ROUNDTABLE

Nationalism and Ethnic Particularism

 

Michael lValzer i: a professor at the Institute for Advancedr Study in
Princeton and co-ea?itor of Dissent magazine. Jean Berliner? Elrbtain is a
poiiticat'philosopher at Vanderbilt University and author of Woman and
War. Gail Kiigman is an anthropologist and Ratiar Visiting Professor in
the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Bogdan
Denitci: is Michael Harrington Professor of Social Science: at Queens
College and Chair of the Socialist Scholars Conference. Todd Gitiin
teacher sociology at U. C. Berkeley and is author of The Sixties and most
recently the novelr The Murder of Albert Einstein. Marshall Barman
teacher politics and culture at City University of New York andr i: the
author ofAll That Is Solid Melts Into Air.

Editor: There has been a renewed outcry against ethnic
particularism in the light of ethnic conflicts in Eastern
EurOpe and in Somalia. It's not unusual to hear, partic-
ularly in liberal and progressive circles, calls for a re-
newed commitment to universal values that can
transcend all the narrow particularisms that some say
crawled out of the woodwork in recent years. Yet the
call for international solidarity may seem jarring to some,
because the academic defenders of liberal and progres-
sive social change movements have Spent so much of
their intellectual energies in the past couple of years
challenging the possibility of any universal standards.
Theorists in women?s studies, African-American stud-
ies, and deconStructionists in literature and the social
sciences have argued for the primacy of particularity and
perspectival views of morality, and for a theory of in-
commensurability of discourse that suggests that every
ethical claim is merely the articulation of the needs and
interests of a particular group or ethnic tradition. By im-
plication, those who speak from their particular per-
Spective, for example, white males in the West, have no
basis from which they could possibly articulate a uni-
versal moral critique of anyone else?s behavior. Given
that approach, originally articulated as an attempt to
protect minority cultures and women from the hege-
monizing power of male discourse, but now increasingly
an impediment to the possibility of forming any uni-
versal moral perspective, what exactly do liberals and
progressives have to contribute to the discussion of na-
tional conflicts in the world today?

Michael WaIZer: I want to put forward three theses re-
lated to the politics of particularism:

1. Particularist identities and the commitments and
passions that go with them are simply a fact of human
life, whatever we decide to think about them.

 

2. The political expression of this particularism can
be repressed or controlled, and has been pretty suc-
cessfully controlled by imperialist and authoritarian
regimes. National and religious communities can live
quietly and peacefully when they are ruled by imperial
bureaucrats or by disciplined agents of a vanguard party.

3. Men and women of the Left can?t endorse that kind
of a rule. So we have to look for political ways of ac-
commodating the particularist realities; and that, it
seems to me, should be the t0pic of this discussion, and
not the value of this or that particular identity or even
the value of particularist identities in general.

Jean Bethke Elshtain: I just returned from Hungary
and Czechoslovakia. What I was told was that these
countries faced for decades communist regimes that
used nationalistic rhetoric when it suited their interests.
Nationalism was not suppressed but encouraged within
this framework. These regimes fueled nationalist senti-
ments and even anti-Semitisrn when it was useful for
their purposes.

I would distinguish between ethnic nationalism and
what I would call civic patriotism that emphasizes citi-
zenship, universalist in the sense that everyone can be-
come part of the civic identity without effacing their own
particular identities.

Gail Kligman: I am troubled about the notion that what
we are facing in Eastern Europe is the reemergence of
a kind of inevitable set of ethnic conflicts. Ethnic iden-
tities were always manipulated by Party elites, not sup-
pressed while some kind of international or ?socialist?
identity was being conStituted.

Nationalist discourses are always manipulated by
elites; we need to pay attention to the internal dynam-
ics of power interests. In Eastern Eu rope, anti-Semitism
was so manipulated, and so too other ethnic hatreds?
in Romania, a hatred of Hungarians, Gypsies, etc.
Ceausescu spent years nurturing nationalist feelings and
fears?often suggesting to his people that the Russians
were massing on one of their borders and the Hungar-
ians on another; this Was an effective mobilization tac-
tic for regime support, at least initially.

Many in the West have paid too much attention to of:
ficial rhetoric and not enough attention to actual prac-
tices. Too many ignored the way that particularism was

49

in fact a part of the everyday lives ofmost peOple in those
allegedly homogenized societies.

Bogtlan Denitch: Some people who discuss the issues of
ethnic particularism and nationalism mix up legitimate
ethnic pride with the murderous, manipulated right-wing
chauvinism that we witness today in many parts of East-
ern Europe. They are treating this chauvinism as if it were
some variant of democratic, nineteenth century Mazzinian
nationalism. But what we are seeing is not that, but rather
?blood and soil? nationalism and you cannot sign on.

In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the nationalists
are quite clear: you cannot Opt to become a Croat or a
Serb, you have to be that by blood. They are intent on
creating states that are states of the dominant national
group that exclude others or that render the minorities
second-class citizens. Any yielding to that on the part of
democrats or peOple on the Left is a major mistake.
There will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
dead before this issue gets straightened out.

I don?t believe that the nationalism we are seeing
sprung up organically from the masses who were jusr
waiting for the opportunity to get at each other?s throats.
I think it was manipulated nationalism, first by the com-
munist elites, and now by the post-communists who can
only attempt to manipulate these kinds of feelings since
they have nothing else to offer in the current catastrophic
economic situation.

I believe that there are universal ideals like human
I reject any view that suggests that these
are merely white, male, or Western. Human rights and
democracy are not particularistic ideas, they are fought
for all around the world, and there are universal attempts
by local elites to suppress these ideas and to impose
right-wing dictatorships as an alternative. Human rights
are more important than a politics ofidentity. But a pol-
itics of identity, as long as it doesn?t mobilize the re-
sources or power of the state, is okay. But that?s not what
we are talking about in Eastern Europe?we are talking
about nationally based states who do use the power of
the state, and that's different.

Todd Gitlin: I agree with Michael Walzer that particu-
larist identities are a fact of life, and I?m not sure there
has ever been a form oflife in which that hasn?t been true.
But universal aSpirations, beliefs that one belongs to all
humanity, are also a fact of life. The mission of the Left
is to look for, call attention to, and insist on commonali-
ties that cross particularist tribal or national boundaries.
The Left is a boundary crosser. In a world in which the
centrifugal forces of separation are rampant, a world in
which those separate identifications often become lethal,
at the very least because they are manipulated from above,

50 VOL. 7, No. 6

it behooves us to insist upon the universal condition, and
to do so in all circumstances, whether we are in the big
tribe or the small tribe, whether we are facing tribes that
are most recently ruthless or tribes whose ruthlessness
was manifested further back in history.

It?s the mission of the Left in particular to overcome
all these forms of hatred and ruthlessness. That entails
stating and holding to a common standard in two re-
spects: first, it requires a commitment to human rights
as a prerequisite to a civic patriotism that transcends the
boundaries of one tribe and insists among all tribes that
coexistence is the prerequisite of civilization. Second,
the Left must promote the recognition that the world is
interdependent, both socially and ecologically. This is a
central universal fact: that all peoples share one earth
and we are facing a common condition.

Marshall Berman: Several things strike m'e. One is that
connected to the surge of particularist politics is an ex-
plosion of aggressiveness, rage, and liberation from the
don't have to listen to you anymore, we
don't care what you think, to hell with you. There?s a
tremendous exhilaration in saying those kinds of things
to peOple who seemed to have the power to define what
is ?rational speech" and ?rational behavior? for the so-
ciety; a position that gives the definer a certain kind of
power. On the other hand, when someone says ?It?s a
Black thing, you can?t understand it,? that claim is
meant to be understood. A lot of the discourse of your
language is incommensurable with mine? is actually
meant to be commensurable; it is, in fact, a reaching out
to the other while simultaneously denying the possibil-
ity of doing so, a reaching out for the humanity of oth-
ers that it simultaneously denies. That?s the good side.

One of the things that I noticed when I read a rant
from a West Bank settler and then compared it with a
rap from a young Black man in Los Angeles is how sexy
they both sounded. I think the Left has to find a way to
make humanism sexy. What?s the way? There?s actually
some pretty sexy humanism in Jewish tradition: for in-
stance, if we imagine Isaiah?s animals as signifying dif-
ferent races or types of human beings, there?s his vision
of the wolf and the lamb and the leopard and the calf
and the lion and the kid all ?lying down together?: or
take Second Isaiah's vision of an ?open city? where the
gates stay open all night, where all the peoples arc gath-
ered together, where the wealth of nations never steps
pouring in. These are pretty good images to nourish our
imagination. But we can find this imagery actually em?
bodied in the ?esh, if we check out the crowds in any
American metropolis today. Take a walk on Broadway??
or at your best local mall?some Saturday or Sunday af-
ternoon, and look at the families out shOpping: you'll

 

v. wm-uuzuwn- 

 

 

 

s?
Q. 1' 3(1.

 

 

see men and women of every color and complexion with
their arms around each other and their children in
strollers or carried on their backs; and look at those kids,
they are bringing new colors and complexions never
seen or even imagined into the world. For anyone who
can see and feel, this is one of the sexiest sights of the
late twentieth century. (This is what Spike Lee?s Jungle
Fever was supposed to be about, but its pregnancy was
ab0rted.) I believe that one of the primary human rights
is the right to belong to a family like this. One of the
nicest things about America today, maybe even the
nicest thing, is its capacity to incubate and nurture mil-
lions of multiracial and multinational families. Green
lines violate this right and sti?e this capacity; I know
there are times and places where we have to live with
them, but I don?t think the Left should promote more
green lines or see them as anything but a desexualiza-
tion and emptying?out of life.

Denitch: One of the problems that gets in the way of
someJews thinking clearly about these issues is their con-
fusion between the problems associated with Zionism
and the quite different problems emerging in Eastern
Eur0pe. It is as if Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia all happened
to be asserting now the right of return. I happen to think
that there are Special reasons why that right makes some

sense in the case of Israel, but it makes no sense in the
case of Eastern EurOpe where I am for states being states
for all their citizens, not just for one national grouping.
In Croatia a third generation Croat who lives in Australia
or New Zealand and doesn?t Speak the language today is
being given the right to vote in the Croatian election,
whereas a Moslem, Albanian or Serb who has lived all
his or her life in Croatia may or may not get a citizen-
ship. This cannot be what a democratic polity is about.

Editor: The argument that each of these groups makes
is that the reason that?members of their own national
groupings now live outside the country is the result of
past oppression by one or another of the other national
groupings in the area.

Denitch: The whole area has had emigration. I do not think
that there was national oppression in the former Yu-
goslavia for any group except the Albaniansm?except com-
munist oppression, but that wasn?t focused on nationality.

Editor: Each of the groups has memories that go far be-
yond a hundred years?and each of those groups can
point to historical moments in which they were in fact
victims .to the imperializing tendencies of some of the
other groups.

ROUNDTABLE 51

 

 

Denitch: All nationalists make the claim that their na-
tion is the martyred nation. In the case of Poland and in
the case of Ireland they use Catholic iconography to bol-
ster this sense of these are used in anti-
democratic ways.

Editor: Can?t there be truth to these claims, and Can?t
there be legitimacy to the desire to want some re-
dress, without these claims or desires necessarily being
antidemocratic?

Denitch: I don?t think an average Pole, Croat or Irish-
man suffers today for what was done in the eighteenth
century??I think that perception is merely an illusion,
but it is an illusion that makes these peOple act in hurt-
ful ways and sometimes kill others. I do not think na-
tional oppression centuries ago justifies murdering
peOple who weren?t even born or whose ancestors
weren?t even around when this occurred. This mythol-
ogy of the past functions as a killer today.

Editor: Absolutely. But it may be that jumping to vari-
ous internationalist or universalist positions may not
work until each national tradition is willing to publicly
own up to the pain that it has caused others as well as
the pain it has received from others, to validate the pain
that it has caused others, and mourn its own pain. With-
out working through the past, the pains may continue
on an unconscious level, transmitted from generation to
generation, and become the focus through which the
anger people are feeling today about living in social ar-
rangements that prevent a deeper connection between
them gets expressed. That is, since there are no con-
temporary social movements that can embody and ex~
press people's deepest desires for connection with each
other, the anger and alienation that is central to daily life
gets expressed in this perverse way, because the com-
munity within which one lives seems to legitimate the
expression of anger at the ?other??who can now be
seen as the embodiment of the historical forces that have
prevented us from achieving the kind of nonalienating
social life that we seek.

Kligman: Historical memory is very selective and is read-
ily reinterpreted by elites. Take a look at Bosnia where
mixed populations were living side by side reasonably
enough?and now they are slaughtering each other. Not
to romanticize prewar life at the local level, relations
were constantly negotiated, contested, etc. But pe0ple
do not live simply in harmony. There are tensions that
erupt into violence in nonethnically mixed villages. In
the case of mixed populations, cultural difference en~
ables ?otherness? and ?identity? to be more sharply dif-

52 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 6

ferentiated. This is where the politics of culture comes
into play. Some of what has happened in Bosnia is fu-
eled by the ongoing manipulation of the past in the ser-
vice of present political interests of diverse elites.

Denitch: A mythic past.l

Kligman: A mythic past, and one which is embedded in
cultural practices about the dead, lineages, ?obligations?
to the dead. Bogdan spoke of blood ties??ties that bind.
There is a saying in the Balkans that blood ties are thicker
than milk ties. Anyway, the past informs the present, to
be sure, but the past is also interpreted through the lens
of the present.

Editor: If it?s so easy for people to live together, why has
it become so easy for ruling elites to manipulate these
antagonisms? Why should it be so easy for people to be
moved into these feelings of hate?

Denitch: It wasn?t easy. It took at least five years for the
Milosevic regime to get things to the point where fight-
ing occurred. There were massive demonstrations
against it; 85 percent of the young men in Belgrade re-
fused to serve in the army during the war in Croatia.
There was hardly massive support for the desire to kill.
Over a hundred thousand young people from Croatia
and Serbia now live in the greater New York region in
order to get out of the conflict. In fact, fighting between
Croats and Serbs in that area only occurred during
World War II?it?s not the case that these people have
been killing each other for centuries. They?ve actually
been living in peace. In Croatia the right-wing national-
ists did not win a majority; and since they took power
they?ve been banning independent newspapers precisely
because it?s not easy to get people to agree with their
policies. The Bosnian majority too was actually opposed
to ethnic strife. It doesn?t take a majority to create eth-
nic strife: the IRA in Northern Ireland was a small mi-
nority, but it managed to polarize the whole society.
There?s some kind of that there?s some biological
urge in Eastern Europe that makes people want to cut
each other's throats, but that just isn?t true.

Walzer: These people lived together peacefully under
Ottoman bureaucrats, Hapsburg bureaucrats, and com-
munist bureaucrats. The question we have to face is
whether the kind of peace that allows for this living to-
gether can survive democratization. I don?t think it can
unless there is also separation, division, some new po-
litical recognition of difference.

The great multinational empires, in which different
ethnic or religious groups lived together and which we

 

 

 

 

 

now remember rhapsodically, were authoritarian struc-
tures. Sure, different groups lived together in one vil-
lage?but that was when they were ruled by someone
else, and neither ethnic group had the upper hand.
\When those authoritarian structures are shattered, we
may have to draw boundaries between the different
groups. You can hope to make it not a hard line but a
dotted line on the map, you can hope eventually for
boundary crossings of various sorts, but ?rst you?ve got
to draw some lines.

Bert-nan: Walzer?s point also suggests to me that there may
be some conflict at times between the principle of self-
rule and the principle of human rights. If self-rule means
that you have to constitute yourself as a Serb or a Croat
or an Israeli or a Palestinian, that may lead to a conflict
between those who draw such lines and others who don?t
want to be part of those kinds of boundary lines at all.

I have a student who is part Serb, part Croat, part Jew-
ish and part Such people are in trouble as the world
gets divided according to these kinds of boundaries.

I don?t think many people?s identities are adequately
described by these nationalist categories. As individuals
people are procmstean beds of complexity.

Gitlin: Michael Walzer is more emphatic about the
tragic fact of tribalism than about the possibility of ac-
commodating tensions within a common frame. He of-
fers us terrible either/ors: either partitioning?at its
worst, multilateral ethnic cleansing?or imperial uni-
versalism at bayonet point. While I accept the tragic
view of society that acknowledges that peOple have long,
bloody memories that elites know well how to stoke, and
that they are lying there ready to be stoked, embers al-
ways red, I also think that the blessings of the parti-
tioned life are overshadowed by the potential curse. The
main curse today is warlordism, from ballranized cam-

puses to balkanized elites to balkanized Ball-tans.

Editor: But on Walzer?s position, that problem exists be-
cause we don?t have good boundaries.

Deniteh: There have never been good boundaries.

Gitlin: That?s just it?everyone has a claim to different
boundaries. Some peOple were nomadic, so it was false
to enclose them in a boundary in the first place. Other
people have sometimes been on one side of a boundary,
sometimes on another. Irredentism seems to me to be a
fool?s game.

Berman: One of the great delusions of the nineteenth
century was the notion of "natural frontiers.?

Walzer: I don?t want to be saddled with ethnic cleans-
ing or even necessarily with any commitment to the idea
of partition. I am open to any arrangement or pattern of
accommodation that works on the ground. If you can
get away with decentralization, or regional autonomy or
cultural autonomy in some functionalist setup, that's
fine. Partition only when there is no alternative. And I
think it?s important to insist that even when there is par-
tition that we don't give up our interest in the awful
things that may go on across the boundary that we have
just drawn. The German decision to recognize the Croa-
tians without insisting that they first guarantee the rights
of their own minorities was a terrible mistake. The in-
ternational community has to sustain an interest on both
sides of the lines that it draws.

Elshtain: By pointing out that order between minorities
was maintained by unjust rule, you have to put to your-
self another important issue: which is the higher politi-
cal good, order or justice? We have to provide for the
expression of ?wounded identities? while hopefully
taming and chastening them with universal aspira-
tions. There are peOple in each of these spots around the
world who do emphasize constitutionalism and human
rights?and they are not without a space to Speak in
these new nations.

Berman: But they are without guns.

Editor: Perhaps what we are suggesting, then, is that we
are committed to holding universal principles which
limit what we allow people to choose democratically.

Gitlin: Exactly. Consider the Universal Declaration of Hu-
man Rights. These are principles that limit the preroga-
tives of nation-states. This is potentially a thrilling moment
in world history, a moment when the prerogatives of su-
perpowers have been dampened. There are institutions in
place, particularly the World Court, and occasionally the
United Nations?organized policing operations, which
have both legitimacy and power to enforce the rights of
minorities against tyrannical majorities, or the rights of
small nations againSt larger ones, or of distinct national
groups against those who would deny them. As we inch
towards the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations and
then the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration,
there is an opportunity to change the discourse aboutwhat
is possible on a global scale. One could start to imagine
the creation of institutions that would counter the worst
depradations of nationalism. It is exciting that when eth-
nic groups and political prisoners are being assaulted or
tortured virtually anywhere in the world, or rain forests
and other ecologically sensitive sites are being threatened,

ROUNDTABLE 53

the world now knows about it, and hence cannot pre-
tend not to know. It is horrible that what happened in
Yugoslavia happened, but the universal knowledge of
violations may be the precursor of some kind of institu-
tionalized commitment to stop all this and defend the
rights of embattled minorities.

Editor: You are made happy because there is someone
to intervene externally, perhaps an international force
that replaces the imperial forces that Walzer referred to
as having previously established world order and peace
between groups. But once one has such an empowered
intervener in the lives of each society, do you worry that
they might intervene in ways that you might not like 
in the case of Israel, interveningin ways that accorded
with the view of Third World countries that saw Israel
as more one-sidedly a human rights violator than we,
who support the Israeli peace movement, but also see
the one-sidedness of some of the critiques of Israel)?
What if the ?higher rational? force that you look to to
intervene is really just a bunch of human beings, with all
the normal sets of interests and irrationalities, but now
empowered in the name of justice to enforce their own
particular views and their own particular interests?

Gitlin: I don?t mean to suggest that the world is yet ready
for some kind of super-court. But I do think that a some-
what more empowered World Court, empowered on
the basis of the Universal Declaration, is something that
we ought to be moving towards, though not at one
stroke. There have to be safeguards, and, in the worst
case, there remains the force of civil disobedience. I
know that there are tremendous difficulties?bud think
we should take the difficulties as part of a conversation
that the world needs to be involved in, the conversation
about how constitutionalism and rights-liberalism can
be strengthened, recognizing that there are going to be
obstacles and built-in limits, but we don?t know where
those limits are going to be.

Walzer: I'm not sure that the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights is the right basis. It is enormously de-
tailed and far longer than the American Bill of Rights.
If you think seriously about the historical prerequisites
and sociological entailments of all the rights on that list,
I think you have to conclude that the only form of life
or political regime that that document would legitimate
is Western liberal democracy, our form of life. Every-
thing else would be ruled out.

We need a much more minimal conception of uni?
versalism which would enable us to respond to ethnic
cleansing or genocide or religious persecution or en-
slavemcnt. But within the limits set by some kind of min~

54 VOL. 7, No. 6

imalism, there are going to be a lot of different kinds of
regimes in the world. There are going to be nation-states
and multinational states and federations and unions of
different sorts, and they will have different degrees of
state neutrality and different ways of recognizing and
supporting ethnic and religious traditions. That is part
of what I think a decent minimalism has to accommo-
date. Certainly, it will rule out ethnic cleansing and geno-
cide, but it?s going to allow a range of practices of the
sort that might be offensive to some of us, for example
the kinds of practices that accompany the creation of an
Islamic republic in Iran.

An Islamic republic could not conceivably meet the
requirements of the Universal Declaration, but so long
as it does not persecute the Bahai and Zoroastrians and
Christians and Jews who live there and grants them a
minimal set of rights to their own cultural life, we prob-
ably should be prepared to recognize its legitimacy.

Ber-man: There is a wide public that doeSH?t want to see
other peOple killed and that worries about people in So-
malia or Bosnia?hand these feelings are the basis for
some commitment to universal human rights. The mass
media has made it much harder to hide mass murder-?
and that could be a source of progress for this minimalist
agenda. I feel optimistic about the fact that a lot of peo-
ple care about pe0ple with whom they have absolutely
no ethnic links, but they don?t want to see them killed.

Kligrnan: To make this more concrete, perhaps we
should be considering ?preventive intervention? in
Macedonia, for example, to forestall the kind of blood-
shed that seems likely to erupt there in the near future.
Is there a role for ?symbolic peacekeeping? in this pe?
riod of radically global restructuring that would also re-
define the roles and authority of international
institutions UN, NATO, CSCE, etc)? Might these
international bodies invoke the minimal universalist
principles as the source of their authority to act? How
can such principles be elevated beyond interest politics
without institutional authority? Might this be an aspect
of redefining the ?world order,? reconstituting it as a
?new world order?? Presently, past and familiar prac-
tices continue to be used in response to unfamiliar, new
and highly disordered, circumstances.

Elshtain: Let?s assume that we accept Michael Walzer?s
conception of a minimalist universalism; accept
regimes that are organized in ways that we wouldn?t wish
them to be organized. But we may have to rethink the
grounds of intervention. Walzer?s book Just and Unjust
Wars makes the argument that aggression is the one clear
crime that a state can commit against another state that

 

 

justifies intervention, say, a border crossing of a violent
sort. But we are talking about things here, as in the case
of the former Yugoslavia, within the borders of a state,
that nevertheless violate basic, fundamental norms that
we want to nourish in international society. So it raises
the possibility of intervention to protect some basic hu-
man rights, the right not to be killed and not to be
tortured because of one?s race, religion or historic iden-
tity. So we may be facing a world of more need for in-
tervention in the name of human rights.

Gitlin: You are right about the dilemma: we can?t wrig-
gle away from it with the kind of rigid isolationism that
has been adOpted in certain quarters of the Left. I op-
posed the Gulf War, yet I was very uncomfortable with
the way that some of the people who Opposed that war
settled for moral isolationism. I think the collective se-
curity framework was the correct one within which to
debate whether the war was wise.

Of course, when we think of collective security, the
principle of regional responsibility ought to be taken
more seriously?~50 I wish that this discussion was hap-
pening in EurOpe.

Walzer: I agree with Gitlin and Elshtain that interven-
tion looms large now in EurOpe, though the issue of in-
tervention in the Third World has loomed large for a
long time. Tanzania to stop Idi Armin, for example, or
Vietnam against Pol Pot in Cambodia. What?s new now
is simply that it?s happening in Europe, where we didn?t
think that humanitarian interventions was going to be
an issue ever again.

Editor: Why the interventions that you mention, but not
interventions in an Islamic fundamentalist society that
takes awa'y all rights from women and puts them in
prison for exercising what we consider basic human
rights in the West? Why draw the line at the denial of
the rights of women?

Walzcr: It would make a big difference if the denial of
the rights of women in Iran was taking place against the
background of Opposition by the majority of women,
and if they were engaged in a struggle against the regime,
and if the regime was murdering and torturing them,
then, yes, intervention would be justified. But we all
know that the Iranian revolution was carried out with
overwhelming support from the women of Iran and that
has got to count for something.

Editor: What about the case of Algeria if a majority
voted in Islamic fundamentalism but a sizable minority
of women opposed it, and fought against it because it

was going to deny them rights that we in the West take
for granted?

Walzer: A lot would depend on the quality of the re-
pression. There is no way to quantify it. Our comrades
in Algeria will be those men and women resisting an Is-
lamic fundamentalism, but whether we would be pre-
pared to invade the country to assist our comrades is
going to depend on what exactly their situation is.

Elshtain: It?s simply impossible to come up with an ab-
stract yardstick for intervention. There is a difference
between people being rounded up and massacred and
peOpIe being told that they need to wear the chadorra
which, for many Iranian women does not seem to vio-
late their rights.

Gitlin: When western women have denounced cli-
teridectomy at international conferences, some Third
World women have told them to mind their own business.

Elshtain: There are practices that we find abhorrent, cli-
teridectomy being one. Western feminists have made a
strong issue of it, and the women from societies that
practiced it told them that this was their issue which they
would deal with in their own way over time, it was a cus-
tom in the hands of women and enforced by women and
would be changed as they saw fit. In those circumstances
you keep making your own case. Arguments travel in
the kind of world we have today?and in some cases
that may be the best we can do. Yet in other cases some
kind of military intervention may be demanded?if
there are massacres or genocide.

Editor: Ought we not acknowledge that some manifesta-
tions of nationalism and ethnic particularism embody
pathology? People?s daily lives are filled with pain and
frustration, and their attention is diverted from the pain
through the creation of a fantasized community?the ?na-
tion? or the pe0ple? or ?the church??that does little to
change the social relations that caused the pain in the first
place. So national or religious traditions may sometimes
serve the purpose of turning peOple's attention away from
the ways that their real needs are not being met in the ac-
tually existing social order in which they live.

Walzer: Beyond the family and neighborhood, all com-
munities are imagined?but there are better or worse
forms of imagined communities. Insofar as I value po-
litical relationships that are relatively communal in form,
warm but not overheated, I would want to work for ways
to connect reality to the imagined reality, and to over-
come the alienation between the two, but I don?t think

ROUNDTABLE 55

 

we will ever escape the need for imagination in our un-
derstanding of our relationship with others. The ties that
bind me to someone in Tennessee or California more
closely than to someone in Mozambique or China are
imaginary ties-n-they have to be evoked, they reflect a
certain history in which I?ve been socialized, they reflect
the holidays of a specific calendar, the rituals and cere-
monies of American political life. We make it more real
if we make America something more like a participatory
democracy, but it?s never going to be as real as my rela-
tionship with the peOple who live next door.

Gitlin: As the world gets more complicated and intri-
cate, there are plenty of other relationships that make
claims on us beyond, and sometimes against, the claims
of family and neighborhood. I feel closer to some peo-
ple with foreign citizenship than to some who share my
own national citizenship. One thing that is developing
is what Charles Nathanson calls a global civil society
that is self-contradictory, unevenly developed, but felt
to be as real as the more formal bonds of political citi-
zenship. And in many ways this is auSpicious. The fact
that hundreds of thousands of people around the world
are willing to write letters to one dictator or another at
the behest of Amnesty International to Oppose unjust
jailings is another sign of this, as well as what Benedict
Anderson calls ?fax internationalism, say, with respect
to repression in China.

Editor: The talk here is very different from that of those
on the Left who support a form of particularism that in-
Sists on noncommensurability of discourse, a particu-
larism that challenges universal values.

Gitlin: When you said particularism, I thought you might
be saying ?protectionism,? and that is exactly what we
are opposing: the notion that one has no other obliga-
tion but that imposed by one?s primary tribe. All of us
have embraced a meddlesome ideal: alongside our eth-
nic, religious, and gender identities there is a transcen-
dent identity, a membership in humanity, and part of
what we honor in the American ideal is the idea of rights
that are inalienable. So we are intrinsically interested in
the contact between different groups, so while difference
is real and should be honored, so is commonality real
and to be honored. We should be very careful before
granting supreme powers to any particular identity unit.

Every once in a while something happens that makes
one remember why tribalism is fierce: I tuned in to the
World Series and I saw the Atlanta fans performing the
?Tomahawk Chop? and I immediately imagined the pub-
lic reaction if a team from Germany, say, calling itself ?the
Diisseldorfjews, had a ritual of public davening or wav-

56 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 6

ing dollar bills. So Indians have a total right to be horri-
fied and to feel that this is abominable. But it is not just
up to Indians to protest this?it is incumbent upon us
as Jews to protest it, for the ADL to protest it, for the
NAACP to protest it. It?s important while defending the
rights and dignity of one?s own tribes, to think about what
is owed to the peoples of other tribes-and that is a
thought that has been submerged with the fascination
with particularism. That concern separates most of the
people in this discussion from the focus of many of those
on the Left or so-called Left in recent years.

Elshtain: I do think we are talking about a so-called Left.
There is a particular kind of academic politics that claims
the mantle of the Left, but I don?t think that it deserves
that designation. It strikes me as not a particularly lib?
eral idea to talk about incommensurability?it?s a kind
of resegregation. With that way of thinking we are sud-
denly given permission to not engage one another: we
can issue manifestoes, but we are not required to engage
one another. But what we are talking about here is the
necessity of engagement.

I?ve fought all my life against the notion that there is
a particular way that women are supposed to think qua
women; and now we are hearing that very idea in the
name of one brand of feminism. There?s a notion today
that my identity is exhausted by my gender. My view of
feminism is one that says that our identity is not totally
defined by our gender, though our gender may be the
ground of our identities. There are many situations in
which I have more in common with a male political
philosopher of good will than I have with a feminist of
a certain kind of ill will preaching this kind of exclusiv-
ity and teaching the notion of male as the ineradicable
?other? with whom I can have nothing in common. This
is a completely anti-democratic idea. Democracy re-
quires that we can and do engage each other as citizens,
a category that makes it possible to engage in alliances
with diverse groups of people depending on what the
issue is in any given instance.

We get disempowered from making the kind of case
that we need to help shape a humane international com-
munity if we align ourselves with those tendencies on
the academic Left that have advocated the kind of brit-
tle exclusivity I?ve been describing. We can?t have it both
ways.

Kligman: I agree with Elshtain. Identity is not ?fixed,?
nor biologically determined. Exclusivity excludes, con-
tradicting fundamentals of democratic ideals and prac-
tices. Engagement is a critical term here. The ?so-called?
Left must re-engage not only with itself, but with

others as well. Cl