Some Questions and Issues About the New Nationalism

Some Questions and Issues about the New Nationalism The question "who are we?" is a question English-speaking Canadians have been asking themselves a lot lately. For a long time, we thought of ourselves as Canadians which is to say not American. But now tha~ the French-speaking population ofQuebec has been showing its determination to leave Confederation, the question has become an urgent one. And in a multicultural state that does not allow its citizens to define their origins as simply "Canadian," the question has becomeinfinitely more problematical to answer. As it turns out, the question of national identity is problematical notjust in Canada, but everywhere in the world. With the collapse of the old bipolarworld order- a collapse that began around 1975 and culminated in the 1989 dissolution of the Soviet empire - nearly every stripe of nationalist expression has been drawn into the sphere of capitalism's structuring of reality, and the process has blurred both the definition and the scope ofself-determination. Where ?ationalism once provided minor geopolitical players with an alternative identity that addressed, at least theoretically, the rectification of political, social and economic inequities, the contemporary pursuitofselfdetermination , deprived of its insurgency, has undergone a curious narrowing of its scope, and now frequently takes the form of sectarian self-aggrandizement. The most extreme expressions of this shift can be found in countries like Somalia and Rwanda, tlle former of which has experienced a collapse of civil government into clan warfare and the latter, tribal genocide. Events in Yugoslavia since 1990, a country with as strong a structural resemblance to Canada as any in the world, have precipitated a brutal ethnic war. In Canada, the expressions ofthis shift thus far have been comparatively benign, but there's reason not to take comfort in that. The structure of neo-nationalism in Canada is rooted in the same ground as anywhere else, and it may Journal ofCanadian Studies only be our relative wealth and comfort that shields us from its predations. While we have time, we'd betterhave a closerlook at what we're getting into. * * * There has been a global rebirth of nationalism since 1975. ln Canada we call it, most oftlle time, multiculturalism, which began in 1972 as a federally instigated democratic celebration of all the things Canadians shared across the differences in their origins and outlooks. A more cynical view of it was that it was a device to cloak the effects of institutional French/English biculturalism, and a yet more cynical view might see it as a cover-up of an immigration policy aimed at ensuring that we had enough people willing to work at minimum wage levels in the kitchens ofour fast food restaurants. But in the past few years multiculturalism has evolved rather strangely: into avowals, often hostile and exclusionary , of how different we all are and how impossible it is to relate to one another across those differences. That is precisely the mindset that destroyed Yugoslavia. By and of itself, the ontological source - and the intense energy - of this new nationalism is impossible to explain. One must look elsewhere to locate a parallel phenomenon that provides it with fuel, a phenomenon rarely, if ever, analyzed as integral to its arousal: the universal redistribution of wealth upward. Whether in Africa, elsewhere in the undeveloped (or perhaps we should say "unmalled") world, or in most of the old Soviet empire, the redistribution of wealth takes the form ofa bizarre "kleptocracy," in which an increased proportion of wealtll flows to military or tribal oligarchies, and insome cases to corporate multinational corporations there to exploit natural resources. In countries like Canada, the phenomenon takes of tlle form of enriched corporate profits, the impoverishment of the public sector, and massive cutbacks in areas of social entitlement . Both this new nationalism and the upward redistribution of wealth, it seems to me, have their roots in the postmodem recognition that the social and economic 189 improvements that every political and economic system took for granted were about to run aground on the limitations of the planet's physical resources. Social and economic progress, in other words, are no longer inevitable, so let's grab our share of the pie...