Patriotism in the Age of Globalization

The new fault line in politics, according to Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front, is between globalists and patriots. It is an argument similar to those being made by euroskeptics in the United Kingdom and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the United States. It is, however, as false as it is dangerous.

Judging by the results of the second and final round of France’s regional elections on December 13, it is also an argument that French voters, at least, roundly rejected. They cast 73% of their ballots for the National Front’s rivals, depriving the party of even a single victory.

Le Pen accused the mainstream parties of ganging up on her, describing their cooperation as a denial of democracy. Her argument is, of course, a classic example of sour grapes; the entire point of a two-round voting system is to force parties and their supporters to seek a consensus and form partnerships. Unless and until the National Front finds a way to win allies, it will not achieve an electoral breakthrough. (The same is likely to prove true about Trump.)

That is not to say that Le Pen’s claim – that those who vote for her party are the only true patriots – should be casually dismissed. She has homed in on a powerful message, one with the potential to attract supporters from other parties. That’s why it must be rebutted, both in France and elsewhere. The assumption underlying such nationalist bombast – that a country’s interests are better served by being closed rather than open – is extremely dangerous.

The belief that openness is treason and closure is patriotic is a rejection of the entire post-1945 framework of politics and policy in the developed world. It is an attempt to turn back the clock to the interwar period, when the focus was on closing off: imposing onerous trade restrictions and persecuting or expelling minority groups. This was true even in the United States, which enacted the most restrictive immigration laws since the country’s founding.

The postwar years marked a complete change of direction, as countries opened up, allowing freer flows of trade, capital, ideas, and people. This process became known as globalization only after China and India joined in during the 1980s, but it had started long before. It was globalization, after all, that created what in France became known as Les Trente Glorieuses – the 30 glorious years of rapidly rising living standards following the end of WWII.

Le Pen and her fellow populists claim that globalization was either an act of foolish generosity that helped the rest of the world at the expense of the nation, or a phenomenon that benefited only the elites and not ordinary people. For them, patriotism means being harder-headed about protecting the national interest and adopting more democratic policies that help the working masses, not jet-setting fat cats.

The second part of this argument – that the interests of ordinary people have been subordinated to those of the elite – must be heard and responded to. A democracy in which a majority feels neglected or exploited is not sustainable. Either the government or the entire system will be overturned.

Elected officials clearly need to find answers to high unemployment and declining living standards. What mainstream parties need to be make clear, however, is that the answers to those problems do not lie in closing borders or minds. There is no example, anywhere in history, of a society or an economy that has prospered over the long term by rejecting globalism.

Moreover, though openness may not guarantee prosperity, it has always been a prerequisite for growth. To be sure, the optimal amount of openness is a matter of debate. But the bigger, more productive arguments are about how to shape education, labor markets, scientific research, and social-welfare policies in order to help societies adapt to the world around them. The patriotic choice – the national interest – has always consisted in crafting domestic policies that best take advantage of globalization.

For mainstream parties in France, the Conservatives in the UK, and Trump’s more internationally minded Republican rivals in the US, there is nothing to be gained from copying the arguments of their extremist counterparts. Doing so would yield crucial ground in the political battle over how best to serve the country and its people. Mainstream parties must reclaim the mantle of patriotism and redefine the national interest accordingly. In today’s world, the national interest lies in managing openness – not in throwing it away.

Bill Emmott is a former editor-in-chief of The Economist. Views expressed are personal.

Source: Hindustan Times, 23-12-2015

Language, power, nationalism

To understand Benedict Anderson’s influential work, it is important to follow the arc of his life and travels.

In 1981, Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children, in which the protagonist Saleem Sinai says: “A nation which had never previously existed, was about to win its freedom… It was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the satisfaction and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood.”

Two years later, three scholars of history and political science began a debate on nationalism. What did nationalism mean and how was it defined or constructed? The scholars were Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm. Anderson, Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government and Asian Studies at Cornell University, died on December 13 in Indonesia leaving behind a formidable academic legacy.

Imagined community

Anderson’s most influential work was Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983), where, puzzled by the rise of nationalisms across the world, he sought to first explain what a nation was and then to trace the rise of different nationalisms. This book, in which he curiously echoed the argument made by Rushdie’s newly post-colonial protagonist mentioned above, has since been translated into 30 languages and is still required reading in most political science courses across the world.

Vasundhara Sirnate

Anderson argued that the nation was an “imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. He saw the advent of the nation as a product of print capitalism, where the invention of the printing press allowed overarching identity discourses to be published across various vernacular languages allowing for a sameness and diffusion of ideas linked to the nation. Nations, suggested Anderson, are much more than simple offshoots of different identities. He also moved the cradle of nationalism from Europe to the Americas and argued that elites in newly decolonised countries in Asia and Africa had perhaps borrowed some of these modular forms of nationalism to fashion their own.

For Anderson a nation was imagined, as it was an agreed upon dream or a “horizontal comradeship” shared by people who did not know each other and would not know each other and still shared the same concept of the nation despite the persistence of inequalities and exploitative relations between them. He wrote, “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

Critiques

A challenging critique of Anderson’s work came from Partha Chatterjee, who raised the question, “Whose imagined community?” In an eponymous essay published in 1996, Chatterjee challenged Anderson’s idea of modular forms of nationalism developed in the West as providing the mould for various anti-colonial nationalisms. Could all anti-colonial nationalism be reducible to mere borrowing? If so, then what exactly were these nations “imagining”? Chatterjee argued that in many colonised nations, an anti-colonial nationalism had already developed and remained within the non-colonised, traditional, inner domain where the coloniser had been able to assert little power. After a point, it was externalised or became public through novels and public schools and this articulation of nationalism, embedded in the distinctness of the traditional or the spiritual, became the foundation of many anti-colonial nationalisms. Such articulations of an “inner” nationalism were further found in popular novels like Ghare Bhaire (The Home and the World) by Rabindranath Tagore in 1916. For Chatterjee, the production of consent about the nation meant that subaltern narratives had to be suppressed and at the same time accommodated by the elite. So the Andersonian process was much more complicated in practice than the book claimed.

It is difficult to understand the motivations of Anderson’s influential work without examining his own ambulant life. He was the son of Irish-English parents and was born in Kunming in China in 1936. His family moved to California in 1941 and to Ireland in 1945 where one-half of the family constituted Republican supporters stressing on an Irish nationalism. After getting a B.A. in Classics at the University of Cambridge in 1957, he enrolled at Cornell University, where he subsequently earned a Ph.D in 1967 with a focus on Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia.

While his anti-imperialist thinking was already strengthened at Cambridge, Cornell provided to him a set of formidable research skills that led to him anonymously co-authoring a paper with Ruth McVey that argued that the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and Sukarno had little to do with the September 30, 1965 coup in Indonesia. After a bloodletting where six top generals of the army were killed in an attempt to crush the rebellion, General Suharto had to maintain order. McVey and Anderson wrote, “The actual originators of the coup are to be found not in Djakarta, but in Central Java, among middle-level Army officers in Semarang, at the Headquarters of the Seventh (Diponegoro) Territorial Division”. This paper, known now as the “Cornell Paper”, was ultimately published in 1966, and led to Anderson being banned from entering Indonesia until 1988.

A polyglot, he also studied the relationship between language and power, and among the books he subsequently published are Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990) and The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (2012).

(Vasundhara Sirnate is the Chief Coordinator of Research at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Washington DC.)

Keywords: academic scholar, Benedict Anderson, nationalism, Partha Chatterjee, book on nationalism, Imagined Communities- Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Source: The Hindu, 17-12-2015