IS NATIONALISM a force for progress or reaction?

Our previous answer attempted to unpack the complex nature of “nations” and “nationality.” Nationalism similarly requires some dissection.  

All nationalism is based on claims about territory — often someone else’s. It is also usually based on assertions or assumptions (sometimes implicit) about culture and often its deliberate fabrication. 

Nationalism can take a range of forms, from “soft” national pride through anti-imperialist and national liberation movements to “alt-right” irredentism (focused on “reclaiming” “lost” territories), the demand for “lebensraum” and fascism.  

Let’s begin with the first. Many Marxists relax with sport — as players or spectators — and have been known to cheer when their local or national team scores. There’s no necessary conflict between politics and sport. 

Some on the left — including Rebecca Long Bailey (a Manchester United supporter, Labour MP and contender for the position of Labour Party leader in 2019) — have attempted to develop this argument with the notion of “progressive patriotism” as an antidote to right-wing English nationalism.  

Often claiming the tradition of Orwell, Woolf and Priestly, this either invokes a notion of cultural identity which necessarily excludes those who don’t share or subscribe to it or, claiming to accommodate multiple identities, collapses into a meaningless phrase.  

In contrast John Foster argues in a recent pamphlet for “progressive federalism”: in the current acute crisis the working-class movement has a duty to take forward national rights in a way that enhances overall class unity against the banks and monopolies that dominate our lives.  

Marx and Engels argued that industrial capitalism “created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead.”  

In the Communist Manifesto they declared that working people “have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.”

But they continue: “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.”

Marx and Engels saw the collapse of the European revolutions of 1848 as due in part at least to nationalism. The connection between class struggle and national liberation was not then as developed as it is today: European powers hadn’t yet colonised the rest of the world and the full scope and horror of what was to follow was yet to be revealed.  

The proportion of Africa colonised by Europe was 11 per cent in 1876 but 90 per cent by 1900, by which time both were dead. 

Since capitalism represented an advance on feudalism, they saw some positive elements in capitalism’s colonial conquests.  

Later they amended their opinions. British rule in India exposed the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation” and the alleged atrocities of the Indian rebellion of 1857 were, said Marx, a reflex of Britain’s own predatory conduct in the country, while Engels commented that the French occupation of Algeria had unleashed nothing but bloodshed, rapine, violence and the barefaced arrogance of the settlers.  

Both supported Irish independence. In 1867 Marx wrote to Engels: “Formerly I held that the secession of Ireland from England was impossible. Now I consider it inevitable…”  

More than a century-and-a-half later the independent unity of the island of Ireland — a land conquered and colonised by Britain — remains a goal that all socialists support.

Under conditions of colonial domination or imperialist exploitation, forms of territorial struggle — “national liberation” movements — may be progressive, at least to the degree that they have the interests of the people as a whole at their centre.  

But even here they easily become populist movements, readily subverted by and subservient to the interests of a dominant “national” ruling class.  

In countries which are not formally governed from elsewhere including those (like Britain) which are subject to control by US finance capital and military bases — nationalism often takes on a populist, reactionary form.  

This particularly applies to those nationalisms which are irredentist (such as the claim of far-right Italian groups to their former territories in the eastern Adriatic) or based on notions of “race” and culture irrespective of whether the “other” is external to national borders (as with Bulgarian nationalists and Macedonia) or internal, in particular to those of different ethnicity or religion, especially where this is associated with easily recognisable features like colour or dress.  

At the other end of the spectrum, some of the features of right-wing nationalism manifest themselves in extreme forms. Fascism is by definition an ultra-nationalist phenomenon.  

Fascism is almost always racist (though racists are not necessarily always fascist), and frequently invokes social Darwinist theories of genetic supremacy/ inferiority. It is often territorially based, ultra-nationalist and sometimes irredentist or expansionist.  

But imperialism is not the same as fascism. The thrust of imperialism is ultimately economic rather than political — although the two spheres are not easily separated and the former often presents itself as engaged in a “civilising” mission.  

Progressive forces have always had to challenge the reactionary potential of national identity — not least in former socialist states such as Yugoslavia where for a precious half-century a slogan of “brotherhood and unity” managed to prevail until its deliberate subversion and destruction by fascists who took up arms to destroy it.

As an earlier Q&A (number 96) argued, the nation-state is a product of capitalism; capitalism needs the state. The state is not, as so often presented, the “honest broker” of society. It is an organ of control.  

Capitalism needs the state to help it control society but it also needs to control the state, economically, politically and militarily.  

All the “former socialist” states of Europe were required to join Nato before they were allowed candidacy to become part of the European Union.  

That is part of the background to the current national conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

In Britain, calls for “progressive federalism” are based not on abstract principles, but on an analysis of the balance of class forces and the possibilities of increased democratic engagement in the promotion of progressive policies “to shift the balance of power in favour of the majority and enable working people and their allies to exercise increasing control over the allocation of resources at federal, national and regional level.”  

This would involve national legislatures in Scotland, Wales and England together with English regional assemblies with “powers to raise revenue and specifically to advance democratic control through public ownership, state investment and public procurement” and a British federal parliament with “jurisdiction over foreign affairs, defence, macro-economic policy and national insurance, the power to raise taxes on wealth and income and the responsibility to redistribute income among the nations and regions on the basis of social need.”

The devil of course is in the detail, in particular the autonomy of the constituent federal bodies. In the 2016 referendum 62 per cent of voters in Scotland (and 56 per cent of those in Northern Ireland) voted to remain in the EU but were dwarfed by the much bigger English (and Welsh) electorate which opted to leave, producing the overall majority of just 52 per cent which led to Brexit.  

Nationalism is complex. It can be a force for progress and for reaction. Marxist theory and practice recognises its complexity in relation to specific circumstances of place and time.

Ultimately, Marxists are internationalists, not nationalists. It’s no accident that alongside keeping “the Red Flag flying here” the Communist Internationale “unites the human race.”  

At the same time, as the Communist Party’s Britain’s Road to Socialism declares: “Each country must find its own path to socialism, applying general principles to specific national conditions in their international context. Each will develop its own model of socialism in tune with the culture and aspirations of its people. In Britain and its constituent nations, taking the road to socialism can only be done successfully if those differing national conditions are taken fully into account.”

Or, as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, the working class must “constitute itself as the nation” and “win the battle of democracy.”

So: in answer to the question we started with — is nationalism a force for progress or reaction? It depends: what kind of nationalism and with what objectives!  

Details of the Marx Memorial Library’s rich autumn programme of lectures and courses can be found online at www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk together with downloadable copies of past Q&A (this is number 103) — there’s a full list on tinyurl.com/FullMarxList.