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ExodusAuthor(s): Benedict AndersonSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 314-327Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343913

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Exodus

Benedict Anderson

I saw a place where English Cattle had been: that was a comfort to

me, such as it was: quickly after that we came to an English Path,which so took with me, that I thought I could have freely lyen downand

dyed.That

day,a little after

noon,we came to

Squaukheag,where the Indians quickly spread themselves over the deserted En-

glish Fields.'

Thus, as remembered subsequently, was the experience of the nineteen-

year old, newly married Mary Rowlandson as her Narragansett abduc-

tors brought her with them through central Massachusetts-perhaps

twenty miles north of today's turnpike-in mid-February 1675. One ob-

serves the strange, thoroughly creole crosscurrents in her words. On the

onehand,

she feels no need toexplain

to her readers whereSquaukheagis located, let alone how to pronounce this strikingly un-European top-

onym. Her familiarity is not surprising; Squakheag is, so to speak, that

place down the road, since she had been born and spent all her younglife in the no less un-European Massachusetts. On the other hand, shesees before her "English Cattle," an "English Path," and "deserted En-

glish Fields," though she has never been within three thousand miles of

England. These are not pluckings from the Cotswolds or the Downs-

1. Mary Rowlandson, A Narrativeof theCaptivity nd RestaurationofMrs.MaryRowlandson,1682, in Narrativesof the Indian Wars,1675-99, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (1913; New York,

1952), p. 132. Squaukheag is today Squakeag, near Bear's Plain, Northfield, Massachusetts.

Critical nquiry20 (Winter 1994)

? 1994 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/94/2002-0002$01.00. All rights reserved.

314



Winter1994 315

real places, as it were-but acts of imagination that would never have

occurred to a young minister's wife in seventeenth-century Gloucester-

shire or Surrey. They are, in a way, getting ready to be "English" exactlybecause they are in Massachusetts, not in England, and are so because

they bear for Mary the traces of her "English" people's agricultural la-

bors. But we can also guess that up till the point of her abduction she

had thought matter-of-factly about cattle as cattle and fields as fields. Her

"nationalizing" moment comes when, in the power of the Narragansetts,she is torn out of the quotidian and-right in the very midst of her native

Massachusetts-finds herself in fearful exile. She struggles along a paththat becomes English at the exact juncture where she is sure she may not

lie down and die upon it. When she is finally ransomed and returns toher community of origin, her "nationalist" frisson vanishes. For she has

managed, more or less, to come home. But this home is Lancaster; it is

not (yet) America.

The paradox here is that we today can without much trouble read

Mary Rowlandson as American precisely because, in captivity, she saw

English fields before her. Acton was on the mark when he wrote, two

hundred years later, that "exile is the nursery of nationality."2On the other side of the Atlantic, Mary Rowlandson's narrative was

published within a year of the Massachusetts first edition and proved verypopular, accumulating thirty editions over the eighteenth century.3A rap-

idly growing reading public in the recently united kingdom-Mary was

captured two decades before Scotland-was becoming aware of anoma-

lous English-writing women who had never been to England but who

could be dragged through English fields by "savages." What were they?Were they really English? The photographic negative of "the colonial,"the non-English Englishwoman, was coming into view.

Because the Spanish conquests in the Caribbean and southern Amer-

icas had begun a century before permanent English settlements in the

2. John Dalberg-Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretationof History, ed. William H.

McNeill (Chicago, 1967), p. 146.

3. See Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, TheImaginaryPuritan:Literature,IntellectualLabor,and the Origins of PersonalLife (Berkeley, 1992), p. 204 and the references

there cited.

Benedict Anderson is the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of Interna-tional Studies at Cornell University and a citizen of Eire. He is the authorof Java in a Timeof Revolution (1972), ImaginedCommunities:Reflectionsonthe Originand Spreadof Nationalism(1983; revised and expanded edition

1991), In theMirror:Literature nd Politics n Siamin theAmericanEra (1985),and Language and Power:ExploringIndonesianPolitical Cultures 1990). Heis currently at work on a book about nationalisms in the Philippines.

CriticalInquiry



316 BenedictAnderson Exodus

North, non-Spanish Spaniards began to loom up very early. Already in

1612, the madrilenoDominican theologian Juan de la Puente was writing

that "the heavens of America induce inconstancy, lasciviousness and lies:vices characteristic of the Indians and which the constellations make char-acteristic of the Spaniards who are born and bred there."4 The creole was

being invented figuratively, later to be realized culturally and politically.We can see here-especially if we recall the century-long rage at de laPuente made possible by the quiet two-way hiss of print across the Atlan-tic-the real historical origins of the "native," a persona that persists un-der sometimes other names well into our own times, in Europe as muchas anywhere else.

For the native is, like colonial and creole, a white-on-black negative.The nativeness of natives is always unmoored, its real significance hybridand oxymoronic. It appears when Moors, heathens, Mohammedans, sav-

ages, Hindoos, and so forth are becoming obsolete, that is, not only when,in the proximity of real print-encounters, substantial numbers of Viet-

namese read, write, and perhaps speak French but also when Czechs dothe same with German and Jews with Hungarian. Nationalism's purities(and thus also cleansings) are set to emerge from exactly this hybridity.

What set all these engines in motion? To put it a bit differently, what

made Mary Rowlandson's-and in due course London's-unstable En-

glishness possible? The simple answer is capitalism, the institutions ofwhich enabled the transportation, from the mid-sixteenth century on, ofmillions of free, indentured, and enslaved bodies across thousands ofmiles of water. But the materialities of this transportation-ships, fire-

arms, and navigational equipment-were guided by the mathematicallyinspired Mercatorian map and the vast, accumulating knowledge storedand disseminated in print. It was also through print moving back andforth across the ocean that the unstable, imagined worlds of En-

glishnesses and Spanishnesses were created.The essential nexus of long-distance transportation and print capi-

talist communications prepared the grounds on which, by the end of the

eighteenth century, the first nationalist movements flowered. It is strikingthat this flowering took place first in North America and later in the Cath-

olic, Iberian colonies to the south, the economies of all of which were pre-industrial. Nothing underlines this process better than the fact that in thesecond half of the eighteenth century there were more presses in colonialNorth America than in the metropole. So it was that by 1765, in the words

of Michael Warner, "print had come to be seen as indispensable to politi-cal life, and could appear to such men as Adams to be the primary agentof world emancipation. What makes this transformation of the press par-ticularly remarkable is that, unlike the press explosion of the nineteenth

4. Quoted in D. A. Brading, The FirstAmerica:TheSpanishMonarchy,CreolePatriots,andtheLiberalState,1492-1867 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 200.



Winter1994 317

century, it involved virtually no technological improvements in the

trade."5

These facts in themselves strongly suggest the untenability of ErnestGellner's argument that industrialismwas the historical source of national-

ism's emergence.6 (One might add that most of the zones in which early

nineteenth-century European nationalisms became visible-say Ireland,

Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia-were those most innocent of

"industrial progress.") Nonetheless, industrialism did, at a later stage, be-

come of signal importance for the spread and transformation of national-

ism, first in Europe, afterwards in Asia and Africa. It did so by creating,

directly and indirectly, new types of exile.

In his bizarre 1847 novel, Tancred, r TheNew Crusade,Benjamin Dis-raeli observed that "London is a modern Babylon."7 In this oxymoron,the echoes of a captivity narrative are as loud as those of a proverbialtrope for luxury and corruption. It sprang quite logically from the cele-brated subtitle of Sybil,or The TwoNations, which Disraeli had publishedtwo years earlier. Deepening industrial capitalism had by then createdwithin a single, very small territorial state-smaller, if we exclude Ire-

land, than Pennsylvania and New York combined-"two nations," how-

ever, that in no way corresponded to any putative ethnic or religious

communities. When Friedrich Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842 andbegan his studies of the condition of the working class, George Stephen-son had preceded him. The world's textile capital already had a railwaystation. The locomotive had begun its world-historical mission of trans-

porting millions of rural villagers into urban slums, a mission scarcely less

epochal than that which the transatlantic sailing ship had performed over

the preceding three centuries.8 Only a minority would return to end their

5. Michael Warner, TheLettersof theRepublic:Publicationand thePublicSpheren Eighteenth-CenturyAmerica(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 32.

6. See Ernest Gellner, Nationsand Nationalism(Ithaca, N.Y., 1983).7. Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, r TheNew Crusade 1847; London, 1894), p. 378; hereaf-

ter abbreviated as T Regarding his England and his Europe as mortally threatened by

Enlightenment rationalism, bourgeois commercialism, and the heritage of the French Revo-

lution, the young Lord Montacute sets off in his yacht for the Holy Land, seeking spiritualrevival in "the only portion of the world which the Creator of that world has deigned to

visit" (T, p. 421.) This quest leads him into proto-T. E. Lawrence political adventures in

Palestine and Lebanon, in which he is guided by wise, courageous Hebrews and from which

he has to be rescued by Mum and Dad, the Duchess and Duke of Bellamont. What is espe-

cially strikingabout the novel is the manner in which the

JewishDisraeli,

Anglicizedat his

father's orders by baptism into the Church of England at the age of thirteen, discovers his

"ethnicity" in Babylonian exile. Montacute, immensely rich, aristocratic, ur-English but, asit were, spiritually Jewish-Disraeli repeatedly insists that Christ and the Apostles were all

Jews-is a hilariously snobbish self-projection of the future Conservative prime minister of

the United Kingdom.8. How quickly this profane mission was understood is entertainingly shown by the

conversation in Tancredn which the hero suggests to Lady Bertie and Bellair that she and

her husband join him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem:

CriticalInquiry



318 BenedictAnderson

days in those cemeteries where the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept.How the novel experience of industrial life radically transformed their

lives and how this transformation made them, as it were, available fornationalism is splendidly described by Gellner, but his description shouldbe read under the sign of exile. It was beginning to become possible tosee "English fields" in England-from the window of a railway carriage.

Meanwhile, exile of another sort was emerging from the very wealththat industrial capitalism was producing for European states. For thiswealth was making possible the spread of a centralized, standardized,

steeply hierarchical system of public education. E.J. Hobsbawm remindsus that at the time of Tancred'spublication, on the eve of the upheavals of

1848, there were only 48,000 or so university students in all of Europe,a number substantially lower than the current enrollment at Ohio State

University.9 But in the second half of the century, ministries of education

sprang up like mushrooms everywhere-Sweden in 1852, England in

1870, and France in 1882-and children began to be compelled to mi-

grate to schools.10

When the elderly Filipino Pedro Calosa was interviewed in the mid-1960s and asked to compare the conditions of that time with those of the

uprising of 1931 that he had led against American colonialism, he ob-

served with nostalgic satisfaction that "there were no teenagers" then."For this new human type-nomad between childhood and workingadulthood-was then only beginning to emerge from the imperialists'novel apparatus for mass education. More generally, however, the teen-

ager was, from the second half of the nineteenth century, the site onwhich the state imposed its standardized vernacular. Whether this ver-nacular was a socially valorized dialect of a language widely understood

among the state's subjects (say, the King's English), or a vernacular deter-mined from among a multiplicity of vernaculars (say, German in Austria-

Hungary), the effect was typically to restratify and rationalize the socialand political hierarchy of vernaculars and dialects; all the more so in thatthe new education was increasingly linked to employment possibilities

"That can never be," said Lady Bertie; "Augustus will never hear of it; he nevercould be absent more than six weeks from London, he misses his clubs so. IfJerusalemwere only a place one could get at, something might be done; if there were a railroadto it for example."

"Arailroad!" exclaimed Tancred, with a look of horror. "Arailroad to Jerusalem!""No, I suppose there can never be one," continued Lady Bertie in a musing tone.

"There is no traffic." [T,p. 162]

9. See E. J. Hobsbawm, TheAge ofRevolution,1789-1848 (New York, 1962), pp. 166-67.10. A characteristic industrial side to this process was the official invention of adult

education in this era.

11. "AnInterview with Pedro Calosa," in David Sturtevant, PopularUprisings n the Phil-

ippines,1840-1940 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), p. 276.

Exodus



Winter1994 319

and opportunities for social mobility. Small wonder that people were be-

coming ever more self-conscious about their linguistic practices and the

consequences of those practices. Quite often the effect was a kind of exile.The more a standardized vernacular ceased to be merely the internal

language of officials and became the official language of a propagandiz-

ing state, the more likely became the emergence in Old Europe of some-

thing reminiscent of the creole or native: the not-really-German German,the not-quite-Italian Italian, the non-Spanish Spaniard. As in the Ameri-

cas, a kind of unstable negativity appeared. Nothing, therefore, is less

surprising than that the nationalist movements which transformed the

map of Europe by 1919 were so often led by young bilinguals, a pattern

to be followed after 1919 in Asia and Africa. How could a boy who learnedCzech from his mother and German from his schooling unlearn a Czech

that had left no contaminating traces on his German-speaking class-

mates? How could he not see his Czech as though in exile, through the

inverted telescope of his German?

From the perspective sketched out so far, one might be inclined to

view the rise of nationalist movements and their variable culminations in

successful nation-states as a project for coming home from exile, for the

resolution of hybridity, for a positive printed from a negative in the dark-

room of political struggle. If one migrated from a village in the delta ofthe Ganges and went to schools in Calcutta, Delhi, and perhaps Cam-

bridge; if one bore the indelible contaminations of English and Bengali;if one was destined to be cremated in Bombay, where was one intelligiblyto be home, where could one unitarily be born, live, and die, except in

"India"?

At the same time, for all the reasons just detailed, home as it emergedwas less experienced than imagined, and imagined through a complexof mediations and representations. At the simplest level this imaginingoccurred through visual symbols such as flags, maps, statuary, micro-cosmic ceremonials; at a more profound level, through "self-"and "rep-resentative" government. The ingenuity of the mechanisms of popular

suffrage seems to me to lie in the double duty they perform. Individually,

legislators represent particular interests, localities, and prejudices; collec-

tively and anonymously, as Parliament, Diet, or Congress, they representa unitary nation or sovereignty.'2

One can thus see why nation-statehood was so central to the

nineteenth-century nationalist projects that destroyed the huge, polyglot,

imperial-dynastic systems inherited from the age of absolutism. For it wasfelt both to represent, with its characteristically republican institutions, a

newfound alignment of imagined home and imagined homeowners and

12. Such is the general pattern, although there are significant exceptions, such as the

House of Councillors in Japan and the Senate in the Philippines, where all members are

elected from a single, nation-wide constituency.

Critical nquiry




to guarantee that stabilized alignment through the organized, systematic

deployment of its powers and resources. Hence the plausibility of the

Listian dream of the self-supplying national economy, guarded moatlikeby the tariff. Hence too, one suspects, the Listian morphology of railway

systems, mapped inward from state peripheries toward state capitals and

often marked off, zollvereinstyle, at borders by differential gauges.13If this

surmise is right, one might view the locomotive along with the printed

newspaper as the material points ofjuncture between the classical nation-state project and capitalism at the stage of primary industrialism.

The irony, however, is that, just as this classical nation-state projectwas coming fully into its own with the formation of the League of Nations

in 1919, advancing capitalism was beginning to sap its foundations. As inan earlier age, the most visible transformations took place in the areas of

transportation and communications. On land, motor vehicles increas-

ingly displaced the locomotive, while the vast proliferation of macadam-

ized road surfaces on which they sped were never gauge-calibrated to

national frontiers. In the air, commercial aviation was, with the exceptionof a few very large and rich nations like the United States, primarily trans-

national from its earliest days. One flew to leave or to return to one's

nation-state rather than to move about within it, and "national airspace"

had only a short plausible life before the advent of the satellite made itobsolete. The pace and thrust of these changes is vividly demonstrated

by the statistics on the admission of nonimmigrant aliens into historically

immigrant America:

1931-40 1,574,0711941-50 2,461,3591951-60 7,113,0231961-70 24,107,224

1971-79 61,640,3891981-91 142,076,53014

(The 1930s were the first decade in which nonimmigrants outnumbered

immigrants, and they already did so by a ratio of three to one.)Radio brought even illiterate populations within the purview of the

mass media, and its reception was never effectively limited to nation-state

audiences. No newspaper could ever hope to command the range of

planetary acolytes that became available to the BBC or the Voice of13. To be sure, at least some railway systems, such as that of Germany, were substan-

tially mapped for strategic military purposes. Differential gauges promised to bring one's

own troops rapidly to one's threatened borders and at the same time block the enemy's

railway penetration.14. InformationPleaseAlmanac,Atlas,and Yearbook,987 (Boston, 1987), p. 787, and Infor-

mationPleaseAlmanac,Atlas,and Yearbook,993 (Boston, 1993), p. 830. These tables lack fig-ures for 1980, which probably were somewhere between eight and nine million.



Winter1994 321

America. Subsequently, the telephone and telex, film, television, cassettes,video recorders, and the personal computer accelerated and enormously

magnified nearly everything that radio had initiated.These developments have had and will continue to have vast conse-

quences precisely because they are integral components of the transna-

tionalization of advanced capitalism and of the steepening economic

stratification of the global economy. As things now stand, less than 25

percent of the world's population appropriates 85 percent of world in-

come, and the gap between rich and poor is steadily widening. Between

1965 and 1990 the difference between living standards in Europe and

those in India and China increased from a ratio of forty to one up to

seventy to one. In the 1980s, over 800 million people-more than thepopulation of the United States, the European Community, and Japancombined-"became yet more grindingly poor, and one out of three chil-

dren went hungry."15Yet, thanks to the airplane, the bus, the truck, and

even the old locomotive, this inequality and misery is in all senses closer

to privilege and wealth than ever before. Hence migration has moved

not, as in earlier centuries, outwards to peripheries in the New World or

the Antipodes but inwards toward the metropolitan cores.

Between 1840 and 1930, about 37,500,000 immigrants, overwhelm-

ingly from Europe, came to the United States; approximately 416,000per annum on average. In the 1970s, the annual figure was almost

500,000 and in the 1980s almost 740,000; 80 percent of the newcomers

came from the "Third World."16Paul Kennedy notes that some demogra-

phers currently believe that as many as 15 million immigrants will enter

America in each of the next three decades, that is, at an annual averagerate of 1.5 million, double that of the 1980s.17 Western Europe absorbedover 20 million immigrants in the three decades between the end ofWorld War II and the oil crisis of the early 1970s. (The figure would have

been much higher had it not been for the helpfulness of Stalin's ironcurtain.) But in the latter part of the 1980s the numbers have swelled andwill probably do so at least through the 1990s. Of Germany's 79 million

inhabitants, 5.2 million (7 percent) are foreign immigrants; for Francethe figures are 3.6 (7 percent) out of 56 million; for the United Kingdom,1.8 (2 percent) out of 57 million; for Switzerland, 1.1 (16.3 percent) outof 6.8 million.18 (Even insular, restrictive Japan is said to have a million

15. Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London, 1992), p. 353. See as well the

sources there cited.

16. "Immigration," The New Funk and WagnallsEncyclopedia,25 vols. (New York, 1945-

46), 19:6892; The WorldAlmanacand Bookof Facts,1992 (New York, 1992), p. 137.

17. See Paul Kennedy, "The American Prospect," New YorkReviewofBooks,4 Mar. 1993,

p. 50.

18. See "In Europe's Upheaval, Doors Close to Foreigners," New YorkTimes, 10 Feb.

1993, pp. Al, A14. Note that these figures do not include an estimated 25 million political

refugees around the world, mostly living in squalid, "temporary" dwellings outside theirhomelands.

CriticalInquiry




or so legal and illegal alien residents.) And the economic and politicalimplosion of the Soviet Union is already moving people in a way that no

fin-de-sieclecontinental system can stem.At the same time, the communications revolution of our time has

profoundly affected the subjective experience of migration. The Moroc-can construction worker in Amsterdam can every night listen to Rabat's

broadcasting services and has no difficulty in buying pirated cassettes ofhis country's favorite singers. The illegal alien, Yakuza-sponsored,Thaibartender in a Tokyo suburb shows his Thai comrades karaoke video-

tapes just made in Bangkok. The Filipina maid in Hong Kong phonesher sister in Manila and sends money electronically to her mother in

Cebu. The successful Indian student in Vancouver can keep in dailytouch with her former Delhi classmates by electronic mail. To say nothingof an evergrowing blizzard of faxes. It is as if, were Mary Rowlandsonalive today, she could see, in her small apartment bedroom, in perfectelectronic safety on the screen beyond her toes, "truly" English fieldsand cattle.

But of course the meaning would have changed completely, not leastbecause she can only see what the masters of the screen choose to let hersee. Her eye can never gaze more widely than its frame. The "En-

glishness" of the fields comes not from within her but from a narratingvoice outside her. More concretely, consider the well-known photographof the lonely Peloponnesian gastarbeiter itting in his dingy room in, say,Frankfurt. The solitary decoration on his wall is a resplendent Lufthansatravel poster of the Parthenon, which invites him, in German, to takea "sun-drenched holiday" in Greece. He may well never have seen the

Parthenon, but framed by Lufthansa the poster confirms for him and for

any visitor a Greek identity that perhaps only Frankfurt has encouragedhim to assume. At the same time, it reminds him that he is only a coupleof air hours from Greece, and that if he saves enough Lufthansa will beglad to assist him to have a fortnight's "sunny holiday" in his heimat. Heknows too, most likely, that he will then return to exile in Frankfurt. Oris it that, in the longer run, he will find himself in brief annual exile inthe Peloponnese? Or in both places? And what about his children?

Before turning to the political consequences of this broad sketch of

post-1930s nomadism, two smaller but important related effects of post-industrial capitalism need briefly to be underscored. Consider the twomost widely prevalent, quite modern official documents of personal iden-

tity: the birth certificate and the passport. Both were born in the national-ist nineteenth century and later became interlinked. It is true that in theChristianized regions of the world the registration of births long pre-ceded the rise of capitalism. But these births were recorded locally and

ecclesiastically in parish churches; their registration, foreshadowing im-minent baptisms, signified the appearance of Christian souls in new cor-

poreal forms. In the nineteenth century, however, registration was taken

Exodus



Winter1994 323

over by states that were increasingly assuming a national coloring. In in-

dustrially preeminent England, for example, the registrar general's office

was created only in 1837. Compulsory registration of all births, whetherto be followed by baptisms or not, did not come until 1876. Identifyingeach baby's father and place of birth, the state's certificates created the

founding documents for the infant's inclusion in or exclusion from citi-

zenship (through jus sanguinis orjus soli). (He or she was no longer born

in the parish of Egham but in the United Kingdom.) The passport, prod-uct of the vectoral convergence of migration and nationalism in an indus-

trial age, was ready to confirm the baby's political identity as it passedinto adulthood.

The nexus of birth certificate and passport was institutionalized inan era in which women had no legal rights to political participation and

the patriarchal family was the largely unquestioned norm. But in our

time all this has radically changed. When the League of Nations was

founded-and female suffrage was coming into its own-the ratio of di-

vorces to marriages in the United States was about one to eight; today it

is virtually one to two. The percentage of babies born to never-married

mothers has increased spectacularly from 4.2 percent in 1960 to 30.6

percent in 1990.19The intranational as well as international nomadism of

modern life has also contributed to making the nineteenth-century birthcertificate a sort of counterfeit money. If, for example, we read that Mary

Jones was born on 25 October 1970 in Duluth, to Robert Mason and

Virginia Jones, or even Robert and Virginia Mason, we cannot noncha-

lantly infer that she was conceived in that same Duluth, was brought upthere, or lives there now. We have no idea whether her grandparents are

buried in Duluth, and, even if they were, we have few grounds for sup-

posing that Mary will some day be buried alongside them. Is Virginia still

a Mason? Or a Jones? Or something else again? What are the chances

that Mary has much beyond periodic long-distance telephone contactwith either Robert or Virginia? How far is she identifiable, also to herself,as a Duluthian, a Mason, or a Jones?

The counterfeit quality or, shall we say, the low market value of the

birth certificate is perhaps confirmed by the relative rareness of its for-

gery. Conversely, the huge volume of passport forgeries and the high

prices they command show that in our age, when everyone is supposedto belong to some one of the United Nations, these documents have hightruth-claims. But they are also counterfeit in the sense that they are less

and less attestations of citizenship, let alone of loyalty to a protectivenation-state, than of claims to participation in labor markets. Portugueseand Bangladeshi passports, even when genuine, tell us little about loyal-ties or habitus, but they tell us a great deal about the relative likelihood

19. Data drawn from Bureau of the Census figures cited in The WorldAlmanacand Book

of Facts,1992, pp. 942, 944.

Critical nquiry




of their holders being permitted to seek jobs in Milan or Copenhagen.The segregated queues that all of us experience at airport immigration

barricades mark economic status far more than any political attachments.In effect, they figure differential tariffs on human labor.

Let me now turn finally to the political realm. The processes expli-cated above may be unraveling the classical nineteenth-century national-ist project-which aimed for the fullest alignment of habitus, culture,attachment, and exclusive political participation-on at least two distinctbut related political sites.

The first site is more or less congruent with the postindustrial cores.

During the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries the so-

called countries of immigration-the Americas, primarily, but also theantipodes-had a remarkable capacity to naturalize and nationalize theirmillions of immigrants. The names Galtieri, Eisenhauer, Fujimori, Van

Buren, O'Higgins, and Trudeau tell the tale. But the birth certificate thenhad a primarily political significance, as we can see from the constitu-tional proviso that United States presidents be born inside that nation'sborders. One was, thus, an American or one was not. Furthermore, mili-

tary participation in the service of a state other than the United Stateswas subject to the legal sanction of loss of citizenship, not that this was

always rigidly enforced. When did this regime begin to weaken? Perhapsin our epochal 1930s, when Americans were permitted to join the Inter-national Brigade in the Spanish Civil War? Or in the later 1940s whenAmericans were tacitly permitted to participate in the defense of the in-fant state of Israel? But these breaks in the established rules were, I think,

permissible precisely because of a confidence that these extralegal affairswere minor matters, concerning unimportant people with rather low visi-

bility. Besides, the Americanness of the Americans involved was never

seriously in question. These conditions began to change, however, after

the middle of the 1960s. Andreas Papandreou started life as a Greek citi-zen, became an American citizen, and then, when opportunity beckoned,became again a Greek citizen and prime minister of Greece. A certain

protocol is still evident in his progress. But what are we to make of the1993 Cambodian presidential candidacy of self-made Long Beach mil-lionaire Kim Kethavy? In the solemn words of the New YorkTimes,he"carries an American passport.... The offices of his campaign headquar-ters bloom with American flags. (Under American immigration law, Mr.

Kethavy would probably be forced to give up his United States citizenship

in the unlikely event that he won.)"20Everything here is indicative: Mr.Kethavy's citizenship is in parentheses and the newspaper of recordthinks that he will only "probably"be forced to give it up if he becomes

20. "For the Cambodian Vote, a Fourth of July Flavor,"New YorkTimes,17 Feb. 1993,p. A4.



CriticalInquiry Winter1994 325

Cambodia's president. Nothing suggests that the Timesof the 1990s finds

anything odd or discomforting in the behavior of Mr. Kethavy-or of

the American government. After all, American citizens Milan Panic andMohammed Sacirbey have recently served as premier of Serbia and Bos-

nian ambassador to the United Nations, while Rein Taagepera ran unsuc-

cessfully for president of Estonia from a tenured professorship within

the University of California at Irvine. Nor is this a uniquely American

phenomenon; the Canadian citizen and computer systems capitalist Stan-

islaw Tyminski ran against Lech Walesa for the presidency of Poland.

The other side of this coin is the recent emergence in the UnitedStates and other older nation-states of an ethnicity that appears as a bas-

tard Smerdyakov to classical nationalism's Dmitri Karamazov. One em-blem of the American variant is perhaps the espionage trial of JonathanPollard a few years back. In the age of classical nationalism, the very idea

that there could be something praiseworthy in an American citizen's spy-

ing on America for another country would have seemed grotesque. But

to the substantial number of Jewish-Americans who felt sympathetic to

Pollard, the resentful spy was understood as representing a transnational

ethnicity. What else could so subversively blur American and Israeli citi-

zenship? Another emblem is the colossal nonblack audience magnetized

in 1977 by Alex Haley's TV miniseries "Roots." (The final episode waswatched by an astonishing 36,000,000 households.) The purpose of the

program was to counter melting pot ideology by underlining the continu-

ous "Africanness" hat Haley's ancestors maintained as it were despite heir

Americanization. There can be little doubt that the popularity of "Roots"

owed much to this transposable theme, given the rush, especially duringthe 1980s, of thoroughly American youngsters to lobby for various ethnic

studies programs at universities and their eagerness to study languagesthat their immediate parents had so often been determined to abandon.

Out of these and other impulses has emerged the ideological program ofmulticulturalism, which implies that a simple nineteenth-century versionof Americanism is no longer adequate or acceptable.

The shift from, say, American through Armenian-AmericanthroughArmenian-American is being accentuated both by the general revolution

of transportation and communications discussed earlier, and by the re-

cent disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Cleveland, for

example, contains more people of Slovene descent than does Ljubljana,and now that Slovenia has become an independent state, being Slovene

in Cleveland, and in the United States, assumes a heightened signifi-cance. Such ethnicities typically share a strongly fictive character with"Roots." We can easily be amused by the determinedly "Irish" Bostonianwho knows no Irish literature, plays no Irish sports, pays no Irish taxes,serves in no Irish army, does not vote in Irish elections, and has onlyholiday conceptions of the Old Sow as she is today. It is less amusing,




however, to reflect on the fact that the visible presence of gays and lesbi-

ans at St. Patrick's Day celebrations in Cork has done nothing to temper

the passions surrounding sister celebrations in New York.In Europe comparable tendencies are at work and may even be ac-

centuated within the European Community by economic integration and

the free movement of labor. The National Front, Le Pen's movement, and

the rise of right-wing extremism in Germany are all signs of the "ethnici-

zation"process. 21 For the thrust of their propaganda is essentially to draw

a sharp line between the political nation and a putative original ethnos.

Even if a black in the United Kingdom was born there, went to schools

and university there, pays taxes there, votes there, and will be buried

there, for the National Front he or she can never be genuinely English.Similarly in Le Pen's imagination, France is today teeming with aliens, not

immigrants still carrying Algerian passports, but "non-French" citizens of

political France. We could thus conceive of him looking out of the window

of a railway carriage and seeing not fields, not even "French fields," but

"dammit, French fields." In these movements racism is a very strong ele-

ment, but I think the racism will prove in the longer run to be less im-

portant than ethnicization as Europeans circulate more massivelyaround Europe.

The second type of political consequence of all the rapid changes Ihave been discussing concerns the migrants themselves. Not least as a

result of the ethnicization of political life in the wealthy, postindustrialstates, what one can call long-distance nationalism is visibly emerging.This type of politics, directed mainly toward the former Second andThird Worlds, pries open the classical nation-state project from a differ-

ent direction. A striking illustration is the fateful recent destruction of the

Babri mosque in Ayodhya, which has plunged India into her biggest crisissince Partition. The dismantling, which was carefully planned and in-

volved extensive rehearsal and training by retired military and policepersonnel, was officially sponsored by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (WorldHindu Council), which "raised huge sums of money from its supportersin North America and Britain."22 Needless to say, the vast majority of

such supporters are Indians living overseas.23Many of the most uncom-

21. The Lega Lombarda of the late 1980s, now the Lega Nord, while not strictly analo-

gous to these movements, nonetheless shows that something close to ethnicization can break

down even a supposed core nation. For the Lega's attitudes to southern Italians are often

rabidly contemptuous, as if the latter were of another, lesser breed.

22. Praful Bidwai, "Bringing Down the Temple: Democracy at Risk in India," TheNa-

tion, 25 Jan. 1993, p. 86.

23. The numbers of such people are very substantial. The total figure for South Asians

outside South Asia is close to 8.7 million. The breakdown is as follows: Europe 1,482,034

(of which 1,260,000 are in the United Kingdom); Africa 1,389,722; Asia 1,862,654 (of which

1,170,000 are in Malaysia); Middle East 1,317,141, mostly in the Gulf states; Latin America

and the Caribbean 957,330 (of which 730,350 are in Guyana and Trinidad); North America

728,500 (of which 500,000 are in the United States); and the Pacific 954,109 (of which

Exodus



Winter1994 327

promising, fanatical adherents of an independent Khalistan do not livein the Punjab but have prosperous businesses in Melbourne and Chicago.

The Tigers in Jaffna are stiffened in their violent struggles by Tamil com-munities in Toronto, London, and elsewhere all linked on the computerby Tamilnet. Consider the malign role of Croats not only in Germanybut also in Australia and North America in financing and arming Franco

Tudjman's breakaway state and pushing Germany and Austria into a fate-

ful, premature recognition.It would obviously be a mistake to assume that long-distance nation-

alism is necessarily extremist. There were substantial numbers of Filipi-nos outside the Philippines who contributed, not from political exile, to

the struggle against Marcos; the Philippine economy today is heavily de-pendent on remittances sent in by such people from the Gulf, Italy, Saudi

Arabia, England, California, Hong Kong, Japan, and Spain. Financialand other support for the democracy movement that culminated in theTiananmen Square massacre also came from many Chinese not residentin China and often, indeed, citizens of other states.

Nonetheless, in general, today's long-distance nationalism strikesone as a probably menacing portent for the future. First of all, it is the

product of capitalism's remorseless, accelerating transformation of all hu-

man societies. Second, it creates a serious politics that is at the same time

radically unaccountable. The participant rarely pays taxes in the countryin which he does his politics; he is not answerable to its judicial system;he probably does not cast even an absentee ballot in its elections becausehe is a citizen in a different place; he need not fear prison, torture, or

death, nor need his immediate family. But, well and safely positioned inthe First World, he can send money and guns, circulate propaganda, andbuild intercontinental computer information circuits, all of which canhave incalculable consequences in the zones of their ultimate destina-

tions. Third, his politics, unlike those of activists for global human rightsor environmental causes, are neither intermittent nor serendipitous.They are deeply rooted in a consciousness that his exile is self-chosen andthat the nationalism he claims on E-mail is also the ground on which anembattled ethnic identity is to be fashioned in the ethnicized nation-statethat he remains determined to inhabit. That same metropole which mar-

ginalizes and stigmatizes him simultaneously enables him to play, in a

flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero.

839,340 are in Fiji). Professor Myron Weiner kindly informs me that although this tablecounts South Asians, the major areas of emigration have long been inside the present bor-ders of India. He also believes the figures to be too conservative: for example, the recentUnited States census shows the Indian population in America to be close to 900,000. Most

likely, in his estimate, the true total for Indians living overseas is between 11 and 12 million.See Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach, and Steven Vertovec, "Introduction: Themes in the Study ofthe South Asian Diaspora," in SouthAsiansOverseas:MigrationandEthnicity, d. Clarke, Peach,and Vertovec (Cambridge, 1990), p. 2.

CriticalInquiry