:: Thursday, January 16, 2003 ::

Nationalism and the Emancipation Project

I should distinguish my position somewhat from that of Vikash below. I too share and understand the post-modern concerns over the viability of Nationalism as a vehicle for emancipation; in part I am sympathetic and part of this tradition as well. However, I am not too sure that the potential of Nationalism in this regard has been fully explored or exhausted, particularly in the Non-Western Nation-states; I also feel that it is usually the case whereby Nationalism is looked at through such jaded eyes by those who have already benefited from whatever emancipatory benefits it had to offer and who can derive no further advantage from its expansion/redefinition. By contrast it does tend to be those previously marginalised and deprived groups who are most attracted to Nationalism as a means for their emancipation; hence Nationalism per se should not be written off as such a force so soon. Yet the concerns and criticisms raised are valid and serious ones, particularly between the tensions between Nationalism and Racism and social conflict; all of which at some level are meant to have been “resolved” in the rhetoric of Egalitarianism. I think it worthwhile to explore this in more detail.

Nationalism, Racism and the Field of Opposition:

We should begin by noting that the very category of Nationalism is intrinsically ambiguous. This is in part to do with the antithetical nature of the historical situations in which nationalist movements and policies arise. Fichte or Gandhi are not Bismarck; Bismarck or Churchill are not Hitler obviously. Yet it is not so easy to suppress the effect of ideological symmetry, which imposes itself here on antagonistic forces. I think it is a great error to equate the Nationalism of the dominant with that of the dominated, the Nationalism of Liberation with the Nationalism of Conquest. Of course this does not mean that we can ignore the fact that there is a common element – even if it is only the logic of a situation, the structural inscription in the political forms of the modern world; in the Nationalism of for example the Algerian FLN and that of French Colonialism or in the Nationalism of the ANC and the Afrikaner parties. This formal symmetry is also related to the painful and the distressing experience we have repeatedly undergone of seeing Nationalisms of Liberation transformed into Nationalisms of Domination; which has compelled many of those committed to emancipation and egalitarianism to inquire into the oppressive potentialities contained within every Nationalism. Such a contradiction resides not only within the language of Nationalism but also within its history.

The difficulty involved in defining Nationalism has been outlined by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their analogy of how as a concept it functions never alone but always as part of a chain in which it is both the central and weak link. This chain is being constantly enriched and added to with new intermediate or extreme terms: civic spirit, patriotism, populism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, chauvinism, imperialism, jingoism etc. It is not possible for anyone to fix once and for all, unequivocally, the differential meanings of these terms; though it is possible to reach a broad interpretative framework. Where the Nationalism-Nation relation is concerned, the core of meaning opposes a ‘reality’, the Nation, to an ‘ideology’, Nationalism. This relation is however, perceived very differently by different people, since several different questions underlie it: Is Nationalist ideology the reflection of the existence of Nations? Or do Nations constitute themselves out of Nationalist ideologies (though it may mean that these latter, having attained their ‘goal’, are subsequently transformed)? Must the Nation itself be considered as a ‘state’ or as a ‘society’?

Liberal Nationalists have sought to reconcile these questions within the broader ambit of the tension between Nationalism and the problem of racism; where the core of meaning contrasts a standard ideology and form of politics such as Nationalism with an “excessive” ideology and behaviour (racism) either to oppose the tow or to offer the one as the truth of the Other. But this confrontation brings out the other possibilities; for example that Nationalism itself maybe the ideological and political effect of the imperialist character of Nations or their survival into an imperialist age and environment. One may complicate the chain further by introducing notions such as Fascism and Nazism with their network of attendant questions: Are these both Nationalisms? Are they a form of Imperialism? Etc…

All these questions point towards one fundamental one: as soon as somewhere in the historic and political chain an intolerable seemingly, ‘irrational’ violence enters upon the scene where are we to locate that entry? Should we consider such violence as a perversion of the normal state of affairs, a deviation from the hypothetical ‘straight line’ of human histroy, or do we have to admit that it represents the truth of what has preceded it and therefore, from this point of view, the seeds of racism could be seen as lying at the heart of politics from the birth of Nationalism onwards, or indeed from the point where Nations began to exist. Naturally the answers to such problems depends on the viewpoint of the observers and the situations they reflect. In my view, however, they all revolve around a single dilemma: the notion of Nationalism is constantly dividing. There is always a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Nationalism as Partha Chatterjee has remarked. There is the one which tends to construct a state or a community and one which tends to subjugate, to destroy; the one which refers to the right and the one which refers to might; the one which tolerates other Nationalism and which may even argue in their defence and include them within a single historical perspective and the one which radically excludes them in an imperialist and racist perspective. There is the one which derives from love (even excessive love) and the one, which derives from hate. In short the internal split within Nationalism seems as essential and as difficult to pin down as the step that leads from ‘dying for one’s country’ to ‘killing for one’s country’ The proliferation of neighbouring terms, whether they be synonyms or antonyms, is merely an exteriorisation of this split. No one has escaped this reinscription of the dilemma within the very concept of Nationalism itself (and when it has been evacuated through the door of theory it has re-entered through the door of practise), but it is particularly visible in the liberal tradition, which is explained by the very ambiguous nature of the relations between Liberalism and Nationalism over the last two centuries.

To move beyond this quandary it is not enough to ask that all value judgements be rejected; that is that judgements on the consequences of Nationalism in different conjunctures be suspended or to alternatively consider Nationalism itself as a strictly ideological effect of the ‘objective’ process of the constitution of Nations and Nation-States. The Ambivalence of effects forms the very part of the history of all Nationalisms, and it is precisely this, which has to be explained. Here, the analysis of the place of racism in Nationalism is decisive: though racism is not equally manifest in all Nationalisms or in all the moments of their history, it nonetheless represents a necessary tendency in their constitution. The overlapping of the two goes back to the circumstances in which the Nation-States, established upon historically contested territories, have striven to control population movements, and to the very production of the ‘people’ as a political community taking precedence over class divisions.

Maxime Rodinson, in his work on Racism, seeks to arrive at a “broad” definition of racism; a definition which seeks to take into account all forms of exclusion and depreciation, whether or not they are accompanied by biological theories. It seeks to get back beyond ‘ethnic’ racism to the origin of the ‘race myth’ and its genealogical discourse: the class racism of the post-feudal aristocracy. And. Most, particularly, it seeks to include under the heading racism all forms of minority oppression which, in a formally egalitarian society, lead in different ways to the “racialisation” of various social groups – not just ethnic groups, but women, sexual deviants, the mentally ill, subproletarians and so on; so as to be able to analyse the common mechanism of the naturalisation of differences. In Rodinson’s view, one ought, however to choose; either one should make internal and external racism a tendency of Nationalism and beyond this, of ethnocentrism of which Nationalism would be the modern form; or one could broaden the definition of racism in order to understand the psychological mechanisms (phobic projection, denial of the real Other overlaid with signifiers of phantasmastic alterity), but at the risk of dissolving historical specificity. In responding to Rodinson’s observations I would put forward certain propositions concerning the idea of racism and Nationalism:

1) No Nation, or Nation-State, has an ethnic basis, which means that Nationalism cannot be defined as an ethnocentrism except precisely in the sense of the product of a fictive ethnicity. To reason any other way would be to forget that ‘peoples’ do not exist naturally any more than ‘races’ do, either by virtue of their ancestry, a community of culture or pre-existing interests. But they do have to institute in real and historical time their imaginary unity against other possible unities.

2) The phenomenon of depreciation and racialisation which is directed simultaneously at different social groups which are quite different in nature (particularly ‘foreign’ communities, ‘inferior races’, women and ‘deviants’) does not represent a juxtaposition of merely analogous behaviours and discourses applied to a potentially indefinite series of objects independent of each other, but ahistorical system of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually interconnected. In other words, it is not the case an ‘ethnic racism’ and a ‘sexual racism’ exist in parallel; racism and sexism function together and in particular, racism always presupposes sexism. So for example the racism of today would not target the “Arab” or the “Black” but the “Arab as terrorist” and the “Black as rapist/mugger” and so on and equally would delinquents and rapists as “Arabs” or “blacks”.

3) It is the broad structure of Racism, which is heterogeneous and tightly knit (first through a network of phantasies and secondly through a set of discourses and behaviours) which maintains a necessary relation with Nationalism and contributes to constituting it by producing the fictive ethnicity around which it is organised.

4) If it is necessary to include in the structural conditions (both symbolic and institutional) of modern racism the fact that the societies in which racism develops are at the same time supposed to be “egalitarian” societies, in other words societies which officially disregard status differences between individuals, this sociological thesis, advanced most famously by Louis Dumont, cannot be abstracted from the national environment itself. In other words it is the not the modern state which is “egalitarian” but the modern Nation-State, this equality having as its external and internal limits the national community and as its essential content, the acts which signify it directly (particularly universal suffrage and political citizenship). It is basically equality in respect of nationality.

The connection between Nationalism and Racism is therefore neither a matter of perversion (as there is no “pure” essence of Nationalism) nor a question of formal similarity (they are not unproblematically identical) but rather a question of historical articulation. While it is important to understand the specific differences of racism to Nationalism it is also important to understand that in articulating itself, it is by its very difference, necessary to Nationalism. This is to say the articulation of Nationalisms and Racism cannot be disentangled by applying classical schemas of causality, whether mechanistic (such as the one being the cause of the other, “producing” the other etc.) or in a spiritualistic fashion (the one “expressing” the other, giving it its meaning or revealing its hidden essence); rather there is an underlying unity of opposites. We can see this on the recurring debate about the “essence of Nazism” where various forms of hermeneutics of social relations are played out and where the political uncertainties of the present are mirrored and transposed. For some Hitlerian Nazism is the culmination of Nazism: it derives from Bismarck, if not from German Romanticism, from the defeat of 1918 and the humiliation of Versailles treaty and provides a project of absolute imperialism with its ideology (Lebensraum, a German Europe). If the coherence of that ideology seems analogous to the coherence of delirium, then one should see this as precisely the explanation of its brief but strong hold on the “mass” of the population, whatever their social origins and on the “leaders”, whose blindness in the end plunged the Nation to its doom. Beyond all the “revolutionary” deception and the conjunctural twists and turns, the enterprise of World Domination was inherent in the Nationalism shared by masses and leaders alike.

For others, such explanations are doomed always to miss the essential point, however, subtly they might analyse social forces and intellectual traditions, events and political strategies, and however skilfully they might relate the monstrous nature of Nazism to the anomalous course of German history. IT was precisely be regarding Nazism as merely a Nationalism analogous to their own, distinguished only by a difference of degree rather than kind, that public opinion and the political leaders in the “democratic” Nations of the time deluded themselves as to its goals and thought they could come to an arrangement with it or limit the havoc it might create. Nazism is exceptional, in this view, because in it the logic of racism overwhelms all other factors, and imposes itself to the detriment of “pure” Nationalist logic, because “race war” both internal and external, ends up by depriving “National war” (whose goals of domination remain positive goals) of any coherence. In this Nazism (indicative of the transgression of political rationality inscribed in the condition of modern man) could itself be seen as the embodiment of the “nihilism” of which it spoke itself, in which the extermination of the Imaginary Enemy, who is seen as the incarnation of Evil (the Jew of the Communist) and self-destruction meet.

History sets itself up as diagnosis of the normal and the pathological and ends up echoing the discourse of its own object, demonising Nazism which itself demonised its enemies and victims. It is not easy to escape from this circle, since the essential point is not to reduce the phenomenon to conventional generalities, the practical impotence of which it precisely revealed. This is the contradictory tendency that with Nazism, Nationalism both plumbs it lowest depths and yet goes beyond itself, and the ordinary form in which it is normally realised and is normally institutionalised to penetrate in lasting way the “common sense” of the masses. On the one hand, we can see (after the event of course) the irrationality of a racial mythology, which ends up dislocating the Nation-State whose absolute superiority it proclaims. We can see that racism, as a complex which combines the banality of daily acts of violence and the “historical” intoxication of the masses, the bureaucratisation of the forced labour and extermination camps and the delirium of “world” domination of the “master race” can no longer be considered a simple aspect of everyday Nationalism. Yet the question then arises as to how we can avoid this “irrationality” becoming its own cause, the exceptional character of Nazi anti-Semitism turning into a sacred mystery, into a speculative vision of history which represents history precisely as the history of Evil and which by extension represents its victims as the true Lamb of God. Doing the opposite and deducing Nazi racism from German Nationalism does not free us from this problem either. For we have to admit that only a Nationalism of an “extreme” intensity, a Nationalism exacerbated by an “exceptional” series of internal and external conflicts was able to idealise the goals of racism to the point of making the violence wrought by the great number of torturers possible and “normalising” relations this in the eyes of the great mass of other people. The combination of this banality and this idealism tends rather to reinforce the metaphysical idea that German Nationalism might itself be “exceptional” in history: though a paradigm of Nationalism in its pathological content in relation to liberalism, it would in the end be irreducible to “ordinary” Nationalism. We here fall back then into the aporias described above of “good” and “bad” Nationalism.

This contradiction is shown in the way which the development of Nationalism and its official utilisation by the state transforms antagonisms and persecutions that have quite other origins into racism in the modern sense and ascribes verbal markers of ethnicity to them. This runs from the way, in which, since the times of the Reconquista in Spain, theological anti-Judaism was transposed into genealogical exclusion based on the “purity of blood” at the same time as the raza was launching itself upon the conquest of the New World, down to the way in which in Modern Europe, the new “dangerous” classes of the international proletariat tend to be subsumed under the category of “immigrants” which becomes the main name given to race with the crisis torn nations of the post-colonial era. This determination and relationship also is apparent in the “official Nationalism” of the 19th and the 20th centuries, which in aiming to confer the political and cultural unity of the Nation on the heterogeneity of the multi-ethnic state, have used anti-Semitism: as if the domination of a culture and a more of less fictively unified nationality (such as the Russian or the German) over a hierarchically ordered diversity of “minority” ethnicities and cultures marked down for assimilation should be “compensated” and mirrored by the racialising persecution of an absolutely singular pseudo-ethnic group (without their own territory and their own language) which represents the common internal enemy of all cultures and all dominated populations.

Such tension is also present in the history of all national Liberation struggles: whether they be directed against the old empires of the first period of colonisation, against the dynastic multinational states or against the modern colonial empires. One wonders whether it is by chance that the genocide of the Amerindians in the US became symptomatic after the United States achieved independence or as Bipan Chandra notes that “Nationalism” and “Communalism” in India were formed together in the period of the anti-Colonial Nationalist Movement; or that independent Algeria made assimilating the Berbers into Arabness the key test of the Nation’s will in its struggle against the multicultural heritage of the colonial state.

From this accumulation of individual but historically linked cases there emerges what I would term the cycle of historical reciprocity of Nationalism and Racism, which is the temporal figure of the progressive domination of the system of Nation-states over other social formations. Racism and exclusion are constantly emerging out of Nationalism, not only towards the exterior but towards the interior. In the United States, the systematic institution of segregation, which put a halt to the first civil rights movement, coincided with America’s entry into global imperialist competition and with its subscribing to the idea that Nordic races have a hegemonic mission. In France the elaboration of an ideology of the “French race” rooted in the past of the “soil and the dead”, coincides with the beginning of mass immigration, the preparation for revenge against Germany and the founding of the colonial empire. In Britain the idea of English exceptionalism in contrast to continental unreliability and perfidy and the detached role that Britain has from Europe with its overseas colonies and place in the global trading network as a financial centre, coincided with the dominant position it occupied as the first Industrial Nation and the sprawling Empire along with the Imperial mission to civilise and colonise. Nationalism can also emerge out of racism, in the sense that it would not constitute itself as the ideology of a “new” Nation if the official Nationalism against which it were reacting were not profoundly racist: thus Zionism comes out of anti-Semitism and Third World Nationalisms come out of Colonial racism. Within this grand cycle, however, there is a multitude of individual cycles. For example in French National history, the defeat suffered by anti-Semitism after the Dreyfuss Affair, which was symbolically incorporated into the ideals of the republican regime, opened up to a certain extent the possibility of a colonial “good conscience” and made it possible for many years for the notion of racism to be disassociated from that of colonisation, at least in the metropolitan perspective.

Secondly however, I argue that the gap subsists between the representations and practises of Nationalism and Racism. It is a fluctuating gap between the two poles of a contradiction and forced identification – and it is perhaps, as the Nazi example shows, when this identification apparently complete that the contradiction is most marked. Not a contradiction between Nationalism and exclusion as such, but a contradiction between the political objectives of Nationalism and the crystallisation of forms of exclusion upon a particular object, at a particular moment: for example when Nationalism undertakes to “integrate” a dominated potentially autonomous population as in the current rhetoric in Britain over the “swamping” of the public system by non-White and “alien” Asylum-Seekers who must be “integrated into the mainstream”. The point that emerges from all of the above discussion on Nationalism and Racism is that: racism is not an expression of Nationalism, but a supplement of Nationalism or more precisely a supplement internal to the very logic of Nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project, just as Nationalism is both indispensable and always insufficient to achieve the formation of the Nation or the project of a “nationalisation” of society.

Egalitarianism and Nationalism:

To look at why I think within broad or revolutionary Nationalism may not have exhausted its emancipatory potential we should turn to the link between the link between revolutionary Nationalism and Egalitarianism. Equality as a political ideal emerged out of the struggle against the hierarchical order of the European ancien regime and was used in the rhetoric of the French and the American Revolutions. The emergence of a new form of society characterised by the “equality of condition” was discerned first by Tocqueville in his work Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s analysis of democratic society conceived equality less as a well-defined normative concept, or a specific set of institutions or social structures, than as a mentalite or structure of feeling. “Equality of condition” represented the absence of the status of hierarchy constitutive of aristocratic societies and therefore was consistent with the existence of considerable differences in wealth and income Tocqueville was chiefly interested in tracing the spiritual consequences of this new social order, its effects on how citizens conceived themselves and their relationships to public life; in doing so, he formulated a remarkably prescient account of the privatised individualism that is such a central a feature of modern Western societies.

It is however the failure to realise equality as an ideal rather these supposed consequences of the “equality of condition”, that has dominated the modern debate. The contrast between aspiration and reality is built into the initial formulations of the ideal. Most obviously, the authors of the French and American Revolutions for example, such as Thomas Jefferson spoke of the equality of men. Jefferson, notoriously was a Virginia slave-owner – “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” asked Dr. Johnson during the American Revolution. The ideal of equality came; it seemed packed with tacit or explicit clauses excluding women, the poor, slaves and many other groups from its ambit. In remarkable essay, Etienne Balibar has suggested that these limitations imply not the abandonment of equality as an ideal, but its radicalisation. He argues that the fundamental meaning of the main programmatic document of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of August 1789, is precisely the equation of Man and Citizen: individual humans, simply by virtue of their humanity, are political subjects. This equation implies another, that of equality and liberty. This is what Balibar calls the “proposition of egaliberte”. By this “deliberately baroque…port-manteau word” he does not mean “the intuitive discovery or the revelation of an identity of the ideas of Equality and of Liberty”. Rather “it is the historical discovery, which one could in fact call experimental, that their extensions are necessarily identical. To put it plainly, that the situations in which each is present or absent are necessarily the same.” In other words: “There are no examples of restrictions of suppression of liberties without social inequalities, nor of inequalities without restriction or suppression of liberties” Balibar draws two main implications from the idea of egaliberte:

The meaning of the equation Man = Citizen is not so much the definition of a political right as the affirmation of a universal right to politics. Formally at least – but this is the very type of a form that can become a material weapon – the Declaration opens up an indefinite sphere of the “politicalisation” of demands for rights which reiterate, each in its own way, the requirement of citizenship or of an institutional, public, inscription of liberty and equality: in this indefinite opening is inscribed as well – and as early as the period of the Revolution one sees the attempt – the demand for the right of wage-earners or dependants as such as women and slaves, later that of the colonised. This right finds itself formulated later in the following form: The emancipation of the oppressed can only be their own work. Which underlies its ethical significance.

Balibar argues, secondly that, intrinsic to “the proposition of egaliberte” is its “absolute indeterminacy”. There is always a discrepancy between the abstract equation of equality and liberty and the concrete historical circumstances in which a particular version of this statement is uttered: “There will be a permanent tension between the conditions that historically determine the construction of institutions conforming to the proposition of egaliberte, and the hyperbolic universality of the statement.” This tension gives the idea and inherently subversive character. This account of egaliberte ruins contrary to one of the main assumptions of liberal tradition, which, from Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill to John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin, has tended to treat equality and freedom as necessarily in conflict with one another. For my purposes it is more relevant to stress that Balibar offers an intriguing analysis of how the political demands of the great revolutions of the 187th and 18the centuries have an inherent tendency to outflank themselves. Ideals that were initially to have quite a narrow reference, to primarily benefit White men of property, proved capable of indefinite extension. The result is a state of permanent revolution, in which a succession of new political subjects – workers, slaves, women, colonial subjects, people of colour, oppressed nationalities, lesbians and gays, disabled peoples, all emerge to stake their claim to the liberty and equality won in earlier struggles.

Jacques Bidet has constructed an ambitious theory intended to show that this dynamic is inherent in modernity itself. He argues that all modern societies presuppose what he calls a “metastructure” constituted above all by contractuality, which embraces both the transactions among individuals on the market and the social contract by which autonomous agents agree to govern themselves. The aspiration to egaliberte implicit in this metastructure is, however, “reversed” in the structures of domination and exploitation that survived the ancien regime. But, as Bidet, insists, “in modernity, domination, exploitation and violence are based on a, metastructural, reference to contractuality, to free and equal relations”. Thus for example, the structure of class inequality “cannot be conceived except by starting from it (in the metastructure), as its reversal: the structure constitutes itself (and therefore can only conceive itself) in the reversal of the principle it poses, it builds itself under the form of the promise of unfulfilled, the pact denied”. What is interesting in Bidet’s theory, which has its own problems, is that the metastrucutre only ever advances in the conditions of the structure in conflict. In other words, the demand for freedom and equality is made in societies that systematically deny it, that indeed are riven by political and social struggles. It is the very existence of social conflict along religious or ethnic lines and economic conflict along class lines that encourages this aspiration towards egaliberte. Since the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, no inherited institution or practice can any longer claim justification by appeal to tradition or divine sanction. Every social relationship is open to question, in an endless debate in which every human must be treated as an autonomous subject possessing the same rights as others. The rectification of particular injustices, such as the status hierarchies of the Old Regime or New World chattel slavery, simply draws attention to others – the exploitation of workers or the racial oppression of black people, that themselves demand remedy. The very generality of the demand for egaliberte puts it in permanent conflict with the particular historical conditions that prevail at any time. This analysis puts Tocqueville’s equality of condition in a different light. It suggests a more dynamic picture, in which existing social and political arrangements are constantly liable to subversion by new demands to extend the application of egaliberte; therefore as long as there are significant discrepancies in wealth and power, there will be movements denouncing them as unjustified and demanding their removal. I think to ignore the emancipatory aspect that such demands for egaliberte have had in removing disabilities for racial minorities, religious sects and other disadvantaged groups such as women is to misread history; such projects have also been intimately tied up with the development of revolutionary Nationalism as was apparent from the French Revolution onwards where the question as to who could be considered a French citizen and who could not was posed. This resulted in the removal of disabilities from the French Jewish community on an unprecedented level and the eradication of slavery and retrospective endorsement of the Haitian Slave Revolution under Overture; that these moves did not remove anti-Semitism or racism from French society or later state policy is to miss the point – they undermined their credibility and made it much harder for such exclusionary forms of discrimination to be practised unquestioningly and set up an internal tension between exclusion and inclusion and who could exactly be said to belong to the Nation. In this they laid the ground for later struggles and resolution of these conflicts.

Indian Nationalism. Geo-Politics and Emancipation:

Returning to Vikash’s observations about bounded Nationalism and South Asia, I would go over some differences and similarities in our positions.

1) While I agree with Vikash’s interpretations of the perceptions of Indian Nationalists to regional supremacy, I think further questions need to be asked as to who defines this National interest. This has to me overwhelmingly been a project of the Centrist formations, which incorporated much of what I would call soft Saffronism in their assumptions and World View. With the disintegration of the Old Centrist forces this has meant that much of the old consensus around which mainstream Indian Nationalism was based has become fragmented with much of the Centrist forces and groups moving to the resurgent Hindu Right that has come to occupy some of the political vacuum created by the collapse of the Centre.

2) The aggressive foreign policy and security concerns of the Indian state have become increasingly dominated by constituencies, which are close to the Saffronist world view. These include the bureaucratic-military nexus, which represent a small unelected group of officials, and officers who share a hawkish view on India’s position in the region. The conventional political right which has now been given to articulating the global aspiration of the Hindutva forces and the elements within the intellectual classes, the urban bourgeoisie and the overseas diaspora who have pretensions of Great Power status for India. These elements have been relatively successful in defining and acting as the guardians of the National Interest. However, I would argue that these represent nothing more than a grab for power by certain social constituencies who push a particularistic agenda under the guise of a universalising Nationalism.

2) Established mainstream Indian Nationalism both at the abstract level of rights (liberty, equality, Gandhianism, Nehruvian republicanism and modernity etc.) and in more concrete manifestations (the Directive Principles of the Constitution) had enshrined certain operative principles and ideals that were aimed for. Much of this remained at the level of rhetoric and was not translated into practise on Independence - hence the label Passive Revolution to the Gandhian and Mainstream Nationalist movement that evicted Colonialism but was unable/unwilling to complete the internal socio-economic reforms promised in the movement towards Indian Nationalism and made sure that the latter was articulated in a form acceptable to the dominant elite which was primarily Hindu, Male and Upper Caste. Clientist networks and patronage-dynastic politics managed an uneasy status quo in this regard with minimal and tokenist concessions being given without disturbing the existing structures in the economy and society. Now with the percolation of democracy downwards and the rise in political consciousness, those left outside traditional mainstream nationalism have come to collect on the formal promises of democracy and those elements that had previously been relegated to the margins in traditional mainstream Nationalism have returned to enact a change in the way such Nationalism is defined and understood. A sort of Freudian "return of the repressed" if you will. The link with external security concerns is an indirect one: a turning inwards and priority to internal reform is implicit in such a changing view of Nationalism; the emancipatory rhetoric of the last 50 years must be redeemed in full before other demands can take precedent. This implies that Great Power ambitions and anything more than regional security has to take a backseat as priorities are reshuffled.

3) Returning to the previous points about how to define our Nationalism and the National interest, it is important that people now understand the limitations of the passive revolution that delivered our independence and ended colonialism; which in effect was our foundational myth. Such a myth had several problems: it had whether one likes to admit it or not, a soft Saffronist hue in many of its aspects, and it was premised on a certain way of interpreting Nationalism that privileged one perspective above others, as well as the explicit promises of Nationhood with its implications of liberty, egalitarianism, civic fraternity and democratic spirit. Two things are important here, therefore, the first is to recognise how many of the movements and their political equivalents such as the caste-based and regional parties are the result of the earlier failures to resolve these issues and to come good on the rights and guarantees within the earlier nationalism. As I don't believe in such failure be accidental or exogenous ones; given the systemic nature in which they occur; this points to the deficiencies and limitations of our earlier Nationalism and the current attack it is under from various sides. Hence one can hear denunciations of Gandhi and Nehru both from the Left and the Right, both from conservative businessmen and activist environmentalists, both from ardent pacifist and security hawks; this is the perennial failure of the inherent Centrist tendency in the Indian polity. I do believe that the earlier nationalism now has served its purpose and needs to be discarded. The Centre as we have seen has collapsed with the fragmentations of the Left and Liberals, the rise of communitarian groups and the New Social Movements and of course the resurgence of the Saffronist Right.

4) My argument would be that much of the old establishment one way or another has migrated from the discredited Centrist version of Nationalism to the Saffronist one. The latter has also been very adept at persuading large elements of the middle-classes, particularly those which have been recently upwardly mobile or those who have been to some degree dislocated such as professional NRIs who want to maintain their connections with India. Yet what can the Right offer except a stronger version of the Saffronist elements in the older discredited Nationalism; there is very little of a positive and constructive vision of India, no real competence at the governance level and certainly nothing more except retrograde reaction under the platform of neo-liberalism on the socio-economic front. This inability to offer anything positive and to disengage from the discredited past will limit the medium-term appeal of the Saffronist Right even amongst its own "natural constituency" as it will only be able to attract elements of these classes an groups not whole segments. Many may still vote for the BJP but the very indeterminacy and hesitancy will handicap the confidence with which the latter can move forward as well the haemorrhaging of voters to other moderate blocs. As for the remnants of the Moderate Centre, they bear the heaviest burden for past failures and their traditional antipathy to the Left and other communitarian groups is a major hurdle in building an effective secular coalition; yet given their reluctance to join the Rightist forces they will eventually gravitate to the opposite side. The biggest problem comes with the Left, the communitarian groups and the New Social Movements; the former are still dealing with the reverse to their ideological position since 1989 and while having credible governance achievements to their credit are unable to expand beyond anti-saffron rhetoric in broadening their appeal; the other two I think are the most preponderant forces in the polity taken together as a whole and they have yet to reach their mobilisational potential. They represent constituencies that cannot be absorbed by the Right but being micro and meso-level orientated in their aims are also distrustful of being taken over by the Left and the Centre for more macro-level projects; after having had this done to them under the old discredited Nationalism it is understandable that they are wary of a repeat performance. Yet the trend of development favours them, as their constituents have been the last to receive the benefits of modernity and incorporation into the mainstream, hence the reason that they are harder to organise effectively despite the great numbers. However, the passage of time, spread of mass literacy, penetration of televisual and print media will all incline towards such an end. Given their desire to implement the promises of citizen-hood that lay at the heart of nationalism and the wider interests they represent, they are much more of an effective force than the Right, but being split into several mutually distrustful and quarrelsome elements they will be much harder to organise. However, let me turn De Maistre's dictum on its head; it is the very disorganisation of such a majority that is its strength as it prevents easy co-option and ensures that the articulation of nationalism it expresses speaks for the many rather than the few. This is my idea of a re-definition of Indian Nationalism.

5) I am sympathetic to Vikash’s arguments about the letting go of regions that have not been fully incorporated into the Idea of India; yet I think such an approach is to make several errors. Firstly at the conceptual level it is to confuse the category of Nation with that of the state. For the regions under concern such as Kashmir and the Northeast where the most serious ethno-regional secessionist movements come from it is one thing to say they do not consider themselves as part of the Indian Nation; another to say that they do not want to part of the Indian state. I think a decentralised federated system would be quite appealing to such movements as a way of remaining within the broad ambit of Indian Nationalism but separated from the states structure; in fact it is ironic that so many of the irredentist movements initially make such demands as was the case in Kashmir and Nagaland where the early demands were never for a separate Nation-state per se but rather a decentralised relationship with the Federal Centre within the broader confines of Indian Nationalism. Had such demands been met and the Nationalist aspirations of the Nagas and the Kashmiris been allowed to be expressed as a variant of a wider Indian Nationalism the bitter antagonism of the later years could have been avoided. It is also important to note that when the articulation of such ethno-nationalist demands is extended through the medium of democracy and electoral representation then purely exclusivist separatist demands become muted and institutionalised into the mainstream – this was how Dravidian separatism was incorporated into Indian Nationalism which till then had a strong North Indian flavour. Similarly, it was this denial of the logic of democracy that proved so fatal, along with ethnic mass killings, to the Pakistani nation-building project, which proved unable to retain East Pakistan and prevent its transformation to Bangladesh. Had the logic of electoral democracy been respected then East Bengali aspirations could have found a satisfactory articulation and voice inside Pakistani pan-ethnic Nationalism –something implied in the Islamic self-definition of that state; yet the refusal of the West Pakistani establishment particularly the Army to accommodate such demands made conflict inevitable. Indian faces the same problem in Kashmir and the North-East; where the traditional vehicle of Nationalist incorporation the anti-colonial Freedom movement was largely absent and where the post-colonial mechanism of Nationalist inclusion under the guise of electoral and civil democracy have also not been allowed to take root.

6) A closer examination will also reveal some problems with the view that the inhabitants of regions, which have strong separatist movements, do not consider themselves as “Indians in any meaningful way”. It is debatable as to whether this can really be applied to examples of religious based separatism such as the Khalistani movement, given that a substantial minority of Sikhs (20%) lived outside the Punjab and the large minority (40%) of Indian Hindus within the state; even if one moves to Kashmir and sees it as a case of a regional and ethnic movement rather than an Islamist one, problems occur as to the unit of analysis. For what we term as Kashmir is divided into the Muslim dominated valley, the primarily Hindu Jammu and the Buddhist Ladakh. A case in this argument could be made for Kashmiri Muslims in the valley not seeing themselves as Indian but the same cannot be said of the inhabitants of Jammu or of Ladakh who would balk at being part of a Muslim-dominated state. Even more problematical is the plight of Kashmiri Pandit refugees from the valley, who form a vocal if small minority and who have important representation in the political parities and bureaucracy as well as the Indian elite. They form a mini-community it themselves whose larger representation in the refugee camps of Delhi act as a constant tool in the hands of political entrepreneurs who want to exploit majoritarian sentiment. In anycase the narrative of Kashmiri Nationalism and its relationship with Indian Nationalism is far more complicated than superficial readings of the two common in the mainstream media allow. The National Conference party and the democratic movements within the state before independence had strong ties with the Indian Congress party and most well respected leaders such as Abdul Lone were all former Congressmen/Janata Dal or belonged to one or another of the mainstream Indian political formations; the quiescence of the population to Indian rule and the complete failure of the Muslim population to rise up as expected by Pakistani planners in the 1965 Indo-Pak conflict (in fact co-operation and support by the Kashmiri population was an important reason behind Indian performance during this war) point towards the fact that large sections of Kashmiris were not averse to regarding themselves as Indians. The downturn began with the subversion and cynical manipulation of Democracy in the 1980’s including electoral rigging of the ballots, suppression of Islamic parties (which were allowed to operate without hindrance elsewhere in India) and the sleazy tie-up between the National Conference and the Congress; this was preceded by the communalising of politics in the region along religious lines undertaken by the Congress itself, where as Balraj Puri an respected commentator on Kashmiri politics observed in the 1972 elections Indira Gandhi “outdid even the BJP” in her communal appeals to majoritarian Hindu sentiment in Jammu and Leh. So one wonders whether it was really a case of Kashmiris not regarding themselves as Indians, or the failure of the Indian Nation-State to see them as Indians in the first place.

7) Going to the Northeast other problems also occur. In those areas which have had a long history of cultural and political ties to India such as modern Assam; ethnic political mobilisation by the Ahom have wrested again the right of democratic representation and rule at the state level by their own political formation under the Asom Ganatantra Parishad and politics; this has resulted in a mediation of Assamese separatism the origins of which were not directed towards secessionism per se but rather the influx of Bangladeshi Muslims which threatened to undermine the ethnic dominance of Assamese groups in the state. However, as remarked upon in the discussion of egaliberte the same rhetoric of self-determination and communitarian self-defence employed by the Assamese against the Indian state has been turned against the Assamese by tribal groups who pre-date the ascendance of the Ahom and who have been marginalised in the areas of Assam where they are in the majority; Sanjib Baruah maps this fragmentation of Assamese regional nationalism very perceptively in his work “India against Itself” and the perils of evoking primordial sentiments to legitimise irredentist claims. The smaller north-eastern states suffer from a patchwork of problems: some like Arunachal Pradesh have no real history of separatism or insurgency while others like Tripura have had their demographics so changed by immigration that they majority of the population are Indian Hindus who would not support any secession from India. The states where secessionist demands remain such as Nagaland have followed similar trajectories to other regional ethno-nationalist movements in India: initial demands were for limited decentralisation and self-determination in internal affairs both of which demands were denied by the Indian state and the manipulation of democracy prevented any emergence of broad representative movements. In Nagaland, the site of the most tenacious and the oldest secessionist movement which has also served as the prototype for the other such movements in the region, there is again the problem of formulating Nationalism, since the very creation of the Naga Nation is a modern concept which did not exist before colonisation and the process of which was accelerated by the forced Hamletisation programme undertaken by the Indian state in the 1950s which destroyed the older dispersed and isolated tribal societies and congregated large groups of Nagas together for the first time. So much of the leadership and the social processes that have given impetus to Naga secessionism have been ironically deeply implicated within the broader workings of Indian Nationalism itself a simple disentangling does not present itself easily. Moreover, given the similar movements in neighbouring states such as Burma, any political resolution which results in decentralisation or limited independence will have to be carefully managed given the interests that other powers will have in the region.

Lastly, I agree about the problems India has with its neighbours; yet this is more indicative of the big Brother syndrome that all greater powers face when dealing with their smaller neighbours. India could have managed it much better; but it would be a mistake to see Chinese overtures as anything more than a strategic ploy and a cynical one at that. After all Chinese rhetoric of respecting national sovereignty, is easy to accept when there are no immediate territorial boundaries for many of the South Asian states such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh with China. The example of Tibet, as well as the rather more sceptical attitude of other Chinese neighbours such as Mongolia and Vietnam in this regard should point towards the limit of Chinese rhetoric in this regard. Moreover, states, which have a border with China, have either played a rather clever game of setting off India against China such as Nepal or have accepted Indian suzerainty in foreign and defence affairs like the mountain kingdom of Bhutan. None it should be noted have gone in for taking Chinese claims at face value or using the Chinese as anything more than a bargaining chip within the internal politics of the region. Furthermore, I think it is incorrect to argue that India has not moved beyond a bounded Nationalism, as the fiasco of the IPKF expedition in Sri Lanka where India burnt her hands has led to a great wariness to becoming dragged back into such adventures again. This went to the extreme of turning down appeals to provide airlifts to refugees stranded on the Jaffna peninsula after the latest offensive by the LTTE or subsequent attempts by both the Singhalese and the Tamil separatists to involve India in a resolution to the conflict. I do think this points to a concern to avoid getting involved in conflicts which are not directly connected to any internal Indian issue and which could prove potentially costly in terms of casualties. Furthermore, if change does come I don’t think it is enough to argue that we should wait for Indians to grow tired of bearing the cost counter-insurgencies to accommodate the demands of regional ethno-nationalist movements; as apart from the reasons mentioned above there is not guarantee that in this war of attrition it would be the insurgents who would prevail. The trajectory of Assamese and Khalistani movements point towards the co-opting powers of the Indian state as well as the superior strength of the security forces to wear down opposition; the North-Eastern militants have endured in part because of the favourable strategic location, the weaker institutionalisation of democratic politics and the inhospitable local terrain; the Kashmir insurgency is still relatively young having started in the late 1980s. Moreover, there is creeping and subtle “political economy of defence” which allows the bureaucratic-military nexus that implements so much of these policies to remain in power if one simply abandons trying to resolve them directly; the network of vested interests find it more rewarding in terms of power and resources allocated to keep in these conflicts going without attempting any form of political solution; this also ignores the whole narrative about how many of these insurgency movements were created (at least in part) by the Indian state itself. Such a network must be tackled directly, as apart from anything else it will only have negative effects in other parts of the polity. I do not think it is possible to hermetically seal off the behaviour of state machinery in one sphere from the rest of the political and public spheres and lack of respect for democracy, suppression of civil and individual rights will sooner or later manifest itself in a decaying of the more civic and democratic institutions at the Centre and undermine what Tocqueville would have called the democratic “mentalite”.

In conclusion, I think there is much potential for re-thinking the concept of Nationalism within the Indian context; too much of which has been dominated by the orthodox anti-colonial Nationalist Movement. Such a Nationalism was really characterised by its own prejudices and was tinged with saffron hues; more damagingly it was modelled on 19th century European and Western ideas of Nationalism – the discourse of Nationalism here was a derived discourse as pointed out by Partha Chatterjee. There is no reason why Indian Nationalism should feel it has to follow this model with all its deficiencies and limitations; a tantalising possibility was the Federation of states offered in the negotiations that ran up to independence, which was aimed at trying to avoid Partition. Separatist elements such as the Muslim League under Jinnah were more than willing to accept such a resolution but Indian Nationalism represented by Congress and influenced by Western ideas of territorial Nationalism could not accept such a resolution. To allow the free and full articulation of the diverse elements of Indian Nationalism and the regional ethno-nationalisms as well as the various communitarian sentiments of the religious and social communities a new model is necessary; one which may break the old linear identity between the Nation and the State and allow a more decentralised and flexible polity that can sustain these tensions in a constructive and fruitful way.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:28 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Bounded Nationalism and "Geopolitik":

Although I am quite pessimistic about the possibility of any emancipatory nationalism, I would state that a "bounded" type of nationalism (i.e., republicanism?) that does not seek to oppress or exert hegemony over those defined as "outside" the nation is a geo-strategic asset.

A reading of John W. Garver's Protracted Contest on the Sino-Indian rivalry, reveals the ways in which India has failed to define a secure strategic zone of influence and allowed itself to become encircled by it major regional rival, the Chinese, even within the subcontinent and Indian Ocean regions. What is the main cause of India's strategic failing in this regard? It is India's inability to secure lasting friendship with its smaller surrounding neighbors. In many cases, despite the public rhetoric of friendship, India has acted in a hostile and hegemonic manner toward its sovereign neighbors, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Indian nationalists seem to believe they inherited their regional leadership status from the British Empire. If India were more skillful at respecting the sovereign status of its neighbors and less niggardly in its economic dealings, India might have earned a position as a leader in the region (and the developing world for that matter). However, India now finds itself in a situation where Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh are increasingly being drawn toward the Chinese sphere of military and political influence. China's rather consistent rhetoric of respecting sovereignty and promoting "co-prosperity" (except in Tibet of course) has played better with small countries in South Asia stung by Indian hegemony. The rise of Chinese influence in the South Asian sphere is not necessarily a menacing development, however, as there have been conflicts between India and China in the past, it is probably not an optimal situation for India at this moment of economic and military vulnerability.

In order for India to develop a type of bounded nationalism, it must first redefine what constitutes the Indian nation. For too long, the conception of the Indian nation has been tied to a historical concept which seems to include all territories under British India's direct control or influence. It may be that a redefinition of Indian nationalism means letting go of those territories and those regions where the inhabitants do not see themselves as "Indian" in any meaningful way despite their historic and cultural ties with the Indian heartland. A stronger nation may mean a smaller nation. By letting go of (which is not the same as giving away) peripheral territories, India may also signal a willingness to adopt less hegemonic relationship with its existing sovereign neighbors.

Is any of this likely in the near future? No. But maybe in a few decades when Indians grow tired of constantly combatting insurgency movements, they will take time to rethink the "Idea of India."

:: Vikash Yadav 4:54 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Needed a New Nationalism:

Reading Vikash's post on Sean Penn's courageous actions in trying to move beyond a simple jingoistic patriotism in seeking a solution to the ballooning conflict of the Middle East; I am reminded of another example of what I would call emancipatory Nationalism. This was the celebration of Verdi upon hearing of the defeat of Italian forces at the Battle of Adowa in 1896 in the Italian attempt to colonise the Ethiopian kingdom of Abyssinia and create their own "Italian" Empire. Verdi was no internationalist or anti-nationalist malcontent; he was an ardent Italian nationalist whose operas were frequently in trouble in a period when Italy did not exist but was occupied by other European powers. Several of his operas were banned by the Austro-Hungarian authorities who correctly saw them as an allusion using Biblical themes such as the story of the Daniel in the Lion's Den, Nebuchdanezzar amongst others such as Aida, to the struggle of the Italian Nationalists to evict the occupying European powers and “create” the Italian Nation. Despite this Verdi was deeply influenced by the Mazzini-inspired belief that no Nation had the right to express its own National greatness by oppressing another. It is time that there was a re-articulation of Nationalism along such lines, that would act as a foil to the rather tired and stale jingoism full of notions of cultural superiority, xenophobia and racism that is implicit in the traditional forms of Nationalism that are so frequently bandied about by the Right. There is so much within the Nation-State and the nation-building project of so many countries that points towards a rhetoric of emancipation and liberation that has yet to be fulfilled; by removing the resolution of these tensions and antagonisms to the external sphere of relations between Nation-states rather than within them, such sticky and problematic questions have been allowed to subsumed in the mire of Imperialism of one form or another. The Universalist assumptions and practises within Nationalism have proved to be all to easy to be hijacked by particularistic interests to in the name of the Nation advance their own sectarian agenda. Too often this has resulted in the silencing of those whose belonging to the Nation could be made suspect or where criticism of prevailing policy could be made to look as an act of treason or of “bad Faith”; frequently these have represented the voices of those that have been the most marginalised and deprived within the boundaries of the Nation. It is time that we found a type of Nationalism that speaks for the Many rather than the Few.

:: Conrad Barwa 2:03 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Some thoughts on Truth and Power:

Truth is a Power. But one can see that only in rare instances, because it is suffering and must be defeated as long as it is truth. When it has become victorious, Others will join it. Why Because it is truth? No, if it had been for that reason then they would have joined it also when it was suffering. Therefore they do not join it because it has power. They join it after it has become a power becuase Others had joined it.

Soren Kierkegaard.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:49 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Engels on the American Media From the Guardian: Bushwhacked

With war looming it is no good the American public looking to its newspapers for an independent voice. For, says Matthew Engel, the press have now become the president's men.

It is more than 30 years ago now, though it seems like yesterday. A Republican president, much derided by liberals, was in the White House and his opponents were being lashed by the rightwing attack dogs, led then by the vice-president, Spiro Agnew. The elite East Coast press, exemplified by the New York Times and the Washington Post, were the special targets of his scorn: "pointy-headed liberals," he called them, and "the nattering nabobs of negativism". But the press laughed last and longest. Agnew resigned in disgrace, to be followed by his president, Richard Nixon - forced out by the investigations of two Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, whose doggedness revealed Nixon's role in covering up the Watergate break-in and sundry other crimes. It remains one of the greatest - maybe the greatest - moment in the history of American journalism.

Now there is a new Republican president, elected even more controversially and pursuing a far more divisive agenda. Where are the pointy-head liberals now? The change can be summed up in Woodward's own career. As the Watergate investigator, he not merely protected his sources, he glamorised them. Now, still on the Post staff, he functions as a semi-official court stenographer to the Bush White House. And it is notable that those who talk to him - such as the president himself - always play the heroic role in his stories. The worldwide turmoil caused by President Bush's policies goes not exactly unreported, but entirely de-emphasised. Guardian writers are inundated by emails from Americans asking plaintively why their own papers never print what is in these columns (in my experience, these go hand-in-hand with an equal number insulting us for the same reason). In the American press, day after day, the White House controls the agenda. The supposedly liberal American press has become a dog that never bites, hardly barks but really loves rolling over and having its tummy tickled.

Indeed, there is hardly any such thing as the liberal press. Since Watergate, the Post has acquired a virtual monopoly over the Washington newspaper market, grown fat and - frankly - journalistically flabby. Its op-ed page is notable for its turgid prose, its conservative slant, and the apologetic tone of its more liberal contributors. The rival page in the New York Times has far more spark, and - in the unfortunate absence of political opposition - has provided the only forum for serious national debate over the Iraq issue. But the Times' own editorials over Iraq, possibly reflecting internal tensions, have been uncertain. And the paper feels itself a little beleaguered, even marginalised, by the strategies employed by the Bush White House.

Outside these two bastions, the media landscape has changed entirely. Day after day, rightwing radio talk hosts dominate the airwaves, deriding opponents and cutting off callers who argue. Indeed, to emphasise the turnaround, one of the most ferocious is run by G Gordon Liddy, who was jailed for his role in Watergate. ("There are no second acts in American lives" - Scott Fitzgerald. Wrong.) The doyen of them, Rush Limbaugh, reaches an estimated 20 million listeners a week. Supporters of the Democrats are rather desperately trying to find ways of countering this. "Most liberal talk shows are so, you know, milquetoast, who would want to listen to them?" Hollywood producer and Clinton buddy Harry Thomason complained to the New York Times. "Conservatives are all fire and brimstone."

On TV Rupert Murdoch's Fox network, pursuing a thinly disguised rightwing agenda, has taken over the No 1 cable news spot from CNN; Bill O'Reilly, the host of its flagship show, makes Limbaugh seem wishy-washy. An attempt by the No 3 channel, MSNBC, to counter this with a liberal alternative by bringing the old master Phil Donohue out of retirement has been an embarrassing failure. The papers are not immune to the shift. The Post's only hometown rival is the Moonie-owned Washington Times, which is negligible in circulation terms (100,000 v the Post's 750,000). But a fair number of those copies go into the White House, which enjoys a newspaper in which 99% of the copy and columns are agreeably slanted in its direction. Rival reporters note sourly that when positions in presidential reporting pools are being doled out, the puny Times seems to do better than its New York namesake. Unanimously, it is accepted that the Bush White House - helped by his popularity, the post-September 11 mood and the weakness of the Democratic opposition - has taken media control-freakery to unprecedented levels.

There is a new game in town. It is not merely Bush's opponents who have failed to grasp the rules, but ordinary reporters who believe their sole job is to get at the truth. American journalists emerge from university journalism schools, which teach rigid notions of factual reporting and "objectivity". But facts can be very slippery creatures, especially when sliding through the hands of skilful politicians and their spokesmen. The journalists may see the sleight-of-hand, but in the US the conventions of their trade make it hard for them to convey it. "It's not that the press is uncritical of the people it covers," says Steven Weisman, the New York Times's chief diplomatic correspondent, "but it's critical the way a sportswriter is critical, calling the points and measuring success or failure based on wherever the administration wants to be. So in a situation like this, when the administration is set on waging a war, is enacting its programme and is winning seats at elections, then in a funny way the press becomes like a ga-ga sportswriter. Except for scandals, the press is unable to set the agenda in this country."

This might seem desirable compared to the British situation, where national newspapers traditionally have an agenda of their own. But there are two major consequences of the American way. Most Washington reports consist of stories emanating from inside the government: these may (rarely) be genuine leaks; they may come from officials anxious to brief against rival officials, but that too is rare in this disciplined and corporately-run administration. Most of these stories, which look like impressive scoops at first glimpse, actually come from officials using the press to perform on-message spin. Whatever the category, the papers lap this up, even when it is obvious nonsense, a practice that reached its apogee last year when palpably absurd plans for the invasion of Iraq emerged, allegedly from inside the Pentagon, on to the New York Times front page. "It's a very cynical game," says Eric Umansky, who reviews the papers for slate.com. "The reporters know these stories are nonsense and they know they are being used. But it's an exclusive. It's an exclusive built on air, but CNN says 'according to the New York Times', so the paper's happy, and it stays out there for a whole news cycle. So what if it's popcorn?"

The second consequence is that this makes for very tedious journalism. One observer thinks Woodward and Bernstein may actually be to blame for all this. "It's been a post-Watergate phenomenon. We just got so sober-sided and Serious with a capital S that it drained a lot of personality out of the newspapers," says Tom Kunkel, dean of journalism at the University of Maryland. "The trend in American journalism has been to be more credible and more objective. But we've just taken all the fun out of it. Most of the time, it's just 'he said' and 'she said'. Newspapers have got kinda boring. The industry wrings its hands and asks what's wrong and beats itself up. What it never does is say: 'Well, we could make the paper a hell of a lot more interesting'." There is actually very little pressure to make the papers more interesting. The last rip-roaring newspaper war outside New York was in Denver, and it ended a couple of years back. Only about a dozen cities still have competing newspapers, and even there the competition is usually notional: either the main paper - as in Washington and Los Angeles - is so dominant it can ignore the opposition or the papers have joint operating agreements to cut costs. The major papers are so fat with ads they hardly notice that circulation is drifting ever downwards. The pressure on editors is not to increase sales but to maintain the industry's phenomenal record of profitability, which is not quite the same thing.

In this situation, journalistic adventurousness is understandably a rarity. The papers are verbose (one Los Angeles Times reporter said his stories were so long even his mother never read to the end of them), formulaic, wretchedly designed (the Washington Post being an especially monstrous example) with the use of pictures being generally of the standard that would have been regarded as slightly old-fashioned in English local papers of the Watergate era. Amid the glorious patchwork of creativity in the American media - in Hollywood, TV, magazines, the net, advertising, even publishing - the newspapers are a drab and unimaginative exception.

And political courage is especially rare. reporters in Washington are kept in line by the standard threat: annoy us, and your stories dry up. In normal times this matters less, because there may be enough dissidents to produce alternative information. But the Bush White House's sophisticated news management has given them control. One official who has worked in administrations of both colours explained: "The Republicans regard themselves as patrician gatekeepers of the news. They say 'If you're really good, we'll give you information and if you're really, really good, we'll give you more information.' The Democrats thought; 'My God, there are all those reporters out there! We better talk to them!'"

In the face of this, only one White House reporter, Dana Milbank of the Post, regularly employs scepticism and irreverence in his coverage of the Bush administration- he is said to dodge the threats because he is regarded as an especially engaging character. It is more mysterious that only the tiniest handful of liberal commentators ever manage to irritate anyone in the government: there is Paul Krugman in the New York Times, Molly Ivins down in Texas and, after that, you have to scratch your head.

To some extent, journalists have felt obliged to tone down criticisms because of the sense of shared national purpose after September 11. Even that cannot explain how the papers cravenly ignored the Trent Lott story. Lott, the veteran senator from Mississippi, made his pro- segregation statement on a Thursday, in full earshot of the Washington press corps. The Times and Post both failed to mention it. Indeed, it was almost totally ignored until the following Tuesday, kept alive until then only by a handful of bloggers. If there is a Watergate scandal lurking in this administration, it is unlikely to be Woodward or his colleagues who will tell us about it. If it emerges, it will probably come out on the web. That is a devastating indictment of the state of American newspapers.


:: Conrad Barwa 11:58 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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