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By Root 1333 0

of origin that fire their imagination can be made real. And they gather, in isolation from one another but in common struggle against commerce and cosmopolitanism, around a variety of dimly remembered but sharply imagined ethnic, religious, and racial identities meant to root the wandering postmodern soul and prepare it to do battle with its counterparts in McWorld. “Let’s slip the fighting dog’s leash” and loose the “savage beast of German blood” on all the “scum,” sings the band Stoerkraft (Destructive Force).21 Not every partisan of Jihad is so menacing (or so blunt), and this particular band subsequently betrayed the Right and today sings songs urging tolerance and social comity.22 But if democracy does not always necessarily appear as an adversary it is rarely deemed an ally. Even among new nationalists who proclaim no animus against it, the bargain has been struck: if to overcome modernity, the modern liberal nation state must be jettisoned along with its democratic institutions, that will be a justifiable cost of the war to revive community and insulate it from McWorld.

The language most commonly used to address the ends of the reinvented and self-described tribes waging Jihad—whether they call themselves Christian fundamentalists or Rwandan rebels or Islamic holy warriors—remains the language of nationalism. Religion may represent a more profound force in the human psyche, but as politics it finds its vessel in nationalism.23 Yet nationalism can be elusive and its many usages are so variously inflected that it is not clear if a common language is actually being spoken. If, as Michael Ignatieff suggests, “the key narrative of the new world order is the disintegration of states” and the “key language” of that dissolution is ethnic nationalism, are we to assume that this is the nationalism of Mazzini and Yael Tamir?24 Or the nationalism of the Nazis and Vladimir Zhirinovsky? Ignatieff speaks cautiously of a “new” nationalism, but strictly speaking, the sundry opponents of McWorld appear to be neither nationalists nor religious zealots. Their rhetoric is too worldly for true religion and far too sectarian and exclusive to be nationalist. The Crusades were murderous in their fanaticism but universalist and expansionist in aspiration—more imperialist than reactionary—which indeed accounts for their bloodiness. Universal ideals can create universal mayhem while the effects of parochial ardor are often far more modest. Our new tribes are murderous and fanatical but small-minded and defensive: trying to secure islands of parochial brotherhood in a sea that relentlessly leaches away essence and washes away fraternal bonds.

The critical question is whether postmodern “new” nationalism, with the nation-state as its target, is assimilable to traditional nationalism, on which the nation-state was founded. Rather than offer either a phenomenological answer (both varieties count as nationalism) or an essentialist answer (only this one or only that one counts as nationalism), I want to suggest here a more dialectical response. Nationalism clearly has now and has perhaps always had two moments: one of group identity and exclusion but another, equally important, of integration and inclusion. Today’s “nationalists” boast about their deconstructive potential and revel in hostility to the state and other constituencies that make up the state. In its early modern manifestation, however, nationalism permitted Europe to emerge from feudalism and facilitated the architecture of the nation-state. Early European atlases like the sixteenth-century Cosmography show Macedonians and Bulgarians, Danes and Vandals, Sicilians and Hungarians, both as constituent pieces of a larger body (a feudal empire) and inclusionary national wholes that assembled parochial tribes into national entities like Italia and Germania.

Thus it is that the two moments of nationalism reflect the two moments of the feudalism against which early nationalism reacted.25 The political entities that brought down and succeeded feudalism had at once to divide and to integrate