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PARTISAN
I~EVIEW
power (like Stalin, who the Georgians nowadays claim was not really a
Georgian but an Ossetian.
Sic transit.
... ).
In Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union, it is national
identity and questions of national culture that have become hegemonic,
and it is such issues of nationalism that appear to be directing the flow of
events. We already have remarked how German nationalism has became
hegemonic, once the Berlin wall disappeared. Even in Yugoslavia, where
the Titoist example gave the national entities more autonomy than
anywhere else in Eastern Europe, the federative structure appears to be
disintegrating along national lines. While the fluidity of the present
situation in the Soviet Union makes it impossible to try to predict the
nature of its future political structure, there is no doubt th at this
structure will be determined by the nationalities issue more than by any
other considerations. This will be so whether the Soviet Union manages
to survive as a more or less coherent body politic, or if it disintegrates
into its national components. In either case, the national structure will
become dominant.
In this blindness to nationalism, Marxism - paradoxically - has a
kindred soul in modern Western liberalism: you will find very little about
nationalism in John Stuart Mill - or, for that matter, in John Rawls.
This should not be surprising, as both Marxism and liberalism hail from
the Enlightenment, with its universalisms and its utter unease about par–
ticularism and specificities. But just as Western liberalism learned how to
overcome this abstract universalism on many levels (how defunct now are
Tom Paine's revulsion against "faction" and Rousseau's similar abhor–
rence of anything that appears inimical to the
!lolonte generale),
so any
socialist thought of the future will have to learn - among other lessons
to be drawn from the Soviet debacle - that the question of nation and
national culture and identity has to be reframed and restated. The old
simplistic answers won't do .
