NATIONALISM AND THE COLONIAL LEGACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA: INTRODUCTION

Abstract

The study of nationalism has been reinvigorated by the debates on the subject carried out in the 1980s and 1990s. 1 Most authors on the subject can be divided into two camps; those who look at the material and objective conditions for the rise of nation-states as a social formation, and those who concentrate on how a national consciousness emerges. (In recent years, this division has ranged classical Marxists and modernization theorists on one side against postmodernists and subaltern theorists on the other). In considering this body of work, one can thus make a distinction similar to the one that E. P. Thompson famously elaborated (drawing on Marx) in labor history, differentiating between a class in itself and a class for itself, between a social class such as factory workers constituted by the objective facts of its material existence and a social grouping that is self-conscious about itself as a class so that it launches unions and labor parties. The former does not automatically or always result in the latter. We will discuss these theories in relationship to the Middle East and Central Asia and to the little theoretical work done on Middle Eastern nationalisms. Many authors speak as though “nationalism” is a unitary set of practices and beliefs that has a natural history, being born at a particular time and maturing into a long-term, fairly static phenomenon. Partha Chatterjee has shown, however, that the character of nationalism changes according to whether it is a metropolitan phenomenon or a colonial one. Implicit in his work, further, is that nationalism—or, at least, the making and conceiving of nationalism—continues in the post-colonial period, throwing up new forces and perspectives that challenge previous formulations of it. 2 Most writers on the subject worry about how the culture of nationalism tends to create a positive image of the nation as homogeneous while defining itself against a hated and despised Other or set of Others, within and without. 3 The debate over the peculiarities of the colonial legacy and its long-term impact on the colonized has constituted the central theme of post-colonial scholarship. Those involved in the two mainly disparate debates—on nationalism and on post-colonialism—need to address each other's concerns. To date, most discussions of the post-colonial condition have centered on South Asia, and it is our aim to open up this debate by considering the very different cases of the Middle East and Central Asia, the one having been subjected to capitalist colonialism, and the latter to czarist domination, followed by the Soviet experiment, with all the ambiguities it introduced in relations between metropole and periphery.