Whatever Eric Hobsbawm’s undoubted merits, he could not be accused of prescience. In 1990, in the introduction to his nevertheless influential Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, the Marxist historian famously declared that, “The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.” The age of both was surely drawing to a close, he asserted, “retreating before the new supranational restructuring of the globe”. Hobsbawm was shocked and appalled by the almost immediate collapse of the Soviet Union, and its replacement by a constellation of fiercely nationalistic new nation-states, a sequence of events, he would later declare, that “was neither probable nor expected before the late 1980s.”
In this, as in so much else, the Senior Common Room revolutionary was entirely wrong. But not, the far less influential Walker Connor. The American political scientist had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of resurgent nationalism in his 1984 book The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Indeed, Connor observed, rather than leading societies away from the backwardness of tribalism toward the promised land, in reality state socialism relied upon the strength of national feeling for the implementation and survival of its project, to the extent that the Soviet Union was forced to create the very structures, the semi-autonomous republics, which would end up consuming it.
Time would prove Connor correct, and the post-national fantasies of Hobsbawm disastrously wrong. Yet while any PPE graduate has at least a cursory familiarity with Hobsbawm’s writing on nationalism, the only recent Westminster allusion to Connor’s writing appears to be an AI hallucination. At our own time of epochal political change and ideological ferment, perhaps analogous to the collapse of Soviet communism, it may therefore be worth reassessing Connor’s central contribution to political science, now that it too has entered the Westminster lexicon: that of ethnonationalism.
There is surely very little that can unite Reformers and Starmerites at the podium in shared expressions of pained distaste, other than the concept of ethnonationalism. Even the populist Right, at least in interminable online debates, is torn between rival concepts of civic and ethnic nationalism, in which the latter is seen as a dangerous and novel radicalization of the former. Alluding to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, Farage recently declared that, “Unless we are able to provide a proper democratic antidote” to anxieties over mass immigration, “then I fear that we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme right ethno-nationalism”. The Home Secretary, for her part, has warned that British “patriotism is turning into something smaller, something like ethnonationalism,” a term Labour MPs nevertheless struggle to define. The Left-wing IPPR thinktank similarly warns that “large parts of the political right are increasingly, often explicitly, ethnonationalist”, including, it claims, 71% of Reform supporters. Reform’s Zia Yusuf, meanwhile, rather improbably accuses Rachel Reeves of being an ethnonationalist. Without being clear precisely what it means, Westminster has awoken to the existence of ethnonationalism, as a political force and as a threat to its current order.
But what is ethnonationalism, other than, as the above Westminster voices, claim, patriotism’s evil twin? In his 1994 book Ethnonationalism: the Quest for Understanding, a collection of essays spanning 30 years of careful deliberation, Connor coined the term to dispel what he termed the “terminological chaos” of writing on the subject. For Connor, all nationalism was at heart ethnonationalism, deriving from essentially emotional loyalties to the nation, itself a fundamentally ethnic category. As he puts it, “nation connotes a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. Nationalism connotes identification with and loyalty to one’s nation as just defined. It does not refer to loyalty to one’s country.”
Most of the world, Connor asserts, “is subdivided into a series of perceived homelands to which, in each case, the indigenous ethno-national group is convinced it has a profound and exclusive proprietary claim.” For as he asks, “Who but the Scots could have plenary claim to residence within Scotland, who but Germans to Deutschland, Kurds to Kurdistan (literally “Land of the Kurds”), or Nagas to Nagaland?” This is, for Connor, simply a historical and social fact: it does not mean that members of other groups can or should not reside among them, or even be absorbed by them; but it does mean that the dominant ethnic group will always see its own group interests as paramount in its own titular homeland, and that this belief will almost always, eventually, come to shape that country’s politics, particularly if the self-assurance of continued ownership comes to be challenged.
The problem, Connor perceived, was that this basic, observable reality had become confused by the popular and lazy academic use of “nationalism” to describe the transference of such emotions, for which “poets are far better guides for penetrating… than are social scientists” to the state, a self-identification he preferred to describe as “patriotism”. Nationalism and ethnonationalism are, to Connor, exactly the same thing, with ethnonationalism his preferred term to underline this relationship; patriotism, in contrast, is limited to loyalty towards the state, which may or may not be founded on ethnic lines. Where multinational states, like Britain, have survived into the age of nationalism, they find themselves increasingly threatened from below, as with Scottish and Welsh nationalism: and in a no-longer hypothetical tussle between British patriotism and Scottish nationalism, Connor places his historical chips on the latter’s eventual victory. Rather than a benign alternative to ethnonationalism, the Westminster-approved concept of “civic nationalism” is, according to this interpretation, something between a misnomer and a category error, an attempt to harness the power of nationalism in the service of state patriotism, just as was tried and failed by the Soviet Union.
Connor’s aim was descriptive, rather than normative. “He has been relatively silent on whether constitutional engineering or astute statecraft can ever successfully manage nationalism,” his intellectual disciple, the Irish political scientist Brendan O’Leary observes. “He has ‘quested’ for understanding, not sought to put the world to right.” Connor did not intend to advocate for ethnic nationalism as a mode of politics, merely to accurately portray the world around him. In this, he expressed frustration at the errors of academics and policymakers who, through a “tendency to perceive trends deemed desirable as actually occurring”, relegated to an atavistic past a phenomenon he believed was only growing in power.
For in his own way, Connor was just as much a modernist as Hobsbawm or Gellner. The antiquity or otherwise of nations was of no interest to him: he understood that the perception of ethnic kinship is a social fact rather than a biological one, in which “the myth of a common and exclusive descent can overcome a battery of contrary fact”. His argument was that the age of nationalism, which dawned with modernity, was a historical watershed setting us apart from all that came before. Before modernity, nations could die or meld into each other or assume new identities: after the age of nationalism, the tendency is for nations to be set into permanent, immovable forms, and for sub-state groups which had not acquired national identities to adopt them, inspired by the contact with other peoples brought about by modernity, increased mobility and the reaction to centralizing state power.
Rather than at its tail-end then, we are only part way through the age of nationalism. Yet through wish-fulfillment rather than a descriptive approach to objective reality, Connor observed, the Second World War’s “immediate afterglow lulled scholars into believing that Europeans had left nationalism behind”, while specious comparisons with the United States created the illusion of a parallel European melting pot, an analogy that nevertheless still trickles down from academia, through thinktanks and journalists directly to policymakers. Muddled thinking thus creates bad policy, leaving the powderkeg dysfunction of modern British politics as the result.
To show the speciousness of the analogy with America, Connor approaches the problem from multiple angles. First, America’s immigrant, assimilationist society is built upon the extirpation of its native inhabitants, as “the American policy of conquest eliminated the indigenous people as cultural competitors”. Few analogies exist in Europe, and where they do they are rarely lauded, especially by the natives themselves. Secondly, he notes, the United States was, historically, explicitly understood as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic polity, in appeals to blood descent, and the bonds deriving, as striking as anything from 19th-century European Romantic nationalism. The descendants of African slaves, Connor emphasizes, though their ancestors had been brought against their will into America from its very beginning, had no say in the formation of this political identity, into which they were only lately, and partly assimilated once it had already crystallized. For those who actively forged this new world political identity, Connor reminds us: “Paeans to the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon strain said to be inherited by the true Americans were plentiful well into the twentieth century”.
Finally, Connor observes, “the pattern of early settlement created a dominant, almost exclusive Anglo-Saxon culture; upon this firmly entrenched cultural base, representatives of other cultures, on their own, were periodically added in relatively small numbers. As a result, ethnic problems in the United States have not been primarily characterized by minorities resisting assimilation, but rather by the unwillingness of the dominant group to permit assimilation at the tempo desired by the minorities.” The American model of assimilation then was, until very recently, one in which immigrants were essentially compelled to adopt a fictive Anglo-Saxon political identity, that of the staatsvolk or dominant, leading ethnic group to whom the state belonged. A modern-day example can be seen in the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, of pure Italian descent, declaring his total self-identification with this legal and political tradition such that when he first visited England, he “felt at home”. Yet by the Nineties, Connor observed, Americans who had previously toned down their Old World ethnic identities began to reassert them, with Connor suggesting that the upsurge in ethnic self-identification, along with what he termed “black nationalism”, “a nationalism in the most correct sense of the word”, might come to challenge the American model. Even in the United States, the ideal form of the immigrant state, the melting pot may not be the final outcome.
That the belated introduction of the term “ethnonationalism” in Westminster discourse derives from the growth of anti-immigration sentiment is hardly surprising. The IPPR paper on ethnonationalism begins with what it calls “the alarming turn on the right towards policies of mass deportation”, an object of genuine surprise to its authors. They would have done well to reflect on the observation made in Walker’s little-read 1986 essay, The Impacts of Homelands on Diasporas, that “history is liberally sprinkled with cases in which diasporas have appeared relatively secure only to be faced with an unexpected outbreak of xenophobia and nativism”.
In this essay, Connor expands on the distinction between America’s unique case and that of the rest of the world, divided up into ethnic homelands. A homeland need not be an ancient state, but can be created, as in the case of Quebec, wherever new settlement is geographically concentrated: we may, here, think of European parallels in the process of becoming. The United States could only become an immigrant society because its prior native peoples were removed from the equation: in Africa, Asia, and Europe, this was not the case, with the result that the threat of expulsion always hangs over incoming peoples, however long-settled they may be, or secure they may feel.
“A homeland need not be an ancient state, but can be created.”
“In such an environment, diasporas are viewed at best as outsiders, strangers within the gates,” Connor observes. “They may be tolerated, even treated most equitably, and individual members of the diaspora may achieve highest office. Their stay may be multigenerational, but they remain outsiders in the eyes of the indigenes, who reserve the inalienable right to assert their primary and exclusive proprietary claim to the homeland, should they so desire.”
Citing the example of the East African Asians, ejected after the end of British rule, Connor notes that the “benign tolerance toward the Asian migrant community did not long survive the British withdrawal from East Africa. The tolerance shown by the colonial authorities does not require explanation, since their homeland was not involved” — but as soon as the homeland peoples of the region obtained the opportunity, their long-suppressed resentments were translated into political reality. Such, Connor suggests, is the nature of human societies, however much we might wish it were otherwise.
That Westminster figures can use Connor’s terminology without engaging with his work should not, perhaps, surprise us. Writing in a 2003 festschrift for Connor, his student and colleague, the Italian sociologist Daniele Conversi, observes that British academics were uniquely blinded, through their intellectual and moral biases and aspirations, from describing objective reality. As he remarks, “A cavalier tradition of superciliousness has percolated through most post-war studies of nationalism in Western, particularly British, academia.,” partly a reaction to the horrors of the Second World War, but “often derived from several overlapping traditions: part of mainstream Liberal thought… or of the competing Marxist viewpoint, as in the case of Eric Hobsbawm”.
The result, it is implied, is that the top-down assimilatory state-building projects suggested by thinktanks like the IPPR are as doomed to failure as those of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia. By failing to take ethnonationalism seriously, by misapprehending its meaning, and by relegating it to a distant, shameful past, they have created a political project in direct opposition to the most powerful political force in modern history, one that brought down each of the great European empires in turn. It is remarkable that the British state can have unlearned this clearly apparent truth, for as Connor observes of Britain’s imperial collapse, “the basic cause of the disintegration of empire was the refusal of people to accept political rule by those deemed aliens.”
But there is another characteristically Connorian observation that British policymakers may be wise to dwell on: on the legitimacy of the state. “The literature has assumed that legitimacy is necessary for a modern state to function,” Connor remarks. Where the state is reduced to coercion to survive, it is generally held, then it has proved its illegitimacy in the eyes of its people: where it is not compelled to rely on coercion, it can be assumed to be considered legitimate. Instead, Connor observes, all the state requires to survive is passivity, in which a “mélange of fear, habit, inertia, apoliticalness, political and cultural isolation, disorganization” staves off immediate collapse, without inspiring loyalty or affection. “Only passivity, not legitimacy, is essential to the everyday, humdrum functioning of a society,” he notes. “But if the state requires more than passivity, if it hopes to invoke the symbols of the state as a means of gaining positive cooperation and sacrifice, legitimacy will be sorely missed.” Beneath its unruffled surface, the Soviet empire was, Connor perceived, fatally wounded by a widespread, popular withdrawal of consent: all it took was an unexpected crisis to elicit collapse.
To stave off this outcome, O’Leary, developing Connor’s thought towards the policymaking ends his teacher spurned, proposes that “a stable democratic majoritarian federation… must have a Staatsvolk, a national or ethnic people, who are demographically and electorally dominant — though not necessarily an absolute majority of the population — and who must be the co-founders of the federation”. Such is the largely unspoken settlement that assures ethnic Russian loyalty to their multi-ethnic state, that of the Han to China or the Fars to Iran: without this predominance, they are likely to withdraw their consent from the state, and bring the whole thing crashing down around them. As Connor warns, “We know from the comparative study of nationalism that when the two loyalties are perceived as being in irreconcilable conflict — that is to say, when people feel they must choose between them — nationalism customarily proves the more potent.”
Such a rebalancing is, more or less, what Katie Lam suggested in advocating the termination of Boriswave visas for the purpose of “cultural coherence”, a policy and phrasing directly quoted, with horror, by the IPPR. This backlash is hardly surprising: such a policy may well be successful, as O’Leary shows, in staving off political instability, but it is also “inconsistent with liberal cosmopolitan and radical multiculturalists’ hopes”. Like those before them, who believed the Soviet Union had resolved the national question, perhaps our own ideologues would rather be swept away by historical forces than give up their cherished illusions.
