Zlatko Hadžidedić, Center for Nationalism Studies Nationalism and Universalism
Nationalism is commonly referred to as a doctrine that promotes particularist approach to most of things in our everyday lives. Nationalists easily claim that the nation, be it theirs or someone else’s, is not only distinct in terms of its “objective” – though hardly ever tangible and self-evident – features, such as history, tradition, customs, language, etc.; the nation is also to be perceived as distinct from any other nation in even less tangible terms of its particular national character, collective spirit, or peculiar sense of humour. Such a discourse, in both of its extremes – one that celebrates diversity of national realities as an end in itself and the other which insists on total separation of such distinct national realities – is usually depicted as being rooted in the teachings of Herder and the subsequent generation of German romanticists. Indeed, some students of nationalism, like Elie Kedourie, have gone so far as to define nationalism as a doctrine invented at the beginning of the 19th century in the German-speaking lands.(1) Yet, as a matter of historical facts, such a discourse had been first promoted as a part of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. Within this context, probably the most extreme form of advocacy of separation of nationalities can be found in John Stuart Mill’s “Considerations on Representative Government”, where the author maintains that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”.(2) Still, the origins of such an argument can be traced back to Hume’s essay “Of National Characters”, where one can find that, for example, “the common people in Switzerland have probably more honesty than those of the same rank in Ireland”, “an Englishman will naturally be supposed to have more knowledge than a Dane”, while “the integrity, gravity, and bravery of the Turks, form an exact contrast to the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the modern Greeks”.(3) A contemporary man, if he follows the line of Hume’s reasoning – and usually, following the projected ideal of common sense, he does – need not be a doctrinaire Herderian nationalist to perceive the reality of the modern world as sharply divided into a number of distinct national realities, each of them containing their particular histories, traditions, customs, languages, pervaded by their particular characters, and therefore inseparably entwined with their particular destinies. All that one has to do is to use common sense, which undeniably suggests that these realities are not only distinct and particular but also self-referential and self-contained: the very fact of the existence of so great a diversity of distinct nationalities craves recognition and it is only a matter of common sense to recognise such a fact. And then, it is also a matter of common sense (or, a matter of utility) to recognise that such distinct realities should not be kept together, within the framework of a common state, as argued by Mill. The next step, then, can easily be to translate such a logic into organised political-military action and forcefully separate identified national units (be they already self-identified or arbitrarily determined by the self-appointed representatives of the international system), as indeed was done with the territories of the former imperial powers defeated in the World War I.
Thus in its appearance the doctrine of nationalism – or, as its advocates prefer to call it, the doctrine of national self-determination – clearly promotes particularism. However, in its essence, nationalism – just like the common-sense approach of the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment or rationalism of the French Enlightenment – claims to be universally valid and applicable. Nationality, as the basic unit with which nationalism operates, is thus within the nationalist doctrine conceived of as a universal property of both the individual and the global system with which the individual is to accommodate. Nationality is therefore not only seen as an unavoidable intermediary between the individual and the world; it is perceived as the only conceivable mode of the individual’s existence in the world; indeed, it is treated as the sole source of legitimacy for the individual to actually exist in the world. Within this doctrine of Modernity, the Transcendental Being of the pre-modern religious universalisms – as the sole source of man’s existence in the world and the sole source of this existence’s legitimacy – has been replaced by a transcendental, timeless and yet bounded unit of nationality, as the only communication channel through which the individual and the world can communicate and interact, through which both actually come into being. Thus, as Kedourie put it, “nationalism has replaced religion as a key to salvation”.
How has this come about? The philosophical sources of nationalist doctrine are obscure and there are hardly two students of nationalism who are of the same opinion on this issue. Perhaps a less fruitless effort could be made in order to locate a political event which triggered the process of national identification and, consequently, of national separation. Thus most scholars emphasise the role of the French Revolution in articulation of the doctrine that places “the nation” in its centre. However, it is difficult to overlook the fact that, chronologically, three national revolutions (English, Dutch and American) had practically promoted liberty of the individual within fraternity of the equal – or, rather, fraternity of the equal for the sake of liberty of the individual – before the French Revolution officially launched its most famous slogan, Liberty, fraternity, equality. In this context, it is of particular importance to stress that the nation as a modern concept, from its earliest beginnings in the revolutionary England, placed the idea of liberty in its very centre: in this sense, unity of the nation in the form of presumed fraternity of the equal, was conceived as a means to promote the end of individual liberty; and, in turn, equal distribution of individual liberty could only bring about fraternity of equally free individuals, that is, the nation. The rise of the concept of nation was thus inseparably entwined with the rise of the concept of liberty. In this initial phase, the nation was perceived as essentially free; indeed, it was regarded as the very embodiment of freedom. Such a nation was conceived in terms of ‘positive liberty’: individuals were born free to associate themselves with their equals into the fraternity of freedom. It was only later, with the spread of the concept of nation in the course of the Napoleonic conquests, that the nation (as in Fichte’s “Addresses to the German Nation”) came to be regarded as historically oppressed, though still potentially free to assert itself as free. Such a concept of nation was thus conceived in terms of ‘negative liberty’: only through liberation from oppression (be that foreign conquest or imperial rule) could the nation realise its essence as free; and only then, eventually, could the individual become free as a member of the free nation. It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to speculate how this inversion came into existence. However, for the present purpose, it is both necessary and sufficient to emphasise that the convergence between the concepts of nation and liberty is all but accidental: it is essential. And, following the logic of both concepts, so is the convergence between the doctrines of nationalism and liberalism: far from being oxymoronic, the retrospective constructs like Tamir’s “liberal nationalism”(4) are rather to be seen as tautological. Out of the proclaimed three supreme values of the French Revolution – liberty, fraternity, equality – it was the doctrine of liberalism that put an emphasis on liberty; within the doctrine of nationalism the stress was put on fraternity, whereas the doctrine of socialism insisted on equality. However, all these three doctrines retained the original set of values, so that both liberalism and socialism – regardless of liberalism’s proclaimed individualism or socialism’s proclaimed cosmopolitanism – practically dealt with the nation as their basic operational unit. At the same time, nationalism – notwithstanding its authoritarian excesses – clearly preserved its liberal and egalitarian conceptual core: thus, according to nationalism’s own rhetoric, it was only within fraternity of the nation that individuals could feel free and equal.
Still, the question of historical events which crucially contributed to the development of the doctrines of liberalism and nationalism – and, subsequently, of their application in the above-mentioned revolutions – has yet to be addressed. To locate the beginning of a historical process in a single event, or in a sequence of events, is inevitably a matter of arbitrary choice. Still, some of the possible choices work better than others; and, depending on the event chosen to be interpreted as a trigger of such a process, one can establish the dominant logic of the process itself.
As doctrines of political legitimacy, nationalism and liberalism locate the source of all political legitimacy into two ostensibly opposed principles: free will of “the people”, usually referred to as “the nation”, and free will of “the individual”, commonly referred to as “liberty”. Without entering the fruitless discussion on whether “a nation is nothing but a collection of individuals” (Hume) or the nation precedes and transcends all the things and, as such, gives birth to the individual (as usually claimed by the 19th-century doctrinaire nationalists), it is sufficient to stress that the concept of free will – both of the people and of the individual – could not come into existence without prior de-legitimisation of the previous source of political legitimacy. Therefore, it was only after the removal of the concept of divine will – together with the temporary removal of its earthly representatives – from the sphere of political affairs that the concept of free will could be promoted as the only conceivable substitute. Although such a concept was already articulated in the course of the English Revolution (beginning with the decapitation of the monarch in the name of the nation), its full development is still usually associated with the French Revolution, which proclaimed universal rights of men and citizens, emanating from the sovereign free will of the nation. Yet, both revolutions were only a consequence of the prior break-up of the European system of political legitimacy, hitherto centred around the political power of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church.
This argument is usually advanced by those scholars who perceive the Reformation as the turning point in Europe’s history. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the contribution of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years War and Protestantism itself to the development of modern capitalist societies, organised into the post-Westphalian system of states. There is a substantial amount of literature on the impact of the post-Westphalian inter-state system on the subsequent establishment of the inter-national order; also, there is a number of theories of nationalism which regard the Protestant introduction of vernaculars as a major contribution to the development of national churches and, later, of linguistic nationalism. The impact of the Thirty Years War and the Westphalian principle “cuius regio, eius religio” on the homogenisation of the targeted populations has also been explored at length. And yet, notwithstanding the significance of these developments for the subsequent introduction of the principle of nationality, it is difficult to overlook the importance of one historical event, which most directly led to the destruction of the political order that had been established after the break-up of political unity of the Roman Empire.
In the entire period preceding the rise of the Modern era, it was Rome, as the centre of spiritual unity of the Empire’s political successors, which had remained the sole source of their political legitimacy. The dissolution of such a system of de-centralised centralism began in the 1530s, when the Church of England was established and proclaimed the sole source of legitimacy of England’s political power. It was this event that had practically introduced the principle “cuius regio, eius religio” long before the Peace of Westphalia did the same. However, with the partial exception of Adrian Hastings and his study of the emergence of proto-national consciousness in the late medieval England,(5) in most other accounts of the rise of nationalism this event has remained widely underestimated, if not entirely unnoticed. The most conspicuous exception to this rule is Liah Greenfeld’s “Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity”, according to which the divorce between the English monarchy and the Vatican triggered the first proto-nationalist mobilisation against the centralism of Rome. This mobilisation – and so goes the argument proposed by Greenfeld – contributed significantly to the subsequent revolutionary mobilisation in the name of the nation, against the monarchy itself. Paradoxically, it was this absolutisation of the sovereign’s divine right – hitherto checked by the universalist/centralist claims of Rome – that had triggered the process of secularisation of political legitimacy, which eventually led to the abolition of the sovereign’s divine right. This went hand-in-hand with the introduction of an entirely new principle of political legitimacy, promoting “the people’/”the nation” – as a presumed bearer of the divine right to exercise sovereignty over itself – into the sole source of its own legitimacy.
It is significant to note that, on the other side of Europe, the memory of the Roman Empire had inspired the pretenders to the title of the Second Rome – the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire – to define their identities in accordance with the presumed universalist, messianic claims of the original empire. Needless to add, these polities had been associated with ecclesiastical institutions of both Western and Eastern Christianity, themselves aspiring to dominate the Christian world and Christianise the rest. Identity of the Tsarist Russia, itself determined by its aspirations expressed in the myth of the Third Rome, was also to a great extent pervaded by the universalist idea of Russia’s messianic, Christianising mission. Also, it is worthy of note that the successors to these empires – the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as the Soviet one – defined their respective identities in rather universalist terms. Thus the Habsburg Empire maintained its Catholic-absolutist universalism, in defiance to the rising claims of the movements inspired by the newly-introduced universalist counter-doctrine of national liberation. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire maintained its theocratic character, determined by its Islamic universalism, in the face of similar claims to national liberation, themselves inspired by the already developed proto-national particularisms of the local Orthodox churches. As for the Soviet empire, its aspirations had clearly been universalist in its rhetoric; yet, the internal practice of the Soviet state had been shaped under the impact of the most radical, Leninist variant of the liberal doctrine of national self-determination. Eventually, the Soviet empire broke up along the lines established in accordance with the doctrine of national self-determination, with the prospects for Russia and its ethno-national units to follow the same path of self-(de)termination.
However, it is of the utmost importance to note that the empires that had previously succeeded the pretenders to the title of the Second and Third Rome were broken up due to the absolute triumph of the universalist doctrine of national self-determination, which has thus retained its position as the main geopolitical doctrine of liberal universalism. Paradoxically, though not unexpectedly, the ultimate triumph of the doctrine of national self-determination has brought about a number of international and subnational inter-ethnic conflicts. Paradoxically, again, these have increasingly been depicted in terms of the universalist claims of the world’s great religions and fought along the lines of their divisions – between Western and Eastern Christianity (the Serb-Croat conflict in Croatia), and between Christianity and Islam (the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Tajikistan, East Timor). However, far from being a sample of Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”, these developments are rather to be seen as a result of the increasing assertiveness of liberal universalism, which inevitably leads to submission or elimination of all remaining, potentially opposing universalisms. For, it is in the nature of universalism to either eliminate the other or be eliminated by the other.(6) If this expansion of liberal universalism at the expense of other universalist doctrines is currently being carried out by playing one religious universalism off against another, it still does not signal that a genuine clash of religious universalisms is taking place. The pattern of conflicting nationalist particularisms – under the auspices and for the benefit of the universal, liberal order – has simply been working too well so as not to be elevated onto the level of conflicting religious universalisms, to the extent of their mutual exhaustion. So, if there is no end of history, no final resolution of the struggle of historical concepts, but a proliferation of conflicts instead, they are likely to be clashes of universalisms (be they Christian, Islamic or liberal), not of civilisations.
Nationalism is commonly referred to as a doctrine that promotes particularist approach to most of things in our everyday lives. Nationalists easily claim that the nation, be it theirs or someone else’s, is not only distinct in terms of its “objective” – though hardly ever tangible and self-evident – features, such as history, tradition, customs, language, etc.; the nation is also to be perceived as distinct from any other nation in even less tangible terms of its particular national character, collective spirit, or peculiar sense of humour. Such a discourse, in both of its extremes – one that celebrates diversity of national realities as an end in itself and the other which insists on total separation of such distinct national realities – is usually depicted as being rooted in the teachings of Herder and the subsequent generation of German romanticists. Indeed, some students of nationalism, like Elie Kedourie, have gone so far as to define nationalism as a doctrine invented at the beginning of the 19th century in the German-speaking lands.(1) Yet, as a matter of historical facts, such a discourse had been first promoted as a part of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. Within this context, probably the most extreme form of advocacy of separation of nationalities can be found in John Stuart Mill’s “Considerations on Representative Government”, where the author maintains that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”.(2) Still, the origins of such an argument can be traced back to Hume’s essay “Of National Characters”, where one can find that, for example, “the common people in Switzerland have probably more honesty than those of the same rank in Ireland”, “an Englishman will naturally be supposed to have more knowledge than a Dane”, while “the integrity, gravity, and bravery of the Turks, form an exact contrast to the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the modern Greeks”.(3) A contemporary man, if he follows the line of Hume’s reasoning – and usually, following the projected ideal of common sense, he does – need not be a doctrinaire Herderian nationalist to perceive the reality of the modern world as sharply divided into a number of distinct national realities, each of them containing their particular histories, traditions, customs, languages, pervaded by their particular characters, and therefore inseparably entwined with their particular destinies. All that one has to do is to use common sense, which undeniably suggests that these realities are not only distinct and particular but also self-referential and self-contained: the very fact of the existence of so great a diversity of distinct nationalities craves recognition and it is only a matter of common sense to recognise such a fact. And then, it is also a matter of common sense (or, a matter of utility) to recognise that such distinct realities should not be kept together, within the framework of a common state, as argued by Mill. The next step, then, can easily be to translate such a logic into organised political-military action and forcefully separate identified national units (be they already self-identified or arbitrarily determined by the self-appointed representatives of the international system), as indeed was done with the territories of the former imperial powers defeated in the World War I.
Thus in its appearance the doctrine of nationalism – or, as its advocates prefer to call it, the doctrine of national self-determination – clearly promotes particularism. However, in its essence, nationalism – just like the common-sense approach of the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment or rationalism of the French Enlightenment – claims to be universally valid and applicable. Nationality, as the basic unit with which nationalism operates, is thus within the nationalist doctrine conceived of as a universal property of both the individual and the global system with which the individual is to accommodate. Nationality is therefore not only seen as an unavoidable intermediary between the individual and the world; it is perceived as the only conceivable mode of the individual’s existence in the world; indeed, it is treated as the sole source of legitimacy for the individual to actually exist in the world. Within this doctrine of Modernity, the Transcendental Being of the pre-modern religious universalisms – as the sole source of man’s existence in the world and the sole source of this existence’s legitimacy – has been replaced by a transcendental, timeless and yet bounded unit of nationality, as the only communication channel through which the individual and the world can communicate and interact, through which both actually come into being. Thus, as Kedourie put it, “nationalism has replaced religion as a key to salvation”.
How has this come about? The philosophical sources of nationalist doctrine are obscure and there are hardly two students of nationalism who are of the same opinion on this issue. Perhaps a less fruitless effort could be made in order to locate a political event which triggered the process of national identification and, consequently, of national separation. Thus most scholars emphasise the role of the French Revolution in articulation of the doctrine that places “the nation” in its centre. However, it is difficult to overlook the fact that, chronologically, three national revolutions (English, Dutch and American) had practically promoted liberty of the individual within fraternity of the equal – or, rather, fraternity of the equal for the sake of liberty of the individual – before the French Revolution officially launched its most famous slogan, Liberty, fraternity, equality. In this context, it is of particular importance to stress that the nation as a modern concept, from its earliest beginnings in the revolutionary England, placed the idea of liberty in its very centre: in this sense, unity of the nation in the form of presumed fraternity of the equal, was conceived as a means to promote the end of individual liberty; and, in turn, equal distribution of individual liberty could only bring about fraternity of equally free individuals, that is, the nation. The rise of the concept of nation was thus inseparably entwined with the rise of the concept of liberty. In this initial phase, the nation was perceived as essentially free; indeed, it was regarded as the very embodiment of freedom. Such a nation was conceived in terms of ‘positive liberty’: individuals were born free to associate themselves with their equals into the fraternity of freedom. It was only later, with the spread of the concept of nation in the course of the Napoleonic conquests, that the nation (as in Fichte’s “Addresses to the German Nation”) came to be regarded as historically oppressed, though still potentially free to assert itself as free. Such a concept of nation was thus conceived in terms of ‘negative liberty’: only through liberation from oppression (be that foreign conquest or imperial rule) could the nation realise its essence as free; and only then, eventually, could the individual become free as a member of the free nation. It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to speculate how this inversion came into existence. However, for the present purpose, it is both necessary and sufficient to emphasise that the convergence between the concepts of nation and liberty is all but accidental: it is essential. And, following the logic of both concepts, so is the convergence between the doctrines of nationalism and liberalism: far from being oxymoronic, the retrospective constructs like Tamir’s “liberal nationalism”(4) are rather to be seen as tautological. Out of the proclaimed three supreme values of the French Revolution – liberty, fraternity, equality – it was the doctrine of liberalism that put an emphasis on liberty; within the doctrine of nationalism the stress was put on fraternity, whereas the doctrine of socialism insisted on equality. However, all these three doctrines retained the original set of values, so that both liberalism and socialism – regardless of liberalism’s proclaimed individualism or socialism’s proclaimed cosmopolitanism – practically dealt with the nation as their basic operational unit. At the same time, nationalism – notwithstanding its authoritarian excesses – clearly preserved its liberal and egalitarian conceptual core: thus, according to nationalism’s own rhetoric, it was only within fraternity of the nation that individuals could feel free and equal.
Still, the question of historical events which crucially contributed to the development of the doctrines of liberalism and nationalism – and, subsequently, of their application in the above-mentioned revolutions – has yet to be addressed. To locate the beginning of a historical process in a single event, or in a sequence of events, is inevitably a matter of arbitrary choice. Still, some of the possible choices work better than others; and, depending on the event chosen to be interpreted as a trigger of such a process, one can establish the dominant logic of the process itself.
As doctrines of political legitimacy, nationalism and liberalism locate the source of all political legitimacy into two ostensibly opposed principles: free will of “the people”, usually referred to as “the nation”, and free will of “the individual”, commonly referred to as “liberty”. Without entering the fruitless discussion on whether “a nation is nothing but a collection of individuals” (Hume) or the nation precedes and transcends all the things and, as such, gives birth to the individual (as usually claimed by the 19th-century doctrinaire nationalists), it is sufficient to stress that the concept of free will – both of the people and of the individual – could not come into existence without prior de-legitimisation of the previous source of political legitimacy. Therefore, it was only after the removal of the concept of divine will – together with the temporary removal of its earthly representatives – from the sphere of political affairs that the concept of free will could be promoted as the only conceivable substitute. Although such a concept was already articulated in the course of the English Revolution (beginning with the decapitation of the monarch in the name of the nation), its full development is still usually associated with the French Revolution, which proclaimed universal rights of men and citizens, emanating from the sovereign free will of the nation. Yet, both revolutions were only a consequence of the prior break-up of the European system of political legitimacy, hitherto centred around the political power of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church.
This argument is usually advanced by those scholars who perceive the Reformation as the turning point in Europe’s history. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the contribution of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years War and Protestantism itself to the development of modern capitalist societies, organised into the post-Westphalian system of states. There is a substantial amount of literature on the impact of the post-Westphalian inter-state system on the subsequent establishment of the inter-national order; also, there is a number of theories of nationalism which regard the Protestant introduction of vernaculars as a major contribution to the development of national churches and, later, of linguistic nationalism. The impact of the Thirty Years War and the Westphalian principle “cuius regio, eius religio” on the homogenisation of the targeted populations has also been explored at length. And yet, notwithstanding the significance of these developments for the subsequent introduction of the principle of nationality, it is difficult to overlook the importance of one historical event, which most directly led to the destruction of the political order that had been established after the break-up of political unity of the Roman Empire.
In the entire period preceding the rise of the Modern era, it was Rome, as the centre of spiritual unity of the Empire’s political successors, which had remained the sole source of their political legitimacy. The dissolution of such a system of de-centralised centralism began in the 1530s, when the Church of England was established and proclaimed the sole source of legitimacy of England’s political power. It was this event that had practically introduced the principle “cuius regio, eius religio” long before the Peace of Westphalia did the same. However, with the partial exception of Adrian Hastings and his study of the emergence of proto-national consciousness in the late medieval England,(5) in most other accounts of the rise of nationalism this event has remained widely underestimated, if not entirely unnoticed. The most conspicuous exception to this rule is Liah Greenfeld’s “Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity”, according to which the divorce between the English monarchy and the Vatican triggered the first proto-nationalist mobilisation against the centralism of Rome. This mobilisation – and so goes the argument proposed by Greenfeld – contributed significantly to the subsequent revolutionary mobilisation in the name of the nation, against the monarchy itself. Paradoxically, it was this absolutisation of the sovereign’s divine right – hitherto checked by the universalist/centralist claims of Rome – that had triggered the process of secularisation of political legitimacy, which eventually led to the abolition of the sovereign’s divine right. This went hand-in-hand with the introduction of an entirely new principle of political legitimacy, promoting “the people’/”the nation” – as a presumed bearer of the divine right to exercise sovereignty over itself – into the sole source of its own legitimacy.
It is significant to note that, on the other side of Europe, the memory of the Roman Empire had inspired the pretenders to the title of the Second Rome – the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire – to define their identities in accordance with the presumed universalist, messianic claims of the original empire. Needless to add, these polities had been associated with ecclesiastical institutions of both Western and Eastern Christianity, themselves aspiring to dominate the Christian world and Christianise the rest. Identity of the Tsarist Russia, itself determined by its aspirations expressed in the myth of the Third Rome, was also to a great extent pervaded by the universalist idea of Russia’s messianic, Christianising mission. Also, it is worthy of note that the successors to these empires – the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as the Soviet one – defined their respective identities in rather universalist terms. Thus the Habsburg Empire maintained its Catholic-absolutist universalism, in defiance to the rising claims of the movements inspired by the newly-introduced universalist counter-doctrine of national liberation. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire maintained its theocratic character, determined by its Islamic universalism, in the face of similar claims to national liberation, themselves inspired by the already developed proto-national particularisms of the local Orthodox churches. As for the Soviet empire, its aspirations had clearly been universalist in its rhetoric; yet, the internal practice of the Soviet state had been shaped under the impact of the most radical, Leninist variant of the liberal doctrine of national self-determination. Eventually, the Soviet empire broke up along the lines established in accordance with the doctrine of national self-determination, with the prospects for Russia and its ethno-national units to follow the same path of self-(de)termination.
However, it is of the utmost importance to note that the empires that had previously succeeded the pretenders to the title of the Second and Third Rome were broken up due to the absolute triumph of the universalist doctrine of national self-determination, which has thus retained its position as the main geopolitical doctrine of liberal universalism. Paradoxically, though not unexpectedly, the ultimate triumph of the doctrine of national self-determination has brought about a number of international and subnational inter-ethnic conflicts. Paradoxically, again, these have increasingly been depicted in terms of the universalist claims of the world’s great religions and fought along the lines of their divisions – between Western and Eastern Christianity (the Serb-Croat conflict in Croatia), and between Christianity and Islam (the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Tajikistan, East Timor). However, far from being a sample of Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”, these developments are rather to be seen as a result of the increasing assertiveness of liberal universalism, which inevitably leads to submission or elimination of all remaining, potentially opposing universalisms. For, it is in the nature of universalism to either eliminate the other or be eliminated by the other.(6) If this expansion of liberal universalism at the expense of other universalist doctrines is currently being carried out by playing one religious universalism off against another, it still does not signal that a genuine clash of religious universalisms is taking place. The pattern of conflicting nationalist particularisms – under the auspices and for the benefit of the universal, liberal order – has simply been working too well so as not to be elevated onto the level of conflicting religious universalisms, to the extent of their mutual exhaustion. So, if there is no end of history, no final resolution of the struggle of historical concepts, but a proliferation of conflicts instead, they are likely to be clashes of universalisms (be they Christian, Islamic or liberal), not of civilisations.
Nationalism is commonly referred to as a doctrine that promotes particularist approach to most of things in our everyday lives. Nationalists easily claim that the nation, be it theirs or someone else’s, is not only distinct in terms of its “objective” – though hardly ever tangible and self-evident – features, such as history, tradition, customs, language, etc.; the nation is also to be perceived as distinct from any other nation in even less tangible terms of its particular national character, collective spirit, or peculiar sense of humour. Such a discourse, in both of its extremes – one that celebrates diversity of national realities as an end in itself and the other which insists on total separation of such distinct national realities – is usually depicted as being rooted in the teachings of Herder and the subsequent generation of German romanticists. Indeed, some students of nationalism, like Elie Kedourie, have gone so far as to define nationalism as a doctrine invented at the beginning of the 19th century in the German-speaking lands.(1) Yet, as a matter of historical facts, such a discourse had been first promoted as a part of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. Within this context, probably the most extreme form of advocacy of separation of nationalities can be found in John Stuart Mill’s “Considerations on Representative Government”, where the author maintains that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”.(2) Still, the origins of such an argument can be traced back to Hume’s essay “Of National Characters”, where one can find that, for example, “the common people in Switzerland have probably more honesty than those of the same rank in Ireland”, “an Englishman will naturally be supposed to have more knowledge than a Dane”, while “the integrity, gravity, and bravery of the Turks, form an exact contrast to the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the modern Greeks”.(3) A contemporary man, if he follows the line of Hume’s reasoning – and usually, following the projected ideal of common sense, he does – need not be a doctrinaire Herderian nationalist to perceive the reality of the modern world as sharply divided into a number of distinct national realities, each of them containing their particular histories, traditions, customs, languages, pervaded by their particular characters, and therefore inseparably entwined with their particular destinies. All that one has to do is to use common sense, which undeniably suggests that these realities are not only distinct and particular but also self-referential and self-contained: the very fact of the existence of so great a diversity of distinct nationalities craves recognition and it is only a matter of common sense to recognise such a fact. And then, it is also a matter of common sense (or, a matter of utility) to recognise that such distinct realities should not be kept together, within the framework of a common state, as argued by Mill. The next step, then, can easily be to translate such a logic into organised political-military action and forcefully separate identified national units (be they already self-identified or arbitrarily determined by the self-appointed representatives of the international system), as indeed was done with the territories of the former imperial powers defeated in the World War I.
Thus in its appearance the doctrine of nationalism – or, as its advocates prefer to call it, the doctrine of national self-determination – clearly promotes particularism. However, in its essence, nationalism – just like the common-sense approach of the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment or rationalism of the French Enlightenment – claims to be universally valid and applicable. Nationality, as the basic unit with which nationalism operates, is thus within the nationalist doctrine conceived of as a universal property of both the individual and the global system with which the individual is to accommodate. Nationality is therefore not only seen as an unavoidable intermediary between the individual and the world; it is perceived as the only conceivable mode of the individual’s existence in the world; indeed, it is treated as the sole source of legitimacy for the individual to actually exist in the world. Within this doctrine of Modernity, the Transcendental Being of the pre-modern religious universalisms – as the sole source of man’s existence in the world and the sole source of this existence’s legitimacy – has been replaced by a transcendental, timeless and yet bounded unit of nationality, as the only communication channel through which the individual and the world can communicate and interact, through which both actually come into being. Thus, as Kedourie put it, “nationalism has replaced religion as a key to salvation”.
How has this come about? The philosophical sources of nationalist doctrine are obscure and there are hardly two students of nationalism who are of the same opinion on this issue. Perhaps a less fruitless effort could be made in order to locate a political event which triggered the process of national identification and, consequently, of national separation. Thus most scholars emphasise the role of the French Revolution in articulation of the doctrine that places “the nation” in its centre. However, it is difficult to overlook the fact that, chronologically, three national revolutions (English, Dutch and American) had practically promoted liberty of the individual within fraternity of the equal – or, rather, fraternity of the equal for the sake of liberty of the individual – before the French Revolution officially launched its most famous slogan, Liberty, fraternity, equality. In this context, it is of particular importance to stress that the nation as a modern concept, from its earliest beginnings in the revolutionary England, placed the idea of liberty in its very centre: in this sense, unity of the nation in the form of presumed fraternity of the equal, was conceived as a means to promote the end of individual liberty; and, in turn, equal distribution of individual liberty could only bring about fraternity of equally free individuals, that is, the nation. The rise of the concept of nation was thus inseparably entwined with the rise of the concept of liberty. In this initial phase, the nation was perceived as essentially free; indeed, it was regarded as the very embodiment of freedom. Such a nation was conceived in terms of ‘positive liberty’: individuals were born free to associate themselves with their equals into the fraternity of freedom. It was only later, with the spread of the concept of nation in the course of the Napoleonic conquests, that the nation (as in Fichte’s “Addresses to the German Nation”) came to be regarded as historically oppressed, though still potentially free to assert itself as free. Such a concept of nation was thus conceived in terms of ‘negative liberty’: only through liberation from oppression (be that foreign conquest or imperial rule) could the nation realise its essence as free; and only then, eventually, could the individual become free as a member of the free nation. It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to speculate how this inversion came into existence. However, for the present purpose, it is both necessary and sufficient to emphasise that the convergence between the concepts of nation and liberty is all but accidental: it is essential. And, following the logic of both concepts, so is the convergence between the doctrines of nationalism and liberalism: far from being oxymoronic, the retrospective constructs like Tamir’s “liberal nationalism”(4) are rather to be seen as tautological. Out of the proclaimed three supreme values of the French Revolution – liberty, fraternity, equality – it was the doctrine of liberalism that put an emphasis on liberty; within the doctrine of nationalism the stress was put on fraternity, whereas the doctrine of socialism insisted on equality. However, all these three doctrines retained the original set of values, so that both liberalism and socialism – regardless of liberalism’s proclaimed individualism or socialism’s proclaimed cosmopolitanism – practically dealt with the nation as their basic operational unit. At the same time, nationalism – notwithstanding its authoritarian excesses – clearly preserved its liberal and egalitarian conceptual core: thus, according to nationalism’s own rhetoric, it was only within fraternity of the nation that individuals could feel free and equal.
Still, the question of historical events which crucially contributed to the development of the doctrines of liberalism and nationalism – and, subsequently, of their application in the above-mentioned revolutions – has yet to be addressed. To locate the beginning of a historical process in a single event, or in a sequence of events, is inevitably a matter of arbitrary choice. Still, some of the possible choices work better than others; and, depending on the event chosen to be interpreted as a trigger of such a process, one can establish the dominant logic of the process itself.
As doctrines of political legitimacy, nationalism and liberalism locate the source of all political legitimacy into two ostensibly opposed principles: free will of “the people”, usually referred to as “the nation”, and free will of “the individual”, commonly referred to as “liberty”. Without entering the fruitless discussion on whether “a nation is nothing but a collection of individuals” (Hume) or the nation precedes and transcends all the things and, as such, gives birth to the individual (as usually claimed by the 19th-century doctrinaire nationalists), it is sufficient to stress that the concept of free will – both of the people and of the individual – could not come into existence without prior de-legitimisation of the previous source of political legitimacy. Therefore, it was only after the removal of the concept of divine will – together with the temporary removal of its earthly representatives – from the sphere of political affairs that the concept of free will could be promoted as the only conceivable substitute. Although such a concept was already articulated in the course of the English Revolution (beginning with the decapitation of the monarch in the name of the nation), its full development is still usually associated with the French Revolution, which proclaimed universal rights of men and citizens, emanating from the sovereign free will of the nation. Yet, both revolutions were only a consequence of the prior break-up of the European system of political legitimacy, hitherto centred around the political power of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church.
This argument is usually advanced by those scholars who perceive the Reformation as the turning point in Europe’s history. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the contribution of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years War and Protestantism itself to the development of modern capitalist societies, organised into the post-Westphalian system of states. There is a substantial amount of literature on the impact of the post-Westphalian inter-state system on the subsequent establishment of the inter-national order; also, there is a number of theories of nationalism which regard the Protestant introduction of vernaculars as a major contribution to the development of national churches and, later, of linguistic nationalism. The impact of the Thirty Years War and the Westphalian principle “cuius regio, eius religio” on the homogenisation of the targeted populations has also been explored at length. And yet, notwithstanding the significance of these developments for the subsequent introduction of the principle of nationality, it is difficult to overlook the importance of one historical event, which most directly led to the destruction of the political order that had been established after the break-up of political unity of the Roman Empire.
In the entire period preceding the rise of the Modern era, it was Rome, as the centre of spiritual unity of the Empire’s political successors, which had remained the sole source of their political legitimacy. The dissolution of such a system of de-centralised centralism began in the 1530s, when the Church of England was established and proclaimed the sole source of legitimacy of England’s political power. It was this event that had practically introduced the principle “cuius regio, eius religio” long before the Peace of Westphalia did the same. However, with the partial exception of Adrian Hastings and his study of the emergence of proto-national consciousness in the late medieval England,(5) in most other accounts of the rise of nationalism this event has remained widely underestimated, if not entirely unnoticed. The most conspicuous exception to this rule is Liah Greenfeld’s “Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity”, according to which the divorce between the English monarchy and the Vatican triggered the first proto-nationalist mobilisation against the centralism of Rome. This mobilisation – and so goes the argument proposed by Greenfeld – contributed significantly to the subsequent revolutionary mobilisation in the name of the nation, against the monarchy itself. Paradoxically, it was this absolutisation of the sovereign’s divine right – hitherto checked by the universalist/centralist claims of Rome – that had triggered the process of secularisation of political legitimacy, which eventually led to the abolition of the sovereign’s divine right. This went hand-in-hand with the introduction of an entirely new principle of political legitimacy, promoting “the people’/”the nation” – as a presumed bearer of the divine right to exercise sovereignty over itself – into the sole source of its own legitimacy.
It is significant to note that, on the other side of Europe, the memory of the Roman Empire had inspired the pretenders to the title of the Second Rome – the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire – to define their identities in accordance with the presumed universalist, messianic claims of the original empire. Needless to add, these polities had been associated with ecclesiastical institutions of both Western and Eastern Christianity, themselves aspiring to dominate the Christian world and Christianise the rest. Identity of the Tsarist Russia, itself determined by its aspirations expressed in the myth of the Third Rome, was also to a great extent pervaded by the universalist idea of Russia’s messianic, Christianising mission. Also, it is worthy of note that the successors to these empires – the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as the Soviet one – defined their respective identities in rather universalist terms. Thus the Habsburg Empire maintained its Catholic-absolutist universalism, in defiance to the rising claims of the movements inspired by the newly-introduced universalist counter-doctrine of national liberation. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire maintained its theocratic character, determined by its Islamic universalism, in the face of similar claims to national liberation, themselves inspired by the already developed proto-national particularisms of the local Orthodox churches. As for the Soviet empire, its aspirations had clearly been universalist in its rhetoric; yet, the internal practice of the Soviet state had been shaped under the impact of the most radical, Leninist variant of the liberal doctrine of national self-determination. Eventually, the Soviet empire broke up along the lines established in accordance with the doctrine of national self-determination, with the prospects for Russia and its ethno-national units to follow the same path of self-(de)termination.
However, it is of the utmost importance to note that the empires that had previously succeeded the pretenders to the title of the Second and Third Rome were broken up due to the absolute triumph of the universalist doctrine of national self-determination, which has thus retained its position as the main geopolitical doctrine of liberal universalism. Paradoxically, though not unexpectedly, the ultimate triumph of the doctrine of national self-determination has brought about a number of international and subnational inter-ethnic conflicts. Paradoxically, again, these have increasingly been depicted in terms of the universalist claims of the world’s great religions and fought along the lines of their divisions – between Western and Eastern Christianity (the Serb-Croat conflict in Croatia), and between Christianity and Islam (the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Tajikistan, East Timor). However, far from being a sample of Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”, these developments are rather to be seen as a result of the increasing assertiveness of liberal universalism, which inevitably leads to submission or elimination of all remaining, potentially opposing universalisms. For, it is in the nature of universalism to either eliminate the other or be eliminated by the other.(6) If this expansion of liberal universalism at the expense of other universalist doctrines is currently being carried out by playing one religious universalism off against another, it still does not signal that a genuine clash of religious universalisms is taking place. The pattern of conflicting nationalist particularisms – under the auspices and for the benefit of the universal, liberal order – has simply been working too well so as not to be elevated onto the level of conflicting religious universalisms, to the extent of their mutual exhaustion. So, if there is no end of history, no final resolution of the struggle of historical concepts, but a proliferation of conflicts instead, they are likely to be clashes of universalisms (be they Christian, Islamic or liberal), not of civilisations.
Nationalism is commonly referred to as a doctrine that promotes particularist approach to most of things in our everyday lives. Nationalists easily claim that the nation, be it theirs or someone else’s, is not only distinct in terms of its “objective” – though hardly ever tangible and self-evident – features, such as history, tradition, customs, language, etc.; the nation is also to be perceived as distinct from any other nation in even less tangible terms of its particular national character, collective spirit, or peculiar sense of humour. Such a discourse, in both of its extremes – one that celebrates diversity of national realities as an end in itself and the other which insists on total separation of such distinct national realities – is usually depicted as being rooted in the teachings of Herder and the subsequent generation of German romanticists. Indeed, some students of nationalism, like Elie Kedourie, have gone so far as to define nationalism as a doctrine invented at the beginning of the 19th century in the German-speaking lands.(1) Yet, as a matter of historical facts, such a discourse had been first promoted as a part of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. Within this context, probably the most extreme form of advocacy of separation of nationalities can be found in John Stuart Mill’s “Considerations on Representative Government”, where the author maintains that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”.(2) Still, the origins of such an argument can be traced back to Hume’s essay “Of National Characters”, where one can find that, for example, “the common people in Switzerland have probably more honesty than those of the same rank in Ireland”, “an Englishman will naturally be supposed to have more knowledge than a Dane”, while “the integrity, gravity, and bravery of the Turks, form an exact contrast to the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the modern Greeks”.(3) A contemporary man, if he follows the line of Hume’s reasoning – and usually, following the projected ideal of common sense, he does – need not be a doctrinaire Herderian nationalist to perceive the reality of the modern world as sharply divided into a number of distinct national realities, each of them containing their particular histories, traditions, customs, languages, pervaded by their particular characters, and therefore inseparably entwined with their particular destinies. All that one has to do is to use common sense, which undeniably suggests that these realities are not only distinct and particular but also self-referential and self-contained: the very fact of the existence of so great a diversity of distinct nationalities craves recognition and it is only a matter of common sense to recognise such a fact. And then, it is also a matter of common sense (or, a matter of utility) to recognise that such distinct realities should not be kept together, within the framework of a common state, as argued by Mill. The next step, then, can easily be to translate such a logic into organised political-military action and forcefully separate identified national units (be they already self-identified or arbitrarily determined by the self-appointed representatives of the international system), as indeed was done with the territories of the former imperial powers defeated in the World War I.
Thus in its appearance the doctrine of nationalism – or, as its advocates prefer to call it, the doctrine of national self-determination – clearly promotes particularism. However, in its essence, nationalism – just like the common-sense approach of the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment or rationalism of the French Enlightenment – claims to be universally valid and applicable. Nationality, as the basic unit with which nationalism operates, is thus within the nationalist doctrine conceived of as a universal property of both the individual and the global system with which the individual is to accommodate. Nationality is therefore not only seen as an unavoidable intermediary between the individual and the world; it is perceived as the only conceivable mode of the individual’s existence in the world; indeed, it is treated as the sole source of legitimacy for the individual to actually exist in the world. Within this doctrine of Modernity, the Transcendental Being of the pre-modern religious universalisms – as the sole source of man’s existence in the world and the sole source of this existence’s legitimacy – has been replaced by a transcendental, timeless and yet bounded unit of nationality, as the only communication channel through which the individual and the world can communicate and interact, through which both actually come into being. Thus, as Kedourie put it, “nationalism has replaced religion as a key to salvation”.
How has this come about? The philosophical sources of nationalist doctrine are obscure and there are hardly two students of nationalism who are of the same opinion on this issue. Perhaps a less fruitless effort could be made in order to locate a political event which triggered the process of national identification and, consequently, of national separation. Thus most scholars emphasise the role of the French Revolution in articulation of the doctrine that places “the nation” in its centre. However, it is difficult to overlook the fact that, chronologically, three national revolutions (English, Dutch and American) had practically promoted liberty of the individual within fraternity of the equal – or, rather, fraternity of the equal for the sake of liberty of the individual – before the French Revolution officially launched its most famous slogan, Liberty, fraternity, equality. In this context, it is of particular importance to stress that the nation as a modern concept, from its earliest beginnings in the revolutionary England, placed the idea of liberty in its very centre: in this sense, unity of the nation in the form of presumed fraternity of the equal, was conceived as a means to promote the end of individual liberty; and, in turn, equal distribution of individual liberty could only bring about fraternity of equally free individuals, that is, the nation. The rise of the concept of nation was thus inseparably entwined with the rise of the concept of liberty. In this initial phase, the nation was perceived as essentially free; indeed, it was regarded as the very embodiment of freedom. Such a nation was conceived in terms of ‘positive liberty’: individuals were born free to associate themselves with their equals into the fraternity of freedom. It was only later, with the spread of the concept of nation in the course of the Napoleonic conquests, that the nation (as in Fichte’s “Addresses to the German Nation”) came to be regarded as historically oppressed, though still potentially free to assert itself as free. Such a concept of nation was thus conceived in terms of ‘negative liberty’: only through liberation from oppression (be that foreign conquest or imperial rule) could the nation realise its essence as free; and only then, eventually, could the individual become free as a member of the free nation. It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to speculate how this inversion came into existence. However, for the present purpose, it is both necessary and sufficient to emphasise that the convergence between the concepts of nation and liberty is all but accidental: it is essential. And, following the logic of both concepts, so is the convergence between the doctrines of nationalism and liberalism: far from being oxymoronic, the retrospective constructs like Tamir’s “liberal nationalism”(4) are rather to be seen as tautological. Out of the proclaimed three supreme values of the French Revolution – liberty, fraternity, equality – it was the doctrine of liberalism that put an emphasis on liberty; within the doctrine of nationalism the stress was put on fraternity, whereas the doctrine of socialism insisted on equality. However, all these three doctrines retained the original set of values, so that both liberalism and socialism – regardless of liberalism’s proclaimed individualism or socialism’s proclaimed cosmopolitanism – practically dealt with the nation as their basic operational unit. At the same time, nationalism – notwithstanding its authoritarian excesses – clearly preserved its liberal and egalitarian conceptual core: thus, according to nationalism’s own rhetoric, it was only within fraternity of the nation that individuals could feel free and equal.
Still, the question of historical events which crucially contributed to the development of the doctrines of liberalism and nationalism – and, subsequently, of their application in the above-mentioned revolutions – has yet to be addressed. To locate the beginning of a historical process in a single event, or in a sequence of events, is inevitably a matter of arbitrary choice. Still, some of the possible choices work better than others; and, depending on the event chosen to be interpreted as a trigger of such a process, one can establish the dominant logic of the process itself.
As doctrines of political legitimacy, nationalism and liberalism locate the source of all political legitimacy into two ostensibly opposed principles: free will of “the people”, usually referred to as “the nation”, and free will of “the individual”, commonly referred to as “liberty”. Without entering the fruitless discussion on whether “a nation is nothing but a collection of individuals” (Hume) or the nation precedes and transcends all the things and, as such, gives birth to the individual (as usually claimed by the 19th-century doctrinaire nationalists), it is sufficient to stress that the concept of free will – both of the people and of the individual – could not come into existence without prior de-legitimisation of the previous source of political legitimacy. Therefore, it was only after the removal of the concept of divine will – together with the temporary removal of its earthly representatives – from the sphere of political affairs that the concept of free will could be promoted as the only conceivable substitute. Although such a concept was already articulated in the course of the English Revolution (beginning with the decapitation of the monarch in the name of the nation), its full development is still usually associated with the French Revolution, which proclaimed universal rights of men and citizens, emanating from the sovereign free will of the nation. Yet, both revolutions were only a consequence of the prior break-up of the European system of political legitimacy, hitherto centred around the political power of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church.
This argument is usually advanced by those scholars who perceive the Reformation as the turning point in Europe’s history. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the contribution of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years War and Protestantism itself to the development of modern capitalist societies, organised into the post-Westphalian system of states. There is a substantial amount of literature on the impact of the post-Westphalian inter-state system on the subsequent establishment of the inter-national order; also, there is a number of theories of nationalism which regard the Protestant introduction of vernaculars as a major contribution to the development of national churches and, later, of linguistic nationalism. The impact of the Thirty Years War and the Westphalian principle “cuius regio, eius religio” on the homogenisation of the targeted populations has also been explored at length. And yet, notwithstanding the significance of these developments for the subsequent introduction of the principle of nationality, it is difficult to overlook the importance of one historical event, which most directly led to the destruction of the political order that had been established after the break-up of political unity of the Roman Empire.
In the entire period preceding the rise of the Modern era, it was Rome, as the centre of spiritual unity of the Empire’s political successors, which had remained the sole source of their political legitimacy. The dissolution of such a system of de-centralised centralism began in the 1530s, when the Church of England was established and proclaimed the sole source of legitimacy of England’s political power. It was this event that had practically introduced the principle “cuius regio, eius religio” long before the Peace of Westphalia did the same. However, with the partial exception of Adrian Hastings and his study of the emergence of proto-national consciousness in the late medieval England,(5) in most other accounts of the rise of nationalism this event has remained widely underestimated, if not entirely unnoticed. The most conspicuous exception to this rule is Liah Greenfeld’s “Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity”, according to which the divorce between the English monarchy and the Vatican triggered the first proto-nationalist mobilisation against the centralism of Rome. This mobilisation – and so goes the argument proposed by Greenfeld – contributed significantly to the subsequent revolutionary mobilisation in the name of the nation, against the monarchy itself. Paradoxically, it was this absolutisation of the sovereign’s divine right – hitherto checked by the universalist/centralist claims of Rome – that had triggered the process of secularisation of political legitimacy, which eventually led to the abolition of the sovereign’s divine right. This went hand-in-hand with the introduction of an entirely new principle of political legitimacy, promoting “the people’/”the nation” – as a presumed bearer of the divine right to exercise sovereignty over itself – into the sole source of its own legitimacy.
It is significant to note that, on the other side of Europe, the memory of the Roman Empire had inspired the pretenders to the title of the Second Rome – the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire – to define their identities in accordance with the presumed universalist, messianic claims of the original empire. Needless to add, these polities had been associated with ecclesiastical institutions of both Western and Eastern Christianity, themselves aspiring to dominate the Christian world and Christianise the rest. Identity of the Tsarist Russia, itself determined by its aspirations expressed in the myth of the Third Rome, was also to a great extent pervaded by the universalist idea of Russia’s messianic, Christianising mission. Also, it is worthy of note that the successors to these empires – the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as the Soviet one – defined their respective identities in rather universalist terms. Thus the Habsburg Empire maintained its Catholic-absolutist universalism, in defiance to the rising claims of the movements inspired by the newly-introduced universalist counter-doctrine of national liberation. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire maintained its theocratic character, determined by its Islamic universalism, in the face of similar claims to national liberation, themselves inspired by the already developed proto-national particularisms of the local Orthodox churches. As for the Soviet empire, its aspirations had clearly been universalist in its rhetoric; yet, the internal practice of the Soviet state had been shaped under the impact of the most radical, Leninist variant of the liberal doctrine of national self-determination. Eventually, the Soviet empire broke up along the lines established in accordance with the doctrine of national self-determination, with the prospects for Russia and its ethno-national units to follow the same path of self-(de)termination.
However, it is of the utmost importance to note that the empires that had previously succeeded the pretenders to the title of the Second and Third Rome were broken up due to the absolute triumph of the universalist doctrine of national self-determination, which has thus retained its position as the main geopolitical doctrine of liberal universalism. Paradoxically, though not unexpectedly, the ultimate triumph of the doctrine of national self-determination has brought about a number of international and subnational inter-ethnic conflicts. Paradoxically, again, these have increasingly been depicted in terms of the universalist claims of the world’s great religions and fought along the lines of their divisions – between Western and Eastern Christianity (the Serb-Croat conflict in Croatia), and between Christianity and Islam (the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Tajikistan, East Timor). However, far from being a sample of Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”, these developments are rather to be seen as a result of the increasing assertiveness of liberal universalism, which inevitably leads to submission or elimination of all remaining, potentially opposing universalisms. For, it is in the nature of universalism to either eliminate the other or be eliminated by the other.(6) If this expansion of liberal universalism at the expense of other universalist doctrines is currently being carried out by playing one religious universalism off against another, it still does not signal that a genuine clash of religious universalisms is taking place. The pattern of conflicting nationalist particularisms – under the auspices and for the benefit of the universal, liberal order – has simply been working too well so as not to be elevated onto the level of conflicting religious universalisms, to the extent of their mutual exhaustion. So, if there is no end of history, no final resolution of the struggle of historical concepts, but a proliferation of conflicts instead, they are likely to be clashes of universalisms (be they Christian, Islamic or liberal), not of civilisations.