The problem set the West by the Yugoslav wars between 1991 and 1995
was at bottom a simple one: whether to intervene on the ground to
defeat the Serb forces in Croatia and Bosnia, and then keep
substantial forces there for a long period to hold down the Serbs and
maintain a united Bosnia. The answer was an equally simple one:
refusal, because it was assumed--probably correctly--that Western
electorates would support neither the loss of life among their own
troops nor the permanent commitment of men and money required. In the
end, the war was terminated (or suspended, we don't know yet) by the
victory of one of the warring nations, the Croats, armed by the
United States and supported to a limited degree by NATO airpower. In
consequence, naturally enough, the Croats have dictated the contours
of the peace settlement on the ground. An accident of geography, and
the imperatives of political ambition, led to this Croat victory
entering the history books under the curious name of the "Dayton
Peace Accord"--the culminative example of the misuse of language that
has characterized so much of the debate on Bosnia in the West.

It is not my purpose in this essay to rehearse this melancholy
history and turn over yet again the bones of Bosnia's dead. Instead,
I want to focus on one key aspect of the intervention controversy in
the West, and on a scholarly debate that provided the intellectual
underpinning for some of the positions adopted: the question of the
origins and nature of nationalism and national conflicts. The
connection between the scholarly debate and contemporary developments
is made explicit in the introduction to a recent collection of essays
on nationalism, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny:

As the claims to nationhood metastasize into the evils of ethnic
cleansing and genocide, the task of intellectuals to remind us all of
the imaginary quality of much of the ideology and history that has
gone into the making of nations becomes all the more acute.

When applied to developments in the former Yugoslavia, the lines of
dispute were, or seemed to be, relatively clear. On the one hand
there were those, like the British columnist Simon Jenkins in the
London Times, who argued against intervention on the grounds that the
wars raging there had been caused by "ancient national hatreds",
which the West could not hope to overcome. As a result, they said,
intervention would only lead to Western armies becoming trapped in a
permanent quagmire without hope of extrication.

In this way, the policy debate became enmeshed with the academic one.
For in answer to this view some advocates of intervention, including
Noel Malcolm and Norman Stone, argued that, far from being the result
of long-established national hatreds and fears, the Yugoslav wars
were essentially the result of artificial and opportunistic
manipulation by the Serbian communists or former communists, led by
Slobodan Milosevic'spart of a campaign to hold on to power in
the face of the collapse of communism as an ideology. These
ex-communists were portrayed as a kind of Iago, whispering evil lies
into the deluded ears of the people until they rush out madly and
start strangling their neighbors.

Since then, some of those who have taken this second position--for
example, Johnathan Sunley in these pages--have extended their
argument to take in other parts of the former communist world,
arguing that the danger of nationalism across the region has been
grossly exaggerated in the West (by, among others, the influential
George Soros), and that the national conflicts in the former Soviet
Union and elsewhere in the region have also been the work of the
former communists and of Moscow. In this essay I shall take issue
with this attempted downgrading of the importance of nationalism in
Central and Eastern Europe, though I shall do so while fully
acknowledging the evil role played by Milosevic and his followers
in starting the war in Yugoslavia.

As far as the public debate on Yugoslavia is concerned, some of it
might as well have been conducted by clowns with cream pies, for all
the intellectual light it generated. In the background to this
grimly-lit harlequinade, however, was an intellectual debate that has
generated some of the leading works of history, social science, and
cultural theory of recent decades: the question of the origins of
modern nationalisms, and of how far these were "constructed", and how
far generated by pre-existing and conscious ethnic, cultural, or
religious affiliations.

Activated by the war, this debate on nationalism has spread far and
fast beyond academic circles to become a central theme of the wider
debate on the nature of our age and its future. Thus, for example,
one of the most oft-repeated arguments against Francis Fukuyama's
"end of history" thesis has been that, far from the world moving
inevitably toward a consummation of history in a liberal capitalist
bed of roses, chauvinist and violent nationalism remains a force of
immense power, even in Europe.

It may well seem immodest, not to say imprudent, for the likes of me
to venture into a field trodden by intellects of the stature of the
late Sir Ernest Gellner. However, as a trained historian who has
spent much of the past seven years as a journalist covering national
and ethnic movements, disputes, and sometimes wars, I would like to
enter my pennyworth of personal experience and, I hope, common sense.

The former Soviet Union, where I have spent those years, is perhaps
the most fascinating field of study in the world today when it comes
to nationalism, for within it can be found an extraordinarily wide
range of national, ethnic, and state communities. There you will find
a fully formed European nation like the Lithuanians next door to the
Belorusians, a people who seem entirely lacking in a separate
national consciousness. Again, when it comes to the development of
nationalism, the Azeris seem to follow many of the standard patterns
for the "construction" of a nation in modern times--while their
neighbors the Chechens have some of the characteristics of a
"primordial ethnic nation." As to national conflicts, there have been
those in which outside manipulation has played an important part,
like Abkhazia--and others, like Karabakh, which have indeed been
mainly the result of conflicting and deeply felt national claims. If
there is one single lesson I have taken away from these past seven
years, it is a deep distrust of dogma, of generalizations and
universal explanations, whether of the historical origins of
nationalism or of contemporary national disputes.

Primordialists versus Constructionists

Crudely stated, one side of the scholarly debate on the origins of
nationalism stems ultimately from the belief that the roots of modern
nationalisms are primordial. That is to say, humanity is naturally
divided into different groups that will tend to exclude and show
hostility toward others; and the roots of modern national allegiances
lie in old and deeply felt ethnic, linguistic, religious, and
cultural differences, albeit transmuted into modern forms. This is
the belief of nationalists themselves, and from the early nineteenth
century on it was of course the official line of numerous national
school systems and schoolteachers, all working with passionate
intensity to convince their charges of the primordial existence and
identity on the same territory of their particular nation--an
approach notoriously summed up in the first words of the old French
history primer: "Nos ancêtres les Gaulois" (Our ancestors the Gauls).
This is very much the version now once again being taught in many
parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

In Western academia in recent decades, however, this approach has
been not so much dissected as slashed to pieces by a whole range of
scholars who have pointed to the ways in which modern nationalisms
were in fact generated by new historical circumstances, ideas, social
classes, and socio-economic conditions over the past two centuries.
These scholars have also sought to expose the numerous ways in which
nationalisms and indeed national "traditions" were artificially
"created" in modern times, most obviously by states through the
aforementioned school systems, but also by less deliberate processes
consequent on the great social, economic, and technological
transformations of the past 250 years.

A key underlying reason for the rise of the new approach was that
nationalism had been deeply discredited by its role in Europe's
twentieth-century catastrophes. In the previous century nationalism
had been seen by most liberal intellectuals as a force for liberation
and human progress--an attitude that reached its most developed and
influential form with Woodrow Wilson's championing of national
self-determination at Versailles in 1919, a policy widely seen as
perverse after 1945.

Paradoxically, however, the post-1945 discrediting of nationalism
among Western intellectual elites came just as the collapse of the
European empires made the nation-state for the first time the
dominant theoretical model across the globe. This has become even
more the case in recent years with the collapse of supra-national
Marxism and the Soviet empire.

Ideologically, the range of scholars somewhere on the
"constructivist" side of the spectrum has on the surface at least
been extraordinarily broad, and their approaches extremely varied.
They extend from Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm through liberals like
Gellner to conservatives like Elie Kedourie and Kenneth Minogue. The
range of their specific explanations of the rise of nationalism is
equally great, but all in the end see nationalism as in one way or
another a function of modernization and a specific product of modern
change: in the case of the Marxists, the development of capitalism
tout court, or--as Gellner and Tom Nairn would argue--its uneven
spread. All would also, and usually rightly, emphasize the role of
the educated classes (for the Marxists, the new middle classes) in
the construction and spread of the new nationalist ideology, which,
originating in Western Europe in the later eighteenth century, spread
in ripples across the world.

One tribute to the intellectual power and weight of evidence brought
to bear by these new critiques of nationalism--now of course several
decades old--has been their effect on those who, broadly speaking,
disagree with their basic thrust. In response to them, recent
scholars like John Armstrong and Anthony Smith, tending to a view of
nationalism as a natural rather than constructed phenomenon, have
greatly adapted and refined the old arguments for "primordialism"
(indeed to the point that Smith would probably deny that he is a
"primordialist" at all). However, at the core of their approach is
still the belief that conscious ethnic attachments are of great
antiquity, and that it is these which form the true basis of modern
national feeling and explain the remarkable success of modern
nationalisms, their capacity to mobilize support and generate
passion. In Smith's words,

"Not only did many nations and nationalisms spring up on the basis of
pre-existing ethnie and their ethnocentrisms, but . . . in order to
forge a 'nation' today, it is vital to create and crystallize ethnic
components, the lack of which is likely to constitute a serious
impediment to 'nation-building.'"

And,

"The modernist definition of the nation omits important components.
Even today, a nation qua nation must possess a common history and
culture, that is to say, common myths of descent, common memories and
common symbols of culture. Otherwise, we should be talking only of
territorial states. It is the conjunction, and interpenetration, of
these cultural or 'ethnic' elements with the political, territorial,
educational and economic ones, that we may term 'civic', that produce
a modern nation."

Smith also points out that to "invent" an ethnie--as opposed to a
"nation"--is difficult to the point of impossibility. It can be
shaped and cultivated, but mainly it has to grow.

Between a convinced, old-style nationalist and a Hobsbawm there can
obviously be neither compromise nor quarter. But this should not be
so between Dr. Smith and most of the "constructivists", since few of
these would in the end seek to deny ethnicity a role in nationalism,
just as Smith and his supporters would not deny that the ideological
form of nationalism--as opposed to its emotional content--is indeed a
development of the past two centuries. As so often happens, however,
the dispute has been calcified by the adoption of dogmatic positions,
ones often in excess of what the work of the authors themselves will
support. Even the principals sometimes formulate their positions in
extreme terms. Thus Hobsbawm has declared that:

"The 'nation' . . . belongs exclusively to a particular, and
historically recent, period. It is a social entity only insofar as it
relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the
'nation-state', and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality
except insofar as both relate to it."

The Mechanistic Fallacy

The member of the constructivist camp who has developed the most
brilliant insights concerning the cultural creation of modern
nationalisms and national identities in the European empires in Asia
is Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities. One thing that
makes his work so valuable is that it shows how new ways of
nationalist thinking were generated by numerous creative
imaginations, rather than consciously "constructed", in response to
new historical and social circumstances. He highlights especially the
creation for the first time of "monoglot mass reading publics" as a
consequence of capitalism, the printing press, and the new education
systems; and of course the creation of new "intelligentsias"--often
badly paid and socially marginal, but desperately aspiring to power
and glory--to serve these new masters and audiences.

On this score, Anderson has leveled some cogent criticism at Gellner,
who once asserted that, "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations
to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist."
In Anderson's words: "Gellner is so anxious to show us that
nationalism masquerades under false pretenses that he assimilates
'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to
'imagining' and 'creation.'" (It is only fair to say that Gellner's
bald formulation in this instance is hardly typical of his immensely
deep and subtle mind. Elsewhere, he has written that, while
nationalism is a created phenomenon, under the historical
circumstances of modern times "nationalism does become a natural
phenomenon, one flowing fairly inescapably from the general
situation.")

This same criticism could also be leveled at the phrase "the
invention of tradition", and the approach represented in the famous
collection of essays of that name edited by Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger. I believe that the word "invention" in this context is
utterly mistaken, necessarily implying as it does a sudden and
radical break with the past, a mechanistic and artificial creation,
and an act of conscious human will. As some of the essays in
Hobsbawm's own collection suggest, the people responsible for
"inventing" these new traditions were themselves absolutely convinced
that they were in fact rediscovering, adapting, and regenerating old
traditions. Prys Morgan, for example, in his essay on the Welsh
national revival, writes that "the Eisteddfod [the Welsh national
song and culture festival] was not in any way a deliberate invention,
the first recorded meeting having been held in Cardigan . . . in
1176", even if the form the revived Eisteddfod took from the
eighteenth century on became something very new. Here, as elsewhere,
what we have is an organic development, not a mechanistic one; a
generation, not an invention. In general, "new" traditions represent
genuine, if hopeless and even sometimes comical, strivings to
"rediscover" old traditions, on the basis of very real feelings of
continuity, identity, and loss.

To take another musical example, this was true of the great Latvian
and Estonian song festivals organized from the later nineteenth
century to the present day. These were quite new, and played a key
part in the generation of the modern Baltic national identities. But
it seems clear from the evidence that not merely were the songs
themselves the product of a continuous tradition of great antiquity,
but so too was a sense of ethnic (though not "national")
identification and common hostility toward non-Estonians and
non-Latvians.

Where new elites are in fact forced to "invent" traditions and
national identities out of whole cloth, as in the colonially created
states of Africa, they produce fantasies that are hardly convincing
even to themselves, and are incapable of inspiring sincere loyalty
and sacrifice. For what can also be said with some confidence is that
there is a crucial relationship between the capacity of a new
nationalism to mobilize people and retain their allegiance, and the
depth of its rootedness in pre-existing loyalties and identities,
whether ethnic or religious. These loyalties do not have to be
national or proto-national in any strict sense--consider the complex
but enormously important role of Hinduism in underpinning Indian
unity--but they do have to be there, or the new national plant is
likely to prove a weak and sickly one.

The most successful example in history of an "invented" nation was
probably that of Great Britain, or rather the Union between Britain
and Scotland. Indeed, so successful was it that not only did it
overcome for more than two centuries the ancient enmity between
England and Scotland, but it almost completely subsumed both Scottish
and English nationalisms. Nairn and others have pointed to the way in
which the success of the British idea was founded on partnership in
the growing British Empire, one that proved immensely profitable not
only for the English but for the Scottish upper and middle classes.
So overwhelmingly did English nationalism become confused with
British imperial patriotism that today it finds tremendous difficulty
in even giving itself a name, and survives in public only in strange
disguises like "Euroskepticism." With the last major colony, Hong
Kong, now gone, it will be very interesting to see how British
identities develop from here on.

However, there was more to Britishness than the advantage of empire.
A brilliant study by Linda Colley has examined all the ways in which
the new British identity was formed in the eighteenth century, on the
basis of very powerful existing elements in both England and
Scotland--notably Protestantism and hostility to Catholic Europe,
especially France--and it was this that gave "Britain" much of its
emotional and cultural force. It was by no means therefore simply
"invented", even if numerous paid scribes and artists did consciously
set out to foster it.

Conversely, of course, the example of Britain is certainly evidence
that the classical nationalist argument is also radically flawed, for
it shows that there is nothing at all inevitable about the creation
of nation-states based on one linguistic and ethnic group. Gellner
and others are quite right when they argue for the existence of a
multiplicity of loyalties and identities alongside the strictly
national one, in the past as in the present. To judge by Colley's
work, successful nationalism needs to be seen as a force that has
achieved success largely by feeding on as many as possible of those
other allegiances.

Academics should therefore keep a check on themselves when writing
about the "invention" of traditions and nationalisms; for it does
rather tend to flatter their own vanity as intellectuals, both
because they present themselves as seeing through the ideas that have
deluded simpler folk, and also because the idea of intellectuals
sitting down and inventing nations and traditions is inherently
gratifying if you are yourself an intellectual.

Once again, though, it is dangerous to over-generalize. The essay
from which the phrase "the invention of tradition" is taken is Hugh
Trevor-Roper's famous study of the creation of the "ancient Highland
dress", the kilt, by an enterprising eighteenth-century Quaker
industrialist; but the whole point of the real Highland Scottish
tradition and society is that they were irrevocably smashed, first at
Culloden and then by the Highland Clearances and the progressive
destruction of the Gaelic language. This left the British free to
impose on the Highlanders whatever twee and artificial version of
Highland tradition they chose.

Next door in Ireland, the British found the human material a bit more
recalcitrant. To engage in a little counterfactual history, if the
Scottish Highlanders had won at Culloden, they might very well have
ended up adopting the kilt anyway, and coming to believe in its
antiquity--but this would have been part of the organic development
of their own living, fighting tradition, as with Irish nationalist
songs sung in the language of the conqueror. Similarly, the most
popular Chechen national song during the latest war with the Russians
was sung in Russian, to an essentially Russian pop tune with vaguely
"oriental" flourishes, and with lyrics allegedly borrowed from
"Patria o Muerte." That may seem strangely artificial and inauthentic
to us--but it clearly had no ill effect on the fighting spirit of the
Chechens who sung it.

From a practical, non-academic point of view, therefore, it is of
secondary importance where nationalist ideas and national passions
came from, how "genuine" or "artificial" they may be, or how recently
they were generated. The test is: Do they work? Do they succeed in
mobilizing and holding together the community to which they appeal?
In the past, and in all too many parts of the world today, there is
an even simpler test: Do they make people willing to fight and die?
If they do, then however inconvenient for intellectuals and scholars,
their origins are moot as far as the policymaker and working
journalist are concerned.

A crude, popularized version of Gellner's approach runs certain risks
traditionally associated with Marxist analysis. It attributes
conscious--and even hypocritical--will and strategy to actions that
are often more likely (as Gellner himself would have recognized) to
be the result either of unconscious changes of attitude, or feelings
that the authors of change themselves share to the full. It rather
recalls the old Marxist belief that the bourgeoisie (or, in Germany
before 1914, the old landowning elites) consciously "manipulated" and
exploited nationalism so as to distract the workers and peasants and
maintain their grip on power. Of course there is an element of truth
in this, just as the important role of Milosevic and the Serbian
(and some Croat) communists in inflaming nationalism is also not to
be denied. But it is far from the whole truth. These people would not
have been so successful in their manipulations if they had not had a
mass of suitably conditioned human material to work on, and if they
had not at least partly ascribed to their own version of nationalist
"truths."

As far as the manipulated masses themselves were concerned, in the
traditional Marxist schema they were at risk of "false
consciousness." Notoriously, the Marxist belief that national,
religious, and other allegiances among the proletariat were a symptom
of this "false consciousness" (as opposed to the "true" and correct
consciousness, which they should have possessed as proletarians) led
communists in the past to dismiss these loyalties and ideologies as
unworthy of serious study. Rather than seeking to understand and
analyze them as the product of old and genuinely held traditions, the
cruder version of the old communist approach was to denounce their
holders as misguided dupes, and hunt around for the wicked
manipulators who had gulled them. The parallels with Johnathan
Sunley's tendency to blame all national conflicts on the hand of
Moscow or the old communists could hardly be clearer.

Conservatives, Marxists, and Positivists

Which brings us back to the debate on contemporary national conflicts
in Europe: That an arch cold warrior like Sunley should now find
himself on the same side of the fence as a Marxist is only
superficially paradoxical. For many of today's "conservatives",
especially in America, are not conservatives in the traditional
sense, but essentially nineteenth-century free-market liberals. They
differ from true conservatives on one absolutely critical point:
their basically optimistic view of humanity, and their belief that in
virtually all conditions human society can be greatly improved by the
introduction of a relatively simple, pre-ordained, fixed set of laws
based on universally applicable rules of reason. They have tremendous
difficulty with the idea that in some circumstances these guidelines
simply will not work, that traditions and emotions and indeed facts
may prove stronger. In this respect, contemporary liberals, Marxists,
and Wall Street Journal editorialists all show their ultimate descent
from the same positivist stable.

For people with this mindset, the idea that some national conflicts
are insoluble by any means short of war or outside intervention and
suppression (that, in Lord Salisbury's words about Ireland, "the free
institutions which sustain the life of a free and united people,
sustain also the hatreds of a divided people") is intolerable. Take,
for example, Nagorno-Karabakh. I have seen some journalistic
colleagues and academic observers jib like frightened horses at a
ten-foot fence when confronted with the blindingly obvious truth that
once you have introduced the idea of full national self-determination
and unqualified independence to the Transcaucasus--and removed
outside military power--then, given the history and the ethnic
divisions of the area, there will inevitably be national-territorial
disputes that cannot be solved by any means short of war and the
victory of one side or the other. Rather than face this particular
fence, I have seen otherwise honest, intelligent people plunge into
veritable jungles of intellectual evasion, and swallow nationalist
lies and excuses in quantity.

It is particularly sad that some British analysts should have so far
forgotten their own history as to take this line; for, after all, we
have had some bitter experiences of our own in this regard. National
self-determination in the Transcaucasus could no more have been
effected without war than could separate self-determination for
British Indian Muslims and Hindu/Sikhs in Punjab in 1947. Once
separation for Pakistan and the partition of Punjab were agreed, then
it was inevitable that, in Sir Sikander Hayat Khan's prophetic words,
"Everyone on the wrong side of the line will get his balls cut off."
As in the Transcaucasus, both Indians and Pakistanis have bitterly
denounced the former colonial authorities (in this case, the
Ratcliffe Commission) for having "created conflict" by the way they
drew the national border--but when asked what kind of border would
have prevented conflict, they either fall silent or say that
everything should have been given to their side.

Likewise in a conversation I had with an Armenian nationalist, a
former Soviet political prisoner. In December 1990 I asked him, "If,
as you say, the Karabakh conflict has been created by Moscow, what do
you think will happen if Soviet rule collapses?" To which he replied,
"Well, as soon as the Azeris are no longer being deceived by Moscow's
propaganda, of course they will recognize of their own free will that
Karabakh is ours." This may well seem grotesque--but it is not much
more so than the explanations of the war in Karabakh offered by some
Western analysts, in their anxiety to avoid at all costs pinning the
blame on Armenian and Azeri nationalism.

Character Counts

Johnathan Sunley is quite right to ask "why some inflammable trouble
spots spontaneously combust while others do not." He just gives the
wrong answer. Or rather, he mechanically, dogmatically gives the same
answer--communist and Soviet/Russian manipulation and
destabilization--in each and every case. Sometimes it is, partially
at least, the right answer. There certainly have been cases where
both Moscow and other former colonial powers have manipulated ethnic
conflicts, and still more where they have tried to do so without
success. Thus while Soviet and Russian manipulation played a very
secondary role in the Karabakh conflict, it played an undeniably
important one in Abkhazia--though even there only on the basis of
previously existing and deeply felt conflicting claims. In no case
did Moscow or the communists "create" or "invent" a dispute out of
nothing.

While it is reasonable, therefore, to see similar elements at work
across much of the former Soviet bloc, there is no reason whatsoever
to assume that these will combine in similar mixtures irrespective of
location and local history. While some Western journalists and
policymakers deserve criticism for seeing nationalists as always and
everywhere chauvinist and aggressive, so do those who try to pin the
blame for every single one of the ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union on the former communists and the Russian
government. While both communist and nationalist manipulators have
indeed been at work in many countries, the readiness of different
nations to respond to their provocations has differed enormously
according to local circumstance, local history, local culture, and,
yes, to "national character." To continue the analogy with Othello:
If the Moor of Venice had been a more secure individual
psychologically, if he had had a happier childhood, if he had not
been made to feel his color so painfully by his Venetian masters, if
for that matter he had not been a Moor at all but a Florentine or an
Aragonese--then instead of believing Iago he would have kicked him
downstairs.

As a journalist in the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 1996 (for
much of the period stationed in the Baltic States and the
Transcaucasus), I observed half a dozen different ethnic disputes and
conflicts, and while manipulation was present in all of them, in each
one its importance, and the local response, were different.

The Baltic States, for example, present interesting examples of
determined attempts at the creation of ethnic conflict that failed to
work, despite all the necessary flammable material apparently being
at hand. In 1990-91 I witnessed Sovi