The New Nationalism: A Modern Phenomenon?

As Hans Magnus Enzensberger suggests, it may be fruitless to rail against national stereotypes: they are absurd, unfair, pernicious, and nonetheless so persistent that they probably serve a intention. When asking where they are most likely to thrive, one realizes that it is not politics. Set ideas about the national character or cultural stereotyping are especially vivid within popular culture and the media.2 Often, they are diagnosed as potentially dangerous invitations to racism, or conversely, as accurate, if regrettable "reflections" of widely held views. But one could also argue that racist incidents in sports or tourism signify the opposite of the new European racism: a mimicking, a "staging" and an impersonation of prejudice, which tries to exorcise the feelings of fear of the other, by ritualizing aggression towards the kinds of "otherness" that have become familiar from life in ethnically mixed metropolitan communities and is thus different from traditional forms of nationalism. By shifting the sites of social representation away from the rhetoric of enemy nations and territorial conquest -trading jingoism, in other words, for stereotyping and puns - does popular culture fuel the old politics of resentment that were mobilized to fight the wars of the first part of the 20th century, or are television, tabloid journalism and advertising merely mining a sign-economy of difference, ready-made via a long history of images and now circulating through the many topographies of consumption? The transformation of the geographic and historical spaces of nationhood and national stereotypes into sign-economies has, nevertheless, in no way diluted the political value and "emotional legitimacy" of the idea of national identity. Rather, precisely because no external threat is involved, nationalism has become a major phenomenon of contemporary politics and a focal point in cultural debate. The divisions are no longer only or even primarily across the borders, but have opened up boundaries, zones and demarcations within the nation-states, dividing groups formerly held together by class-interest, economic necessity and religious faith or were powerd together by political ideologies, such as fascism or communism. European nation-states, it would seem, are re-tribalising themselves, and in the process, give new meaning to both the nation and the state. The two concepts are no longer bound to each other, as they have been from the time that the idea of citizenship became the cornerstone of the bourgeois world order in the wake of the French Revolution, and Napoleon's attempt to unify Europe under French hegemony.

This suggests that it is the end of the Cold War and the globalization of capitalism, with its free flow of investments and the creation of mobile labor markets that has given the idea of "the nation" unexpected new currency and even urgency, while at the same time, radically redefining its referents. The rise of the new nationalism was unexpected because the societies in question, whether advanced or developing, were coping with the post-1989 upheavals in rather paradoxical ways. In the 1990s, very different kinds of modernization could be observed: the break-up of hegemonies, be they neo-colonial, as in South Africa or ideologic as in ex-Yugoslavia; the devolution of democratic decision making to political bodies like regional parliaments, as in Great Britain, or to centralized bureaucracies, as in the European Union; the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms - whether Christian, Jewish, Islamist, or Hindu.4 None of these realignments of authority and legitimation have, as far as one can see, given rise to genuinely new political forms of organization or social bonding (which had been the hope of the "revolutionary" 1960s and the "radical" 1970s when fighting imperialism, racism, and capitalism). On the left, one speaks of post-colonialism and post-Fordism, and on the right of the "clash of civilization" and the "end of history." At the same time, these inward turns of politics seem to have revived a longing for traditional structures of kinship and ethnicity, of family and clan, as a rule thought of as reactionary, atavistic or even criminal.5 Many of the various religious fundamentalisms, meanwhile, rely materially and ideologicly on substantial and often wealthy diaspora-communities in France, Germany, Canada, Britain and the United States. Even more confusingly, both religious fundamentalism and family- or clan-based business cartels depend as much on the deregulated circulation of capital and labor as do multinational companies, and all take for granted the high-tech world of the mobile phone, the modem and the internet. Nationalism in the forms in which it is "returning" now would thus seem a thoroughly modern phenomenon, exposing how contradictory the processes of "modernity", "modernization" and "post-modernity" have been in the 20th century, and are set to continue to be, now under the new name of "globalization," into the 21st.