The Wrath of Ages: Nationalism's Primordial Roots

These two books are significant additions to the rather meager corpus of books on nationalism. Like other books in this category, they raise more questions than they answer. Both, but especially The Wrath of Nations, abound in the sort of propositions that university examiners like to put between quotation marks and follow with the minatory instruction, "Discuss." Many are well worth discussing, and I propose to discuss them here, beginning with some of Pfaff's.

William Pfaff is a well-known and respected commentator on international affairs. The Wrath of Nations is far-ranging in space and time, abounding in miscellaneous information, briskly written, always stimulating, sometimes shrewd and penetrating, sometimes brashly didactic, and sometimes sweeping in its generalizations. This combination will attract many readers to the book.

Near the opening of his book, Pfaff sweeps aside the idea that nationalism is "a primordial historical phenomenon" and goes on to put forward his own view: "Nationalism is a phenomenon of the European nineteenth century. It is a political consequence of the literary-intellectual movement called Romanticism, a Central European reaction to the universalizing, and therefore disorienting, ideas of the eighteenth century French Enlightenment."

ANCIENTS AND MODERNS

This is very mixed up. Even in its narrowest sense-as an intellectual position-nationalism antedates the nineteenth century. It is a product of the late French Enlightenment, although it came to include "a Central European reaction . . . to the French Enlightenment." At the very outset of the French Revolution the Abbé Sieyès, an archetypal figure of the late French Enlightenment, gives us in his seminal 1789 manifesto, What is the Third Estate? the basic doctrine of nationalist absolutism: "The nation exists before all, it is the origin of everything. Its will is always legal, it is the law itself." The worst excesses of nationalism, from the Revolutionary Terror to the Third Reich, are encapsulated in those two coldly dogmatic sentences in which the protagonist of the French Revolution establishes the fateful and explosive conjunction between the emotional force of nationalism and the totalitarian potential of Rousseau's General Will.

Pfaff's belief in the nineteenth-century origins of nationalism is so strange as to verge on the willfully obtuse. What reader of John O'Gaunt's speech in Shakespeare's Richard II, which was written in the last decade of the sixteenth century, can fail to hear the distinctive, authentic note of exalted nationalist passion? But in the second decade of the same century in another country, nationalist passion had already made itself heard, unmistakably, one might have thought, in the 26th (and last) chapter of Machiavelli's The Prince, entitled "An Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians." In the previous century-in a third country-we have the towering figure of Joan of Arc. How can anyone contemplating the life and work of Joan classify nationalism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon? Jules Michelet and George Bernard Shaw would not have agreed on much, but at least they knew a nationalist when they saw one and had no doubt about placing Joan in that category.

Shaw saw Joan as a nationalist prototype, but in this perception he was mistaken. The fusion of religion and nationalism attained an unusual-perhaps unique-intensity in Joan but is a very ancient phenomenon. It can be found in abundance in the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament; the idea of a "chosen people" in a promised land has been immensely infectious and influential in the history of Christendom. Early Christians, beginning with Jesus himself, tried to get the land out of the picture, but later Christians brought the chosen-people idea down to earth again with a vengeance. By the seventh century A.D. the process of what might be called the nationalization of Christianity was already well advanced. A Frankish document of that period asserts, as if referring to a well-known fact or gospel truth, that "Christ loved the Franks." From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Reformation, chosen peoples popped up all over the place, and the land which each inhabited was always uniquely holy: "Writers of the following nations explicitly refer to their people as chosen and to their land as promised: England, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland and especially and insistently the United States, for both blacks and whites took up this theme." It happens that both Pfaff and Tamir add other nations to this list of the chosen. Tamir quotes the above passage and comments: "Other nations such as Israel, Iran and Egypt could be added to the list."

More surprisingly, Pfaff obliges me by providing a strikingly important and early example-earlier indeed than any Christian instance of mine-of a fusion of religion and nationalism: "The sixth-century origins of Islam lie in a reaction in Arabia against foreign interference, that of Abyssinia, Persia, and Byzantium, during the period prior to Mohammed's birth in 570. It was a patriotic as well as a religious movement, advocating, as an Edwardian scholar says, 'Arabia for the Arabians.' "

What could be more characteristically nationalist than the idea of "Arabia for the Arabians"? But then what becomes of the idea of nationalism as a nineteenth-century invention? Fortunately Pfaff has the sense not to let himself be bound by the narrow (and unhistorical) definition he unwisely adopted at the beginning of the book. Toward the end, he implicitly throws that definition to the winds, returning to the "primordial" dimension which he had earlier explicitly rejected: