anderson_benedict_exodus.pdf

ExodusAuthor(s): Benedict AndersonSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 314-327Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343913Accessed: 04/09/2009 19:55

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Exodus

Benedict Anderson

I saw a place where English Cattle had been: that was a comfort to me, such as it was: quickly after that we came to an English Path, which so took with me, that I thought I could have freely lyen down and dyed. That day, a little after noon, we came to Squaukheag, where the Indians quickly spread themselves over the deserted En- glish Fields.'

Thus, as remembered subsequently, was the experience of the nineteen-

year old, newly married Mary Rowlandson as her Narragansett abduc- tors brought her with them through central Massachusetts-perhaps twenty miles north of today's turnpike-in mid-February 1675. One ob- serves the strange, thoroughly creole crosscurrents in her words. On the one hand, she feels no need to explain to her readers where Squaukheag is located, let alone how to pronounce this strikingly un-European top- onym. Her familiarity is not surprising; Squakheag is, so to speak, that

place down the road, since she had been born and spent all her young life in the no less un-European Massachusetts. On the other hand, she sees before her "English Cattle," an "English Path," and "deserted En- glish Fields," though she has never been within three thousand miles of England. These are not pluckings from the Cotswolds or the Downs-

1. Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, 1682, in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-99, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (1913; New York, 1952), p. 132. Squaukheag is today Squakeag, near Bear's Plain, Northfield, Massachusetts.

Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994) ? 1994 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/94/2002-0002$01.00. All rights reserved.

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Winter 1994 315

real places, as it were-but acts of imagination that would never have occurred to a young minister's wife in seventeenth-century Gloucester- shire or Surrey. They are, in a way, getting ready to be "English" exactly because they are in Massachusetts, not in England, and are so because

they bear for Mary the traces of her "English" people's agricultural la- bors. But we can also guess that up till the point of her abduction she had thought matter-of-factly about cattle as cattle and fields as fields. Her

"nationalizing" moment comes when, in the power of the Narragansetts, she is torn out of the quotidian and-right in the very midst of her native Massachusetts-finds herself in fearful exile. She struggles along a path that becomes English at the exact juncture where she is sure she may not lie down and die upon it. When she is finally ransomed and returns to her community of origin, her "nationalist" frisson vanishes. For she has

managed, more or less, to come home. But this home is Lancaster; it is not (yet) America.

The paradox here is that we today can without much trouble read

Mary Rowlandson as American precisely because, in captivity, she saw

English fields before her. Acton was on the mark when he wrote, two hundred years later, that "exile is the nursery of nationality."2

On the other side of the Atlantic, Mary Rowlandson's narrative was

published within a year of the Massachusetts first edition and proved very popular, accumulating thirty editions over the eighteenth century.3 A rapidly growing reading public in the recently united kingdom-Mary was

captured two decades before Scotland-was becoming aware of anoma- lous English-writing women who had never been to England but who could be dragged through English fields by "savages." What were they? Were they really English? The photographic negative of "the colonial," the non-English Englishwoman, was coming into view.

Because the Spanish conquests in the Caribbean and southern Amer- icas had begun a century before permanent English settlements in the

2. John Dalberg-Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History, ed. William H. McNeill (Chicago, 1967), p. 146.

3. See Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley, 1992), p. 204 and the references there cited.

Benedict Anderson is the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of Interna- tional Studies at Cornell University and a citizen of Eire. He is the author of Java in a Time of Revolution (1972), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; revised and expanded edition 1991), In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (1985), and Language and Power: Exploring Indonesian Political Cultures (1990). He is currently at work on a book about nationalisms in the Philippines.

Critical Inquiry

316 Benedict Anderson Exodus

North, non-Spanish Spaniards began to loom up very early. Already in 1612, the madrileno Dominican theologian Juan de la Puente was writing that "the heavens of America induce inconstancy, lasciviousness and lies: vices characteristic of the Indians and which the constellations make characteristic of the Spaniards who are born and bred there."4 The creole was

being invented figuratively, later to be realized culturally and politically. We can see here-especially if we recall the century-long rage at de la Puente made possible by the quiet two-way hiss of print across the Atlan- tic-the real historical origins of the "native," a persona that persists under sometimes other names well into our own times, in Europe as much as anywhere else.

For the native is, like colonial and creole, a white-on-black negative. The nativeness of natives is always unmoored, its real significance hybrid and oxymoronic. It appears when Moors, heathens, Mohammedans, sav-

ages, Hindoos, and so forth are becoming obsolete, that is, not only when, in the proximity of real print-encounters, substantial numbers of Viet- namese read, write, and perhaps speak French but also when Czechs do the same with German and Jews with Hungarian. Nationalism's purities (and thus also cleansings) are set to emerge from exactly this hybridity.

What set all these engines in motion? To put it a bit differently, what made Mary Rowlandson's-and in due course London's-unstable En- glishness possible? The simple answer is capitalism, the institutions of which enabled the transportation, from the mid-sixteenth century on, of millions of free, indentured, and enslaved bodies across thousands of miles of water. But the materialities of this transportation-ships, fire- arms, and navigational equipment-were guided by the mathematically inspired Mercatorian map and the vast, accumulating knowledge stored and disseminated in print. It was also through print moving back and forth across the ocean that the unstable, imagined worlds of En-

glishnesses and Spanishnesses were created. The essential nexus of long-distance transportation and print capi-

talist communications prepared the grounds on which, by the end of the eighteenth century, the first nationalist movements flowered. It is striking that this flowering took place first in North America and later in the Cath- olic, Iberian colonies to the south, the economies of all of which were pre- industrial. Nothing underlines this process better than the fact that in the second half of the eighteenth century there were more presses in colonial North America than in the metropole. So it was that by 1765, in the words of Michael Warner, "print had come to be seen as indispensable to political life, and could appear to such men as Adams to be the primary agent of world emancipation. What makes this transformation of the press par- ticularly remarkable is that, unlike the press explosion of the nineteenth

4. Quoted in D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 200.

Winter 1994 317

century, it involved virtually no technological improvements in the trade."5

These facts in themselves strongly suggest the untenability of Ernest Gellner's argument that industrialism was the historical source of nationalism's emergence.6 (One might add that most of the zones in which early nineteenth-century European nationalisms became visible-say Ireland, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia-were those most innocent of "industrial progress.") Nonetheless, industrialism did, at a later stage, become of signal importance for the spread and transformation of nationalism, first in Europe, afterwards in Asia and Africa. It did so by creating, directly and indirectly, new types of exile.

In his bizarre 1847 novel, Tancred, or The New Crusade, Benjamin Dis- raeli observed that "London is a modern Babylon."7 In this oxymoron, the echoes of a captivity narrative are as loud as those of a proverbial trope for luxury and corruption. It sprang quite logically from the cele- brated subtitle of Sybil, or The Two Nations, which Disraeli had published two years earlier. Deepening industrial capitalism had by then created within a single, very small territorial state-smaller, if we exclude Ire- land, than Pennsylvania and New York combined-"two nations," however, that in no way corresponded to any putative ethnic or religious communities. When Friedrich Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842 and began his studies of the condition of the working class, George Stephen- son had preceded him. The world's textile capital already had a railway station. The locomotive had begun its world-historical mission of trans- porting millions of rural villagers into urban slums, a mission scarcely less epochal than that which the transatlantic sailing ship had performed over the preceding three centuries.8 Only a minority would return to end their

5. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth- Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 32.

6. See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983). 7. Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847; London, 1894), p. 378; hereaf-

ter abbreviated as T Regarding his England and his Europe as mortally threatened by Enlightenment rationalism, bourgeois commercialism, and the heritage of the French Revo- lution, the young Lord Montacute sets off in his yacht for the Holy Land, seeking spiritual revival in "the only portion of the world which the Creator of that world has deigned to visit" (T, p. 421.) This quest leads him into proto-T. E. Lawrence political adventures in Palestine and Lebanon, in which he is guided by wise, courageous Hebrews and from which he has to be rescued by Mum and Dad, the Duchess and Duke of Bellamont. What is especially striking about the novel is the manner in which the Jewish Disraeli, Anglicized at his father's orders by baptism into the Church of England at the age of thirteen, discovers his

"ethnicity" in Babylonian exile. Montacute, immensely rich, aristocratic, ur-English but, as it were, spiritually Jewish-Disraeli repeatedly insists that Christ and the Apostles were all

Jews-is a hilariously snobbish self-projection of the future Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom.

8. How quickly this profane mission was understood is entertainingly shown by the conversation in Tancred in which the hero suggests to Lady Bertie and Bellair that she and her husband join him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem:

Critical Inquiry

318 Benedict Anderson

days in those cemeteries where the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept. How the novel experience of industrial life radically transformed their lives and how this transformation made them, as it were, available for nationalism is splendidly described by Gellner, but his description should be read under the sign of exile. It was beginning to become possible to see "English fields" in England-from the window of a railway carriage.

Meanwhile, exile of another sort was emerging from the very wealth that industrial capitalism was producing for European states. For this wealth was making possible the spread of a centralized, standardized, steeply hierarchical system of public education. E. J. Hobsbawm reminds us that at the time of Tancred's publication, on the eve of the upheavals of 1848, there were only 48,000 or so university students in all of Europe, a number substantially lower than the current enrollment at Ohio State University.9 But in the second half of the century, ministries of education sprang up like mushrooms everywhere-Sweden in 1852, England in 1870, and France in 1882-and children began to be compelled to mi- grate to schools.10

When the elderly Filipino Pedro Calosa was interviewed in the mid- 1960s and asked to compare the conditions of that time with those of the uprising of 1931 that he had led against American colonialism, he observed with nostalgic satisfaction that "there were no teenagers" then." For this new human type-nomad between childhood and working adulthood-was then only beginning to emerge from the imperialists' novel apparatus for mass education. More generally, however, the teen- ager was, from the second half of the nineteenth century, the site on which the state imposed its standardized vernacular. Whether this vernacular was a socially valorized dialect of a language widely understood among the state's subjects (say, the King's English), or a vernacular determined from among a multiplicity of vernaculars (say, German in Austria- Hungary), the effect was typically to restratify and rationalize the social and political hierarchy of vernaculars and dialects; all the more so in that the new education was increasingly linked to employment possibilities

"That can never be," said Lady Bertie; "Augustus will never hear of it; he never could be absent more than six weeks from London, he misses his clubs so. IfJerusalem were only a place one could get at, something might be done; if there were a railroad to it for example."

"A railroad!" exclaimed Tancred, with a look of horror. "A railroad to Jerusalem!" "No, I suppose there can never be one," continued Lady Bertie in a musing tone.

"There is no traffic." [T, p. 162]

9. See E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New York, 1962), pp. 166-67. 10. A characteristic industrial side to this process was the official invention of adult

education in this era. 11. "An Interview with Pedro Calosa," in David Sturtevant, Popular Uprisings in the Phil-

ippines, 1840-1940 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), p. 276.

Exodus

Winter 1994 319

and opportunities for social mobility. Small wonder that people were be-

coming ever more self-conscious about their linguistic practices and the

consequences of those practices. Quite often the effect was a kind of exile. The more a standardized vernacular ceased to be merely the internal

language of officials and became the official language of a propagandiz- ing state, the more likely became the emergence in Old Europe of some-

thing reminiscent of the creole or native: the not-really-German German, the not-quite-Italian Italian, the non-Spanish Spaniard. As in the Ameri- cas, a kind of unstable negativity appeared. Nothing, therefore, is less

surprising than that the nationalist movements which transformed the

map of Europe by 1919 were so often led by young bilinguals, a pattern to be followed after 1919 in Asia and Africa. How could a boy who learned Czech from his mother and German from his schooling unlearn a Czech that had left no contaminating traces on his German-speaking classmates? How could he not see his Czech as though in exile, through the inverted telescope of his German?

From the perspective sketched out so far, one might be inclined to view the rise of nationalist movements and their variable culminations in successful nation-states as a project for coming home from exile, for the resolution of hybridity, for a positive printed from a negative in the dark- room of political struggle. If one migrated from a village in the delta of the Ganges and went to schools in Calcutta, Delhi, and perhaps Cam-

bridge; if one bore the indelible contaminations of English and Bengali; if one was destined to be cremated in Bombay, where was one intelligibly to be home, where could one unitarily be born, live, and die, except in "India"?

At the same time, for all the reasons just detailed, home as it emerged was less experienced than imagined, and imagined through a complex of mediations and representations. At the simplest level this imagining occurred through visual symbols such as flags, maps, statuary, micro- cosmic ceremonials; at a more profound level, through "self-" and "rep- resentative" government. The ingenuity of the mechanisms of popular suffrage seems to me to lie in the double duty they perform. Individually, legislators represent particular interests, localities, and prejudices; collec-

tively and anonymously, as Parliament, Diet, or Congress, they represent a unitary nation or sovereignty.'2

One can thus see why nation-statehood was so central to the

nineteenth-century nationalist projects that destroyed the huge, polyglot, imperial-dynastic systems inherited from the age of absolutism. For it was felt both to represent, with its characteristically republican institutions, a newfound alignment of imagined home and imagined homeowners and

12. Such is the general pattern, although there are significant exceptions, such as the House of Councillors in Japan and the Senate in the Philippines, where all members are elected from a single, nation-wide constituency.

Critical Inquiry


to guarantee that stabilized alignment through the organized, systematic deployment of its powers and resources. Hence the plausibility of the Listian dream of the self-supplying national economy, guarded moatlike

by the tariff. Hence too, one suspects, the Listian morphology of railway systems, mapped inward from state peripheries toward state capitals and often marked off, zollverein style, at borders by differential gauges.13 If this surmise is right, one might view the locomotive along with the printed newspaper as the material points ofjuncture between the classical nation- state project and capitalism at the stage of primary industrialism.

The irony, however, is that, just as this classical nation-state project was coming fully into its own with the formation of the League of Nations in 1919, advancing capitalism was beginning to sap its foundations. As in an earlier age, the most visible transformations took place in the areas of

transportation and communications. On land, motor vehicles increas-

ingly displaced the locomotive, while the vast proliferation of macadam- ized road surfaces on which they sped were never gauge-calibrated to national frontiers. In the air, commercial aviation was, with the exception of a few very large and rich nations like the United States, primarily transnational from its earliest days. One flew to leave or to return to one's nation-state rather than to move about within it, and "national airspace" had only a short plausible life before the advent of the satellite made it obsolete. The pace and thrust of these changes is vividly demonstrated

by the statistics on the admission of nonimmigrant aliens into historically immigrant America:

1931-40 1,574,071 1941-50 2,461,359 1951-60 7,113,023 1961-70 24,107,224 1971-79 61,640,389 1981-91 142,076,53014

(The 1930s were the first decade in which nonimmigrants outnumbered immigrants, and they already did so by a ratio of three to one.)

Radio brought even illiterate populations within the purview of the mass media, and its reception was never effectively limited to nation-state audiences. No newspaper could ever hope to command the range of

planetary acolytes that became available to the BBC or the Voice of

13. To be sure, at least some railway systems, such as that of Germany, were substan-

tially mapped for strategic military purposes. Differential gauges promised to bring one's own troops rapidly to one's threatened borders and at the same time block the enemy's railway penetration.

14. Information Please Almanac, Atlas, and Yearbook, 1987 (Boston, 1987), p. 787, and Infor- mation Please Almanac, Atlas, and Yearbook, 1993 (Boston, 1993), p. 830. These tables lack figures for 1980, which probably were somewhere between eight and nine million.

Winter 1994 321

America. Subsequently, the telephone and telex, film, television, cassettes, video recorders, and the personal computer accelerated and enormously magnified nearly everything that radio had initiated.

These developments have had and will continue to have vast conse-

quences precisely because they are integral components of the transna- tionalization of advanced capitalism and of the steepening economic stratification of the global economy. As things now stand, less than 25 percent of the world's population appropriates 85 percent of world in- come, and the gap between rich and poor is steadily widening. Between 1965 and 1990 the difference between living standards in Europe and those in India and China increased from a ratio of forty to one up to

seventy to one. In the 1980s, over 800 million people-more than the

population of the United States, the European Community, and Japan combined-"became yet more grindingly poor, and one out of three children went hungry."15 Yet, thanks to the airplane, the bus, the truck, and even the old locomotive, this inequality and misery is in all senses closer to privilege and wealth than ever before. Hence migration has moved not, as in earlier centuries, outwards to peripheries in the New World or the Antipodes but inwards toward the metropolitan cores.

Between 1840 and 1930, about 37,500,000 immigrants, overwhelm-

ingly from Europe, came to the United States; approximately 416,000 per annum on average. In the 1970s, the annual figure was almost 500,000 and in the 1980s almost 740,000; 80 percent of the newcomers came from the "Third World."16 Paul Kennedy notes that some demogra- phers currently believe that as many as 15 million immigrants will enter America in each of the next three decades, that is, at an annual average rate of 1.5 million, double that of the 1980s.17 Western Europe absorbed over 20 million immigrants in the three decades between the end of World War II and the oil crisis of the early 1970s. (The figure would have been much higher had it not been for the helpfulness of Stalin's iron curtain.) But in the latter part of the 1980s the numbers have swelled and will probably do so at least through the 1990s. Of Germany's 79 million inhabitants, 5.2 million (7 percent) are foreign immigrants; for France the figures are 3.6 (7 percent) out of 56 million; for the United Kingdom, 1.8 (2 percent) out of 57 million; for Switzerland, 1.1 (16.3 percent) out of 6.8 million.18 (Even insular, restrictive Japan is said to have a million

15. Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London, 1992), p. 353. See as well the sources there cited.

16. "Immigration," The New Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia, 25 vols. (New York, 1945- 46), 19:6892; The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1992 (New York, 1992), p. 137.

17. See Paul Kennedy, "The American Prospect," New York Review of Books, 4 Mar. 1993, p. 50.

18. See "In Europe's Upheaval, Doors Close to Foreigners," New York Times, 10 Feb. 1993, pp. Al, A14. Note that these figures do not include an estimated 25 million political refugees around the world, mostly living in squalid, "temporary" dwellings outside their homelands.

Critical Inquiry


or so legal and illegal alien residents.) And the economic and political implosion of the Soviet Union is already moving people in a way that no fin-de-siecle continental system can stem.

At the same time, the communications revolution of our time has profoundly affected the subjective experience of migration. The Moroc- can construction worker in Amsterdam can every night listen to Rabat's broadcasting services and has no difficulty in buying pirated cassettes of his country's favorite singers. The illegal alien, Yakuza-sponsored, Thai bartender in a Tokyo suburb shows his Thai comrades karaoke video- tapes just made in Bangkok. The Filipina maid in Hong Kong phones her sister in Manila and sends money electronically to her mother in Cebu. The successful Indian student in Vancouver can keep in daily touch with her former Delhi classmates by electronic mail. To say nothing of an evergrowing blizzard of faxes. It is as if, were Mary Rowlandson alive today, she could see, in her small apartment bedroom, in perfect electronic safety on the screen beyond her toes, "truly" English fields and cattle.

But of course the meaning would have changed completely, not least because she can only see what the masters of the screen choose to let her see. Her eye can never gaze more widely than its frame. The "En- glishness" of the fields comes not from within her but from a narrating voice outside her. More concretely, consider the well-known photograph of the lonely Peloponnesian gastarbeiter sitting in his dingy room in, say, Frankfurt. The solitary decoration on his wall is a resplendent Lufthansa travel poster of the Parthenon, which invites him, in German, to take a "sun-drenched holiday" in Greece. He may well never have seen the Parthenon, but framed by Lufthansa the poster confirms for him and for any visitor a Greek identity that perhaps only Frankfurt has encouraged him to assume. At the same time, it reminds him that he is only a couple of air hours from Greece, and that if he saves enough Lufthansa will be glad to assist him to have a fortnight's "sunny holiday" in his heimat. He knows too, most likely, that he will then return to exile in Frankfurt. Or is it that, in the longer run, he will find himself in brief annual exile in the Peloponnese? Or in both places? And what about his children?

Before turning to the political consequences of this broad sketch of post-1930s nomadism, two smaller but important related effects of postindustrial capitalism need briefly to be underscored. Consider the two most widely prevalent, quite modern official documents of personal identity: the birth certificate and the passport. Both were born in the nationalist nineteenth century and later became interlinked. It is true that in the Christianized regions of the world the registration of births long preceded the rise of capitalism. But these births were recorded locally and ecclesiastically in parish churches; their registration, foreshadowing im- minent baptisms, signified the appearance of Christian souls in new cor- poreal forms. In the nineteenth century, however, registration was taken

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over by states that were increasingly assuming a national coloring. In in-

dustrially preeminent England, for example, the registrar general's office was created only in 1837. Compulsory registration of all births, whether to be followed by baptisms or not, did not come until 1876. Identifying each baby's father and place of birth, the state's certificates created the

founding documents for the infant's inclusion in or exclusion from citi-

zenship (through jus sanguinis orjus soli). (He or she was no longer born in the parish of Egham but in the United Kingdom.) The passport, product of the vectoral convergence of migration and nationalism in an industrial age, was ready to confirm the baby's political identity as it passed into adulthood.

The nexus of birth certificate and passport was institutionalized in an era in which women had no legal rights to political participation and the patriarchal family was the largely unquestioned norm. But in our time all this has radically changed. When the League of Nations was founded-and female suffrage was coming into its own-the ratio of di- vorces to marriages in the United States was about one to eight; today it is virtually one to two. The percentage of babies born to never-married mothers has increased spectacularly from 4.2 percent in 1960 to 30.6

percent in 1990.19 The intranational as well as international nomadism of modern life has also contributed to making the nineteenth-century birth certificate a sort of counterfeit money. If, for example, we read that Mary Jones was born on 25 October 1970 in Duluth, to Robert Mason and

Virginia Jones, or even Robert and Virginia Mason, we cannot noncha-

lantly infer that she was conceived in that same Duluth, was brought up there, or lives there now. We have no idea whether her grandparents are buried in Duluth, and, even if they were, we have few grounds for sup- posing that Mary will some day be buried alongside them. Is Virginia still a Mason? Or a Jones? Or something else again? What are the chances that Mary has much beyond periodic long-distance telephone contact with either Robert or Virginia? How far is she identifiable, also to herself, as a Duluthian, a Mason, or a Jones?

The counterfeit quality or, shall we say, the low market value of the birth certificate is perhaps confirmed by the relative rareness of its for-

gery. Conversely, the huge volume of passport forgeries and the high prices they command show that in our age, when everyone is supposed to belong to some one of the United Nations, these documents have high truth-claims. But they are also counterfeit in the sense that they are less and less attestations of citizenship, let alone of loyalty to a protective nation-state, than of claims to participation in labor markets. Portuguese and Bangladeshi passports, even when genuine, tell us little about loyal- ties or habitus, but they tell us a great deal about the relative likelihood

19. Data drawn from Bureau of the Census figures cited in The World Almanac and Book

of Facts, 1992, pp. 942, 944.

Critical Inquiry


of their holders being permitted to seek jobs in Milan or Copenhagen. The segregated queues that all of us experience at airport immigration barricades mark economic status far more than any political attachments. In effect, they figure differential tariffs on human labor.

Let me now turn finally to the political realm. The processes expli- cated above may be unraveling the classical nineteenth-century nationalist project-which aimed for the fullest alignment of habitus, culture, attachment, and exclusive political participation-on at least two distinct but related political sites.

The first site is more or less congruent with the postindustrial cores. During the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries the so- called countries of immigration-the Americas, primarily, but also the antipodes-had a remarkable capacity to naturalize and nationalize their millions of immigrants. The names Galtieri, Eisenhauer, Fujimori, Van Buren, O'Higgins, and Trudeau tell the tale. But the birth certificate then had a primarily political significance, as we can see from the constitu- tional proviso that United States presidents be born inside that nation's borders. One was, thus, an American or one was not. Furthermore, military participation in the service of a state other than the United States was subject to the legal sanction of loss of citizenship, not that this was always rigidly enforced. When did this regime begin to weaken? Perhaps in our epochal 1930s, when Americans were permitted to join the Inter- national Brigade in the Spanish Civil War? Or in the later 1940s when Americans were tacitly permitted to participate in the defense of the infant state of Israel? But these breaks in the established rules were, I think, permissible precisely because of a confidence that these extralegal affairs were minor matters, concerning unimportant people with rather low visi- bility. Besides, the Americanness of the Americans involved was never seriously in question. These conditions began to change, however, after the middle of the 1960s. Andreas Papandreou started life as a Greek citizen, became an American citizen, and then, when opportunity beckoned, became again a Greek citizen and prime minister of Greece. A certain protocol is still evident in his progress. But what are we to make of the 1993 Cambodian presidential candidacy of self-made Long Beach mil- lionaire Kim Kethavy? In the solemn words of the New York Times, he "carries an American passport.... The offices of his campaign headquar- ters bloom with American flags. (Under American immigration law, Mr. Kethavy would probably be forced to give up his United States citizenship in the unlikely event that he won.)"20 Everything here is indicative: Mr. Kethavy's citizenship is in parentheses and the newspaper of record thinks that he will only "probably" be forced to give it up if he becomes

20. "For the Cambodian Vote, a Fourth of July Flavor," New York Times, 17 Feb. 1993, p. A4.

Critical Inquiry Winter 1994 325

Cambodia's president. Nothing suggests that the Times of the 1990s finds

anything odd or discomforting in the behavior of Mr. Kethavy-or of the American government. After all, American citizens Milan Panic and Mohammed Sacirbey have recently served as premier of Serbia and Bos- nian ambassador to the United Nations, while Rein Taagepera ran unsuc-

cessfully for president of Estonia from a tenured professorship within the University of California at Irvine. Nor is this a uniquely American

phenomenon; the Canadian citizen and computer systems capitalist Stan- islaw Tyminski ran against Lech Walesa for the presidency of Poland.

The other side of this coin is the recent emergence in the United States and other older nation-states of an ethnicity that appears as a bas- tard Smerdyakov to classical nationalism's Dmitri Karamazov. One emblem of the American variant is perhaps the espionage trial of Jonathan Pollard a few years back. In the age of classical nationalism, the very idea that there could be something praiseworthy in an American citizen's spy- ing on America for another country would have seemed grotesque. But to the substantial number of Jewish-Americans who felt sympathetic to Pollard, the resentful spy was understood as representing a transnational

ethnicity. What else could so subversively blur American and Israeli citi-

zenship? Another emblem is the colossal nonblack audience magnetized in 1977 by Alex Haley's TV miniseries "Roots." (The final episode was watched by an astonishing 36,000,000 households.) The purpose of the

program was to counter melting pot ideology by underlining the continu- ous "Africanness" that Haley's ancestors maintained as it were despite their Americanization. There can be little doubt that the popularity of "Roots" owed much to this transposable theme, given the rush, especially during the 1980s, of thoroughly American youngsters to lobby for various ethnic studies programs at universities and their eagerness to study languages that their immediate parents had so often been determined to abandon. Out of these and other impulses has emerged the ideological program of multiculturalism, which implies that a simple nineteenth-century version of Americanism is no longer adequate or acceptable.

The shift from, say, American through Armenian-American through Armenian-American is being accentuated both by the general revolution of transportation and communications discussed earlier, and by the recent disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Cleveland, for

example, contains more people of Slovene descent than does Ljubljana, and now that Slovenia has become an independent state, being Slovene in Cleveland, and in the United States, assumes a heightened significance. Such ethnicities typically share a strongly fictive character with "Roots." We can easily be amused by the determinedly "Irish" Bostonian who knows no Irish literature, plays no Irish sports, pays no Irish taxes, serves in no Irish army, does not vote in Irish elections, and has only holiday conceptions of the Old Sow as she is today. It is less amusing,


however, to reflect on the fact that the visible presence of gays and lesbi- ans at St. Patrick's Day celebrations in Cork has done nothing to temper the passions surrounding sister celebrations in New York.

In Europe comparable tendencies are at work and may even be accentuated within the European Community by economic integration and the free movement of labor. The National Front, Le Pen's movement, and the rise of right-wing extremism in Germany are all signs of the "ethnicization" process. 21 For the thrust of their propaganda is essentially to draw a sharp line between the political nation and a putative original ethnos. Even if a black in the United Kingdom was born there, went to schools and university there, pays taxes there, votes there, and will be buried there, for the National Front he or she can never be genuinely English. Similarly in Le Pen's imagination, France is today teeming with aliens, not

immigrants still carrying Algerian passports, but "non-French" citizens of

political France. We could thus conceive of him looking out of the window of a railway carriage and seeing not fields, not even "French fields," but "dammit, French fields." In these movements racism is a very strong ele- ment, but I think the racism will prove in the longer run to be less im-

portant than ethnicization as Europeans circulate more massively around Europe.

The second type of political consequence of all the rapid changes I have been discussing concerns the migrants themselves. Not least as a result of the ethnicization of political life in the wealthy, postindustrial states, what one can call long-distance nationalism is visibly emerging. This type of politics, directed mainly toward the former Second and Third Worlds, pries open the classical nation-state project from a different direction. A striking illustration is the fateful recent destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, which has plunged India into her biggest crisis since Partition. The dismantling, which was carefully planned and involved extensive rehearsal and training by retired military and police personnel, was officially sponsored by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), which "raised huge sums of money from its supporters in North America and Britain."22 Needless to say, the vast majority of such supporters are Indians living overseas.23 Many of the most uncom-

21. The Lega Lombarda of the late 1980s, now the Lega Nord, while not strictly analo-

gous to these movements, nonetheless shows that something close to ethnicization can break down even a supposed core nation. For the Lega's attitudes to southern Italians are often

rabidly contemptuous, as if the latter were of another, lesser breed. 22. Praful Bidwai, "Bringing Down the Temple: Democracy at Risk in India," The Na-

tion, 25 Jan. 1993, p. 86. 23. The numbers of such people are very substantial. The total figure for South Asians

outside South Asia is close to 8.7 million. The breakdown is as follows: Europe 1,482,034 (of which 1,260,000 are in the United Kingdom); Africa 1,389,722; Asia 1,862,654 (of which 1,170,000 are in Malaysia); Middle East 1,317,141, mostly in the Gulf states; Latin America and the Caribbean 957,330 (of which 730,350 are in Guyana and Trinidad); North America 728,500 (of which 500,000 are in the United States); and the Pacific 954,109 (of which

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Winter 1994 327

promising, fanatical adherents of an independent Khalistan do not live in the Punjab but have prosperous businesses in Melbourne and Chicago. The Tigers in Jaffna are stiffened in their violent struggles by Tamil communities in Toronto, London, and elsewhere all linked on the computer by Tamilnet. Consider the malign role of Croats not only in Germany but also in Australia and North America in financing and arming Franco Tudjman's breakaway state and pushing Germany and Austria into a fateful, premature recognition.

It would obviously be a mistake to assume that long-distance nationalism is necessarily extremist. There were substantial numbers of Filipi- nos outside the Philippines who contributed, not from political exile, to the struggle against Marcos; the Philippine economy today is heavily de- pendent on remittances sent in by such people from the Gulf, Italy, Saudi Arabia, England, California, Hong Kong, Japan, and Spain. Financial and other support for the democracy movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre also came from many Chinese not resident in China and often, indeed, citizens of other states.

Nonetheless, in general, today's long-distance nationalism strikes one as a probably menacing portent for the future. First of all, it is the product of capitalism's remorseless, accelerating transformation of all human societies. Second, it creates a serious politics that is at the same time radically unaccountable. The participant rarely pays taxes in the country in which he does his politics; he is not answerable to its judicial system; he probably does not cast even an absentee ballot in its elections because he is a citizen in a different place; he need not fear prison, torture, or death, nor need his immediate family. But, well and safely positioned in the First World, he can send money and guns, circulate propaganda, and build intercontinental computer information circuits, all of which can have incalculable consequences in the zones of their ultimate destina- tions. Third, his politics, unlike those of activists for global human rights or environmental causes, are neither intermittent nor serendipitous. They are deeply rooted in a consciousness that his exile is self-chosen and that the nationalism he claims on E-mail is also the ground on which an embattled ethnic identity is to be fashioned in the ethnicized nation-state that he remains determined to inhabit. That same metropole which mar- ginalizes and stigmatizes him simultaneously enables him to play, in a flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero.

839,340 are in Fiji). Professor Myron Weiner kindly informs me that although this table counts South Asians, the major areas of emigration have long been inside the present borders of India. He also believes the figures to be too conservative: for example, the recent United States census shows the Indian population in America to be close to 900,000. Most likely, in his estimate, the true total for Indians living overseas is between 11 and 12 million. See Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach, and Steven Vertovec, "Introduction: Themes in the Study of the South Asian Diaspora," in South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, ed. Clarke, Peach, and Vertovec (Cambridge, 1990), p. 2.

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