Modalities of National Sovereignty: Territorial Nationalism versus Islamic Fundamentalism in Muslim-Majority Countries

I employ the concept of modality in order to capture the configurations of homogeneous elements that may exist in a heterogeneous context encompassing diverse nationalist movements. Modalities of nationalism are varied outcomes of the efforts of intellectuals to resolve issues concerning the identity of their political community, its boundaries, and the ideal political regime. A modality rests on identity and feelings of national solidarity such that changes in identity and feelings are linked in a predictable way to changes in attitudes toward other issues. I argue that the modalities of territorial nationalism, pan-Arab nationalism, and Islamic fundamentalism are varied ways in which indigenous intellectual leaders resolved sociopolitical issues. I also argue that modalities have varying supports among ordinary individuals. They are clustered on and driven by identity and national pride. An analysis of data from twelve crossnational surveys carried out in ten Muslim-majority countries in 2000-2008 has shown that the change in the basis of identity from religion to territorial nation is connected to a significant increase in favorable attitudes toward gender equality, secular orientation, secular politics, Western culture, and, except in two cases, democracy, but not linked consistently to attitudes toward outsiders. National pride, on the other hand, is a driver of fundamentalist values, as it is inversely linked to gender equality (except in three cases), secular orientation, secular politics, and Western culture. National pride has inconsistent linkages with democracy and attitudes toward outsiders. Finally, the link between socioeconomic status and liberal values (except in Saudi Arabia) suggests that the modernist interpretations of nationalism may only apply to the modality of liberal territorial nationalism. Territorial Nationalism versus Islamic Fundamentalism in Muslim-Majority Countries 3 INTRODUCTION Anthony D. Smith may be accused of making a sweeping historical generalization in describing nationalism at the beginning of his remarkable book, Nationalism and Modernism, as “a single red line” that “traverses the history of the modern world from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin Wall” (Smith 1998: 1). For sure, insofar as the term applies to a variety of movements that (1) define communities of people as a nation based on certain characteristics shared by a significant sections of their population, (2) bestow on these communities the right to organize a political regime, and (3) advance an exclusive claim to represent them, his generalization is defensible. Nonetheless, Smith’s generalization overlooks the fact that the nationalist movements that emerged on the world stage in different places and times have been too diverse and heterogeneous to be adequately represented by a single line with only one color. Even in a single region of the world and within the confines of a much narrower historical period, like the twentieth-century Middle East, nationalism covers such dissimilar movements as territorial nationalism, pan-Arab nationalism, and Islamic fundamentalism. Although all are instances of nationalism, these movements vastly differ in their sociopolitical and cultural orientations and the type of regimes they created. Lumping them together under the umbrella of nationalism may lead one to gloss over serious differences among these and other varieties of nationalism that may coexist even in the same society, giving rise to different historical outcomes. Finally, in the absence of a conceptual scaffolding that captures the variety of nationalism and of a mechanism that explains the working of diverse variants of nationalism, it would be hard to understand the persistence of violent reactions in Muslim-majority countries to purportedly anti-Islamic behaviors perpetrated by some in Western countries. How does one explain the glaring contrast between Muslims’ responses to terrorism perpetrated by insiders against their own populations and their overly partisan reactions to anti-Islamic behavior of some Western outsiders? On the one hand, innocent men, women, and children are slaughtered by misguided suicide bombers; powerless captives and political opponents are hideously beheaded in front of the camera, and billions of dollars’ worth of property is destroyed by Muslim terrorists—all in the name of Islam and God’s handsome rewards in the paradise. But there has been hardly commensurable outrage in Islamic countries. If, on the other hand, British author Salmon Rushdie writes the impressionist novel Satanic Verses, a U.S. president uses the word Territorial Nationalism versus Islamic Fundamentalism in Muslim-Majority Countries 4 “crusade” in an ill-prepared speech, a Danish cartoonist draws an unflattering portrayal of the faith, or a misguided expatriate Egyptian Christian makes an anti-Islamic film, Islamic communities are mobilized in indignation against the West; Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa calling for the execution of Salmon Rushdie, the American flag and effigies of the U.S. president are burned publicly, the Imams and Western-educated politicians alike in certain Arab countries call for the boycott of Danish products, and American diplomats in Benghazi are murdered. Are these expressions of Muslim nationalism in general or a particular type of nationalism? In this paper, I suggest that one way to manage and better comprehend the variety of nationalist movements is to employ the concept of modality. Nationalism encompasses many different types of movements, whose sociopolitical objectives are quite different from, if not diametrically opposed to, one another. Conceptualizing this variety as representing multiple modalities reduces the historical complexity of nationalist movements. Modalities thus capture the configurations of relatively homogeneous elements within the context of historical variation of nationalist movements. I also suggest that modalities are distinguished from one another in terms of (1) the definition of the basis of identity or a cognitive understanding of the basis of the national community, and (2) a feeling of group solidarity or emotional expression of belong to the national community. The identity of a modality may rest on a territorial nation, ethnicity, or religion. Its conception of pride may be diachronic, historical and self-referential, or synchronic and in relation to the other (i.e., foreigners). These two features of modalities shape other aspects of a nationalist ideology, including the demarcation of the governing principles of national political boundaries separating in-groups from out groups, the distinctive projection of the political map and national territories, and the way in which history is remembered, constructed, or invented. Modalities thus serve as a transmission belt connecting the abstract concept of nationalism to concrete historical cases. Modalities are constrained by social structures and exigencies of historical development. They, however, cannot be derived from these structures or exigencies. Rather, modalities are produced as intellectual leaders offer resolutions to historically significant issues facing their communities. Variation in modalities is thus a function of the different ways in which these issues are resolved. Modalities are understood in differential relations with one another. They differ in terms of their conception of the basis of identity and the manner in which the feeling of Territorial Nationalism versus Islamic Fundamentalism in Muslim-Majority Countries 5 national solidarity is mobilized in order to promote the cultural and political values among the subject population. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of these theoretical propositions, I first present territorial nationalism, pan-Arab nationalism, and Islamic fundamentalism as instances of modalities of nationalism and argue that these modalities are the outcomes of the efforts of intellectual leaders to resolves historically significant sociopolitical issues facing their communities. Then, I focus on liberal territorial nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism as two currently competing modalities in Muslim-majority countries, and I argue that they predict two different competing attitudes toward significant sociopolitical and cultural issues. More specifically, I propose that the difference between people who considered religion as the primary basis of their identity and those who consider nation as such is associated with significant differences in their value orientations toward gender equality, secularism and secular politics, democracy, Western culture, and outsiders, while national pride has just the opposite relationships with all these variables. The population may thus be configured into those leaning toward liberal modality and those toward Islamic fundamentalism. To assess these propositions, I use data from twelve surveys that were carried out in Algeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran 2000 and 2005, Iraq 2004 and 2006, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Finally, I discuss the implications of the findings for the study of nationalism. THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT The social-scientific literature on the causes and consequences of nationalism is vast and engaging. Nonetheless, there has been little theorizing about how to handle the diversity of nationalism. Many of the existing explanations are formulated in terms that are too general to account for this diversity. They refer to such historical changes as industrialization, the expansion of mass education, print capitalism, and uneven development of capitalism in different theories within the modernist tradition; to substantialist accounts of the rise of nation in various versions of the primordialism perspective; or to cycles of nationalism in varied perennial interpretations. It thus appears that whatever the forms of nationalism—territorial, linguisticcum-ethnic, or religious—they are all somehow related to the conditions of modernity, the primordial attachments underpinning the formation of nations, or the perennial features of historical cycles. Even then, there is little of a mechanismic explanation that connects these aspects of social conditions to the genesis of nationalism. Territorial Nationalism versus Islamic Fundamentalism in Muslim-Majority Countries 6 Built on the premise that the modern era is ipso facto an age of nationalism (Smith 1998: 35-36), proponents of the modernist paradigm link the origins of nationalism to such conditions of modernity as (1) social dislocations caused by economic transformation under ethnicallydivided empires where language serves as a medium for turning social conflict into nationalism (Gellner 1964); (2) uneven development that creates center-periphery division in the world economy (Nairn 1977) or internal colonialism in the center (Hechter 1975), prompting the elite in the periphery or of the subordinated groups in the center to engage in nationalist activities; (3) the expansion of networks of discursive literacy by the agencies of the military state and capitalist development, which serve as a medium for the rise of national communities (Mann 1992); (4) the state’s bureaucratic expansion that creates a chasm between the state and society, shaping political conflict and the rise of movements for national self-determination (Breuilly 1982); (5) the pulverization of traditional society and regimentation of the colony caused by imperialism, which lead to the decline of traditional industry, on the one hand, and the rise of mass literacy and the emergence of new marginal men who embrace Western ideals of selfdetermination, on the other (Kedourie 1971); and (6) the decline of the sacred language and kingship, the rise of the Reformation, the standardization of the vernacular as a tool for administrative centralization, and the advance of print capitalism that generates a unified fields of communication, gives a new fixity to language, and creates languages of power—all contributing to the rise of nation as “an imagined community” (Anderson 1983:4, 44-45). The primordial and perennial perspectives decouple nationalism and modernity. Their alternative accounts, however, fly even more widely over the historical horizon and thus fail to capture variation in nationalism. Primordialism seeks the roots of nationalism in either people’s genetic relatedness or cultural givens. In the former, kinship, ethnicity, and nation are forms of cooperation that expand genetic relatedness, enhance inclusive fitness, and thus improve an organism’s overall reproductive success (Hamilton 1964). Nation is made possible by the cultural inventions of unilineal descent and lineage exogamy that extended the “primordial model of social organization to much larger societies running into tens of thousands of people” (van de Berghe 1978: 403-4; Smith 1998: 147). Given that altruism is a function of genetic relatedness (Burnstein et al. 1994; Korchmaros and Kenny 2001), with nation being an extension of kin, this theory readily explains self-sacrifice vis-à-vis threats from other nations. This is similar to the way that a ground squirrel giving an alarm call to warn the members of its herds of the presence of a predator, even though the call gives away its location and thus putting itself in mortal danger (Mateo 1996, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness, retrieved October, 24, 2013). Territorial Nationalism versus Islamic Fundamentalism in Muslim-Majority Countries 7 The cultural version treats nationalism as an outgrowth of a primordial attachment, stemming from the assumed givens “of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them givenness that stems from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times, overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves” (Geertz