Assuredtosh Varshney wrote some 10 years ago-
A nation-state, as Ernest Gellner explained in his 1983 classic Nations and Nationalism, is a place where the territorial boundaries of a state and the cultural boundaries of a nation coincide.
Gellner was wrong. A Nation State exists even if some of its people are on the wrong side of a border. Indeed, it even exists if the majority of its people are on the wrong side of a border. But it too may have minorities whose closest relatives are across the border not within it.
Modern France is viewed as the best historical example of such fusion.
Why? It isn't a good example at all. The French speaking Belgians ought to belong to it. Balance of Power considerations led to the creation of that unhappy, deeply divided country. Perhaps it will be partitioned.
In the current literature on nationalism, however, the French model of undifferentiated citizenship is viewed as a nineteenth-century curiosity, to be studied primarily to understand why the Basques and Bretons did not rebel against Paris and its profoundly assimilationist thrust.
The French Army kicked ass except when fighting Germans. That's a good enough reason not to rebel.
In his classic 1976 study Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Eugen Weber showed how the French central state, using military conscription and compulsory public schooling, turned Catalans, Corsicans, Gascons, Normans, Picards, Vendéens, the aforementioned Basques and Bretons, and a host of others into Frenchmen.
What happened in 1870? France was beaten by Germany. If it wanted to turn everybody into 'Frenchmen' it was because the French still believed they were good at fighting. Sadly their offensive doctrine consisted of shouting loudly and charging at the Germans who had better long range artillery. In the Second War, instead of 'attacque a outrance' the French simply surrendered. In the end the Germans were beaten by the Russians while France itself was liberated by English speaking peoples. That's why they still hate us.
As part of this project, the diversities that once so vividly characterized France were deliberately and systematically flattened.
You can't flatten a Frenchman. You may want to, but you can't. They re-inflate themselves too quickly. Like the Italians, they are more cunning than their own bureaucrats. So long as they continue to value their own regional cuisine and wine or cider or whatever, France can never become the subject of Foucauldian bio-politics.
And vivid these diversities had been: As E.J. Hobsbawm reports in Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, at the time of the French Revolution more than half of all those living in France spoke no French at all, and “only 12-13 percent spoke it correctly.”
The figure for those who spoke Italian even in 1890 was lower still. But this scarcely mattered- except perhaps to the Army.
Today, Japan, Portugal, and some Scandinavian countries approximate the French nation-state model.
Very true. Many Japanese speaking people live in Belgium which lies to the north of its border. Also, Japan does not have a monarch. Scandinavia is unique in that the divorce between Norway and Sweden at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was completely peaceful. Both, like France, are monarchies.
Most of the rest of the world comprises either countries marked by strong ethnic diversity,
France has 8 active separatist movements. We may think they all wear striped jerseys, berets, and have a string of garlic around their neck but there's a lot of ethnic diversity there- Flemish people, Normans, Bretons, Alsatians, Provencals, Catalans, Occitanians and so forth. Admittedly Alsatians are dogs and say woof woof but the important thing to note is that they want autonomy from France because Macron isn't taking them walkies often enough.
some of which has a territorial aspect and may give rise to demands for independence, or multicultural countries where ethnic diversity is spread around and lacks a politically charged territorial focus. The United States is an example of this latter type—its Civil War was a constitutional and, some would say, cultural fight among people of essentially the same stock who spoke a common language.
Sadly, some are now speaking of 'Texit' or a secession of Red states or some such nonsense. It is interesting that Ashutosh does not mention what happened to the First Nations. Maybe nobody told him about it.
Stepan, Linz, and Yadav call the former class of political entities—those with strong ethnic diversity, some of it territorially concentrated—not “nation-states” but “state-nations.” Belgium, Canada, India, and Spain are state-nations, as are Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
This is stupid shit. India and Sri Lanka and Thailand are nations and have been so for thousands of years in the case of India and at least 2000 years in the case of Sri Lanka. The Thais may have arrived more recently but the Khmers have always been there. By contrast, Belgium and Canada and Nigeria and Pakistan are recent constructs. The Philippines is differentiated by religion from other Malay speaking countries as is Pakistan and Bangladesh from India.
Each has geographically concentrated ethnocommunal differences. The book’s arguments, therefore, will have resonance in many societies.
Except India which has been a nation longer than the Jews or the Greeks but not perhaps the Egyptians and the Chinese.
Nation-states tend to be assimilationist. Among their key features is the erasure of ethnic and cultural diversities.
Why should they bother to do any such thing? It is enough to have a common religion and for it to be permissible to inter-marry. Otherwise the smart thing to do is to adapt to the climate and geography of the region. A Garwalhi Brahmin would freeze to death if he dressed like a Tamil Brahmin. What is certain is that a Tamil gets exactly the same service from a Garwalhi priest as he would from a Tamil priest and vice versa.
State-nations, by contrast, work on two levels: They strive to create a sense of belonging
Whereas Nation States employ a large class of officials to go around knocking on people's doors and shouting 'You don't belong here. Get the fuck out of this country, Mummy. Oh, btw. could I drop off some dirty laundry? Please be careful ironing my blouse. Luv u!'
with respect to the larger political community, and at the same time they put in place institutional protections for politically salient diversities having to do with language, religion, or sacrosanct cultural norms.
That was what General Custer was doing at Little Bighorn. He was putting in place institutional protections against Redskins not getting butchered in accordance with their sacrosanct cultural norms.
If such diversities are territorially specific, they normally require the protection afforded by federal arrangements.
Why? Such 'diversities' can exist under a tyrant or an Emperor or a Commissar or a Unitary Democracy- if that is what the majority wants. Federations arise where a bunch of sovereign or otherwise separate administrative units come together such that each preserves a separate legal code. That's what happened between England and Scotland which is why they have separate Justice systems. It also happened in the US and Canada and so forth. But it didn't happen in India.
This double-barreled character sets the state-nation apart from Arend Lijphart’s consociationalism, which focuses solely on setting up institutional safeguards for ethnoreligious diversity and pays no heed to the task of nurturing countrywide loyalties at the same time.
Like Lebanon? Is that what happened there? The truth is the Maronites fucked up because they were a bunch of clannish factionalized gangsters. Where does 'consociationalism' prevail? Nowhere which aint a shitshow. The word 'legal pluralism' was coined for Burma. It's still a shitshow. Ceylon got strong constitutional protection for minorities along with universal suffrage in 1931. Still a shitshow. Lebanon- but enough about Lebanon. It has great people but shitshows don't get shittier.
The concept is also to be distinguished from Will Kymlicka’s “multicultural citizenship.”
Who isn't just Canadian, he's a fucking Canadian vegan! You can't tell me he has a soul. Hopefully he'll come out for votes for, not Mounties, but Moose.
Kymlicka, too, emphasizes recognition of certain forms of diversity, but not a coexistence of centrifugal and centripetal institutions.
Canada has indigenous people as well as French speaking people. It needs to be give special rights to both without falling foul of equal rights legislation. But this has nothing to do with ancient nations like India. China did say it would give Hong Kong special rights but it stopped bothering with that pretense once Taiwan showed it wasn't buying it.
According to the state-nation view, one can be both a Catalan and a Spaniard, a Québécois and a Canadian, or a Punjabi and an Indian.
The problem is that some Catalans don't want to be Spanish. Canadians of all descriptions might rebel against the 'Laurentian elite'. Canadian Sikhs tend to be Khalistanis and thus don't want Punjabis to be Indian at all. However Hindus in India don't not want to be Indian while remaining Punjabi or Tamil or whatever. Why? India has been a nation since ancient times. So has China but the Taiwanese and the Hong Kongers have good reasons not to want to be under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party. Tibet however was never part of the Chinese nation.
Undifferentiated and singular Spaniards, Canadians, and Indians do exist.
What's an undifferentiated Indian? The thing does not exist. You have an 'ancestral place', a 'parent's place', and then the place where you 'lodge'. Thus I'm from Kumbakonam by way of Madras and Delhi though from the legal point of view I am a Londoner and a British national. By this last piece of information people understand that I clean toilets in England. Still, the bit about Chennai and Delhi confers a certain amount of prestige unless you actually come from Delhi or Chennai in which case you become depressed.
But a lot of citizens in such countries tend to have multiple, though complementary, identities.
Very true. During the day they are billionaire playboys. At night they turn into Batman. The fact is an individual identity is denoted by a set of traits- height, weight, age, ethnicity, religion, languages spoken and so on. This does not mean anybody has multiple identities. True, some people have dual or triple nationality. Some may get to vote in more than one State or Province. But their identity remains singular unless they have gained Yogic superpowers and thus can exist in more than one body simultaneously.
The wisdom of the state-nation approach is the recognition that trying to hammer together these various identities into a single national identity would not solidify the state, but instead would shatter it.
But that is true of families and business enterprises and social clubs and any sort of society. It is not a good idea to make Mummy sport a mustache like Daddy. The cat would protest if it were forced to get a job in Business Process Outsourcing. Baby however would thrive in that environment.
India is an especially complex case.
Unless you are Hindu in which case your religion tells you you belong to an ancient Nation which however was a bit shit at fighting and thus which came under British paramountcy. Thankfully, Jinnah did us a favor by getting the Muslims out of our hair. We don't have to pretend that Hinduism isn't what holds the country together. But Europeans too are no longer apologizing about being White and Christian. Multi-culti is well and truly over.
It has diversities of caste, religion, language, and tribe, the latter two of which are territorially concentrated.
Because it is big and has been around for thousands of years.
Because of this, language and tribe—the former, especially—have become Indian federalism’s main concerns.
There is no Indian federalism. The constitution is wholly unitary.
Fifteen languages form the basis on which state lines are drawn within India.
No. Some linguistic states have been split into smaller units. This has improved governance.
Each state (there are 28, plus 7 union territories) has its own official language.
Nagaland chose English as its state language. This is because the indigenous people have about 20 mutually unintelligible languages.
That language serves as the medium of instruction in government schools. Dealings among states, or between a state and the federal government, go on in English or Hindi, which is the lingua franca
no. It is is the official language.
in six states. Most of the fifteen languages are both the main language of a single state and scarcely spoken outside that state.
But, if Hinduism prevails, there is no secessionism.
Major language groups were
recognized and deliberately fostered and used for administrative purposes by the Brits. Why? Because that governance was better and cheaper. The British administrator had to learn at least one classical and one vernacular language to get his salary increment.
given a direct stake in the Indian system
by the Brits. The Indians cautiously extended this. Why? It improved governance. Still, there were some nutters- e.g. Gandhi- who wanted to impose Hindi as the national language.
as well as separated from one another.
Or not. Punjab and Haryana share Chandigarh.
Their stake came in the form of a politically legitimized regionalism.
Legitimized by the Brits. It was they who fostered vernacular languages and chose to do so in the script of the majority.
A political party in Gujarat, Karnataka, or Tamil Nadu cannot easily go against the commonly held notions of Gujarati, Kannada, or Tamil cultural pride.
Nor can the Indian National Congress go against the commonly held notions of the Hindu majority.
But claims supporting Tamil heritage, for example, mean little outside the state of Tamil Nadu.
Ditto re. claims regarding Welsh outside Wales. On the other hand, English is a wine that needs no bush.
Hindus, Muslims, and Christians can be found in most states
not Hindus if the Muslims or Christians kill them
(and the various castes are spread out as well), but speakers of state languages such as Gujarati, Kannada, or Tamil are found only in small numbers outside their respective home states.
Very few Bengalis are found in Tripura or Assam- right?
A state-nation means more than just a safe way to institutionalize diversity.
Why institutionalize it if it is not safe to do so?
It also, as the authors stress, means a simultaneous nurturing of commitment to the larger Indian polity.
Back then it was the fashion to pretend that politics was about being very respectful and nurturing and empathetic to everybody else. Consider all beings as requiring gratuitous rape counselling. Then there was Brexit and Trump and Orban and so forth. The political scientists shat themselves and ran back to their safe spaces on campuses where they all got Me Too'd or else fell victim to some other variant of the woke circular firing squad.
In India, the institutions that have played key roles in generating loyalty to the Federal Republic include the Congress party,
This was written in 2012, the year the activists fucked up Manmohan's attempt to keep growth on track. Still, it took the genius of Rahul to make Congress unelectable.
the armed forces, the federal civil service, the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, central high schools, the Supreme Court, and (over the last two decades) the Election Commission.
This is foolish. The vast majority of the population has little contact with any of these things. Religion matters. Local leaders matter. But, more and more, film and television matter. But this means political scientists don't matter. But Prashant Kishore does matter. He has common sense.
Shielding diversity while building unity
and protecting fidelity while violating chastity and fostering unanimity while sexually harassing harmony and germinating plurality while fisting governmentality vigorously
is not always an easy two-step to dance.
Unless such dancing is shielded while unity is getting built up Ashutosh's asshole.
India’s record is not perfect, and secessionism has not been unknown. The authors examine the insurgencies in Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Punjab, finding that each arose
because non-Hindus were a majority or near majority
largely because New Delhi seriously departed from the state-nation model. (In Kashmir, India-Pakistan tensions have caused additional problems as well.)
That's what happened in Dokhlam as well. Chinese soldiers were protesting New Delhi's serious departure from some shite Yogendra Yadav pulled out his ass.
On the whole, we learn, state-nation policies in India have yielded remarkable success. In nationwide surveys, more than 85 percent
Hindus are about that percentage of the population
of those polled say that they are “proud” or “very proud” of India—numbers that roughly match what pollsters uncover in Australia, Canada, and the United States, and are higher than those commonly reported by Belgians, Brazilians, Germans, or the Swiss. In other surveys, only about a fifth of randomly sampled Indians say that they consider their identity to be mostly or completely drawn from their home state rather than India as a whole.
In the case of non-Hindus, this is a function of education and mobility. India is big enough to generate a sense of hope. Your own District may be going down the tubes but there is always the rumor that things are good somewhere else.
Thus the simultaneous pursuit of nationalism and subnationalism has been reasonably successful in India.
Because Hinduism has reformed and revived. Unlike Islam or Christianity, Hinduism is a quintessentially National religion. What's more it doesn't have a political fundamentalism. It has a political ecumenism.
Even in 1989-90, as secessionist revolts raged in both Punjab and Kashmir,
where Hindus were getting slaughtered
only about 5 percent of India’s vast populace was directly affected. Across most of the country, life went on more or less normally. Commitment to the larger polity has been achieved not by a suppression of diversities, but by their recognition.
and soldiers and policemen killing killers. How many died in the Khalistan insurrection? 12,000? 50,000? Extra-judicial killing is what does the heavy lifting, not fostering unity while giving diversity a handjob.
Two chapters comparing and contrasting how India and Sri Lanka have dealt with their respective Tamil populations underscores this point.
What fucking point? Tamils are the majority in Tamil Nadu. They aren't in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka’s dominant Sinhalese might have adopted federal institutions in order to reconcile the Tamils, who live mainly at the north end of the island country, but instead pursued French-style nation-state policies, much to the detriment of democracy and national unity alike.
This is nonsense. Sri Lanka's problems started when the Government weakened the Army fearing a 'Burgher' coup. First the Trostkyites and then the Tigers- under the leadership of a Christian- ran amok. But the problem in Sri Lanka has to do with leaders doing stupid shit. A bit like Lebanon really. Both countries started off with complicated Constitutions which proved useless or actively mischievous. But leaders doing stupid shit compound the problem.
India gave its Tamil minority
India does not have a Tamil minority. It has a Hindu majority which includes Tamil Hindus and Gujarati Hindus and so forth.
far better treatment, including a state where Tamil is the official language.
Fuck is wrong with this cunt? Does he really think that New Delhi gave this as a nice Diwali present to the poor little Tamils? Tamil was already the language of the Presidency. It was the Telugus who were going on hunger strike to get their own state. Madras was a great city when New Delhi was still a blue-print. Rajaji was the first Governor General of India. Kamraj was the kingmaker in the early Sixties. But the Kamraj plan was silly. T.N started to rise when it turned its back on Congress.
As a result, Tamil separatism was nipped in the bud,
This is crazy shit. It was the Chinese invasion which took the sails out of it. MGR and other film-stars were busy raising funds and boosting the morale of the troops. The problem with Dravidian ideology was that the Keralites and the Andhras didn't have a problem with Sanskrit words. Karnataka had historically been the center of the Vijaynagar based Hindu revival and resistance. It is the one Southern State which might become a BJP stronghold provided caste rivalries and Lingayat v Veershaiva type problems subside. Meanwhile Tamils are hoping that Stalin can deliver rapid growth and Malayalees are hoping Vijayan will be the Deng Xiaoping of India. But this does not mean Tamils or Malyallees are less devout than anybody in any other part of India.
and today most Tamils feel that they have a serious stake in the Federal Republic of India.
How very patronizing! The fact is the South is respected because it resisted Islam. This deracinated cunt probably has some Aryanist bee in his bonnet. America is the right place for him.
As much as I like this book, I do have some criticisms to offer. First, although the term “multinational” might make sense for Belgium, Canada, or Spain, it does not for India.
Because the Hindus are an ancient nation.
Territorially concentrated ethnic diversity may well be a favorable ground for nationalist insurrection, but it does not have to be. India’s various geographically based groups are at best ethnic groups, not nations.
Jinnah's two nation theory prevailed. But whereas Hindus stick together as a Nation, Muslims don't even if they were originally Hindu.
Even before a state-nation model was explicitly embraced after independence came in 1947, most linguistic groups had shown no desire for independence.
But first Buddhist Burma split off and then the majority Muslim areas. One reason Hindus want to stick together is because they fear a resurgence of Muslim power. At any rate that is what Gandhi said in 1939.
Feeling a regional as well as a larger all-India national identity has been a feature of Indian politics at least since the freedom movement became mass-based under Mahatma Gandhi in the 1920s.
It was a feature of Swami Vivekandanda and Swami Dayanand Sarasvati's thinking. Indeed, it was a feature of every Swamy or Acharya or Yogi's thinking. Gandhi was a fuckwit who screwed up his one job which was to keep the Muslims on side till the Brits agreed to negotiate with the Congress-Khilafat combine. Gandhi's unilateral surrender made Partition inevitable. Look at it from the Muslim perspective. What is the point of being chained to a very large number of whiney pussies who talk incessant bollocks? Let those fuckers starve and surrender to any fucking foreigner who turns up. Create a Pakistan where Indic people aren't saddled with a religion fit only for cowards and crackpots.
Indeed, it is striking that Kashmir, Mizoram, and Nagaland were all places where the British or princely authorities did not allow the freedom movement to emerge, and all would be wracked by secessionism after 1947.
Crazy shit. What happened in Hyderabad? Patel sent in the Army though, no doubt, the RSS and the Mahasabha also played a role.
Punjab is a prominent exception to this pattern (it had an active freedom movement yet witnessed secessionism).
Because Sikhs have very good reason to get away from cowardly casteist cunts who refused to let that State develop industrially on the grounds that the Pakis might invade and take it over. To be fair, it was Leftists who dictated this stupid and evil policy which refused to admit that Sikhism is a pure spiritual one hundred percent anti-caste Religion. But then so is Hinduism according the best of its own Brahmin Acharyas.
Still, the pattern remains strikingly suggestive.
The pattern is simple. Hindus are the majority. If they get behind cowardly crackpots or Socialist shitheads then minorities should get the fuck away from that Hindu majority because it is useless and talks incessant bollocks. But if the Hindus do sensible things then everybody benefits.
Second, was France not turned into a nation-state
Napoleon turned it into a fucking Empire. Then it was cut down to size though it kept doing stupid shit. Germany too became an Empire and did even stupider shit. Then it became a thousand year Reich which did such incredibly stupid shit that Europe itself declined to a dependency of either America and Communist Eurasia. That may well be the ultimate outcome of the Ukraine conflict.
despite some territorially concentrated diversities? Is that not one way to read Eugen Weber?
Why read that shithead? 'Modernization theory' is as dead as a dodo. Still, he wrote like a gentleman.
If so, would it not be more accurate to say that France became a “nation-state” due to the exigencies of early-modern times, and not because it lacked territorially specific diversities?
It would be accurate to say that the levee en masse against the crowned heads of Europe's attempt to reimpose the ancien regime created the French Nation in the same way that the Spanish Armada soldered together the English speaking people though Catholicism continued to be a problem. In other words, the thing didn't actually happen but the myth was stronger than the reality. Henry V was wrong about St. Crispin's day. Every Englishman above a certain age- and I include myself here- remembers the glorious feats we performed though, truth be told, we are a bit ashamed that our valor was expended on cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Fortunately, first the Kaiser and then Herr Hitler gave us a chance to square off against a sturdier, if stupider, enemy. As for the Rooskies, we'll just sanction them and take away their yachts. That will teach them.
Would today’s minorities readily accept the superiority of a “high” culture imported from and imposed by Paris and the Ile-de-France?
Today's minorities, in France, are of migrant descent.
The question has implications that go well beyond the French case. These point in the direction of constructivism, now the mainstream view about national (and ethnic) identities.
A view which is mainstream among stupid peeps is still a stupid view. Did these guys predict Donald Trump? There's definitely an identity of some sort being asserted there. What is it? Fuck if I know.
All nations are constructed.
In the sense that cats are socially constructed. If we treated cats the way we treat dogs they will say woof woof and want to play fetch.
But in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, heavy-handed nation-building à la française seems neither possible nor desirable.
Tell that to the Uighurs and Tibetans and so forth.
It is too likely to undermine rather than bolster unity, even as democracy suffers collateral damage amid violent ethnic or ethnosectarian struggle.
So, that's what happened to Ashraf Ghani in Afghanistan! He succumbed to 'ethnosectarian' struggle. Democracy was collateral damage. Nothing was the fault of Trump or Biden. Good to know.
Arguments about some languages, races, or ethnic groups being intrinsically superior will today be called colonialism in another form, and resisted as such.
Fuck that. Everyone is welcome to say their own language is super-cool and their Mummy is the bestest Mummy in the Universe and so on and so forth.
That was not so in the late eighteenth century when France as we know it today came into being: Ernest Gellner’s “high culture” could more easily spread and assert its systematic dominance over “low cultures” because the localism of the “low” cultures had only raw custom or inarticulate habit on its side, and could not draw on a powerful modern doctrine such as anticolonialism to spur it to resistance.
So, the Gascon and the Breton was like the Tamil of Ashutosh's imagination- an inferior being who was bound to imitate 'high culture'. Sadly, in India, New Delhi told the Tamils that they could speak their own jibber jabber and awarded them a nice little State of their own. Had this not happened those Madrasi monkeys could have evolved into proper human beings. Ashutosh himself might be prepared to visit that benighted place. However he will refuse to do lungi dance like Shahrukh. This is because he draws on powerful modern doctrines such as anti-colonialism which disappeared sixty years ago because colonialism had disappeared by then. Still, that counts as modern to academics in shite subjects because their brains turned to shit decades ago.
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