The State, National Hatred, and Its Transcendence

There are a few important ethnonational conflicts in the world where the most virulent forms of nationalism have been institutionally contained and transcended. I think it worthwhile to look at these to see what instrumental lessons we may derive for curbing destructive nationalism.

The institutions of government, such as military service, education, fiscal policy, marital and family law, the establishment of religion, taxation, business and professions codes, and building restrictions, have a direct effect on the formation of character and national identity and are relevant in building the content and dynamics of nationalism. As Walter Metzger points out: “With respect to character formation there is nothing ‘simple’ about government nothing moderate about its jurisdiction’.”¹ For example, governmental and historical institutions have created different German-speaking national characters and civic cultures on the two sides of the German-Swiss border because of the character-forming agency of the respective states, educational socialization, and historical experiences.

Anglo-Americans should be open to

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the possibility that there are other forms of democratic polity than the “Westminster” model where the winner by one vote takes all. An alternative model, called consociationalism, builds a policy input for structural minorities at all levels of the political system. Under this approach the various interests in society, be they religious, ideological, linguistic, regional, cultural, or ethnic, are guaranteed proportionality in representation at every level of political decision-making, including civil service appointments and the allocation of public funds.²

The first of two cases I wish to take up has its roots in wrestling with forces of nationalism in the final three decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multinational, polyglot, multi­ethnic and multi­religious dynastic monarchy. The most creative thinkers on nationalities questions were the Austromarxists, especially Karl Renner (1870­1950) and Otto Bauer (1881­1938).³ The essence of their proposals is the personality principle (Personalitktsprinzip), which is to detach national identity from territory. Under this idea, nationality should not be determined by birth or residence, but by personal choice which would be recorded in a national register. Cultural and educational life, including taxation to support these, would be determined by the various autonomous groups who could thus occupy the same territory and share economic, governmental, and transport facilities.

Karl Renner was the President of Austria from 1945 to 1950 when Italy and Austria negotiated the Paris Agreement, known as the Gruber de Gasperi Agreement, of 5 September 1946, which set the outline for a long-term settlement of the ethno­linguistic issues in the South Tyrol.³ This agreement provided for Italian sovereignty and cultural autonomy for the German-speaking majority. A noteworthy feature of Austro­Italian diplomacy over the past fifty years is a gradualistic structure, including a “Package” of 137 sections negotiated in 1969 and a “Calendar of Operations” for their implementation. These measures include the use of the German language in place names; judicial, police, and other administrative procedures; regional finances; water courses; forestry; education textbooks and teacher credentialing; and agreements worked out in bilateral commissions. In 1992 all 137 sections of the Austro­Italian Autonomy Package for the South Tyrol were declared fulfilled, an impressive and under­recognized achievement in the history of international conflict resolution. The points for our conceptual understanding are that: 1) cultural autonomy can be successfully separated from sovereignty and 2) not all issues can be settled in one adjudication. As in psycho­therapy, the processes of creating new structures over time itself constitutes a healing function.

The second case I will put is directly contra to the “personality principle” ­ it is the “territorial principle.” The exemplary case is the Swiss “cellular” formula for resolving historical, ethnic, religious, and linguistic conflicts. The territorial principle, which is as old as the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, is that ethnoreligious identity follows the prince or the jurisdiction of the territory.

The grievances of the Swiss French Catholic population of the northern Jura, in canton Bern, propelled the creation of a new canton of Jura in 1978. How this was done provides a case worth studying and considering in other areas of national conflict. The Swiss model is to circumscribe conflict by precisely focusing differences in plebiscites, and then recognizing and satisfying these by creating new and smaller territorial units. The political mode of handling the Jura conflict was to hold a series of referenda, in the entire Swiss federation, in the canton of Bern, and repeatedly in the districts involved, to give full and precise ex­

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pression to the popular will down to the local village level.

The Swiss national identity is grounded in the value of preserving the smallest ethnic, linguistic, and cultural units. The aim of childhood family and school socialization is to inculcate the attitude that although people from other cantons may have another culture, religion, or language, “they are Swiss.” As a demonstration of this willingness to allow those who wish a separate politico-cultural unit to have it, we may look at the results of the national referendum of 24 September 1978 to amend the Federal Constitution to add the canton of Jura: 82 percent of the voters in the federation voted to accept the new canton. In no single canton was the positive vote to create the new Jurassien canton less than 69 percent. The Swiss civic culture allows for a toleration of ethnic, linguistic, confessional, and cultural pluralism in the definition of a national identity of what it means to be a Swiss. As Jonathan Steinberg felicitously put it about the Swiss, the most important characteristic of Swissness is “The equality of all human communities before the bar of history.”⁵ This is a fitting formula for the world as we enter the twenty-first century.

Individuals are made up of many different psychodynamic introjects, identifications, partial identifications, and inner objects which may be in conflict. This knowledge becomes crucial for understanding the role of various group and regional identifications in national conflict or the equally complex problem of national cohesion.

What importantly distinguishes the Austro­Italian and the Swiss cases from the tragedy of national conflict and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia or in the Caucasus, where wars of ethnic expulsion or extermination take place, is the presence of religious and social class cross­cutting ­ by which I mean that the divisions, “fissures” or “cleavages” of a society, such as sectionalism, ethnic, cultural, class, linguistic, or religious, differences do not neatly overlap for most of the population. In cases where a national identity is maintained any two individuals may be members of the same occupational status, as in a common observation in dining establishments in my own part of the country, the American Southwest: “English in the restaurant, Spanish in the kitchen,” or the White Anglo day­time occupants of high-rise office buildings and the night­time custodial cleaning personnel. This fissure between owner and client on the one hand, and culinary or custodial employees on the other, is likely to include not only language, but citizenship as well as religion, culture, and ethnicity.

Religion and language are especially important cleavages. The situation in Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Cyprus, the Israeli West Bank, and Quebec, to name just a few of the world’s current national clashes, is distinguished in being subject to no significant cross­cutting. All categories of ethno­linguistic­ religious cleavage are congruent and therefore bipolar and subject to intolerant total black and white judgments. All Quebecois are Francophone and Roman Catholic; Anglophone Canadians are overwhelmingly Protestant. All culturally Turkish Cypriots speak Turkish and are Moslem; all Greek Cypriots speak the Hellenic tongue and are Greek Orthodox. All Armenians speak Armenian and are Christians; all Azerbaijanis speak Azeri and are Moslems. In the former Yugoslavia all Croats are Roman Catholic and all Serbs are Serbian Orthodox. During the Partisan War of 1941­1945 and in the current fighting in Bosnia, it sufficed to ask a child how she makes her cross to distinguish Croat from Serb and to decide to kill or let live.

By contrast, in Switzerland the core cantons of “Inner Switzerland” are German­ speaking and Roman Catholic while other important German speaking areas such as Zurich, Basel, and Bern are Protestant. The Francophone area also has predominantly Protestant cantons, such as Geneva, the birthplace of the Calvinist Reformation, but Catholic cantons as well. Thus in Switzerland the religious division, instead of being congruent with cultural linguistic cleavages, cuts across them. In the Italian Alto Adige­South Tyrol both the Germanic and the Italian population are Roman Catholic. Because any individual is subject to cross pressures of various identifications and allegiances, cross­cutting encourages conciliation. Moderate attitudes and actions are fostered and often

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prevail by mobilizing like introjects and common inner objects.

Hostility and aggression in the politico­ social world are created through murderous rage, persecutions and foulness, in the conscious and unconscious inner fantasies of the perpetrators. A moment’s reflection will convince us that we are only able to postulate a characteristic or trait in another because it has been to some degree known to us in fantasy. Peoples and nations find in their minorities and in their neighbors an available and vulnerable target on whom to project their bad internal objects ­ their hatred and urge to kill as well as their depreciated sense of inferiority, of being despised as slovenly parasites, cheats, and unscrupulous characters. In the passion of nationalism the enemy within becomes the enemy without.

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Original Footnotes

¹ Walter P. Metzger, “Generalizations about National Character: An Analytical Essay,” in Louis Gottschalk, ed. Generalization in the Writing of History (University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 96­97.

² See Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (Yale University Press, 1977).

³ Synopticus (Renner pseudonym), Zur osterreichischen Nationalitatenfrage (Vienna, 1899); Stoat and Nation (Vienna, 1899); Der Kampf der osterreichischen Nationen urn den Stoat (Vienna, 1902). Peter Loewenberg, “Karl Renner and the Politics of Accommodation: Moderation Versus Revenge,” in Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 22 (1991), pp. 35­56.

Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitatenfrage and die Sozial­ demokratie (1907), Werkausgabe (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1975), I. Peter Loewenberg, “Austro­Marxism and Revolution: Otto Bauer, Freud’s ‘Dora’ Case, and the Crisis of the First Austrian Republic” in Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 161­204.

⁴ For an anthropological perspective on the cultural differences and conflicts between these two peoples, see John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf, The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (Academic Press, 1974); and Eric R. Wolf, “Cultural Dissonance in the Italian Alps,” Comparative Studies in Society and History: An International Quarterly, 5 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1962­63), pp. 1­14.

⁵ Jonathan Steinberg, Why Switzerland? (Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 72.