“On the whole, modern man has no solutions,” Alexander Herzen warned his son in a letter written from Richmond House, Twickenham, in 1855.
Certainly no solution is in sight to the agony unfolding in Gaza. With every hostage taken and civilian slain the prospect of lasting peace recedes.
But the liberal mind abhors a vacuum. It demands hope of salvation, a scenario in which the combatants are induced to behave in a liberal way.
In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this hope of eventual salvation is known as the two-state solution, first proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937. An admirable account of the history of the two-state solution can be found on Wikipedia.
Most observers of good will, when pressed to say how they would like the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to be resolved, commend the two-state solution.
But the unfortunate possibility exists that holding out the hope of a two-state solution actually makes matters worse. For it implies that the conflict can only be settled along national lines.
The Israelis must recognise the legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinians, and the Palestinians must recognise the state of Israel. What could be fairer than that?
Here is a piety which may help to avert distressing scenes at a Hampstead dinner party.
But by accepting that the settlement has to be along national lines, we inadvertently find ourselves giving aid, comfort and a kind of legitimacy to nationalists who are by no stretch of the imagination liberal.
Nationalism as a cause offers an irresistible opportunity to ruthless men (they are still almost always men) to seize power for themselves by slaughtering innocent people, the more the better, for the aim is to terrify one’s opponents into submission, including those moderate, decent, liberal-minded figures on one’s own side who wish to proceed by constitutional means.
How irrelevant in coverage of the present conflict are moderate, decent, liberal-minded figures on either side. One may criticise the media for ignoring such people, but one cannot pretend that news editors are altogether wrong to do so.
Elie Kedourie (1926-92) described with scholarly rigour the dreadful effects which flowed from the encouragement by the British from Lawrence of Arabia onwards of Arab nationalism, with despots seizing power in the name of the nation, minorities suffering persecution, and naive British liberals such as Arnold Toynbee supposing that all the faults lay on the British side, and the answer was to hand over to local leaders.
An excellent short sketch of Kedourie’s life and thought can be found in the obituary notice by Kenneth Minogue for The Independent. Kedourie was a Jew born in Baghdad, where in those days about a third of the population was Jewish, and where he received an admirable education at French schools, though he was to spend most of his career at the London School of Economics, to which he was recruited by Michael Oakeshott.
In Nationalism, first published in 1960 and proceeding from a series of lectures given at the LSE, Kedourie contended that “contrary to the dreams of Mazzini and President Woodrow Wilson national self-determination is a principle of disorder, not of order, in international affairs”.
We can see this now with Putin, whose burning desire as a nationalist to reintegrate Russian minorities into Russia has led to the invasion of Ukraine. We saw it also with Hitler, determined to bring widely scattered German minorities into the Reich, willing to precipitate and fight a world war in order to do so, and bent on the extermination of the Jews, who did not fit inside his racial definition of the German nation.
Wilson said of his Fourteen Points in January 1918:
“An evident principle runs through the programme I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.”
The collapse at the end of the First World War of the empires in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Near East, appeared to offer the chance to implement Wilson’s programme, but the difficulties of doing so were so much greater than he was willing, in his high-flown liberal way, to grasp, that within 20 years the free world, far from being made, as Wilson promised, “safe for democracy”, was once more plunged into a war for survival.
“Oh,” the reader may rejoin, “so you prefer empires, do you?”
To which I reply, “Not exactly.” But I agree with Kedourie when he writes:
“The Ottoman Empire was not a ‘nation’, the Roman Empire was not a ‘nation’, and yet they were able, as few contemporary states have yet shown themselves able, to continue for centuries, to maintain the cohesion of the social fabric and to attract the loyalties of men.”
We have been attempting, since the end of the First World War, to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of empires. The League of Nations, with Toynbee providing intellectual support from Chatham House (how Kedourie demolishes that edifice of wishful thinking), was an early attempt to do so.
The United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and indeed the European Union, are among the later attempts to fill the vacuum. If good intentions were enough, we would have nothing to worry about.
But in Gaza and many other places, good intentions on their own are useless, NGOs such as World Central Kitchen are vulnerable, and the cry goes up for the United States, working with a coalition of Arab states, to intervene, avert famine and restore order.
The word “imperial” is not used of this proposed intervention, but that is what it is, or would be. Imperial power may be exerted indirectly, by bringing pressure to bear on the Israeli Government and on its sworn enemies: evidently what Washington is attempting to do.
But the starting point has to be the admission that nationalism, however liberal it may be in theory, is in practice not enough. Envenomed nationalism has long been part of the problem.
Short of a war of extermination – a genocide – only higher authority can settle a bitter struggle between two competing nationalities for the same narrow ground.
An Arab-American imperium should not be promoted as a solution, but it would be a less bad, or more realistic, way of going about things.
The post Nationalism is part of the problem in Gaza: Washington cannot avoid its imperial role appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Andrew Gimson
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.