The Paradox Denied: Marxist Perspectives

uh welcome everybody good afternoon it's a pleasure to uh be here to welcome Michael waler back for the third of his four lectures on the subject of whatever happened to National Liberation um from time to time graduate students come and say to me that they want to work on the subject of nationalism and I generally advise him that this is not a good idea uh because uh just about anything that anyone could possibly say about the subject of nationalism has almost certainly been said and uh it it would be uh very unwise therefore to try and get involved in a PhD dis a on a subject of that sort and that might be good advice for a graduate student um but I think that it's it's a testimony to to the fact that Michael waler is one of among other things it me many distinctions one of the most creative political uh theorists of Our Generation broadly construed that in fact he's been developing an account of National Liberation that truly is Innovative uh it is an argument that I have never heard before and he in his first lecture when he talked about the Paradox of National Liberation India Israel and Algeria he really uh crystallized this the Paradox uh that National Liberation movements tend to be uh secular in their motivation and in their anticipated effects but produce a a a a downstream reaction against the secularism that uh was part of what motivated their leaders he dug into that um Paradox in the case of uh Zionism in the second lecture in a remarkably uh thought-provoking and Illuminating way again you would think if is if anybody was to say that something new would be said about Zionism and the Israel Palestine conflict at this time in the evolution of uh uh witnessing and thinking about that subject one would have to be skeptical but indeed I think uh his pursuit of of that Paradox in the context of uh the the challenges that Israel now finds itself confronting was indeed novel and Illuminating uh today he's going to anticipate criticism of that thesis uh that he he's been developing in his lecture his third lecture on on the subject of the Paradox denied Marxist perspectives Michael thank you so the um the the the Paradox with which I began these lectures has to do with the tense relationship of liberators and the people they aim to liberate and actually do liberate this is simultaneously a relationship of deep sympathy and deep hostility sympathy because the liberators don't just resent the foreign rulers and hope to replace them they really want to improve the everyday life of of their people the people with whom they identify their people the possessive pronoun is important hostil because at the same time they hate what they take to be the backwardness ignorance passivity and submissiveness of those same people they want to help them by transforming them by overcoming or modernizing their traditional religious beliefs and practices to which of course many of them most of them are deeply attached and the position that I implicitly and occasionally explicitly defended in the first two lectures is one of sympathy for this transformative Enterprise coupled with criticism of its harsher more singular and absolute versions I I should add that in two of my three cases India and Israel it really can't be said that the rule of The Liberation militants after Independence was particularly harsh in comparison say to accounts of political harshness in in the morning newspapers on pretty much any day this year Israel imposed military rule over the Western Galilee and its mostly Arab inhabitants nou ruled with force in Kashmir and in nagaland and other provinces of the Indian Northeast but by World standards these were liberal regimes with opposition parties a highly critical press and free universities indeed a Contemporary Indian sociologist criticizes neu's refusal to use the coercive powers of the state to hasten the secularization process nou was too much a liberal on this view or he was too optimistic about the decline of religion he invites comparison with lenon and Ataturk says this critic and if you allow dictatorship suffers by the comparison well I I don't allow dictatorship and have been hinting at a very different critique of The Liberation militants they didn't acknowledge the substantive seriousness and strength of their traditionalist opponents and begin a process of Engagement and negotiation with them but I agree that it's entirely appropriate to be skeptical about this position after all the militants who did try to engage with the traditions of their people rather than simply negate them were not successful in any of the cases I'm considering they could not resolve the Paradox of National Liberation nor could they ward off the religious revival before asking again how one might deal with the Paradox I need to consider two alternative accounts of National Liberation and I'm going to focus on alternative accounts of Indian National Liberation Marxist and postcolonialist which deny that there is a paradox to deal with on these views the Aging militants of The Liberation movements should not be surprised by the religious revival for they are its direct cause revivalist religion is as an Indian friend said to me the dark twin of National Liberation the opposition on which I have focused is only a surface phenomenon a mere squabble between social forces that are whatever their militants and True Believers think world historical allies the Marxist account holds that religious identities are an example of false consciousness they are premodern and anti-modern and not usefully engaged with the the real world the liberationists failed to overcome these identities because their own nationalism is also an example of false consciousness and it is also premodern and anti-modern whatever their pretended opposition nationalism and religion reinforce each other postcolonial writers by contrast see these two nationalism and religion as specifically modern creations they stress with a kind of romantic Nostalgia the fuzzy syncretistic reciprocal and overlapping character of premodern religious identities and argue that the singular and exclusive religion that Foster zealotry is the product of colonial rule which the liberationists did not challenge so much as perpetuate they the liberationists appropriate Western forms of disciplinary power and it can't be surprising that Hindu militants compete with them to exercise that power I'm going to focus mostly today on the Marxist critique since I find it the more challenging of the two I will say something about postcolonialism at the beginning of my next lecture the Marxist critique begins just as I began with a nation whose members have adjusted to foreign rule accepted their subordinate roles and even found ways especially religious ways to legitimize their own subordination they are indeed passive quiescent submissive they fit the description given by the National Liberation militants except that there is nothing in their condition that is peculiar to their nation in fact they are exactly like or fundamentally similar to subordinate men and women everywhere and it is critically important that they come to recognize the similarity the sense of oneself as the member of a subject people writes Edward SED in culture and imperialism is the founding Insight of Anti-Imperialist nationalism but it will lead to chauvinism and xenophobia unless the individual member sees his own history as an aspect of the history of all subjugated men and women the alternative account is a universalizing account which denies that oppression has a national name Indians are not oppressed as Indians or Jews as Jews or algerians as algerians they are simply subject peoples parts of a global proletariat and it is a mistake to think that their Liberation has to be or that it can be a National Liberation Perry Anderson the founding editor of new left review has developed the most subtle version of this argument in a comparison of countries and movements only a little different from my own he deals with India Israel and Ireland in these three countries he writes and I'm quoting now the Nationalist party that came to power after Independence distanced itself from the the confessional undertoe of the struggle without ever being able to tackle its Legacy headon in each case as the ruling party gradually lost its luster it was outflanked by a more extreme rival that had fewer inhibitions about appealing directly to the theological passions aroused in the original struggle the success of these parties that is the religious parties that come later was due to to their ability to articulate openly what had always been latent in the national movement but neither candidly acknowledged nor consistently repudiated on this view the liberators try to distance themselves from the religious commitments of their fellows but they don't have the courage or because of their nationalism they don't have the capacity to do so openly explicitly and consistently and so religious passion remains latent and unchallenged in their nationalist project in effect the militants of National Liberation create the Modern Nation in much the same way as the revivalists later on create a modernized religion by evoking its primordial character by searching for Heroic moments in its history and insisting at the same time on the injuries it has suffered at the hands of conquerors and persecutors while they are critical of the actual culture of their people they recover or invent a historic culture that they can celebrate and all this brings with it the undertoe of the old religion so the nation becomes the prison of its liberators and fundamentalist religion turns out to be nationalism's secret double or for Anderson its unchosen but inevitable successor claiming with some Justice he says to be its legitimate Heir my friend's phrase dark twin is ambiguous for National Liberation on this view is as dark as religious revival the two of them are equally parochial and exclusive they lead inevitably to the creation of others who are excluded from the nation treated as enemies feared and hated they give rise to a chauvinist and intolerant politics of course the militants of National Liberation have a different view of their project many of them can rightly insist that their repuation of the old religion was over many years resolutely explicit and entirely consistent and all of them argue that their aim is not the aggrandisement of their Nation but rather equal membership in the Society of Nations and reciprocity with the others but in so far as they are nationalist this is the alternative view the Marxist view they cannot achieve these goals without mobilizing their own nation and in practice that means appealing to Blood Ties gut feelings and irrational beliefs the liberators imitate the Believers they hope to defeat they appropriate the religious themes of martyrdom and Vindication to come they set past and future Glory against present humiliation and whatever they say about their goals the political struggle they begin isn't aimed at Independence simply or equality or religious freedom but at triumph over ancient enemies many of whom were also members of a different Faith infidels Anderson limits his argument to nationalist movements and this is his these are his words in which religion played a central organizing role from the start providing so to speak the genetic code of the movement the the biological imagery is is a mistake I think as it always is in writing about politics but I don't disagree with Anderson's effort to focus the argument I'm afraid though that many more cases than his three or my three will have to be included most national histories are entangled with religious histories that's why why the militants have to work so hard at disentanglement that's what makes National Liberation so problematic asked by Al Andre maloe what his most difficult task after Independence had been Neu replied at first piously and then realistically creating a just state by just means he said and then creating a secular state in a religious country the alternative view of National Liberation holds that secularists like Neu weren't secular enough couldn't be secular enough as long as they were also nationalists inevitably the National Liberation militants summon up the religious zealots the doctrines change but the underlying parochialism and the passionate in genders are very much alike it follows that Gandhi's political use of Hindu motifs is not an exception to the general rule of National Liberation it is in fact an especially clear example of the general rule only his pacifism is exceptional yes as naul wrote Gandhi called up India's archaic religious emotions but that's what all nationalists do even when they think they are opposing religion for these archaic religious emotions are closely connected to the archaic National emot tions which are the necessary material of liberationist propaganda in fact the two sets of emotions are in many cases virtually identical Hinduism as a unified and coherent world religion standing with Christianity and Islam may be an invention of the British the opposition of Hindus and Muslims May in part be the consequence of Imperial policy it is still the case that Hindu beliefs and practices and Hindu understandings of defeat and oppression played a crucial role in Indian national mobilization and they served at the same time to remind Hindu Indians that there was a Muslim Conquest before the British Conquest efforts to evoke the image of an independent India inevitably look back to the time of a Hindu Raj many Hindu nationalists in neu's time and later too were not religious at all all VD sakar the chief ideologue of hindutva who invented the word wrote a book defending the idea that Hindus not Indians were a nation and that Hinduism in all its varieties was simply the culture of the nation but he also wrote that India was the Hindu Holy Land which demonstrates I suppose Anderson's undertoe and India according to of arar was no one else's Holy Land Muslim and Christian Indians had holy lands of their own far away zakar imagined an inclusive Hindu Community he wanted to bring in Janes and siks and to bring back men and women who had converted to Islam or Christianity but they could only come back if they return to the culture of Hinduism which was in fact a religious culture theorists of hindutva like sarar and also the more radical Ms gwalker frequently compared themselves to the zionists who were also asserting the claim of a nation that was conventionally described as a religious community the difference is that Jewish nationhood was clear at least to the Jews Amel the people of Israel or the nation of Israel was the most common name for the Jews among among the Jews themselves Hindu nationhood by contrast was an ideological construction unknown to most Hindus in delineating this ideological nation and marking its boundaries the hindutva theorist could not avoid religious markers of a fairly extreme sort thus gwalker in his 1938 description of a future Hindustan and I'm quoting him now the non Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and languages learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture in a word they must cease to be foreigners or they may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation claiming nothing deserving no privileges far less any preferential itial treatment not even citizen rights the line from that sort of thing to an overt religious zealotry is easy to make out not so the line from Congress nationalism whose ideolog like neou insisted that India was a composite and not simply a Hindu culture not so the line from labor Zionism either whose protagonists as I suggested last time were not inclined to hold Judaism in reverence let alone require anyone else to do that there are indeed nationalists and Orthodox zealots today who would like the state of Israel to embody the same radical entanglement of nation and religion that the theorists of hindutva advocate but it was a central aim of most zionists to separate what sarar and gwalker struggled to bring together they wanted a secular state in which religious Jews would feel at home but which would also include non-jews and Jewish non-believers as equal citizens sarar thought of himself as a man of the Enlightenment a secular rationalist but he had as ashis nandi writes paradoxically arrived at the conclusion that only religion could be an efficacious building block for nation and state formation in South Asia his kind of nationalism was indeed the dark twin of religious zealotry but throughout his life says nandy he remained at the margin of Indian politics throughout the struggle for National Liberation he was a distinctly marginal figure how then did he move posthumously into the center for the Marxist account of National Liberation again that's not a hard question the answer is that n politics was closer to sarar than either of them would ever have admitted they are each other's disowned doubles and I want to give that argument it's due in the Israeli and Algerian cases also so let me acknowledge that the Jewish love of Zion the original holy land was a necessary Foundation of Zionist Politics the militants of Labor Zionism secularists all could not help but evoke that religious emotion even if they agreed with Hillel zeitlin that I quoted this last time the same tradition that burdens Us in the diaspora will burden us a thousand times more in the land of Israel the love of Zion made the Uganda project impossible it is powerfully expressed in hatikva Israel's national anthem which Arab citizens are loathed to sing since it expresses a peculiarly Jewish longing for the land of Israel the case is the same in Algeria the Arabs came to the mreb as a conquering people and Islam was the reason for the conquest and then the ideological Foundation of Arab rule centuries later it was perhaps The crucial reason for algerians to identify themselves as not French and to resist the incorporation of Algeria into the French Republic the politically necessary commitment of the fln to the principles of Islam was far more consequential than the movements leaders intended their Retreat on the woman question certainly suggests what might be called a natural Drift from National Liberation to religious revival so this is the central claim of the Marxist account parochialism is parochialism whether it calls itself National or religious from a Universalist standpoint the secular and religious versions of Indian Jewish and Algerian nationalism are pretty much indistinguishable they feed one another and if the best intentions of the secular Liberation militants are frustrated the frustration is their own work the necessary consequence of their nationalist commitments by contrast the universalism of the alternative account derives from internationalist commitment which are based on social classes and economic interests rather than on Nations and religions these commitments are nicely illustrated by an Indian historian and social theorist G alius who argues that the Nationalist movement precisely because of its religious affinities prevented the maturing of the masses and their emergence this is him speaking and their emergence into a new interest-based political Community the much vaunted struggle against untouchability he writes reduced a total struggle against ascriptive hierarchy to a nominal symbolic struggle for a minority of Untouchable casts it's certainly true that the cast system made and still makes class politics difficult in India but there is little evidence that an uprising of all the Indian subaltern groups was waiting to happen but was diverted by the Congress nationalists into a merely symbolic campaign against untouchability the total struggle existed I'm afraid more in theory than in practice or better it should have existed and is evoked by Marxist writers as if it actually did exist but any political leader in the real world looking for the maturing masses would have ended up not with a social movement but with an isolated sect the Marxist project failed or at least has not yet succeeded though the critique of National Liberation survives as we will see the liberationists have not been pushed aside by the emergence of the masses as a mature political force nor have they they been replaced in the absence of the masses by the revolutionary Vanguard of the global proletariat and even if that replacement had occurred the Vanguard militants would have encountered the same problem that the liberationists did they would have found themselves at war with the very people whose interests they claimed to advance indeed their War might have been even more intense and it might have led in the case of the Russian marxists it did lead to a far more brutal authoritarianism since it wasn't only the religious feelings but also the national cultural commitments of ordinary men and women that the Vanguard militants could not or would not acknowledge attempting to Rally the people Marxist internationalists would indeed have appealed to Universal principles rather than to archaic emotions theirs would not have been a parochial but rather a Cosmopolitan mobilization in their politics they would have cultivated a new solidarity of the oppressed across all the boundaries of nation and religion Hindu and Muslim Jew and Arab Algerian and pied Noir would have found themselves working together Global allies against the global axis of capitalism and imperialism post-marxist critics of nationalism still long for This Global Alliance it's an attractive Vision so long as it's only a vision so long as it isn't enforced perhaps the most authentic political representation of secularism and Enlightenment but it was never realized and we need to reflect for a moment on the failure of the Cosmopolitan revolutionaries and on the success however qualified of National Liberation it's not the case that the revolutionaries were just unlucky nowhere in the world did proletarian internationalism succeed even for a brief time in displacing National identification Marx may have been right about class interest but he was certainly wrong about the relative appeal of class-based and nation-based politics foreign rule was everywhere experienced as a form of national oppression in whose miseries all social classes is shared and opposition to foreign rule cut across class lines even when it was begun and led by upper or middle class groups workers and peasants eventually joined in a Cosmopolitan Liberation movement may or may not come after the Triumph of National Liberation that's still an open question but there was never a chance that it could come before and efforts to make it come before did not bring anything like Liberation from the failure of internationalism in practice however it doesn't necessarily follow that the theoretical critique of National Liberation is wrong I suppose that the unity of theory and practice requires us to be skeptical now about Marxist internationalism if the practice has failed then the theory should be in trouble but the critique of national Liber ation is also a moral critique which holds that the liberationists share responsibility for all the dark features of contemporary nationalism including those that are marked by religious Zeal can this be right given that National Liberation was so fiercely anti-religious it's certainly true that secularism was something new for Indians Jews and algerians and the separation of religion and politics was an artifact of liberationist politics hence artificial any effort to find liberationist themes in the history of these peoples moments of Independence activism solidarity and self-sacrifice would inevitably draw on religiously inflected events and beliefs the collective goals of the National Liberation movements overlapped with and were often expressed in the language of religious hopes and dreams all that is true on the other hand secularist commitments did make a difference and it's important to focus on that difference in order to recognize the value of the liberationist project to its militants and to argue as I will want to do tomorrow in the last of these lectures that the project is worth continuing and completing so consider once more for the last time the Jewish belief that the Messiah would bring the exiled people home to the land of Israel this in gathering becomes a central Zionist goal but now it is reconceived as a political project subject to all the normal vicissitudes of politics requiring organization fundraising diplomacy compromise and possibly this was the struggle of fierce debate a subject of fierce debates possibly the use of force the idea of waiting for divine Deliverance was rejected and that idea as I've already argued lay at the heart of exilic Judaism the case is the same with the religious idea of settling the land the Zionist Maxim another dunam another goat is not only a prosaic version of this idea it's also a transformed version focused now on human effort and open to the necessity of compromise and limit the religious idea does not admit of dividing the land but dividing the dunams is a real possibility of course religious revival produces its own Transformations when Jewish zealots entered into the Practical work of settling the land after the 1967 war they were obviously not waiting for the Messiah they were in the old religious language for forcing the end forcing the end but they acted with a sense that the end was near that they were on the brink of Messianic times the success of their work was divinely guaranteed and so the ideas of compromise and limit were inconceivable to them one can argue that the liberationist project made this zealotry possible and historically that's certainly true just as one might rightly say that the enlightenment made the counter enlightenment possible but I doubt that it's morally right to blame the liberationists for the zealots it would be a great mistake to ignore the difference between the two ways of settling the land and similarly it would be a great mistake to ignore the difference between the critique of untouchability by Gandhi and Neu however incomplete it was and the defense of the functional organization of society by Hindu nationalists hindutva isn't implicit in and doesn't follow from the incompleteness of the navian critique it's more accurate to say that it follows from the No Doubt partial success of National Liberation as Thomas Hansen has argued hindutva is a reaction against broad Democratic transformations of both the political field and and public culture in postcolonial India he means egalitarian transformations in fact the Hindu nationalists have made good use of democracy which has brought their followers previously passive and inarticulate committed to the routines of the old religion into Political life recall Raji bava's explanation for the rise of Hindu nationalism the propensity of representative democracy to encourage ethn religious political mobilization but this mobilization made possible by democracy can be and in part has been turned against social and gender equality against Liberation in fact the contrasting politics of Liberation militants and religious zealots might be described in another way all three of these National Liberation movements and many others too claimed that they were going to create a democratic State and a just legal order and in all three of them democracy and Justice were understood in standard that is European ways I won't immediately say Universal ways although that's what the militants believed and probably rightly they imitated the values of the European Enlightenment which are expressed in Universalist terms and which certainly set the militants against their own people's parochialism these were nationalists who wanted their Nation to measure up to principles first established elsewhere indeed their commitment to those principles was probably stronger the algerians are an exception here than that of their Marxist critics they wanted to join the Society of states which in its Origins was a European Society but in its Ambitions a global Society they wanted as the Zionist said to be normal by contrast the religious zealots want to be different they don't aim at a state like all the other states they want a state shaped by their own interpretation or reinterpretation of a particular religious tradition and that's why they resist the universalizing discourse of democracy and human rights invoking instead Hindu culture and Asian values or Jewish or Islamic law the same contrast can be Illustrated even with regard to the treatment of the new minorities created by National Liberation Muslims in India Arabs in Israel berbers in Algeria where the Marxist critique of nationalism is seemingly strongest the liberationists were indeed committed first of all to the Revival of their own Nation but they were also committed to the inclusion of the others in the state they were making I can't argue that any of them were successful or entirely successful in their inclusiveness they fell far short their politics sometimes collapsed into nationalism toour but I do want to argue that their original commitments were significantly different from those of the religious nationalists who came later I'll take up the Algerian case first the FL was committed from the beginning to a unitary state with full equality for all its citizens the sumam platform of 1956 singled out Europeans and Jews as the future minorities that most needed to be reassured and accommodated though berbers figured significantly in the leadership of the FL and in the drafting of the platform nothing was said there about autonomy or linguistics equality for the Berber Community which turned out to be the most important minority in the new state once Independence was W and almost all the Europeans and Jews were gone the fln government first Ben Bellas and then buan launched a fierce arabization campaign a rejection of Liberation for the sake of a straightforward nationalism the result was a brief uprising ring in cabila the Berber district and then almost 20 years later a Berber spring the beginning of an ongoing agitation for State recognition of the language culture and history of the Berber people the fln in power has steadily resisted this agitation but the Liberation movement that it once was still has a voice in Algerian politics it is represented by the milit who found themselves in prison or in Exile in the years after 1962 and who continue to fight for a secular democracy fenon died of leukemia in 1961 and so wasn't among them as he might have been hosin 8 Ahmed one of the berbers among the historic nine the founders of the fln is perhaps the best spokesman for an ongoing liberationist politics he is a leader of I think he's recently retired he must be in his 80s he is a leader of the front of socialist forces a national political party that draws its support mainly from cabila a Ahmed went into opposition and into Exile early in the history of the new state and in the years since has defended with great courage a secular pluralist and Democratic politics in the local elections of 1990 in the national elections of 91 when the islamists swept the country cabila remained a secular stronghold and voted strongly for the Socialist front during the colonial years the French touted the berbers in contrast to the Arabs as almost European the natural carriers of French culture in Algeria I'm not going to play that game there are many secular nationalists and Democrats among Algerian Arabs who would claim to descend from the original fln and who set themselves against islamist radicalism in the drafting of the secular sumam platform however the initiative lay I'm quoting a historian of the Algerian War the initiative lay with the berbers as opposed to the Arabs and in the years after 1962 the arabized fln regime from whose leading positions berbers were excluded was not a force for Liberation not for women as we have seen and not for minorities Still Still the state the fln created was and is a secular State and if it were ever replaced by an Islamic State women would surely be worse off and the berbers probably so labor zionists in power did better than the fln in avoiding authoritarianism and brutality but they too failed to live up to their egalitarian commitments the state they created in May of 1948 was a Jewish state but at the same time a secular state with the rights of national and religious minorities guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence Israel took over without significant change the Millet system originally put in place by the Ottomans and maintained by the British so though Arab Christians and Muslims had and have their own family courts conducted in their own language ruling in accordance with their own religious law but this egalitarian Arrangement which owes more to enlightened imperialism than to National Liberation has no parallel in society or economy where the commitment to equality was mostly ignored the commitment nonetheless was important it set up barriers against the worst forms of discrimination and abuse if one reads and listens to the religious zealots in Israel today the difference is obvious and it makes little sense to say that the strength of the zealots follows naturally from the nationalism of the labor zionists it follows instead as in India from the Democracy that the labor Zionist created and then from their failure to produce a strong and coherent secular culture to go with that democracy the zealots represent the return of the negated or of the not quite negated their opposition to equality for the others isn't a continuation of an earlier Zionist politics but a repudiation of it so here is David Boran speaking in late 1947 after the UN had voted for partition he's speaking to a meeting of M mapai that is the political party that he led and that ruled Israel for its first first three decades this is what he said we must think in terms of a state in terms of Independence in terms of full responsibility for ourselves and for others in our state there will be non-jews as well and all of them will be equal citizens equal in everything without any exception that is the state will be their state as well the attitude of the Jewish state to its Arab citizens will be an important factor in building good neighborly relations with the Arab states the striving for a Jewish Arab Alliance requires us to fulfill several obligations which we are obliged to do in any event full and real equality de Ure and de facto of all the States citizens gradual Equalization of the economic and social standards of the Arab Community with the Jewish Community recognition of the Arab language as the language of the Arab citizens in administration courts of justice and above all in schools Municipal autonomy in villages and cities and so on that is was a liberationist vision of a state at peace with its nebor neighbors and the invasion of the new state in 1948 by five Arab armies must count as one of the reasons perhaps The crucial reason that none of the governments over which vuan presided lived up to the commitments he described in that speech the equality he promised has never been realized in the 65 years of Israel's history but it is a matter of real importance that equality was for benorian as it was for the Algerian authors of the sumam platform consistent with and even required by National Liberation for it is not required by nor is it consistent with the religious nationalism that came later my next and last lecture will begin with the Indian debate about these issues in which postmodern and postcolonial writers have played a major part but I I want to stop here to quote from a speech that closely parallels boran's 1947 talk delivered at the inaugural session of the Indian constituent assembly where the newly created States Constitution was drafted the speaker is rajendra Prasad president of the assembly and later the first President of India he's responding to the boycott of the assembly by members of the Muslim League we who are present in the house cannot forget even for a moment that many of the seats are vacant at this meeting our Brethren of the Muslim League are not with us and their absence increases our responsibility we shall have to think at each step what would they have done if they had been here we hope that they will come and take their place but if unfortunately these seats continue to remain unoccupied occupied it will be our duty to frame a Constitution which will leave no room for complaint from anybody the promise implicit here extends beyond the mere writing of the Constitution and like other liberationist promises it remains unfulfilled Muslim Indians have many legitimate complaints but I need to insist again that while National Liberation may have its own failures its own pathologies these are not the same as or the source of the pathologies of contemporary politicized religion and religious nationalism the test of every National Liberation movement is the nation that comes next so the Jews are tested by the Palestinians the Algerian Arabs by the berbers and the Indians by the Muslims in their largely Hindu nation state right now none of the three nations is scoring very high nevertheless the three minority groups demonstrate the strength of the liberationist project by imitating it like self-determination National Liberation is a reiterative process each Collective self must determin itself each Nation must liberate itself the proletarian Revolution May free all Humanity at one go but National Liberation is always partial and particular these people free themselves and other people looking on are invited to do the same so labor Zionism doesn't produce religious zealotry we might better say that its most authentic project is the Palestinian National Liberation movement and similarly the Berber spring is the most authentic project product of fln nationalism and if you are in favor of this kind of liberation of Nations or peoples one by one you must be in favor of its repetitions it would be morally inconsistent as well as foolish to imagine that the process stops with me or with you and me or with us the pathologies of religious zealotry by contrast do not derive from an inconsistent application of Hindu or Jewish or Muslim Doctrine but rather from a passionate consistency if all these religious groups wanted was Toleration for themselves then they would be much like National groups seeking Liberation and they would be bound if not by the rule of reiteration then by the rule of reciprocity I will tolerate you if you will tolerate me but Toleration is not what the zealous want they aim in each of my three cases to create a state that is entirely their own and to exalt their Nation above all others the passion they bring to this effort is obviously a response to National Liberation but it is also radically different from it thank you

Channel: Yale University

Views: 8,180

Keywords: Michael Walzer, The Stimson Lectures, The MacMillan Center, Yale University, Marxist Perspectives, National Liberation

Id: a8568jCfI30

Length: 51min 54sec (3114 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2013