Following on from the work of the past chapters, which traced the development of social movements from a transitory expression of social discontent to ideational movements of greater permanence, there is a need, I believe, to discern why nationalism as a doctrine of social change proves so attractive to certain movements in particular political environments, defined by the ascendancy of one community over another. Central to my premise is how nationalism, through national movements mobilisation, has become associated with concepts of communal sovereignty, peripheral representation and oppositional mobilisation. The key I believe lies in its ability to manifest as a responsive doctrine of social revolution that ‘mimics’ the intent of the state’s integration of cultural peripheries to the centre.

My intention in this chapter is not to show the necessity of nationalism as a precondition for social mobilisation. Rather, how, in specific culturo-political environments, nationalism is the sole doctrine that can achieve social reform that places the communal entity in a position that ensures their cultural specific path to political modernity. I believe that when a political system is reforming, the only way by which peripheries may utilise political opportunity structures offered them is through countering, or ‘mimicking’, the official state doctrine with a viable consensual alternative. Hence, nationalism will be shown here as an ideological response designed to usurp the processes of reform commenced by shifting centre elites.

What will be explored is how national movements have come to be seen as democratising agents within polarised systems, and how they enable marginalised elites to exploit repression as a means to anti-state mobilisation. This will be demonstrated by following the development of national movements, within the cycle of reform-protest-reform. The key to this anti-state mobilisation lies in how national movements have utilised political opportunity structures found within the struggle between reforming centre and mobilising peripheries to harness collective discontent as a tool of political mobilisation within repressive state structures. Hence, the expansion of the ideational movement to include nationalism will be seen as an expansion of protest repertoire within itself as it creates a sense of historicity and place that more traditional social movements would struggle to attain.

It is thus necessary to explore the reasoning why nationalism, from a cultural, identity, and ideological base, became integral to the existence of regional movements seeking greater permanence within the state. By examining these movements in the forthcoming chapters, I intend to show the significance of the rise of national movements as eternal oppositional forces within specific European nation-states. In the examples of the Irish Republican, Basque and Croat national movements, nationalism can be defined as providing an ideational alternative to the official unitarist state doctrine, and as a movement, an opposing form of socio-political organisation. But first, the reason why it is seen as an effective doctrine of social revolutionary agency against the established state entity will be explored; as will its significance to peripheral movement mobilisation to rebellion within the overall cycle of protest.

 

Nation as the Exemplification of Popular Sovereignty: The Role of Nationalism in Attaining Sovereignty for the Periphery in Mobilisation.

The crux of the emergence of the notion of sovereignty being placed within the form of the nation has its roots in the French Revolution (Connor 1977: 25). The realisation that disenfranchised classes could place their personal destinies into a movement that was “dependent on the existence of the nation” as a vehicle of power consolidation and goal attainment, was to play a significant role in shaping oppositional movements towards modernity (Greenfeld 1993a: 184). The French Revolution had taught the masses of Europe the value of popular mobilisation, as well as, more importantly, that alien rule was abhorrent and only a regime consecrated by the attainment of ‘popular legitimacy’ could be considered just (Smith 1983: xxi-xxii).

This was a period whereby, in the manner of Herder (Berlin 1976; Barnard 1995), the doctrine of nationalism was to inherently link itself with the notion of civil and human rights in the minds of Europe’s disenfranchised peripheral communities, through expansionist policies of the post-Revolutionary Napoleonic elites (Smith 1992c: 60; Calleo 1995: 18). Prior to 1789, Europeans from the times of the Moorish invasion and colonisation of Iberia through to the conflicts with the Ottomans and the internal expansion of post-Reformation England had been socialised and mobilised through wars of principles as much as wars of interest (Malcolm 1994: 82-92; Vaca de Osma 1995: 88-90; Carty 1996: 55-59; Sells 1996: 28-31).

It was from this dynamic process of power consolidation and peripheral integration that communal sovereignty was to continually align itself with the concept of physical space as a means of communal defence. Smith (1983: 13-14) felt that the reconquista ¹ was to signify this rise of defensive communal organisation as a means to independent continuous communal development. A commencement of the notion of rising against the oppressors, which would become embedded within the collective framework of the European psyche that was parallel to the notion of controlling space as a means of religious sovereignty. Yet it was not until the development of revolutionary movements did these notions leave the limitations of their elitist and religious socio-political organisation (Smith 1991: 96).

Tilly (1975b: 35) noted one of the main reasons for the rise of national movements over the past two hundred years has been the need to base political organisation within the framework of coherent socio-cultural groups, based on the incorporation of elites through progressive enfranchisement. It was in this era that the catch cry of self-determination became fully equated with citizenry participation (Tilly 1994b: 133). This imperialist period was to further the legacy, according to Said (1993: 193), of a cultural hierarchy that placed the centre at the top of the ratings of civilisation. In doing so the right to rule and the right of sovereignty began to indicate the stature of a given culture within the imperial hierarchy of established states. Thus implicitly suggesting that only through the attainment of a similar level of cultural organisation, through the attainment of the nation-state, can one guarantee the right of a new collective to participate within the given international order.

 

The Popularisation of Nationalism as a Doctrine of Mobilisation.

The development of the English (Greenfeld. 1993a), Dutch (Deutsch 1979: 266) and American Revolutions (Weilenmann 1963: 55), and the refinement of the concept of the nation as a means to political mobilisation against reactionary conservative forces, was to produce a school of thought that placed the nation at the centre of oppositional political mobilisation. Forged by the ideas of Bosanquet in the English speaking world (Calleo 1995: 20) the nature of state centralism was to allow for the spread of the doctrine throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century as not just the guarantor of legitimacy but also as a doctrine of liberation to be utilised by fledgling movements on the ethnic peripheries of Europe (Schöpflin 1995: 38). A point of reference further enhanced by the linking of ethnic sovereignty to the attainment of statehood in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points on the redrawing of the European state systems at Versailles, towards the end of World War One (Radan 1996: 1).

This is tied to the works of Hegel (1975) and the idea of the “dialectic of the spirit of peoples”, espousing that the highest form of collectivity manifests itself in the formation of statehoods; placing the path to heightened political formation for minorities within the attainment of the nation-state. The ratification of the right of all peoples to the “principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” in the United Nations Charter Article 1 (2) and 55 was to further solidify this, equating sovereignty with the control of the nation-state within the international order (ibid.: 2). When the conditions of participation within the international order are added to the nature of state centralism there emerges a counter trend from the periphery to ‘mimic’, by example, the elitist state paradigm in order to secure their own continuity. The state hence becomes equated with power attainment and consolidation, whilst the nation grants the periphery within the historic continuum of state development; a cultural permanency that the average social movement lacks. Thus, the nation becomes the focal point of power attainment and culturo-political enfranchisement.

In reality, these movements were looking primarily for access to power within the confines of the existing state frameworks. Accordingly, they tended to limit their demands to local, cultural, or regional issues, which could be solved through devolution or better provisions for minority languages (Schöpflin 1995: 46).

The base of the popularity as a doctrine of movement mobilisation lay in its very populist makeup as well as its ability to enfranchise the previously marginalised. Greenfeld and Chirot (1994: 80) noted that originally the nation symbolised inclusion within an elite for marginalised communities which would allow for the reinvention of peoples in direct opposition to the repressive centralist structures that had previously threatened their autonomous existence. Nationalism as a means to collective sovereignty, according to James Anderson (1988: 25), “can therefore be seen to offer ‘something for everyone,’ enabling it to draw support from very different sections or classes in the nation.” In my opinion, this popularisation of the nation enabled the nation to become a focal point of oppositional movements for the politicisation of disparate communities. The placing of sovereignty of the people at the foot of the nation would lead movements such as the IRA and ETA to view the attainment of national sovereignty as the means to democratisation for ethnic classes, previously denied access by centralist elites to political opportunity structures of state.

The popularity of the nation as a means to oppositional mobilisation lies inside its fabricated defining structures that facilitate a counter movement of great societal flexibility and permeability. According to Benedict Anderson (1993: 7) it is the very culturally elastic, as well as geographically finite, structures that contain its specified identity that has enabled nationalism to arise in the shadows of the autocratic state. It is here, in its oppositional status, that nationalism has become associated with pluralism through its resistance to state centralism, and the enfranchisement of the marginalised into the established order (ibid.). A position that allows the periphery to develop an alternative socio-political structure that is equally flexible as the state it is ‘mimicking’.

Nations are not static, but rather dynamic entities created in response to state fostered ideals of national social organisation through continuous processes of mobilisation, politicisation, territorialism and autarchy of human society (Dofny 1980; Foltz 1981; Anderson 1988). Hence, as keepers of sovereignty they mutate according to the needs of their constituent population, and levels of mobilised discontent, within the political environment created by the state in transition. At all stages they are responsive to the level of centralisation emanating from the core elites of state, and hence are a reactionary ideological movement that emerges within the cleavages engendered from the processes of state consolidation and periphery counter mobilisation.

Essentially, in a political environment dictated by the supremacy of established nation-states in a post-colonial world, the only political entity that could guarantee unhindered continuous cultural development was that of the state (Kecmanovic 1996: 8). The concept of the nation-state proved popular because it would, through its very definition, place the cultural nation at the core of the state’s existence, providing a bulwark to further encroachment by ever expanding core centres. This is what Kecmanovic (1996: 9) calls the “bastion mentality”, creating a polity built around the attempts to ensure individual civil rights of the community, as well as inner demands of ethnic solidarity. What has kept this political entity solvent has been the ability of people to identify their own aspirations with that of the group (Levi & Hechter 1985: 134). A synthesis of varying demands into one alternate social movement that achieves the stability considered necessary to formulate a collective polity provides a continuous cyclical mobilisation against the shaping and reshaping state centre.

 

The Convergence of the Notions of National Sovereignty and Democracy as Ideational Factors in National Movement Mobilisation.

It is this ability to portray popular mobilisation as a means of influencing elite policy formation, by directly challenging the legitimacy of the centre to rule over the periphery, which has led certain communities to see nationalism as a true exemplar of popular democracy (Horowitz 1994; Nodia 1994; Shlomo 1994). Add to this the fact that all basic needs, from political, economic and educational to medical and sanitational, are now brokered by political institutions within the structures of the contemporary nation-state set apart from, and in some cases above, traditional communal life (Jenson 1995). As Deutsch (ibid.: 171-172) states:

only the nation-states can administer the broadening scope of politics and public services. Only the nation-states- at best- have the governmental responsiveness to the needs and wishes of the governed that people now demand. Only the nation-states can get the broad popular support that governments need to endure in our time.

As Deutsch (1969b: 24) notes one finds that nearly every social interaction may have a political outcome dictated by the ability of the nation-state to alleviate these and other societal pressures. An environment is hence fostered whereby national interdependence becomes a safety valve for continued social and political cohesion. A scenario that forces many a movement to consolidate their gains in similar organisational structures to the state they oppose. In many ways national movements realise that the only way to prevent the centre from retracting their hard fought for previous victories is by consolidating their gains within a structure that negates the role of the centre in future decision making processes by in turn excluding the centre from further means of participation on the periphery (Bugajski 1994, 1995).

This interestingly points to the “neutrality” of the state, as well as its central importance as the target for oppositional movements, due in part to its openness to mobility and the innate competition it fosters amongst competing elites (Markovits & Oliver 1981: 174). The state in such a paradigm may play the role of target, or creator of political opposition, depending on the way it is utilised by the elite at the centre. Most nationalisms are political, and are hence centred around placing sovereignty in the hands of the people, rather than concentrating on cultural retrogradism (Kamenka 1975a; Gellner 1980; Jenson 1995). This placing the role of activism within the ‘people’, according to Greenfeld and Chirot (1994: 78), allows the movement to be the target of the primary loyalty and founding base of collective solidarity.

The nation of an individual was the community within whose bounds he could realise his liberty and the right of participation, the community whose interests were fully one’s own interests since one could influence them, and in which one had true membership. The inability to fulfil one’s rights of citizenship within a particular geo-political sphere justified exit (Greenfeld.1993: 420).

This is especially the case in Northern Ireland with the reinvention of contemporary Irish nationalism since 1968 from a movement seeking electoral enfranchisement to one of national liberation, and eventually communal consolidation (Maguire 1996a). It is difficult for a minority group to bypass the jurisdiction of the existing state whilst the national movement seeks change via the utilising of political opportunity structures granted by the state (Johnston et al. 1988a: 2). In Northern Ireland since 1968 nationalism has been able to bridge this gap by at once providing an ideology of resistance and one of unity. At the core of this convergence of sovereignty and participatory democracy is the notion of the people being an organic extension of communal sovereignty (Smith 1992b: 61).

The state in such circumstances plays a dual role of target and fulcrum of protest, whilst the national movement embodies the democracy of the alternate counter organisation (Rosenthal & Schwartz 1990). It is within this movement alternative that nationalisms voluntaristic nature emerges as a means to populist mobilisation. To maintain popular legitimacy the nation must act as facilitator to social mobilisation and political change in times of state reform, as it is as an active agent that the nation provides an effective challenge to the state unwilling to absorb certain groups.

A state, though, need not necessarily be founded on national principles, but it also does not necessarily preclude the classic nation-state from remaining a significant goal of the national movement. In fact, being the predominant presence in the international system, Nodia (1994: 3-4) notes that the Western experience of nationalism throughout the 20th century has highlighted the parallel development of democratic structures and the consolidation of national state centres. Yet, the perpetuation of a struggle defined in nationalist rhetoric also risks solidifying the state’s own identity creating a reciprocal national movement mobilisation at the centre of the state. This can, through the control of policing structures, lead to a radicalisation of the state’s own identity and criminilisation of the periphery’s mobilised activism (Hanle 1989: 208). This subsequently has led to peripheral national movement mobilisation to becoming viewed as reactionary, populist and anti-democratic threats to the consensus democracies found within the established European nation-states of modernity (Przeworski 1985 & Przeworski et al. 1986).

I believe it is the Western perception of nationalism as emotional, or reactionary, that has led nationalism to be viewed as irrational, and hence undemocratic. Popular sovereignty is as universal a subject as is the concept of justice or right, leaving it open to many interpretations. Nodia (1994: 6) points out it would be wrong to presuppose that liberalism should be the sole precursor for democracy to occur. What if the ‘people’ should choose an alternate form of democratic political organisation that they may feel is more fluid and responsive to the needs of the masses? In fact, the act of union or secession are the manifestations of the will of people to create their own physical polity, as the precursor state had failed to eliminate fears of demagogy from the minds of newly politicised peripheral communities (Connor 1994a: 96-97). What has made political movements so potent, especially nationalist movements, has been their ability to feed off the instincts of the masses (Mosse 1975: 39).

Doctrinally the attraction of nationalism to movements, as opposed to theoretical Marxism or capitalist inspired state centralism, is that it does not furnish a complete theory of social or political change, due to its ability to grant a greater flexibility to those who see the advantage in holding to it as an effective doctrine of social change (Bugajski 1994: 102-105; Ferrero 1995; Gellner 1995: 1-19; Ramet 1995: 112). This subsequently, allows for the incorporation of a broader protest repertoire that can successfully ‘mimic’ the state according to the centres own shifts in strategy. Its literature and polemic is riddled with notions of: “Identity, purity, regeneration, the ‘enemy’, historical roots, self-emancipation, building the ‘new man’ and the ‘community’, collective sovereignty and participation” (Smith 1983: 23). In essence it is symbolically inclusive, from the view of the marginalised community seeking parity, but not necessarily for those classified as the ‘enemy’. It is the fusion of the three ideals of self-determination, mass expression and distinctiveness which gives it a wider scope of appeal than more theoretical and scientific doctrines (ibid.).

Thus, for movements holding a nationalist doctrine they can, not only challenge the state’s legitimacy, but also attempt to rectify the failure of policy development by promising to recreate the polity in order to include disassociated minorities in future political development. The key notion here is that of sovereignty as opposed to any politicisation of ethnos that places the movement within an historical paradigm that could grant it legitimacy. Giddens (1981: 192) thought that the fusing of notions of nationhood and democracy emerged from the bourgeois stress of placing popular sovereignty within the people during the period that saw the rise of European liberalism. For many members of minority communities, this is a true example of the implementation of their democratic right to enfranchisement in action; or what Rosenthal and Schwartz (1990) believe to be an example of democracy within the social movement, and pluralism within the expression of discontent through action.

The traditional means of defining national movements solely in terms of protecting claims to linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences do not hold (Deutsch 1962; Connor 1994d: 70; Gellner 1994b: 38-46). What has developed is an ideological reciprocity between the movement and the state. This is because of how the processes of democratisation became synonymous with the ideals of national self-determination (Przeworski & Laitin 1995: 12). Whilst the national ideal places the movement in a continuous historical paradigm (Greenwood 1977; Horowitz 1985; Druckman 1994; Ramet 1994), the movement grants the organisational impetus for the ethnos that is seeking enfranchisement and political acceptance through providing alternative, yet interdependent, options of socio-political organisation (Gellner 1994d: 81-84; Popovic 1994). Smith (1987: 168) felt that the ethnic group grants inclusion no matter what class one belongs to, and in doing so grants a quasi-recognition of the extension of the bonds of citizenship that the marginalised individual has been seeking from the centre. It is here that national aspirations of minority groups become linked to more democratic aspirations such as collective enfranchisement (Anderson.1988: 22).

Nationalism is a mass phenomenon that is totally irrelevant, until it takes on mass proportions. This is why so many national movements tend to see the necessity of transcending their classic social movement form for a party political organisation (Bugajski 1994: 105-115; see Ramet 1995; Aughey 1996). An expansion of repertoire, and hence agency, which is all encompassing. Central to this need for permanent agency and democratic fluidity is the realisation that any attempt at attaining consistent mobilisation once the set national goals have been achieved is limited by the populist nature of the original response (Marcet 1987; Arthur 1996).

This is where movements cannot consolidate themselves unless they transform themselves into constituent states because the legitimacy they achieve through the mobilisation of popular will is at a level that should not be continued without incorporating other interests that may fall outside the realm of nationalism; such as housing, employment, welfare distribution, or small business expansion. Thus, at once expanding the relevance of the national movement’s agency to the continued social and economic development of the community, whilst increasing the dependence of the community upon the national movement as their representative within state structures.

 

National Mobilisation as an Agent of Social-Political Change During Periods of State Transition.

The role of the nation as a means to social agency lies in the latent political awareness of a shared history, grievance, and clandestine mode of communication, and its subsequent ability to mobilise a given ethnic core into a viable oppositional political entity. Tilly (1994b: 134) himself recognised that the continued denial of public grievance leads to revolutionary activity and the spread of ‘universalistic’ movements of ‘national liberation’. This form of mobilisation depends heavily on the ability, according to Smith (1991: 64-65), of the national mobilisation to mobilise against the state. Hence, the state once again plays an integral role as provider of the environment that allows for separate, yet parallel, development between centre and periphery. This is what Connor (1994g: 31) has called the emergence of the interrelationship between state nationalism and peripheral social mobilisation. The importance of nationalism’s agency is found within its ability to forge a viable political will amongst a dispossessed community that can create the necessary political constituency to enforce social mobility denied those previously disenfranchised (Greenfeld 1993: 11; Purvis 1996).

The mobilisation of state-claiming ethnic identities is less the product of the intensification of nationalistic sentiments than of the development of external conditions that allow preexisting sentiments to be acted upon. These conditions include the breakdown of traditional patterns of authority, a shift in the military balance, or other developments that empower an ethnic group that previously felt incapable of challenging the status quo (Kupchan 1995a.: 9).

By appealing to mass consciousness and historic memory, such leaders tend to mythicise politics in order to avoid the harsh realities of contemporary social disorder caused by economic mismanagement (Kimmel 1989). The problems of oppositional mobilisation were exemplified in Eastern Europe where civic and social movements in the post 1989 environment utilised nationalism in the same manner as nineteenth century national movements did (Stokes 1993; Ramet 1995). That is as an “agent of liberation” from communist dictatorship in a way that nineteenth century national movements liberated themselves from ethnically based hegemonic monarchist elites (Fukuyama 1994: 23). The fact that many of these movements lay dormant for some seventy years is not important, as Sharp (1994: 17) points out, any political movement is dependent upon the political environment that is dictated from the state centre.

From the period of Mazzini (Smith 1992b: 61), nationalism has been able to cast itself as an historicist response to contemporary social problems akin to Breuilly’s (1982) idea of it being a formalisation of a ‘cultural mode of opposition’. Yet, its status as a vector that assisted in political and social liberation stems from the role it played in the decolonisation processes after Versailles and World War Two in ousting foreign rule, and repossessing centralist power away from colonial/settler elites distributing it to an autochthonous elite (Hobsbawm 1993: 169; Dunn & Fraser 1996). Eventually, this would lead to the consolidation and recognition of such rule within the international state’s system order.

The formation of such movements are a manifestation of a method of protest that gives the movement greater scope of options in choosing whether to aim at reforming the state, or, becoming the point of societal restructuring in the form of separatist mobilisation. This was the advantage of nationalism as a social agent as it placed the people’s will at the heart of referencing the movement which made it at once pragmatic and volatile (Smith 1991: 12). A position that Breuilly (1982: 295) noted, may be used by a sophisticated elite as an instrumental doctrine to be utilised as an implied threat, since it always carries the possibility of alternate political organisation outside the structures of state from which it emerged. In this sense the concept of the nation takes on a more direct role as a vector of social change that frames itself within a larger picture, than one that traditionally deals solely with the limited aspirations of cultural and ethnic relativism (Kecmanovic 1996: 6-7). For Tilly (1994b: 134) it was in its ability to create potentially revolutionary scenarios out of political opportunity structures, made available in shifting elite relations within states in transition, where its agency was most potent. These were exemplified in three key elements:

1. the appearance of contenders, or coalitions of contenders advancing exclusive competing claims to control of the state, or some segment of it;
2. commitment to those claims by a significant segment of the citizenry;
3. incapacity or unwillingness of rulers to suppress the alternative coalition and/ or commitments to its claims (Tilly.1994b: 134).

As one can see, if one takes the dynamic relation between national movement and state polarisation, and eventual enfranchisement, as essential to the ability of the national movement to act as a social vector of change, then one can see how its power lies in its portrayal of itself as having the ability to transfer power from a demagogic elite to the people. This is because of its polyvalent nature, which allows the nation to satisfy the urge for conquest, defence, and social identity whilst focusing the thrust of a movement towards the attainment of civic justice at a collective level (Kecmanovic 1996: 97). The national movement hence serves as an all purpose forging of political unity based on traditional sociological means of community control in times of societal shift (Deutsch 1979: 308-309).

 

National Movement Mobilisation as a Means of Ascendancy for Political Marginalised Ethno-National Peripheries.

In this way a movement can foster not just upward mobility and the consolidation of the newly acquired status but also create the conditions that impinges the values of the movement upon the society it is purporting to represent. This, consequently, increases the community’s dependence upon the success of the movement. Talking of the Henrician aristocracy, that could be seen as major source of contemporary English nationalism, Greenfeld (1993b: 49) noted that they were nothing more than:

Upwardly mobile commoners who reached the top of the social ladder, they found unacceptable the traditional image of society in which social mobility was an anomaly, and substituted a new image for it, that of a nation as it came to be understood in modern times.

The national movement, unlike the ethnic group in pre-mobilised form or fixed capitalist based centralist state structures, offers a mobile class structure, increased communication between elite and the people, whilst placing the people within a given historical context (Gellner 1983b: 33-34). As such, it is more than a mere agent of change aimed at replacing one elite with another, but it also acts as a responsive ideological core that allows for a supposedly porous relationship between the vanguard and the populace it represents (Horowitz 1985; Kimmel 1989; Wilson 1991). This is taking the notion of Ur-nazion² of the works of Fichte, Herder, Novalis and Schleiermacher and combining them with idea of classic social agitators and protest interest group agency found in post-industrial times (Tilly 1975b: 10-12). The nation, and hence the national movement, could be viewed from this perspective as a “multi-dimensional project” designed for a radical review of the entire political system which the minority feels has failed them (Szporluk 1988: 159). In this way the national movement is viewed as an agent of opposition that is determined to redraw the entire nature of political, class and ethnic relations within a given state entity. Nationalist movements by definition have their own solution for the crises of identity and legitimacy: They propose to establish a new state that corresponds to the nation for which they claim to speak. But their agenda is much broader; they have preferences about how their state should be governed (participation, penetration) and they usually take a stand on major economic and social questions (distribution) (Szporluk 1988: 158).

The roots, for example, of the Croatian national movement and its successful equating of social restructuring with national independence can be ascribed to an expansion of such mobilisation to incorporate class driven reasons (Radic 1936: 83-88; Krizman 1989: 13-25; Macan 1992:317). Hence, social autonomy became equated with with national self-determination. It was, moreover, Benedict Anderson (1996: 3-4) that noted if it was not for the placing of the national question at the centre of Otto Bauer’s (1996: 39-77) notions of socialism as the facilitator of oppressed people within Habsburg Austro-Hungary to political revolution, in his proposal for a federated Vereinigten Staaten von Gross-Österreich (Unified States of Great Austria) in his Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemocratie (The National Question and Social Democracy) one would doubt the validity of continually equating civil rights with national-class empowerment.³ This is further exemplification, I believe, of how the state in creating classes on ethnic bases leaves little option but for those disenfranchised to view the national movement as the sole agent of socio-political mobility.

It is interesting to see how Anderson (1996) links the revolutionary social doctrine of socialism, come East European state communism, with that of the national movement. When I mention national movement I mean the striving and eventual attainment of the national state. It is in this construct that the nation as an imagined community seems more reliable as a form of social agency due to its ability to posture itself as a continuance of pre-existing ethnic based social orders, and as such a traditional based counter movement to that of the state. This brings us naturally to the question of the validity of ethnic mobilisation over civic mobilisation as a less transient and more fluid, in terms of scope, forms of political organisation?

 

Civil versus Ethnic Forms of Mobilisation: The Reasons Behind the Rational Choice Mobilisation of Ethnic National Movement Mobilisation.

The greatest divisions within the literature have emerged between those that take the civic (Deutsch 1962, 1963a, 1969; Kamenka 1975a; Seton-Watson 1977; Merritt & Russett 1981), and those that develop the ethnic path to national mobilisation (Hechter Friedman & Appelbaum 1982; Horowitz 1985; Smith 1987). Much of the difference that lies between civic and ethnic bases to nationalist mobilisation is in the former being viewed as voluntaristic, and the latter as inherent (Greenfeld 1993a: 11). Essentially, what was emerging was the need for a more continuous form of movement opposition that, though shaped by state response, would not necessarily become heavily reliant on the state at the level of mobilisation, except as the raison d’être. Ethnicity may be viewed as a type of cultural segmentation that was able to intersect other classes and territorial divides (Thompson & Rudolph 1986: 32). In fact the re-emergence of ethnic definitions of nationalism lay in it being a “destabilising, potentially revolutionary force that threatened to disintegrate state or at least to disrupt their smooth functioning” (Ronen 1986: 4). The dynamic nature of ethnic social interaction has led correspondingly to ethnicity being more prone to movement mobilisation. This is due to the increased fluidity of communication between varying classes in a political organisation system based on kinship (Smith 1991: 12).

The transferring of allegiance to more peripheral modes of social organisation also allows for the replacing of older forms of political organisation that predate the state into positions of organisational significance. For identity to be perceived as organic, it must somehow be linked to social units that, one way or another, predate the formation of the state they are opposing. Such a linking of identity and social organisation is enhanced by the historicity of a specific cycle of protest, and state-centre periphery development, that grants the national movement a permanent position in direct opposition to the state’s own ideological solution (van den Berghe 1978: 401-409; Giner 1984). Connor (1994e: 212) in fact shows that:

Common Britishness, Belgianess, or Yugoslavness does not involve the ultimate sense of blood affiliation; the sense of having evolved from common ancestors does not extend beyond the Welsh, Fleming, or Croatian nation. In such a circumstance ethnic alignments persist due to ethnic divisions being “maintained by the efforts of their members as part of a pattern of social interaction” enabling them to bargain with the majority at the centre (Banton. 1986: 11).

Ethnicity grants this sense of permanency that most social movements seek. Yet, once linked to the nationalist doctrine it provides, as well, an organisational base for future peripheral elites to exploit. For the classic oppositional movement geared at reacting to the state’s rhythm, the advantages of ethno-national mobilisation over more civic means are that the individual may obtain maximum net advantage through the utilisation of physical and cultural differences in a process of inclusion and exclusion. That in turn, solidifies the group on the periphery into a cohesive political unit ready to organise outside the realms of state control. Once these societal cleavages are set, and the fixed shape of the community becomes solidified, the community based movement becomes less readily shaken. It is a development that hinges greatly upon the relationship between the state and the communities it is attempting to control. In such circumstances the national movement is but a reaction to a political order defined on ethnic predominance (Connor 1977: 22).

In divided societies, the sense of an ethnic group as a community and its competition with others to constitute the whole community create a strong impetus toward party organisation along ethnic lines (Horowitz 1994: 49).

It must not be forgotten that all nations bear the imprint of ethnic and territorial aspects of national formation (Smith 1991: 37-42; Gellner 1995: 29). This in itself defines the relationship between centre and periphery because more often than not it is this battle for common rights and inclusive citizenry that leads many national movements to undertake a politic that is wider than the usual definition given to national movements (Hechter & Appelbaum 1982; Hechter 1985). Hence, social and cultural matters are considered as equally important as the fulfilment of nationalist and irredentist rhetoric (Smith 1987: 149). Yet, there remains an understanding that national rights could never be satisfied without corresponding guarantees for civil rights. It is here that Deutsch (1969a: 101) believes that national movements correspond with other movements; be it in the organisational set up and employment of popular symbols of collective identity, or, the utilisation of popular legitimacy within legislative frameworks.

The two are not mutually exclusive, and for most national movements this is recognised within their rhetoric (Bhabha 1994a; During 1994). It is after all, as Smith (1987: 165) recognises, the question of common legal citizenship that is the main reason behind the rise in political awareness on the periphery. For as Gellner (1983b: 1) acknowledges, nationalism is but a principle that takes the form of national sentiment when this principle of social organisation has been seemingly violated; it becomes a movement once this has been acted upon. This violation is subsequently determined in terms of the ability of the state to create the necessary environment in which to resolve such crises of legitimacy whilst placating the demands of the periphery (Rokkan 1983; Arrighi 1985). If this is formulated along ethnic lines then the movement has little choice but to proffer their own ‘ethnic solution’ (Wilson & Tyrrell 1996). In this way the state plays a major role in defining the preconditions for the remobilisation of supposedly ‘atavistic’ ethno-nationalist sentiment:

The mobilisation of state-claiming ethnic identities is less the product of the intensification of nationalistic sentiments than the development of external conditions that allow preexisting sentiments to be acted upon (Kupchan 1995a: 9).

As such ethnos enables these elites to formulate a body polity that may ensure the continuation of the cultural development of one group in the face of the territorial aspirations of another (Conversi 1994). It is what Connor (1994g: 44) calls an “ethnopsychological phenomena” that leaves a space within the collective psyche that creates a bordered security in the face of rapid social change.

Concepts of suppression, liberation and ascendancy remain terms that are ensconced in civic notions gained from previous battles with state centralist elites. The prevalent philosophical thought, according to Smith (1991: 9), is that of the ‘Western Civil Model’, which is perpetuated through the legitimation of the territorial administrative centres, that dictates the nature of the national ideal. The field is hence defined in terms of the legal-political and civic-legal (Carty 1996). In such circumstances full enfranchisement can never be truly granted unless these issues of civil rights are achieved. The embracement by Sinn Féin of feminist, sexual, and gender issues highlights the need for many national movements to embrace a wider scope of social issues traditionally founded within civil rights movements in order to become truly representative of their community.⁴

Schöpflin (1995: 55) points out that the community defined on ethnos has outlived feudalism, imperialism, post-imperialism and communism to create a sense of societal order built on lines similar to clanal structure in times of extreme societal stress. This occurs when institutions of political mediation fail and people have to rely on less stable, yet more fluid, lines of negotiation and communication (Smith 1991: 24), that are espoused through the client patron relationship so common in clanal based societies (Gellner 1977). These networks can guarantee direct access to leaders that established civic political democracies may not. As Schöpflin (1995: 61) states:

The feebleness of the civic sphere means, at the same time, that reference to nationhood can be used to legitimate propositions or to delegitimate opponents- indeed, in this connection they become “enemies,” “traitors to the nation,” rather than political opponents who share the same basic commitment to the state as citizens.

In the end, the reinvention of such ethno-filial ties is but a latter day response to similar mobilisations that occurred at the centre centuries before. The difference was that the state’s own consolidation was derivative of an internal recognition for the need of a restructuring of government. The contemporary emergence of nationalist discontent are the parallel response of such state consolidation processes.

 

Conclusion

The adoption of ethno-nationalist means to mobilisation lay in the rational desire to find a continuum within the established order that could survive at the demise of the state that was seen as the target (Smith 1991: 28-34, 1992a). This seemingly is in contrast with the notion of ethnicity being a replacement ideology developed within cleavages that had emerged as a by-product of industrialisation (Deutsch 1963a). Ethno-nationalist mobilisation is a response, not one developed in spite of the processes of modernisation but rather in reaction to forms of bureaucratic centralism which have not been inclusive enough (Esman 1977: 12; Connor 1994c: 145-147). It is interesting to note that even in 1883 Ernest Renan recognised in his seminal work What is a Nation? that exclusivity breeds the desire for the marginalised to withdraw. The danger though would be viewing the adoption of the nation as the focal point for movement mobilisation as being the desire to create a civil religion to replace the beliefs displaced by the processes of modernisation.

Renan’s theories of entwining nationalism with religion, be it in a civic form, was to influence Deutsch (1962, 1963a), Gellner (1974b, 1983b, 1986) and Hechter (1993a) in formulating concepts of national development that were to concentrate upon the link between shifting societal values and the development of the Industrial Revolution and the Imperialist State. Yet few have, with the exception of Greenfeld (1993a), Smith (1987) and Banton (1986), concentrated on the movement based on state influenced anti-elitist ideological nature of ethno-nationalist mobilisation. The nation as a response to the established nation-state identity based around state centralism has held little weight within the literature that concentrates on the ‘Great Nation State’ (Kupchan 1995: 4-5). This could allow for a theoretical discussion on how the current emergence of ethno/religious nationalism, especially in Northern Ireland, challenges the notion of the attainment of full participation for minorities within the current conglomerate international nation-state system. Civil religion, in fact, has served only to further enhance the status of the lieties and further peripheralise minorities by entrenching them within class divisions defined along the lines of the ‘other’.

Civic unity on its own was deemed ineffective as a guaranteed loyalty for states undergoing massive socio-economic change (O’Brien 1968, 1969). In Britain this was symbolised in the religious interdependence of the developing Protestant Royal elite of the sixteenth century (Greenfeld 1993a: 49-51). Yet contemporary examples points to ethnos, in the nineteenth century Mazzinian sense, as becoming a major frame for socio-political organisation (Schöpflin 1995: 41). Greece 1829; the abortive revolutions of 1848 in Germany, Hungary and Italy; Rumania and Serbia 1878; Norway 1905; Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia in 1918, are examples of this legitimation of the ethno-nationalist form of resolving ethnic based socio-political cleavages (Connor 1977: 26). Correspondingly, these new identities emerge when pre-existing state structures fail to offer sufficient political opportunity structures to incorporate these fledgling peripheral identities (Greenfeld & Chirot 1994: 84).

On an organisational basis the ability of the national, or sub-national group, to provide a level of distinctiveness, autonomy and alternate political mobilisation has allowed for the ethno-nationalist path to provide a site for organisation and protest to occur (Kupchan 1995: 5-6). Yet, if one was to look at the development of national movement organisation since the 1960s, within the European perspective, there seems to be more correlation between the development of initial civic inspired social mobilisation and the rise of ethno-national questions than previously thought (Connor 1977; Nairn 1993; Hroch 1996b). The aspect of clearly demarcated boundaries between nationalist and civic questions is waning, and studies by Tilly (1975b, 1975c, 1994b) and Tarrow (1996) suggests that perhaps they were never there.

When one looks at the development of the Nationalist Republican movement in Northern Ireland from 1963 (Kiberd 1996: 573-579), the Basque movement in Spain from 1959 (Conversi 1997), and Croatian decentralists from 1971 onwards (Denitch 1994), one can see a pattern emerging of initial social disparity being transferred into political disenchantment and eventual mobilisation against the centre. At the core is a realisation that at some point there occurs an entwining of civic and national causes that seem to the participants, indivisible. Whether or not the nationalist doctrine becomes a new civil religion is insignificant to the greater question which should be asked, ie, why is the national doctrine viewed as the cure all for problems of mobilisation, goal attainment and consolidation by marginalised communities?

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