such as flesh and blood, language … and especially … on the classes, already implied by the division of labour … one of which dominates all the others.⁴⁰

The retention of Marx’s pre-class theory within this framework enabled the authors to acknowledge circumstances in which the state could acquire a degree of autonomy from the control of a single, monolithically conceived class. But they regarded the ‘supra-class’ state as a transitional phenomenon, arising only where both the ‘previously dominant’ and newly ascendant classes were too weak to monopolize state power.⁴¹ From the standpoint of epochal change, conflicts among rising and declining classes were expected to culminate in the conquest of political power by the former.

Throughout most of continental Europe, Marx and Engels still looked forward to bourgeois’ revolutions that would replace the last vestiges of feudalism and absolutism with an advanced capitalist society. But in describing the form of state ideally suited to bourgeois interests, Marx and Engels insisted that the ‘merely political’ freedoms bestowed by republican constitutions were not enough to transform class-divided societies into cohesive national communities.⁴² The formal separation of an egalitarian public realm from unequal economic relations was, they argued, made possible by the indirect character of capitalist ‘exploitation’: that is, the process through which surplus value⁴³ is extracted from the labouring class by those who own the means of production. In classical antiquity and feudalism, an amalgam of overt repression and ties of mutual obligation served to restrain threatening forms of class conflict over long periods. In the absence of such personal ties between wage-labourers and their capitalist employers, workers are legally free to take or leave employment; they are bound only by temporary contracts, which they may enter or leave as ‘free’ agents.⁴⁴ This apparent freedom, however, obscures the fact that economic necessity compels the worker to sell himself on the market on whatever term his employers may set. ‘Thus,’ wrote Marx and Engels, ‘in imagination, individuals seem freer under the domination of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental’ rather than imposed by human design. But ‘in reality, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces’.⁴⁵ Both market and state thereby maintain a formal neutrality between participating individuals; but the former produces class-based inequalities while the latter, by protecting the bourgeoisie’s right to exploit, secures that class’s dominance under a veil of political equality. On a longer view, however, Marx and Engels forecast an increasing polarization of dominant (bourgeois) and subordinate (proletarian) classes as the catalyst for the final, communist revolution. This teleological component of their theory of history allowed them to envisage future forms of association that did not depend on the structures provided, in their own time, by the institutions and frontiers of statehood. In their post-capitalist projections, the achievement of ‘true’ community was no longer equated simply with political self-determination in democratically governed states. It was now seen as a more radical function of the relations of production, and the abolition of classes was posited as its precondition.

There is no ambiguity in Marx and Engels’ assertion that classes are destined to disappear with the advent of communism. They left room for speculation as to what precisely they meant in asserting that the state, too, would disappear. But with the anticipated demise of the exploitative property relations that generate class conflicts, the two men clearly expected the institutions they associated with class-states to become redundant. The massive coercive apparatus, sprawling bureaucracies, and professionalization of politics that set such states apart from the wider community would be supplanted by more participatory mechanisms of government and administration. As the Communist Manifesto expressed it, ‘the public power will lose its political character’⁴⁶ under communism, since neither Marx nor Engels appears to have doubted that the society of associated producers would be free from the entrenched relations of dominance and subordination—endemic in class society—which they saw as the essence of the ‘political state’. It is far less clear, however, whether they regarded the disappearance of distinctive national communities as a corollary of the demise of classes and states.

This lacuna in their writings has invited attempts to extrapolate answers from their general theory. The simplest solutions are based on the assumption that Marx and Engels regarded states and stateless national communities as analogously ‘derivative’ of the division of labour in class society; and, therefore, that the extinction of class divisions anticipated in Marx’s abstract revolutionary scenario must entail the ‘withering away’ of all forms of national and ethnic diversity.⁴⁷ Another route to this inference is to locate the nation-state within Marx’s theory of capital accumulation, thereby singling out one element of the national community—unification of the internal market—as the definitive feature of nationhood. In this economic dimension the territorial and cultural ‘nation’ is largely a product of the state, which breaks down local customs barriers, laws, and governments, homogenizing broad areas of commercial and financial interaction. The conclusion that Marx and Engels expected nations to ‘wither’ along with states is deduced from the argument that, on their account, both state institutions and the cultural, territorial nation were created, as isomorphic phenomena, by commodity capital in a process initiated by the early mercantile bourgeoisie. The continuation of this process, in dissolving the economic self-sufficiency of separate states, would simultaneously dissolve all the different characteristics associated with nationality.⁴⁸

If it were the case that Marx and Engels understood national phenomena wholly or primarily in economic terms, they would appear to have ignored altogether the question of why the unification of markets, and conflicts over resources and economic power, frequently occur at the level of the nation. Having ‘reduced’ national diversity to the relatively superficial differences between ‘capitalist states’, they could then assume that the expansion of the world market—and, after that, the transition to communism—would drain national entities of any political, cultural, or psychological significance. If, on the other hand, Marx and Engels acknowledged that these non-economic dimensions of nationality may resist easy absorption into an expanding global society, their expectation that communism could eliminate intersocietal conflict would have to rest on one of two assumptions. They could assume that the non-state forms of diversity associated with various national cultures may persist under communism, yet not constitute a sufficient condition for the emergence of virulent national hostilities. Or they could assume that such diversity would be more or less thoroughly dissolved by the international spread of ‘large-scale industry’, and see this as an indispensable condition for human flourishing. Several passages in the German Ideology and the Manifesto refer to the erosion of ‘nationality’ by the world market; but there is no reference to the dissolution of ‘nations’. Here I attempt to clarify Marx and Engels’ use of these cognates, and find that they were not treated as synonyms.

Marx’s pre-communist use of the term ‘nationality’ is scarcely modified in the early collaborative works. ‘Nationalität’ was, in current conditions, mainly an attribute of existing states, not of ethnic communities or self-determining peoples. Marx and Engels adopted this conventional usage in order to underline the difference between ‘merely’ statist nationality and the ‘universal’, communitarian aspirations it professed to fulfil. Thus they declared that civil society ‘transcends the state [Staat] and nation [Nation], though’, they added, ‘it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality [Nationalität], and inwardly must organise itself as the state’.⁴⁹ In this context, the external dimensions of ‘nationality’ are distinguished from the internal organization of the ‘state’. Nationality appears as the negative self-assertion of one state-bound society against others, reflecting the failure of class-divided states to achieve a semblance of internal unity by any other means. This form of ‘nationality’ was, for Marx and Engels, an inadequate substitute for the more substantial bonds of community that were waiting to be forged in civil society, above and below the level of the state. It was in this sense that ‘nationality is already dead’⁵⁰ for the workers of industrialized countries, since according to Marx and Engels their various states, dominated by the bourgeoisie, could not hope to win the working class’s wholehearted patriotic allegiance. Excluded from the domestic social and political community, the proletariat would identify with the negative ‘nationality’ asserted by the dominant classes only in conditions of repression or extreme international crisis.

The same pejorative connotations recur in Marx and Engels’ use of the plural, ‘nationalities’. ‘The communist revolution’, they proclaimed, ‘is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities [Nationalitäłen], etc. within present society.’⁵¹ But it is plain that the authors are referring here not to an abstract identity ascribed by states to their populations, but to what Marx called ‘empirically existing’ categories of people: classes, nationalities, ‘etc.’. The categories in this series share a tendency to pit one group against another, suggesting that Marx and Engels saw both classes and ‘nationalities’ as groups defined negatively by their opposition to others, not by any intrinsic unifying characteristics. There is no clear textual basis, however, for concluding that the authors regarded all forms of national diversity as inherently alienating or conflictual. The assertion that communism represents the dissolution of nationalities within present society should be read as a call for the elimination, both within and between existing states, of the virulent forms of national self-assertion which stifle the cooperative impulses latent in civil society. Marx and Engels regarded the pacification of national or ‘ethnic’ conflicts within established states as a prerequisite for the wider internationalism they envisaged: an internationalism built from the ground up, as it were, on the nation-wide organization of workers within particular states. Further support for this reading can be found in their later writings, where they use the plural ‘nationalities’ almost exclusively to refer to groups which constituted a non-ruling minority in plurinational states, and whose reform-minded members were enjoined to cooperate with the revolutionary movements of dominant national groups.

If Marx and Engels now spoke of ‘nationality’ and ‘nationalities’ as phenomena linked to transient social conditions, Marx’s pre-materialist, democratic concept of the nation had not been expunged from his later vocabulary. In their efforts to distance themselves from the prevailing statist idiom, however, Marx and Engels advanced this concept through a different discourse than that deployed by Hegel and other defenders of nationality as seen ‘from above’. Throughout Marx’s writings, ‘nation’ is often used interchangeably with the terms ‘people’ or ‘peoples’ (Völker) without any of the ethnic connotations attached to these words by Herder, Fichte, and their followers. This resolutely pre-Romantic usage, together with Marx and Engels’ tendency to refer in the same breath to ‘states and nations’ as if there were no important difference between these entities, has done much to encourage the view that they saw the ‘nation’ as essentially a political construct serving economic and class purposes. On this view, Marx treated the distinguishing characteristics of nations as the product of state-building activities stimulated, above all, by economically motivated movements toward territorial and administrative centralization. Many contemporary readers have complained about Marx’s alleged failure to distinguish the pre-political, ethnic sources of nations from their economic and political embodiments. But the distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘political’ concepts of the nation simply does not capture the issues Marx and Engels were grappling with in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. Their main concern at this stage was not to deny the longevity of ethnic identities in the face of powerful centralizing movements within states, or the growth of economic interdependence between them. They saw pre-political forms of ethnicity, language community, and territorial attachments as unthreatening to their revolutionary project so long as these were not pressed into the service of aggrandizing, authoritarian states. What worried them, and what they wanted most urgently to discredit, were the ‘political’ claims of such states to represent what Hegel had called the ‘genuine nationality’ or patriotism of ‘the people’. They continued to use the terms Nation or Volk in ways which implicitly opposed statist pretensions, but without abandoning the older revolutionary ideal of internally self-determining ‘nations’ pursuing their own members’ purposes in close association with other like-minded communities.

Once again, close attention to context can help to forestall the usual kinds of misconstruction. Consider, for example, an oft-quoted passage from a letter written by Marx in 1846: ‘Is the whole internal organisation of nations [Völker], are all their international relations anything but the expression of a particular division of labour? And are they not bound to change when changes occur in the division of labour?’⁵² As the translation of this passage illustrates, it is tempting to read Völker as a synonym for the ‘nation’ in the statist sense—denoting the formal political identity ascribed to members of established states—since stateless nations are likely to lack both ‘internal organisation’ and the capacity to engage in conventional international relations. But this interpretation misses the critical point of Marx’s choice of words. By referring in this context to ‘peoples’ rather than ‘states’, Marx registered his dissent from the conservative presumption that the popular ‘nation’, working from below the institutions of the class-ridden state, could not develop quite different forms of ‘internal organisation’ and international relations than those which currently prevailed. Far from implying that nations or ‘peoples’ were merely the by-product of state formation, Marx’s usage suggests that members of these entities have the potential to redefine the internal and external purposes of the ‘political’ state by bringing about ‘changes in the division of labour’. In a speech delivered in 1847, Engels contrasted the destructive collusion between statist ‘nationality’ and class interests with the potentially fruitful fraternity of ‘nations’. ‘Only the proletarians’, he declared, ‘can destroy nationality, only the awakening proletariat can bring about fraternisation between the different nations [Nationen].’⁵³ In a similar vein, the Manifesto looks forward to the end of conflict and exploitation among different ‘nations’, not to the withering of those nations themselves: ‘In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.’⁵⁴

In other passages Marx and Engels explicitly differentiate states from nations, without assigning specific properties to these entities. Thus in the German Ideology they asserted that civil society ‘transcends the state and the nation’, while their journalism and speeches abound with references to stateless as well as state-embodied ‘nations’: the Irish and the English, the German and the Polish. It is significant that Marx and Engels rarely attached the rubric ‘nation’ to countries which lacked a vigorous reforming opposition to existing authoritarian or imperial rulers. While they often referred to the subjugated ‘Russian people’, for example, they usually reserved the term Nation to distinguish countries which contained important liberal, democratic, and anti-feudal movements—movements, that is, directed against the state—from the narrower ‘nationality’ based on an antagonism between society and its rulers. As the Manifesto declared, the ‘political power’ pervading class societies would yield to a non-exploitative ‘public power’ when ‘class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation’.⁵⁵

Although in the original German version this passage speaks of ‘associated individuals’ rather than an association of ‘the nation’,⁵⁶ Marx and Engels’ distinction between states and other groups arising within ‘society’ suggests that they recognized certain collective characteristics, with both origins and a residual existence distinct from the ‘political’ state and class society, that enable people to identify themselves with particular ‘nations’. We may recall their account of the rise of states, cited earlier in this section (p. 38), where they wrote that class-dominated states are ‘always based on the real bonds present in every family and tribal conglomeration, such as flesh and blood, language …’. These non-class antecedents of the state explain why class relations develop within one set of boundaries rather than another, and indicate that Marx and Engels did not treat ‘economic’ or state-centred explanations of the nation as exhaustive. ‘Nation’ also designated for them a collectivity with historical, proto-political roots, which were moulded into the basis of modern political units called nations by successive states and empires, but which nevertheless retained certain differentiating ‘bonds’ of language and ethnicity.

With these definitions in mind, we can now ask whether there are good grounds for assuming that Marx and Engels saw the thorough erosion of national differences as a necessary condition for the emergence of fully ‘human’ community. They did not explicitly recognize a non-conflictual dimension of national diversity, and their account of the conditions needed to defuse national tensions in communism is deplorably vague. But Marx and Engels never suggested, in their early or later writings, that the abolition of classes must be accompanied by the dissolution of those features of nations which are not genetically tied to class divisions. They certainly welcomed the tendency of capitalism to increase global interdependence in cultural and political as well as economic matters, but not because they regarded group differences based on language, race, or culture as intrinsically alienating. Nor, for that matter, did Marx and Engels believe that economic interdependence tended to pacify national conflicts of its own accord. They identified the basic source of those conflicts in class-based forms of oppression, and saw the abolition of classes as the key to moving from coercive interdependencies towards more voluntary forms of cooperation and exchange.

Marx and Engels were not especially worried, then, by the persistence in the modern world of ethnicity per se. They saw ethnic and cultural differences as a problem only when these were harnessed to the repressive, bellicose aims of class states. Within any given society, the authors of the Manifesto advocated the disappearance of exclusionary ‘class cultures’ which masked or sanctified the domineering activities of class-states; but they emphatically denied that this amounted to urging ‘the disappearance of all culture’.⁵⁷ The pejorative concept of ‘class cultures’ better captures the grounds on which Marx and Engels criticized prevailing forms of ‘nationality’ than a sweeping distinction between national and ‘human’ culture, or between ‘political’ and ethnic concepts of nationality. Class cultures and class-states were repudiated not because they were diverse, but because they upheld exploitative practices and social relations which prevented most people from fully enjoying the benefits of membership in their own national communities. Marx and Engels’ conception of nations was, to be sure, mainly a political one. But it bears repeating that there were two rival conceptions of political nationhood at the time they were writing, and in Germany—a country which had not experienced the political and social revolutions already effected in Britain, France, and the Netherlands—the radical democratic ideal stood in a much weaker position than its adversary. It was because the dominant German discourse still identified ‘nationality’ with the legitimate rule of pre-democratic, class-ridden states that Marx and Engels used this term in a pejorative sense, preferring to speak of the legitimate demands of the ‘nation’ or the ‘people’. But nothing in their writings suggests that the repressive features of class-states were, in their view, inextricably connected to the linguistic and cultural diversity associated with non-statist conceptions of the nation.

1.4. THEORY OF POLITICAL ACTION, OR WHY THE WORKERS HAVE NO VATERLAND

If Marx and Engels didn’t call for the thorough erosion of national differences, they did expect the cultural differences between national societies to be greatly diluted in the capitalist era. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 heralded—prematurely, as its authors later acknowledged—the tendency of world capitalism to render the nation-state increasingly moribund, allowing class identities to become as important a basis for international activity as the state itself. The universal spread of wage-labour and exchange relations would, Marx and Engels thought, give rise everywhere to similar class structures, while long-standing non-class attributes of communal culture such as language, kinship, ‘etc.’ would be transformed by their passage through successive modes of production. The expansion of the world market would produce increasing uniformity in the living conditions of all peoples affected by it, together with a degree of cultural homo-genization, and the ‘universal interdependence of nations’.⁵⁸ In cognitive terms, the diffusion of capitalist productive relations was supposed to heighten awareness of common class interests, transcending local particularisms within states, and eventually crossing ethnic and state frontiers as well. International class consciousness would develop first among the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie; but Marx and Engels also anticipated its spread among the working classes of different states and ethnic groups.

The Manifesto famously identifies the proletariat as the first class whose interests rise above the political as well as the economic constraints of ‘nationality’. Marx and Engels remarked that, although it was the bourgeoisie which spearheaded the growth of a global economy, the interests of that class remained rooted in particular states. Opining that ‘the proletarians of all nations … are already really beginning to fraternise under the banner of communist democracy’ in the mid-1840s, Engels went on:

And the proletarians are the only ones who are really able to do this; for the bourgeoisie in each country has its own special interests, and since these interests are the most important to it, it can never transcend nationality; and the few theoreticians achieve nothing with all their fine ‘principles’ because they simply allow these contradictory interests … to continue to exist and can do nothing but talk.⁵⁹

By working to break down the division between state and civil society within each country, the proletariat was supposed to challenge the assumption that an expanding global economy can continue to thrive within a system of jealously sovereign, competitive states. In international relations as in domestic social life, Marx and Engels saw the persistence of a separate political ‘sphere’ in capitalism as a fetter on the economic development needed to satisfy ‘universal’ wants.

These developments notwithstanding, the co-authors of the Manifesto stated unequivocally that no effective international action could be taken by the proletariat before they had brought the class struggle to a head at the national level. In the first instance, ‘the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies’.⁶⁰ They must first join ranks with the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the vestiges of feudalism, and against ‘the bourgeoisie of foreign countries’, before they can challenge their erstwhile capitalist allies. Marx and Engels viewed this preliminary struggle as an important educative process: only by fighting the bourgeoisie’s battles can the workers come to apprehend the gulf between their own interests and those they are used to defend. In this manner the supreme illusion of class politics, that of the state-bound national community or ‘nationality’, is exposed in all its contradictions. In form, therefore, ‘though not in substance’—since class struggle, for Marx and Engels, is really ubiquitous—that struggle is ‘at first a national struggle’ in which the proletariat of each country must ‘settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’.⁶¹

The Manifesto’s insistence on the international character of the proletariat has led many commentators to downgrade the importance of the national arena and national ‘consciousness’ in Marx and Engels’ strategic thinking. It is widely assumed that the authors of the Manifesto regarded working-class and national consciousness as mutually exclusive forms of identification, or that they dismissed all manifestations of national partiality on the part of workers as the effect of ‘false’ consciousness encouraged by their exploiters. On this view, the working class cannot appeal to the ideas of trans-class community expressed in the language of patriotism or nationalism without jeopardizing its own, essentially international, interests. All forms of national ideology are tied directly to the interests of a dominant class, and are therefore inimical to those of other classes: a proletarian discourse on the nation is at best an oxymoron, at worst a sellout to the class enemy.

The assumption that Marx and Engels explained all nationalism as a fiction of ruling-class ideology is fostered, in part, by a failure to distinguish their prescriptive, radical democratic concept of the nation from their empirical ‘class-instrument’ theory of the state. But the simple class-versus-nation thesis also reflects a tendency to reconstruct Marx and Engels’ views on national issues from their most abstract statements of theory, while overlooking the concrete strategies they recommended in specific political contexts. To clarify the role of national movements within those strategies, it may be useful to differentiate between the anticipatory or predictive statements found in Marx and Engels’ theory of history, and the prescriptive statements which, I suggest, are part of a distinctive political theory aimed at guiding strategic action and clarifying the goals of actors. The first, more familiar, set of statements identify long-term trends that are expected to modify current definitions of nationhood and to undercut prevailing forms of national conflict. These statements are grounded in a teleological understanding of history, and frequently reflect some form of economic determinism: the forces preparing the world for a conflict-free future stem not from wilful political deliberation, but from impersonal developments in the productive forces. The prescriptive arguments, on the other hand, imply that economic developments merely create the preconditions which both enable and make it desirable for certain actors to transcend ‘nationality’ in its statist, exclusive sense. From this perspective determinism takes a back seat to political activism, and Marx and Engels are found confronting hard questions about the strategic choices their allies had to make in order to turn economic or ‘world-historical’ trends to their best advantage.

The political dimension of their thinking is developed more fully in Marx and Engels’ writings on contemporary events than in theoretical and polemical works like the German Ideology or the Manifesto. But even here, beside the most apocalyptic revolutionary prognoses and their abstract class-instrument theory of the state, the authors allude to two complicating features of the political landscape which called for flexibility in the working class’s attitudes towards state and nation. First, politically active classes do not arise ready-made from rigid economic ‘structures’. Marx and Engels usually used the word ‘class’ to refer to any grouping whose members shared the same relation to the means of production. But they also maintained that the attributes of a fully-fledged class—consciousness of basic shared interests, and a capacity for collective action—can only develop through political activity and organization. The German Ideology pointed out that ‘the separate individuals form a class in so far as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; in other respects they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors’.⁶² At first, the fragments of a rising class typically form sub-political associations within particular trades and industries to defend their economic interests. But these diffuse concerns needed the unifying guidance of political parties, organized on a broad national scale, in order to capture state power from the currently dominant class. Since Marx and Engels regarded political dominance as a necessary means for any class to secure its social ascendancy, and saw existing state institutions as a key battleground in class struggles, they could also insist that working-class movements must be national ‘in form’—although the social ‘substance’ of such movements might represent a very different understanding of a nation’s collective interests, character, or external purposes.

Second, far from viewing proletarian definitions of the national ‘substance’ as a straightforward reflection of parochial, economic interests, Marx and Engels treat the content of national ideology as a matter open to considerable debate both within and among social classes. The need for such debate was created by the presence in any society, however polarized, of a wide variety of class, quasi-class, and sub-class groupings which could provide crucial support in struggles for political power. Throughout their careers, Marx and Engels addressed their strategic prescriptions to situations where the rising class—the French and German bourgeoisie in 1848, the proletariat in England and later on the Continent—could not hope to overthrow the ‘previously dominant’ class without the help of other classes and class-fractions. In attracting such allies, the leading revolutionary class had to represent its own interest as the common interest of society at large;⁶³ and one way of doing this was to expand definitions of the national community to include a wide range of social interests, while establishing those of one’s own class as the linchpin of all the rest. As we will see later on, the concept of trans-class alliances or coalitions is a central yet largely neglected feature of Marx and Engels’ writings on specific national movements. For both tactical reasons and in the interests of future democratic development, the proletariat could not afford to adopt a stubbornly unilateral position on the domestic or external purposes of the national community. It should, Marx and Engels suggested, clearly differentiate its interests from those of other classes while striving, at the same time, to ‘constitute itself the nation’⁶⁴ by building coalitions around a core set of ecumenical goals.

These distinctly political prerequisites of class struggle disallow any dogmatic opposition between working-class internationalism and the ‘nation’ conceived as a piece of ruling-class mythology. The concept of the nation as an organic association of diverse social classes bound together in blissful political community was, for Marx and Engels, patently a fiction masking class conflicts. But a broader democratic ideal of the nation, which exhorted workers and their allies to strive towards a non-exploitative, self-governing society, retained a central place in Marx and Engels’ strategic thinking and in their normative political theory. National ‘ideology’ appears in this context not as a fixed or monolithic mechanism of a single class’s ascendancy, but as a key doctrinal arena in struggles for political power. Marx and Engels repeatedly upbraided those ‘utopian’ socialists who would ‘make us believe that the struggle over the form of state is meaningless, illusory and futile’ for subaltern classes.⁶⁵ The proletariat’s task was to infuse the protean concept of the nation with a radical content shorn of strong statist associations, not to oppose it with a disembodied internationalism.

How, then, should we understand the much-vetted declaration that ‘the working men have no country’? Let us relocate this sentence in its original context.

[a] The Communists are … reproached with desiring to abolish countries [das Vaterland] and nationality [die Nationalität]. The working men have no country [Vaterland]. We cannot take from them what they have not got.

[b] Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.⁶⁶

Taken by itself in English translation, passage (a) may lend itself to the following familiar interpretation:

1.The polarization of classes, and the resulting immiseration of the proletariat, prevent the latter from absorbing any national culture or from developing material or psychological attachments to their ‘country’. Therefore the proletariat is essentially an international class with no stake in the interests of the states which divide it up, since those interests are exclusively bourgeois.

But if passage (b) is read together with passage (a), this interpretation looks too strong; it leaves no room for explaining how the proletariat could be expected to develop the motivation needed to act collectively, as enjoined by passage (b), at the national level. In conceiving the proletariat as a strictly international class, I implies that Marx and Engels ignored the question of how the cosmopolitan processes of consciousness-formation could elicit effective political action when nation-states remain the loci within which class relations and their political aims are formed. Passage (b), however, indicates that the authors were aware that the mechanisms which create class consciousness operate initially at the national level: the concentration of workers in factories, the struggle for better working conditions, and the increasing frequency of direct political repression by class-dominated states are mentioned in the Manifesto.

The second passage, moreover, invokes the ‘nation’ in an unambiguously positive sense as the initial political basis for revolutionary organization and legitimation. Most Anglophone readers are not aware that the Manifesto disavows Vaterlands, not territorial or culture-promoting ‘countries’ or ‘nations’. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, the polemical device of denying that workers (and other categories of reasonable people) have or need Vaterlands was borrowed from an older convention established in the writings of French and German Enlightenment authors, and based on the rejection of social and political inequities as well as on cosmopolitan ideals. By the time Marx and Engels were writing, the word Vaterland had already acquired highly charged political connotations quite different from those of the now neutral-sounding English ‘country’: the language of Vaterland was often and eloquently used by both defenders of the traditional state⁶⁷ and the Romantic prophets of ethnic nationality. The combined strength of these Vaterland-touting forces, both of which posed daunting obstacles to democratic ambitions, helps to explain why Marx and Engels turned their backs so abruptly on the rhetoric of das Vaterland. Whereas triumphant French revolutionaries in 1789 could rally gleefully to their new republican patrie, German democrats and revolutionaries in 1848 could not yet afford the luxury of undiscriminating patriotism. But Marx and Engels’ crucial evaluative distinction was not between national and ‘international’ classes. It was rather between conservative class-statist forms of ‘nationality’, on the one hand, and national movements aimed at far-reaching social transformation on the other.

A different reading of passages (a) and (b) therefore suggests itself as follows.

(a)The workers have no exclusive allegiance to the nation-state, and no stake in the survival of institutions and cultural practices which help to sustain class dominance over them. They therefore lack nationality in the ‘bourgeois sense of the word’, which holds that the interests protected by existing states are identical to those of society as a whole, and prior to the sub- and transnational interests of classes.

(b)By expanding and strengthening their political organizations, workers can start to differentiate the ‘national interest’ of the dominant class from their own class interests, which require both domestic alliances within the wider national society and transnational alliances with opposition movements abroad.

This interpretation leaves room for a more plausible account of the pressures which Marx and Engels expected to galvanize workers into collective international action than reading I, where the implication was that the impetus to such action would have to come from vague appeals to a largely intangible, ‘universal’ class interest. Marx and Engels stressed that the proletariat did have a material and, initially, a political stake in its own national society, if not in the state itself. The proletariat had a dual loyalty to fellow workers at home and to the workers of other countries, but its first duty was to conduct the national class struggle. In the Manifesto and elsewhere, the authors took pains to refute what they branded as ‘idealist’ beliefs that the proletariat was a strictly international class, capable of setting up a new order without any regard for existing political arrangements and national attachments. In a speech delivered at a London gathering in December 1847, shortly before the Manifesto was issued, Marx reminded British delegates of their priorities in this matter. ‘You Chartists’, he insisted, ‘should not express pious wishes for the liberation of nations. Defeat your own enemies at home and then you may be proudly conscious of having defeated the old social order in its entirety.’⁶⁸

These arguments indicate that while Marx and Engels saw class as the principal basis of collective action at both national and international levels, they did not belittle the role of nationality in shaping the parameters of class-based movements. This in no way represented an admission to the limitations of class theory. Since Marx and Engels regarded the nation-state as one of the main strongholds of class power, they could also view its role in restraining or promoting revolutionary transitions as part and parcel of the broader class struggle. The novelty of their position lay in Marx and Engels’ insistence that the collective interests and ideals associated with the nation cannot be explained in relation to an independent field of political power; rather, they derive from social divisions which yield conflicting definitions of the national community in its political, cultural, and international aspects. The Manifesto suggests that the concepts of nationhood appropriate to working-class interests must shed the exclusive and self-assertive characteristics of ‘bourgeois nationality’: the political and even cultural preconditions for developing a robust national community are, Marx and Engels argued, increasingly found in the wider global arena.

This position implied that the merits of particular national communities can—and should—be measured against global standards of development and social well-being. Modern nationalist movements, however, have frequently displayed a profound ambivalence toward such standards, claiming that they offend the distinctive identities of groups which lack the power to dictate international terms of ‘interdependence’. How adequate was Marx and Engels’ account of the historical conditions that tended to restrain national conflicts, and how well did they understand nationalist concerns to defend and develop particular ‘ethnic’ identities? The following chapter addresses these questions.

2

Identities in Conflict

THE last chapter suggested that when Marx and Engels’ abstract prognoses are reconsidered in the light of their prescriptive theory of political action, their arguments concerning the feasibility of transnational class cooperation cannot easily be dismissed as economistic or utopian wishful thinking. But we still need to ask whether they gave sufficient weight to circumstances which tended, in their lifetimes and after, to work against internationalist ambitions. There are good reasons for suspecting that the obstacles to durable cooperation may be rooted in more persistent conditions of human life than exploitative class relations or particular forms of state. Commentators have highlighted two sets of ideas which, they allege, disabled Marx and Engels from developing the resources needed to explain why human beings have always identified with one another not only as individuals sharing certain material interests or existential needs, but also as members of discrete political and cultural communities.

In singling out ‘productive’ activity as the driving force of social change, first of all, the materialist theory of history appears to underestimate the historical significance of conflicts between communal identities. According to some critics, Marx and Engels’ account of the processes creating ‘universal’ interdependence is too one-dimensional to support their expectations of imminent global community. It focuses on a generically human interest in producing the means of technological control over an inclement, hostile nature, while neglecting an equally fundamental interest in self-definition through particular communities.¹ Few contemporary readers would dispute Marx and Engels’ claim that, with the spread of industrial capitalism, the ‘local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency’ of distinct polities and cultural communities has been irreversibly replaced with the ‘universal interdependence of nations’.² But the Manifesto has little to say about the ambivalent political and psychological responses to this process that have been registered, most conspicuously, in modern nationalist and ethnic movements; and it offers no recognition that such movements might involve the legitimate resistance of communities threatened by a hegemonic ‘world market’, and by the cultures which purvey it.³

A deeper source of these oversights has been located in the ‘philosophical anthropology’ sketched in Marx’s early writings. Criticizing the alienated relationships that prevailed under capitalism, Marx projected a communist future in which individuals would be free to choose their means of creative and social self-expression without bowing to arbitrary external constraints, including those imposed by exclusive communal attachments. Marx’s critics object that this vision perpetrates an implausibly radical view of personal autonomy, since the relations between individuals are always mediated by ascribed social roles or particularistic identities. Against Marx’s sanguine view of the prospects for universal ‘species’ association our perennial everyday experience seems to suggest that particularity is an indispensable condition of all human relationship, since ‘there is no way of being human which is not a way of being human’.⁴ Even some of Marx’s most sympathetic readers have been prepared to confront the prospect that communism ‘cannot abolish anthropological alienation’, although it may end social alienation.⁵

Both of these interpretations rightly stress the point that, for Marx and Engels, the expansion of human freedom crucially depends on increasing access to goods, options, and social roles that may not be available at a local level. The cooperative interchange of cultures and resources—ultimately on a global scale—was thus a central desideratum of Marx and Engels’ theory. But this position is too often confused with the view that universalism is objectively a good thing, however its effects are perceived by those drawn out of their ‘former local and national seclusion’ by the spread of capitalism. Taking this view, many readers have concluded that Marx and Engels’ critique of transient or unnecessarily restrictive particularisms implies a blanket hostility towards all forms of particularity. Such a reading tends to exaggerate the economistic and utopian aspects of Marx and Engels’ critique of particularism, while obscuring what is most distinctive in that critique: namely, its account of the ways in which human beings have modified the natural and social constraints that shaped their identities in different periods of history, and its analysis of the specific power relationships that restrict efforts to recreate those identities under capitalism. The first of these arguments tempers the economic determinist dimensions of ‘historical materialism’ with its emphasis on the creative choices that produce social change. The second qualifies the strong utopian reading of Marx’s philosophical anthropology by underlining current obstacles to the formation of non-confrontational relationships, and by assigning a key role to political activity in overcoming those obstacles.

This chapter tries to salvage these elements of Marx and Engels’ theory from the critical commentary, while asking how they might contribute to our understanding of national identity and conflict. Starting with the theory of history, Section 2.1 denies that Marx and Engels’ view of historical progress can be captured by a simple evaluative opposition between universalism and particularity. It contrasts Marx’s critique of the ‘natural’ constraints that generated conflict among pre-class communities with his and Engels’ analysis of the more complex, social constraints that shape group identities in later epochs. Section 2.2 clarifies the normative theory behind this analysis, drawing on Marx’s early writings on alienation and his vision of a communist future. A final section shows how Marx and Engels used the ideas developed in both their historical and normative theories to explain and evaluate the growing influence of ethnocentric nationalist doctrine in their native Germany. In the German Ideology, where the authors were beginning to elucidate the relationship between ‘historical materialism’ and Marx’s earlier philosophical critiques, we find Marx and Engels directly applying the theory of alienation to differentiate between robust and impoverishing forms of national identity. The arguments behind this distinction, I suggest, constitute the main theoretical background to Marx and Engels’ writings on other nationalist movements.

2.1. NATURAL AND SOCIAL SOURCES OF WARFARE

The materialist theory of history contends that human productive activity is elicited by the need to struggle against an inclement and parsimonious nature. The motor of historical development is supplied, at first, by human efforts to transcend the limitations of their natural environment. These efforts, in turn, result in the formation of relationships, norms, and institutions which come to constitute a distinct category of social constraints on human freedom.

In his writings on primitive, pre-class societies, Marx explicitly contrasted the ‘natural’ roots of communal identities based on language, kinship, and ‘community character’ with the class basis of societies produced by the division of labour. Expounding on this theme in his Grundrisse, Marx emphasized that the distinctive attributes of ‘natural’ communities cannot be explained by the functions they serve in the productive process.⁶ On the contrary, ‘the clan community, the natural community, appears not as a result of, but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilisation of the land’ in early nomadic economies; and ‘this naturally arisen clan community … is the first presupposition—the communality of blood, language, customs—for the appropriation of the objective conditions of their life’.⁷ These primordial foundations of early communities are seen, then, as having origins independent of particular relations of production. Marx implies that productive activity in prehistory is fundamentally conditioned by ‘the communality of blood, language, customs’. He did not treat these characteristics, in their archaic form, as objects of ‘materialist’ explanation.

Marx’s reference to certain ‘natural’ attributes that may serve as focuses for communal identity does not indicate a hiatus in his theory of history; nor should it call into question that theory’s explanatory sufficiency. Marx regarded historical materialism as essentially a theory of social change. The motor of that change was the development of productive forces, induced and diversified by the division of labour. In this respect the ‘natural’ communities described in the Grundrisse fall outside the scope of Marx’s general theory; for Marx they were pre-historical, in so far as they had not yet experienced the division of labour into labouring and appropriating classes. ‘It is not’, Marx wrote, ‘the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their material exchange with nature … which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence. …’⁸

By explaining the ‘separation’ of natural and social conditions of life as the result of human ‘productive’ activity, Marx sought to make the point that the relationship between those two sets of conditions is subject to continuous modification. Beyond the most primitive stages of human evolution, Marx did not accept that there are certain ‘natural’ bases for group identity which perennially take precedence over others. His theory suggests that if we want to understand why some forms of identity become historically significant, it will not do to isolate certain primordial elements of group identification from the context of natural and social constraints in which they are asserted, and to assume that they operate in the same ways in different epochs. This point is overlooked by theories which assume that certain social institutions or cultural characteristics impose an immutable set of constraints on associative possibilities. One of the chief explanatory advantages Marx claimed for historical materialism over such theories was that it placed social relations in historical perspective, thereby dispelling misconceptions about their permanence or intrinsic value. But Marx did not regard early communal communities as sufficiently complex to generate this kind of misconception among their members. Social and natural constraints have not yet become confused with one another in preclass societies; the latter are not, therefore, appropriate objects of ‘materialist’ enquiry. In Capital Marx pointed out that in early communal societies, ‘precisely because relations of personal dependence form the given social foundation, there is no need for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality’,⁹ and hence no need for materialist demystification. In a sense, then, historical materialism itself has a limited history. Its critical perspective becomes necessary only with the emergence of class society, and is expected to become redundant with the emergence of communism.¹⁰

If Marx did not explain differences in the language, customs, and kinship structures of early communal societies as simply functional to the material relations of production, how did he deal with intercommunal conflicts? The Communist Manifesto implies that national ‘antagonisms’, if not all the attributes defining nationality, are the product of class conflicts and will disappear with the abolition of class society. Yet in his Anti-Dühring Engels declares that ‘war is as old as the simultaneous existence alongside each other of several groups of communities’;¹¹ while Marx, in the Grundrisse, describes war in pre-class conditions as ‘the great comprehensive task, the great communal labour which is required either to occupy the objective conditions of being alive, or to protect and perpetuate the occupation’.¹² The first statement seems to imply that it is the mere existence of communal plurality that causes conflict, notwithstanding the non-class character of the productive relations subsisting in these primitive societies. The second statement, Marx’s, can be interpreted as suggesting that the territorial base of any community may acquire an economic and political importance such that the simple fact of human settlement, apart again from any class motivations, may constitute a permanent source of dissension among territorially distinct communities.

Expanding on these interpretations, some commentators have concluded that Marx and Engels acknowledged the essentially trans-historical role of two factors—plurality and territoriality—in rendering human society chronically prone to warfare, but that they failed to incorporate these factors into their theory of history, thereby jeopardizing that theory’s putative claims to explanatory sufficiency.¹³ A stronger criticism suggests that Marx and Engels could not consistently admit these factors into their theory of history, since such an admission would subvert their alleged presumption that individuals, in their essential capacity as producers, can potentially relate to ‘humanity’ as a whole without mediation by particular communities.¹⁴ Can Marx and Engels’ statements about intercommunal conflict be made consistent with their proposition that intense national conflicts are coeval with class society, and eliminable under communism?

The key to this problem lies in the fundamental differences between primitive communal society and ‘full’ communism as Marx and Engels conceived these epochs. Marx saw the conflict-engendering character of territoriality and communal plurality in ‘natural’ communities as the effect of three interrelated factors prevailing in those communities, but largely eliminated in the capitalist era: (1) conditions of scarcity, (2) technological and organizational limitations within the productive process, and (3) a consequent insecurity concerning the ability of societies to reproduce their basic material conditions of existence. The collective aspirations of ‘naturally arisen’ communities, and the needs and desires of their members, are on the whole rather modest. ‘The aim of all these communities’, Marx wrote, ‘is survival: i.e. reproduction of the individuals who compose it as proprietors … in the same objective mode of existence as forms the relation among the members and at the same time therefore the commune itself.’¹⁵ The members of such communities are not yet motivated by the need to extract surplus value from the labour of others, or to sustain a diversified economy engaging a large population in organized productive activity. In economies based on primitive methods of accumulation—in which, that is, the known methods of cultivation may yield barely enough to sustain all a community’s members—the very possession of land acquires paramount importance for the commune. So long as the productive forces remain rudimentary, Marx observed,

The only barrier which the community can encounter in relating to the natural conditions of production—the earth—as its own property … is another community, which already claims it as its own inorganic body. Warfare is therefore one of the earliest occupations of each of these naturally arisen communities, both for the defence of their property and for obtaining new property.¹⁶

The impetus to obtain new property arises, according to Marx, from new conditions generated in the process of social reproduction. The original purpose of productive activity was simply to ensure the survival of the community at the standard of living to which it had grown accustomed. But if, to give one of Marx’s own examples, one of the conditions for survival in this manner was that ‘each of the individuals is supposed to possess a given number of acres of land’, then ‘the advance of population’ might compel the community to initiate a process of colonization; ‘and that in turn’, wrote Marx, ‘requires wars of conquest’.¹⁷ These developments in prehistory took place, as Marx observed, like a natural growth. Conditions of scarcity, and human ignorance as to how those conditions might be overcome by means other than conquest and plunder, raise the value of a community’s territorial possessions in relation to the value of cooperative association with neighbouring groups.

It would be reasonable to expect conflicts over territory and other scarce resources to reinforce divisions between separate communities, encouraging rival groups to cite differences in ancestry, customs, or language as factors contributing to their mutual hostility. Marx recognized that recurrent conflict tends to heighten awareness of communal differences, and that this helps to explain the formation of boundaries between groups in all periods of history. He was not content, however, to treat intercommunal diversity as a sufficient cause of conflict between ‘natural’ communities. The roots of such conflict were located not in territoriality or communal plurality as such, but in the special significance attached to communal property by ‘naturally’ diversified groups whose ability to control their natural—and thus also their social—environment remains undeveloped. Marx envisaged communism, by contrast, as an era of universal abundance produced and reproduced by advanced technological forces of production, and distributed in such a way as to minimize disparities in the material well-being of individuals and the regions they inhabit. In such circumstances, he suggested, neither the impulse to conquer nor the prejudices and antipathies engendered by conquest would regularly be activated. Marx maintained that conflicts between separate communities may be endemic where the ability of human beings to command the resources needed to satisfy their wants and perpetuate their social existence remains imperfectly developed, or where that ability is frustrated by the presence of social and institutional constraints that simulate the restrictive effects of natural necessity. It was the impermanence of these conditions which allowed Marx to acknowledge their presence as a recurrent dimension of intersocietal conflict while, at the same time, arguing that such conflict would be virtually absent under communism.

The overcoming of the natural conditions which fuelled conflict among primordial communities was, for Marx, of ancillary importance in societies that had experienced a class-based division of labour. In capitalism, an epoch in which the productive forces were highly developed, the scarcity inflicted on particular classes, regions, or communities was viewed principally as an effect of class exploitation. Marx, of course, regarded exploitation as the dominant form of social constraint which frustrates human strivings for free self-development. Exploitation simulates the natural constraints that activated intersocietal conflict in primitive societies, creating new impulses to conquer and dominate other groups. These impulses may appear as the expression of an incorrigibly conflict-prone human nature, while encouraging exploited groups to attach a high value to the characteristics which distinguish them from their exploiters. But Marx suggested that such antagonisms should be seen as the contingent and ultimately tractable response to forms of scarcity and insecurity which are, in capitalism, sustained artificially.

This view did not necessarily imply that material abundance on a global scale could suffice to resolve all social and intersocietal conflicts. It is certainly true that Marx saw abundance and its precondition, global interdependence in production and exchange, as factors which tended to pacify antagonistic impulses. This expectation was based partly on the reasoning that, as one author has put it, ‘abundance ensures that people can opt out of non-reciprocal relations, relations in which one party is treated instrumentally, without fear of losing their means of livelihood’.¹⁸ But if the potential for conflict is reduced when actors have the material capacity to ‘opt out’ of non-reciprocal relationships, sustained cooperation depends on a positive commitment to the norms and practices of reciprocity. Marx treated global material abundance as a base-line but insufficient condition for the emergence of such a commitment. He recognized that barriers to intersocietal cooperation arise not merely from scarcity, but also from certain forms of political and cultural particularism which do not always or readily succumb to the pressures of ‘globalization’.¹⁹ This was why, in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, Marx devoted a great deal of energy to analysing the circumstances which led people to modify their social dispositions and identities in different historical epochs.

In ‘natural’ society human beings exhibit ‘herd-consciousness’ only since, as Marx wrote in Capital, ‘each individual has as little torn himself free from the umbilical cord of his tribe or community as a bee has from his hive’.²⁰ Only through a ‘long and tormented historical development’,²¹ initiated by the first division of labour, can groups and individuals break down the material, geographical, and cognitive barriers restricting their potential for new and wider forms of self-determination. Marx valued this process because it involved human beings in the creation and recreation of their own conditions of association. In capitalism men remain subject to their own social creations: private property, exclusive political and communal attachments, and the impersonal constraints of an expanding world market appear to them as quasi-natural institutions, while the conflicts arising from them look inevitable. But Marx contemplated this state of affairs with dialectical optimism, since ‘the formation of the world market already … contains the conditions for going beyond it … And certainly,’ he added, ‘this … connection is preferable to … a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, ‘natural’ relations, wherein the human subject would be unable to develop ‘the universality and comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities’.²²

On Marx’s account, language, blood-ties, and customs do not serve as principles for self-conscious identification in primitive communities; nor do these characteristics have the same social significance or exclusionary properties in all historical periods. In several passages in the Grundrisse Marx intimated some of the ways in which the ‘natural’ bases of collective identity are modified through the transition to more complex units of social organization. He mentioned the erosion of older kinship bonds and ethnic homogeneity by the migrations and conquests of successive epochs, and underscored the protean character of religious beliefs, group loyalties, and even language in the adaptation to more complex societies.²³ Marx did not systematically trace the forms assumed by these phenomena under various types of class society. He did, however, sketch certain broad, transepochal patterns that occur in the shift away from primordial ‘herd-consciousness’ toward new forms of identity shaped by socially complex, heterogeneous polities. Charting the general trend followed by the ‘natural’ characteristics which distinguished one archaic community from another, Marx observed:

The less it is the case that the individual’s property can in fact be realised solely by communal labour … the more … the clan removes itself from its original seat and occupies alien ground, hence enters into essentially new conditions of labour, and develops the energy of the individual more—its common character appearing, necessarily, more as a negative unity towards the outside … ²⁴

Marx did not, however, suggest that the progressive attenuation of natural attachments meant that language, tradition, and ethnicity cease to have an important influence on the formation of separate political systems and cultural identities. He noted that ‘the abstraction of a community, in which the members have nothing in common but language, etc., and barely that much, is obviously the product of much later historical conditions’ than those which precipitated the erosion of communal society.²⁵ ‘Language, etc.’ is tantalizingly vague;²⁶ but we may infer that Marx meant the ‘etc.’ to include other cultural characteristics of ‘natural’ origin, albeit transformed by the social relations and state-building activities of successive epochs. This passage illustrates Marx’s concern to underline the extent to which evolving social structures and institutions, rather than primordial ethnic characteristics, become the main factors defining the relations among increasingly ‘advanced’ collectivities. But it also shows that he did not see class-based structures as the only factors shaping the nation-states and stateless nations of the capitalist era. Marx undoubtedly regarded class divisions as both the basic lines of social cleavage and the main focuses for collective action under advanced productive systems. Yet he did not deny to ‘language, etc.’ a role in explaining why people frequently express aspirations for material well-being and self-determination in terms of nationality or ethnicity as well as class.

According to Marx, the struggle against the social constraints inflicted by capitalism is still motivated by the quest for physical security and material well-being. But beyond the most primitive stages of human development, this quest loses the merely instrumental rationale it possessed in man’s confrontations with nature; it is also motivated by the desire to satisfy a basic human urge towards personal and collective self-development, which gives rise to demands for freedom from all forms of arbitrary control. Marx’s critique of primitive communities rested on the notion that ‘natural’ beings have yet to develop the faculties which allow them, under communism, to become fully self-determining. In Marx’s theory of history, self-determination entails the development of individual and particular self-consciousness and, simultaneously, the unfolding of ‘universal’ social relationships on which the free exercise of individual capacities depends. The evolution of personal and collective identities was, for Marx, as telling an index of human advancement toward self-determination as material prosperity. As the next two sections will further illustrate, however, he measured that advancement not according to an abstract preference for wider rather than narrower identities, but by asking whether the collective identities of individuals were formed freely and reflectively or under duress.

2.2. COMMUNITY, FREEDOM, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

Marx’s conception of man as an essentially creative, productive being invites comparison with alternative conceptions of the basic human qualities—if indeed there are such qualities—that influence the way in which human beings relate to one another throughout their history. In the last section I argued against the view that Marx conflated the natural and social sources of intersocietal conflict in his theory of history, assuming that both could be removed through the same processes of technological and economic development. But the reader might still question Marx’s belief that the main social constraints on human cooperative possibilities are inessential to the well-being of individuals and groups, and that they can be dismantled without wreaking untold social and psychological havoc. One possible criticism of Marx’s anthropology is that it is too dynamic and rationalistic: it defines the human subject’s ‘essence’ in relation to transient and negative constraints on its flourishing, while neglecting what may be a more persistent set of intersubjective limits on a broader ‘human’ association.

The Hegelian anthropology rejected by Marx in his youth placed a stronger emphasis on such constraints. Hegel preceded Marx in stressing the individual’s capacity to rise above consciousness of his particularity and to grasp his shared, ‘universal’ essence. But Hegel argued that this developed form of consciousness was not directly accessible to the individual. It could be grasped only by way of membership in a community, through a collective selfhood attainable only when distinct ‘others’ were present: I recognize who I am in beholding what I am not. For Hegel the individual’s potential for cooperative association depended, in the first instance, upon this process of reciprocal differentiation, a dialectic of subject and object which found its analogue at the level of intersocietal relations. ‘The state’, he wrote in the Philosophy of Right, ‘is an individual, unique and exclusive, and therefore related to others.’²⁷

Hegel’s insights into the essentially reciprocal processes of identity formation appear more deferential than Marx’s conception of man to the familiar fallibilities of social existence. The world may in fact be too big, and the individual subject’s consciousness too narrow, for an unmediated species association of the kind that Marx seems to have envisaged to be seriously imaginable.²⁸ This objection suggests that Marx may have gone too far in rejecting Hegel’s argument that individuals have a basic need to be defined by something outside themselves, something they have neither chosen nor created; and that only such a need can explain why individuals so tenaciously defend their national identities, even at the expense of their own freedom or material welfare. G. A. Cohen has stated the problem in this way: Marx, he suggests, ‘failed to do justice to the self’s irreducible interest in a definition of itself, and to the social manifestations of that interest … I do not mean its need to define itself, but its need to be defined, whatever may, or must, do the defining’. As his chief example of possible defining agents Cohen mentions ‘shared culture based on nationality, race, or religion, or some slice or amalgam thereof’.²⁹

The proposition that individuals ‘need’ to have group identities conferred on them may itself be too one-sided, too insensitive to historical variations on needs and identities, to provide a sure foundation for evaluating Marx’s anthropology. It does, nevertheless, provoke an enquiry into the forms of social identity he saw as compatible with fully ‘human’ flourishing. I suggested in Chapter 1 that it may be wrong to understand Marx’s vision of ‘universal’ humanity as one which entailed the withering of all group diversity, together with the withering of states, classes, and inherently conflictual features of nationality. I have also pointed out that, in his theory of history, Marx treated personal and collective individuation as a necessary process leading to the full development of human sociability. Marx diverged significantly from Hegel’s position on two more specific issues. He differed, first, in his projection of the historical time-span in which reciprocal differentiation among political or cultural communities appears as a necessary condition for their internal cohesion. Hegel seems to have maintained that ‘unique and exclusive’ social, cultural, and political identities are a permanent condition of all human relationship, not least at the global level, where nation-states represent the optimal embodiment of ‘universality’.³⁰ Marx, by contrast, viewed the historical dialectic between self and other as a process through which individuals come to apprehend the vast range of their social possibilities, enabling them to appreciate what they have in common with ‘others’ while clarifying the boundaries between their personal and collective identities. Marx differed from Hegel, second, on the question of whether people should or must have their collective identities determined for them by tradition or birth, or whether they can, in any meaningful sense, become self-determining in this respect. Let us take Marx on his own terms and see how he might have responded to the objections raised against his position.

It is not at all clear that Marx saw an amorphous, ‘human’ identity as the only authentic focus for individual and communal flourishing. As the following passage from his 1844 Manuscripts suggests, he also recognized that more limited forms of association may occur at the narrower level of occupational, creative, and other activities:

Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although communal activity and communal enjoyment—i.e. activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other men—will occur whenever such a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment.³¹

Marx’s conception of the ‘universal’ freedoms realized in communism thus implies the rejection of certain forms of particularism, not of particularity as such. Communist man’s social nature would, he believed, continue to be mediated by direct, particular forms of activity within smaller-scale cooperative associations. The identities constituted by these kinds of ‘communal activity’, however, would differ from strong national attachments in several crucial respects.

They would not, first of all, be mutually exclusive attachments; nor would a person’s commitment to one particular association command his overarching allegiance, or absorb all his energies. Marx envisaged a network of multiple and overlapping collective identities converging on, and contributing to, the individual’s broader ‘human’ consciousness. He expected such identities to emerge as a consequence of the radical restructuring of social needs under communism, a process which he assumed would go hand in hand with changes in the human psyche. Among these changes, he anticipated a reversal of the modern individual’s tendency to conceive of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as antinomies in all fields of life. The supreme Hegelian fallacy, according to Marx, was to posit an ontological distinction between society and the individual. ‘Above all’, he wrote,

we must avoid postulating ‘society’ again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being … Man’s individual and species life are not different, however much-and this is inevitable-the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life … Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality … ³²

Here Marx was not simply collapsing individual and society together. What he offered was a complex image of a broad human identity based, however, on the maximal individuation of each person partaking of this identity. He did not directly oppose this conception to Hegel’s idea that man’s potential for sociability culminates in the reciprocal differentiation of one nation-state against another. But he did imply that there was no dialectical or logical reason why the individual’s capacity to identify with increasingly large, heterogeneous groups should be expected to stop at the level of the nation or state.³³

This position did not entail a rejection of all forms of group diversity on any scale below that of a world society. I have suggested that Marx did not deny the transepochal tenacity of certain demographic and cultural characteristics associated with nationality, and that his argument concerning the ‘withering’ of the state could have been, but was not, employed with reference to such features. His argument simply questioned the assumption that collectivities based on historical, cultural, or territorial distinctions require a hostile ‘other’ to sustain their own integrity. If individuals are able to identify with these groups because they support their deepest values and contribute to their well-being, there should be no need to maintain a ‘negative unity towards the outside’, or to restrict individual affiliations with wider and narrower groups which also promote their values and well-being. This multilateral conception of ‘human’ identity, rather than an abstract universalism, formed the normative underpinnings of Marx and Engels’ internationalist doctrines. The authors of the Manifesto certainly denied that the well-being of individuals, groups, or localities could, in the interdependent world forged by the spread of capitalism, be secured without strong transnational and transcultural commitments. This empirical position implied a prescriptive claim about the need to reassess, relax, or otherwise modify exclusive national and local attachments in the light of new needs born of interdependence. But nothing in Marx and Engels’ critique of ‘negative’ or constricting identities precludes the survival of non-exclusive national or local attachments, or denies a significant role to smaller-scale groupings in addressing the material and cultural needs of individuals.

This brings us to a second difference between Marx’s ideal of ‘truly human’ community and that embodied in some varieties of modern nationalism. For Marx, the only communities worthy of the name were those that fulfilled a substantive end-purpose. This was the import of his carefully qualified statement, quoted above, that ‘direct association’ can occur only when it ‘stems from the true character of the activity’s content’. As an example of the kind of end-based association which might serve as a model for future cooperatives, Marx pointed to the meetings of communist workers of his own day. These gatherings, of course, were originally called into existence by the reciprocal opposition of capitalist employers against wage-labourers. ‘But at the same time’, Marx observed, ‘as a result of this association, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means now becomes an end.’³⁴

This passage indicates that Marx recognized the potential of groups not initially formed for the purpose of satisfying positive, non-alienated needs for society and self-expression to acquire such purposes. There is no reason to believe that this development could not occur within the historical, cultural, and territorial communities which currently define themselves as nations, as well as in class-based or occupational groups. Although Marx’s speculative jottings on communism tend to stress the technical and functional ends of collective activity, his early writings also point towards a normative conception of non-alienated needs and ends that can furnish a standard for assessing all forms of group identity.³⁵ The ‘need for society’ as an end in itself lay at the core of this conception; and this need, in turn, was tied inseparably to individual strivings for expressive self-development, for a ‘human emancipation’ which could only take place in a context of social reciprocity. As I pointed out in the last section, Marx also insisted that the individual and communal flourishing described in his philosophical anthropology depended on, but was not guaranteed by, the satisfaction of increasingly complex material needs. If communities distinguished by ‘national’ particularities contribute, inter alia, to their members’ personal freedom, material well-being, and sense of communal reciprocity, there is no reason to view those communities as alienating—unless the freedom and membership of some depends on the unfreedom and exclusion of others, within or outside the community.

Marx postulated a third characteristic of social life under communism which he thought would distinguish that era from previous epochs: in fully humanized communities, he suggested, individuals should be free to question and revise their conditions of association. Against the one-sided view that a person’s collective identities reflect a need to ‘be defined’, Marx’s argument maintains that those identities are themselves defined by successive human choices. At this point Marx might seem to be straying too far from the premiss he later upheld in his analysis of class societies: namely, that ‘men make their own history, but … they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’³⁶ Marx did not, however, conceive of the process of self-definition as one which would take place, on an individual’s whim, within a historical vacuum. The meaning of his proposition that free individuals may choose their social identities becomes clearer when we recall that Marx regarded history itself as the product of aggregated individual choices. Alienation discourages people from revising their old terms of communal association to accommodate new needs, because it fosters the illusion that contingent social relations are produced and sanctioned by an immutable natural order and not, as Marx insisted, by conscious human activity. Referring to the expansion of international intercourse in the capitalist era, Marx wrote:

It is an insipid notion to conceive of this … bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent to individuals and inseparable from their nature … This bond is their product. It is a historic product … The alien and independent character in which it presently exists vis-à-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that they have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it.³⁷

I will not attempt here to deliberate whether or not Marx’s optimum picture of human freedom depicts a realistic vision of future possibilities. Its value for the contemporary reader—and its main influence on Marx’s later thinking—lies in its critical rather than its prescriptive implications. But Marx was not content simply to highlight the deficiencies of existing society by describing a counterfactual model of non-alienated relationships. His early writings also sought to identify specific institutions that encouraged the formation of antagonistic identities, and to suggest a motivation for dismantling those institutions. This dimension of his analysis clearly set Marx apart from his ‘utopian’ contemporaries who underestimated existing obstacles to social harmony or international cooperation. Against the view that Marx neglected the possibility that particularistic identities might obstruct his emancipatory project, I will argue below that even his earliest writings show a keen awareness of this problem; but that his analysis of alienated identities suggested strong reasons for doubting the necessity, value, or permanence of the most divisive forms of particularism.

The idea that human beings have a basic, transhistorical need for community was, as we have seen, a central theme in Marx’s early writings. The individual’s need to be defined by phenomena perceived as ‘outside himself’, on the other hand, was viewed by Marx as a non-essential function of specific historical conditions. It did not exist in natural, pre-class societies, where the distinction between individual and communal needs remains submerged in what Marx called ‘mere herd-consciousness’. The ‘long and tormented’ struggles to transcend this primitive condition begin with the first division of labour, and involve an increasingly complex process of reciprocal opposition both within and among social units. In his parallel account of this process, Hegel had treated changes in social relationships as the effect of subjective self-development: human consciousness evolves principally through its own internal oppositions, and the emergence of free and rational institutions depends on the prior clarification of free and rational identities. Marx’s critique of Hegelian idealism reversed this causality. The process of reciprocal differentiation is not, he suggested, impelled by an act of self-sufficient consciousness, but by successive divisions of labour which enable some groups and individuals to control the means of material and social production. Identities formed in this way are inherently restrictive and coercive, because the bases of reciprocal self-definition are themselves defined in terms of a conflict of interest.

In his theory of history Marx focused primarily on the constraints imposed by class-based identities on the subordinate, producing classes. He criticized such identities not because they were particularistic, but because they embodied asymmetrical powers of collective self-definition which bear no intrinsic relation to the attributes or capacities of a class’s individual members. On this account, the conflicts of power that fuel processes of identity formation are located within specific social relations, not in the collective or individual consciousness of statesmen or nations or ‘civilizations’. The formation of free and rational identities therefore requires changes in the social relations which prevent some groups and individuals from exercising their powers of self-definition.

The force of this argument does not depend on viewing individual powers of self-definition as potentially unlimited. It is certainly true that Marx failed, in his vision of communism, to spell out the ways in which the presence of others with distinct wills, desires, and group attachments must restrict the freedom of individuals in any imaginable society. It is also probable that a degree of reciprocal differentiation enters into all relationships between individuals and collectivities, and that the mutual influence exerted by parties to these relationships is rarely symmetrical: the prospect of domination, whereby one party asserts the power to define another’s self-image, is never wholly absent from human relationships. But Marx’s class-based critique targets a more specific and systematic form of domination, in which the power of one group or person over another resides in a contingent and coercive set of social relations. Marx believed that the relative material abundance produced by capitalism had rendered exploitation unnecessary and wasteful. He did not expect the removal of exploitative class relations to bring an end to all interpersonal and social conflicts, but he did argue that those relations were an unnecessary source of intense and recurrent antagonisms.

Whereas the clash of class interests takes centre stage in Marx’s later theory, his earliest writings focus on the restrictive character of religion, nationality, and citizenship as bases of communal identification. In 1843 Marx had not yet identified the source of these problems in private property or class relations. The institutions he discussed in On the Jewish Question were deemed inadequate bases for self-definition not because they were exploitative, but because they were alienating for members of all social classes. While Marx’s theory of alienation is best known as the normative basis for his critique of private property, it is also directly concerned with the relations between individual and communal identity. Alienated individuals find themselves passively ‘defined’ by social relations which they see as external, constricting, and impervious to deliberate transformation. In response to contemporary critics, Marx might have argued that the identities conferred by such relations tend to impoverish self-understanding rather than to promote it: they reflect only a small part of an individual’s personality and potential, and provide a merely ‘abstract’, compensatory sense of belonging to a wider community. Alienated identities take shape as a negative response to adverse social conditions, not as the expression of an individual’s spontaneous commitment to something larger than himself. In fact, Marx suggested quite plausibly that while certain forms of religious, political, and national identity may go part of the way towards satisfying a basic need for community, other forms overwhelmingly frustrate that need.

Thus in On the Jewish Question Marx argued that religious and political emancipation should be seen not as intrinsically valuable goals, but as partial measures directed towards a ‘general human emancipation’.³⁸ Individuals strive for particular forms of emancipation not simply because they long to be liberated, in a negative sense, from religious or political oppression, but because these forms of oppression frustrate a universally human urge toward positive self-affirmation and development. Several aspects of this early position were retained and developed in Marx’s later analyses of class, political, and national consciousness. First, as we saw in Chapter 1, Marx argued that the rift individuals perceive between their ‘private’ and ‘public’ life is the product of specific social arrangements, not the natural or inevitable condition of social life per se. Second, he put forward a normative conception of ‘truly human’ emancipation to explain why these arrangements are experienced as frustrating. The divide between state and civil society reinforces rampant egotism, thereby impeding the positive exercise of individual powers for the benefit of the community. Marx suggested, third, that these conditions drive individuals to project their frustrated aspirations for community and self-development towards inappropriate social objects. In the absence of social arrangements that promote these aspirations, communal self-definitions based on religion, statehood, or the ‘abstract’ rights of citizenship are endowed with quasi-mystical properties and misperceived as the quintessential embodiments of communal life. Marx’s fourth point, however, was that this strategy of compensation is ultimately self-defeating; it merely reinforces the social institutions which separate individuals from the wider community.

This fourth argument was to become an important component of Marx’s later evaluations of national movements. His critique of self-defeating action did not necessarily rely on an abstract model of human interests posited against the avowed, more limited aims of actors. Instead, Marx suggested that the conditions needed to fulfil such aims were often more complex than actors supposed. If groups or individuals had a flawed or incomplete view of these conditions, they might unintentionally commit themselves to courses of action which ultimately subvert their own initial aims.³⁹ By elucidating those aims and the wider preconditions for their fulfilment, Marx hoped to modify behaviour based on alienated self-misunderstandings without second-guessing the avowed interests of actors.

These arguments enabled Marx to question the proposition cited at the beginning of this section: that people value their attachments to a particular ‘nationality, race, or religion’ regardless of whether these thwart or promote their other basic needs and purposes. Two corollaries of Marx’s position, one explanatory and the other prescriptive, will be developed in my discussion of his and Engels’ later writings on national movements. The first is that while individuals acquire their communal attachments by birth, the significance they ascribe to them goes deeper than a need for ‘self-definition’. Struggles over identity, the theory of alienation implies, are also struggles for freedom, and for the material security needed to enjoy it: they aim to expand personal and social self-determination by overcoming the limitations imposed by coercive institutions and the material deprivations these help to sustain. Marx’s early argument suggests, however, that these ends may be obscured by a nexus of alienated relationships, and that this explains why abstract notions of religious or political community—usually defined in a ‘negative’ way against the outside—come to appear as ends in themselves. Since alienating conditions may prevent individuals from acknowledging the deeper motives fuelling their own political or national struggles, the observer cannot rely wholly on the limited self-understanding of actors in explaining their activity. Thus Marx criticized Bruno Bauer for failing to see that the quest for positive, ‘human’ self-determination is the driving force behind movements aimed, initially, at the religious or political emancipation of particular groups.⁴⁰ The identities of these groups are not valued simply because they are distinctive, even if the desire for recognition or separation from other communities is what their members stress. They are endowed with social significance in so far as they serve as vehicles for advancing and protecting the freedom, security, and communal needs of their members.

In the German Ideology, the authors repeated Marx’s earlier warning against treating actors’ self-descriptions as an exhaustive account of their motives and actions. ‘If an epoch’, they wrote, ‘imagines itself to be actuated by purely “political” or “religious” motives, although “religion” and “politics” are only forms of its true motives, the historian [wrongly] accepts this opinion.’ But they also stressed a point implied by Marx’s argument about the self-defeating consequences of action guided by an alienated social perspective: namely, that ‘the “conception” of the people in question about their real practice is transformed into the sole determining and effective force, which dominates and determines their practice.’⁴¹ This account suggests a second, prescriptive corollary of Marx’s early analysis: that the prejudices or combative intentions of collective actors—including nationalists—cannot be modified simply through education or persuasion. By arguing that alienated individuals misidentify the root sources of their frustration, and by locating these in specific, coercive institutions, Marx sought to rectify the tendency among his liberal, democratic, and ‘utopian’ socialist contemporaries to underestimate current obstacles to social and international harmony. Exclusionary or antagonistic dispositions and identities, he suggested, can only be modified when the coercive relations which encourage their formation have been removed. Marx recognized that the ‘illusion’ of belonging to an integrated or superior community may, after all, be a negatively rational response to social disorientation, material deprivation, or a sense of weakness vis-à-vis other communities. If the later Marx stressed material abundance as a basic condition for overcoming these circumstances, the young Marx emphasized the need for far-reaching social and political reforms; and this aspect of his prescriptions, as we will see in the next section and after, was developed more fully in his and Engels’ later writings on nationalism.

2.3. THE RISE OF ETHNOCENTRIC NATIONALISM

It should be clear by now that Marx’s early writings developed a more subtle set of criteria for evaluating particularistic identities than his critics have admitted. As later chapters will amply illustrate, Marx certainly did not regard all forms of nationalism and national identity as equally alienated. Indeed, it bears repeating that he also saw the universalism disseminated by capitalism as profoundly alienating. The expanding ‘world market’, he believed, created the preconditions for cooperation based on a system of ‘universally human’ needs; but it also compelled individuals, regions, and countries to ‘become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them’,⁴² fuelling the exploitative and competitive processes that pitted class against class and nation against nation.⁴³ Far from taking the complacent view that economic progress was bound to pacify international conflicts, Marx was keenly aware that national identities forged in response to the global expansion of capitalism may appear more sharply divisive than those of any previous era. Already in 1843, he observed that the pressures of international competition had engendered a distinctly alienated form of nationalist ideology in his native Germany. This ideology was wrong-headed, according to Marx, because it sought to overcome Germany’s relative political and economic backwardness not by challenging the domestic institutions which sustained it, but by spurning the global standards which gauged the country’s backwardness. A misplaced obsession with Germany’s uniqueness or, indeed, its superiority to other nations came to disguise the social causes of German weakness, thereby impeding efforts to address those causes directly. Instead of pointing the way towards active self-transformation, this strand of ‘German ideology’ upheld a regressive and negative conception of national identity: it ‘flatters itself with a movement which no other people in the firmament of history went through before it’, while seeking ‘our history of freedom beyond our history, in the primeval Teutonic forests’.⁴⁴ In this section I show how, by combining their theory of history and Marx’s critical anthropology, Marx and Engels were able to develop a distinctive analysis of the domestic and international sources of assertive, ethnocentric nationalism in Germany.

In the German Ideology Marx and Engels pointed to two mutually reinforcing circumstances which had, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, created widespread disaffection with political and social conditions in Germany. By comparison with their western neighbours, first, the major German states remained politically conservative and economically backward. Marx and Engels attributed this situation to both internal and international factors. They noted that Germany’s marginal position in international trade since the late Middle Ages had crippled the social development of the bourgeoisie, the class which had emerged as the vanguard of modern ‘civil society’ in Britain and France. In the absence of any viable contender arising from ‘society’ to challenge the absolutist state, the latter had ‘built itself up into an apparently independent force, and this position’, Marx and Engels wrote in 1846–7, ‘it has maintained in Germany until the present day’.⁴⁵

Second, the country’s political fragmentation had been alleviated, but not overcome, by the settlement negotiated at Vienna in 1815.⁴⁶ Marx and Engels saw the creation of a single German nation-state as a desideratum for Germans of all social classes whose interests were ill-served by existing political arrangements. But they identified one large and heterogeneous group in Germany whose concern for social reform, and hence for national unity, was especially urgent. This was the group to which, in the German Ideology, Marx and Engels referred as the ‘middle classes’ or ‘burghers’.⁴⁷ Before the 1848 revolutions, they used these terms to describe a loose, unorganized agglomeration embracing wealthy businessmen as well as the numerous small traders who were later to form a distinct quasi-class of ‘petty bourgeois’. The common interests of the German middle classes were increasingly expressed through demands for liberal reform: the creation of representative institutions which would give the middle classes a central role in policy-making, and of large free-trade areas conducive to the growth of industrial capitalism. Marx and Engels strongly supported these demands. They concurred with what had, by the early 1840s, become a virtual axiom of German political thinking: namely, that the creation of a strong and unified nation-state was a necessary part of the solution to Germany’s political and economic problems. But they rejected the type of solution which merely protested against the external standards which exposed German backwardness, while glorifying its domestic sources as cherished attributes of German identity.

The likelihood that this ‘alienated’ response would prevail over more constructive nationalist programmes was heightened, according to Marx and Engels, by the fact that foreign economic competition was the main catalyst for the nation-wide organization of the German middle classes. They cited Germany as the prime example of their argument that revolutionary conditions may arise ‘in a particular national sphere … through the appearance of a contradiction, not within the national orbit, but between this national consciousness and the practice of other nations’:

The ever more powerful foreign competition and world intercourse—from which it became less and less possible for Germany to stand aside—compelled the diverse local interests in Germany to adopt some sort of common attitude. Particularly since 1840, the German middle class began to think about safeguarding these common interests; its attitude became national and liberal, and it demanded protective tariffs and constitutions.⁴⁸

But Marx and Engels hinted at an uneasy relationship between the ‘national’ and ‘liberal’ attitudes of the German middle classes when they noted that the liberalism espoused in early nineteenth-century Germany was of fairly recent foreign derivation, and had shallow indigenous roots. Transposed on to German soil, the ideas that had come to be associated in the popular imagination with the first French revolution lacked the sharp cutting edge needed to attack the multiple, deeply entrenched obstacles posed by German absolutism and political disunity. Marx and Engels saw the specifically German contributions to liberal thought as anodyne and politically ineffectual efforts to wish away the need for revolutionary action.⁴⁹ As the two men observed, the tensions between nationalism and liberalism in Germany were aggravated by repressive policies which, in most German states, had long prohibited free and open criticism of the existing governments. Important political debates were confined largely to rarefied academic circles, where concrete questions about institutional alternatives were overshadowed by speculative musings about the nature of historical change.⁵⁰ The genuine desire of the German middle classes to participate more actively in making future history was, so to speak, sublimated in the unthreatening hope that history would, of its own accord, take a turn in their favour. Marx and Engels saw this brand of idealism as quintessentially German: whereas French and British thinkers were inclined to locate the driving force of historical change in a distinct realm of ‘political’ activity, they argued, the Germans sought to ‘transcend’ human agency altogether by making ‘religious illusion the driving force of history’.⁵¹

The same adverse circumstances that drove political criticism in Germany into transcendental exile tended to spawn idealized conceptions of the nation, apparently detached from specific political programmes. The concern registered in the German Ideology was that the longer middle-class opposition remained confined to the realm of philosophical speculation, the more its exponents seemed to lose sight of the need for liberal reform which had, in Marx and Engels’ view, inspired the quest for national unity in the first place. By driving a wedge between nationalist ideas and arguments for reform, the paralysis of social opposition in Germany fostered an almost obsessive preoccupation with abstract ideas about national history and identity. The authors of such ideas, Marx and Engels suggested, were not only guilty of neglecting the primary task of political criticism; their idealist historiography also tended to produce conceptions of German nationality which implied hostility to crucial arguments for reform.

Middle-class frustration with the comparative backwardness of political and economic conditions in Germany was, as Marx and Engels noted, frequently expressed through cosmopolitan rather than nationalist doctrines. Comparisons with France and Britain were invoked not only as models for reform in Germany, but also to criticize absolutist states for their role in sustaining Germany’s dejected international position. For Marx and Engels, this critical cosmopolitanism was an indispensable component of any effective ideology of reform in Germany; together with liberalism it expressed, albeit in merely ‘ideal form’, the German middle classes’ interest in joining the mainstream of progress in Europe. Like liberalism, however, cosmopolitan ideals suffered a peculiarly German metamorphosis at the hands of idealist philosophers. Wary of provoking the political authorities yet anxious to overcome a sense of national inadequacy, idealists produced grandiose theories of ‘world history’ which tried to locate Germany at the epicentre of global events. Seizing on the one area where Germans had recently distinguished themselves in European culture—the realm of philosophy—they turned history into ‘a history of ideas, separated from the facts and the practical development underlying them’,⁵² and placed Germany’s contribution at the centre of this history. In this way, the world-historical schemes that originated in a laudable desire to surmount German limitations ended by merely reflecting, and sometimes even glorifying, those same limitations. Unwilling to confront the harsh realities of their national backwardness, the German idealists conveniently ‘forget all other nations [Nationen], all real events’, in their efforts to restore national self-esteem and avoid self-criticism.⁵³ These nationalist thinkers ‘do not recognise the deeds of other nations [Völker] as historical; they live in Germany, within Germany, and for Germany; they turn the Rhinesong into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine … by Germanising French ideas instead of French provinces.’ The absence before 1848 of a vigorous movement of middle-class opposition only strengthened what Marx and Engels saw as the counter-productive influence of intellectuals ‘who, in the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominance of Germany’.⁵⁴

Marx and Engels deplored this way of thinking because, by turning what they saw as Germany’s glaring deficiencies into national virtues, it blunted the edge of cosmopolitan arguments for drawing Germany into the currents of economic and political progress flowing from the west. Beneath the ‘narrowly national outlook which underlies the alleged universalism and cosmopolitanism of the Germans’, Marx and Engels perceived the germ of a defensive national arrogance which sprang, by way of compensation, from the conditions that should have generated self-criticism:

Because everywhere their lot is merely to look on and be left high and dry they believe themselves called upon to sit in judgement on the whole world while history attains its ultimate purpose in Germany … National narrow-mindedness is everywhere repellent. In Germany it is positively odious, since, together with the illusion that the Germans are superior to nationality and to its real interests, it is held in the face of those nations which openly confess their national limitations and their dependence upon real interests.⁵⁵

By ‘real interests’ Marx and Engels seem to be referring to the wider international conditions which, in their view, restricted or promoted any single nation’s development. The formation of the robust, forward-looking kind of national identity that they saw as a necessary counterpart to reform in Germany depended on the willingness of Germans not only to take ideological lessons from other countries, but also to expand cooperative ties with their more advanced neighbours. The transcendental cosmopolitanism of the German idealists, they argued, papered over the unavoidable fact that the form eventually given to a unified Germany could not be determined by a narrow unilateralism; its policies and institutions would be constrained by Germany’s relations with other countries and, at the same time, affect the future of those relations. The prospects for improving Germany’s political reputation and economic competitiveness through constructive intercourse were threatened, Marx and Engels suggested, by the doctrine of national ‘incomparability’ devised to insulate Germany from external criteria of national flourishing. They charged that the effect of this doctrine, whether intended or not, was to assert Germany’s unique superiority over the nations whose intercourse the Germans sorely needed:

Great nations—the French, North Americans, English—are constantly comparing themselves with one another both in practice and theory, in competition and in science. Petty shopkeepers and philistines, like the Germans, who are afraid of comparisons and competition, hide behind the shield of incomparability supplied them by their manufacturer of philosophical labels.⁵⁶

This doctrine of national ‘uniqueness’ was, in Marx’s view, the alienated artefact of social and political repression in Germany, and a prime example of the kind of self-defeating response that he had diagnosed in his early writings. Recoiling from the prospect of challenging their own governments, the German middle classes turned their wrath against foreign competitors and, more generally, against the Anglo- and Francocentric yardsticks of national adequacy which put Germans to shame. Marx and Engels maintained, however, that neither Germany nor other relative latecomers to capitalism could avoid self-assessment by those standards; the pressures to enter the world market on pre-existing terms were too great to resist. This did not mean that the terms of global interaction could not be modified by the entry of other nations, or that those nations were obliged to follow a unilinear path carved out by the merchants and political philosophers of London or Paris.⁵⁷ But Marx and Engels did believe, with many of their liberal contemporaries, that prospects for improving Germany’s international standing depended, above all else, on internal social and political reform. Attempts to define the terms of German unity in sharp opposition to prevailing global developments, as a merely ‘negative unity towards the outside’, must fail to remove—indeed, may even strengthen—the very home-grown institutions that were responsible for Germany’s international weakness.

In the summer of 1848, when discussions about the formation of an all-German constitution were well under way, Marx continued to insist that a satisfactory redefinition of German identity must draw on the political traditions of its western neighbours. Although the ascent of Louis Napoleon was later to subdue his early admiration for France as a revolutionary model for Germany to follow, in 1848 Marx fell clearly into the large left wing of German nationalists—many of them Rhinelanders like himself—who looked back on the first Napoleon’s conquests as a positive contribution to the present tasks of nation-building in Germany, and rejected the anti-French sentiments of more conservative nationalists.⁵⁸ ‘If Napoleon had remained victor in Germany’, Marx declared provocatively in August 1848,

he would have removed at least a dozen beloved ‘fathers of the people’ … French legislation and administration would have created a solid base for German unity and spared us 33 years of humiliation and tyranny of the Federal Diet … A few Napoleonic decrees would have completely destroyed … the entire feudal and patriarchal systems which still torment us from end to end of our fatherlands. The rest of Germany would long since have reached the level which the left bank of the Rhine reached soon after the first French revolution … and we would no longer have to inhale the stuffy air of the ‘historical’ and ‘Christian-Germanic’ swamps.⁵⁹

Marx’s purposes here were polemical, and should not be taken literally as a warrant for foreign invasion in the interests of what he saw as progress. His argument was directed against proponents of German unity who favoured an eastward orientation in Germany’s foreign policy over closer ties with the west. Marx shared the hope of other democrats and left-wing liberals that a unified Germany would be strong enough to repudiate ties with arch-reactionary Tsarist Russia, ties which bound the German Confederation through Prussia’s participation in the conservative Holy Alliance. But he feared that ethnocentric definitions of German nationality would block the entry of liberal and progressive influences from the west, thereby reinforcing the reactionary political and international traditions that had held Germany back in the past.

Marx saw Prussia as a particularly fecund source of such traditions. In an article written in July 1848, he observed that Prussia’s authoritarian institutions were already threatening to swallow up the fledgling constitutionalist movement introduced by the March revolution. Commenting on a bill to establish a civic militia in Prussia, Marx claimed that the express purpose of the bill—to expand popular participation in the public organs of the state—was covertly undercut by the authoritarian organization projected for the militia. The citizen-soldier, Marx declared, ‘has received weapons and uniform on condition that he first of all relinquish his primary political rights … blindly carrying out the orders of the authorities, by exchanging the usual civil liberty which was tolerated even under the absolute monarchy for the passive, automatic and disinterested obedience of the soldier’. He went on:

Would it not be more original to dissolve the nation in the army rather than to dissolve the army in the nation? This transformation of constitutional phrases into Prussian facts is a truly bizarre spectacle. If Prussianism condescends to become constitutional, constitutionalism ought surely to take the trouble to become Prussian. Poor constitutionalism! It would be easier to recognise the Greeks in the shape of the animals into which Circe transformed them than to recognise the constitutional institutions in the fantastic images into which they have been transfigured by Prussianism and the Government of Action.⁶⁰

The ‘transformation’ described here is analogous to the process described in the German Ideology, whereby the cosmopolitan aspirations Marx and Engels imputed to the German middle classes were philosophically inverted into national arrogance and unilateralism. This phenomenon of ‘inversion’ had been analysed in the theory of alienation: where people lack the freedom to pursue their own purposes in community with others, at a national or international level, they project their frustrated longings on to existing, restrictive institutions and endow these with a mythical significance. As we saw in the previous section, Marx criticized this process not simply because it spawned ‘illusions’ about the bases of collective identity, but because it reinforced unnecessary oppression while failing to address the basic frustrations which, he suggested, underlie the quest for communal identity. These elements of his early philosophical analysis reappear in Marx’s comments in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where he showed how readily ethnocentric conceptions of the nation could be harnessed to the conservative purposes of absolutist and authoritarian states.⁶¹ He observed that many of his liberal and democratic contemporaries, while grounding their arguments for national unity in ideals that enjoined social or political reform, unwittingly turned nationalism into an overriding end. In this manner they tacitly endorsed national unification as an end in itself and refrained from discriminating among the means that might be used to achieve it, whether or not these endangered the very social and political goals which had prompted them to advocate unity in the first place.

The key to overcoming this ‘alienated’ hybrid of ethnic-statist doctrine, Marx and Engels contended, lay in the emergence of an organized opposition which refused to separate the question of national unity from questions of social reform. Once the German middle class began to assert a coherent set of interests against an otiose absolutism, the need for practical action might restore debates about German identity to earthly proportions. ‘“Liberation”’, Marx and Engels declared, ‘is a historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions … in Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is taking place, these mental developments, these glorified and ineffective trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical development, and they take root and have to be combated.’⁶² In the event of a middle-class revolution negative, incendiary assertions of national identity would, Marx and Engels hoped, cease to ‘substitute’ for active self-transformation pursued in a spirit of international reciprocity.

This chapter has examined Marx and Engels’ views on national identity and conflict from several different angles, and questioned the widespread view that their deepest theoretical commitments discouraged them from taking national particularism seriously. By analysing the interplay of global and particularist pressures shaping national identities in their own time, Marx and Engels laid the foundations for an internationalist strategy which sought to reconcile demands for national freedom and development with the need, in an increasingly interdependent world, for a wider global outlook. Before moving on to discuss the empirical analyses that informed that strategy, I want briefly to underline one of the main reasons why so many previous commentators have oversimplified Marx and Engels’ critique of modern particularism. As I intimated in Section 2.2, critics often identify the errors they impute to Marx and Engels by referring to an equally contestable set of assumptions about the longevity or intrinsic value of particularistic identities, especially those invoked by nationalists. Those who call Marx to task for having propagated a one-dimensional universalism may, however, propagate the converse error: that of treating nationalism as simply a modern variant of a recurrent, perhaps ineliminable, human tendency to assert separate and exclusive identities, involving an impulse to separation which is perennially stronger than the impulse to unity. A high incidence of national or ethnic self-assertion is thus taken as evidence that universalist aspirations are at worst hegemonic and coercive, at best self-defeating.

As a normative perspective, this view offers an impoverishing picture of cooperative possibilities, just as excessive universalism may foster false optimism about the transient nature of intersocietal conflict. As an explanatory perspective, it obscures the interplay of separatist and integrating impulses that have fuelled most modern national movements. Such movements typically seek to improve their constituents’ access to the perceived benefits of international institutions, while resisting the subordinate status to which certain ‘global’ standards of development may consign them. The balance between these two impulses differs within each national movement, and may be tipped in one direction or another by external circumstances or the political choices of nationalists themselves. My argument so far has suggested that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Marx and Engels’ general theories did enable them to understand and confront these contingencies of nationalist politics, often far better than the alternative perspectives recommended by their critics. The following chapter looks at how the authors applied the theoretical resources discussed above to explain national movements in their own time.

3

Explaining Nationalism

BY declining to single out nationalism as the subject-matter for a distinct theory, Marx and Engels left ample room for doubt about the theoretical status of their writings on specific national movements. The Communist Manifesto provides their most comprehensive analysis of the changing role of nation-states within the ‘world market’, and their most concise formulation of an international strategy for the proletariat. Most of their writings on national issues, however, appear in a variety of other genres: in speeches, journalism, and personal correspondence. Some of these writings are highly polemical, while others offer on-the-ground reportage from a radical perspective. In either case, the style is often less rigorous than that employed in their theoretical works, while the content is more overtly political: the authors’ attention is focused on the volatile ephemera of contemporary affairs, only occasionally shifting back towards wider historical developments and economic processes. This emphasis has induced some commentators to draw a sharp line between Marx and Engels as self-styled ‘scientific’ theorists of society, on the one hand, and Marx and Engels the ‘pragmatic’ observers of political events, on the other.¹ Their overwhelmingly journalistic discussions of national issues may convey the impression that the authors were not at all concerned to explain the appeal and development of national movements in terms consistent with their general theory, but that they took a merely opportunistic stance towards such conflicts, hoping to channel them into their revolutionary strategy.

It would be implausible to account for their apparently untheoretical treatment of national issues by suggesting that Marx and Engels regarded all politics, including nationalist politics, as mere ‘superstructural’ emanations, as though they did not think that such epiphenomena required further explanation once their economic foundations had been analysed. First, as I suggested in Chapter 1, it is not at all clear that Marx and Engels conceived of nations as entities which could be fully understood within a base-superstructure schema—a schema which, I should emphasize, does not exhaust the explanatory resources of ‘historical materialism’. The proposition that Marx and Engels regarded all ‘superstructural’ phenomena unworthy of their theoretical attention cannot, moreover, be sustained in view of the numerous works in which they offered rigorous analyses of political, legal, and cultural issues. If Marx and Engels did not develop fully fledged general theories of law, politics, and nationalism, this does not mean that they saw no need to explain why these phenomena assume different forms and take on a different historical significance within the class struggles and ‘modes’ of production described in their socio-economic theory.²

The perception of a gap between Marx and Engels’ general theories and their writings on nationalism has, in fact, been fostered by a misguided belief that any properly Marxian account of nationalism must be framed primarily in terms of a base-superstructure model, or an economic theory of capitalist development, or a ‘ruling class’ theory of ideology. In their political writings and journalism, Marx and Engels did sometimes describe nationalism as the mere residue of outmoded historical formations, or as a deliberate policy applied by leading classes to distract or divide their opponents. But they applied these descriptions to particular forms of nationalism or uses of nationalist ideology, not treating them as general explanations of nationalism as such. Readers who assume that some amalgam of these elements should have provided the theoretical moorings for Marx and Engels’ writings on national issues may, on failing to find the expected kind of theory, simply conclude that those writings lack any firm moorings at all.

This chapter locates a different set of theoretical resources at the basis of Marx and Engels’ empirical writings on nationalism, and suggests that these avoid some of the shortcomings associated with more familiar ‘Marxist’ approaches. The ideas which guided their analyses of national issues can be found in a strategic theory of politics centred on, but not reduced to, the analysis of class conflicts. Building on the foundations laid out in the two preceding chapters, Section 3.1 outlines the main elements of this approach. The remaining sections examine its explanatory applications in Marx and Engels’ writings on three aspects of nationalism in their own time: the relationship between different nationalist programmes and the class interests of the ‘dominant’ bourgeoisie (Section 3.2), the impact of domestic class conflicts on foreign policy (Section 3.3), and the appeal exerted by populist, xenophobic nationalism on the peasants and ‘petty-bourgeoisie’ (Section 3.4). Each section deals selectively with one or two cases which exemplify Marx and Engels’ thinking on these issues, focusing on western and central Europe in the 1840s and 1850s. The theoretical developments embodied in their later writings, including those dealing with non-European countries and with Ireland, will be discussed in Chapter 5.

3.1. ELEMENTS OF THEORY

The first two chapters placed considerable emphasis on a distinction implied, though never elaborated, in Marx and Engels’ writings: namely, that between pre-existing historical, cultural, or political attributes which distinguish one national group from another, and Marx’s prescriptive concept of the nation, embodying aspirations to create a genuinely democratic community out of pre-existing elements. My initial aim in underlining this distinction was to show that Marx and Engels’ understanding of nationality resists straightforward assimilation by any of the economic or sociological categories of their general theory. Nations were not seen as the product of impersonal economic forces, or as weapons wielded exclusively by the bourgeoisie in ideological battle. The prescriptive concept implies that the elements of territory, history, culture, and statehood which come to embody a nation’s distinctiveness are reworked and ascribed a certain significance by people, not by the inexorable logic of capitalist development. These elements, moreover, are not the monopoly of any single ‘ruling class’; they furnish the building-blocks with which all social classes must work in their efforts to preserve or redesign existing communities. Marx and Engels did not posit an inherent conflict between nations and nationalism, on the one hand, and the interests of some classes on the other. They simply observed that different classes may infuse the prescriptive concept of nationhood with conflicting aspirations, and that the social significance ascribed to pre-existing elements of nationality will vary according to those aspirations.

Having differentiated this position from more familiar ‘Marxist’ conceptions of nationality, we can now summarize its basic explanatory implications.

1.The political or cultural nation cannot be abstracted from its social bases and treated as a wholly independent source of collective interests and aspirations, and hence as a stable focus of explanation.

Marx and Engels recognized that the parameters of nationalist activity are shaped by historical, cultural, and political factors to which nationalists may ascribe a major significance in their struggles over the form and control of the state. But those struggles themselves are fuelled by the pursuit of particular, often conflicting, interests within any single nation; and it is these interests which explain the aspirations directed by different social groups towards the ‘nation’.

2.Nationalism cannot be analysed, then, as a phenomenon sui generis, with origins and aims that are clearly distinct from those of movements which Marx and Engels linked to the interests of conflicting classes. Not all class movements are nationalist movements; all nationalist movements are driven forwards or backwards by class struggles, and can be analysed in terms of the class interests they aim to promote or obstruct.

While recognizing that the interests of rival classes may converge in some periods on a core set of common goals—especially when confronted with external pressures or threats—Marx and Engels stressed the limited and often fragile nature of trans-class unity, denying that its occurrence proved the perennial magnetic power of national over class allegiances. The presence of class conflict, they pointed out, may fracture an apparently cohesive national movement into antagonistic movements which all claim to represent the same ‘national’ community. As Engels remarked in a retrospective on the failed revolutions of 1848, ‘German unity was in itself a question big with disunion, discord and, in the case of certain eventualities, civil war.’³ Observing the same phenomenon in other countries, Marx and Engels refrained from analysing national movements as relatively monolithic blocs cemented by an overarching set of common purposes. They treated them, instead, as provisional, shifting coalitions of diverse social groups, made or broken on the basis of class interests.

3.The international context of nationalist activity should also be examined in relation to class conflicts which arise below the level of states and nations and cut across these units.

Marx and Engels rarely insulated the analysis of domestic class conflicts from international relations. In their empirical analyses, they constantly referred to both transnational developments and the particular facts of local history which made nationalism an effective form of politics for a wide cross-section of social classes. But they also argued that different class interests produce conflicting programmes and policies in response to the same external pressures; and these internal conflicts may shape nationalist attitudes towards outsiders as much as foreign relations per se. Those relations can, on Marx and Engels’ account, be explained largely in class terms, and do not constitute an autonomous structure which determines the incidence and intensity of national antagonisms. Social conflicts in the domestic arena tend to produce divergent definitions of a nation’s foreign friends and enemies, and different strategies for dealing with national conflict or economic interdependence.

4.Nationalism’s appeal to various social groups cannot, finally, be understood primarily in terms of a primordial national identity, or a need for self-definition as against other national groups. Questions about the distinctive identity of a nation tend to acquire political importance only where other, concrete interests are at stake; and these interests were defined, in the societies Marx and Engels observed, largely in class terms.

We saw in Chapter 2 that efforts to redefine group identities as ‘national’ may be activated by external threats or competition which affect all groups inside a given nation. But Marx argued that the specific forms of identity asserted in response to such pressures are also shaped by domestic constraints, which may obstruct the freedom and material well-being of a nation’s members as much as any external impediments. Assertions of national identity can therefore operate in one of two ways: negatively, as a frustrated response to both internal and external constraints which disable people from securing their interests through practical action; or positively, as a resource defined with a view to changing the conditions that frustrate basic needs and interests. In neither case, however, is the concern to defend or develop a distinctive national identity seen as the basic activating force behind nationalist movements.

These positions do not imply that the most conspicuous political, cultural, or ideological motives for engaging in nationalist activity merit no systematic analysis. To the contrary, one of my main contentions in this chapter is that Marx and Engels’ writings on specific national movements were concerned far less with the structural or economic ‘preconditions’ of nationalism than with the complex motivations of nationalist actors. The theoretical rationale for this emphasis can be clarified, once again, by examining how Marx and Engels’ prescriptive concept of nationality came to operate as part of an explanatory theory.

That concept carries, first of all, a specific temporal emphasis: it directs attention towards the present and future rather than back to the past, focusing on the goals of current nationalist activity rather than on the origins of distinct nations or national conflicts.⁴ Whereas descriptive concepts of nationality put for ward the historically ‘given’ conditions which shape nationalist activity, the prescriptive concept invites an enquiry into the ways in which nationalist actors seek to change those conditions in line with their aspirations. This temporal emphasis, second, fosters a theoretical preoccupation with the programmes, struggles, and negotiations that occur within and among national movements. The strategic and political aspects of nationalism thereby come to attract as much explanatory attention as its economic or sociological bases. Marx and Engels’ analyses of nationalism were intended, third, to provide action-guiding maps of the complex social terrains in which national aspirations were pursued. Their explanations, that is, also served a prescriptive function, and entailed explicit judgements about the merits of some national movements or policies as against others. It is sometimes assumed that Marx and Engels based such judgements solely on ‘economic’ criteria, supporting all nationalisms which aimed to create large-scale economic units while opposing the separatist movements of less developed nations. As I will argue below, however, the authors generally subordinated such criteria to a prior set of political conditions: they did not support authoritarian national movements aimed at centralizing ‘from above’, or oppose the separatist movements of smaller nations where these demonstrated a commitment to progressive social reforms. In each case, the decisive factors were the class identity and political intentions of nationalists; and the analysis of these factors occupied much of Marx and Engels’ attention in their political writings and journalism.

Their interest in the complex, strategic dimensions of nationalism belies the assumption that a faithfully ‘Marxian’ treatment must give short shrift to the ideological and political aspects of nationalism, while asserting the explanatory ‘primacy’ of social structures and economic processes. This assumption is based on rigid remodelling of Marx and Engels’ theory which downgrades its key emphasis on praxis or human agency, so that ‘such stern realities as property relations, bureaucratic authority, or the division of labour’ are seen as imposing ‘their own stern discipline upon the social action of incumbents’, whose ‘motives, values and expectations’ merit scant theoretical attention.⁵ Readers who scour Marx and Engels’ empirical writings on national issues in search of this kind of theory are likely to come up empty-handed. For the most part, those writings offer detailed analyses of the motives, ideas, and organizational efforts of nationalist actors, while the broader social and economic developments which stimulate the rise of ‘nationalism’ as a general, global phenomenon are placed in the background.⁶ To elucidate the two-way relationship between Marx and Engels’ general theories and their strategic-political analyses of national movements, it is useful to distinguish between the general tendencies displayed by social and political development in a given ‘mode’ of production, and the particular, complex settings in which national and class struggles occur. Marx and Engels’ statements about particular national issues should, I suggest, be understood as contextual statements which specify and supplement the applications of the general theory itself.⁷ The theory guides particular observations, while those observations will extend or otherwise modify the theory, thereby clarifying its proper scope.

Our discussion so far has stressed the central explanatory role of class interests in Marx and Engels’ analyses of national issues. Before moving on to concrete examples, however, I should point out some crucial differences between the interpretation offered here and other well-known varieties of ‘class analysis’ that have been applied to the study of nationalism, and which claim to derive from Marx and Engels’ writings. Much obfuscation has resulted from attempts to devise a simple theoretical formula expressing Marx and Engels’ views on the relations between class interests and specific national movements. Against one oversimplifying line of interpretation, we have already argued that the two men did not tie nationalism as such to the interests of any single class. But there is a more sophisticated candidate for entry to the ranks of ‘Marxist’ approaches to nationalism which deserves closer consideration. This formula allows that different national movements may have different ‘leading classes’; but it does not presume an identity between the political leaders of a movement and the class whose interests dictate its actions and programmatic content. On this view, the social origins of nationalist leaders are less important as an index of a movement’s class moorings than the interests served by that movement.⁸ Nationalist movements that are apparently based on broad social coalitions or the esoteric activities of intellectual, professional, and bureaucratic minorities can accordingly be found, on close investigation, to serve the interests of a particular ‘dominant class’.

This type of argument invites us to probe beneath complex social constituencies in search of a unitary, dominant set of class interests ostensibly served by a particular national movement. Students of the nineteenth-century nationalisms discussed by Marx and Engels are urged, more specifically, to play what one historian has called ‘the game of Hunt the Bourgeoisie’.⁹ The objective of that game is to identify the bourgeoisie as the effective ‘leading class’ in national movements which, whether inadvertently or as a matter of policy, advanced the development of capitalism and the political conditions for its flourishing. This approach has several glaring inadequacies. It exaggerates the degree of cohesion and political self-conciousness possessed by the bourgeoisie in this period, and postulates an explanatory set of interests that were not, in fact, consistently pursued by that class in any European country. The attempt to explain particular national movements in terms of a single class’s interests may, moreover, discourage close enquiry into the role of other social groups who support or oppose the nominal ‘leading class’.

Several features of their theory of political action enabled Marx and Engels to avoid these shortcomings. According to that theory, first of all, the concept of class interests cannot be used to assert an abstract set of nationalist aims which class actors were expected to pursue, regardless of the circumstances in which they had to manoeuvre. Marx and Engels’ analyses indicate two levels of any class’s interests which explain patterns of support or opposition to nationalist programmes: substantial interests in specific economic and political arrangements, and prudential interests formed, through a process of reciprocal opposition, in conflicts with other classes. The first set of interests explains class action by identifying the ends that class actors hope to maximize. The second refers to negative interests in self-preservation, which become paramount when efforts to secure substantial interests are diverted or restrained by the opposition of other classes and their supportive institutions.

Marx and Engels invoked the concept of prudential interests to explain why class actors may support nationalist programmes that do not reflect their maximal interests, or refrain from advancing programmes that do. They also recognized that the members of nascent or politically unorganized classes, like the German middle classes before 1848, may lack a clear definition of their substantial collective interests. In such cases—and this brings us to a second point—the appeal of particular nationalist ideas and policies is still explained by class interests, but in a negative rather than a substantive way. When the individuals, occupational groups, and regional segments comprising a nascent class are unable to organize around a clear set of common interests, they tend to misidentify the main obstacles that prevent them from more fully realizing their narrower interests. If those obstacles lie in political conflicts in the domestic arena, as Marx and Engels believed they did in Germany, the difficulty of forming a cohesive opposition may give rise to doctrines which invert class priorities: foreign ideas or competitors are blamed for thwarting key interests, while the political and cultural strongholds of the internal ruling class are hallowed as repositories of national uniqueness. Support for such forms of nationalism was, in Marx and Engels’ view, the alienated and transitory effect of domestic repression; it reflected not a positive attraction to the aims and symbolism of nationalism as such, but a practical inability to secure social interests through any other movement. Once the members of a nascent class had begun to distinguish their interests more clearly from those of classes below and above them, they would develop a new set of substantial aims in relation to national issues.

Not all the major social groupings discussed by Marx and Engels met their criteria for constituting a ‘full’ class. The authors suggested that quasi-class groups like the peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie were particularly susceptible to the appeal of chauvinistic nationalism, because their socio-economic conditions of life prevented them from forming effective alternatives to the programmes advanced by other classes. As we will see in Section 3.4, however, Marx—though not always Engels—denied that the members of quasi-classes were congenitally xenophobic or prone to the manipulative ruses of ‘false consciousness’. Their support for specific nationalist policies was seen as conditional, not wholly irrational; and the decisive conditions involved concrete interests in security and material well-being. Following this analysis, Marx was able to argue that the ‘reactionary’ attitudes of quasi-class groupings could be turned around by alliances with strong progressive movements, led by the bourgeoisie or proletariat, which addressed their interests more effectively than the opposition.

This third element of their strategic theory—the concept of inter-class coalitions or alliances—is central to an adequate understanding of Marx and Engels’ concrete analyses of national issues. If they refrained from positing any fixed affinity between certain classes’ interests and specific forms of nationalism, this was largely because they recognized that the quest for allies—both at home and abroad—may oblige a class’s members to compromise or even recant some of their initial aims. As we will see below, alliances carried risks even for the socially dominant classes, often pushing their programmes beyond a restricted set of goals or truncating them beyond recognition. Since most of the national movements observed by Marx and Engels included several different class components, no form of nationalism appears in their writings as the complete realization of any single class’s interests. Their analyses are theoretically interesting not because they contain a simple formula reducing national to class phenomena, but because they draw attention to the ways that social conflicts within the national ‘unit’ shape the content of national ideology, conceptions of national identity, and relations with other nations and transnational actors. The following sections illustrate this approach.

3.2. LIBERAL AND STATIST NATIONALISM IN GERMANY

By the early 1840s it had become apparent to most Germans that national unity was a basic precondition for political and economic reform in their various states. Since 1815, even the most stubbornly conservative of those states had been forced to respond to foreign competition by moving towards economic integration, forming a German Customs Union in 1834 under the aegis of Prussia. Proponents of more extensive reforms, however moderate or radical their specific aims, also became German nationalists. Between 1847 and 1849 Marx and Engels closely followed the course of this broad nationalist opposition in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, an organ of the radical German left of which Marx was co-editor and Engels a prolific contributor on international affairs. The two men advocated national unity as a means of breaking down dynastic particularism, creating a liberal all-German constitution, and carving out large internal free-trade areas favouring the rapid growth of capitalist industry.

As I suggested in Chapter 2, however, Marx and Engels perceived that the obstacles to comprehensive reform in Germany were more complex than many of their liberal and democratic contemporaries suspected. Writing in the German Ideology, two years before the revolutions of 1848 led to the first, abortive attempt to form a unified German nation-state, Marx and Engels described the circumstances that militated against the success of a liberal nationalist movement. They linked the rising popularity of an inward-looking nationalism with the frustrations of the German middle class, and expressed doubts about that class’s ability to surmount entrenched obstacles to forging German unity on a constitutional basis. The authors’ concern was that the very groups which had the most pressing interest in liberal reform might become so preoccupied with the nationalist demand for unity that, if faced with persistent opposition, they would sacrifice crucial parts of their reform programme in favour of unity by any available means—including its forcible imposition ‘from above’ by one of the authoritarian monarchies competing for dominance within the German Confederation. In the NRZ Marx and Engels repeatedly urged that the quest for national unity should not be allowed to supersede the opposition’s fundamental goals of reform. Their analyses of the circumstances which created a tension between liberal and nationalist aims in Germany highlight three distinctive aspects of their general approach to explaining nationalism.

First, Marx and Engels sought to remind German liberals and democrats that their interest in national unification had not initially been conceived as an end in itself. Unity was a means of advancing the economic and political interests of the rising ‘middle classes’ against absolutist rulers; those rulers should not, therefore, be permitted to stifle calls for comprehensive reform by seizing the reins of the broader nationalist movement. The two men were keenly aware that in the years before the revolutions, the Prussian state had shown a growing willingness to support legislation favouring capitalist concerns while striving, at the same time, to discourage any independent political ambitions on the part of the middle class.¹⁰ Such partial concessions were intended, in Marx and Engels’ view, to dampen that class’s zeal for the political changes needed to implement large-scale reforms. Hoping to avert this outcome, the authors insisted that the maximal or substantive interests of the German middle classes—who, once they were organized behind a coherent set of common aims, qualified for the more precise designations of ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘petty bourgeoisie’¹¹—required the simultaneous achievement of unity and reform, not the former before the latter.

Second, Marx and Engels identified specific social and political conditions in Germany which threatened to invert the initial priorities of the liberal-nationalist programme. Their analysis in the NRZ closely followed the German Ideology’s earlier account of this reversal. If the ecumenical appeal of nationalist aims appeared to be stronger than that of more particular social and political interests, this was not simply because the pressures of foreign competition tended to blunt the edge of internal class conflicts. In fact, Marx and Engels argued, external pressures had underlined class divisions in Germany, and the emergence of an increasingly assertive middle-class opposition led governments to intensify repressive legislation and coercive measures at home. It was this domestic repression, rather than any general animus towards an external enemy or trans-class sense of a common national destiny, which frustrated aspirations for reform and led some members of the German middle classes to invest all their hopes in the ill-defined goal of national unity. As Engels was to write some years after the failed revolutions of 1848, ‘[b]oth in Prussia and the smaller states, the difficulty of giving vent to political opposition created a sort of religious opposition’ whose proponents strove ‘to build that great temple under the roof of which all Germans might unite’.¹²

Third—and this argument took Marx and Engels beyond their earlier accounts—the prospects for implementing a liberal programme for national unification hinged on a question which, before 1848, remained wide open: the question of class alliances. Marx and Engels realized that, once engaged in open conflict with their various governments, the German bourgeoisie would have to call on the support of other social groups. Their choice was whether to align themselves with the lower-class supporters of reform nationalism, who were represented by a variety of democratic and radical organizations, or with groups closely associated with the traditional state authorities, favouring unification without substantial reform. This was, as Marx and Engels recognized, a painfully hard choice for the nascent and historically risk-averse German bourgeoisie. If its members’ interests in economic and constitutional reform were likely to be compromised by an alliance with the right, an attempt to mobilize the popular left might stimulate pressures to go far beyond the initial, relatively modest reforms that were congruent with bourgeois class interests. By insisting that the fate of liberal nationalism in Germany stood or fell on the question of class alliances, Marx and Engels avoided the conclusion that the rise of an authoritarian, power-state nationalism in Germany after 1848 was the inevitable result of previous historical developments.

In the repressive climate that prevailed before 1848, the radical positions of the NRZ had little chance of gaining direct political expression. Its editors saw their role as that of a goad to the mainstream liberal opposition which, Marx argued, ‘was nothing else than the opposition of the bourgeoisie to a political form that no longer corresponded to its interests and needs’.¹³ The revolution of March 1848 gave this opposition a leading position in the newly formed governments, but it left the separate German states very much intact. The task of drafting a constitution for a unified Germany was assumed by a new representative National Assembly based at Frankfurt-am-Main. While its constituents waited for the Assembly to embark on this task, however, the old state authorities began to recover strength. By June Marx and Engels were expressing grave doubts about the competence of the Frankfurt parliament to formulate a realistic programme for German unification, let alone to assert its sovereignty over monarchs and state Diets when it possessed neither an army nor a government. The summer of 1848 revealed a division in the Frankfurt parliament between a left wing which wanted to dismantle the old state institutions through social revolution, and moderate liberals who believed that German unity could only be built federally with the cooperation of state parliaments and monarchs.

Marx and Engels supported the first of these groups, but the second had an overwhelming parliamentary majority. By the time the Assembly had moved from its preliminary debates to its main task of drawing up a constitution, the monarchs of the two major German states, Prussia and Austria, were already preparing their counter-assault on the opposition movements in their domains. As the year drew to an end, Marx and Engels blamed bourgeois moderates within and outside the Frankfurt parliament for short-circuiting the National Assembly’s ambitious liberal programme for unification. Marx was particularly concerned to note that in Prussia, whose rulers had for some years displayed hegemonic ambitions to unite Germany by force under the Prussian crown, the bourgeoisie had shown an increasing willingness to cooperate with the traditional authorities in thwarting the decisions made at Frankfurt.¹⁴ Such cooperation, he argued, reignited old rivalries among the different German states and paved the way for the counter-revolutionary triumphs of spring and summer 1849.

Marx and Engels’ analysis of these events gave due explanatory weight to the factors usually underlined by historians who have endeavoured to explain the failure of the German liberal-nationalist movement in 1848–9. They stressed, first, the political inexperience, indecisiveness, and doctrinal divisions among delegates to the Frankfurt Assembly; second, the obstacles to unification posed by the entrenched interests associated with the separate German states, and especially the international rivalry between Prussia and Austria; and third, the powerful resistance of traditional ruling classes—especially the aristocratic Junkers and conservative bureaucrats in Prussia—to the liberal, all-German conception of the nation-state propounded by the opposition movement.¹⁵ In identifying the liberal leadership of that movement with specifically bourgeois interests, moreover, Marx and Engels’ account does not diverge significantly from arguments included in the mainstream of recent German historiography. A large body of non-Marxist scholars have operated with the assumption that, until 1848, liberal nationalism in Germany was the ideology of a movement aimed at expanding capitalism by creating political institutions that would give the manufacturing and entrepreneurial middle classes a greater say in policy-making.¹⁶

Unlike many later historians, however, Marx and Engels did not explain the collapse of this programme by arguing that the German bourgeoisie, confronted by the unabashed power of traditional states backed by strong military resources, simply lacked the strength needed to carry out its intentions. This explanation of the revolution’s ‘failure’ might be invoked to defend the thesis that a panoply of deep-seated historical, political, and cultural factors made the defeat of liberal nationalism in Germany a foregone conclusion in 1848. Action taken in the pursuit of class interests, on this view, tended perennially to face the far stronger imperatives of tradition and state. Marx and Engels recognized that the political fragmentation and inflated role of the absolutist state in Germany had helped to give the class interests of that country’s bourgeoisie a particular form, and constrained the manner in which those interests could be pursued. But it is significant that the authors’ epitaph on the German revolution denounced its ‘betrayal’ by the bourgeoisie, a charge which clearly differentiates their explanation of the revolution’s defeat from that of scholars who contend that the German bourgeoisie simply ‘failed’ to implement their liberal–nationalist programme. The ‘betrayal’ thesis implies that the bourgeoisie had the power to implement that programme, yet intentionally refrained from using that power, thereby limiting what the wider liberal and democratic opposition could achieve.¹⁷

If it is assumed that Marx and Engels started by positing a clear-cut, unchanging set of class interests which explained the German bourgeoisie’s position on the question of national unity, the betrayal thesis may appear as a piece of opportunistic scapegoating, or the product of hopelessly contradictory analysis. On the one hand, the two men never altered their opinion that the Frankfurt Assembly’s initial goals represented the optimum interests of the bourgeois class: the creation of a constitutional nation-state based on popular sovereignty, and including German parts of Austria and Prussia. On the other hand, Marx came to argue that the non-achievement of these goals was also explained by the interests of the very bourgeoisie that had previously pursued them.

The solution to this apparent contradiction lies in the distinction between substantial and prudential class interests outlined in Section 3.1, and relates to the crucial question of class alliances. Having achieved a measure of political power through the March revolutions, representatives of the German bourgeoisie were obliged to seek support for their policies among both the traditional ruling groups and a wider popular constituency. From this point forward, the bourgeoisie’s substantial aims were pressed from two sides: by those on the right who hoped to restrict political and economic liberalization, and by those on the left who wanted to dismantle the existing governments and create a nation-state based on a democratic constitution. The question then was whether, in the light of its considered prudential interests, the German bourgeoisie would continue to support the liberal programme of unification ‘from below’ by constitutional agreement; or if, intimidated by the first experience of political leadership, it would hand back the nationalist reins to the old monarchical states, whose rulers could then proceed to settle the ‘national question’ by force of arms.

Marx and Engels pointed to two factors which predisposed the German bourgeoisie towards the latter solution. The members of that class, first of all, lacked a coherent political organization and remained deeply divided on crucial policy issues. In 1847–8 Marx produced detailed reports for the NRZ on local and nation-wide debates on one of the most divisive questions, that of free trade versus protectionism. Advocates of the latter more often found allies among landowning, conservative aristocrats than among the liberal left and centre. Many preferred to wait for unification ‘from above’ by a powerful state which could protect them against foreign competition.¹⁸ Even outside Prussia, protectionist concerns tended to weaken the German bourgeoisie’s commitment to the Frankfurt Assembly’s Grossdeutsch formula for unification—which sought to include all traditionally German-speaking lands—in favour of a Kleindeutsch solution, based on Prussian hegemony and excluding German Austria.

Secondly, by the middle of the nineteenth century Germany had—in Prussia, at least—not only a strong conservative state, but also a very numerous urban lower-middle class, and a burgeoning proletariat. The constitutional and national demands of both these groups were radical by the standards of the moderate liberalism that prevailed in the National Assembly. Amid vivid memories of 1789 and current reports of violence on the streets of Paris, the German bourgeoisie began to doubt the advantages of a high political profile which might become the target of urban discontent. In the same article of December 1848 where he located the bourgeoisie at the vanguard of the German revolution, Marx also remarked that in Prussia the bourgeoisie

was not a class speaking for the whole of modern society. It had sunk to the level of a kind of social estate as clearly distinct from the Crown as it was from the people, with a strong bent to oppose both adversaries and irresolute towards each of them because it always saw both of them either in front of it or behind it.¹⁹

In Marx’s view, then, the German bourgeoisie did have an avowed substantial interest in the creation of a German nation-state on a liberal, constitutional basis. But when in 1848 they were forced to navigate between the Scylla of unabashed traditional rulers and the Charybdis of restive lower classes, bourgeois leaders concluded that it would be premature and foolhardy to try to maximize their interests on the liberal schedule planned by the National Assembly. The revolution which had swept the bourgeoisie to power ‘also upset their plans’, Marx observed, ‘because their rule was thus bound by conditions which they neither wanted nor were able to fulfil’.²⁰ These prudential concerns attenuated the German bourgeoisie’s commitment to the liberal political principles of the Frankfurt parliament. The most powerful sections of that class therefore opted to pursue far more restricted nationalist aims through defensive alliances with the old ruling classes and, eventually, by abstention from direct involvement in government.²¹ This strategy enabled the old authorities to crush the reforming opposition, and paved the way for the illiberal and hegemonic nationalism that accompanied German unification in 1871.

It is important to stress that Marx and Engels regarded the bourgeoisie’s prudential interests vis-à-vis the lower classes—and not bourgeois weakness in the face of intra-class divisions, international conflicts, and traditional ruling authorities—as the decisive factor explaining the collapse of the liberal-nationalist movement. This emphasis enabled Marx and Engels to resist the conclusion that pre-existing political structures exerted an ‘independent’ influence on events in Germany, inevitably forcing the bourgeoisie to subordinate its class interests to traditional statist concerns and power politics. We have seen that Marx and Engels shared the view of many more recent historians that, even before the disappointments of 1848, there were strong pressures on German liberals to place national unity above reform on their political agenda, even at the expense of cherished liberal principles. But they rejected the presumption that this outcome was inevitable in 1848. By emphasizing fears of social unrest ‘from below’ rather than irresistible pressures ‘from above’, Marx and Engels suggested that opposition leaders in 1848 had an opportunity to steer events in a different direction than the one they took. None of their strategic options were free from risks, but they did have a genuine choice: and one of them was to take a less compromising stance against the old rulers, if necessary by mobilizing popular support for a social revolution aimed at unifying Germany on the basis of national representative institutions.

If this analysis rules out the notion that the downfall of liberal nationalism represented an unmitigated defeat for the German bourgeoisie, it also precludes the argument that the goal of national unity took priority over class interests in 1848. On Marx and Engels’ analysis, bourgeois interests were not entirely coextensive with the liberal programme of 1848; the withdrawal of bourgeois support did not, therefore, testify to the superior appeal of nationalist over class aims. The presence or absence of bourgeois support for specific nationalist policies tended to be related to fairly narrow, pragmatic concerns rather than to any strong ideological commitments or political principles. Liberal doctrines were invoked selectively, often strategically, to advance bourgeois aims while averting confrontation with either the Crown or the lower classes. For Marx and Engels national unity was a means to class-related ends, not a free-floating idea which appealed to the German bourgeoisie against its members’ better interests. Their preference for one programme of unification rather than another, for a Kleindeutsch solution imposed by Prussian arms or a Grossdeutsch formula imposed by constitutional means, was explained by the vagaries of their prudential interests at times of political crisis.

In 1848 Marx continued to make unfavourable comparisons between the German bourgeoisie’s revolutionary performance and that of its counterparts in other countries. ‘The bourgeoisie in France,’ he declared in November,

headed the counter-revolution only after it had broken down all the obstacles to the rule of its own class … in Germany it acts like a slave and carries out the counter-revolution for its own tyrants. In France it won its victory in order to humble the people. In Germany it humbled itself to prevent the victory of the people. History presents no more shameful and pitiful spectacle than that of the German bourgeoisie.²²

In identifying pressures exerted from below as the key constraint on bourgeois interests, however, Marx and Engels began to move away from their earlier preoccupation with the apparently anomalous relations between state and society in Germany, and to observe parallel constraints on bourgeois action elsewhere. Events in 1848–9 were to show that even the heroic French bourgeoisie had absorbed the cautionary lessons of successive revolutions, and come to fear the intractable movements of the ‘masses’. Duly noting this phenomenon, Marx ceased to invoke foreign models of political development as a stick with which to beat the German bourgeoisie. He continued to view the overbearing statism and political disunity of Germany as conditions which greatly aggravated the bourgeoisie’s conservative tendencies; but after 1849 he no longer treated those tendencies as a peculiarly German aberration.

We should not be surprised, then, to find close similarities between the attitudes to nationalism that Marx and Engels identified in the German bourgeoisie and those they ascribed to other national branches of that class—including the French and British branches, ostensibly the prototypes against which he measured the disappointing revolutionary performance of the German bourgeoisie. The parallels, of course, are indirect: Marx and Engels discussed the ambivalent, compromising attitudes of the French and British bourgeoisies in relation not to indigenous national movements, but to reform-oriented nationalism abroad. The following section locates the ideas discussed above within a wider European perspective, examining the relationship between the domestic and international dimensions of bourgeois interests.

3.3. PRINCIPLES AND INTERESTS IN FOREIGN POLICY

In explaining the tenacity of absolutist rule and feudal property relations throughout central and eastern Europe, and the limited success of efforts in France to eradicate those institutions, Marx and Engels stressed the international dimensions of conservatism. For them the single most important factor to be taken into account in formulating a strategy for any reform-oriented movement, whether nationalist or not, was the likelihood of a common response by the politically dominant classes of Europe to a revolutionary threat affecting any one of them. In an age when the corrosive effects of nationalism on existing state boundaries were compounded by its assault on established governments, national movements were a prime target of international anti-revolutionary alliances. Before the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions the Holy Alliance, led by arch-conservative Russia and including Prussia and the polyglot Austrian empire, had openly committed its member states to suppress political movements which threatened absolutist government in any part of Congress Europe.

In this hostile environment, the sympathy of more liberally inclined governments and populations abroad helped to sustain the aspirations of opposition nationalists. Public opinion in France and Britain, the two leading constitutional states in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, strongly favoured foreign policies supporting the republican forces of the Italian Risorgimento and the anti-imperial, constitutional nationalisms of central and eastern Europe. The governments of France and Britain publicly committed themselves to defend the national freedom of peoples struggling to break their absolutist chains. But when matters came to a head in 1848, these avowals were rarely translated into active or consistent support. Marx and Engels were joined by other European liberals and democrats in criticizing what they saw as the fence-sitting, two-faced response of the French and British governments to calls for assistance from their foreign friends. What was distinctive about Marx and Engels’ critique, however, was that it explained this response in relation to the ambivalent class interests which, in their view, the dominant bourgeois component of those governments strove to protect through their international relations.

In his studies of contemporary international relations, as in his writings on domestic politics, Marx rarely explained specific policy preferences of the bourgeoisie in terms of a clear-cut, transnational class interest in sustaining capitalism ‘as a whole’. The bourgeoisie, after all, did not attain social or political dominance in all states at the same time; the global ascendancy of capitalist economic relations coexisted for long periods with absolutist states and empires. The strength of the latter, as Marx recognized, had to be accounted for in any reasonable definition of the class interests pursued through bourgeois foreign policy. In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, then, the forces of international conservatism combined with a fear of revolution ‘from below’ to confront political representatives of the bourgeoisie with hard strategic choices. On the one hand, they shared an interest in weakening absolutist obstacles to capitalist development. On the other, they relied on absolutist states for help in suppressing revolutionary threats at home or in allied countries.

Outside the abstract model of polarized class struggle, then, the problem of identifying the main opponent of bourgeois interests impinged on the foreign policy even of states which had, by and large, resolved it internally. Throughout 1848, Marx and Engels looked to France to play its historic role as spearhead of the European revolutions. Their hopes that the newly formed republican government would actively support national struggles abroad were disappointed by the contradictory policies of Lamartine, Foreign Minister to the Second Republic. After issuing a manifesto which effectively abandoned France’s commitment to revise the frontiers imposed by the Treaty of Vienna, Lamartine authorized French forces to join Austria and Naples in intervening against the newly proclaimed Roman republic in 1848.

In identifying the class-related motives that helped to bring about this shift in policy, Marx stressed the interplay of domestic and international pressures that helped to redefine France’s ‘national interest’. At home, the new French government had been obliged to pass an electoral law granting universal manhood suffrage. Fearing a radical backlash from the urban subaltern classes, it sought to court the vote of the most numerous, traditional, and devoutly Catholic part of the French population: the peasantry. The government’s pretext for sending troops to Rome alongside reactionary foreign forces was to protect the Pope who, Marx remarked wrily, ‘was to consecrate the worthy republic and to secure Cavaignac’s election as President. With the Pope Cavaignac wanted to hook the priests, with the priests the peasants and with the peasants the Presidency.’²³ At the same time, Marx argued that the government’s need to resort to this populist stratagem revealed the weak social basis of its legitimacy. Lacking a solid domestic constituency and squeezed between a monarchist reaction and the radical demands of urban workers and artisans, the moderate republic, Marx argued, ‘no longer seeks its supports in France, but outside, abroad, in invasion’.²⁴

Its foreign adventures were not, however, mere propaganda exercises aimed at temporarily glossing over France’s tarnished gloire. They also had a more important purpose in the broader, strategic scope of class struggle in Europe, since

a blow struck against the Roman revolutionaries was a blow struck against the allies of the French revolutionaries; the alliance of the counter-revolutionary classes in the … French republic was inevitably continued in the alliance of the French Republic with the Holy Alliance, with Naples and Austria.²⁵

Like their German counterparts, then, the French bourgeoisie—having briefly tasted the dangerous fruits of political power—saw the single greatest threat to its interests in revolution ‘from below’. It could not avert this threat without collaborating with the enemies who faced it ‘from above’. But so long as there remained some hope of fending off both opponents at home, it was politically safer to collaborate with foreign ‘forces of reaction’ to attack the foreign allies of domestic revolutionaries than to take on the latter directly. Engels observed that the French bourgeoisie’s weak, defensive position at home made it particularly vulnerable to reactionary pressures from abroad. In pressing France to join the Roman expedition ‘Austria’, he wrote, ‘understands very well that the French bourgeoisie wants “peace at any price”, that the freedom or bondage of the Italians is altogether a matter of complete indifference to the bourgeoisie.’²⁶

Marx sought further evidence of these prudential, class-based motivations in the gaps he found between the government’s avowed intentions and the actions it took to defend them. The intervention in Rome, Marx argued, was not only contrary to Lamartine’s ‘empty words of the fraternity of all nations, of the impending emancipation of all the nations by France’;²⁷ it also violated the principle of non-intervention enshrined in the French republican Constitution.²⁸ He dismissed official denials that such a violation had occurred, arguing that these showed merely that prudential bourgeois interests, and not constitutional principles, were the basic constraint on government policy. The touchstone for interpreting and applying the principle of non-intervention was, Marx declared, the bourgeoisie’s concern to ward off revolution ‘from below’: ‘The Constitution … forbade any attack on the freedom of foreign peoples, but according to the ministry what the French army was attacking in Rome was not “freedom” but the “despotism of anarchy”.’ This tendentious wording suggested that the Constitution ‘was bound to be interpreted in accordance with its viable sense, and … the bourgeois sense was the only viable one’.²⁹

Beneath these evasions of the obligations imposed by ‘principle’, Marx perceived not the ruse of a manipulative, politically confident ‘ruling class’, but an endangered bourgeoisie looking for any available way out of a perplexing strategic conundrum. He underscored this distinction by contrasting the republican government’s approach to nationalism at home and abroad with the cynical bravado of its precursor. The leaders of the Second Republic, he remarked ironically, ‘deserve praise for the reason that, instead of exaggerating the national sentiment as under Louis Philippe, they now, when they had command of the national power, crawled before foreign countries and, instead of setting Italy free, let her be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans’.³⁰ In France as in Germany, bourgeois attitudes toward anti-conservative nationalism abroad and liberal or republican ambitions to restructure the ‘nation’ at home were, on Marx’s analysis, by no means unequivocally positive. His writings on both countries stressed the bourgeoisie’s ambivalent, instrumental response to nationalist programmes elaborated outside their class ranks.

In the French Second Republic, of course, evasions of international principle were encouraged by the fear of domestic upheaval. If we take the abstract pronouncements of the Manifesto as a canonical reference, we might conclude that Marx regarded both the French and German bourgeoisies as merely ‘nascent’ classes, whose behaviour in 1848 should not be seen as exemplifying bourgeois politics in general. Marx the theorist, as opposed to Marx the journalist, perhaps expected the bourgeoisie to act differently in situations where it faced no immediate threat of internal revolution—to offer resolute support for ‘progressive’, centralizing, or anti-feudal national movements abroad, as a means of opening up foreign markets and removing political and economic obstacles to the global spread of capitalism. In fact, Marx found the very epitome of the bourgeois class’s ambivalent, ideologically reticent approach to nationalism in the foreign policy of the country which, in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, was least convulsed by violent social conflicts.

In Britain, bourgeois interests were safely guarded by government against demands ‘from below’ that were, in any case, seldom framed in revolutionary terms. But bourgeois apprehensions about revolution on the Continent were no less acute in Britain than elsewhere. Its strong position in domestic politics did not make the British bourgeoisie any bolder in its stance against international reaction, or more zealous in its support for foreign movements striving to realize the political ideals espoused by its government, than its French counterparts. The absence of a powerful ‘internal enemy’ simply made it easier for the bourgeois-dominated government of Britain to form a clear-sighted view of its strategic options in foreign affairs, and to navigate stormy waters with greater dexterity. Marx drew this contrast with France in November 1848, when he wrote that ‘The fumbling approach of continental provisional governments to the solution of problems and … contradictions is not required in England, for she is more competent in dealing with and solving them than any country.’³¹ While other governments were struggling to define a set of ‘national interests’ that they could pursue without encouraging domestic upheaval, the British government, in Marx’s view, had long since resolved this problem. Its basic interest was clear, and consistent with the basic class interests of the bourgeoisie: to maintain Britain’s dominant position on the world market.

In political terms, this usually translated into a concern to maintain peace and stability on the Continent. The main outward thrust of British capitalism was directed beyond Europe where, in mid-century, it faced no serious competitors; closer to home, bourgeois interests were essentially conservative. According to Marx, Britain’s economic dominance enabled British policymakers to exert a great deal of influence on events on the Continent while preserving an equally considerable freedom of manœuvre.³² ‘England’, he declared on New Year’s Eve 1848, ‘seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled in the womb.’³³ Popular revolutions were not only destabilizing; they were also internationally contagious. Yet British leaders had no desire to become directly entangled in another Continental war. Preoccupied with colonial interests overseas, they sought to use their international influence to undermine chances of revolutionary success abroad while, at the same time, declaring British support for the opponents of absolutism everywhere.

As the personification of this method Marx chose Lord Palmerston who, as Britain’s Foreign Minister during the Continental revolutions, had ‘inherited from Canning England’s mission to propagate Constitutionalism on the Continent’.³⁴ In a series of polemical articles written in 1853, Marx evaluated Palmerston’s versatile use of this theme to vex absolutist powers while actually withholding material support from constitutional national movements in Europe. According to Marx, the Foreign Minister invoked the idea of a special British ‘mission’ to ‘pique the national prejudices, and to counteract revolution abroad and, at the same, to hold awake the suspicious jealousy of foreign Powers’.³⁵ Marx pointed out that, when judged by the standards of traditional diplomacy, Palmerston’s approach appeared waffling and unsuccessful. Before the outbreak of the revolutions, Palmerston’s diplomatic activity consisted in ineffectual counsel urging rulers on the Continent to undertake timely constitutional reforms. Once the revolutions had erupted, he sought to bluff the same rulers by creating the impression that Britain would actively oppose any foreign intervention in a neighbouring state.³⁶ But what looked like a failure to achieve substantial diplomatic results appeared highly successful when measured by a yardstick of class interests. In Marx’s view, Palmerston’s merits as a statesman of the bourgeoisie lay precisely in his ability to avoid British engagement in European conflicts while preserving Britain’s international image as the level-headed guardian of constitutional principles.³⁷

Interpreting those principles in a pragmatic, conservative fashion, Palmerston proved a most accomplished performer of the balancing-acts which Marx saw as the hallmark of a well-calibrated ‘bourgeois’ foreign policy. His agility in this respect was epitomized for Marx in his approach towards nationalist movements on the Continent. ‘If he betrayed foreign peoples’ for fear of encouraging revolution, Palmerston always ‘did it with great politeness. If the oppressors were always sure of his active support, the oppressed never wanted a great ostentation of his rhetorical generosity.’ Palmerston’s strategy, Marx claimed, was designed to keep all parties guessing as to where British sympathies lay. ‘Poles, Italians, Hungarians and Germans found him in office’, he wrote, ‘whenever they were crushed, but their despots always suspected him of secret conspiracy with the victims he had allowed them to make.’³⁸ In the following passage, Marx summarizes the Foreign Minister’s approach to the ideological issues raised by national revolutions in Europe:

He knows how to conciliate a democratic phraseology with oligarchic views, how to cover the peace-mongering policy of the middle classes with the haughty language of England’s aristocratic past—how to appear as the aggressor where he connives, and as the defender where he betrays—how to manage an apparent enemy, and how to exasperate a pretendant ally—how to find himself, at the opportune moment of the dispute, on the side of the stronger against the weaker, and how to utter brave words in the act of running away.³⁹

The bourgeoisie’s interests in Britain, as in France and Germany, were thus advanced through the highly selective application of principles that were supposed to underpin the legitimacy of its representatives. By suggesting that class interests explained why and when those principles were or were not applied, Marx challenged two more conventional ways of explaining foreign policy choices: those based on the idea that statesmen are motivated by free-floating principles or ideals, and power-political accounts which postulated a class-neutral ‘national interest’ as the basic guide to policy-making. Marx’s observations suggest a general, cross-national hypothesis: that the bourgeoisie’s commitment to the political doctrines which express their substantial interests is weakened, not reinforced, in proportion to the clarity of those interests and the confidence that they can be secured. This hypothesis helps to explain British disengagement from the crusading, Manichaean battles of doctrine that raged throughout the Continent. In Marx’s view, Britain was able to remain aloof from those battles because of its undisputed economic dominance; and it was this dominance, rather than the Foreign Minister’s personal shrewdness, which enabled Palmerston to brandish a rhetoric aimed at playing foreign rivals off each other. As Marx was to remark in later years, British statesmen would be obliged to take sides in politics as soon as their country’s commercial interests faced serious threats from abroad.

We can therefore conclude that, for Marx, the class interests of the bourgeoisie did not dictate any practical commitment to support liberal and republican national movements abroad. The decisive factor explaining the presence or absence of such support was, as in the domestic arena, prudential class interests in relation to revolutionary threats both at home and in neighbouring countries. From the standpoint of bourgeois rationality, the wisest course was exemplified for Marx by Palmerston’s foreign policy: to keep all strategic options open in a volatile context of class and international conflict. As Palmerston himself declared in 1848: ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’⁴⁰ In seeking to divulge the class basis of Britain’s dominant ‘national interests’, of course, Marx denied that those interests were defined primarily in terms of unchanging geopolitical factors or the common good of all British subjects. The following section examines his and Engels’ analyses of the role played by subaltern social groups in supporting or challenging populist appeals to nationality.

3.4. THE SOCIAL BASES OF POPULAR NATIONALISM

The articulate, programmatic activity of nationalist leaders has often been contrasted with the emotionally charged response of their lower-class followers. Whereas the former are typically characterized as highly self-conscious actors pursuing well-defined nationalist objectives, the latter make briefer appearances in much of the literature on nationalism as that amorphous but crucial variable in modern political equations: the ‘masses’. The decision to explain popular politics by using the concept of ‘the masses’ rather than that of class is not an arbitrary one. From the early nineteenth century onward, the rise of a distinctive mass politics was associated with the decline of traditional class structures which had, in the past, provided a relatively stable framework for transmitting social interests into the political arena. The ‘masses’ have often been defined as precisely those aggregates of individuals who lack a strong sense of class identity or compelling class interests.⁴¹ When in the first half of the twentieth century the older class structures appeared to have collapsed in many parts of Europe, the concept of class was apparently deprived of its previous analytical utility; the political behaviour of atomized, desultory masses called for a different form of explanation.

When subaltern classes are dissolved into masses, their motives for supporting or dissenting from specific nationalist programmes appear far less accessible to rational analysis than those of their more articulate leaders. ‘Masses’ are activated by fears and hopes, not by any determinate set of corporate interests or consciously shared ideals. Their attitudes to nationalism cannot, therefore, be elucidated by asking how their actions relate to concrete interests, but only by looking into the non-rational aspects of ‘mass’ behaviour that seem to be tapped so effectively by nationalist ideology. That ideology is usually thought to work on the deficient political consciousness of the masses in one of two very different ways: through some form of manipulation, or through a direct appeal to deep-seated but unarticulated needs and longings. In the first case, popular responses to nationalism may be seen as an effect of ‘false consciousness’ to which the indifferent masses, ‘harnessed’ like a cart-horse to elite movements, passively succumb. In the second case, the same responses may be taken as evidence that the unsophisticated majority of any given population is naturally prone to attitudes which feed into nationalism: hostility towards outsiders, a longing for pride in a collective identity, or generalized social and economic insecurities. In neither case is the subaltern class’s role in national movements explained in relation to specific interests and aims which furnish rational motivations for supporting or opposing those movements. It is therefore assumed that popular nationalism requires ‘elite’ leadership; that the concerns of subaltern classes are neither clear nor compelling enough to serve as the basis for independent nationalist programmes.

By differentiating classes within ‘the masses’, Marx and Engels’ theory appears at first glance to erode the sharp distinction between popular and ‘élite’ nationalism which has upheld this assumption. That theory identified one subaltern class—the proletariat—whose interests provided strong motivations to support some forms of nationalism while opposing others, and which was capable of developing the consciousness and organization needed to spearhead movements of national opposition. Marx and Engels’ views on the role of other non-dominant classes are more ambiguous. The two men sometimes seem to reinstate the mass/elite distinction by simply adding the proletariat to the latter, privileged category. The Manifesto describes the peasants and petty bourgeoisie as unthinking instruments of reaction, lacking the social attributes and collective consciousness needed to form full-fledged classes.⁴² Elsewhere, the authors made detailed analyses of the concerns that influenced peasant and petty bourgeois responses to nationalist appeals. The following discussion begins by asking whether Marx and Engels assumed that peasant nationalism must always take a ‘reactionary’ form, and then goes on to examine their comments on the petty bourgeoisie’s attitudes toward xenophobic and authoritarian national movements. In dealing with these issues, I try to separate those explanations which rely on the key concepts of class interests and alliances from those that do not. I will also suggest that Marx and Engels sometimes laid stress on quite different elements of their theory in their respective analyses of nationalism, and that these analyses were not necessarily congruent.

In a series of articles entitled ‘The Magyar Struggle’ written early in 1849, Engels examined the role of the peasantry in national conflicts within the Habsburg empire, where the Magyars and numerous Slavic nationalities had lived for centuries alongside the politically dominant German Austrians. Two features of his account are worth emphasizing at the outset. First, Engels recognized that friction among the Austrian nationalities had deep historical roots. But he argued that, historically, centripetal pressures had frequently been as strong as those working for open national conflict. Second, Engels identified wider social movements and class conflicts as some of the chief factors tending to ignite or to pacify national antagonisms in Austria. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hostilities between subject Slav nationalities and their German and Magyar overlords were partly neutralized, according to Engels, by the growing tensions between bourgeoisie and nobility throughout the multinational empire. National divisions remained a relatively insignificant source of conflict so long as the ruling class within each national group, who shared an interest in ‘preserving the monarchy, which had more and more to defend the nobility against the developing German and Magyar bourgeoisie’,⁴³ maintained its dominant position.

As the bourgeoisie gathered strength, however, feudal class relations in Austria were shaken from the roots upward. In the revolutionary fever that swept across the Continent in 1848, national antipathies became interlinked with class struggles and thereby took on an inflammatory, political character. Engels wrote elsewhere that the growth of urban middle-class power ‘upset in Austria, as it had done everywhere else, the old relations and vital conditions of whole classes of society’.⁴⁴ Classes that had hitherto played a marginal role in politics soon responded publicly to changes in the character of productive forces and relations, expressing dissatisfaction with the central government. The Viennese bourgeoisie was joined in opposition by a part of the state bureaucracy and lower nobility. These movements at the centre then activated movements for national autonomy and reform throughout the empire. Engels argued that one of the most important developments affecting all parts of Austria, whether directly or indirectly, was the revolutionizing impact of industry on rural life. Even in largely agrarian, Slav-populated areas, capitalist activity had begun to change ‘serfs into free men, small farmers into manufacturing operatives’.⁴⁵ This development altered the old balance of class forces between feudal nobility and the peasantry, jeopardizing the former’s position.

Against this broad historical background, Engels ascribed to the peasantry a pivotal role in transforming social conflicts into national ones. ‘Since the movement of the peasants, who’, he asserted, ‘everywhere are the embodiment of national and local narrow-mindedness, necessarily assumes a local and national character, it was accompanied by a resurgence of the old national struggles.’ In the wake of this social upheaval came imperial divide-and-rule: ‘The different class interests, the national features of narrow-mindedness, and local prejudices, despite their complexity, were completely held in check by their mutual counteraction and allowed the old scoundrel Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, complete freedom of manœuvre’⁴⁶ to inflame nationalities and classes against each other when he needed a pretext for imposing imperial order. Once again, Engels placed special emphasis on the state’s use of class conflicts, which cut across and divided nationalities, to foment divisions within each nation and deflect resentments against the central government toward the local nobility. The latter, whose language and culture were often different from those of peasants within their estates, then looked to the Crown and army for assistance.⁴⁷

This account avoids some of the explanatory inadequacies that have often been attributed to Marx and Engels’ accounts of nationalism, but provides stark examples of others. Engels refrained from treating peasant nationalism as a form of ‘false consciousness’ deliberately fostered from above, or from arguing that national conflicts occur because they benefit the ruling class. He suggested only that such conflicts, once they have been stirred up by broader social change, may be used intentionally by rulers to deflect assaults on their legitimacy. Thus in 1846 ‘Metternich suppressed the democratic Polish movement, which had begun in the interests of the peasants, by using the religious and national fanaticism of the Ruthenian peasants’⁴⁸ against the reforming Polish nobility, who professed a different religion from the putative beneficiaries of their efforts. Here the emergence of national conflict is not explained by its function in sustaining the class relations on which Habsburg rule rested. It is simply treated as being susceptible of cynical application to class purposes.

At the same time, Engels assumed that peasant nationalism is necessarily reactionary, posing an inconvenient obstacle to the modernizing movements of the urban bourgeoisie. Assertions of a ‘local and national narrow-mindedness’ are treated as a non-rational response to what Engels saw as inevitable social progress, amounting to mere outbursts of ‘fanaticism’. It is the peasant’s stubborn attachment to outmoded ways of life, rather than ruling-class tricks of ‘false consciousness’-raising, which reduces the peasantry to a malleable appendage of the government’s counter-revolutionary efforts. This analysis yields a tendentious outlook on the future of national conflicts which rely on peasant support. If peasant nationalism is rooted in outworn conditions of life, it must soon be swept away by the stronger forces of modernity. Engels did not suggest that opposition leaders should compete with the Habsburg centre for peasant support by addressing legitimate discontents in the countryside. He simply assumed that broader social and economic developments would eliminate the problem.

What is missing in Engels’ otherwise consistently ‘materialist’ analysis is any account of the concrete class interests that predisposed the peasantry towards ‘reactionary’ forms of nationalism. To find such an account, we must turn to Marx’s remarks on the peasantry in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx devoted considerable effort here to explain why the French peasants had rallied so eagerly to the summons of an imperial adventurer whose only merit, in Marx’s eyes, was his kinship to the first Napoleon Bonaparte. Whereas Engels had merely observed and deplored peasant ‘fanaticism’ in Austria, linking its demise to impersonal economic forces, Marx’s analysis identified its more complex sources in contemporary French society. His account rests on the three elements of the strategic political theory outlined in Section 3.1. First, peasant support for ‘reactionary’ forms of nationalism can be explained, albeit in a negative way, by class interests; second, the peasantry is not congenitally conservative or xenophobic, but may respond to such appeals when its members’ concrete interests are threatened; third, patterns of peasant support for different forms of nationalism are essentially explained by class alliances.

Marx began by identifying the concrete social and economic interests that explain peasant responses to nationalist appeals. The French peasant’s livelihood depended on the security of his property, and on freedom from the exacting demands that were frequently made by local and central authorities on his financial resources and manpower. Governments which inflicted heavy taxes and long wars rarely endeared themselves to the peasantry. But Marx also underlined two features of peasant life that disabled peasants from securing their interests through resolute collective action, and which made them vulnerable to manipulation by other groups. He argued that the peasantry, tied for centuries to particular plots of land, had never been able to develop a strong class consciousness transcending their parochial, particularistic attachments because ‘their mode of operation isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse’.⁴⁹ In a well-known passage Marx enunciated his two criteria for defining a class, and suggested that the French peasants met only the first:

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions … that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is a merely local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not form a class.⁵⁰

This meant that the peasants were rarely able to express their class interests through independent political programmes. They were obliged to rely on other classes to protect their interests: ‘they cannot’, Marx wrote, ‘represent themselves; they must be represented.’ This sense of vulnerability, second, had been heightened in more recent times by the peasant’s marginal position within urban-based processes of social transformation.

Marx went on to identify several aspects of peasant culture that fed readily into authoritarian, xenophobic nationalism. The first was the peasants’ religious mentality, inclining them to regard with superstitious awe any strong leader who promised to protect their land and assure good harvests. When their welfare was seriously threatened and no realistic solutions presented themselves ‘their representative’, Marx wrote, ‘must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above’.⁵¹ The second was the army: ‘the point d’honneur of the smallholding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won nationhood … war was their poetry, the smallholding, extended and rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism was the ideal form of their sense of property.’⁵²

Marx therefore recognized that certain cultural predispositions, shaped by the peasant’s position in feudal society, helped to explain the success of populist national appeals. But he firmly rejected the notion that cultural values provide a stronger set of motivations explaining peasant nationalism than their more specific, prudential interests. To espouse an ideology which strikes deep chords in tradition-bound peasant hearts is not, he insisted, a sufficient condition for a successful appeal to the peasantry; the decisive question was whether those who issued the appeal promised to protect the peasant’s material and social interests. Marx argued that those interests did not necessarily dictate support for reactionary leaders and policies. During the 1848 revolutions which gave birth to the Second Republic, the actions of many peasants had confounded the assumption that their class was uniformly, incorrigibly backward-looking: ‘the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasant’, Marx argued, now ‘contended for mastery.’⁵³ Within the three years of its life-span, however, the republic’s policies had reinforced the latter at the expense of the former. Peasant efforts to take an independent stance towards the government were nipped in the bud, while burdensome taxes and the rising mortgage debt owed by smallholders to capitalist lenders accelerated the impoverishment of the countryside. In these circumstances, Marx argued, peasant support for Bonaparte’s imperial pretensions was not simply the result of effective propaganda, or an irrational escape to a mythicized past. On the contrary, it was the only rational response available to the peasants in conditions which threatened their livelihood and impeded their occasional efforts to organize collectively. He berated the bourgeoisie for fostering those conditions, and challenged their belief that the peasants’ native irrationality was responsible for Bonaparte’s rise to power. ‘This same bourgeoisie’, he declared,

now cries out about the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude that has betrayed it to Bonaparte. It has itself forcibly strengthened the imperial sentiments of the peasant class, it conserved the conditions that form the birthplace of this peasant religion. The bourgeoisie, to be sure, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses as long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.⁵⁴

Marx clearly implied here that the French peasants’ enthusiasm for the panaceas offered by militant forms of nationalism was inflamed only when they were deprived of any more efficient means of securing their interests. Having explained peasant nationalism as an ‘alienated’ means of pursuing class interests, Marx went on to argue that the apparently unchanging cultural attitudes that lend support to conservative appeals may be undermined by social and economic deprivation. If, he wrote, on the one hand the peasant smallholding ‘was naturally religious’ in ‘its accord with society, in its dependence on natural forces and its submission to the authority which protected it from above’, on the other hand it ‘naturally becomes irreligious’ when it is ‘ruined by debts, at odds with society and authority, and driven beyond its own limitations. Heaven’, he quipped, ‘was quite a pleasing accession to the narrow strip of land just won, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon as it is thrust forward as a substitute for the smallholding.’⁵⁵ In other words, the objects of peasant ‘emotions’-whether the army, Crown, or foreign enemy—were not fixed in advance by ancestral traditions, insulated by the ‘local and limited’ character of peasant life. They shifted according to basic peasant interests, which were clear enough on a local and even personal level without large-scale class organization.

This analysis informed Marx’s third argument: that the peasants’ conservative, xenophobic proclivities may be restrained by alliances with progressive class movements which address their concrete concerns. The peasants might support a reactionary party so long as it promised land and security; but if these promises proved false over time, Marx suggested, the peasants were quite capable of transferring their allegiance to another movement which offered better guarantees to their class interests. This activist position stands in sharp contrast to Engels’ comments on the peasantry in Austria and elsewhere: whereas Marx tended to stress the peasants’ potential for transcending narrow, traditional horizons, Engels emphasized the ‘natural’ limitations which fostered the peasant’s ‘unbounded nationalism’ and ‘his equally unbounded hatred of l’étranger’.⁵⁶ Both men pointed out, however, that in France and Germany, where feudal property relations were already being supplanted in the countryside by capitalist forms of ownership and exchange, the political attitudes of the peasantry were far from monolithic.⁵⁷ Marx argued that the conservative majority of the French peasants was opposed in revolutionary periods by ‘country people who, linked up with the towns, want to overthrow the old order through their own energies’.⁵⁸ Anticipating the failure of Louis Napoleon’s agrarian policy, Marx predicted that the the French peasants would eventually be forced to flood urban centres in search of work. There, he declared, the impoverished peasants would ‘find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order’.⁵⁹ While clearly regarding the proletariat as the ‘vanguard’ of this alliance, Marx later cautioned workers’ parties to avoid trying to ‘revolutionize’ the peasants through the kinds of forcible dislocation inflicted by capitalists: ‘it is important not to antagonise the peasant, e.g. by proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or the abolition of his property … ’.⁶⁰ Far from treating the peasants as a passive appendage of either conservative or proletarian élites, Marx insisted that the leaders of any political or national movement ignore, suppress, or second-guess peasant interests only at their own peril.

Moving from country to town, Marx and Engels offered a similar analysis of the relationship between right-wing nationalism and the quasi-class status of the petty bourgeoisie. Engels remarked that ‘the small trading and shopkeeping class’ was ‘a most important one in every modern body politic, and in all modern revolutions’; in Germany, it ‘generally played a decisive part’ in political struggles.⁶¹ The characteristics ascribed to the petty bourgeoisie in Marx and Engels’ writings mark out that group as an immediate ancestor of the urban ‘masses’ who were to play such a large supportive role in twentieth-century national movements. Marx and Engels describe the petty bourgeoisie as ‘the most changeable’ of modern social groups,⁶² a quasi-class which cannot be integrated into any stable class structure. The interests of small manufacturers and traders were substantially the same as those of large industrialists, entrepreneurs, and financial magnates: both sought to acquire and expand their private capital. But with the growth of large and unregulated markets, capital tended to become concentrated in the hands of the larger bourgeoisie, exposing small businesses to the threat of ruin. According to Marx and Engels, the petty bourgeoisie typically responded to that threat by clinging to the coat-tails of large capitalists, whose ranks they hoped to enter by expanding their own enterprises with loans and mortgages. The debts thereby incurred left the petty bourgeoisie highly vulnerable in times of economic crisis, when their creditors’ demands could lead to bankruptcy. This meant that their prudential interest in self-preservation could not be guaranteed by any independent, strategic action. Perennial insecurity was the lot of the petty bourgeoisie, whether they joined large capitalists in pursuing their interests or formed defensive alliances against them.

These circumstances, according to Marx and Engels, created a strong preference among the petty bourgeoisie for political doctrines that posit classlessness as an immediate social goal. Fears of class conflict were sublimated in populist visions of social harmony, wherein the petty bourgeoisie imagine they are ‘elevated above class antagonism generally’ and assert that ‘they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people”.⁶³ Such doctrines could, as Marx and Engels noted, be assimilated to quite different forms of nationalism. At times when hopes of rising to the class above them gained ascendancy over their fears, petty bourgeois populism asserted a strongly democratic conception of the nation against more restrictive, class-based definitions. In so far as this conception held up an exacting standard for gauging the shortcomings of capitalist society, Marx welcomed its contribution to movements of national opposition. In so far as it denied the existence of class conflicts or underestimated their potential for fracturing the ‘nation’ in the future, Marx regarded it as idealistic and ineffectual. On the other hand, the fear of bankruptcy and poverty might elicit petty bourgeois support for authoritarian policies ostensibly aimed at averting internal or external threats. Bonaparte’s Second Empire, Marx observed, appealed directly to this fear: it ‘professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over the working class; and … professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory.’⁶⁴ Here Marx also touched on a phenomenon that was to become more widespread in the twentieth century: the ‘mass’ popularity of leaders who come from outside the incumbent ruling classes and claim to stand above them, imposing order on chaos in the name of the popular ‘nation’.

Written in the light of twentieth-century events, general surveys of the role of different classes in national movements usually stress the authoritarian, chauvinistic attitudes that arise from the petty bourgeoisie’s precarious social position.⁶⁵ But Marx was less interested in predicting future developments than in trying to forestall the dangers already visible in the petty bourgeoisie’s anomalous situation. By explaining that group’s authoritarian leanings in relation to specific, frustrated interests, he was able to argue that efforts to address those interests might channel petty bourgeois populism into progressive social and national movements. In a close alliance with the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie’s ideals of classlessness could play a positive hortatory role, mobilizing support for hard-headed strategies aimed at working out existing class conflicts.

Marx had occasion to observe such an alliance at work in 1871, when the petty bourgeoisie joined forces with working-class organizations to form the Paris Commune. Cooperation among the lower and lower-middle classes within this ephemeral organization was based at once on a defensive patriotism and on common opposition to the politically dominant bourgeoisie. The Commune rejected the heavy indemnity inflicted on France by the Prussian victors in the war of 1870, and opposed the French government’s efforts to make the lower classes pay for a war for which they were not responsible. Marx applauded the radical patriotism represented by the Commune in its early days, arguing that appeals to the popular ‘nation’ were entirely appropriate for expressing dissent from the dominant class’s view of the ‘national’ interest. ‘The unity of the nation’, redefined in terms of the subaltern class’s interests,

was not to be broken but, on the contrary, to be organised by the Communal constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself … while the merely repressive functions of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society.⁶⁶

Guided by the strategic realism Marx attributed to working-class organizations, the petty bourgeoisie were able to respond in a constructive, organized way to a humiliating national defeat and the threat of bankruptcy. In earlier writings, Marx and Engels had stressed the need to subordinate petty bourgeois parties to firm working-class control. By the 1870s, however, Marx realized that the petty bourgeoisie was not an infinitely malleable quantity that could simply be harnessed to the movements of other classes. The bourgeoisie had alienated their mass supporters by persistently treating them as a docile appendage, and Marx urged working-class parties to avoid committing the same mistake. Among the supporters of the Paris Commune, Marx continued to see the working class as ‘the only class capable of social initiative’;⁶⁷ but if the Commune survived, Marx insisted that the petty bourgeoisie should constitute an important part of a transitional ruling bloc, sharing in Communal government in proportion to their numbers.⁶⁸ He saw the Commune as a model public forum wherein future conflicts between workers and other classes could be worked out through political debate; it afforded ‘the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way’,⁶⁹ thus removing the need to forcibly suppress dissenters from working-class policies. The best way to channel petty bourgeois frustrations into revolutionary movements was not, then, to suppress their expression through a ruthless ‘dictatorship’, but to address the social causes of those frustrations in a genuinely participatory alliance of subaltern classes.⁷⁰

Marx did not go on to forecast the dangerous consequences that might ensue in the event that cooperation between petty bourgeois and working-class organizations proved impossible to sustain. He simply pointed out that the petty bourgeoisie were not congenitally inclined to support chauvinistic and authoritarian forms of nationalism, and that their interests increasingly favoured a radical democratic definition of the nation. Thus Marx argued that in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, the French government was impaled on its misguided hope ‘that the Paris people (and the French people) could be stultified into the passion of national hatred and by factitious outrages to the foreigner forget its real aspiration and its home betrayers!’⁷¹ Marx did not stop to contemplate what might happen if working-class leaders ignored his advice and, instead of cooperating closely with petty bourgeois representatives, drove them away with extremist policies and élitist attitudes. He did, however, imply that militant attitudes were likely to be inflamed among the lower classes by undemocratic governments which systematically failed to address both petty bourgeois and working-class concerns. Where the petty bourgeoisie found itself confronted on one side by a tightly organized, doctrinaire communist party and on the other by an indifferent or hostile bourgeoisie, conditions were ripe for the violent forms of popular nationalism that have erupted in the twentieth century.

I suggested in Section 3.1 that the elements of theory discussed in this chapter had both explanatory and prescriptive applications. By applying a strategic, politically discriminating analysis to nationalist movements and ideologies, Marx—and sometimes Engels—sought to provide action-guiding maps that would help democrats and revolutionaries to decide when to support or oppose a particular national movement. The relationship between this strategic-political theory and Marx and Engels’ policies towards national movements has not, however, been fully investigated in the existing literature. One reason for this has been touched on above: some of the strongest policy positions that appear in Marx and Engels’ writings were put forward by Engels who, as we have seen, was less consistently inclined than his partner to stress the effects of shifting social interests and alliances on nationalist programmes and conflicts. The next chapter tries to clarify the prescriptive theory behind Marx and Engels’ national policy in 1847–9, and asks how faithfully that theory built on the explanatory premisses outlined above.

4

Ethics and Realpolitik in the National
Policy, 1847–1849

IF Marx and Engels explained nationalism by focusing on conflicts below the level of the nation, their policy positions on contemporary national movements often reflect a more conventional, state-centred approach towards advancing revolution in Europe. The struggle to restore Polish independence was of particular interest to them, as it was to other radicals and democrats, since the partition of Poland by the Holy Alliance was widely regarded as the mainstay of absolutist reaction in central and eastern Europe. They were stalwart champions of German and Italian unification, and consistently supported Hungarian demands for autonomy from Vienna. In the 1860s Marx embraced the cause of Irish nationalism as the centrepiece of a strategy aimed at weakening the British empire. This choice of allies was not, however, dictated by a general commitment to support all nationalisms that challenged the central authority of empires and authoritarian states. Marx and Engels were vehement in their opposition to the national movements of various Slavic nationalities scattered throughout Habsburg and Ottoman territory. Engels was prone to singularly unscientific tirades against the autonomist aspirations of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Czechs. His more extreme pronouncements have not escaped the censure of later commentators, many of whom have accorded a pivotal significance to these statements as a source for understanding Marx and Engels’ overall policy toward nationalism.¹

The immediate goals of that policy were twofold: to undermine the great blocs of reactionary and imperialist power in Europe, and to encourage the formation of large, centralized states that would provide a suitable terrain for revolutionary activity. These goals supplied a strategic rationale for Marx and Engels’ selective advocacy of nationalist movements. They enjoined support for the creation of independent nation-states only where the nations seeking to form them were sufficiently homogeneous to avoid sub-national fissures, and strategically well placed to resist reactionary influence or economic subordination. The two men vaunted the strategic realism reflected in this position as one of its chief advantages over the ‘idealistic’ national policies of contemporaries like Mazzini and Bakunin.² But the state-centred premisses of Marx and Engels’ realpolitik are hard to square with their explanatory emphasis on nationalism ‘from below’. Their policy even appears, at times, to have been influenced solely by concerns about the balance of international power and the capacity of different nations to constitute themselves as powerful, economically buoyant states, and scarcely at all by the progressive nature of the aims or the class identity of nationalists.

Marx and Engels’ reputation as exponents of an unbending realpolitik has been bolstered by their stubborn silence on the problems addressed by mainstream international ethics. Successive commentators have deplored their apparent lack of interest in questions about how to arbitrate competing nationalist claims, how to differentiate acceptable forms of nationalism from those which should be opposed, and how to find grounds for mutual accommodation in cases of intense national conflict. Marx and Engels’ famous amoralism is usually linked to the more visionary postulates of their theory of history, which led them to focus so single-mindedly on long-term goals that they were unconcerned about—or perhaps unable to address—problems of ethical deliberation in ‘the here and now.’³ In declining to defend their strategy in terms of general principles or moral obligations, Marx and Engels implied that the sole criterion of whether to support nationalism is whether or not it advances a long-range, monolithic interest in global revolution; and its capacity to do so will, on a strict ‘realist’ assessment, depend more on geopolitical contingencies than on the progressive intentions of nationalist actors.

This distinctive brand of ‘utopian realism’ can be impugned on two counts. On the one hand, Marx and Engels’ millennial aspirations offer little solace to those who seek mechanisms for limiting national conflicts en route to the millennium. Their vision of a conflict-free future may seem to ‘assume away’ the arduous, practical work needed to forge cross-national links between diverse types of opposition movement.⁴ Marx and Engels’ variant of realism, on the other hand, was ill designed to challenge existing configurations of international power. Where they allowed geopolitical, demographic, and economic criteria to dictate their choice of nationalist allies, the two men appear to have conceded that the existing states system exerted a far greater impact on their revolutionary project than did class movements that cut across national boundaries. A policy that privileged the claims of ‘great historical nations’, however, could hardly encourage the growth of global-revolutionary sympathies among radicals and democrats who happened to inhabit one of the smaller, more vulnerable nations of Europe. It tended rather to reinforce the very asymmetries of national power that fuelled nationalist competition, aggrandisement, and resistance in the first place, thereby defeating Marx and Engels’ own revolutionary intentions.

Previous commentators on Marx and Engels’ national policy have focused almost exclusively on the power-political tactics that led them to sponsor whole ‘nations’ against others. But this emphasis has obscured a different strand of reasoning that runs through Marx and Engels’ policy statements, tempering their often blinkered fixation on long-term goals with a concern about the means needed to achieve them. Alongside the familiar line of argument that gave precedence to the demands of ‘great historical nations’ over the conflicting claims of their smaller, more vulnerable neighbours, Marx and Engels developed a quite distinct set of criteria for evaluating the merits of various national movements. These criteria applied not to whole ‘nations’ conceived in abstraction from their internal social divisions, but to diverse national programmes competing for ascendancy within the same nation. They called for Polish independence and German unity, but not by any means or in any form; indifference as to the way in which unity or independence might be achieved was, for Marx and Engels, a far greater threat to revolutionary success than the disruptive demands of small ‘nationalities’. Moreover, although numerous references to the latter notoriously consign whole nations to the proverbial dustbin, there are also indications that a reprieve would be granted if appropriately progressive national movements were to emerge in those nations.

A fuller account of this position is needed before those writings which reflect an uncompromising, statist realpolitik are upheld as the definitive statement of Marx and Engels’ national policy. This chapter tries to reconstruct a distinctly ethical line of reasoning that informed some (though not all) of Marx and Engels’ judgements on nationalism, to clarify its relationship to their explanatory and normative theories, and to suggest that it may be worth developing as part of a prescriptive theory of nationalism. Section 4.1 outlines the theoretical resources that enabled Marx and Engels to adopt an ethical perspective on national movements, notwithstanding their scepticism about conventional international ethics. Sections 4.2 and 4.3 draw out two evaluative criteria implied in the authors’ policy statements—the first based on prohibitive injunctions against oppressing nations, the second on positive injunctions directed at nationalists working to overcome oppression. A final section examines the problematic relationship between these criteria and a third, non-ethical, criterion of ‘viability’ developed in Marx and Engels’ writings in 1848–9. I ask whether Engels’ harsh pronouncements on the fate of so-called ‘historyless’ nations were symptomatic of deeper flaws in his and Marx’s overall theory, and conclude by summing up some of the merits and shortcomings of their approach.

4.1. THE THEORY BEHIND THE POLICY

Marx and Engels expounded their general understanding of what they called the ‘national problem’ in a series of speeches delivered in 1847. In his speech on Poland Marx provided (a) an analysis of the current sources of national conflict, and (b) a broad prescriptive claim about how to overcome it:

[a]The unification and brotherhood of all nations [Nationen] is a phrase which is on the lips of all parties today, especially those of the bourgeois free-traders. A certain kind of brotherhood does of course exist among the bourgeois classes of all nations. It is the brotherhood of the oppressors against the oppressed, of the exploiters against the exploited … For the peoples [Völker] to be able truly to unite, they must have common interests. And in order that their interests may become common, the existing property relations must be done away with, for these property relations involve the exploitation of some nations by others.

[b]The victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie is, at the same time, victory over the national and industrial conflicts which today range the peoples … against one another in hostility and enmity. And so the victory of the proletariat … is at the same time the signal of liberation for all oppressed nations [unterdrückten Nationen].⁵

These passages point towards an underlying ambiguity in the theory behind Marx and Engels’ strategy towards nationalism. Marx begins, in the sceptical tones of political realism,⁶ by denying that appeals to a supra-national moral constituency can elicit cooperation in the absence of ‘common interests’. This argument helps to explain the Communist Manifesto’s insistence that existing states and nations must be the initial loci of revolutionary activity, and that a commitment to defeat the ‘enemy at home’ should precede more diffuse commitments to international ‘unity’ or justice. Passage (b), on the other hand, takes a markedly universalist tack, upholding the prospect of a conflict-free future by tying the resolution of national conflicts to the ‘victory of the proletariat’. This millennial argument shifts attention from the obstacles currently impeding international ‘unity’ towards its final realization. But the shift is so abrupt that one is left puzzling over how, in practical terms, Marx expected to accomplish it.

What is needed to resolve the puzzle, but lacking in the Manifesto and other abstract statements of internationalist policy, is, first, a theory of political action that connects popular opposition movements in different nations and states to a well-defined set of transnational ‘interests’; and second, an account of how cooperative efforts to promote those interests might engender a more durable commitment to long-term internationalist goals. The first requirement calls for a hands-on, diplomatic approach to internationalism; it involves drawing connections and making trade-offs among various local concerns, and suggesting an immediate motivation for transnational cooperation in circumstances where it might seem reasonable to follow disparate courses of action. The second requirement involves setting out more general principles that ought to govern relations among cooperating groups, and furnish a basis for sustained international cooperation.

Marx’s 1847 speech did not address these political tasks of internationalism, but it did suggest a starting-point for dealing with them. Marx recognized that national divisions, as defined by the existing states system, made it likely that broad ‘human’ sympathies would frequently conflict with particularistic ones. Keeping one foot in the tradition of political realism, he criticized universalist moralities which underestimated this potential for conflict or denied it altogether. Unlike other ‘realists’, however, he located the basic source of that conflict not in perennial features of human nature or the competitive system of states, but in exploitative ‘property relations’. The oppression of one nation by another, Marx suggested in his speech on Poland, can be explained by the interests of the dominant class of the oppressing nations or states. The oppression of other nations enables that class to assert its power in the international arena, thereby bolstering its ascendancy over subordinate classes at home. This explanation enabled Marx and Engels to argue that the exploited members of different national societies shared a pressing interest in transnational cooperation, fulfilling the first requirement outlined above. It also laid the foundations for an internationalist ethics which sought to foster more enduring habits of self-restraint and reciprocity in relations between national societies, as viewed ‘from below’.

Marx and Engels elaborated this constructive dimension of their policy by arguing from initially prudential considerations, underscoring the reciprocal benefits of national freedom for the ‘peoples’ of both the oppressing and oppressed nations. One consequence of the growth of global interdependence described in the German Ideology and Manifesto was, as we have seen, that social discontents could not be exclusively diagnosed or addressed at the state or national level. The transnational interlinking of class oppositions and alliances meant that these relationships had to be studied on a global scale, whether or not the societies concerned had reached similar stages of development. Writing from this perspective, Engels developed the theme of international exploitation in an article on Poland published in August 1848. Here he identified a system of exploitation operating on several national fronts. The partition of Poland among the three great reactionary powers of Europe was, according to Engels, the cement which bound the Holy Alliance together and stifled the activities of liberalizing, anti-feudal movements in central and eastern Europe. Engels claimed that this partition was ‘advantageous to all parties’, helping the absolutist classes governing Russia, Austria, and Prussia to maintain their domestic ascendancy. One ‘party’ in particular, Engels argued, benefited from the Holy Alliance. ‘Russia’, he wrote, ‘ordered Prussia and Austria to remain absolute monarchies, and Prussia and Austria had to obey’, despite the presence in those countries of an increasingly volatile, reform-oriented bourgeoisie. Prussia and Austria were obliged to remain within the Alliance, thereby continuing their oppression of Poland, in exchange for ‘the support which Russia offered to the feudalist-absolutist class’⁷ against bourgeois encroachment. The price of this support, according to Engels, was strategic and political dependence on Russia. The benefits derived from oppressing a foreign nation were not unqualified, then, even for the classes that perpetrated it.

In 1847–8 Marx and Engels saw this as a crucial source of vulnerability for Poland’s oppressors. By committing them to reactionary policies at home, the three-way partition of Poland served as a rallying-point where foreign and domestic opposition could converge in a powerful, countervailing alliance of progressive forces. For the mass of people in the oppressor countries, they argued, the Polish plight was linked inextricably with their own domestic subjection; it was the linchpin of an international alliance whose members were committed to oppose reform in all parts of Europe. The threat of revolutionary contagion, Engels observed, meant that the Poles’ resistance ‘compelled their oppressors to maintain the patriarchal feudal structure not only in Poland but in all other countries as well’.⁸ For this reason, as Engels declared in February 1848, the German and Polish people have ‘the same oppressors, for the Prussian government weighs on us as heavily as on the Poles’.⁹

One might wonder, however, whether the presence of ‘common oppressors’ can furnish a sufficient motive to form and maintain such alliances. The adverse effects of foreign oppression on the interests of subordinate classes in an oppressor nation are, after all, less direct or comprehensive than those experienced by members of the oppressed nation itself. It may be tactically opportune for the former, while struggling to overthrow the old regime, to condemn its adversary’s foreign policies and spurn its reactionary allies. But once in power, revolutionaries have a habit of adhering to the international practices of their predecessors. Fearing this kind of revanchism, nationalists seeking independence from foreign control may be wary of alliances with any group within the oppressor nation. Given the potential for such friction, the transnational community of interest engendered by the presence of ‘common oppressors’ can be little more than negative and provisional; it appears strategically expedient while both parties remain too weak to fight alone, but may break down as soon as one party wins its local battle.

To guard against this outcome, a sound internationalist policy cannot rest on tactical calculations alone: it needs to include measures ensuring that the benefits of alliances continue to be reciprocal, while creating a stable set of mutual expectations and obligations that can counteract deep-seated national suspicions. Internationalist strategy, in other words, needs some grounding in the imperatives and constraints that are usually provided by political ethics. It is widely assumed that Marx and Engels were unable to meet this need because, in their single-minded pursuit of global revolutionary ends, they refused to sacrifice tactical flexibility to ethical constraints of any kind.¹⁰ There is no question that the reasoning behind their overall strategy was basically consequentialist: it evaluated actions not in relation to principles of conduct, but by asking whether or not the consequences of an act were likely to advance revolutionary ends. But as the next section will illustrate, the consequentialist arguments behind Marx and Engels’ national policy were not always too ‘long-range and perfectionist’¹¹ to accommodate important restrictions on the methods that may be used to pursue long-term ends. In evaluating the ethical reasoning that guided Marx and Engels’ policies, a distinction should be drawn between the unrestrained con-sequentialism applied by those ‘unwilling to tolerate any constraint upon the methods by which they strive to obtain their goal’, and a more restricted variety which, in the light of both prudential and moral considerations, seeks ‘to maintain and establish such constraints, not to reach or impose agreement about goals and ideals’.¹² In the arguments cited above, Engels avoided any reference to the ‘ultimate’ goal of world-wide socialist revolution as a reason to form transnational alliances. He started instead by pointing to the beneficial consequences that such alliances would have for all concerned parties, given the more limited and particular interests that they were already seeking to advance. In epistemological terms, this form of argument was intended to provide an empirically grounded or ‘scientific’ alternative to political idealism. But it also reflected a pragmatic judgement that it is unrealistic—if not morally unacceptable—to demand or impose agreement on distant, global ends.

To those who treat Marx and Engels as exponents of a rigid economic determinism backed up by a ‘utopian’ philosophical perfectionism, this pragmatic form of argument may appear to serve merely tactical purposes, while lacking any foundations in the authors’ general theory. But the activist, political dimensions of that theory suggest a clear rationale for working from preexisting conflicts and particularisms towards more substantial ethical agreement. Marx had spelt out this rationale in an early letter which I cited, in part, in Chapter 1 (p. 35). ‘Nothing prevents us’, he wrote in 1843, ‘from participation in politics, and therefore real struggles … In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles.’¹³ This notion—that new principles can be ‘developed’ through the sustained cooperation of initially self-centred agents—cuts across the sharp separation between prudential and ethical considerations that characterizes much ‘realist’ consequentialism. By drawing attention to the hazards that ensue when agents pursue their own goals at the expense of others’ interests, consequence-sensitive thinking may assist rather than jettison the search for principles enjoining self-restraint and reciprocity.¹⁴ In defending their policies towards specific national movements, Marx and Engels sometimes departed from this constructive line of reasoning in favour of a stronger, unrestrained consequentialism. But the notoriety of the latter has long obscured a more restricted strand of consequentialist argument which, by building on Marx’s early call for ‘new principles’, led the authors to impose certain constraints on the pursuit of revolutionary and internationalist goals. These constraints were embodied in two distinctive criteria which Marx and Engels applied in deciding whether to support or oppose various nationalist programmes.

4.2. CRITERION 1: INTERNATIONAL RECIPROCITY

Formulating a first criterion in 1848, Engels came close to endorsing a general principle of international reciprocity as the sine qua non of any successful revolutionary effort. In a speech on Poland delivered on the same occasion as Marx’s, Engels began to develop the implications of his colleague’s assertion that ‘existing property relations’ encourage the exploitation of one nation by another. The crucial sentence in Engels’ speech was simply: ‘A nation cannot be free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations.’¹⁵ This was not a cynical attempt to win popular support by using the language of conventional morality. It was a prudential argument, appealing to the self-interest of liberal and democratic reformers in the oppressing states, for renouncing policies that thwarted the desire of other nations for freedom.

Engels’ precept echoes Marx’s early argument that there may be more than a conceptual affinity between two distinct forms of ‘national’ freedom: the formal ‘sovereignty’ conferred by independence from unwanted foreign rule, and the freedom demanded by popular conceptions of the nation from coercive or unresponsive government. In 1848–9 Marx and Engels repeatedly argued that national oppression provides a powerful prop to reactionary and exploitative regimes, chiefly by mooring them in an international network of supportive alliances. Since the extensive reach of that network thwarts local efforts to combat oppression in both its national and domestic forms, the success of such efforts depends on the formation of counter-alliances across national boundaries. And since opposition movements in the oppressed nations were understandably wary of cooperating with their counterparts in oppressing countries, it was a matter of utmost urgency that the latter commit themselves to a policy aimed at ending past oppression.

Marx and Engels elaborated this reciprocity criterion after the liberal revolutions of 1848 opened heated parliamentary debates about Germany’s traditional, hegemonic relations with neighbouring countries. The Prussian government continued to participate in expansionary wars against national movements in Poland, Bohemia, and Italy, often with the approval of the Frankfurt parliament. Marx railed against the hypocrisy of German liberals and democrats who acquiesced in their governments’ renewed acts of national oppression ‘at the same moment that they are struggling with these same governments to obtain freedom at home!’¹⁶ As chief foreign policy analyst for the NRZ, Engels developed a more carefully reasoned case for treating the freedom of other nations as a condition for freedom within one’s own. He began by trying to persuade his compatriots that their failure to support the aspirations of oppressed nations would damage prospects of reform in Germany itself. Opposing the arguments of Frankfurt delegates who wanted to incorporate the insurgent Polish province of Posen (now Poznań) in a united Germany, Engels pointed out three likely consequences of such a measure that would undermine attempts to create a strong, unified, and liberal German state. In the first place, it would inflame national hostilities in Poland to a point of no return, creating a persistent source of conflict that would impede efforts to stabilize a central German government.¹⁷ Second, the presence of this internal threat on its eastern border would entangle Germany more deeply than ever in a reactionary alliance with Russia. Third, that alliance would help the old German governments to regain power and reverse the modest achievements of the 1848 revolution.¹⁸ To avert this outcome, Engels argued, German reformers must extend their liberating efforts beyond the domestic arena to nations seeking independence. ‘Now that the Germans are throwing off their own yoke’, he wrote, ‘their whole foreign policy must change too. Otherwise the fetters with which we have chained other nations will shackle our own freedom … Germany will liberate herself to the extent to which she sets free neighbouring nations.’¹⁹

Many would reject the consequentialist rationale behind this call for reciprocity. Surely national oppression is bad because it harms those who are oppressed, not because it is self-defeating for oppressors? But Engels clearly thought that by reflecting on the disadvantages of an oppressive national policy from an initial standpoint of self-interest, prospective oppressors might reach a deeper appreciation of the ways in which their interest in freedom depended on the freedom of others. Having suggested strong prudential reasons for Germans to renounce their claims on Polish territory, Engels asked his countrymen to consider how they would react if the shoe was on the other foot. ‘How’, he demanded of his fellow Rhinelanders, ‘would we look upon people who bought our land for next to nothing … people who were thrust upon us for the express purpose of accustoming us to the intoxicating motto “With God for King and Fatherland”?’²⁰ He went on to observe that the forms of oppression inflicted by the old governments on fellow Germans were generally less violent than those imposed on their foreign subjects in Poland where, unrestrained by legal traditions and national empathy, ‘they could indulge in floggings and secret inquisitions to their heart’s content’²¹ in order to ‘oust the native Poles and their language from their own country’.²²

These arguments were clearly designed to heighten German sensitivities to the position of oppressed nations while, at the same time, suggesting more immediate motives for changing that position than those supplied by abstract notions of international justice. In asking his compatriots to reflect on the ways in which oppression of other countries harmed their own immediate interests and goals, Engels’ reasoning was undoubtedly consequentialist. But its effect was to stress the importance of constraints on the methods that may be used to pursue long-term revolutionary ends. It is interesting to note that Engels scathingly dismissed arguments, issuing from both the left and right wings of the Frankfurt Parliament, that the dire human consequences of German rule in Poland were outweighed by the benefits conferred on a backward country by a more advanced one. The measure of a sound national policy, he insisted, was not some impersonal standard of cultural and scientific ‘progress’, but whether or not the ostensible benefits of cultural and scientific interpenetration were forced on one nation by another. The ‘forcible intrusion’ of Germany into Poland only ensured that the Poles would more adamantly reject any advantages they might have derived from close relations with Germany, possibly driving them into the arms of even more reactionary allies.²³ Engels also criticized delegates on the extreme democratic left of the Frankfurt Assembly for obliquely endorsing the notion of German-sponsored ‘progress’ in their attempts to defend the cause of Polish independence. By arguing that the Polish national movement was the product of republican and democratic ideas imbibed from Germany, France, and Britain, and therefore worthy of support, German democrats fell into the conservative nationalist trap: they did nothing, Engels claimed, to challenge the dangerous notion that Poland was the beneficiary of culturally superior nations rather than their victim.²⁴

We will later see that both Engels and Marx sometimes overlooked this important insight into the causes of intense nationalism. In his early articles, however, Engels strongly implied that justified national resistance tends to obstruct any progress towards international convergence, whether on the cultural matters dear to German hearts or on common revolutionary goals. ‘A nation’, he declared, ‘which throughout its history has allowed itself to be used as a tool of oppression against all other nations must first of all prove that it has really been revolutionised … Together with her own freedom [Germany] should have proclaimed the freedom of nations hitherto suppressed by her.’ Engels went on to absolve oppressed nations from liability for the conflicts which prevented transnational cooperation ‘from below’. At this stage, he extended absolution not only to the strategically pivotal Poles, but to other nations whose aspirations he would later view as an obstacle to revolutionary change. ‘Are the Czechs’, he asked, ‘to be blamed for not wanting to join a nation that oppresses and maltreats other nations, while liberating itself?’²⁵

These arguments defy the commonplace view that Marx and Engels’ realpolitik invariably placed end-states above the well-being of national agents. In fact, the prohibitive injunctions of his reciprocity criterion took Engels only a short step away from proclaiming a general obligation to support all movements against national oppression. If national unfreedom generates conflicts that help to shore up reaction and divide democratic forces, then it would seem prudent to defend national freedom as a matter of principle. Why, then, did Marx and Engels refrain from including an unconditional principle of national self-determination in their revolutionary strategy?

4.3. CRITERION 2: SOCIAL REFORM

Marx and Engels’ national policy has frequently drawn criticism from those who believe that only one criterion is relevant in decisions to support or oppose nationalist movements: namely, whether or not such movements are directed toward relieving foreign oppression. On this view, if one national movement merits support in its struggle against a foreign yoke, surely it would be inconsistent and unethical not to support all movements striving to combat comparable treatment.²⁶ It has been suggested that Marx and Engels’ hostility towards all forms of oppression should have yielded an unconditional principle of national self-determination and only failed to do so because by endorsing such a principle they might have restricted their strategic flexibility.²⁷ This view reflects the assumption that the ethical content of Marx and Engels’ thought is confined to their millennial vision of the future, and that whatever their reasons for denying support to some nationalist movements, these could not be ethical reasons.

The grounds on which Marx and Engels discriminated among national movements cannot, however, be reduced to a condemnation of foreign oppression simpliciter; nor are they exhausted by non-ethical considerations of strategic expediency. A more complex conception of the relationship between domestic and international and social and political dimensions of national self-determination informed Marx and Engels’ choice of nationalist allies. This conception should be clarified before standards for judging their position are imported from outside their own writings.

While Marx and Engels condemned national oppression in virtually every case they observed, they also sought to end it in a way that would prevent the recurrence of oppression or the engendering of new national conflicts. But not all movements against foreign oppressors contributed to these ends. Within oppressed nations no less than their oppressor states there were despotic as well as democratic nationalists, aggrandizers and doves, chauvinists and internationalists. In the volatile years 1847–9, the leaders who claimed to represent an aspiring nation frequently changed their policy positions and foreign alliances with each new threat or successful advance. In these circumstances, Marx and Engels saw the presence of foreign oppression as an insufficient condition for wholehearted democratic support. If the criterion of international reciprocity placed the onus for resolving national conflicts on reformers in oppressor states, a second criterion apportioned a measure of responsibility for changing ‘old’ patterns of international relations to members of the oppressed nations. Once again, the analysis behind this criterion can be found mainly in Engels’ writings on Poland.

From the mid-1840s onward, Marx and Engels identified internal class conflict as a crucial factor which invited and perpetuated external oppression. If at one level Engels explained the trilateral suppression of Polish national aspirations as a means for the oppressors to keep their own domestic subjects in check, he located a more basic cause of Poland’s partition in class conflicts within that country itself. According to Engels, ‘as soon as the allies attempted to introduce the first oppressive measures, the Poles not only rose to fight for independence but simultaneously came out in revolutionary action against their own internal social conditions’.²⁸ Engels argued that the Polish aristocracy saw partition by the Holy Alliance as the only available means of buttressing its own privileges against a rising middle class. To this extent, the interests of Poland’s rulers coincided with those of the three partitioning powers, whose ruling classes also sought external support to strengthen their domestic position vis-à-vis their indigenous bourgeoisies. Thus, Engels wrote, ‘the partition of Poland was effected through a pact between the big feudal aristocracy of Poland’ and the ruling classes of Prussia, Austria, and Russia; it was, he claimed, ‘the last means the big aristocracy had to protect itself against a revolution’.²⁹

Engels therefore concluded that a non-reforming nationalist movement against foreign domination, one which left intact the class relations and political institutions that had paved the way for foreign domination, ought not to merit democratic support. Nationalists should not be content with expelling a particular foreign oppressor from their soil; they should also demonstrate a commitment to restructuring the social and international relations that had encouraged conflict and oppression in the past. If the Czechs or Poles ‘could not be blamed’ for shunning alliances with an unreformed Germany, they could and must be held responsible for ameliorating the internal conditions which contributed to their own external vulnerability. Marx had already adumbrated this criterion in 1846. To be eligible for support, he argued, a nationalist movement should demonstrate that it is authentically ‘national’ in his democratic sense: it should, that is, positively address the concerns of a broad section of a nation’s people by improving social conditions and expanding the bases of political participation. He cited the Kraków insurrection of 1846 as an example of such a movement, applauding not only the political reforms advanced by the nationalist rebels but also their social and economic programme which represented, as Marx declared, Poland’s attempt to ‘break the chains of feudalism’.³⁰

Marx did not overlook the question of why, in many countries, movements for political and social reform involved nationalist struggles. Reform efforts in Poland could not but be bound up with the issue of national independence, he explained, since it was precisely the foreign patronage of those who sought to preserve an outdated set of social relations which impeded domestic movements aimed at economic and political development. ‘No one’, Marx declared, ‘will deny that in Poland the political question is tied to the social question. The one has always been inseparable from the other.’³¹ In the same speech, Marx applied the social reform criterion beyond the Polish case. He differentiated between the ‘narrowly nationalist’ and ‘national’ parties in Ireland, suggesting that whereas the former prosecuted its case for independence on the basis of a purely negative assault on foreign oppression, the ‘national’ party infused the quest for national freedom with substantial social goals.³²

The evaluative distinction between ‘narrowly nationalist’ and ‘national’ movements was grounded in a deeper normative premiss that emerges throughout Marx and Engels’ writings on nationalism: namely, that independence from foreign rule was not an intrinsically valuable goal, but one that derived its value from more fundamental goals which it served. This position closely paralleled Marx’s pre-communist argument that the achievements of ‘political emancipation’ within the modern state should be measured against a wider standard of ‘human’ emancipation. In On the Jewish Question Marx argued, first, that the goal of human emancipation is not unequivocally advanced by removing the political and legal barriers which had, in the past, prevented some groups and individuals from participating in public life. ‘Merely political’ emancipation, according to Marx, not only left intact the coercive social relations that disabled some groups from exercising their newly recognized political and natural rights. Second, by casting citizens in the individualistic role of rights-bearers it also discouraged the formation of the sympathetic social bonds that might restrain some groups and individuals from oppressing others.³³

These two arguments were transposed into Marx and Engels’ writings on nationalism to underline the limits of a ‘narrowly’ independence-oriented conception of national self-determination. The first argument reappears in the view that freedom from foreign rule is desirable, for rank-and-file members of oppressing nations as well as for the oppressed, because it enables both groups to reduce coercion within their own societies. Where national independence tended to restore oppressive social relationships, its value must be questioned. Marx’s second argument, that a narrowly rights-based approach to emancipation ‘makes every man see in other men not the realisation of his own freedom, but the barrier to it’³⁴ parallels his and Engels’ criticisms of extreme national unilateralism. A one-sided preoccupation with independence may prevent nationalists from forming the internationalist ties and attitudes which, in Marx and Engels’ view, were needed both to heal old national antipathies and to check the emergence of new ones. Such nationalists were likely to regard their nation’s international relations in much the same way as politically emancipated individuals regarded society: ‘as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence’, wherein ‘the sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.’³⁵

Their multilateral analysis of the internal and external dimensions of national oppression lent empirical backing to Marx and Engels’ view that formal independence was a contingently valuable goal, which ought to be pursued in tandem with extensive policies of reform. Engels’ writings on Poland underlined two damaging consequences that were likely to flow from a failure to treat social reform as an integral part of nationalist programmes.³⁶ First, the expulsion of a foreign oppressor from a nation’s soil might initially give rise to a strong sense of common purpose throughout a national society; but such attitudes were unlikely to survive a return to the structures of social and political power that prevailed before independence was lost. And if this outcome undermined the domestic legitimacy of new national governments, it also tended to produce a secondary consequence which threatened the limited achievements of independence as such. The main empirical point of Engels’ arguments is that internal conflicts cannot easily be contained within the nation-state. Domestic conflicts tend to become internationalized, particularly in regions where—as in nineteenth-century Europe—great-power competition for influence over smaller states made the latter depend heavily on foreign alliances to maintain their integrity. An independent but unreformed nation like Poland, Engels suggests, would remain dangerously vulnerable to renewed incursions by its former oppressors who, in the event of civil crisis, might come invited or uninvited to its aid. A reforming nationalist government, on the other hand, could strengthen its popular base and seek supportive alliances among like-minded governments and opposition movements within the old oppressor states.

These arguments imply that nationalist leaders have a prudential interest in social reform which converges, at least in part, with the substantial interests of their nation’s rank-and-file majority. Where Marx and Engels grounded their ethical claims in an initial appeal to prudential interests, they did not need to invoke a perfectionist ideal of a coercion- and conflict-free future to identify the fundamental goals of national self-determination. Struggles for national independence, they suggested, were to be valued in so far as they contributed to intermediate goals which demanded no specifically socialist or revolutionary commitment: social and economic development, political democracy, and the curbing of national conflicts. These goals, in turn, implied a broader understanding of what ‘self-determination’ required, beyond its specifically national component.

But alongside their cool evaluation of consequences, we also find Marx and Engels making stronger claims about the fundamental status of domestic social freedom as a yardstick for measuring the achievements of national independence. This teleological undercurrent ran beneath even their most pragmatic, restrained judgements on nationalism, and sometimes interfered with them.

The reform criterion maintains that the goals of internal freedom and independence from foreign rule overlap each other, and cannot be treated as entirely separate policy issues. But in arguing that the absence of internal freedom both jeopardizes independence and diminishes its value, Marx and Engels left little room for doubt about their ethical priorities in this period. In a speech on Poland, Marx pointed out that indigenous rule may be no less oppressive than a foreign yoke, and hence no more consonant with the aspirations of the popular ‘nation’ than foreign rule. ‘Replace the Russian autocrat by Polish aristocrats’, he declared, ‘and you will [merely] have given despotism naturalisation papers … If the Polish lord no longer has a Russian lord over him, the Polish peasant will still have a lord over him, but a free lord in place of a slave lord. This political change will have altered nothing in his social position.’³⁷ It would be absurd to infer from this rhetorical passage that Marx saw no difference at all between foreign oppression and the social and political unfreedoms inflicted by some classes on their own co-nationals. Marx was simply overstating a point that he and Engels had already elaborated elsewhere: that the act of ending foreign oppression does not lead automatically to increased national freedom, in as much as the term ‘national’ designates a society of freedom-seeking persons and not just the juridical status of the state. Nevertheless, the overstatement highlights a worrying feature of the reform criterion. There is a fine line between the claim that national independence is a limited and derivative goal, best viewed as an important but insufficient condition for realizing more fundamental values, and the assumption that those other values invariably trump the desire for national independence. Marx and Engels’ arguments neither draw this line with any clarity nor stay consistently on one side. Their arguments for international reciprocity, on the one hand, stress the need to end foreign oppression as a precondition for any fruitful transnational cooperation between nationalist and revolutionary movements. But the reform criterion asks nationalists to commit themselves to a demanding set of domestic goals before they can expect support in their struggle to end foreign oppression.

This is worrying because, in practice, nationalists may lack the internal or external support needed to put forward a programme for independence that is at once progressive and feasible. It is not clear what policy Marx and Engels’ two criteria would recommend in such cases. Might the fact that a nation has suffered foreign oppression count as an extenuating circumstance, creating strong grounds for democratic support even if its leaders lack spotless reforming credentials? Or should the reform criterion serve as the sole and absolute test of whether demands for national independence are worth heeding? Marx began to work out these ambiguities in the 1860s and after. In 1848, however, his and Engels’ remarks on nationalism betray an unresolved tension between the prohibitive injunctions of their first criterion and the positive requirements of social reform. The ethical hazards embedded in that tension will be illustrated in the next section.

4.4. CRITERION 3: VIABILITY

Up to this point, Marx and Engels formulated their national policy with a view to breaking down the traditional battle-lines of international conflict. Their immediate aim was to defuse specific national hostilities, like those that simmered between Germany and Poland, by encouraging opposition movements within feuding nations to form cross-national alliances. Their broader aim was to undercut the very assumption that the authoritative agents of international relations must be states or national ‘units’. Marx and Engels’ two criteria were based on an understanding of ‘national oppression’ as an offence perpetrated not by whole nations against others, but by particular classes and class alliances, internally and transnationally. Accordingly, their injunctions and prohibitions were addressed primarily to social movements working below and against established states, and to the rank-and-file supporters of nationalist movements whose leaders required close vigilance.

This approach ran against the grain of political and international realism in three respects. First, it offered an alternative to state-centred politics which was based on existing movements of social and democratic opposition, and sought to integrate such movements into a more durable framework for international cooperation. Marx and Engels wanted that framework to supplement, and eventually to supplant, the functions inadequately performed by the institutions of independent statehood: to protect vulnerable nations from aggression, assist in their internal development, and forge identities that did not depend on viewing other nations as ‘barriers’ to their own freedom. Second, this programme carried a more optimistic outlook for a lasting resolution to national conflicts than traditional, hard-line realism will admit. Marx and Engels’ exhortations to reform were meant to challenge the belief that such conflicts are the endlessly recurrent consequence of national plurality and insecurity. Third, by holding out the prospect of ‘building up’ common interests and habits of spontaneous cooperation from below, Marx and Engels implicitly rejected the realist view that national boundaries place perennial limits on the development of a supranational moral sensibility.

Had Marx and Engels based their policies towards national movements on the reciprocity and reform criteria alone, it would have made little sense for them to support entire nations as agents of their desired reforms against others that were deemed insufficiently progressive. The empirical assumption behind those criteria was, as we have seen, that particular classes and coalitions within each nation are potentially powerful enough to change old patterns of national conflict and oppression; and that the use or abdication of that power was a matter of social choice, not of eternally predisposing national characteristics. Moreover, Marx and Engels did not exempt nationalists in the oppressed nations from responsibility for choosing the path of reform. While recognizing that the strategically crucial choices lay with reformers in the most powerful oppressor nations, their second criterion implied that erstwhile victims of oppression need not depend entirely on the good intentions of others.

Marx and Engels were keenly aware, however, that the preponderant blocs of international power in 1848 were based on states, and that these set limits on what a transnational alliance of the left could realistically hope to achieve in the short term. Engels made an important concession to the demands of traditional realpolitik when he introduced a third, non-ethical criterion for supporting national movements in his NRZ articles: an aspiring nation-state must be ‘viable’. ‘Viability’ meant for Engels the feasibility of drawing boundaries so as to give a new state effective independence from foreign control, and a population free from national divisions significant enough to jeopardize the process of democratic reform. It was in this sense that Engels called the creation of an independent Polish state ‘the most easily solvable of all the political problems which have arisen’ in eastern Europe since the outbreak of revolution; whereas, he pointed out, ‘The struggle for independence of the diverse nationalities jumbled together south of the Carpathians is much more complicated and will lead to far more bloodshed, confusion, and civil war.’³⁸

In articles written in the early months of the 1848 revolutions, it is unclear whether or not Engels regarded geopolitical ‘viability’ as the litmus test of a national movement’s eligibility for democratic support. At times, he stressed the relatively constant geographical and demographic factors which obliged some national groups to depend on neighbouring states to take the reforming initiative. In applying his viability criterion to national movements in central and eastern Europe, Engels produced some common-sense arguments about the risks of national unilateralism for strategically vulnerable nations. It was quite reasonable to point out, for example, that in the mid-nineteenth century small and relatively undeveloped nations tended to fall into the orbit of their more powerful neighbours. And since the smaller Slav nationalities had for centuries remained in the sphere of one absolutist state or another, it made sense to warn that formal independence might not be a one-way ticket to effective national self-determination, enabling them to break the shackles of foreign or internal reaction. Engels argued, quite plausibly at the time he was writing, that the lack of a common language, uneven development of the territories concerned, and the weakness of the indigenous bourgeoisie made it likely that, given even the best of democratic intentions, ‘the realisation of pan-Slavism would … be restricted to Russian patronage over Austria’.³⁹ If this were the case, it would also fail to meet the other criteria on which Marx and Engels assessed the merits of nationalist programmes. The mainstays of international oppression would not have been undermined, and the progress of internal reform could not be assured an unimpeded course.

But Engels’ earlier articles tempered this bleak prognosis with the argument that reform-oriented movements within the weaker nations might escape the shadow of hegemonic neighbours, and defuse ethnic tensions in and around their territory, by choosing to enter firm alliances with like-minded movements abroad. From this activist perspective, ‘viability’ was not simply an attribute of immutable national characteristics. It was, more importantly, a matter of commitment to a countervailing network of international power. On this view, nations which failed the test of ‘viability’ on a purely geopolitical yardstick need not give up their hopes of self-determination. They simply could not expect to fulfil those hopes by pursuing a blinkered separatism. It is hard to impugn Engels for insisting that the various Balkan nationalities, in particular, had a pressing need to pursue democratic and economic reform as a means of reducing the ever-present temptation for one ethnic group in the region to dominate others. Moreover, given the proximity of a Russia anxious to quell any democratic movements among fellow-Slavs, there was even more reason to insist that the latter should pursue their autonomist aims in the context of regional and international alliances based on a common commitment to democratic reform. To this extent, the viability criterion gave Marx and Engels an advantage over those who refused publicly to admit what they admitted: that strategic considerations must be brought to bear in arbitrating nationalist claims, at least if a concern to secure a durable settlement is part of what ought to guide our judgement.

In so far as Marx and Engels treated the viability criterion as a source of ancillary questions about how best to apply their ethical criteria, rather than as the basis for deciding which nations deserved ethical consideration at all, there is no reason to suspect the consistency of their national policy. Engels got himself—and by implication his colleague—into trouble only when he turned his attention to the national conflicts that accompanied the counter-revolution in the Habsburg empire. By the beginning of 1849, he argued, those conflicts were polarized into two hostile camps: the ‘revolutionary’ camp, consisting of Germans, Poles, and Magyars; and the ‘counter-revolutionary’ camp, comprising Romanians and all the Slavic nationalities except the Poles. Engels discussed this polar division wholly in terms of the national groups it pitted against one another. In failing to undertake an analysis of the social composition and aims of each national movement, he lost a fine opportunity to develop a strategy for undermining the ‘counter-revolutionary’ camp from below, by encouraging the growth of reforming national movements within the reprobate nations. Instead, he now introduced the distinctly unmaterialist theory of ‘historical’ and ‘historyless’ nations to explain the counter-revolutionary role played by the Czech and southern Slav nationalities in crushing the Austrian revolution.

Hegel, the originator of this theory, had argued that national groups which have not succeeded in creating a state, or whose state has long since been destroyed, are disqualified from ‘historical’ status and destined to be absorbed by their more dynamic neighbours.⁴⁰ Drawing uncritically upon Hegel’s argument, Engels insisted that the ‘fragments of nations’ which comprised his counter-revolutionary phalanx were congenitally incapable of leading an independent existence. Fearing absorption by larger neighbours like the Germans or the Poles—nations which, according to Engels, had continued a vigorously ‘independent’ process of development despite their current political disunity—the smaller ‘nationalities’ were incorrigibly reactionary. Engels prophesied, however, that they were doomed to lose their separate identities with the collapse of their reactionary protectors.

The peculiar premiss of this theory, that stateless nations would always remain stateless, cannot easily be squared with the activist prescriptions embodied in Marx and Engels’ reform and reciprocity criteria. In adapting Hegel’s categories to his own polemical purposes, Engels entangled himself in a web of inconsistencies.⁴¹ His keynote dictum of 1847–8, that ‘a nation cannot be free and continue to oppress other nations’, was conveniently forgotten when it came to assessing the conduct of Hungary’s ‘great historical’ nationalist movement. Engels did not openly condone the Hungarian leader Kossuth’s ruthless efforts to ‘Magyarize’ his country’s sizeable Slav minorities,⁴² but he certainly took no trouble to scrutinize the policies of those he regarded as indispensable allies of the revolutionary movement. Moreover, in railing against the crimes of ‘historyless’ nations against the revolutionary centre in Vienna, Engels displayed a penchant for the most chauvinistic shades of German nationalism. Having inveighed only a few months earlier against the idea that Germany had a ‘civilizing’ mission towards its Slavic neighbours, from the end of 1848 onwards Engels threw frequent fits of great-German indignation against nations that ‘collaborated’ with the ancien régime: ‘And all that by way of thanks for the Germans having given themselves the trouble of civilising the stubborn Czechs and Slovenes … !’⁴³ Once Engels’ very own nationalist genie had been uncorked by the events of 1848–9, it sometimes turned even against the NRZ’s ‘model’ Slavic nation. Looking back on the failed revolutions in 1852, Engels invoked a crude evolutionary standard of progress to assess the border disputes between Poland and Germany, asking his readers if ‘large towns, entirely German’ should ‘be given up to a people that as yet had never given any proofs of its capability of progressing beyond a state of feudalism based upon agricultural serfdom?’⁴⁴

Many commentators have underlined the strategically opportunistic and even racist motivations behind such remarks. Engels’ use of the ‘historyless’ and ‘historical’ categories was untenable, however, not only because it was ethically arbitrary, but because it was self-contradictory. On the one hand, Engels’ basic premiss was deterministic. He insisted that whole nations are historically programmed in such a way that their members, en masse, have no option but to behave in either a revolutionary or a reactionary manner. They are either too small and dependent on other nations to assert themselves against reactionary influence, or they are not. Thus he contended that Poland met the requirements of territorial and social viability which enabled the Poles to attain ‘great political insight’ of a progressive nature; whereas the other Slavs, he asserted, ‘lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for independence and viability’.⁴⁵ Engels contradicted this determinist position, however, in a follow-up article where he declared that if the Slav nationalities had shown a revolutionary disposition in 1848, ‘that by itself would have proved their viability’,⁴⁶ as though this were now regarded as a matter of free choice. Engels applauded nations like Poland and Hungary for adopting a revolutionary course, while condemning others for joining the counter-revolution after already having pronounced them incapable of choosing any other option.

It is difficult to say whether Marx fully endorsed these aspects of Engels’ thinking on national issues in 1848–9. He certainly assigned to certain nations a tutelary position within the revolutionary movement, while treating others as followers. But he nominated different nations for this role at different strategic junctures, selecting them on the basis of their internal revolutionary momentum rather than on any privileged ‘historic’ credentials they might exhibit. Like Engels, he occasionally referred to the Croats, Serbs, and Czechs as ‘fragments of nations’. But in view of his constant emphasis on ‘revolutionizing’ even the most resistant groups of modern society, it is likely that Marx had in mind not any innate deficiencies in certain national populations, but rather their current inability to struggle unilaterally against reactionary neighbours. Although Marx refrained from taking issue with his colleague’s ‘historic’ and ‘historyless’ categories, it does not follow that he tacitly concurred with the somewhat metaphysical notions of progress that informed them. Marx frequently denounced the counter-revolutionary actions of Czech and Croat troops loyal to the Habsburg empire without invoking the deterministic assumptions that shaped Engels’ position, suggesting that the ‘historyless-historic’ formulation was Engels’ own adaptation of Hegel’s idea.

Whatever Marx’s stance on this question, Engels simply did not need Hegel’s categories to explain or evaluate ‘revolutionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ patterns of national action. He had already offered quite an acceptable account of such patterns in earlier writings, where he pointed to the social and international obstacles working against the reforming efforts of Slav national movements in 1848. The moderate and even sympathetic tone of his earlier articles indicates that Engels was quite capable of explaining Slav ‘reaction’ without resorting to Hegel’s idealistic categories, and of passing balanced judgements on this behaviour. In an article of June 1848, for example, Engels soundly condemned the Habsburg army’s suppression of a Czech uprising in Prague. Here he clearly recognized that past national oppression gave the Czechs good reason to suspect the intentions of even the most conciliatory and reform-minded Germans. He deplored the fate of the ‘gallant Czechs’ who, he declared, ‘have been driven into the arms of the Russians by four hundred years of German oppression’, insisting that the German Habsburgs were to blame for forcing the Czechs ‘on the side of despotism opposed to the revolution’.⁴⁷ One sentence in this article is ambiguous: ‘However the uprising may end, a war of annihilation by the Germans against the Czechs is now the only possible outcome.’⁴⁸ Engels has sometimes been taken here to be recommending the ‘annihilation’ of the latter nation, since the crushing of the democratic Czech minority would have left only a reactionary majority to contend with.⁴⁹ But the context suggests that Engels was simply describing what he saw as a likely consequence of the Prague rising, not prescribing revolutionary policy towards the Czechs. He declared that ‘[t]he revolution will triumph and the Czechs will be the first to be crushed by it’, apparently because their failure to adopt an independent posture vis-à-vis their foreign rulers would make them a pawn ripe for use by reactionary powers in the next social upheaval.

Engels’ contradictory judgements cannot be written off, however, as mere anomalies bearing no relation to his and Marx’s general theory. They reflect a fundamental tension between the activist and deterministic, pragmatic and perfectionist strands of that theory. Engels evidently could not quite decide whether to stress political choice and mobilization as means of revolutionizing national movements, or to give up the hard work and rely instead on the inexorable workings of historical ‘progress’. His despair over the violent suppression of the Vienna uprisings helps to explain why Engels was ready to hurl whole nations into his infamous dustbin of history. But the strong teleological pressures in his and Marx’s theory enabled him to justify this sacrifice of national aspirations in the name of a higher, universal good. While there is nothing particularly ‘materialist’ in Engels’ description of that good as a ‘right of civilisation against barbarism’,⁵⁰ this doctrine could easily be tacked on to the general notion of historical progress, and used to deny certain nations a chance to produce acceptably forward-looking movements. Engels’ earlier understanding that such a policy might have disastrous consequences for the revolutionary movement was apparently lost with the defeats of 1848–9. In a series of articles written in 1866, he revived his argument that the ‘great historical nations’ have a ‘right’ to seize their own independence at the expense of less ‘civilised’ neighbours.⁵¹ The reform criterion, moreover, hovers precariously between pragmatic activism and perfectionism. But the more it downgrades the value of national independence in favour of other, distant, goals, the closer it comes to condoning indifference to legitimate national aspirations. Should we conclude, then, that the ‘reciprocity’ constraints built into Marx and Engels’ national policy were too weak to guard against an authoritarian and therefore self-defeating internationalism, and that the substantive goals of democratic and social reform should have no bearing on decisions to support or oppose nationalist claims?

There is little doubt that a concern to secure long-range, global outcomes frequently submerged the insight reached, but incompletely developed, in Engels’ writings on Poland: that national independence is valuable not only as a means to other ends, but also because it gives recognition to a previously degraded society and offers some hope of protection against future conquest. But if Marx and Engels sometimes undervalued these aspirations when considering the claims of specific nationalist movements, the basic ethical premiss behind their reform criterion was a sound one. We may grant that recognition and security are essential to the well-being of groups and individuals, and that national independence is often a necessary condition for recognition and security. But if we value independence because it makes things more difficult for oppressors and restores dignity to people who have been oppressed, then there is no reason to be satisfied with oppression and indignity which flourish after independence. This is not a good reason for condoning unwanted foreign rule in situations where independence contributes little to the freedom or self-respect of a nation’s people. It is, however, a good reason for withholding unconditional support from nationalist programmes which disregard the well-being of co-nationals, or threaten the security and dignity of other national groups.

This point should be painfully obvious, but it is all too frequently obscured in both popular and academic reasoning about why we value national independence. If recognition and security are intrinsically valuable because they are essential to collective and personal well-being, the reasoning goes, then national independence must also be intrinsically valuable. This view conflates well-being with a policy which contributes to it, and diverts attention from the other domestic and international policies that are needed to secure worthwhile forms of independence. The idea that national self-determination should be granted as a matter of ‘right’ has sometimes encouraged this single-minded and undiscriminating focus on independence. To say that agents have a right to something is to say, first of all, that their interest in that thing is such that it cannot be overridden by competing interests or goals except in the most unusual circumstances. Second, rights impose obligations or duties on other agents to grant the thing claimed by the right-bearer. The first aspect of rights tends to insulate nationalist claims from the wider context of political judgement. The second places responsibility for meeting those claims on agents other than nationalist leaders themselves, while saying very little about the responsibilities of those leaders towards their own constituency or other states and nations. Since the relationship between national self-determination and individual rights has never been clearly defined, nationalists who build their case on rights have tended to stress the collective and external dimensions of self-determination at the expense of its internal prerequisites.⁵²

Marx and Engels gave no systematic thought to the idea that national groups have a right to self-determination, mainly because the philosophical basis and legal applications of this idea remained underdeveloped in their lifetimes. Nevertheless, Marx’s early critique of a rights-based approach to ‘political emancipation’ suggests grounds for an analogous critique of a narrowly rights-based understanding of national self-determination. We need not share Marx’s unduly dismissive view of rights⁵³ to accept his central point: that when oppressed peoples view their plight through a purely national lens, and see their nation primarily as a bearer of rights which demand redress from others, they may fail to confront the sources of oppression and conflict that reside within their own society. At the same time, the language of rights is largely silent on the question of how formerly deprived and dejected peoples might be integrated into a network of supportive international relationships. This silence, rather than any built-in adversarial content of rights, reinforces the nationalist tendency to see other nations as potential oppressors and threats. Nationalists have been known to invoke a right of self-determination to justify acts of internal repression and international violence that do not directly affect the oppressor state: violence against minorities, weaker neighbours, or civilians. Such acts fuel repetitive cycles of national conflict, and make it difficult for weaker nations to achieve either security or respectful recognition abroad.⁵⁴

These problems will not be solved by expunging the language of rights from our discussions of national self-determination. But they appear less intractable when the rights demanded by nationalists are built into the broader context of transnational interdependence, and tied to specific domestic and international responsibilities. Marx and Engels’ two criteria were devised precisely to remind nationalists of the internal and external limits on what they could do in their struggles for independence. The task of ending national oppression, they suggested, is only a starting-point for the real hard work of healing social divisions and international enmities. In this respect, the conception of national self-determination suggested by their criteria is far richer than those that place a one-sided emphasis on independence or the rights of individual nations.⁵⁵

In 1848–9 Marx and Engels seem to have expected movements against class and national oppression to converge, spontaneously, in a powerful united front. The fact that such movements often worked at cross-purposes during that period could not but have alerted them to the limitations of their early strategy towards nationalist movements. In particular, they needed to work out the full policy implications of their three criteria by addressing a crucial question: in what circumstances, strategic or otherwise, might national independence be a necessary precondition for domestic reform and international cooperation? The next chapter examines Marx and Engels’ later efforts to revise their internationalist strategy in the light of this question.

5

Rescuing Internationalism

THE last two chapters have sought to unsettle a widespread assumption: the assumption that Marx and Engels offered neither a coherent explanatory account of nationalism nor any but the most ad hoc, strategically grounded criteria for evaluating national movements. In 1848–9, however, Marx and Engels were only beginning to work out the implications of their theory for internationalist practice. Still prone to view capitalism as a relentlessly universalizing force, they remained wary of separatist nationalisms which threatened to divide and scatter revolutionary forces; and their activist arguments for supporting particular national movements, rather than whole nations, remained entangled with—and were sometimes undermined by—strains of economic and cultural determinism that bore little relation to their class-centred prescriptive theory.

In the decades following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, Marx and Engels turned their attention towards two developments which obliged them to clarify their thinking on these issues. First, the accelerating pace of colonial expansion into non-European countries raised fresh questions about the relationship between ‘progress’, as defined by the economy-centred teleology of the Communist Manifesto, and justified resistance to foreign exploitation. Second, the emergence of distinct working-class movements in several European countries revealed a far more complex range of nationalist dispositions than the Manifesto had envisaged. In seeking to counter the adverse effects of colonialism, statist nationalism, and war on democratic and working-class movements, Marx and Engels refined their arguments of 1848 to produce clearer distinctions between hegemonic and defensive nationalism, enlightened working-class patriotism and uncritical support for existing national governments. These distinctions, in turn, led them to upgrade the role of national autonomy within their internationalist strategy. While this chapter continues to focus on aspects of Marx and Engels’ thinking that have been obscured by the critical commentary, Section 5.3 adumbrates some problems of theory and practice that will be assessed more fully in Chapter 6.

5.1. ANTI-COLONIAL NATIONALISM OUTSIDE EUROPE

Marx and Engels’ writings on non-European affairs received only sparse attention before the 1960s. Much of the analysis which heralded the ‘rediscovery’ of their articles on colonialism was coloured, inevitably, by the prevailing climate of North-South relations in the Cold War era. The founders’ comments on India, China and the ‘Asiatic mode of production’¹ were cited to undergird or discredit current Marxist recipes for dealing with an ideologically embattled, increasingly assertive ‘Third World’. The end of Cold War rivalries has lowered the political stakes, and should make it easier to read Marx and Engels’ comments on the non-European world for what they largely were: the reactions of non-specialists, now based in England, to parliamentary debates and press reports on events taking place in regions to which they had never travelled. As London correspondent for the left-leaning New York Daily Tribune in the 1850s, Marx took a special interest in the effects of British colonial expansion on Indian society. But while he marshalled the impressive results of his studies on India to analyse current events, Marx offered neither a comprehensive theory of colonialism nor a programme for the liberation and development of non-European countries.² His and Engels’ articles on Asia conspicuously lack the strong prescriptive content of their writings on European politics: in contrast to the exhortations they constantly showered on Germans, Britons, and Frenchmen to adopt this policy or form that alliance, Marx and Engels refrained from giving direct advice to the Indians or Chinese on how to confront their occupiers. They had, moreover, rather little to say about the attitude that British workers and radicals should take towards their government’s colonial policy outside Europe.

It is not difficult to explain this reticence. Marx and Engels wrote most of their articles on colonialism for an American rather than a British or Asian audience, and Marx’s position on the Tribune did not give him the polemical licence he had enjoyed as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. But if these circumstances discouraged him from outlining a policy for the colonized peoples in his articles, they did not stop Marx from making controversial judgements about the events he reported. When evaluating debates on the pros and cons of colonialism, Marx styled himself as the enfant terrible of both the commercial and political right and the idealistic left on the spectrum of British opinion. This provocative stance, combined with the oracular tone adopted in many of his articles on India and China, creates the impression that Marx wanted to position himself above the scrabbling of contemporary politics, passing judgement on its actors from the standpoint of a broad historical understanding that they themselves lacked. It also helps to explain a much-debated paradox in Marx’s writings on colonialism. On the one hand, his outrage at the exploitative aspects of capitalism was never expressed more ferociously than when he condemned the violence and hypocrisy of the British bourgeoisie in India. At the same time, he assigned to that same bourgeoisie ‘a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia’.³

The coexistence of these positions in Marx’s articles confounds attempts to paint him as either a simple apologist or an uncompromising foe of imperialism. Nevertheless, even the most disinterested reader may be forgiven for thinking that, at the end of the day, Marx exonerated European colonial expansion as a necessary evil.⁴ His readings on India had convinced Marx that ‘Asiatic’ societies could not develop capitalist or socialist forms of production by their own momentum. They needed the shock of external stimulus to break out of their ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative’ village life and dispel the incubus of oriental despotism, which had ‘restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies’.⁵

This infamously ‘Eurocentric’ thesis has embarrassed generations of western Marxists who, in the wake of decolonization, were re-schooled in the doctrine that there are as many ways of making historical ‘progress’ as there are different cultural traditions. Attempts to resolve Marx’s paradoxical position have only reinforced the assumption that, in evaluating the responses of oppressed or ‘exploited’ peoples to foreign intrusion, Marx’s sole criterion was whether such intrusion tended to advance or retard the ‘development’ of local societies, as measured by the unyielding laws of an economy-driven history. Shlomo Avineri has suggested that the one-track theory of capitalist development sketched in the Manifesto enabled Marx ‘to dissociate moral indignation and social critique from historical judgement,’ while his Hegelian heritage taught him that actions were ultimately justified by “objective historical results” rather than the ‘subjective motivation’ of actors.⁶ In a variation on this theme, Umberto Melotti has denied that there is any inconsistency in Marx’s endeavour to ‘condemn capitalism and colonialism from the point of view of those who suffer them, and at the same time to consider them as important progressive forces from the point of view of objective historical movements’.⁷ Viewed in this light, Marx’s judgements reflect a tough-minded realism which allowed him to deplore the inhuman effects of colonial exploitation while welcoming its long-range benefits. Anti-colonial resistance may be an understandable response to the initial impact of foreign encroachments; but, according to the laws-of-history thesis, resistance is ultimately irrational and self-defeating. The final arbiter of conflicts between European colonizers and their non-European subjects must be an objective standard of progress imported by the former, not the avowed desire of the latter for respect, self-determination, and the material security and well-being that can only be achieved when exploitation is absent.

If this perspective fully captures Marx’s reasoning, we would have to conclude that his analyses of colonialism—like Engels’ comments on the ‘historyless’ nations in Europe—clearly fall outside the non-determinist, prescriptive theory of nationalism outlined in earlier chapters. That theory, as it was developed in Marx and Engels’ writings on Germany and other European countries, seeks to identify and encourage forms of resistance which repel foreign oppression without spurning the benefits of interdependence. It treats the technological and industrial developments spawned by capitalism as base-line conditions for the freedom, welfare, and peaceful cooperation of all societies in the modern world; but it also discriminates among more and less acceptable means of disseminating such developments, and allows that national resistance may be needed to transform the agencies of ‘objectively’ beneficial development into instruments used consciously to promote local freedom and welfare. Did Marx’s writings on colonialism sidestep these issues in favour of an essentially apolitical, ‘economistic’ assessment of anti-colonial movements?

If previous commentators have usually answered this question in the affirmative, they have also tended to overlook the ambivalent political role that Marx ascribed to colonialism—a role shaped as much by complex ‘subjective’ responses to ‘objective’ processes as by those processes per se. Marx recognized that the impact of capitalism and foreign exploitation outside Europe—as within it—was double-edged. It stimulated technological progress and removed old obstacles to democratic development; but it could also create longings for a ‘golden age of Hindostan’,⁸ leading some Indians and their western sympathizers to call for the restoration of old social and political institutions. Marx strongly opposed this revanchist line of resistance, and much post-colonial indignation has been stirred by his refusal to mourn the passing of the ‘ridiculous, absurd, and childish’ remnants of native ‘despotism’ in India.⁹ His reasons for taking this stance, however, had little to do with a positive preference for European colonialism. Instead, they reflected his concern to encourage the emergence in India of indigenous social movements opposed at once to colonial exploitation and to the traditional ‘despotism’ which, in an analysis which paralleled Engels’ account of the Polish partition, Marx held responsible for India’s weakness in the face of European incursions. His dissatisfaction with both nostalgic nativist and ruthlessly ‘westernizing’ alternatives for India provides the key to unravelling Marx’s paradoxical judgements on colonialism; and his efforts to chart a third way reflect a strategic analysis of the more varied political options available to anti-colonial nationalists in Asia and elsewhere.

The parameters of that analysis were laid out in a series of articles written in 1853, where Marx launched a two-pronged assault on the conflicting reactions of British MPs to the government-sponsored annexation of ‘native’ Indian states. Challenging the response to this measure of both ‘reformers who denounce it as a crime’ and ‘the men of business who excuse it as a necessity’, Marx argued that to draw the battle-lines in this way was to present a false alternative between ineffectual moralism and bourgeois interests masquerading as hard-nosed realism.¹⁰ His refusal to oppose the annexation does not, as is often supposed, mean that Marx applauded it as an altogether welcome victory for the progressive forces of capitalism. It simply reflected a judgement that colonialism had already destroyed the social and economic foundations of any effective political autonomy in the Native States, so that the ‘crime’ of annexation should properly be seen as no more than a postscript to a longer history of commercial, industrial, and administrative encroachments on Indian sovereignty-measures which had, Marx insinuated, been welcomed by many of the ‘reformers’ who now bellowed against outright annexation. In these circumstances, as Marx pointed out, the question whether the British had any ‘right’ to annex new provinces was already a sterile one. To refrain from annexation at this stage might soothe Indian sensibilities and aching liberal consciences. But it would not spare the Indians further assaults on their autonomy; and the destructive effects of previous colonial policies were by now irreversible.¹¹ If the restoration of pre-colonial society was not a feasible option for colonized peoples, the question now was not whether European colonialism was to be preferred to native rule, but what kind of indigenous movement was most likely to end colonial oppression while ‘reaping the fruits’ of the colonial legacy.

By raising this question, Marx sought to move beyond the terms of a debate which, in considering India’s social and political options, presented a stark choice between more colonialism or an escapist return to a mythical golden age. Contemporary readers will recognize an affinity between this debate and present-day quarrels between political and cultural traditionalists, on the one hand, and those who, on the other, preach more sensitive policies towards foreigners and ‘minorities’ on the grounds that ‘their’ ways of life are as worthy of respect as ours. Marx, as I’ll suggest below, was certainly more ‘sensitive’ to the plight of colonized peoples than his critics make out. But he sneered at self-righteous posturing which condemned insensitivity while doing nothing to improve the material situation of its victims; and he delighted in debunking the anaemic norms of nineteenth-century political correctness. A letter he wrote to Engels in June 1953 helps to place Marx’s harshest criticisms of pre-colonial Indian society in proper polemical context. Referring to his article ‘The British Rule in India’, Marx noted rather gleefully that the editors of the New York Daily Tribune would find it ‘shocking’ that he welcomed the ‘revolutionary’ effects of British capitalism on Asian society, and confided his desire to conduct ‘hidden warfare’ against the soft-left editorial line of the American paper. The fact that the editors and readers of his Tribune articles were already disposed to condemn colonial expansion ‘as a crime’ does much to explain why Marx, ever the iconoclast, bent so far in the opposite direction. His aim was not to exonerate colonialism, but to counter the tendency of western leftists to idealize traditional non-European societies, invoking flaccid moralistic arguments against their invaders while failing to support changes that could eventually improve the lot of local peoples. ‘As for the rest’, Marx declared, ‘the entire British management in India was swinish, and is to this day.’¹²

Since, according to Marx, the destruction of the Indian States was a fait accompli, the morally charged quarrel between ‘businessmen’ and ‘reformers’ in the British Parliament came to turn in practice on a narrower issue: whether or not to maintain the trappings of local autonomy in the form of the native aristocracy. Marx acknowledged that this question touched upon the abrasive psychological effects of colonialism. He noted that some of the British reformers who sought to preserve the aristocracy were motivated by ‘a real sympathy for the Indian people,’ fearing that ‘the subversion of that aristocracy will not raise but debase a whole people.’¹³ But this argument, Marx suggested, only carried force because British rule ‘systematically excluded’ Indians of all classes from higher civil and military office, a policy which raised few liberal protests in Britain. He also pointed out that the maintenance of hereditary princes prevented less high-born Indian subjects from rising to positions of authority. By maintaining traditional social distinctions alongside a colonial system of discrimination, British policy created a situation in which anti-colonial resistance tended to take a purely negative and nostalgic form. In the absence of strong indigenous movements among the traditionally non-ruling groups in Indian society, resistance developed through a process of reciprocal differentiation which placed disproportionate value on what Marx derided as ‘ridiculous and absurd’ in traditional Indian society: on the artefacts, that is, of an arrogant aristocratic caste.¹⁴

Marx was not in the least inclined to wish away the prospect of nostalgic nativism by insisting that, in due course, the ‘objective’ forces of capitalist development would vanquish all resisters. He did imply, however, that this ‘reactionary’ form of identity-based resistance was ultimately self-defeating. If British supporters of India’s traditional aristocracy were motivated by a respect for the ‘Indian people’, their tendency to identify the best interests of that people with an otiose and exclusive caste merely reinforced obstacles to popular anti-colonial resistance. Willy-nilly, the native princes served as props to a British policy of social and regional divide-and-rule; they were, Marx concluded, ‘the strongholds of the present abominable English system and the greatest obstacles to Indian progress’.¹⁵

This analysis drew heavily on the normative concepts and strategic analyses that informed Marx and Engels’ critique of non-reforming nationalisms in Europe. In particular, it stressed the close relations between the domestic and external agencies of ‘national’ oppression, suggesting that the removal of the latter depends on challenging the former. According to this analysis, self-determination for a colonized people cannot be achieved simply through the obdurate assertion of what has been suppressed by the colonizers. The real work of building a self-determining society must go beyond a separatist politics of identity, and concern itself with advancing the freedom and material welfare of people who, before the colonial era, had been demeaned and exploited by their own rulers.

In Asia as in Europe, Marx repudiated cultural relativism by arguing that, like it or not, the expansion of capitalism had irreversibly forged bonds of cultural, political, and economic interdependence which put pressure on societies everywhere to meet certain base-line standards of ‘development’. Anti-colonial insularity was therefore as self-defeating a stance as nostalgia for a romanticized past. The aim of constructive resistance should be to open up and participate in a wider global society which currently excluded and degraded the colonized peoples, not to spurn that society altogether. But Marx did not assume that this aim could be achieved through the impersonal workings of capitalism, or deny that the identity of its purveyors carried any psychological or political significance. The key to effective anti-colonial resistance was, in Marx’s view, to expand opportunities for ordinary Indians in military and administrative offices—to ‘create a fresh class’ of educated Indians ‘endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science’. Marx did not defend this solution on paternalistic grounds, nor did he envisage a gradual evolution towards self-rule under a British aegis. He saw it as the ‘sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation’,¹⁶ firmly rejecting the notion that indigenous freedom and well-being depended on the efforts of their foreign oppressors:

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?¹⁷

This discussion brings out a dimension of Marx’s views on colonialism that is seldom highlighted in the commentaries. Marx alludes to the specifically political, subjective requirements of ‘progress’ in India when he states that the freedom and material welfare of its people depend on more than the development of ‘productive powers’. The Indians, as Marx wrote, could not ‘reap the benefits’ of European technology and methods of production until they had placed these under popular indigenous control. The destruction of older social moorings rooted in ‘Asiatic despotism’ had made it possible for the Indian people to build a thriving economy and democratic institutions; but they could not realize this potential under foreign or capitalist rule. Marx did not say a great deal about the important political and psychological difference between self-emancipation and emancipation by foreigners—even if the foreigners were proletarian revolutionaries—but by 1853 he had clearly begun to modify the view that the freedom of colonized peoples must await and depend upon revolutionary guidance from those in the metropole. The import of Marx’s emphasis on ‘self-emancipation’ is frequently obscured by the assumption that he was concerned only with the progressive results of colonialism, and far less with the means used to achieve progress. Although he did not forecast a programme for Indian independence at a time when that remained a distant prospect, Marx was far ahead of most of his European contemporaries in looking favourably on the possibility that India might be ‘emancipated’ by an organized indigenous movement. Marx foresaw two possible paths to Indian independence: either a proletarian revolution in Britain, or an internal revolution when ‘the Hindus themselves have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether’.¹⁸ He located the impetus for such a movement in the ‘fresh class’ he saw emerging from the ruins of traditional Indian society. Members of that class would not passively follow in the footsteps of their European mentors; they would also be well situated to ‘appropriate’ the ‘material premises’ for political liberation and economic development, and use these to combat British rule.

Against the ‘objective’ laws-of-development thesis, then, this analysis suggests an activist solution to Marx’s paradoxical judgements on colonialism—a solution which rested on a more sensitive understanding of anti-colonial responses than the objectivist argument admits. Loosely applying the criteria he applied to national movements in Europe, Marx judged the merits of anti-colonial uprisings in Asia by asking, first, whether these were based on programmes of comprehensive social reform and, second, whether they sought to develop new transnational bonds of cultural and economic interdependence or to shun these in favour of a backward-looking separatism. The fact of colonial oppression did not constitute grounds for unconditional support of all movements launched in the name of the oppressed, or exempt the latter from basic domestic and international responsibilities. It is perverse to berate Marx for refusing to treat the victims of colonialism as childlike wards of their erstwhile oppressors, or to absolve them from the same ethical and political standards which condemned their victimizers. To do so would mean continuing to denigrate the humanity and capacity for independent agency of people who have been debased. The champions of present-day political correctness would do well to remember this.

The same discriminating position he adopted in Europe, rather than a positive preference for colonialism, helps to explain why Marx failed to greet the outbreak in 1857 of anti-colonial uprisings in China and India with the unbounded enthusiasm that many readers have hoped to find. Marx was initially sceptical about the military chances of the Sepoy mutiny within the Indian army, underestimating the intensity and geographical scope of the support it would evoke. Although he soon revised this view, he did not hail the mutiny or the Taiping rebellion in China as fully fledged nationalist movements or summon European revolutionaries to throw their strength—such as it was—behind their Asian brethren. Such omissions have led some authors to draw extravagantly critical conclusions: if Marx ‘did not acclaim the Indian Mutiny as a revolutionary struggle’, the reason for this must be that ‘he did not accept that an independent India could have a viable path of national development ahead of it’.¹⁹ This conclusion is all the more curious because, notwithstanding the polemical constraints they faced at the NYDT, Marx and Engels searched eagerly for portents of future nationalist revolutions in the unplanned, loosely organized revolts of 1857. Marx saw the Indian mutiny as evidence that, by creating an army with a large native contingent, ‘British rule simultaneously organised the first general centre of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of’. The centralizing thrust of colonial policy, he argued, gave the mutiny certain ‘characteristic and fatal features’:

It is the first time that sepoy regiments have murdered their European officers; that Mussulmans and Hindus, renouncing their mutual antipathies, have combined against their common masters … that the mutiny has not been confined to a few localities; and lastly, that the revolt in the Anglo-Indian army has coincided with a general disaffection exhibited against English supremacy on the part of the great Asiatic nations, the revolt of the Bengal army being, beyond doubt, intimately connected with the Persian and Chinese wars.²⁰

Engels went even further towards recognizing the Taiping rebellion as a precursor, if not the nucleus, of a broadly based nationalist movement in China.²¹ He contended that ‘the piratical policy of the British government has caused this universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners’, describing the Chinese conflict as ‘a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like; but yet a popular war‘.²²

Engels’ language in this passage brings out his and Marx’s profound ambivalence toward the 1857 uprisings. On the one hand, they refused to approve of the xenophobic aspects of early anti-colonial protests; their wholehearted support was offered, as it was in Europe, on condition that the rebels formulated a coherent, internationally oriented programme for reform. On the other hand, this conditional approach was by no means tantamount to ‘extenuating’ colonialism. To the contrary, Marx and Engels consistently extenuated even the most ‘barbaric’ and ‘fanatical’ acts of anti-colonial resistance as an understandable response to foreign exploitation. Engels argued that ‘the very fanaticism of the southern Chinese in their struggle against foreigners seems to mark a consciousness of the supreme danger in which old China is placed’; and, while he wept no tears for the loss of ‘old China’, Engels pointed out that ‘since the British treat them as barbarians’, the Chinese ‘cannot deny to them the full benefit of their barbarism’.²³ Noting the hypocritical reaction of the conservative British press to the Indian mutiny, Marx urged that ‘however infamous the conduct of the sepoys, it is only a reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India’.²⁴ If European revolutionaries could not welcome the xenophobic extremities of anti-British resistance as an adequate basis for India’s ‘emancipation’, they could not deny that the Indian people were ‘justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects’.²⁵ John Bull, as Marx declared, should not forget that ‘his Government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions it has been allowed to assume’.²⁶

These aspects of Marx and Engels’ thinking on colonialism allow us to clarify the political and ethical ramifications of their ‘Eurocentric’ conception of progress. It needs to be stressed, first, that their writings contain only a few examples of the argument that new colonial conquests should be welcomed as a victory of ‘civilization’ over non-European ‘barbarism’; and these date mainly from Engels’ bleak historical-historyless period of 1848–9, when he also applauded France’s conquest of Algeria and the United States’ war on Mexico.²⁷ Engels had distanced himself from these judgements by 1857, now condemning the ‘barbarous system of warfare’ inflicted on Algeria by the French and expressing admiration for ‘the Arab and Kabyle tribes, to whom independence is precious, and hatred of foreign domination a principle dearer than life itself’.²⁸ In denouncing the often violent methods of European intruders, Marx and Engels frequently turned conventional usage of the normative terms ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ upside-down to make the point that technological expertise did not justify European claims to moral superiority over foreigners. Arguing that scientific knowledge in capitalist hands amounted to ‘scientific barbarism’,²⁹ Marx underlined the crucial difference between ‘the profound hypocrisy and barbarism of bourgeois civilisation’ in its European homelands, ‘where it assumes respectable forms,’ and its impact on ‘the colonies, where it goes naked.’³⁰ On the whole, Marx and Engels welcomed the ambivalent effects of colonialism in so far as these stimulated the growth of a native opposition imbued with reforming national consciousness. The question whether science was good or bad for the colonized peoples turned not on ‘objective’ historical processes, but on actions taken by those peoples to ‘appropriate’ its benefits for themselves.

It also bears repeating that the standard of scientific and social progress which Marx and Engels used to criticize traditional ‘Asiatic’ societies was applied with equal rigour to the vestiges of feudalism and ‘superstition’ in nineteenth-century Europe—not just in nations of doubtful ‘viability’, but also in France, Poland, and their native Germany. Whether in Asia or in Europe, the two men campaigned against the uncritical acceptance of traditional social or political institutions on the grounds that these expressed an unyielding, immeasurably valued ‘identity’. This attitude, as Marx suggested in his discussion of the Indian aristocracy, not only locked ordinary Indians into the debased and morally arbitrary identities imposed by the caste system, but also helped to prop up colonial rule by impeding the growth of an educated, strategically well placed, and supra-local opposition. This recalls Marx and Engels’ argument that Poland’s independence had been bartered away by its own aristocracy, and that Poland would probably remain vulnerable if that same class took the lead in a new independence movement. Marx’s controversial statement that India was the ‘predestined prey of conquest’³¹ does not reflect any special contempt for non-European cultures, but a trans-continental judgement that internal class ‘despotism’ and political fragmentation—whether in Germany, Poland, or India—may invite foreign oppression.

One might still question the cosmopolitan and teleological assumptions behind Marx and Engels’ idea of progress, or object that Marx’s vision of a ‘superior structure of society’ based on ‘the full and free development of every individual’³² is particularly biased against non-European cultures. But Marx and Engels did not assume that cultures outside the capitalist ‘core’ had nothing distinctive to contribute to economic and technological development or, for that matter, to the understanding and practice of freedom. Marx was constantly on the lookout for alternative national routes to socialism. As early as 1850 he acknowledged, somewhat apprehensively, that ‘Chinese socialism may stand in the same relation to the European variety as Chinese philosophy stands to the Hegelian’³³—the implication being that the two versions may, while clearly falling under the same genus, belong to only distantly related species. Marx squarely confronted the possibility that socialism might develop in different ways in different countries when, several decades later, he identified the peasant commune as ‘the strategic point of social regeneration in Russia’,³⁴ and suggested that if a revolution in that country were to coincide with a proletarian revolution in the west, ‘the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting-point for a communist development’.³⁵ Writing to Karl Kautsky in 1884, a year after Marx’s death, Engels adverted to the view that non-European colonies would have to be ‘led as rapidly as possible towards independence’ by the victorious metropolitan working classes. ‘But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organisation’, he wrote, ‘I think we today can advance only rather idle hypotheses. One thing alone’, he added, ‘is certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing.’³⁶

With this consequence-sensitive argument for self-restraint, Engels extended to non-European countries his early dictum that international ties must be built through voluntary association. Despite various refinements on his and Marx’s earliest remarks about colonialism, however, the two men left an important gap on questions of political and international strategy for anti-colonial movements outside Europe. The next section examines Marx’s efforts to map out a clearer programme for anti-colonial nationalism in Ireland, and asks whether his analyses of the ‘Irish question’ led Marx radically to revise his internationalist policy.

5.2. IRELAND AND THE INDEPENDENCE QUESTION

In 1848 Marx and Engels had devoted much polemical energy to pointing out the ‘common interests’ which ought to ally the subordinate classes in hegemonic nations with national movements in the oppressed ones. By arguing that such alliances were the key to nationalist success, they were able to insist on tying nationalist objectives to the broader goals of social and international reform. From the other direction, their reciprocity criterion also enjoined reformers in the hegemonic nations to meet separatist demands as an element of their own struggles against class dominion. In the 1850s, however, Marx and Engels offered no similar internationalist programme for the non-European colonies. Marx alluded somewhat vaguely to the ‘solidarity of human woes and wrongs’ that bridged East and West,³⁷ and observed that only a small and privileged class of Englishmen reaped the economic benefits of colonialism in India.³⁸ But he said virtually nothing about the concrete interests that linked anti-colonial resistance to democratic and working-class movements in the metropole, or about the common goals and tradeoffs that such interests might require.

This silence is partly explained by the constraints Marx faced during his first decade of exile in Britain, when he lacked the insider’s authority and journalistic independence to prescribe policy outside the Continent. Towards the end of the 1850s, however, he and Engels began to register doubts about the internationalist credentials of the English working class. Writing to his colleague in October 1858, Engels remarked that

the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation that exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.³⁹

Engels touched here on what he and Marx would later identify as the critical problem for anti-colonial movements and, indeed, for internationalist strategy in the second half of the nineteenth century. The position occupied by a particular national bourgeoisie in the world market, Engels implied, inevitably affects the way that it exploits workers at home. Neither Marx nor Engels ever expanded this observation into a general theory of capitalism’s international dimension. No more than the barest rudiments appear in their works, for example, of a proto-Leninist argument that imperialism tends to have a politically corrupting influence on a section of the metropolitan working class.⁴⁰ Yet they did note some general features of colonialism which militated against the emergence of supportive alliances between metropolitan workers and colonized peoples. After tabulating the extortionate export duties and taxes levied by the British against their colonies, Marx concluded in 1859 that ‘to be free at home, John Bull must enslave abroad’.⁴¹ In a similar ironic reversal of his dictum that oppressor nations sign away their own people’s freedom, Engels had suggested a few years earlier that ‘the so-called liberty of English citizens is based on the oppression of the colonies’.⁴² Britain’s unparalleled dominance in the global economy enabled its ‘leading class’ to cushion the effects of domestic exploitation by drawing its largest profits from foreign commerce and labour.

Squarely confronting these differences between domestic and external forms of capitalist exploitation, Marx and Engels set out to revise their earlier argument that movements for national independence must work strictly within the bounds of a wider internationalist programme. Whereas in 1848 they had urged nationalists to adjust their goals to those of revolutionaries in hegemonic countries, and to view their nation’s independence as simply one facet of a global movement towards social emancipation, in the 1860s and 1870s Marx relaxed these strong international conditions on movements within the oppressed nations. If the working classes in the dominant countries were unwilling to liberate themselves by opposing foreign oppression, then the revolutionary impulse had to come from the oppressed nations themselves. In such circumstances, Marx came to argue, the achievement of national independence might be a prior condition for social reform and progressive international alliances, not just a means of pursuing these broader objectives.

Marx qualified his internationalist optimism when he turned from China and India towards a colony closer to home. Ireland had previously held the anomalous status in his and Engels’ thinking of a commendably revolutionary yet ‘unhistoric’ nation. What Marx had referred to in 1847 as the reforming, ‘national’ branch of Irish nationalism was supported as a sort of external goad to the metropolitan opposition in England. But the actual liberation of Ireland from colonial rule was still expected to result from English revolutionary efforts, and to preclude Irish independence from Britain. At this stage Irish ‘freedom’ meant to Marx and Engels freedom from colonial extortions through incorporation into a socialist, multinational Britain. This view was substantially modified when Marx confronted the problem of national hostilities between Irish and English workers.

Writing to two of his German supporters in 1870, Marx noted that, as a result of Britain’s systematic impoverishment of its ‘first colony’⁴³ and its recent attempts to supplant the Irish population ‘by pigs, sheep and oxen’⁴⁴ through forcible eviction, ‘all English industrial and commercial centres now possess a working class split into two hostile camps: English proletarians and Irish proletarians.’⁴⁵ In explaining this rift, Marx began by observing that the economic insecurity engendered by capitalism tended to fuel intra-proletarian resentments. ‘The ordinary English worker’, he declared, ‘hates the Irish worker because he sees him as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.’ But why, within a class that was supposed to represent the triumph of shared interests over divisive prejudices, should competition among English workers themselves be any less fierce than competition with their Irish counterparts? Marx suggested that part of the answer lay in a psychological effect of the asymmetrical relations between metropole and colony, which allowed the English worker to regard himself as ‘a member of the ruling nation’. By succumbing to such prejudices, the English worker tacitly endorsed the acts of exploitation which had demeaned Irish national identity and obliged Irish workers to leave their country in search of employment. ‘For this very reason’, Marx argued, ‘he turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.’⁴⁶

Marx acknowledged through this analysis that the roots of English prejudice and Irish resentment predated the capitalist era, and cut far deeper into the national memories evoked in the present conflict. He refrained from arguing that the English worker cherished prejudices against his Irish counterpart because such prejudices benefit English capitalists, by ‘strengthening their domination’ over the worker. Cultural and religious differences had, as he pointed out, become inextricably bound up—even in the minds of workers-with assertions of national superiority and defensive reactions against colonial high-handedness. Marx even identified differences in national temperament as a source of tension in the workplace, noting that ‘the revolutionary fire of the Celtic worker does not go well with the solid but slow nature of the Anglo-Saxon worker’.⁴⁷ The claim that these tensions were ‘artificially sustained and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all means at the disposal of the ruling classes’ was introduced not as part of a functional or conspiratorial class theory of nationalism, but only to explain how an unintended by-product of colonial policy may, once it has been seen as suitable for ideological service, be encouraged by the rulers to divide working-class ranks. Marx’s account does suggest, however, that cultural differences would not have become the focus of popular national hatreds had British capitalists and landlords not invited competition through the forced emigration of Irish workers to England.

Marx came to argue that the very depth of the antipathies between English and Irish workers made it necessary for Ireland to achieve political and economic independence from Britain. In 1867 he wrote to Engels: ‘I used to think the separation of Ireland from England impossible. I now think it inevitable, although after the separation there may come federation.’⁴⁸ Marx arrived at this conclusion only after his long-standing appeals to the common interest of English and Irish workers in opposing English ‘landlordism’ in both their countries had failed to elicit a solidary response. As in earlier analyses, he appraised the need for Irish independence from two sides at once, frequently changing his mind on the question of whether ‘separation’ should precede the hoped-for renewal of federal ties or await English cooperation. In November 1869 Marx considered this question from the standpoint of the wider European revolution, contending that ‘since the English working class undoubtedly throws the decisive weight into the scale of social emancipation generally, the lever has to be applied here’; the ‘initiative in dissolving the Union’ should, he argued, come from the English side and result in ‘a free federal relationship’ between the two countries.⁴⁹ Two weeks later, Marx shifted towards the Irish perspective and came up with a more radical solution. ‘For a long time’, he wrote to Engels, ‘I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish [colonial] regime by English working-class ascendancy … Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland.’⁵⁰ Marx’s conviction now that the ‘lever’ of socialist revolution in England ‘must be applied in Ireland’ was still based in part on an assessment of the influences acting to stifle the growth of revolutionary consciousness among the English working class, not by humanitarian sympathies with the Irish. But his basic premiss in arguing for ‘self-emancipation’ was that colonial policy had fanned implacable resentments on the Irish side, making anathema the notion that any class of Englishmen should ‘liberate’ Ireland. His letter illustrates Marx’s view of the intimate connections between foreign and domestic oppression:

The first condition for emancipation here—the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy—remains an impossibility, because its bastion here cannot be stormed so long as it holds its strongly entrenched outpost in Ireland. But once affairs are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition there of the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the same persons as the English landlords) will be infinitely easier than here, because in Ireland it is not merely a simple economic question but at the same time a national question, for the landlords there are not, like those in England, the traditional dignitaries and representatives of the nation, but its mortally hated oppressors.⁵¹

Some commentators have exaggerated the extent to which Marx’s ‘Irish turn’ represents a decisive ‘break’ from his 1848 policy, contrasting the power-political opportunism of that earlier policy with the principled approach of the later.⁵² This interpretation overlooks the distinctive line of interest-based ethical reasoning that runs through the writings of both periods, with some modifications. Marx continued to advance support for Irish independence through consequentialist arguments, which stressed the self-defeating character of continued oppression for English workers and the wider revolutionary movement. In his letters and speeches, Marx repeatedly insisted on the need to avoid ‘moralizing’ appeals to ‘abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment’ in the campaign for Ireland. Such appeals, he argued, could scarcely be expected to galvanize sustained British support unless the English workers were persuaded that Irish independence was also ‘the first condition of their own social emancipation’.⁵³ This position undoubtedly reflected a more realistic view of the proletariat’s capacity for transnational altruism than that found in earlier writings. Marx acknowledged, more explicitly than he had before the 1860s, that circumstances may render the proletariat no less immune than other classes to the attractions of national arrogance. But he saw the operative psychological mechanism as a compensatory one, triggered by the English worker’s sense of vulnerability in relation to his own co-national exploiters. Marx’s multilateral analysis of the intra-proletarian conflict emphasized the inflammatory effects of class relations on national differences that would, presumably, otherwise pose no barrier to peaceful coexistence or class cooperation. At least some identifiable sources of the conflict, Marx implied, were tied to a specific set of social and economic arrangements rather than to deep-seated historical antipathies. The impermanence of those arrangements allowed him to argue that a transnational strategy aimed at strengthening the English workers’ position might still be the key to an Anglo-Irish rapprochement.

Moreover, given Marx’s insistence on viewing the ‘Irish problem’ as one which assumed quite different forms in different social and historical contexts, it would be wrong to infer that his support for Irish independence brought him close to endorsing a supra-historical principle of national self-determination. It is significant that when in 1867 he first renounced his old belief that independence for Ireland was ‘impossible’, he explained this volte face as a response to recent developments in colonial policy, not as a move reflecting despair in the face of perennial national tensions. Marx continued to argue that the nature and depth of those tensions varied according to the specific forms of exploitation endured by Irish and English workers, and that the political solutions appropriate to any given period must take these contingencies into account. Ireland’s separation from Britain was ‘inevitable’ only now, Marx argued, because by forcibly evicting Irish farmers from their native soil since the 1850s ‘the economic content and therefore also the political aim of English domination in Ireland have entered an entirely new’ and particularly dehumanizing phase. This baffled any remaining hopes of an imminent reconciliation, raising Irish resentments to an unprecedented pitch and stimulating the growth of a broad, popularly based movement against British rule.⁵⁴ Marx believed that these developments both justified Irish demands for independence and made that policy a necessary condition for future comity between Irish and English workers. Yet he adhered to the 1848 view that national independence should not be supported as the end-point of policy, but only in so far as it contributed to the welfare of a nation’s people and to long-term prospects of resolving old national conflicts. Marx did not give up hope that Irish independence would be followed, sooner or later, by federal reunion with a revolutionizing England, although he refused to make abstract judgements as to whether this solution was feasible or desirable. ‘Experience’, Marx wrote in his most deeply pragmatic vein, ‘must show whether the merely personal union can continue to subsist between the two countries. I half think it can if it takes place in time.’⁵⁵

These remarks betray Marx’s enduring concern that a nationalist obsession with ending foreign rule might, if left unchecked, blind oppressed peoples like the Irish to the ‘common interests’ they shared with the majority population in the dominant nation. To counteract unilateralist leanings, Marx continued to apply the social-reform and reciprocity criteria developed in his and Engels’ earlier policy to the Irish case. If his conversion to the cause of Irish independence led Marx to relax his strong internationalist strictures on nations fighting against oppression, he did not shift towards a position of unconditional support for any nationalist movement which professed to lead that fight. He and Engels were particularly suspicious of nationalist leaders for whom ‘Ireland still remains the sacra insula, whose aspirations must on no account be mixed up with the profane struggles of the rest of the sinful world’. In explaining the marked Irish propensity to nationalist monomania, Engels acknowledged that desperate conditions had fostered a certain ‘honest madness on the part of these people’; but, he added, ‘it is equally certain that it is partially also a calculated policy of the leaders in order to maintain their domination over the peasant’, and thereby to hold in check the ‘socialistic tendencies’ of the nationalist rank-and-file. According to Engels, efforts to separate the national question from a radical form of the ‘social question’ in Ireland reflected the particular concern of native Irish gentry to replace English rule with exploitative, albeit indigenous, class rule. The linkage between this domestic strategy and external unilateralism was explained by the leaders’ desire to discourage Irish peasants and proletarians from forming fraternal links with the international labour movement. ‘To these gentry’, Engels wrote, ‘the whole labour movement is pure heresy and the Irish peasant must not on any account be allowed to know that the socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.’⁵⁶

Marx also intimated his distrust of certain political and religious leaders of the Irish national resistance,⁵⁷ and suggested that the downfall of ‘the English Established Church in Ireland’ would remove an important bulwark of English rule and irritant of popular national feeling among the Irish. At the same time, Marx insisted that the roots of the Anglo-Irish conflict could not be fully addressed by attacking its political and religious dimensions. ‘I have’, he wrote, ‘been convinced from the first that the social revolution must begin seriously from the bottom, that is, from landownership.’⁵⁸ In keeping with their previous national policies, then, Marx and Engels extended preferential support to the national movement of the ‘lower orders’ in Ireland. But, here as in other countries, the social identity of nationalists was not enough to qualify them for unquestioning support. Marx noted that although the increasingly assertive Fenian movement had a strong rural and popular base, it remained a ‘socialistic’ movement only ‘in a negative sense’, directed against further British seizures of Irish farmland.⁵⁹ An adequately reforming programme would need, he argued, to launch a far-reaching agrarian revolution aimed at correcting the distortions inflicted on the Irish economy by British colonists, as well as expelling the latter. Wary that resort to violent methods could deprive Irish nationalists of crucial foreign support and destroy prospects of a future alliance with English workers, Marx also urged tactical restraint in the interests of international reciprocity. When the Fenians set off an explosion at a London prison in 1867 in an attempt to free imprisoned comrades, Marx opined that this ‘was a very stupid thing. The London masses, who have shown sympathy for Ireland, will be made wild by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of the Fenian emissaries.’⁶⁰ These strictures notwithstanding, Marx sympathized strongly with demands for the release of Irish political prisoners, and spent several years campaigning for the cause of Irish amnesty in the First International.

The reasoning behind Marx’s ‘Irish turn’ did not, then, depart substantially from his and Engels’ previous arguments for extending conditional and discriminating support to nationalism in oppressed countries. Marx continued to apply the interest-based criteria and explanatory premisses set down in 1848 to justify his about-face on the question of Irish independence. But if the basic theory proved remarkably flexible in this respect, his studies of the Anglo-Irish conflict also alerted Marx to some of its limitations. The novelty of his position on Ireland lay in Marx’s growing appreciation of the constructive role played by separatist nationalism in promoting international revolution. This subtle shift of emphasis from global towards local conditions for revolution entailed two important developments in his internationalist strategy.

First, Marx’s writings on Ireland mark a decisive retreat from the view that the spark igniting revolutions around the world could only be lit by certain privileged ‘historical’ nations. Marx had already begun to distance himself from this view in the 1850s. In an article on China, he contemplated the possibility that ‘the next uprising of the people of Europe, and the next movement for republican freedom and economy of government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire-the very opposite of Europe-than on any other political cause that now exists’.⁶¹ By 1858 Marx was even questioning Engels’ unwavering conviction that the uncooperative Slav nationalists caused nothing but trouble for European revolutionaries, arguing that ‘the exceptionally big movements among the Slavs’, and especially the Czechs, were ‘indeed counter-revolutionary, but still add to the ferment of our movement’.⁶² In the Irish case, Marx went further still. The emancipation of Ireland—a small, strategically vulnerable nation which lacked a recent history of independence—was expected to strike a critical blow against the economic, political, military, and ideological supports of the dominant classes in the oppressing nation, and therefore against the entire system of international oppression which Marx and Engels saw as operating throughout Europe and the colonies. This expectation did not exempt nationalists in the oppressed nations from the reciprocity and reform conditions outlined in 1848. It did, however, undercut earlier arguments for giving preferential treatment to certain categories of nation.

Second, his support for the Irish cause led Marx to upgrade his previous assessment of the ways in which independent statehood may contribute to the wider, more fundamental goals of social and international reform. Among the most notable signs of Marx’s shift in this direction was his argument that an independent Ireland should adopt a strict policy of protectionism against English trade, thereby counteracting the adverse effects of economic vulnerability and enabling the Irish to develop a non-dependent industrial base.⁶³ This added an important caveat to Marx’s general preference for free trade as the most efficient means of forging transnational bonds among the workers of the world. But it also had deeper political implications. By suggesting that the welfare and international standing of disadvantaged nations like Ireland might depend on state-sponsored commercial and industrial policies, Marx acknowledged that the state may take on internal and external functions that benefit all its citizens, regardless of class. He did not consider that, even if these functions were performed in a non-neutral manner, the state’s responsibilities in promoting economic development and protecting citizens against foreign exploitation might attract stronger trans-class loyalties to the nation-state than Marx was ready to accept. Domestic exploitation might continue with the state’s complicity, but for Irish peasants and workers it was far better than the subjection they had endured at foreign hands. I will later suggest that Marx’s failure to pursue these implications of his position on Ireland impaired his general understanding of popular nationalism towards the turn of the century. The following section argues, however, that his response to the rise of working-class ‘accommodation’ with the nation-state was politically more sophisticated than has usually been supposed, and more clear-sighted than that of many of his radical and internationalist contemporaries.

5.3. WORKING-CLASS PATRIOTISM AND THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

Marx’s arguments for Irish independence were prefigured in his attempts, after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, to come to terms with changes in the wider European workers’ movement. By the 1860s, the rapid growth of modern industry throughout western Europe led to the formation of mass political movements based on specifically working-class concerns. From his exile in London, Marx continued to urge the leaders of such movements to differentiate their aims and methods from those of both the pre-industrial urban classes and the bourgeoisie itself. If workers were able to adopt an independent stance in the domestic arena, he reasoned, they would be better placed to form separate international alliances when they wished to oppose the domestic and foreign policies of their own governments. But Marx realized that workers’ movements did not operate with a political carte blanche. They had, no less than other classes, to make hard strategic choices about their domestic and foreign alignments.

The upgrading of separatist nationalism within his internationalist strategy stemmed, in large part, from Marx’s growing apprehensions about the capacity of workers to act in spontaneous, global unison against international alliances of absolutist and bourgeois conservatism. His concern that a zest for empire had infected the national outlook of English workers was echoed in writings on Germany in the same period. For a decade after the 1848 revolutions, the German workers’ movement languished under the heavy hand of reaction in Prussia. When it emerged as a distinct political force after 1859, the international scene was dominated by the struggle between Prussia and Austria for German hegemony. In 1862 Bismarck, Prussia’s newly appointed Chancellor, vowed to unify Germany by ‘blood and iron’ after the Diet refused to grant army credits for his annexationist plans. Hoping to exploit this inter-governmental conflict to gain concessions for German workers, the socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle offered to solicit working-class support for Bismarck’s scheme in exchange for state-aided cooperatives and universal suffrage. The Chancellor declined the offer; but Lassalle’s strategy of cutting deals with the political right, as well as his preference for a ‘Prussian solution’ to the problem of German unification, continued to attract Social Democratic leaders after his death in 1864.⁶⁴

Marx took particular exception to the overtones of cultural superiority in Lassalle’s view of the German nation, which combined Fichte’s messianic ideas about that nation’s contribution to human development with a Hegelian reverence for the state. This view fed readily into right-wing arguments which justified the status quo in Poland by calling for a Kulturkampf against Prussia’s Polish subjects, thus colliding with the shibboleth of Marx and Engels’ international policy.⁶⁵ Although the exiled Marx had little influence on the German workers’ movement at the time, he and Engels expanded their correspondence with Lassalle’s successors in the hope of steering them away from Bismarck’s ‘great Prussian’ policy. Arguing that the ‘realistic politics’ of Lassalle’s deal-making in fact lacked any ‘real basis’ in the interests of German workers, Marx dismissed Lassalle as a ‘quack saviour’⁶⁶ whose nationalist doctrines offered a false ‘panacea for the sufferings of the masses’.⁶⁷ But the pressures inducing leaders of the German workers’ movement to ‘accommodate themselves to existing circumstances’⁶⁸ proved far less transient than Marx had envisaged. Bismarck’s successful wars of unification in 1866 and 1870 shattered Marx’s hopes of forging German unity from below, on the basis of a liberal-democratic programme which would renounce future hegemonic ambitions and relinquish old claims on Polish territory.

Faced with a German workers’ movement that lacked any significant influence on foreign policy, Marx and Engels came to argue that national independence for oppressed countries should provide the impulse for revitalizing working-class internationalism in oppressor states. The paradoxical dependence of internationalism on struggles for national freedom was neatly expressed by Engels, who declared in 1882 that ‘two nations in Europe have not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalistic: the Irish and the Poles. They are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic.’⁶⁹ The thinking behind this position had already been laid down in Marx and Engels’ 1848 writings. Transnational cooperation was possible only where each national group was willing to recognize and respect the desire of others for freedom from external oppression, and where each concluded voluntarily that cooperation was in its own best interests. Marx and Engels elaborated this reciprocity condition at an international meeting held to commemorate the twelfth anniversary of the Polish uprising of 1863, declaring that:

It is not in the least a contradiction that the international Workers’ party strives for the creation of an independent Polish nation … Only after Poland has won its independence again, only after it is able to govern itself again as a free people, can its inner development begin again and can it cooperate as an independent force in the social transformation of Europe. As long as the independent life of a nation is suppressed by a foreign conqueror it inevitably directs all its strength, all its efforts and all its energy against the external enemy; during this time, therefore, its inner life remains paralysed; it is incapable of working for social emancipation.⁷⁰

This passage indicates Marx’s awareness, expressed more forcefully here than in earlier writings, that the location of class conflicts in the political arena may occur in such a way as to make national concerns the paramount issue in some periods. It also provides a clear reminder that, unlike many of their followers in the twentieth century, Marx and Engels never posited a zero-sum relationship between nationalism and internationalism. In their eyes the main threat to international cooperation among workers came not from attempts by oppressed peoples to form separate states, but from the conservative and hegemonic internationalism of the dominant classes. They judged the merits of nationalist or internationalist policies in terms of their specific programmatic content, not according to an abstract, cosmopolitan model of working-class unity. The ‘nationalizing’ of internationalism was desirable, moreover, in so far as it involved a growing recognition of the practical interdependence of local and external needs. As in 1848, Marx continued to advocate an interest-based conception of working-class internationalism, treating nationally localized interests as the building-blocks of any effective cooperation between the workers of different countries.

Marx’s contribution to the activities of First International illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of this conception as a guide to political practice. Marx was not involved in the founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864. He was drawn into the London-based organization when its General Council, frustrated in its own efforts to draft a programme capable of bridging a bewildering variety of national and ideological viewpoints, invited Marx to write its inaugural address. Faced with the Herculean task of drafting a clear yet acceptably limited statement of common purposes for an organization embracing Mazzinian republicans, moderate trade unionists, and French anarcho-syndicalists, Marx produced a remarkably ecumenical document which provides more insight into his mature political thinking than has usually been granted.⁷¹ The militant, teleological overtones of the youthful Manifesto are largely absent from Marx’s inaugural address, where a plurality of workers’ movements based in particular countries replace abstract economic developments as the main agencies of global political integration. Despite its concessions to the language of ‘rights’ and ‘duties’ favoured by many sections of the IWA,⁷² Marx’s address did not abandon the Manifesto’s analysis of the broad economic undercurrents necessitating working-class cooperation at the global level. But it did confront the hard questions, left unanswered by that analysis, about the specifically political problems of transnational cooperation.

Marx’s draft was adopted unanimously by the General Council, and eventually became the definitive statement of the International’s aims. Although rival leaders later attacked Marx for trying to impose an unacceptable degree of doctrinal and structural uniformity on participating groups, blaming his ‘centralist’ zeal for the IWA’s demise, Marx’s integrating efforts played a highly constructive role at the organization’s inception. By forging a provisional consensus around core goals of social, economic, and international reform while leaving questions of political method to be worked out in each national arena, Marx was instrumental in getting the International off the factious ground from which it started and, indeed, in enabling it to survive as long as it did. He seems to have conceived of the organization as a forum in which sectional differences might be openly negotiated and progressively ironed out; and while the persistence of squabbling factions meant, in practice, that convergence entailed the marginalization of some views by others, Marx’s unifying ambitions remained cautiously limited. In trying to strike a compromise among competing draft programmes for the International, he rejected Italian statutes providing for the centralized control of the European labour movement as ‘utterly impossible’.⁷³ Later, in an interview given in 1871, Marx described the structure of the IWA as ‘designedly that which gives the greatest play to local energy and independence … It is a bond of union rather than a controlling force.’⁷⁴ Aware by now that hegemonic nationalism was not the sole prerogative of the ruling classes, he and Engels led a campaign to create special provisions protecting the independence of delegations from the smaller and oppressed nations. When English representatives proposed that the Irish sections be brought under the British Federal Council, Engels protested that ‘true internationalism must necessarily be based upon a distinctly national organisation’, insisting that ‘the Irish, as well as other oppressed nationalities, could enter the organisation only as equals with the members of the conquering nation, and under protest against the conquest’.⁷⁵

For all his efforts to accommodate local needs, however, Marx failed to patch up the ideological rifts that plagued the International throughout its brief career. The disputes which led to its downfall had less to do with traditional national rivalries than with conflicting ideas about the long-term aims and methods of working-class struggle. In his 1871 interview, Marx insisted somewhat disingenuously that effective transnational cooperation did not depend on doctrinal or organizational affinities between workers’ movements. The International, he claimed,

does not dictate the form of political movements; it only requires a pledge as to their end … In each part of the world some special aspect of the problem presents itself, and the workmen there address themselves to its consideration in their own way. Combinations among workmen cannot be absolutely identical in Newcastle and in Barcelona, in London and in Berlin.⁷⁶

In fact, Marx was well aware that certain ‘forms’ of working-class organization affiliated to the IWA were quite unwilling to endorse the ‘end’ stipulated in the inaugural address, and made again in 1871: viz., ‘the economical emancipation of the working class by the conquest of political power.’⁷⁷ The voluble anarchist contingents within the International—including a large segment of the French section and numerous other groups which fell under the influence of a Russian exile, Mikhail Bakunin—fought long and hard against Marx’s attempts to build a consensus around his view that the working class must use state power as a means of achieving social ascendancy. Bakunin, who urged workers to refrain from any parliamentary activity or tactical alliances that involved working through the existing state, argued that Marx’s strategy jeopardized the working class’s chances of overthrowing the state apparatus altogether. It not only encouraged ‘reformist’ compromises with the powers-that-be; by treating centralized national states as the key instrument of proletarian revolution, Marx’s position also struck Bakunin as a blueprint for reinforcing hegemonic national chauvinism at the expense of internationalism.

These criticisms underscore the practical difficulties Marx faced in trying to advance ambitious revolutionary goals without sidestepping the harsh realities of political and international power. Bakunin was hardly justified in branding Marx as a covert pan-Germanist, or in suggesting that Marx favoured the ‘conquest of political power’ as a means of securing exclusively national ends. Marx shared Bakunin’s concerns about the risks involved in using state institutions to improve the position of workers, and continued to warn German Social Democrats against ‘realistic’ tactics that might lead to nationalist complicity with the government. But in maintaining that these risks were unavoidable, and in rejecting the anarchist alternative as a utopian attempt to wish away the constraints imposed by states and the inter-state system, Marx stood on solid prescriptive ground. His preference for open political struggle over the militant, conspiratorial methods of Bakunin’s followers rested on a judgement, borne out by the subsequent history of communism, that such methods endanger the democratic and internationalist aims of revolution no less than the conquest of state power by the workers’ movement.⁷⁸

But Bakunin had undeniably hit upon one of the most persistent stumbling-blocks of Marx’s strategy. Where working-class movements could successfully use political means to bolster their position vis-à-vis their employers, might they not cease to view the state as an irredeemably oppressive entity? And might not the easing of domestic hostilities undercut the main arguments for proletarian internationalism, leading workers to place the national interests of their class above wider commitments?

To his credit, Marx recognized the problem and even conceded that the anarchists’ interventions in the IWA were ‘useful’ as ‘polemics against chauvinism’.⁷⁹ The increasing incidence of war between large European states presented the most critical test that Marx’s internationalist strategy was to face in his lifetime. His idea that the presence of a common oppressor could galvanize the workers of different countries to take united action against it was logically compelling, if not always effective, when two conditions obtained: when the oppressor could readily be identified as a particular national government or alliance of governments, and when at least one party could be identified—not necessarily with the aid of class-analysis—as the victim of overt oppression or aggression. It was hardly surprising that the case of Poland, which met both conditions and represented, moreover, the violation of a once-powerful state’s sovereignty, evoked such widespread sympathy among republicans and liberals as well as socialists. The case of Ireland presented a greater challenge to Marx’s considerable skills as a propagandist: the plight of a remote and sparsely populated island, traditionally regarded as a mere agrarian appendage of England, was not obviously a matter of concern to workers outside Britain itself. It was therefore incumbent on Marx to insist that England’s role in supporting repressive foreign regimes was directly a function of its colonial policy in Ireland.⁸⁰ If this argument did not always elicit the desired internationalist response, it shows none the less that democratic and anti-colonial nationalist movements were relatively unproblematic focuses for Marx and Engels’ attempts to raise international protests against class oppression. The task was less clear-cut in situations where no single government or alliance could be identified uncontroversially as the appropriate target of international working-class opposition. When the ‘oppressed’ in question were the subordinate classes of two or more hegemonic countries whose governments were fighting a war against each other, there arose an eminent possibility of confusion as to whether the prime enemy was one’s own government, that government’s foe, or the traditional states system as such.

The outbreak of war between France and Prussia in 1870 forced Marx and Engels to grapple with these issues. While expressing equal distaste for Bismarck’s policies and the government of Louis Napoleon, they gave three reasons for supporting Prussia. First, they—like most of the German and British public—were initially persuaded that France was the aggressor, although it later came out that Bismarck had deliberately provoked the war for his own aggrandizing purposes. They believed, second, that a French victory would do greater damage to workers’ movements in both countries: it would, Engels speculated, strengthen the hand of ‘Bonapartism’ over French workers, and arouse such nationalist fury in Germany that there could be ‘no more question of an independent German working-class movement’, since ‘the struggle to restore Germany’s national existence will absorb everything’. Third, they privately hoped that by completing the drawn-out process of German unification even by the unpalatable means of Prussian arms, Bismarck was unwittingly ‘clearing the deck’ for a powerful, centralized workers’ opposition to emerge in Germany.⁸¹

The second and third of these rationales apparently exemplify the danger, underlined by Bakunin, that the very act of taking sides in ruling-class politics tends to compromise internationalist objectivity. In the past, Marx and Engels had usually pinned higher revolutionary expectations on the French workers than on their German counterparts; but when war between the two countries posed an apparent threat to Germany’s ‘national existence’,⁸² they found ample justification for putting Vaterland first. This fleeting display of national favouritism should not, however, be seized upon as evidence that a dark undercurrent of German chauvinism distorted Marx and Engels’ entire international perspective. Marx’s constant battles with French sections of the First International had recently lowered his opinion of the workers’ movement in France, and he believed that his own chances of exerting a moderating influence on the workers’ response to the war were better in Germany. The limited and provisional nature of his and Engels’ pro-German stance is indicated by the strict conditions they placed on working-class support for Prussia. Such support should, they insisted, immediately be withdrawn if Prussia departed from its declared war aim of self-defence and sought to annex Alsace and Lorraine to a greater Germany. German workers, meanwhile, were exhorted to keep in mind ‘the difference between German national and dynastic-Prussian interests’, retain close fraternal contacts with their French counterparts, and oppose Prussian efforts to impose a conqueror’s peace on France.⁸³

Marx and Engels repeatedly stressed that the concern to achieve a settlement conducive to future cooperation between French and German workers must outweigh any particular interest in German unity. ‘If the German working class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people’, Marx warned, ‘victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous.’⁸⁴ National resentments in France would understandably erode sympathetic ties with German workers, while Prussian efforts to hold down foreign subjects in yet another conquered territory would lead to the further repression of Germans. The annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was thus

the most certain way to convert this war into a European institution. It is the surest way to perpetuate a military despotism in the rejuvenated Germany, as a necessity for maintaining a western Poland … It is the unfailing way to convert the approaching peace into a mere ceasefire, until France is sufficiently recovered to demand the lost territory back.⁸⁵

When this worst-case scenario materialized with Prussian victory, Marx took some solace in the fact that the German workers’ movement had consistently opposed Prussian aggrandizement and supported the popular French resistance briefly manifested in the Paris Commune. But the subsequent repression of workers’ movements in both countries showed how little influence those movements were able to exert, in this period, over the course of inter-state conflict.

After the collapse of the International in the wake of the Paris Commune, Marx had frequently to remind workers that a transnational network of interests among the dominant classes made parallel working-class alliances a necessary means of combating oppression in any particular country. This was why, in 1875, Marx upbraided the German Social Democrats for omitting from their programme any mention of ‘the international functions of the German working class’, declaring:

It is altogether self-evident that, in order to be able to fight at all, the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle. To this extent its class struggle is national … But the ‘framework of the present-day national state’, for instance, the German Empire, is itself in turn economically ‘within the framework of the world market’, politically ‘within the framework of the system of states’ … And to what does the German workers’ party reduce its internationalism? To the consciousness that the result of its efforts ‘will be the international brotherhood of peoples’ … And it is thus that it is to defy its own bourgeoisie—which is already linked up in brotherhood against it with the bourgeois of all other countries … ⁸⁶

The problem for Marx was to prevent the workers’ salutary interest in defeating a foreign aggressor, or in defending whatever limited gains they may have won in their own countries, from developing into outright sympathy with their national ruling classes. He dealt with this problem by arguing that in the capitalist era all warfare, whether aggressive or apparently defensive, was motivated at least partly by the dominant class’s need to contain domestic class conflict. Thus, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx insisted that the conventional distinction between defensive and aggressive aims tended to obscure the mutual responsibility of the two combatants; whatever their other ambitions, he claimed, both Bismarck and Louis Napoleon sought out war ‘for the purpose of crushing popular opposition at home’.⁸⁷ On this view, unconditional nationalist support for war was predicated on hostility toward the majority of each ‘nation’, not upon any core set of class-neutral national interests. A corollary of this argument was that, even in wartime, the dominant classes of each nation still had a shared prudential interest in containing internal class struggles, particularly where international links between workers’ movements created a threat of revolutionary contagion. In this respect, at least, class considerations generated a stronger set of motives for action than interstate rivalries per se, since warring governments could usually be expected to put their differences aside when either was faced with an internal revolutionary threat. ‘The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable’, Marx intoned, ‘is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war.’⁸⁸

Despite his growing doubts about the potential solidarity of working-class movements, then, Marx invested hopes of future success in the expectation that a large-scale war among the major states would culminate in the simultaneous outbreak of ‘civil war’ against all of them. The domestic and international pressures exerted by highly organized workers’ movements, he surmised, confronted the dominant classes with an inescapable dilemma. On the one hand, their different national fractions came increasingly to perceive their common interest in suppressing revolutionary unrest wherever it might erupt. This interest provided prima-facie grounds for trying to avoid international conflict which, as Marx pointed out, gave the workers a fine opportunity to agitate against their respective governments. On the other hand, on Marx’s argument, class-based governments could not indefinitely avoid inter-state conflict; they were compelled to resort to war because the pressures of internal class opposition were growing too strong to be contained by any other means. And it was precisely in wartime that the founders of Marxism expected workers to lose their ‘chauvinistic’ illusions, to recognize that the ‘national interest’ they were being summoned to defend in fact ran counter to their own interests, and to seize the moment of bourgeois weakness to ‘conquer political power’ for themselves.

6

The Revenge of Nations, 1870– ?

MARX and Engels’ internationalist expectations were confounded by the outbreak of the First World War, when workers defected en masse to the patriotic camps of their various countries. This fact is often adduced as evidence that national allegiances are inherently stronger than those of class, a proposition amply corroborated by the subsequent historical record. As the twentieth century draws to an end, the eruption of ethnic and national conflicts throughout the post-communist world is widely viewed as a ‘resurgence’ of primordial fissures that were papered over, though never mended, by authoritarian regimes. The stubborn tenacity of these fissures may appear to reaffirm the judgement that Marx and Engels’ writings should be read today—if they are read at all—not as an aid to understanding nationalism, but as a cautionary example of how to misunderstand it.

The assumptions that inform this judgement may, however, be no less tenuous than those for which Marx and Engels are called to task. In the first place, it is doubtful whether the founders of ‘Marxism’ would have endorsed the centralist and authoritarian brands of internationalism which were discredited by their association with communist regimes. The pragmatic, consequence-sensitive strand of political reasoning identified in our last two chapters clearly warned socialists against trying to impose too much internationalist conformity, particularly on movements seeking to end repressive foreign hegemony. In this respect, Marx and Engels’ prescriptive arguments sought to avoid the hazards met by many later ‘Marxist’ derivatives, and should be spared an over-hasty burial alongside the icons of defunct socialist regimes.

It is not clear, moreover, that the theoretical yardsticks commonly invoked to measure the deficiencies of Marx and Engels’ views on national issues should themselves be exempted from critical scrutiny. If Marx and Engels sometimes focused too narrowly on the class conflicts that divide and cut across national allegiances, it is also possible that the defenders of state-and nation-centred theories may err in the opposite direction: they may propagate their own forms of ‘reductionism’, especially when they posit the invariable primacy of national cohesion over social divisions, or an autonomous system of inter-state relations conceived in abstraction from domestic social pressures. If our aim should be to correct all forms of reductionist thinking, it can serve no purpose to reject Marx and Engels’ views out of hand without first taking careful stock of the strengths and weaknesses in their treatment of national issues. Section 6.1 identifies specific points at which the authors failed to account for conditions that were contributing to the rise of nationalism in their own time. I then go on to reappraise the view that these limitations were rooted in such profound theoretical errors that the attempt to salvage anything of enduring value from Marx and Engels’ writings on nationalism must be misguided. Sections 6.2 and 6.3 disentangle the main elements of Marx and Engels’ political-prescriptive analysis from their ‘economistic’ expectations, suggesting that the arguments behind that analysis cut through much of the confusion that clouds our contemporary understanding of nationalism.

6.1. THE NATIONALIZING OF SOCIALISM?

Let us start by evaluating Marx’s account of war in the capitalist era, since periods of inter-state crisis were expected to furnish the most fruitful opportunities for transnational agitation ‘from below’. It was suggested in the last chapter that Marx saw the common threat of internal revolution as a persistent motive for international ‘brotherhood’ among the dominant classes. But it is not always clear whether he regarded anti-revolutionary cooperation or intra-class rivalry as the dominant feature of bourgeois international relations. At times he wrote as though the very notion of distinct and conflicting interests within the bourgeoisie was a chimera, an ideological weapon used solely for the purpose of deluding and dividing the working class. Bourgeois nationalism was, he declared, merely ‘a means, by permanent armies, to perpetuate national struggles, to subjugate in each country the producers by pitching them against their brothers in each other country, a means to prevent the international cooperation of the working classes, the first condition of their emancipation’.¹ At other times, Marx implied that the bourgeoisie—by its very nature a competitive, self-seeking class—was congenitally prone to nationalistic attitudes. He and Engels had remarked in the Manifesto that one of the bourgeoisie’s principal means of overcoming commercial crises was ‘by the conquest of new markets’;² and they frequently observed that competition for such markets outside Europe, as well as the jockeying of relative latecomers to capitalism for a more favourable position within the ‘world market’, helped to fuel intra-bourgeois conflicts.

There is no necessary contradiction between these two views of intra-bourgeois relations—the one cooperative, the other competitive—but the difference in their emphasis is theoretically important. In describing war as ‘a means to prevent the international cooperation of the working classes’, Marx treated inter-class conflict as the basic motive for war between apparently hostile class-states. This prudential motive, he implied, ultimately overrides the bourgeoisie’s substantial economic interest in competing for external markets, making intra-class cooperation their first priority. On the other hand, Marx and Engels continued to argue that ‘contradictions’ within the economic structure of capitalism itself—apart from the class struggles that might be provoked by economic crises—may of their own accord drive the bourgeoisie to conquer new markets, at the risk of having to fight a war to secure them. This argument implied that there is no necessary causal connection between inter-state warfare and the domestic struggles between classes. War occurs here not through the medium of class struggle, which provides a domestic political motive for creating an international diversion; the immediate motive in this case is the economic and strategic rivalry of differently situated national ‘bourgeoisies’.

Had Marx and Engels pursued the implications of this second set of causes as extensively as they did those of the first, they might have been better equipped to explain the disruptive effects of inter-state competition on working-class internationalism. If conflicts among various national ruling classes could not readily be explained as an extension of domestic class warfare, it became harder to persuade workers that opposition to state policy must be in their best interests. But in failing to draw a systematic connection between intra-capitalist competition and national war, Marx and Engels also failed to offer satisfactory explanations of two related developments which were gathering powerful momentum by the 1870s: the build-up of military power within the state apparatus, and the political integration of working classes into separate nation-states. These developments were highly conducive to the survival and, indeed, the strengthening of national particularism in an era when it was becoming more difficult than ever for particular states and peoples to opt out of a global economy.

Marx’s emphasis on the endogenous sources of international conflict, first of all, could not yield a really adequate account of the massive growth in the military power of European states that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is hard to see how this phenomenon can be explained primarily in terms of the dominant class’s need to suppress the internal revolutionary strivings of unarmed workers who, in Marx’s lifetime, were only beginning to understand the potential power of general strikes. Even if it could plausibly be maintained that the militarization of nation-states was initiated because of domestic class pressures, which induced governments to deploy their armies outside as well as within their own borders, it would still be necessary to recognize that international—or, to use a Marxian synonym for this case, intra-bourgeois—rivalries might acquire a momentum beyond what was needed to restrain class struggles. Marx’s initial reaction to the Franco-Prussian War, which he imputed to a ‘conspiracy’ between governments seeking to avert class struggle at home, illustrates his tendency to exaggerate the impact of that struggle on foreign policy while underestimating the effects of military success or defeat on the workers’ movement. Efforts to build up the state’s defensive and coercive capabilities not only meant that armies mobilized in wartime could also be used to stifle popular agitation in the event of war; it also meant that the risks of large-scale warfare to the workers’ own livelihood could be seen as outweighing the benefits of revolutionism, or of refusing to support their respective governments in a war effort.

In his later years, Engels acknowledged that the growth of militarism carried serious risks for the future of socialism. The Franco-Prussian War, he wrote in 1878, compelled all the Continental Powers to introduce universal conscription, so that ‘the army has become the main purpose of the state, and an end in itself … Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe.’ Mustering his usual dialectical optimism, Engels insisted none the less that militarism carried ‘the seed of its own destruction’: by arming the mass of people in each country for foreign wars, it also gave them the means for launching civil conflicts.³ But his private correspondence suggests that Engels was less confident about this outcome than he publicly admitted. In 1879 he predicted that an imminent revolution in Russia would either create an atmosphere more congenial to workers’ movements throughout Europe, or ignite a general European war which would submerge such movements in ‘the inevitable struggle of each people for its national existence. Such a war’, Engels opined, ‘would be the greatest misfortune for us; it might set the movement back twenty years.’⁴ By describing struggles for national existence as ‘inevitable’ while withholding the same description from class struggles in this period, Engels acknowledged the relative weakness of the latter without suggesting what independent action the workers’ movement might take to overcome it. The disintegration of that movement into parochial national fractions appeared irreversible, and Engels now presented the chances of revolutionary action—let alone success—as depending more on fateful contingency than on coordinated exertions by the working-class movement.

Had Marx and Engels elaborated the relationship between intra-bourgeois competition and international ‘conquest’, secondly, they might have gained a clearer understanding of the conditions which increasingly favoured working-class accommodation with the state. While the workers’ movement continued to expand throughout the 1870s, the external pressure of military and colonial competition came to bear heavily on the class struggle: through repressive measures, to be sure, but also through the granting of political and economic concessions which helped to rein in domestic opposition. Manhood suffrage was granted in Bismarck’s North German Confederation in 1867, and extended to the German Reich when it was founded in 1871. The Electoral Reform Act in Britain raised hopes that workers there would soon win the franchise, while after 1877 the French Third Republic began to encourage workers to organize politically within the legal framework of the state. Marx scoffed at these measures as attempts at social divide-and-rule. But having set himself firmly against the ‘political indifferentism’ of his anarchist rivals, he continued to urge workers’ parties to expand their power base within existing state institutions wherever this seemed possible. This policy doubtless encouraged workers to see the nation-state as a valuable—albeit still defective—instrument in their struggles against employers, whose ‘dominant’ political position no longer presented an unyielding obstacle to working-class gains. By redirecting the state’s coercive resources towards external purposes and away from domestic class struggles, the dominant classes paved the way for a wide range of compromises which effectively integrated the working class into the ‘national’ community over the next few decades.

It is true that workers usually remained subaltern participants in that community, regarded with suspicion by governments which dreaded the spectre of proletarian internationalism. But the main trend after 1870 was towards national accommodation rather than social fission;⁵ and it seems fair to say that Marx’s later strategy tended to promote rather than to discourage this trend. The problem was not that his strategic method went against the changing historical grain. It was that Marx refused to modify his early revolutionary goals in the light of the reform-oriented and national means he now advised workers to use in their struggles for power. He therefore left a confused legacy which enabled some of his followers to rail against working-class ‘reformism’, and to equate all forms of working-class patriotism with chauvinistic ‘false consciousness’; while others in the ‘reformist’ camp could equally cite Marx’s authority to defend an enlightened patriotism which, although quite compatible with a pluralistic internationalism, located the workers’ first interests within particular national societies.

The textual record suggests that Marx’s overall position—and certainly that adopted in his later years—was closer to the second of these interpretations. But by clinging to revolutionary goals conceived in the very different circumstances of the 1840s, he was forced to walk a polemical and strategic tightrope between an ambitious internationalism and the risk that, in times of international crisis, proletarian patriotism would become indistinguishable from the ‘national narrow-mindedness’ of the ruling classes. At the height of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx continued to extol the international fraternity of French and German workers who, he insisted, ‘feel deeply convinced that whatever turn the impending horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war’.⁶ At an earlier date, however, Marx had observed the ambivalent attitude of French and British workers towards the Crimean War:

The industrial working population has, in both countries, almost the same peculiar position with regard to this war. Both British and French proletarians are filled with an honourable national spirit, although they are more or less free from the antiquated national prejudices common, in either country, to the peasantry. They have little immediate interest in the war, save that if the victories of their countrymen flatter their national pride, the conduct of the war, foolhardy and presumptuous as regards France, timid and stupid as regards England, offers them a fair opportunity of agitating against the existing governments and governing classes.⁷

Marx’s distinction between the ‘antiquated national prejudices’ endemic in the peasantry and the proletariat’s ‘honourable national spirit’ is perfectly coherent in view of his insistence that the primary locus of class struggle, and hence the first commitment of workers, lay in their own national societies. Yet in his very admission that inter-bourgeois wars may evoke ‘national pride’ among workers, Marx touched on a psychological phenomenon which he never adequately explained; and which, especially for those workers whose governments could be seen as fighting on the ‘right side’ against a power even more reactionary than their own, stood in danger of being inflated. The task of deflating ‘national pride’ proved equally recalcitrant when Marx confronted the paternalistic attitudes and prejudices fostered by imperialism. Marx tried to dispel such attitudes by dissuading metropolitan workers from the ‘illusion’ that their governments’ foreign colonies contributed to their own economic well-being. He noted a countervailing tendency for the military costs of defending colonial possessions in India to increase the burden of taxation on British workers,⁸ and argued that the forced emigration of Irish labourers to England ‘forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class’.⁹ But it was increasingly clear that such arguments were not enough to dissuade British workers from ‘accommodation’ with their employers and government, or from supporting the latter’s foreign policy objectives. By 1882, Engels was more pessimistic than ever about the prospects of disentangling working-class interests from those of the dominant class:

You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, you see, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.¹⁰

Contrary to a popular misrepresentation, then, Marx and Engels suffered few delusions about the ‘bourgeois’ nation-state’s potential for generating trans-class loyalty by the late nineteenth century. They simply failed adequately to explain that potential; and this omission disabled them from recognizing the growing tensions between working-class accommodation with the state and the theory of socialist internationalism.

At the root of this failure lay Marx and Engels’ tendency to conceive of capitalism as an inexorably polarizing force, dividing the main classes within each nation-state even as it eroded national differences among them.¹¹ This conception was limited in its explanatory power because it did not articulate the historical relationship between the international expansion of capitalism and the particularizing, integrating activities of the modern state, with its capacity to pacify internal conflicts through a mixture of coercion and compromise. Their lingering conviction that capitalism had ‘drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood’¹² seriously underrated the role played by the state and international competition in the development of capitalism. It was still possible to explain the expansion of that role in terms of the class interests involved in intra-capitalist competition, and without adverting to a class-neutral theory of the state’s ‘autonomy’. But where the effect of this competition was to contain conflicts between the ‘polar’ classes within separate states, national particularism tended to supersede class struggle as the most conspicuous motor of historical change.

Marx and Engels never quite revised their early misapprehension, shared by many of their liberal laissez-faire-ist contemporaries, that capitalist economic activity was harmed more than it was helped by the system of separate nation-states. Behind this notion lay the belief that capitalism was essentially a global system, which would only reach its productive peak when stateerected barriers to free trade had been removed. Whereas the classical political economists expected free trade to benefit capitalism in all countries, Marx—at least in his youth—supported laissez-faire policies for other reasons: he expected these to hasten the polarization of classes within each state, thus setting the stage for ‘universal’ revolution.¹³ As E. H. Carr observed in 1945, it seemed reasonable to view state boundaries as economically insignificant at a time when the rapid and unprecedented globalization of economic activity appeared as the wave of the future, and when European wars were often averted or limited by the concern to protect commercial interests.¹⁴ Moreover, the apparently shrinking role of the state as arbiter of economic well-being encouraged nineteenth-century thinkers to see individuals or classes, not nation-states, as the driving-force behind international relations in the capitalist era. On this view, the states-system was not inherently particularistic; state boundaries were rather a convenient way for individuals or classes to organize diffuse local concerns within a wider global economy. Marx and Engels’ adherence to this brand of economism does much to explain why they saw no contradiction between working-class internationalism and the idea that, in organizing politically, workers should give priority to the particular national interests of their class. Working within an international framework in which political frictions were offset by economic interdependence, the proletariat could embrace the revolutionized state as a transitional, functional entity without embracing exclusive or aggressive nationalism.

In fact, matters were far more complicated than either Marx or his free-trader contemporaries saw. Tensions between the apparently separate spheres of state and ‘global’ economy were already emerging by the 1870s, and were manifested in the protectionist policies adopted by rising nation-states like Germany. It became increasingly clear that a single country—Britain—was the main beneficiary of laissez-faire, while states which were less advanced in their commerce and industry attempted to improve their position by intervening in the national economy. Again, Marx and Engels frequently pointed out that free trade was, to a large extent, forced upon other countries by Britain, and even went so far as to ask why those countries should continue to ‘sit still and submit in humility’ to British hegemony.¹⁵ In his writings on Ireland, Marx had explicitly advocated protectionism as an insurance against the loss of economic sovereignty. Yet he failed to see that the most effective response of non-hegemonic states in general might be to expand political control over local economies, making capitalism ‘in the first instance’ a national phenomenon. And although state intervention in the economy did not necessarily lead to the redistribution of domestic wealth, the growing pressures of external competition did encourage states to adopt welfare policies that helped to stem the threat from within and improve competitiveness abroad. Marx’s polarized model of class struggle deterred him from envisaging the rise of the welfare state as an antidote to the ‘divided nation’, giving workers an economic as well as a political or psychological stake in their own national states. In these conditions the global spread of capitalism not only proved compatible with the persistence of national particularisms; the uneven geographical diffusion of its benefits tended to stimulate new patriotic and separatist nationalisms, which workers often supported out of rational self-interest rather than ideological delusion.

In pointing out these weaknesses in Marx and Engels’ account, I may seem to have affirmed the familiar case for debarring their legacy from mainstream studies of nationalism. Scholars within a broad cross-section of disciplines have recently highlighted the capacity of states to act ‘autonomously’ in both the domestic and foreign arenas, unconstrained in their choice or implementation of policy by any particular social sector.¹⁶ If the ‘relative autonomy’ of the nation-state has so effectively crystallized national particularisms that their autonomy no longer appears merely relative, should we conclude that Marx and Engels’ class-centred treatment of national issues deserves little sympathetic consideration today?

There are at least two reasons to hesitate before answering this question in the affirmative. In the first place, it is not at all clear that the historical record unambiguously illustrates the ‘triumph’ of nationalism over class-based movements, as though these were two discrete phenomena locked in a life-or-death combat with one another. Such zero-sum models of the choice between nation or class, nationalism or socialism, are both politically naïve and historically distorting. There is clearly a sense in which ‘the growth of citizenship and the nation-state is a more significant dimension of modernisation than the distributive inequalities underlying the formation of social classes’;¹⁷ but this does not mean that class conflicts have exerted no reciprocal influence on the growth of citizenship and the nation-state.

The limitations of a class-or-nation framework become apparent when we take a closer look at the historical developments which are commonly cited to establish the ‘autonomy’ or, more strongly, the decisive victory of nationalism over class conflicts. Proponents of this type of argument often write as though the rapprochement between nation-states and the working class was a oneway process, in which the superior force and appeal of national attachments clearly prevailed over those of class. Certainly the process was asymmetrical, and the imbalance was not in Marx and Engels’ favour. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, none the less, the ‘nationalization’ of workers’ movements often went hand in hand with the gradual ‘socialization’ of the nation-state, whereby pressures exerted from below forced states to broaden their definitions of citizenship and to meet workers’ demands for state protection against their employers. ‘The defence of wages and employment’, as Carr observed in the middle of this century, ‘becomes a concern of national policy and must be asserted, if necessary, against the policies of other countries; and this in turn gives the worker an immediate practical interest in the policy and power of his nation.’ This suggests that ‘the socialisation of the nation has as its natural corollary the nationalisation of socialism’.¹⁸

Marx and Engels were not unaware of these developments in their own lifetimes. Despite their reluctance to accept reform from above as an alternative to the ‘self-emancipation’ of the working class, the two men generally supported that class’s efforts to strengthen its power base within state institutions, and thereby to challenge socially exclusive definitions of the national community and its interests abroad. On this measure, the peculiar ‘marriage’ of nationalism and socialism appears neither so peculiar nor as an unambiguous failure of Marx and Engels’ vision. The authors recognized the complex, mutually effective relationships in which class and national movements have historically been entangled, and took account of these relationships in their mature internationalist policy. Proponents of the class-or-nation thesis, on the other hand, frequently overstate the influence historically exerted by states and national ‘consciousness’ over class divisions.¹⁹ The ‘nationalizing’ of workers’ movements did not always entail the wholesale identification of workers with the national aims of governments or the propertied classes, even in times of international crisis. Combatant governments may have taken some solace from stirrings of working-class chauvinism during the First World War; but labour and socialist support for the war effort was, in each country, highly conditional and based on the belief that their own governments were on the defensive.²⁰ This initial support broke down during the course of the war, when socialist and labour parties called for new international conferences to protest against the expanding war aims of their own governments. In the defeated countries the war was followed, as in 1870, by social uprisings directed against both the foreign victors and the national ‘ruling classes’, who were blamed for having led working men into battle for aims which collided with their own better interests.²¹

These considerations indicate the need to work out a clearer understanding of the constant interplay between nationalism and the wider and narrower social movements, interests, and values that cut across it. I have already identified arguments in Marx and Engels’ writings that directly address that need; and these arguments constitute a second set of reasons why we do ourselves a disservice by continuing to issue blanket dismissals of their thought on national issues. If the grounds usually cited to justify such dismissals are themselves based on an incomplete understanding of nationalism, it may be worth asking whether some of Marx and Engels’ arguments might contribute to a fuller understanding of the subject.

6.2. THE NON-AUTONOMY OF NATIONALISM

We can start by evaluating the complaint that Marx and Engels failed to recognize the ‘independent’ impact of nationality on politics. This complaint seems justified when it is directed against theories which treat nations and nationalism as mere epiphen-omena of some other omnipotent cause. But crudely reductionist theories are easy to debunk, with or without evidence of nationalism’s independent force. Take away the reductionist straw man—a role in which Marx, as I’ve argued, has often wrongly been cast—and it’s not clear what the autonomy argument has to offer in the way of substantial explanation. It is true that Marx and Engels did not account for the political successes of nationalism by acknowledging a unique set of national values, cherished by most of a nation’s members, which easily take precedence over other values and interests whenever nationalists say they should. It is not obvious that this omission represents a damaging theoretical oversight.

In fact, the converse may be true. Some versions of the autonomy argument draw unduly sharp dividing lines between nationalist goals and other aims, interests, and frustrations that reinforce or weaken popular commitment to nationalism. The class-or-nation thesis provides a good example of what happens when the nationality of actors is presumed to have an ‘independent’ impact on the wider field in which they operate. A preoccupation with what is uniquely national about the motives of nationalists and their supporters may discourage analysis of other concerns that cut across, oppose, or join forces with nationalism, infusing it with a specific programmatic content. The resulting hiatus furnishes a fertile breeding-ground for empirically suspect explanations of nationalism’s widespread appeal. In accounts which treat nationalism as the only convincing answer to a basic need for identity, presumably felt in the same way by all members of a national society and directed towards the same objects, the problem emerges clearly. Nationalism seems to hover above all social and political contingency, imposing an iron logic on everything that impinges on it.

This outlook has, of course, been greatly fortified by the strengthening of nation-states in the twentieth century. It also derives much of its theoretical persuasiveness from the testimony of nationalists and their supporters, who frequently proclaim the world-historical and identity-fulfilling goals of their activity. But by taking what nationalists say about their motives as hard evidence, many contemporary observers fall prey to a ‘methodological nationalism’²² which produces as many errors and oversights as the assorted ‘blind spots’ ascribed to Marx and Engels. Since there is nothing to be gained by the easy tactic of counter-straw-manning, I should say something more about the source of such errors. What I refer to here as ‘methodological nationalism’ is not so much a theory as a set of closely related, often tacit assumptions that inform a great deal of scholarly and journalistic commentary. Some of these assumptions immediately shrivel up when they are placed under a searching theoretical spotlight. Others find powerful sustenance in well-rehearsed arguments about the autonomous motivating force of nationality, and cannot lightly be dismissed.

This becomes clear when we examine one of the central claims which may foster methodological nationalist oversights: the claim that nations possess a capacity beyond that of other human groupings to command strong allegiance and elicit collective action. Those who make this claim may make more or less defensible assumptions about where that capacity comes from. Among the less defensible is the assumption that nations, or at any rate the linguistic and cultural communities from which they derive, are everywhere the natural, perennially self-reproducing bases of identity and objects of group loyalty. This assumption doesn’t hold up for long under scrutiny. As any dispassionate historian will admit, most of the entities we call nations today were only recently stitched together out of a patchwork of groups whose members spoke different dialects or even unrelated languages, lived in different regions under different laws or the influence of different neighbours, and who for centuries fought on opposite sides in dynastic or imperial wars. It has usually taken a lot of vigorous nation-building activity—and no small dose of mythology—to persuade such people that their affinities are natural, let alone that they should transfer their loyalties from the village or province or empire to the ‘nation’.

But there is a more sophisticated account of the nation’s mobilizing powers which lends prima-facie plausibility to methodological nationalist assumptions. This account does not reject the idea that nations are a natural source of collective identity. Instead it points out that the myths of primordial nationhood should not be taken literally, since they are just metaphors which capture a basic ontological truth. The truth, simply, is that the distinctive cultures, languages, and ‘ways of life’ embodied in nations do in fact permeate all aspects of people’s lives, shaping their other commitments and interests. The ‘constitutive’ character of national attributes fosters a singular depth of attachment which cannot be replicated in other social groupings. And this has always been the case, even if the homogenized cultures of modern nations are a fairly recent creation. National identities may not be primordial, but they do provide a sense of continuity in a world where older bonds are brittle and other social roles transient. Political parties and doctrines are in one day and out the next; empires and corporations rise and fall. Yesterday’s peasants became today’s wage-labourers, and the miners of today will be the microchip salesmen of tomorrow. Last year we pretended to meet Five Year Plans laid down in Moscow; this year the IMF calls the shots. National identity gets its resilence and mobilizing power from its capacity to withstand these turbulent waters. While it sometimes takes a heavy battering, it is particularly hard to sink.

Nothing in this account leads us inexorably down the blind alley of methodological nationalism. Indeed, many critics of that approach will find little to quarrel with here. There is no contradiction between cosmopolitan sympathies and the will, inspired by an ‘honourable national spirit’, to defend at least some elements of one’s native culture against threats of violent change or extermination. If this is all that is meant by the claim that nationality has an independent causal impact, then the claim is uncontroversial. Even Marx and Engels took it for granted that national identities shape the parameters of social action, and urged their allies to give priority to their own national concerns. Marx would not have denied that, after all his years of exile, he continued to feel more at home speaking his native tongue with other Germans than in the company of many English, French, or Russian fellow-thinkers. The constitutive account isn’t wrong. What is wrong is the methodological nationalist assumption that this account tells us all we need to know in order to explain why nationalism is so widely and intensely supported.

Much of the fog which surrounds casual discussions of nationalism—and sometimes scholarly discussions, too—issues from an alluringly simple line of reasoning. Once we recognize the constitutive role of nationality, the reasoning goes, we no longer need to examine the specific circumstances or motives that make people rally under a nationalist banner. It is enough to know that most people have a national identity to which they are, in some sense, deeply attached. This explains why they defend it, no matter what class or profession or other associations they belong to; and the depth of national attachments explains why nationality usually prevails ‘in the last instance’ over its rivals. Satisfied with these answers, too many observers fail to raise further questions which might help them to reach a fuller understanding of their subject. The constitutive account tells us why people often place a high value on their nationality, but it cannot explain why they express this valuation through very different kinds of political movement or ideology. Strong constitutive attachments to a national identity reveal themselves in many guises. They are sometimes asserted in a defensive way against specific threats. At other times they are invoked to justify aggression, often against alleged internal enemies as well as foreign ones. We often find them expressed in broadly based, pluralistic movements aimed at ending foreign occupation or reforming domestic institutions. But they also appear in authoritarian programmes which seek to repress independent social organizations, setting up narrowly exclusive criteria of what activities or sub-national identities can be counted as acceptably ‘national’.

A naive methodological nationalist might protest that these are trivial differences which pale alongside the overwhelming magnetic pull of national sentiment, a phenomenon whose superior force is demonstrated by the fact that all these various movements see fit to use nationalist discourse. This rejoinder is simply obtuse. In the first place, to underline the different forms and uses of national discourse is not to deny that certain basic features of national identity constitute a common point of reference for all of them. It is only to point out how little this explains about the actual behaviour of nationalists—and to remind us that the idea of the nation as a quasi-natural unity is a fiction, albeit a powerful one. There may be some analytical utility in speaking in abstract terms of ‘French’ or ‘Polish’ nationalism if the speaker wants to describe not specific doctrines or programmes, but a general stock of historical narratives and memories to which different groups may appeal for a variety of reasons. Merely to acknowledge the existence of such a stock cannot, however, tell us very much about the aims or intensity of nationalist activity. The more interesting questions call for a finely tuned analysis of the other groups, motives, and institutions that support specific nationalist policies at a particular juncture. What are the social and political conditions for a successful appeal to nationalist sentiments? Which groups within a national society are most susceptible to such appeals, and which groups most immune? Why, out of a complex and protean store of collective self-representations, have certain myths and memories been harnessed to a contemporary national movement? The failure to pose these questions is what leads to methodological nationalist distortion. Too many otherwise scrupulous commentators write as though ‘German nationalism’, for example, is by definition ethnocentric or even proto-fascist; but you can’t derive Hitler from Herder. Lifted out of the political context where it intersects with non-national phenomena, ‘nationalism’ becomes a blanket concept which creates the misleading impression that all the elements it covers are essentially one thing. The explanatory load forced upon it is so heavy that it can only cope with the most abstract issues, while questions about the goals and policies that differentiate one nationalist programme from another may get short shrift.

Attempts to elucidate the common ground of all nationalist doctrines are only the starting-point of probing explanation. They certainly cannot tell the whole story about nationalism, or at any rate not the most troubling parts. But the troubling parts are what we want most urgently to understand. And this suggests a second reason why it is wrong to see the differences between various national programmes as relatively minor variations on the same unitary theme. These differences are not trivial, above all, because they require different moral and political responses. In practice, of course, it is not always easy to draw clear lines between ‘honourable’ patriotic attitudes and exclusive ethno-centricism, or to see where a ‘purely’ defensive stance stops and aggressive nationalism begins. These various expressions of nationality tend to coexist and cut across each other, within specific political programmes and the wider social landscape. But this doesn’t mean that we can avoid trying to identify crucial differences between them, especially if we want to support responsible policies towards really existing nationalisms. If we assume that all nationalism is at bottom just one thing, always driven by similar motives and having similar effects, the result will be moral and political paralysis. Either we will blithely tolerate all forms of nationalism because we think all are equally legitimate expressions of a valued identity; or we will treat all forms with the same contempt, because we find them equally barbaric. Outsiders cannot always afford such an easy agnosticism toward nationalisms, while insiders—the members of a nation called to arms—can seldom afford it at all.

With the idea that national identity creates particularly strong affective ties to a country, culture, and people, we have gone a long way towards explaining defensive forms of nationalism. The constitutive account can illuminate situations where nationality confronts aggressively anti-national forces, underlining elements of a shared national heritage which come to symbolize unity against external assailants. It cannot help us to understand why the same external pressures generate divergent responses within one nation. In all but the most extreme cases of war or repression, people who share a belief in the value of their nation’s distinctive life often disagree sharply about what constitutes a threat to that life. Some will see an influx of foreign ideas and consumer goods as a deadly menace, while others view the same phenomena as valuable aids to national development. One party trumpets its sacred mission to protect the nation’s purity, erecting high barriers against an outside world whose every radio wave threatens ‘national genocide’; its competitors want to realize untapped national potential by expanding the nation’s horizons and shedding ancestral customs which sapped its strength. Some political factions treat the collapse of imperial rule as an opportunity to build up peaceful, mutually profitable relations with old national rivals. Others, alas, seize the chance to grab new territory at their neighbours’ expense. The spokesmen for all these platforms claim to be working on behalf of national interests, and all may claim to be the true defenders of a nation’s cherished identity. While the constitutive account tells us why any of these discourses might have a broad popular appeal, it cannot explain why, in the volatile field of political competition, one form of national argument sometimes wins out over others. What are the conditions which allow extremist nationalism to prevail over the ‘honourable spirit’ of nationally constituted agents—or vice versa? How can we explain shifting patterns of popular support for or indifference to nationalist appeals? What circumstances might enable nationalists to avoid violent collision when tempers have been raised and threats exchanged?

These questions go directly to issues that have been obscured by the reign of methodological nationalism, but which come to the fore in Marx and Engels’ writings. Far from representing an irredeemable weakness in their approach to the subject, Marx and Engels’ emphasis on the limited autonomy of nationalism has much to recommend it today. In their empirical writings, first of all, Marx—and sometimes Engels—insisted on clearly distinguishing the different nationalist programmes supported by various groups within the same nation, and on relating these differences to conflicts over social and political power. At one level, the authors underlined the role played by transnational processes in activating modern ‘national’ consciousness and nation-building efforts. But they pointed out that while some social groups may perceive these processes as threatening their domestic interest or international standing, others within the same nation will embrace transnational standards of development, seeking closer ties with sympathetic groups abroad. This argument was linked to a second level of analysis, which drew attention to the ways that domestic social conflicts affect the form, intensity, and outcome of nationalist activity. Since most national ‘entities’ contain groups with varying degrees of interest in international cooperation or confrontation, the question of which disposition comes to define the prevailing ‘national interest’ hinges crucially on the outcome of domestic political struggles.

While their general theory described the actors operating at both trans- and subnational levels as class actors, Marx and Engels usually applied this complex analysis to situations where no single class was able to exert uncontested control over the nationalist agenda. Their writings on non-European countries further illustrate the flexibility of a theory which focuses, in the broadest sense, on the relationship between domestic social conflicts—whether class-based or not—and nationalist policies designed to confront outsiders. In recognizing the enduring usefulness of these arguments as a counterweight to methodological nationalism, then, we need not accept an obsolete polar-class model of society or sympathize with anti-capitalist revolutionism. When these components of their thinking are placed on the historical sidelines, some key arguments developed in Marx and Engels’ political analyses can still help us to understand and confront the tensions between nationalism, international integration, and democratic development.

I have said that Marx and Engels saw no need to proffer elaborate explanations of defensive nationalism. Their political analyses sought to explain a more complex and disturbing phenomenon: the rise of virulent nationalisms which threatened to stifle public debate, stamp out democratic impulses, and block off channels of international cooperation. The ethnic–authoritarian demons that Marx and Engels spotted in nineteenth-century Germany bear a close family resemblance to the more militant forms of nationalism that have emerged in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Marx and Engels’ account of the conditions which nurtured such forms in their own era can still shed light on contemporary situations where, with the collapse of repressive regimes and their imperial sponsors, extremist nationalism has emerged as the main rival to democratic initiatives. There are several parallels between Marx’s pre-democratic Germany and the conditions now confronting much of post-communist Europe. Before the revolutions of 1848 and 1989, both contexts prohibited the free public discussion of social and political alternatives to the status quo. When the revolutions broke out, their supporters held up an ambitious standard of ‘western’ development to measure local defects and demand far-reaching reform. And reformers in both contexts confronted opposition from the old ruling guard, but also from large sections of the population wary of the hazards that would attend the reforming process. Each of these circumstances contributed to the rise of extreme nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany, and they help to explain similar currents in central and eastern Europe today.²³

‘Really existing socialism’ produced a great deal of frustration, but it rarely tolerated the formation of independent associations aimed at improving material and cultural life. On the other hand, communist regimes were often ready to tolerate minor expressions of national discontent, especially when these could be diverted from the regime itself and turned against internal traitors or foreign conspiracies. Given these two conditions—the absence of other legal bases for opposition, and the relative safety of the national line of resistance—it is not surprising that anti-communist dissent was often expressed in strong nationalist terms. These terms were not inherently at odds with the democratic, westernizing aims of reformers, but circumstances in some countries tended to give national discourse an extremist edge. First of all, during the communist era as in Marx’s Germany, many national concerns could not be articulated in concrete political programmes. Instead, they were frequently expressed through romantic nostalgia for the glorious national past, or by dredging up old resentments against national rivals. Political repression thereby helped to nourish negative, mythologizing conceptions of national identity among some sectors of the population; and these conceptions did not evaporate overnight in 1989. Second, the political significance of nationality was grossly inflated by the weakness or absence of other organized forms of opposition. Where the omnipresence of the state prevented people from organizing around specific group interests, national identity became—at least partly by default—the most potent political resource available to dissidents. It embodied values and traditions which could be invoked as alternative sources of political legitimacy; at the same time, it provided a kind of surrogate unity in societies atomized by the forcible shattering of collective bonds that were neither ‘natural’ nor officially sanctioned. In other words, an exaggerated concern with issues of national identity played much the same compensatory social role as that ascribed by Marx to ethnocentric nationalism in Germany. Until new movements could emerge offering concrete, trustworthy solutions to what Marx would have called the ‘real problems’ of ‘real individuals’, the negative appeal of nationalism remained strong.

Finally, after years spent in off-and-on alliance or confrontation with communism, many central and east European nationalisms ended up looking rather like their sometime opponent. This is one reason why it was so easy for communist apparatchiks to restyle themselves as nationalist demagogues. Never exposed to the softening effects of open democratic debate, national doctrines in most formerly communist countries retained some authoritarian, collectivist, and combative features which enabled their oracles to step suavely into new power vacuums in 1989–90.²⁴ Their enduring popularity is by no means inevitable—as we will see below, it has already been dealt a crippling blow in some countries—but it is boosted in others where political and economic change has been accompanied by sharp increases in material or physical insecurity. Rising criminal activity, much of it organized and brutal, provokes an understandable nostalgia for the days of strong state authority. The deprivations wrought by soaring prices, privatization, and the closing down of old industries make some people long for the return of economic collectivism, while more generalized fears about the social effects of competitive individualism fuel support for nationalist panaceas. Where such fears and deprivations are rife, more and more people will start looking for someone to blame. They may also look for someone to insult, because the resulting sense of superiority assuages their wounded pride. And if political correctness no longer permits talk against the class enemy, various breeds of foreigner may serve as both scapegoats and significantly inferior others. The more militant strands of nationalist populism urge people to repudiate the very ‘western’ models of development that inspired many to spurn the old system in the first place. Native reformers, as much as minorities or foreign influences, may then be targeted as part of the great anti-national conspiracy; internal repression thus becomes inseparable from the cause of national self-defence. Such conditions present risks similar to those Marx saw in Germany before and after 1848. Then and now, nationalist ideas that first acquire popularity as a form of opposition to repressive governments may, if they remain detached from any clear strategies of reform, assume extreme and negative forms which obstruct reforming efforts in the future.

These very general observations map out a worst-case scenario for countries which have shaken off the communist yoke. But they should be taken as a warning, not as a prophecy of preordained disaster. If extremist nationalism is a powerful force in some formerly communist countries, the rise of blood-lusting nationalist dictatorships is hardly a foregone conclusion in most of them. Commentators who operate with strong methodological assumptions often write as though ethnic and authoritarian nationalisms reflect a monolithic, potentially explosive core of nationalist fervour within an undifferentiated national psyche. Some also write as though the explosive force of this core is independent of particular social, political, and economic conditions, since it comes directly from the deeply constitutive character of national attachments. And since the identities of some nations have been ‘constituted’ from time immemorial in conditions of intense conflict, these nations are seen as constitutively—if not genetically—predisposed to national extremism. All nationalist leaders have to do is to tap at the core shouting a few inflammatory slogans and whole populations, setting aside their other interests and commitments, will be like putty in their hands. It is this perspective which underlies the easy fatalism of accounts which attribute the war in ex-Yugoslavia to ‘ancient ethnic rivalries’, assuming that this is all we really need to know to understand that complicated political mess. The same perspective lurks behind exaggerated fears that, having been released from the ice-box of communist discipline, rabid nationalism is ready to spread like wildfire throughout central and eastern Europe. Obvious differences in the economic and political situations of different societies tend to elude strict methodological nationalists, for whom the presence in any ‘eastern’ country of a small gang of noisy xenophobes is enough to raise the spectre of mass nationalist hysteria.

It will be noticed that these assumptions have much in common with Engels’ theory of historical-historyless nations, and they share the main fault of that theory: namely, its premiss that the past behaviour of national groups predetermines their future, no matter what political choices their members make now. Events since 1989 have confirmed Engels’ more judicious remark that in some parts of Europe, particularly that ethnically scrambled area ‘south of the Carpathians’ which we call the Balkans, national conflicts remain less easily ‘solvable’ than many contemporary optimists had hoped. Nevertheless, a view which freezes entire nations in a time-warp of past enmities denigrates their capacity for development no less than the ‘historyless’ label. It would be both historically false and politically unwise to assume that, however unpleasant some of its current manifestations, Serbian or Croatian national feeling has always been and always will be expressed through acts of reciprocal violence. It is also wrong to think that popular support for militant nationalism in the Balkans springs mainly from a primeval urge to upgrade the status of one’s own national identity against that of others. Some people were doubtless attracted to nationalist ranks because they wanted to affirm their nation’s power and prestige, thereby also enhancing their own. A much larger number, however, were impelled in the first instance by negative or prudential motives. The strongest of these was sheer physical insecurity. The breakup of federal Yugoslavia left unhappy minorities in states whose leaders, they claimed, offered scant reassurance about their safety. At the same time, the fears of Serbs inside the former Croatian republic were whipped up to fever pitch by their ex-communist leader, backed by the federal army, who scorned proposals pressed within and outside Serbia for a negotiated solution to territorial disputes. It was a person’s ethnic identity, to be sure, which made him or her a potential target in the Yugoslav conflict. But to support nationalism out of reasonable fear—based on the belligerent conduct of national and local chieftains seeking to revive fairly recent memories of intercommunal violence for their own purposes, not on ‘ancient’ grievances—is not the same as to rally spontaneously to the battle-cry of Us versus Them. The first is a prudentially rational motive, activated in specific political circumstances. The second is pre-rational, and can in principle be activated at any time. The second account implies that since nationalism is an ‘independent’ force which has nothing to do with circumstances or reason, there is not much we can do to limit its worst excesses. The first holds out the possibility that, in conditions where most people have a reasonable sense of physical and material security, few will be eager for nationalist aggression.

The first account is losing ground today against nationalist firebrands and the fatalists who see no point in trying to stop them. But those still brave enough to defend it can find help in Marx’s arguments, even if they decline to name Marx as their source. By drawing attention to the specific interests, threats, and deprivations that induce people to embrace extremist nationalism, Marx and Engels’ accounts undermine a welter of assumptions that sustain the national-determinist view: the assumption that nationalism carries a uniform, trans-historical appeal for all the members of a national society; that it always represents the primary form of collective allegiance in the modern world, overriding even the most basic material concerns and subnational loyalties of supporters; or that popular nationalism is at root an emotional phenomenon, impervious to rational analysis. Recent events bear out Marx and Engels’ argument that nationalism becomes virulent in adverse social conditions. These conditions are usually changeable, although hard political work is needed to improve them. As Marx pointed out in his writings on populist nationalism, intense feelings of physical or material insecurity furnish an important set of prudential reasons for supporting nationalist leaders. While some leaders may have genuine concerns for the safety of their fellow-nationals, others unashamedly exaggerate the dangers in order to buttress their own authority. In the first case, where a clear external threat exists, popular nationalism needs no demystification. When politicians succeed in stirring up national panic for their own ends, bad domestic government may be the root of the problem.

This suggested to Marx what is again apparent today: that the insecurities which fuel nationalism are intensified by political repression. Governments that keep information flows under tight control can easily persuade their public that the enemy is about to raid their villages, burn down their houses, and rape their daughters. By blocking the expression of dissenting opinions, they can stifle any imaginative discussion of non-violent solutions to a national crisis. And even where no immediate crisis looms, repressive governments feed what looks like ‘irrational’ nationalist extremism by preventing people from organizing independent movements to articulate, defend, and negotiate specific interests. Political repression encourages irrational behaviour because it doesn’t allow people to make their own considered choices out of a range of policy options. Where people have scant control over their own destinies, they feel helpless; and helpless people will cheer nationalist promises of protection if no other credible protectors are available. Where authoritarian institutions have silenced public discussion of concrete social alternatives, the temptation to hark back to a golden age of national glory may be fuelled by fears of rapid and uncertain change. Such fears are experienced more acutely by some groups than by others, and may be exploited by leaders anxious to preserve their power from democratic assaults.

There can be only a limited interest in pondering what Marx would have thought about post-communist nationalism, but nothing in his writings suggests that it would have surprised him. In politics Marx was a ferocious anti-authoritarian; and ‘really existing’ communism was, in its gentlest incarnations, an authoritarian system of government. It is no coincidence that nationalist militancy today is strongest in those former communist countries where reforming currents are weakest, and particularly in those where the old political structures remained intact or where the old guard—including flocks of communists turned nationalists—have retained key positions of power without first undergoing any real metamorphosis. The strength of populist nationalism in Serbia, Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, and Russia stands in striking contrast to its declining fortunes elsewhere, notably in several countries whose voters trounced the communists in their first free elections, enabling governments to push through vigorous programmes of reform.

Not all western observers have recognized the importance of this difference. When Hungarian voters were finally offered a rich menu of political choices which included well-organized liberal and democratic programmes, many western observers were baffled by the electoral success of a conservative (anti-communist) party with a noisy nationalist right wing. They were even more astonished when some of ‘our’ good democrats in Poland began to mumble about the ethnic impurity of their opponents on the campaign trail. This behaviour appears less perplexing when we recall that whereas nationalist slogans had a familiar, often anti-communist ring to many voters, the reform strategies of liberal-democratic parties were still regarded warily outside professional circles in 1990–1. Often pitched at a technically sophisticated level, these programmes had an esoteric quality for voters who were only starting to penetrate the mysteries of ‘shock therapy’, market economics, and democratic competition. But fears that populist nationalism was the wave of central Europe’s future proved premature. By 1993 Poland’s fragile coalition government, headed by the centrist Democratic Union and prodded forward by conservative Christian Democrats, had begun to cave in to the Catholic Church’s demands for influence on crucial matters of legislation and public policy. Politicians parroted the distinctive hybrid of religious-patriotic discourse used by outspoken Church leaders, some of whom did not stop at reviving old xenophobic rhetoric from the inter-war years. Leading members of Hungary’s so-called Democratic Forum overplayed their own nationalist card with endless sermons about Hungarian history and identity, warnings about the plight of Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries, and by their evident reluctance to control the arch-nationalists on their fringes.²⁵ Many of these politicians were themselves anything but nationalist ideologues. They simply thought they were telling the public what they wanted to hear. Some evidently shared the methodological nationalist assumption that ‘the people’ are more easily moved by sentimental musings about the tragic or glorious national past than by arid policy debates. Others reckoned that xenophobic scaremongering would distract electorates from the pains of shock therapy. At the next elections in 1993–4, both governing parties and other right-wing nationalist groupings in Poland and Hungary were unceremoniously turned out of office. The populists had underestimated the populace.

If Yugoslavia alerted optimists to the risks of national violence in unreformed, Hobbesian conditions, recent events in Hungary and Poland serve a different kind of warning to those who see populist nationalism as a sure-fire winner of votes. The difference between these countries and others fuming with nationalist extremism cannot be found in geopolitics or pre-communist traditions. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon left three million Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia, and former Yugoslavia; ultra-nationalists still mutter about recovering ‘their’ lost lands, and Hungary itself has large ethnic minorities. Poland’s Jewish, German, and Ukrainian minorities were mostly expelled or exterminated by the Nazis and Soviets. But Poland’s post-1945 borders contain huge, controversial swathes of historically German territory, while even bigger chunks of ‘historic’ Poland lie in Ukraine and Lithuania. Both Poland and Hungary have traditions of ethnic, authoritarian, and xenophobic nationalism which should, on a methodological nationalist view, be no harder for populists to ‘tap’ than similar traditions in Romania or Russia. The difference is that the persistence of old political structures in the latter countries has frustrated the process of reform, contributing to widespread economic misery and the burgeoning of organized crime. Since the demise of communism here has brought tangible benefits to so few, nationalists who revive old foreign conspiracy or imperial restoration themes may give vent to popular desperation. This is the least people can hope for, if they can’t see any practical solution to their problems. But people who have reasonable expectations of a better life, whose immediate future does not look nasty and brutish, usually have better things to do than to brood over foreign conspiracies or the tragic-heroic national past. The fallen Polish and Hungarian governments may have pressed too hard on the national or religious-patriotic themes, but they did stay a steady course of thoroughgoing reform, helping to build a cross-party consensus on basic political and economic goals. These goals have so far been pursued faithfully by the transmogrified ex-communists who won the last elections on a platform of ‘pragmatism’.²⁶ Their victory in no way signified a sharp leftward shift in popular attitudes, or a longing for the good old days of central planning and one-party rule. Voters backed them because their campaigns were neither populist nor arrogant. They claimed to take seriously people’s worries about unemployment and the loss of social security, and they seemed willing to talk straight about ‘real’ concerns: inflation, wage reductions, health care, education, and pensions. Critics of the new leading parties point, no doubt with some justice, to the opportunism behind the ex-communists’ posture of social concern. Few, however, fear a return to the past; and at least some are starting to see that it doesn’t take long for people in a sturdily built democracy to assert their felt interests against populist appeals. What Marx said about the French peasantry in the 1850s remains true of people living in similarly uncertain yet undesperate conditions today: if the nationalists don’t deliver other goods, appeals to ‘national feeling’ might not suffice to guarantee their political survival.

The future, of course, remains uncertain. Extremist currents could regain strength if reforms should seriously falter, if high levels of unemployment persist, or if organized crime breaks the back of state authority. But if nationalism does take violent revenge on these fledgeling democracies, this will not be proof of its ‘independent’ force. Its future role in politics will depend on more than the unforgiving facts of national history or the prerational passions of ordinary people. It will also depend on choices made by governments and their international foes and allies, and on whether or not the ‘people’ are given a genuine choice of political programmes that address their major concerns. This is a central argument in Marx and Engels’ writings on nationalism, where the authors suggest a strong correlation between negative attitudes towards ‘outsiders’ and political repression, material insecurity, and social alienation within national societies. While theories of ‘mass’ society have called attention to the social and economic frustrations that feed into modern nationalism, the methodological individualism that underpins the very concept of ‘the masses’ yields readily to strong methodological nationalist assumptions. The power of nationalism is explained here as an effect of the individual’s sense of powerlessness, spread uniformly throughout society. Confronted by the extreme atomization that distinguishes modern mass society from its predecessors, individuals have little choice but to project their desire for communal moorings on to the all-encompassing nation or state. Such accounts shed much-needed light on the domestic or ‘endogenous’ sources of assertive nationalism; but they continue to explain national conflict as the struggle for power or recognition among discrete entities, each embodying a coherent schedule of purposes to which the members of national society universally subscribe. This analytical framework disables theorists of mass society from identifying movements above and below the level of the nation that tend to intensify national conflict or, for that matter, to restrain it. Such theorists may fail to anticipate potential patterns of opposition within each national ‘unit’, whereby competing groups challenge populist definitions of their nation’s interests.

Neither ‘mass’ theory nor methodological nationalism, then, can help us to cope with the most urgent problem posed by nationalism today. That problem can be formulated as a question: how might it be possible to politicize national conflicts, that is, to make them more manageable by subjecting the issues at stake to processes of bargaining, negotiation, and compromise?²⁷ It seems clear that this cannot be achieved unless we abandon the view that nationalism is somehow above or beyond the mundane sphere of ‘normal’ politics, because it is concerned with values that are inherently resistant to reasoned discussion. This is, of course, what militant nationalists want us to think, and all too many outside observers have been ready to believe them. By insisting that what is at stake in their struggles is no more and no less than that most precious of constitutive goods—national identity—arch-nationalists effectively block off the search for negotiated solutions. National identity, they claim, is a unique, incommensurable value which cannot be weighed up against the other values and interests it touches. In politics people regularly trade off a degree of economic security against the desire for more political liberty, or balance the costs of democratic change against the risks of social destabilization. Material and physical security, freedom and democracy are values which can be coolly debated and on which compromises can be struck. But according to nationalists and the theories which excuse them, identity is too close to the bone to be bartered in the political market-place.

When national identity is reified in this way, and mysteriously elevated above all other concerns, we are left with the impression that nothing but chance or imperial force can prevent the explosion of seething national tensions. But if we look at what lies behind these bloated, inflamed identities, we can hardly avoid seeing the many other interests and deprivations that are at stake in national conflicts. And if these are addressed along with legitimate concerns about identity, the political outlook will not seem so bleak. The assumptions I have lumped together under the label ‘methodological nationalism’ have long baffled attempts to politicize national conflicts, both in theory and in practice. By subordinating non-national interests to the all-embracing ‘force’ of nationality, methodological nationalism exaggerates the integrating powers of nationalism. It cannot account for the different varieties of national programme that claim to answer the same concerns, or explain the fact that active popular support for nationalism has usually been intermittent and selective. Because these shortcomings have grave implications for political judgement, it is well worth taking a second look at what Marx and Engels had to say about national politics. Some of their judgements were flawed; but others can be applied to subvert an equally faulty conventional wisdom which regards national antagonisms as a uniquely intractable form of conflict. By denying that national identity automatically trumps all other social goods, or that it is a sacrosanct value which cannot be weighed up against other things people want, Marx and Engels pave the way for bringing politics back into the study of nationalism.

6.3. SOME POST-NATIONALIST FALLACIES

If their explanatory theory enabled Marx and Engels to identify groups inside rival nations whose interests were ill served by virulent nationalism, their prescriptive arguments exhorted these groups to cooperate, at both the domestic and international levels, to restrain or supplant the authors of national warfare. This activist perspective yields a more encouraging outlook on the prospects for resolving national conflicts than prescriptions derived from a state-centred ‘realism’, or from accounts that insist upon the primordial roots of national animosities. But it also stresses the need for a clear-sighted view of pre-existing obstacles to cooperation: ‘Men make their own history’, according to Marx’s activist maxim, but not ‘under circumstances chosen by themselves’.²⁸

This proviso helps to differentiate Marx and Engels’ position from another set of assumptions which induces nearly as much political myopia as methodological nationalism. For the sake of expository convenience I label these assumptions ‘liberal post-nationalism’, although they are often advanced by people who prefer to call themselves conservatives or socialists. What unites post-nationalist views around a common liberal core is the belief that the expansion of freedom—personal, civic, political, and economic—is a more or less sufficient condition for restraining national conflict. Here freedom plays the same central motivating role that methodological nationalists ascribe to national identity. Whereas the latter hold that most people most of the time will place their national identity above other values and interests, liberal post-nationalists expect people to put freedom first. In repressive societies where they have no choice of other means, strong nationalism may look like the most efficient weapon available in the fight for freedom. But liberal post-nationalists predict that once the shackles have been broken, giving people a chance to pursue their own goals in their own way, their desire to enjoy this new-found liberty will promptly override the more primitive attachments and impulses that feed assertive nationalism. Give people civic rights, good federal constitutions, and the freedom to express their cultural preferences and various national groups will surely be inclined to settle their differences without destroying multinational states. Give people private enterprise, open competition on the market-place, and the right to buy and sell goods wherever they please and the invisible hand of self-interest will quickly tame their fighting spirit.

We all knew people who talked like this in 1989, and today most of their faces are red. Liberal post-nationalists hailed the end of communism in Europe as the advent of a brave new era of democratic multinationalism in eastern countries, which would swiftly be followed by their peaceful integration into a common European homeland. Once the fall of communism had cleared the road to democracy, the squabbling ‘nationalities’ of Yugoslavia and the Soviet empire were supposed to bury their hatchets and create new federal arrangements to serve as models of multinational harmony within free institutions. Liberated at last from the Kremlinite yoke, the countries of central and eastern Europe were expected smoothly to evolve into paragons of ‘civic’ nationalism, upholding minority rights within a nationally neutral political culture while cultivating their rich traditions of cultural diversity.

Although Marx and Engels’ internationalism is usually treated as a similar species of post-nationalist naïveté, its affinities with contemporary liberal post-nationalism are superficial. Marx would certainly have agreed that virulent nationalism thrives on unfreedom. He would also agree that the removal of political and economic oppression is a necessary first step towards restraining intense national conflicts. But he persistently criticized his liberal free-marketeering and ‘utopian’ democrat contemporaries on two other counts.

First, Marx argued, the latter wrongly equated the removal of specific forms of coercion with the achievement of freedom per se. Marx was as keen as any nineteenth-century liberal to see the end of protectionist barriers, restrictions on civil liberties, and foreign oppression. But he did not think that free trade, civic liberties, or national independence could suffice to end conflicts over the appropriate way to distribute and exercise these newly expanded freedoms. Once the most daunting obstacles were removed, some people would still seek to enlarge their range of social choices and to increase their capacity to get what they want-and these efforts, as Marx saw, would bring them into conflict with others who prefer to keep some people less free than themselves. Second, Marx believed that both classical liberals and democratic idealists made fundamental mistakes in identifying the values that inspire people to make peace or war. Liberals assumed that what reasonable people want, more than anything else, is the freedom to pursue whatever they regard as their self-interest. According to Marx, this assumption obscured two by-products of modern political and economic freedoms that may render them threatening: intense competition, and social atomization. For people unaccustomed to such freedom, or for those who find themselves disadvantaged by it, freedom may appear less attractive than the authoritarian or collectivist values embodied in militant nationalism. Idealists, on the other hand, treated human beings as vehicles for the realization of higher spiritual or collective goals which presumably propel the quest for freedom, rational statehood, and ethical wholeness even when people are hungry or otherwise endangered. Marx chided his ‘utopian’ democrat friends for overestimating the ‘goodwill’ of the man on the street when he faced bankruptcy, denying that it was necessarily irrational for such a man to recoil from offers of political and economic freedom if that freedom seemed to threaten his livelihood. Whereas liberal individualism downgraded the value people place on cooperative bonds and social stability, democratic idealism exaggerated the independent motivating force of its own political ideals, forgetting that these arise from and must eventually confront the ‘real wants’ of ‘real people’.

These nineteenth-century arguments can be extended to help us see where contemporary liberal post-nationalism went wrong. First of all, its proponents focused too narrowly on the initial freedoms gained by the dismantling of communist regimes and imperial structures. Some viewed the uprisings of 1989 as evidence that whole populations had positively embraced the values of liberal free-market societies. Basking in post-communist euphoria, post-nationalists did not think deeply enough about the hard work that was still needed to consolidate freedoms after revolution or independence. As Marx and others have pointed out, the act of removing the most obvious sources of oppression is by no means the end of the quest for freedom; before people can enjoy freedom enough to defend it, they need some reassurance that it will not deprive them of other things they value. Minimal material and physical security are, again, among the most fundamental of these things. If people have reason to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or if they live in constant fear of skinheads or bomb attacks, many will be prepared to trade in a large portion of their freedom for more food or protection. Although Marx might have taken issue with the methodological individualist premisses behind Hobbes’s war of all against all, he would probably have conceded that freedom without social habits of reciprocity looks uninviting to most people. Recent examples also bear out Marx’s warning that the act of declaring national independence after years of foreign domination is only the beginning of the struggle to build free societies. In some countries of the former Soviet Union, the obstacles remain particularly forbidding. Local traditions were sometimes crushed, large populations were moved to places they still refuse to call home, prospects of economic independence from Moscow were damaged by policies which obliged each republic to specialize in a few products while importing all the rest. Russian workers were sent in droves to inhabit distant lands whose natives, with some reason, fear that these ‘colonizers’ might provide a pretext for future big-brotherly intrusions. Spreading poverty and corruption, the remarkable staying-power of old home-grown elites, and the bearlike growls that still emanate from some corners of the Kremlin make independence seem a fragile achievement in many places, in others even a hollow one.²⁹ Whether or not reformers in these countries will be able to beat the odds against their efforts to establish free institutions remains an open question.

A basic error of liberal post-nationalists, then, was to forget that freedom is a conditional rather than an absolute value for most people. The human palate is not naturally inclined to relish modern forms of personal, political, and economic freedom. The taste for these is and always has been an acquired one, even in long-established liberal democracies, whose more comfortable denizens tend to take for granted the material and social benefits that allow them to enjoy the freedoms they have. People who lack these benefits cannot be expected to embrace democratic and market institutions without serious reservation, or to value national self-determination unconditionally. Political leaders who assume that they will, and who spend more time flaunting their credentials as national or anti-communist liberators than confronting the reasonable fears of constituents, often find themselves out of a job after the next elections.

Foreign friends of post-communist liberalizers would therefore do well to remember that the freedoms they espouse are a luxury of the relatively secure and well fed. They should also remember that, even in the older democracies, democrats never vanquished their opponents without a fight. Many western liberals feel uneasy about intense political conflict. Some see infinite tolerance of one’s opponents as a litmus test of democratic integrity. But tolerance comes easily only where the broad political mainstream flows safely on liberal democracy’s side. Gentlemanly tactics of persuasion cannot always guarantee the triumph of democratic reforms when powerful opponents of democracy refuse to be gentlemen and deny, as militant nationalists often do, that their values can brook any level-headed dialogue. You can’t reason with fanatics, or with politicians who behave like fanatics because this enables them to avoid the mundane politics of compromise. Reformers in countries with large extremist movements know this very well, and they need outside help to win the hard battle ahead. Too many western governments have shied away from the full implications of this task, afraid of soiling their clean post-nationalist hands in the muck of ‘ancient’ ethnic rivalries and the occasionally combative methods of new democratic warriors. But a rereading of Marx and Engels reminds us that those methods and rivalries may not spring directly from immutable traditions of authoritarianism or ethnic aggression. Their more immediate, removable sources can be found in persistent repression and the hardships democrats face in battling it. If the new democrats and their foreign allies recoil from adversarial politics—as Marx claimed German reformers did in 1848 and after—their opponents will win. And they will owe their victory not to their electorates’ native incapacity to acquire a taste for freedom, but to the democrats’ failure to find, either at home or abroad, the strategic and economic resources needed to consolidate it.

Marx’s critique of liberalism can also help us to uncover a further source of post-nationalist fallacies. I have argued that intense physical and material insecurity may dampen aspirations for freedom, and fuel extremist nationalism. But it seems clear that people do not always make freedom their top priority even when their basic wants are largely satisfied: Liberal post-nationalism underestimates the political (though not the ‘independent’) significance of another set of values that may conflict with freedom, sometimes—but not always—through strong nationalism. The values I have in mind are usually clustered together under the term ‘identity’, although this term covers many desires that are at least partly distinct: desires to know who I am, on whom I can rely, and how others see me. I will return to the implications of these various identity-related desires in a moment. For now, I want simply to underline the failure of liberal individualists to appreciate how discomfiting it can be, psychologically and materially, to suffer slights or challenges to one’s accustomed identity. Marx was not perhaps the most sensitive analyst of this problem, but he was aware that the breakdown of pre-modern social structures and the rise of competitive individualism made freedom terrifying for many; and his writings on alienation reflect a keen appraisal of the value people place on having satisfactory social and political identities. In so far as post-nationalists share liberal individualist assumptions, they downplay the disruptive effects of liberalization on people’s beliefs about who they are and whom they can trust. Such disruption can be profoundly worrying for people used to ‘being defined’ by something or someone else—tradition, family, familiar occupational structures, religious authority, authoritarian or totalitarian states. Many baulk at the prospect of having to define themselves anew in unpredictable circumstances, not knowing what competing identities will be asserted against theirs or how the revamped society will evaluate them. This fear, moreover, may be just as acute in established liberal democracies as in newly ‘democratizing’ countries, especially during periods of rapid social and economic change. The old western democracies today are facing a veritable epidemic of personal and collective identity crises stimulated by fast-changing work and family structures, the decline of old industrial jobs and the communities and the associations based on them, massive immigration, loss of the clear political orientations mapped out during the Cold War, and European integration. Some of these crises have been known to take extremist, even violent, forms. Their roots lie only partly in ethnic or national frictions. But where other frictions cut across ethnic or national ones, western liberals can expect to see the growth of new collectivist challengers to their benign politics of tolerance.

These developments should alert us against the complacent belief that freedom is ever complete, or completely secure, when the desires I have linked to the notion of ‘identity’ remain unsatisfied. Liberal post-nationalists erred if they looked forward to the once-and-for-all triumph of individualist values over what they saw as the atavistic claims of collective identity. Nothing I have said, however, should be taken as a confirmation of methodological nationalist assumptions, or indeed as a refutation of Marx. The foregoing remarks suggest that most people will remain dissatisfied with freedoms which unsettle, or prevent them from acquiring, satisfactory social and personal identities. This was one of Marx’s reasons for insisting on the limited achievements of ‘merely political emancipation’, and for pointing out how the contractual freedoms of nineteenth-century capitalism actually locked workers into a debased and dependent social role. But if there can be no really valuable freedom without satisfactory identities, it is equally true—particularly in the modern, fast-changing world—that such identities cannot be defined or secured without freedom. The interdependence between social freedom and shared identity was a central theme of Marx’s early writings, and it appears again in his critiques of both liberal individualism and authoritarian nationalism. I now want to take up this theme, going beyond what Marx himself said, to point out some basic flaws in the assumption that nationalism can satisfy identity-related desires even when it fails to promote freedom or democracy.

I said earlier that when we speak about the value people attach to their identity, whether personal or collective, we may have in mind a number of distinct desires that become inflamed when they are thwarted. In so far as it relates to social and political concerns, the desire for a satisfactory identity can be broken down into two broad, partly overlapping elements. The first is the desire to be recognized by others as someone worthy of respect because of who I am or what I do. The second is the desire to feel that I belong to some community or association that confers this recognition, and which in turn is recognized by members of other communities as worthy of respect. These twin desires for recognition and community or ‘belonging’ can both be satisfied through diverse kinds of association. Collective identities do not have to be national, or at least not exclusively or primarily national; but most people do place a high value on certain inherited cultural characteristics associated with their nationality, while modern political and work structures reinforce strong national identifications.

Even so, both desires can be frustrated by certain definitions of national identity. Individuals and nations often seek new kinds of recognition which they cannot get within the old forms of national ‘community’, and which that community itself cannot get from others in its present form. The desire to upgrade one’s personal and/or national status is strongly encouraged by democratic doctrines, which proclaim the equal dignity of individuals and peoples. Chances for personal recognition are unevenly distributed in pre- or undemocratic societies, where peasants or the unpropertied or women or non-Party members have few opportunities to distinguish themselves publicly. Such chances remain partly skewed in most modern liberal democracies, where women and ethnic minorities and permanent underclasses continue to serve as foils for the self-satisfied identity of those who decline fully to recognize them. When groups like these demand recognition, a large part of what they are demanding is the freedom to revise the old communal institutions which prevent them from getting it, or the terms of evaluation which undervalue them. But popular strivings for higher social and political recognition frequently clash head-on with the foundations of established communities, and with the anti-democratic programmes of authoritarian nationalists. These defenders of community assert that people simply can’t have it both ways: they must either take their ‘given’ community as it is, with all its unique and non-negotiable values, or they can indulge their selfish desire for more personal recognition and end up destroying the only identity they could ever hope to have. This is a false alternative which worms its way into much conservative and nationalist discourse. What most recognition-seekers want is not the destruction of common social life, but a different kind of common life which confers the more flexible kinds of belonging that allow more people to seek wider forms of recognition and deeper forms of ‘community’.

If desires for recognition and community cannot always be satiated by just any form of national identity, it follows that people need freedom to work out identities that can keep them reasonably satisfied. Without freedom, and in the absence of any cooling scepticism, the old identities that have ‘been defined’ in advance for individuals, social classes, or nations may become dangerously overheated. And then they can either turn inwards and strangle domestic freedoms, or turn outwards to attack the identities of others. Marx saw both these things happening in nineteenth-century Germany, where a large cross-section of intellectuals, businessmen, and other professionals felt inadequately recognized at home and abroad. Because internal barriers disabled them from achieving the domestic distinction they wanted, they began to resent other countries where their counterparts had acquired the freedom to distinguish themselves and make greater strides towards modernity. Both westernizing liberals and democrats and inward-looking conservatives wanted to upgrade Germany’s international status. But they were divided over the question of how to do so, and over what kind of recognition was desirable: should they radically revise the social and political bases of the old Germany, trading away some elements of traditional identity in favour of advantages gained by following foreign models? Or should they refuse to compromise, stress their ingrained differences from their neighbours, and pretend that everything German was incomparable or even superior to foreign ways? Repression helped the latter tactic to prevail, and it continues to help ultra-nationalists in many parts of the world today. But repressive ethnic nationalism has usually been a deeply unsatisfactory solution to identity-related frustrations. Nationalists can resist the pressures of democratization and interdependence as violently as they please; but if their resistance succeeds, its price will almost certainly be domestic misery and wars (including civil wars) they aren’t always equipped to win.

The mistakes made by liberal post-nationalists and national militants can be traced, then, to the tendency of both parties to posit a false opposition between the values of freedom and the values of identity. Marx’s normative theory sought to bridge these values, while his writings on nationalism suggest that the prospects of pacifying national conflicts are best when a balance can be struck between the demands of identity and freedom. This point can be developed to help us rethink the distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ concepts of nationality that has become a standard touchstone of contemporary judgements on nationalism. If we accept the argument that satisfactory personal and collective identities cannot be worked out without freedom, we must reject ethnic nationalist demands for states whose criteria for membership and participation are based exclusively on inherited genetic or cultural characteristics. The problem with such states is not just that they deprive ethnic minorities of freedom while frustrating their desire for recognition, although this is bad enough. They also imprison members of the dominant nation in an artificially narrow definition of who they are and what they should or should not do. Ethnic-national criteria rarely stop at telling people who they belong with in the world: they also tell them what roles they should play within the family or economy or other element of the national organism, who they can be friends or do business with, and what opinions they can express without incurring the wrath of the paternal (or maternal) nation. It would be self-defeating to try to force people to abandon their ethnically defined preferences on any of these matters, or to deny them political representation. But ethnic interests can be subjected to the sobering pressures of democratic politics, which oblige ethnic nationalists to confront the scepticism of their own co-nationals about the forms of recognition they promise to supply, and about the social and material benefits they are able to deliver.

On the other hand, the flaws I have identified in liberal post-nationalism also appear in some conventional understandings of what ‘civic’ nationalism requires. The civic concept of the nation prescribes an inclusive community of shared political allegiance, where citizens enjoy extensive and equal political, economic, and personal rights regardless of their ‘ethnic’ nationality. The civic–national state protects citizens’ rights to express their particular cultural or religious identities in a broadly demarcated private sphere; but it also curtails the influence of these identities on public life, cultivating loyalty to an overarching political ‘nation’. These features of civic nationality clearly meet the requirements for freedom set out above, and may help to defuse ethnic conflict when other social, material, and psychological conditions are satisfied. But proponents of civic nationalism, like liberal post-nationalists, often place so much faith in the political and legal guarantees of supra-ethnic national community that they forget to look after the more fundamental conditions which sustain popular allegiance to the civic nation. I have already made the point that civil and economic freedoms are not always enough to make people feel reasonably secure, or to underwrite everyone’s chances of gaining adequate social recognition. When civic nationality is understood in narrowly juridical terms within deeply divided or atomized societies, it may develop large security and identity deficits that assertive nationalism can try to fill.

But if civic national recipes are not enough to build and maintain satisfactory forms of ‘community’, this does not mean that we should start injecting heavy doses of ethnic nationalism into civic constitutions in the hope of filling their identity and security gaps. It is possible, though not always easy, to negotiate compromises between what I have called the values of freedom and the values of identity; but it would be naïve to think that personal or political freedom can flourish for long where complex identities are whittled down to a constricting ethnic core. Marx’s writings suggest a different kind of remedy for the deficits of civic nationalism. Where national identities are inflamed by widespread material insecurities, or by the systematic failure of large groups to achieve the social recognition they desire, democrats should concentrate on formulating policies designed to address these concerns. Attempts to substitute the fissiparous politics of identity for concrete social policies have proved no less destructive of ‘community’ than immoderate individualism, and scarcely less threatening to freedom than extreme nationalism. Many of the old civic nations today are racked by the clamouring of ‘special interest groups’ or ‘minorities’ who loudly protest against society’s failure to give them adequate recognition, but whose programmes often lack any comprehensive strategy or clear, realistic goals. The problem with identity-based politics is that conflicts over identity are almost never only about identity, and they cannot be resolved by imposing multicultural curricula or norms of gender-sensitivity designed, above all, to make people feel better about themselves. If one person insults some aspect of my social identity, this may hurt my self-esteem. If the insult is repeated often enough on the streets, in my workplace, or in public pronouncements, I may find myself out of a job or under attack. Political conflicts centred on identity, whether national or some other kind, usually concern jobs and security as much as the desire for verbal or legal recognition. The champions of civic nationhood should keep this in mind if they want to prevent illiberal ethnic and nationalist claims from creeping in through the back door.

Of course, neither civic nationalism nor prudent social policies can ensure the survival of plurinational states which are already riven by fierce intercommunal conflicts. At the end of the Cold War, many post-nationalists were so blindly attached to civic national nostrums that they decried declarations of independence from the Soviet Union, and later from Yugoslavia, as retrograde acts which proved the stubborn tribalist idiocy of seceding peoples. By refusing to see and condemn the coercion, threats, and provocations which destroyed prospects of democratic cohabitation in these states, post-nationalists did their bit to undermine western efforts to formulate clear supportive policies towards the new nation-states. Now that post-nationalist optimism has ebbed, it seems obvious that if different peoples really cannot live together—and especially if they never chose to do so, but were forced under a common roof by imperial tanks—it is sheer foolishness to try to hold them together at any cost. But if outsiders want to do what they can to prevent the outbreak of violence between divorcing nations, or to limit future cycles of coercion and conflict in newly independent states, they need clear criteria to help them decide when to support or oppose nationalist programmes.

The criteria I have extracted from Marx and Engels’ writings do not address the complex legal and technical issues involved in contemporary disputes over national sovereignty. Nevertheless, the consequence-sensitive reasoning behind their reform, reciprocity, and viability conditions can still help democrats to work out a general strategy for dealing with nationalist claims. Marx and Engels’ criteria draw our attention to several consequences of non-reforming nationalism that are increasingly visible in post-communist countries today. When new nationalist governments fail to reform old social and political structures, they are likely to become as vulnerable to domestic dissent and extremist pressures as the governments they replaced. And when nationalists try to contain these pressures by kindling popular suspicions of minorities or foreign powers, they may embroil themselves in wars which lead to outside intervention—in other words, to direct violations of the very independence that nationalists claim to protect. The failure to reconstruct post-communist nationality on robust democratic foundations may therefore be as self-defeating for nationalists as it is unpleasant for minorities, and indeed for rank-and-file members of the dominant nation. Contemporary friends of democracy might not achieve much by invoking these prudential arguments where conflicts are already inflamed. But they can and should do a great deal more than has been done since 1989 to give economic and, in some cases, military assistance to reformers in former communist countries; and they should be less reluctant to impose sanctions on governments which audaciously flout the requirements of reform and international reciprocity.

Not long ago, Marx and Engels were frequently reproached for ‘failing’ to uphold an unconditional right to national self-determination. Today liberals and democrats of all shades are busy laying down conditions for the exercise of this right. Some have even begun to doubt whether the principle of self-determination should be interpreted as a right at all, since a variety of other considerations—including ‘strategic’ ones—might in many cases have to trump it. The reason for this change of heart is easy to find. After nearly half a century when central and eastern European nationalism was kept under communist permafrost, western observers have suddenly been forced to face some awkward political facts that were obscured by the ideological polarities of the Cold War. Because the regimes which had hitherto ‘frozen’ national aspirations were imperial and repressive, it seemed logical to infer that all anti-communist nationalism must be the mirror-image of what it opposed: it must, that is, be liberal and westward-looking. As it happened, nationalism after communism turned out to be more than one thing. Some of it was tied to the construction of liberal democracies, and sought to forge cooperative links with the world outside. But much of it was illiberal and anti-democratic, while more than a few of the most zealous anti-communist nationalists turned out to be formerly zealous communist anti-nationalists. The new nationalisms, then, have not lost the Janus-like quality that their precursors showed to Marx and Engels. Democracy and democratic nationalism are once again on the defensive against powerful adversaries, which include nationalisms of a very different stamp; and these opposing forms of nationalism can often be found, again, locked in life-or-death struggle within the same nation. This was why Marx and Engels refused to endorse an unconditional principle of national self-determination; and it is the fresh realization that all nationalism is not one thing, even if it starts out battling the same enemy, which has obliged western liberals to adopt a more discriminating stance towards nationalist movements.

There are two further reasons why democrats need to clarify the conditions under which they will or will not support nationalists, and to shed their reservations about enforcing those conditions. First, the freedoms enjoyed even in long-established democratic societies are probably far more fragile than we used to think. The comforting contrast between the ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ worlds has been eroded by the end of the Cold War, forcing western societies to confront the insecurities and deprivations that threaten freedom from within. Memories of our very own ‘ancient’ rivalries may have lost their sting by now; but we can’t be certain that new currents of extremist nationalism will not gain momentum if insecurities deepen, jobs keep disappearing, and more and more people begin to doubt their own social worth. Second, by spelling out their conditions democrats will have taken a crucial step towards politicizing national conflicts. Political discussion cannot begin until each side has laid down its bottom line, however tentatively. When democracy’s avowed friends confront extreme nationalism with wide-open minds, they invite both contempt and resentment. They invite contempt because, by failing to put a firm foot down to defend what they claim to value, they make themselves vulnerable. They invite resentment because, in refusing to enforce a bottom line, democratic governments seem to convey indifference to nationalist claims. If we refrain from making judgements or refuse to take sides, we appear to be saying: they are not our kind, their conflicts are a sort that we can’t possibly understand, our civilized norms of conduct do not apply to such people. So long as they don’t drop bombs on us, let’s leave them to tear each other apart-or to fall back into the clutches of some equally wretched empire, which will at least save us the trouble of brokering a peace. It is most unlikely that the lessons of democratic indifference will be lost on other nationalists and aspiring empire-builders. Indifference means non-recognition. And in a democratic era, when individuals and peoples are taught to protest against slights to their dignity, that is the greatest provocation of all.

Notes

Introduction

¹ CM 502.

² Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17.

³ See, respectively, Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature (London: Verso, 1983; Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice: A Radical Critique of Liberalism (London: Methuen, 1982); and Louis Dupré, Marx’s Social Critique of Culture (London: Yale University Press, 1983).

⁴ See e.g. Vendulka Kubálková and Albert Cruickshank, Marxism and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); James M. Blaut, The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of Nationalism (London: Zed Books, 1987); and Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx and Friedrich List (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

⁵ As it is described by Z. A. Pelczynski, ‘Nation, Civil Society, State: Hegelian Sources of the Marxian Non-theory of Nationality’, in id. (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 262–79.

⁶ The argument that there is an ‘epistemological break’ between Marx’s early and later writings was stated most forcefully by the Continental school of structuralist Marxists, led by Louis Althusser; see his For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1986). This view has been affirmed by some British Marxists: see e.g. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1984), esp. p. 114.

⁷ For such an account, see Ian Cummins, Marx, Engels and National Movements (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

1. Nationality in the Divided State

¹ Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, afterword (ed.) Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf Verlag, 1967).

² A classic exposition of these authors’ ideas appears in Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (London: Macmillan, 1961).

³ Friedrich Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics (London: Routledge, 1944), 331–2.

⁴ Quoted ibid. 316.

⁵ G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 157.

⁶ Ibid. 156.

⁷ G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 123. ⁸ Ibid. 122–3.

⁹ Ibid. 178–9.

¹⁰ Ibid. 182.

¹¹ Ibid. 182–3.

¹² Ibid. 164.

¹³ Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), esp. 53 and 63.

¹⁴ Philosophy of Right, 156–7.

¹⁵ CCHP 31.

¹⁶ Ibid. 109.

¹⁷ JQ 154.

¹⁸ The ‘imagined’ dimensions of national community have more recently been discussed in Benedict Anderson’s popular work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

¹⁹ Marx’s Critique deals only with paras. 216–313 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It stops short of commenting on paras. 321–51, where Hegel discusses international relations and war.

²⁰ CCHP 38; German citations from Marx, Die Frühschriften, (ed.) Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1953), 52.

²¹ Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 215.

²² See e.g. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), vol. ii, ch. 12.

²³ CCHP 38.

²⁴ Philosophy of Right, 127.

²⁵ CCHP 38; German citation from Marx, Die Frühschriflen, 52.

²⁶ Ibid. 22–3.

²⁷ Ibid. 22.

²⁸ CCHP 38; German citation from Marx, Die Frühschriften, 30–1.

²⁹ See ibid. 49–54.

³⁰ Ibid. 114.

³¹ Ibid. 102.

³² JQ 166.

³³ ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction’, MECW 3: 184.

³⁴ On the historical career of these concepts, see Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination (London: Fontana, 1969).

³⁵ ‘Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher’, MECW 3: 144.

³⁶ ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, MECW 3: 178.

³⁷ Ibid. 186–7.

³⁸ Marx’s only explicit formulation of ‘historical materialism’ as a theory centred on the base-superstructure metaphor appears in his 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Here Marx describes the superstructure as ‘legal and political’ and refers separately to the ‘forms of social consciousness’ arising from the ‘economic structure’. Marx frequently warned his readers against thinking that the base-superstructure image implied the unimportance of non-economic factors in class struggles. The history of Marxist thought suggests, however, that Marx’s caveats have often been read as a licence for generating a welter of ‘relative autonomies’ of states, nations, and ideologies which obscure the distinctive features of Marx’s theory. At the same time, twentieth-cent. attempts to develop a ‘structuralist’ Marxism oversimplified the causal relationships Marx wanted to analyse through the base-superstructure image. I have therefore avoided reconstructing Marx and Engels’ concept of the nation by starting from their abstract base-superstructure model which, in fact, they rarely applied to national issues.

³⁹ GI 90.

⁴⁰ GI 46.

⁴¹ The passage quoted above continues: ‘The independence of the state is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes … where consequently no section of the population can achieve dominance over the others.’ Ibid. 90; see also Sect. 1.4 below.

⁴² Thus Marx reproached a republican contemporary for implying that the Germans were prevented from realizing their common ‘humanity’ only by the political division between ‘princes and subjects’, while he ignored the divisive effects of class relations. On this view, Marx argued, ‘all classes melt away before the solemn concept of “humanity” … And it would be a sign of intellectual blindness’, he continued in characteristically ironic vein, ‘to point out that there are privileged and unprivileged subjects; that the former by no means see humiliating gradations in the political hierarchy … that finally amongst the subjects whose subjection is considered a fetter, it is however considered a fetter in very different ways. Along come the “narrow-minded” Communists now and see not only the political difference between prince and subject but also the social difference between classes.’ ‘Moralising Criticism’, MECW 6: 330–1.

⁴³ ‘Surplus value’ refers to the differential between the means needed for the worker to survive and reproduce his basic standard of living, and the actual value produced by his labour.

⁴⁴ Neither Marx nor his recent explicators insist on restricting the term ‘exploitation’ to capitalism. Alan Carling draws a useful distinction between capitalist exploitation, which is ‘unfair and voluntary’ and feudal extortion, which is ‘unfair and involuntary’ or ‘exploitation compounded by intimidation’. Carling, ‘Exploitation, Extortion and Oppression,’ Political Studies, 35/2 (June 1987), 175.

⁴⁵ GI 78–9.

⁴⁶ CM 505.

⁴⁷ These solutions are suggested by, inter alia, R. N. Berki, ‘On Marxian Thought and the Problem of International Relations’, World Politics, 24 (1971), 80–105, and Vendulka Kubálková and Albert Cruickshank, Marxism-Leninism and Theory of International Relations (London: Routledge, 1978), 48.

⁴⁸ This interpretation appears to underlie Walker Connor’s claim that in Marx and Engels’ view, ‘both nation and nationalism were relegated to the superstructure … it was the new economic relations, brought on by changes in the mode of production, that created nations … The nation was to Marx essentially an economic unit.’ The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 7–8. For a similar reading, see Michael Löwy, ‘Marxists and the National Question’, New Left Review, 96 (1976), 82.

⁴⁹ GI 89; German citations from MEAW 1: 273.

⁵⁰ Gl 73.

⁵¹ Ibid. 52; German citations from MEAW 1: 231.

⁵² Letter to P. V. Annenkov, 28 Dec. 1846, MESC 32; German citation from MEAW 1: 611.

⁵³ ‘The Festival of Nations in London’, MECW 6: 6.

⁵⁴ CM 503.

⁵⁵ CM 505.

⁵⁶ MEAW 1: 438.

⁵⁷ CM 501.

⁵⁸ CM 488.

⁵⁹ ‘The Festival of Nations in London’, MECW 6: 6.

⁶⁰ CM 492.

⁶¹ Ibid. 495.

⁶² GI 70.

⁶³ GI 60–1.

⁶⁴ CM 503. This is a literal translation from the original German edition, which has ‘sich selbst als Nation konstituieren muss’. MEAW 1: 435.

⁶⁵ Marx, ‘The June Revolution’, MECW 7: 149.

⁶⁶ CM 502–3. The German original has ‘the national class’ instead of ‘the leading class of the nation’. See MEAW 1: 435.

⁶⁷ See e.g. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 52: ‘The State, its laws, its arrangements, constitute the rights of its members; its natural features, its mountains, air, and waters, are … their fatherland, their outward material property; the history of the State, their deeds; what their ancestors have produced, belongs to them and lives in their memory. All this is their possession, just as they are possessed by it; for it constitutes their existence, their being … the adoption of these laws, and of a fatherland so conditioned, is the expression of their will.’ (Italics added.)

⁶⁸ ‘Speech on Poland’, MECW 6: 388.

2. Identities in Conflict

¹ G. A. Cohen, ‘Reconsidering Historical Materialism’, in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds.), Marxism (NOMOS: Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, vol. xxvi, New York: New York University Press, 1983), 227–51.

² CM 488.

³ Misgivings about Marxism’s ability to deal sensitively with nationalist claims have often focused on the destructive, authoritarian policies that may be vindicated by its preference for the norms associated with a ‘western’ model of economic and technological ‘modernization’. On this problem see Charles Taylor, ‘Socialism and Weltanschauung’, in Leszek Kołakowski and Stuart Hampshire (eds.), The Socialist Idea (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), 51.

⁴ Cohen, ‘Reconsidering Historical Materialism’, 240.

⁵ Samir Amin, Class and Nation: Historically and in the Current Crisis, trans. Susan Kaplow (London: Heinemann, 1980), p. ix. Regis Debray offers a similar criticism in ‘Marxism and the National Question’, New Left Review, 105 (1977), 25–41.

⁶ Marx therefore cannot be seen as the direct progenitor of the argument, defended by some ‘structuralist’ Marxists, that a properly ‘materialist’ theory should explain even primordial aspects of human culture—kinship relations, religion, and even language—as arising from and shaped by the productive needs of early, pre-class societies. For a recent example of this argument, see Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material (London: Verso, 1988).

⁷ GR 472.

⁸ Ibid. 489.

⁹ Capital, i, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 170.

¹⁰ See G. A. Cohen’s related argument in ‘Karl Marx and the Withering Away of Social Science’, in id., Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 326–44.

¹¹ Anti-Dühring (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1943), 202.

¹² GR 474.

¹³ W. B. Gallie reads Engels’ passage in this way: ‘The existence of war … is postulated at the outset as an independent factor in the situation to be explained … we are shown how war was used to advance certain economic purposes; but this presupposes its existence as a permanent intersocietal possibility.’ Philosophers of Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 76.

¹⁴ See Berki, ‘On Marxian Thought’.

¹⁵ GR 493.

¹⁶ GR 491.

¹⁷ Ibid. 493–4.

¹⁸ Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 120.

¹⁹ This argument runs against the grain of an important reading of Marx developed by the Frankfurt School and more recently expounded by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas has argued that Marx ‘conflated’ the natural and social constraints on human freedom in his theory of history, expecting that both could be eliminated through the development of productive forces. In failing to provide a full account of the normative and ideological dimensions of human interaction, Habermas suggests, Marx gave a merely one-sided description of the constraints on his emancipatory project, supplanting older ideological forms of domination with the equally impoverishing instrumental norms of technological control. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (London: Polity Press, 1987), esp. 25–63.

²⁰ Capital, i. 452.

²¹ Ibid. 173.

²² GR 161–2. See also the draft of a letter written to Vera Zasulich in March 1881, where Marx noted approvingly that the peasant community in Russia ‘has been freed from the strong but restrictive ties of consanguinity’. Marx and Engels, Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 296.

²³ GR 475, 494, 540.

²⁴ GR 475.

²⁵ Ibid. 490.

²⁶ The Grundrisse was compiled from Marx’s personal notebooks, which were not intended for publication. Many sentences in this work are therefore abbreviated or incomplete.

²⁷ Philosophy of Right, 174.

²⁸ Thus Z. A. Pelczynski suggests that Marx and Engels ‘ignore … the question whether such a vast world society could ever be perceived by anyone as a community, whether it could possibly become a real, meaningful focus of loyalty and unity for a vast multitude of individuals’: ‘Nation, Civil Society, State’, 227.

²⁹ ‘Reconsidering Historical Materialism’, 233–5.

³⁰ Although Hegel alluded in some passages to the possibility of a future phase of world history transcending the nation-state, as when he wrote that ‘the mind of a special nation … has essentially a particular principle on the lines of which it must run through a development of its consciousness and its actuality … But as a restricted mind its independence is something secondary; it passes into universal world-history, the events of which exhibit the dialectic of several national minds—the judgement of the world.’ Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 147.

³¹ EPMS 298.

³² Ibid. 299.

³³ See CCHP 14.

³⁴ EPMS 313.

³⁵ On the distinction between alienated and non-alienated needs in Marx’s thought, see Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London: Allison and Busby, 1974), esp. 25–98.

³⁶ EB 103.

³⁷ GR 162.

³⁸ JQ 150.

³⁹ Some examples of how this behaviour shaped the content of nationalist ideology will be discussed in Sect. 2.3.

⁴⁰ JQ 146–69.

⁴¹ GI 55.

⁴² Ibid. 51.

⁴³ Ibid. 69.

⁴⁴ CCHP 176–7.

⁴⁵ GI 194–5.

⁴⁶ The German Bund or Confederation was an alliance of thirty-five monarchs and four free cities, lacking a common administration, government, or army. Despite some discussion of the need for common action promoting all-German economic interests, the Confederation gave scant encouragement to private groups and corporations which called for such action, and generally acted as a common body only to repress movements for social change. For a survey of the Confederation’s activities, see Michael Hughes, Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945 (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), 55–67.

⁴⁷ The terms used in the original German text are respectively die Mittelklasse or die Bürgerklasse, and die Bürger. This terminology registers the authors’ scepticism about the German middle class’s capacity to act as an organized, politically conscious class before 1848, when its members finally asserted their common interests against the old ruling elites. While the German Ideology confidently describes the French or English ‘bourgeoisie’ as a distinct class, its authors were far more circumspect in applying this term to any section of German society before it had demonstrated, through joint political action, its full class credentials. Thus, in tracing the evolution of the ‘middle classes’ from mere ‘Bürger’ (trans, in GI as ‘citizen’) to fully fledged ‘bourgeois’, Marx and Engels clearly distinguish the intermediate ‘Bürgerklasse’ (trans, as ‘middle class’) which only later evolves into die Bourgeoisie. See MEAW 1: 258–9, and GI 76–7. Eric Hobsbawm provides further etymological assistance on this point. He points out that in French usage by the 1830s the term bourgeois was already defined in contrast to the lower classes or peuple, whereas in Germany in the same period the group described by the term Bürger was still contrasted with the older classes: the aristocracy, on the one hand, and the peasantry on the other. German writers were just beginning to associate their native Bürger with the ‘bourgeoisie’, and did so partly in the expectation that the former would eventually take a firm political stand against the traditional order. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise (London: Verso, 1990), 20.

⁴⁸ GI 196.

⁴⁹ Immanuel Kant came under particularly heavy fire in the German Ideology for supplying the German middle classes with a rationalization of their failure to launch an active assault against the conditions they volubly deplored. See GI 193–4.

⁵⁰ Marx and Engels noted that the paralysis of social and political opposition in Germany had, by default, greatly enlarged the role of philosophers and other intellectuals in elaborating nationalist doctrine. They differentiated this group from the socio-economic middle classes, but denied that they were capable of producing an independent political programme. Their ideas merely represented the ‘philosophic form’ of the middle class’s interests, and not an autonomous set of ideals pertaining to a separate academic caste or, for that matter, to German society as a whole. See GI 23–4.

⁵¹ Ibid. 55.

⁵² GI 56–7.

⁵³ Ibid. 56.

⁵⁴ Ibid. 57.

⁵⁵ Ibid. 470.

⁵⁶ GI 441.

⁵⁷ I deal with this theme more fully, in relation to Marx and Engels’ writings on non-European countries, in Ch. 5.

⁵⁸ For a discussion of the different views of France within the German national movement in the 1840s, see Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism from Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 1763–1867, trans. Sarah Hanbury-Tenison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 64–6.

⁵⁹ ‘The Russian Note’, MECW 7: 308–9.

⁶⁰ ‘The Civic Militia Bill’, MECW 7: 257–9.

⁶¹ See Sect. 3.2 below.

⁶² GI 38.

3. Explaining Nationalism

¹ See e.g. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 17.

² Marx explicitly acknowledged the need for this kind of explanation in Capital, where he wrote that ‘It is in each case the relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers … in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence … This does not prevent the same economic basis … from displaying endless variations and gradations in its appearance, as the result of innumerable different circumstances, natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analysing these empirically given conditions.’ Capital, iii, trans. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 927–8.

³ RCR 25.

⁴ In this respect, Marx and Engels’ main explanatory concerns are quite different from those of the ‘sociological’ theories that have dominated the literature on nationalism in the last two decades, and whose proponents are mainly interested in the question whether nations (not nationalisms) are perennial entities or the novel—and hence probably transient—creations of modernity. These two positions are perhaps best represented, respectively, by Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

⁵ Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (London: Tavistock, 1981), 4.

⁶ It is inevitable, however, that Marx and Engels’ empirical writings often reflect quite different views of how their general theories should be applied to specific cases of nationalism. As we will see later, Engels’ remarks on national issues were frequently framed within a speculative, highly deterministic conception of historical change. Marx was inclined towards a more activist and class-centred view of nationalism, showing less interest than his colleague in the historical and cultural aspects of contemporary national conflicts.

⁷ Alan Gilbert suggests a similar relationship between Marx’s general theory and what he calls ‘auxiliary statements’ of a more specific character, in Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981).

⁸ Thus John Breuilly has asserted that ‘within the Marxist framework the only criterion one can employ’ in identifying the dominant class of a national movement ‘is not direct evidence about their social origins but to note which class interests the national movement serves’. Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 23.

⁹ David Blackbourne, ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: Reappraising German History in the Nineteenth Century’, in David Blackbourne and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 167.

¹⁰ Thus, writing four years after the revolutions, Engels noted that between 1815 and 1840 ‘every political defeat of the middle class drew after it a victory on the field of commercial legislation. And, certainly, the Prussian Protective Tariff of 1818, and the formation of the Zollverein, were worth a good deal more to the traders and manufacturers of Germany than the equivocal right of expressing, in the chambers of some diminutive dukedom, their want of confidence in ministers who laughed at their votes.’ RCR 8.

¹¹ Marx and Engels generally used the term ‘bourgeoisie’ to refer to the larger financial and entrepreneurial sectors of the broader ‘middle classes’, while the ‘petty-bourgeoisie’ or Kleinbürger comprised those engaged in smaller enterprises and low-paid professions. Each group possessed its own political, intellectual, and artistic representatives who, according to Marx and Engels, were primarily responsible for articulating common class or quasi-class objectives. In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx pointed out that these ‘spokesmen’ did not necessarily have their social origins in the class whose concerns they voiced; but he denied that they were capable of forming an autonomous intellectual élite, since their activities were not insulated from wider social conflicts. Thus Marx, the son of a civil servant, and Engels, scion of a manufacturing family, could claim quite consistently to speak on behalf of the working class. See EB 131–2.

¹² RCR 23–4.

¹³ ‘The Bourgeoisie and Counter-Revolution’, MECW 8: 159.

¹⁴ See Marx, ‘Camphausen’, MECW 8: 295–7.

¹⁵ For recent, non-Marxist, accounts which emphasize these factors, see Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism, and Hughes, Nationalism and Society, 84–100.

¹⁶ For citations and a thorough critique of this body of historiography, see Blackbourne and Eley, Peculiarities.

¹⁷ Marx and Engels were not alone in calculating that in a revolutionary conflict between German society and the state, the bourgeoisie was the pivotal group whose support could tip the balance at the showdown. Looking for guidance to the English and French ‘models’ of capitalist development in the early, optimistic days of revolution, German liberals—including bourgeois liberals—eagerly endorsed the myth of the bourgeoisie’s historical ‘mission’ to create a modern German nation-state. See Blackbourne, ‘The Discreet Charm of the German Bourgeoisie’, ibid., esp. 188–9, 251–2. Historians who challenge this myth often mis-leadingly ascribe a specifically ‘Marxist’ lineage to that legend, although many acknowledge the ambiguities in Marx and Engels’ own contribution on this issue: see e.g. Pamela M. Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1990), esp. 294–302.

¹⁸ Engels underlined this factor in 1884 when he wrote that in 1848 ‘the German bourgeoisie, which had just begun to establish its large-scale industry, had neither the strength or the courage to win for itself unconditional domination in the state, nor was there any compelling necessity to do so.’ ‘Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’, MECW 26: 122.

¹⁹ ‘The Bourgeoisie and Counter-Revolution’, MECW 8: 162.

²⁰ Ibid. 160.

²¹ For a similar argument by a contemporary historian, see Blackbourne, ‘The Discreet Charm’, in Blackbourne and Ely, Peculiarities, esp. 289.

²² ‘The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna’, MECW 7: 504.

²³ CSF 85.

²⁴ Ibid. 127.

²⁵ Ibid. 86.

²⁶ ‘Mediation and Intervention. Razdetzky and Cavaignac’, MECW 7: 402.

²⁷ ‘English-French Mediation in Italy’, MECW 7: 481.

²⁸ Thus Marx cited para. V of the Constitution, which stated that ‘The French Republic will never employ its armed forces against the freedom of any people whatsoever’, although, he observed, ‘the French President is using the French army against the freedom of Rome’. CSF 95.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ EB 119.

³¹ ‘The Revolutionary Movement in Italy’, MECW 8: 101–2.

³² Thus, Marx described England as ‘a country which, through her industry and commerce, dominates all the revolutionary nations of the Continent and nevertheless remains relatively independent of her customers because she dominates the Asian, American and Australian markets … England more than any other country pursues her own, independent course of development’. Ibid. 101.

³³ Ibid. 214.

³⁴ Marx, ‘Lord Palmerston’, MECW 12: 347.

³⁵ Ibid. 347.

³⁶ I do not attempt here to evaluate Marx’s arguments against the historical record; my aim is simply to clarify his distinctive form of analysis. For a concise, mainstream account of Palmerston’s foreign policy in the period when Marx was writing, see J. A. S. Grenville, Europe Reshaped: 1848–1878 (London: Fontana, 1976), 82–3.

³⁷ Marx also evaluated this approach in terms of its success in reassuring liberal opinion at home that the British policy was not designed to bolster foreign absolutism against its liberal and constitutionalist enemies. He wrote that if the ‘art of [Palmerston’s] diplomacy does not shine in the actual results of his foreign negotiations, it shines the more brilliantly in the construction he induced the English people to lay on them, by accepting phrases for facts, phantasies for realities, and high-sounding pretexts for shabby motives.’ ‘Lord Palmerston’, MECW 12: 348.

³⁸ Ibid. 347–8.

³⁹ Ibid. 347.

⁴⁰ Quoted in Grenville, Europe Reshaped, 82.

⁴¹ Hannah Arendt stresses this point in her classic study of totalitarian movements, writing that: ‘Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who … cannot be integrated into any organisation based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organisations or trade unions.’ The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1973), 311.

⁴² CM 496.

⁴³ ‘The Magyar Struggle’, MECW 8: 229.

⁴⁴ RCR 29.

⁴⁵ RCR 29.

⁴⁶ ‘The Magyar Struggle’, MECW 8: 229–30.

⁴⁷ This class-based form of analysis did not unduly simplify the complex patchwork of class and national tensions that plagued the Habsburg empire. Engels acknowledged its complexity when he wrote that Metternich ‘kept the burghers and the peasantry of each nation under control by means of the aristocracy of that nation and the peasantry of every other nation, and he kept the aristocracy of each nation under control by its fear of that nation’s burghers and peasantry.’ Ibid. 229–30.

⁴⁸ Ibid. 216.

⁴⁹ EB 187.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid. 187–8.

⁵² Ibid. 192.

⁵³ Ibid. 188.

⁵⁴ EB 189.

⁵⁵ Ibid. 192.

⁵⁶ ‘From Paris to Berne’, MECW 7: 520 and 522. Marx’s comments on the peasantry were not always free from this kind of thinking, particularly in his earlier writings. In 1874, however, he defended himself against the charge of the Russian anarchist Bakunin that ‘the peasant mob … does not enjoy the goodwill of the Marxists and … will apparently be governed by the urban factory proletariat’. Marx insisted that the working class’s policy should be to address peasant concerns by ‘measures needed to enable the peasant to directly improve his condition, i.e. to win him over to the revolution; these measures … contain the seeds which will facilitate the transition from the private ownership of land to collective ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this economically, of his own accord’. Marx, ‘Notes on Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy’, MECW 24: 517.

⁵⁷ Engels offered a detailed analysis of the regional, economic, and political differences among the German peasants in 1848 in RCR 11.

⁵⁸ EB 188.

⁵⁹ EB 191.

⁶⁰ ‘Notes on Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy’, MECW 24: 517–18.

⁶¹ RCR 9.

⁶² Engels, ‘The Prussian Military Question’, MECW 20: 69.

⁶³ EB 133.

⁶⁴ CWF 330.

⁶⁵ Breuilly, for example, writes that ‘order rather than change; consensus rather than conflict; threats from below rather than from above: these tend to become the central concerns’ of the petty bourgeoisie. ‘The ideology which appeals tends to be negative, stressing the absence of social division, of class identity and class conflict and disorder. At times of political crisis … this can lead to support for fascist or similar movements which make these appeals a central feature of their programmes.’ Nationalism and the State, 318.

⁶⁶ CWF 332–3.

⁶⁷ Ibid. 336.

⁶⁸ Ibid. 496.

⁶⁹ Ibid. 491.

⁷⁰ A few years later, in his critique of the German Social Democrats’ party programme, Marx registered his sharpest objections to the assertion that, in relation to the working class, ‘all other classes are a single reactionary mass’. This fatalistic diagnosis, he argued, effectively aligned the workers’ party with ‘the absolutist and feudal opponents’ of the bourgeoisie by discouraging efforts to attract broadly based popular support. The much-misunderstood Manifesto, Marx pointed out, had not claimed that all other classes were a ‘single reactionary mass’, but only that all of the classes opposing the bourgeoisie, ‘the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class’. Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, MECW 24: 88–9.

⁷¹ CWF 501.

4. Ethics and Realpolitik in the National Policy, 1847–1849

¹ See e.g. Löwy, ‘Marxists and the National Question,’ 81–5, and J. L. Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984).

² For a discussion of Marx and Engels’ arguments with these men, see Horace B. Davis, Nationalism and Socialism: Marxist and Labor Theories of Nationalism to 1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 27–54.

³ The literature on Marx and morality presents different views as to whether Marx and Engels subscribed to any moral theory at all, and whether their critique of conventional morality enriched or impoverished their critique of capitalist society. In an unusually sympathetic reading, Allen Wood has suggested that Marx rejected all forms of moral and ethical argument as we know it, condemning the conflicts associated with capitalism simply because they were associated with obsolescent relations of production; see Wood, ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1/3 (spring 1972), 244–82; and id., ‘Marx and Equality’, in John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),283–303. Steven Lukes has argued that Marx defended a distinctive ‘morality of emancipation’ against what he saw as a narrower Rechtbased ethics; but that this was a one-sided, consequentialist morality, unable to address ethical problems in the ‘here and now’. See Lukes, Marxism andMorality.

⁴ See Chris Brown, ‘Marxism and International Ethics’, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds.), Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 236. Reproducing the standard view of Marx and Engels as unregenerate realists in international affairs, Brown asserts that ‘The only theory of international relations that can be discerned’ in their writings is ‘Clausewitzian’. Like other international relations scholars before him, Brown suggests that this state-centric ‘mode of analysis’ supplants rather than supplements an investigation of the ‘economic interests’ governing international relations, thereby producing a sort of theoretical schizophrenia between the materialist and the realist Marx.

⁵ Marx, ‘On Poland’, MECW 6: 388; German citations from MEAW 1: 356.

⁶ I use the term ‘political realism’ to refer to a diverse tradition of thought, distinguished by an emphasis on conditions that limit the power of morality to engender reciprocity and self-restraint. This tradition encompasses several varieties of international ‘realism’, whose proponents often regard particular states and nations as effective moral communities but question the capacity of moral argument to regulate relations between them. My discussion below considers the relationship of Marx and Engels’ internationalist strategy to both the moral scepticism of the broad realist tradition and the state-centric premisses of its international branch.

⁷ ‘The Frankfurt Assembly debates the Polish Question’, MECW 7: 350.

⁸ Ibid. 351.

⁹ ‘On Poland’, MECW 6: 552. This speech was delivered some months after those of the same title cited above and below.

¹⁰ This view has recently been reiterated by Nardin and Mapel, who write that Marx and his followers ‘focus on an end-state, the classless society, and discuss tactics for producing that end-state, not moral obligations’. See ‘Convergence and Divergence’, in Traditions of International Ethics, 302–3.

¹¹ Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 142.

¹² J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), 154. Consequentialism is usually contrasted with deontological ethical systems, which are built around the notion that certain rules and obligations are morally binding regardless of the consequences that flow from their observance. But the line between these two systems should not be drawn too sharply: rules and principles may be formulated in a way that takes consequences into account, while outcome-oriented ethics usually accommodate some deontological considerations.

¹³ ‘Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher’, MECW 3: 144.

¹⁴ As Joseph Raz has argued, a view as to the likely consequences of an act or policy requires actors to step back from their immediate, particular aims, and to reassess these in the light of other people’s projects and interests. A restricted consequentialism can thus yield strong arguments for observing rules designed to resolve conflicts of interest, and for meeting wider obligations. See Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 265–86.

¹⁵ ‘On Poland’, MECW 6: 389.

¹⁶ ‘German Foreign Policy and the Latest Events in Prague’, MECW 7: 212.

¹⁷ Thus Engels wrote that the annexation of Polish territories with large German-speaking minorities ‘would entail the suppression of language and nationality of more than half of Posen’s Polish population and especially that part of the province in which the national insurrection raged with the greatest violence and intensity’. (‘A New Partition of Poland’, MECW 7: 65.) He elaborated the political consequences of this in a later article, observing that the privileged position of the German minority’s language and administrative system in Posen had ‘impeded centralisation, that most potent of political means by which a country achieves rapid development’. (The Frankfurt Assembly Debates’, MECW 7: 339.)

¹⁸ ‘The Danish-Prussian Armistice’, MECW 7: 424–5.

¹⁹ ‘Germany’s Foreign Policy’, MECW 7: 166.

²⁰ ‘The Frankfurt Assembly Debates’, MECW 7: 343.

²¹ Ibid. 342.

²² Ibid. 343.

²³ Ibid. 337–44.

²⁴ Ibid. 375–7.

²⁵ ‘The Prague Uprising’, MECW 7: 92–3.

²⁶ See e.g. Talmon, The Myth of the Nation, 21–66.

²⁷ Ronaldo Munck, The Difficult Dialogue: Marxism and Nationalism (London: Zed Books, 1986), 10–14.

²⁸ ‘The Frankfurt Assembly Debates’, MECW 7: 350.

²⁹ Ibid. 351.

³⁰ ‘On Poland’, MECW 6: 546.

³¹ Ibid. 546.

³² Ibid. 549.

³³ JQ 150–68.

³⁴ Ibid. 163.

³⁵ Ibid. 164.

³⁶ I will argue in Ch. 6 that these consequences can be seen again today in some formerly communist countries.

³⁷ ‘On Poland’, MECW 6: 549.

³⁸ ‘The Frankfurt Assembly Debates’, MECW 7: 352.

³⁹ ‘Democratic Pan-Slavism’, MECW 8: 376.

⁴⁰ Philosophy of History, 39; Philosophy of Mind, 150.

⁴¹ These inconsistencies have been examined in close detail by a Ukrainian Marxist, Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistone’ Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, ed. and trans. John-Paul Hinka (Glasgow: Critique Books, 1986). I mention only a few basic problems below.

⁴² On Hungarian nationalist policies and their effects on the political alignments of 1848–9, see Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), i. 120–5.

⁴³ ‘Democratic Pan-Slavism’, MECW 8: 369. A few pages later, Engels tried to deflect charges that he was speaking ‘on behalf of German national prejudices’ with the argument that he had hitherto directed his sharpest criticisms against ‘the despicable role that Germany has … played in history’. This was true; but it was one thing to say that one’s own nation had sometimes behaved badly, and quite another to suggest that other nations-the Slavs, Danes, and other neighbouring peoples-were innately inferior to the Germans.

⁴⁴ RCR 45.

⁴⁵ ‘Democratic Pan-Slavism’, MECW 8: 367.

⁴⁶ Ibid. 371.

⁴⁷ ‘The Prague Uprising’, MECW 7: 93.

⁴⁸ Ibid. 92.

⁴⁹ This interpretation is suggested in the editor’s footnote in Marx and Engels, The Revolutions of 1848, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 126.

⁵⁰ ‘The Danish-Prussian Armistice’, MECW 7: 423.

⁵¹ ‘What have the Working Classes to do with Poland?’, MECW 20: 152–61.

⁵² As R. J. Vincent has pointed out, the tendency to downplay the internal aspects of national self-determination also appears in contemporary international law, although this raises difficult juridical questions about what claims citizens may make against the collectivity. See Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73–90.

⁵³ For detailed analyses of Marx’s thinking on rights, see Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 48–70 and 139–49, and Buchanan, Marx and Justice, 50–85 and 177–9.

⁵⁴ As Isaiah Berlin has suggested, the fact that nationalists are often willing to take these risks, and to endure domestic deprivation or even ‘bullying’ when these are inflicted by co-nationals, undoubtedly attests to the high value that they-and perhaps human beings generally-attach to the recognition and protection conferred by independent statehood. See Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 155–7. My point, however, is that a deeper appreciation of these goals cannot take us very far in the search for measures aimed at restraining nationalists who resort to repression and violence.

⁵⁵ I will say more about this in Ch. 6.

5. Rescuing Internationalism

¹ Marx added the ‘Asiatic’ mode to his much-criticized, European-based schema of ancient–feudal–capitalist modes of production in the Grundrisse (1857–8) and the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), but he never fully integrated it into his global theory of capitalism. For a thorough discussion of the ‘Asiatic’ mode and its difficulties, see Umberto Melotti, Marx and the Third World, ed. Malcolm Caldwell, trans. Pat Ransford (London: Macmillan, 1977).

² Marx did devote several sections in Capital to colonialism, but he treated the subject almost exclusively from the point of view of the metropolitan countries and the emergence of a ‘global’ market.

³ ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, MECW 12: 217–18. As V. G. Kiernan has noted, this passage also epitomizes Marx’s somewhat irritating tendency to jump from observations about India to sweeping generalizations about ‘Asia’ as a whole. See Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 172.

⁴ This conclusion has been reached by many commentators, including Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernisation (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 12; and David Fernbach (ed.), Surveys From Exile (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 24. Kiernan distinguishes more sharply than these authors between ‘the Marx of the 1850s’ and after, but maintains that the earlier of these Marxes ‘judged any price worth paying to get rid of Asia’s senseless torpor, even the brutal surgery of imperialism’. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, 175.

⁵ ‘The British Rule in India’, MECW 12: 132.

⁶ Marx on Colonialism, 3 and 12–13.

⁷ Marx and the Third World, 118. Unlike Avineri, Melotti vigorously defends his realist Marx against critics who cry ‘ethnocentrism’ from an equally problematic standpoint of ‘cultural relativism’. But Melotti’s defensive strategy relies too heavily on this somewhat straw-mannish distinction to reassure sceptics, while his assumptions about ‘objective’ historical progress echo rather than resolve the basic problem in Marx’s thinking on colonialism.

⁸ Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, MECW 12: 126.

⁹ ‘The Russo-Turkish Difficulty’, MECW 12: 198.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid. 198–9; see also Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, MECW 12: 217.

¹² Marx to Engels, 14 June 1853, MESC 79.

¹³ ‘The Russo-Turkish Difficulty’, MECW 12: 199.

¹⁴ This position recalls the Manifesto’s emphatic distinction between the ‘national’ cultures its authors denied wanting to abolish and the exclusionary ‘class cultures’ they opposed. See Sect. 1.3 above.

¹⁵ ‘The Russo-Turkish Difficulty’, MECW 12: 198.

¹⁶ ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, MECW 12: 218.

¹⁷ Ibid. 221.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Fernbach, Surveys From Exile, 26.

²⁰ ‘The Revolt in the Indian Army’, MECW 15: 298.

²¹ Marx himself wrote only a handful of articles on China, and often asked his colleague to cover events—particularly their military aspects—in the Far and Middle East.

²² ‘Persia–China’, MECW 15: 282.

²³ Ibid. 281.

²⁴ ‘The Indian Revolt’, MECW 15: 353.

²⁵ ‘Investigation of Tortures in India’, MECW 15: 341.

²⁶ ‘The Indian Revolt’, MECW 15: 356.

²⁷ See Engels, ‘French Rule in Algeria’, cited in Avineri, Marx on Colonialism, 43; on Mexico: ‘Democratic Pan-Slavism’, MECW 8: 365.

²⁸ ‘French Rule in Algeria’, MEOC 158.

²⁹ Marx, ‘Parliamentary Debate on India’, cited in Avineri, Marx on Colonialism, 76.

³⁰ ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, MECW 12: 221.

³¹ Ibid. 217.

³² Capital, i. 603.

³³ Marx and Engels, ‘First International Review’, MEOC 18.

³⁴ Marx to Zasulich, Mar. 1881, in Marx and Engels, Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 296.

³⁵ Marx, preface to the second Russian edn. of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW 24: 426.

³⁶ Engels to Karl Kautsky, 12 Sept. 1882, MESC 342.

³⁷ ‘The War Question’, MECW 12: 216.

³⁸ ‘British Incomes in India’, MECW 15: 349–52.

³⁹ Engels to Marx, 7 Oct. 1858, MESC 103.

⁴⁰ See V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975).

⁴¹ ‘The Question of the Ionian Islands’, MEOC 231.

⁴² Engels to Marx, 23 May 1856, MESC 86.

⁴³ As Engels described Ireland, ibid.

⁴⁴ Marx to Engels, 30 Nov. 1869, MEI 157.

⁴⁵ Marx to Siegfried Meyer and August Vogt, 9 Apr. 1870, ibid., MEI 407.

⁴⁶ Ibid. 407–8.

⁴⁷ ‘Confidential Communication’, MECW 21: 120.

⁴⁸ Marx to Engels, 2 Nov. 1867, MESC 182.

⁴⁹ Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 29 Nov. 1869, MESC 216.

⁵⁰ Marx to Engels, 10 Dec. 1869, MESC 218.

⁵¹ Marx to Kugelmann, 29 Nov. 1869, MESC 216–17.

⁵² See e.g. Munck, The Difficult Dialogue, 3–22.

⁵³ Marx to Meyer and Vogt, 9 Apr. 1870, MEI 407–8.

⁵⁴ Marx to Engels, 30 Nov. 1867, MESC 184.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Engels to Marx, 9 Dec. 1869, MESC 217–18.

⁵⁷ Marx to Engels, 10 Dec. 1869, MESC 219.

⁵⁸ Marx to Kugelmann, 6 Apr. 1868, MESC 191.

⁵⁹ Marx to Engels, 30 Nov. 1867, MESC 184.

⁶⁰ Marx to Engels, 14 Dec. 1867, MEI 159. Also see Engels’ 1882 criticism of Fenian methods in ‘About the Irish Question’, MEOC 262–5.

⁶¹ ‘Revolution in China and in Europe’, MECW 12: 93.

⁶² Marx to Engels, 8 Oct. 1858, MESC 103.

⁶³ Marx to Engels, 30 Nov. 1867, MESC 184–5.

⁶⁴ For a general account of Lassalle’s influence over German Social Democracy and Marx’s response, see John Schwartzmantel, Socialism and the Idea of the Nation (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), ch. 5.

⁶⁵ See ibid. 114–16.

⁶⁶ Marx to Kugelmann, 23 Feb. 1865, MESC 156–60.

⁶⁷ Marx to Schweitzer, 13 Oct. 1868, MESC 200–2.

⁶⁸ Marx to Kugelmann, 23 Feb. 1865, MESC 159.

⁶⁹ Engels to Kautsky, 12 Sept. 1882, MEI 332.

⁷⁰ Marx and Engels, ‘For Poland’, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 391.

⁷¹ For a rare, detailed analysis of Marx’s inaugural address and his role in the founding of the International, see Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London: Macmillan, 1965), 30–55.

⁷² In a letter to Engels written on 4 Nov. 1864, Marx provided a revealing account of his authorial aims and the compromises he was obliged to make in drafting the address and the preamble to the International’s rules. See MESC 137–40.

⁷³ Ibid. 138.

⁷⁴ ‘Record of Marx’s Interview with the World Correspondend, MECW 22: 601.

⁷⁵ MEI 303.

⁷⁶ ‘Record of Marx’s Interview with the World Correspondend, MECW 22: 602.

⁷⁷ Ibid. 601.

⁷⁸ For Marx’s response to Bakunin’s criticisms, see his ‘Notes on Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy’, MECW 24: 487–526.

⁷⁹ Marx to Engels, 7 June 1866, MESC 166.

⁸⁰ See Marx to Kugelmann, 29 Nov. 1869, MESC 216–17.

⁸¹ Engels to Marx, 15 Aug. 1870, MESC 227–8.

⁸² Ibid. 227.

⁸³ Ibid. 228, and Marx, ‘First Address of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War’, MECW 22: 3–7.

⁸⁴ Engels to Marx, 15 Aug. 1870, MESC 6.

⁸⁵ Marx and Engels, ‘Letter to the Committee of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party’, MECW 22: 260.

⁸⁶ ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, MECW 24: 89–90.

⁸⁷ ‘First Address of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War’, MECW 22: 5.

⁸⁸ CWF 353.

6. The Revenge of Nations, 1870– ?

¹ CWF 501.

² CM 490.

³ Anti-Dühring (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1943), 191–2.

⁴ Engels to August Bebel, 16 Dec. 1879, MESC 311. For a discussion of Engels’ later views on war, see Sigmund Neumann and Mark von Hagen, ‘Engels and Marx on Revolution, War, and the Army in Society’, in Peter Paret (ed.), The Makers of Modern Strategy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 262–80.

⁵ The impact of this trend on working-class consciousness is traced by Eric Hobsbawm, ‘What is the Workers’ Country?’, in his Worlds of Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), 49–64.

⁶ ‘First Address on the Franco-Prussian War, MECW 22: 7.

⁷ ‘Prospect in France and England’, MECW 14: 144–5.

⁸ ‘British Incomes in India’, MECW 15: 352.

⁹ Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, 9 Apr. 1870, MESC 222.

¹⁰ Engels to Karl Kautsky, 12 Sept. 1882, MESC 330–1.

¹¹ In an unusually doctrinaire passage written in 1879, Marx and Engels expressed their reluctance to abandon their polar-revolutionary model of class struggle in capitalism. ‘In view of our whole past’, they wrote to a group of German Social Democratic leaders, ‘ there is only one road open to us. For almost forty years we have emphasized that class struggle is the immediate driving power of history, and in particular that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the great lever of the modern social revolution; we, therefore, cannot possibly cooperate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement: ‘Circular Letter’, 17–18 Sept. 1879, MESC 307. In their practical dealings, the two men were generally more pragmatic than this rhetoric suggests, but their propensity to theoretical bull-headedness is unmistakable here, as is the sense that their revolutionary theory was in serious trouble.

¹² CM 488.

¹³ Paraphrasing his colleague’s position after Marx’s death, Engels explained that only under free trade could capitalism reach ‘its inevitable results’: ‘society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-labourers there … an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression’, making free trade ‘the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be soonest created’ on a global scale. ‘Protection and Free Trade’, MEOC 269. See also Marx and Engels’ original 1847 speeches to the Free Trade Congress at Brussels, MECW 6: 284–90.

¹⁴ Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945), 11–16.

¹⁵ Engels, ‘Protection and Free Trade’, MEOC 267–70.

¹⁶ For a survey of recent literature which indicates a growing agreement about the ‘autonomy’ of the state among sociologists, political scientists, and international relations scholars, see Cornelia Navari, ‘Introduction: The State as a Contested Concept in International Relations’, in id. (ed.), The Condition of States (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 1–18.

¹⁷ Reinhard Bendix, Embattled Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 313–14.

¹⁸ Nationalism and After, 19.

¹⁹ The class-or-nation thesis has, of course, been propagated at least as widely by Marx’s disciples as by his opponents. Despite his pragmatic uses of the doctrine of national self-determination, Lenin could boldly declare that ‘Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the … most refined and civilised brand.’ Quoted in Schwartzmantel, Socialism and the Idea of the Nation, 177. Schwartzmantel goes on to insist, against the view proposed here, that Lenin’s position simply ‘reasserted the fundamental views of Marx on this subject’.

²⁰ E. J. Hobsbawm stresses this point in Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 88–90.

²¹ As Hugh Seton-Watson has pointed out, even in wartime the most powerful classes often felt a stronger affinity with an enemy government than with the popular democratic and socialist movements of their own compatriots, and frequently feared the latter more. For further historical examples and discussion, see Seton-Watson, Nations and States (London: Methuen, 1977), 417–41.

²² I borrow this term from Anthony Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979), 191, but use it in a very different way.

²³ I use the cumbersome terms ‘central and eastern’ or ‘post-communist’ Europe to make broad generalizations about very diverse countries and regions which lived under communist rule until 1989/90. It will be clear from what follows that I do not think such generalizations can take us very far, although the scope of this work prevents me from discussing individual countries in any depth.

²⁴ Zarko Puhovski, ‘The Moral Basis of Political Restructuring’, in Chris Brown (ed.), Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1994), 207–8.

²⁵ See Istvan Deák, ‘Post-Post-Communist Hungary’, New York Review of Books 41/14, 11 Aug. 1994, pp. 33–8.

²⁶ There are interesting parallels and contrasts between the situation in neighbouring Slovakia and recent developments in Poland and Hungary. Having engineered a ‘velvet divorce’ from the Czechoslovak federation in January 1993, the nationalist government of (ex-communist) Vladimir Meciar proceeded to throttle the reform process and wreak havoc on the Slovak economy. Meciar’s authoritarian-populist style infuriated his colleagues, who pushed him out in March 1994, setting up a moderate coalition government. This paved the way at last for a rapprochement with the new, more conciliatory, Hungarian government, and for substantial measures aimed at improving the status of Slovakia’s Hungarian minority, an issue which had been overheated by the refusal of both previous governments to discuss it constructively. Meciar’s party, however, remained extremely popular among the country’s peasants, elderly people, and the 15% of the population who are unemployed. Meciar returned as prime minister after the elections of November 1994, forming a coalition government with parties of the far right and post-communist left.

²⁷ For a classic statement of this problem, although one quite different from my own, see Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics, 2nd edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 74–91.

²⁸ EB 103.

²⁹ For a vivid illustration of this point, see the chapter on Ukraine in Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: BBC Books/Chatto & Windus, 1993), 77–107.

Bibliography

This bibliography consists mainly of works cited in the text. An English-language edition of Marx and Engels’ writings, Collected Works, was started by Lawrence and Wishart, London and Progress Publishers, Moscow in 1975; thirty-five volumes (numbered 1–30, 40–5) out of a projected fifty were available at the time of writing. Most of the citations in my text were taken from this edition, although in quoting Marx and Engels’ letters I have usually referred to Selected Correspondence. I have cited from other collections in three cases: (a) where these include material not yet available in MECW (the texts not yet published here include Marx’s Capital, his preparatory notes for that work and other economic manuscripts, and the later correspondence); (b) where I have been unable to locate certain texts, especially the records of some speeches, in MECW; or (c) more rarely, when I have found other translations to be clearer.

Works by Engels

Anti-Dühring (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1943).

Works by Marx

Capital, i, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

Capital, iii, trans. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).

Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1953).

Works by Marx and Engels

Ausgewählte Werke, 6 vols. (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972).

Collected Works, 35 vols. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, and Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975– ).

The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).

Ireland and the Irish Question (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978).

On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).

Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979).

The Revolutions of 1848, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).

Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975).

Surveys From Exile, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).

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———Culture, Identity and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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———The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1986).

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———Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981).

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HABERMAS, JÜRGEN, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (London: Polity Press, 1987).

HEGEL, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894).

———The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956).

———The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

HELLER, AGNES, The Theory of Need in Marx (London: Allison and Busby, 1974).

HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFRIED, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, afterword ed. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf Verlag, 1967).

HERTZ, FRIEDRICH, Nationality in History and Politics (London: Routledge, 1944).

HOBSBAWM, E. J., ‘Karl Marx’s Contribution to Historiography’, in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology and Social Science (London: Fontana, 1977), 265–83.

———Echoes of the Marseillaise (London: Verso, 1990).

———Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

———Worlds of Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984).

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———‘Nationalist Movements and Social Classes’, in Anthony D. Smith (ed.), Nationalist Movements (London: Macmillan, 1976), 111–33.

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———and HAMPSHIRE, STUART (eds.), The Socialist Idea (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).

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———Marxism and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

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Index

absolutism 9, 24–5, 30, 36, 82, 84, 86, 91, 105, 109, 114–15, 119–20, 138, 144

Algeria 184

alienation 35–6, 75–81, 91, 246

see also freedom; identity

Arendt, Hannah 123 n.

Asiatic mode of production 172 n.

Austria:

and counter-revolution 107, 116–17, 162–3

and German unification 108, 110–11

see also Habsburg Empire

autonomy of nationalism, the 7, 22, 96–8, 112–13, 210, 219–41

Avineri, Shlomo 174

Bakunin, Mikhail 131 n., 139, 202–3, 205

Balkans 161–2, 233

see also Croats; Serbs; Slovenes; Yugoslavia

Bauer, Bruno 80

Bismarck, Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von 198–9, 204–5, 207

Bonaparte, see Napoleon

bourgeoisie:

British 118–22, 173, 180, 188

definitions of 83 n., 105 n.

and foreign policy 110, 114–22, 142, 210–14

French 113–18, 130

German 35, 82–3, 104–14

in the Habsburg empire 125

and national ideology 48–50, 53–6, 83, 101, 104–14

and revolution 38–9, 108–19

see also petty bourgeoisie

Britain:

concepts of nationality in 16–17

and the Electoral Reform Act 214

foreign policy of 114–15, 118–22

and the world market 119, 122, 187–8, 218

see also colonialism

capitalism:

and exploitation 39, 65, 77, 173

and the nation-state 41, 46, 48, 115, 118, 171, 216–19

and social development 126, 173–7, 179

and the world market 48–9, 67, 81–2, 88, 187, 211

Carr, E. H. 217–18, 220

China 172–3, 182–3, 185, 195–6

civil society 23–4, 27–35, 42, 79, 82

classes:

alliances between 51–2, 55, 97, 103, 106–7, 110–12, 115, 117, 128–9, 131–6, 197–8

definitions of 51, 103, 124, 128, 132

and historical materialism 37–40

and national oppression 144–6, 148, 154–5, 159, 170, 178–80, 185, 189–97

and nationality 7, 40–2, 45–56, 68, 94–8, 100–14, 122–36, 142–3, 199–200, 207–8, 210–21, 228–9

see also bourgeoisie; peasants; petty-bourgeoisie; proletariat

Cohen, G. A. 70

Cold War views of Marx and Marxism 3, 6, 172

colonialism 172–95, 204, 216

see also China; India; Ireland

communism:

Marx and Engels’ vision of 36, 58, 62–3, 65, 74, 185–6

and national diversity 40–7

‘really existing’ 2–3, 230–2, 235

see also revolution; state

community and nationality 5, 15, 28–30, 57

see also identity

consequentialism 139–40 n., 146–8, 150–1, 167, 174–5, 191–3, 209

see also ethics and nationalism

Crimean War 215

Croats 138, 165, 233

cultural relativism 174 n., 179, 184–5

Czechs 138, 152, 164–6

Danes 164n.

democracy:

and demands for national dignity 248, 255

Marx’s early views on 26–7, 31–5, 155–6

as a restraint on extremist nationalism 231, 235–40, 242, 245–6, 250, 253–5

and working-class patriotism 214, 220

see also nationality and nations, concepts of

élites in national movements 122–4, 132

see also masses, concept of

Engels, Friedrich, and Marx:

collaborative relationship between 13

differences in the approaches of 100 n., 103, 124, 136–7, 165

England, see Britain

Enlightenment 20–1, 23, 54

ethics and nationalism 5, 138–70, 181, 191–6

see also national self-determination

ethnic and ‘natural’ sources of nations 43–7, 60–2, 68, 223–4

Eurocentrism 174, 180–1, 184–6

Fenians 194–5

Feuerbach, Ludwig 27

Fichte, J. G. 18, 198

First International, see International Working Men’s Association

First World War 209, 221

France:

concepts of nationality in 16–17, 134–6

foreign policy of 114–18, 204

peasant nationalism in 127–32

see also Paris Commune

Franco-Prussian War 134, 136, 204–7, 212–13, 215

Frankfurt Assembly 10, 19, 107–11, 149, 151

free trade 217–19, 242

see also protectionism

freedom:

and civil society 23–4, 27, 155–6

and class society 38–9, 247

and communism 58, 69

and community 26–7, 251

and identity 68–9, 71–80, 90, 246–52

as a restraint on national conflict 241–5, 254

see also identity; national self-determination

French Revolution (1789) 17, 23, 84

Gellner, E. 98 n.

German Confederation 83 n., 89, 104

Germany:

civilizing mission of 164

concepts of the nation in 16–22, 82–91, 102, 198, 229–31, 249

debates about unification of 19–20, 82–3, 97, 104–14, 149–52, 198–9

foreign policy of 149–50, 204–6, 218

liberal nationalism in 84–6, 88–9, 104–14

and the Napoleonic wars 18

socialist movement in 198–9, 203, 206–7

and universal manhood suffrage 214

see also Frankfurt Assembly; Prussia

Habermas, Jürgen 66 n.

Habsburg empire 10, 114, 125–7, 138, 162–6

Hegel, G. W. F. 22–36, 43, 54 n., 69–73, 76, 163, 165–6

see also Young Hegelians

Herder, Johann Gottfried 9, 17–18, 43

historical materialism 15, 36–8, 57, 59–62, 94

‘historyless’ nations 25–6, 138, 140–2, 163–7, 175, 184, 188, 195–6, 233

Hobbes, Thomas 244

Holy Alliance 89, 114, 138, 144–5, 154

Hungary 138, 162–3, 165, 236–8

identity:

alienated forms of 72–82, 84–91, 98, 102–3, 179, 185, 192, 230–2, 235, 249

and the appeal of nationalism 7–8, 97–8, 223–7, 232, 240, 246–7

and community 5, 70–80, 248–51

and historical change 61, 66–9, 76, 224

as a source of conflict 64–5, 80–1, 92, 233, 251–2

ideology and nationalism 15, 51–3, 85–92, 94–6, 98–100, 103, 123–4, 126–7, 129–31, 133, 189–90, 192–5, 210–11, 215, 219, 225–7, 230–2, 236–8

see also nationality and the nation, concepts of; populist nationalism

imperialism, see colonialism

India 172–4, 176–83, 185, 187

individualism 23, 26–8, 231, 246–7, 251

inequality 21, 33–4, 38–9

insecurity as a source of conflict 63–5, 68, 80, 103, 124, 128–35, 189, 227–8, 231–5, 237–9, 243–7, 251–2, 254

intellectuals and national doctrine 17–19, 85 n., 86, 105 n.

interdependence, global 46–8, 56–9, 66, 73, 87, 92, 97, 144, 175, 179, 200

interests, concept of 36, 79, 102–3

International Working Men’s Association (IWA) 195, 200–3

internationalism 4, 34–6, 43, 48–56, 73, 91, 143–9, 151–2, 157–60, 162, 167, 170–1, 186–8, 193–219, 221, 242

Ireland 138, 155, 188–97, 199, 201–2, 204

Italy 114, 116–18, 138

Kant, Immanuel 84 n.

Kossuth, Lajos 163

Krakow insurrection 155

Lamartine, Alphonse de 115–17

Lassalle, Ferdinand 198

Lenin, V. I. 187 n., 221 n.

liberalism:

and foreign policy 114–15, 122

and nationalism 83–5, 104–14, 241–7, 253–4

Louis Napoleon, see Napoleon III

Magyars, see Hungary

masses, concept of 122–4, 132, 239

Mazzini, Giuseppe 9, 139

Melotti, Umberto 174–5 n.

Metternich, Clemens Fürst von 126–7

Mexico 184

middle classes, see bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie

militarism 212–14

monarchy 24–30

Napoleon 17, 89

Napoleon III 89, 127, 130–1, 133, 204, 207

nationalism, general theories of 1, 7–10, 6, 22, 93–100

see also autonomy of nationalism

national self-determination:

and internal social reform 152–60, 167, 179, 181, 186, 193–5, 253

and international reciprocity 144–6, 148–52, 181, 186, 195, 199

as a precondition for revolution 170, 188, 190–201

as a right 156, 168–70, 253–4

and self-emancipation 180–1, 186, 188, 191

and the value of independence 155–9, 161, 167–70, 192–3, 196, 242–4

and ‘viability’ 9, 139–40, 160–6

nationality and the nation, concepts of 95–6, 98–9, 225–30

civic 242, 250–2

democratic 8–10, 16–22, 29, 32, 34, 43–5, 47, 50, 95–6, 133–4, 136, 148, 154–5, 220

ethnic 17–22, 54, 81–91, 229, 231, 249–52

statist 17, 19–25, 29–31, 42–6, 54, 91, 198

needs 23, 30, 35–6, 74–5

non-intervention, principle of 117

Palmerston, Lord 120–2

Pan-Slavism 161

Paris Commune 134–5, 206

patriotism 33, 42, 54, 129, 134, 215

peasants 103, 116, 124–32, 185–6, 194, 215

petty bourgeoisie 83, 103, 105 n., 116, 124, 132–6

Poland 138, 144–5, 149–52, 154–5, 157–8, 162–5, 185, 198–9, 204, 236–8

political economists 217–18

populist nationalism 10, 116, 122–4, 129–31, 133–4, 198, 207–8, 232, 234, 236–7, 239

Posen [Poznań] 149–50

post-communist nationalism 9–10, 209, 229–39, 242–6, 252–5

Prague uprising 166

private property 33–4, 132

progress 9, 26, 87, 127, 151, 166–7, 171, 174–5, 179–81, 184–5

proletariat:

attitudes to nationality and war 48–56, 142–3, 171, 187–97, 196–7, 203–21

British 187–95, 214, 216

French 134–6, 205, 214

German 111, 198–9, 205–7

and leadership of national movements 52, 124, 132, 134–6, 186

in Marx’s early writings 35–6

political movements of 197–9, 214, 220–1

see also internationalism

protectionism 110, 196–7, 218–19

Prussia 19, 26, 35, 89–90, 104–8, 110–11, 113–14, 145, 149, 198, 204–7

realism:

in German social democracy 198, 203

in Marx and Engels’ national policy 139–40, 142–4, 147, 152, 159–60, 175, 191–2

‘really existing socialism’, see communism

recognition as a value 167–9, 248–52, 255

see also democracy; national self-determination

religion and nationalism 116, 127, 129–30, 194, 236

see also ideology and nationalism; peasants

republicanism 9, 25, 38–9

revolutions of 1848: 9–10, 104, 112–13, 115, 129, 149–50, 230

see also Frankfurt Assembly

revolutionary theory and strategy 34, 36–40, 84, 139–40, 143, 148, 151–2, 165, 190–1, 201–8, 214–20

see also internationalism; proletariat

Rights of Man 25

Roman Republic, see Italy

Romania 162, 235

Romantic nationalism 17–20, 25

see also Fichte, J. G.; Herder, Johann Gottfried

Ruge, Arnold 34

Russia 67 n., 89, 114, 145, 150, 161–2, 185–6, 213, 235

self-determination, see national self-determination

Serbs 138, 165, 233, 235

Slovakia 235, 238 n.

Slovenes 138, 164

Smith, A. D. 98 n.

sovereignty, concept of 9, 17, 24–32, 148

Soviet Union 242, 244, 252

state:

autonomy of 38, 219–21

class theory of 32–4, 37–42

classical models of 23, 31

disappearance of 32, 40

Hegel’s philosophy of 23–35

working-class accommodation with 203–21

states system 29–32, 97, 140, 143, 160, 203–4, 210

structuralist Marxism 11

Taiping rebellion 182–3

Trianon, Treaty of 237

Ukraine 235, 244 n.

‘unhistorical’ nations, see ‘historyless’ nations

universalism 58–9, 69–71, 73–4, 81, 92, 143–4

see also identity; internationalism

‘utopian’ socialists 52, 81

Vienna settlement 82–3, 116

war:

Hegel’s views on 29–30

impact on working-class solidarity of 203–16, 221

and intra-bourgeois competition 210–13

in primitive societies 62–6

welfare state 219

working class, see proletariat

Young Hegelians 26

Yugoslavia 232–4, 237, 242, 252