Nationalism is a political movement - it has to engender action and political solidarity among a significant proportion o f the population and imbue them with a common goal. As has been stressed above national self-determination is not limited to the establishment o f independent statehood. Nationalist mobilisation o f the political will continues
whenever grievances, real or putative, are belittled and no political or administrative solution has been found, or when nationalist elites create a sense o f dissatisfaction in order to seek a remedy for their waning legitimation. In Slovakia nationalist mobilisation gathered momentum after independence; the political elite in order to camouflage the growing political cleavages concentrated on the ethnic ones. One could identify this kind o f nationalism as ‘post-independence’, so nationalism o f the newly independent states is the type o f nationalism that affects the transition to democracy directly and is the subject o f this study.
If nationalism was only about intellectuals writing stories about ancient heroes and states declaring citizenship and language laws, without encountering opposition from other national groups, we would not be considering the impact o f nationalism on
democracy and there would be nothing controversial about nationalism. The emphasis upon culture and identity is possibly useful in understanding a type o f nationalist
development or the mechanisms it uses in a particular country. However, too much focus on the particularity o f nationalism is to neglect the fact that the controversy comes from nationalism’s innate tendency towards the appropriation o f the state’s authority and the exercise o f power. Power, despite the much propagated view that the state has sacrificed its predominance to global economic interdependence (see chapter 7), is still about significant control o f the national state.
Here we face a major dilemma o f the nationalism-democracy relationship. Nation-building and state-building are overlapping, but two conceptually (and
historically) different processes. The well-established idea o f seeing a nation as ‘a people’ in possession o f a state might be the ideal o f nationalism, but a nation, seen as a cultural community, can exist without a state as much as a state does not need one such ‘people’ to exist; what a democratizing state needs is a unified nation in a political, not a cultural sense. In other words, democracies require a sense o f identification with the political community which in terms o f identity means that being a citizen should rate as an
important component o f who they are. To Dunkwart Rustow one single background condition for transition to democracy is national unity, meaning “that the vast majority o f citizens in a democracy to be must have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they belong to”167.The point to underscore is that a political
community is not determined by culture or common heritage, membership is not a given, but can be acquired or chosen, so that strictly speaking nation-building should mean the integration and harmonisation of the whole society and all citizens in it.
It is the state, however, that controls the territory and has the supreme authority to impose rules and forms o f behaviour and demand taxes; in short, a nation and its leaders cannot impose any desired rules or behaviour without the significant control o f the state. In the process o f nation-state consolidation, state power plays a fundamental role, also because it holds the key to the major element of cultural homogenisation of state’s population: the education system. The state in order to increase, or maintain its legitimacy has a vested interest in creating and reinforcing the nation - it must justify the purpose o f its existence, which besides the physical protection o f its citizens and their welfare, is also the guardianship o f the national culture.
In newly independent states, both the state and the nation are engaged in the process o f strengthening their position. The main resource that the nation has for acquiring political power stems from the unity provided by the psychological
identification o f its members. Nationalism is thus conducive to nation-building process, which is rooted in a deliberate effort to construct an overarching collective identity, which is usually based on a “putative common national (ethnic) sentiment, culture and heritage” 168 in an effort to create a sense o f purpose that a state needs in order to
function effectively. State-building then is in principle a complementary project, aiming at the establishment o f a political community o f citizens and at forging social solidarity and loyalty to state institutions. The compatibility o f those two processes is however
dependent on whether the state and its leaders who pursue nation-building policies perceive the state to be o f and for the dominant nation. The clash between the
administrative and the political emphasis o f democratising policies on the one hand and the culturally preoccupied nation-building process on the other hand aiming at the
167 D.Rustow ‘Transitions to Democracy’ in Comparative Politics 2:3 April 1970 p.p.337-363 p.350 168 O.Yiftachel ‘Nation-building or Ethnic Fragmentation?’ Space and Polity 1:2 November 1997 p.p. 149-171 p. 150
consolidation o f the nation is less relevant if there is a congruence between the polity (demos) and culturally conscious nation (ethnos), which is not the reality o f most states in ECE.
In multinational (multiethnic or multicultural) states those two processes can be conflicting, mostly due to the assumption by the dominant nation and its nation-building elites that the state is their own nation-state which implies the exclusion o f other ethnic groups from the ownership o f the state. In the case o f newly independent multinational states the problem is further magnified by the tension about the order o f preference given to either state-building or nation-building.
When it comes to democratisation, the legitimacy o f the democratisation process, as will be argued throughout, is central to politics, but in new multinational democracies that are still in the process o f consolidating the nation which the state embodies, legitimacy o f that state is also at the heart o f nationalist mobilisation. The disintegration o f the postcommunist Czechoslovakia is a good example. The legitimacy o f transition and the common state was challenged by the Slovak claim that the state consisted o f two peoples, each o f which had the right to decide the fate o f its nation (the pace and type o f transition), thus, the building o f a common state lost to the challenge of nation-building from one o f its constituent parts169.
The reasons why some states give a considerable preference to nation-building over state-building was the subject o f the first chapter, but for the moment I want to stress that states, particularly the new states, need the energy and loyalty that ‘the nation’ is capable o f providing and that often it is easier to achieve by an appeal to national (ethnic) identity than to the newly acquired citizenship.
Paradoxically, civic identity tends to lose out as soon as there is a disagreement about state-building policies. Ethnic nationalism is as much a consequence o f
unsuccessful state-building as it is its cause, for the disintegration o f the state, the loss o f its legitimacy, diminishes civic affiliation and leaves the field open to ethnic mobilisation. The disintegration o f Czechoslovakia changed the civic identity o f the Hungarian
minority, who found themselves citizens o f a new state they did not want. Consequently, the Hungarian minority was faced with strong nationalising policies o f new Slovakia, inspired by historical animosity against Hungary and the minority’s lack o f enthusiasm
for independent Slovakia. Therefore their identity became narrower, in the sense that they became defined as ‘the Hungarians’ and without the protection o f more neutral and historically less hostile Prague. Similarly, the mobilisation o f Slovaks within
Czechoslovakia could not be done on the basis o f civic identity, for the state that should have inspired that identity was being questioned - in both cases state-building failed to create a political nation and lost to an ethnic one.