








ely one cannot open a newspaper or view the TV news without finding an item describing an attack on refugees in Germany or presenting the horrors of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Events such as these have stunned the civilized world. Aren t we supposed to have left such barbarity behind?
There is a common, widely held assumption that there is no place for ethnic nationalism in the modern world. Modernity and the concomitant urbanization, industrialization, and social mobility are deemed inimical to primordial attachments.
Clifford Geertz defined  primordial attachments  as those that  stem from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language ... and following particular social practices. 1
In other words, all attachments engendered by ethnicity those of kin, language, and custom will gradually recede, lose their importance under the relentless assault of the all-pervasive modernity.
This assumption is based partly on the  liberal principle that people should be treated as individuals, and not as members of racial, religious, and other groups. . . . [Eventually] membership in ethnic groups must become increasingly irrelevant  and partly on the mistaken belief that increased economic and cultural integration of the global economy will diminish primordial attachments.2
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Crudely put, if Serbs and Croats both like hamburgers they are less likely to kill each other.
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ral communities where everyb< longed to the same ethnic group, the modem world, people of differ1 nic backgrounds are increasing centrated in huge urban aggioma and compete against each other ir sumably meritocratic society in a I ian all against all.
The very fact that mobile soc
That is why the recent explosion of nationalist passions in Europe and elsewhere caused such a shock. In fact, modernity is highly conducive to ethnic tensions. N ationalism was not an explosive issue when most people lived in small ru-
... ...... appeared in The World & I, July 1993, pp. 465-477. Reprinted with permission from The World publication of The Washington Times Corporation.   1993.
This article first
appeared in The
44. Ethnic Conflict
fers a way to the top leads to fierce competition in which any weapon, but especially ethnic differences, lends itself to effective use. As Kautsky put it,  raffways are the greatest breeder of national hatreds. 3 And airlines work even better, we may add.
CLASS AND ETHNICITY
one s ethnic/racial group, whose economic and ideological life was to be developed along socialist principles.
Socialism, that is, class nationalism (as opposed to ethnic nationalism), emphasized devotion to one s class within one s ethnic entity. It tried to suppress (ethnic) nationalism in the belief that it tied the working classes to their capitalist exploiters, thus blunting the class struggle.
The most principled socialists, such as Rosa Luxembourg, always insisted that there was no place for nationalism in a socialist society. She was even willing to give up hope for Polish reunification because, once Austria, Germany, and Russia turned socialist, national oppression would disappear and nationalism itself would become meaningless.
Once the Bolsheviks came to power,
The end-of-primordials assumption is shared by the Left, especially Marxists, but while liberals believe in the triumph of modernity, orthodox Marxists await the triumph of the working class.
To Marx, nationalism was part of the ideological superstructure arising on the foundations of economic self-interest. Like a true bourgeois, Marx was obsessed with monetary/economic relations of dominance and exploitation that reflected the ownership of the means of production. The main conflict pitted those who owned the means the bourgeois  against those who did not the proletariat. Everything else culture, religion, ethnicity was derivative.
Marx s hostility to nationalist movements also reflected his view that they served the interests of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie, diverting the proletariat from the really important task: the class struggle.
Actually, the relationship between nationalism and socialism was very complicated. In the nineteenth century they were allies in their struggle against autocracy and feudalism, at least in the semi-feudal Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. Marx himself distinguished between national movements that were progressive, that is, all those struggling against czarist Russia and Austria, and those that were reactionary, for example, Croats who allied themselves with Vienna in 1848 out of fear of Hungarian centralism. This artificial distinction led to strange ideological somersaults: Romanians of Transylvania who, like Croats, sided with Vienna, were reactionary, while Romanians of Bessarabia fighting against St. Petersburg were progressive.
Once the feudal order was defeated and the old empires collapsed, in 1917-18, nationalism and socialism parted company. Nationalism, for example, ethnic nationalism, tried to absorb socialism and quickly evolved into national socialism, which emphasized adherence to
Precis
The recent outbreak of fierce ethnic and nationalist passions in Europe and elsewhere has shocked many. Modernity's urbanization, industrialization, and social mobility were supposed to have crowded out ethnic nationalism and primordial attachments of kin, language, custom, and religion. Classical liberalism holds that people should be treated as individuals, not as members of racial, religious, or other groups. Marxists, seeing struggle in terms of economic classes, were hostile to ethnic and nationalist movements, and saw them to be serving the interests of the bourgeoisie. Socialism class nationalism was to lead to a one-class society.
But communist ruling elites did not actually destroy nationalism; instead, they often put it to their own use, so nationalism worked to undermine socialism. Fascism emphasized primordial attachments, and shared Marx's anti-Semitism; both promoted paranoid hate. Breakup of empires has historically allowed ethnic differences to emerge. Favoring one s ethnic brothers is part of any traditional social system. And modern mobility leads to competition in which ethnic differences can be used as a tool of triumph. The melting pot works only somefimes. Although the world knows and condemns it in South Africa, apartheid is one solution: Switzerland has such a system with its cantons. Other proposals include proportional democracy and territorial autonomy.
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8. THE ETHNIC FACTOR: CHALLENGES FOR THE 1990s
however, they quickly realized that nationalist passions were a powerful tool, particularly in Russia, which transferred its religious zeal from Orthodox Christianity to orthodox Marxism. When in 1941 the German armies were approaching Moscow, Stalin called for the defense of Mother Russia, not world socialism.
Contrary to commonly held opinion, communist ruling elites did not put nationalism on ice. Instead, they put it on the back burner, to be served to the presumably gullible public whenever an internal situation called for cohesion. They tried to domesticate it, to use it for their own purposes, as evidenced by government-inspired and -organized nationalist campaigns in virtually every socialist country, for example, Poland and Romania in the 1960s and repeatedly in Soviet Russia.
In the process, there occurred a nationalization of socialism that, in some aspects, moved it closer to the nationalist socialist mode. Thus, one hundred years after nationalism and socialism parted company, they joined hands again, this time with state socialism in the driver s seat.
Gradually, however, nationalism destroyed socialism from within and then slunk out of the old socialist skin. This is what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989. This is what accounts for nationalist virulence in the former communist countries.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM
While Marxism is a chilias-tic movement striving for the yawning heights of a rational, scientific (perfect) society, fascism is representative of a whole class of antimodem ideologies that reject the anomie, the atomization and impersonal character, of modem society. It stresses social harmony, spiritual values, and cooperation that tilt it toward emphasizing primordial attachments, that is, ethnicity. Because  ethnicity... implies affection based on intangible bonds and a belief in collective sustenance. 5
That, incidentally, explains why, in a struggle of ethnic nationalism class nationalism, ethnic nationalism always wins: It offers the additional comfort of kinship and affective ties, the warmth of community as opposed to impersonal class interests.
Fascism proclaims society s organic
unity, which Marxist class struggle and liberal individualism have destroyed. Urban environment and industry, by their very nature, destroy human and social solidarity. Therefore, where modernity promotes conflict and individualism, fascism offers unity and mutual support. And unity based on ethnic community is all the stronger. This may be one of the main reasons for fascism s success: It promised sup-
Semitism into a bourgeois/pn chotomy.  Marx s invention o geoisie,   wrote Paul Johnso: most comprehensive of [the1 ries and it has continued to pre dation for all paranoid re movements, whether fascist or Communist-intemationali theoretical anti-Semitism [is] of Marxism. 7
port and solidarity to atomized, insecure, vulnerable masses. Communism did likewise but only to the working classes; fascism offered panacea to all.
Among things both movements share, none goes deeper than anti-Semitism. Marx, imbued with virulent Ger-man raasm and Jew-hatred ( This Jew-
Lassalle 6), redirected the hatred against an alien religious and ethnic hatred of   economic S ^^sie. Jew the swindler became bourgeois-wiS  rtransfoTed the JewX iVChnshan dichotomy of traditional anti-
It is no accident that virt ropean communist countries enced periodic flare-ups of an Russia repeatedly, Czechc 1952 53 (largely Russian-ir land in 1967-68, and so forth
ARE ETHNICITY AND NAI HERE TO STAY?
ttempts to define too numerous to b Perhaps the bes that of Stalin, w*
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44. Ethnic Conflict
indispensable characteristics: a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a common mental ,	8
makeup.	, c J -  
However, one can always find ethnic groups that aspire to be called or to become full-fledged nations even though they lack one of these characteristics. Are Hispanics who barely speak English disqualified from being American? Do Transylvanian Hungarians cease being Hungarian because there is a stretch of Romanian ethnic territory that separates them from the bulk of their ethnic cousins? Was partitioned Poland no longer a nation? Wasn t Germany? And, of course  mental makeup  is too vague to be useful.
That is why many specialists despair.
 Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no  scientific definition  of a nation can be devised; yet the phenome
