National Identity and State Formation in Africa. Группа авторов
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nationalist movement, built around Trump, or the mobilization for Brexit in the UK, are clear expressions of the power of identity – a trend that often leads to xenophobia.
Sources of collective identity (always a cultural construction) are diverse. One of the most significant in the socio-political evolution of our societies is national identity. National identity is the set of interrelated cultural attributes that provide meaning and self-recognition to a collective of humans that define themselves as a national community. The term ‘national’ specifies the aspiration of this community to be acknowledged as a distinct social group that transcends primary ascription attributes, such as ethnic or territorial, and to emphasize their shared experience over time and space. It is suggestive of a congruence between polity and culture. Fundamentally, nations are cultural communities, but they are not ‘imagined’; they are constructed with the materials of history and geography.
Nations must be clearly distinguished, conceptually and practically, from states, because states are political-institutional constructions, sometimes derived from a pre-existing nation, but more often resulting from the integration/annexation of several nations, that are fused, through political domination, into a given state. In fact, the nation-state of the modern era is an exception in the high diversity of institutional constructions resulting from the interaction between nations and states, from city states to imperial states, and from communal institutions to tribal confederations. The multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual composition of many (if not the majority of; cf. Welsh 1993) states gave rise to the idea of ‘multinational states’ (cf. Peleg 2007; Kraus 2008).
Moreover, when a nation-state is constituted, it defines a new identity: citizenship as established by the state. Citizenship tends to reflect the cultural identity of the nation that prevailed in the construction of the state, although in some cases, the project of state formation may include the negotiated recognition of pluri-national states – always a fragile construction because it does not necessarily respect equal access to the resources of the state. This is where federalism becomes a critical intermediate institution between the state and the nation. In some situations (South Africa is one example), despite the formal structure of a unitary state, many ethnic groups would rather understand and speak of themselves as nations. This is especially the case in previously colonized countries who see themselves obliged to operate under the label of modern nation-states, post-colonialism.
The existence of nations without states is widely acknowledged as a result of the diversity of the historical process. The most often cited examples are Scotland, Wales, Quebec, Catalonia, Euskadi, Kurdistan, Palestine (still without a state), Tibet and multiple quasi-national communities still entangled in struggles, violent or not, in their aspiration to statehood. The boundaries between nationhood and statehood are fluid and often change over time. Moreover, nations tend to persevere longer than states, the most important examples being the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
The role of identity in both founding and dissolving the institutions of the state can be better understood by differentiating three major types of national identities: resistance identity, legitimizing identity and project identity.
Resistance identity occurs when a materially produced, culturally experienced collective identity is not recognized in the institutions of the state, when states are formed on different constellations of culture and power. Then, social movements and political projects emerge in what could be a protracted confrontation that results in a new institutional system. However, when the force of the existing states prevails, resistance identity becomes the source of multiple forms of negation of the dominant state institutions, sometimes for centuries. Pluri-national states based on consensus (such as Switzerland or Canada) become stable institutions that weave a new political actor by sharing in the construction of meaning. States that include various nations without recognition of national rights are periodically torn by confrontations, often intensified by ethnic or religious conflicts.
Legitimizing identity is the collective identity produced by the state on the basis of a period of sharing the building of common institutions, usually under the predominance of one particular identity, and a given set of interests. Most of the nation-states created in the last three centuries follow this pattern, so that national identities are constructed by the state, with the education system being primordial in this construction. The school of the French Third Republic epitomizes this cultural hegemonic development.
Project identity is the collective identity defined by a process of becoming rather than that of being. It is the national or pluri-national community that people would like to be, not as the expression of a pre-existing cultural community but as the will of discovering new institutional forms on the basis of a set of values in the making. The project of the European Union would qualify as a national identity project. The United States of America was also built on the quest for a common goal – not without conflicts, as manifested by the atrocious civil war fought not only due to economic interests but also to the divergent fundamental values of the two national identity projects that clashed on the battlefield.
The nature of this relationship between nations and states is variegated. The nation-state, historically produced by the formation of states as an expression of cultural identities that became national by becoming embedded in the state, is under stress in our time because of the use of the state by globalizing forces, to enhance their power and interests, in increasing conflict with the identity and interests rooted in the national community. The opposition between globalizers and nationals, between cosmopolitans and locals, is evident everywhere. Ultimately these trends lead to the separation between the nation and the state in the course of history.
It would seem paradoxical that at the time of universal globalization, and networking of states, the old issues of nationalism and nationalistic politics have emerged at the forefront of current affairs. In fact, it is precisely because of the political projects aiming at superseding the largely obsolete sovereign nation-states that national cultural constructions emerge as a powerful alternative to the dissolution of meaning in instrumental networks of power without identity roots. ‘Citizens of the world’ is only fitting for the masters of the world, that is the financial, technological and cultural powers that do not need cultural roots to assert their power.
However, we want to focus this major issue on the interplay between nations, states and nation-states in Africa, a continent in which the identities of colonizers and colonized have been woven for centuries without necessarily finding a stable institutional construction that could reflect this human diversity. Africa is characterized by high levels of diversity related to a range of issues like race, ethnicity, language, culture, history, territory, colonialism, power struggles and wars. Congruence between the political and national as envisaged by Gellner (1983: 1) is therefore the exception rather than the rule. Accordingly, the need for nation-building (in the sense of making the boundaries of the state and the nation coincide; cf. Mylonas 2017: xx) and ways to achieve this are pervasive themes and a priority on many a national agenda.
While countries in Africa share many of the characteristics and trends to be found in other parts of the world, there are also specific features which shaped their histories and influenced their constitutional and statehood options. An important factor is that the process moved through different constellations of power and a variety of governing traditions, spanning many centuries and covering pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial phases. The result is a kaleidoscope of experiences, legacies and attitudes, which still influences contemporary developments, and which requires a long durée perspective (Braudel 1958; Erk 2018) in order to make sense of a complex and multi-faceted history.
Despite this diversity on the level of individual states, there are some common, meta-level forces that shape the interplay between global networks and local responses in a less visible way. In his contribution, Francis Nyamnjoh highlights the importance of mobility which characterizes both global forces and local responses. He reaches into the ‘deep past’ before the advent of modern tools of communication and of containing human mobility to remind us of the ‘primordial’ forms of border crossing when waves of migration moved out of Africa. But the ‘nimble-footedness’ does not pertain to humans alone – it is equally true of things and ideas.
Nyamnjoh links the ancient past to present-day protest