Before continuing, I want to discuss some of the concepts and vocabulary of this analysis. I have used a range of familiar terms in an unfamiliar way and also made up some new ones. Most important among these are ‘citizen’ and ‘authentic national subject’ (discussed throughout the text, for the sake of brevity, as a ‘national subject’). I have opposed these two terms in order to capture the difference between two kinds of political community. The first is a democracy conceived not simply as a mode of government, but as a form of society. The second is a nation, also understood as a particular kind of society. The first is composed of citizens, and the second of national subjects. I have invoked this last term, ‘national subject’, in order to avoid confusion.
We will see, for reasons associated with the historical origins of democracy, that the term democracy is seldom opposed to that of nation. In other words, the two terms are hardly thought to be contradictory, except when nationalism goes ‘bad’ – when it is associated with fascism and racism. This is hardly surprising. Nationalism was an important vehicle of democracy, especially in relation to colonialism, monarchies and empires. It has also played an important role in equalising members of society, at least at the level of political rights. Historically, democracies were lodged in nations, such that citizenship implied closure in a particular state. ‘The citizen’, moreover, is a pre-democratic appellation. Enlightened monarchs often referred to themselves as citizens of the realm.7 In this regard, in conversational and some academic writing, it makes sense to talk and write of ‘citizens of the nation’. Here the two terms are reconciled by an appeal to distinct levels. The nation refers to the political community (demos) in which citizens are entitled to exercise their rights and responsibilities. We might say that the nation belongs to the ontology of the political, whereas the citizen belongs to the ontic (see Chapter 7). In other words, the term ‘citizen’ is simply the name for the subject of the nation. We will see later that this is the way that Jurgen Habermas (2001) conceptualises the relationship between them.
The purpose of this book is to argue that there is a heavy price to pay for this seemingly benign formulation. It comes at the expense of a certain idea and practice of democracy. The citizen is the subject par excellence of democracy, not of the nation.
The historical contiguity of nations and citizens obscures their political-theoretical distance. Even though they are both products of the democratic imaginary, the citizen and the national subject are the effects of answering the question of democracy differently: Who are ‘the people’ in the rallying cry ‘Power to the people’?
When we discuss democracy simply as a kind of politics, as a way of exercising power, it becomes akin to, say, dictatorship or oligarchy or republicanism or liberalism. What such a notion foregrounds is democracy qua system of institutions, practices of decision-making, rules and regulations, rights, and obligations. As a form of society, what comes into view, in contrast, are the very persons that inhabit the political community. What are the customs and codes that govern how they relate to one another? From such a perspective, we are able to undertake a political anthropology of the demos. This is where the difference between the citizen and the national subject becomes most apparent. The citizen is hailed through democratic institutions and acts according to democratic norms – what I will call ‘ethical values’. The national subject is produced in and through the nationalist movement, supplemented by state bodies if it comes to power.
1 The Nature of African Nationalism
In 1991 the historian Saul Dubow declared that ‘in recent years our historical understanding of Afrikaner nationalism [in South Africa] has been transformed’ (Dubow, 1991: 1). ‘We now have’, he continues, ‘a much deeper understanding of the ways in which Afrikaner identity was forged from the late nineteenth century, and the means by which Afrikaner ethnicity was mobilised in order to capture state power in the twentieth century’ (p. 1). What remained, he suggests, were certain gaps in the historical record. These omissions were a result of a general amnesia about the place of racist ideas in Christian thought. They also reflected, he suggests, the pre-eminence of a Marxist scholarship fearful of ‘idealism’. Marxist scholars were not interested in questions of ideology and culture on their own terms. ‘The ideology of race’, Dubow observes, ‘has therefore tended to be discussed in terms of its functional utility: … the extent to which racist ideas can be said to express underlying class interests’ (p. 1). Dubow had in mind the tradition of radical political economy that announced itself so boldly in the mid-1970s.
In September 1976, just three months after the beginning of a massive student revolt in Soweto, the Review of African Political Economy published a special edition on South Africa. It contained several essays that would partly define the terms of South African studies for at least the next ten years. Of especial importance was an article on the state by Robert Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris and Dan O’Meara. Applying theoretical developments within French Marxism to a periodisation of the form of the state in South Africa, the authors explored what they called the secondary contradictions of the social formation. They argued that the form of the state was given, in addition to the primary contradiction between workers and capitalists, by struggles for hegemony between different fractions of capital itself (Davies et. al., 1976). Between 1920 and 1948, they argued, the critical division within the capitalist class was between imperialist/foreign capital(s) on the one hand and national capital(s) on the other (p. 29). At stake was whether ‘South Africa was to remain an economic chattel of imperialism or to generate its own national capitalist development’ (p. 29). The ‘unique’ feature of South Africa, they concluded, was the early hegemony that national capital exercised in the state. The displacement of imperial capital from this position after World War II saw the transformation of the economy away from reliance on primary production (mining) towards relatively high levels of industrialisation (p. 29). What is important to notice is how Davies et al. treated phenomena like Afrikaner nationalism. On their terms, political/ideological criteria reflected the latter’s base in different sectors of production (p. 5). ‘[It] is here’, Davies et al. continue, ‘that the English/Afrikaner traditions are to be located’ (original emphasis) (p. 6). English traditions in South Africa reflected the interests of foreign capital; Afrikaner nationalism was an ideological effect of national capital.
These were the terms of analysis that Dubow protested. John Lonsdale too had complained, at about the same time, that ‘Marxists were not much interested in the historical study of … nationalism’ (Lonsdale, 1992: 301). Both noted how, in the hands of such scholars, notions of race, volk1 and nation were reduced to mere effects of class positions. So too was racism. On these terms, there was little place for studies of ideology, politics and culture on their own terms. What Dubow was, in effect, celebrating when he toasted the growth of research on Afrikaner nationalism was the emergence of an environment more conducive to the study of nationalism, race and politics generally.
At least since the early 1980s, in South Africa and Britain, so-called French structuralist historiography was being taken on by a school of historians that claimed sympathy with the Marxist project, often self-identified as radical, and yet refused the idea that history was a process without a subject. Instead of privileging the role of anonymous structural processes, they emphasised the agency of historical actors and the contingency of beliefs and practices. In South Africa, these scholars often rallied behind the banner of social history, citing E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (1978) in their disputes with those sympathetic