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Habermas on the Origins of Nationalism

21/07/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The history of the term 'nation' reflects the historical genesis of the nation-state. For the Romans, Natio was the goddess of birth and origin. Natio refers like gens and populus but unlike civitas, to peoples and tribes who were not yet organized in political associations; indeed, the Romans often used it to refer to 'savage,' 'barbaric,' or 'pagan' peoples. In this classical usage, then, nations are communities of people of the same descent, who are integrated geographically, in the form of settlements or neighborhoods, and culturally by their common language, customs, and traditions, but who are not yet politically integrated through the organizational form of the state. This meaning of 'nation' persisted through the Middle Ages and worked its way into the vernacular languages in the fifteenth century. Even Kant still wrote that 'those inhabitants… which recognize themselves as being united into a civil whole through common descent, are called a nation (gens).' However, in the early-modern period a competing usage arose: the nation is the bearer of sovereignty. The estates represented the 'nation' over against the 'king.' Since the middle of the eighteenth century, these two meaning of 'nation'— community of descent and 'people of a state'— have intertwined. With the French Revolution, the 'nation' became the source of state sovereignty, for example, in the thought of Emmanuel Sieyes. Each nation is now supposed to be granted the right to political self-determination. The international democratic community takes the place of the ethnic complex.

With the French Revolution, then, the meaning of 'nation' was transformed from a prepolitical quantity into a constitutive feature of the political identity of the citizens of a democratic polity. At the end of the nineteenth century, the conditional relation between ascribed national identity and acquired democratic citizenship could even be reversed. Thus the gist of Ernest Renan’s famous saying, 'the existence of a nation is… a daily plebiscite,' was already directed against nationalism. After 1871, Renan could rebut German’s claims to the Alsace by referring to the inhabitants' French nationality only because he thought of the 'nation' as a nation o citizens, and not as a community of descent. The nation of citizens finds its identity not in ethnic and cultural commonalities but in the practice of citizens who actively exercise their rights to participation and communication. At this juncture, the republican strand of citizenship completely parts company with the idea of belonging to a prepolitical community integrated on the basis of descent, shared tradition, and common language. Viewed from this end, the initial fusion of national consciousness with republican conviction only functioned as a catalyst.

The nationalism mediated by the works of historians and romantic writers, hence by scholarship and lierature, grounded a collective identity that played a functional role for the notion of citizenship that originated in the French Revolution. In the melting ot of national consciousness, the ascriptive features of one' origin were transformed into just so many results of a conscious appropriation of tradition. Ascribed nationality gave way to an achieved nationalism, that is, to a conscious product of one's own efforts. This nationalism was able to foster people's identification with a role that demanded a high degree of personal commitment, even to the point of self-sacrifice; in this respect, general conscription was simply the flip side of civil rights. National consciousness and republican conviction in a sense proved themselves in the willingness to fight and die for one’s country. This explains the complementary relation that originally obtained between nationalism and republicanism: one became the vehicle for the emergence of the other" (Habermas 1996:494-495).

Habermas, Jürgen
1996[1992] Between Facts And Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. William Rehg, trans. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Political Culture and Multiplicity of Subcultures

23/06/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Originally, the suggestive unity of a more or less homogenous nation could ensure the cultural embedding of a legally defined citizenship status. In this context, democratic citizenship could form the focal point of social ties of mutual responsibility. But today we live in pluralistic societies that are moving further and further away from the model of a nation-state based on a culturally homogeneous population. The diversity of cultural forms of life, ethnic groups, religions, and worldviews is constantly growing. There is no alternative to this development,except at the normatively intolerable cost of ethnic cleansing. Hence republicanism must learn to stand on its own feet. The central idea of republicanism is that the democratic process can serve at the same time as a guarantor for the social integration of an increasingly differentiated society. In a society characterized by cultural and religious pluralism, this task cannot be displaced from the level of political will-formation and public communication onto the seemingly natural substrate of a supposedly homogeneous nation. The latter would merely serve as a facade for a hegemonic majority culture. For historical reasons, in many countries the majority culture is fused with the general political culture which claims to be recognized by all citizens regardless of their cultural background. This fusion must be dissolved if it is to be possible for different cultural, ethnic, and religious forms of life to coexist and interact on equal terms within the same political community. The level of the shared political culture must be uncoupled from the level of subcultures and their prepolitical identities. Of course, the claim to coexist with equal rights is subject to the proviso that the protected faiths and practices must not contradict the reigning constitutional principles (as they are interpreted by the political culture).

The political culture of a country crystallizes around its constitution. Each national culture develops a distinctive interpretation of those constitutional principles that are equally embodied in other republican constitutions—such as popular sovereignty and human rights#8212;in light of its own national history. A 'constitutional patriotism' based on these interpretations can take the place originally occupied by nationalism. This notion of constitutional patriotism appears to many observers to represent too weak a bond to hold together complex societies. The question then becomes even more urgent: under what conditions can a liberal political culture provide a sufficient cushion to prevent a nation of citizens, which can no longer rely on ethnic associations, from dissolving into fragments?" (Habermas 1998:117-118).

Habermas, Jürgen
1998 The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

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National Identity

16/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“Nationalism, as it has developed in Europe since the end of the eighteenth century, is a specifically modern form of appearance of collective identity. After the break with the ancien regime and the dissolution of the traditional orders of early bourgeois society, individuals became emancipated within a framework of abstract civil liberties. In that situation, nationalism satisfied the need for new identifications. It differed from previous identity formations in several aspects. First, the ideas establishing this identity were drawn from a secular heritage that was prepared and mediated by the emerging Geisteswissenschaften. This explains something of the simultaneously penetrating and conscious character of the new ideas. They caught hold of all strata of the population in a similar manner and were dependent upon a self-activating, reflexive form of appropriating tradition. Secondly, nationalism brought the shared cultural inheritance of language, literature and history into coincidence with the organizational form of the state. The democratic nation state which issued from the French Revolution remained the model to which all nationalistic movements were oriented. Thirdly, in national consciousness there was a tension between two elements which remained more or less in balance in the classical nation states. I am referring here to the tension between the universalistic value orientations of democracy and the rule of law, on the one hand, and the particularism of a national demarcating itself off from the outside world, on the other. In the context of nationalsim, freedom and political self-determination mean both the popular sovereignty of citizens with equal rights and the political self- assertion of a new sovereign nation. The former element is reflected in international solidarity with the oppressed, from the enthusiasm for the Greek and Polish causes in the early nineteenth century to the hero cults and revolutionary tourism of our times (China, Vietnam, Cuba, Portugal, Nicaragua). The latter element is manifested in the stereotypical images of the enemy that have lined the paths of all national movements. (Between 1806 and 1914 the Germans had such images of the French, the Danes, and the English.) The tension between the two elements is exhibited not only in such antithetical tendencies, but in the state and the historical consciousness through which nationalism took shape.

The form of national identity makes it necessary for every nation to organize itself into a state, if it is to be independent. In historical reality, however, the state with a homogeneous national population was always a fiction. The nation state itself generated those movements for autonomy in which oppressed national minorities struggled for their rights. In subjecting minorities to its central administration, the modern state places itself in opposition to the very premises of self-determination on which it rests. A similar contradiction runs through the historical consciousness of the public spheres in which the self-consciousness of a nation takes shape. To form and maintain a collective identity, the linguistic-cultural complex has to be made present in such a way as to produce meaningful orientations. But the very medium of making affirmative pasts present, the Geisteswissenschaften, work against this. Their claim to truth obliges them to be critical; it stands opposed to the integrative functions in whose service the nation state wanted to make public use of historical scholarship. The usual compromise was a historiography that raised emphathetic identification with what existed as a methodological ideal and rejected the idea of ‘combing history against the grain’ (Benjamin)” (Habermas 1988:5-6).

Citation Style – Link to JSTOR Stable URL
Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: Remarks on the Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West
Author(s): Jürgen Habermas
Source: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1988), pp. 3-13
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4200681.
Accessed: 16/02/2011 12:36 .

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