To believe in a nation means to believe that one is not alone, that one is a member of a community of believers. Each belief also has its unifying ideas and symbols. But they exist only insofar as the people believe in their existence
It is often argued that old identities, which stabilised the social world for so long, are declining. New identities are rising and destabilising the individual as a unified subject. This so-called ‘identity crisis’ is part of the process of change that is taking place in contemporary social and political life.
Identity becomes a problem whenever one is not sure where one belongs, where to place oneself in the narrations of the past, and in the network of inter-relationships with others. It becomes a problem when one is not sure whether others accept this placement as correct. “Identity”, wrote Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, “is a name given to the escape sought from that uncertainty”.
There are various situations in which one might ask the question of identity. It was asked in a letter, submitted anonymously, to Ahad Ha’am, the founder of a secular Jewish movement in 1947: “We call a Jew, one who loves his people, its literature, and its cultural heritage. . . . But the one, who at the same time, believes in nature and natural law, and does not believe in God, the creator, is such a person a Jew or isn’t heIJ”
It seems as if in the modern world some form of community, such as nation, race, class, or gender, to which we belong, or suppose ourselves to belong, constitutes a part of our self-image. English philosopher Roger Scruton, for example, argues that: “The condition of man requires that the individual, while he exists and acts as an autonomous being, does so only because he can first identify himself as something greater — as a member of a group, class, or nation, or of some arrangement to which he cannot attach a name, but which he recognises instinctively as a home.”
And, from a more liberal position, philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner wrote: “That man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears is quite obvious, but not true”. This is a paradoxical feature of identity. It is obvious that everybody has to have it, but we do not have it, as we have noses and ears. It has to be re-invented and re-interpreted in each new situation, by each generation and each community. It does not pass from generation-to-generation by teachingand learning.
If institutionalised and taught, it easily makes people chauvinist and exclusionist. In short, a sense of identity is transmitted less through cognitive language or learning than through imagination and fantasy.It was supposed by some that the solution to the problem could be the establishment of alienated political institutions. These would be formal and empty enough to maintain their distance from claims of identity; they would not embody any particular community’s dream, and thus, keep open the space for them all.
Only if the term ‘citizen’ denotes an empty place, in the network of interrelationships between people, a place which can be occupied by anyone, may a citizen be imagined as a subject of the proclamation of human rights, “All people without regard to race, sex, religion, wealth, or ethnicity”. But, as Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us, we failed to notice “the violent act of abstraction at work in this ‘without regard to’.
Why then is the nation or ethnicity the best candidate to fill the empty spaceIJ Perhaps Mr Scruton and lithuanian politician Bronislovas Genzelis are right. A person simply cannot be devoid of local identity, traditions, views and convictions. Perhaps an individual can exist only when he can identify himself as a member of some ‘we’. But it’s also true that this identification is always the work of belief, of fantasy instead of cognition.
To believe in a nation means, wrote Mr Zizek, to believe that I am not alone, that I am a member of a community of believers. Each belief has its causes and effects; but the paradoxical feature of some beliefs is that they are caused by their own effects. Unifying ideas and unifying symbols are causes of this kind. They exist only insofar as people believe in their existence. To believe in a common thing (in an idea that unifies us) means to be a member of the community of believers in the same thing.
But what is the thing we all believeIJ Be it either religion, or nation or money, always it is a substantiation of some habit to behave. The Others are those who are dangerous for our habits of behaviour and way of life, but rather than real beings they are constructs of fantasy. This is the pathological aspect of our contemporary intellectual and political situation: The imaginary Other determines the way we act toward the real Other.
It was assumed that multiculturalism was a good starting point for a politics which is neither exclusivist nor assimilativist. According to the liberal reading, multiculturalism was understood as an expression of the anti-racist idea that there are no superior or inferior races, no superior or inferior cultures. There are only various traditions, various ways of organising social life, each of equal value, and each worth preserving, if there is a community of people to identify with.
The problem with multiculturalism, in either the liberal or the conservative interpretation, is that it reduces differences to different identities. It neglects the fact that even under the conditions of cultural and national differences political goals are selected more by interests than by cultural values.