Luke Ford

Liah Greenfeld writes in this 2016 book:

* The worth of the nation—the psychological gratification afforded by national identity and therefore its importance—is related to the experience of dignity by wide and ever widening sectors of humanity. The remarkable quality of national identity—and also its essential quality—is that it guarantees status with dignity to every member of whatever is defined as the national community. It is this quality that recommended nationalism to European (and later other) elites whose status was threatened or
who were prevented from achieving the status they aspired to, that ensured the spread of nationalism throughout the world in the last two centuries, and that explains its staying power in the face of material interests that often pull in the other direction.

In the early days of nationalism, different elite groups, exposed to nationalist ideas, reacted dissimilarly to them, in accordance with the relative ability of nationalism to aid them in their status-maintaining and status-aggrandizing pursuits. An example is furnished by the nobility in various German lands who as late as the 1800s remained indifferent to the appeal of nationalism, embracing it rather reluctantly during the Wars of Liberation.

* Among non-noble intellectuals, the second of the two elite groups that were responsible for the initial establishment of nationalism in Europe, the idea of the nation also had to compete with other status-bestowing frameworks. As long as other identities appeared to promise more dignity, the nation failed to captivate them and secure their commitments. French philosophes were above particularistic self-content. Voltaire wrote that “a philosopher has no patrie and belongs to no faction,” and that “every man
is born with a natural right to choose his patrie for himself.”1 Abbe Raynal believed that “the patrie of a great man is the universe.”2 Great men, explained Duclos, “men of merit, whatever the nation of their origin, form one nation among themselves. They are free from the puerile national vanity. They leave it to the vulgar, to those who, having no personal glory, have to content themselves with the glory of their countrymen.” …So long as one could reasonably hope to become world famous (and French philosophes in the mid-eighteenth century still had a reasonable chance of that), it was foolish to limit oneself to a small part of the world. And if one was confident in one’s superiority and felt assured of recognition, one had no need for shared dignity of a nation. In fact, one had no need for nation at all, a republic of letters was enough.

…German intellectuals remained faithful to their cosmopolitan ideals long after their French brethren had abandoned theirs. Nicolai considered German nationalism “a political monstrosity”;4 Schiller claimed to have given up his fatherland in exchange “for the great world” and wrote “as a citizen of the world.”5 Fichte was a principled cosmopolitan as late as 1799… Nationalism did not appeal to German intellectuals prior to the Napoleonic campaign because they were the only group interested in the redistribution of prestige in society, and without the support of the nobility and the bureaucracy, they lacked the means to enforce it. To insist on such a redistribution (implied in the idea of the nation) in this situation would have only invited ridicule and damaged the chances of social advancement which some of them had. It was more satisfying to dream that one was an equal member of a community of intellectuals…

* Most of our experiences, however, are not experiences of physical or biological realities, but of the social reality. This reality is also constituted by our experiences, but we don’t experience it through our bodily senses, we experience it through, or in, our minds. Most of our empirical reality, in other words, is neither material nor organic, it is mental.

* While all other animal species, irrespective of the level of development and place on the evolutionary tree, essentially transmit their ways of life genetically, we overwhelmingly transmit our ways of life through symbols.

* No human group of any duration, and no individual, unless severely handicapped or (as an infant) undeveloped mentally, can live without an identity. Having an identity is a psychological imperative and, therefore, a sociological constant… An identity defines the position of its individual or group bearer in a more or less extensive sphere of the social world that is relevant for this bearer, and serves as a map or blueprint for this sphere…

* [P]opulations homogeneous as to any particular such characteristic do not necessarily share the same identity and consciousness: medieval peasants and lords in Europe, though all Christians, did not share an identity—peasants identifying as peasants and lords identifying as lords—and, beyond all doubt, thought differently. To return to language, they did not speak the same language… identities were estate-based… there were no ethnic identities before nationalism…

* Language, above everything else, is the medium of thinking, thinking representing the explicitly symbolic component of our consciousness, the explicitly symbolic mental process… traffic lights well may be the most efficient system of communication among humans… To capture symbolic experiences (experiences produced by the specifically human, cultural environment) language is necessary; only it can incorporate them into reality. A stable sphere of new experiences presupposes the annexation to human existence of a new sphere of meaning which only language can create, the emergence of a new semantic space. Therefore, while one can imagine a social current without the participation of language, institutionalization without language is impossible. Any social order starts with the creation of a new vocabulary, and this is demonstrated by every case of nationalism…

* collectivistic nationalisms are more likely to engage in aggressive warfare than individualistic nationalisms… Collectivistic nationalisms, by contrast, are forms of particularism, whether perceived in geopolitical, cultural (in the sense of acquired culture), or presumably inherent, ethnic terms. The borderline between “us” and “them” is relatively clear… collectivistic nationalisms are articulated by small elite groups… To achieve the solidarity of this larger population, made of diverse strands, they tend (though not invariably) to blame their misfortunes not on agencies within the nation, whom they would as a result alienate, but on those outside it. If they do blame internal elements, they define these as agents acting on behalf of or in collusion with hostile foreigners. Thus, from their perspective, the nation is from the start united in common hatred.

* During war, ethnic nationalism is more conducive to brutality in relation to the enemy population than civic nationalism. This is so because civic nationalism, even when particularistic, still treats humanity as one, fundamentally homogeneous entity.

* In the sixteenth century, English emotional vocabulary dramatically expands: numerous new terms appear (redefined concepts as well as neologisms) without equivalents in any other language, which capture widely experienced emotions that had not been experienced before. On examination, they are all related to the three principles of nationalism: its secularism, fundamental egalitarianism, and popular sovereignty.

All three of these features place the individual in control of his or her destiny, eliminating the expectation of putting things right in the afterlife, making one the ultimate authority in deciding on one’s priorities, encouraging one to strive for a higher social status (since one is presumed to be equal to everyone, but one wants to be equal only to those who are superior), and giving one the right to choose one’s social position (since the presumption of fundamental equality makes everyone interchangeable) and therefore identity. But this very liberty, implied in nationalism, both empowering and encouraging the individual to choose what to be—in contrast to all the religious pre-national societies in which no one was asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” since one was whatever one was born—makes the formation of the individual identity problematic, and the more so the more choices for the definition of one’s identity a society offers and the more insistent it is on equality. A clear sense of identity is a condition sine qua non for adequate mental functioning, but national consciousness—modern culture—cannot help the individual to acquire such clear sense, it is inherently confusing. This cultural insufficiency, the inability of a culture to provide individuals within it with consistent guidance, is what Durkheim named anomie…

A member of a nation can no longer learn who or what she or he is from the environment, as would an individual growing up in an essentially religious and rigidly stratified, hierarchical order, where everyone’s position and behavior are defined by birth and divine providence.

* Ambition, aspiration, romantic love, and happiness… appears with a corresponding form of suffering… Ambition was the main cause of the characteristic suffering in sixteenth-century England. The defense against threats—or experience—of a thwarted ambition was love.

* Like ambition, love made it possible for the free and therefore rootless modern individual, whom the society around would not define, to find one’s proper place and to define oneself. Functionally, both love and ambition were identity-forming devices. This, above all else, explains the tremendous importance of this emotional complex in our lives. Moreover, in distinction to ambition, which led the searcher by a circuitous way, made an obstacle course by the myriads of simultaneous, crisscrossing and overlapping searches of others, which demanded unceasing effort on one’s part, and never guaranteed the result, love required no effort whatsoever—it happened to one, one fell into it. Thus it led to the discovery of one’s true identity directly. The supreme and truest expression of the sovereign self, it was, in effect, a miracle, for which one was in no way responsible.

What made it an expression of the self nevertheless was the immediate recognition of the true love’s object, the One, that particular her or him who was one’s destiny and yet, paradoxically, was most freely chosen. One’s identity, one’s true self, was found in that other person and what he or she saw in one. This was the central theme of Romeo
and Juliet.

* since no genetic or any other organic origins of functional mental disease have ever been found, despite constant and constantly very well-funded attempts to find them (in fact, schizophrenia and affective disorders are defined as diseases “of unknown organic origin” and this is precisely what the term “functional” emphasizes), our knowledge of it essentially consists of clinical observation, that is, observation of visible symptoms…

* Madness spread with national consciousness and already in the seventeenth century was severely affecting Scotland, Ireland, and the English settlements in America. But until the French Revolution it was known elsewhere only as “the English malady.”

* No disease caused by an outside agent—plague, tuberculosis, common flu, and so on—affects populations exposed to it uniformly: while some succumb, others don’t, and among those who succumb, some catch the severe form with a lethal outcome, and some get away with weaker, curable expressions of the disease and survive. This depends on the interactions of the agent with the environment, on the conditions in which it operates: predisposition of the patient, availability of therapies, and so on. The same applies to functional mental illness. Its agent—national consciousness itself—is always present in modern society; it makes anomie pervasive and the formation of individual identity one’s own responsibility, and therefore problematic. This general problematization of individual identity and specific problems with the formation of identity led to degrees (clinical and subclinical, permanent and temporary) of mental impairment, derangement, and dysfunction, today recognized as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness. The common symptoms of these conditions are social maladjustment (chronic discomfort in one’s environment) and chronic discomfort (dis-ease) with one’s self, the sense of self oscillating between self-loathing and delusions of grandeur, megalomania, most frequently (in cases of unipolar depression) fixing on self-loathing, and in rare cases deteriorating into the terrifying sense of a complete loss of self (in the acute psychosis of full-fledged schizophrenia). This mental disease reaches its clinical level in a minority of cases (even if it is a very large minority, as in the United States). But the pervasive anomie of modern national societies affects very large numbers of people—statistics claim, close to 50 percent of Americans today, for example, are occasionally mentally disturbed—and therefore, makes very large numbers of people socially maladjusted and deeply dissatisfied with themselves…

* nationalism radically changes our social and political experience. Because of its secularism, egalitarianism, and insistence on popular sovereignty, it makes people activist. It follows logically from the explicit or implicit recognition that man has only one life, that social reality, at least, is a thing of his making, and that all men are equal—that nothing can justify this one life falling short of giving full satisfaction, that men are responsible for all its disappointments, and that everyone has the right to change reality that disappoints.

* An example of individual ideological activism is “lone-wolf” Islamic terrorism: young Western-born or Western-educated people from generally secular, mostly Muslim but quite often Christian backgrounds, converting to Islam (as a rule without acquiring much knowledge about the tradition) and carrying out violent acts against targets which symbolize the West. In the overwhelming majority of cases of apprehension and post-act investigation the person is revealed as a consciously maladjusted, unhappy, confused individual—a misfit, frequently complaining of one’s loneliness and unhappiness on the Internet. Why do these mildly disturbed people, who clearly suffer from the modern malaise, rally to radical, particularly violent, version of Islam? They do this for precisely the same reason young people in their existential situation earlier rallied to
Marxism.

* …ideological politics is a specific form of politics brought about by nationalism. They are irrational in the sense of being motivated by a dedication (passionate, if not fanatic) to causes which in the large majority of cases lack the remotest connection to the personal experience—and therefore objective interests—of the participants, but characterized by their capacity to justify and explain the discomfort these participants feel with their self and social environment. At their core invariably lie visions that bear the most distinctive mark of a schizophrenic delusion: the loss of the understanding of the symbolic nature of human social reality and the confusion between symbols and their referents, when the symbols themselves become objective reality.

* Different types of nationalism favor different types of self-medication through social/political activism. Thus individualistic nationalisms naturally encourage individual activism, which explains why lone-wolf terrorism is particularly widespread in liberal democracies… When suffering from the modern malaise, each one of them turns against the society that makes them, each individually, uncomfortable: their own society, their own nation.

* Collectivistic nationalisms, in distinction, encourage violent collective action. Thus all the great revolutions—the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the German, that is, National Socialist, revolution—happened in collectivistic nations.

* the rates of severe (clinical) mental disturbance should be inversely proportional to the possibilities of engaging in ideologically motivated collective activism, that is, necessarily the highest in individualistic nations, and higher in collectivistic and civic nations, than in ethnic ones. Thus most aggressive and xenophobic nationalisms—the worst for the world around—would be, in fact, of all nationalisms, the best for the mental health of their individual members.

* oppositional movements in them, as a rule, insist on ever greater group equality, superimposed on the equality of individuals before the law (equality of opportunity) and at the expense of individual rights. Dignity of personal identity in nations derives from membership in a sovereign (that is, self-governing, free) community of equals—those who share in sovereignty or freedom, which, in individualistic nations implies the right to distinguish oneself. The goal of oppositional movements in individualistic nations is to assure the dignity implicit in this equality without exercising this right, thus escaping competition and personal responsibility for one’s possible failure in it.

Here are excerpts from Liah Greenfeld’s essay on nationalism and religion published in this 2006 collection:

* Both essentially secular nationalism and the transcendental religions are ways to interpret – that is, invest with meaning – otherwise meaningless reality, providing prisms through which it is to be perceived and seen as ordered. Both nationalism and religion are order-creating cultural systems.

* No human group of any duration and no human being, unless severely disabled or as yet undeveloped mentally (as in early infancy), exists without an identity; having an identity appears to be a psychological imperative and thus a sociological constant. But if the development of some identity is inevitable, the emergence and ascendancy of a particular kind of identity – for example, of a national versus a religious identity – is always, at root, a matter of historical contingency. There is nothing in human nature, and therefore in society in general, which makes any specific identity necessary.

* An identity defines a person’s – and a group’s – position in the social world; it carries the set of expectations that its bearer, whether an individual or a collectivity, can legitimately have, orienting the actions of the bearer by defining what can be legitimately expected of the latter. The least specialized type of identity, the one believed to define the bearer’s very essence, shapes behavior in a wide variety of social contexts and reflects, by containing in microcosm, the image of social order or the social consciousness4 of the given society. In the modern world, national identity, much more than any other, has been such a generalized identity. Its framework, nationalism, thus has been also the framework of the modern social consciousness. It was religion, by contrast, that formed the framework of social consciousness in the premodern world; nationalism has replaced religion as the main cultural mechanism of social integration. But though on this (sociologically crucial) level religion and nationalism are functionally equivalent, they differ in virtually all other important respects and inattention to these differences obscures the nature of nationalism.

For example, since the transcendental religions to which nationalism is sometimes compared held out the promise of eternal life, it is maintained that nationalism, for all its this-worldly orientation, must proffer similar guarantees; otherwise, why would people die for their nations?

* Most of the experiences that drive people to distraction – making them curse the day they were born and wish they were dead, or turning them into suicides, murderers, or revolutionaries – has to do with people’s relations with others. The nature of most suffering is social, not physical; it is caused by rejection, humiliation, betrayal, shame, and social disorientation – that is the proverbial anomie – not by aging or mortality. If people’s actions are any indication of their obsessions, they are, on the
whole, far more preoccupied with injustice than with death. It is the ability of religions (and nationalisms) to justify otherwise distressing social arrangements, to create a sense of a just social order, and to make social suffering sufferable,7 that explains their endurance over time.

* The perception of the mundane as meaningful in its own right implies its sacralization. With nationalism, the heavens, so to speak, descend to earth; this world, the world of empirical reality and social relations, becomes the sphere of the sacred. Unlike the need for immortality, the need for meaning is universal; proximity to the perceived sources of ultimate meaning takes our breath away. Nationalism provides countless opportunities for such perception in the routines of quotidian activity, business, parenting, and neighborly association, which to the religious mentality are the very strongholds of the profane. It was this uniquely modern sacralization of the secular through the experience of national identity that moved Durkheim to declare that God is society…

* The perception of this world as ultimately meaningful – its investment with the creative powers and authority that the great religions were willing to recognize only in the mysterious beyond – makes our everyday existence, contrary to the Romantic deprecation of modernity as soulless and materialistic, far more intensely spiritual than that of any of the prenational social formations. Within the framework of nationalism, society is saturated with spirituality…

* It is no coincidence that the age of nationalism is also the age of science. The nationalist enchantment of the world is reflected in the apotheosis of the means of knowing the world. Science is expected to penetrate the world’s mysteries, harness its powers, and uncover its meaning. It is forced to take the place of theology. But society is God
(pace Durkheim) only if we make it so; the meaning of the world is not simply there to be uncovered.

* nationalism replaced religion as the order creating system, substituting the social and political relations between men for the bond between man and God as that which gives meaning to life…

* Because most religious nationalisms are ethnic nationalisms, the fanaticism, the abnegation of self (one’s own as well as others’) for the sake of the community, which we associate with religious nationalism, are more often than not predicated on the essential worldliness of this complex of sentiments…

Liah Greenfeld writes in this 2019 book:

* [W]hen it comes to our core ideals of equality and respect owed to every human being, a mere suggestion that these ideals may be denied arouses our wrath. We firmly believe that the purpose of humanity is to realize these ideals, we measure other societies by how well their institutions accord with these ideals, and we constantly demand of our own institutions a more perfect accordance with them, never satisfied with the current state of affairs. But in 1776, the declaration that “all men are created equal” was revolutionary; it would have appeared absurd, preposterous to the vast majority of people then alive. Even today, the reason why three billion people in Southeast Asia do not find this declaration strange is only because it has become a cultural trope, thanks to a world hegemony of Western nations that has lasted for a quarter of a millennium. A cultural trope, however, is not a value or even a belief: it is simply a statement that has been repeated without question so often that it
arouses no reaction whatsoever.

* The value of equality—the cornerstone of the American system of beliefs—is the essential value of nationalism. Nationalism transformed Western societies into nations, and in doing so made equality a core Western value. Even among Western societies, the American society is unique, indeed exceptional, because its population was national from its earliest origins. This can be said of no other society: populations of other societies went through numerous social (cultural) permutations before becoming populations of nations.

* The society of orders, as mentioned, was based on the presupposition that the upper and lower orders were different species of humanity, utterly unlike each other even to the color of blood in their veins. They coexisted but were no more compatible than chickens and horses. Now that the blue-blooded order had been physically exterminated, the red-blooded sons of butchers (such as Cardinal Wolsey) and of smiths (such as Thomas Cromwell) ascended to positions and were treated in ways that were as difficult to justify as riding a chicken or expecting eggs from a horse. Yet the new Henrician aristocracy needed to justify these positions and treatment. Instead of claiming that all of the new aristocracy were lost children of dead princes, they declared that the English people was a nation. Not only did this make the bewildering situation of the new aristocracy understandable and legitimate, it also reinforced the originating trend from which it resulted, normalizing social mobility, and reconstructed the previously hierarchical society on the basis of equality. How could an equation of two terms, people and nation, a linguistic event, produce so powerful a social transformation?

* Once the people and the elite shared a common identity, families were no longer bound to their current place in the social hierarchy, which appeared temporary and accidental. Social stratification became fluid: depending on will, ability, and chance, individuals could move up and down society as if on a ladder. This was a revolution in the imagination, in consciousness.

* The presupposition of fundamental equality in the inclusive community—of shared identity, implied in the definition of the people as a nation—had several vital implications. It is hard to rank them in order of significance. We may start with the one that was to shape the American experience: individual freedom. One was no longer born into a social position or personal identity but had the right to (in fact, had to) choose one for oneself. The decision no longer belonged to God; one became one’s own maker. With this notion, appreciation for the individual human being, human creativity, increased tremendously. There was dignity in simply being human; one could take pride in one’s humanity. The modern idea of the individual as an autonomous agent emerged from this mindset. (Émile Durkheim, therefore, was right when he claimed that the individual was created by modern society, that, in other words, societies had existed for millennia without individuals.)2 Simultaneously and necessarily, God became much less important, and the world of living experience came to occupy a far greater place in human concerns than ever before. The process of secularization was set in motion, reinforcing the appreciation for the individual and, specifically, greatly increasing the value of human life. The authority of the nation, as an elite, to make decisions regarding the political and religious positions of the population for which it was responsible was now presumed to belong to the population in its entirety. As God gradually assumed less importance in people’s lives, this authority soon was regarded as supreme authority, or sovereignty.. To be a member of the people was itself an honor.

* And in their right to communicate with God directly, all Englishmen were now equal.

The Reformation also helped establish the principle of national sovereignty.

* This national dignity was expressed, above all, in international prestige—the relative standing of one’s nation among other nations, and their regard for it—which made national consciousness (nationalism) inherently competitive. From their earliest days, nations have engaged in a never-ending race for respect. England was the first nation. In the sixteenth century, national consciousness existed nowhere else, no other society was a nation, and no other people cared how foreigners regarded the societies of orders in which the people were a despised, expendable rabble. But the English did not know that. Their conversion to nationalism was, like any inner conversion, a total replacement of one faith by another. They no longer could see and experience reality but through the lens of national consciousness, and therefore they imagined they were surrounded by other nations, and thus by competitors.

* To protect their national dignity, the English began to compete. They challenged their European neighbors to combat in every area in which comparisons were possible, and these neighbors, bewildered by the strange behavior of a kingdom that until recently had seemed to be a normal European feudal community, had to engage with them. But none of these neighbors had the competitive motivation that actuated the English. Instead of competing, they could only watch in amazement as the little England of 1500—a peripheral European principality, exhausted by internecine fighting, rough in manners, and as poor in natural resources as it was in learning, emerged as a great leading power, the center of attention and an object of emulation for other great powers, in the span of a century.

* At the beginning of the sixteenth century, according to Erasmus, there were five or six erudite people in London; according to John Leland, there was one “slender” library. A few decades later, England was emerging as a cultural powerhouse… To accept the authority of the ancients would mean admitting England’s cultural inferiority. Unwilling to do so, the English espoused a primitive cultural relativism, arguing that what was good for one period and society was not necessarily good for another.

* Science was a modern, new, activity: apart from the few practicing scientists, it had not been of interest to anyone before. With so few achievements to date, a culturally
backward England could compete in it effectively. Science’s ability to contribute to the dignity of the nation—which none of England’s neighbors at the time cared to consider—prompted England to throw behind it the might of general social approbation.

* [S]cience became the measure of native intelligence, and it was impossible to claim national dignity without excelling in it.

* Nationalism…implies democracy. The fundamental principles of democracy are the principles of popular sovereignty and of the fundamental equality of membership (or
fraternity) in the community. Nationalism made them the moral and political canon of the modern world, so much so that we believe them today to be natural, hard-wired into the human brain, and their increasing implementation around the globe an inevitable feature of human progress. Every nation—a community based on the principles of popular sovereignty and fundamental equality of membership—is a democracy by definition.

* As implementations of individualistic nationalism—specifically, of the concept of the nation as a voluntary association of individuals— liberal democracies by logical necessity are majoritarian. The choices, and thus the will and the interests, of the nation are those of the numerical majority of its constituent individuals. By contrast, collectivistic nationalisms—which conceive of the nation as an indivisible collective individual, reified and personified as a higher being with a will and interests of its own, independent of those of the human individuals composing it—require a specially designated elite, presumably of intelligence or virtue, capable of divining the will and interests of the nation. The authority of such elites reflects their innate characteristics. It can be recognized by acclamation, but does not result from election. Indeed, the rank and file of the nation are not qualified to elect national leaders; they can only acclaim them.. Individualistic nationalisms see the nation as an association of individual autonomous agents, and collectivistic nationalisms see it as a collective individual.

* Because the sphere of their activity as intellectuals was essentially defined by language, the romantics insisted that communities of language were true moral individuals and fundamental units of humanity. But language, they held, had a material basis. It was determined by blood ties—or, as these ties were later to be called, race.

* Jews were defined as a separate race, rather than a part of the German nation. The French had attempted to emancipate them, and therefore they were seen as the beneficiaries of German humiliation. For these reasons, the Jews came to personify Western liberalism, individualism, and capitalism. Their allegedly vile nature, in accordance with the principles of romantic philosophy, was seen as a reflection of their blood or biological constitution, not their religion; thus there was no hope that they would ever change for the better.

* after World War II, nationalism in general was identified with resistance to change, conservatism, reaction, a hankering for the imaginary good old days—in short, with the right, and therefore as evil.

…The intelligentsia blamed acquiescence to the Holocaust on classical liberalism, with its stress on individual freedom, which implied the right to be indifferent to the suffering of others and the right to use one’s strengths to outcompete the weaker. …in the United States, this response dramatically increased the appeal of Marxism, socialism, communism, and anticapitalism in general, prompting leading sectors of the intelligentsia to self-identify as the left. At the same time, nationalism as such (that is, not a particular type of nationalism) was associated with gore and brutal primeval instincts, and defined as the opposite of the progressive direction of history.

For some forty years, nationalism was banished from discourse (among others, academic) and considered completely irrelevant to the life of nations. History equaled progress and was perceived by the majority of intellectuals as leftward oriented…transnationalism.

* Paradoxically, inside the United States, this shift in mentality coincided with growing concern with the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, as well as other groups underrepresented in the elites—women above all—which had been classed by their physical or genetic characteristics. These groups were presumed to be separate (in this sense, exclusive) but inclusive (that is, cutting through lines of status and class) communities of natural identity, parallel to the ways in which exclusive, ethnic nations were imagined in the framework of collectivistic-ethnic nationalisms, such as German and Russian. They all were presumed to be opposed to and suffering under the privileged or majority group, another naturally (biologically) constituted inclusive community of identity—that of white heterosexual males.