ISIS and the west: The false search for unity and nationhood

The rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria), led by murderous men who want to create a new nation of Islam united under a Caliph, is the logical culmination not of militant Islamism alone but the western concept of nationhood. Regardless of whether or not all Muslim countries coalesce as one political entity and accept the ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph (fat chance!), the intent clearly follows the western ideal of what a nation is - a group of people united by common ideals and a common past interested in creating a common future jointly.

Islam and Christianity have always seen themselves as antagonists, which is why trying to constitute a national under an Islamic Caliph to fight western evil falls within a western concept of what constitutes a nation. This is what made the late Samuel Huntington propose a “Clash of Civilisations” – which is an expanded form of nationhood. The western idea of nation is about emphasising unity and erasing difference.

The idea is flawed and failing all over. To presume that so many people can be so united under one essential idea as to submit to it fully is a recipe for disaster. And this is exactly what will happen to ISIS and all nations created on the basis of eliminating all differences or pretending that only similarity matters. Difference is as much key to progress as uniformity.

All western-defined concepts of nationhood are thus either turning out to be seriously flawed or are falling victim to their own narrow definition. Europe defined a nation as people of a similar ethnicity (based on race, religion, etc) confined within a geography. This definition was a product of their history, their geography.

Since it was the Europeans who dominated the world for the last 400 years, it was their definition that was adopted by all the new post-colonial “nations” that got created. For all that, the European masters left the natives within non-national boundaries where arbitrary lines were drawn in the sand without reference to ethnic and tribal realities. Hence we have wars all over Africa and large parts of Asia.

The Indian experience with difference and diversity led us to not try and define what a nation is – we left the definition aside, and bought into it only after the British left. But what evolved here was an agglomeration of communities with some sense of the “other”, but where the “other” was not someone who needed to be annihilated or forced to become “one of us.” All our current problems with Jihadis and Hindutvavadis relate to our trying to adopt European ideas of similarity and nationhood and secularism. We were a plural people earlier, who did not need these definitions.

The western concept of nationhood got refined in its ultimate essence by Ernest Renan , a 19th century French historian, who said that a nation is defined by a long, shared past of “endeavours, sacrifice and devotion”. His ideal of a nation was this: “To have common glories in the past, and to have common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform more - these are the essential conditions for the constitution of a people.”

This ideal offers a perfect reason to rewrite history to create a false and synthetic unity. This is why the Left tried to create a synthetic history, and which the saffronistas now was to rewrite.

The Renan definition is the perfect path to creating a Hitler, and every despot in the world has the same dream. Despots are not always neurotic demons created by a flawed birthing process or bad ideas imbibed during infancy, but the culmination of an ideal of uniformity that draws on the Renan idea of nationhood.

As Rajiv Malhotra writes in his book Being Different, difference causes anxiety to humans and human groups. The western antidote to this anxiety was to try and erase difference by elimination, absorption or digestion (breaking up the different entity into its parts and using the bits that are relevant to it, and discarding the rest). Indic religions and cultures dealt with difference anxieties not by elimination or absorption, but by learning to reduce anxieties by culturally accepting difference as legitimate.

The Renan idea of nation went unchallenged in the past for that was how the west resolved its identity and difference anxieties. But today, with cross-border immigration, globalisation and the creation of virtual communities on the internet, elimination and suppression of difference is no longer possible. Not only that, the old differences of creed, community, race, language, religion and ethnicity are now being amplified by the creation of entire communities of interest defined by ideology and common interests.

Are America’s Red states (those who almost always vote Republican) seeking to build the same kind of nation as those living in Blue states (Democratic)? The jury is out. From a melting pot of communities and a common White Anglo- Saxon Protestant (WASP) past, today’s America is a mix of ethnicities and no longer a nation as defined by Renan.

Can ISIS create a new nation under a new Caliph? No, for its version is about Sunni Islam, which itself has divisions – leave alone not being compatible with Shia Islam.

Is India a nation? Not in Renan’s sense, but in the sense of there being a loose, and broad consensus that we are an agglomeration of communities and peoples.

Even assuming we have a “nation” fully peopled by citizens of the same ethnicity, will it still remain a nation? Again, probably not. For within this nation there will be several differences generated by communities of interest, gender and ideology. There will be men and women, there will be gays and straights, there will be people who believe in marriage, there will be people who believe in the opposite, there will be people who believe in living nude, and other against.

In short, Renan’s definition will fail once more as a nation gets richer; as other differences come to the fore as immigration and globalisation widen our differences of perspective.

So what are we really left with? We have to define “nation” not through the kinds of people who live in it, but as an administrative or governance entity that creates and administers a common law that most people think are reasonable.

There is no such thing as a nation as defined by the west. But there can be administrative units called a nation, united only by ensuring the right of every citizen to be different. By this definition, India is more nation than any in the west and east.