the charisma of the nation odf

8/3/2019 The Charisma of the Nation Odf

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On the Charismatic Nation yYADD S YADAand the Success ofUribismo in recent Colombian Politics

Gregory J LoboUniversidad de los AndesBogot, ColombiaAnd I can do thisno problem itlooks likeAbstract:My paper argues that it is the nation idea itself that is charismatic. I develop this by first explaining the concept of nationism, which Iestablish as the ideological condition of possibility for nationalism. Nationism is the more fundamental episteme, even though as yetit is unthought and unrecognised in nation studies. Nationism is to nationalism as deism is to any particular religion, and allows us to

understand that it is the concept or idea of nation that is charismatic, that is irrationally powerful, to which we are inexplicablyenthralled. I explicate this idea using my research in Colombia. I argue that the purported successes of President Uribe a manquite widely held by Colombians (but not by non-Colombian observers) to be charismatic of Colombia, are, in fact, betterexplained by his paratactical relationship with the idea of the nation in all its enigmatic utopian meaninglessness, than throughascription of the charismatic quality to the person himself. This is not to deny that people can be charismatic, but only to the extentthat they are subsumed by an idea that has, for whatever reason, a grip on the group in which the ostensibly charismatic person isactive.

Instead of applying the term charisma to individuals, as Weber (1978), Shils (1975) and Greenfeld (2006)do, I want to suggest that we think of it in relation to ideas and how ideas relate people to each other. Thisview, which one might provocatively say makes Webers insights more properly sociological, is notnecessarily new, but it is somewhat of a minority position. Some time ago, for instance, Horkheimer andAdorno had already observed that the 'metaphysical charisma of the Fhrer invented by the sociology ofreligion has finally turned out to be no more than the omnipresence of his speeches on the radio, whichare a demoniacal parody of the omnipresence of the divine spirit' (1989: 159). What they imply is that,

pace Weberian sociology (referred to in the quotation as the sociology of religion), charisma is not apersonal quality, and that, by extension, Hitler was not a charismatic person. Would that he were so, forthat would exculpate the so many that went along with him. But whatever the errors of exaggeration inGoldhagen (1996), his main assertion that there was a great deal of wilful support for the ideas Hitlerespoused, rather than mere deference to the charismatic powers of the man, stands. If the man wasattractive, it was because the ideas were attractive. Hitlers omnipresent voice was saying something,something about an idea, the Germans and Germany, something about unity and purity, and moreimportantly, necessity. In short, that voice was articulating an imaginary construct that we can name inone word: the nation.

What I am driving at is that we ought to understand ideas, in this case the idea of the nation, ascharismatic, rather than particular persons as being so. What would it mean for something like the nation

to be charismatic? It would mean, most obviously, that it has charisma; and if we can read beyondWebers insistence that this is always a certain quality of an individual personality (1978: 21), that is,beyond his inclination to link it primarily to a person, we will see that it has to do with that which isconsidered extraordinary ... supernatural, superhuman, ... as of divine origin (1978: 21). Nor is thisdisplacement of charisma from the person to the idea just another way of talking about what Weber callsthe charisma of office, the belief in the specific state of grace of a social institution (1978: 1140). Whilemany social practices and offices have been institutionalised qua national institutions and offices, thenation as such has not been, and indeed, could not be so institutionalised. The nation is much more thana social institution, than an office. It is akin, in many respects, to God, an idea that though religions andtheir offices have been institutionalised, escapes institutionalisation as such. To get an idea of therelevance of this comparison, let us look again at the formidable words of the Abb Siys regarding thenation:

The Nation exists before all things and is the origin of all. Its will is always legal, it is the law itself... Nations on earth must be conceived as individuals outside the social bond, or as is said, in thestate of nature. The exercise of their will is free and independent of all civil forms. Existing only inthe natural order, their will, to have its full effect, only needs to possess the naturalcharacteristicsof a will. In whatever manner a nation wills, it suffices that it does will; all forms are valid and itswill is always the supreme law. (as cited in Smith 2001: 43)

The nation, like God, is the origin of all things and is the law itself. Before mere humans get their handson it and turn it into their particular nation (or, in the case of God, their particular God), it is somehowapprehended, a priori, as extraordinary, supernatural, superhuman, divine.


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I want to emphasise here the marked difference between the Abb's and Anderson's more measureddefinition of the nation as an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited andsovereign (1983: 6). True, both point out that the nation is a sovereign entity. But the Abb stresses,against Andersons definition, that the nation is pre-political, that it is in a sense natural. This difference isfundamental insofar as Andersons nation, imagined as a political, that is, as a constructed and contingentcommunity, is always already liberal and tolerant of other nations. Andersons nation recognises the limitsof its sovereignty, while there is nothing to suggest that the Abbs does the same. Anderson stressesadditionally that the nation is imagined as inherentlylimited and goes to explain that he means limited inthe sense of membership in the sense of who can be a part of it rather than with reference to itsgeographic boundaries (1983: 7). The point to be made here, of course, is that these limits onmembership take effect not merely with regard to those who are externally other, but to those who areinternally other. I will make more of this below; suffice to say for now that Andersons definition of thenation does not allow for the use to which the idea of the nation will be put in suppressing and oppressingdissident internal individuals and groups. Finally, Anderson focuses on the notion of community. He iscorrect to do this, but the way he does it is wrong. Despite his obviously deconstructive stance vis--visthe nation, he nonetheless seems to take it largely at its word, as a more or less neutral idea in a worldwhere strife is somehow a contingent phenomenon rather than an ontological fact. The nation, he says, isimagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail ineach, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship (1983: 7). I want to suggest thatit is not a matter ofregardless, that it is precisely because the situation in question is always one of actualinequality and exploitation, that the idea of the nation as a horizontal community is so important. Thehypostatisation of a deep, horizontal comradeship is supposed to trump the otherwise quite empirical

hierarchies that characterise social life in modern societies, and making the former seem somehowephemeral trifles compared with the eternal permanence of the nation.

Indeed, by liberalising the idea of the nation, by arguing that itspoliticaland limitedcharacter aresomehow essential to it, Anderson has in fact stripped the nation of its charismatic force. It is analogousto saying that God is imagined as one among many, that the idea of God is always alreadymultidenominational, that believers in God, by the very nature of their belief, believe also in other Gods. Inso arguing Anderson has, in a sense, shot himself in the foot. For if the nation is what he says it is, thenindeed, the question he poses as to why and how the shrunken imaginings of recent history, suchlimited imaginings, could ever make it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions ofpeople, not so much to kil l, as willingly die (1983: 7), is unanswerable. On the other hand, the nationunderstood as unbound in what we call with the Abb a pre-political sense, as a sort of transcendentand compelling, natural community might indeed have the capacity to obviate experiences of social

stratification; cloud ones moral sense of, on the one hand decency and on the other self preservation,and at once excite and produce deference. It would have, in short, the quality of charisma.If the nation is thus understood, we can see that as the Abb says, it does not matter how it wills, only thatit does will, for howsoever the nation does will, its will must be done. This is the reasoning that constitutesan apologetics for any and all governments, but especially so for those of an authoritarian tendency.Because the nation is such a powerful idea, if one can somehow lay claim to it, make the idea come alive,give it voice, both in relation to external observers and internal constituencies, one can get away with justabout anything. And this is of fundamental importance for understanding modern politics, as I will try toshow below with reference to Colombia.

Here I want to develop a concept which I think may be helpful in the further study of the nation. Theconcept is nationism, which, though it has been used in print before (see, for example, Bien 2005, Fasold1987, Fishman 1976, MacShane 1998 and Miyoshi 2000), has not been developed in the sense proposedhere. Nationism, I in the sense I propose, best captures the notion of the charismatic nation. It can beunderstood by distinguishing it from nationalism. Nationism is not nationalism. Nationalism is in the firstinstance love of one's nation, like patriotism. Loving ones nation one seeks to advance its interests, evenat the expense of ones own, particular interests. In social scientific discourse one might say thatnationalism is the ideology of one's nation, or of one's purported nation. Still, there is likely to be confusionabout the difference or whether there even is a difference between nationism and nationalism. InBreuillys (1994) work, for instance, the difference is plain to see, but elided nevertheless. He writes:


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The term nationalism is used to refer to political movements seeking or exercising state powerand justifying such action with nationalist arguments.

A nationalist argument is a political doctrine built upon three basic assertions:(a)There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character.

(b)The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values.(c)The nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires at least the attainmentof political sovereignty. (1994: 2)

My claim is that these assertions are, in fact, nationistassertions; they are the core principles ofnationism. We can see here then that nationalism always about a specific country/population is builtupon nationism, even though the latter is not named. Nationalism is about how we understand ournation. Nationism is about how we understand reality, the world. Nationism precedes nationalism in thesame way that any specific religion is always preceded, logically at least, by a prior belief in god as such.That is, nationism is to nationalism as deism is to any specific religion. The former, in each case, is thecondition of possibility of the latter, though in the case of religionists many are loathe to admit it.Nationism is the universal form of a discourse about being in the world, while nationalism is its particularform. In the same way that we distinguish red from pink, nationism must be distinguished fromnationalism. That we are in fact talking about two different (albeit intimately related) things becomes clearwhen one considers, for example, the case of Iran. In Iran, at least two forms of nationalism, onereligious and the other secular, coexist side by side and in dynamic tension. That is, two differentideologies of the particular nation exist. What they have in common is their point of departure, the belief in

a nation that is Iranian their nationism from which all else necessarily follows.

Theorists may well understand, with Breuilly (1994), that nationalism is a form of politics. Nationism, wecould say, is then a meta-politics, a successful organisation of the terrain upon which politics may becarried out: always in terms of the nation, as if this thing really did exist. Understanding what nationism isallows us to see the world differently. If we do not understand what nationism is, we might slip intothinking that the world actually is ontologically composed of nations. This seems to be the beliefundergirding a large part modern historiographical practice. For example, Riall (2010) has stated:Contrary to an historical orthodoxy which sees Italy as a failed nation [] I suggest that Italy was not somuch a weak nation as a politically divided one. In other words, in both Rialls argument and the one sheopposes, it is as if in each case Italy must be a nation, first and foremost. Having taken that assertion forgranted, we can talk about what kind of nation it is. But to take the assertion for granted is to miss themore fundamental point that nations in fact do not exist. Ways of talking about the world exist, but thoseways are interested; that is, different ways of talking about the world can construct and advance differentinterests. What we absent-mindedly refer to as nations might better be understood as more or lessdisaggregated populations in and among which differing and competing interests are articulated bydifferent and competing groups. Terms are taken up and discarded by these groups as they themselvesexperience articulation and disarticulation, as they participate in the struggle to define reality the politicalstrugglepar excellence, as Bourdieu (1990) would say to understand who they are and what theyshould do, but also who others are and what theyshould do. So while it is true that people exist, andpopulations exist, that political communities exist, certainly, we can only talk of them as nations ascollective subjects in which each and every member of the population, past, present and future, is notonly related, but bound in an essential, transcendental communion with every other member of thepopulation if a certain discursive field has already been ceded, already been conquered. Having onceallowed that nations existwe are prepared to allow the nations interests to trump all others rather thanunderstand the case as one in which certain interests in a given population are allowed to trump otherinterests in the same population because the former have somehow managed to cast themselves as

nothing less than the interests of the nation.

This understanding allows us not only to pose legitimately but also to answer in a theoretically appropriateway the question, what is a nation? Brubaker (1996), arguing against understanding nations as realsubstantial entities which is a position I agree with would proscribe such a question, because, hewrites, it


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is not as theoretically innocent as it seems: the very terms in which it is framed presuppose theexistence of the entity that is to be defined. The question itself reflects the kind of realist,substantialist belief that a nation is a real entity of some kind.... (1996: 14)

But if, instead of falling into the trap set by the question and attempting to describe naively some sort ofreal community with these or those characteristics, we should respond that the nation is discourse. It is adiscourse that constantly reworks a fundamental idea that adumbrated by the Abb in an attempt toorder reality, to make it make sense. To the extent that it is successful, other discourses, such asnationalist ones, can then invoke the nation, which has already been established as a real entity with anultimate claim upon us, so as to incite or justify or interrupt different types of social action.To further clarify why I think it is important for nation theory to include nationism within its conceptualarsenal, it may be helpful to relate how I discovered the need for the term while working on a book aboutthe nation in Colombia (Lobo 2009). It is worth pointing out that the development of the independencestruggle in Colombia did not have its origins in the idea of the nation. The first constitutions were textuallyand politically popular, not national. By this I do not mean to say that they were well received but that thevoice they articulated was that of thepueblo, the people. In this sense they borrowed from the model oftheir northern continental cousins, whose Declaration of Independence and Constitution claim nothing forthe nation. The former invokes the the right of the people to rebel, and declares independence in theName, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, while the latter famously begins We thepeople without ever going on to constitute a nation. (Strictly speaking then, Lincoln, was wrong when, inhis address at Gettysburg, he averred that eighty-seven years ago, a new nation was born.) In Colombia,independence was first declared by the towns, that is, by the people in the towns. It was only after the

Spanish had failed to re-conquer the rebellious continent that the nation appeared, at least textually, asthe central collective subject. In other words, the constitutions redacted after the failure of theSpanish reconquista began to invoke the nation, here a much more expansive idea than the people,which was supposed to subsume at least at the level of discourse local and regional claims, of whichthere were many. And indeed, at the level of historical reality local and regional claims have continued,right up until the present day, to give the lie to invocations of the nation in Colombia.

What can be read in the constitutions are the attempts by one side in a meta-political struggle to organisethe discursive field, to organise, in a sense, the world of conflicting interests, such that it serve theirinterests. They do this by insisting that the nation, in the sense described by the Abb, is a reality. Thewriters of the constitutions that were to constitute the nation would be the same people who would be ableto understand and effect its will. It should not surprise us that the nations will and interests, as articulatedin the constitutions, should turn out to coincide quite nicely with those of the various framers. Thus, for

example, effective citizenship the right to vote and run for office would be restricted to males, overtwenty-one or married, who are literate and either independently wealthy or at least professionallyindependent. On the other hand, all will be called upon to kill and be killed when the nation is in danger, aduty which the better off will be able to buy their way out of (Lobo 2009: 61-90). The writers again andagain insist on the existence of the nation because this is not 1945: the idea that nations were anontological fact of nature that only lacked political sovereignty was not yet the dominant perspective inworld or even local politics. But the constitutional assertion of the nation was an assertion by some actorsof something that did not exist in any substantial sense at all, and that had no meaning as such for themajority of other actors inhabiting the space over which the constitution claimed jurisdiction. Such was thetenuousness of this national claim that thepeople the political subject of the first constitutions wasrigorously proscribed. To claim to be or to speak for the people was constitutionally pronounced to beseditious (ibid.). In sum, what we are witnessing is the attempt to bring to bear, against all evidence to thecontrary, the factual existence of the nation on affairs, less the attempt to win independence from an alienpower but to win authority over the domestic population. This of course, is not only typical of the post-colonial situation, but of any so-called national situation, as Bell (2001), for example, has shown, in thecase of France. It is the attempt to conjure up a deference, a condition of compliance, of blind submissionto what is understood as unquestionably authoritative. It is an attempt to wield the charisma of the nation.

But as distinct from the so-called charismatic person, and despite constitutional rhetoric to the contrary,the nation cannot actually exercise any authority it cannot actually authorise anything. In this sense thenation ispurelycharismatic, which would mean, as Greenfeld, reading between Weber's lines, argues,that it 'is not meaningfully oriented [and] thus cannot serve as a basis for meaningful orientation in action'(2006: 5). In this first, pure instance, charisma is simply compelling. Beyond that it is mute, because as


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Greenfeld points out, it is not further symbolically oriented. By extension then, the nation, while hopefullycompelling, is nonetheless mute. It is compelling, but what does it compel us to do? Its bidding isunderdetermined. In order to actually become meaningful, pure charisma must be accompanied 'bysuccessful manipulation of value complexes relevant to the situation' (Greenfeld, 2006, 6). Thus we seethe installation of the nation as such, and only then will we see specific nationalistprojects: the projects ofparticular, interested people and groups, attempting to universalise their will on the basis of this primordialbut recurrent nationist moment.

It only remains to be said that this purely charismatic moment will emerge in times of crisis. In 'Reflectionson two charismas' (2006) Greenfeld writes:

what makes people particularly responsive to charisma is the condition of anomie which rendersvalues and norms incapable of guiding people in their actions. The individual is left groping innormative darkness, yearning for the authority of a confident leader to show him the way out ofthis situation. A charismatic personality provides such leadership, offering through his contagiousexcitement a badly needed model for behavior [sic] and restoring to the confused individual hissense of order. (2006, 9)

Though she is still talking about the charismatic person, the point remains that we recognise charismawhen otherwise disoriented, when otherwise lost. Shils, for his part, also privileges the person when heexplains that we will defer to someone when we believe that she is 'effectively in contact with what is mostvital, most powerful, and most authoritative in the universe or society' (1975: 129). But, I would argue, it isthis most powerful and authoritative Thing that is fundamental for understanding the phenomenon of

charisma, and the nation is precisely one of those vital entities. Being, however,purelycharismatic, notmeaningfully oriented, that is, mute is it calling on us to die, to kill, to pay taxes, to form an anti-taxmilitia? human mediation is called for. The possibility of the charisma prompting collective actiondepends on there being relevant values in play. They don't have to be terribly explicit, just more or lesssensible. For as Weber says:

In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness oractual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to be aware of it in avague sense than he is to know what he is doing or be explicitly self -conscious about it. In mostcases his action is governed by impulse or habit' (1978, 21).

To sum up the argument so far: the nation, understood as a natural and transhistorical horizontalcommunity to which we belong, one which we, across time, are said to constitute, and whose will is

supreme, is a charismatic idea. In other words, we find it or we are supposed to find it irresistiblycompelling. Having established the reality and the authority of the nation, social actors will then attempt tonationalise their particular interests, or present their interests as being those of the nation.

I want now to elucidate what might have been up to this point an abstract argument by applying it orusing it to makes sense, so to speak, of recent Colombian politics. I dare say that when most non-Colombians think of Colombia some may well repose on perhaps a few now out of focus memories ofAhundred years of solitude, a vague recollection of an own goal in the 1994 World Cup and the consequentmurder of the offender; possibly, on a related note, a more specific subset might recall Newcastle United'sTino Asprilla scoring a hat-trick against Barcelona in the Champions League back in 1997. But mostprobably think of Colombia and then think of drugs, guerrillas, violence and, well, there really isn't muchelse. In fact, this might even sum up the thinking of many Colombians about their country.

As forUribismo, the wordcomes from the first surname of lvaro Uribe Vlez, the thirty-ninth president ofColombia. He has been president since 2002. In 2006 he was re-elected after many Colombianssupported a constitutional change allowing for a single exception to the usual prohibition against secondpresidential terms. Future presidents will enjoy no such opportunity. His second attempt to bypass theconstitution for a further re-election was, however, scuttled in February, 2010, by the Constitutional Court.This ruling has on the one hand caused great consternation for many Colombians Uribe has enjoyedsteady approval ratings of around seventy percent who talk about his eight years in power as a 'secondindependence' (Matiz Corts 2010: 2), and great joy among his critics: 'Now begins the nationalreconstruction' (Bejarano Guzman 2010).


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Uribismo is credited by many with saving Colombia, as the approval ratings would suggest. To appreciatemore clearly what exactly Uribismo is and what it has saved Colombia from, we first need somebackground information. In the nineteenth century the political classes of what can roughly be calledColombia promulgated at least twenty different constitutions depending on how you count a goodnumber of them the result of their authors being on the winning side of yet another civil war. Eachconstitution can well be considered an illustration of Foucault's (1980: 90) observation that political peaceis merely the legalisation and legitimation of the balance of forces at the close of armed confrontation.

While the Constitution of 1886 endured until 1991, it did little to fulfil its stated intention, namely, 'toconsolidate national unity and to guarantee [the goods of] justice, liberty and peace.' It was replaced in1991 precisely because territorial loss, civil wars, political violence, and drug-related violence, and everyother sort of violence, combined with a deeply corrupt democracy, seemed to necessitate a new, modernconstitution. What is pertinent here is that, having been unable to perform nation-ness convincinglythroughout its history, the 7th Article of the Constitution of 1991, one of what are grouped as 'TheFundamental Principles,' essentially gives up on the nation, in so far as it affirms that the 'Staterecognises and protects the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Colombian Nation.' Now of course, on theone hand, this sounds progressive and democratic, and Colombia is certainly not alone among LatinAmerican countries in making this move. On the other hand, it is a contradiction in terms. The wholecharm of the nation is that it speaks to one-ness, to unanimity, however chimerical. That is what makes itsuch an appealing idea for any politician and for any lost soul.

So we have, first of all, a history that is only national by decree. In Colombia it is common forcommentators to acknowledge that there is no national culture, that it is a country of regions and

regionalisms, and that the state has never even come close to making good on the idea that it should bepresent and effective in the remotest corners of the territory, not to mention the idea that it shouldmonopolise the legitimate means of violence. This is compounded by a Constitution that essentially givesup on the very idea of nation, which is compelling insofar as it offers identity, unity and community in placedifference, fragmentation and alienation. Indeed, as if to underline its dissolution we witness the return ofthe people' as 'sovereign' in the Constitution's preamble, so it should not surprise us that this Constitutionhas, like those before it, also been somewhat remiss in its mission to 'strengthen the unity of the Nation'.Though expected to lead to the pacification and democratisation of the political process, political violenceactually increased in the wake of the Constitutions establishment. For example, the Patriotic Union(Unin Patritica), the political party of one of the major leftist guerrilla movements, the FARC (Fuerzas

Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), tried to participatein the supposedly revitalised democracy established by the new Constitution. For its effort it saw morethan three thousand of its activists and candidates assassinated by state and para-state actors (see

Dudley 2003 for further details). Additionally, narcotrafficking has not ceased to grow and with it moreviolence and further corruption. In the early nineties, during the presidency of Cesar Gaviria, Colombialiberalised its economy leading to the structural dislocations that we've seen take place in so manycountries in recent decades. The once wealthy were humbled by bankruptcy and the poor became evenpoorer. While the legitimate economy more or less seized up, the illegal economy blossomed. Indeed,since the latter did provide some nice multiplier effects, many were quite happy to turn a blind eye, forwant of something better. Others, including the sectors of the armed forces, actively participated.

In the period just before Uribe's election the country really seemed be coming undone. Much of theprivileged class in Colombia and even some of the less privileged in a surprising number of instances owns at least one additional home in the country for quick weekend get-aways. These arecalled fincas.Before 2002, travel to these fincas was next to impossible, owing to the fact that, as I havementioned above, the Colombian state was far from consolidating its monopoly on legitimate violence.Thus, bands of outlaws as well as guerrilla forces, which many recognised as legitimate violenteers,made travel to the fincas simply too risky: being kidnapped on the road was a distinct possibility. (Thedialectical upshot of this is that Colombia has a quite highly developed aviation system, planes being thesafest and even the most convenient way to negotiate the countrys distances). If this state of affairs inwhich Colombians felt insecure on their own roads was not enough to deal with, they also had tocomprehend the fact that their President from 1998 - 2002, Andrs Pastrana, ceded to the FARC a hugepart of Southern Colombia called San Vincente del Cagun, an area larger than some Europeancountries. This was seen as an affront to any nominal idea of national sovereignty.


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A context in which self-described communist revolutionaries are ceded a contiguous, large percentage ofthe national territory and in which they exert influence over a more diffuse area one in which thelegitimate armed forces abet and aid paramilitary forces and narcotraffickers corruption is rife andkidnapping an ever-present danger, and a superficial but extensive discourse of social solidarity isobviously and repeatedly violated by empirical reality at all hours of the day is a context quite aptlycharacterised as anomic, hence, ripe for the emergence of what some might call a charismaticpersonality.

Though I have been arguing against seeing charisma as solely a personal quality, this is how many do infact see it. And indeed, in conversation Colombians are quick to embrace the idea that Uribe is acharismatic personality. It is not hard to understand why, since he fulfils in an almost textbook fashion therequirements. He is seen to be intense, to enjoy a commanding forcefulness, and is understood toaspire to larger transformations (Shils 1975: 129) than any Colombian politician of recent memory. Evenexasperated critics refer to him as a mago, a magician, as if unconsciously referencing Webers assertionthat such a persons authority is thought of as resting on magical powers (1978: 241). On a related note,it is not uncommon to hear remarks that compare Uribe favourably to the devil, in that he is morediabolical, and the pope, in that he is more papist. But is this not the same sort of faulty thinking advanceby those who see the rise of Nazism being caused by the twisted dreams of a charismatic Hitler, ratherthan seeing it resulting from, as, again, Goldhagen (1996) argues, the articulation of what were alreadyfor some people some powerfully attractive that is, charismatic ideas. While it is unsettling thatUribismo derives its name from a man, just as Hitlerism did, I do not mean to equate the two. The point isthat the so-called followers of these isms are not mere dupes. They are more or less active participants.As Breuilly puts it with regard to ideological messages, [p]eople will tend to respond [to them] only if they

are not merely accessible but if the message has relevance, and that will depend on their prior views ofthe situation (1994: 68).People must, in other words, be already predisposed to defer to the so-calledcharismatic personality insofar as they already adhere, more or less strongly, to the values and ideas thathe or she will espouse. The charismatic personality is, I mean, nothing more than the alibi for complicity.

That said, foreigners are often puzzled by the claim that Uribe is charismatic. Tellingly, a recentNewsweekpiece on his third-term aspirations began like this: In a continent crowded with charismaticpopulists and noisy autocrats, lvaro Uribe is an odd fit. Smallish, bespectacled, and poker-faced, theColombian president is not given to windy speeches or fist-shaking (Margolis 2009). The implication isobvious: this is not a particularly charismatic man. So what is going on?

My argument is that it is not so much his personality as his ability to somehow precipitate a nationistmood, a sense that the nation is real, something to which foreigners, coming from more stable, less

anomic places than Colombia, are immune to and cannot appreciate. (Indeed, one of the reasonsforeigners enjoy Colombia so much is because it is anomic, because there are no norms, or at least lessnorms than they are used to.)Shils reminds us that charisma is a 'property attributed to great innovatingpersonalities who disrupt traditionally and rational-legally legitimated systems of authority and whoestablish or aspire to establish a system of authority claiming to be legitimated by the direct experience ofdivine grace (1975:128). Now, Uribe does not claim to have a direct line to god, and in Colombia politicsis not as god-centric as it is, say, in the US. But the public is not averse to seeing Uribe as a saviour(Margolis 2010). What Uribe did was disrupt traditional Colombian politics, traditional Colombianauthority, which was in fact understood as the field of spineless and self-interested adventurers, and bypromising to re-establish, or establish for the first time, the nation, itself understood as a sort of divinity, asI have suggested above. He did not offer up the multicultural, multiethnic nation which, strictly speaking,is not much of a nation at all but the nation of the good, against the non-nation, against the criminal,terrorist, lazy, bad. Uribe managed to incarnate the nationist aspirations of Colombians: their need for

there to be a nation. That nation justifies, just as the words of the Abb remind us, anything. Anythinggoes. Even in the face of continued corruption, continued undeniable violations of human rights includingthe murder of innocent people by the armed forces, continued land grabs and dispossessions, continueddisappearances, continued proletarianisation (Lobo 2009), people long for and defer to the nation whichUribe, in the face of an historically compounded anomie, is claiming only to serve.

Uribe, in other words, has somehow helped in the production of an ultimately fleeting but really recurrentpsychological state in which people feel they are in contact with the nation, but through him. He did this byradically circumscribing the purview of the nation, by invoking its singularity and its indivisible sovereignty.He threw the FARC out of San Vicente del Cagun, and made no concessions to the idea of


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multiculturalism; Uribe turned a historical social and political conflict into a struggle between Colombiaand terrorists; he also turned NGOs, unions, and in fact everybody who didn't agree with him into theenemy. He managed to rekindle the idea of the nation as one, rather than as many.

It might be helpful here to introduce Brubakers (1996) notion of the eventfulness of nationness, of thesense that the nation is a real and compelling entity. Brubaker suggests that nationness doesnt develop;rather, it happens. We should think of it as something that suddenly crystallizes rather than graduallydevelops, as a contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating, and precarious frame of vision and basis forindividual and collective action, rather than as a relatively stable product of deep developmental trends ineconomy, polity, or culture (Brubaker 1996: 19). He invokes the idea of being overcome by nationhood(1996: 20), a phrase coined by Slavenka Drakulic (1993), to point out how people suddenly might becomeimprisoned by an all-too-successfully reified category (1996: 20): the nation. Being overcome in this wayconsists in the relatively sudden and pervasive nationalization of public and even private life, which

has involved the nationalization of narrative and interpretative frames, of perception andevaluation, of thinking and feeling. It has involved the silencing or marginalization of alternative,non-nationalist political languages. It has involved the nullification of complex identities by theterrible categorical simplicity of ascribed nationality. It has involved essentialist, demonizingcharacterizations of the national other, characterizations that transform Serbs into Chetniks,Croats into Ustashas, Muslims into Fundamentalists. (1996: 20-1)

And in the present case, it has turned various political actors into terrorists and legitimate targets of thearmed forces, into an internal other to be extirpated. The thing we should not overlook, of course, is that

while for some this being overcome may well constitute a sort of imprisonment, for others who mightwell comprise a majority it would constitute a liberation.

And indeed, in articulating a new sense of Colombia what Uribe has managed to do is produce anexcitement about being Colombian, a sense of liberation, indeed a second independence. He has donethis by drawing a line between the real Colombian who is honest, hardworking, and ethical, anunwavering supporter of the military, and everyone else, who are not, therefore, really Colombian. This isnot just an assertion on my part but manifested itself in 2008 when, on two separate occasions,unprecedented numbers of supporters took to the streets, expressing unmitigated and unprecedentedlevels of support forUribismo and the man Uribe and, perhaps most importantly, the armed forces. Theywere thrilled to have finally, seemingly, become nationalised. The slogan of the marches, appearing on T-shirts, billboards, banners, advertisements, and of course on the lips of the participants was Colombiasoy yo (I am Colombia). Recall the words of the Abb: it does not matter how the nation wills, only that it

does will, its will is the supreme law. If I am Colombia, since I am Colombia, my will is thus the nation'swill, and so let my will be done. A significant part of the population, for reasons that still need to be moreclearly worked out, has embraced the idea of the nation as a pure and purifying force that will somehowput things right, not because of Uribes charismatic personality but because the message has relevancefor them, as Breuilly suggests. They have embraced it, though, without thinking through the practicalconsequences, which include, as mentioned above, the wilful killing of innocents by state actors, and anincreasing gap between rich and poor (Lobo 2009).

My point, once more, is that if we're going to talk about nation and charisma, it's less about the leader,than the idea in this case the idea of the nation. The promise of the nation a promise of order, stasis,permanence is, finally and thankfully, a wholly unrealistic and unrealisable once. It is, nevertheless, dueto whatever psychological shortcomings of our species, a compelling, that is to say, charismatic idea. Theirony in the present case is that Colombians may be actually getting a nation. Not by a long shot the onethat they think they are excited about that transcendental, utopian community, that nation in which themany are magically resolved into one but rather the empirical 'nation,' that mass, more-or-lesshomogeneous but sharply stratified social formation, wrought in grand measure (as has been the casewheresoever we think we see it) by a mixture of thuggery and exploitation, enclosure and dispossession,disciplinisation and governmentality. This is, in the most substantial sense, the nation in this real world an idea that prevails not in spite of social dislocations, but, indeed, because of them.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London:Verso.


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Bejarano Guzman, Ramiro. 2010. Ces la horrible noche!, El Espectador, 28 February: 46.Bell, David A. 2001. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press.Bien, Peter. 2005. Inventing Greece, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 23, 2: 217-234.Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Social Space and Symbolic Power, In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology.Stanford: Stanford University Press.Breuilly, John. 1994. Nationalism and the State, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Drakulic, Slavenka. 1993. The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War. New York: W. W. Norton.Dudley, Steven. 2003. Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia. New York: Routledge.

Fasold, Ralph. 1987. The Sociolinguistics of Society. Oxford: Blackwell.Fishman, Joshua A. 1976.Advances in the Sociology of Language, Vol. 1. The Hague: Mouton & Co.Foucault, Michel. 1980. Two Lectures, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. NewYork: Pantheon Books.Goldhagen, Daniel. 1996. Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf.Greenfeld, Liah. 2006. Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.Horkheimer, Max & Adorno,Teodor. 1989. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Dialectic of theEnglightenment, New York: Continuum.Lobo, Gregory. 2009. Colombia: algo diferente de una nacin. Bogot: CESO-Ediciones Uniandes.MacShane, Denis. 1998. Two Visions of Europe, Critical Quarterly40, 4: 119-126.Margolis, Mac. 2009. Uribes Legacy, Newsweek11 December, viewed 1 May 2010,

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Miyoshi, Masao. 2000. Ivory Tower in Escrow, Boundary 227, 1: 7-50.Riall, Lucy. 2010. Heroes of the Nation: Charisma and Personality Cults in Risorgimento Italy, Abstract, Program ofthe Twentieth Anniversary ASEN Conference. London: LSE.Shils, Edward. 1975. Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Smith, Anthony D. 2001. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity.Weber, Max. 1978 [1968]. Economy and Society. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.
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