Introduction to Part 3

The preening excess of anarchist-style paradoxes would, were a cri-

sis to arrive, not stand up for even a minute against the power of an
integral workers’ awareness, combining and reconciling the Inter-
nationale and the nation.
Jean Jaurès, L’armée nouvelle, “Internationalisme et patriotisme”

∵
The League of Nations was born of the First World War, and the United
Nations Organization of the Second: “nations”, not states, because the nation
was regarded in the twentieth century, everywhere on the planet, as the only
legitimate fundament of the state. The struggles against the European colo-
nizers were led by Fronts or Movements for national liberation; and by now,
every secessionist claim within a constituted state passes via the proclama-
tion of the existence of a nation that is both specific and oppressed. The
idea of the nation has triumphed and has spread across the globe, achiev-
ing a catholicity in the etymological sense of the term.1 But the universality of
the nation is not the same as that of the great religions that make converts: no
nation, even in a phase of exacerbated imperialism, has ever been thought of
as coextensive with humankind.2 The universal presence of nationality takes
a piecemeal shape, by parcelling out the totality of our space in discrete and
matching units. Nevertheless, this new organization of the world and the exis-
tence of international societies of arbitration between nations are powerless
to prevent bloody conflicts, because no definition of the nation gives a defini-
tive answer to the basic question: How can one define the territory of the
nation, and deduce from this the limits of a state? The nation is a princi-
ple, whereas the state is a concrete reality. From the concept of the nation
as the soul of the people, neither a bounded territory can be derived, nor its
transposition into cultural terms. Linguists and ethnographers can locate the
areas of the diffusion of a language or of a tradition, but it is impossible to

1 Etymologically, catholicity means “extended to the entire world”, universal.

2 Benedict Anderson, L’Imaginaire national, op. cit., justly defines the nations as limited “imag-
ined communities”.

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182 Introduction to Part 3

map these with continuous lines that demarcate homogeneous surfaces.3 Nor
does the political concept of the nation bring a solution to the question of
frontiers: a referendum on the choice of the nation state, if it is democratic,
will endorse the majority preference and by the same token create a minor-
ity within the state that does not conform to that state’s endorsed nationality.
Besides this, the introduction of a third dimension, that of time, makes the
situation intractable, since it is very often the case that one and the same terri-
tory has been occupied successively by different populations. And it is difficult
to employ the national principle to prescribe a date in terms of seniority in the
occupation of the territory, because that would mean endorsing the rights –
illegitimate from the national perspective – of the invader who took posses-
sion, or of a third party who profited from the enforced abandonment of the
territory by its previous occupants. The extreme case is the Serbian claim to
Kosovo, hallowed national ground because it was there that in 1389 the great
battle against the Ottoman Empire had taken place which marked the end of
an independent Serbian kingdom.
The idea of the nation was born of the power struggle between the monar-
chy and the social classes with their unequal rights. Its triumph was the
triumph of liberal democracy. Universal male suffrage and establishing a con-
stitution generally followed soon after the creation of a nation state; how this
was applied varied according to the evolving power relations in society. But
by the time the nation achieved supremacy as a political principle, economic
and social conditions had in large parts of Europe become very different from
what they had been when the nationality principle was initially conceived.
Industrial capitalism had established itself as a mode of production, and the

3 This question of the geographical transposition of the nations has generated an enormous
mass of writings ever since the various statistics of the nationalities were established in the
Habsburg Empire. The entire period of the First World War and its immediate aftermath
marked an intensification of publications: treatises asserting nations’ (ambitious) territorial
demands, studies by geographers or ethnographers, preparatory commissions for the treaties
of 1919–1920. The study by Arnold Van Gennep, Traité comparatif des nationalités (Vols. II and
III were announced, but never published), presents an interesting synthesis of these debates.
Two chapters are devoted to “the problem of frontiers”. Taking up the criteria of linguistic,
cultural, religious, or even natural frontiers, Van Gennep demonstrates through numerous
examples that these are incapable of providing a satisfactory solution. The linguistic crite-
rion itself turns out to be totally fallacious, for in large areas of Europe, the contiguity and
familial crossovers between populations with different vernaculars make it impossible to
identify the language of individuals who may, depending on the situation, use several lan-
guages. It is the nation state, with its schools, its directives on public usage, and its mass
media that has given rise to more or less homogeneous linguistic spaces. (Reprint of the
Traité comparatif des nationalités, with a preface by Jean-François Gossiaux, Paris, Comité
des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1995).

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Introduction to Part 3 183

growth of a new societal group, the working proletariat, had brought to light
a social divide and a new sense of identity that stood at odds with the nation.
“Workers of the world, unite!”: internationalism on the basis of belonging to
a social class versus the union between the classes on the basis of belonging
to the nation.4 It does indeed appear that the nation emerged victorious from
this clash, which formed the principal axis of European history in the twen-
tieth century. No doubt, capitalism possessed an irresistible power, and the
attempts made to replace it with another mode of production failed; but the
idea of the nation as a community of fraternity, solidarity, and protection was
also powerful. Thus, when the globalization of capitalism called into question
the sovereignty of the nation states at the close of the twentieth century, the
nation appeared as a refuge; its disappearance looked like a terrible menace to
social cohesion and to the living conditions of the destitute. The national idea,
formed under the auspices of liberty, equal rights, and fraternity, has always
been presented as an ideal that if necessary demanded the sacrifice of one’s
life. “You believe that you are fighting for France or Germany, and you will die
to serve the interests of the Krupps or the Schneiders”. Those harsh rebukes
by the internationalist militants were powerless to stop the slaughter of the
First World War. Was this a psychological alienation on the part of proletari-
ans unable to discern what was in their own interests? It was also because the
nation state had already established itself as the space par excellence where
each one had rights and could struggle to defend and increase these rights.
It was in this context that social conflicts could democratize rights and have
them guaranteed by the public authorities, and that a partial redistribution of
wealth was carried out. The only horizon of the international class war was the
absolute victory in a final struggle at a date so uncertain that the mobilizing
discourse necessarily had a messianic character; but the clash in the frame-
work of the nation state brought results that were partial but tangible. And
it was membership of the nation that gave the individual a status other than
that of a mere producer. In practice, class identity and national identity often
coexisted. The fact that one of the two was highlighted in a particular political
or economic context did not mean that the other had been abandoned.5

4 For an examination of the tensions between national identity and international identity,
see Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1992, and Georges Haupt, Michaël Loewy, and Claude Weil, Les Marxistes et la Question
nationale, Paris, Maspero, 1974. See also Ulrike Brummert, L’Universel et le Particulier dans la
pensée de Jean Jaurès, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990 (original publication in French).
5 See the description of the procession that solemnly marked the opening of the International
Socialist Congress in Basle in 1912: “The red of the flags was mixed with a whole flowerbed of
colors, ornaments, and costumes. Twelve fanfares played melodies, one after the other, from

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184 Introduction to Part 3

The nation had been constructed intellectually as an immutable organism

that was always identical with itself across the vicissitudes of history. The
transition from the nation as an atemporal principle to the nation state, an
organization that can last only by adapting, brought to light this contradic-
tion between fixity and evolution, and gave birth to the fear that the nation
might disappear. By becoming incarnate, the eternal nation became subject to
morbidity and mortality. It was precisely when the nation state triumphed as
a form of political organization par excellence, at the close of the nineteenth
century, that a discourse about the decadence of the nation found its fullest
expression. This discourse, a contemporary of Social Darwinism, denounced
an internal breakdown that it attributed to a pathology affecting the body
of the nation. And it launched an exhortation: the nation must be regener-
ated. In the background lay two medical perspectives on the etiology and
the treatment of illnesses, namely, the invasion of the organism by aggres-
sive external agents, or else consumption. The version of integral nationalism,
often xenophobic and anti-Semitic, denounced the harmful germs or the para-
sites that must be expelled from the national body. The more common version
attributed the weakening to a criminal forgetfulness on the part of the mem-
bers of the nation: it was urgently necessary for them to return to their origins,
their tradition, and their soul, which they had forgotten. The national rebirth
was thus presented as a return to the sources. National revolutions and reac-
tionary nationalisms were nourished by these phobic diagnoses of decadence,
which were repeatedly pronounced in the course of the century.
Ranz des vaches to the Internationale. The refrain of the bells rang out without interruption,
high above. At the head of the cortege were a hundred cyclists from the Socialist Party. […]
Then came the young socialists from Basle. And here the idyll began. There were hundreds
of young people in national costume; you can imagine little William Tells, twenty years old,
marching in a crowd with their little hats, broad-sleeved shirts, green braces, their bare knees
emerging from the short trousers, the crossbow at their side. […] Behind the cortege of the
William Tells came the girls. Dressed in white, with gowns in the ancient style, thus mingling
the epochs and the mythologies. […] Children in white with short tunics waved palms on
which it was written, in letters of gold, that it was more glorious to dry tears than to spill
blood. And right behind this group there marched, not Christ entering into Jerusalem, but
Jaurès and Kautsky in their dark clothes. The delegates made their way forward under the
flags. […] Most of these were not simple red banners, but bore corporative emblems that
took the march right back into the Middle Ages. […] The national groups, separated by a
clear interval, followed while singing – the Germans, the Hungarians, the Croatians, the
French, the Belgians, the English, the Russians. The songs were not identical: each country
had its own song. The only one the French knew was the Internationale”: Louis Aragon, Les
Cloches de Bâle, 1934, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, Paris, NRF–Gallimard, “La Pléïade”,
1997, pp. 994–995.

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