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Religion, Nationalism, and Civil Society
Conor Cruise O'Brien
Conor Cruise O'Brien We are living in the aftermath of the collapse of a system which claimed to have superseded both religion and nationalism. Both have survived it and are flourishing among its ruins. I want first to take a look at these two forces and their interaction in history. Later, I shall consider what the reassertion of these forces may mean for the prospects of civil society in the former Soviet Empire.
In ancient societies, politics and religion were not separate spheres. They still are not for many millions of contemporary peoples: Muslims, for example, and Sikhs.
Perhaps the most controversial part of my remarks will be an insistence on the antiquity of nationalism, nationalism as coeval with religion. Standard modern textbooks on nationalism generally date its emergence from the late eighteenth century. It might be more fruitful to think of what happened in the late eighteenth century not as an emergence but as a separation--the separation of nationalism from religion. Nationalism--or proto-nationalism if you prefer--had been conjoined with religion in antiquity, in both branches of our Judaeo-Hellenic heritage. The Hellenic side had the religious cults of those who fell for the polis and the patria. The Hebrew Bible, even more strikingly, had the concepts of the Chosen People and the Promised Land, surely a nationalist combination.
Christianity, however, as taught by Jesus and Paul, and later by Augustine, separated religion from politics: the things that were God's from the things that were Caesar's. It did not last; after the conversion of Constantine, under the Christian Emperors, it became increasingly hard to make that distinction. This was not yet a renewal of the old covenant, the conjunction of the divine with a particular people. The Roman Empire, both in its Christian and pre-Christian forms was a supranational entity; nationalism, or proto-nationalism, was as hostile to it as nationalism was to prove, long afterward, to the supranational Empire of the Hapsburgs or as nationalism is today to the supranational politics of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
The Christian Empire, in the West, was destroyed, not so much by forces of nationalism or proto-nationalism from within, as by the migration of the Germanic tribes. But the tribes were the nuclei of new nations which eventually became the successor states of the Roman Empire. It is customarily said that the Germanic tribes became converted to Christianity. It would be nearer the truth to say that the Germanic tribes converted Christianity to their own use. And the use they made of it was to consecrate and exalt their own tribes and later their nations and nation-states in a long, still-continuing succession of new chosen peoples.
The spirit of the new age--which soon came to be known as the Enlightenment-- was secular and cosmopolitan. Fanaticism was the enemy; tolerance the key to liberation. In a seventh-century Frankish oath occurs the phrase, "Christ so loved the Frank. . . ." This might seem an odd idea. Christ's message had been addressed to all human beings, and not pre-eminently the Franks, a people of whom it is not probable that Christ had ever seen a representative. Yet the Franks had clearly convinced themselves that Christ viewed them with peculiar favor, not accorded to other people. The medieval Church taught that Christendom collectively is the legitimate successor of ancient Israel. But it was already clear, within medieval society, that new claimants to that succession were emerging among particular Christian nations; new chosen peoples, not just in some abstract theological sense but existentially, as peoples actively loved and favored by God in the here and now, above all other peoples.
By the late Middle Ages, this fusion of religion and nationalism was inflamed both in France and England. Joan of Arc, on the eve of her trial, declared in a dictated letter: "He who makes war on the Kingdom of France makes war on the Holy Kingdom of Jesus." The English, who organized Joan's trial in British-occupied Rouen, were equally sure that Jesus was on their side. One of the charges against Joan was that she claimed that the heavenly voices she heard, St. Michael and St. Catherine, were speaking in French. This could not be, was indeed blasphemous, since everyone knows that the language spoken in Heaven is English.
Now in theory the English and the French, in those days, shared the same faith. Both belonged to the same supranational religious institution: the universal Catholic Church. But clearly the forces which were about to rend that Church were already at work, and one of the most powerful of those forces was nationalism. The Reformation was accompanied by an upsurge of national fervor, especially intense in Elizabethan England, and given its classic expression in John of Gaunt's speech in Shakespeare's Richard II. The wars of religion were often also national wars, as was the long conflict between England and Spain.
The aftermath of the wars of religion saw an understandable revulsion against their ferocious spirit. The wars had discredited religion, in the minds of the most intelligent citizens; they had also, though to a lesser extent, discredited the more manic forms of nationalism, for a time. The spirit of the new age--which soon came to be known as the Enlightenment--was secular and cosmopolitan. Fanaticism was the enemy; tolerance the key to liberation. It was generally taken for granted that religion was the source of all fanaticism and intolerance. The discovery that irreligious people could be intolerant, and anti-religious people fanatical, was not to be proved until after the Enlightenment had been in progress for more than a hundred years.
As far as surfaces are concerned, French Revolutionary nationalism is entirely secular. . . . In reality [it] is a new form of religious upheaval. By around 1760, the authority of the Church in France was gone among the educated classes: aristocracy, bourgeoisie, even the clergy itself. And with the authority of the Church gone, there was no longer any ideology which could sustain the Monarchy and the rest of the ancien régime. The King of France was the Most Christian King; he derived his authority from God, as defined by the authority of the Church. This whole system now hung by a thread.
By the 1760s, then, the educated public in France was undergoing a crisis of identity, as we would now call it. The old certainties, the guiding lights for generations of French people over hundreds of years, had gone. The heart no longer responded to the appeal of faith in the Catholic Church, loyalty to the Most Christian King. What would fill the vacuum? The answer, eventually, was nationalism. The French nation, soon to define itself as la grande nation, took the place of God and the King. There was nothing, any longer, above the nation.
The hinge of eighteenth-century history, and of world history in that epoch, was the Seven Years War. (The germs both of the American Revolution and of the French Revolution were in that conflict.) The Seven Years War represents the moment when religion and nationalism, hitherto closely associated, flew apart in France, and also the moment when the interests of the nation came to be seen as in conflict with the existing institutions of the State. The point about the Seven Years War is that France lost it spectacularly, and lost it in extremely bad company, by the standards of the French educated class of the period. In that war, two Protestant powers--Britain and Prussia--were seen as aligned against two Catholic powers, France and Austria, and the Catholic side, if you can call it that, lost decisively. French nationalism was humiliated (and there is nothing more dangerous in history than humiliated nationalism) and laid its humiliation at the door of the French Monarchy and the Catholic Church. Many historians have been myopic about that turning point in history, but General de Gaulle for one saw its significance clearly. In a penetrating historical insight, de Gaulle wrote: "The fall of the ancien régime began with the battle of Rossbach." Rossbach in 1760 was the battle at which the French Army underwent a major defeat at the hands of a minor power: upstart Prussia.
Although most historians have tended to minimize the fact, the French Revolution was, in all its phases, an explosion of nationalism. The decisive political event that opened the Revolution was the conversion of the old States General into an entirely new, unprecedented institution, the National Assembly. Revolutionary France awarded itself the title la grande nation. "The Marseillaise" is the greatest of nationalist anthems. The petition that prepared the way for the King's deposition called for the punishment of "those who have blasphemed against the nation," the only entity that can be blasphemed against. And when Louis XVI was executed, on 23 January 1793, the cry that followed his decapitation consisted of just three words: Vive la Nation!
Le Roi est mort. Vive la Nation.
As far as surfaces are concerned, French Revolutionary nationalism is entirely secular, purged of all religious content. In reality, French Revolutionary nationalism is a new form of religious upheaval, and a progenitor of other forms of religious upheaval, in secular and often nationalist guise.
In December of 1791, Edmund Burke wrote a memorandum, "Thoughts on French Affairs," to be read by William Pitt, then chief minister of the Crown. The memorandum was never published in Burke's lifetime, and has been little noticed since, but it contains the most profound of all Burke's profound insights into the French Revolution. Burke sees that the French Revolution was a revolution of an entirely new kind, different from any previously brought about in Europe, as he says, "upon principles merely political." Burke went on, "It is a revolution of doctrine and theoretical dogma." (Burke italicized those nine words, then added, "The last revolution of doctrine and theory which has happened in the world is the Reformation."
Had Burke been able to contemplate the processes which led to the revolutions of the twentieth century, I believe he would have concluded that the vanity of intellectuals has constituted the most destructive force in human history. Burke saw the French Revolution as the first secular (or apparently secular) "revolution of doctrine and theoretical dogma." The twentieth century has seen three major revolutions of the same breed--the Russian Revolution of 1917, with a dogmatic system around the idea of class; the German revolution of 1933 to 1944, with a dogmatic system around the ideas of race and nation [Volkstum]; and the Chinese revolution with roughly the same dogmatic system as the Russian one.
The key word in that Burkean diagnosis is the word dogma. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had thought they were putting an end to the world of dogma and priestcraft. But they had not destroyed dogma, only opened the way to new sets of dogmas, all the more plausible because they were apparently secular and scientific. They had brought down a feeble and somnolent priesthood, and had ushered in a far more dangerous breed of priests in plain clothes, using secular discourse to promote millenarian schemes. The new dogmas were enforced, as the dogmas of the ages of faith had been, by torture and terror.
Within the revolutionary system of secular dogma we can distinguish two versions of the secular Apostolic Succession. First is the left-wing version from Rousseau to Marx to Lenin. Second is the right-wing one from Gobineau through Houston Stewart Chamberlain to Adolf Hitler. Both lines of succession, of course, led to disaster on historically unprecedented scale.
Edmund Burke believed that the vanity of intellectuals, especially the vanity of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was among the main causes of the French Revolution. Had Burke been able to contemplate the processes which led to the revolutions of the twentieth century, I believe he would have concluded that the vanity of intellectuals has constituted the most destructive force in human history.
It is not, however, on that side that the main dangers now seem to lie. The secular dogmatists have been comprehensively discredited by the ghastly failure of their confident experiments. It is true that they may well manage to pop up again in some new guise--they're a versatile crew. For the present, however, the dangers are not coming from the pretensions of intellectuals, but from the visceral side of human nature.
Two hundred years ago the vacuum left in France by the collapse of Catholicism was filled by nationalism. Today, throughout the former Soviet Empire, various forms of nationalism, in association or contention with various forms of religion, are contending to fill the gap left by the collapse of Communism.
Aroused and competing nationalisms in a disintegrating supranational polity represent a formidable threat to the emergence of democracy and of anything like a recognizable civil society. It may be said that democracy and its associated values, the values of civil society, are also contenders. But I think on the whole that would be a misleading formulation. The contenders are collective emotional forces that move hearts and minds, and these forces include nationalism and religion. For people who have never experienced it--as is the case with most of the peoples of the Soviet Union--democracy is not a force that moves hearts and minds. It is merely a condition to which people aspire. And whether they can get there or not depends very largely on the emotional forces at work, as well as on the economic and political conditions under which they work. Aroused and competing nationalisms in a disintegrating supranational polity represent a formidable threat to the emergence of democracy and of anything like a recognizable civil society.
How then should we rate the chances for the emergence of acceptable civil societies in what was once the Soviet Empire? I take it that that is a central question for all of us. In answering that question it is necessary to distinguish between what might be called the "First" and "Second" Soviet Empires. The "First" is basically the former Empire of the Tsars as reconstituted by the ruthless genius of Lenin and Stalin after the First World War. The Second Soviet Empire consists of the States and territories added to the First Empire by Stalin at the beginning and end of the Second World War. The States of the Second Soviet Empire appear to have a much better chance of making a breakthrough to stable democracy and civil society than do those who made up the First Soviet Empire. One of the states that made up the Second Empire is already part--if a somewhat uneasy part--of a democratic united Germany. Six others--the Baltic Republics plus Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia--appear to have a better than even chance of making the great breakthrough to becoming stable democracies. All have minority problems which may yet give them serious trouble, but they have offsetting advantages and incentives which may induce them to resolve their minority problems sensitively, through the accommodation of minority aspirations. The peoples concerned feel themselves to be part of Europe, and are looked on by other Europeans in that light. They know that, once their democratic and free market credentials are fully established, and once the state of their economy permits, they will be welcome to membership of the European Economic Community. That attractive prospect is the strongest possible incentive to keep xenophobic tendencies in check, and stay on the straight and narrow path of democratic mores. Even so, they may not all make it--Latvia and Estonia, with their large ethnic minorities, seem the most doubtful cases, but it seems reasonably sure that most of them will. Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania are more doubtful.
The inhabitants of the First Soviet Empire, however, are at much more of a disadvantage even than Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania. There is no serious possibility for at least a generation--and probably much longer, if ever--of any of them being admitted to the European Community. Gorbachev has imagined some such possibility, and no one has definitely rebuffed him, but neither is anyone in Western Europe seriously thinking along such lines. No such ties as bind the populations of the Second Soviet Empire to the West are present in the case of the First one.
The countries of the First Soviet Empire lack the salutary discipline, inhibiting towards xenophobia, which close ties with the West and the alluring prospect of entry to the European Community provide for the populations which once made up the Second Soviet Empire. But there are also other relevant differences. The process of attempted denationalization, through the calculated redistribution of populations under Stalin, went much farther in the Soviet Empire proper (including, in this case, Latvia and Estonia) than it did in the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The latter countries were supposed to be allies, not subjects, of the Soviet Union, and while the alliance was always held together by the threat (and occasionally the use) of force, the need to provide the "alliance" theory with some plausibility did impose some inhibitions in the use of Soviet power. Once the Second World War was over there were no more great enforced or artificially stimulated movements of population as between members of the Warsaw Pact. Inside the Soviet Union itself (including the Baltic Republics which, unlike the member states of the Warsaw Pact, were declared annexed to the Soviet Union) no such inhibitions operated. Forced migration occurred on a large scale, especially after the Second World War, and artificially-stimulated mass migrations, as between the various Republics, regions and districts, were systematically promoted.
In a relatively homogeneous country, such as modern Poland is, a strong nationalism may be conducive to democratic stability by providing a basis for consensus. But in the heterogeneous Republics that make up the Soviet Union, nationalism is a potently divisive force, undermining the possibility of democratic consensus.
Nationalities policy within the Soviet Union was the special province of Joseph Stalin. Very early on, Stalin made himself an expert on nationalities, and it was in his capacity as such an expert that he first caught Lenin's eye. His expertise combined three elements: a shrewd eye for the social and ethnic realities of the Empire of the Tsars, in the period of its dissolution; a capacity to allude to these realities in Marxist terminology and within the general parameters of Lenin's specific teaching--Stalin was nothing if not "politically correct"; and finally a genius for applying these gifts in such a way as to lead to the expansion and consolidation of Bolshevik power, meaning Lenin's power, followed by Stalin's own.
Today, all over the vast territories of both former Soviet Empires, people are demanding some lost Transylvania. Stalin's nationalities policies--first by their degree of success and then by the nature of their failure in the hands of his successors--have led to the construction of an enormous demographic trap, in which the peoples of what was once the Soviet Union are now helplessly, and increasingly violently, thrashing around.
The essence of Stalin's nationalities policy was an appearance of great decentralization and local autonomy, combined with the reality of tight control from the center. Theoretically, the constituent Republics enjoyed from the beginning even the right of secession. In practice, the machine was so constructed as to render impossible the exercise of that right.
Throughout the duration of Stalin's Empire, nationalism remained a latent force, in various disguises. I discovered, when I was a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly in the fifties, an example of its working within the countries of the Warsaw Pact. In 1957 two Romanian delegates called on me. They wanted to explain the reasons for their country's support of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the previous year. There was a young delegate and an old one. It was the young one who at first did all the talking. He was a brash, glib apparatchik and what he was telling me was that the Hungarians who fought the Russians were Fascists. This did not carry conviction, and the older delegate could see this. Finally, he spoke up, rather sadly: "I can see, Dr. O'Brien, that you find it hard to believe what my colleague has told you. Yet there is something in what he says. Two months before the Russian intervention, Budapest sent us a note demanding the return of Transylvania. Believe me, Dr. O'Brien, it is always a bad sign when people start looking for Transylvania."
I had no trouble in believing him. As it happens my own country, the Republic of Ireland, throughout the seventy years of its existence, has been calling for the return of its own particular Transylvania: Northern Ireland. For the last twenty years, the Provisional I.R.A. has been seeking to enforce that demand by a campaign of murder. So when I discuss the dangers of an irredentist nationalism, I am talking of something of which I have some experience.
Today, all over the vast territories of both former Soviet Empires, people are demanding some lost Transylvania. And the quest for Transylvania is being pursued under conditions with far greater explosive potential than Northern Ireland has.
Over huge areas, it is not just Communism that is being rooted out: it is the entire Enlightenment that is being repealed. I spoke earlier about a divergence between religion and nationalism which took place in France in a late phase of the Enlightenment on the eve of the French Revolution. What is happening now among the ruins of the Russian Revolution is a new convergence of religion and nationalism, a regression to pre-Enlightenment conditions.
Bronislaw Geremek recently pointed to authoritarian tendencies in the Catholic Church in Poland today. But the Polish case is mild compared with some of the things that are happening to the East in the First Soviet Empire. At a recent conference in Kingston, Ontario, I heard Elena Bonner deliver an exceedingly bleak tour d'horizon in that regard. Among much else, she quoted an Azerbaijani leader as calling on his people "to emulate Stalin and Hitler" in coping with the Armenian question. Elsewhere the reaction proceeds more insidiously. In Tadjikistan, and elsewhere in Soviet Central Asia, Islamic fundamentalists are forcing educated Westernized women to resume their proper place within the Shari'a, total submission to patriarchal authority, confinement to the home, wearing of special dress, dictated by men. Over huge areas, it is not just Communism that is being rooted out: it is the entire Enlightenment that is being repealed.
On another occasion I heard a Bulgarian scholar speak. She was a quiet, sad woman, and when she was asked what she foresaw for her country, she replied: "New forms of backwardness," some of the saddest words I have heard in the aftermath of the euphoria of the liberation of Eastern Europe. She was speaking of the restored authority of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, in alliance with Bulgarian chauvinism. Clearly, she didn't find that prospect any more exhilarating than she had found the rule of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
The threat to civil society comes not from the State alone, but from some of the components of civil society itself. Not least among these are the churches, almost all of which in the former Soviet Empire have strong authoritarian traditions and now will be working together with and not against other authoritarian traditions in the society.
I think there is little or nothing we in the West can do for what I have called the First Soviet Empire. We are somewhat better equipped to help the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, and they are better equipped to be helped by us. The prospects there for the emergence of civil society, within a democratic framework, are reasonably good. But even there negative forces are at work, even in the bosom of the civil society itself.
Introduction
W. Robert Connor
Civil Society
and the Present Age
Bronislaw Geremek
Economics and
Human Values
György Varga
Religion, Nationalism,
and a Civil Society
Conor Cruise O'Brien
On Being Sane
in the Midst of
Madmen
Eduardo Rabossi
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Revised: February 1998
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