Aijaz Ahmad

Abstract

“Nationalism” has emerged in many of the contemporary discourses on the left, as much as in the corporate media, as the name for a whole range of modern malignities. In most such narratives, though not in all, these growing “nationalisms” are said to be intrinsically opposed to neoliberalism and globalization, a state of affairs entirely negative from the standpoint of the corporate media. The left, however, is also in a quandary: One does want this neoliberal order to perish – but not at the hands of the nationalist monster! In some other narratives, these “nationalisms” are construed to be not neoliberalism’s opponents but its rebellious offspring. Let us propose, then, that there may well be something wrong in the perception itself, hence in the way the question then gets posed.

There is a problem with the promiscuous use of the word “nationalism” across many currents on the left. Nor does attaching the word “right-wing” to “nationalism” (to get “right-wing nationalism”) solve the problem. For something like a quarter century, I have held a working hypothesis that there really is no such a thing as nationalism, per se, with an identifiable, trans-historical essence, over and above particular historical practices and projects. At the deepest, most abstract level, nationalism is today the reflection, in thought, of the fact that nationstate either already exists in the world of material relations or is sought to be obtained in the future, as in the case of the Palestinians for example. Transnational capital and the multinational corporation, neoliberalism and globalization, all operate in a world of nation-states, which as a form is not, contrary to all rumour, at all on its deathbed.

Nationalisms are serviceable for all sorts of purposes: as a revivalist ideology that purports to link a desired future with an imagined past that never was; as ideology of resistance to colonial rule; as the ideology of a fictive unity in which the exploiter and the exploited, irreconcilable in practice, can be made to appear as equal members of a national community; a racist majoritarianism for which all others within the national boundary are really not truly national, or as a project for creating not just legal but also substantive equalities within the nation and its nation-state. We could think of nation, and of nationalism as its corollary, as a terrain that various kinds of political forces and class coalitions seek to define and occupy. No single definition of nationhood emerges from these competing projects, and there is no logical reason why nationalism, even right-wing nationalism, would be necessarily aligned with or opposed to neoliberal forms of globalization. We do have irrefutable evidence, however, which goes to show that neoliberalism has always been an agenda of the right. As such, it would be hard to imagine the right abandoning its most profound class commitments at the altar of some new-fangled nationalism.

From: Socialist Register 2019, vol. 55

Editor: Wang Yi