Identity

7 NATIONALISM AND RELIGION

Luther, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel understood dignity in different ways. But they were universalists insofar as they believed in the equality of dignity of all human beings based on their potential for inner freedom. Yet the demand for recognition often takes a more particular form, centering on the dignity of a particular group that has been marginalized or disrespected. For many, the inner self that needed to be made visible was not that of a generic human being, but of a particular kind of person from a particular place and observing particular customs. These partial identities could be based on nation, or they could be based on religion. Because they demanded recognition of the dignity of the group in question, they turned into political movements that we label nationalism or Islamism.

The thinker who was critical in shifting the focus of recognition struggles away from an individual if universally shared freedom to collective freedom based on particular national or cultural characteristics was Johann Gottfried von Herder, a late-eighteenth-century student and contemporary of Kant. Herder has often been attacked as the father of modern European ethno-nationalism, a writer who celebrated the primitive Volk, or people, and was a distant precursor of Adolf Hitler.

This view is highly unfair to a thinker who has been inadequately read and studied in the English-speaking world. Herder shared many of Kant’s Enlightenment views about human equality, but spent far more time reading broadly the travel literature of Europeans who had visited obscure foreign lands and recorded their observations of local customs. In Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Herder states clearly that there is a single human species, and he attacks other authors who have tried to establish hierarchies among the world’s races. He empathizes with the pain of Africans taken in slavery and asserts that cultures can be measured by their treatment of women. In a period well before the discovery of modern genetics, he had an amazingly sophisticated understanding of the complex interaction between biological characteristics and environment in shaping behavior.^{1}

Nonetheless, Herder argued that each human community is unique and separate from its neighbors. He notes that climate and geography have had huge impacts on the customs of different peoples, each of which expresses its own “genius” in the ways they have adapted to local circumstances. Unlike Hegel, who simply wrote off Africa as irrelevant to human history, Herder took a sympathetic view of non-European cultures. Like a contemporary cultural anthropologist, he was more interested in describing than in evaluating other peoples. And, in an age well before the big European push to colonize the globe, he issued a warning that contemporary nation-builders might take to heart: “Let it not be imagined, that human art can with despotic power convert at once a foreign region into another Europe.”^{2}

Herder’s link to modern nationalism is clear. His work sought to promote an appreciation for the unique customs and traditions of each of the world’s people. Like Rousseau, he did not believe that those who lived in later historical times were necessarily better or happier than the “primitive” peoples who came before. He agreed that society could force us to play false roles. In doing so, he staked out a position very different from that of Hegel, who in the following generation would argue that history was universal and progressive.^{3}

Herder applied his idea of cultural authenticity to the Germany of his time, which was divided into countless petty principalities, many of which sought to emulate the splendor and culture of the French court at Versailles. Herder argued that the Germans needed to take pride in their own culture and traditions rather than seeking to be second-rate Frenchmen. He sought recognition, not for an abstraction like the “Man” in the Rights of Man, but rather for his particular people and, by extension, every other human community.

The “long nineteenth century” that stretched from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 saw two versions of dignity and two approaches to identity in competition with each other. The first sought recognition of the universal Rights of Man (not, at that point, necessarily of women as well). The other sought recognition of the dignity of particular peoples who had been oppressed or held in bondage by others. These different versions of dignity, universal and national, contended with each other over decades; the revolutions of 1848, for example, were fought in the name both of liberal rights and of national self-assertion. By the early twentieth century, the liberal version of dignity was joined by another universalist doctrine, Marxist socialism, which would fight for the rights of proletarians. Both the liberal and the socialist movements contended with nationalism through the two world wars; after fascism’s defeat in 1945, the two universal doctrines emerged as the poles around which global politics was organized during the Cold War. But nationalism was never fully discredited, despite institutions such as the European Union that were designed to keep it in check, and has reemerged as a new force in the twenty-first century.

Ideas were important to understanding the rise of nationalism, but important economic and social changes were also taking place that prepared the ground for its emergence in nineteenth-century Europe. The old European order of the Middle Ages was hierarchical and stratified according to social class; feudalism divided Europe’s populations into countless tiny jurisdictions and was designed to lock them into place.

A modern market economy, by contrast, depends on the free movement of labor, capital, and ideas from places where they are abundant to places where they can earn a high return. The universal recognition offered by liberal societies was particularly conducive to capitalist development, since it protected individuals’ freedom to engage in commerce from the state and preserved their right to own private property. It is therefore not surprising that liberalism became the handmaiden of economic growth, and that two of the most liberal societies of the time, Britain and the United States, were leading drivers of industrialization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But a modern market economy required something like nationalism and identity based on nation as well. Nationalism is a doctrine that political borders ought to correspond to cultural communities, with culture defined largely by shared language. In premodern Europe, France was a mosaic of different tongues such as Breton, Picard, Flemish, and Provençal, in addition to Parisian French. Elsewhere in Europe, peasants often spoke a different language from their lords in the local manor; Latin was the court language of the Habsburg Empire until the nineteenth century. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, Germans were mixed with Poles, Moravians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and many others in small, self-regarding communities. All of this inhibited the mobility required by labor markets in an industrializing society. As the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner explained, “A society has emerged based on a high-powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers.” This necessitates a uniform national language, and a state-sponsored educational system to promote national culture. “The employability, dignity, security and self-respect of individuals… now hinges on their education… Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.”^{4}

But nationalism was also born out of the acute anxieties bred by industrialization. Consider the situation of a young peasant, Hans, who grows up in a small village in Saxony. Hans’s life in the little village is fixed: he is living in the same house as his parents and grandparents; he is engaged to a girl whom his parents found acceptable; he was baptized by the local priest; and he plans to continue working the same plot of land as his father. It doesn’t occur to Hans to ask “Who am I?” since that question has already been answered for him by the people around him. However, he hears that big opportunities are opening up in the rapidly industrializing Ruhr valley, so he travels to Düsseldorf to get a job in a steel factory there.

Hans is now living in a dormitory with hundreds of other young men like himself, coming from all over northwestern Germany. People speak in different dialects; some of the people he meets are not German at all, but Dutch or French. He is no longer under the thumb of his parents and local priest and finds people with different religious affiliations than those in his village. He is still committed to marrying his fiancée but tempted by some of the local women he has met, and he feels a bracing sense of freedom in his personal life.

At the same time Hans is troubled. Back in his village, he was surrounded by friends and relatives, who knew him and would support him in times of sickness or a bad harvest. He does not have that kind of certainty about the new friends and acquaintances he has made and is not sure that his new employer, a big corporation, will look after his interests. He is told that some Communist agitators are pushing to create a trade union in his factory, but he has heard bad things about them and doesn’t trust them either. The newspapers are full of conflicting stories about fights in the parliament, and he is not sure whom to believe. Hans suspects that all of these quarreling political parties are selfish and not interested in representing him. His part of Germany has become part of an enormous Reich of which he can feel proud, but one that is barreling forward to an uncertain future. He feels lonely and disconnected from his surroundings; he feels nostalgia for his village, but doesn’t want to return there, as that would be a sign of personal defeat. For the first time in his life, Hans can make choices about how to live his life, but he wonders who he really is and what he would like to be. The question of identity, which would never have been a problem back in his village, now becomes central.

Hans’s personal story was characterized by the nineteenth-century social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or from (village) community to (urban) society. It was experienced by millions of Europeans during the nineteenth century and is now happening in rapidly industrializing societies such as China and Vietnam.

The psychological dislocation engendered by the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft laid the basis for an ideology of nationalism based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the divisions and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist. Well before the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, German writers were lamenting the loss of Gemeinschaft and what they saw as the perversions of a cosmopolitan liberal society.

The historian Fritz Stern analyzed a number of these early ideologists of German identity, such as the hugely influential polemicist and biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde. Lagarde lived in Bismarck’s newly unified Germany of the late nineteenth century, when the country was experiencing an economic miracle of growth, industrialization, and burgeoning military and political power. Yet Lagarde, in countless articles and pamphlets (collected as his German Writings in 1886), saw around him nothing but cultural decay: the German spirit had declined into self-seeking as a result of liberal doctrines based on rationality and science. The old Germany was one of virtues and strong community that needed to be brought back. He imagined a new religion that would fuse Christianity with the “national characteristics of the Germans,” a faith that would become the basis for a new national identity. Lagarde wrote, “Once a nation, [a people] has but one will, and all conflict is banished.” Something of an academic outcast, he had never achieved the fame he thought he deserved for his interpretive work on the Septuagint; unity with the German people was at once a solution to his personal loneliness and a source of the dignity he could not achieve as an individual scholar.^{5}

Lagarde, like Julius Langbehn, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and other nineteenth-century German nationalists, saw the German people as victims of outside forces. Lagarde had a conspiratorial view of why German culture had decayed: the Jews were the bearers of liberal modernity, inserting themselves into the cultural life of the new modern Germany, bringing with them universalist ideas of democracy and socialism that undermined the unity of the German people. To reestablish German greatness, the Jews would have to be banished from the new order he envisioned.

Intellectuals from Friedrich Nietzsche to Ernst Troeltsch to Thomas Mann read Lagarde sympathetically, and his works would be widely distributed by the Nazis.^{6} He spoke to the anxieties of people making the transition from agrarian village society to modern, urban industrial life, a transition that for millions of Europeans experiencing it pushed the question of identity to the forefront. This was the moment in which the personal became the political. The answer given to a confused peasant like Hans from ideologists such as Lagarde was simple: You are a proud German, heir to an ancient culture, connected by your common language to all of the millions of other Germans scattered across Central and Eastern Europe. The lonely and confused worker now had a clear sense of dignity, a dignity that, he now realized, was disrespected by bad people who had somehow infiltrated his society.

The new form of identity based on shared culture and language unleashed new passions, since these new cultural groups lived in old jurisdictions such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire that were based on dynastic ties rather than culture. Uniting scattered Germans under a single Reich would become a political project over the next three generations undertaken by leaders from Bismarck to Hitler. Other nationalities—Serbs, Poles, Hungarians, Russians—were also seeking to create or consolidate states based on ethno-nationalism, which would lead Europe into two devastating world wars in the early twentieth century.

Identity also became a critical issue in the then-colonial world. The parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America dominated by the European powers were not as a whole industrializing as Europe was. They were instead going through what has sometimes been labeled modernization without development—that is, urbanization and rapid social change without sustained economic growth. They acquired new capital cities with a small indigenous elite that collaborated with the colonial powers in administering their territories. Members of this elite received European educations and spoke the metropolitan language. But they felt an intense inner conflict between these acquired identities and the indigenous traditions with which they had grown up. As nationalism spread in Europe, it took root as well in Europe’s colonies, leading by the middle of the twentieth century to open revolts in such places as India, Vietnam, Kenya, and Algeria in the name of national liberation. Nationalism in the colonial world led to efforts by intellectuals to revolutionize culture as well. Black writers such as Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Senghor, for example, developed the concept of Négritude to help blacks take pride in their race and heritage, reversing the colonial regimes’ denigration of them.

Ernest Gellner was a major theorist of nationalism, and he suggested that modern Islamism needed to be seen through a similar lens of modernization and identity. Both nationalism and Islamism are rooted in modernization. The shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft has been occurring in the contemporary Middle East, as peasants or bedouin have left the countryside for cities such as Cairo, Amman, and Algiers. Alternatively, millions of Muslims experienced modernization by migrating to Europe or other Western countries in search of better lives, settling in Marseille or Rotterdam or Bradford and confronting there an alien culture. In other cases, the modern world came to them in their villages via satellite TV from stations such as Al Jazeera or CNN International. People living in traditional villages with limited choices are suddenly confronted with a pluralistic world with very different ways of life in which their traditional norms are not respected.

The identity problem is particularly acute for young second-generation Muslims growing up in immigrant communities in Western Europe. They are living in largely secular societies with Christian roots that do not provide public support for their religious values or practices. Their parents often came from closed village communities offering localized versions of Islam, such as Sufi saint worship. Like many children of immigrants, they are eager to distance themselves from their families’ old-fashioned ways of life. But they are not easily integrated into their new European surroundings: rates of youth unemployment, particularly for Muslims, are upward of 30 percent, and in many European countries a link is still perceived between ethnicity and membership in the dominant cultural community—an issue that we will return to in later chapters.

Under these circumstances, confusion about identity becomes acute, just as it was for newly urbanized Europeans in the nineteenth century. For some Muslims today, the answer to this confusion has not been membership in a nation, but membership in a larger religious group—an umma, or community of believers, represented by a political party such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Turkey’s Justice and Development Party or Tunisia’s Ennahda. Like classic nationalists, contemporary Islamists have both a diagnosis of the problem and a clear solution: you are part of a proud and ancient community; the outside world doesn’t respect you as a Muslim; we offer you a way to connect to your true brothers and sisters, where you will be a member of a great community of believers that stretches across the world.

This assertion of pride in one’s identity may explain the cultural shifts that have been taking place across the Muslim world over the past generation. After a prolonged period in which it was fashionable for educated people from the Middle East to adopt Western customs and garb, a large number of young Muslim women in Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and other Middle Eastern countries have started to wear the hijab or headscarf; some have taken to even more restrictive forms of female dress such as the full-face veil, or niqab. Many of these women are indeed pious Muslims, but others are not particularly religious; wearing the hijab is rather a signal of identity, a marker that they are proud of their culture and not afraid to be publicly identified as a Muslim.

Mainstream Islamist parties such as those mentioned above have been willing to participate in democratic politics and have won victories at the polls that have led them into government. Despite their public avowals of commitment to democracy, their secular opponents often remain highly suspicious of their long-term agenda. The same could be said about nationalists, either in the nineteenth century or today: they often play by democratic rules, but harbor potentially illiberal tendencies due to their longings for unity and community.

As was the case with nationalism, more extreme versions of politicized religion have been proffered by ideologists such as Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of the Islamic State. Their narrative is far more focused on victimization by the United States, Israel, the Assad regime in Syria, or Iran, and they advocate an even tighter community bound by a shared commitment to violence and direct political action.

The French Middle Eastern scholar Olivier Roy has pointed out that many recent terrorists, such as those who staged the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2015, have a similar background: they are second-generation European Muslims who have rejected the Islam of their parents. (About 25 percent of the new generation of jihadis are converts to Islam with personal stories similar to those of jihadis who were born Muslim.)^{7} In their early years they appeared to be westernized, drinking alcohol and smoking weed, dating girls, watching sports, and otherwise seeming to fit into their surroundings. Yet many failed to find regular jobs and began a descent into petty crime and run-ins with the police. They lived at the margins of their own communities, with no history of great piety or interest in religion, until they are suddenly “born-again” by watching videos of radical imams or being converted by a prison preacher. When they showed up in Syria with a long beard and toting an AK-47 or staged a murderous attack on their fellow Europeans, their families always professed surprise and incomprehension at the transformation. Roy has described this not as the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamicization of radicalism—that is, a process that draws from the same alienation that drove earlier generations of extremists, whether nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde or Communists such as Leon Trotsky.^{8}

Roy’s profile suggests that the motives behind jihadist terrorism are more personal and psychological than religious and reflects the acute problem of identity that certain individuals face. Second-generation European Muslims in particular are caught between two cultures, that of their parents, which they reject, and that of their adopted country, which doesn’t fully accept them. Radical Islam by contrast offers them community, acceptance, and dignity. Roy argues that the number of Muslims who become terrorists or suicide bombers is minuscule compared to the total global population of over a billion Muslims. Poverty and deprivation, or simple anger over American foreign policy, does not inevitably lead people to extremism. Many terrorists have come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, and many were apolitical and unconcerned with global politics for most of their lives. Neither these issues nor any kind of genuine religiosity drove them so much as the need for a clear identity, meaning, and a sense of pride. They realized that they had an inner, unrecognized self that the outside world was trying to suppress.^{9}

Olivier Roy has been sharply criticized for his interpretation of contemporary jihadism and his downplaying of its religious dimension, particularly by his fellow French scholar of Islam Gilles Kepel. Kepel argues that the turn toward violence and extremism cannot be understood apart from the religious doctrines being promoted around the world, and in particular the brand of ultraconservative Salafism exported out of Saudi Arabia. He accuses Roy and much of the French left for exonerating Islam by pretending that the problem of jihadism has little to do with a particular religion. Others have pointed out that many terrorists do not fit the description offered by Roy.^{10}

The Roy-Kepel debate centers around a critical question: Is the rise of Islamist radicalism in the early twenty-first century best understood as an identity problem, or is it at base a genuinely religious phenomenon? That is, is it the by-product of the sociology of our age and the dislocations brought on by modernization and globalization, or does it represent a timeless feature of one particular religion, and the independent role of ideas in motivating human behavior? Answering this question is critical to knowing how to deal with the problem in practical terms.

These alternative interpretations are not, however, mutually exclusive; they may complement one another. Olivier Roy is correct in noting that the huge majority of the world’s Muslims are not radicals, which implies that explanations for extremism must be rooted in individual stories and social settings. Yet Kepel is correct that disaffected young European Muslims are not becoming anarcho-syndicalists or Communists, but jihadis preaching a particular version of Islam. Moreover, earlier generations of radicalized youth did not seek to blow themselves up in suicide attacks; specific ideas motivate this fashion.

Social change and ideology were also separate drivers of European nationalism. The identity confusion created by rapid modernization laid the groundwork for nationalism in Germany and other European countries. But it cannot be solely blamed for the rise of the particularly virulent and extreme version of nationalism represented by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party. Other countries such as France, Britain, and the United States underwent similar social changes; they may have been tempted but ultimately did not succumb to similar radical nationalist doctrines. It took a brilliant political entrepreneur and ideologue such as Hitler, and the huge economic dislocations experienced by Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, to permit the rise of the Nazi movement.

Similarly, in the Middle East today, many Muslims feel identity confusion and have turned to religion as an answer to “Who am I?” This turn may take the innocuous form of wearing a hijab to work or a burkini at the beach. But for some it takes a more violent and dangerous turn in the form of political activism and terrorism. The extremist forms of Muslim identity being proffered in the early twenty-first century are no more compatible with international peace than were the nationalist doctrines of the early twentieth century.

Both nationalism and Islamism can thus be seen as a species of identity politics. Stating this does not do justice to the full complexity or specificity of either phenomenon. But they nonetheless have a number of important similarities. They both appeared on the world stage at moments of social transition from traditional isolated agrarian societies to modern ones connected to a broader and more diverse world. They both provide an ideology that explains why people feel lonely and confused, and both peddle in victimhood that lays the blame for an individual’s unhappy situation on groups of outsiders. And they both demand recognition of dignity in restrictive ways: not for all human beings, but for members of a particular national or religious group.