Reasons for Hope - The Bright Side of Nationalism

good afternoon I'm Michael Ignatieff rector and president of Central European University I want to bid welcome to faculty staff students from our wonderful Cu community I want to say a warm welcome to distinguished diplomats from the diplomatic community I see below I want to welcome particularly warmly our colleagues and friends from academic and scientific institutions across Budapest I want to welcome members of the public who are always welcome at our events I want to welcome you've all her Ahri's team his husband his family all the people who've worked with us to make this wonderful event possible I want to thank a truly fabulous events team over there I want to thank King Gopal everybody in the events team at CU for making this possible here's what we want to do we want to have a lecture and then a question period the question period is a little difficult to do because of the size of this wonderful crowd it's fabulous we've got so many people but justice will not be done many hands will rise and few will be chosen all I can say is that this distance I can't say see you well enough to play favorites but what I will do is start at the back and work forward and I hope we will have time for good sharp questions let me remind you of something you know well which is that a question is a short interrogative statement followed emphasis on short followed by a question mark and there's one per customer that's how it works here okay now let me get down without further ado to introduce a person who barely needs introduction because he has become a global phenomenon with books that are known in this room sapiens a brief history of mankind homo Deus a brief history of tomorrow and the most late latest version 21 lessons for the 21st century books that have been translated in many languages including Hungarian this is a phenomenon in itself a success that I think speaks well of the hunger of the general public for a public intellectual who treats you with respect and exposes you to difficult ideas and puts a emphasis throughout on the crucial importance this is important for a university to understand human experience in deep time that is to understand how brief our our period on the planet is and how long the human experience has been on the planet and how crucial it is to understand the human experience on the planet through the whole recorded period of our human experience this seems to me an important addition to our understanding of what it is to be a human and I think it's one reason why you go no hurries work has had such an extraordinary impact around the world he was born in Haifa Israel in 1976 I want to emphasize in an academic setting in a university setting that he received his PhD from the University of Oxford in the master discipline of all namely history my discipline and he is currently and still a lecturer at the Department of History at one of the world's great universities the Hebrew University of Jerusalem I won't put words into you've all her Ahri's mouth he should speak for himself but I would just like to say this is a very busy man who could have accepted many invitations and the fact that he accepted an invitation to this university speaks for itself I want to welcome know her so hello everyone and thank you for welcoming welcomed me here I would have to talk to you today about nationalism in the 21st century and the Central European University in Budapest is a perfect place to talk about this subject since unfortunately this campus is now among the victims or might be among the victims of what seems to be a growing nationalist wave sweeping Europe I also have a personal connection to this part of the world two of my grandparents came from the austro-hungarian Empire and almost their entire family was murdered during the last nationalist tsunami that swept over this area seventy-five years ago but in this talk and assuming that my audience is likely to be already worried of nationalism I want to caution us not to go to the other extreme of viewing all forms of nationalism as inherently evil I want to focus today on the bright side of nationalism on its immense contribution to humanity and on its continuing importance in the 21st century so let's begin by surveying the history of nationalism beginning with deep time today's nation-states are certainly not an eternal part of human biology or human psychology they are a very very very recent development in human evolution true humans are social animals with group loyalty imprinted in our genes but for millions of years humans lived in small intimate communities and not in large nation-states homo erectus Neanderthals and even archaic Homo sapiens lived in bands which numbered at most a hundred or 200 individuals only about 70,000 years ago which is a very short time in evolutionary terms Homo sapiens learned to use culture as a basis for large-scale cooperation which is the key to our success as a species we control this planet and not the Neanderthals of the chimpanzees or the elephants because we are the only mammals that can cooperate in very large numbers and do so flexibly changing the way that we cooperate over time if you put 10,000 chimpanzees in a football stadium or in a market or in university what you'll get is complete cows if you put 10,000 Homo sapiens there then provided they share a culture you will get very orderly networks of cooperation but creating such mass networks of cooperation was a slow and gradual affair when small bands merged into the first sapiens tribes in East Africa about 70,000 years ago these tribes numbered just hundreds of people perhaps a few thousand people until the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago we don't know of any larger human groups now these ancient tribes that lived tens of thousands of years ago were very very different from other nations nationalists sometime imagined that nations of like tribes but they are not the ancient tribes had no system of administration taxation or welfare they didn't have standing armies or police most importantly the ancient tribes were relatively intimate communities of friends and relatives and not imagined communities of strangers a tribe of say 3000 people was divided into a number of bands that cooperated sporadically from time to time they would hunt together or celebrate a festival together or join forces to fight against a column a common enemy if you lived in such a tribe perhaps ten percent of the population were your immediate friends and relatives they were your sisters your cousin's your nephews your best bodies and even the other 90% were connected to you by very short chains of acquaintances one person was perhaps your cousin's best friend another person was the brother of your nephew's wife a third person was somebody you had a one-night stand with in a festival five years ago there are very few complete strangers in the tribe this stands in sharp contrast to a modern nation well more than 99% of the population is comprised of complete strangers for example my home country of Israel which today celebrates its national holiday it's Independence Day is a very small nation a small country it has just eight million citizens but still that's a lot I don't know even 1% of these 8 million people I don't know 80,000 people actually I don't even know 8,000 people 99.99 percent of the people who share my Israeli citizenship are complete strangers to me I may imagine them as my brothers and friends but this is just imagination I never met most Israelis and I am very unlikely to ever meet most Israelis at least in person maybe I passed them by in the train station but I never really met them they are not my cousin's best friend they are not my nephew's wife and they are not my ex one night stand' the same goes for the territory an ancient hunter-gatherer tribe rolled a territory of perhaps a few hundred square kilometers if you lived in such a tribe you knew intimately every spring every Rock every tree in contrast Israel has a territory of about 20,000 square kilometres Hungary has a territory of 93 thousand square kilometers Russia has 17 million square kilometers now most Russians have never visited most of Russia even small Israel is mostly unfamiliar territory to most Israelis if you drop me at a random place in the Negev desert or in the Galilee Mountains or even in suburban tel aviv i would have no idea where i am i don't know the territory of my nation so people often equate modern nationalism with ancient tribalism but this is a complete mistake the amazing thing about modern nations is that they found ways to make people care about strangers they never met and to care about places they never visited and this was mostly beyond the power of the ancient tribes this why in ancient times when tribes grew bigger and bigger eventually the percentage of strangers was too high and the tribe split Australia for example was colonized about 40 50 thousand years ago perhaps by one tribe perhaps by a fruit a few tribes but when Europeans got there in the 18th century they didn't encounter a single Australian nation or a handful of Australian nations they encountered hundreds of different and sometimes hostile tribes because they split overtime so one important lesson to remember is that nations aren't tribes and nationalism isn't tribalism some nationalists because they want to make nationalism seem very ancient and very natural they insist on blurring the difference between nations and tribes but this is a mistake and even even if we accept the equation of nations with tribes it doesn't make nationalism an eternal and natural part of human biology because it's knotted earlier even tribes are at most about 70 thousand years old whereas humans are more than 2 million years old so try even tribalism not to mention nationalism is a late comer in human evolution some nationalists go on to claim that the national sentiment is as ancient and natural as the mother-child bond it's very common to speak about the nation as a mother like in the phrase Mother Russia but this is even more far-fetched this is fantasy the bond with entities like Mother Russia is perhaps let's be very generous seventy thousand years old in contrast the mother-child bond in mammals is at least 70 million years old it long predates the emergence of the first humans so to summarize what we've seen so far for millions of years humans lived in small bands numbering dozens of people then for tens of thousands of years humans lived in tribes numbering thousands of people at most only after that we color evolution and after the invention of writing and money about five thousand years ago do we begin to see the emergence of large kingdoms and empires and nations transforming different tribes into a single nation was never simple not in ancient times and not today because the main problem is not it earlier is that whereas ancient tribes were intimate communities of people who actually know one another nations are communities of strangers now we need to be careful to distinguish strangers from foreigners a foreigner is somebody who speaks a different language looks different from me has a different culture from me in contrast a stranger may speak my language may look like me may share my culture but he or she is still a stranger because I never met them and I don't know them personally large nations appeared when developments like agriculture like writing like better communication enabled the same culture to be shared by many strangers by millions of strangers this sometimes happened violently and sometimes voluntarily but in any case it was not enough for millions of strangers to share a culture in order to create a nation since nobody can have intimate relations with millions of people in order to transform a culture into a nation it was always necessary to somehow make people bond with strangers care about strangers and this is the great project of nationalism to make humans bond with strangers now this great project involves two tasks one task easy the other task very very difficult the easy part of nationalism is to make people prefer people like me over foreigners that's easy because humans have been doing that for millions of years xenophobia is to a large extent unfortunately in our DNA if I encounter two people who may have never met before I don't know them personally so there are both strangers in this sense but one person looks like me and speaks my language and shares my culture whereas the other looks different and speaks a foreign language then I will almost always prefer the stranger who looks like me over the foreigner that's the easy part of nationalism but the hull a much more important part of nationalism nationalism is not about hating foreigners because nationalism has a second and far more important and far more difficult component and that component is to sometimes prefer strangers over my friends and relatives for example suppose I am a government official maybe in the interior ministry and there is a job opening and I am interviewing people to feel that you I decide who gets the job I need to decide between two applicants one applicant is a brilliant woman whom I have never met before the other applicant is a rather mediocre person but she happens to be my cousin now what should I do difficult question millions of years of evolution are screaming inside my brain don't be stupid give the job to your cousin that's obvious but nationalism tells me no no no no no you should give the job to the brilliant stranger because a good Patriot places national interests ahead of family connections and the nation needs the best civil servants given the job to your cousin would be corruption and a betrayal of the nation another example suppose two children are sick one child is an unknown stranger living in a distant town I've never visited in my life the other child is my own daughter now I earn about say 2,000 euros a month and in emergencies I can spend maybe 1,000 euros on health care on medical services again what should I do evolution tells me well that's a no-brainer it's obvious take the 1,000 euro and spend them on your daughter take her to the best private clinic and give her the best treatment available but nationalism says no a good patriot of course takes care of his or her family but all citizens are part of your family so spend only 500 euros on your own daughter and pay the other 500 euros in taxes which the government will use to finance public health care services to less fortunate children on in distant part of the country now again evolution will tell me no way cheat the government evade somehow paying all your taxes and nationalism will reply and say that again this is corruption or in extreme cases this could be even treason over thousands of years nationalism as well as other ideologies and religion has managed to somehow to some extent weaken our natural tendencies towards nepotism and tax evasion and convinced us that at least in some cases we should put the interest of strangers who are from our nation before the interests of friends and family nationalism does made us care about strangers and this has been one of the most positive developments in human history it's a dangerous mistake to imagine that without nationalism we would all be living in some kind of liberal paradise much more likely we would be living in tribal chaos in which nobody cares about anyone except his or her immediate friends and family and in which it is impossible to build large-scale systems of health care education and security even democracy can rarely function without at least some level of nationalism what people often don't understand about democratic elections is that democratic elections are a system to resolve disagreements between people who already agree on the basics people who really care about one another and share some core values despite their disagreements elections work well only in situations when I think that my political rivals are wrong and perhaps even stupid but I don't hate them and they don't hate me when people hate one another and when society is divided into hostile tribes then democracy is untenable because in such a situation people feel that all means are legitimate to win the election because if we lose our tribe is in danger whoever wins the election takes care only of their own tribe and whoever loses the election is unwilling to accept the verdict because what do I care about people who don't care about me when a state lacks strong national feelings it can function as a dictatorship all right or it might descend into civil war but it will find it increasingly difficult to function as a democracy this is situation today in countries like Congo or Afghanistan or South Sudan it is no coincidence that democracies first evolved in countries like Britain and Denmark which already prior to that had a fairly strong national sentiment even today democracies find it hard to survive without the help of nationalism contrary to a common opinion there is a strong and positive connection between nationalism and democracy and contrary to another common opinion the crisis that many democracies today find themselves in is the result less of an upsurge of nationalism it's actually the result of the weakening of national ties when nationalism is too strong it usually manifests itself like the the syndrome on the surface it's very obvious when nationalism is strong what you see is a lot of vicious conflicts between nations as happened in Europe a century ago but today there are few such conflicts between nations for example in Europe most conflicts are within nations which indicates that nationalism of the right kind of nationalism is actually quite weak there is no lack of xenophobia in the world hating strangers hating foreigners that's it for sure but nationalism is not about hating foreigners nationalism is about loving your compatriots and currently there is a global shortage of such love and there is a shortage of such love also in Europe in countries like Iraq and Syria and Yemen internal hatreds and weak national sentiments have led to the complete disintegration of the state and to murderous civil wars in countries like United States weakening national sentiments have led to growing rifts within society and to a winner-takes-all mentality the hatred within American society today has reached such a level that many Americans hate their fellow citizens far more than they hate or fear the Chinese or the Russians or the Mexicans many leaders today who present themselves as nationalists are in fact the exact opposite instead of strengthening national unity they intentionally widen the rifts within society by using inflammatory language and divisive politics and by depicting anybody who opposes them not as a legitimate rival but rather as a dangerous traitor this is true of the President of the United States it's true in my country in Israel and it's true in many other countries today around the world when these kinds of leaders see a wound in the national body they don't put a healing medicine on it rather they take their finger and start poking inside the wound to try deliberately to enlarge it and reopen it so we see that nationalism is important but it's also fragile realizing both the importance and the fragility of nationalism is very relevant to many debates today especially perhaps the raging debate about immigration here in Hungary and Europe and many other parts of the world as well realizing that nationalism is important but fragile questions some of the arguments on both sides of this debate on the one hand people who oppose immigration often imagined the nation as some kind of eternal entity that existed from time immemorial and that should not be allowed to be polluted by foreigners or foreign influences but this is pure fantasy all nations existing today are relatively recent creations they will know whom variants of Austrians or Italians or Israelis 5000 years ago most present-day European nations are perhaps a thousand years old and some are much much younger all of them have been created by uniting people who previously were belonging to hostile and different tribes and ethnic groups modern Germans for example were created from the merger of Saxons and Prussians and Swabians and Bavarians who not long ago wasted very little of Omaha one another during the Thirty Years War in this in 17th century Protestant Prussians and Catholic Bavarians treated each other with murderous hostility even worse than what you see today say between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq Otto von Bismarck the great unifier of Germany allegedly remarked after reading darvin's on the Origin of Species that the Bavarian is the missing link between the Austrian and the human and of course by human he meant portion moreover though modern nation is the product of internal unification alone no matter in which country you live you would be living a very very pool life if you limited yourself only to the products and inventions and ideas of your own nation thus would you like to eat all your life only Hungarian food never tasting these foreign dishes like sushi or curry and what is Hungarian food anyway paprika for example is certainly not Hungarian our part in sin Stefan and Jana Sunni Adi never ever spiced their food with paprika because paprika originated in Mexico it was the Indians in Mexico who domesticated it and was brought to Europe only by this bag by the Spaniards only the 16th century and became a central part of Hungarian cuisine just two three hundred years ago so should patriotic Hungarians stop using paprika because this is a foreign intrusion into the authentic Hungarian cuisine similarly should Hungarians stop playing football just because it was invented by the English should they stop reading all foreign literature from Tolstoy to Harry Potter and read only pure Hungarian text if they do that they will have to give up the Bible also so it was written by these Middle Eastern people and brought here by immigrants from the Middle East for that's really ridiculous on the other hand the importance and fragility of nationalism also raises questions about the wisdom of trying to absorb too many immigrants too quickly people who favor immigration often discount the very real problems that mass immigration poses to the national unity of countries or else they discount the dangers of undermining the national sentiment thus they often fail to appreciate the deep historical connection between nationalism and democracy and the fact that in the absence of nationalism democracy is constantly in danger of descending into tribalism so perhaps the most important thing to say about the immigration debate in Europe is that both sides have legitimate views those who favor immigration are wrong to depict their rivals as immoral racists while those who oppose immigration are wrong to depict all the rivals as irrational traitors this is not a battle between good and evil it is an argument between two legitimate views that can and should be decided through the normal democratic procedures it would be wrong I think of any government to force mass immigration on an unwilling population immigration is a long-term process a difficult process and to succeed you need the support of the local population on the other hand it would be a clue equally wrong to destroy the democratic system in order to allegedly protect the purity of the country from immigrants it is very alarming that in several European countries and also in other places around the world autocratic leaders are inflaming excessive fears of immigration in order to undermine the foundations of democracy now I've spent quite a long time on the bright side of nationalism but of course it would be wrong to completely ignore the dark side when nationalism goes to extreme it can certainly lead to war and to genocide and it can foster dictatorial and even fascist tendencies and perhaps it would be good to explain in a few words what fascism is and how it is different from nationalism because too many people confuse the two and think that any nationalist is a fascist or any sign of nationalism is a sign of fascism so in brief nationalism what nationalism tells me is that my nation is unique and I have special obligations towards my nation in contrast fascism tells me that my nation is supreme and that I have exclusive obligations towards it according to fascism my nation is the only important thing in the world and I shouldn't care about anyone or anything except mine if I need to sacrifice my family for the nation I should sacrifice my family if I need to kill millions of people for the nation I should kill millions of people if I need to betray truth and betray beauty for the nation I should have no hesitancy about doing that to for example how does a fascist evaluate art how does a fascist decide whether a movie is a good movie it's very simple there is just one yardstick if the movie serves the interest of the nation it's a good movie if the movie doesn't serve the interest of the nation it's a bad movie similarly how does the fascists decide what to teach kids in history lessons in school again there is only one yardstick not a truth but the interests of the nation you should teach kids whatever serves the interest of the nation no matter what the truth is the horrors of the Second World War and the holocaust remind us of the terrible consequences of this way of thinking but today fascism and other extreme forms of nationalism are even more dangerous than what they were in the 1930s because today they might lead not just to war in genocide but might also prevent humanity from dealing with three existential threats that can only be solved through global cooperation these threats are nuclear war climate change and technological disruption these three threats threaten the survival and prosperity of all the nations and they cannot be dealt with by any single nation by itself they cannot be dealt with just by waving flags and building walls on the border you cannot build a wall against nuclear winter you cannot build a wall against worming and no nation can regulate artificial intelligence and bioengineering by itself because no government controls all the scientists and engineers in the world consider for example conducting genetic engineering experiments on humans every country will say we don't want to conduct such experiments we are the good guys but we cannot trust our rivals not to do it so we must do it before them we cannot allow ourselves to remain behind similarly consider developing autonomous weapon systems killer robots again every country will say this is a very dangerous technology and it should be regulated carefully but we don't trust our rivals to regulate it so we must develop it first if we allow such an AI arms race or a genetic arms race to develop it doesn't matter who wins the arms race the loser will be humanity and the only thing that can prevent such destructive arms races is not building walls between countries but rather building trust between countries which is not impossible if today the Germans promised the French trust us we aren't building killer robots in some secret laboratory under the Alps the French are likely to trust the Germans despite the terrible history of these two countries we need to build this kind of trust globally for the survival of humanity we need to reach a point when Americans and Chinese can trust one another like the French and the Germans similarly we need to build a global safety net to protect all humans against the coming economic shocks that the AI revolution will unleash automation will create immense new wealth in high-tech hubs like Silicon in eastern China while at the same time the worst effects will be felt in developing countries whose economies depend on cheap manual labor there will be many more jobs for software engineers in San Francisco in Shanghai but there will be few jobs for factory workers and truck drivers in Mexico and in Bangladesh unless we find solutions on a global level to the disruptions caused by AI entire countries could collapse and the resulting cows and violence and waves of immigration will destabilize the entire world so in order to survive and flourish in the 21st century humankind needs better global cooperation and nationalism need not prove an impossible barrier for such cooperation I know that some politicians like the u.s. president argue that there is an inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalism and that we should reject globalism and choose nationalism but this is a mistake not because you need to choose globalism but rather because there is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism for nationalism isn't about hating foreigners nationalism is about loving your compatriots and taking care of your compatriots and in the 21st century the only way to guarantee the safety and prosperity of your compatriots is by cooperating with foreigners so good nationalists should now be globalists globalism doesn't mean abandoning all national loyalties and traditions and it certainly doesn't mean opening the border to unlimited immigration I know that there is a conspiracy theory going around the the lists want to abolish all restrictions on immigration and flood Europe with tens of millions of foreigners but this is complete nonsense I happen to know quite a few globalists and none of them bonds that global is in fact means to far more modest and far more reasonable things first globalism means a commitment to some global rules these rules don't deny the uniqueness of each nation and the loyalty people should order a nation rather the global rules just regulate the relations between nations and a good model to think about it is the world football Cup the World Cup is a competition between nations and people often show fierce loyalty to their national team but at the same time the World Cup is also an amazing display of global harmony France cannot play football against Croatia unless the French and the Croatians first agree on the same rules for the game a thousand years ago it would have been absolutely impossible to bring French and Croatians and Japanese Argentinians to play games together in Russia even if you could somehow get them there they could never agree on the rules but today we can do it and that's globalism in action if you like the world football Cup then you are a globalist the second principle of globalism is that sometimes it is necessary to prefer global interests over national interests not always but sometimes for example again in the world football Cup all national teams agree not to use forbidden drugs to enhance the performance of their athletes even if you can't win the the cup by dragging your football players you shouldn't do it because if you do it other nations other teams will soon copy your example and the world football Cup will become a competition between biochemists and the sport will be ruined as in football so also in economics we should balance global and national interests even in a globalized world the vast majority of the taxes you pay will still go to provide health care and education to people in your nation but sometimes nations will agree to slow down their economic growth and the technological development in order to prevent catastrophic climate change and to prevent the spread of dangerous technologies now it's true that in the past humans never managed to create effective global cooperation but humans can learn new tricks nations to where once a very new trick when five thousand years ago some tribes united to form the first nations there are probably a lot of conservative people who said this is impossible undesirable and unnatural to create a nation we want to stay in tribes on the long way from small hunter-gatherer bands to global cooperation nationalism is much much closer to the global Pole in the beginning and for millions of years we humans could cooperate effectively only with perhaps 80 friends and relatives thanks to nationalism now people can cooperate with 80 million or even 800 million strangers the distance left until we can cooperate with eight billion strangers is comparatively small now this isn't a call for the establishment of a global government which is a dangerous and realistic vision rather I think our goal should be global harmony without uniformity like an orchestra in which every instrument is different but they all play in harmony if all instruments are the same there is uniformity it's lifeless if each instrument is doing its own thing in complete disregard of the others what you get is terrible noise we need to find a balanced middle path so to conclude my main message one of the main messages is that we don't need to choose between nationalism and globalism because there is no contradiction between them without self-confident nations humankind is more likely to split into warring tribes than to establish global cooperation on the other hand without global cooperation no nation can deal with the challenges of the 21st century what does all this mean in practice it means that we need to give more weight to global problems and global interests within the existing framework of nation-states when the next elections come along and politicians are imploring you to vote for them you need to ask these politicians for questions if you're elected what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war what actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change what actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and bioengineering and finally how do you see the world of 2050 what is your worst-case scenario and what is your vision for the best-case scenario if some politicians don't understand these questions or if they constantly talk about the past without being able formulate a meaningful vision for the future don't vote for these politicians thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Central European University

Views: 10,997

Keywords: CEU, Central European University, Yuval Noah Harari, Harari, The Bright Side of Nationalism, Reasons for Hope, Michael Ignatieff, Nationalism

Id: v1xXF4RjC9A

Length: 49min 26sec (2966 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019