A gemütlich Segregation – Multiculturalism and the Iceman's Curse

Stefano Fait, "A gemütlich Segregation – Multiculturalism and the Iceman's Curse in Italy"

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409411215

It is useless to continue speaking German if we acquire Italian ways and mentalities…An ethnic minority must never lose its fear of disappearing. Once it does, it will disappear.

– Silvius Magnago, the father of modern South Tyrol

Everyone wants to be a minority, here; being a majority is unappealing.

– Anton Pelinka, Austrian political scientist, on multiculturalism in South Tyrol

In Italy, as in France, Iberia and Latin America, hyphenated identities are uncommon.  It is generally assumed that a cohesive civil religion is incompatible with an emphasis on ethnic and cultural distinctiveness as discussed in the Adsett chapter.  But what happens when this assimilationist logic, stressing what people have in common, comes face to face with an ethnic identity which celebrates difference, as in South Tyrol or Québec?

South Tyrol/Upper Adige, the northernmost trilingual Italian region, on the alpine border with Austria, has often been celebrated as a model of how ethnic rivalries can be contained. However, the post-war agreement really was a ‘cold peace’ which rested on a peculiar reinterpretation of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine.  The campaign slogan adopted by the party representing the German-speaking majority used to be: “the clearer we make the distinction between us, the better we will get on with each other”, roughly corresponding to the English saying “good fences make good neighbours”.  This compromise, together with a lavishly subsidized, but also vibrant, local economy – South Tyrol’s per capita income exceeds the national average by 40 percent, and ranks among the highest in the world – has ensured that the interests of otherwise competing and antagonistic groups would not diverge too sharply.  But it has come at a price: ethnic identities and interests matter sensibly more than individual identities and rights.  An arrangement originally designed to protect ethnic Ladins and Germans – a majority in the region but a minority nationally – from the encroachments of the Italian State, has produced a ‘fenced society’. Most people live side by side but separately (nebeneinander), often in self-enclosed, ethnically homogeneous enclaves, guarding their ‘irreducible uniqueness’. Mixture (Vermischung), mixed marriages (Mischehen) and mixed schools (gemischte Schulen) are deemed undesirable; even nursery schools are ethnically segregated.  This is the result of a clash of two distinct inflections of nationalism.

European nationalism did not come in a package with individualism and secularism, and the transformation of the agrarian world produced sensibly different outcomes.  The moral and cultural consensus expressed by the nationalized masses could find a sense of cohesion and shared identity in opposite directions.  In part, this is because modern European secular narratives have been shaped by both the Enlightenment and positivistic belief in the malleability of human nature and society and by the Romantic passion for ethnicity and localism and its critique of social fragmentation and dehumanizing mechanism. Under the influence of Romantic aspirations, national identities have been literally invented through the selective removal of memories of past hybridism and syncretism.

Historically, this dualism gave rise to two divergent traditions of accommodating cultural and ethnic diversity within a nation-state.  The first is an assimilationist and contractual model, adopted in Western Europe, and mostly derived from the Roman and Roman Catholic ecumenical traditions, and from the Enlightenment and liberal individualist and cosmopolitan values. Its explicit aim is to gradually absorb diversity within its legal framework and the hegemonic national culture. Nationality thus coincides with civic, voluntary affiliation, and membership is determined by acquired traits such as a common language and shared cultural traditions.  The second tradition is a particularistic and separatist model, where minorities are not encouraged to integrate into the larger society because their cultural identities are held to be not entirely reconcilable with the values and norms of the host society, and because their members are presumed to be too firmly anchored to their cultural baggage.  Arguably this is what we have seen in the case of Germany and Austria in previous chapters, and in Eastern Europe.  Within this model, nationality is an ethno-cultural, ascribed affiliation relying on genealogical criteria.

This difference in policy had important consequences. Both the German and the Italian unification processes began during the Napoleonic wars and came to fruition in the early 1870s. But German Romantic nationalism was impregnated with ruralism, ethnicism, and anti-cosmopolitism and drew heavily on a symbolic repertoire of peasants alienated by the ills of modern urban life.  Conversely, Italian nationalism developed along the lines of ever-widening circles of integration and abstract superimpositions, and an emphasis on a common language, tradition, history, and on highly formalized juridical and political units that were inevitably inimical to ethnic particularism.  The postulate of a ‘natural causation’ of politics and society was consistently rejected even by the far right, and nationalism was seldom associated with völkish themes (Absalom 1995). Thus, for instance, Italian encyclopedias and dictionaries consistently stressed the voluntaristic aspects of nationality and excluded ‘race’ as a constitutive, unifying factor (Gentile 2006).

In brief, German nationalism was more inclined to make a fetish of ethnic identity, that is, to treat it as something superior to humans, possessing an intrinsic, almost sacred value, whereas Italian nationalism often manifested an alarming state idolatry, which would fester with Mussolini’s rise to power. Besides having a remarkable heuristic value as an analytical tool, this divide can be clearly seen in Trentino-South Tyrol (TST), where different ethnic groups managed to peacefully co-exist until the age of European nationalism. Until 1919 a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, TST was assigned to Italy by the treaty of Saint Germain, even though its German-speaking inhabitants – an ethnic majority in South Tyrol – longed for their reintegration into the Austrian homeland and especially for the unification with North Tyrol, still part of Austria.

When Mussolini came to power, he was determined to force upon the nation a sense of national identity, in order to make it disciplined and efficient, in spite of the existing linguistic and regional divisions.  This meant imposing an absolute linguistic and cultural unity for the whole of Italy, which had been unified less than sixty years earlier.  This would include the French-speaking Aosta Valley, the Slovenian-speaking minority, and the German-speaking South Tyrol.  He then undertook an ethnocidal scheme of Italianisation of South Tyrol, encouraging thousands of Italian workers to settle down in its towns,[1] disbanding cultural and recreational associations, hiring only monolingual Italian-speaking civil servants and barring access by local elites to positions of responsibility, forbidding the teaching and use of German language in public, and having place names, given names and even gravestone inscriptions translated in Italian.

Eventually, in 1939, Hitler and Mussolini devised a radical solution to this problem: ‘voluntary’ ethnic self-cleansing.  South Tyroleans were asked to choose between staying in South Tyrol and renounce their cultural heritage and declaring themselves ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and be resettled somewhere in the German Reich.  Approximately 170,000 – 90% of Germanophones and 61% of Ladins – opted for the Reich and were called ‘Optants’ (Optanten). The Dableiber, those who refused to leave their land, and there were as many as 70,000 of them, were regarded as traitors by the others. This collective trauma left a legacy of pain among South Tyroleans.[2]

After the war, some of those who had been resettled in the former German Reich began to return home, but South Tyrol was not restored to Austria.  Rome was instead urged to grant self-government to its German-speaking and Ladin-speaking minorities, which it did, in 1948, but in a way that would make sure that South Tyrol would not be able to secede, and which deeply enraged South Tyroleans.  The special status was extended to the Trentini, their Italian-speaking neighbours to the South, and a new region was created, called ‘Trentino – Upper Adige’,[3] in which German speakers would once again be a minority with little control over their own destiny.  Then came mass demonstrations, bombing attacks, the first victims, and troops were sent to police the province: the spectre of Northern Ireland loomed large in the national debate. Eventually, Rome agreed to discuss a set of far more meaningful measures of self-government for the ethnic minorities, the so-called ‘second autonomy package’, which was originally signed in 1969 and put in place in 1972, although it took twenty years of fierce negotiations to implement all the measures (137) that it contained (Paketabschluss).  

It was in those years, late 1960s – early 1970s, that two American anthropologists, John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf, did ethnographic fieldwork in TST.  They detected a number of distinctive cultural traits which set Italian-speaking and German-speaking peasants apart, despite living in the same ecological niche, to which they had adapted in much the same way. They ranged from settlement and field layouts (dispersed in South Tyrol and nucleated in Trentino);  professional aspirations; economic and social arrangements (independence and self-government vs. interdependence and community-orientation, rural life vs. urban life); and, migration patterns (Italian-speaking emigrants maintained close ties with their homeland, whereas German-speaking emigrants burned the bridges behind them).  But the most striking divergence was in kinship and family structures.  In Tyrolean families, the first born son (Wirth) would inherit the estate (primogeniture) and the younger siblings would have to leave (weichen).  Alternatively, some of them were allowed to remain at the farm, and work as farmhands (Knechte, which also means ‘slaves’).  Conversely, ethnic Italian families in TST divided the estate and the patrimony in equal parts among all siblings.  Farmers would not regard themselves as rulers of an estate, but as stewards.  Communities tended to be inclusive, democratic, reciprocal, and flexible, and families and distant relatives would enjoy broad social networks (Wolf & Cole 1999).

From this brief overview of ethnic relationships in TST, one can readily discern that this can easily result in a brand of multiculturalism in which power struggles between ethnic groups and interest groups may cause the right of peoples to self-determination to become a vehicle for the fetishization of group identities.  Indeed, in South Tyrol, TST’s northern autonomous province, every ten years, the ethnic census requires local residents, including foreign residents, to identify with one of the three available ethnic designations[4] – dubbed ‘ethnic cages’ by the critics of this system – which will determine welfare entitlements (e.g. social housing) and public employment quotas available to each group, in proportion to their numerical strength.  The political implications of this census are obvious.  Eastern Europeans living in the region are the most likely to self-identify as German-speakers in the ethnic census, for German was the official language of the Habsburg Empire, and was commonly spoken across south-eastern Europe. The recent decision on the part of the ethnic German ruling party to impose restrictions on migrant workers who are not from Eastern Europe, shows that ethnic allegiance overrides all other considerations.

As a result, 20 percent of residents who would rather not identify with any of the official ethnicities or, given the choice, would check off more than one, have no choice but to select one.  In other words, individuals are to a large extent defined by their membership in an ethnic group. Ethnic identities matter sensibly more than individual rights and, even though things are improving,[5] many, perhaps most people still live side by side but separately, in self-enclosed, ethnically homogeneous enclaves, guarding their ‘irreducible uniqueness’, and stigmatizing those who have dared to cross the clearly defined boundaries.  People from different ethnic backgrounds, it is argued by the German-speaking political leaders, should meet “as little as possible and as much as necessary” (so wenig als möglich, so viel als notwendig).  The imperative of ‘boundary maintenance’ is inexorable: society must be ordered in ‘ethnic drawers’ (ethnische Schubladen) (Staffler 1999), which means that individuals are forced into ethnic straitjackets that define them by their ascribed roles. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to initiate a reversal of perspective when social interactions and economic transactions are based on ethnically homogeneous pre-existing networks of trust –. This is a problem that has been extensively examined by Patti Lenard in her chapter on immigration and trust.

This ideal Heimat,[6] for all its protections from the outside world and its perpetual reproduction of a ‘geography of avoidance’,[7] seems to be economically unfeasible and politically unwise in an increasingly integrated continental economy and in times of mass immigration.  The underlying premise of this model of multicultural coexistence is that ethnic groups should be highly integrated, self-referential and static, or else South Tyrol would quickly find itself on the brink of Verelsässerung, that is, total assimilation, like Alsace, in France (Elsass in German).

As a result of all this, today Upper Adige is “the one area in Central Europe where there is not a dominated but a dominant minority” (Pallaver 1990, 70).  But the outcome of this institutionalized compensatory differential treatment and measures taken to promote the autonomous development of each ethnic group – whether manifested in sport, media, religion, education, the labour market, the house market, social amenities, recreational facilities, etc. – can be usefully compared to J.S. Furnivall’s (1948, 304) disillusioned description of South East Asian colonial societies:

It is in the strictest sense a medley, for they mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the marketplace, in buying and selling. There is a plural society, with different sections of the community living side by side, but separately, within the same political unit.

Life in the South Tyrol of ethnic quotas (ethnischer Proporz) can also be contrasted with the Cantle Report’s (2001, Section 2.1) depiction of the inner cities of Northern England:

The extent, to which these physical divisions were compounded by so many other aspects of our daily lives, was very evident.  Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges.

Bones of Contention

Symbols, systems of signification, and narrative accounts are tied together in complex ways, and even scientists sometimes end up enmeshed in the cobweb of identity politics.

Between 1878 and 1900, in a political climate ideologically charged due to border disputes between Austria and Italy, Meran medical anthropologist Franz Tappeiner (1816-1902) and his colleagues used craniometric measurements and skin and hair sampling to argue that Trentini[8] closely resembled the dolichocephalous ‘Germanic type’.  Their colleagues in Trent, Giovanni Canestrini (1835-1900) and Lamberto Moschen (1853-1932), countered that, according to their own findings, Trentini should be classified together with their Italian neighbours to the south.[9] Paolo Mantegazza, one of the leading Italian anthropologists, while clarifying that his critical remarks should not be intended as a personal attack on an esteemed colleague and friend, remarked that he could not believe that “the hyper-craniological faith could be stretched to the point of fanaticism” (Mantegazza 1884, 355-356).  Both sides refused to acknowledge the physical resemblance of South Tyroleans and Trentini, who had lived side by side and intermarried for centuries.  This is a forgotten tidbit of local history which shows that even scientific practices may become objects of fierce struggle and impassioned debate over disputed classifications.  This is far more likely when there is an ongoing conflict between ethnic groups vying for control of resources and power.

About a hundred years later, in 1991, German hikers discovered a well-preserved corpse, still half buried in a glacier on the South Tyrolean border with Austria.  It turned out that the corpse was not that of a mountaineer, but of a man who lived in the region thousands of years ago and who was christened ‘Oetzi the Iceman’, because people initially thought that he had been found in the Austrian Oetz Valley.  Since 1998, despite the protests of those who found this decision appalling and degrading, Oetzi has been on display in a refrigerated chamber at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano/Bozen, the capital town of South Tyrol, and has immediately become an object of desire.  Hundreds of tourists from across the world[10] line up every day to catch a glimpse of the mummy through a small stainless steel window.  As the oldest preserved human being, he has acquired a true celebrity status and, from an invaluable treasure for palaeontologists, he has turned into a huge business venture, spawning a veritable ‘Ice Man industry’, with countless commercial ramifications, from books and documentaries, to tours, holiday packages, and escorted hikes to the site of discovery, to special recipes, dishes, and menus, to merchandise.  His image appears on cups, t-shirts, postcards, key chains, calendars, notepads, mouse pads, backpacks, etc.  Now even Hollywood stars are joining the Oetzi-cult.  It is reported that Brad Pitt got a new tattoo of Oetzi on his left forearm, perhaps because the Iceman himself had 60 tattoos, allegedly for shamanic/therapeutic reasons.

Now, because the body was found on the Italian-Austrian border, a legal battle ensued between Italy and Austria over the ownership of Oetzi, which soon became a clash between North and South Tyrol, Innsbruck and Bozen.  Bolzano eventually won the dispute when a topographic survey established that the resting place lay inside South Tyrol, less than a hundred yards from the border. For the first time since the annexation, South Tyroleans had reason to rejoice for not being part of Austria: their special status meant that every archaeological finding would fall under the provincial jurisdiction.[11]  This also meant that the ancient man initially dubbed by the media Homo Tirolensis, and portrayed as the first Tyrolean, really was Homo Tirolensis Meridionalis (‘South Tyrolean Man’), with potentially serious implications for the future relations of the two ethnically related, but politically separated neighbours.  Many Austrian Tyroleans thought that they had been robbed.  After all, his name was Oetzi, like the Austrian Oetz valley, not Schnalsi, as he should have been called, if he had been found in the South Tyrolean Senales valley.  This was but the latest of a string of altercations between Tyroleans, with the northerners accusing the southerners of taking unfair advantage of Italian multicultural policies to pursue their own interests to the detriment of their Austrian ‘cousins’.

This story is important because it highlights the limits of identity politics when the need to emphasise diversity leads to the iconization of symbols of difference, even if it is the body of a deceased man, turned into a relic.  Oetzi has been turned into a South Tyrolean saint, the object of a secular, spontaneous devotion.  A hunter, a travelling salesman, a shaman, an outlaw, or a warrior, no one really knows who this man was.  Nevertheless, his body, preserved forever in a sarcophagus monitored by multiple sensors, together with his goatskin leggings, axe, grass cape, longbow, arrows, fire-making kit, and backpack, is now part of a mythologizing process, which closely resembles the cultification of Lenin.

This is unsurprising, given that the cultural construction of ethnicity is grounded in objects, symbols, institutions, places, and habits.  The perpetuation of undiluted cultures and ethnicities has much in common with the preservation of this warrior hero, media icon, and ancestral patriarch.  The 5,300-year-old mummy is in many ways an allegory of how local power struggles have led to the fetishization of group identities.  When certain ethnic identity markers are less readily accessible, or their content is thinning, or they are questioned, or no longer as distinctive as they used to be, and therefore less relevant –this is precisely what is going on in South Tyrol, as the new generations appear to be less interested in ethnicity – then it becomes necessary to develop and introduce some new ones (Wrong 1997).  In other words, apart from the ordinary symbolic manipulation for commercial purposes, the hype surrounding Oetzi is possibly an indication of a decline of real cultural differences, or at least of a much less polarized division between South Tyroleans and Alto Atesini.  This has forced ethno-political entrepreneurs to find new ways to mobilize intra-group solidarity.  This secular relic is therefore a promise of immortality for the current multi-ethnic arrangement of the province, the guarantee that South Tyroleans will forever continue to exist as a distinct ethnic group.  As the body of the mythical ancestor[12] has stood the course of time, so will the South Tyrolean identity (Bergonzi & Heiss 2004).  What is even more interesting is that all this is occurring as North and South Tyroleans, who share virtually the same tradition and language, are undergoing a process of schismogenesis (Bateson 1958).  Partitioned into two subgroups by the border, and therefore lacking those checks and restraints that prevent progressive differentiation, the division is becoming dialectically heightened to the point that it is spinning out of control and leading them to increasing rivalry and hostility.  This could lead, eventually, to the breakdown of pan-Tyrolean ethnic solidarity, similar to the way in which, in the post-war years, Austrians distanced themselves from pan-Germanism as seen in the previous chapter.  An event that would appear all the more baffling, given the otherwise stubborn commitment to the ‘one Tyrol’ ideology (Landeseinheit), which finds eloquent expression in the old folksong ‘There is only one Tyrol’ (Tirol isch lei oans).  Ultimately, the nature of the alleged Iceman curse, which has thus far claimed the lives of 7 persons somehow related to the discovery of Oetzi or to research conducted on his body, might well be that those coming in close and prolonged contact with Oetzi are bound to be torn apart from their loved ones, and this is just as true for ethnic groups.

But there is another sense in which identity politics has major commercial implications. These days, DNA-screenings are performed on a number of peoples, particularly if they live in remote places, in which case they are known as founder populations, that is, human groups descending from a small number of ancestors (founders).  They represent an enormous opportunity for clinicians, because their genetic variations become amplified, with a higher allele frequency.  Instead, the rest of their genome remains substantially the same, given that very few mutations are introduced from the outside (‘genetic noise’).  These studies can only be useful if both the environment and lifestyles have remained unchanged, playing a minor role in genetic variation, and isolated populations come closer to the ideal conditions.  This should facilitate the highly profitable and immensely helpful medical research into the genetic determinants of common disorders.

The Alps, with their narrow valleys and scattered settlements would appear to be extremely promising for genetic analysis of complex traits.  And, indeed, there is an ongoing population research project, called GenNova, which is being conducted by the Institute of Genetic Medicine at the European Academy[13] in Bolzano/Bozen – which also hosts an ‘Institute for Mummies and the Iceman’ – in partnership with the universities of Harvard, Munich and Lübeck.  Their homepage[14] says that ‘several of South Tyrol’s remote Alpine valleys and villages, especially some Ladin communities and other communities of the Val Pusteria, Valle Isarco and Val Venosta, have basically maintained the same geographical conditions, small-scale economic structures and above all, limited mobility since their settlement in the Neolithic period, leading to genetic-environmental ‘microisolation’.  Such small, visible pockets of microisolated populations, together with unique genealogical and medical documentation, make South Tyrol an ideal location for research in the field of genetic medicine.

Understandably, German-speaking media reports of this project often betray the crypto-colonial fascination with the “virgin”, “the pristine”, the ‘Otherness’ of peoples “living close to nature”.  Now even genetics appear to be committed to the preservation of the ethnic Garden of Eden, where South Tyroleans are most themselves, at their most pristine, unsullied and immune for centuries from the diluting influences of foreign cultures and genotypes (Pinggera et al. 2006).  These communities have ostensibly marched through history in ordered ranks, keeping their ethnic heritage intact and becoming sites of moral values where pristine native culture intersects with a primordial landscape.  However, critics have questioned the value of this kind of research, on the ground that population geneticists ignore the significant body of ethnographic literature pointing to the mobility of the human species and to the contingency and plasticity of human cultural expressions and of group-boundaries.  They believe that scientists have fallen prey to the so-called ‘classificatory fallacy’ (or ‘essentialist fallacy’), in that they have mistaken artificially constructed and constantly negotiated and contested categories for natural categories.

Indeed, in deeply divided multicultural societies like South Tyrol, it is not always easy to disentangle scientific reasoning from preconceived notions of self-identity, and professional agendas from political agendas.  For instance, let us consider Germanic kinship and inheritance systems. Traditionally, Germanic ethnic aggregations (Stämme) comprised a few thousand families and defined their identity in relation to a common ancestor and to their consanguinity (endogamy) (Gasparri 1998).  It was customary for the members of peasant patriarchal clans to be unilaterally related to each other and to trace their genealogy back to the alleged founder of the lineage, that is, to their common ancestor.  The patriarch was the highest religious, political, and legal authority of the clan and decided when it was time to transfer his power to the first-born son, together with the knowledge of the body of norms and practices of the lineage, according to the inheritance right called Anerbenrecht.  It is therefore far more natural for South Tyroleans than for Alto Atesini to think of their heritage as part of this ‘ancestral inheritance’ (Ahnenerbe).  Because we cannot assume a basic literacy in genetics and biological evolution for most South Tyrolean readers, many might erroneously understand genealogies in terms of genetic continuity – some sort of Eternal Recurrence – and regard their existence as an epiphenomenon of perpetual bloodlines.  This would in turn exacerbate the existing tendency toward the fetishization of culture and identity, or neotraditionalism, whereby ethnicity is seen as timeless, bounded, discrete, and organic, the permanent and inalterable property of a primordial ethnic group.

Indeed, the implicit assumption is common, that the authentic South Tyrol is rural and that genuine South Tyroleans are healthy and sturdy mountain farmers.  Those who have to leave the countryside for urban settings are presumed to be eager to reconnect with their rural roots, whenever possible.  This belief recreates and commercializes a mystique of the natural and redeeming authenticity and purity of the Alps as a getaway from the pressure of urban daily life and from the corrupting influence of modernity, especially Italian modernity.  The Alps are then viewed as an ideal space of subversive nostalgia, for those longing for a more genuine identity.  It is through this psychological transference that environmental conservation (Naturschutz) and ‘homeland protection’ (Heimatschutz) become closely intertwined in the South Tyrolean self-narrative.

Advertising campaigns for tourism promotion make the link between environmental management and the multiple meanings and uses of the ‘touristification’ of heritage even more apparent.  In the South Tyrolean tourism industry it is not unusual to encounter traces of ethno-nationalistic rhetoric such as the expression “the obstinate love of the people for their homeland” (hartnäckige Heimatliebe der Menschen) or quotes such as, “every man has a homeland and should love and honour that patch of land where he was born” (Jeder Mensch hat eine Heimat und soll das Fleckchen Erde, wo er geboren ist, in Lieb’ und Ehren halten).  These words, found in a tourist brochure, were taken from a poem by the nineteenth-century German poet and writer Julius Wolff, and were used by the South-Tyrolean Dairy Association as a caption for the photo of two blond children drinking milk while sitting in the mountain grass.

Within the ethno-environmentalist model “Homeland and environment” (Heimat und Umwelt), Heimat is the ubiquitous and constitutive feature of a defensive strategy against the globalised and secularised ‘outside world’ which combines landscape preservation, economic protectionism, and the attempt to restore the perceived harmony of the past and the moral qualities associated with the countryside.  Yet South Tyroleans should not be seen as passive recipients of the effects of this manipulation of signs and signifiers.  They also play active roles in the dynamic conversion of the particular into the universal and back again, and they deliberately try to market a particular approach to modernity and multiculturalism, transformed into a fetishized commodity.  In other words, today’s South Tyrol is also a brand name closely identified with authenticity.  By the same token, South Tyroleans, as they dress in traditional garb, play traditional instruments, sing folksongs, and try to anticipate the tourist’s expectations are, as it were, human billboards, with a corporate identity who seek to generate brand loyalty among tourists/consumers while catering for the demands of the local tourist industry.

What is truly fascinating is that, far from restricting the jurisdiction of commodization, as in Igor Kopytoff’s model (Appadurai 1999), South Tyroleans are resolutely and purposefully committed to its expansion, as the only viable remedy to the increasing depopulation of mountain areas, and as a way to express their lifestyle.  Self-objectification and self-commoditization via the resurrection, invention, and staging of folkways are palatable because they provide hard currency and symbolic capital, and revive practices that would otherwise have no place in everyday life.  In this way, South Tyroleans can assert their group identity and teach traditional values, ideals and norms of behaviour to the new generations.  The focus is on building a sense of continuity with the past and integrity in the present, and retaining an appearance of authenticity, spontaneity, worth, genuineness,  and plausibility, that is, of collective identity. At least for young people, who are gradually losing the sense of ethnic self-preservation (Selbsterhaltungsgefühl), being South Tyrolean also means voluntarily consuming one’s own identity, choosing to be part of a ‘tribe’, but only insofar as it is in their economic, social and political interest to do so (Maffesoli 1996).

I therefore have to disagree with Oliver Schmidtke’s contention that “the pragmatism of a primarily managerial approach to a common market and the highly emotional reference to the endangered Heimat are not very compatible” (Schmidtke 1996, 298).  South Tyrolean identity has served to protect and expand business opportunities.  What is more, a fast-shrinking global marketplace causes distinctiveness to become commercially attractive, and at the same time it intensifies regional competition, fostering economic and cultural chauvinism.  Hence, identity politics should be seen, at least to some extent, as a natural outgrowth of mass consumerism and the struggle for symbolic hegemony.  It follows that there is no inherent tension between commercialism and traditionalism, and between exchange-value and use-value.  Cultural preservation and business are simply two sides of the same coin, and the commercial exploitation of objects and practices (including a people’s genome) may lead to native essentialism – the idea that group members have a primordial attachment to their traditional ways of life and worldviews – which, incidentally, seems to enjoy a broad appeal, and not only in South Tyrol (Brumann 1999).

Dominant Minorities

It is only fair to say that the alpine region has never been welcoming to foreigners, newcomers and underrepresented minorities.  Witch-hunting was endemic in the isolated rural societies of the Alps and their foothill (Trevor-Roper 1969) and minorities such as Gypsies, Jews, Karrner, Hutterites, Sinti and Roma, have been systematically discriminated against, harassed and persecuted by institutionalised lynch mobs for centuries in Switzerland, Austria, Trentino-South Tyrol, and Slovenia. They were regarded as ‘imperfectly assimilated’ or ‘inassimilable’, and treated as ‘matter out of place’.  These itinerant, cosmopolitan, boundary-transgressing ethnic groups violated the deeply entrenched taboos and imperatives of societies where priority was placed “on keeping people judiciously apart, on maintaining delicate balances that made possible long-term accommodation” (Barber 1974, 256).  This is precisely the state of affairs in Upper Adige.

Alexander Langer, a South Tyrolean green politician, journalist, and writer, ostracized in his own community for his hostility to ethnic segregation and for his alleged betrayal of his own ethnic group, committed suicide in 1995.  In a short autobiography, he recalled the day that he was late for school and saw other children that he had never seen before, entering the school from a different entrance, which he had never heard of: “it wasn’t my entrance, I did not know them, the whole place was different, and there were fewer children”.  It was then that he realized that an entire side of the school was reserved for children from a different ethnic background, with their teachers and their recreational area, their gate, and their schedule.  This early experience made Langer’s resolve to denounce and combat social segmentation, ethnic segregation, and separate education unshakeable.  But even after his death, this state of affairs has not improved significantly.  His dream of a society whose main slogan would be “the more contact we have, the better we will get on with each other” has not come true.  The official motto of this formal democracy is still “to count, to weight, and to divide” (zählen, wägen, teilen) (Baur et al. 1998).

Under Mussolini’s dictatorship, the only way for ethnic German children to study German was through a network of illegal, underground schools in farm-houses called Katakombenschulen.  Today, it’s the other way round, and there are ethnic German parents who must hire Italian teachers for their children sub rosa, because South Tyrolean and Alto Atesini pupils are not supposed to mix and learn about each other’s culture.  Integration cannot go too far, for Italians must continue to play the role of the ‘perpetual foreigners-within’ as Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos describe in their chapter.  In the words of Siegfried Brugger, a former South Tyrolean People’s (SVP) chairman, “we need no new type of South Tyroleans, who are a mish-mash, with a little bit German, a little Ladin, a little Italian. This is a political approach which is old-fashioned and has been superseded” (Quoted in Pallaver 2005, 203).

The South Tyrolean People’s Party is a Sammelpartei, that is, a party with a cross-class electoral appeal representing an ethnically homogeneous constituency.  It was founded in 1945 and has since managed to secure the votes of nearly all South Tyroleans and Ladins, invariably gaining the absolute majority of votes and seats in local elections.  Oliver Schmidtke reports that, in the 1990s, a group of people, all wearing their folk costumes, appeared on an election campaign poster in support of the SVP, with the slogan “We South Tyroleans” (Wir Südtiroler). Schmidtke correctly argues that the poster seems to suggest that those who share that identity should cast their vote for the SVP (Schmidtke 1996).  However, the obverse could also be posited: those who express a preference for the SVP are expected to dress, act, look, and feel like Südtiroler, at least once in a while. “My ethnicity right or wrong” (Mir sein mir) is still the dominant attitude in this corner of Europe.  After all, in a less ethnically divided society, the party would lose considerable ground, because the very reason for the existence of the “guardians of the homeland” (Heimatschützer) would disappear, and a crisis of legitimacy would ensue (Pallaver 2005).

This is why the SVP maintains a peculiar attitude to autonomy, and concentrates its efforts in perpetuating inter-ethnic divisions and prioritizing social cohesion and ethnic conflict (Volkstumkampf) over individual rights (Rossi 1980).  This approach is noticeably reminiscent of the collectivist “Liberty of the Ancients”, understood as “active and constant participation in collective power”, and is a far cry from the modern notion of liberty as private independence against the subjection to arbitrary power (Constant 1988).  Freedom as intended in South Tyrol is a group right, not an individual right, a subject Andrew Robinson in Chapter Two reflects on the importance of both personal autonomy and communal identifications in the pursuit of a meaningful life.

In order to preserve the “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) which keeps all South Tyroleans bond to one another and to the party, the SVP has invested heavily in ethnically based and party-linked social and cultural associations, knowing that, in the long run, they would ensure the propagation and hegemony of the party’s ideology (Schmidtke 1996).  In this respect, we should highlight the fact that, as part of the compensatory package, more than 90 percent of the tax revenue generated in South Tyrol is then returned to the province and that 70% of the budget is spent on the fixed costs of the ‘hypertrophic’ public sector which provides ethnically differentiated goods and services.  This translates into a tremendous amount of financial backing for the party’s essential purpose of preserving the status quo by avoiding conflict through compromises rather than through integration.  Akin to Suzanna Reiss’ (Chapter Four) trenchant analysis in Canada, South Tyrol’s provincial government budgetary provision for 2008 has allocated 380,000 euros (~ US $575,000) to cultural investments such as the concert of the folk music band Kastelruther Spatzen and a folk music festival to be held next year.[15]  

It is small wonder that given this almost embarrassing ‘liberality’, which benefits all ethnic groups, albeit not equally, open interethnic conflicts only resurface during times of economic and political crisis and are instead silenced in periods of economic expansion (Obkircher 2006).  Still, a social system in which resources are distributed among ethnic groups according to their numerical size is more likely to succumb to envy and greed; because if one group obtains more goods and prestige, the other groups will correspondingly perceive themselves as losing worth.  It can only work when the cake is large enough for all to share, and nobody knows what the future has in store for Italy and Europe (Wakenhut 1999).

Viewed in this light, one has to admit that the modernizing process in South Tyrol has, at least contingently, deepened the ethnic rift, instead of bridging it, possibly because ethnicity is vague enough a concept that it can be used to forge consensus around shared material interests, while concealing ulterior motives that might actually be contrary to the public interest.  I do not believe that multiculturalism is necessarily bound to be “a formula for manufacturing conflict” (Barry 2001), but the fact remains that South Tyrolean identity politics is premised on a victim status that has outlasted its usefulness, and now prevents local people from accustoming themselves to hold multiple, fluid, hybrid identities and affiliations.

References

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Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). 1999. The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barry, Brian M. 2001. Culture and equality: an egalitarian critique of multiculturalism. Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University press.

Bateson, Gregory. 1958. Naven: A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view. Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press.

Baur, Siegfrid et al. 1998. Zwischen Herkunft und Zukunft. Meran: Alpha & Beta.

Bergonzi, Valentina, Hans Heiss. 2004. ‘Progressi e limiti del regionalismo’. L’Alto Adige/Südtirol dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, Memoria e Ricerca, 1, pp. 79-100.

Brumann, Christoph. 1999. ‘Writing for Culture. Why a successful concept should not be discarded’. Current Anthropology 40 (supplement): S1–S27.

Cantle Report. 2001. ‘Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team’. Chaired by Ted Cantle. London: The Home Office.

Constant, Benjamin. 1988. ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns’. In Biancamaria Fontana (ed.). Benjamin Constant: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Furnivall, J.S. 1948. Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. London: Cambridge University Press.

Gasparri, Stefano. 1998. Prima delle nazioni. Popoli. etnie e regni fra antichità e medioevo. Roma: Carocci.

Gentile, Emilio. 2006. La Grande Italia. Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo. Laterza: Roma-Bari.

Istituto Provinciale di Statistica (IPS). 2006. Barometro linguistico dell’Alto Adige. Bolzano: Provincia di Bolzano.

Langer, Alexander. 1986. Minima personalia. in ‘Belfagor-Rassegna di varia umanità’, 41(3).

Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes. The decline of individualism in mass society. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Mantegazza, Paolo. 1884. ‘L’Antropologia del Tirolo’, La Natura, 1. 355-356.

Obkircher, Raimund. 2006. Tensioni etniche e situazione socio-economica in Sudtirolo, Archivio Trentino, 2, pp. 125-135.

Pallaver, Günther. 1990. South Tyrol. the ‘Package’ and its ratification. in: Politics and Society in Germany. Austria and Switzerland, 2(1/2), pp. 70-79.

Pallaver, Günther. 2005. ‘The Südtiroler Volkspartei and its ethnopopulism’. In: Daniele Caramani & Yves Mény (eds.). Challenges to consensual politics. Democracy. identity. and populist protest in the Alpine region. Brussels: Peter Lang, pp. 187-208.

Pinggera, Gerd Klaus et al. 2006. Medizinisch-genetische Forschung in Südtirol; 1: Gene und Geschichte - in Stilfs - Langtaufers – Martell. Bolzano/Bozen: EURAC.

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Schmidtke, Oliver. 1996. Politics of identity. Ethnicity, territories and the political opportunity structure in modern Italian society. Sinzheim: PUV.

Staffler, Gudrun. 1999. Migration und Ethnizität in Südtirol. Zur sozialen Konstruktion von Fremdheit und Ethnizität in einer pluriethnischen Gesellschaft. Diplomarbeit. Philosophie. Universität Wien.

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Patriotism is a mistake

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
H.L. Mencken

Brian (not wanting to be a messiah): you don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for your selves! You’re all individuals!
The Crowd (in unison): Yes! We’re all individuals!
Brian: You’re all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we are all different!
Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the following essay is to demonstrate that, when it takes a political form, patriotism is dangerous because certain objectionable attitudes that make unquestioning acquiescence and violence more likely, such as for instance the fetishism of intrinsic value, the objectification of human beings, and the subordination of rational means to irrational ends, usually come in the same package with patriotism. I offer a political-anthropological reflection on the mechanisms through which: (a) patriotism becomes naturalized and taken for granted as the ideal alternative to leaving people at the mercy of their (it is assumed) wicked and egotistic impulses; (b) patriots reorient the meaning of the phrase “autonomous citizenry” in order to produce an emotional bond (usually pride and sense of belonging) between citizens and a given political community and to promote the belief that there is such a thing as a single, common will and national interest.


It has long been a matter of common knowledge that because modern, democratic societies need trust, cohesion, solidarity, and long term civic loyalty to function and to be societies in a significant sense, citizens must develop an emotional attachment to the country they live in. According to this accredited belief, in times of spiritual voids waiting to be filled, when there is a comparably low level of demand for the available religions, a shared national/patriotic identity, a feeling of belonging, of being part of something larger than oneself – i.e. a “deep” community, a Gemeinschaft writ large, a community of destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) –, will provide bonds of shared values, affection, and concerns. These are needed in order to avert the danger of social alienation and mass atomisation and to foster real human fulfilment and a common understanding of the human good. The argument usually goes that the homeland (patria) should be the ‘primary focus of identification’, that citizens should be willing to make sacrifices for “their” polity, identify themselves with it, have an emotional investment in it, set aside their own private interests and take care of it, responsibly, and improve it, making it more just, with benevolent dedication, as they do with their families and communities. In doing so, they surely build more than one fence, but as the saying goes, “good fences make good neighbours,” and, at the end of the day, human beings are naturally inclined to feel territorial and tribal attachments: to deny these communal identities is tantamount to gainsay one’s own identity. There are no “citizens of the world.”
This is dangerous ground to tread. How much cohesion is really needed? Are not liberal, plural democracies supposed to be based on the free play of conflicting opinions and human diversities? Granting that the amount of diversity suitable to a democracy is not unlimited, how do we prevent the state from gradually being given a superior moral status and from becoming an ethical state, namely an overarching source of morality? Moreover, how effective really is patriotism in overcoming other, more localistic and private loyalties and in producing widespread allegiance, trust, and solidarity? Is it not perhaps the case that it simply adds a further exclusionist boundary without substantially weakening the others? US citizens have been patriotic (and nationalist) for a very long time, but it is hard to deny that sexism, racism, localism, religious fundamentalism and gross inequity in the distribution of wealth and services are still commonplace in American society. Ultimately, patriotisms and civil religions are misguided in that they presume that individuals are too flawed, too ignorant, too unreasonable, too selfish and wicked to lead a dignified and undisruptive social life and to control their own destinies, without the guidance of gurus, customs, and institutions that are by necessity beyond reproach. Patria is all too often regarded as “innocence itself” and this may justify the unacceptable in the pursuit of a vicarious sacredness and of the common weal, absolving people from their responsibilities and validating the existing order and the obtaining epistemologies of truth. People are far too easily led to believe that, because they are inherently good, decent and law-abiding, they cannot possibly commit something morally wrong. We don’t need patriotism and civil religion to strengthen their conviction that, if they perpetrate a vile act, they are following their conscience.

Patriotism and Civil Religion

The term religion is generally derived from two Latin verbs: religàre, meaning “to bind,” and religere which, like the Greek verb alégein, means ”to care for, to be concerned about.” By extension, religion can be defined as the “careful observance of a binding divine rule.” “Civil religion” is the bond that unites a people under the same laws and rules and provides a sense of inclusion, belonging, identity, unity and structure, worth, confidence, transcendence, and purpose. It is the ethos of a society and it may be so compelling that citizens are driven to sacrifice their lives for what purports to be the common good, and sometimes really is but a figment of the imagination. The nature of civil religions can be best understood by considering the distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, which roughly translate as “society” and “community”. Gesellschaft is the “artificial”, heterogeneous, and competitive social milieu of modern urban society in which ties between individuals are loose and personal interest, instrumental rationality, and the law are the glue that holds a society together. Gemeinschaft is the “natural,” organic model of society prevailing in rural areas, which are typified by cultural homogeneousness, cohesion, enforced harmony, common objectives, and emotional bonds.
As anticipated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in chapter 8 (“De la Religion Civile”), book 4 of “Du Contrat Social” (1762), civil religions, with their quasi-religious rituals, liturgies, collective narratives, holidays, myths, heroes, symbols, and sacred places, as well as their empowering and galvanizing images, slogans, and principles, are widely regarded as the cement of modern societies. Their function is to preserve “community” alongside “society.” They mobilize people around key issues and common concerns and goals, while at the same time conferring a religious significance, and thus giving legitimacy, to the dominant cultural practices, rules, value orientations and institutions. Civic religions are alternative ways in which people may express their religiosity, and they generate that “collective effervescence” enabling a society to venerate itself. The cult of secular institutions is sometimes at variance with the orthodoxy of metaphysical religions, while at other times it becomes exceedingly difficult to draw a boundary line between civil religions and politicized faiths.
People may be more or less aware of the existence of a civil religion, but there are circumstances, like September 11, 2001, when its presence is overwhelming, and principles such as gratuity, generosity, solidarity, and reciprocity intensify a drift toward a sort of ecstatic communal worship, calling for virtue and moral excellence and offering in return spiritual reassurance and fulfillment. In extreme cases, civil religions may lead to the glorification and sacralization of nations and their political leaderships and to the repudiation of the distinction between the public and the private sphere. During the Depression and the Second World War, in Europe as in Japan, fascist and crypto-fascist governments were given full powers and states were treated as moral entities. With the convergence of religious and political authority, the cult of sacralized collectivities supplanted the liberal democratic emphasis on individual rights. Through its commitment to uphold the good and the righteous society, the Japanese State acquired a strong ethical foundation and was entitled to give moral guidance in public life and see that citizens didn’t swerve from the right path. Because there was no transcendent source of moral authority outside the emperor, there followed that Japanese could not rely on an independent standard of justice, fairness and moral conduct, and nobody would dare to challenge the emperor’s decisions. Soldiers were enjoined to obey their superior officers as they would obey the orders of the emperor himself. But because the emperor was infallible, then dutiful soldiers and officers would always be right, no matter how vicious their war tactics and behaviour towards civilians and POWs. That would exclude them from moral responsibility and would assuage feelings of guilt and fear of retribution. Consequently, historical, political, economic necessities, infused with a religious zeal, overruled any legal constraints and alternative moral views. The Japanese empire was held to be the mundane embodiment of all that was pure, true, good and beautiful. The belief in the ultimate infallibility of the leadership provided a considerable measure of ontological security. Like today’s Islamic fundamentalism and Christian radicalism, Kokka Shintô, the local version of civil religion, rejected modern secularism, which extolled the value of personal freedom and the inherent worth of the individual over religious faith and collective duties, labeling it a source of incoherent liberal values leading to social fragmentation and atomization, a watered-down religiousness, and political decline. Its militant advocates believed that an uncontaminated cultural and moral authenticity could be preserved in the context of modernity. Culturalism (bunkashugi), as part and parcel of a broader process of redefining what it means to be Japanese through an emphasis on self-affirmation and authenticity, would enable the Japanese to acquire the “modern” without acquiring “the West” as well, and especially the inquisitive “democratic frame of mind” characteristic of an autonomous citizenry. In this way, the Japanese “closed society” would be eternalized and the Japanese would be subsumed by the organic state and submerged by a collective, hyper-ritualized religious practice. The voluntary dissolution of the self to serve the public (messhi hōkō) would secure the attainment of a perfect sense of spiritual integration. At the same time, the institutional indifference to individual circumstances and interests, and the fear of personal liberties, which is so typical of organic conceptions of society, fostered a self-righteous worldview stamped by intolerance and violence, and the crystallization of differences as timeless essences. This justified killing, mass murder, and the clash of civilizations, for those who did not belong to the divine, racially and culturally superior Yamato ethno-religious community – i.e. the jama gedō, “unruly heathens” – were impure and corrupted sub-humans. These tenets also disposed thousands of Japanese soldiers to self-sacrifice for the sake of Japan’s rebirth, for if their destiny was to follow the imperial dictates to the letter, then their duty was to eagerly embrace their own death and the death of those who opposed the emperor’s plans. Japanese soldiers would look at themselves through the eyes of the imperial propaganda and of Japanese society and see their deeds and choices as inevitable and transcending good and evil. As a result, decisions concerning the life and death of civilians were morally indifferent, as witnessed by the atrocities committed by desensitized Japanese soldiers during the war, and especially at Nanking, in 1937, when as many as 350,000 Chinese civilians were remorselessly tortured and murdered.
The fascist civil religion blended pedagogic moralism, collective responsibility, social utility and regimentation, with the repudiation of the materialist, decadent, atomized, bourgeois, and democratic West. It conferred an almost numinous quality and eschatological dimension to the policy-making process, and reinscribed emotional attachment, spiritual yearning, and an idealistic sense of citizenship in a society in which individuals were expected to put their own interests after the interests of society at large. In the words of Joseph Goebbels, “It hardly matters what we believe in, so long as we believe in something.” This radical version of civil religion promised an alternative, re-moralized modernity which would lead to a collective, mundane salvation and to the redemption of the national community from an alleged fallen state. National Socialists were particularly successful in injecting “magic”, “sublime” and “epic” into a society awaiting its regeneration. Indeed, as Hitler himself remarked, “those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is even more than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew”.
Adolf Eichmann is the embodiment of the one-dimensional man shaped by the radicalization of patriotism. A man who images groups too vividly and hence loses sight of himself and his individuality. Because of that, he willingly cooperated in the victimization of other ordinary persons. Shortly before his execution, Adolf Eichmann announced: “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” In the end, when the time for his execution arrived, he added: “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” Hannah Arendt could not take seriously a man who addressed the witnesses to his execution by expressing his belief in life after death, when he himself had stated that he was a Gottgläubiger, that is, not a Christian. She assumed that it was a glaring contradiction, for only Christians would believe in the afterlife. Not so. Everyone must struggle to reconcile the reality of one’s mortal body and the hope (or faith) in the immortality of the spirit in order to affirm one’s significance in a seemingly absurd universe (“absurd” in a Camusian/existentialist sense). In the words of anthropologist Ernest Becker, “what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.” National Socialism helped Germans deny their finitude by persuading them that they were part of a transcendental entity (the Aryan Race) committed to a millenarian project, i.e. the immortality project called “the Third Reich”. This is how ordinary Germans gained a sense of vicarious divinity and could drastically devalue the life of Untermenschen in the larger scheme of things. And this is also why they fought to the point of self-destruction. Sacrifice and annihilation of the enemy became the German single survival strategy, in the sense that the sacralized German Reich, which through its eternal existence would assure the perpetuation of its members, was engaged in a struggle over truth, immortality, and the ultimate, imperishable meaning of life. Defeat was identical with extinction. It would not be necessary to impose the imperative of cosmic heroism: joining one’s destiny to the Third Reich was a shared patriotic and racial responsibility, which would assuage the anxiety over one’s physical vulnerability and, above all, break the spell of the absurd through self-transcendence.
Obviously, historical and political factors, status anxiety, power relations, and economic competition, all play a major role in human life, but the fact remains, as Albert Camus has so definitely and persuasively argued in his L’Homme Révolté, that the self-imposed servitude to a “mortality-denying system” is the greatest threat to individual liberty. Eichmann and the other perpetrators of the Holocaust believed that they were taking part in a cathartic event which would purify German society and German souls once and for all. Their millenarian mélange of Arcadian and utopian sentiments translated into contempt for the present, the hallmark of those people who feel that they are born too early or too late, and whose emotional attachments and loyalties have been best described by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “higher than love of one’s neighbor is love for the remote and for the future.”
When pursued to its extremes, this logic generates a cultic milieu where everything must be experienced in an all-or-nothing basis and which is highly likely to veer towards dystopian developments, as with National Socialism. The worldview of an Eichmann completely neutralizes the relevance of human agency and turns back the clock of history to a time prior to the breach of order, to an age of primordial harmony and reassuring moral discipline where each would find the right place in the order of things. This shared imaginative (and sedative) vision provides ontological security and soothes personal anxieties. This probably also explains why millenarian movements generally resurface during times of perceived national crisis, when they are regarded as vehicles of world-rejecting purification, enabling people to feel that they are more effectively in control of their own destinies.
Where monistic beliefs prevail over negotiations, compromises, and public debates, the consequences can be entirely different. Most German physicians and nurses who took part in the execution of thousands of mentally sick people did not realise that their justifications (and their self-definition as principled individuals) could only be deemed acceptable in a world ruled by their country. The most unpleasant truth we confront is that, in the performance of their duties, perpetrators were cognitively and morally one-dimensional, conformist, and uncritical but their inner life was probably no more inarticulate or impoverished than the inner life of the average person. They were ordinary people who did not see themselves as monsters, but as diligent and conscientious professionals. Like Eichmann, they never doubted that the principle of their volition could be the basis of general legislation. The problem was that in Nazi Germany the Kantian imperative was rephrased as follows: “act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your actions, would approve it”. In “Personal responsibility under dictatorship”, Hannah Arendt notes that most German people, “regardless of party affiliation and direct implication, believed in the new order of things for no other reason than that was the way things were”. The totalist scenario in which they operated triggered a process of cognitive redefinition of the morality of their actions, and many of them most certainly believed that they had compelling reasons to act consistently as they did.
Moral agency is far more dramatically affected by circumstances and external pressure than we would like to believe. Moral choices are to a large extent shaped by the context, i.e. the social network of interactions, roles, expectations, obligations, etc. In other words, the morality of a society generally reflects its power structure. As a consequence, just men and women do not necessarily build just societies and individuals with advanced cognitive skills are just as likely to forfeit freedom of thinking and moral decency in a highly paternalistic and ideologized milieu, especially if they perceive that a command, however morally questionably it may be, comes from a legitimate authority. Groups give people the strength necessary to resist oppression and oppose evil-doing, but group dynamics also generate the kind of diffusion of responsibility that may lead ordinary people to commit atrocities.
Ultimately, while in the short term the achievement of social cohesion and social justice may benefit from a vibrant civil religion, citizens should remain vigilant to the risk that, in times of dislocation and crisis, civil religion itself might justify the belief that individuals exist for the state and the community, and not vice versa. Like any other religion, civil religion is not immune from the temptation to portray history as a perpetual battle between good and evil, to urge believers to prove their faith and commitment, and to underplay the question of the inherent worth of individuals.

When patriotism goes awry

Even though postmodernism has defected from the Enlightenment universalist principles, the weight of the empirical evidence is on the side of the philosophes and cosmopolitanism. For all the communitarian rhetoric about preserving the organic unity of individuals and communities in order to cut crime, suicide and divorce rates, most suicides occur in social environments where norms are too tight and people are more easily crushed by the pressure to conform. By contrast, societies with a high level of social capital are by and large the most individualistic and vice versa: “in societies where individuals are more autonomous and seemingly liberated from social bonds, the same individuals are also more inclined to form voluntary associations and to trust each other and to have a certain kind of public spirit.” Evidence shows that when people manage to relieve themselves from feelings of guilt and shame imposed from the outside (submission, ‘constricted’ personality), that is, when they see themselves in control of their own lives, they enjoy greater self-esteem, subjective well-being, and develop an ‘expansive’ personality, more trusting, tolerant and more open to new experiences. They also become more optimistic, less aggressive and more effective at negotiation, and are more ready to accept responsibility (ethical agency). In other words, high levels of fear, guilt and shame correlate with lower levels of moral reasoning and higher levels of compliance and submissiveness. As a result, individualism is, rather paradoxically, the necessary condition for the building and maintenance of social cohesion, economic development, mutual trust, co-operation, and social inclusion.
This sounds encouraging, but there is another side to it. As Emile Durkheim and Erich Fromm have predicted, the more individuals feel liberated the more they risk to feel ill at ease with their individuality, which may cause them to feel the urge to sacrifice it to whomever or whatever promises to put an end to their sense of alienation and isolation. That is, the new social bonds may turn out to be more inhibiting than protective and likely to bring people to grow even more dependent on society. Instead of the pursuit of the institutionalization of conflict and diversity, a self-interested, opaque, and unaccountable ruling elite will maintain a democratic but not liberal tradition of institutional consensus (the general will) leading, inevitably, to the increasing colonization of the “life-world” of civil society on the part of the state and, possibly, to the moral castration and critical self-lobotomisation of citizens.
This is what generally occurs in those societies that are engaged in a rather brisk transition to liberal democracy and respond in “Rousseauesque” ways to the challenge of Renaissance humanism, “rootless” Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, and the universalistic pluralism driving the human rights agenda. These societies share in common a seemingly incongruous blend of strong egalitarian communalism and libertarian paternalism (we might want to call it “atomistic communitarianism” or “individualist statism”) which possibly arises from the ideological constraints of a freedom-loving and authoritarian peasantry. While for Kant “a universal cosmopolitan existence” was the “highest purpose of nature”, faced with the challenges of globalization, instead of embracing change, these “enclave societies” often opt for the domestication of the foreign to immunize themselves from the “shallowness” of cosmopolitanism. This outlook tends to undermine efforts to establish a modern, pluralistic, open civil society as a collection of intermediate, freely chosen bodies between the State and the citizens. Historically, in Britain, Northern France and Benelux, and in the Canadian and American East Coast a cosmopolitan mindset was far more widespread. In my opinion these societies are the yardstick against which we should compare the performance of other countries in terms of their commitment to liberal democracy – meaning “rule by the people”, where people is understood as demos (individual citizens), not as ethnos (ethnic majority) – and to the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that is, to the culture of human rights. These seafaring, open societies traditionally welcomed immigrants and religious and political refugees and have been virtually immune to fascism, eugenic legislation, and racial hygiene. Anti-Semitism has also been less strong there than anywhere else in Europe and North America. Prior to WWII, the further one moved from these core areas, the more insufficient the grasp of the humanist and liberal cosmopolitan values was, and the greater the prejudice against vulnerable minorities, women, and democratic institutions.
Because the way a society treats its minorities is an important indication of its level of “civility” and “enlightenment”, it is no accident that France and the Benelux are high on the list of “Righteous among the Nations”. Together with Italy and Denmark (two countries with an important tradition of maritime trade), they had the highest rate of Jewish survival. With an important exception: 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population was annihilated. Of 144,000 Jews, only about 35,000 survived the war. Thousands of Dutch turned into “Jew bounty hunters”, while Dutch Jews did not realise that placing their trust in the state government and complying with its rules is not always safe. This raises a question that cannot be answered: How many Jews did not leave their countries or defy the law and died in the Holocaust because of their patriotism? Hamburg is another remarkable case-study: possibly the most cosmopolitan and tolerant German city, it was also the most eager to deport or sterilize “antisocial individuals” and to send its Jews to the extermination camps. How do we explain this puzzling contradiction? And then there are the Danes, so law-abiding and patriotic that about two hundred German functionaries were sufficient to secure the shipment of food supplies to Nazi Germany. At the same time, around 80% of Italian Jews survived the war, despite the Axis alliance, Mussolini’s anti-Semitic segregationist laws and the fascist aggressive warfare. Why did so many Italian officers and rank and file soldiers become rescuers, at the risk of being court-martialed for treason? The Nazi rounding up of Jews for their extermination was the Grenzsituation, the ultimate boundary-situation that drew hundreds of Italians into civil disobedience. By taking advantage of the painstaking German legal/bureaucratic procedures and turning them against the Nazis themselves Italian officials and functionaries, unpatriotically and inadvertently, put into practice Thoreau’s dictum that “it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice” and the wise words of Emerson that “good men must not obey the laws too well.”
Historian Jonathan Steinberg has argued that Italians and Germans “inhabited different moral universes”. I agree with Steinberg and with his view that many, but still a tiny minority of Italians, understood that civic duty and patriotism, with their cumbersome baggage of strong ideals of incontrovertible good and evil, should never be placed above human compassion and moral courage. Still, we need to locate the source of this fundamental cleavage. For centuries, the Mediterranean, Latin and Western liberal traditions have been cosmopolitan. They have been civilizations for exportation, for it was commonly assumed that culture and civilitas transformed people. By contrast, the fate of the heroes of Nordic/Germanic sagas was sealed from their birth: their lot was decreed by their genealogy. Correspondingly, Nordic Lutheranism calls the original sin arvsynd, which, like its German equivalent Erbsünde, conveys the idea of the heritability of sins. This belief translated in the doctrine of Ahnenerbe (‘ancestral inheritance’), which described individual life as the epiphenomenon of perpetual bloodlines, and was deployed by Heinrich Himmler to justify his plans for a New European Order. Traces of this erroneous understanding of genealogies in terms of genetic continuity, that is, of a combination of Eternal Recurrence – human beings as expressions of the immortal germ-plasm – and a natural teleology of history – biology as destiny –, were evident in the writings of many German-speaking popularisers of evolutionary theory. Instead, law-makers in Holland, Britain, New England and Latin Rim countries objected to selective breeding, involuntary sterilization, the assault on the notion of free will, and the linear extension of natural laws into the social sphere. Eugenics, genetic fatalism, and the marriage between bureaucratic rationality and scientism did not evidently resonate with every Western repertoire of values and symbols.
Dutch nationalism followed the liberal-constitutional pattern but perhaps many Dutch civil servants and policemen had not developed a sufficient degree of ego-independence, which would have allowed them to resist the “lust” for submission and compliance. This would be in agreement with Kateb’s contention that “all this energy and commitment emanating from love of country strengthens some of the worst aspects of modern political life and, in itself, this love, this patriotism, sacrifices universal moral principle in worship of a false god. Patriotism is not only disguised self-worship, not only eager self-abjection, not only voluntary self-exploitation; above all it is idolatry.” It would also confirm Durkheim’s and Fromm’s intuition that the threat of collectivism is always present, especially when penalties for breaking protocols are very high. In this sense Alfred North Whitehead’s statement that “it is a profoundly erroneous truism…that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them,” is just as accurate as it is alarming. It intimates that the complexities of modern society can only be dealt with effectively if a large chunk of the population is prepared to disown individuality for the sake of their country, à la Eichmann, and to shun solitude, the only condition in which someone can detach himself from the crowd and explore one’s inner ocean. The outcome is the worst kind of utilitarianism: it justifies anything.
The history of eugenics provides the clearest demonstration of this. By the early 1930s, sterilisation programmes were in full swing on the North American West Coast, in Central Europe and in the Nordic Countries. Following the moral panic generated by the Great Depression, few families were prepared to put up with the social protection of what was perceived to be a disproportionate number of dependent people. Some prominent Scandinavian, North American and German jurists argued that, under exceptional circumstances, basic rights could be withheld and that social services should only be provided to those whose social usefulness and biological capability were beyond dispute. The state was the source of a morality more in line with the demands of modernity, and therefore was not necessarily bound by constitutional principles and norms: personal rights were not inalienable, for they really were culturally and historically relative legal fictions or superstitions, their existence being, to a large extent, contingent on the majority’s willingness to uphold them, that is, on considerations of general welfare and public utility. Instead of protecting the citizens, laws legitimized the persecution of certain categories of people, purportedly unable to enjoy freedom and to pursue happiness, by gradually stripping them of their rights and legal protections. Such policies were described as politically necessary and ethically indisputable. In a tragic reversal of roles, according to the dominant “discourse of truth,” those who violated the physical integrity of other citizens were fulfilling a constitutionally sanctioned civic duty, while the victims of involuntary sterilization and confinement were a social threat and, as such, they should be subject to legally mandated sterilization or confinement “for the good of society”. This is how patriotism, in concert with technocratic fanaticism, made it easier to strip away citizens’ fundamental rights with a clear conscience. Enlightened governments, like good shepherds, would foster virtues and restrict personal rights for the sake of communal rights and civic responsibility, that is, in the name of the homeland.

Liberal democracies have no use for the mystique of patriotism and civil religion

Wilton Sekzer, a retired NYPD officer, lost his son on 9/11. Seeking revenge, he e-mailed the Pentagon and the Army to have his son’s name painted on a bomb to be dropped in Iraq. The bomb, with inscribed the dedication “In loving memory of Jason Sekzer”, fell on the Iraqis. Sekzer was later to find out through a televised press conference by George W. Bush that there was no connection between Iraq and the terrorist attacks on American soil.
It is most unfortunate that those communitarians who condemn the alleged “social monism” of cosmopolitan liberalism and advocate primordial memberships do not seem to have fully thought through the actual implications of their contentions in the light of the historical precedents. Primary civic virtues such as obedience, loyalty, discipline, harmony, self-restraint, duty, respect, group cohesion, which are indispensable to maintain the larger social system, are also potentially harmful, and even deadly, in so many ways. One only has to think of the worrisome results of the experiments carried out by Asch, Sherif, Milgram, Zimbardo, etc. on group influence, conformity to social role, obedience, the stifling of dissent and their disastrous consequences in terms of judgment and decision-making. The sad truth is that people in crowds behave like sheep or ants, blindly following their leaders who, in turn, cannot help but submit to the herding instinct of the shepherd dog set on the salvation of the flock (pastoral power). In so doing, they ignore new and more promising options. But even a single dissenter can make a difference in the moral reasoning of the other members of a group. It is not that individuals make better decisions than groups, for countless tests prove the opposite, what we should avoid is group polarization through a norm of openness and dialogue and a strong emphasis on individual autonomy, universality and generality. This is precisely why cosmopolitan liberalism is irreconcilable with patriotism and civil religions. Cosmopolitan liberalism is likely to increase the number of potential dissenters because it is not premised on the “ethics of community” but on the “ethics of autonomy”, that is, on the Kantian/Kohlbergian assumption that: (a) moral maturity comes down to moral autonomy; (b) morality should be based on individual rights rather than on social duties (post-conventional morality) and entails acting in a way that is in accordance with universal standards of justice; and, finally, (c) rational autonomy is empowering, for it enables citizens to make up their own minds and decide the kind of life they wish for themselves (ethical agency).
Ultimately, the most infuriating vice of humanity is not egotism (which is bad enough already) but conformism, which is often accompanied by a sense of cosmic determinism and by our willing subjugation to an oppressive sociality, and to myths and other abstractions such as an idealised past and an ideal future. These traits function as powerful mobilizing forces causing people to believe that asserting one’s personality and individuality is intrinsically wrong, even though “the ordinary self is not so impoverished as to acquire substance only through intense adherence to a group pattern.”
Once again, wouldn’t we all be better off if human beings only loved living beings, instead of perverting the very nature of love by extending this feeling to things and figments of the imagination, like “homeland” and “common will”? A related question is whether the aim of policy-making is to preserve certain institutions or instead to pursue the welfare of human beings? In other words, does the Italian constitution deserve my love, indulgence or reverence, as if it were Sacred Scripture, or rather my respect and appreciation for what it stands for, namely the notion that human beings have worth as human beings, and only secondarily as members of some category or other? If the latter is true, then “constitutional patriotism” is indeed an oxymoron (Kateb, 2008).

Conclusion

After the spectacular failure of conventional (communitarian) morality during the past century, unconditional and unreflective identifications are extremely problematic. It is, in my opinion, rather preposterous to argue that it is possible to teach patriotism without instilling jingoism, for patriotism is not a natural sentiment in large scale state societies. It is an invention, an artificial construction, unlike our membership in the human species, and needs to be relentlessly mobilized, also through the language of moral obligation, to the extent that one is recognized as a dutiful citizen and moral agent only as a patriot. This mobilization demands an emotional investment that constitutional patriotism as such cannot possibly trigger – hence the unavoidable nationalistic overtones – and implies that there is a “correct” way of relating to one’s country. In this sense, patriotism can only be idolatrous and the heartland, or Heimat, is apt to be seen as a natural entity, an inherited commitment from which one can hardly tear himself away, rather than a “territory of the imagination.”
Furthermore, there is no such thing as an intellectually objective patriot promoting some sort of “benign, progressive patriotism”. Someone’s patriot is another one’s nationalist. Patriotism, a variety of tribalism that becomes more conspicuous in times of increased rootlessness, far from erasing otherness, magnifies it and thus cannot be the vehicle of a deeper affection for human beings. We should instead question any settled sense of ‘we’ identification and strive to develop ‘post-conventional identities’ in what Habermas has termed ‘post-traditional society’. A truly cosmopolitan culture is the universal acid that will eventually eat through all ascribed group identities which depersonalize individuals, disable their critical faculties and independence of thought, and ultimately prevent them from pursuing a more subjective idea of the ‘good life’, in a socially responsible manner.


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