This book counters a range of assumptions commonly held about Marx's views of nationalism and internationalism, not least by twentieth-century marxists themselves. It shows that Marx did not envisage the abolition of national communities or nation states; that the politics of nationalism in Marx is not incompatible with a politics of class; that Marx was repeatedly critical of a "utopian" internationalism, and that the themes of nationalism and international solidarity, far from being necessarily in opposition, can be seen in many cases as mutually reinforcing. Nationalism then emerges in Marxist theory as a form of political self-identification and mobilization that can contribute to the broader project of social and political freedom.
"For a young scholar this is a remarkably subtle and mature piece of work, and it must now stand as the best analysis yet offered of the Marxian understanding of nationalism."--American Political Science Review
280 pp.; 0-19-827959-0
<http://www.oup-usa.org/isbn/0198279590.html> *****
***** Benner, Erica. (1995). Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Summary: That Marx and Engels did not take nationalism seriously is one of the most fixed of all idées fixes in our post-World War, post-Cold War, post-Balkans era. "Workers of the World, Unite!" now seems, at best, a naïvely internationalist slogan. And M & E's seemingly solid prophecies of the imminent demise of nationalism at the hands of an increasingly alienated proletariat melted into air when the workers rallied to "their" respective flags in 1914. But what evidence -- other than the stentorian passages of the Communist Manifesto, and our duo's fulminations against nationalism as phenomenon and as political program -- is there to support the notion that they failed to rigorously theorize it? "Not much," is Erica Benner's spirited and cogently argued reply.
Benner sets herself the task of proposing "a different reading of what the two men wrote on the subject [of nationalism], and [of identifying] some neglected strands of thought that are less easy to dismiss than the views usually attributed to them" (3). To accomplish these goals, she carefully and sensitively examines Marx and Engels's political commentaries from the revolutionary years 1848-9 and the years after 1860, with special focus on M & E's analyses of nationalist movements in their native Germany. In Chapter 1, "Nationality in the Divided State," Benner rejects the base-superstructure model of M & E's theories, finding instead the conceptual tools with which to mine their thought on nationality in Marx's critique of Hegel's political philosophy and in the materialist theory of history and the theory of political action that he formulated with Engels. Chapter 2, "Identities in Conflict," emphasizes the importance of M & E's historicist anti-naturalism for understanding their critique of political particularisms (like nationalism). In Chapter 3, "Explaining Nationalism," Benner argues that M & E's analyses of nationalism should be seen as part of a concrete, strategic theory of politics. Chapter 4, "Ethics and Realpolitik in the National Policy, 1847-1849," mines M & E's early writings to outline an ethical position on nationalism that belies the received wisdom that their policies were simply power-driven. In Chapter 5, "Rescuing Internationalism," Benner turns to the results of M & E's experience of the years between after 1848, when European colonialism and statist nationalism were on the rise. She finds that M & E, for strategic reasons, took a favorable view of some varieties of anti-colonialist nationalism and proletarian patriotism in this period. Chapter 6, "The Revenge of Nations, 1870-?" evaluates what is living and what is dead in M & E's thought on nationalism: Benner points out the causal conditions that M & E overlooked, to the detriment of their theories' predictive power; but she also points to the virtues of M & E's conception of nationalism as arising from a concrete totality, and argues that we would better comprehend the nationalisms of our own day if we were to seriously theorize them in the context "of other concerns that cut across, oppose, or join forces with nationalism, infusing it with a specific programmatic content" (222). [Tom Donahue]
<http://www.nationalismproject.org/books/a_b.htm#Anchor-Benner-49575> *****
Erica Benner: <http://www.lse.ac.uk/people/e.benner@lse.ac.uk/> -- Yoshie
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