The search for the elements of stable democratic government may take one of two distinctively different trajectories.1 The first asks, "Under what circumstances is the democratic form of government most likely to succeed?" Searching for the optimal "conditions" for successful majoritarian government, this approach draws on the experience of established democracies and on the idea of democracy itself. It is essentializing and its analysis is static. Conflict and division are problematicthe more deeply rooted the more problematic. Relative social and cultural homogeneity, shared beliefs and attitudes on substantive issues, and a common democratic "political culture" are not only "conditions" but "preconditions" for the success of democracy. Democracy is thus delicate and rare, requiring hardy doses of socialization, or careful management of mass sentiment, to succeed under all but the most fortunate of circumstances.
This is the classical view, but it is also the one which received social scientific standing in the atmosphere of embattled freedoms of the 1950s when Robert Dahl and a host of colleagues and competitors elaborated an "empirical democratic theory" on the basis of a profound suspicion of the "mass politics" and perfervid nationalisms of the first half of the twentieth century.2 It was "empirical" mainly in its search for the sociological preconditions of democracy and in its appeal for evidence to survey research, mostly in Britain and the United States. Out of these beginnings grew the Social Science Research Council's project on political development (which pictured the development of democratic institutions as the culmination of a long and uncertain struggle to overcome five "crises") and a variety of studies of "nation-building" and the problems of dealing with social and political "mobilization" in the "new nations".3
The more historically oriented of the studies of the emergence of the modern nation-state argued persuasively that the centralization of state power preceded, and was in some sense a condition for, the developing sense of "nationhood," which, in any case, did not assume its modern form until the nineteenth century.4 Indeed, Stein Rokkan recognized a necessary tension between what he called the "National Revolution" dictated by a "central nation-building culture" and "the increasing resistance of the ethnically, linguistically, or religiously distinct subject populations in the provinces and the peripheries."5
Hobsbawm likewise points to the dangers inherent in the centralizing project of promoting a "national" consciousness in the age of popular participation, because the modernization of the state itself, especially the spread of its administrative and educational reach, could provoke counter-nationalisms.6 "Nationalism," in these accounts, while intertwined with the spread of participatory forms of government and pressures for democratization, was never a straightforward "pre-condition" for democracy, but stood, in much the manner emphasized by Ghia Nodia in this volume, in complex tension with democratizing tendencies.
The second approach asks, "What are the incentives which drive political actors to choose democracy over the alternatives?" It treats conflict as the heart of politics and the decision for one or another form of government as a decision about the terms under which conflict will be carried out. It assumes that democracy is the answer to fundamental conflicts and asks why people would give such an answer. As the authors to a recent study of the Spanish transition describe it, "The fundamental task facing the founders of the new regime was to create a political system capable of managing deep-seated conflicts through institutional channels."7 In Giuseppe Di Palma's words, democracy is a matter of "coexistence" and struggles over democracy force an "ultimate question," namely, "Can a country afford not to have coexistence?"8 In this view, the absence of objective "preconditions" is precisely the problem democracy is constructed to deal with. The only question is how and why do groups come to see democracy as the way to do so, and having done so, what keeps them to their agreements to observe democratic forms?
It would be tempting, but wrong, to speculate that these orientations do little more than reflect the biases and vantage points of the ages in which they were posed, the more pessimistic presentation of the classical and "empirical" schools flowing from periods in which autocracies and mass-based dictatorships seemed better equipped to deal with the manifold difficulties of governance, the more optimistic view of democracy as somehow essential to conflict management in the modern world springing from a setting in which democracy and democratization seems almost everywhere the rage. While there may be some truth in this reading as to the origins of these approaches, it is important to note that they represent not only distinctly different intellectual strategies, but they spring from different empirical bases, as well. The first is analytic, spinning out the supposed presuppositions of democracy on the basis of a static analysis of the "idea" of majority rule. Its empirical bases are the established democracies, particularly Britain and the United States, in a sometimes idealized version of their "modal patterns".9 The second, by contrast, is processoriented and more interested in the empirical processes by which countries have become democracies than in the logical "prerequisites" for democracy. As DiPalma notes, it is apt to focus on outlying cases, where the prospects for democracy seem slim in "objective" terms; but it has been able to draw on a wide range of recent democratizations, from Southern Europe to Latin America, to bolster its sense that democracy, however contingent, is nevertheless a solution to problems of conflict management rather than an inevitable victim of conflict.10
Our approach, while drawing on some of the insights of earlier work on nationalism and nation-building, is much more in tune with the second camp, and this choice necessarily colors our view of such supposed "preconditions" of democracy or political development as a democratic "political culture," a relatively homogeneous population, or a sense of nationhood. Since these will be crucial issues in what follows it seems a good idea to begin our discussion with a brief explanation of the factors which we think make for the successful installation and maintenance of democracies. We follow this with a look at one of the first of the so-called "nation-states" of Europe, France, and at its own struggles over the concept of "nation". In section three, we look at the ambiguities surrounding the accoutrements of national identity in relatively successful nation-states. In the concluding section, we attempt to draw some lessons for democrats and nation-builders.
DEMOCRACY: THE MINIMALIST VIEW
We start from the premise that democracy is the institutionalization of a certain uncertainty, in the sense that, given democratic rules, no political outcome is definitively foreclosed.11 While there appears little doubt that in the late twentieth century the democratic form has taken on a quasi-mandatory character, something more is needed for the parties involved, particularly those wielding the power to block its installation, to come to agree to the uncertainties that democracy entails. Where major parties do not readily see mutual advantage (whatever their antagonisms) in democratic rules of the game, democracy appears to be out of the question unless one of the following conditions is met: 1) the power of the party or parties intent on blocking settlement must itself be seriously in question (as in the case of certain of the Communist parties of the former Soviet bloc or Salazarist forces in Portugal in 1974); or 2) conservative forces facing protracted resistance from oppositions move to save what they can (and risk losing all: the Gorbachev reforms perhaps represent an example; the Brazilian abertura is another); or, finally, 3) political forces reach a stalemate in which each side agrees to institutionalize conflict under the pacific rules of a democracy (El Salvador is a prime example).12
In any case, unless democracy is imposed forcibly by a conquering power, internal or external, the parties to a democratic settlement will always strive to insure that their interests will be guarded in two ways: through substantive agreements about the limits and pace of policy change; and through agreements on procedures designed to maintain as level a playing field as possible for all significant parties to the agreement. Such political pacts go beyond the transition and what Linz calls the Eruptura pactada; they are implicit in any functioning democracy. Insofar as any "allegiance to democratic principles" counts, it will rest, in the last analysis, on satisfaction or desperation. In this respect, democracies do not differ from other regime types.
Thus, we differ with Ghia Nodia's presentation in this volume in one important respect: the first step in forging a democracy is not the formation of a "political `we'" in the sense today associated with nationalism, but only, if at all, in the narrower sense that significant actors come to see the arena within which they struggle and the opponents they face as more or less permanent features of their political landscape. The sense of political "we" is not a "precondition" for democracy, but its long-term product, often won in protracted struggle. The first step is some common recognition of the arena of struggle and a sense, on the part of important actors, that this arena must be permanently shared. Today the arena is provided in part (in most cases) by the bare fact of international recognition and the territorial boundaries established thereby. By and large, absent some tremendous effort to shake free, the territorial entity accorded sovereign statehood by the international community defines the boundaries of domestic conflict and of the possibilities for its resolution, or rather, management. Without doubt, tremendous efforts to redefine those boundaries are possible, as recent events proclaim; but such cases are exceptional and do not provide us with much insight into the relationship between the elements of nationalism, as usually understood, and democratizing projects or democracies.
Second, it is important to emphasize the term "significant actors." Not all actors in the process of installation, consolidation, and maintenance of a democracy are equally significant. In many respects, the mass of a population plays little role in the crucial decisions affecting the future of democratic arrangements. They may or may not bear the full panoply of "democratic attitudes" usually thought necessary for the success of a democracy. They may or may not think of themselves as a "political `we'". They may or may not have any very extended, or appreciative, view of themselves as constituents of a "nation". In sum, whether or not the mass of the population shares any of these attitudes and understandings may or may not be salient for the success of a democracy. Whether and to what extent they are salient depends largely on the ways in which the elements of the population, their organizations, and the various elites put these attitudes to use.
Finally, just as "democratic attitudes" are neither necessary nor sufficient for the successful launching of a democratic polity, so too are nationalistic sentiments13 neither necessary nor sufficient for the constitution of a political `we'. Not necessary because we can cite more than one case of a democracy founded around distinctively different understandings. Not sufficient, because recent history is full of tales of "national" groups unable to forge the sort of political 'we' necessary to constitute an effective revolutionary or national movement. That said, we can proceed to a closer look at the roles which nationalism has played in the forging of a democratic political `we'.
FRANCE: THE QUESTION OF THE NATION
Is the establishment of a coherent national identity crucial to the sort of sustained elite consensus and popular acquiescence necessary for stable democracy? Or does agreement on the contours of "the nation" follow on a political settlement? The history of France, birthplace in many respects of the modern idea of citizenship, provides some support for both arguments. For the source of the persistent volatility in French public life, from the Revolution to the Fifth Republic, lay not so much in the lack of a conception of nationality as in the seeming impossibility of reconciling competing conceptions of French nationhood. For close to two centuries, through the Revolution, two empires, five republics, a restored Bourbon and an illegitimate Orleanist monarchy, and the quasi-fascist Vichy regime, the central issue of French political life, the question of republican versus other forms of government, revolved around the character and implications of French nationality.
Superficially, at least, France appears to possess the quintessential characteristics of a unified nation-statecommon language, culture, religion, traditions, territory, and history. Why should a country enjoying such advantages suffer such chronic instability? The answer lies in an evolving struggle over the meaning of French nationality for the governance of France. At the heart of the political struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a deep disagreement over how France was to be defined in terms of participation and citizenship. At first a question of citizenship and loyalty versus older notions of station and obedience, by the end of the nineteenth century the struggle took on racialist and chauvinist overtones which were only superseded (and then not completely) by more straightforward battles over the form popular government should take.
The radical democratic notion of French nationality arose from the Jacobin concept of citizenship, which entailed the adoption of a set of commitments, including (usually) knowledge of French and the acceptance of a host of values and precepts associated with loyalty to the Republic. It was voluntarist by and large, relying on the individual to choose to become "French" by adopting the revolutionary values encapsulated in the revolutionary mantras of liberté, egalité, fraternité. The Jacobins made no attempt to exclude any group from assuming French citizenship, provided they remained loyal to revolutionary France. Even an outsider like Tom Paine, who spoke no French, could be elected to the National Convention on the basis of his political ideals. Arguments about blood, race, or even linguistic preferences, were of no concern to the Jacobins.
The French Revolution sharply challenged the legitimacy of traditional political arrangements of the ancien régime by offering a cogent alternative based on the sovereignty of the people, rather than on God or the monarchy. No longer content with the passivity of the population as subjects, the Jacobins instructed the French people to become participatory citizens and to defend the republic from domestic and foreign counter-revolutionaries. This meant that the citizen would replace the subject; France belonged to its people, not to the royal family and its functionaries. If this left open the question of how "the people" is defined and delimited, as Professor Nodia suggests, that problem was solved practically by the scope of French territorial claims. Jacobin France was state-based, and the Jacobins advocated a popular-revolutionary patriotism which idolized the state as the instrument of popular sovereignty. The republic, not the ethnic nation, was the object of the Jacobins' veneration and loyalty. The Jacobin revolutionary patriotism rallied segments of the population to defend the fatherland against the counterattacks of the European monarchies in 1793. As E.J. Hobsbawm observes, "`patriots' in the sense pioneered by the Americans, the Dutch revolutionaries of 1783, and the French" were not ethnic nationalists: ". . . the patrie to which their loyalty lay was the opposite of an existential, pre-existing unit, but a nation created by the political choice of its members."14
With the revolution and the empire, France was identified with democracy, patriotism (as embodied in the defense of the fatherland), and military greatness, throughout the continent. The legacy of Napoleon is particularly ambiguous, since his own imperial reign was hardly the epitome of democratic republicanism. And yet, on the continent, among radical democrats and republicans, the Napoleonic invasions were celebrated, at least at first, for the damage they wrought on the traditional social and political order and for the possibility they presented for a renewal of public life on democratic bases. The Napoleonic Wars reawakened Spain, Germany, Italy, and Russia, and gave hope to forlorn ethnic groups like the Poles. For many Europeans, the Napoleonic era was remembered more for its ignition of democratic and "national" aspirations heavily tinged with democratic sentiment than for the wars or French conquest.
The French nation was born in the French Revolution; however, its meaning was still fluid enough to permit both right and left to appropriate it for their own purposes. Those purposes were radically opposed. The restored monarchy of the Bourbon Charles X fell as a result of the July Revolution of 1830, an expression of "uncontrollable forces" set loose by the French Revolution. In Charles' place, the Orleanist Louis Philippe declared himself "king of the French," that is, of the people of France rather than the territory, thereby implicitly accepting the revolutionary notion of citizenship in an effort to legitimate his "Bourgeois Monarch". As Hobsbawm notes, after the American and French revolutions, "such traditional guarantors of loyalty as dynastic legitimacy, divine ordination, historic right and continuity of rule, or religious cohesion were severely weakened, [and] all these traditional legitimations of state authority were, since 1789, under permanent challenge." Even monarchies "as secure from revolution as George III's Britain or Nicholas I's Russia" felt the need to provide a popularly-based legitimation for traditional rule.15 By and large, the monarchs merely succeeded in buying time. Louis Philippe's time ran out in the Revolution of 1848, which created the short-lived second republic. By 1851, Napoleon III had become a democratically elected quasi-dictator and the Second Empire was proclaimed. In 1871 his empire came to its ignoble end with the occupation of much of the north by the Prussian military and the revolt of Paris under the radical Commune.
The political dynamics which led to the birth of the Third Republic are particularly interesting for our purposes. The defeat of the Commune by the forces of Thiers in May of 1871 set aside the "social question" represented by the left and their radical republican sympathizers in the Commune. With that the political struggle returned to center, with a renewed battled between republicans and the conservative dominated Assembly over the form of government. Under pressure from the Legitimists, Thiers offered the last Bourbon pretender, the Comte de Chambord, the crown. The Comte's insistence on reigning under the white flag of the Bourbons, opposed even by his own party, was decisive. He would not rule under the tricolore, and the Assembly would not renounce what had become a symbol of popular French nationality. France would have no king.16 The situation was exacerbated by divisions among the monarchists (besides the Legitimists, the Orleanists and the Bonapartists claimed to represent traditional forces). But perhaps most important was the new legitimacy enjoyed by the moderate republicans, who had supported Thiers' invasion of Paris and thus could represent themselves as the "party of order." The Republic was no longer a threat to the Right, so the argument went; the republicans were replaced by the (now defeated) workers' movement as the chief threat to order and property, and they had shown that they were capable of containing the latter. Thus was the Third Republic born; despite continuing opposition to republicanism on the right, the Republic had become a viable choice, indeed, the only viable choice, once again.
With the virtual extinction of the traditional monarchist forces after the bungled attempt of General Boulanger to seize the government in 1877, a new antirepublican opposition was forged, drawing support from the right and left and representing a Bonapartist politics which amalgamated nationalist, antiparliamentary, personalist, and plebiscitary tendencies. Action Française undoubtedly represents the best example of this new political phenomenon. Led by the atheist Charles Maurras, Action Française articulated "integral nationalism," whose program called for the restoration of the monarchy, the maintenance of the aristocratic social order, the use of the Church as a bulwark against social radicalism, and the exclusion of Jews and other foreigners in an effort to restore French national solidarity. Based on racially determined arguments of blood and birth, Action Française helped propagate ideas for political forces on the extremes while attracting a declining middle class and peasantry still tied to the Church and the remains of the aristocracy.
The dominant struggle during the Third Republic was between the clericals and the anticlericals. At the heart of this fight was the question who should control education; but behind this concrete political issue lay the deeper one of how France should define itselfas a sacred state or a secular republic. Vitriolic conflicts between the Roman Catholic Church, which had allied itself to the old monarchist-royalist right, and the republicans paralyzed much of the political life of the republic. Similar struggles were repeated throughout Catholic Europe and the religiously divided polities of the Rhine basin and old Hapsburg Empire, as Rokkan points out. "The development of compulsory education under centralized secular control for all children of the nation came into direct conflict with the established rights of the religious pouvoirs intermédiaries and triggered waves of mass mobilization into nationwide parties of protest" and "religious defense".17 Here again, then, the imperatives of "nation-building" aroused the ire of adherents of older systems of authority, generating intense disputes over the character of the nation being built. By this time, however, the methods, if not the democratic principle, of mass politics had been adopted by all contenders.
When the Dreyfus case exploded into the public eye at the end of the nineteenth century, the political forces allied to Action Française and those of the anticlerical republicans, radicals, and socialists entered into mortal conflict. This cause célèbre crystallized the conflict over the meaning of French nationality because, as it came to be interpreted by both sides, it represented a fundamental assault on the Jacobin notion of citizenship. If a Jew could not be a Frenchman, then revolutionary citizenship did not define French nationality. This profound attack on the revolutionary conception of French citizenship solidified republican-radical cooperation by forcing the anticlerical agenda into the forefront for both parties. The culmination of this new alliance came in 1905 when the Act of Separation definitively disestablished the Catholic Church as the official religion of France, effectively settling the education question while relieving the French state of the temptation of meddling deeply in Church affairs.
The arrival of World War I brought about the restoration of the Union Sacré of France. During this war there was no fifth column collaborating with the Germans. However, the unity of the war was elusive and ephemeral. Intriguing by the right and violent demonstrations by militants of Action Française led to the formation in 1934 of the Popular Front government which temporarily allied the socialists, communists, and the remains of the radicals in one government under Leon Blum. The Front collapsed in 1936, and France drifted, unprepared for war with Nazi Germany because the pro-German right and pacifists on the left had blocked centrists plans to build up French defense.
The Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1940 overwhelmed the French in six weeks. But in contrast to the situation in World War I, the Germans encountered no united opposition. The government of Marshal Pétain and Admiral Laval in Vichy concretely illustrated the persistence of deep divisions within French society. Their regime, committed to a "National Revolution," appealed to notions of fatherland, solidarity, and corporatism. The Vichy regime was "Bonapartism with Bureaucracy"conservative, Catholic, and ostensibly neutralist. While collaborationist elements within the regime did play an increasingly vital role in the governance of unoccupied France, the Vichy government in fact embodied the aspirations of an important segment of French society. Indeed, it attempted to formulate a new French nationality on the lines of earlier rightist movements, particularly Action Française.
During the first eighteen months of the German occupation of the remainder of France, moreover, there was little resistance. In fact, for the most part there was active collaboration with the Nazi rulers. It was not until the beginning of 1942 that the vast majority of the French with the German-ruled occupation zone started to oppose Nazi rule. Nothing can easily account for this nearly wholesale acceptance of German rule. Unlike many on the Eastern Front, who welcomed the Germans as seeming liberators from the tyrannical grip of Stalin, the French were not oppressed by a totalitarian dictator; yet their behavior belied a genuine antipathy for the milieu of the Third Republic.
Competing for the loyalties of the French people were the various resistance groups. The most vital faction of the resistance was made up of the Communists, whose Leninist party organization provided them with the organizational structure, loyalty, and discipline needed to successfully prosecute a guerrilla war. The other major faction, the Free French, were led from exile by Charles DeGaulle. Allied with Catholic resistance forces within France, the Free French became the most important non-Communist formation with the resistance, enabling DeGaulle to head a provisional government whose purpose was to draft a new constitution following the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Communists, Socialists, and the Gaullist/Christian Democratic-MRP were the leading parties. Despite DeGaulle's efforts to dictate key provisions, the new constitution, which provided the foundation for the Fourth Republic, promised to suffer from many of the debilities of the Constitution of 1875. DeGaulle withdrew from politics, and in his place a disloyal right rallied and plotted, often behind his name. The Communists quickly went into opposition at the end of 1947, when their trade union, the CGT, sponsored widespread strikes which the Socialist interior minister forcibly put down.
On the left, thereafter, the Communists were in permanent opposition, and with the emergence of a Gaullist political party, the PRF, nearly half of the parliament was dominated by anti-Fourth Republic political parties. DeGaulle's major goal was to contain the French Communists, but several factors conspired to devalue the importance of the "Communist threat" by the mid-1950s: the success of the MRP made a Communist victory unlikely; Khrushchev's famous attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956 helped reduce the power of the old conservative lodestone of Stalinist terror; the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in that same year discredited French apologists for the Soviet Union in the eyes of many; and the French Communist Party itself made its intense nationalism a central element of its propaganda. These changing circumstances made the possibility of an elected Communist government at once more remote and less unpalatable to many.
On the surface, the issue which brought down the Fourth Republic had its roots in the civil war in Algeria. The intensification of the Algerian crisis culminated with the 1958 coup de main which ended the Fourth Republic and ushered in the Gaullist Fifth Republic. Behind the conspiracy that put DeGaulle into power, and indeed behind the political conflicts which plagued the Fourth Republic throughout its short life, was the continuing battle over the meaning of French nationality and, in particular, over the legitimacy of the republican heritage. As in the crisis of 1871-75, the defusing of the threat from the left at once gave new life to conflict over the form of government and new legitimacy to republican formulas. DeGaulle embraced republicanism while forging a strong central executive. Both moves proved crucial to overcoming at last the divisions of nearly two centuries of French nationalism. The new Gaullist state was hardy enough to weather the storms of the decolonization of Algeria in 1962, the student protests of 1968, and the ascent of a Socialist-Communist government in 1981.
What changed with the Fifth Republic which put an end to the extensive anti-democratic opposition which had plagued all French republics heretofore? In the largest terms, the answer seems to lie in the acceptance of a unified French national identity which draws its life from the mainsprings of the French Revolution. While it is true that the Revolution has received extensive critical reappraisal in the last few years, this would seem to be more of a sign of the strength of the mythos of the Republic and the republican tradition it spawned than of an open rejection of its principles. Behind the apparent "consensus", however, lie the stark political facts that the major conflicts which fueled the old debate have been resolved, and resolved largely in favor of the republican tradition. The monarchist alternative is clearly dead. The old battle over education was essentially settled with the Act of Separation. The Church embraced, definitively by the Second Vatican Council of 1964 if not before, the democratic forms of the Republic. In these senses, clearly the Republic, and the Revolution on which it is founded, have triumphed. Their more inclusive, radical democratic notion of French nationality has also triumphed, at least in important long-standing practices. Alsace, Brittany, and Occitania are safely ensconced in "great France," despite folkloric "nationalist" revivals here and there. The Republic, in short, and the more inclusive notion of citizenship on which its conception of the nation was based, has outlived the alternatives. And without alternatives, even the most questionable of regimes may appear legitimate.18 Consensus on political forms, won in hard struggle over alternatives, has become the basis for consensus over national identity.
No doubt, the shadows of the old struggle have reappeared in the racialist and chauvinist sentiments behind the growing popularity of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. Its anti-immigrant stance portends a larger agenda of anti-republican themes which, thus far, have not manifested themselves. As even the optimistic developmentalist theorists of the 1960s discovered on examining the historical record, "even the most stable kinds of political situations contained conflicting tendencies and potentialities."19 In this respect, Adam Przeworski's observation that conflicts are rarely resolved, only temporarily and to one degree or another "terminated", seems apropos.20 If the evolution of such issues up to now is any indicator, however, Le Pen's movement, like Maurras', will eventually dissipate.
What will make all the difference, we would contend, will be the interests to which alternative versions of French nationality are attached and the degree to which those interests resist reconciliation. The resources of nationality may unite or divide; everything depends upon the uses to which they are put. What can be extracted from the French case is a clear sense of the difficulty of arriving at a coherent conception of a political "we". For two hundred years, the French have struggled with what their identity means and how this decision should be manifested in their political system and their social relations.
The development of national identity and of democratic political forms may be correlated with one another, if only imperfectly. Both arose from the expansion of participatory politics at the end of the eighteenth century. But, despite seductive examples from the age of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and from the current breakup of the old Russian Empire, both processes usually start with the solidification, centralization, and expansion of state power within boundaries set by international circumstances. Nationalism, both state-centered and oppositional, is a response, as Hobsbawm has shown, to that process in a context in which popular participation is presumed to be vital to the legitimacy of the state. The idea of nation is explosive in divided polities; it is equally fraught with consequence in those polities where it provides a basis for common political identity. In the following section, we explore some the implications of national signs, stories, and what Hobsbawm calls "proto-nationalism" for national identity.
SIGNS WHICH UNITE, SIGNS WHICH DIVIDE
One of the characteristics of 'nation' most often cited as the basis of common identity is language. While linguistic identity is by no means primordialmany national languages are the self-conscious products of nation-buildersthe acquisition of a common language (or dialect) is an important sign of citizenship even where radical democratic notions of nationhood prevail (Revolutionary France, the United States). Even where bilingualism is tolerated, the command of both national languages or of the "official" national language as well as the "other" language is widely seen, by populace and elite alike, as a sign of willing participation in a polity defined as a commonweal over and above the cultural distinctions within it. Common language is as much a sign of political union for many people as it is a means to that end; it is hard to account for the "English Only" movement in the United States in any other terms.
National languages nevertheless represent significant exclusions that cannot always be ignored in discussing the formation of a political `we'. A national language is generally built on one among a number of variant dialects or languages. These may be relegated to the position of bearers of the "little tradition" as opposed to "high culture" ("Hochdeutsch" expresses it well). Their speakers are often automatically disadvantaged over against those raised in the prevailing tongue. The excluded language or dialect may in turn become the basis for self-conscious dissent from the political domination of an "alien" tradition, as the revolts of Catalonia, the Basque country, and Quebec attest, and as revolutionary nationalists have recognized throughout the last century-and-a-half. On the other hand, the national tongue itself may carry important political implication: the Croatians' choice, at the end of the nineteenth century, of that dialect which united them with the Serbs both deprived "Croat nationalism of the convenient linguistic justification, and . . . provid(ed) both Serbs, and later Croats, with an excuse for expansionism."21
Closely related to the question of national languages are the politics of place names and capital cities, the symbolism of the flag, and the emergence of a national poetry. Place names may play an important symbolic role in relating a specific city or region or geographic feature to both a particular nation and sometimes to a historical or fictive past. For example, the campaigns throughout the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union to change place names into local languages served as an early and seemingly innocuous means of promoting glasnost. The Popular Fronts which were founded as grass-roots civic organizations in 1987 and 1988 combined cultural and linguistic revivalism with support for perestroika. They evolved into more assertive "national fronts" by the close of the decade. Cultural and linguistic concerns gave way to wider themes of political empowerment and greater economic self-determination. One of the most interesting aspects of the nationalist campaigns in the former Soviet Union and its relationship to language was the concerted effort on the part of Ukrainian nationalists and their supporters to detach "the" from "the Ukraine" in English because it was surmised that the definite article made the historic Ukrainian nation simply one more region of Russia.
Throughout the Soviet Union, cities and regions attempted to rejoin their pre-Communist histories by restoring street, city, and regional names. As might be expected, the nomenclature of post-Soviet geography has been seriously complicated by the complex ethnic admixtures in many regions. For example, the western city of Lviv has a Ukrainian, Russian (Lvov), Polish (Lwow), and German (Lemburg) name, each corresponding to a particular epoch in the city's history. The decision to restore Leningrad to its pre-Communist name, St. Petersburg (its name was briefly changed during World War I to Petrograd because St. Petersburg was too German) reflected, it appears, the desire to readopt the Westernizing legacy of Peter the Great. Wholesale name changes have occurred, e.g., Byelorussia to Belarus, Moldavia to Moldova, Kirgizia to Kyrgyzistan.
As the response of the Comte de Chambord to the tricolor suggests, the evocative power of the flag as a symbol of competing conceptions of the nation continues to this very day. Under President Gorbachev, the restive nationalities rallied around their respective pre-Soviet national flags as a means of manifesting their discontent with the Soviet Union and their desire for autonomy, sovereignty, and finally independence. The Baltic Republics resurrected the suppressed flags of their independent predecessors of the interwar period; the blue and yellow standards featuring the national symbol, the trident of Saint Wolodmyr, waved in Kiev and Lviv; Moldavians rallied behind the Romanian national tricolore (and alienated many Russians, Ukranians, and Gagauzians); and the green flags of Islam were seen in the capitals of the Muslim republics of Azerbaijan and Central Asia. The importance of flags appears to arise from their role as symbols of both statehood and nationhood, of both political and popular identity. No state lacks a flag, and emergent or potential states always create a standard as a concrete manifestation of their intention to seek and procure independence. With the French Revolution, flags ceased to represent an aristocratic or royal line and came to stand for popular sovereignty. Ironically, several recent national movements have chosen ancient monarchical standards to represent their claims for independence (the Quebec separatists' blue and white, and even the Russian reversion to the Czarist standard), raising fears in some cases of a rise to power of nationalist-chauvinist elements.
Many new nations or modernizing regimes have made deliberate choices to eschew tradition in the choice of a particular location for a capital city in an effort to escape from other centers of power or the heavy burden of history in the process of building a new national identity. Washington, D.C. was made the capital of the United States because it was a sleepy backwater, distant from the economic and financial power of New York City, where the capital had temporarily resided. Bonn was likewise an acceptably sleepy backwater for the temporary West German republic. Brasilia was built on the Amazonian frontier, a utopian city for the New Brazil, far from the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro and the powerful governors of Sao Paolo and Minas Gerais. The Turkish nationalist reformer, Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk", established the capital of the new Turkish republic on the Anatolian plateau, far from the cosmopolitan and historical city of Istanbul, so that his westernizing program would not have to contend with the traditional and transnational representatives of the Ottoman Empire who still dominated the ancient city. Similar impulses drove the Meiji reformers to move the capital of Japan from the historical center of Japanese politics at Kyoto to the eastern fishing port of Edo (now Tokyo).
Poets and composers adopt geography in a different way to forge a common identity out of diverse materials. Rooted in the Romantic celebration of nature and of folk life, nationalist poets celebrated the landscape of, their homelands, often as part of deliberate attempt to extend andelaborate a national self-identification. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is perhaps the most self-conscious of the genre; but composers, too, often combined traditional folk melodies in lyric celebrations of the natural beauty of their homeland (Smetana's "The Moldau") or recollections of peasant life (Antonin Dvorak's "Slavonic Dances") or evocations of a historic or myth past (Franz Liszt's "The Ride of the Huns"). In doing so, each welded together elements whose "natural" relations were questionable or in dispute. "Walter Scott thus built a single Scotland on the territory soaked in the blood of warring Highlanders and Lowlanders, kings and Covenanters, and he did so by emphasizing their ancient divisions."22 The keepers of American history and the historical landscape of the United States similarly join Confederate and Union forces in a single celebration of national glory on the killing fields of Gettysburg or Antietam. Local words and customs and beauties; historical struggles, internal and external; fictive and real ties of blood and politics; all are woven together in often unforeseen combinations to feed national identities and supplant local loyalties and rivalries with the more encompassing mythos.
Religion likewise may serve as a basis for national identity where it is not, as in the United States, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, overwhelmingly representative of "the principle of civil society, the principle of division" (Marx). The trouble with the world religions is, of course, precisely their rejection of tribal identifications. As Hobsbawm points out, world religions provide the basis for national identity only where the entity in question is surrounded by countries identified with other confessions. Where that is not the case, as in most of Western Europe, religion itself loses much of its power as a source of national identity, though it may certainly provide one pole in internal struggles over the character of the national state, as we saw in the case of France.
Nevertheless, national religious symbols do sometimes play an important role in the development or maintenance of national self-consciousness. The Virgin of Guadalupe, while undoubtedly accessible to all Catholics, is closely identified with Mexican nationalism. The persistence of a Mayan secret tradition in Guatemala, by contrast, despite the overlay of Catholicism, is enough to differentiate "Indian" from white and mestizo (ladino) society. The Virgin, however, is just one of hundreds, even thousands, of local venerations. What propelled this Virgin into Mexican national history? The development of the political symbolism of the Virgin of Guadalupe suggests some of the difficulty of achieving such a national symbolism and some of the ambivalent possibilities inherent in it. The apparition of the Virgin in 1531 to the Nahuatl-speaking Indian, Juan Diego, immediately produced a cult, encouraged by the bishops of Mexico City, which attracted converted Indians not only because of Juan Diego's origins, but because the Virgin whose image appeared miraculously on his cloak was dark-skinned.23 According to national legend, however, what ensconced the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican history was the appearance of her banners at the head of the creole and Indian army led by the liberal priest Miguel Hidalgoy Costilla in the first of the Wars of Independence. Nevertheless, it took the figure of the "Indian" president, Benito Juarez, and the social upheaval of the Revolution of 1910 to insure that Mexico's "Indians" and "their" Virgin would have a place in Mexican nationalism. Even then she could be appropriated by antirevolutionary forces when elements of the church led the Cristero rebellion against the secular state in the 1920s.
The political apotheosis of the Virgin of Guadalupe was a contingent political act, whose peculiar valence for Mexican nationalism depended more on the figures and forces which triumphed over the centuries than on the specific content of the symbol. The dark Virgin, finally, patroness at once of the Mexican nation and of that nation's all but excluded indigenous peoples, is herself a principle of exclusion for the country's growing Protestant minority, whose nationalism is automatically subject to question, by peasant and priest alike, on the basis of their "rejection" of the Virgin.
While a common language may have a purely pragmatic and "universalizing" appeal for "nation-builders", religious symbols and allegiances and other "proto-nationalist" foci of popular identity always bear the risks of their exclusivity. As Hobsbawm observes of nineteenth century nation-builders, "the merger of state patriotism with non-state nationalism was politically risky," since the latter substituted exclusive criteria for comprehensive ones, thus fostering both the alienation of citizens who could not or would not be assimilated and the potential that they, in turn, would seek protection in a counter-nationalism of their own.24
One counter to such dangers is the construction of a comprehensive national myth. Rousseau felt the polity should be endowed with a common religion, and he enjoined his wise Legislator to choose one carefully. Plato, without the experience of the Protestant Reformation behind him, was nevertheless more circumspect. He was convinced that the Republic would have to be founded on a lie, and he crafted a myth to suit his creation. Stories of founding, stories of founders, foundational stories capture a nation's sense of itself and teach its lessons to politicians and people(s). The Marseillaise sets the sons of "France" against the tyrants and itself is enshrined in the story of valiant soldiers marching from the port city of that name to defend the Revolution in Paris. Washington's refusal to become king suggests both the precariousness of the founding and its first principlesthe refusal of pre-eminence and the choice for a rule of law over the rule of princes together uphold the egalitarian and constitution-bound political order of the American imagination.
Other, less political, stories may likewise define a nation. The Statue of Liberty, with its promise not only of freedom, but of opportunity as well, enters into an archetypal story of flight, arrival, and dreams consummated, if not in the first generation, then invariably in the next. Horatio Alger is part of that story, despite his Anglo-Saxon monicker, or perhaps because of it, since assimilation is the means to success in the national myth. Ellis Island, swindles and seductions, prejudice and poverty, big city machines and murderous working conditions are not. What makes "America" is opportunity; the "national" stories insist on that moral even more than on the unspoiled innocence of the continent. The quintessential American myth, like the faith of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century generally, is not cast in illo tempore, in some lost Golden Age, but in an ever renewed present, pregnant with an ever hopeful future.
In many respects, an eschatological national narrative of this sort is essential for a democracy, for a political order, that is, which constantly claims the ability to make and remake itself. Revolutions, insofar as they embody a faith in progress, make equally compelling founding myths. The French Revolution, in claiming to achieve everything at once, lost much of its claim to the future. That claim could only be upheld by invoking the specter of "counter-revolutionary forces" (of which there were many) who systematically blocked the Revolution's aspirations for liberté, egalité, fraternité. The Mexican Revolution claimed more: it was not just, said President José Lopez Portillo, the last of the bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth centuries but the first of the social revolutions of the twentieth. As such, it would continue (this was 1976 and Lopez Portillo was as counter-revolutionary a figure as any of his predecessors in the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution) to provide the framework within which class struggles might be worked out and social justice for all sectors of Mexican society achieved. If the "revolutionary" rhetoric of the Mexican state has more than once alarmed business interests, that rhetoric has nevertheless provided a powerful cement to hold together one of the most unequal societies on earth.
These are all, in many respects, radically democratic national myths. They invite one and all to participate in the benefits of "liberty" or "the revolution". The revolutionary myths exclude those most likely to be identified with the trampled foe; but they also provide a broad basis of popular support for a strengthened state. This, in turn, may move to satisfy just those excluded interests, so important to what are, despite the growth of state power and privilege in each case, liberal capitalist societies.
Other sorts of founding myths, those which hark back to a lost historic identity, may more readily become the basis for a `we' opposed to some neighboring `them'. The patriots of the French Revolution declared themselves the descendants not of the Franks, but of the Gauls, neatly excising themselves from Germanic Europe and carving out an exclusive place for themselves on the continent. Italian nation-builders, from Dante onwards, have envisioned Italy as the continuator of the Roman Empire. In each version, the resulting entity took on different possibilitiesthe basis for world government (Dante), a crucible for the re-creation of Roman virtue (Mazzini), a renewed imperialism (Mussolini). The destructive potential of such myths is evident in the recent disintegration of Yugoslavia, where the story of Serbian resistance and Croatian perfidy justified both years of Serbian dominance and fierce resistance to Croatian independence.
The dangers of the radical democratic narratives are generally other. The elisions that make these narratives workthe omission of slavery and indentured servitude, the mistreatment of immigrants, the swindles and exploitation in the American storyalso provide fuel for the discontented and the excluded, particularly as the promised future fades from grasp on a larger scale. As "liberty" or "the revolution" ages, a body of experience, evidence and thought grows to contest their claims and challenge their veracity. The more self-consciously the national myth is repeated, the more distrust it seems to generate. Here, for once, control of the educational system is not sufficient. Certainly, generations raised on the national narrative will continue to give it some credit, even as they challenge it. But its rote repetition, its official and ritual character, its very obviousness must sooner or later arouse suspicion. Cartoonists and satirists exploit its simpleminded affirmations and crafty avoidance of contradiction virtually from its inception. Intellectuals revise or revile it. And the excluded, those among them, that is, who are able to achieve organized dissent, turn its claims against the society which rests on them. The greater the promise, the more radical and rapid the counter-demands appear; the deeper the disappointment, the greater the questioning. Exclusion dogs identity even at the heart of democratic national consciousness.
By way of conclusion two observations seem worth stressing. First, by and large we would underline the historical accuracy of the notion, put most succinctly by Colonel Pilsudski, the liberator of Poland: "It is the state which makes the nation, not the nation the state."25 The "democratic state" emerges at the confluence of international recognition and the acceptance by key players that they have nowhere else to go and no better recourse than the democratic game. As Emilio Ponce, Chief of El Salvador's armed forces explained to a group of election observers in March 1991, the Salvadoran armed forces supported a negotiated settlement (read: democracy), not because they could not defeat the guerrilla forces but because it would be too costly to try any longer to do so. Out of such unpromising beginnings, we would argue, are democracies usually built. In such casescases, that is, in which profound differences, and at times profound suspicions as well, divide the countrysources of national identity which significant sectors of society might share may be powerful resources. But in general they will only serve as such to the extent that basic agreement on democratic "rules of the game" is already in place.
Second, the elements of national identity are fraught with political consequences, and those consequences are always mixed. The effort to forge a national identity always excludes and omits. To say this is not to deny the importance of arriving at decisions about a national language, of settling questions surrounding the character of the educational system, of formulating a worthy national self-image. None of these, of course, can be accomplished quite "from scratch," but must build on existing materials, subject to all the limitations that entails. But among those limitations is the unavoidable circumstance that the very signs, images, and stories which build national identity provide as well the basis for dissent and disruption. In this sense, the problem of minorities and their rights is most decidedly not simply a "liberal" problem; it is a profoundly political problem for democracies, precisely because democracies provide unique opportunities for such voices to be heard, if not always heeded. The "nation-builder", accordingly, who builds on division, unites by dividing, in remembering chooses to forget, and in speaking chooses to pass over in silence wields a power the nation may come to regret. May the Legislator be wise, for today, whether we like it or not, some such power does rest in human hands.
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.
1. Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
2. Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956) is still one of the most thoughtful efforts to work out a democratic theory in sociological terms.
3. The five crises were crises of "identity, legitimacy, participation, penetration, and distribution." See Leonard Binder, James S. Coleman, Joseph LaPalombara, Lucian W. Pye, Sidney Verba, and Myron Weiner, Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971). For studies of "nation-building" from this period see, for instance, Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (New York: Wiley, 1953; rev. ed. MIT University Press, 1966); Seymor Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1965). Implicit in all of these was a concern for "stability" and "political order" which quickly became the basis for a sharp critique of the "optimistic equation" of socio-economic modernization with increasing prospects for democratization. See Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Guillermo O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (Berkeley: Institute for International Studies/University of California, 1979).
4. Gabriel Almond, "Approaches to Developmental Causation," in Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development, ed. by Gabriel A. Almond, Scott C. Flanagan, and Robert J. Mundt (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 3; E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 84.
5. Stein Rokkan, Citizens, Elections, Parties: Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development (New York: David McKay, 1970), p. 102. We will be centrally concerned with one such struggle in our analysis of French nationality, below.
6. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 93.
7. Richard Gunther, Giacomo Sani and Goldie Skabad, Spain after Franco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 7.
8. Di Palma, p. 29.
9. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963) was an early attempt to extend the net, but its normative anchor remained Great Britain, whose citizens seemed to Almond and Verba to combine just the right proportions of civic mindedness and submissiveness.
10. The relevant literature is vast, but must include Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and the four volumes edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, especially the final statement by O'Donnell and Schmitter, volume 4, Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Di Palma's book, cited above, lays out the distinctions sketched here and develops an argument along the second line. An early statement is Dankwart Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy," Comparative Politics, 2 (April, 1970).
11. Adam Przeworksi, "Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 58.
12. For a comprehensive catalog of possible political dynamics leading to democratization, see Alfred Stepan, "Paths toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative," in Transitions...Comparative Perspectives, pp. 64-84.
13. In the contemporary sense; we will discuss the origins of the notion of "nation" below.
14. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 87.
15. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 84.
16. Robert J. Mundt, "The Republic Which Divides Us Least: The French Crisis of 1870-75," in Crisis, Choice, and Change, p. 266. The potency of the tricolore as a symbol of the French Revolution and its concomitant slogan of liberté, egalité, fraternité was of such a magnitude that the Comte de Chambord chose to eschew the throne rather than swearing allegiance to the revolutionary standard. This incident points to the power of the flag as a symbol for defining both political and national identity. Indeed, flags have been used to engender a sense of identity and community by movements across the entire political spectrum and often without reference to actual state power. From the French Revolution, nationalist and radical democrats throughout Europe and the Americas adopted the tricolore as a model for their own national flags. The red flag of socialists and communists and the black standard of the anarchists were also derived from flags used during the French Revolution. Forces on the right, on the other hand, up to the rise of fascism, favored flags with symbolic roots in the monarchist and aristocratic tradition, reflecting dynastic lineages rather than "national" symbols based on notions of popular sovereignty or plebiscitary legitimation. The fascists' claims to the latter were symbolized in flags that combined the tricolore with the symbols of national might or imperial pretension.
17. Rokkan, Citizens, Elections, Parties, p. 103.
18. Przeworski, "Some Problems", pp. 51-2.
19. Gabriel A. Almond and Robert J. Mundt, "Crisis, Choice, and Change: Some Tentative Conclusions," in Crisis, Choice, and Change, p. 620.
20. Przeworski, "Some Problems," p. 56.
21. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 55.
22. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 90.
23. On the early history of the cult, see Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966). Ricard notes that the Virgin who appeared to the Spaniards during their desperate flight from the Aztec capital a decade earlier, by contrast, gained no such following.
24. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 93.
25. Quoted in Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 44.