KNOWLES, Rob. "Anarchist Notions of Nationalism and Patriotism"

PROUDHON, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865)BAKUNIN, Mihail Aleksandrovič (1814-1876)SwitzerlandHERZEN, Alexander. Nom de GERTSEN, Aleksandr Ivanovitch (1812-1870)State and statismpatriotismRussiafederalismFrancoPrussian War (1870-1871)Population. SlavsLANDAUER, Gustav (7/4/1870 - 2/5/1919). Écrivain et anarchiste allemandnationalismPolandPopulation. Peoples of the worldRevolutions of 1848UkraineKNOWLES, RobReligion. Judaïsme

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During my research I came across the Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin curiously using the expression "the United States of Europe". In 1867 he asserted that in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe. [1]
My question was how was it possible for Bakunin, an anarchist and so-called ’Apostle of Pan- Destruction’, [2] to believe in the concept of, let alone the possibility of, a peaceful and familial ’United States of Europe’? In this paper I want explain the apparent paradox of the concept of an anarchist United States and demonstrate the way in which positive communitarian anarchist ideas were insightful in their own time. By the end of the paper I hope it will also be clear that communitarian anarchist ideas are able to contribute to insights into nationalism and patriotism today.
The historical period under review extends from the middle of the nineteenth century until approximately the First World War. Anarchist notions were clearly visible in confrontation with liberal democratic ideology and with statist Realpolitik of the period. The Russian writer and communitarian anarchist Alexander Herzen provided a particularly informative current account of the significance of the 1848 European revolutions to anarchist thinkers, his having walked the bloodied streets of Paris during the June Days. [3] The response of Herzen to the revolutions were a mirror of those experienced by the French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Russian revolutionary anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin. [4] For Herzen, the liberals of the French Revolution who had established the republic ’became the assassins of freedom’ in 1848. They had certainly sought freedom and a republic, but on their own liberal terms.

In this context Herzen asked of the liberals the uncomfortable rhetorical questions: ’How will you persuade a workman to endure hunger and want while the social order changes by insensible degrees? How will you persuade a capitalist, a usurer, an owner to unclench the hand with which he clings to his monopolies and rights?’. In an astute even if obtuse reference to nationalism, he asserted that ’liberalism’ - by which he meant the parliamentary politics of the bourgeoisie [5] - ’constructed their people a priori, created it out of memories of things read...’. For Herzen, the liberals had found it ’easier to invent the people than to study it’. [6] Here was an early observation of the instrumental use of nationalism by the state. It did not require today’s retrospective theories of nationalism to determine what was happening. Herzen accurately recognised it and documented it at the time.
In contrast to the liberal imperative to merge nation and state by means of a nationalism which ’invents the people’, for Herzen the nation was organic:

Nations are products of Nature...a nation is always true: there is no such thing as a nation that is a lie. All that Nature can do is to bring into existence that which is practically possible under certain given conditions...Some peoples contrive to have a pre-historic, others an unhistoric, existence: but once they have entered the great stream of History, which is one and indivisible, all alike belong to humanity and, conversely, the whole of humanity’s past belongs to them. [7]

In referring specifically to the Russian peasant commune, to its history of paying material tributes to the nobility and to the government, Herzen noted that the peasant looked inwardly and knew no life outside the commune. Yet he observed that communal life ’is profoundly national in character...’. [8] These insights were central to Herzen’s ideas, in his acknowledged role as an early theorist of Russian ’populism’. [9]
Herzen applied his view of nationalism to the plight of Poland and the Ukraine under the rule of Tsarist Russia. Writing in 1859, he advocated a free federation which would include Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine. In the face of accusations that he sought a Slav federation under Russian hegemony, Herzen asserted, ’you are completely wrong. I am even less a patriot than a liberal’. [10] He connected patriotism directly with the nationalism of the state. His concept of a liberating Slav federation was echoed by Bakunin, a few years later, after the failure of the Polish insurrection of 1863. The ideas were also set out clearly in a letter which Herzen wrote to Proudhon in 1860. [11]
Proudhon was a strong polemical writer but he was not always consistent in his writings and it is therefore sometimes difficult to be certain that his ideas have been pinned down, especially in English translation. His particular strength was the way in which he connected specific economic ideas with political ideas of the state, however as his ideas of nation and nationality emerged more clearly in the words of Bakunin, I will not dwell on Proudhon here.
Proudhon died in 1865 and Herzen in 1870 however their fellow-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin lived until 1876, long enough to see not only the processes of unification of both Italy and Germany but also the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the Paris Commune in its aftermath. Bakunin perceived the 1848 revolutions of Europe and the Paris Commune of 1871 to be the first and second ’acts’ of the coming ’social revolution’ which would overcome the ’oppressive statist orientations’ which had followed the bourgeois political and economic victories over the people. He identified the existence of bourgeois patriotism within the context of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. For Bakunin,

It turned out that the presence of the victorious German army, which was hateful, coercive, and shameful for France, was comfort, support, and salvation for the privileged French patriots, the representatives of bourgeois valor and bourgeois civilization, and its prospective departure was synonymous to them with a death sentence. So the strange patriotism of the French bourgeoisie seeks its salvation in the ignominious subjugation of the fatherland. [12]

Although Bakunin’s view of bourgeois patriotism was profoundly negative, he was not dismissive of all notions of patriotism. The state was not ’the fatherland’ - which he defined as ’the incontestable and sacred right of every man, of every human group, association, commune, region, and nation to live, to feel, to think, to want, and to act in its own way...’. [13] For Bakunin, despite the bourgeois patriotism and nationalism espoused by the state, the people retained ’a natural, real love’ for what they believed to be their ’fatherland’ and it was this which constituted the ’patriotism of the people’, as a social reality, not the ’false abstraction’ of ’political patriotism’ created by the bourgeois state. [14] The ’fatherland’ was whatever the individual person or any community of persons believed it to be: every person had an ’incontestable and sacred right’ to make a free choice.
Bakunin provided a clear illustration of these principles in this scenario which he described in relation to a hypothetical claim by the state of Italy for a canton of Switzerland:

We are told that such and such a region - the canton of Tessin [in Switzerland], for instance - evidently belongs to the Italian family: it has language, morals, and everything in common with the populace of Lombardy, and therefore it should become part of the Italian state. Our answer is that this is an utterly false conclusion. If there really exists a substantial identity between the Tessin canton and Lombardy, there is no doubt that Tessin will spontaneously join Lombardy. If it does not do it, if it does not feel the slightest desire for it, that will simply go to prove that real history - which continues from generation to generation in the real life of the people of the Tessin canton, the history which produced its reluctance to join Lombardy - is something altogether different from the history written in books. [15]

Bakunin’s reference to different kinds of history is interesting here. There is the history ’written in books’, which is contingent on who writes it and why it is written, and there is ’real history’ which is the story of the ’real life of the people’. The distinction was important for Bakunin, as it is or should be for social historians today.
Bakunin’s anarchist understandings of nations and nationality - distinct from the people’s patriotism which could be understood as affection for the ’fatherland’ - were expressed most clearly in his discussion of Slav nationalist aspirations. He asserted that

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation’s entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this. [16]

He believed that just because a nation has ’a certain identity’ it does not follow that it has a right or would benefit from having a right to build and preoccupy itself with ’nationality’ based on that identity. In considering the possibility of ’a formation of several purely Slavic states of medium size, as the necessary guarantee of the Slavic peoples’ independence’, for Bakunin the suggestion was illogical and contrary to historical experience. The choice for the Slavs was clear: ’either there will be no Slavic state or there will be one huge and alldevouring pan-Slav, knouto-St. Petersburg state’, He contrasted ’narrow, self-centered, and abstract Slavism’, that is, nationalist Slavism, with the Slav peoples’ ability to be part of ’the free brotherhood of nations’. [17]
It was in this spirit of the ’free brotherhood of nations’ that Bakunin expressed his vision of a "United States of Europe". He sought ’a new organization’ based solely on the principle of ’the free federation of individuals into communes, communes into provinces, provinces into nations, and the latter into the United States, first of Europe, then of the whole world’. These confederated ’states’ were obviously not the political monoliths which he saw around him. They were a new genus of non-authoritarian states which germinated in the naturallyoccurring fraternal soil of communitarian anarchism. Their genealogy would be a succession of ’free federations’. The anarchist ’United States’ required rejection of all existing ’natural, political, strategic and commercial frontiers’ and the recognition of the right to ’complete autonomy’ for ’all nations, great or small, all peoples, weak or strong, and all communes...’. There would be freedom of union and of secession at all levels and this ’right’ would come ’first and foremost among all political rights; [because] without it confederation would be nothing but centralization in disguise’. [18] It was a fluid and dynamic diaspora of free federations and not a hierarchy of socially contracted structures.
I now want to push aside the writings of prominent anarchists of the late nineteenth century such as Elisée Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Jean Grave, and Errico Malatesta. They added little to the notions expounded by Herzen, Proudhon and Bakunin except perhaps Kropotkin’s emphasis on an ’indivisible’ bond between people and the land or water. [19] It is more informative to look at the more mystical ideas of the important but little-known German anarchist Gustav Landauer as he confronted the First World War. Although Landauer’s writings have been closely associated with the Zionist movement and theorising with respect to early Jewish attempts to build a ’voluntaristic, mutualistic, "free" society...’ in Palestine in the 1920s, [20] it was not the Jewish religion which inspired his ideas. He had denied his religion early in his life, although not his Jewish nationality. He comfortably described himself as a ’threefold nationalist: a German, a south German, and a Jew’. [21] It is unfortunate that Landauer’s notions of nation, and nationalism made use of the German words Volk and Geist which do not readily translate and which have each been appropriated by both right and left streams of politics over centuries. [22] The specific meanings they held for Landauer, however, were so central to his ideas that use of these words is unavoidable.

Landauer held a belief in human community as a natural phenomenon. His concept of Geist can perhaps be most succinctly described as a natural ’cohesive spirit’ which was inherent in individual humanity. [23] When this spirit was not generally apparent, it was dormant rather than destroyed, but it always remained active in at least a few individuals. The active characteristic of Geist was important. He believed it could be discerned during the Middle Ages, until the state began to dominate society and ’politics replaced Geist as the basis for society’. [24] The basic problem with the society which surrounded Landauer was, he observed, that ’There is no cohesive spirit that impels men to spontaneously collaborate in matters of common interest...’. [25] His ’socialist-anarchist’ - as he preferred to label his thought - project was therefore to seek to create the social circumstances within which Geist could return to the surface of human existence and function as the needed cohesive force: ’Socialism is a return to nature, a re-endowment with spirit, a regaining of relationships’. [26]
That project did not, for Landauer, require a revolution to destroy the state. It required individuals to recognise and awaken within themselves the spirit which would draw them together as alternative communities which had sufficient internally-derived cohesion to be able to ignore or withstand the state, until it was replaced by ’economic community, cultural society’. There was no doubt that the state was the essential problem: it had become a surrogate for Geist:

The state...exists for the people as a miserable replacement for Geist...and now the people are supposed to exist for the sake of the state, which pretends to be some sort of ideal structure and a purpose in itself, to be Geist...Earlier there were corporate groups, clans, gilds, fraternities, communities, and they all interrelated to form society. Today there is coercion, the letter of the law, the state. [27]

The state was artificial, a political structure which had resulted from ’accidents of history’ rather than ’a mutual experience of history’. The state was the means by which capitalism lived but the state itself was a ’phantom’, ’a name for what man allows’. [28] As Lunn explained, for Landauer

All political and social institutions...depend for their existence on the decision of the individual’s will to lend them support; withdrawal of this voluntarily given support can also bring change. Capitalism and the state are voluntarily chosen by men because their capacity to live independent, self-determined lives has atrophied. [29]

So what of the nation? Did it have a separate existence from the state? Landauer believed that the Nation ’is the particular way in which human nature in general and the unique traits of the individual express themselves within a community whose element of cohesion is a common historical background’. This ’historical background’ was, more expansively, ’the communal history of language, customs, and intellectual experience’. Further, it was always uncertain ’whether national correlation comes from physical and intellectual similarities or causes them’. [30] In other words, the characteristics which constitute a nation were causally indeterminate. He understood the nation to be ’anarchistic, that is, without force; the conceptions of nation and force are completely irreconcilable’. [31] The nation was also not territorially or geographically constrained.
With the nation perceived in this way, and with the state eliminated as being a ’phantom’ which people had permitted to be built, Landauer revived the medieval ’organism of the Volk’ - as ’people’. It is here that the active character of Geist came into clear view. The cohesive spirit of the ’common historical background’ of the nation was Geist which, when active within the nation, creates a Volk, or ’people’. As Eugene Lunn explained the difference between state and Volk, ’The state is a centralized, bureaucratic structure; [whereas] the Volk is tied to localities, to the land, and to the remnants of village communities’. [32] It was this ’newly evolved organism of the Volk’ which must, for Landauer, begin to displace the state in order that socialist-anarchism can live. [33] The Volk was conceptually the vessel which contains nationality. It was still of course ’an illusion’, but one which grew from human freedom: ’The Volk or the nation is an older, more genuine illusion which must be liberated from its coupling with the lie...the state’. [34] Landauer, like Bakunin, looked towards a united Europe as part of united humanity. As Lunn noted, he sought

the development of a united humanity of diversified Völker. The way toward a united Europe lay through the prior "bottom-up" groupings of culturally similar nations...[in 1912 he called for] a potential "united Völker of humanity", a union of Swiss, Belgian, Alsation, and Dutch ’nations’ as a neutral Völkerbund based on geographical and historical-cultural unities. [35]

With respect to patriotism Landauer, as other anarchists, saw it for the moment attached to the nationalism which was created by the state. Implicitly, however, he perceived patriotism similarly to Bakunin in that a people’s patriotism was possible. Landauer stated that ’If I want to transform patriotism then I do not proceed in the slightest against the fine fact of the nation...but against the mixing up of the nation and the state...’. [36]

In summary, then, for communitarian anarchists of the second half of the nineteenth century, given their underpinning beliefs in a social instinct or human fraternity or Geist, the state was, as Emma Goldman once gently said, ’unnecessary’. The nation was perceived as being organic, a freely constituted community of shared feelings as much as ’historical background’ or culture or beliefs. Nationalism was not the illusion created by the state in the interests of capitalism and the state. It was the collective feelings, thought and behaviour of the community which constituted the nation, small or large. Patriotism for the anarchist was the people’s patriotism, simply the individual’s affection for the freely constituted nation which he or she believed to be the ’fatherland’. There were no necessary geographical, economic, or political boundaries. Secession from or uniting with freely constituted federations of other groups or nations, or groups of nations, was a free choice at all times. If nothing else, in its own time, the communitarian anarchist notions of nation and nationalism represented an alternative goal to the merging of nation and state which was being forcibly built around them. Many of those nation-states and the associated political nationalisms have been fragmenting ever since. The anarchists can help explain the inherent tensions. And their ideas are a potentially fruitful model for ethnic or cultural nations to examine today.

[1Franco Venturi, Studies in Free Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)., p. 94.

[2E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)., p.14.

[3George Woodcock, "Alexander Herzen" in The Writer and Politics, ed. George Woodcock (London: Porcupine Press, 1948)., pp. 43-54; Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (Chicago: Knopf, 1960)., pp..231, 250-1.

[4Mutual respect and friendship between Herzen, Proudhon, and Bakunin had coalesced in Paris during the 1840s and it continued throughout their lives. Ibid., pp. 117-9; Eugene Lunn, Prophet of community: the romantic anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)., pp. 62-3.

[5Charles B. Maurer, Call to revolution: the mystical anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971)., p. 235.

[6Herzen, ’From the other shore’ and ’The Russian people and socialism’., p.93.

[7Ibid., p.178.

[8Ibid., pp.181-4.

[9Venturi, Studies, p.250.

[10Herzen, cited in Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (Chicago: Knopf, 1960)., p.122.

[11Arthur Lehning, "Herzen and Bakunin: An Ambiguous Friendship" in Alexander Herzen and European Culture: Proceedings of an
International Symposium
, Nottingham and London, 6-12th September, 1982, ed. Monica Partridge (London: Astra Press, 1984)., p.91;Herzen, cited in French, in Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p.123.

[12Marshall Shatz, ed., Michael Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)., p.21

[13G.P. Maximoff, ed., The political philosophy of Bakunin: scientific anarchism (New York: The Free Press, 1964)., p.324.

[14Ibid.

[15Ibid.

[16Shatz, ed., Statism and Anarchy, p.46.

[17Ibid.., p.47.

[18Arthur Lehning, ed., Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973)., pp..95-6.

[19Peter Kropotkin, "Finland: A Rising Nationality", The Nineteenth Century, March , 1885, p.531.

[20Ruth Link-Salinger Hyman, Gustav Landauer, philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., c1977)., pp.53, 95; Eugene Lunn,
Prophet of community: the romantic anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)., p.271.

[21Ibid., pp.28, 267.

[22Ibid., pp.258-61; Charles B. Maurer, Call to revolution: the mystical anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971)., pp.113-4.

[23Gustav Landauer, For Socialism (St Louis: Telos Press, 1978)., p.38; Lunn, Prophet of community, p.107.

[24Maurer, Call to revolution, pp.84,91.

[25Landauer, For Socialism, p.38.

[26Ibid., p.136; Maurer, Call to revolution, p.96.

[27Landauer, cited in Ibid., p.93.

[28Ibid., p.79; Lunn, Prophet of community, p.158.

[29Ibid., p.225.

[30Landauer, cited in Maurer, Call to revolution, p.79.

[31Lunn, Prophet of community, pp.257-8.

[32Lunn, Prophet of community, p.190.

[33Landauer, cited in Ibid., p.191.

[34Landauer, cited in Ibid., p.265.

[35Ibid., p.237.

[36Landauer, cited in Ibid., p.263.