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November 22, 2002
Passion
and Paradox: Joan Cocks Considers the 'Terrible Beauty' of
Nationalist Movements
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Joan
Cocks
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As
a political theorist, Joan Cocks is interested in the ways that
people have understood and fought over freedom, equality, justice,
community, and other ideals. But to assume that Cocks lives only
in the realm of theory is to overlook the roots and applications
of her work, which are firmly grounded in world events and her
own experiences. During the 1960s and '70s, Cocks studied issues
surrounding class, imperialism, and gender that were brought to
the fore by the Vietnam War and the feminist movement. In the
1980s, Mount Holyoke students struggling with their cultural identity
led her to develop a new course, Cultural Politics, and students
interested in theory across disciplines inspired her to shape
the College's Critical Social Thought Program. Recently, having
joined a group opposed to construction of a Home Depot store in
the small agricultural town of Hatfield, Massachusetts, Cocks
has been helping to define and debate beneficial development,
economic progress, and other concepts relevant to land use—the
subject of her Memories of Development course. But for the past
decade, world events and her own ethnic and national entanglements
led Cocks to consider national identity, national self-determination,
and nationalist violence, the topics of her most recent book,
Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question
(Princeton University Press, 2002).
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Cocks first became
interested in nationalism in politics, especially the drive for
political unity based on the idea of shared ethnicity and homeland,
in 1991, the beginning of what Cocks calls "a decade of high
nationalist drama." The catalyst was the U.S. government's
offensive against Iraq after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Cocks
recalls widespread support for U.S. retaliation among ordinary
Americans. "Even the mechanic at my muffler shop had a huge
poster of Saddam Hussein with a bull's-eye on his head and an
unprintable slogan underneath. I began to wonder what triggers
such passionate identity with their national government and such
fervent willingness to go to war on the part of the American people,
most of whom know little or nothing about Iraq, Kuwait, or Middle
Eastern politics. Why are citizens of any one state viscerally
outraged by a distant second state's violations of the sovereignty
and borders of a third state?" Questions about national loyalties
multiplied for Cocks during the explosion of ethnic cleansing
in Rwanda and Bosnia. "Citing high moral principles, Americans
rallied around their government to stop a country from invading
another in an area where our oil interests are," she said.
"Yet there was little official interest in or popular support
for intervening in another country to stop a genocidal enterprise,
even after the world had promised in 1945, 'Never again.' "
Cocks's interest in
nationalism intensified when she began participating in a local
organization, Arabs and Jews against the Gulf War. This was the
first political group she had ever joined on the basis of her
ethnic (Jewish) identity, because, said Cocks, "I never saw
my political commitments as a function of what I was, as opposed
to what I thought." And in fact, "the Jewish and Arab
members of the group agreed on many things, including their assessment
of U.S. foreign policy and their opposition to the bombing of
Iraq. At the same time, they were divided along strict ethnic
lines in their attitude toward nationalism. All the Jews in the
room were staunch antinationalists, critical even of Jewish nationalism;
all the Arabs were proud proponents of Arab nationalism. I had
such an instinctive distaste for nationalism that I had avoided
the subject for most of my life, but given my observations of
this group, I thought I'd better find out more about it."
Cocks began asking
questions. What constitutes a people? Does national identity merit
territorial autonomy? Is national self-determination a condition
of political freedom? Of human freedom? Whose will makes up the
national will? Does national identity require a homogeneous national
population, and if so, what is the fate in a national community
of ethnic and racial minorities, diaspora populations, dispossessed
peoples, immigrants, and "guest workers"? And does intervention
in violent nationalist drives against those deemed "aliens"
and "outsiders" bring vulnerable groups a better or
worse fate?
For answers, Cocks turned to the writings of eight intellectuals
from diverse backgrounds and political camps who were compelled
by imperialist oppression, ethnic persecution, and other events
of their time to confront dilemmas of ethnic identity, national
self-determination, and feelings of belonging or alienation. Exploring
the writings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Frantz
Fanon, Isaiah Berlin, Tom Nairn, V. S. Naipaul, and Edward Said,
Cocks discovered that nationalism is inherently ambiguous and
complex.
On the one hand, Cocks
found that nationalist movements do have positive aspects, emerging
from and fostering pride in shared history and culture, love of
homelands, and collective political agency. In her book, she examines
Frantz Fanon, for example, who wrote and acted in support of nationalist
movements for independence, arguing that even violent movements
can be necessary for humiliated peoples seeking freedom from oppressive
colonial regimes. On the other hand, Cocks—and Fanon, too—found
that valuing one nation above all others can engender contempt
for difference and a drive to dispossess "aliens" and
conquer new territory. She notes the escalating violence and counter-violence
in recent relations between Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Kosovars,
Israeli Jews and Palestinians. She looks back to the early twentieth-century
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who accused European capitalist
states of championing nationalist self-determination "to
justify their intrusion into other regions of the world, thereby
denying the possibility of national self-determination to those
regions and so negating national self-determination as a universal
right."
While examining and
comparing philosophers' perspectives on nationalism, Cocks confronted
its polar opposite, cosmopolitanism, and again found ambiguity
and complexity. Cosmopolitan individuals can avoid parochialism,
take pleasure in difference, and identify with strangers, writes
Cocks in Passion and Paradox, but they can also be disdainful
of the local attachments of other people, feel disconnected from
all settled ways of life, and show no regard for the landscape,
history, and culture of the places they visit, reside in, or develop.
Still, she takes issue with the Scottish neonationalist Tom Nairn
for condemning cosmopolitanism as "the self-serving ideology
of 'big battalion' states, metropolitan managerial and intellectual
elites, socialist enemies of ethnic difference, a Jewish international
intelligentsia, and diasporic individuals who live as lightly
in one country as in another."
Research for Passion
and Paradox not only expanded Cocks's understanding of nationalism
but also helped explain her "instinctive antipathy"
toward nationalist movements. As she read accounts of the alienation
felt by dispossessed peoples throughout history, she recalled
childhood stories about Jewish relatives in Europe who had become
targets of discrimination, exclusion, and, in the worst case,
extermination, when ethnonational movements arose where they lived.
Cocks sees an inevitable logic of persecution at work in all ethnonational
states, including, ironically and tragically, the state of Israel,
this time with Jews as the majority state people. "The only
way that logic could have been avoided by those in search of a
Jewish homeland would have been through the creation of a binational
state for Palestinian Arabs and Jews providing a roof and equal
political voice to both peoples," says Cocks, echoing her
book's excerpts from Hannah Arendt. Cocks says that a bi or multinational
state, while ideal, is possible only "if all people in that
state claim the best aspects of nationalism, namely collective
action and love of place, and the best of cosmopolitanism, namely
delight in heterogeneity of the kind that the United States as
a society of immigrants achieves at its very best moments. Exclusive
nation states, states for a single people, are always dangerous
for other groups who happen to be living there and in certain
circumstances will lead to catastrophe for them."
Cocks has concluded
that nationalism is more complicated than she had once thought.
"There is no political phenomenon more ambiguous than this
'terrible beauty,'" she writes, acknowledging that one can
have sympathies for ethnonationalism even while one champions
heterogeneous political community. "Human beings and cultures
are not purely evil or purely good," says Cocks about her
book's findings. "People are filled with contradictory combinations
of desires, and life is usually more complicated than two clear,
opposing poles. I learned the same thing about nationalism; it
doesn't align at one pole. Both nationalism and cosmopolitanism
have positive and negative moments. The project for our century
is how to glean and intertwine the positive from both ends, and
create something new and interesting for the world."
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