Portrait across the Iconography


  It goes almost without saying that Nations were the creation of a time and a place. The ‘almost’ of course matters here. The point about any or every nation is that its iconography is so very powerful, that once forged, it becomes eternal and sacrosanct (in the same way that Democracy so likes to claim that it is). Nations then claim that their customs, symbols and history are ancient, but like the kilt (and the Scottish bagpipe) they are no such thing. On the contrary the very notion of nations was founded at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries, in response to the French Revolution. Napoleon might have conquered in the name of France, and yet his real legacy was the creation of nations – nations whose legal system as often as not he founded, and yet which were formed in reaction to, and to resist, the Empire of the French.

  The Nation state is then really very recent in the history of the world. That is to say that the union of language, political milieu, and a little scrap of mud, that makes the modern nation is barely two hundred years old. However once they were founded, it was in the interest of course for all such (newborn) nations, to be expressing something eternal about the land or a set of values. Nations then tied themselves to a history or to features in the land. They rooted what they were in their environment (one way or other). Or to put it slightly differently they founded for themselves the iconography of nationhood. A bit of nonsense about a climate (or a land feature), a romance about the language, some well known facts, and a Golden Age - and bingo, the formula went, one has a nation. The trouble was of course that in most cases, historical circumstance, which mixed up languages and creeds, and created diverse reactions to the so-called imponderables of climate or land, refused to support nationhood. The Forging of Nations was then, save in one or two notable exceptions, a violent and dramatic affair. In the name of sovereignty, Nations were partitioned, and fought over, in the name of the cod history and the little piece of land.

  Perhaps the real issue here, is that the very concept of a nation, and the iconography that supports this concept are at once both paranoid and problematic. If one thinks about what a nation is for a second, one starts to wonder why. I mean exactly ‘why?’- have we divided up the world into a hundred and seventy or so randomly sized parcels of land, each of which we claim is sovereign (and independent), and all of which are invited to create prejudices in favour of a group of people (call them citizens)? More than that, why have we rooted these divisions in little pieces of as often as not, made up history, and a local tradition? And even more than that - why in a world where this division codifies real inequalities and makes those inequalities appear absolute and problematic, do we stick with the fiction? More critically perhaps, why do we have such a deep faith in it, a faith that no end of wars or civil wars appears to shake: for one might have thought the endless civil wars of the violent modern age were enough to shake confidence in nations, and our ready assumptions about them. One might have thought that thirty years of war in Sri Lanka, and endless civil strife in Pakistan, or the bloodshed that surrounded the creation of Kosovo, and the rest, might have been enough to shake our confidence in nationhood. But on the contrary they appear if anything stronger, and more powerful, while organizations such as the United Nations (a clear oxymoron) have faded.

  Why then – why nation? This is one of those questions. The kind that are so easy to pose and so impossible to answer, Or rather so easy to answer in the abstract. The Abstract then tells us, that nations very much suit capitalism as a whole. A nation creates blocs within the world where all things that are not immediately controlled by the economy (ideology of government and the realities of military power) can then be wrapped up in easy to handle bite-sized (and often frankly bribable) pieces. A nation sets in stone the people whom one needs to contact to do business in the area, and the codes (and to a small degree) laws that one follows. Nations then create or define non-capitalist areas in our world. What is more they define in relation to these areas both how business needs to respond to the non-capitalist dimensions of the world, but also how those dimensions need to respond to business. A nation then is a unit with an attitude towards capitalism or certain parts of it. It will be an area with a certain set of taxes and policies to promote (or demote) business. The nation then allows a group of folk to relate their non-capitalist hopes and dreams (of laws or health) to the powerhouse of economic change that is our world.

  More than that it creates textures within what one does, areas where one needs more or less care. For example, one knows as an oil company that one needs to worry more about doing pollution in Western countries than in the rest of the world. In the West one needs to parade around talking about respecting the climate and being a green industry, while elsewhere one can ensure cheap oil production! Nations create then shop windows and production houses. They create places where all is order and places where all is disorder, and so makes sense of an otherwise rather senseless world. It is of course BP’s great sin, at the moment that they have treated the Gulf of Mexico like they treated Biafra; and of course discovered that leaks in Nigeria are one thing, and leaks in America are something different.

  Nations then articulate in form not only the non-capitalist dimensions of our lives, but also the tensions within capitalism itself. You know the one, the tensions that demand that goods are high quality and cheap. An aspiration which lies at the heart of so much selling, and which is only possible by some sleight of hand. - I.e. if one creates a world of contrasts (cheap labour, rich high streets and the rest), a world which Nations allow and articulate. More than that, nations clearly allow us to localize mistrusts about others, and a lack of patience that we feel with what is foreign. I mean it is perfectly natural one suspects, for humanity to love its own cabbage patch and look at others askance and with possible fear. Nations then allow us to express this mistrust in an easy to manage manner. We are then merely callous about the Greeks, or despise the Nigerians or whatever prejudice we choose. We do not need any more to indulge in the politics of race or creed, as we have that of nation. The advantage here is that this politics need not be violent (although it always could be so). It might merely be about football or culture or whatever – and not about blood or humanity, or race or religion. The idea of nations is then an advance, in that it allows us to understand that the other lot love their cabbage patch too, and creates a framework where we need not feel threatened by the fact (they are foreign and that makes them mad). More than that it creates, beyond the bullets or capital, other ways in which groups within the world might compete one with the other, and work out our status. Where Polynesia had the Kula ring, and Indonesia made Moka, we play football and sing rude songs at one another.

– So much for an old Marxist is very easy to understand. And yet it really does not get to the heart of Nationhood, for there is something very big that nationhood has got right, something beyond the convenience of businessmen. This extra factor lies in the fact that nationhood in a sense controls pretty much all of the iconography of the modern age. We live in an age of not elaborately painted icons or gold-leaved divinities, so much as national flags and costumes. More than that the doctrine we confess is no longer a holy catechism, but a belief in our ability as a nation to hold some of our destiny in our own hands. Our entire political and social lives are based around this fact – the fact that we are British. This allows us to create modern totems in football teams, or armies (our boys) and support them come what may. Or to put it slightly differently, nations create a bloc of apparent manufactured group interest - an interest that then can create a unity and even a collectivity that otherwise might be lacking in the modern age.

  Here of course one needs to make a careful distinction. A union or traditional socialist organization would claim to do as much. Indeed perhaps to do more (as would a business organization). Why then is there a special power in nations? Why have they flourished when other organizations have withered or at least remained contained? The question has three rather different answers - three tenses if you like of the modern nation and its apparent assumption of the iconography of modernity. 

  There is then a clear present for the nations. Their power lies not in being an interest group so much as making in creating it. To be British is nothing if it is not made. That is if one does not manufacture national events (where we all come together), and collective sentiment (we as a nation are told we express this or that feeling). Nations operate in creating a way of articulating a feeling beyond mere self-interest, a feeling that we are all somehow caught up together with and through one another. The trouble is with this feeling, that writ large it would force us to confront all kinds of problems within the world, and force us no doubt to change how and what we are. That feeling is then rather unstable and potentially undermining. A problem which nations solve by expressing it almost exclusively in relation to a certain discrete unit of land, which feels itself peculiarly different, and in relation to manufactured events and icons. We become then at once communal, and yet that community does not threaten the rest of our identity. We can be selfish too!

  Secondly there is a clear past to nations. Nations yearn to breed their own history. More than that they need it and often (but not always) have problems if they lack it (or if it pulls in different directions). To be a nation is therefore to have a shared story of some sort. The point is about such little pieces of common cod history, that they are always about not the past but the present. That is they dress up the struggles in the present and the sacrifices in the stories of the past, and so articulate their sense. We wear then the clothes of our forefathers (as Marx would snort) to express the struggles of today.

  The trouble of course here, is that all histories are not the same, and if that history is particularly problematic it is all too easy to warp it into something monstrous. Israel is surely the paradigm case of this. For the rest of the world Israel is a bully state - one which is kept artificially wealthy by the USA and awash with arms, and one that struts across the Middle East doing as it likes, bullying who it likes and behaving absolutely despicably. But of course to the Israelis it never really feels this way. What they are trying to do is so difficult you see. That is they are trying to pour a welter of different customs and beliefs, languages and faiths, into a single mould – a single Jewish identity. Moreover this identity is firmly Bronze Age in its feel, with all the vindictive injustice that that creates. The nation is then united when they are behaving like their fictional forbears, the children of Israel, and smiting their fellows (and being smited). In effect then Palestine is running a horrid experiment in nation building - radical differences between peoples have to be ignored in the name of a Bronze Age people. At the same time this ‘singular’ truth has to now create affinities between radically different groups, many of whom have never lived in the land (at any point of their history); and at the same time it must deny a more salient link between the indigenous population be they Jewish or Arab. The entire place is then a historical-national mess, and it is no wonder that the result is both bloody and paranoid.

  Finally nations offer a hope for the future. Poverty, war and disease we treat not as global problems but rather as local affairs. If these people had a functioning nation state (like ours) we say this would be different. Or again if only these two people can learn to live together (as the Angles and Saxons did) then everything would be all right. More than that, such is the power of this promise that across the world individuals pour their hopes and dreams into being that nation state - they aspire to it as the panacea to cure all ills. It forms a reachable bar to end their suffering, that is a moment when we all pretend that things could change, that their suffering might end, given luck and hard work (and sometimes they do). ‘Become a nation state in our

own right’, think the Tamils or the Kashmiris or the Biafrans, ‘and all this suffering would end’, all the prejudice and inflicted poverty. The great sores of modernity, famine and manufactured poverty, then finds its answer in the nation state, a fact that of course greatly destabilises the world, and confirms certain stable state’s positions within it (and ensures that other areas of the world, those so-called failed states, remain where they are). The nation state then pedals hopes and dreams to the world, which it quietly undermines and controls; it is the great castrator for our times. It takes conflict and protest and renders them bloody if ineffective and so makes them lucrative for the arms industry.

  It is a mistake to call our age anything other than a great age of faith. The trouble is that where before faith might have been tied to region or creed (or Blood), it is now utterly wedded to a little piece of land and a whole lot of cod history. Into this mould we pour the complex welter of existence – with all our dreams and hopes, faiths and goals. Faith in our society, our nationhood is pan class and criss-crosses the political divides, it is the great binding agent of our times; our collective faith in ourselves and what and where we are in the complex world which we have created. Its divinity lies in this, that however bad it gets, however much the model appears to fail, and to whatever bloody result nations lead us, we still keep the faith, we modern crusaders, and still carry out our missionary zeal. If the nation fails then it is always the world’s fault as if it were fallen or had sinned – can you get a more religious sentiment than that?