Podcast

Intro: Nationalism is a topic of obvious contemporary relevance today, as well as for modern history at large. In the last ten years, and especially in the last three or two years, many observers of political life worldwide have diagnosed a resurgence of nationalism. I think after a while, during which many people thought that the nation state was a dying breed. And so here we are again with people and scholars and historians, but also sociologists, political scientists, finding again their interest in nationalism in order to explain many present-day concerns of political life. #AskDifferent, the podcast by the Einstein Foundation.

Doris Hellpoldt: Hello. My name is Doris Hellpoldt. Welcome to the podcast. We live in a time and society where the term globalization is used very frequently, but the implications and consequences as well as the historical roots of the process are very hard to entangle and fully make sense of. But that's exactly the task attempted by today's guest on #AskDifferent. Michael Goebel currently holds an Einstein professorship for Global History at Freie Universität Berlin. And among the topics he deals with are migration cities, urban development, social injustice, as well as nationalism, and the ways all of these are interconnected. Welcome, Michael Goebel, and thank you for being with us here today. 

Michael Goebel: Thank you for having me. 

Hellpoldt: As I've just mentioned, your research interests cover quite a broad range of topics such as migration cities, urban development, the rise of social injustice, and very importantly and very relevant at this time, nationalism in their historical context and their interconnectedness on a global scale. That's quite a list and to me, I must admit, almost a bit intimidating. What is it specifically that makes these fields interesting to you and why are they relevant for the increasingly globalized political and economic era we live in today? 

Goebel: It's funny that you'd say that these are broad concerns, which they are, but in fact, these buzzwords are a way of interconnecting much more specific research items and empirical projects that can be quite distant from each other. As you implied, I began my life as a historian, as someone who was interested in nationalism, especially in the political and intellectual history of nationalism, originally in Latin America. But then I wrote a second book that was about anti colonialism in interwar Paris and nationalism. So there was a connection. In the course of that project, I became more interested in the history of cities and of migration also. So, that is basically how these large buzzwords connect, even though I'm more interested in more specific empirical projects also. 

I do think that nationalism is a topic of obvious contemporary relevance today, as well as for modern history at large. In the last ten years, and especially in the last three or two years, many observers of political life worldwide have diagnosed a resurgence of nationalism, I think, after a while during which many people thought that the nation state was a dying weed. And so here we are again with people and scholars and historians, but also sociologists, political scientists, finding again their interest in nationalism in order to explain many present-day concerns of political life. 

Hellpoldt: Let's stay, for a moment with this rather complex phenomenon of nationalism and how that's connected or influenced by the concept of nation states and national identity of the people living in them, which isn't necessarily the same thing. On the contrary, there can be a lot of tension created by situations where these do not fully overlap or are potentially different from one another. What are examples that you've been looking into or that you find interesting at the moment? 

Goebel: So first of all, like you said, I consider myself someone who works in global history and who has an interest in global connectivity. But unlike what many people imagined for a long time, I don't think it is the case that an increase in global connectivity equals a decrease in nationalism. If you will, nationalism and national identities, that's a term that I'm a little bit less comfortable with. But nationalism is one of the most global and also one of the most globally connected phenomena in modern history. Right? So the vast majority of the world population nowadays consider themselves to have a nationality and think of themselves as belonging to a nation. And the process by which most people in the world over the last two 250 years of world history came to think of themselves in these terms is obviously a globally connected process. So to put this bluntly, there are few phenomena as globalized as the idea that everybody has a nationality. Even though, of course, in nationalist ideals, everybody has one national identity, which is exclusive vis a vis other national identities, right? So, Benedict Anderson, a famous, theorist of nationalism who wrote a book in the 1980s called ‘Imagined Communities’, called this the modular form of nationalism. So there's a model which stipulates that everybody needs to have one and then you fill it with actual cultural content. Right? So the national dish, the national dress, the national symbol, the flag, what have you, is of course distinct between the cases. But the basic idea that you need each of them is fairly widespread. 

Hellpoldt: The complexity starts at this very point, I think, because as you say, some people have or identify as having several national identities depending on their background, I guess. And also there's not always necessarily an exact overlap between nation or nationality and the state or country people are living in. So what are the problems that might arise from that? 

Goebel: There's plenty of problems. First of all, there's one question, what exactly do we even mean when we say nationalism? Right? And theorists of nationalism offer different definitions. I broadly think that the everyday definition that you read in newspapers today thinks of nationalism as an exclusivist and bad version of patriotism, which is the good and nice version, right? But if you think of this in more sociological and definitional terms, one could also say that nationalism is just the basic idea that the world is divided into different nations and that the best form of political organization is that each nation has its state, right? So you divide the world into different nation states. And that basic idea, which is very widespread, I think, creates many problems because then people will constantly quibble around either the boundaries of the state or the nation, right? So obviously, like you implied, there's plenty of examples of people who perceive of themselves as a nation, the Basques, the Kurds, the Scots, you can have a long list, who do not have their clearly identifiable state. And so that creates a political problem, a great deal of violence. And conversely, there's also often the idea with which we are perhaps even more familiar today, which is that nationalists, in order to achieve this intended congruency between nation and state, aim at expelling this or that other group from the body politic in order to make nation and state congruence. So non-nationals, right, there's an exclusivist element in short. Those people over there do not belong to my nation and in order to achieve a proper nation state, we need to get rid of them. 

Hellpoldt: That's something that's actually very current, especially in Germany. The term nation state is often used by right wing political parties. We've seen that particularly most recently in the context of the past regional and also federal elections in Germany where you almost get the impression that the term is kind of hijacked for populist propaganda purposes. Do they mean the same thing you would be talking about in a in a research sense when they speak about, like a sovereign democratic nation state?

Goebel: That's a difficult question. I think in principle, yes. If you say that my nation is the people of x and y that other group do not belong to that nation and therefore have to be expelled, it can be conceived as an attempt to achieve congruency or overlap between the nation and state that you want to have. Right? The basic problem here is the idea of national homogeneity. On the other hand, of course, who the nation is is not predefined. It is actually malleable and changeable, which is, you know, the chance, but also the problem. So that people bicker over or fight over the boundaries of the nation. And I think that's in principle true of both right-wing nationalism, which is the kind of nationalism that in Europe today we mostly think about probably when we hear the term nationalism. But also of left-wing nationalism, it is true of larger nation states as well as smaller nation states, is true of poor and rich nation states. So I think that basic idea is true of different kinds of nationalisms even though they don't exactly have the same politics or aims. 

Hellpoldt: As an historian, would you say that the definition of the idea or the concept of a nation state has changed in the, I don't know, last 100 or 50 years? Is it different, now than it used to be? 

Goebel: Everybody is free to have their own definitions of what they mean when they say the word nationalism. I mostly think of this basic principle that one thinks that every nation should have its state. And I take this from a Czech British sociologist, who wrote a lot about nationalism in the 1970s and '80s by the name of Ernest Gellner. That's the basic definition that I operate. But I understand that other people use this concept differently and I think there's very fundamental differences in the political aims for which nationalism is mobilized. Just to give you one example, it's obviously not the same if you say that there is such a thing as a Basque nation and it should have its state. Because if you don't have it, it basically pushes you towards fighting against existing state structures. That's different from the AfD today, which is mostly about expelling symbolically or actually perceived aliens. So one thing is to have a state and do politics within it and it's another to not have one, for example. But there's also differences in states that have a great deal of global power and resources and others that don't. 

Hellpoldt: Historically, there used to be alternative models, of course, to the nation states, such as empires. Is there a modern alternative model that we see right now in the political landscape?

Goebel: That's an interesting question and then is also one that a lot of my colleagues have debated very keenly over the past decade or two. I think the question is bedeviled by a few conceptual problems. There's people and scholars and colleagues of mine who want the answer to your question to be yes. Because I think understandably, they worry about the real-life consequences that the idea of national homogeneity can have and has had in 20th century history, right? Think of the Nazis and the Holocaust or plenty of other examples. So I understand that and so I think in that sense it's very attractive to think of the possibility of alternatives to the nation state. The question is how exactly do we perceive of them or what would be an alternative? So an alternative obviously is to uncouple state and nation, right? So you have a state which is not defined by reference to a nominal nation. So it's just a state in which the citizens do not necessarily belong to that nation, right? But I think there's also a conceptual problem at the heart of this which is that people overburden the term nation with a meaning that it doesn't automatically have. So if you start from the basic assumption that your state operates on the notion of popular sovereignty. Take the German Basic Law of 1949, which I think in article 20 stipulates that all state power flows from the people. Then you basically construe the people as the ultimate sovereign of power. It's just the notion of popular sovereignty, which is, of course, fundamental also to democracy. Now if you think of it in these terms, then you also think of the people who are the sovereign as some sort of bounded community. And I think one problem in this debate is that oftentimes there's a slippage between the words the people and the word the nation. And I can go on to explain why I think that slippage happens, right? But I think it's important to think of the nation as just a specific different term that is given to the people as a source of sovereignty. That's why I think it's hard to get rid of the notion of or the idea of the nation state or find alternatives to the nation state if you do not simultaneously want to also get rid of the principle of popular sovereignty. 

Hellpoldt: What would an attempt look like to, find a definition or make a distinction between nation and the people? Is the people just really all the people living in a certain territory and a political entity? And nation has, I don't know, more common determinators that kind of define them as the nation of x, y, or z? 

Goebel: Yes. That's exactly the all decisive question. Right? I take clues here from other people who have written about that. For example, a Canadian political theorist by the name of Bernard Jacques, who says the following, if you start from the assumption that sovereignty or power or authority flows from the people, then again, you must think that the people has some sort of boundaries. And like you just implied, you could say, okay, so the boundaries of the people are just whatever the state defines as the boundary. So whoever is born in my territory, for example, irrespective of ancestry. So it doesn't matter who your parents are, it doesn't matter what you look like, what you eat, or what you pray, or what language you speak, all of these people are part of my people who can vote and who are the ultimate notional source of sovereignty in my state. The problem is if you think of it in these terms, if power flows from the people then in some way the people must have been there before the state which defines the boundaries of the people. And I would argue that nation is just a different term given to the idea of a people that exists through time. So basically a political community that is transmitted from one generation to the next. And the moment you think of it in these terms, you get ancestry into play and all these very dangerous questions which have created so much violence in the 20th century and even the 19th.

Hellpoldt: It sounds like almost a, like a chicken and egg conundrum whether the nation was first or the state was first. But as you said, you very easily get into this dangerous territory of how do you define this? Yeah. What is the solution to not drive down the slippery slope into a dangerous, very strictly defined question of ancestry or belonging to a certain nation? 

Goebel: I don't have a good answer to this question. I agree with the premise. And by the way, because you said chicken and egg and what's first state and nation? Right? So for a long time, historians and sociologists of nationalism differentiated between such cases of nationalism in which the nation was there before the state and those nationalisms in which the state was there before the nation. It was typically differentiation between Germany and France very often. So in the German case, you only get national unification in 1871, but you obviously get an idea of the existence of a German nation before 1871. That's 19th century German nationalism, which in part drives this process of unification. So that would be a case in which you have nation or the idea of a nation before you actually have a unified state. Now that obviously predisposes early nationalists to fight against the existing state, in the case of 19th century Germany, and also define national belonging through ancestry. And so you there you get citizenship laws that are essentially ethnic and defined by ancestry. Who are your parents? That's how nationality is transmitted. 

The French case oftentimes was perceived as the opposite case. There was a state first and the state then built an idea of a nation, but basically notions of citizenship and of national belonging are territorial, right? French is whoever is born in the French territory because the state was there before. And so it's not an ethnic definition of national belonging, but it's more of a political or civic definition of national belonging. A subscription to certain political values, for example, or a constitution or the republic. Now, if you observe this in the long run, what you find is that in both cases, things get mixed up. So you have the Rassemblement or the Front National in France which very much in many ways defends a very ethnic and exclusivist notion of French identity. And then Germany also had changes to citizenship law which have made it more territorial. So basically, the question is why do they mix up? Now to your question, is there an easy solution to permanently guaranteeing that nobody goes down the ethnic exclusivist route? I don't have that solution. I wish I did. But I can't tell you much more than permanent everyday political vigilance or something like that. 

Hellpoldt: From your perspective, do you see examples where there are attempts to make changes to make the model of nation state more open to changes in society and, like, be less definitive and less strict about where is the boundary, where is the border, where is the not belonging begin?

Goebel: Yes. I mean, look, for example, when I studied in actually in Berlin in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of people were talking about this term proposed by German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, about ‘Patriotismus’. So the patriotism of the constitution would be the English translation. That was basically the idea to de ethnicize German national identity. Right? So from now on, we do this I put this slightly flippantly. Right? But the idea from now on, we handle this more like the Americans do or the French do. Right? So German national identity is no longer defined by ancestral belonging and by ethnicity and also less by culture, but simply by birth. And so that's, in a certain sense, a more inclusive idea of how to define German citizenship, of which I approve, except that it hasn't been all that successful as we now see. And even in The United States, which people like Habermas probably twenty years ago portrayed as this shining example of that kind of more inclusivist understanding of national belonging, we now see that these supposedly civic examples of pure patriotism without the bad version of nationalism can go very wrong. 

Hellpoldt: You’ve said in a different context that, and I'm trying to quote this correctly, it is worth learning about the things that people have said and done in the past. Why is it so important, especially right now in the times we live in? 

Goebel: Yeah. You would hope that a historian has a good answer. Right? And you'd also hope that a historian says what you just said I said, which is that we can learn from the past. And I do think we can although sometimes to my students, I also there's this being brought up in the 1980s. I remember distinctly that song by a British musician called Sting, which is called ‘History Will Teach Us Nothing’. And then I'm genuinely torn, right? So I don't think we should think of the lessons of history in a banal way that if we study the past, we will learn how not to repeat past mistakes. That's clearly not the case. And not only because people do not know enough about history, right? So I'm not even very optimistic that more knowledge of history equals less propensity towards repeating mistakes. So I think it's complicated, but I would insist that, yeah, I do think history can teach us lessons and they are important. And I think they can teach us analytical skills to, you know, patiently separate what's what and think about it in a calm and analytical manner that helps perhaps tune down today's populist polarization. 

Hellpoldt: You've mentioned your students and I've checked on the website of the Freie Universität for the MA program that you're kind of associated with. And it says that an important part of studying global history is not just looking at the past history, but also in some way to rewrite it because the perspectives for a long time have been very Eurocentric or male centered and, you know, colonialist centered. Is the field particularly interesting to study now because you have the chance to do that? You have the sources. You have more accessibility to knowledge and to different ways of, indeed, perhaps, rewriting things that have been written before.

Goebel: Thanks for the invitation to add a little commercial break for our MA program. I obviously encourage people to apply to it and to come to Berlin for it. And within Germany, it's, I think, one of the best places to study global history. I completely agree. Global history by now has been around for a while. So I think especially in Berlin, it's well established. And yes, it has responded to changing perceptions of which kinds of histories matter and I think largely for the better. And I also think that to the degree that global history has now become a fairly established field, especially in a place like the FU here in Berlin, at some point maybe the prefix or the adjective global will become less necessary because parts of the reformist goals have actually been achieved. 

Hellpoldt: Looking back into history is vital to changing perceptions and thus perhaps hopefully shaping the future in a better way, is a good summary to end this conversation with. It's been very, very interesting, and I think we could probably go on for a long time. Michael Goebel has been our guest on this episode of #AskDifferent. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing some of your ideas and research process and insights with us today. 

Goebel: Thanks for having me. It was great talking to you. 

Hellpoldt: You've been listening to the latest episode of #AskDifferent, the podcast by the Einstein Foundation where we speak to scientists and researchers in various fields about their work. If you like what we do, please subscribe if you haven't done so already. You'll find us wherever you get your podcasts from. Feel free to let others know about us who might also be interested or enjoy these kinds of conversations, and do check-in with us and #AskDifferent for the next episode. My name is Doris Hellpoldt. Once again, thank you for listening. Thank you for being here, and until next time. Bye bye. 

#AskDifferent, the podcast by the Einstein Foundation.