Blood and Belonging (3 page)

There was nothing new in itself about this cosmopolitan ethic. We have lived with a global economy since 1700, and many of the world's major cities have been global entrepôts for centuries. A global market has been limiting the sovereignty and freedom of maneuver of nation-states at least since Adam Smith first constructed a theory of the phenomenon at the outset of the age of nationalism in 1776. A global market in ideas and cultural forms has existed at least since the Enlightenment republic of letters. Rootless cosmopolitans have existed as a social type in the big imperial cities for centuries.

Two features, however, distinguish the big-city cosmopolitanism of our era from what has gone before. First of all is its social and racial diffusion. Twentieth-century democracy and unprecedented postwar prosperity have extended the privileges of cosmopolitanism from a small white moneyed male elite to a substantial minority of the population of the nation-states of the developed world. Suddenly, there are a lot of us about, and our sense of sharing a post-nationalist consciousness has been mightily reinforced by cheap air travel and telecommunications.

The second obvious change is that the global market we live in is no longer ordered by a stable imperial system. For two hundred years, the global expansion of capitalism was shaped by the territorial ambitions and policing authority of a succession of imperial powers, the British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Soviet and American joint imperium after the Second World War. Since 1989, we have entered the first era of global
cosmopolitanism in which there is no framework of imperial order.

There have been three great reorderings of the nation-state system of Europe in this century: at Versailles in 1918, when the new nations of Eastern Europe were created from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires; at Yalta in 1945, when Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill allocated the nation-states of Western and Eastern Europe to two spheres of influence; and between 1989 and 1991, when the Soviet empire and the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed. What distinguishes the third of these is that it has occurred without any imperial settlement whatever. No treaty exists to regulate the conflict between the territorial integrity of nation-states in Eastern Europe and the right to self-determination of the peoples within them. For every resolution of this conflict by civilized divorce, Czech-style, there have been a dozen armed conflicts. The basic reason is obvious enough: the imperial police have departed.

The Americans may be the last remaining superpower, but they are not an imperial power: their authority is exercised in the defense of exclusively national interests, not in the maintenance of an imperial system of global order. As a result, large sections of Africa, Eastern Europe, Soviet Asia, Latin America, and the Near East no longer come within any clearly defined sphere of imperial or great-power influence. This means that huge sections of the world's population have won the “right of self-determination” on the cruelest possible terms: they have been simply left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, their nation-states are collapsing, as in Somalia and in many other nations of Africa. In crucial zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire—notably the
Balkans—populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to. Small wonder, then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.

Globalism in a post-imperial age permits a post-nationalist consciousness only for those cosmopolitans who are lucky enough to live in the wealthy West. It has brought chaos and violence for the many small peoples too weak to establish defensible states of their own. The Bosnian Muslims are perhaps the most dramatic example of a people who turned in vain to more powerful neighbors to protect them. The people of Sarajevo were true cosmopolitans, fierce believers in ethnic heterogeneity. But they lacked either a reliable imperial protector or a state of their own to guarantee peace among contending ethnicities.

What has happened in Bosnia must give pause to anyone who believes in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted. Though we have passed into a post-imperial age, we have not moved to a post-nationalist age, and I cannot see how we will ever do so. The cosmopolitan order of the great cities—London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris—depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation-state. When this order breaks down, as it did during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, it becomes apparent that civilized, cosmopolitan multi-ethnic cities have as great a propensity for ethnic warfare as any Eastern European country.

In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation
states to provide security and civility for their citizens. In that sense alone, I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives. At the very least, cosmopolitan disdain and astonishment at the ferocity with which people will fight to win a nation-state of their own is misplaced. They are, after all, only fighting for a privilege cosmopolitans have long taken for granted.

SIX JOURNEYS

There is only so much that can be said about nationalism in general. It is not one thing in many disguises but many things in many disguises; nationalist principles can have dreadful consequences in one place, and innocuous or positive ones in another place. Context is all. I wanted to see nationalism in as many of its guises as possible. But where was I to go?

The itinerary I chose was personal, but, I hoped, not arbitrary. I chose places I had lived in, cared about, and knew enough about to believe that they could illustrate certain central themes.

I began my journey in Yugoslavia, because I had lived there for two years as a child and knew it well enough in Tito's heyday to be astonished that it should have been the place where the infamous phrase “ethnic cleansing” was coined. The thirty-five years of Tito's rule did not seem to me just an interlude of peace in an interminable history of Balkan inter-ethnic warfare. In the Yugoslavia I had loved, Croats, Serbs, and Muslims had lived as neighbors. What, then, had turned neighbors into enemies? How exactly had
nationalist paranoia torn apart the structure of inter-ethnic accommodation and produced the new order of partitioned, ethnically homogeneous states?

My next journey was to Germany, the nation which both invented ethnic nationalism under the Romantics and then disgraced it under Hitler, and which now is struggling to contain ethnic nationalism in its modern Western European form: the white racist youth gang. Postwar Germany thinks of itself as a civic democracy, yet its citizenship laws remain defined by ethnicity. It is the society in Europe most tormented by the choice between succumbing to its ethnic nationalist past and building a civic nationalist future.

Of the fifteen successor states of the Soviet empire, Ukraine is the largest: a nuclear superpower getting its first experience of national independence and discovering how difficult it is to dig itself out of centuries of Russian rule. It was a natural choice of destination for a journey into the ruins of the former Soviet empire. But there was a personal reason for choosing Ukraine. My grandparents and great-grandparents were Russian landowners who owned an estate in Ukraine. What better way, I thought, to explore the deep interpenetration of Ukrainian and Russian identity than to return to that estate and to see how my ancestors were now remembered in a new state.

The same personal agenda led me to choose Quebec, where those same Russian grandparents ended their lives in exile. The nationalism I know best, the one that has torn my country—Canada—apart for thirty years, is Quebecois. Here is a nationalism in a modern, developed, and democratic society, a demand for cultural and linguistic self-determination that raises a fundamental issue—equally relevant to Scotland and Catalonia—if you already are a nation and enjoy
substantial autonomy, why do you need an independent state of your own?

Since nationalism is so often called a form of tribalism, Quebec also offered an opportunity to observe how tribal and national consciousness interact among an aboriginal people of northern Quebec, the Cree, who have adopted the language of national self-determination to confront Quebec's plans for economic development in the north. How, in turn, do Quebec nationalists confront a nationalist challenge within?

As a Crimean Tatar nationalist told me in Ukraine, only a man who has no mother knows what a mother means. Only a man without a state knows what a nation-state means. Of the many stateless peoples in the world—from the Crimean Tatars to the Palestinians—the most numerous are the Kurds. The creation of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, by the Gulf War armies of the West, allowed me to see for myself how limited autonomy and self-rule have transformed a people who have never had a home of their own. In the Kurdish struggle for a homeland, they have had to fight against four of the most virulent secular and religious nationalisms of the twentieth century: Kemal Ataturk's Turkey, the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Hafez Assad's Syria. Can their own national struggle finally bring the Kurds together? In other words, can nationalism create a nation?

My final journey took me back to consider the fraying national identity of my adopted country, the British Isles. Where better to observe this identity under stress than in the streets of Belfast, where for seventy-five years the Protestant Loyalist community has been defending its right to be British against the most violent nationalist movement in
Western Europe, the IRA? What exactly is Loyalism loyal to? Is it a cargo cult of Britishness, or is it a mirror in which the British can see the distorted image of who they really are? Coming home to the fierce Britishness of Ulster allowed me to confront the central conceit that cosmopolitans everywhere, and the British in particular, have about the tide of ethnic nationalism destroying the fixed landmarks of the Cold War world: everyone else is a fanatic, everyone but us is a nationalist. If patriotism, as Samuel Johnson remarked, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, so post-nationalism and its accompanying disdain for the nationalist emotions of others may be the last refuge of the cosmopolitan.

SIX JOURNEYS

CROATIA AND SERBIA

THE ANCIEN REGIME

Wild strawberries were served in a silver cup at breakfast, I remember, followed by hot rolls with apricot jam. The dining room looked over the lake, and when the window was open you could feel the mountain air sweeping across the water, across the white linen tablecloth and then across your face.

The hotel was called the Toplice, on the shores of Lake Bled, in Slovenia. The diplomatic corps spent the summer there, in attendance upon the dictator who took up residence across the lake. My father, like the other diplomats, came to gossip and take the waters. Every morning, he bathed in the heated pools beneath the hotel. I played tennis, ate wild strawberries, rowed on the lake, and conceived a passion for an unapproachable Swedish girl of twelve. Such are my
ancien régime
memories, and they are from Communist Yugoslavia.

I remember an evening listening from the bottom of our dining room as the then foreign minister, Ko˘ca Popović, suavely smoked cigarettes in an ivory holder and told how his partisan unit had “liquidated the Chetniks,” the Serbs who had fought on Hitler's side at the end of the war. I had never heard the word “liquidated” used like that before.

It was obvious, even to me, that the Communist elite had won power not merely by defeating a foreign invader but by winning a vicious civil war. The reality of Tito's police state
was just as obvious. We lived in Dedinje, a hillside suburb overlooking Belgrade, only several hundred meters from Tito's residence. Wherever you walked, there were men in plain clothes, strolling about or whispering into walkietalkies. Tito himself was the hidden god of the whole system. With his sleekly groomed hair, permanent suntan, shiny silk suit, and black onyx ring on his finger, he resembled nothing so much, my father said, as a prosperous south German refrigerator salesman.

Obviously, he was more imaginative and sinister than that. I remember how, on a cruise in the Adriatic, my parents kept hiding a book from the crew, stowing it under their bunk, locking it in their luggage. The book turned out to be Milovan Djilas's
The New Class
. Djilas, Tito's companion in arms, was still in Tito's jail for denouncing his dictatorial tendencies.

We traveled everywhere in the Yugoslavia of the late 1950s—through Bosnian hill villages, where children swarmed up to the car, barefoot and in rags; to the great mosque of Sarajevo, where I removed my shoes and knelt and watched old men pressing their foreheads on the carpets and whispering their prayers; to the Dalmatian islands and
beaches, then unvisited by Western tourists; to Lake Bled in Slovenia. Parts of southern Serbia, central Bosnia, and western Hercegovina were so poor that it was not clear how ordinary people survived at all. Ljubljana and Zagreb, by contrast, were neat, prosperous Austro-Hungarian towns that seemed to have nothing in common with the bony, bare hinterlands of central Yugoslavia.