• Home
  • About
  • Reading Lists
    • Egypt
    • Great Books
    • Iran
    • Islam
    • Israel
    • Liberalism
    • Napoleon
    • Nationalism
    • The Nuclear Age
    • Science
    • Russia
    • Turkey
  • Digital Footprint
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pocket
    • SoundCloud
    • Twitter
    • Tumblr
    • YouTube
  • Contact
    • Email

Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: nationalism

Nationalism Restored

01 Sat Sep 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Catholicism, Christianity, clan, family, halakha, imperialism, Islam, Judaism, liberalism, loyalty, Marxism, milkhemet hareshut, milkhemet mitzva, nationalism, Protestantism, The Virtue of Nationalism, tribe, Yoram Hazony

Hazony, Yoram. The Virtue of Nationalism. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 304 pp.

Ever since the cultural turn in academia in the early 1970s, it has become de rigueur to disparage nationalism as a volatile and dangerous sentiment susceptible to extreme violence and prejudice. Nationalism was cast as an imagined community with the implication that it was a simulacrum whose substance came wholly from fabricated myths, rituals, and symbols. In this echo chamber, Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism comes as a rare and welcome breath of fresh air that revives the idea and places it in context with other alternatives that have been offered over the ages.

Hazony looks to the Bible, specifically Devarim, to find his definition of nationalism. The scriptures actively promote the feeling of brotherhood among all members of the Jewish nation and Mosaic law would serve as their constitution; the king of the Jewish state, its priests, and prophets would all be drawn from among the brotherhood and each would have a role in preserving the traditions, customs, and laws of the community. Geographically, the boundaries of Israel are set by Moses as he expressly forbids the expansion of the nation-state into the neighbouring lands of Esau, Moav, Lot, and Ammon.

The ambitions of nationalism are clearly limited and not inherently expansionist or committed to world domination as critics are prone to hyperventilate. Hazony does not deny that there has been great violence in the past in the name of nationalism but that is also true of any other theory of mass organisation, ethics, and governance. This is an interesting proposition put forth by the author, that nationalism is not merely a feeling of cultural connectedness between people who do not know each other but properly seen, it also includes a system of ethics.

According to Hazony, the roots of nationalism are to be found in the structure of the family – individuals are biologically related in a family and share a sense of rights and duties, blood and belonging, vis-a-vis one another; the prosperity of one member is the success of them all. As families band together into clans, clans into tribes, and tribes into nations to provide better security and accomplish greater tasks, the loyalty commanded by the heads is transferred upwards towards common characteristics the members share, such as language, faith, or ethnicity.

Using the family as a model of organisation for the state is certainly not peculiar to the Bible – similar notions are found as far apart as China and Greece. Confucius clings to the metaphor a little too closely with the result that the ideal Chinese state tends towards authoritarianism; Aristotle sees the polis – state – as the full flowering of the family life but does not carry the analogy too far as he recognises that there is a difference in the nature of power within states and families, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well.

The Virtue of Nationalism juxtaposes a localised nationalism with universalist ideologies such as imperialism, Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism. Nations are inherently anti-imperial and therefore more stable, the argument runs, because its members are connected to each other through bonds not mediated by institutions of state. Nations are particular to geography, language, faith, ethnicity, or some other criterion that defines the community whereas the universalist aspirations of Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and Liberalism fall to the temptation of conquest and subjugation of the entire world to the one “true” doctrine of choice.

Hazony’s depiction of nationalism as limited may be true in the Jewish tradition but it has had a very different history in Europe and Asia, at least. Halakha distinguishes between milkhemet mitzva – war of obligation – and milkhemet hareshut – optional war. In the first category fall, for example, the wars of Joshua against the seven nations while David’s campaigns of expansion come under the latter classification. In fact, G-d prohibits David from building the Temple because he was “a man of battles and [had] shed blood.”

It is also problematic to portray imperialism as a universalist principle. Although imperialists have no bounds to their geographic ambitions, it is usually also true that the imperial quest is usually carried out in the name of a nation; the various nations that fall to a growing empire are neither treated nor seen as equals. We see this again and again from the Roman Empire to the pink-tainted map of British expansion. Rome expanded its citizen base only in the latter years to stave off a fiscal crisis brought on by decades of decadent emperors but ties by birth or marriage to the Italian peninsula and preferably Rome were favourable traits to possess well into the second century. Similarly, London scoffed at Mohandas Gandhi’s idea that Britain welcome all inhabitants of its dominions as equal citizens of their empire. Hazony accepts this at one point, but not before an unnecessary discourse on the universalist instincts of imperialism.

The difficulty of sustaining nations on abstractions such as liberalism stems from the inability to justify loyalty to the principle. The likelihood of changing our minds as we experience life and are exposed to more information means that any belonging to an ideal remains unstable at best. Hazony takes help from psychology to make the case that humans are social animals who have a need to belong to networks and believe in something greater than than the mere material of life. Here, he brings up a word not often seen in nationalism studies these days – loyalty – which is the crux of the debate. It is not easy, if at all possible, to have loyalty to an idea in the same manner one feels ties to a sibling or parent.

Hazony reworks several historical events to lend support to his hypothesis, in many cases problematically. For example, rather than see the Thirty Years’ War from the traditional perspective of a conflagration between Protestants and Catholics, Hazony casts it as being primarily motivated by universalist impulses against local inclinations. While most historians would agree that the religious element ceased to animate the conflict as the years passed, the war remained an old-fashioned struggle for geopolitical dominance between France and the Habsburgs.

Perhaps the most jarring incongruity in The Virtue of Nationalism is how the second Christian schism is repackaged as a contest between universalism and particularism. At a certain level, it is undeniable that Catholic allegiance to their Pope made way for dual loyalties. However, it is hardly the case that Protestantism was a particularist creed any more than Christianity a sub-sect of Judaism. While the theological reorganisation gave monarchs their independence from Rome, the faith itself still believed it possessed a universal message. The recent Evangelical movement has strongly underscored this conviction.

The largest empire in the modern era was put together by Britain and it was Prussian militarism that sank Europe into the first of its cataclysmic convulsions of the 20th century. The United States began its expansionist project with Manifest Destiny and then eyed territories beyond; none of these countries were Catholic. What is disappointing is that these ill-considered examples are unnecessary and distract from Hazony’s already persuasive defence of nationalism.

These weak digressions may conceal the real import of The Virtue of Nationalism, which is an assault on the cult of the solitary individual. Hazony traces the roots of this ideology to at least one of its origins, John Locke. Hazony finds the English philosopher’s initial assumption that all people are rational and his utilitarian methodology in assessing rationality flawed. Contrary to Locke, Hazony argues that the fundamental unit of existence is not the individual or even the family but the community. Our ethics arise from our communal interactions as does our sense of self; in turn, these inform all our other beliefs and relations, such as liberty or nationalism.

This is at the root of the conservative world view, that the community and family are prior to the individual. Ever since the early Liberals recast society as a collective of individuals, the idea has taken hold and grown to a point where it is not even questioned any more. The few who reject this modern normal have usually done so on theological grounds and have been easy to ignore in an increasingly profane world. By reviving a classical framework, The Virtue of Nationalism fires a broadside at not just the critics of nationalism but the entire Liberal project. Not only are the dangers of a universalist mindset compared against nationalism and found to be as dangerous if not worse, but individual liberty is argued to be mere license if not exercised within the bounds of community and morality. Thus, this is as much a work of political philosophy as it is about nationalism.

It is to the author’s credit that he does not pay much heed to the silly distinction between patriotism and nationalism – Vidura counters this best in the Udyoga Parva in India’s treasured epic, the Mahabharata, when he says, “[t]hose prone to get drunk get drunk on knowledge, wealth, and good birth; but the same are triumphs of the strict.”

The Virtue of Nationalism is a short book and not written in a solemn academic tone despite boasting an impressive bibliography. Hazony would do well to realise, however, that his understanding of nationalism is peculiar to Judaism and not characteristic of all politico-cultural movements. The inadvertent contradistinction, however, should be most interesting to scholars of nationalism. Readers should beware that the chatty affectation of the book belies a profound sociopolitical weltanshauung and a powerful critique of Liberalism in all its guises. There may be some historical quibbles but they do not, oddly, take away from the overall argument and to narrowly focus on those would be to miss the forest for the trees. In an era of Liberal activist academia, Hazony’s efforts to take us back to first principles and rethink our implicit assumptions is a welcome intellectual challenge.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Hindutva and Zionism: Parallels

01 Thu Jun 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Israel, Middle East, Opinion and Response, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Hindutva and Zionism: Parallels

Tags

Ahad Ha'am, Anandamath, anti-Semitism, Asher Ginsberg, Aurobindo Ghose, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Bhagavad Gita, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Christianity, civic nationalism, Dayananda Saraswati, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, emancipation, ethnic nationalism, Giuseppe Mazzini, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Heinrich Graetz, hindutva, India, Israel, Jüdischer Staat, Judenstaat, Krishna Charitra, Moses Hess, Moshe Lilienblum, Nachman Krochmal, Nathan Birnbaum, nationalism, secularism, Swami Vivekananda, Theodor Herzl, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Yehuda Hai Alkalai, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Zionism

Hindutva and Zionism. Few words—ideas—have been as misunderstood or reviled as these two have been. Both are similar, scholars of nationalism will tell you, because they espouse ethnic nationalism—the notion of a national community based on religion, race, or blood. Notwithstanding the differences in the symbols they choose to venerate or vilify, the core dynamics of identity and emotion are identical.

However, there lies a deeper similarity between the two than merely rhetoric. Between Hindutva and Zionism, there exist three core similarities that shape their worldview in profound ways. It is not my contention that these concurrences are responsible for a subconscious affinity between India and Israel: in fact, it is an uncomfortable and unspoken verisimilitude that much of the sympathy and admiration for Israel in India probably comes from the perception of a common enemy. Despite Jewish presence in the subcontinent for two millennia, Indians are only now beginning to discover Jews—perhaps speaking to the seamless harmony in which Hindus and Jews existed.

The first point of congruence between Hindutva and Zionism is that, as nationalism goes, both are weak. It is not their fervour that is in doubt but the fact that neither held the land which they claimed on behalf of their nationhood. For the Zionists, they had been in exile from the territory that was the object of their nationalism for 18 centuries; expelled by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, Judea (renamed Palestina during the Diocletian reforms at the end of the 3rd century) was subsequently ruled by the Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans, and finally the British. All nationalism needs to look inwards to create a community; colonial nationalism also has an outside enemy to rally against in the form of an imperial power. Zionism had a third obstacle in that the Jewish people had not even been living on the land they claimed as their own. While a very small number of Jews always remained in Herod’s fallen kingdom, they usually faced persecution at the hands of the occupying power and immigration to the region was tightly controlled. On the eve of the First Aliyah in 1882, the number of Jews in Palestine was barely 20,000.

It may seem farcical at first glance that Hindus—the subjects of Hindutva—did not possess their own land. After all, they were, and remain, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Yet habitation alone does not mean possession: one must be able to exercise hegemony over it. For centuries before even the advent of the Raj, the Hindu kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent had been relegated to the footnotes of history. Four centuries after the first Muslim raids into Sindh, Muslim rule was firmly established in India with Muhammad of Ghor’s victory at the second battle of Taraori in 1192. It was not until the appearance of the British East India Company and the Maratha Confederacy in the late 17th century that the Dar al-Islam ceased to be the predominant power in the subcontinent.

Sultanates in Delhi, Bengal, Gujarat, and the Deccan expanded Muslim rule as far south as Madurai and subjugated all major Hindu kingdoms. The result was not just the loss of political sovereignty but the end of state patronage for Hindu society. Hindu art, literature, music, and welfare systems went into decline, and the famous temple construction projects as evidenced at Ellora, Khajuraho, Thanjavur, Badami, Belur, and elsewhere ceased; philosophy and theology stagnated. The short-lived ascent of the Marathas breathed some life into a moribund society before suzerainty over India passed into British hands but it was not enough.

The second core commonality between Hindutva and Zionism is how the exposure to secular, civic nationalism shaped their ideologies along similar lines. The decay of Hindu society and the dilution of Jewish identity preyed on early Hindutva and Zionist leaders’ minds. Both feared that living under foreign rule and gradual assimilation over the centuries had weakened the sense of identity in their communities. Despite a Hindu majority, religion was not the clarion call to the masses during India’s independence movement. Rather, mainstream Indian nationalists argued in the Western lexicon of liberty, self-determination, equality, and good governance.

The Jewish people were the first victims of the myth of civic nationalism—the notion of a national community based on shared values rather than the contrasting immutable properties of race and blood that ethnic nationalism privileged. It is an interesting observation that while immigration to Israel was central to Jewish identity and the land features centrally in their liturgies, there was not much of a rush to return to the Holy Land. This hesitation gives l’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim—next year in Jerusalem—uttered at the end of the Yom Kippur and Passover Seders, an unintended, tongue-in-cheek meaning! Zionist ideology and immigration to Israel began to increase only in the aftermath of the first set of pogroms after the French Revolution.

It seems strange that it was the emancipatory message of the French Revolution that fuelled Zionism. After all, the new French laws allowed Jews to come out of their ghettos, take up whatever profession they desired, serve in the military, and be considered full French citizens as long as they swore an oath to defend the secular French state. Many Jews welcomed this sudden inclusiveness and began to assimilate into the mainstream cultures of France, Germany, Russia, and other European nation-states. They spoke European languages, were comfortable in their literature and philosophy, adopted many of their customs in clothing and other banal aspects of life. Until 1815, owing to their exclusion, Europe’s Jews had contributed hardly anything to politics, philosophy, finance, medicine, the arts, or the law. Yet by the end of the 19th century, Jews were heavily concentrated in the major metropolis—Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and to a lesser degree, London, Paris, and Odessa.

These “modernising” Jews also gave up attending yeshiva and, in the process of deracination, lost familiarity with their culture. During their exclusion, the Jewish community had established a parallel education system, in a language Europeans ironically considered dead. Hebrew had long been an exclusively liturgical language but fewer Jews could now read it. This distanced them from the scriptures.

Yet the secular modern nation-state did not hold all the answers. Suddenly, the myriad smaller issues of quotidian life intruded upon newfound Jewish liberty. For example, France would not accept the Sabbath, which put the bureaucracy and educational system on a collision course with Jewish tenets. Or, the adherence of the Jewish community to their dietary laws restricted Jews only to restaurants of their own community. In essence, gentiles viewed emancipation as a vehicle for the integration of Jews into general society and their ultimate disappearance within it. Thus, ironically, secularism and liberalism did not solve problems of Jewish identity but exacerbated them by asking them to meld into the purgatory of undifferentiated universalism.

Doubts over the benefits of Jewish emancipation were quickly washed away when a fresh wave of anti-Semitic pogroms swept across Europe. It reiterated to the Jews that despite their assimilation, to true Europeans they would forever remain Judas. As Jewish elders also began to ask, could a Jew in France truly identify with Vercingetorix, the chieftain who united the Gauls against Rome, and would Germans really view a Jewish colleague as a true descendant of Arminius, who liberated Germania from the Roman empire? The inclusivism of the universalistic principles of the French Revolution came to be tempered by the historicist exclusivism of modern nationalism.

Jews had been persecuted throughout their history—first by the Visigoths and the Byzantines, and later by Muslims and Christians. They had been massacred during the Crusades and expelled from England, France, and Spain. Jews were not allowed to reside in the imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire, forcibly converted in Spain, and made to wear distinctive clothing and barred from public office in Italy. The pogroms of the 19th century, however, were different. Zionism, then, a post-Jewish emancipation phenomenon, was a response to the challenges of European liberalism and civic nationalism much more than a response merely to anti-Semitism.

Hindu nationalists came to the same conclusions about liberalism and the whole general caboodle of post-Enlightenment European values. Efforts to turn Indians into Macaulay’s children notwithstanding, Indians were kept out of the upper echelons of colonial administration. Under the guise of freedom of religion, proselytism was allowed even though it was detrimental to local traditions that did not proselytise. These policies were justified in the name of development while they slyly whittled away any sense of an Indic identity. The scientific temper had a decidedly European accent, as if there had been no intellectual achievements elsewhere. Being modern meant for the Indian what the Enlightenment and emancipation meant to the Jew: the disappearance of the communal essence of their culture through atomisation and alienation—for this, as Max Nordau described, was the nature of the modern world based as it is on deracinated individualism.

Moreover, Hindu nationalists saw their community as a victim of centuries of excessive pluralism. While Hindu kings had welcomed refugees and traders of other faiths warmly, the sentiment was not reciprocated when foreign rulers dethroned them. Hindu nationalists remembered only too vividly the forced conversions, the rapes and massacres, the pillaging and looting, the destruction of temples, and the overall attempt to erode Hinduism at the hands of Muslims and Christians. The Raj and opposition to it presented a unique opportunity which held the potential of uniting India under one administration again and reviving Hindu society.

Both Hindutva and Zionism have several different strands and are evolving phenomena. Independence has not meant stagnation, though the principal actors and foci change. Early Zionism, for example, was strongly opposed by the religious sections for they saw it as playing messiah and interference in God’s work. The questions that preoccupied the Jewish community then were also not religious but European emancipation and liberalism. It is little wonder, then, that the towering Zionists of the era preached cultural revival as the first step towards Jerusalem.

The philosopher-historian Nachman Krochmal, for example, saw history through a Hegelian lens and the nation as Herder did. Thus, he recognised the particularities of the Jewish people that forge a unique nation distinguished from others and argued that this was not an end unto itself but only a step in the development of universal culture. What Krochmal attempted to do philosophically, historian Heinrich Graetz did historically, firmly establishing the idea that the Jews were one nation among a community of nations. Rather than search for and expand a gap between the Jewish community and religion as many Jewish intellectuals of the time tried to do, Graetz maintained that “Judaism is not a religion for the individual, but for the community…and the fulfillment of commandments do not refer to the individual”, but rather are intended for the entire people.

Yet as Moses Hess, one of the founders of Labour Zionism, had disappointedly noted, the Jews suffered from Mangel an Nationalsinn—an absolute lack of national consciousness. One way to rebuild kinship was through a national language. Although Eliezer Ben Yehuda would later go on to resurrect Hebrew, it was Rabbi Yehuda Hai Alkalai who first gave sanction to the idea. His standing as an Orthodox rabbi lent some weight to the effort, for the clergy were strongly opposed to the idea of desacralising their holy language.

Cultural Zionism got its poster boy in Asher Ginsberg, who wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha’am. He rejected anchoring Zionism in traditional religious symbolism. Instead, he argued, the creation of a body politic is the apex of the cultural and spiritual forces of a people. A state based on a purely political imagination, such as that of Theodor Herzl, may perhaps be a State of Jews—Judenstaat, but it could not be a Jewish state—Jüdischer Staat, for the sociocultural infrastructure is a necessary condition for political life. Ahad Ha’am believed that a political ideal which does not rest on the national culture is apt to seduce the people from a loyalty to spiritual greatness and turn them onto a quest for material power and political dominion, thus making the Jewish state an ordinary one. Moshe Lilienblum’s corollary to Ginsberg was the observation that in contemporary Europe, just as in historical Judea, redemption and liberation came from the popular masses, not from the assimilated elites.

The Zionist emphasis on a cultural revival in service of a political goal echoes closely to the thoughts of Hindu nationalists. Although Hindutva is most closely associated with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar for it was he who coined the term in his 1923 essay, Essentials of Hindutva, its definition could well encompass thinkers who came before then just as many prominent figures of Zionism lived and died before 1890 when the term was coined by Nathan Birnbaum. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, for example, was a key figure in the revival of cultural Hinduism. Besides his famous novel Anandamath which speaks of an ascetic army taking on the British, he wrote an important commentary on the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna Charitra, in which he tried to demystify the deity and bring the values inherent in Krishna to the popular masses.

As in Judaism, it is difficult to separate culture from religion and several of Hindutva’s cultural revivalists spoke in religious or philosophical tones. Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose are perhaps two of the most prominent of such figures who tried to revive dharmic thought and values. At a social level, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar organised the Deccan Education Society whose goal was to impart education with an Indic emphasis. Additionally, via their feuilletonistic bon mots, they passionately put forth to the multitudes their vision for a free India. Others such as Dayananda Saraswati worked to uplift the status of women in society.

Disparate though these labours may seem, they were all held together by the common belief in the reemergence of Hindutva in India. The distinction between religion and culture is crucial here: while all of these personalities were personally religious, their advocacy of their causes was not borne out of a desire to spread or preserve their religion and rituals but to instill the values of a philosophical system that has informed all Indic faiths since time immemorial.

The third similarity between Hindutva and Zionism is their openness and pluralism. Hardly the words that most would use to describe ethnic nationalism, they are nevertheless accurate depictions of Hindutva and Zionist ideology at least until the early years after independence. As Hess conceived nationalism, it followed Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini’s thoughts in that it combined national particularity with a universal vision. Mazzini held that only by being a member of a nation, one can also be a member of the human race, and the only way of belonging to humanity is by belonging to a specific nation.

Later Zionists very much followed this pluralistic view—for them, the new state was to be informed by Jewish values just as France was informed by Catholicism and Britain by Protestantism but other communities would be welcome participants in the state if they could adapt to the majoritarian Jewish ethos.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, considered to be the devil child of Zionism, also supported a pluralistic state. Although Jabotinsky’s innovation in the Zionist cause was the demand to immediately set up an armed Jewish militia, preferably with British help, he was ideologically more of an aggregator. His own views emphasised the military and the political over the cultural but his goal was a capitalist and pluralist Jewish state of Israel. This should be no surprise, given the strong influence of Italian nationalists, particularly Mazzini, on Jabotinsky during his youth.

Savarkar’s Hindutva is no different. He explains the characteristics of his Hindu nation in terms of matrubhumi, jati, sanskriti, and punyabhumi. This flattens not just all castes in the Hindu fold but even other religions that arose in India such as Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. These, Savarkar felt, were bound by a similar philosophical structure that other communities lacked. Although contemporary commentators have chosen to portray this as a stigma on Hindutva, this same reservation was held by several prominent non-Hindutva leaders such as Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar as evidenced in his Pakistan, or, The Partition of India. Savarkar’s Hindutva may have no room for India’s Christians and Muslims in the nation but that did not mean that India could not be a pluralistic state. Like Jabotinsky and Mazzini, the Hindutva leader only wanted a nation-state that would be sensitive to its own values. Neither Zionism nor Hindutva advocated the dispossession of the civil and political rights of other communities to the extent that they did not conflict with the national culture.

These three characteristics—dispossession of land, experience with civic nationalism, and pluralism—mark Hindutva and Zionism as unique among nationalist movements. On pluralism, many nationalist groups are also imbued with a touch of xenophobia and unwilling to tolerate outsiders as equal citizens if not members of the nation. On the experience with civic nationalism, few nations outside East and Southeast Asia have a similar experience. This is largely due to the immense proselytism efforts that went hand in hand with the age of imperialism and spread Christianity to large parts of the world. The Christian roots of liberal secularism remove any grounds for contention between state and community if the society is Christian. Countries where this is not so, mostly along the northern rim of the eastern Indian Ocean, would share the Hindutva and Zionist experiences with the civic nationalism of a secular, modern liberal state.

On the matter of not having control of the land for which nationalism is espoused, this phenomenon is sometimes known as Fourth World nationalism. The term refers to the nationalism of nations that are not recognised by the United Nations, such as Kurds, Assyrians, Yezidis, Pashtun, Rohingya, Balochi, and others. While the situation has certainly changed for the Jewish people since 1948, the situation prior to that is still rather uncommon. It is difficult to imagine, for example, a Russian or Spanish nationalism that originated outside Russia or Spain. For Hindutvawadis, they now endure their own “emancipation” as the Jews of Europe did two centuries ago.

While the Indian and Israeli people seem to share an inexplicable warmth for each other—the Indian state had maintained an icy distance from the Jewish state until recently, they remain largely ignorant of each other’s cultures and customs. There are, no doubt, many differences, both superficial and profound. These seem to be, however, balanced by similarities that are equally superficial and profound. Perhaps it is a subtle sensing of these resemblances that brings these two people together.


This article first appeared in the June 2017 ‘Israel Special’ print edition of Swarajya.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

An Alternative Europe

08 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on An Alternative Europe

Tags

Alsatian Décapole, Battle of Bouvines, Bosonid, Charlemagne, Charles V, Daily Courant, Europe, Golden Bull of 1356, Habsburg, Hanseatic League, Holy Roman Empire, Lombard League, Lusatian League, Luxembourgs, nation, nationalism, Otto I, Ottonians, Peter Wilson, Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Salians, Seven Years' War, Staufen, Stupor Mundi, Supplinburg, Swabian League of Cities, The Heart of Europe, Unruoching, Welf, Widonid, Wittelsbach

Heart of EuropeWilson, Peter. The Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2016. 1008 pp.

Perhaps the most widely known thing about the Holy Roman Empire is the one credited to French philosophe François-Marie Arouet, who quipped in 1761 that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor Empire. The Frenchman was not alone in disparaging the Central European polity. James Madison, when looking for a model of a federal union for his republic in the New World, remarked upon the European sovereignty that it was a “nerveless body; incapable of regulating its own members; insecure against external dangers, and agitated with unceasing fermentation in its bowels. [Its history was simply a catalogue] of the licentiousness of the strong, and the oppression of the weak…of general imbecility, confusion, and misery.” Peter Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, University of Oxford, pushes back against this entrenched negative impression of the Holy Roman Empire in his masterful new book, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire.

Part of the prejudice may come from the fact that the demise of the Holy Roman Empire coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Ideologues then and historians since have written the European saga as one of progress towards the modern, centralised, ethnic nation-state and the Holy Roman Empire had no place in a world where every nation was supposed to have its own state. Thus, it achieved the reputation of a failed state for no doing of its own. Moreover, distortions have crept in as historians seeking to explain the character of modern Germany looked to the Holy Roman Empire – not to understand it on its own terms but to project later events into the past.

Wilson’s tale begins with the “surprise” coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800 as the King of the Romans. The Frankish chieftain was seen as carrying on the legacy of Rome. This was important to medieval Christian theology which prophesised the arrival of the Kingdom of God after the fall of the fourth great empire – Babylonia, Medes-Persia, Greece, and Rome. It was not until 962, however, that an emperor – Otto I – was crowned specifically as the ruler of a Holy Roman Empire. His decisive victory over the pagan Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 earned him a reputation as the saviour of Christendom.

A chronological history of the Holy Roman Empire would be a nightmare to write and even more challenging to understand. A mosaic of principalities, free cities, grand duchies, kingdoms, and even confederations, the imperial polity had no clear hierarchy of authority. Authority was not concentrated in an imperial capital but was diffuse in several of the major cities in the emperor’s domain – Augsburg, Milan, Antwerp, Prague, Leipzig, Hamburg, Vienna, and elsewhere. This befuddling framework governed by consensus of its parts rather than by coercion, the bewildering diversity of communities and practices protected by imperial decree rather than assimilated.

Instead, Wilson chooses to present a thematic analysis of the Holy Roman Empire and his book is divided into four parts: ideal, belonging, governance, and society. What is important for the author to tell his readers, in this book at least, is not what happened but how things worked. The past is a foreign country, as British novelist LP Hartley memorably opened his The Go-Between with in 1953, and Wilson endeavours to ensure that we comprehend its values, priorities, politics, relations, dynamics – in short, its entire weltanshauung.

Despite a political system that must appear unfathomable to the modern reader, the Holy Roman Empire proved adept at governance. It established the world’s first postal system in 1490 and the world’s first newspaper, a weekly, in 1605; the first imperial daily had to wait until 1635, still 67 years ahead of England’s Daily Courant. Almost every town had a lending library by the 18th century and there were over 200 publishers and 8,000 authors in the Holy Roman Empire – twice that of France which had a comparable population. There was relatively little censorship and even that was usually only at the local level. The Holy Roman Empire had 45 universities in its realm by 1800, while France had 22 and England just two.

This is not to say that such a decentralised system ran always ran smoothly or efficiently. Trade was particularly difficult given the shifting currencies and endless tolls; a pound of pepper, for example, could almost double in price simply by traversing from one end of the Holy Roman Empire to the other due to the taxes in each principality.

Foreign policy was no picnic either, with different regions of the Holy Roman Empire associating in leagues such as the Hanseatic League, Swabian League of Cities, the Lusatian League, the Alsatian Décapole, and the Lombard League. Some of these, such as the Hanseatic League, was a loose confederation of merchant guilds, who, at the zenith of their power, were strong enough to declare war on Denmark and Norway to extract trading concessions from King Valdemar IV and King Haakon VI. These semi-independent actions, needless to say, influenced imperial policy as well.

Other alliances, such as the Swabian League of Cities and the Alsatian Décapole were formed to ensure that their members do not lose their rights in the constant imperial power shuffles while others were created to defend local regions from the Emperor. The Lombard League, for example, was formed to defend Italy from the German Staufen dynasty which held the imperial reins then. Paradoxically, the papal-supported Lombard League did not wish to secede from the Christian empire.

Despite his thematic approach, Wilson does adhere to some semblance of chronology within his sections. He traces his core ideas through the Carolingian dynasty, followed by the Ottonians, Salians, Staufen, Luxembourgs, and finally the Habsburgs. Minor interruptions in dynastic succession such as the Wittelsbach, Welf, Supplinburg, Unruoching, Bosonid, or Widonid houses naturally get less of a mention. However, the author rejects the narrative of progress and nationhood as so many historians before him have told. As Prasenjit Duara, in his thought-provoking Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, has argued, Wilson also resists the temptation to depict regionalism – whether due to religion, language, or ethnicity – as meaningless fratricide that diminishes from the unified national edifice. Imperial subjects had multiple identities within a complex framework of allegiances and hierarchies. A Münchner could be a Catholic, a burgher, a guildsman, a father, and a Bavarian. The Holy Roman Empire did not “fail” to evolve into a German nation because none of its imperial subjects felt the need for such a development.

Despite producing a thought-provoking and rich work on the history of one of Europe’s important yet less understood empires, Heart of Europe, at 1,008 pages, is likely to be a daunting read for most people. In all fairness, Wilson has done his best to minimise the length of this convoluted saga but unfortunately, it may only serve to confuse the average reader more. For example, even the average reader might be expected to know of Charles V, Stupor Mundi, the Golden Bull of 1356, the Battle of Bouvines in which the Holy Roman Empire fought on both sides, or the Seven Years’ War and use these events and personages as markers in the longer history of medieval Europe. However, Wilson gives most such major events and figures short shrift in his narrative with the result that only those with a solid background in European history would be able to appreciate the author’s mammoth effort. Even the non-academic prose of Heart of Europe does not redeem its readability for most.

Seen from a global perspective, the Holy Roman Empire was not as unique as it appeared in Europe. The Ottoman Empire, its close neighbour, was also socially diverse though politically more centralised. Some of the Holy Roman Empire’s Indian contemporaries were also comparable in their diversity and pluralism. For that matter, even the modern Indian republic is no less confounding. Compared to these empires, the Roman Empire was a far greater claimant to the label of modern with a genuine sense of civic nationalism.

Heart of Europe‘s publication at a critical juncture in the history of the European Union is bound to draw comparisons. Wilson himself points to the similarities between the two – permeable boundaries, multi-layered jurisdictions, a byzantine bureaucracy, consensus-driven policy. However, he is also the first to warn the reader that such similarities should not lead one to advocate a neo- Holy Roman Empire as a solution to the European Union’s difficulties. For one, modern sensibilities regarding equality cannot coexist with the hierarchical nature of the Holy Roman Empire’s domains to the emperor and to one another. Second, it remains to be seen if society can genuinely transcend its monotheistic fetish, whether expressed as nation or deity.

Wilson’s monograph is a substantial one in heft as well as content and deserves careful consideration. It is not for the casual reader nor is it amenable to yielding quick solutions to current problems in world affairs. Belying its chatty style is a rigorous academic tome that requires an equally rigorous and disciplined reader.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Chirps

  • Nehru’s aide who turned into an art dealer in the US: bit.ly/3AunFS7 | So much for Congress nationalism... 1 hour ago
  • Is Bangladesh next to fall in China's debt-trap diplomacy? bit.ly/3P0NSLW | It already has, though Dhaka p… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 hour ago
  • Russia nudges India to break ranks with Germany, Japan in pursuit of UNSC membership: bit.ly/3ONR6Ty | As… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 hours ago
  • Ben & Jerry's sues parent Unilever to block sale of Israeli business: reut.rs/3AtG4yh | I hope the judge fi… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 hours ago
  • New Covid variant detected in India: bit.ly/3yJAoiE | Variants will occur; is this one a cause for panic? 8 hours ago
Follow @orsoraggiante

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 225 other followers

Follow through RSS

  • RSS - Posts

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • The Mysterious Case of India’s Jews
  • Polarised Electorates
  • The Election Season
  • Does Narendra Modi Have A Foreign Policy?
  • India and the Bomb
  • Nationalism Restored
  • Jews and Israel, Nation and State
  • The Asian in Europe
  • Modern Political Shibboleths
  • The Death of Civilisation
  • Hope on the Korean Peninsula
  • Diminishing the Heathens
  • The Writing on the Minority Wall
  • Mischief in Gaza
  • Politics of Spite
  • Thoughts on Nationalism
  • Never Again (As Long As It Is Convenient)
  • Earning the Dragon’s Respect
  • Creating an Indian Lake
  • Does India Have An Israel Policy?
  • Reclaiming David’s Kingdom
  • Not a Mahatma, Just Mohandas
  • How To Read
  • India’s Jerusalem Misstep
  • A Rebirth of American Power

Management

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com
Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Chaturanga
    • Join 225 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Chaturanga
    • Customise
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: