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Mostrando postagens com marcador Foreign Policy. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Foreign Policy. Mostrar todas as postagens

quinta-feira, 28 de março de 2024

Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future - Adrian Karatnycky Foreign Policy

 Essay

Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

With a Soviet-style election, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has come full circle.

By Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the founder of Myrmidon

FOREIGN POLICY, MARCH 24, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/24/russia-putin-stalin-soviet-election-war-repression-political-prisoners/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=World%20Brief%20-%2003272024&utm_term=world_brief

 

In 1968, the American scholar Jerome M. Gilison described Soviet elections as a “psychological curiosity”—a ritualized, performative affirmation of the regime rather than a real vote in any sense of the word. These staged elections with their nearly unanimous official results, Gilison wrote, served to isolate non-conformists and weld the people to their regime.

Last Sunday, Russia completed the circle and returned to Soviet practice. State election officials reported that 87 percent of Russians had cast their vote for Vladimir Putin in national elections, giving the Russian president a fifth term in office. Not only were many of the reported election numbers mathematically impossible, but there was also no longer much of a choice: All prominent opposition figures had been either murderedimprisoned, or exiled. Like in Soviet times, the election also welded Russians to their regime by serving as a referendum on Putin’s war against Ukraine. All in all, last weekend’s Soviet-style election sealed Putin’s transformation of post-Communist Russia into a repressive society with many of the features of Soviet totalitarianism.

Russia’s return to Soviet practice goes far beyond elections. A recent study by exiled Russian journalists from Proekt Media used data to determine that Russia is more politically repressive today than the Soviet Union under all leaders since Joseph Stalin. During the last six years, the study reports, the Putin regime has indicted 5,613 Russians on explicitly political charges—including “discrediting the army,” “disseminating misinformation,” “justification of terrorism,” and other purported crimes, which have been widely used to punish criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine and justification of Ukraine’s defense of its territory. This number is significantly greater than in any other six-year period of Soviet rule after 1956—all the more glaring given that Russia’s population is only half that of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

 

In addition to repressive criminal charges and sentences, over the last six years more than 105,000 people have been tried on administrative charges, which carry heavy fines and compulsory labor for up to 30 days without appeal. Many of these individuals were punished for taking part in unsanctioned marches or political activity, including anti-war protests. Others were charged with violations of COVID pandemic regulations. Such administrative punishments are administered and implemented rapidly, without time for an appeal.

On March 4, 2022, a little over a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Russia’s puppet parliament rapidly adopted amendments to the Russian Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code that established criminal and administrative punishments for the vague transgressions of “discrediting” the Russian military or disseminating “false information” about it. This widely expanded the repressive powers of the state to criminally prosecute political beliefs and activity. Prosecutions have surged since the new laws were passed, likely leading to a dramatic increase in the number of political prisoners in the coming years. In particular, punishments for “discrediting the army” or “justification of terrorism”—which includes voicing support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself—have resulted in hundreds of sentences meted out each year since the war began. The most recent such case: On Feb. 27, the 70-year-old co-chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting” the Russian military.

As the Proekt report ominously concludes, “[I]n terms of repression, Putin has long ago surpassed almost all Soviet general secretaries, except for one—Joseph Stalin.” While this conclusion is in itself significant, it is only the tip of the iceberg of the totalitarian state Putin has gradually and systematically rebuilt.

As in the Soviet years, there is no independent media in Russia today. The last of these news organizations were banned or fled the country after Putin’s all-out war on Ukraine, including Proekt, Meduza, Ekho Moskvy, Nobel Prize-winning Novaya Gazeta, and TV Dozhd. In their place, strictly regime-aligned newspapers, social media, and television and radio stations emit a steady drumbeat of militaristic propaganda, promote Russian imperialist grandeur, and celebrate Putin as the country’s infallible commander in chief. In another reprise of totalitarian practice, lists of banned books have been dramatically expanded and thousands of titles have been removed from the shelves of Russian libraries and bookstores. Bans have been extended to numerous Wikipedia pages, social media channels, and websites.

Human rights activists and independent civic leaders have been jailed, physically attacked, intimidated into silence, or driven into exile. Civic organizations that show independence from the state are banned as “undesirable” and subjected to fines and prosecution if they continue to operate. The most recent such organizations include the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, Memorial, the legendary Moscow Helsinki Group, and the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum. In their place, the state finances a vast array of pro-regime and pro-war groups, with significant state resources supporting youth groups that promote the cult of Putin and educate children in martial values to prepare them for military service. Then there are the numerous murders of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists at home and abroad. Through these various means, almost all critical Russian voices have been silenced.

Private and family life is also increasingly coming under the scope of government regulation and persecution. The web of repression particularly affects the LGBT community, putting large numbers of Russians in direct peril. A court ruling in 2023 declared the “international LGBT movement” extremist and banned the rainbow flag as a forbidden symbol, which was quickly followed by raids and arrests. Homosexuality has been reclassified as an illness, and Russian gay rights organizations have shut down their operations for fear of prosecution. Legislation aimed at reinforcing “traditional values”—including the right of husbands to discipline their wives—has led to the reduction in sentences and the decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence.

Many of the techniques of totalitarian control now operating throughout Russia were first incubated in territories where the Kremlin spread war and conflict. Chechnya was the first testing ground for widespread repression, including massive numbers of victims subjected to imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and rape. Coupled with the merciless targeting of civilians in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, these practices normalized wanton criminal behavior within Russian state security structures. Out of this crucible of fear and intimidation, Putin has shaped a culture and means of governing that were further elaborated in other places Russia invaded and eventually came to Russia itself.

In Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014, there has been a widespread campaign of surveillance, summary executions, arrests, torture, and intimidation—all entirely consistent with Soviet practice toward conquered populations. More recently, this includes the old practice of forced political recantations: A Telegram channel ominously called Crimean SMERSH (a portmanteau of the Russian words for “death to spies,” coined by Stalin himself) has posted dozens of videos of frightened Ukrainians recanting their Ukrainian identity or the display of Ukrainian symbols. Made in conjunction with police operations, these videos appear to be coordinated with state security services.

In the parts of Ukraine newly occupied since 2022, human rights groups have widely documented human rights abuses and potential war crimes. These include the abduction of children, imprisonment of Ukrainians in a system of filtration camps that recall the Soviet gulags, and the systematic use of rape and torture to break the will of Ukrainians. Castrations of Ukrainian men have also been employed.

As Russia’s violence in Ukraine has expanded, so, too, has the acceptance of these abominations throughout the state and in much of society. As during the Stalin era, the cult of cruelty and the culture of fear are now the legal and moral standards. The climate of fear initially employed to assert order in occupied regions is now being applied to Russia itself. In this context, the murder of Alexei Navalny ahead of the presidential election was an important message from Putin to the Russian people: There is no longer any alternative to the war and repressive political order he has imposed, of which Navalny’s elimination is a part.

All the techniques and means of repression bespeak a criminal regime that now closely resembles the totalitarian rule of Stalin, whom Putin now fully embraces. After Putin first came to power in 1999, he often praised Stalin as a great war leader while disapproving of his cruelty and brutality. But as Putin pivoted toward war and repression, Russia has systematically promoted a more positive image of Stalin. High school textbooks not only celebrate his legacy but also whitewash his terror regime. There has been a proliferation of new Stalin monuments, with more than 100 throughout the country today. On state-controlled media, Russian propagandists consistently hammer away on the theme of Stalin’s greatness and underscore similarities between his wartime leadership and Putin’s. Discussion of Stalinist terror has disappeared, as has the memorialization of his millions of victims. Whereas only one in five Russians had a positive view of Stalin in the 1990s, polls conducted over the last five years show that number has risen to between 60 percent and 70 percent. In normalizing Stalin, Putin is not glossing over the tyrant’s crimes; rather, he is deliberately normalizing Stalin as a justification for his own war-making and repression.

Putin now resembles Stalin more closely than any other Soviet or Russian leader. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Andropov—not to mention Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—Putin has unquestioned power that is not shared or limited in any way by parliament, courts, or a Politburo. State propaganda has created a Stalin-like personality cult that lionizes Putin’s absolute power, genius as a leader, and role as a brilliant wartime generalissimo. It projects him as the fearsome and all-powerful head of a militarized nation aiming, like Stalin, to defeat a “Nazi” regime in Ukraine and reassert hegemony over Eastern and Central Europe. Just as Stalin made effective use of the Russian Orthodox Church to support Russia’s effort during World War II, Putin has effectively used Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill as a critical ally and cheerleader of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. And just like Stalin, Putin has made invading neighboring countries and annexing territory a central focus of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.

Putin’s descent into tyranny has been accompanied by his gradual isolation from the rest of society. Like the latter-day Stalin, Putin began living an isolated life as a bachelor even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like the later Stalin, Putin lacks a stable family life and is believed to have replaced it with a string of mistresses, some of whom are reported to have borne him children for whom he remains a remote figure. Like Stalin, he stays up late into the early-morning hours, and like the Soviet dictator, Putin has assembled around him a small coterie of trusted intimates, mostly men in their 60s and 70s, with whom he has maintained friendships for decades, including businessmen Yury Kovalchuk and Igor Sechin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and security chief Nikolai Patrushev. This coterie resembles Stalin’s small network of cronies: security chief Lavrentiy Beria, military leader Kliment Voroshilov, and Communist Party official Georgy Malenkov. To others in leadership positions, Putin is a distant, absolute leader who openly humiliates seemingly powerful officials, such as spy chief Sergey Naryshkin, when the latter seemed to hesitate in his support during Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine.

Through near-total control of domestic civic life and media, his widening campaign of repression and terror, relentless state propaganda promoting his personality cult, and his vast geopolitical ambitions, Putin is consciously mimicking the Stalin playbook, especially the parts of that playbook dealing with World War II. Even if Putin has no love for Soviet Communist ideology, he has transformed Russia and its people in ways that are no less fundamental than Stalin’s efforts to shape a new Soviet man.

Putin’s massive victory in a Soviet-style election last weekend represents the ratification by the Russian people of his brutal war, militarization of Russian society, and establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. It is a good moment to acknowledge that Russia’s descent into tyranny, mobilization of society onto a war footing, spread of hatred for the West, and indoctrination of the population in imperialist tropes represent far more than a threat to Ukraine. Russia’s transformation into a neo-Stalinist, neo-imperialist power represents a rising threat to the United States, its European allies, and other states on Russia’s periphery. By recognizing how deeply Russia has changed and how significantly Putin is borrowing from Stalin’s playbook, we can better understand that meeting the modern-day Russian threat will require as much consistency and as deep a commitment as when the West faced down Stalin’s Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

ARTICLES BY ADRIAN KARATNYCKY

A protester sits on a monument in central Kyiv during the Maidan uprising on Feb. 20, 2014.
A protester sits on a monument in central Kyiv during the Maidan uprising on Feb. 20, 2014.
A woman poses for a photo in front of a tall decorated Christmas tree in front of a war-damanged building in Melitopol in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region with a Russian flag flying from a tall pole overhead.
A woman poses for a photo in front of a tall decorated Christmas tree in front of a war-damanged building in Melitopol in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region with a Russian flag flying from a tall pole overhead.
A man suspected to be a Russian collaborator is seen facing away through a slightly open doorway with his hands cuffed behind his back during an operation in Ukraine. He is inside a home with ornate wallpaper and wall hangings, including a calendar with a pinup girl and a framed image of Jesus.
A man suspected to be a Russian collaborator is seen facing away through a slightly open doorway with his hands cuffed behind his back during an operation in Ukraine. He is inside a home with ornate wallpaper and wall hangings, including a calendar with a pinup girl and a framed image of Jesus.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama chat after a bilateral meeting at the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama chat after a bilateral meeting at the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.
A poster of Russian President Vladimir Putin is used as target practice near Zolote, Ukraine, on Jan. 21, 2022.
A poster of Russian President Vladimir Putin is used as target practice near Zolote, Ukraine, on Jan. 21, 2022.
Russians protest against President Vladimir Putin's government at Pushkin Square in Moscow on Jan. 23.
Russians protest against President Vladimir Putin's government at Pushkin Square in Moscow on Jan. 23.
Viktor Medvedchuk gives a speech in Ukraine.
Viktor Medvedchuk gives a speech in Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelensky arrives at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
Volodymyr Zelensky arrives at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
Top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent are sworn in prior to testifying before the House Intelligence Committee in Washington on Nov. 13.
Top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent are sworn in prior to testifying before the House Intelligence Committee in Washington on Nov. 13.
502370482 crop
502370482 crop



sexta-feira, 12 de janeiro de 2024

A guerra que ninguém quer, mas alguns desejam: Israel-Hezbollah (Foreign Policy)

 How a War No One Wants Could Break Out

Foreign Policy, Jan 12, 2024

As Israel wages its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there are prospects of a new war brewing on Israel’s northern border against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group based in Lebanon. The United States and other Western powers are scrambling to try to prevent it, but diplomatic efforts to keep the war in Gaza from igniting conflicts in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region have already failed in some respects.

Militant groups that act as proxies for Iran—Israel and the United States’ arch regional rival—have ramped up attacks as Israel continues its military campaign in Gaza, from Houthi rebels in Yemen targeting commercial maritime traffic in the Red Sea to salvos of missiles targeting U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria.

A failure to contain Israel-Hezbollah tensions could be much deadlier, however.

The bigger war that everyone fears. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is considered one of the most powerful and heavily armed nonstate groups in the world. All sides agree that an Israel-Hezbollah war would be devastating.

But history is rife with examples of wars breaking out even when no side wants one. Given how tensions in the region are already at a boiling point, all it would take is one ill-placed or ill-timed spark to alight a major new front.

“The longer this goes on, the greater the possibility of some mass casualty event which pushes both sides over the edge,” said Aaron David Miller, a former longtime U.S. diplomat and Middle East peace negotiator who now works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank.

Upping the ante is the fact that U.S. officials now assess that the risk is rising that Hezbollah could begin targeting U.S. troops or diplomatic personnel in the Middle East, or even plan attacks in the U.S. homeland, according to Politico.

The deadliest “what if?” From the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, the Hezbollah question—whether the group would join Hamas’s war effort by launching a full-scale assault on Israel from Lebanon—has hung over the heads of U.S. and regional powers engaged in crisis response. Hezbollah’s military capabilities, with an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 missiles and rockets aimed at Israel and tens of thousands of fighters in its ranks, far outstrip those of Hamas. Experts warn that an Israel-Hezbollah war could be far deadlier and more drawn out than Israel’s operations against Hamas in Gaza, which have killed an estimated 22,000 Palestinians so far, according to health authorities in the Hamas-controlled territory.

Blinken’s warning. During his most recent trip to the Middle East this week—his fourth since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023—U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that the conflict could spill beyond its current contours. Behind the scenes, Blinken’s team has focused much of its efforts on both crafting a postwar plan for Gaza and heading off a major Israeli conflict with Hezbollah. “This is a moment of profound tension in the region. This is a conflict that could easily metastasize, causing even more insecurity and even more suffering,” Blinken said while visiting Qatar on Sunday.

Meanwhile, another top Biden administration envoy, Amos Hochstein, is in Lebanon this week following meetings in Israel to see if there’s room to negotiate on border disputes between the two countries in a bid to dial down the tensions. He has his work cut out for him, to say the least, as Robbie reports this week.

100,000 tons of diplomacy. The threat from Hezbollah is a key reason why the Biden administration deployed a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group and other warships to the Eastern Mediterranean in the months after the Israel-Hamas war started as a deterrent signal to head off any major Hezbollah offensive against Israel.

Ultimately, however, officials and experts widely agree that Iran has the deciding vote on whether Hezbollah should dive into the conflict. “Hezbollah does have a seat at the table, but the Iranians, at the end of the day … they make the decisions, and what they say goes,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Middle East terrorist groups.

Iran’s calculus. For now, Iran seems content with the status quo of dragging Israel through a grueling war in Gaza that has alienated much of its support on the world stage, as well as upending maritime trade routes through the strategic Red Sea chokepoint with Houthi attacks. In short, Tehran is already getting a lot for a relatively low cost—keeping thousands of Israeli soldiers occupied near Lebanon’s borders with the threat of a war there, while saving its biggest asset, Hezbollah, in reserve and skirting any direct role in the fight itself.

“Iranians are notorious for fighting to the last Lebanese, to the last Yemeni, to the last Syrian, to the Palestinian, to the last Iraqi, without implicating themselves, and this time is no different,” said Bilal Saab, a regional security expert at the Middle East Institute think tank.

Thus far, Hezbollah has limited its role in the war to cross-border fire targeting northern Israel, a clear sign in the eyes of U.S. officials and regional experts that Hezbollah’s patrons in Tehran don’t want a full-fledged war. Israel, meanwhile, has issued public warnings that it could launch a major military offensive against Hezbollah but has so far held off from doing so, as the bulk of its forces is bogged down in fighting in Gaza.

A powder keg waiting for a spark. The risk of miscalculation is high. On Tuesday, Hezbollah attacked an Israeli army base in Safed, located in northern Israel near the Lebanese border. This attack came just a day after a senior Hezbollah military commander, Wissam al-Tawil, was killed by an Israeli drone strike. A senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, was also killed in a strike in Beirut, though the Israeli government has not acknowledged its likely role in that killing.

Then there’s the political climate in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be bowing to the far-right members of his governing coalition in how he carries out the war as he scrambles to stop hemorrhaging political support.

Red lines. One major lingering problem is that both sides don’t have a clear idea of what the other’s red lines are. Israel may perceive the targeting of Hezbollah commanders as fair game in the so-far limited skirmishes along the Lebanese border, but Hezbollah may not. Similarly, Hezbollah could launch what it sees as skirmish attacks against Israeli bases, but Israel could perceive those as a major attack.

“There’s no mutually agreed-upon definition of what escalation is for both sides,” Saab said. “I’m not sure that intentions on their own to prevent a major war … [are] sufficient for actually preventing one.”

terça-feira, 9 de janeiro de 2024

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities (on nationalism) - David Polansky (Foreign Policy)

The Greatest Book on Nationalism Keeps Being Misread

“Imagined Communities” is far weirder than you remember.

 

By David Polansky, a political theorist and research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.


FOREIGN POLICY, JANUARY 7, 2024, 7:00 AM


 

There’s a scene in Sam Raimi’s classic horror-comedy Evil Dead II in which the protagonist saws off his own zombified hand and traps it under a copy of A Farewell to Arms. This is an intentional joke, but a similar titular misreading has haunted another 1980s classic: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

Due to a combination of the title’s pithiness and its well-established place on college syllabi, few works of social science have been so widely misunderstood. It is in that rarified genre of books more written about than read (officially known as the “Fukuyama Club”). For many readers appear to have taken the title literally, supposing that he treated nations as somehow fictional. His actual thesis, however, was more subtle. For Anderson, nationalism is imagined rather than imaginary — though too many readers only noted the first part.

He recognizes, in other words, that nations are historical creations rather than natural expressions of some authentic pre-political identity, but he does not assume this invalidates them. Thus (to take examples with particular contemporary relevance), Zionism is both a late 19th-century invention and a reality for Israeli citizens. Palestinian nationalism is both a derivation of a larger modern movement of Arab nationalism and the source of a recognizable collective identity. Nagorno-Karabakh acquired new (and mutually exclusive) significance for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, without thereby being any less consequential. All of these and more are real and meaningful, even when their historical claims are convenient.

And yet, being widely misread is still a greater legacy than most scholars can boast. And, indeed, the work’s scholarly footprint is substantial; four decades out, it remains one of the most-cited works in all the social sciences, and more to the point it is “by far the most cited text in the study of nationalism.” This is probably less an indication of widespread commitment to Anderson’s specific theses regarding the role of print capitalism or the role of New World states in the development of nationalism and more a testament to the way his book, and its title, came to stand in for a larger intellectual shift in the study of nationalism.

In the wake of the nationalist furies unleashed by the end of the Cold War, we are perhaps more sharply aware now of the themes of Imagined Communities than its contemporary readers were. But why more than two centuries into the age of nationalism and decades after the first wave of decolonization, when the study of nationalism only saw an efflorescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s? Anderson himself notes in a much-cited remark that “unlike most other isms, nationalism [had] never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers.”

The book’s shaped the study of nationalism—but it did so in a way that was sui generis. This quintessential work of modern social science is in fact quite nonrepresentative of the discipline. It proceeds unsystematically, veering into highly poetic digressions throughout, from literary references to autobiographical details. In fact, Anderson’s influential account of nationalism is ultimately poetic both in the sense that he emphasizes the role of language and literature in the formation of nations and in the sense that his own arguments themselves take poetic forms. That makes it, unlike many of its peers, remarkably readable—and has no doubt contributed to its shelf life.

Its distinctiveness surely owes something to its author. In a fascinating posthumous essay, Anderson noted how his imagination was spurred one day at Cornell from overhearing Allan Bloom in full pomp remark how the ancient Greeks had no concept of “power” as we understand it, which subsequently set him off on his own study of that theme in Javanese culture.

Several of Anderson’s qualities are on display here, all of which shape the book. One is his ability to make unexpected intellectual connections across domains and cultures. Another is his strong historical sense—what the great classicist Peter Brown calls a historicized imagination. The last is his strong orientation toward Southeast Asia, a region to which he remained devoted for much of his life. In a nice bit of biographical caesura, though Anderson was barred for decades from visiting Indonesia owing to a critical analysis of Gen. Suharto’s coup, he spent much of his retirement there, ultimately dying in Java in 2015.

This last might not be remarkable for a historian or professor of “area studies,” but it was for a time unique among scholars of nationalism, who tended to focus on its development in early modern Europe, more or less in parallel with the literature on the rise of the modern state. Anderson’s approach thus stood out even during a time of broader revisionism when it came to the study of nationalism.

Even beyond his wider geographical ambit, his practical experience with how waning colonial systems gave way to elite-shaping national consciousnesses in places like Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines accorded his work a real sense of how nationalism actually emerged. Unlike more analytical works, Anderson’s work seemed to ask—to paraphrase a famous philosophy paper—what is it like to be a nationalist?

Some background is probably in order here. Part of what drove this movement to study nationalism anew was the apprehension that nations and nationalism were, in fact, modern creations, and that nationalism was something stranger and more complex than merely the political expression of a supposedly authentic pre-political nation. This view, labeled “modernist,” was set against the so-called perennialists, at least some of whom were themselves galvanized to develop their own theories in response to the modernist challenge (the usual caveats that this brief description greatly oversimplifies the scholarly debates apply).

Yet Anderson’s relationship to this group was always somewhat ambiguous. Anderson accepts the modernist view, he does not therefore assign it a pejorative slant or deny its validity—he explicitly distinguishes himself from his near-contemporary Ernest Gellner, whose own treatment emphasized the inherent falseness of nationalism.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.

Anderson’s highly memorable title led to his being casually associated with the normative positions of those he otherwise opposed. Much of this, I suspect, was due to larger prevailing intellectual trends—particularly the way that critical approaches had given license to debunk any phenomena that were held to be socially constructed. Work on the socially constructed nature of gender, for instance, tends to go hand in hand with a critique of gender norms. Thus, it was (and largely still is) tacitly assumed that acknowledging the socially constructed nature of nations must issue a similar critique.

As he himself noted: “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. If you think about researchers such as Gellner and [Eric] Hobsbawm, they have quite a hostile attitude to nationalism. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

Perhaps, for this reason, Anderson is able to address upfront (as not all his peers do) the implicit question a reader has when confronted with such a work: Why should we care about nationalism? His correct answer is that it has induced people to kill and, more importantly, to die on a scale not before seen in history.

What, however, is the basis for Anderson’s basically positive outlook on nationalism? His is not that of, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in his famous Nobel lecture, endorses variety for its own sake. A multihued, patchwork world of different peoples and customs is to be devoutly preferred to the gray homogeneity of Marxism-Leninism (or democratic liberalism, for that matter).

His appreciation is, in fact, an interesting mix of traditional and modern. The traditionalist in him remarks:

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

Here he is probably closer to George Orwell, who sought to rescue the decent and even admirable elements of these particular patriotic loyalties. Anderson labored to rescue nationalism from associations with racism, arguing that nationalists are primarily concerned with history, whereas racists are primarily concerned with essences. Some readers may find that argument more plausible than others.



 

But the modernist in him also celebrates nationalism for its instrumental role in the process of decolonization. Here, his particular engagement with Southeast Asia dovetailed with his left-wing political sympathies. This may in fact be the most striking thing for a reader encountering it today—even in the later revised editions: how much of Anderson’s considerations play out within the context of Marxism.

His thought was steeped in Marxism, though his treatment was never dogmatic. To begin with, honesty compelled him to take seriously the national conflicts that he saw erupting between Marxist nations.

In this he resembles his brother, the historian and social critic Perry Anderson, whose trenchant commentary still graces issues of the London Review of Books. It is difficult for us at the other end of history to recall (assuming we were there in the first place) the overwhelming presence of Marxist ideas at the time, but much of the show Anderson puts on makes more sense when viewed in light of his intended audience (though Marxist ideas are hardly absent from academia today, they no longer enjoy the hegemony they once held over entire areas of study). It may seem bizarre to us now, but Anderson was at the time fighting a bit of an uphill battle to demonstrate that national identities, however recent, were not less real or consequential than the movements of capital or material production that were and are the chief preoccupations of Marxists.

Anderson himself takes a largely benign view of such movements without sharing the internal perspective of those working from within them (that they are participating in the formal establishment of an authentic pre-existing social identity). How, then, does he expect us to judge their successes or failures? The implicit answer, I think—particularly given Anderson’s Marxist leanings—is to look to the material well-being of the real people that a given nation purports to represent. There, the record has been mixed, from the bloody methods of decolonization in places like Algeria and Vietnam to the fratricidal viciousness by which former neighbors decoupled themselves during the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. At the same time, the extraordinary economic achievement of pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere cannot be decoupled from the social cohesion that nationalism provides. Anderson himself thus characterizes nationalism’s legacy as “Janus-headed.”

As I write this, the enduring conflict between two opposed nationalisms in the Levant has erupted again into terrible violence. Imagining a beneficent nationalism seems harder than ever. Perhaps for this reason, many outsiders have increasingly embraced a binational solution to the conflict—a kind of nationalism without nationalism—regardless of the actual preferences of the protagonists. And when confronted with such visible evidence of nationalism’s hard edge—the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7, or the Israel Defense Force’s ongoing shelling of Gaza—it is understandable that many would blanch at what it really entails.

And it is similarly understandable that one may ask in the face of this and so many other conflicts—from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and Pakistan to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and beyond—just what people get from nationalism. Why do they imagine this and not some other form of community? One answer is that at the level of practical reality, the nation provides the form for the ordinary liberal goods we enjoy. In another classic of modern social science, Seeing Like a State, James Scott described the state as “the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms.” Something like this is true of nationalism as well: that for all its capacity for violence, it also makes possible the bounded community within which we gain protections of individual rights and welfare benefits and security.

Anderson goes beyond this, however; his view of nations is not just instrumental. And perhaps for this reason the language we use to describe these conflicts today is very much his language. Hence the use of mythologized histories to legitimize territorial claims. And hence also the attempts to force the Israel-Palestine conflict into the framework of decolonization, in which a righteous emerging nationalism confronts a system of oppressive domination.

But what happens when two authentic nationalisms compete for the same territory? And while we may speak of the self-sacrificing love the nation inspires, what makes these sacrifices worthwhile in the end? The poetic resonances of Anderson’s treatment of nationalism have been widely recognized—but even poetry has its limits.

David Polansky is a political theorist who writes on geopolitics and the history of political thought. He is currently a research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.


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