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Article 1
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Lulu Publications, USA, 2007‘The Uncultivable Seeds of Multiculturalism in the Civilised World'
‘The Uncultivable Seeds of Multiculturalism in the Civilised World' is quite a serious article that I have written to elucidate some of the issues that define the perilous situation in which many Western nations find themselves today in relation to the intractable problem of immigration. I have written this article by beginning to ask myself the following question: ‘have modern scholarship and social sciences lost the sense of historical exploration and conceptual technicality to the profit of thoughtless humanism and liberal politics?'
Such is, of course, my question: a pretty simple one, but the practical implications of which affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the world today and which constitute the daily burden of those who are ‘now' known as ‘immigrants' in almost every civilised nation (mainly western European nations and North America, and most particular since the terrorism wind began to blow from the East).
Actually, the uncontrollable steady build-up of variegated societies in the west, and which has been going on from the time when the Europeans first felt the economic need to engage in massive imports of domitable manpower 500 years ago from Africa and the Middle East, has resulted in such unexpected social slants in a politically changing world that, unfortunately, does not seem to be stepping away from its basic protectionist principles. And this has been aggravated by more recent influxes of economic and political migrants from the third world, in search of a better life, and has ended up causing various social and judiciary concerns that now touch the most deprived and disfranchised social strata of these nations, vastly composed by both the descendents of former human imports and the current immigrants, all of whom now seem to be categorised on similar social classes if not the same class. As a consequence, psychological tensions have permanently settled in and have overpowered the humanistic aspirations of the resulting so-called ‘multicultural societies' that, yet, were so copiously endorsed by these Western nations at the time of need. It, therefore, seems that there is now an imperative necessity to enforce new types of subtle institutional injustice onto these types of human species that still do not seem to fit even in diversity.
These problems are sharply manifest in issues of discrimination and phobia towards race, faith and even ideology, which affect very much of our daily lives today in these Western nations. As a human soul, I take these issues quite seriously. this is even why I take trouble writing this type of articles – I have also resolved many of such difficult issues in my recent book: Third Mind (2006) – because not only do these difficult issues cramp our sense of social cohesion and national consolidation in whatever political structure to which we ‘belong' in the West, they also impinge on individuals' ability, skills and good will to play their part and fulfil themselves in their respective societies for being unfortunate enough to carry the stigma of new fascist definitions of the term ‘immigrant'.
Somebody once made a sarcastic remark to me during a conversation in which we were discussing this subject by saying that in Britain today, many people spend 80% of their time fighting for their rights; the remaining 20% of their time can only help them achieve a sad, rebellious and sloppy subsistence. And most of the reasons that turn a great number of people into that regrettable breed are racial, religious and ideological differences, which many of us see as relevant factors for cultural distinctiveness and, therefore, social incompatibility between humans. And, in the mind of many of us, it seems that the right culprit to charge for this societal dis-ease is what i may call the ‘uncultivable seeds of multiculturalism'.
What I want to do in this article – the length of which, I am afraid, might be quite annoying to you, dear reader, but probably worth taking a look at – is to argue that if there is anything at all that may lead people to feel different from one another to the point of being unable to share the same society harmoniously, it is most certainly not ‘multiculturalism'; and, if it is, it must have very little or nothing to do with religion, race or ideology; because none of these three concepts has itself much to do with ‘culture'. In fact, what I am going to try and show here is that the concept of ‘culture' has been so increasingly ill-defined and misapprehended over the past century by media agents, scholars and politicians so much so that it has resulted very easy for people to raise cultural arguments in issues that are not cultural at all, because just anything is now seen as culture.
I will take shortcuts all the way through the article to make it a bit easy, although these shortcuts themselves may take a few paragraphs to be made intelligible. My first shortcut is going to be religion, which is causing so much cultural row in the world today in that respect; in order to demonstrate that just anything nowadays is seen as culture even when it has nothing to do with the concept of culture.
So, take the concept of religion, and just think of some politicians and journalists who appear on your television screen almost every evening and who, quite insistently, seem to be adamant to publicise the sense of tolerance that they have shown in allowing their countries to become multicultural, not least of all that these countries are actually multicultural, but because the adjacent plant of a mosque to a church in Birmingham City is, very often, for them, an outstanding factor of ‘multicultural' Britain.
My objective here is to suggest, probably against your expectation, that the coexistence of a Muslim and a Christian in Birmingham does actually not imply that Britain is multicultural. What I mean is that there is a big difference between the concept of culture and the concept of religion. A multi-religious society is not a multicultural society, because religion does really not equal culture. Many of us may be surprised at this declaration. But I am going to show why I say this.
A religion is an order of faith centred on a spiritual wisdom or an ideology and practised through a number of ritual acts and social attitudes. This is surely where the problem lies. Religious practices do display a certain number of social attitudes. And because, for some people, social attitudes and ways of life are often seen as cultural features, then religion ends up vetting the wrong label: culture.
Just take these benign examples of social attitudes and ways of life that happen to overlap with the concept of culture in order to understand what I am trying to say here. You will find, for example, many Latin-Americans who see their cultural identity through the steps of a Salsa dancer, not least that Salsa is a culture but because Salsa is part of their way of life, that is to say, an outstanding feature of their social behaviour. And they end up calling it culture. You could also think of the case of binge drinking, which is part of the English society's way of life and that is often referred to as a culture by some people in England.
Now, the reason why social attitudes and ways of life cannot, in my approach, be confounded with the notion of cultural identity is simply because it is perfectly practical for different societies to display similar social attitudes and ways of life whilst they themselves do not come under the same cultural identity at all. Dr Jeremy Narby had already pointed this anthropological fallacy in The Cosmic Serpent (2001) by noting that different cultures can perfectly make similar discoveries and display similar ways of life either out of a mere chanceful coincidence or due to emulation (because societies do copy from others). For example, the fact that many English people dance Salsa today does not force them to sharing the same cultural identity as the Cubans; they just happened to like and therefore copy this amazing dance from a different society that has its own cultural identity. And this is a characteristic that religions also display: they can be practised by people from very diametrically divergent cultural identities either because of the fact that religions are held from some basic moral principles that most human societies coincidentally share or because they are most often exported from society to society where they end up incurring some similar attitudes shared between all those who practice them irrespective or their basic different cultural identities. The fact that English Catholic priests and French Catholic priests display similar attitudes does not imply that the French culture and the English culture are the same. It simply means that they practise the same religious tradition whilst remaining ‘culturally' different.
And not only that, religious traditions, like any other traditions, are mostly inventions that often spring from within societies that already have their own attitudes and ways of life that then end up interfering in the way in which these religions are to be practised; therefore, the practice of a religion invented and worked out in Arabia, for example, will ineluctably display some of the social features that are typically inherent to the Arab way of life and that may have existed even before the invention of the said religion. And these social features may happen to be shared between different societies that would, yet, be under different cultural identities in essence, because these societies themselves may either be geographical contiguous (which often lead cultures to borrowing from one another's way of life even before they happen to practise any religion at all) or due to the fact that once a religion is born in a determined society, some of that society's attitudes that end up being incorporated into the practice of that religion – now seen by some people as inherent to that religion – may end up being shared between all societies that end up adopting that religion even though not only would these societies themselves be under different cultural identities in essence, but also the social attitudes that they may end up sharing thorough the sharing of that religion may themselves not have been invented for the sole purpose of practising that religion, but rather as the result of a mere chanceful incorporation of these pre-existing social attitudes into that religion once invented.
If one takes Islam, which is the case to which I am intending to refer here, one will see that there is an incredible number of attitudes that are now seen as typically Islamic attitudes even though they actually have nothing to do with Islam but rather with the Arab way of life and that did exist far before Muhammad himself was born. For example, if one takes a closer look at a typical catholic Madonna one might be surprised that the Holy Virgin Mary looks very much like a Muslim woman, not least that she was, but because women from many Middle Eastern societies, including Jewish and Arab women, have often shared similar ways of life, including the covering of their head with a scarf of some particular shape, and this had prevailed even before Islam and Christianity were invented. So, even the idea that the Arab woman's scarf is an Islamic symbol can be an absolute absurdity, otherwise an Essenian, Carmelian woman like Mary would not have had worn a scarf.
Such common attitudes between different societies that are themselves under different cultural identities are often held from geographical proximity, as I have just said, and sometimes a case for traditional proximity too whereas the concept of tradition is also frequently confounded with the concept of cultural identity. Yet, traditions have more to do with the practice of customs, whereas customs are habitual practices and usages that establish familiarity and constitute a common law between individuals or societies that have some specific historical links from particular historical events. The Thanksgiving celebration or even the Pancake Day, for example, can stand for illustration as far as the concept of tradition is concerned. Even individual families have particular family traditions. Commemorating the anniversary of a special ancestor in a particular way can be a family tradition.
Now, because some traditions are formed out of historical events, they can be shared between different societies, because different societies can share a common history. The remembrance of the Holocaust by all nations that shared the misadventures of the Jews in Germany is a good example of this. But this would not mean that the English and the Jews belong to the same cultural identity. They only share one specific historical event that has resulted in a common tradition between them.
Religions themselves often display a number of traditional aspects about them that different individuals from different cultural identities can happen to share and that will have nothing to do with their different cultural identities. For example, the fact that the Spanish and the Zulu share the Christmas tradition today has nothing to do with a common cultural identity between the two. Christmas in itself has become more secular than religious to the point that even pagans celebrate it out of a purely Christian context. Obviously, it has nothing to do with cultural identity.
The connection between religion and a cultural or national identity is, thus, only a matter of philosophical misconception and, sometimes, only a case for some coincidental superfetation. One of these outstanding cases of coincidence is that of the war between the English and the Irish in Northern Ireland and of which modern politicians and journalists quite often refer to as a war between Catholics and Protestants – let alone the paradoxical fact that they both read the same Bible and, therefore, share the same spiritual wisdom.
But the fundamental reasons for the war are not due to some sort of ideological clash between these two Christian trends; otherwise Catholics and Protestants would be at war everywhere in the world. The reasons for the Northern Irish war are strictly connected to such or such a cultural or national identity at odds with another on some historical and political issues. The unfortunate coincidence lies in the fact that some are mainly Catholics whereas others are mainly Protestants. It is only a coincidence not a factor for the war. The Northern Irish war would still have been launched if both of the parties did not practice any religion at all.
And likewise, there are politicians and journalists who, today, speak so relentlessly of ‘Muslim countries', and especially since the war on terror was launched by the English and the Americans. Yet, the concept of ‘Muslim country' is not tenable in any technical way. Of course, some people may have strong feelings about Islam, and some other people may be sympathetic or express their solidarity to those with whom they share the same faith or even the same ideology. The western part of Ukraine is sympathetic to Western Europe, and vice versa, on the grounds of democracy, which is only a political ideology not a cultural feature.
Indeed, like religious convictions, political ideologies too have the characteristic of bearing a system of thinking that one or some people may have very strong feelings about and even end up seeing in them some form of identity to be fought for or against. Joe McCarty himself – the famous American senator – saw communism that way in the 1950s. But this would not be to say that any nation or part of a nation's identity would hold from the idea of some political ideology or some religion, because none of these is any matter for identity. And perhaps the fact that some countries happen to call themselves ‘Democratic Republic of X' or ‘Islamic Republic of Y' is misleading many of us. But if we look carefully, we will see that most of such countries fall in the category of countries that do not actually have a true cultural identity, or that they have lost it after being politically or spiritually colonised by some other nations (because this is what colonisation does: kill local cultural identities). So, these countries have to try and build a vacuous identity around some ideology or some religion, in most cases, invented by their political or spiritual colonisers. And sometimes it is a case for political scam: either to cover up the cultural identity vacuum of the country or to instigate some type of provocative propaganda.
Such a country as Iran does quite perfectly fit in this category. The fact that today's Iran calls itself ‘Islamic Republic of Iran' cannot have any better technical explanation than the almost total loss of its true cultural identity after the complete erasure of the original Elamite culture that founded that nation by waves of invasions that began with the influence of neighbouring Sumerians and Mesopotamians as well as the Akkadian invasion all the way through to the arrival of the Indo-European Aryan conquerors including the Persians, the Greek, the Turks, the Arabs and the Mongolians – which even caused the region to be called Iran (Indo-European Aryan). So, what today's Iran represents is only an amalgamated mixture of colonial legacies bequeathed by its conquerors, which combine Persian features with those of Assyria and Urartu Turkish and Soviet Armenian, Farsi, Greek, and a strong Arab influence whereby Islam comes in. If we add to this original cultural identity loss and amalgamation the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish propaganda that has animated Iranian politics from the past century, it becomes quite easy to figure out the reason for such an empty provocative name to be endorsed onto the country. And the point that I am trying to make here is that occupational and colonial legacies as well as traditions, ideologies and religions do not constitute cultural or national identities at all. Any citizen or group of citizens from any nation with its own cultural identity can cherish any ideology and practise any religion; and conversely, any nation can practise different political systems and religions.
If we take the case of Turkey, we may find that it can stand as a good example of this. The Turks who practise Islam are not necessarily Arab immigrants, nor are those who practise Christianity Jewish or Spanish immigrants. They are all typical Turks who have had the choice to practise either, not because these religions are both part of the Turkish identity. The Turkish identity has nothing to do with Islam or Christianity. Some Turks may even happen to be utterly atheist, but they will not lose their Turkish identity for being atheists.
Now, if Turkey happened to conquer a faithless nation today, such a colony may equally practise both religions, except if the Turkish leader who would have achieved such a conquest would be particularly a Muslim and would probably use his power to limit the exportation of Christianity into such a colony. But he would not do so because the Turkish identity would be particularly connected to Islam in any way – although the ignorant colonists may think of it that way due to the political dogmatic dispositions fabricated by their conqueror's personal sympathy for Islam.
What has mostly happened throughout history is that some strong leaders, converted in some religion, have often despotically tried to impose their faith onto their people, leaving open the impression, in the long run, that such or such a national identity should be fundamentally connected to such or such a religion.
For example, there are some French right-wing politicians who cry out so constantly that ‘France is a Christian nation' (another type of political scam: anti-Muslim propaganda). But they don't notice that the Franks, as a people, did not know anything about Christianity until they were conquered by the Romans and influenced by the Greeks, who both had imported Christianity from Judea. I mean, if French people happen to be Christians today, this is not because the French identity is connected to Christianity in any possible way. It is just that Christianity was exported into France when France was under Roman occupation.
A conqueror's religion, way of life or traditions, can even influence many other aspects of the mode of existence of the conquered. The Western suit, mostly worn in all Negro territories that were influenced by the English or the French, has nothing to do with Christianity or some sort of cultural sameness between the Negroes who wear it and the English or the French, no less than the Arabic jibba, mostly worn in parts of Africa that were conquered or influenced by the Arabs would have anything to do with any mark of cultural sameness between the Negroes who wear it and the Arabs. It has everything to do with sharing lifestyles between different societies whose members admire each other or are influenced by each other in some possible way – whereas the concept of lifestyle in itself is another thing that has more to do with ‘tastes' and ‘standards of living'. An Englishman can have a Chinese lifestyle by the type of food he eats.
So, neither a way of life, lifestyle, tradition nor a faith is any matter for cultural identity. That is why some of these concepts, especially the imported ones, often bear the danger of causing cultural and identity dislocation in individuals when they are misunderstood and mishandled. This is the case of the poignant issue of faith education, mostly promoted by faith schools. One may be quite surprised to find that it is a vastly marginalizing idea vis-à-vis the standard requirements of education in a dynamic society. It is, for instant, the kind of schools that would discriminate women from higher aspirations in their cultural and political context, or restrict men from a sharper exploration of human intelligence, both of which descend to the abyss of mediocrity and cultural dislocation.
I know English people who, because of their uncontrolled infatuation for Christianity, give old Jewish names to their children instead of English names or, at least, English forms of these names. Such children are, quite unconsciously, meant to believe, to some possible extent, that Christianity is their primary identity or that it is for them a parallel identity to their English identity: not too different from the disturbing issue of Muslims whose English Identity constantly comes into question today for being Muslims.
I know that some people will always force themselves into maintaining that ideologies and religions are paramount to culture or that ways of life and lifestyles are tantamount to identity. But there is no culture or identity called Islam or Christianity or Salsa in this world. Culture is not a social attitude or an ideology or a tradition. Culture – the definition of the identity of a people – has its fundamental basis on language, with all the artistic genius inherent to it: its ability to express art, philosophy, science, technology, politics and spiritual wisdom, all of which ascend to the heavens of human affirmation and are accessible only to native speakers, whatever their beliefs or attitudes. And this is what constitutes nation.
I have to say that I am very surprised at the spectacular way in which the concept of cultural identity has ended up suffering such pernicious fallacies in modern political thinking; which has subsequently resulted in a devastating knock-on effect on the concept of nation, as both concepts are intricately connected in the sense, as I have just stated, that culture is what makes nation. This philosophical blunder has even caused some scholars such as Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson, that particular political scientist, to end up bluntly denying the existence of the concept of nation altogether because he must have got just too confused about what the word nation actually stands for due to the causative confusion inherent to what the word culture stands for nowadays. Anderson could not do otherwise but to deny the existence of the concept altogether by coming up with the pessimistic and indecisive idea – as he put it in his famous title Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) – that the concept of nation is only an ‘imagination' that bubbles in the minds of those who want to believe in it; not least of all because the concept of nation is actually imaginary, but most probably because Anderson may have been too distracted by some of the fallacious causalities and ramifications of the concept itself as interpreted by the masses and some scholars who have regrettably got lost in the translation of the concept. Because, when I look carefully at the reasons why Anderson has had to veer into such a spectacular position, I rather tend to see in his approach the slippery quagmires of intellectual uncertainty.
To begin with, Anderson says that ‘the concept of nation is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each of them lives an image of their community.'
What this first shows is that Anderson must have started his observation of the formation of human nations halfway and, for that, he has ignored all historical precursors of the nations that we have today and that stem from very restricted ancient and medieval communities of people inhabiting extremely small geographical spaces, sometimes hamlets, and practically knowing each other and doing things their own particular way to entertain and build their tiny communitarian existence. Bavaria, Bohemia, Castilla, Loire, Rome etc., were, in their inception before our era, very small communities not in the way in which Anderson may have looked at them in their modern forms as France or Germany.
So, the fact that these communities have grown so populated either due to the exponential increase of the modern birth rate or by expanding themselves through countless conquests over their neighbours up to turning themselves into such big nations as France or Germany in a way that it results difficult for all citizens of such nations to be personally acquainted to one another does not make the concept of nation an ‘imaginary fabrication' as Anderson suggests. It rather means that these nations have grown in volume and expanded in structure.
I know many people in Africa who have so many wives that they have ended up with hundreds of children many of whom they do not even know any more, nor do the children themselves know every one of their siblings. General Jean Boniface Assélé, former minister for public services in Gabon in the 1980s and brother-in-law of the incumbent President Albert Bongo, is one of such phenomenal fathers. But this does not imply that the concept of family should be seen as an imaginary fabrication in precisely such cases because some members do not know others. It rather means that the family has grown so big that many of its members have trouble knowing each one of their peers personally.
This is where Anderson may have got it wrong, because all nations have grown too from incredibly small numbers of individuals living in tiny spaces of land several thousand years ago before becoming as big as China. No true nation started with millions of citizens, nor did the idea of nation start with our modern kind of inflated nations.
If the term ‘nation' is recent in human languages, as Anderson considers it to be, the signifier ‘nations', on the other hand, can be visualised from very ancient, medieval and even primitive and pre-historic times. The only reason why this reality may escape any political thinker is because he may be too distracted by the recent corrupt forms of the concept of nation in modern history. This is, besides, what Anderson's own understanding of the subject shows. He says that ‘if the concept of nation is to be defined, it must be imbedded in the cultural roots of nationalism' which for him, ‘is what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history generate such colossal sacrifices through a deep horizontal comradeship; a fraternity that has made it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people as willing to die for such limited imaginings.'
We can see it. When Anderson indicts his so-called ‘shrunken imaginings of recent history', he does so first because he seems to have in mind the picture of a very recent catalogue of some nationalistic movements apparently risen from some ideological upheavals. This is even more relevant in the sense that Anderson bases his analysis only on ‘the past two centuries.' One may therefore see that it is probably Anderson's own Irish and Northern Irish experiences, where religious ideologies have turned into nationalistic uproars, that, quite predictably, justify his conviction that people have often stood as a nationalistic force for believing strongly in such or such an imagined ideology. I would not stand against Anderson if he told me that religious ideologies are human imaginations, since this may be the case. But this does not amount to say that nations are human imaginations too, since the concept of nation and the concept of religion are very different things.
And not only that, if we considered Anderson's amalgamation of these two concepts, this would give us the impression that citizens of the same nation cannot believe in different religions, or that followers of the same religions ideology cannot be citizens of different nations; which is absolutely nonsensical. Moreover, maintaining such a view would amount to say that the Romans had never stood as a nation before the invention of Roman Catholicism only 1,900 years ago, or even before ‘the past two centuries' (if we only stay within Anderson's own time span); which is completely untenable too.
Furthermore, Anderson should have observed that when it comes to a nation having to defend itself at times of war, there is always an intellectual elite sitting at the table of war lordship, contriving strategies for popular mobilisation. Religions or ideologies of any etiquette do not become the central object of nationalistic movements because they invent nations. They are, most of the time, only used as material for propaganda to incentivise people, to give them a good, a greater reason to give their lives for.
The word ‘god' being extremely sensitive in the minds of a vast majority of us who have been brought up to take it for granted, is often used by war propagandists because it is more likely to produce a greater response for recruiting soldiers than any other word could. Even though the warlords who may use it may be fully aware that they would actually be fighting for something else, but telling their subjects that they should be fight for God or in the name of God is more guaranteed to get them devoted soldiers than any other message could have done.
This is most probably what all religious-orientated recruitment centres for fighters have done including today's recruiters of Islamic suicide bombers. But this is not to say that this type of nationalistic strategic message at wartime invents nations. The Arabs – or all people around the world who take an interest in today's cultural challenges and political struggles of the Arabs – would have found a different strategy to get people fight to death if they did not have Islam. The Japanese kamikazes did not believe in Islam when they volunteered to blow themselves up the same kind of way to defend their nation.
Of course, many other types of exciting strategic messages have often been used to convince people that they have to fight to death where God has been difficult to handle due to the inexistence of any religion at all. Some warlords have often used a pompous reverence towards their nation's ancestral legacies to convince their people that they should fight for them (this is what Patrice Lumumba did in the Congo when he fought the Belgians before getting himself killed).
Sometimes, the strategic message can take the tone of a flamboyant eulogy for a people's values that ought to be stood for (this is what George Bush and Tony Blair did to try and score a point against Islamic fundamentalists by bringing forward the argument of their alleged hatred for Western Christian and democratic values, and by calling them ‘evil' as the Christian Bible commands; and many English and American fighters of the second Gulf war believed in it). However, none of these supposes that any of the nations involved in any of these developments may have been imagined or invented only at the time of the development of these nationalistic strategies for war.
It is quite irritating. I cannot understand the reason why such big brains as Anderson, in the history of political science and to which we owe so much respect for their contribution to political intellect seem, in my appreciation, to, quite staggeringly, fail to observe that religions, ideologies or traditions (all of these ideological and historical facets that contribute to the build-up and manifestation of nationalistic movements) are only some of these things that always come about in the course of history from within nations that exist well before their invention and that are their inventors in the first place. How would an invention be the inventor of its inventor? Is the concept of nation a ‘chicken and egg concept?
There are many more prolific arguments that divide the three main philosophical tendencies in the field, namely the perennialists, the modernists and the ethno-symbolicists. But they all seem to be stuck rather in the meanders of the advent of different facets of nationalism in recent historical developments than looking at the fundamental bases of the formation of human communities as nations.
Even when we consider Benny Lim, who ended up proposing an expansively compiling compromise as a definition by picking up bits and pieces from Benedict Anderson, Daniel Papp and James Watson in order to complete the nation jigsaw and, by so doing, sway the bewilderment around the definition of the concept, we find that he also tripped into the same fallacies. In his book Nation-State (2000), Lim suggests that a nation should be defined as ‘a specific group of individuals sharing similar language, culture and religion, thoughts and ideologies, possessing a political community for them (Anderson) and also having a psychological fixation (Papp) with the feeling of national consciousness (Watson).'
Well, if I may happen to fancy this conciliatory compilation it is only because Lim does me the honour of mentioning ‘language' before anything else. However, there are two important things that I need to point out here. First, I do not know the reason why Lim had chosen to introduce such a cautious ambiguity in his definition by using the adjective ‘similar' instead of the adjective ‘same'. Because – to make my objection easy to understand – if we take the Spanish language and the Italian language, we will see that they are extremely similar grammatically, syntactically, lexically, structurally, morphologically, and even phonologically. But this does not imply that Spain and Italy can be seen as one nation as long as we are not dealing with strictly the same language despite the striking similarity between the two. What I am trying to show here is that Lim should have learned that the word ‘similar' and the world ‘same' do not have exactly identical implications, either in theory or in practice, and therefore that his definition of the concept of nation is already wrong from this lexical angle alone. Secondly, this ambiguity applies to the rest of attributes that, in Lim's mind, should be ‘similar' for a nation to stand as such. For example, Lim suggests that ideologies should be similar too for nations to be considered as existing; yet, the Chinese, the Russians and the Cubans have been militating for communism for decades; which would not imply that the three of them can constitute a nation for that reason.
My first suspicion here is that Lim did not know how to differentiate between the concept of affection and the concept of nation. He did not know whether he wanted to talk about mutual affection or sympathy between people who share similar creeds, ideologies and thoughts even though they may happen to be members of different nations. Of course, this has often been the case every time some major ideology or creed has come to existence or has been considered to be likely to help some people achieve certain goals together. Think of the type of mutual affection that was developed by Marxism when Marx and Engel recommended all proletarians of all nations to stand together as one in the fight against the bourgeoisie in the framework of social class dominance and industrial exploitation; which ended up inducing some form of worldwide proletarian brotherhood. But this did not imply the formation of a worldwide nation. We see the same type of mutual affection today between Muslims of all nations who happen to be standing as one in the fight against the political expansion of some Western nations, which many of them see as a form of Christian imperialism, some sort of ‘crusade' in the very words of President George W. Bush himself. Little wonder if they call themselves Muslim Brothers.
This type of mutual affection between people who share something – whatever the nature of the thing – has always existed within and between nations. Even people who go to the same Salsa club may happen to develop some form of special affection for each other although they may happen to be from different identities and nationalities. But Salsa would unite them in a certain way. It would be thoughtless to believe that this could constitute a criterion for defining a nation.
So, not only does the idea that such criteria as religions, ideologies and thoughts need to be met for a nation to be pronounced as existing preclude the prevalence of secular nations in our history, it also eliminates the very idea of different nations on earth, since most religions, ideologies and thoughts are share by people from almost every corner of the earth.
My second suspicion is that Lim did surely not know how to differentiate between the concept of state and the concept of nation. Because, this extended definition of his bears the averse tendency of overlapping with the definition of the concept of state due to the inclusion of the notion of ‘political community' in the sense of it having to forcibly ruminate a ‘psychological fixation' and breed a sense of ‘national consciousness'.
This is the type of mental gymnastics that is often required from citizens where a nation is not real; where it is only a patchy synthetic structure with no true intuitive basis for cohesion. It is an ostensible kind of state of mind that often needs incentivising when people find themselves in a culturally variegated – and therefore devolving – state where an authentic sense of pertaining in a timely national spirit of cultural kinship is not naturally inducible. It therefore has to rather take the form of a political and psychological obligation. Little wonder if in this case citizens have to be reminded of their ‘nation' in order for them to be ‘conscious' of its existence at all.
What I mean is that you will not need to teach one that one is French if one can see oneself growing up as a native speaker of the French language (and not of any other language that may be ‘similar' to it), which already makes one see oneself as being naturally French. There is no need, in precisely this case, to breed any form of ‘French consciousness'. The natural fact of the French language being one's native language alone does the job. On the other hand – and I presume that this is the kind of situation that Lim was alluding to –, you will certainly need to teach one that one is Belgian because there is nothing that one can see oneself growing up with that would make one see oneself as being naturally Belgian (except the frequent political reference to it, and this is what the psychological fixation and the breeding of a sense of national consciousness are all about). But in this case Lim's language similarity argument falls apart completely, because the four languages that are spoken in Belgium, namely French, Deutsch, Walloon and Flemish, are just not similar at all. Yet, Belgium does stand as a political community. I do not think that you need to be a genius to stumble at this contradiction.
What is really worrying is that this chronic confusion between the concept of state and the concept of nation is getting very contagious. The recent book by Matt Rosenberg, Country, State and Nation (2004), is dreadfully affected by this trend of thinking, which has resulted from that conceptual fallacy in modern political philosophy and that consist in confounding the concept of state with the concept of nation. This is even why Rosenberg is led to come up with the admission that ‘Canada and Belgium are nations'; which is not true. They are only states.
Shall I try to make it clear surely once and possibly for good. A state is only a recent ramification in modern political organisation and it is normally defined by the existence of a certain number of economic and judiciary structures that operate within a delimited territory recognised as being politically sovereign; which is completely irrelevant to what characterises nations.
A nation, on the other hand, is a group of people known as such by their culture [their particular way of thinking] and their language [their particular way of expressing their particular way of thinking]; which makes their identity.
As Such, thus, a nations is perfectly fathomable from its primitive formation before the progressive advent of religious creeds, political ideologies, historical developments turned into memories and traditions, and borrowings of all types from other nations; and it can, quite surprisingly, extend beyond the borders of specific territories that may be turned into sovereign states or countries.
As a matter of fact, the English nation – which many refer to as the Anglo-Saxon nation – for example, by its culture and language, extends beyond the boundaries of England to North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, English Canada etc. that, yet, stand as sovereign states of their own. The French nation extends beyond the boundaries of France and goes around to embrace French Belgium, French Switzerland, French Luxemburg, French Canada etc. that, yet, are viewed as sovereign states or countries. The Arab nation extends beyond Arabia to encompass such territories as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria etc. in which the Arabs have managed to impose their culture and language, although these political communities may be themselves known as sovereign states or countries. This is the difference.
My complete definition is, therefore, this one: ‘a nation is a community of all people who share the same mother tongue (although they may live in different territories turned into sovereign states, practise different traditions, believe in different religions, have different thoughts, follow different ideologies, or display different skin colours).'
The face of modern history in the light of the special alliances that swarm the world today between different states that are fundamentally members of one common nation is self-evident. Such alliances, as I have just shown, as the Arab League, the Francophone Bloc, the Hispanic confederation, the Anglo-Saxon brotherhood etc. etc. can do justice to my definition. The fact, for example, that the Americans and the Australians always happen to be fighting side by side with the English whenever a major conflict burst out has no other fundamental reason than the cultural and linguistic communion that they enjoy together and that unites them as a nation.
This phenomenon of interstate cultural alliances is universal due to the proliferation of extraterritorialities all over the world, caused by the sense of adventure and the will to colonise shown by most European peoples and the Arabs over 700 years ago, which resulted in the dislocation of nations be losing part of their population for overseas settlements as well as the creation of colonial maps that ended up sundering colonised nations into different territories now seen as countries of their own right. We saw this with the displacement of Anglo-Saxons towards North America. It is also real in the case of African nations that today experience quite bitterly these interstate communions, but in a more colonial, clandestine manner.
As far as my experience of Black Africa's clandestine interstate cultural cohesions goes, I know many Ndebele people from Zimbabwe, such as that special friend of mine, Patience Mnguni, who used to see Nelson Mandela as their real leader. This was because Mandela is a Kossa,
