Conflicts in Indochina

• A fundamental transformation is occurring in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements.
• Wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China are signs of this transformation.
• These wars are between regimes with undeniable independence and revolutionary credentials.
• The belligerents have made only superficial attempts to justify the bloodshed using Marxist theoretical perspectives.
• The Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969 and Soviet military interventions in Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1980) could still be interpreted through terms like 'social imperialism' or 'defending socialism'.
• The Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia (December 1978-January 1979) was the first large-scale conventional war between revolutionary Marxist regimes.
• China's assault on Vietnam in February confirmed the precedent.
• It is less likely that the USSR and the PRC will support or fight on the same side in future interstate conflicts.
• Since World War II, successful revolutions have defined themselves in national terms, like the People's Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
• These revolutions have grounded themselves in territorial and social spaces inherited from the pre-revolutionary past.
• The Soviet Union, like the United Kingdom, refuses nationality in its naming.
• This suggests that the Soviet Union is both a legatee of prenational dynastic states and a precursor of a 21st-century internationalist order.
• Marxist movements and states have become nationalist in form and substance.
• The tendency towards nationalism is not limited to the socialist world.
• The United Nations admits new members almost every year.
• Many 'old nations' face challenges from 'sub'-nationalisms within their borders.
• The 'end of the era of nationalism' is not in sight, and nation-ness is a universally legitimate value.
• Defining and analyzing the concepts of nation, nationality, and nationalism has proven difficult.
• Plausible theory about nationalism is meagre compared to nationalism's influence.
• Hugh Seton-Watson concludes that there is no scientific definition of the nation.
• Tom Nairn considers the theory of nationalism as Marxism's great historical failure.
• Nationalism has been an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory.
• This is why Marx failed to explain the importance of the adjective in his 1848 formulation, "The proletariat of each country".
• The concept of 'national bourgeoisie' has been used for over a century without serious theoretical justification of the adjective.
• Reinterpreting the 'anomaly' of nationalism is needed because both Marxist and liberal theory have become weak.
• Nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism are cultural artifacts of a particular kind.
• Understanding them requires considering how they came into historical being, how their meanings have changed, and why they command emotional legitimacy.
• The creation of these artifacts began in the late 18th century through a complex 'crossing' of historical forces.
• Once created, they became 'modular' and capable of being transplanted to various social terrains.
• The aim is to show why these cultural artifacts have aroused deep attachments.

Concepts and Definitions

• It is important to consider the concept of 'nation' and offer a workable definition.
• Theorists of nationalism are often perplexed by three paradoxes:
  • Objective modernity of nations vs. subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists.
  • Formal universality of nationality vs. particularity of its concrete manifestations.
  • Political power of nationalisms vs. philosophical poverty and incoherence.
• Unlike other isms, nationalism has not produced its own grand thinkers.
• This emptiness leads to condescension among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals.
• Tom Nairn writes that nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history.
• It is rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness and is largely incurable.
• Difficulty arises from hypostatizing the existence of Nationalism and classifying it as an ideology.
• It would be easier to treat it like kinship and religion rather than liberalism or fascism.

Definition of the Nation

• The nation is an imagined political community that is inherently limited and sovereign.
• It is imagined because members will never know most of their fellow members.
• Yet, in their minds, they have the image of their communion.
• Renan wrote that the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common and have also forgotten many things.
• Gellner states that nationalism invents nations where they do not exist.
• The drawback to Gellner's formulation is that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity' rather than 'imagining' and 'creation'.
• All communities larger than primordial villages are imagined.
• Communities are distinguished by the style in which they are imagined.
• Javanese villagers have always known they are connected to unseen people, but these ties were once imagined particularistically as stretchable nets of kinship and clientship.
• The Javanese language had no word meaning 'society' until recently.
• We think of the French aristocracy as a class, but it was only imagined this way very late.
• The answer to who Comte de X is would have been 'the lord of X' rather than 'a member of the aristocracy'.
• The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest nation has finite boundaries.
• No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.
• The nation is imagined as sovereign because it was born in an age destroying divinely-ordained dynastic realms.
• Nations dream of being free, and the sovereign state embodies this freedom.
• A nation is imagined as a community because it is always conceived as a deep comradeship.
• This fraternity makes it possible for people to willingly die for such limited imaginings.
• Nationalism poses the problem of how shrunken imaginings generate colossal sacrifices.
• The beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.

Cultural Roots

• Cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers are emblems of modern nationalism.
• Public reverence is accorded to these monuments because they are empty or their occupants are unknown.
• They lack true precedents in earlier times.
• It would be sacrilegious to discover the Unknown Soldier's name or fill the cenotaph with real bones.
• These tombs are saturated with ghostly national imaginings despite being empty of mortal remains or immortal souls.