Reappraising Communism and Nationalism

Abstract

There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Reality was different. Certainly from 1945 onwards, communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests. The communist states of Central and Eastern Europe constructed “socialist patriotism,” a form of loyalty to their own state of workers and peasants. Up to 1989, communists in Eastern Europe sang the national anthem, and waved the national flag next to the red banner. The use of national images was not the exception, but the rule. From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. This was not incidental or a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, but ingrained in the theory and practice of the communist movement since its inception.

The paradox of nationalism: The common denominator of radical right and radical left euroscepticism

“…Nationalism and the left usually are treated as polar opposites and theoretically incompatible (Minkenberg 1995; Mevius 2011). The main features of the radical left include a rejection of capitalism, a call for a major redistribution of resources, ‘the espousal of collective economic and social rights’ (March & Mudde 2005: 25) and internationalism.…”

“…The relationship between nationalism and left‐wing radicalism may be traced historically as the ‘product of the Enlightenment and the French revolution’ (Erk 2010: 425), where there is a close link between nationalism and civic concepts such as ‘popular sovereignty’ (Yack 2001) and ‘class’ (Schwarzmantel 1987). The combination of the national, class (Hobsbawm 1990; Mevius 2011) and popular dimensions of the French Revolution culminated in directing ‘its struggle against the social elite of its own ethnie’ (Smith 2004: 203) – in other words, in the equation of nation and people, seen from below as representing the common interest of the nation against the privileged elites (Hobsbawm 1990: 20). This explains why nationalism has been associated with early radical and labour movements of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s (Breuilly 2011) as well as with a number of more recent radical left‐wing and/or communist movements, whose trajectory can be explained by this equation of nation with class, including Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mao's China, Nasser's Egypt, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Tonnesson 2009) and Milosevic's Serbian Communist Party (Mevius 2011: 2).…”

‘The True Love of the People and the Motherland’: The concept of socialist patriotism, socialist nation and anti‐nationalism in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s

“…If communism is regarded as narrow dogmatism, it may seem obvious that the two ideas are completely mutually exclusive (Kemp, 1999), or, at best, the political discourse on the nation and national values can be considered merely as a rhetorical strategy of communist power seeking (Connor, 1984). Moving away from these explanations, I suggest that socialist patriotism can be regarded as a communist response to the question of nationalism, which produced greatly different ideological variants in the Soviet Union and later in Eastern Europe (Mevius, 2009). The kinship between the socialist patriotisms of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can be recognised in their basic conceptual structure.…”

Revolution as a transition from empire to nation-state(s): Comparing the Soviet and Chinese paths

“…Connor’s thesis became influential after the revolutions of 1989. Historians began to note the fusion of national legitimacy and communist ideologies under communist/post-communist regimes, usually by elaborating upon how a single state or a revolution in a particular state had mobilized nationalist symbols to support a communist agenda (see Mevius, 2009). A most relevant source in this regard is Liliana Riga’s (2012) masterpiece, which probes how the internal struggle among religious universality, ethnic particularity and geopolitical nationalism shaped the Bolsheviks’ comprehensions of communist ideology.…”