Abstract
This article examines the views of Vladimir Medem (1879-1923) —a major leader and theorist of the Jewish Labour Bund in Tsarist Russia and, after 1918, in independent Poland— on the ‘national question’, as he presented them in internal discussions within the Bund and in his theoretical works. It demonstrates that Medem’s goal was not just to outline a political program for the Bund but to establish the foundations for a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the nation from a social democratic perspective. Strongly opposed to nationalism in all its manifestations, Medem put forward, as an alternative to the nation-state (demanded by all nationalist movements), a model of a ‘state of nationalities’ in which citizenship would be nationally neutral and granted equally to the members of all nationalities. At the same time, Medem proposed that the state must take an active role in protecting national minorities by granting each of them a national-cultural autonomy with a limited jurisdiction over cultural matters (and only those matters). Medem’s analysis of the national question and the Bund’s program of national-cultural autonomy (like the similar views formulated by Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer) deserve special attention, I argue; as a form of ‘multiculturalism avant la lettre’, they may offer insights relevant to today’s increasingly diverse and multicultural societies.
Highlights
The ‘national question’ was the term used by early-twentieth-century European socialists to refer to the set of problems arising from the coexistence of different ethnic, cultural or national groups within one state, in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires
By the early twentieth century, virtually no work within the Marxist tradition offered a convincing analysis of the national question
The reason for this philosophical or theoretical weakness may be found in the fact that the ‘founding fathers’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had focused most of their attention on the categories of class and production, which they put at the centre of their analysis of history and society, and they had not examined the national question systematically in any of their major theoretical writings
Summary
Résumé Le présent article explore les points de vue sur la « question nationale » exprimés par Vladimir Medem (1879-1923) —dirigeant et théoricien notoire du Mouvement international des travailleurs juifs, dans la Russie des Tsars, puis, après 1918, dans la Pologne indépendante—, dans des discussions internes au Mouvement, ainsi que dans ses œuvres théoriques. J’estime que l’analyse de la question nationale effectuée par Medem et le programme d’autonomie nationale-culturelle du Mouvement international des travailleurs juifs sont particulièrement dignes d’intérêt (comme les opinions similaires exprimées par les théoriciens austro-marxistes Karl Renner et Otto Bauer); multiculturalistes avant l’heure, ces approches peuvent s’avérer particulièrement utiles aux sociétés d’aujourd’hui, de plus en plus diverses et multiculturelles
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