The Seven Pillars of Nationalism

Diaspora 7:3 1998 "he Seven Pillars of Nationalism Peter Murphy University of Ballarat/Melbourne, Australia I "No one can have two countries." This maxim, in many respects the governing maxim of the nation-state, turns two norms into facts: first, that dual or multiple geopolitical identities are impermissible ; second, that geopolitical allegiance must be to a "land." The transformation ofthese norms into facts was (in large part) the work ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In some cases, this work was very bloody; in many cases it was also left incomplete because of memories, often only half-understood, of alternative norms and political facts—memories ofstates in which dual identity was taken for granted, and in which allegiance was not to "a land" or "a country" but to a "porte"—a city gateway through which the transactions of the world flowed. Ancient Rome is a paradigm of the portal state. It gave domicile to Latins, Syrians, North Africans, Spanish, and even the Germans conscripted to its armies. The flow of staple goods from the land was the lifeblood ofthe Roman state, but not its raison d'être. Thus, when Emperor Constantine decided to found a new Rome, in the East, he chose to rebuild the ancient waterway city of Byzantium. Sited on the Bosphorus and possessing the magnificent harbor of the Golden Horn, the New Rome replicated the elements of the portal city, but nearer to the eastward-looking riverine (DanubeEuphrates ) axis-frontier of an increasingly embattled empire. Venice, Barcelona, Genoa, Trieste, and Amsterdam, among others, followed the example of Rome and Constantinople. The mythological essence of the imperial maritime city is captured in Claude Lorrain's seventeenth-century painting Ulysse remet Chryseis a son pere, with its scene of anchored ships, port-side loading and embarkation, seamen and merchants of many nationalities, all framed by impressive government buildings and patiently watching officials. Claude's painting depicts something outside of any particular time and place. Various ships' insignia, state flags, and the distinctive dress of nationalities are portrayed, yet all of them occupy the same proscenium space of the port. This is a place of 369 Diaspora 7:3 1998 power, but not of national power. The concerns of the officials are transactional ones: managing the traffic through the maritime portal , the bodies oftransient and permanent foreigners, the ambassadors and exiles, adventurers and travelers who wash up in its harbor. As Claude's painting makes clear, the perspective of the portal is not the stormy seas of the nineteenth-century Romantic painters but a sheltered anchorage. The open sea beyond is barely glimpsed. The painterly vista is not a "landscape"; there are no misty mountains, scrubby beaches, or rocky cliffs in sight. Rather, the harbor is framed by public buildings of great architectonic power and beauty. The quay forms the sinewy peras (limit) of the water, and the wealth of the portal city is vividly measured in its buildings. Without a doubt, this wealth is dependent on the produce of conquered territories. But land, no matter how necessary, is not central to the imaginary of the portal. Its dreams are diaphragmatic . The Romans venerated the guiding spirit of Janus, the god of gates (of entry and exit). The gate opens and closes, much as someone breathes in and out. Passage through the gate does not require naturalization, assimilation, change of nationality, identity papers, or proofofbirthplace—only the payment oftaxes. (How else can the state pay for its buildings and its empire?) The architectonic imagery of the Roman Empire is very familiar to us. Even a modern city like Paris calls upon the Roman symbol of the freestanding arch-gate in deploying the Arc de Triomphe as a material icon through which the traffic of the urbs flows. What is striking, from a comparative historical perspective, is the way in which the "logic of the gate" finds a parallel in other portal cities and states. One ofthe most remarkable and long-lived examples ofthe "logic of the gate" outside of the Greco-Roman-Latin world has to be that ofthe Ottoman Empire. Remarkable for two reasons: firstly because of the sheer bloodiness of the non-diaphragmatic nationalisms that arose when that...