This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious conflict; he has also written on the role of faith in US foreign policy. During 2012-2013 he will be a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.Â
Are some nations more real than others? Does it matter? Wednesday on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,” Joe Klein was a guest, discussing the current showdown over Iran’s nuclear program. Klein is a smart and reasonable man, and most of what he said made sense. But he made a few almost throw-away comments about ‘real’ versus ‘fake’ nations thatóin my mind at leastówere a bit disturbing.
The segment is available here, and the two comments are 8:35 and 9:40 (counting down on the MSNBC video player). In explaining why we shouldn’t attack Iran over its nuclear weapons, he said it is a ‘real’ country unlike many others in the region, with a strong sense of identity and history. When the conversation turned to Pakistan, he contrasted it with the real-ness of Iran in explaining why its possession of nuclear weapons is more concerning than Iran’s.
Again, I don’t necessarily disagree. The people of Iran are not rabid America-haters, and its leadersówhile ideologically-drivenóare not crazy. Moreover, Iran has a long and proud history, going back to the Persian Empire. Likewise, Pakistan has had a difficult history due to its multiethnic composition and often-poor leadership, as I’ve noted before. What got me was the real-versus-fake distinction. To be fair, he meant that Iran existed as a political entity before the modern era, while Pakistan was formed through post-colonial demarcation and the efforts of political figures like Muhammad Ali Jinnah after World War II. But the extension of this argument is that countries with a pre-modern existence will likely be more stable and friendly to the United States, while those of more recent genesis will not.
Whether or not Klein meant it, he interjected himself into a long-running debate over the origin of nations. The classic view of nations as eternally-existing entities is, while prevalent in popular discussions, not in line with contemporary scholarship. Gellner, Anderson, Kedourie and others demonstrated how nations emerged from various processes of modernity, such as industrialization, the spread of vernacular languages or political manipulation by elites. In Gellner’s words, many nations do not have a navel; they emerged fully-formed from modernity, not pre-modern social groups. Of course, many disagree with this, most prominently Anthony Smith, who argues that pre-modern ‘ethnies’ set the stage for modern nationalism. But both sides agree that whether a contemporary nation arose from pre-modern social groups or the disruptive processes of modernity, once established none are any more ‘real’ than others; nations are based on the intersubjective beliefs of their members, not objective characteristics like land or genetics.
Just to recap: Klein’s implication was that some nations are ‘real’ by virtue of pre-modern existence, and others are not as they emerged more recently. The latter group is more likely to experience instability and violence. In discussion of political reform in the Middle East, or plans to resolve the post-invasion chaos of Iraq, the supposed ‘fake-ness’ of countries in the region factored into assessments of what will happen and what to do about conflicts there. If the countries are ‘fake,’ then can a stable political system ever arise? Should we just help create new countries that are somehow less ‘fake?’ It’s actually an interesting corollary of the ‘ancient hatreds’ argument; some groups have been fighting for thousands of years, and try as we might to resolve their conflicts with shiny democratic institutions, there’s nothing we can do. In this case, the argument is: if some nations were never meant to be, then we can never really expect them to develop into stable democracies.
Now, again, to be fair, Klein made these comments on a morning show. He’s a smart guy, but was giving a blurb on TV, not an academic lecture. And as an academic, I admit I share academia’s often-irrational irritation with pundits who simplify scholarly debates. But Klein’s attitude, which I’m sure is shared by others in the punditocracy and policy community, is potentially dangerous. Multi-ethnic states born of modernity can work out well, like the United States. States with ancient histories can be disruptive internationally, like Iran. And the fact that Pakistan is less than a hundred years old doesn’t mean ‘real’ Pakistanis don’t exist.
I guess it’s a little much to expect pundits to peruse Imagined Communities before appearing on the morning talk shows, but it would be nice.
“I guess it’s a little much to expect pundits to peruse Imagined Communities before appearing on the morning talk shows, but it would be nice.” I think that’s one of those books that public intellectuals generally just ought to read…oh, wait, I’m sorry, you were talking about pundits, not public intellectuals. My mistake.
A few minor points on this comparison between Iran and Pakistan, since I think you could have pushed Klein much further:
First, Persians only constitute about 61 to 65% of the Iranian population. There are other quite important ethnic groups: Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Baluchis, etc. So much like Pakistan, it is a multi-ethnic society. In fact, the Pakistani state and the Iranian state have been know to collaborate in repressing rebellious Baluchis.
Second, the current boundaries of Iran are also in part the product of European meddling, although perhaps not to the degree of Pakistan. For example, Herat only became part of what is now Afghanistan in 1747 and it only remained part of Afghanistan because of the Anglo-Persian War in 1856. The main reason that Iran survived without being colonized directly is that it served as a buffer between Russia and the UK. In fact, the state was pretty much split into spheres of influence between these two powers. The Qajars who ruled Iran did not exercise much influence outside of the urban areas and they did not control all of the cities. Hence, even the Qajar state must be seen as engaged in a process of state building. The process of nation building in Iran begins with Reza Khan.
So when might it be worth categorising countries according to the extent to which their formal institutions that delimit national/ethnic/community boundaries match informal or pre-formal boundaries?
When it makes a difference?
Well okay, but I’m curious as to when it does. Or at least, whether we can speak in any generalities about the relationship between informal and formal identities (maybe it’s best put on a continuum?) and nationalism. As Vikash and Peter have observed, ‘strong’ nationalism shows up in multi-ethnic states while even in less ethnically diverse contexts the production of a national identity was labour intensive.
Peter brought up the pre-national narratives that enable national narratives. Does that make pre-modern or informal/preformal norms a scaffold upon which national identity rests? Or are they a more amorphous kind of substrate: not a skeleton for the nation but a phase-specific vocabulary that facilitate a certain part of the nation-forming process but become less salient later? If they’re the former, I wonder if other scaffolds enable nation-making (multiple realizability of nationhood?), and if the latter, what they transform into?
I think it might affect the content of nationalism. Meaning when national symbols enter politics, the pre-modern history can determine what symbols are salient, but may not be useful in predicting the direction nationalism will take- violence, democracy, etc.
thanks for the comments. @1b103f91b5f6271acf0dddd41aa309a1:disqus I think pre-national entities can matter in terms of how easily a nation is formed, and the content of nationalism-what they refer to, myths, stories, etc. But once a national sentiment arises, it might be hard to tell the difference-even French nationalism arose through great effort, see Weber’s work.
@twitter-11463632:disqus thanks, good points. I think a lot of people forget about the ethnic minorities in Iran.
@twitter-15414456:disqus I think pundits and public intellectuals might be interchangeable nowadays.
Interesting post – just read it quickly. A couple of pts. (1) I haven’t read Eugen Weber’s ‘Peasants into Frenchmen’ but the context in which I see it cited suggests that it’s about the spread of a sense of French national identity to the population as a whole in the 19th c. via the education system etc., and that’s not quite the same thing as ‘nationalism’ in general, it seems to me. E.g., the elites of a particular country could be nationalistic before a sense of national identity spreads to the more isolated, rural parts of a country. In this sense one could argue there was French nationalism quite a bit before the 19th c., even if many ‘ordinary people’ still identified more w their locality (pays) than w France. (2) Pundits, public intellectuals (or whatever) often use ‘nation’ and ‘country’ or ‘nation’ and ‘state’ interchangeably, which in some cases doesn’t matter a lot but in other cases might well matter.
Peter, you’re probably right, and it’s tragic. But the decline of public intellectuals into pundits is an established social fact. Sigh.
From the post: “the fact that Pakistan is less than a hundred years old doesn’t mean ‘real’ Pakistanis don’t exist.”
I think this is 100 percent right. The notion that Pakistan somehow isn’t “real” because it was created in 1947 is absurd.