Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MAKING NATIONS 33
some trepidation, nevertheless accepted in principle the idea of government
by the people.
Unfortunately, neither writer went on to publish extensive, methodical
inquiries into nationhood. The nineteenth century was not ready for this. Such
famous thinkers on this subject as Johann Gottfried Herder, Giuseppe Mazzini
and Jules Michelet did not fully fathom the cunning of national reason, which
they mistakenly considered to be ancient or even, at times, eternal.
The first to deal with this issue in terms of theory were Marxists of the early
twentieth century For ideologues such as Karl Kautsky, Kail Renner, Otto Bauer,
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Stalin, nationalism was a sucker punch. In its presence,
history, the permanent proof of their rightness, seemed to betray them. They
had to contend with the strange phenomenon that the prognosis of the great Marx
failed to envision. A wave of national demands in Central and Eastern Europe forced
them to engage in a discussion that produced intricate analyses as well as hasty
conclusions that were always subjected to immediate parry exigencies. 14
The Marxists' significant contribution to the study of the nation was to
call attention to the close connection between the rise of the market economy
and the crystallization of the nation-state. They argued that the advance of
capitalism destroyed autarkic markets, severed their specific social links and
opened the way to the development of new species of relations and consciousness.
"Laissez faire, laissez aller," the first war cry of capitalist commerce, did
not in its early stages lead to sweeping globalization, but enabled the conditions
for the rise of market economies within the framework of the old state
structures. These economies formed the basis for the rise of nation-states,
with their uniform language and culture. Capitalism, the most abstract form
of property control, required, above all, a system of law that sanctified private
property, as well as the state power that ensured its enforcement.
Significantly, the Marxists did not ignore the psychological aspects of
the national changes. From Bauer to Stalin, they involved psychology in their
central polemics, though in simplistic terms. For Bauer, the famous Austrian
socialist, "the nation is the totality of men tied by the community of destiny
to the community of character" 15 Stalin, on the other hand, summed up the
discussion in more definite terms:
14 For more on Marxists and the nation, see Horace Davis, Nationalism and Socialism:
Marxist and Labor Theories of Nationalism to 1917, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967;
and Ephraim Nimni, Marxism and Nationalism: Theoretical Origins of a Political Crisis,
London: Pluto Press, 1991.
15 Quoted in G. Haupt, M, Lowy, and C. Weil, Les Marxistes et la question nationale,
1848-1914, Paris: Maspero, 1974, 254.