Walker Connor on ‘docility’

Walker Connor identifies the factors explaining minority groups’ docility even where they do not consider the state to be legitimate. I post it here because the analysis is equally applicable to majorities where “western norms of cultural liberalism are driving a wedge between increasingly ‘civic’ nation-states and their dominant ethnies in an attempt to render western states ethnically-neutral.” (Kevin Macdonald examines Kaufmann’s claim that ‘norms’ are doing this to us here.)

From Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, edited by Daniele Conversi (Routledge, London, 2002) pp. 38-41:

(1) Fear: Granted that violent coercion cannot be used too frequently or too long or in too heavy doses, its periodic, small-scale application to ‘examples’ may prove a very effective means of persuading a population that overt resistance to an unpopular political system is not worth the entailed risk. How fear of reprisal can dampen a population’s will has been eloquently captured by the former editor of a Czechoslovak journal:

Where government stands for a long time, the citizen falls. Where does he fall? I will not try to please the non-Marxist enemy and say that he falls on the gallows. Only a few tens or hundreds of citizens do that. Our friends know that it is sufficient because it is followed by the fall of, perhaps, the whole nation into fear, into political indifference and resignation, into petty daily cares and little desires, into dependence on gradually tinier and tinier overlords, into a serfdom of a new and unusual type, impossible to explain to a visitor from abroad.

Fears of physical coercion or incarceration fail to explain why people in a democratic society do not vote for nationalist parties. But fears can be wide-ranging, and the prospect of secession can raise fear of the unknown, the untraveled road. It can also raise fears, particularly among the elderly, of unemployment or of no governmental old-age assistance. It is probably not just coincidence that professional people, those with a sense of security and independence because of their training and vocation, have been disproportionately represented in separatist movements, and that, as one moves from the middle-aged to the post-middle-aged element, support for such movements sharply decreases.

(2) Habit: Aristotle was among the very earliest of philosophers to indicate the link between habit and political behavior. In emphasizing the consensual rather than the coercive side of law enforcement, he noted that ‘the law has no power to command obedience except that of habit, which can only be given by time.’ Some two thousand years later, Max Weber, while substituting the word custom for habit, would substantively agree. Though noting that our knowledge as yet ‘does not allow us to determine very clearly the point of transition from the stage of mere custom to the, at first vaguely and dimly experienced, “consensual” character of social action’, Weber nonetheless insisted that habit is a principal reason why people obey the laws of the society in which they reside. Tradition, in the active form of habit, exerts an oughtness of its own. Most significantly, it is a force militating against change: ‘The inner orientation toward such regularities contains in itself very tangible inhibitions against “innovations.” ’ Particularly when combined with fear of the unknown, the comfortableness of that with which one is familiar would explain a timidity concerning such an all-encompassing ‘innovation’ as a new state.

(3) Apathy and/or Inertia: Apathy can, of course, be further broken down into a number of explanations ranging from a psychological state of mind such as fatalism (‘If Allah wills…’) to the prevalence of energy-sapping parasites. In any case, it is one thing to grumble about the illegitimacy of rule by the Castilians, Han Chinese, or French, and something else to become actively engaged in terminating that rule. Even powerful mass movements may be divided into activists and sympathizers. Thus, the number of people actually willing to serve as guerrillas in a national war of liberation may be meager, while the number who demonstrate their agreement with the guerrillas concerning the illegitimacy of the political system by the passive act of refusing to give information on the guerrillas’ whereabouts, despite governmental threats and offers of rewards, is necessarily impressive, or the guerrillas could not survive. But again, such a conviction concerning political legitimacy is for many not sufficient to motivate positive activity.

(4) Apoliticalness: If economists tend to place too much emphasis upon economic motivation, political scientists are prone to exaggerate the degree to which the typical person is emotionally involved in political matters. So-called highly authoritarian states often offer bewildering experiences to the visitor, who finds people pursuing their life-ways with apparent good cheer and outwardness. Such people have learned to accommodate themselves comfortably within limits prescribed by the authorities. The injunction not to speak or act in any way that could be construed as ‘antistate activity’ does not weigh heavily on some shoulders. What the earlier cited Czech dissenter termed the ‘petty daily cares and little desires’ can be preoccupying. In democracies, the lack of interest in political matters is illustrated by low participation in elections, and by surveys indicating extremely meager knowledge of political issues and public figures. Even if they are convinced that alien rule is illegitimate, therefore, the issue may not generate enough enthusiasm by the apolitical segment of a minority to motivate it to join the national movement’s ranks.

(5) Political and Cultural Isolation: The intensity of the urge to cast off a foreign yoke is influenced by the degree to which the yoke is felt. For the notion that alien rule is illegitimate rule to trigger action, it is necessary that the alien rule be perceived. Multinational, non-integrated states (such as pre-World War II Ethiopia, Iran, and Thailand) were able to survive for generations without ethnonationally inspired separatist movements because political and social control by the centre was a fiction. In effect, such units were comprised of a series of ethnocracies, as each group (or subgroup) ruled itself. But as communications and transportation networks made the presence of (a) the central government and (b) the dominant ethnic group felt in the periphery, ethnonational discord rose precipitously. So too, Basque, Breton, and Scottish nationalist movements gained strength as improved communication- and transportation-networks made the central government an increasingly pervasive force, and also led to an increase in the quality and quantity of contacts between the dominant group and the national minorities. A particular irritant to minority sensibilities (and, therefore, a catalyst for separatist sentiment) proved to be the increased presence of non-members of the minority within the homeland. In general, separatism has risen with in-migration. However, perception of the alien presence will vary among individuals. With a larger homeland, such as Quebec (or Scotland), some, because of their occupation, neighborhood, and/or reading and listening interests, will necessarily be more sensitized to the alien yoke than others. To these others, Ottawa and the Anglophones (or London and the English) will be too remote to their experience to ignite the fires of separatism.

(6) Disorganization: A resistance movement requires poles or foci about which to form and develop. A state which can atomize its population decreases the likelihood of effective antistate activity. Some states, through secret informers and infiltrators of social organizations (unions, churches, organized sports, and even the family) have proven adroit at isolating the individual. A leading Chinese composer and musician rendered this account concerning controls in the People’s Republic during the Cultural Revolution:

I was cautious about discussing such matters. Everybody and anybody could be attacked. I know many others felt as I did … but it was increasingly dangerous to admit it. There were party members who kept their membership secret. Even within one’s own family it was necessary to be circumspect. I trusted my wife and children, but I knew individuals whose children reported on them; Youth League members were required to do this. It happened to the father of one of my daughter’s schoolmates. Therefore, in some families, especially if the children were ‘progressive’ and were trying to ‘draw a line’ (as the expression goes) between their parents and themselves, the adults stopped talking or changed the subject whenever the children entered. It was not uncommon for families to eat meals in silence for weeks at a time.

In such societies, the odds of mounting a challenge to the state are slight indeed. But even in a democracy, a peaceful national movement may encounter problems. For example, the incarceration and expulsion of Breton leaders for purported collaboration with the Nazi occupiers impeded the Breton national movement for some years after the war. The state’s control of the communications media may also inhibit a movement’s ability to present its side of the issue. In early 1977, Canadian political leaders accused a number of CBC announcers on the French network of favoring the Parti Québécois. Apparently the former did not believe that secession merited ‘equal time.’ A mélange of fear, habit, inertia, apoliticalness, political and cultural isolation, disorganization, and other overlooked factors may therefore help to account for a people’s passive willingness to abide within a political system to which they do not ascribe legitimacy. And, from the perspective of the state apparatus, perhaps passivity is enough. Thus, for decades the British pursued a policy of buying the passivity but not the allegiance of the Pushtun tribes within northwestern British India, and Pakistan has continued the policy. Authorities in the Federal Republic of Germany, Switzerland, and other Western European states have wanted no more than passivity from their large guestworker communities; policies have been pursued that purposefully dissuade the guestworkers from developing an emotional attachment to the state. Only passivity, not legitimacy, is essential to the everyday, humdrum functioning of a society. But if the state requires more than passivity, if it hopes to invoke the symbols of the state as a means of gaining positive cooperation and sacrifice, legitimacy will be sorely missed. Simply because one person will not raise a hand against another does not mean that he would raise a hand to aid him.

Walker Connor on the appeal of nationalism

Extended quotations from Walker Connor, Ethno-nationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton University Press, 1994), 196-8, 202-6:

For the sake of clarity, we begin by noting that nationalism and patriotism refer to two quite distinct loyalties: the former to one’s national group; the latter to one’s state (country) and its institutions. For people, such as the Japanese, who possess their own ethnically homogeneous nation-state and for staatvolk, such as the French, who are culturally and politically preeminent in a state, even though other groups are present in significant numbers, the fact that nationalism and patriotism are two different phenomena is usually of little consequence. For such people, the two loyalties tend to blur into a seamless whole. But in a world containing thousands of ethnonational groups and less than two hundred states, it is evident that for most people the sense of loyalty to one’s nation and to one’s state do not coincide. And they often compete for the allegiance of the individual.

[…]

We know from the comparative study of nationalism that when the two loyalties are perceived as being in irreconcilable conflict - that is to say, when people feel they must choose between them - nationalism customarily proves the more potent. You have been privileged in your lifetime to witness one of history’s most vivid illustrations of the relative strength of these two loyalties: the very recent case of the Soviet Union, wherein a beleaguered Soviet President Gorbachev only belatedly discovered that a sense of loyalty to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (what, for seventy years had been termed Soviet patriotism) was no match for the sense of nationalism demonstrated by nearly all of the peoples of the Soviet Union, including even the Russian nation. And obviously, events within what, until recently, was known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia certify that Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovene nationalism has each proven itself far more potent than a Yugoslav patriotism.

To understand why nationalism customarily proves to be a far more powerful force than patriotism, it is necessary to take a closer look at national consciousness and national sentiment. What, for example, is the nature of the bond that both unites all Poles and differentiates them from the remainder of humanity? Until quite recently it was the vogue among prominent writers on nationalism to stress the tangible characteristics of a nation. The nation was defined as a community of people characterized by a common language, territory, religion, and the like. Probing the nation would be a far easier task if it could be explained in terms of such tangible criteria. How much simpler it would be if adopting the Polish language; living within Poland, and adhering to Catholicism were sufficient to define membership in the Polish nation were sufficient to make one a Pole. But there are Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians who meet these criteria but who do not consider themselves Polish and are not considered Polish by their Polish fellow citizens.

Objective criteria, in and by themselves, are therefore insufficient to determine whether or not a group constitutes a nation. The essence of the nation is a psychological bond that joins a people and differentiates it, in the subconscious conviction of its members, from all nonmembers in a most vital way.

With but very few exceptions, authorities have shied from describing the nation as a kinship group and have usually explicitly denied any kinship basis to it. These denials are customarily supported by data showing that most nations do in fact contain several genetic strains. But this line of reasoning ignores the dictum that it is not what is but what people perceive as is which influences attitudes and behavior. And a subconscious belief in the group’s separate origin and evolution is an important ingredient of national psychology.

In ignoring or denying the sense of kinship that infuses the nation, scholars have been blind to that which has been thoroughly apparent to nationalist leaders. In sharpest contrast with most academic analysts of nationalism, those who have successfully mobilized nations have understood that at the core of ethnopsychology is the sense of shared blood, and they have not hesitated to appeal to it. Consequently, nationalistic speeches and proclamations tend to be more fruitful areas for research into the emotional/psychological nature of nationalism than are scholarly works. Too often such speeches and proclamations have been precipitously dismissed as propaganda in which the leadership did not truly believe. But nationalism is a mass phenomenon, and the degree to which its inciters are true believers does not affect its reality. The question is not the sincerity of the propagandist, but the nature of the mass instinct to which he or she appeals.

[ ... ]

Unlike most writers on nationalism, then, political leaders of the most diverse ideological strains have been mindful of the common blood component of ethnonational psychology and have not hesitated to appeal to it when seeking popular support. Both the frequency and the record of success of such appeals attest to the fact that nations are indeed characterized by a sense - a feeling - of consanguinity.

Our answer, then, to that often asked question, ‘What is a nation?’ is that it is a group of people who feel that they are ancestrally related. It is the largest group that can command a person’s loyalty because of felt kinship ties; it is, from this perspective, the fully extended family.

The core of the nation has been reached and triggered through the use of familial metaphors which can magically transform the mundanely tangible into emotion-laden phantasma: which can, for example, mystically convert what the outsider sees as merely the territory populated by a nation into a motherland or fatherland, the ancestral land, land of our fathers, this sacred soil, land where our fathers died, the native land, the cradle of the nation, and, most commonly, the home - the homeland of our particular people - a ‘Mother Russia,’ an Armenia, a Deutschland, an England (Engla land: land of the Angles), or a Kurdistan (literally, land of the Kurds). Here is an Uzbek poet referring to Uzbekistan:

So that my generation would comprehend the Homeland’s worth,
Men were always transformed to dust, it seems.
The Homeland is the remains of our forefathers
Who turned into dust for this precious soil

A spiritual bond between nation and territory is thus touched. As concisely stated in the nineteenth-century German couplet, ‘Blut und Boden,’ blood and soil become mixed in national perceptions.

It is, then, the character of appeals made through and to the senses, not through and to reason, which permit us some knowledge of the subconscious convictions that people tend to harbor concerning their nation. The near universality with which certain images and phrases appear - blood, family, brothers, sisters, mother, forefathers, ancestors, home - and the proven success of such invocations in eliciting massive, popular responses tell us much about the nature of national identity.

A Glossary

A useful glossary compiled by Walker Connor in his paper ‘The timelessness of nations’. Most active nationalists have a fairly clear understanding of these terms obviously, but it’s surprising how many people are clueless. I have heard it said that the English, the Scots and the Maoris are a single ethnic group because they all speak English, for example. Then there are the ‘English nationalists’ of the Witanagemot club for whom the English nation is made up of members of ethnic groups without limit - just so long as their individuals live in England.

The glossary:

Ethnic – derived from ethnos, the ancient Greek word for a nation in the latter’s pristine sense of a group characterized by common descent; the prefix ethno therefore means national.

Ethnonationalism – a redundancy, coined in response to the general tendency to misuse the word nationalism to convey loyalty to the state rather than to one’s national group; it is designed to leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that the author is discussing loyalty to the nation.

Ethnocracy – an ethnically homogeneous political unit; it can vary in size from a small village to a modern state.

Gemeinschaft – an association resting upon a sense of kinship, real or imagined; gemeinshaft groupings include the family, band, tribe, and nation.

Gessellschaft – an association of individuals resting upon the conviction that their personal self-interest can be best promoted through membership in the group; whereas a gemeinschaft society is based upon sentiment, the gessellschaft society is in large part a product of rational self-interest (in political philosophy, the case for the political legitimacy of the gessellschaft state has been closely tied to the notion of the social contract).

Nation – a group of people sharing a myth of common ancestry; it is the largest grouping that can be mobilized by appeals to common blood (nation is often improperly employed as a synonym for state, as in the League of Nations or the United Nations, or as a synonym for the citizenry of a state regardless of its ethnic complexity, as in references to ‘the American nation’).

Nationalism – identity with and loyalty to one’s nation in the pristine sense of that word (see above); nationalism is often incorrectly used to refer to loyalty to the state.

Nation-state – that relatively rare situation in which the borders of a state and a nation closely coincide; a state with an ethnically homogeneous population.

Patriotism – devotion to one’s state and its institutions (civic nationalism is the currently fashionable, but confusing, substitute for patriotism; civic loyalty or civic identity would better convey this type of devotion, without misrepresenting it as a form of nationalism).

State – the major political unit in world politics; country.