Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Sat 10 Jan 2009 09:56 AM PST
Religious Nationalism and Transnationalism
University of California, Santa Barbara
Despite the rapid mobility of peoples, mass migrations, the proliferation of diaspora cultures, and a transnational sense of community provided by internet relationships, national identities persist. In fact they seem to flourish in a global world. And therein lies a paradox. Religious affiliation, while providing a connection to transnational networks, also offers resources for shoring up local identities. Why have limited loyalties and parochial new forms of ethno-religious nationalism surfaced in todays' sea of post-nationality?
History
seems poised on the brink of an era of globalization, hardly the time for new
national aspirations to emerge. In fact, some observers have cited the
appearance of ethnic and religious nationalism in such areas as the former
Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, Algeria and the Middle East, South
Asia, Japan, and among right-wing movements in Europe and the United States as
evidence that globalization has not reached all quarters of the globe. But is
this really the case? Is it possible to see these quests for local identities
and new nationalisms not as anomalies in the homogeneity of globalization, but
as further examples of its impact?
This is what I would like to
explore in this essay. It seems to me that the paradox of new nationalisms in a
global world can be explained, in part, by seeing them as products of one or
more of several globalizing forces. In many cases, the new ethnic and religious
movements are reactions to globalization. They are responses to the
insufficiencies of what is often touted as the world's global political
standard: the secular constructs of nationalism that are found not only in
Europe and the United States but remain in many parts of the former Third World
as vestiges of European colonialism.
In this essay I will look at the
responses to old secular nationalisms, which are under siege precisely at a
time when they have themselves been weakened by globalization. Their
vulnerability has been the occasion for new ethno-religious politics to step
into the breach and shore up national identities and purposes in their own
distinctive ways. Some forms of ethno-religious politics are global, some are
virulently anti-global, and yet others are content with the attempt to create
ethno-religious nation-states. Thus these new forms of ethnic and religious
politics will remain paradoxical: sometimes aligned with nationalism, sometimes
with transnational ideologies, and in both cases standing in uneasy
relationship with the globalizing economic and cultural forces of the post-Cold
War world.
Globalization's
assault on nationalism
It should not be surprising that
new sociopolitical forms are emerging at this moment of history since
globalization is redefining virtually everything on the planet. This includes
especially those social and political conventions associated with the
nation-state. Among other things, global forces are undermining many of the
traditional pillars on which the secular nation-state have been based, such as
national sovereignty, economic autonomy, and social identity. As it turns out,
however, these aspects of the nation-state have been vulnerable to change for
some time.
Born as a stepchild of the
European Enlightenment, the idea of the modern nation-state is profound and
simple: the state is created by the people within a given national territory.
Secular nationalism--the ideology that originally gave the nation-state its
legitimacy--contends that a nation's authority is based on the secular idea of
a social compact of equals rather than on ethnic ties or sacred mandates. It is
a compelling idea, one with pretensions of universal applicability. It reached
its widest extent of world-wide acceptance in the mid-twentieth century.
But the latter half of the century
was a different story. The secular nation-state proved to be a fragile
artifice, especially in those areas of the world where nations had been created
by retreating colonial powers--in Africa by Britain, Portugal, Belgium, and
France; in Latin America by Spain and Portugal; in South and Southeast Asia by
Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States; and in Eurasia by the
Soviet Union. In some cases boundary disputes led to squabbles among
neighboring nations. In others the very idea of the nation was a cause for
suspicion.
Many of these imagined
nations--some with invented names such as Yugoslavia, Pakistan, and
Indonesia--were not accepted by everyone within their territories. In yet other
cases, the tasks of administration became too difficult to perform in honest
and efficient ways. The newly-created nations had only brief histories of prior
colonial control to unite them, and after independence they had only the most
modest of economic, administrative, and cultural infrastructures to hold their
disparate regions together.
By the 1990s these ties had begun
to fray. The global economic market undercut national economies, and the
awesome military technology of the US and NATO reduced national armies to
border patrols. More significantly the rationale for the nation-state came into
question. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-colonial,
post-Vietnam critique of Western democracy, the secular basis for the
nation-state seemed increasingly open to criticism. In some instances, such as
in Yugoslavia, when the ideological glue of secular nationalism began to
dissolve, the state fell apart.
The effect of what I have
elsewhere called "the loss of faith in secular nationalism" was
devastating (Juergensmeyer 1993). Throughout the world, it seemed, nationalism
was subject to question, and the scholarly community joined in the task of
trying to understand the concept in a post-Cold War and transnational era
(Anderson 1983, Gottlieb 1993, Kotkin 1994, Smith 1995, Tamir 1993, Young
1993).1 Part of the reason for nationalism's shaky status was that it was
transported to many parts of the world in the cultural baggage of what Jurgen
Habermas has called "the project of modernity" (Habermas 1987, 148)--
an ascription to reason and a progressive view of history that many thought to
be obsolete. In a multicultural world where a variety of views of modernity are
in competition, the very concept of a universal model of secular nationalism
became a matter of lively debate.
Globalization challenges the
modern idea of nationalism in a variety of ways. These challenges are varied
because globalization is multifaceted: the term, after all, refers not to any
one thing but to a series of processes. The term embraces not only the global
reach of transnational businesses but also their labor supply, currency, and
financial instruments. In a broader sense it also refers to the planetary
expansion of media and communications technology, popular culture, and
environmental concerns. Ultimately it also includes a sense of global citizenship
and a commitment to world order.
When one speaks of
"globalization," therefore, it is useful to specify which aspect of
it one has in mind. It is possible that people in a particular region of the
world will experience one kind of globalization but not others. For instance,
countries that are brought into contact with economic globalization--by
supplying labor for the commodity chains of globalized production--may not
experience the globalization of culture and citizenship. In fact, the advent of
economic globalization may threaten local identities in such a way as to
encourage the protection of local cultures and social identities, sometimes in
hostile and defensive ways.
My own studies have demonstrated
that some of the most intense movements for ethnic and religious nationalism
arise in nations where local leaders have felt exploited by the global economy
or believe that somehow the benefits of economic globalization have passed them
by (Juergensmeyer 1993, 2000). The global shifts in economic and political
power that occurred following the break-up of the Soviet Union and the sudden
rise and subsequent fall of Japanese and other Asian economies in the past
fifteen years have had significant social repercussions. The public sense of
insecurity that has come in the wake of these changes has been felt especially
in areas economically devastated by the changes, including those nations and
regions that had been under the dominance of the Soviet Union.
These shifts led to a crisis of
national purpose in less developed nations as well. A new, postcolonial
generation no longer believed in the Westernized vision of India’s Nehru or
Egypt’s Nasser. Rather, it wanted to complete the process of decolonialization
by asserting the legitimacy of their countries' own traditional values in the
public sphere and constructing a national identity based on indigenous culture
(Chatterjee 1993). This eagerness was made all the more keen when they observed
the global media assault of Western music, videos and films that satellite
television beam around the world, and which threaten to obliterate local and
traditional forms of cultural expression.
In other cases it has been a
different kind of globalization--the emergence of multicultural societies
through global diasporas of peoples and cultures, and the suggestion of global
military and political control in a "new world order"--that has
elicited fear. Perhaps surprisingly, this response has been most intense in the
most developed countries of the West which in other ways seem to be the very
paradigm of globalization. In the United States, for example, the Christian
Identity movement and militia organizations have been fueled by fears of a
massive global conspiracy involving liberal American politicians and the United
Nations. In Europe this fear of the loss of national identity and control has
led to the rise of right wing parties and stridently xenophobic ideologies.
As far-fetched as the idea of a
"new world order" of global control may be, there is some truth to
the notion that the integration of societies, communication among disparate
peoples, and the globalization of culture have brought the world closer
together. Although it is unlikely that a cartel of malicious schemers has
designed this global trend, its effect on local societies and national
identities has nonetheless been profound. It has undermined the modern idea of
the nation-state by providing nonnational and transnational forms of economic,
social, and cultural interaction. The global economic and social ties of the
inhabitants of contemporary global cities are linked together in a way that
supercedes the Enlightenment notion that peoples in particular regions are
naturally linked together in a social contract. In a global world, it is hard
to say where particular regions begin and end. For that matter, it is hard to
say how one should define the "people" of a particular nation.
This is where religion and ethnicity step
in to redefine public communities. The fading of the nation-state and old forms
of secular nationalism have produced both the opportunity for new nationalisms
and the need for them. The opportunity has arisen because the old orders seem
so weak; and the need for national identity persists because no single
alternative form of social cohesion and affiliation has yet appeared to
dominate public life the way the nation-state did in the twentieth century. In
a curious way, traditional forms of social identity have helped to rescue the
idea of national societies. In the increasing absence of any other demarcation
of national loyalty and commitment, these old staples--religion, ethnicity and
traditional culture--have become resources for national identification.
Ethnicity
and religion to the rescue of nationalism
In the contemporary political
climate, therefore, religious and ethnic nationalism provides a solution to the
problem of secular politics and global control in a multicultural world. As
secular ties have begun to unravel in the post-Soviet and post-colonial era,
local leaders have searched for new anchors to ground their social identities
and political loyalties. Many have turned to ethnicity and religion. What is
ideologically significant about these ethno-religious movements is their
creativity. Although many of the framers of the new nationalisms have reached
back in history for ancient images and concepts that will give them
credibility, theirs are not simply efforts to resuscitate old ideas from the past.
These are contemporary ideologies that meet present-day social and political
needs.
In the modern context this is a
revolutionary notion—that indigenous culture can provide the basis for new
political institutions, including resuscitated forms of the nation-state.
Movements that support ethno-religious nationalism are, therefore, often
confrontational and sometimes violent. They reject the intervention of
outsiders and their ideologies and, at the risk of being intolerant, pander to
their indigenous cultural bases and enforce traditional social boundaries. It
is no surprise, then, that they get into trouble with each other and with
defenders of the secular state. Yet even such conflicts with secular modernity
serve a purpose for the movements: it helps define who they are as a people and
who they are not. They are not, for instance, secularists.
Since secularism is often targeted
as the enemy, that enemy is most easily symbolized by things American. America
has taken the brunt of religious and ethnic terrorist attacks in recent years,
in part because it so aptly symbolizes the transnational secularism that the
religious and ethnic nationalists loathe, and in part because America does
indeed promote transnational and secular values. For instance, America has a
vested economic and political interest in shoring up the stability of regimes
around the world. This often puts the United States in the position of being a
defender of secular governments. Moreover, the United States supports a
globalized economy and a modern culture. In a world where villagers in remote
corners of the world increasingly have access to MTV, Hollywood movies, and the
internet, the images and values that have been projected globally have often
been American.
So it is understandable that
America would be disdained. What is perplexing to many Americans is why their
country would be so severely hated, even caricatured. The demonization of
America by many ethno-religious groups fits into a process of delegitimizing
secular authority that involves the appropriation of traditional religious
images, especially the notion of cosmic war. In such scenarios, competing
ethnic and religious groups become foes and scapegoats, and the secular state
becomes religion's enemy. Such satanization is aimed at reducing the power of
one's opponents and discrediting them. By humiliating them--by making them
subhuman--ethno-religious groups assert the superiority of their own moral
power.
The
future of religious and ethnic politics in a global world
Emerging movements of ethnic and
religious politics are therefore ambivalent about globalization. To the extent
that they are nationalistic they often oppose the global reach of world
government, at least in its secular form. But the more visionary of these
movements also at times have their own transnational dimensions, and some dream
of world domination shaped in their own ideological images. For this reason one
can project at least three different futures for religious and ethnic
nationalism in a global world: one where religious and ethnic politics ignore
globalization, another where they rail against it, and yet another where they
envision their own transnational futures.
Non-globalization:
new ethic and religious states
The goal of some ethnic and
religious activists is the revival of a nation-state that avoids the effects of
globalization. Right-wing movements in Europe and the United States that reject
regional and international alliances usually imagine that their nations could
return to a self-sufficient economic and political order that would not rely on
global networks and transnational associations.
Where new religious states have emerged, they have tended to be
isolationist. In Iran, for instance, the ideology of Islamic nationalism that
emerged during and after the 1979 revolution, and that was propounded by the
Ayatollah Khomeini and his political theoretician, Ali Shari'ati, was intensely
parochial. It was not until some twenty years later that new movements of
moderate Islamic politics encouraged its leaders to move out of their
self-imposed international isolation (Wright 2000). The religious politics of
Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban was even more strongly isolationist.
Led by members of the Pathan ethnic community who were former students of
Islamic schools, the religious revolutionaries of the Taliban established a
self-contained autocratic state with strict adherence to traditional Islamic
codes of behavior (Marsden 1998).
Yet religious politics need not be
isolationist. In India, when Hindu nationalists in the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), "Indian People's Party," came to power in 1998--a victory that
was consolidated in the national elections of 1999--some observers feared that
India would become isolated from world opinion and global culture as a result.
The testing of nuclear weapons as one of the BJP's first acts in power did
little to dispel these apprehensions. But in many other ways, including its
openness to economic ties and international relations, the BJP has maintained
India's interactive role in the world community. Credit for this may be due, in
part, to the moderate leadership of the BJP Prime Minister, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, one of the country's most experienced and temperate politicians. The
rise of a modern Muslim government in Indonesia has also adopted a tolerant and
international stance.
Guerrilla
antiglobalism
In other regions of the world it
is not the creation of new religious states that is at issue but the breakdown
of old secular states with no clear political alternative. In some instances,
religious and ethnic activists have contributed to these anarchic conditions.
In the former Yugoslavia, for instance, the bloodshed in Bosnia and Kosovo was
caused by the collapse of civil order as much as by the efforts to create new
ethnic and religious regions. Because these situations have been threats to
world order they have provoked the intervention of international forces such as
NATO and the UN.
It is, however, world order that
many of these religious and ethnic nationalists oppose. They note that the
increasingly multicultural societies of most urban communities around the world
have undermined traditional cultures and their leaders. They have imagined the
United States and the United Nations to be agents of an international
conspiracy, one that they think is hell-bent on forming a homogenous world
society and a global police state. It was this specter--graphically described
in the novel, The Turner Diaries--that one of the novel's greatest fans,
Timothy McVeigh, had hoped to forestall by attacking a symbol of federal
control in America's heartland. His assault on the Oklahoma City federal building,
and other terrorist attacks around the world--including Osama bin Laden's
alleged bombing of U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in Yemen
in 2000--were acts of what might be considered "guerrilla
antiglobalism."
Transnational
religious and ethnic alliances
Although the members of many radical religious and ethnic groups
may appear to fear globalization, what they distrust most are the secular
aspects of globalization. They are afraid that global economic forces and
cultural values will undercut the legitimacy of their own bases of identity and
power. Other aspects of globalization are often perceived by them as neutral,
and in some instances, useful for their purposes.
Some groups have a global agenda
of their own, a transnational alternative to political nationalism.
Increasingly terrorist wars have been waged on an international and
transnational scale. When the World Trade Center was demolished in the dramatic
aerial assaults of September 11, 2001, it was not just America that was
targeted but also the power of the global economic system that the buildings
symbolized. Osama bin Ladin’s al Qaeda network was itself a global structure.
Its world-wide attacks may be seen as skirmishes in a new Cold War, or, more
apocalyptically, a "clash of civilizations," as Samuel Huntington
termed it (Huntington 1996).
Another form of religious
transnationality may emerge from the international relations of kindred
religious states. According to one theory of global Islamic politics that
circulated in Egypt in the 1980s and 90s, local movements of Muslim politics
were meant to be only the first step in creating a larger Islamic political
entity--a consortium of contiguous Muslim nations. In this scenario, religious
nationalism would be the precursor of religious
transnationalism. Transnational Islam would lead to Islamic versions of
such secular consortia as NAFTA and the European Community. In the Islamic
model, however, the divisions among states would eventually wither away when a
greater Islamic union is formed.
A third kind of transnational
association of religious and ethnic activists has developed in the diaspora of
cultures and peoples around the world. Rapid internet communication
technologies allow members of ethnic and religious communities to maintain a
close association despite their geographic dispersion. These "e-mail
ethnicities" are not limited by any political boundaries or national
authorities. Expatriate members of separatist communities--such as Irish
Republicans, Indian Sikhs, and both Sinhalese and Tamil Sri Lankans--have
provided both funding and moral support to their compatriates' causes. In the
case of Kurds, their "nation" is spread throughout Europe and the
world, united through a variety of modern communications technologies. In some
cases these communities long for a nation-state of their own; in other cases
they are prepared to maintain their nonstate national identities for the
indefinite future.
Identity,
power and globalization
Each of these futures contains a
paradoxical relationship between the national and globalizing aspects of
ethno-religious politics. This suggests that there is a symbiotic relationship
between certain forms of globalization and religious and ethnic nationalism. It
may appear ironic, but the globalism of culture and the emergence of
transnational political and economic institutions enhance the need for local
identities. They also create the desire for a more localized form of authority
and social accountability.
The crucial problems in an era of
globalization are identity and control. The two are linked, in that a loss of a
sense of belonging leads to a feeling of powerlessness. At the same time, what
has been perceived as a loss of faith in secular nationalism is experienced as
a loss of agency as well as identity. For these reasons the assertion of
traditional forms of religious and ethnic identities are linked to attempts to
reclaim personal and cultural power. The vicious outbreaks of religious and
ethnic terrorism that has occurred at the beginning of the 21st
century can be seen as tragic attempts to regain social control through acts of
violence. Until there is a surer sense of citizenship in a global order,
therefore, ethno-religious visions of moral order will continue to appear as
attractive though often disruptive solutions to the problems of identity and
belonging in a global world.
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ENDNOTES
1. The renewed academic interest in nationalism has spawned two new journals, Nations and Nationalism, and Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. Other journals have devoted special issues to the topic: "Reconstructing Nati
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