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By Root 1535 0

old Europe: at one and the same time to dismantle the empire of the church and to weld together the provincial neighborhoods. Clannish loyalty and blood oaths were too narrow a basis for new national states, imperial contract and theological fealty too broad a basis. The nation seemed a perfect integer, holding together the tribes in larger entities that nonetheless permitted something resembling common culture and civic reciprocity.26 The new relationship was one not of fealty but contract, one that in the novel language of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury pictured the king’s power as embodying the wills of people understood as individuals rather than as blood brothers. The sovereign’s authority derived directly from a contract among his subjects, who thus become his authors, his obedient but ultimately sovereign subjects. Emancipated from parochial fealty to kin and clan as well as from ascriptive subservience to vassal lords, newly created subjects of the British realm or of the French nation were little by little able to transform themselves from individual subjects into individual freemen whose obedience to the crown and responsibility to others grew out of rights they now understood themselves as possessing by birth and liberties they conceived as belonging to them by nature. Essex defined a parochial brotherhood: England defined the liberties of Englishmen. The feudal towns of Burgandy and Basque were walled: France was an idea that opened out to the cosmopolis. Feudal vassalage had created an intricate network of obligations in which birth inexorably controlled identity and identity in turn conditioned freedom (liberty being a hereditary characteristic of a single class). The new nation-state turned bondsmen into nationals and, in putting men on an equal footing, set the stage for a political theory of rights, resistance, and social contract, and thus for a political practice that would eventually become both egalitarian and democratic.

Nationalism is a kind of group remembering of ancient stories of founding, and foundings were often midwifed by fratricide. But, as the historian Michelet had learned from the bloody lessons of the St. Bartholomew’s Night Massacre (in which Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered in their beds), it also requires self-conscious group obliviousness: not just common remembering but common forgetting.27 Differences are held in suspension in successful communities of difference—what civic nations are when they succeed—and that entails a certain amount of studied historical absentmindedness. Injuries too well remembered cannot heal. The greatest peril to American civic culture today is the memory of slavery, kept alive by ongoing prejudice and persistent institutional racism. Without an opportunity to forget slavery, there can never be a chance for racial harmony. The burden, of course, is on the heirs to the slaveholders, not the heirs to slavery.

In the peculiar transformation of nationalism in the nineteenth century, imperialism played a special mollifying role. The great empires spawned by Austro-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans (and to a lesser degree, the overseas empires of France, Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands) repressed the political expression of cultural identity and enforced a mutuality that made possible a more inclusive solidarity. Yet the empires afforded culture its own zone, and seemed to neutralize its toxicity without quashing its tastes. Ignatieff and others have perhaps overstressed the ways in which empire kept Kulturkampf under wraps and ethnicity at bay, yet there is little question that they contained Jihad.

Whether the ideological empire of the Communists or the economic empire of the capitalists can be said to have done the same is more controversial. Certainly under communism the nationalities question that had so perplexed Lenin and frightened Stalin was kept under control, if only by propaganda and brute force.28 As the collapse of the great European empires of the nineteenth century following World War I catalyzed the balkanization that had so worried Ortega,