Paranoid Society

Concept of paranoid society

Unlike what occurs in PGs, where paranoidization takes place in minority groups — whose existence unfolds within the environment of a broader society from which they attempt to isolate themselves and with which they tend to maintain a tense relationship — paranoidization can also affect a society as a whole, which allows us to speak of the existence of paranoid societies (PSs).

This collective paranoidization can be reached by two paths:

In states of endogenous paranoidization, a general drift of that society toward more paranoid behavior and toward ideologies with persecutory and messianic overtones can be observed. Groups and leaders with exalted and intolerant attitudes proliferate, finding an audience and acceptance far beyond what they would encounter under baseline conditions. These periods of paranoid social ferment tend to occur under certain circumstances: economic crises, cultural and values crises, and threats of aggression or mass mortality.

Imposed paranoidization occurs when a paranoid chieftain or a PG seizes the reins of power (that is, control of the State) and from that privileged position imposes and spreads its own altered state upon the society as a whole.

The paranoid societies that proliferated in the twentieth century can be assigned, according to their ideology, to three main groups:

1) nationalist,

2) Leninist, and

3) Islamic fundamentalist (fundamentalisms of other religions obviously existed, but without exceeding the size of minority groups).

In the fourth part of this book we will use the first two — nationalism and Leninism — as illustrative cases of how a society can develop, as a whole, the same dynamics as paranoid groups and microgroups. We will attempt to describe each of those traits in which totalitarian societies and sectarian groups resemble one another, or are, quite simply, identical.

But first it is necessary to introduce the two cases under study; nationalism and Leninism. In turn, the presentation of nationalism requires a prior description of the ideological construct (some would prefer to speak of the myth) upon which nationalism is grounded: the Nation-State.

One further clarification. The idea that the Nation-State is the best form of government, if not the only viable one today, has taken root so powerfully in humanity as a whole, is so absolutely unquestioned, that it has ceased to constitute an ideology —opposed to other ideologies— and has become an obvious idea, taken for granted, requiring no further elaboration, explanation, reflection, or discussion. It can be said that nationalism strictu sensu has died of its own success.

The paranoid mobilization, therefore, takes shape around each of those byproducts of the national idea into which humanity and the earth's surface must be divided: nations. Consequently, for our purposes it is more accurate to speak of nationalisms, in the plural.

Patriotic mobilization

The Nation-State

Although it may not seem so, the national State and nations are relatively recent creations, born of humanity's inveterate insistence on dreaming of utopias, putting them down on paper, and attempting to make them reality. The fathers of this utopia were the thinkers of the Enlightenment and a German intellectual of Romanticism (Herder).

As a sociopolitical model it was established for the first time — and on this point nearly all authors agree — with the French Revolution and American independence.

The construction of Nation-States, together with industrial development and the consequent migration of rural populations to the cities, constitute two central tendencies of modernity. What were initially isolated phenomena at three specific points in the Western world (France, the USA, and the United Kingdom) gradually transformed into an objective pursued by a growing sector of political elites across the globe; from the Spanish American independence movements, through the Meiji Revolution and the patriotic movements that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, sought to overthrow the Chinese empress, to the new countries that emerged from the decolonization of the Third World or from the collapse of the USSR.

The legacy of nationalism is manifold, and some aspects deserve to be highlighted:

Intertwined with and joined to liberalism, it confronted and defeated the Ancien Régime, fostering the establishment of a new sociopolitical order. And wherever it encounters other, more primitive social forms — such as the tribal — nationalism also tends to undermine their authority and to blur them.

It has been the principal force shaping the modifications of borders between States that have taken place over the last two centuries. Nationalist were the movements that, in the North and the South, led to the independence of the nations of the American continent, of the European colonies of Africa and Asia, those that led to the unification of Germany and Italy, to the independence of Ireland, and it is by nationalist criteria that a good number of new homelands were created in the territories of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Soviet empires. And nearly all of the movements today that aspire to the modification of current state borders remain nationalist.

Most especially during the twentieth century, nationalist exaltation has been associated with a trail of conflicts and massacres of colossal proportions, with its principal victims being those who, for ethnic or ideological reasons, were excluded from the process of national construction (in the eyes of the patriotic builders, of course). The first link in this succession of slaughters was the massacre of Armenians at the hands of the young Turkish intellectual-patriots.

Let us first look at what the Enlightenment and Romanticism projected.

The social contract

"Among the French thinkers of the Enlightenment, the idea of the nation conceived as a free, enlightened, and harmoniously united people had been taking shape, and in all of them there existed a widespread belief in the incompatibility between monarchical despotism and the nation.

In Montesquieu, in Voltaire, in the majority of Enlightenment authors, these principles appear clearly formulated, but it will be Jean-Jacques Rousseau who lays down the theoretical postulates of the new nationalism that had such great influence during the revolution. True, in the Social Contract Rousseau elaborates a theory of the State — a genuine utopia — which to a large extent can be considered a nationalist utopia, and whose foundations would be widely used by the French revolutionaries" (15).

After the overthrow of Louis XVI, The Social Contract largely inspired the design of the new society that the members of the Third Estate (who soon stopped recognizing themselves by this name and instead called themselves, simply, "the nation") attempted to build.

The ideas that Rousseau expressed in "The Contract" can be grouped into two major blocks: the critique of feudalism and of enlightened despotism — the latter being the final version of the former — and the defense of an alternative form of social organization. Of the feudal system (the authors of the Enlightenment used the term in a broad sense, not limiting it to the period of the Middle Ages characterized by feudo-vassal institutions) he criticized its perversity in that it benefits only a few, to the detriment of the majority, and reduces men to slaves who, by renouncing their freedom, also lose their dignity.

In addition to considering it perverse, he called into question the legitimacy of the Ancien Régime.

"All power emanates from God, I must acknowledge it; but all illness also comes from God. Would it therefore be forbidden to call upon a physician? If a bandit surprises me in a forest, am I obliged in conscience, not only by force, but even when I could avoid it, to hand over my purse? For, in the end, the pistol he holds is a power" (18).

With this simple argument, he turned upside down the ancient justification of the monarch's power (its divine origin) and, in general, the entire system of authority relations prevailing in the Ancien Régime, in which the nobility and the clergy held privileges and exercised authority, legally sanctioned, over the bulk of the population.

Rousseau saw himself more as a rediscoverer than as an inventor. There would have existed a glorious past in classical Antiquity followed by a prolonged eclipse of obscurantism that he identifies with the feudal period. The principles he defends would have already prevailed in their time, and it would simply be a matter of restoring their validity.

An interesting feature of his work is that the system he proposes is the only one —there is no other— capable of restoring to the human being the freedom and dignity lost in the "feudal night." With the stability produced by the traditional lines of obedience gone, he saw only one alternative for preserving the social order without any man being forced to submit to another, thereby losing his dignity. The solution consisted in building a State whose sole source of authority would be the laws (whose elaboration, as we shall see, would be a shared task of all citizens).

"Since no man has natural authority over his fellow man, and since force constitutes no right whatsoever, there remain only conventions as the basis of legitimate authority among men"(18).

"By Republic I understand every State governed by laws, whatever the form under which it is administered, for only in this way does the public interest govern and the public thing have any meaning"(18).

Through an equal participation, and under conditions of complete equality, in the elaboration of the laws, each and every citizen enjoys the same right to intervene in the management of the res publica, in equal shares. Thus did Rousseau bid farewell to the intolerable hereditary differences of feudalism.

"If, then, the people simply promise to obey, they lose by that very act their condition as such and dissolve; from the very instant they have a master, the sovereign [people] disappears and the body politic disintegrates"(18).

The "body politic" formed by the totality of citizens acquires —in a certain sense— a life of its own. The gestation of that kind of living organism that is the "body politic" or "people" occurs at the moment when a group of free men agree to it.

"Through the social contract we have achieved existence and life for the body politic…"(18).

"Sovereignty thus emerges as a direct product of a social contract, of a reciprocal commitment among all citizens, equal in rights and in duties. And the State appears as the result of the general will and the repository of sovereignty" (15).

What constitutes a people is the existence of a contract by which its members agree to be such a people and to unite all their forces in the pursuit of the common good. On some occasions he refers to said contract as a formal act, carried out at a given moment and place, and on others he accepts its existence as a kind of myth or implicit agreement. Once the body politic has beenconstituted, it is capable of making decisions, and the decisions it makes are called thegeneral willwhich is always manifested in the form of laws.

"The sovereign authority having no other force than the legislative power, it acts only by means of laws, and these being legitimate acts of the general will…"(18).

In The Social Contract, by Rousseau, the general willwas established in the general assembly of all citizens, in which they had the right to express their opinions and to vote. The author admitted absolutely no other means for the elaboration of laws than the assembly of the entire people, an assembly that constituted the authentic pulse of the life of the "body politic".

"It is not enough that the assembled people has established the constitution of the State by sanctioning a body of laws, nor that it has organized a perpetual government, nor provided once and for all for the election of magistrates. Beyond the extraordinary assemblies that unforeseen circumstances may require, it is necessary to have others that are fixed and periodic, which cannot be abolished or postponed, so that on the appointed day the people may be legitimately convened by the law without need of any other formality"(18).

The general will, the great sustaining myth of the Rousseauian edifice, can only manifest itself in the assemblies of the entire people, never through representatives.

"I do not thereby consider that it is necessary to have slaves, nor that slavery is a legitimate right, since I have demonstrated quite the contrary. I simply set forth the reasons why modern peoples who believe themselves to be free have representatives, and why the ancients did not have them. Be that as it may, as soon as a people gives itself representatives, it ceases to be free and ceases moreover to be a people"(18).

But Rousseau dreamed of a Europe of City-States similar to those of Greek Antiquity. Common sense compelled the replacement of the general assembly of all citizens with a representative assembly.

The new order dreamed of by Rousseau was characterized by the fact that a new authority, the general will, completely displaced the traditional lines of authority. The power of the king, that of the feudal lord, that of the clergy, that of the brotherhood, or the power of lineage were completely annulled in the face of the overwhelming general will. This implied, obviously, that the "body politic" necessarily had to be perceived as such, with a clearly differentiated character, and that the new free citizen required a new identity. All of this was clearly perceived by Rousseau.

"The moment this act of association takes place, the particular person of each contracting party is transformed into a moral and collective entity, composed of as many members as the assembly has votes, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will. The public person thus constituted by the union of all the others formerly took the name of City and now that of Republic or body politic, which is called State when it is active, power in relation to its peers. As for the associates, they collectively take the name of People and particularly that of citizens, as participants in the sovereign authority, and that of subjects by virtue of being subject to the laws of the State. But these terms are often confused, one being taken for the other; it suffices to know how to distinguish them when they are used with absolute precision" (18).

Equally novel was the connection of these peoples thus constituted with a particular inalienable territory.

"If, then, the social pact finds opponents, such opposition does not invalidate it and implies only their exclusion, and they shall be regarded as foreigners among the citizens. Once the State is established, residence is an implicit sign of consent: to inhabit the territory is to submit to sovereignty" (18).

"But the body politic or the sovereign, deriving its existence solely from the legitimacy of the contract, can never bind itself, even toward others, to anything that derogates from that original act, such as alienating a part of itself or submitting to another sovereign" (18).

Insofar as the social contract by which a people was formed was indestructible, and insofar as it is the territory that determines citizenship, national borders necessarily became immutable.

Having reached this point, we must emphasize that the Rousseauian Republic contains numerous elements that point to a remarkable degree of totalitarianism. Let us examine some of them.

The general will acquires the quality of a supreme, almost divine good, whose decisions are always the correct ones. This sacralization of assembly decisions entails a significant blindness toward the evident possibility that the majority may make erroneous or immoral decisions, or the risk of the majority being manipulated by individuals gifted for such purposes. To expect that in the assembly each citizen will aseptically weigh the pros and cons of each point under discussion, and debate them civilly with their fellow citizens, is a sign of a certain naivety. Yet in Rousseauian thought, the general will became an unappealable, unquestionable, and intrinsically good decision.

"What, then, properly speaking, is an act of sovereignty? It is not a covenant of the superior with the inferior, but of the body with each of its members; a legitimate convention, because it is grounded in the social contract; equitable, because it is common to all; useful, because it can have no other end than the general good; and solid, because it has as its guarantee the public force and the supreme power" (18).

Being the general will necessarily good, the obligation of absolute submission to it is justified, so that the individual lacks entirely any kind of right to resist the dictates of the body politic.

"From this clarification it follows, in accordance with what was said in chapter XVI, that the act which institutes the government is not a contract, but a law; that the depositaries of executive power are not the masters of the people, but their officials, and that the people can appoint and dismiss them whenever it wishes; that it is not their place to acquire, but to obey, and that in taking on the functions which the State imposes on them, they do no more than fulfill their duty as citizens, without having any right whatsoever to argue about the conditions" (18).

Subsequent nationalist thought would not fail to deepen the supreme character of the general will, and ultimately, as was to be expected, the absolute power of the State.

German nationalism

"For a long time, however, the individualism of the eighteenth century survived among those for whom the state was a necessary evil. But the national withdrawal, the autarky projects, gradually led to setting state reason against individual reason and to conceiving of the state as an instrument of salvation [...] For Hegel, the state is 'the reality of the moral idea', 'the sole condition that will allow the individual to fulfill his purpose and attain his good'; the state is properly 'the divine will'" (4).

Thus, in the face of the general will, nothing remains but obedience.

"Each person places in common his person and his power under the supreme direction of the general will, and each member is regarded as an indivisible part of the whole" (18).

The idea that the general will is not that of the majority, is not a sum of individual wills, but that the decisions of the assembly are the decisions of all, proves difficult to assimilate. There can be no one who holds an opinion against a particular decision of the assembly of citizens.

"The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; by it they are citizens and free. When a law is proposed in the assemblies of the people, what is sought is not precisely to know the opinion of each of its members, nor whether they should approve or reject it, but to know whether it is in accordance with the general will, which is that of all of them"(18).

No less absurd is the notion that the citizen of the Republic is absolutely free, and that the obligatory obedience to each and every one of the dictates of the general will does not entail any diminishment of his freedom.

The social contract

"I suppose men to have reached the point where the obstacles that impede their preservation in the natural state surpass the forces that each individual can employ to maintain himself in that state. Then that primitive state can no longer subsist, and the human race would perish if it did not change its way of being.

[...] This difficulty, returning to my subject, may be stated in the following terms:

'How to find a form of association that defends and protects, with the common force, the person and goods of each associate, and by which each one, uniting with all the others, obeys no one but himself and remains, therefore, as free as before.' This is the fundamental problem whose solution the social contract provides"(18).

It must be acknowledged that the Nation-States that today cover virtually the entire planet are by no means a reproduction ad integrum of the Rousseauian totalitarian dream, and they equip themselves with mechanisms to protect individuals, groups, and minorities from the possible excesses of the general will. Nor are those Nation-States that are still no more than projects of the innumerable nationalist movements that have not yet achieved their objective. It is not without reason that one of the greatest concerns of the early nineteenth-century liberals was to prevent, in their respective countries, the emergence of a new Robespierre. But what continues to characterize all nationalisms is that potentiality or, better yet, that totalitarian predisposition that had already been prefigured in the Rousseauian utopia.

Allow me a second comment relating not to the work itself but to its author, a singular figure who, without having enjoyed any political power, nor having led any movement or organization, left a decisive mark on the gestation of the modern West. He himself reminded us of his exceptionality.

"I am undertaking a task of which there has never been an example and which will find no imitators. I wish to reveal to my fellow men a man in all the truth of nature, and that man will be myself.

Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men: I am not like any of those I have seen, and I even dare to believe that I am not like any of those who exist. If I am not worth more, at least I am different from all others. Only after having read me will one be able to judge whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mold in which it cast me" (17).

Rousseau's life was eventful from the very moment of his birth, which caused the death of his mother. He was left in the care of his father, a man of violent character and a dissolute life, who took little interest in his education. When his father was arrested for theft, an aunt took charge of him. From childhood he developed a genuine passion for reading, and he worked as an assistant to a notary and a coppersmith before fleeing his native Geneva at the age of 16. From that moment on he led a wandering life with frequent changes of residence and occupation, until at the age of 39 he settled in Paris.

In this city he was admitted into the circle of the encyclopedists, who valued his gifts for entertainment and his boundless vanity. In his writings from this period he postulated the superiority of the "noble savage," criticized the corrupting influence of civilization, and denounced social inequalities. His works enjoyed great recognition. During this Parisian period, he maintained a romantic relationship with the maidservant at the inn where he lodged. With her he had five children. All of them were handed over, as newborns, to the orphanage, at Rousseau's express wish.

At the age of 44 he retired to the country house of Madame d'Epinay where he hoped to enjoy contact with nature. But, as a result of multiple domestic troubles, his tormented passion for the Countess of Houdetot and the loss of his friends brought about by his irritability and distrust, he moved to a castle belonging to the Duke of Luxembourg, where he remained from age 46 to 48, at which point he was forced to flee following an attack by the peasants. It is during this period that he wrote The Social Contract.

In the years that followed, his arrogance and misanthropy grew, and his morbid distrust gradually evolved into the delusional conviction that a conspiracy directed by Diderot and d'Alembert, his former encyclopedist friends, existed against his person. It is in this final stage that he wrote his Confessions with the aim of denigrating his imaginary enemies and of justifying himself before the society of his time. He died suddenly at the age of 66 in Ermenoville.

During the second half of the 18th century, in a large part of European countries and around the various societies of thought, nuclei of "patriots" or "democrats" formed, who opposed fiercely the hereditary privileges in the name of the new principles of the Enlightenment. From an intellectual point of view, it was The Social Contract (published in 1762) the work that most decisively contributed to shaping their ideas. Its brief length, the clear and forceful style, as well as the fact that its author was the first of the philosophers to make the leap from the defense of an enlightened despotism that dispensed with the nobility to a new and attractive vision in which the people dispensed with the monarch and became their own sovereign (7), would make possible its rapid and wide dissemination across the European continent and in Latin American lands (in the English colonies of America — as in the British metropolis — its echo would be lesser). It remains quite intriguing that The Social Contract, which the majority of scholars consider to be little less than the founding charter of the modern Nation-State, or something akin to a literary blueprint of it, was written, precisely… by a paranoiac.

At first, these patriotic nuclei enthusiastically welcomed the arrival of Napoleonic troops in their respective countries, although they would ultimately end up confronting them. In any case, the continental advance of the French army facilitated an even wider dissemination of "The Contract."

In a world that was supposedly going to fragment into territorial units separated by clear borders, with their respective peoples subject to their respective general wills of unlimited power, the determination of such borders was going to become a matter of the utmost importance, especially when it was not the force of conquest but popular will that should establish them. This problem had gone unnoticed by Rousseau, but it is obvious that the thorny question of establishing the limits of each national territory through appeals to popular will could generate an endless number of insurmountable practical obstacles. Would it be necessary to organize a referendum in each city, or in each district or each region? Who would fix the limits of each city, district, or region in which a plebiscite is held? Is the will of the majority imposed on all citizens even when the difference is a small number of votes? What happens if demographic changes occur or opinions shift regarding what was previously decided? What happens if the citizens of the eastern part of valley A choose to join state B while those of the west choose C and those of the south choose independence? And, in this manner, one could draw up an endless list of irresolvable situations.

Regarding the identification of nations and their boundaries, a radically different formulation would come with Romanticism. A new approach that asserts the following: nations were created by God (or, in its secular version, are "ethnicities" that have existed since time immemorial) and one need only delve into History, language, and folklore to know them. But the Rousseauian nation and the first patriotic movements still bore absolutely no relation whatsoever to ethnicity, as would come to pass later on.

"As Pierre Vilar has pointed out, what characterized the people-nation seen in this way was precisely that it represented the common interest against particular interests, the common good against privilege, as the terms used by Americans before 1800 to indicate the quality of nationhood while at the same time avoiding the term itself in fact suggest. From this revolutionary-democratic point of view, differences of ethnic group were as secondary as they would later seem to socialists. It is clear that what distinguished the American colonists from King George and those who supported him was neither language nor ethnicity, and reciprocally, the French Republic saw no difficulty in electing the Anglo-American Thomas Paine to the National Convention"(10).

"As the French Declaration of Human Rights stated in 1795:

Every people is independent and sovereign, whatever the number of individuals who compose it and the extent of the territory it occupies. Sovereignty cannot be alienated.

But it said little about what it was that constituted 'a people'. In particular, there was no connection between the body of citizens of a territorial state on the one hand, and identification with the nation on ethnic, linguistic, or other grounds that would allow collective recognition of group membership on the other. In fact, it has been argued that the French Revolution 'was completely alien to the principle or sentiment of nationality; it was even hostile to it' for this reason. As the Dutch lexicographer astutely perceived, language had nothing to doin principlewith being English or French, and indeed, as we shall see, French experts tenaciously opposed any attempt to make the spoken language a criterion of nationality which, they argued, was determineduniquely by French citizenship. The language spoken by Alsatians and Gascons was irrelevant to their status as members of the French people" (10).

In the pages that follow I shall briefly comment on some of the principles and characteristics of democratic Nation-States, inspired to a considerable extent by Enlightenment thought, and, for the most part, set forth unequivocally in The Social Contract.

The principle of equality among citizens

The modern enlightened nation was not conceived in a vacuum but in opposition to, and as a replacement for, a political-social system — that of the "Ancien Régime" — founded on the institutionalization of inequalities, largely hereditary in nature. Society was divided into "estates," each of which carried clearly defined obligations and privileges.

On the other hand, the crown exercised its authority through a sworn pact with a set of kingdoms, principalities, cities, lordships, etc., by which each of the twoparties acquired responsibilities toward the other. This meant that the laws of each kingdom, and the terms of its pact with the crown, differed profoundly from one case to another. Therefore, the Ancien Régime was characterized by the existence, within the domains of a single king, of deep differences between estates and between territories.

Absolutism confronted both the privileges of the estates and the traditional local political entities, with unequal success in each case, but without in any way managing to suppress the estate-based division of society. On the other hand, absolutism advocated a radical distinction between king and subjects, such that the unlimited power of the former would derive from no pact — neither with the estates, nor with the kingdoms, nor even with his subjects — but rather that said power would have been given by God directly to him, the king, and not (by God but)perpopulum(through the people).

Faced with this universe of inequalities derived from social stratification, territory, or royalty, Enlightenment thought proposed the creation of "nations" governed by the principle of equality among persons. Equality of obligations (now transformed into "patriotic duties," "civic" responsibilities, etc.) and equality of privileges (which in the new terminology were converted into "freedoms" and "rights").

As could not have been otherwise, the principle of equality was to clash with the resistance of those sectors most advantageously positioned within estate society: the king, the nobility, and the clergy.

"It is no surprise, then, that the idea of the nation, as a historical principle, came to be enshrined in the French Revolution of 1789, to designate the bloc of social classes — from which the aristocracy was explicitlyexcluded— that had as its objective the struggle against particularisms and feudal privileges and the creation of a national state that would allow for the free expansion of capitalism.

Before the revolutionary outbreak of 1789, this idea of the nation and the very concept had been forged as a clear rallying cry of opposition to the absolute monarchy. It is very significant that Louis XIV, the 'Sun King,' the absolute monarch par excellence, never used it, and that when he spoke of France and the French he referred, respectively, to 'my States' and to 'my people'(15).

"But it is in his description of Waterloo that the Jesuit historian surpasses himself: we see the 'troops of Bonaparte [...] excited by national rivalry, displaying an animosity that reached the point of fury' facing a Wellington piously described as 'unshakeable.'

And what is to be said of the end of the Imperial Guard as narrated by Loriquet?:

'These convicts were seen firing upon one another and killing each other mutually before the eyes of the English, upon whom this strange spectacle kept a sense of awe in which horror was mingled' (vol. IV, p. 411)'

It is certain that at Saint-Acheul the hands of six-year-old children were not martyred. But what is one to think of this obscene caricature of a teaching of 'history' that, for nearly a century, distilled hatred of the Republic, or simply of the 'nation,' into the hearts of so many young people…" (12).

When the ideal of the national State spread beyond the borders of Europe and America, it would always do so in open opposition to the various prevailing traditional systems; in Japan, the emperor's troops had to confront on the battlefield an army of daimyos and samurai; in China, the nationalist parties and secret societies were attempting not only to expel foreigners but to put an end to the imperial system; in India, the Congress Party was striving for the disappearance of the castes… In Africa nationalism would equally come up against tribal identities and differences and the power of traditional chiefs, likewise incompatible with the establishment of a true nation.

The egalitarian ideal implied that, before the State, each and every citizen had the same rights and the same obligations, and among the latter, the obligation to participate in the management of the res publica. But at this point, certain qualifications are in order.

For the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, and most especially for Rousseau, collective deliberation and decision-making should always take place in assemblies open to all citizens, where each and every one of them would have the right to express their opinions and to vote. But what might have been feasible in classical Athens (where 80% of the population consisted of slaves, and half of the remainder were women who were likewise excluded from citizenship) was not so in modern cities, and far less so in nations that encompassed vast territories and populations within their borders. Consequently, the representative system ultimately prevailed, whereby periodically elected deputies were transformed into a kind of permanent citizens' assembly, which was supposed to embody the general will. The excesses of the revolutions also contributed to discarding the idea of a direct assembly-based management of the res publica.

On the other hand, the body of "citizens" bearing rights — including the right to vote (that is, to participate in collective decision-making) — took a very long time to coincide with the totality of the territory's inhabitants. At first, aristocrats were excluded, as enemies — by definition — of the nation. Women were likewise not included among those entitled to suffrage, a situation that in most countries would persist well into the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, various forms of restricted suffrage also prevailed, which barred from the exercise of citizenship those individuals deemed to lack the adequate conditions to participate in it: the illiterate, the poor, wage earners…

Reason and the Common Good

The modern nation, inspired to a considerable degree by the memory of the republics of Greek and Roman antiquity, was also conceived as a union of persons who, all of them concerned with the common good (that of their own collectivity, not the good of the world at large), deliberate and debate the decisions to be made, always accepting the verdict of the majority. It is thus founded on a cult of reason, of the "lights," whose contrast with the Ancien Régime could not have been greater — a regime in which independent thought was not especially valued, and in which the Inquisition, the Church, and religious literature dominated the intellectual landscape.

The common good toward which the process of collective deliberation would be oriented — an earthly good — stood equally in contrast to the end to which feudal society was supposedly meant to be directed, namely: the otherworldly salvation of souls.

But reflection, debate, the search for the best solutions and voting did not replace tradition and silent submission overnight. Within absolutist societies, circles and social networks had already been forming in whicha new form of sociabilitywas practiced, a foretaste of what would end up characterizing modern man.

"The social actors of the ancient type are characterized by bonds that do not depend on the current will of the men who compose them. The bonds that unite them do not normally result from a personal choice, but from birth into a particular group: bonds of kinship (in the broadest sense of the word, which includes both political kinship and godparenthood), bonds arising from belonging to a village, a lordship, an estate, an ethnic group… In other cases, the bonds result from a personal decision, but the individual who voluntarily joins a group or a body of the Ancien Régime is not free to set the rules or the conditions of membership.

All these groups are governed by custom, by law, or by the regulations of the body. A man may join a family clan or the clientele of a powerful patron, establish bonds of friendship or take up one trade or another that brings him into a given corporation or brotherhood, but the bonds of kinship, clientele, and friendship have, in any given era, a content fixed by custom, just as membership of a guild or brotherhood is fixed by regulations. The choice of these bonds may be more or less free, but once made, the bonds are normally irrevocable, unless the person integrates into another group or becomes an outsider.

In all these cases, the bonds are eminently personal, from man to man, with reciprocal rights and duties of a pact-based nature and, as a rule, unequal and hierarchical. In the imaginaries of these ancient actors, what is valued above all is custom, tradition, and precedent, since it is these sources that legitimize the existence of the bonds. And the same applies to values such as faithfulness, loyalty, and honor, all of which contribute to preserving over time the identity and cohesion of the group, for it is the group, whatever its structure, that occupies the central place in traditional societies. The group — a village, or a family clan, for example — precedes and outlives the individuals who compose it at any given moment in its history. Men pass and the group endures, ceaselessly renewing itself in its individual members without the overall structure changing, except very slowly. The ancient actors have a lifespan and an inertia far greater than those of their members.

[...] The individual alone, without his affiliations, was scarcely conceivable.

Very different are the actors we find in modern societies. In them, in place of the bonds we have just described, we find ties of an associative type, but of a very particular kind of association. Associations that draw their legitimacy not from custom or law, but from the association itself, from the will of its members. The intensity and form of the bonds result from the very constitutive act of the association. The members define it themselves and may — at least in theory — redefine it at any moment.

At the origins of this type of bond lies not only the formation of an imaginary founded upon the individual, but also the emergence of new forms of sociability that spread throughout Europe at the end of the eighteenth century: salons in France, tertulias in the Hispanic world, academies, literary societies, Masonic lodges, economic societies, etc. The word by which they were later designated in France, societés de pensée, literally 'societies of thought', aptly expresses their primary purpose: to think and converse in common, to arrive at a shared opinion. In this world of opinion, governed solely by the laws of 'clear and distinct' ideas, all individuals are necessarily equal, since within it they are considered only as 'wills' that associate and/or as 'reasons' that think. For this reason, from the very beginning, these forms of sociability brought men together regardless of their membership in the various bodies and estates. It follows that the bonds are seen as egalitarian, impersonal, and revocable — that is, as radically different from bonds of a traditional kind" (8).

"The tertulia is the first known form of modern sociability in Spain, just as the 'salon' is in France. In both cases, it is initially a form of elite sociability with very limited reach, with origins that go back to the seventeenth century. The 'salon' and the tertulia are like the primary form of a 'society of thought' insofar as nobles, clergy, civil servants, and bourgeois, united by their belonging to the cultural elite, discuss — without distinction of status — a variety of topics: literary, worldly, scientific, or religious. Although it is still an informal gathering with no defined statutes or members, it is already in embryonic form a true society, since the same people generally come together in it, with regular periodicity and shared habits. In a certain sense, the subsequent forms are like the formalization of the salon and the tertulia. Scientific and literary societies, academies, and the patriotic societies or Sociedades de Amigos del País of the eighteenth century institutionalize the group, grant a status to their members, and sometimes specialize the topics of discussion" (8).

"But, despite the State's impetus and control, the economic societies undoubtedly contributed to the progress of social Modernity. Not so much through the work carried out, through the publication of Memorias, or through the founding of educational establishments — although the activities of some of them in these fields were considerable — but above all through their social practices. The equality among their members, regardless of their belonging to a body or an estate, which in the tertulias was informal and a consequence of bonds of friendship or of belonging to the same cultural or family milieu, was in these societies statutory. This equality manifested itself even physically, through provisions as concrete as the prohibition of orders of precedence and the stipulation that members should be seated in the order in which they arrived. Their members were, within them, 'pure citizens' — as the society of Guatemala expressed it. When one knows that the order of precedence was the symbolic reflection of the social order and its hierarchies, and to what extent quarrels over this matter were fierce in the society of the Ancien Régime — and more particularly in America — one can perceive how these new practices constituted a silent revolution.

It thus appeared as the harbinger of a new society formed of individuals freed from the concerns of their station, and freely associated in the pursuit of the general interest of their homeland and the common good. The new image of the social was also reinforced by other egalitarian practices, such as the election of its authorities by the vote of all its members, or the rules governing the discussion of matters, the drafting of conclusions and of the minutes. There thus gradually imposed itself a whole set of practices that may well be characterized as 'democratic,' and which served as an apprenticeship in those that would later triumph in modern politics.

Another feature. Common to all forms of modern sociability, but which the economic societies institutionalized to the point of featuring in the name of many, was the concern for the improvement of their homeland, their country. The solutions were to result from the joint reflection of their members, from their discussions. That many of these were not precisely 'academic' and were not grounded in any technical knowledge of the subject matters little from this perspective. What was truly important was that, since the light — the 'lights' — is by its very nature called to illuminate all things, all subjects should become objects of possible reflection, and that it should be thought that their solution depended on the sole use of a well-employed reason. The argument from authority and the legitimating force of tradition, so important in the society of the Ancien Régime, thus gradually lost their value, and an active critique advanced, one that was first applied to the social and the economic and afterward to other fields — elements all of which favored the questioning of the existing order, the search for new solutions, and also the development of utopia" (8).

"What all these modern sociabilities point us toward is a cultural milieu united by dense networks of epistolary and human exchanges. It is a social milieu endowed with a common sensibility, with a shared appreciation of the useful, with a shared belief in progress, with the same readings, with the same associational practices that teach free suffrage, the equality of members, and the reign of opinion" (8).

Once reason, the common good, and the equality of persons had been brought to the fore, displacing Tradition, the salvation of souls, and hereditary privileges, coherence demanded that the State be reformed from top to bottom. To cite only one of the innovations that would ultimately be introduced, and one of great consequence: any post in the administration should be accessible to any citizen on the basis of simple meritocratic criteria.

Establishment of universal and compulsory education

Another fundamental characteristic common to all modern Nation-States has been the deployment of compulsory and universally reaching educational systems, with unified programs and content. Universal and compulsory education had already been championed by Rousseau, who in various works demonstrated his great interest in pedagogy and its possibilities.

This institution represents a radical break with a past in which the transmission of knowledge took place primarily within the family environment and in small productive units. It entails the setting in motion of an enormous and complex system of schools, civil servants, curricula, qualifications, etc., the functioning of which requires state oversight and funding.

What are the objectives and outcomes of the development of these general-coverage educational systems?

1) The modern school creates an unprecedented situation in humanity; literacy, which until that moment had been limited to very small elites, extends to the population as a whole, which for the first time in history learns to use written language.

2) Universal schooling enables the learning of the official language of the nation, making communication between fellow nationals possible. The local spoken languages and dialects thus tend to disappear or to be confined to domestic and private use. The insistence on learning and using the national language also works to the detriment of the lenguas francas that cross borders, through which the aristocratic elites had traditionally communicated with one another.

3) Universal schooling makes it possible to generalize a body of mathematical, scientific, and technical knowledge that is indispensable for adapting to the new environment — more complex and ever-changing — created by the Industrial Revolution.

4) The educational system of the Nation-State also acts as a vehicle for the transmission of a system of values, myths, beliefs, habits… that foster the integration of citizens, uprooted from their villages of origin, into the productive and administrative apparatus. Thanks to the establishment of a uniform education, the citizens of a nation share a culture (and not only a language) that makes it easier for them to understand one another and to deal with the Administration. This objective is of the utmost importance. In the pre-modern world, a peasant interacted with a small circle of people throughout his entire life, people whom he knew deeply on a personal level. However, with the changes brought about in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, it would become indispensable for him to interact with a large number of strangers. The need for a shared set of values, customs, and assumptions is evident.

5) The educational system makes it possible to instill a national identity and love of the homeland in future adults. A role that had already been foreseen at an earlier time.

"When [Rousseau] writes his Considerations on the Government of Poland he does not hesitate to affirm that one of the most important means of increasing patriotism is national education: 'Upon awakening to life —he writes with great forcefulness— the child must see the fatherland, and until his death he must see no other. Every true republican imbibes, with his mother's milk, love of his fatherland, that is to say, of the laws and of freedom." (15).

Certainly, schooling is not a sine qua non factor in the creation of national consciousness, as demonstrated by the fact that among the Napoleonic troops there were numerous illiterate peasants filled with enthusiastic patriotic sentiments. But the educational system does seem necessary in order to universalize such sentiments. Various historians share this view.

"After all, national consciousness is a mass phenomenon, not one of elites, and the gestation of nations is a process, not something that happens nor an event. Although we cannot know with exactitude what proportion of the population has internalized a national identity and, therefore, contributed to conferring upon the ethnic group the title of nation, we have certain clues indicating that even in Western democracies this process has been something recent and (even in Europe) incomplete. In support of this assertion, Connor cites the lack of national consciousness among immigrants arriving in the United States of America at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the evidence provided by Eugène Weber to the effect that the greater part of the French population (the peasants) did not consider themselves 'French' until the First World War; that is to say, not until they had passed through the mass education system and had been compulsorily incorporated into the army of the Third Republic." (20).

It imposes a common language

Nation-States —with very few exceptions— endow themselves with a language common to the citizenry as a whole. The official language of the nation, transmitted principally through schools and the Army (and, subsequently, also through the mass media) is the language in which political representatives express themselves, in which all departments of the State Administration operate, and is the language in which the educated elites write and communicate, as well as the tongue adopted by the masses of peasants who, coming from various backgrounds, moved from the countryside to the cities. Linguistic homogenization is not an absolutely indispensable factor in the construction of a modern nation-state, as the Swiss case demonstrates. That said, in the universe of nations, the polyglot Swiss model constitutes the exception and has had very few imitators (such as the Ethiopian republic). The majority of nationalisms have endeavored to have their citizens speak a single language and, whenever possible, one not shared with any other nation. Historically, it appears that several reasons made this orientation toward monolingualism highly advisable:

To make effective the right of every citizen to access a position in the administration, a common language was indispensable.

Nor would it otherwise be possible to have direct contact, without intermediaries from the estates, between officials—who collect taxes, administer justice, or provide postal and educational services—and a population that could not understand them.

Peasants from different geographical areas who converged in the cities, and who spoke multiple dialects mutually incomprehensible to one another, needed a common language with which to communicate in their new environment.

The shared language served equally as an instrument in the creation of a differentiated identity from the surrounding nations.

"For sixteen-year-old Cesare Balbo and his adolescent companions—the finest of the Piedmontese aristocracy—the only way to reclaim Italian identity was through literary activity, as ancient and as widely used as it was. The program of the Accademia dei Concordi, which was proclaimed privately at the Balbo palace in 1805, was explicit:

Each day we become a little more aware that language is a national bond, it is a sure sign of recognition among peoples, and the only one for Italy, divided and strangely subjected to so many dominant foreigners; for if since Dante the various Italian peoples recognize themselves as brothers, they do so by virtue of this blessed harmony that is our language. To think that even in our own day there are those who wish to eliminate even this sign!" (23).

Moving to a more mythical plane, the assembly in which citizens gather… would simply be impossible if they did not all share a common language. Paradoxically, on some occasions the common language selected is not the majority one (as in the Basque or Indian cases).

The national language of some Nation-States is a language of international diffusion, such as Spanish or French, but other nations possess their own exclusive language which, often, barely has any precedent of literary or administrative use. It then becomes necessary to codify the language, an endeavor that pursues the objective of establishing, even if arbitrarily, which usages are incorrect and which are correct. There is also an element of arbitrariness in the choice of the dialectal variant that will be considered the purest, and which will serve as the matrix in the codification process.

Patriotic sentiments do nothing but stimulate the collaboration of citizens toward the objective—by no means easy—of linguistic unification.

Establishment of compulsory military service

National armies, in which male citizens serve freely and compulsorily for a few years of their lives — remaining available for a good part of the rest — have constituted one of the most prominent facets of national States. Their importance is made manifest in the central role that uniformed men, weapons, songs, and military marches play in patriotic exaltation festivities or in the liturgy that often surrounds great formal events and the symbolic figures of the Nation. A role evidently more prominent than that of postmen, judges, or schoolteachers, who do not parade through capital cities, nor raise flags, nor pose before foreign dignitaries.

And there can be no doubt that modern armies, beyond their military purposes, have served the objective of instilling patriotic feelings in all young males. In the armed forces, where young men from different geographical backgrounds converge — sometimes from remote rural areas — recruits learn to use weapons, to obey without complaint... and to love and die for their homeland.

This facet of the Nation-State had also been lucidly envisioned by Rousseau, who conceived of defense as a collective task of citizens, a duty that each man fulfills willingly, not for a soldier's pay or because he is coerced, but out of love for his homeland and in defense of his freedom. B. Ehrenreich (6) argues that, for the first time in the history of humanity, the Nation has transformed the entirety of the male population into warriors. The history of the last two centuries shows us to what an extraordinary degree patriotic feelings generate a general disposition to cooperate and to wage war. Never before had the common people shared in the martial ardor and decorations reserved for armed elites. Never before had it been expected of a slave, a merchant, or a peasant that they distinguish themselves through warrior virtues — a patrimony traditionally exclusive to elites one gained access to by the simple fact of being born within them. Not even in the uniformed armies of absolute monarchs (very similar, in many other respects, to those of national States) was excessive martial fury expected of soldiers. Desertion — the ultimate negation of warrior values — constituted a serious problem.

"There have been men who, to avoid going to war, fled their homes, served long prison sentences, amputated their own limbs, shot themselves in the foot or the index finger, feigned illness or madness, and still others who, when they could afford it, paid a substitute to fight in their place. 'While they are on their way, some pull out their own teeth, others bring on blindness, others mutilate themselves,' complained the governor of Egypt about his peasant recruits at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So untrustworthy were the common soldiers of the eighteenth-century Prussian army that military manuals forbade camping near a forest; to do so was to risk having the troops vanish among the trees"(6).

"Just as Cromwell, Frederick depended above all on one tactic to ensure his military and, therefore, social successes: discipline. To begin with, his soldiers were compelled to wear uniforms even more elaborate and distinctive than those of Cromwell's army, and could be severely punished for removing them while on duty. Thus equipped, they were watched by their superiors day and night, and under no circumstances were they authorized to loot on their own account. Desertion constituted a serious offense, inasmuch as Frederick knew that most soldiers did not desert out of homesickness but to seize the opportunity to use the weapons they had been given to carry out looting. Over time this rule became so strict in Frederick's army that troops were not permitted to bathe or go to the latrine without company. 'The slightest relaxation of discipline,' declared the king, thinking of the excesses of a century before, 'would lead to barbarism.' Soldiers had not changed over time and probably never would: 'Consequently (since honor does not affect them) they must fear their officers more than any danger.' Discipline even influenced tactics: soldiers went into action in well-formed units, where they could be seen at all times, and troops rarely advanced at night"(6).

The nation would not have represented a disappearance of the warrior elites who, from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution, had subjected the great majority of the population (composed mainly of peasants) to slavery or other forms of subjugation, but rather an incorporation of the population as a whole into those elites.

The overwhelming superiority of the Napoleonic army, led by unworthy commoners, was due in large measure to the fervor with which all of them, from Napoleon himself down to the last soldier, showed themselves willing to fight to the end for their Grande Nation and not to desert, without any form of coercion being needed for this. Few facts were more decisive for the decline in the prestige of the estates-based society than the unstoppable advance of an army whose command posts were occupied, inconceivably, by military men who did not come from noble aristocratic lineages. From that moment on, patriotism would also become a military necessity.

The nation as an object of cult and as a novelty

Finally, one must highlight the sentimental element of the nations that emerged from the Enlightenment. Despite the pretensions of a strict rationalism and the fact that the pact by which the political body is constituted is described in fairly formal terms, Rousseau spoke of the profound love for one's homeland that citizens ought to feel.

And certainly, the motherland (from pater), a hermaphroditic entity that is at once mother and father, has been the object of the most passionate loves on the part of its subjects, who dedicate poems and songs to it, and who organize the most moving ceremonial tributes in its honor. The copious paraphernalia destined to satisfy and/or inflame these feelings is known to all.

This sovereign nation, which has displaced the absolute monarch in his role of sovereign by divine design, whose will is embodied in laws and which is at once ruler and ruled, is an entirely novel type of human association in the History of Humanity.

"There is one point on which virtually all experts agree. As an ideology and as a movement, nationalism is modern. It emerges at the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth century and has its origins in central and eastern Europe, as well as in the U.S." (20)

A curious proof of this novel character comes from reading dictionaries.

"The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, whose various editions have been subjected to scrutiny for this purpose, does not use the terminology of state, nation and language in the modern way until its 1884 edition [...] Before 1884 the word nación simply meant 'the aggregate of the inhabitants of a province, a country or a kingdom' and also 'a foreigner'. But now it was defined as 'a state or political body that recognizes a common supreme center of government' and also 'the territory constituted by that state and its individual inhabitants, considered as a whole', and henceforth the element of a supreme and common state will be central to those definitions, at least in the Iberian world. The nación is the 'set of the inhabitants of a country governed by the same government" (10).

"For the Dictionary of 1726 (its first edition) the word patria or, in more popular usage, tierra, meant only 'the place, city or location in which one was born', or 'any region, province or district of any lord or state' [...] It was not until 1884 that tierra was linked to a state, and it is not until 1925 that we hear the emotional note of modern patriotism, which defines patria as 'our own nation, with the sum of all material and immaterial things, past, present and future, that enjoys the loving loyalty of patriots" (10).

The pre-modern nation, then, lacked the precise connotation it was later to acquire; it was simply a vague term used to allude to geographical location or origin.

Understood in opposition to the Ancien Régime, the nation implied a radical change in the entire sociopolitical structure, which was reflected, for example, in the need for a new language.

Spanish nationalism.

"The means employed are diverse. One of the most commonly used is to transform the usual meaning of words, carrying them through successive shifts in meaning toward a modern significance. The word 'homeland' passes, for example, from its most common sense as the place of birth, to signifying a human community governed by laws it has given itself. The struggle for freedom and independence, which in the proclamations of that era refers to the exterior as a defense against the invader, moves into the register of domestic politics to reclaim the freedom of the nation, or of its citizens, in relation to the government.

The words 'people' and 'nation', above all the terms par excellence of the new legitimacy, are the object of a particular effort to, starting from their polysemy, carry them to the modern register, without in any way signaling their different meanings. Through a shift in the meaning of words, one passes from the people, as a population with all its heterogeneity, unanimous in its rejection of the [French] invader, to a people, at once abstract and homogeneous, and from there to a unitary nation, freely constituted by a new pact, in which neither class and estate distinctions, nor those resulting from belonging to the different kingdoms and provinces, have any place: henceforth only Spaniards exist" (8).

Guerra (8) shows us in detail how these semantic mutations were introduced both consciously and surreptitiously in the weeklies and publications directed by the first defenders of the idea of a sovereign Spanish Nation, who would soon be identified by the term "liberals" (which until that moment had been a synonym for generous).

There is an alternative to this change in the meaning of words, consisting in creating neologisms with which to refer to that entity that is at once new and artificial — the nation.

Basque nationalism

"As in the Garden of Eden, Arana invented new names for those unsuspected things. Thus, Euskadi, land of the Basques; aberri, people of the race or homeland; abizen, name of the race or surname; abertzale, lover of the homeland" (1).

In the thinking of the early patriots, the nation's conquest of power would make it possible to resolve the great ills that afflicted society.

"The sovereign nation is free to give itself a new law, the Constitution, which does not result from the restoration of 'fundamental laws,' but from a new social pact, capable of curing all social ills and of creating ex nihilo a new man and a new society" (8).

The messianic component of these early nationalisms, which defined themselves in opposition to the Ancien Régime, often took on puerile and even fanciful overtones.

Spanish nationalism

"Freedom and love of the homeland will purge man of whim and vanity; they will make him less susceptible to amorous dalliances; they will push him to become a father and will favor marriage, 'the safeguard of customs'; respect for the property of others will keep him from adultery, 'a crime that is the most general source of corruption'; children will then obey their fathers and respect their mothers. Civil liberty will prevent the corruption of public employees, private theft, slander, the influence of fashion and the luxury of customs..." (13).

Recapping, it seems apt to affirm that the modern Nation-State constitutes the embodiment of an ideal that had been taking shape during the Enlightenment and whose condensed exposition is found in The Social Contract. An embodiment that attempts to approach the original utopia, which envisioned a society of literate, cultured men, free from hereditary distinctions, selflessly devoted to the service of the common good, at times bearing arms as brave warriors and at others using the power of reason to achieve the progress of a society made up of a stable group of people who shared the same territory, spoke the same language, and were moved by the same anthem and the same flag.

And yet, nationalisms, nations, and Nation-States have another equally important facet, at times less visible, more enigmatic.

The national State of Romanticism

"But the essential themes and images for the nationalist drama of salvation of the community advancing through the ages are always authenticity, continuity, identity, dignity, and destiny" (20).

Romanticism was above all an artistic movement, born in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, which spread across the European continent in the first half of the nineteenth and which, by its very nature, evades attempts at definition and systematization. Common to all Romantics was the valorization of freedom, subjectivity, feeling, mystery, and the authenticity of the artist in opposition to the—thus perceived—impersonality of the prevailing rationalism. The very choice of the term is significant. In 1755, Dr. Johnson defined "romantic" as: "resembling the tales or romances; strange... improbable; false...; fantastic; full of natural scenery."

Romanticism constituted a true fashion, which swept across the European continent and was enthusiastically embraced by the elites. The fascination with the past and the recondite, with mythical origins, led the Romantics to take an interest in dances, tales, traditional dress, festivities, and other folkloric elements, which could only be recovered through the study of historical archives and of the vestiges still preserved alive among rural populations.

And it is in this context of fascination with the remote and mysterious that the German philosopher Herder developed a conception of the nation that had little or nothing to do with that of the Enlightenment (that which, let us recall, holds that the origin of the nation is a pact among free men).

"Among the numerous thinkers, philosophers, and theorists of this new nationalism, which emerges during the second half of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Johann G. Herder stands out above all others—who died in 1803 and is considered the great pioneer of Romanticism, despite his admiration for Rousseau and his having remained faithful to the moral principles of the Enlightenment. Herder, in his extensive body of work, and especially in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, developed the theory that the nation is a biological organism, the product of the common heritage of the same race, the same language, and the same history. In this way, the nation—the national community—would be grounded in the spirit of the people, in a 'collective soul' (Volksgeist), whose manifestations take concrete form in language, poetry, the arts, traditions, etc. Nations, then, are differentiated not by the type of society or political organization, but by languages, literatures, education, and customs, from which the nation forges a soul destined to perpetuate itself from generation to generation" (15).

The nation Herderian combines racial elements (the nation constituted by the descendants of the same ancestors from whom certain physical or intellectual traits have been inherited...), historical elements (the nation as an extension of ancient political entities), geographical elements (the nation intimately bound to a particular landscape, to precise territorial boundaries), and cultural and spiritual elements (the nation with a soul toward which one has duties that Reason can barely comprehend).

Today we know that this ethnicist vision that delineates sharply defined peoples is radically false, especially on the European continent. The boundaries of this set of elements that shape ethnicity are loose and do not coincide with one another. If we draw maps of Europe based on linguistic, historical, racial, religious, etc. boundaries of peasant populations (which, for these purposes, are the ones that truly matter to the Romantics), we will find that some and others do not coincide with one another in any way, they do not overlap nor do they delineate sharply defined peoples. Nor is there any clear relationship between any of these elements used to identify nations and the emergence of a national consciousness in broad sectors of the population.

"Attempts have frequently been made to establish objective criteria for nationhood, or to explain why some groups have come to be 'nations' and others have not, based on a single criterion such as ethnicity or language, or on a combination of criteria such as language, common territory, common history, cultural traits, or any other. Among these, Stalin's definition is probably the best known, but by no means the only one. All such objective definitions have failed, for the obvious reason that, given that only some of those entities that fit such definitions can be described at any given moment as 'nations,' exceptions can always be found. Either cases that clearly correspond to the definition are not (at least not yet) 'nations,' nor are they possessed of any national aspiration, or unquestionable cases of 'nations' do not correspond to the criteria or combinations of criteria. Indeed, how could it be otherwise, when we are attempting to fit historically new, emerging, changing, and —even today— far from universal entities into a framework of permanence and universality?" (10).

The following quotations reveal to us the difficulties that, over time, the internal inconsistency of the Romantic model of the nation would generate, as well as the contradictions between this model and the Enlightenment one.

"The Treaty of Versailles with Germany imposed —apart from war reparations, the loss of its colonies, and other clauses that the Germans considered humiliating— solutions to border conflicts that considerably reduced German territory: in addition to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, of northern Schleswig and of some border areas with Belgium, it lost its part of Poland. Regarding Poland, the treaty established the need to create an independent Polish state comprising the 'territories inhabited by an indisputably Polish population,' which would be guaranteed free and secure access to the sea. The difficulties of interpretation over what was to be understood by 'indisputably Polish population' entailed numerous conflicts that were ultimately resolved with the loss of Upper Silesia on the part of Poland..."(15).

"Richard Böckh, whose influential publications in the 1860s argued that language was the only adequate indicator of nationality—an argument that suited German nationalism well, given the wide distribution of Germans across Central and Eastern Europe—found himself compelled to classify Ashkenazi Jews [many of them Polish, Lithuanian…] as Germans, since Yiddish was unquestionably a dialect derived from medieval German. This conclusion, as he well knew, was not likely to be shared by German antisemites" (10).

"What we know is that nationalist struggles have been complicated in modern times by the refusal of factions of linguistic groups to accept political unity with their co-speakers. Such cases (the so-called Wasserpolacken in Silesia during its German period, the so-called Windische in the border area between what is today Austria and the Slovenian part of Yugoslavia) ..." (10).

German nationalism.

"The Italian unification stimulated the revitalization of German nationalism [...] it was not clear which States were susceptible to being unified: whether all those of Germanic language and culture integrated in the Confederation of 1815 —which included, therefore, Austria—, or only the small German States, Austria excluded, and which since 1833 already had a customs union" (15).

"The Tamil-speaking people of Ceylon constitute a nation distinct from that of the Sinhalese by any of the tests of nationality, firstly that of a separate historical past in the island at least as ancient and glorious as that of the Sinhalese (sic), secondly by the fact of being a completely distinct linguistic entity from that of the Sinhalese, with an unsurpassable classical heritage and a modern development of the language that makes Tamil fully adequate for all the needs of the present times, and finally by reason of the territorial occupation of defined areas'

The purpose of this passage is clear: to request autonomy or independence for an area described as 'over one third of the island' of Sri Lanka, on the basis of Tamil nationalism. Nothing is as it seems. It obscures the fact that the territorial occupation consists of two geographically separate areas inhabited by Tamil-speakers of distinct origin (indigenous and recently immigrated labor force respectively); that the area of continuous Tamil settlement is also, in some zones, inhabited by up to one third of Sinhalese and up to 41% of Tamil-speakers who refused to consider themselves as Tamils and prefer to identify as Muslims (the 'Moors'). In fact, even setting aside the central region of immigrants, it is not at all clear that the territory of uninterrupted Tamil settlement, which comprises areas of solid Tamil settlement (from 71 to 95% —Batticaloa, Mullaitivu, Jaffna) and areas in which those who identify as Tamils form 20 or 33% (Amparal, Trincomalee) ought to be described, except in purely cartographic terms, as a single space" (10).

There is no doubt that there do exist peoples, such as the Japanese or the Khmer, who conform to the romantic vision of the nation (one territory, one racial unit, one ancestral culture), but even in these cases it is misleading to cement this set of elements into an ethereal Volksgeist, immaterial and immemorial, destined to project itself into eternity.

In summary, romantic/ethnic nationalism postulates the following:

"In its original natural state and as created by God, each nation is unique and 'authentic'. The task of the nationalist is clear: he must restore his community in order to return it to its authentic, natural state. But this is only possible if the cultural nation becomes a political nation…" (20)

"Considered as a theory of world political order, nationalism postulates the establishment of a one-to-one correspondence between ethnic groups and territories. Each ethnic group or nation must have a well-defined territory upon which to build its own national State. And each territory on the planet must be assigned to a specific ethnic group as the home of its culture and the stage of its destiny" (14).

On the surface, nothing could seem more opposed to the Enlightenment nation than this nation, which has not been constituted by a pact among free men but rather exists "since time immemorial" and which is far more oriented toward the recovery and preservation of its atavistic quintessences than toward the achievement of the common good. But despite the inherent logical contradiction between both models, the truth is that the majority of nationalisms would end up combining variable doses of both approaches without entertaining excessive intellectual scruples.

The romantic conception of the nation has been absolutely decisive in two aspects of the history of nationalism:

a) Identifying and delimiting supposed nations.

b) Guiding the "fabrication" of national identities and cultures.

a) Discovery of nations

Let us begin with the first point. If the myth of the original social contract might have proven useful for those Nation-States whose borders coincided with the borders of the European absolutist States (as in France or Spain), with the borders of their colonies (U.S.A.) or of the former political entities of Spanish America, Romantic nationalism "discovered" nations whose borders did not necessarily have to coincide with the political ones of the moment. Based on assessments of a linguistic nature, of a historical nature, or on supposed continuities with ancient kingdoms or peoples, dozens, if not hundreds, of units of destiny in the universal have "awakened" to self-awareness. Over time, however, it would be linguistic considerations that would ultimately prevail above all others as the criterion for the delimitation of nations.

German nationalism.

"The Addresses to the German Nation, which Fichte delivered in 1807-1808, are the first manifesto of German nationalism [...] Fichte already replaces the French notion of natural borders with the idea of a linguistic border and, in a text from the year 1800, advocates the relocation of populations" (4).

Nationalism.

"Now, what proved important in the long run was not so much the degree of support for the national cause among this or that people, but rather the transformation of the program and the definition of nationalism. Today we are so accustomed to an ethno-linguistic definition of nations that we forget that, in essence, that definition was invented at the end of the nineteenth century. Without going into an in-depth analysis of this question, it suffices to recall that the ideologues of the Irish movement did not begin to link the cause of the Irish nation with the defense of Gaelic until shortly after the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893; that it was during that same period that the Basques placed their language at the foundation of their national claims (as a distinct factor that had nothing to do with their fueros — historical institutional privileges); that the passionate debates over whether Macedonian more closely resembles Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian were the final arguments used to decide to which of those two peoples they should be united" (9).

Somewhat mysteriously, the emergence of a national consciousness — among the inhabitants of a valley, or an island, or among those who speak a particular language or are supposed to descend from the same tribe of primordial settlers — can be limited to tiny minority circles or constitute a true mass movement. Thus, for example, there is hardly any nationalist movement among the Alsatians (who for the most part speak their own German dialect), there is a nationalism of some weight among the Bretons, though a minority one, while Irish and Basque nationalisms have managed to command majority support from the populations to which they have addressed themselves.

The why of why, in certain parts of the planet, movements have arisen that seek to encompass a given territory and its inhabitants within a new Nation-State — on the grounds that they constitute a nation by virtue of their linguistic, historical, racial, or other such particularities — while in other territories with those same particularities, or different ones, no nationalist impulse appears — or does not go beyond an elite of visionaries — remains one of the mysteries for which no satisfactory answer can be found. Nor is it fully understood what has caused the "awakening" to occur at such different historical moments; the Irish became conscious of being a nation — and, therefore, of having the right to and the obligation of possessing their own independent State — at the beginning of the 19th century, while the Scots seem not to have realized this until a century later (and, for the moment, little more than a third of them).

b) Fabrication of nations

And what is to be said regarding the second point? Romantic nationalism also plays a prominent role in the "shaping" of nations, once they have been identified.

1. Through a biased fascination with history that leads to seeing the existence of a continuity between the nation of today and a distant glorious past of unity, which would have been lost during certain historical periods

Nationalism.

"Later Romanticism entailed, as is well known, a linguistic renaissance without precedent in European history, but it also entailed a renaissance in many other fields of the human sciences. There emerged, on one hand, a new historical school interested in seeking in the past the markers of collective national identity. Everywhere, documents from the past were being compiled and edited; the people began to feel a renewed interest in their own history, and this also became a cultural instrument of nationalist exaltation. When in 1819, the former Prussian prime minister Karl Stein founded the Society for the Study of Ancient German History, he set out to 'stimulate a taste for German history and facilitate its study, thereby contributing to preserving the love of our common homeland and of our great ancestors.' It is no coincidence that the most important publication produced by this Society, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, bore as its motto Sanctus amor patriae dat animus" (15).

Nationalist historiography tends to exaggerate the victimist elements, the lost greatness, and the role of internal and external enemies who have prevented the unity and/or the glory of the nation.

This perennialist approach is transmitted through educational systems and is the approach with which we are most familiar. Surely the key to its success lies in the fact that it is the one that best satisfies certain psychological needs.

"As we know that not only our interests but, in fact, our very identities and our survival are bound to the nation, we show that great devotion toward it and are willing to make the greatest sacrifices when we believe it to be in danger. Hence the peculiar passion and violence it generates in its members, the sense that the nation is an insurance against mortality or, better said, against the oblivion that is a clearly implicit threat in our death. Nationalism, through absorption into the nation, offers humanity a secularized version of immortality. And it does so by bringing into play its capacity to unite the dead, the living, and the yet unborn in a single community with a common destiny, and through the idea of the judgment of posterity.

Therefore, the concept of nation is not only an abstraction or an invention. It is also something that is perceived, and passionately perceived as something very real, as a concrete community in which we can find certain assurances regarding our identity and even, through our descendants, regarding our immortality" (20).

Consequently, it should come as no surprise that nationalist thought takes the greatest liberties in distorting history in favor of this perennialism of romantic roots. On the contrary, the majority of modern historians — non-nationalist ones — attribute to the nation a more recent and more artificial character.

"[...] Furthermore, like Gellner I would emphasize the element of artifice, invention, and social engineering that is introduced into the fabrication of nations. 'Nations as a natural way of classifying men, God-given, as an inherent... political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and transforms them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often causes pre-existing cultures to disappear: that is a reality.' That is to say, for analytical purposes nationalism precedes nations. Nations do not create states and nationalism but rather it is the other way around" (10).

"Nationality was not a naturally occurring phenomenon easily identified, but rather something that had to be constructed. Consequently, the way in which some constructs, but not others, manage to underpin a nationalist movement does not derive from their intellectual validity, but only from the context [...]" (2).

2. Romantic nationalism makes the establishment of a common language, beyond a practical necessity, a spiritual duty toward the soul of the nation.

3. Romantic nationalism leads to the recovery of festivities, attire, customs, musical rhythms and all kinds of traditions when these have been conveniently catalogued as belonging to the nation itself (historians have rightly pointed out the capricious and biased nature of this selection process). The use of a large part of these traditional elements, however, will necessarily remain limited to the realm of protocol and ceremonies of patriotic exaltation.

Napoleon's attempt to clothe his army and administration in feudal garb is a good example of that nationalist constant of returning to a (inadvertently) adulterated past.

"If, on the one hand, the army was incited to assert itself as a caste, on the other hand, Napoleon deliberately created a nobility that was to accompany his Empire. The adoption of the title of Emperor required a court and the creation of appropriate titles for the sovereign's family. In both cases, the protocol of the Ancien Régime was constantly copied. And the legal language used to decree the assignment of principalities and duchies — under the conditions of great fiefs of the Empire — to Napoleon's relatives and some favorite generals and ministers (1806) was even more symptomatic of the manifest desire to assert a hierarchical order based on an imaginary past. The concept of primogeniture through the male line that was adopted for these fiefs, which reverted to the Crown in the absence of legitimate children, incorporated the ideal of what was considered the original model of feudalism, as it was imagined to have been in Carolingian times, though purified of later additions and corruptions. We find the same neo-Gothic imagery in the oath of allegiance of the new nobles, who promised, as true knights, 'to march in defense of the Fatherland every time the territory is threatened or His Majesty leads the Army.' That is one of the best examples we can find of a terminology replete with meanings that change depending on whether they refer to the present or to an imaginary past: the 'fatherland,' the 'territory,' and the king 'at the head of his army'" (23).

But under no circumstances would such a revival of obsolete forms imply a return to the Ancien Régime. The national principle, that of the French nation, had already crystallized irreversibly, and a return to estate-based society was impossible in a world that was changing before one's very eyes in absolutely every respect, and in which new social sectors were emerging that could hardly be accommodated within the simplicity of the tripartite feudal scheme.

4. Romantic nationalism likewise leads to an insistence on religious particularities, especially when these allow for differentiation from surrounding nations. In Germany, for example, some nationalist circles went so far as to propose the far-fetched idea of replacing Christianity with the cult of the ancient barbarian gods, taking a delirious — and surely impossible — step backwards in the inexorable unfolding of History.

5. And, often, romantic thought provides arguments sui generis that support imperial expansion projects.

Conclusion: the national utopia

What, ultimately, is supposed to characterize a nation? What are its most prominent features? A nation, in the modern sense of the term, is, in essence:

A group of people united by a mythical original pact of fidelity and mutual aid, by which they decided to submit to no one but themselves and to constitute themselves as a political body.

A group of people united by common origins, a common soul, and a common destiny, determined by God, by Nature, or by History.

A group of people who, in any case, intimately feel their belonging to the same flock, love it, and are moved by the same visual and auditory symbols.

A group of people willing to fight together in defense of their independence, their freedom, and their identity, willing to debate everything related to the common good and willing to submit to collective decisions.

The nation, moreover, is assumed to require several indispensable elements for its own existence and for the achievement of its goals:

A State.

A territory.

An official language (with some exceptions).

Historical outline

From a historical point of view, it was during the American War of Independence and during the French Revolution that a "national consciousness" was forged for the first time, in which broad sectors of the population participated.

"When the French revolutionary process begins in 1789, the issue of nation and patriotism ceases to be a matter of abstract definition of a concept and enters massively into social and political struggles. Already in that same year of 1789, Abbot Siyès publishes his famous pamphlet What is the Third Estate?, where he makes it very clear that the privileged Estates of the Old Regime were 'foreign to the nation', and that only the third Estate —the bourgeoisie— constituted the nation. As the revolutionary struggles deepened and the participation of the popular classes in them increased, the nation tended to be identified with the revolutionary people who had brought down the monarchy" (15).

However strange it may seem from our current perspective, the first nationalisms were essentially anti-monarchical and anti-traditionalist movements.

"It is rather in the political opposition to the increasingly powerful monarchical States where we can identify something resembling nationalism. Although a political rhetoric similar in many respects to that employed by the monarchical State is adopted, the appeal to the national idea acquired an increasingly important role in such opposition movements" (2).

But the substitution of the king by the people as the holder of sovereignty was but one aspect of a deeper change that was to affect many more areas of feudal society as a whole. Let us recall that, in these early stages, the concept of nationalism that prevailed was the Enlightenment one. Ethno-romantic notions were not yet present.

"[...] the French Revolution, which seems to have used the term in the manner introduced by the Americans and more especially by the Dutch revolution of 1783, considered patriots to be those who demonstrated their love of country by wishing to renew it through reform or revolution. And the patrie to which they surrendered their freedom was the opposite of a pre-existing existential unit; it was a nation created by the political choice of its members who, in doing so, broke with or at least diminished their previous loyalties. The 1,200 National Guards of Languedoc, the Dauphiné, and Provence who gathered near Valence on November 19, 1789, took an oath of loyalty to the Nation, the Law, and the King, and declared that from that moment on they were no longer Dauphinois, Provençals, and Languedocians, but only French; as did the National Guards of Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche-Comté at a similar gathering in 1790, thus transforming the inhabitants of the provinces annexed by France barely a century earlier into genuine Frenchmen. As Lavisse expressed it: 'La Nation consentie, voulue par elle-même' was the French contribution to history. The revolutionary concept of a nation constituted by the deliberate political action of its potential citizens is, evidently, still alive in its purest form in the USA. Those who wish to be Americans are Americans. Nor did the French concept of 'nation' as analogous to a plebiscite ('un plébiscite de tous les jours' as Renan wrote) lose its essentially political character. French nationality was French citizenship: ethnicity, history, or the language or patois spoken at home were irrelevant to the definition of 'the nation'" (10).

The French Revolution, by demonstrating that the Enlightenment ideal of a State oriented toward the service of the common good — and in which the feudal estates had completely disappeared — was achievable, also contributed to inspiring those intellectual elites outside France who had already distanced themselves from the Ancien Régime.

"In this way the French Revolution generates a national principle that will set a precedent among European liberals of the 19th century [...] the national principle of the French Revolution spread very rapidly through early 19th-century Europe, still dominated by absolutist regimes …" (15).

Outside French borders, the first nuclei of "patriots" dreamed, influenced by Rousseau, of a Europe of City-States.

"In that era, classical culture and modern philanthropy combined to limit the reproductive power of patriotism to the dimensions of regional identity:

One must not imagine love of the Homeland as an abstract and unnatural sentiment, but rather it is limited, like all the faculties of man, and cannot expand across too great a space... The Frenchman and the German have the vanity of their race in place of the passion of patriotism. Being obliged to unite twenty or thirty million individuals under the bond that connects them to their compatriots, said bond is so relaxed that instead of patriotic enthusiasm they feel nothing more than a kind of general benevolence... The deep attachment to one's native land still subsists above all, at present, in circumscribed states, and even more so in free cities that govern themselves, where all take an interest in the prosperity of the city where they are born and die, in the preservation of its monuments, in public safety" (23).

These patriots initially welcomed the Napoleonic armies with open arms and collaborated with the French occupier in civil administration.

"When the coup of Brumaire took place, successive French governments had experimented with the mechanisms of occupation and had developed certain techniques. Purely military occupation, which entailed treating the conquered country as enemy territory, was a provisional or emergency situation (such as the seven requisitions that Masséna carried out in Switzerland over five months during 1799). If the occupation was prolonged, the most common practice consisted of replacing local administrators (many of whom had fled) with a provisional administration of patriots or less enthusiastic collaborators" (23).

But the abuses of power by the Napoleonic armies made it easier for these nationalisms to acquire an anti-French orientation and, more importantly, a great surge in prominence.

"It is true that France's cultural pretensions were violently contested —by a Giuseppe Mazzini or a Friedrich Karl von Savigny, for example— in the name of national individuality; but that antagonism reflected precisely the depth of the penetration of Napoleonic domination. The radical political and administrative break with the past; the attempt to create and consolidate new loyalties in place of the traditional passive bonds of authority, deference, and local identity; the still more ambitious aspiration to forge, out of the heterogeneity of the European past, a new identity modeled on Napoleonic France, inevitably provoked resistance, not so much at the immediate political level as within the deeper social relations of each society. As a reaction to the Napoleonic experience, old solidarities forged over centuries were reinforced (such as language, community, or popular religion); and, on the other hand, new solidarities emerged, such as the discovery and construction of national individuality" (23).

Universalization of nationalism

And it is starting from these first nationalisms that…

"A single red line runs through the history of the modern world from the storming of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin Wall. As could not be otherwise, it arises in the England and Holland of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reaches its fullest expression at the end of the eighteenth century in France and North America. Dividing and redividing countries and peoples, it passes through Central and Latin America, enters through the south, the center and the east, then through the north of Europe as far as Russia, India, and the Far East, before turning and reaching the Middle East, Africa and Australasia" (20).

Over the past two centuries, nationalism and the conviction of belonging to some nation —whichever it may be— have spread in an unstoppable manner across the entire surface of the planet. Although each nationalism has come to light or has crowned its efforts at a different moment, following a logic that is difficult to untangle, it is no less true that during this time there have been crucial "cycles" in which, more or less simultaneously, a set of nationalisms or (presumably) national states emerged in a particular region of the planet. The most notable are the following: the occupation of Europe by Napoleon's troops, the independence of the Ibero-American countries, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the independence of the colonies of the European powers, and the dissolution of the USSR. Other nationalisms developed independently of these great cycles.

For some historians, there exists a kind of domino effect, whereby the achievements of a particular nation serve as inspiration, example, or stimulus for others.

"The Greeks, for their part, began their war of independence in 1821, a war that possessed at once a liberating and national character, in which all sectors of Greek society took part — from the flourishing merchant bourgeoisie that led the rebellion, to the clans of peasant-shepherds of the peninsula of Morea, including the Greek patriarch of Constantinople — and which constituted a genuine myth among the European left and, for that very reason, found very little support from European states. Only in 1830, after nine years of war and after the Greek National Assembly had proclaimed the independence of Greece in 1822, did an international protocol promoted by England create the new Greek state, which would be recognized by the Ottoman Empire in 1833. The new independence of Greece fostered throughout Europe — and particularly in the Balkans — the expansion of nationalisms" (15).

"Moreover, it is during this period [1880–1914] that we find nationalist movements multiplying in regions where they had previously been unknown, or among peoples until that moment of interest only to folklorists, and even for the first time, as a notion, in the non-Western world. It is not at all clear to what extent these new anti-imperialist movements can be regarded as nationalist, although the influence of nationalist ideology on their spokespeople and activists is undeniable — as in the case of Irish influence on Indian nationalism" (10).

"In fact, what Connor calls 'ethno-nationalism' has swept the globe as a result of the repeated messages transmitted through the mass media to the effect that popular sovereignty is tied to ethnicity; all of this combined with the 'demonstration effect' of successful ethno-nationalisms" (20).

Consequences of nation-building

There is no doubt that the creation of modern nation-states has gone hand in hand with the development of democratic systems, respectful of individual liberties, and has made possible an economic growth that was impossible in traditional societies. But it is no less true that nationalism has been distinguished by a less brilliant side.

"[the red line] It leaves in its wake a trail of protest and terror, war and revolution, the inclusion of some, the exclusion of many" (20).

Indeed, from the Jacobin Terror to the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian patriots, nationalism has been distinguished by a particular ferocity, merciless toward those who stand in its way. A ferocity that is difficult to explain.

Nationalism-patriotism

During the more than two centuries of existence of the modern nation, these multitudinous groups of people (mainly men) who share a State, a territory, fight in the same army, sing the same anthem and worship the same flag, have shown a surprising predisposition to collective exaltation and to the display of the universal traits of paranoid activation.

Grosso modo, we can classify the policies associated with patriotic exaltation into four broad groups.

In "construction" nationalism the objective is to provide the nation with what it still lacks for its normal development: a State, a language for general use, a national consciousness implanted in the minds of the majority and not only in that of the elite, a territory…

"I use the term nationalist in the sense defined by Gellner, that is, to signify primarily a principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent" (10).

Once the Nation-State is an apparently consistent reality, governmental actions with a nationalist bias are those sustained by the principle of "national interest."

Colonialist and imperialist policies, which transform the Nation-State into an expansionist machinery.

Fascist policies orient the nation toward the struggle against internal and external enemies and radically change the concept of general will which is now expressed in mass acts and is embodied in the person of the charismatic leader.

Concept of "construction nationalism"

The construction of the national State usually follows one of the following two paths:

1) the forging of a nation from the State (through linguistic unification, the inculcation of love for the homeland, the elaboration of a biased historiography relating to distant common origins…) and

2) the opposite path, that is, the achievement of an independent State for a supposed nation whose consciousness has already "awakened" (an ambiguous expression that takes for granted that said consciousness existed at some point, subsequently passing into a state of… transitory lethargy).

A somewhat atypical case is that of Latin America or the countries that emerged from the decolonization of Africa, where Nation and State had to be built simultaneously and in a short period of time.

In any case, these two paths are not as radically different as they may seem and are frequently confused.

"On the other hand, there have been in recent years important advances in the study of national movements that aspire to statehood, mainly following the innovative comparative studies of Hroch on small European national movements. There are two points in this writer's excellent analysis that are subsumed within mine. First, 'national consciousness' develops unevenly among social groups and regions of a country; this regional diversity and its reasons have been remarkably ignored in the past. Most scholars would probably agree that, regardless of which groups were captured first by 'national consciousness', the popular masses —workers, servants, peasants— are the last to be affected. Second, and consequently, I follow his useful division of the history of national movements into three phases. In nineteenth-century Europe, for which it was developed, phase A was purely cultural, literary and folkloric, and had no particular political or even national implications, no more than the investigations (by non-Gypsies) that the Gypsy Lore Society has for the subjects of its inquiries. In phase B we find a body of pioneers and militants of 'the national idea' and the beginnings of political activity in support of that idea. The bulk of Hroch's work focuses on this phase and the analysis of the origins, composition and distribution of this minorité agissante. My greatest interest in this book is in phase C when —and not before— nationalist programs acquire mass support, or at least part of the mass support that nationalists always claim to represent. The transition from phase B to phase C is evidently a crucial moment in the chronology of national movements. Sometimes, as in Ireland, it occurs before the creation of a national state; probably much more often it takes place afterward, as a consequence of such creation. Sometimes, as in the so-called Third World, it does not occur even then" (10).

The first situation, that of nation-building from the State, occurs when a nationalist elite holds effective political power but governs over populations that for the most part cling to the old loyalties and values.

"[...] Massimo d'Azeglio, who between 1849 and 1852 had presided over the Piedmontese government, stated in 1860: 'We have made Italy; now we have to make Italians'(15).

When he uttered this well-known phrase, he was probably thinking of some of the initiatives that the French revolutionaries had undertaken half a century earlier.

"Therefore, this starting situation should not lead us to dispense with the idea that the French Revolution played a fundamental role as a nationalist revolution and not simply a bourgeois one. Already in its earliest phases, the French revolutionaries disseminated and politicized some pre-existing ideas such as those of nation, patrie or le citoyen and chose a new French flag, the tricolor, to replace the old royal standard. In the crisis of 1792 and the subsequent war they resorted to the levée en masse and adopted a new anthem: the Marseillaise. Furthermore, the Estates General became the Assembly and the Convention, new oaths to the patrie were invented and heard on the Champ de Mars, new hymns were sung, heroes in the Roman style and recent martyrs were adopted, the great journées acquired a new nationalist liturgy. Throughout France, customs were abandoned and regional assemblies were abolished along with the dialects spoken in them. The belle langue was disseminated and a new calendar was adopted, all citizens were required to fight and die for the patrie. The French nationalism of the Jacobins even went so far as to sacralize the ideas of national mission and destiny, and the need to depose tyrants and liberate the peoples of Europe" (20).

"As has been highlighted on more than one occasion, this type of [State] nationalism presupposes that the nation is not a mass, collective fact that is constituted through history, but an administrative fact, insofar as it is the State that imposes the nation" (15).

But the construction of the nation is not without its difficulties. In order to "make Italians" or "Germans," nationalisms had to confront, among other obstacles, the old pre-modern loyalties to which the majority of the population continued to adhere.

1) Loyalty to the authority of the king or princes.

2) Loyalty to the estate (especially among aristocrats, cosmopolitan by nature and opposed to nationalist localism).

3) Loyalty to lineage (for example, in the Roma community it still remains, even today, largely well ahead of patriotism and loyalty to the State and the Law).

4) Loyalty to religious authorities.

5) Loyalty to local identity, especially in populations furthest from the core upon which the national culture was shaped, and which tend to have the greatest disparities with the latter.

"In a more general sense, the theoretical problem, so well summarized in the great Tableau de la géographie de la France of 1903 by Vidal de la Blache, had to be resolved by virtually all nation-states; namely, 'how a fragment of the earth that is neither an island nor a peninsula, and which cannot properly be considered a singular unit by physical geography, has risen to the status of a political country, and finally become a patria'. For any nation even of medium size had to build its unity upon the basis of an evident disparity" (10).

The task of creating the nation from the State is especially arduous when, on the basis of some hecho diferencial (such as language, religion, or the memory of ancient political institutions), an independent nationalist project develops that aspires to the construction of its own State within a portion of the State in question. By contrast, local differences are overcome without major difficulty when the population identifies resoundingly with the nation offered to it by the State and does not embark on an alternative national project.

Love of the nation, feelings of patriotic exaltation, and civic spirit are apparently transmitted through the following channels:

1) The educational system.

2) The army.

3) The media.

4) The rituals of patriotic exaltation in which the population is called upon to participate.

5) Families.

In any case, and even with the means available, efforts to instill national feeling in the subjects of a given State are not always successful. There are no foolproof recipes with which rulers can transform those they govern into a nation. And, in fact, numerous failures occur.

Austrian nationalism

"Naturally states would use their increasingly powerful machinery for communicating with their inhabitants, above all primary schools, to spread the image and heritage of the 'nation' and to inculcate attachment to it, tying it all to the country and the flag, often 'inventing traditions' or even nations for that purpose. This author recalls having been subjected to one such (failed) display of political invention in an Austrian primary school in the mid-1920s, in the form of a new national anthem that desperately attempted to convince children that the few provinces that had remained when the rest of the great Habsburg empire had broken away or been torn from them formed a coherent whole, worthy of love and patriotic devotion; a task not at all facilitated by the fact that the only thing they had in common was what made the vast majority of their inhabitants want to unite with Germany. 'German Austria', was the beginning of this curious and short-lived anthem, 'we love your magnificent land', continuing, as was to be expected, with a dissertation on geography that followed the Alpine currents from the glaciers to the Danube valley and Vienna, and concluded with the assertion that this new residual Austria was 'my homeland'" (10).

And it is that, for numerous nationalist thinkers and historians, the true crucible of nationalism is war. That, and nothing else, is the royal road by which a solid national consciousness is formed, and the best instrument for preventing its dissolution. The prolonged period of peace through which Western Europe is passing allows one to observe how the distance from the battlefield tends to dissolve the iron boundaries of national States and to dissipate patriotic exaltations. We do have, to be sure, those simulations of warlike confrontations that are sporting competitions, authentic jousts of modernity to which nations send their finest specimens. In the absence of genuine wars, they allow the martial ardors to be periodically awakened, while at the same time avoiding the devastation that accompanies the massive use of weapons.

Governmental nationalism

In already consolidated Nation-States there exists what we can call "governmental nationalism," which fluctuates in intensity over time, and in which, at any given moment, there are differences in intensity among parties, among geographical regions, and among social sectors.

This form of nationalism is more elusive when it comes to attempts at definition, but we are not going to lose sight of it. In general, it is used to refer to a policy that not only makes greater use of the rhetoric of the nation, but is distinguished by a greater intransigence and combativeness toward external and internal enemies (of the nation), a certain emotional exaltation, attitudes hostile to cultural diversity, an excessive use of the (national) flag and anthem, and the placing of "duty" toward the fatherland above any other obligation.

"[...] I would add that this principle also implies that the political duty of the Ruritanians toward the state that encompasses and represents the Ruritanian nation surpasses any other public obligation, and in extreme cases (such as wars) all other obligations of any kind" (10).

As we have already noted, governmental nationalism fluctuates in intensity over time, typically becoming exacerbated in periods of conflict, especially armed conflicts. On the other hand, there are political parties with a greater patriotic inclination than others (the Republican Party and the Gaullists, in their respective countries, have traditionally been more nationalist than the Democrats or the UDF, to give one example).

But the presentation of nationalisms cannot be closed at this point, given that over the course of the two centuries of history of the phenomenon, two great movements have occurred (both transitory, fortunately) in which the national State departed significantly from its initial democratic ideals, drifting into something fundamentally different from what was originally conceived by Enlightenment thinkers. These are imperialism and fascism, both in its corporatist and its racial versions. In both, there occurred a marked (and, thinking of Nazi Germany, it would be better to say colossal) increase in the paranoid traits inherent in states of patriotic exaltation.

In reality, the militarist, authoritarian, and implacably expansionist drift of nationalism had already occurred, premonitorily… in France, very few years after the establishment of the Republic.

Imperialism

A good part of the constituted Nation-States, especially the oldest ones, have shown at some point in their history the pretension of extending their borders by force of arms.

"Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it was possible to be a nationalist in order to claim self-government and national sovereignty, to achieve the unification of different States, or to pursue annexationist objectives"(15).

The conquest of a territory by a Nation-State and the military victory over its inhabitants may be followed either by policies of subjugation, which place the locals in a position of inferiority, or by policies of absorption of indigenous populations, through which the aim is togive them access to citizenship in the colonizing metropolis.

The imperialist annexation of territories and populations foreign to the Nation-State can be carried out through contiguity or at a distance. The latter is what happened on a large scale during the period of colonial imperialism, which began in the penultimate decade of the19th century, and in which a handful of States extended their domains within a very brief period of time and on a scale without historical precedent.

Let us allow the historians to speak.

"[...] there is no doubt that the termimperialism entered the political and journalistic vocabulary during the 1890s in the course of the debates that developed around colonial conquest" (9).

"African colonization was preceded by the expeditions that, without immediate economic and political interests, were carried out by a long series of European explorers and missionaries from the 1820s until the end of the 1870s. Driven by a spirit of adventure, with the aim of exporting the Christian religion and European civilization — which they considered superior — these explorers revealed the African continent to Europeans and served as the vanguard of a rapid colonization process that in twenty years — from 1880 until the end of the century — brought almost all of Africa under European control" (15).

"Between 1876 and 1915, approximately one quarter of the planet's surface was distributed or redistributed in the form of colonies among half a dozen states. The United Kingdom increased its possessions by some ten million square kilometers, France by nine million, Germany acquired more than two and a half million, and Belgium and Italy somewhat less. The United States obtained approximately 250,000 km2; primarily at Spain's expense, an extension similar to that which Japan achieved through its annexations at the expense of China, Russia, and Korea. Portugal's former African colonies were expanded by some 750,000 km2; for its part, Spain, which proved to be a clear loser (to the United States), nevertheless managed to obtain some arid territories in Morocco and the Western Sahara" (9).

"Once the rival powers began to divide the map of Africa or Oceania, each of them attempted to prevent an excessive portion (a particularly attractive fragment) from falling into the hands of the others. Thus, once the status of great power became associated with the act of flying one's flag over a beach lined with palm trees (or, more frequently, over stretches of dry scrubland), the acquisition of colonies became a statusstatus symbol, regardless of their actual value. By 1900, even the United States, whose imperialist policy had never been associated, before or after that period, with the possession of formal colonies, felt compelled to follow the fashion of the moment. For its part, Germany felt deeply offended by the fact that such a powerful and dynamic nation possessed far fewer colonial territories than the British and the French, even though its colonies were of little economic value and of even much lesser strategic interest. Italy insisted on occupying highly unattractive stretches of African desert and mountains in order to reinforce its position as a great power, and its failure to conquer Ethiopia in 1896 undoubtedly weakened that position" (9).

"On the eve of the world war, only the small state of Liberia, on the Atlantic coast, artificially created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by African Americans under the auspices of the United States, and the territory of Ethiopia, which would later end up being occupied by the Italians, escaped European control" (15).

"Despite these agreements and the bilateral treaties signed between two or more imperialist powers, the rivalries and conflicts were not brought to an end and ultimately continued until the final outbreak of the Great War of 1914–1918" (15).

Historians and economists have offered different explanations for the expansionist enthusiasm of Nation-States. For some, colonialism would have derived from the very evolution of the prevailing capitalism. An excessive accumulation of money in the hands of a small number of individuals would have produced the need for new spaces toward which to channel investments.

"However, the most transcendent historical phenomenon that occurred during this period —and to which, in one way or another, the rest of the phenomena are articulated— was the transformation undergone by capitalism on a global scale, as a result of the dual process of industrial and banking concentration that emerged in the most advanced capitalist countries from 1870 onwards, and of the acceleration of the industrial productive process that increased, in each of these countries, the excess of profits and capital. This transformation of the European economic system provoked, as a consequence, the great imperialist wave, initiated around 1875…" (15).

Another economistic explanation holds that what was actually being sought were new markets in which to sell.

"The best known of these arguments, the pressure of capital to find more favorable investments than those that could be made within the country itself, safe investments that would not suffer from the competition of foreign capital, is the least convincing [...]

A more weighty general argument for colonial expansion was the search for markets. It matters little that these projects were often frustrated. The conviction that the problem of 'overproduction' during the period of the great depression could be solved through a major export drive was shared by many" (9).

Some historians have been critical of both interpretations and, referring to the English case, have explained the colonialist impulse in terms of the need to find occupation for the large number of graduates trained to fill positions in the administration, who exceeded the employment-generating capacities of their own country's administration.

These three explanations imply that certain economic or social elites would have self-interestedly pressured governments into initiating expansionist policies. The patriotic bluster associated with conquest projects would have been merely an instrument to mobilize society as a whole in favor of such expansionist projects. The ultimate origin of imperialism, therefore, would have to be sought in certain minority interests, which would resort to a mass manipulation of the population through the exploitation of patriotic sentiment.

Another interpretation to be found in the literature on colonialism holds that colonialism would have been used to avoid internal conflicts within each nation, uniting its citizens behind the conquest project. It became particularly important to appease the discontented sectors of society at a time when universal suffrage gave the masses an unprecedented prominence, with the consequent risk of the rise of workers' parties.

"Far more relevant to us seems the common practice of offering voters glory instead of costly reforms, and what could be more glorious than the conquest of exotic territories and dark-skinned races, especially when such conquests were achieved at so little cost? More broadly, imperialism encouraged the masses, and especially potentially discontented elements, to identify with the imperial State and nation, thus unconsciously providing justification and legitimacy to the social and political system represented by that State" (9).

The contrast between these multiple explanations, offered a posteriori by historians, and those coming from the protagonists of these imperial projects could not be more stark. The arguments —nationalist in nature— used to justify imperial expansion (from Napoleon to the Chinese occupation of Tibet) can be summarized in two:

1) The conquering nation has a civilizing mission toward the rest of the world; it is the one that can save it, the true spiritual reserve...

Nationalism.

"Even within the European socialist movement —which during this period became definitively organized and asserted its presence in the political and parliamentary institutions of various European States— significant voices emerged that endorsed European imperialism, such as that of the German Bernstein, who, in the face of indigenous resistance against imperialism, had no qualms in declaring that 'hostile peoples incapable of civilized life have no right to our sympathies when they rise up against civilization,' in defense of the urgent necessity that 'savages be subjugated and the rights of superior civilization be asserted over their own'" (15).

Racist nationalism.

"Race theorists do not always adopt radical positions. Some believe that inferior races can be improved through progress, religion, or education, and develop what Pierre-André Taguieff calls a 'universalist-spiritualist racism', the most important version of which is offered to us by the colonial ideology of the French Third Republic in a man like Jules Ferry, but also in socialists such as Léon Blum, who for example will evoke in 1925, in the Chamber of Deputies, the mission of the superior races, their duty to place science and industry at the disposal of the inferior races, as well as to elevate their cultural level..." (22).

German Nationalism.

"Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who held the Chair of Philosophy at the newly created University of Berlin, the most formidable of these institutions, wrote a series of works during the final phase of the Napoleonic Wars, in which he underscored the intellectual and moral supremacy of Germany in a way that could become, as he saw it, a factor destined to drive the progress of all humanity through the modern State" (11).

With these postulates, nothing could be easier than ending up resorting to arms, even when the first intellectuals who expressed conviction in the civilizing mission of their nation did not intend it.

2) The conquering nation is superior to other peoples and its citizens superior to the rest of mortals, whereby there exists a clear right to the exercise of superiority and the enjoyment of privilege.

Japanese Nationalism

"The doctrine of Mabuchi was the foundation of the far more important literary work of Moto-ori, a physician of prodigious energy, who in the hours left free by his medical practice wrote 55 books in 180 volumes. In certain respects, he is the Japanese Rousseau. His Kojiki-den, his fundamental work, was written during the years 1764-1796, but the printing of the work was completed in 1822. Afterwards, it spread widely in educated circles. It is remarkable that the shoguns did not censor Moto-ori's book. The short-sighted reason that led them to adopt this attitude was perhaps that he enormously modernized and improved written Japanese, eliminating the accretions of imported Chinese words and highlighting the pristine force of the native tongue. Moreover, the Kojiki-den was a patriotic compendium of Japanese learning, including elements of history and cosmology, as well as philosophy and religion, a kind of medieval Summa. But there is no doubt that it was a work that came to subvert the shogunate, and that ultimately destroyed it. Moto-ori was a religious fundamentalist of the most obscurantist type, who believed in primitive Shinto with its 8 million deities, its fables and myths interpreted as facts, and who rejected the kind of abstract philosophy that China had brought to Japan. But he also displayed the rough practicality and concrete imagery that is characteristic of the Japanese character, and this imagery — with its remarkable language — explains the influence he achieved.

Moto-ori argued that under Shinto Japan was a Garden of Eden, simple, rustic, frank, and pure. The Mikado [emperor] was a great monarch who wisely exercised his enormous power. Then Confucianism and China had arrived, deceiving the innocent Japanese with their pseudo-religious sophisms and bringing with them the tendency toward civil war, which was endemic in China. (The contrast between a disordered and divided China and a disciplined and unified Japan is a constant refrain in Moto-ori.) In due course came the emasculation of the Mikado, the god-man of Japan: 'Since the introduction of Chinese customs, the sovereign, although he occupies a very dignified place, has been degraded to the intellectual level of a woman. Real power fell into the hands of servants, and although they never actually assumed the title, they were in fact the rulers, while the Mikado became a complete nullity.' One of the reasons why Moto-ori rejected Chinese religious ideas was that they represented China as the center of the universe, to which all human beings were actually or potentially subject. As descendants of the Sun Goddess, the Mikados had been designated by divinity to rule not only Japan but the entire world.

Moto-ori brought about a fundamental change in Japanese thought. He became the center of the Japanese cultural renaissance. The Shogun made him a highly honored official despite the fact that his works identified the shoguns with Chinese cultural imperialism and that they were to be, for the half century beginning in 1822, the basis of the exultant slogan: 'Sonno Jo-i' –'Honor the Emperor and expel the barbarians!' From all over the country, men and women came to hear him. Events seemed to justify his ideas. The fact that China was facing increasingly serious difficulties due to foreign interference, as observed by the Japanese, validated Moto-ori's analysis. The Japanese had always been told that the Chinese were the 'Chosen Nation'. Now, Moto-ori taught them to see their neighbors as the pitiable, crushed, and humiliated inhabitants of what he called 'a filthy country'. It was the Japanese, rather, who formed the chosen nation. This claim, so appealing to Japanese xenophobia and racism, was reinforced by the large number of works by Hirata, Moto-ori's principal disciple, born in the same year as the United States Declaration of Independence. The cosmology and creation theory conceived by Hirata confirmed Japanese preeminence. The text began thus: 'Why Japan is the Land of the Gods'. He argued that the thousands of gods of Shinto worship had been born in Japan, and none abroad. Therefore, every Japanese person descends from a god and is born with a perfect disposition, a pure heart and spirit, corrupted only by foreign influences. 'Between the Japanese,' he wrote, 'and the Chinese, the Hindus, the Russians, the Dutch, the Siamese, the Cambodians, and the remaining nations of the world, there is a difference of quality rather than of degree.' Therefore, the Japanese must take measures to prevent the entry of corrupting foreigners. His works became a handbook of defense against Russian, Dutch, and Anglo-Saxon penetration.

Certainly it was inevitable that Shintoist fundamentalism would later determine a militarist spirit, as well as the overthrow of the shogunate, and it is remarkable that a subversive like Hirata was permitted to publish and teach openly in Edo during the 1820s and even afterward. (It was not until 1836 that one of his books was censored, and in 1840 he was exiled to his hometown.) But equally important is the influence of a revived and modernized Shintoism on Japanese society. Shinto was limited to speaking of the deities. It lacked an ethical or moral code; if it was to be a viable religion in modern Japan, one had to be assigned to it. But this ethical code was produced in accordance with the needs of the militarized Meiji State that emerged in Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century; and in this way a religious support was provided for a form of totalitarianism that was at once primitive and highly refined. And as its philosophy of the 'chosen nation' slowly moved from a merely defensive posture, as the hermit State shed its shell to become an acquisitive and imperialist entity, fundamentalist Japan ultimately became the terribly aggressive State of the 1930s and early 1940s" (11).

It is plausible, and to be expected, that certain economic and political elites ardently defended colonialist policy with a self-interested objective such as the acquisition of new markets, or the opening of new investment opportunities, or employment for young graduates, or that they sought merely to neutralize the labor movement. But no historical evidence leads us to think that the fantastic beliefs of superiority and mission were a fully conscious invention, contrived by a few with the aim of deceitfully mobilizing the population as a whole in pursuit of objectives that in reality responded to hidden and unconfessable interests.【/2】【1】e【/1】【2】nte la política colonialista con un objetivo interesado como la obtención de nuevos mercados, or the opening of new investment opportunities, or employment for young graduates, or that they sought merely to neutralize the labor movement. But no historical evidence leads us to think that the fantastic beliefs of superiority and mission were a fully conscious invention, contrived by a few with the aim of deceitfully mobilizing the population as a whole in pursuit of objectives that in reality responded to hidden and unconfessable interests.【/2】 --- Let me redo this cleanly: 【0】It is plausible, and to be expected, that certain economic and political elites ardently defended colonialist policy with a self-interested objective such as the acquisition of new markets, or the opening of new investment opportunities, or employment for young graduates, or that they sought merely to neutralize the labor movement. But no historical evidence leads us to think that the fantastic beliefs of superiority and mission were a fully conscious invention, contrived by a few with the aim of deceitfully mobilizing the population as a whole in pursuit of objectives that in reality responded to hidden and unconfessable interests.ente la política colonialista con un objetivo interesado como la obtención de nuevos mercados, or the opening of new investment opportunities, or employment for young graduates, or that they sought merely to neutralize the labor movement. But no historical evidence leads us to think that the fantastic beliefs of superiority and mission were a fully conscious invention, contrived by a few with the aim of deceitfully mobilizing the population as a whole in pursuit of objectives that in reality responded to hidden and unconfessable interests.

The paranoid hypothesis provides us with an alternative approach to explain the curious tendency of nationalisms to transition from the struggle for the right to existence to the conviction in the right to preeminence. Only in the context of states of paranoid collective exaltation can the often far-fetched arguments of national mission and superiority be taken seriously by the majority of citizens. Not without reason, both types of arguments also characterize the rest of the paranoid contagion groups; the bellicose expansionism that some nations display at some point in their history responds to the same underlying dynamic as the tireless proselytism of sectarian cults.

Fascism

Fascisms constitute a set of political movements, with similar characteristics, that proliferated mainly in continental Europe at the beginning of the last century.

Unlike other ideologies, fascism does not have a systematic exposition of its principles or any "canonical" reference texts (such as Lenin's writings). In fact, the ideas of the fascist movements, and we are thinking above all of Italian fascism, underwent numerous mutations, in line with the ideological evolution of their protagonists, the successive desertions from and incorporations into the movement, circumstantial opportunism, and the imperatives of socio-political reality. On the other hand, although all fascisms share an important component of imitation of Italian fascism, nationalism itself — with its eagerness for self-differentiation— and electoral interests led many fascist movements to present themselves rather as the fruit of an autochthonous evolution, even to omit the term fascist, as well as to create a symbology, a terminology, and other attributes distinct from Italian fascism.

Below I outline, in broad strokes, the main characteristics and ideas of the fascist movements, with the clear understanding that none of them should be taken as a sine qua noncharacteristic, given the remarkable heterogeneity of the fascist movements.

Nationalism. All fascisms had the Nation as their main point of reference. All presented themselves as the true representatives of the Nation's interests; all were called upon to regenerate it, to unify it, to glorify it, and to project it into the future. Fascism acted for and on behalf of the Nation, with absolute indifference — when not contempt — for any other consideration.

Imperialism. Fascisms advocated for their respective countries policies of imperialist expansionism, demanding a status similar to that of the great colonial powers.

Anti-parliamentarism and anti-parties. The fascists saw themselves as the establishers of a radically new society that would mean for the decrepit liberal-parliamentary systems what the liberal revolutions meant for the Ancien Régime. The party system was criticized for the disunity it introduced into the life of the nation, for the fact that it did not serve the people (the nation) as a whole but rather the economic elites, and for allowing the irruption of ideologies contrary to the spirit of the nation. Consequently, they advocated for a single-party regime that would encompass and represent the nation as a whole (an idea that had already been advanced by some liberal thinkers of the early nineteenth century).

Authoritarianism. The society to which the fascists aspired was a strongly hierarchical, authoritarian society in which the power of the leader dispensed with constraints. They likewise rejected the human rights of liberalism (which limit the risks of abuses of power by the State against individuals) and replaced them with a single right: the right to obey.

Direct expression of popular will. Inspired by a vitalist attitude that scorned reason in favor of action, and that exalted imposition over negotiation or dialogue, the fascists, nonetheless, did not reject the myth of the general will, but they did reject the idea that it should be established through deliberations and votes. They preferred, instead:

To think that popular will is better expressed in rallies and demonstrations in which the people speak directly to their leaders;

or to think of a democracy in which it is the different sectors of society who send their representatives (corporatism, organic democracy…)

or even to affirm that it is the leader who "embodies" the general will (a very oft-repeated expression with unmistakable religious overtones… the will of the people that is made flesh in the supreme leader…).

Anti-traditionalism. Fascists saw themselves as the pioneers of a radically new order which, if it sought to subvert capitalism and liberal democracy, did so by no means with the intention of returning to the previous regime. Thus, fascists rejected the monarchical system, were — often — anticlerical, and were committed to an agrarian reform aimed at breaking up and redistributing the large estates that, in many countries, remained in the hands of the old nobility.

Secularism. Fascism always maintained a distant attitude, when not openly hostile, toward the Church, which it tended to view as a venerable and outdated organization. In a certain way, fascism can be seen as an alternative religion, with its own violent mysticism (hardly compatible with the Christian religion), oriented toward earthly values and ends. For example, it was the first mass movement to incorporate the defense of nature into its ideology.

Mysticism and imagery. Fascist movements all resorted to the elaboration and profuse use of a repertoire of symbols, ceremonies, chants, and uniforms that gave them an air that was at once military (and indeed they aspired to be militias) and of religious exaltation.

Anti-capitalism. On the whole, fascism proved hostile to the capitalist system and particularly toward the upper bourgeoisie and toward the presence of foreign capital. The themes of economic modernization, poverty, and the unequal distribution of wealth constituted one of the obsessions of fascist movements. As for their alternative proposals, these evolved from a revolutionary socialism in which economic management was to be transferred to the trade unions or to the State, to an economic model characterized by:

Autarky, isolation from the outside world (with the exception of colonies) tending toward complete self-sufficiency.

The nationalization of broad sectors of the economy.

The thorough regulation of economic life and labor relations.

Anti-Marxism. All fascist movements demonized Marxist ideology and communist parties and trade unions as the great enemies of the nation, and it was against communists that they first directed their intense aggressiveness. The internationalism of communism was rejected as a threat to the life of the nation. Nevertheless, they shared with the labor movement the revolutionary spirit and the aspiration to replace capitalism with a socialist system. In Spain, Ramiro Ledesma, founder of the JONS, expressed his sympathies and attempted to draw closer to the CNT, whose indomitable and spontaneous character seemed to him… more genuinely Spanish!

Lifestyle: youth, machismo, glorification of violence and repudiation of bourgeois values. The fascists preached an enthusiastic, militant, combative, exalted, ardent way of life… something akin to the values of an ultras gang of a football club. They glorified youth, manliness, the resort to violence and the spirit of adventure, while deeply scorning the comfortable lifestyle and old age. Some fascist organizations only admitted into their ranks those under 45 years of age and likewise insisted that public positions of responsibility be held exclusively by young people.

Fascism, manifestly opposed to the values of the Enlightenment, did not arise suddenly and from nothing in opposition to them. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century, rabidly nationalist, revolutionary and right-wing movements had proliferated, characterized by an exalted, violent and intransigent nationalism. Fascism must be seen as a later extension of these tendencies and, in a broader panorama, as the political expression of a far-reaching cultural change.

"The end of the nineteenth century was the era of the 'second industrial revolution,' with the rapid expansion of heavy industry, accompanied by astonishing technological innovations [...] electrification [...] of the telegraph, the telephone and the cable, high-speed ocean liners and the introduction of the automobile followed by that of the aeroplane [...] ever greater population movements, with growing waves of people crossing continents…

[...] Changes in social structure were equally rapid and profound, owing to an unprecedented increase in urbanization and the new working class [...] of sectors of the middle classes [...] the emergence of mass society, mass commercial consumption and mass industrial production [...] the introduction of cinema and the dawn of a new 'visual age' [...] increase in mass leisure, for the first time in history, and the beginning of sports as collective spectacle [...] far-reaching and unprecedented changes created a new sense of the acceleration of history and of the transformation of society and culture.

[...] The nineteenth century had been increasingly dominated by liberalism in politics and by materialism and science in culture, while part of the generation of the eighteen-eighties and nineties rejected those values, replacing them with a new orientation toward subjectivism, emotionalism, irrationalism, and vitalism. This attempt to overturn the dominant values produced what one historian has called 'the intellectual crisis of the nineties' (of the nineteenth century, that is). This concept highlights the drastic innovations of the new thinkers, writers, and artists, but it must be borne in mind that, at that moment, these new tendencies were not generally accepted by the greater part of intellectual and artistic society.

The most famous and influential precursor of the new tendencies was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed 'the death of God' and categorically repudiated the materialism and rationalism of the nineteenth century…

Although in England and in certain philosophical circles in other countries renewed efforts were made to refine and reaffirm rationalist and positivist thought, a growing 'rebellion against positivism' reinforced the neo-idealist approach to life…

New tendencies in literature, music, and the arts also led to a move away from realism and from the harmonies of nineteenth-century culture. Toward the end of the century neo-romanticism came into fashion, while in opera the great works of Wagner had already created a mystical world of the German past that exalted instinctive forces and tragic heroism. After the turn of the century, new styles of painting rejected the representational realism of the earlier period, turning instead toward expressionism and abstraction, which sought to reflect inner and emotional forces. In music, new compositions employing exotic scales, fractional tones, and microtonality dissolved the classical harmonic system…

The role of leadership and the futility of ordinary political doctrine —whether liberal, democratic, or socialist— were highlighted by the new Italian school of elitist theory in political sociology, headed by Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and later Roberto Michels. They subjected the existing parliamentary systems, especially the Italian one, to devastating criticism, and affirmed the necessity of elite rule in all systems [...] For Pareto, the most distinguished of the group, both democracy and socialism were mere myths, and politics rested, ultimately, on emotion, which is why it required an enlightened system of strong authority…

The revolutionary revision of Marxism went much further in France and Italy. It was initiated especially by the retired French engineer Georges Sorel who, in a series of writings after 1901, proposed a fundamental modification of socialism [...] 2) in culture, revolutionary socialism had to sustain a new culture and a new psychology, which recognized the importance of moral and emotional forces and the motivating power of idealism and myth; 3) in politics, revolutionary socialism had to totally reject the parliamentary trap of liberal democracy in favor of direct action.

In his seminal work Réflexions sur la violence (1908), Sorel insisted on the 'moral' character of violence and its importance in generating a sense of seriousness, commitment, purpose, solidarity and common bond [...] It may be said, with some simplification, that he considered violence to be good in itself, as it created something that could not be found in any other experience. This was the first clear theoretical assertion of a doctrine that, mutatis mutandis, would be fundamental –though not absolutely exclusive– to the development of subsequent fascist theory…

[...] Whereas nineteenth-century science had seemed to encourage liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism, the new scientism (usually based on vulgarizing and popularizing writings that were merely pseudoscientific) encouraged concepts of race, elitism, hierarchy and the glorification of war and violence.

[...] At the beginning of the new century there were increasingly more supporters of the pursuit of the unity of nature. In the German-speaking world (and to a lesser degree in other areas), this meant a search to associate the ideal and the physical, the cultural and the material, the spiritual with the biological, nature with society, so that the hidden essence and ultimate unity of 'nature' might come to be revealed. These tendencies greatly reinforced the conceptualization and appeal of nationalism, as they exalted the identity of the biogroup and conferred new value on organic relations within societies and on nations understood as complete units. This, in turn, reinforced a greater insistence on order, discipline and authority rather than on individualism and indulgence, for only through strong authority could organic relations be strengthened and the identity of the biogroup be more fully affirmed.

[...] the end of the century also witnessed the spread of a new cult of virility and a more conscious insistence on masculine expression, as a reaction to the sedentary, egalitarian, and homogenizing tendencies of modern society. This new style of conscious virility, although in a certain sense it was first shaped in private life, had clear implications for nationalism and militarism, with which it became more and more associated in political terms.

It would be a considerable exaggeration to claim that European society as a whole went through a cultural crisis during the generation of 1890–1914, but the changes in attitude among sectors of the cultural elite were impressive, particularly in some of the great continental countries, and especially in central Europe, Italy, Russia and, to a certain extent, France. There had settled, so to speak, a disposition of rejection of the dominant values of the preceding generations. Faith in rationalism, the positivist approach and the worship of materialism were increasingly under attack. This rejection was often accompanied by hostility toward bureaucracy, the parliamentary system, and the desire for 'mere' equality" (16).

It is against this cultural backdrop that a new authoritarian patriotism emerged, for which, in fact, the term nationalism was coined. Subsequently, in the historical period that opened after the First World War, it was Bolshevism and fascism that were the two movements which most fully embodied in concrete political programs the new currents of elitism, authoritarianism, and the exaltation of political violence.

Coming down to somewhat more concrete ground, let us examine what the human nuclei were whose amalgamation gave birth to fascism, shortly after the end of the First World War.

"[...] was the meeting [in 1919] of about a hundred left-wing interventionists and ardent nationalists, among them at least six women, in a rented hall near the Piazza Santo Sepolcro in Milan, on March 23, 1919, to form a new revolutionary nationalist movement, which they called Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. The participants came almost exclusively from these four groupings: revolutionary syndicalists turned national syndicalists, a few ex-socialists who converted, along with Mussolini, to extreme nationalism, Marinetti and some of his futurists (who were abandoning the attempt, begun shortly before, to found a Futurist Political Party) and, above all, some former members of the Italian Army's commando units known as arditi (who during the war wore black uniforms, a symbol of death)" (16).

Who were each of them?

1) The revolutionary syndicalists.

"The nucleus that eventually founded fascism in Italy did not emerge, however, from the cultural elite or from right-wing nationalists, but from the transformation of part of the revolutionary left, in particular the sector known as revolutionary syndicalism. This originated in France in the eighteen-nineties, as a reaction to the weakness and moderation of socialism and the labor movement. It sought to overcome these limitations through 'direct action' or, as its French supporters called it, the manière forte, with the goal of bringing about the revolution through a great general strike that would make it possible to restructure society around the trade unions. The revolutionary syndicalists detested reformism, compromise, and parliamentary government or, as they put it, 'the superstitious belief in majorities.' They were influenced more than the rest of the socialists by the cultural crisis of the fin de siècle, especially social Darwinism, the importance of group conflicts, and Sorelian ideas about the moral value of violence. In France, they reached their peak in 1902–1906, after which their influence rapidly faded.

Revolutionary syndicalism began to grow in Italy after 1900…

[...] The intellectual leaders of revolutionary syndicalism were able to devote considerable time to the elaboration of theory thanks, so to speak, to the lack of practical opportunities for their movement. Aware of the futility of mere insurrection, they insisted on the importance of structure and organization. Although they rejected the irrationality and the lascivious attraction of the Futurists toward violence, Sergio Panunzio and other theorists highlighted its necessary and vital role. While the syndicalists knew that lucidity was something distinct from emotionality, they sought a new approach that would mobilize the vital instincts of the workers. Roberto Michels, the most distinguished of their intellectuals, studied the need for new elites, the role of leadership and voluntarism, the psychology of large groups, and the problems of mass mobilization. Equally important, in syndicalist theory, was the insistence on new ideals and symbols, and the creation of a more positive morality in place of Marxist materialism, so as to motivate and guide the workers" (16).

2) Mussolini and the socialist militants who accompanied him.

"[...] the former socialist leader Benito Mussolini, who in December 1914 left his neutralist party to join the left-wing interventionists. Mussolini had been born in 1883 in a village in Romagna, in northeastern Italy, in an area well known for its rebellious spirit and left-wing politics. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father, a socialist, was a blacksmith, who baptized him with the name of the Mexican liberal Benito Juárez. Although his education in local schools was at times disrupted by violent attacks on his fellow students, he obtained a primary school teaching diploma at the age of nineteen. During a brief stay in Switzerland, he became a socialist and returned to Italy to complete his military service. He then worked briefly as a schoolteacher, but soon showed a talent for journalism and in 1908 was provisionally appointed director of an Italian socialist newspaper in Trieste, a city that belonged to Austria, from which he was soon expelled for revolutionary agitation. From that point on, he rose rapidly through the socialist ranks as an avowed champion of violent revolution, and helped the revolutionaries take control of the party apparatus in 1912. He was then appointed director of the daily Avanti, the official socialist organ. At twenty-nine, he was already one of the most prominent leaders of the party.

[...] Mussolini served in the army for seventeen months, eight of them on the front line, and was seriously wounded when a mortar exploded during a training exercise in February 1917, which brought his military service to an end. During the war his commitment to nationalism became complete and extreme, though he retained the desire to combine nationalism with some form of socialism that would appeal to all classes" (16).

3) The Futurists.

"After 1900 there was an important shift, when a large part of the cultural elite leaned toward a militant and violent nationalism. The fin-de-siècle cultural crisis had a greater impact in Italy than in other countries. Italian philosophers competed with the Germans in the anti-positivist rebellion, and in favor of neo-idealism, while sociologists and theorists such as Mosca, Pareto, and Scipio Sighele, were international figures of the new elitist and anti-parliamentary doctrines. Nowhere were there such vehement adversaries of bourgeois culture, liberalism, humanitarianism, and pacifism. The corollary of aggressive nationalism was, in their eyes, imperialism and vigorous elite leadership.

[...] Equally vehement were the voices of the participants in Italy's main contribution to the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century, the Futurist movement, led by Filippo Marinetti. Futurism was absolutely neophilic, reflecting the new mechanical and industrial Italy emerging in the north, and rejecting all the artistic canons of the past; it embraced novelty, speed, machines, and all the spectacular changes of the twentieth century. The Futurists offered at once a new content and a new style; their theatrical productions were provocative, their paintings were full of factories, machines, moving parts, and symbols of the acceleration of life. They were, in a certain sense, metaphysical motorists.

[...] The original Futurist manifesto of 1908 declared:

We want to sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.

The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and rebellion.

We want to exalt aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the forced march, the perilous leap, the slap and the punch…

We want to glorify war – the world's only cure –, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for women.

We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight against morality, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice.

Much of what Italian fascism of 1919 was can already be found in the futurist manifesto of ten years earlier" (16).

4) Among those who joined fascism from the very first moment were the arditi, although the new movement would end up proving greatly appealing to the rest of the demobilized male population.

"The war produced, on the western and Italian fronts, a new type of experience that until then had never been lived by such a large number of men and for such a prolonged period. The virtually static front of the trenches paralyzed millions of men for months and months, thereby creating a collective consciousness of a separate society, of a warrior group partially isolated from the rest of the nation and from normal experiences, united by a prolonged camaraderie and a new sense of collective identity, which common suffering and sacrifice made even deeper and more lasting. This sense of collective identity and mission survived the war and helped to create in many veterans a new sense of nationalist identity, mission, and purpose. It produced a perception of a new 'civil military class' that was going to play a special, militant, and leading role in postwar nationalism and in the political activities of the twenties and thirties. It gave validity to the concepts of 'blood socialism' and of 'trenchocracy' that later emerged in the minds of hundreds of thousands of veterans" (16).

As so often happens, the term fascist would undergo, over the years, a process of blurring, such that it would end up being equated with concepts such as "authoritarian," "dictatorial," or simply "violent." And in the language of some left-wing groups, any defender of democracy and the market economy would have come to be considered a fascist.

For its part, German National Socialism presented certain particularities that allow it to be distinguished from other fascisms. We will highlight two in particular:

The component of revenge against the disproportionate conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, which not only humiliated the country by stripping it of population and territory, seizing its colonies and its foreign patents, making it lose control of some of the most thriving sectors of its economy, imposing limitations on its military development and economic reparations beyond its means, etc., but also plunged broad sectors of the population into poverty and unemployment

The relatively greater weight of antisemitism and racial supremacy theory compared to other fascisms. Both were based on various discourses, dating back to the previous century, which in turn relied mainly on biological arguments of negligible scientific rigor, on peculiar interpretations of History, on belief in all manner of conspiracies and secret activities of the Jews, and, no less importantly, on philosophical-religious beliefs —if they can be called that— transmitted by certain occultist societies.

Leninism

Leninism is a doctrine that, in the last century, guided the politics of a good number of States around the globe and over prolonged periods of time. The Marxist-Leninist parties imposed dictatorships with markedly paranoid profiles upon their respective countries, isolated from the rest of the world by impenetrable borders, authoritarian and focused on the struggle against internal and external enemies. These dictatorships degenerated with some frequency into orgies of blood, indiscriminate violence, and destruction, playing a leading role in the great massacres of the century (alongside the Hitlerian Holocaust, the slaughter of Armenians by Turkish nationalists, and the inexplicable mass murder of Tutsis in the nineties).

Obviously, it is not possible to introduce Leninism without making reference to Marxism, the labor movement, and, ultimately, the working class. This "class" emerged as a novelty in History in the nineteenth century, and as a consequence of a new phenomenon with then-unimaginable repercussions: industrialization.

The working class

"When in 1771 the English barber Richard Arkwright, together with other partners, set in motion the first factory in history, he could not have imagined that he was initiating the development of a momentous process in the organization of labor. The factory, which replaced the old artisanal system, was the bringing together in a single place of the machines, the energy that drives them, and the workers who control their movements and direct them toward the creation of a fully finished product.

[...] The increase in productivity depended on the use of human labor, whose coordination with the machine allowed for production in large quantities and the replacement of bespoke manufacturing with serial production…" (19).

"[...] industrialization [...] Having begun in England, it very soon became a common objective in all countries interested in, or compelled toward, this change. Won over by this interest, the first proprietors to become entrepreneurs on the Continent, by hastening to acquire machines, patents, and techniques, were able through this imitation and subsequent refinement to found new centers of industrialization in northwestern Europe and on the eastern coast of North America…" (19).

"Industrialization thus becomes the most important historical change since the invention of agriculture…" (19).

"It was precisely the urban development resulting from the proliferation of industrial activities, manufacturing, and services that brought about the slow but progressive demographic decline of the rural population and the growing transfer of the active workforce to the cities" (18).

The new social "class" of factory workers would be spared from the famines that periodically ravaged agricultural populations, but would have to face other hardships: meager wages, expensive and poor-quality housing, overcrowding in unsanitary neighborhoods, excessive working hours and harsh working conditions, child exploitation…

"But in the new society, in which formally at least the triumph of the political revolution had sought to erase distinctions in line with the estate-based organization of society, in order to establish the legal principle of equality, there arose — or rather began to gain progressive weight — a new division, in keeping with the economic inequality generated by the accumulation of productive assets in a small number of individuals, at the same time that it raised the percentage of citizens stripped of property and compelled to work for others in exchange for a wage only formally agreed upon in freedom" (19).

Workers were still a minority of the urban population (in the first half of the nineteenth century, even in England, their number was still lower than that of domestic servants), yet their misery and resulting desperation, their confinement to clearly identifiable neighborhoods, and the fact that they gathered in large numbers in factories lent workers a particular strength. A strength catalyzed by the emergence of a new kind of associative movement.

The labor movement

"By labor movement, then, is meant the organized struggle of workers through groupings or institutions in which workers and all those who choose to join their ranks come together, both alike conscious of their solidarity and of the usefulness of organizing for the purpose of defining their common objectives and pursuing their realization" (19).

At first, worker agitation expressed itself in the form of uprisings with no organizational backing whatsoever, reminiscent of the traditional peasant rebellions during times of famine. Furthermore, they were directed primarily against the machines.

"Then, from 1819–1820 onward, the protests left the machines alone and began to be directed against the employers…" (19).

Worker associationism took shape, in its first stage, in societies aimed at providing protection against situations of need.

"[...] in the early eighteen-thirties the first mutual aid societies also began to emerge, tolerated by the Government as long as they devoted themselves to the economic assistance of the unemployed, the sick, or the elderly" (19).

But these mutual societies would not take long to give way to a series of secret societies (necessarily so, given that they were prohibited) that aspired to improve the fate of the working class through the conquest of political power and the consequent introduction of reforms (or revolutionary changes) within emergent capitalism.

"This climate of conflict exerted an enormous influence on the development of workers' associationism. In a very short space of time there emerged the Societé des amis du peuple, the Societé des familles and the Societé des Saisons; and many others of a secret nature, with the aim of seizing political power by force through conspirators, rigidly organized, prepared to liberate the working class, guarantee the education of the people in democracy, and promote the development of a utopian-communist society" (19).

The secret societies were succeeded by other organizational forms: trade unions, workers' parties, and internationals. The emergence of the latter was facilitated by the fact that the persecution of the workers' movement led its most prominent leaders and intellectuals to seek asylum in the more tolerant countries, which allowed them to weave a cosmopolitan social network that in turn contributed to giving the workers' movement its characteristic internationalist orientation, in a world in which the principle of the nation-state seemed to be imposing itself gradually over every obstacle.

Insofar as the improvement of workers' living conditions entailed a reduction in business profits — and employers opposed any legislation or agreements aimed at establishing maximum working hours or minimum wages — the outbreak of conflicts between workers and employers was inevitable. These conflicts often took on a violent character and led to the intervention of state security forces, with violent repression and express prohibitions of workers' associations. All of this was done in the name of the principle of individuals' right to sign contracts without the necessary mediation of third parties. For their part, the labor movements adopted attitudes of hostility toward a State whose principles benefited employers and which showed itself willing to use force to impose them. There can be no doubt that from the liberal perspective of the French Revolution, nothing was more retrograde than returning to regulations and "collective bargaining"; such a concession would amount to something akin to a return to estate-based relations, albeit with entirely new "estates." But for the impoverished factory workers, such arguments made little sense.

The massacre of workers during the revolutionary events of 1848 in Paris marked a turning point and a dispersal of the labor movement. For many intellectuals within the movement, among whom Marx must be singled out, better planning of action and the establishment of a supranational organization had become necessary.

In 1864, the IWA, the First International, was founded, in whose genesis Karl Marx played a leading role, and which for a decade brought together various organizations and positions (Marx's followers — the most important current —, Proudhonian mutualists, anarchists following Bakunin, etc.). Disagreements between currents led to the gradual dissolution of the IWA, which was unable to adopt a unified stance following the massacre that put an end to the Paris Commune (1871).

The labor movement, in addition to pursuing the introduction of immediate improvements

for workers (material and political ones: in wages, in working conditions, in access to the vote…), acquired a strong utopian dimension. The primary object of criticism was no longer the Old Regime but, precisely, the liberal-capitalist system that had replaced it. And in opposition to the latter, labor ideologies offered alternatives that, with varying degrees of radicalism, all tended toward greater economic egalitarianism and advocated that ownership of the factories should belong to the workers (for many, though not all, through their appropriation).

Tenets of the labor movement

At first, these ideologies were developed by a small number of intellectuals who shared a growing concern over the problem of poverty (and its consequences, such as alcoholism, disease, and "moral degradation") and over the problem of economic exploitation; over time, these thinkers would come to be known, somewhat disparagingly, as "utopian socialists."

"However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe, specifically during its first three decades, and once an awareness had been reached, however superficial, that 'production increases while well-being diminishes', as noted by the Genevan economist Sismondi, the explosion of discontent and the fear of its danger due to the congregation and overcrowding among those who suffered it, as well as due to its pauperizing homogenization, led the public authorities to an initial concern for misery and pauperism, while at the same time charitable and benevolent associations were growing and the first socialists were inaugurating their critique of the capitalist system, which they held responsible for economic and social inequalities" (19).

The term socialism was coined in the first half of the 19th century to refer to these egalitarian utopias. It derived from the Latin socius, meaning friend, which in the Middle Ages had been used by the Cathars to refer to pairs of "perfects" who traveled from village to village preaching Albigensian doctrine.

"In the newspaper Le Semeur, Pierre Leroux boasted, in 1831, of being the first to use the term 'socialism', taken up again in 1832 in Le Globe Saint-Simonian, and in 1833 in La phalanstère Fourierist" (5).

The majority of the first socialist visionaries did not directly participate in the nascent labor struggles and oriented themselves preferentially toward the organization of small egalitarian factory communities which, due to their greater productivity and as an example of morality and civilization, should end up displacing the capitalist mode of production. But all the experiments failed spectacularly on the economic level and amid internal quarrels. Nevertheless, and despite the repeated debacles, the written works of these authors (Saint Simon, Fourier, Owen…) had a wide resonance and decisively influenced the ideas of labor leaders and organizations.

Although these early socialisms never managed to converge into a unitary "workers' doctrine," the truth is that within the labor movement a series of powerful ideas and objectives were being forged that went beyond economic egalitarianism: equality in relations between men and women and the critique of the institution of marriage and the family, opposition to the churches and even to religion (with the surprising phenomenon of "workers' apostasy"), pacifist internationalism and the belief in a "new man," solidary and less competitive, the conception of property as theft, the necessity of destroying the State or reducing it to its minimal expression…

But these areas of loose coincidence did not manage to erase the profound divergences of all kinds existing within the movement. Let us examine some of the questions on which opposing positions existed:

struggle for the improvement of economic and labor conditions (in each enterprise or through protective legislation) versus change of the type of society,

destruction versus utilization of the State,

centralization versus spontaneity in revolutionary activity,

entry into the political-electoral arena versus specifically workers' institutions and methods (strikes, demonstrations, occupations…),

internationalism versus acceptance of the national fact (or fiction),

violent methods versus peaceful ones,

gradualism versus revolution,

worker isolation versus collaboration with other political currents (democratic, republican…) or social sectors and, finally,

destruction of capitalism versus the implantation within it of socialist units of production.

"To this end, R. Owen proposed establishing 'villages of cooperation' or cooperatives where the workers, as owners of the means of production, were to manufacture the product in order to subsequently sell it [...] In 1834, and also in England, a National Organization was founded, based on the grouping of workers by trade and locality, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, with the aim of transforming trade unions into bodies prepared to direct production across the various sectors of a growing and ever more widespread industry" (19).

The most influential leader of the First International, whose opinions were most respected (on the European continent, though not so in the Anglo-Saxon world), was, without any doubt, Karl Marx. Following his death (1883), the body of his ideas would be transformed into a doctrine identified as Marxism.

In his writings, Marx emphasized the importance of class struggle as the driving force of history, rejecting the peaceful construction of socialism within liberal society and advocating for a violent seizure of power by the organized working class, with the aim of establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat," a step prior to the construction of a society free from class conflict, without a State, egalitarian, and in which the "new man" could liberate his finest potentialities. All of this would necessarily come about as a consequence of an inexorable historical destiny, scientifically demonstrated by him.

The period of the Second International

"Aware, therefore, that the International was to be 'the General Staff of the proletarian Army,' and that Internationalism remained the driving force that would make possible the conquest of power and the advent of collectivist society, from the dissolution of the International Workingmen's Association and even more so at the beginning of the eighteen-eighties, its reconstruction through Congresses and Conferences was contemplated…" (19).

The Second International was formally constituted in Paris in July 1888. It brought together numerous socialist parties and organizations, with the undisputed prominence of the German SPD and with Marxism as its guiding ideology. Indeed, since the dissolution of the old IWA, labor leaders had never ceased to think about recreating a second international. Its founding took place during a period in which, from a demographic standpoint, the working class was reaching its maximum expansion (subsequently, a gradual transfer of workers to the tertiary sector would begin).

"As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, no industrial, industrializing, or urbanizing country could fail to be aware of those historically unprecedented masses of workers, apparently anonymous and rootless, who constituted a growing and, it seemed, inevitably increasing proportion of the population and who would probably before long make up the greater part of it. The diversification of industrial economies, above all through the growth of tertiary-sector occupations — offices, shops, and services — was only just beginning, except in the United States, where tertiary-sector workers were already more numerous than manual laborers. In other countries the inverse situation seemed to predominate. Cities, which in the pre-industrial period had been inhabited primarily by people employed in the tertiary sector — since even craftsmen tended also to be shopkeepers — became centers of manufacturing. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, approximately two thirds of the working population in large cities (that is, in cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants) were employed in industry" (9).

A notable feature of this historical period was the ease with which socialism penetrated the masses of dispossessed workers, and the firm irreversibility of their newfound conviction.

"In 1886, the locals of the Belgian valleys around Liège, who had traditionally been engaged in the manufacture of firearms, were completely lacking in political consciousness. They lived on a poor wage, their lives enlivened in the case of the men only by pigeon fancying, fishing, and cockfighting. From the moment the 'workers' party' appeared on the scene, they threw themselves into it en masse: from then on, between 80 and 90% of the population of the Val de Vesdre voted socialist, and even the last bastions of local Catholicism were undermined. The inhabitants of the Liègois found themselves sharing an identity and a faith with the weavers of Ghent, whose language (Flemish) they could not understand, and also with all those who shared the ideal of a single, universal working class. Agitators and propagandists carried that message of unity among all those who worked and were poor to the most remote corners of their countries" (9).

With some exceptions, the most prominent organizations of the labor movement in this historical period were the socialist parties. The numerical growth of the industrial proletariat, the gradual expansions of voting rights, the indisputable success of the socialist cause within the working class, and the — lukewarm — acceptance of the parliamentary path transformed these parties — in a brief span of time — into significant electoral forces. It should be noted that with the exception of the SPD (founded in 1875), the socialist parties came into being during the course of the 1880s. By the time World War I began, they were no longer small, peripheral nuclei but genuine mass movements.

"In fact, in 1914 there were mass socialist parties even in the United States, where that party's candidate received almost one million votes, and also in Argentina, where the party achieved 10% of the vote in 1914, while in Australia a labor party — certainly not socialist — had already formed the federal Government in 1912. As for Europe, socialist and workers' parties were already significant electoral forces in almost every place where conditions allowed. They were certainly in the minority, but in some states, above all Germany and Scandinavia, they were already the largest national parties, gathering up to 25–40% of the vote, and every expansion of voting rights revealed the industrial masses ready to choose socialism. Not only did they vote, but they organized themselves into gigantic armies: the Belgian workers' party, in its small country, had 276,000 members in 1911, the great SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) had more than one million members, and the workers' organizations — not so directly political, such as the trade unions and cooperative societies — linked to those parties and often founded by them, were even more massive" (9).

But the presence of socialist deputies in national parliaments did not in any way mean that the labour movement had been transformed exclusively into a parliamentary force.

"[...] German social democracy, which had managed to overcome the limitation of classic bourgeois parties to the political sphere, had been transformed into an alternative 'way of life' that rivalled the established capitalist society.

[...] it transcends the traditional conception of the party as a 'mere machine of political struggle' to become a microsociety, alien to and marginalised from bourgeois society, and capable of functioning on its own..." (19).

This microsociety, differentiated from the rest not only by the fact of living from factory work, but also by its own system of values, was structured around trade unions, purchasing cooperatives, and a host of recreational organisations.

"What, then, was 'the movement' which, in some extreme cases, could practically coincide with the class? Everywhere it included the basic and universal organisation of workers, the trade union, albeit in different forms and with varying degrees of strength. It also frequently included cooperatives, primarily in the form of workers' shops, which on occasion (as in Belgium) were the fundamental institution of the movement. In countries where socialist parties were mass parties, it could include practically every association in which workers participated, from the cradle to the grave, or rather, given their anticlericalism, to the crematorium, which, according to 'progressives', was far more fitting in that age of science and progress. Among such associations one might mention the German Federation of Workers' Choirs, founded in 1914, with its 200,000 members; the workers' cycling club 'Solidarity' (1910), with its 130,000 members; or the Workers' Stamp Collectors and the Workers' Rabbit Breeders, whose traces still occasionally appear in the taverns of the suburbs of Vienna. In practice, however, all these associations were subordinate to the political party, or formed part of it (or were at least closely linked to it), a party that was their fundamental expression and that almost invariably bore the name of the Socialist (Social Democratic) Party and/or simply the Workers' Party or Labour Party" (9).

Marxism constituted a kind of official religion of the movement (with the exception of the British Isles, where Fabian ideas predominated), from which only a few isolated individuals or radical circles deviated.

"Labor movements that lacked organized class parties or that opposed politics, although they represented an old current of utopian or anarchist ideology, were almost always weak. They consisted of shifting groups of individual militants, evangelizers, agitators, and potential strike leaders rather than mass structures. Except on the Iberian Peninsula, always out of step with European events, anarchism did not become anywhere in Europe the predominant ideology even of weak labor movements. With the exception of the Latin countries and —as the revolution of 1917 revealed— Russia, anarchism lacked political significance" (9).

Although the axis of the labor movement of this period (which ends with the First World War) were the Socialist Parties of each country, it is no less true that the continuous meetings of the Second International stamped upon the labor movement that same internationalist hallmark that had distinguished the IWA.

As could not be otherwise, dissenting voices would soon emerge within socialism itself. On the right, the so-called revisionists advocated abandoning Marxism and its utopian charge, as well as relinquishing the insufficiently democratic idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

"For E. Berstein, and more specifically from the publication of his work in 1899, The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, written with the aim of 'strengthening social democracy,' his advance along the path he had initiated involved a revision of the assumptions of Marx and Engels, who never fully nuanced the importance of social and political institutions and their effect on the economy.

[...] Familiar with the academic socialists and with Fabian reflections and experiences, for E. Berstein it is 'Great Britain of the trade unions, cooperatives, and socialist communities' that holds a promising future free from 'revolutionism.' Socialism, he concludes, is 'the expression of liberalism' taken to its ultimate consequences; which renders unnecessary the demand and claim of power solely for the proletariat, since class dictatorship implies a lower level of civilization" (19).

On the left side there existed a sector of the labor movement more inclined toward violent revolutionary action, which looked unfavorably upon the parliamentarist drift that socialism was acquiring. The most extreme manifestation of this current was constituted by the so-called French "revolutionary syndicalism," hostile toward political parties and which defended the accession to power by workers through strictly union action and, more concretely, through a revolutionary general strike.

There likewise existed a radical wing within the main socialist parties, especially in the Slavic countries, also in favor of the revolutionary general strike and not particularly fond of the evolutionism that, de facto, was imposed by the logic of parliamentary politics and by the very evolution of socioeconomic circumstances. Because, contrary to what had been predicted, wages were not falling below subsistence level (which, according to Marx, would eventually happen and would precipitate the proletarian uprising) but were instead rising unstoppably year after year, and the welfare state was taking charge of meeting basic needs and protecting the most disadvantaged.

This radical sector of the Second International — which, unlike French revolutionary socialism, remained faithful to Marxism — led by Rosa Luxemburg, shared the critical attitude toward war with the rest of socialism, which affirmed that "for workers, war is a civil war," but thought to take advantage of the chaos that would be created in the warring nations in order to redirect the confrontation between states into a revolutionary war against capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin were convinced that the great conflict whose approach was already becoming visible was nothing other than the final expression of the internal contradictions of capitalism, which Marx had predicted, and that it was bound to lead to the seizure of power by the proletariat. This somewhat apocalyptic position was a minority one, yet it nonetheless managed to find its way into the conclusions of one of the Congresses of the Second International.

"[...] and it even went so far as to approve a proposal, put forward in the most radical sector by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, according to which, in the event that the conflict should break out, socialist organizations ought to take advantage of it to 'shake the people and thereby accelerate the suppression of the dominance of the capitalist class'" (19).

These more radical sectors felt profoundly betrayed by the support that, at the last moment and in a climate of unbridled nationalist exaltation, the socialist parties gave to their respective national governments in an almost unanimous fashion.

"[...] Before the International could convene, however, at the end of July 1914 war broke out, and the socialist parties, which lacked uniform and concrete guidelines, were swept up by the patriotic fervor that shook the countries involved in the conflict. The German Social Democrats went so far as to accept in 1914 the truce proposed by the kaiser to all political and social struggles, and chose to support the war [...] The war was the death blow, the 'bankruptcy' in Lenin's words, of working-class pacifism and of the International itself, rendered incapable after the conflict of any efficient reconstruction" (19).

Despite being in the minority with respect to the bulk of socialism, and once the First World War had ended, the radical sector of the Second International pressed ahead with its insurgent plans and in several countries swept considerable nuclei of workers toward the final Revolution that would put an end to capitalism. Efforts were concentrated particularly in Germany, with the Spartacist League. The historical determinism of Marxism made them feel that History was on their side, and it did not help them to accurately gauge their own strength. Only the Russian Bolshevik party succeeded in its coup.

Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov would go down in posterity as Lenin, one of the many aliases he used, following revolutionary custom, and the one with which he would ultimately come to be identified. He was born into a comfortable family, his father being a brilliant civil servant who ended up receiving a noble title in recognition of his work. As a curious aside, his maternal grandfather, a physician and converted Jew, was a landowner obsessed with hydrotherapy who forced his daughters to spend the night wrapped in damp sheets.

A descendant of Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German, and Swedish ancestors, Lenin was born on the tenth of April, 1870.

He suffered no economic hardship and lived in a spacious house with domestic staff. A brilliant student, like his elder brother, he was first in his class. His childhood friends speak of a certain arrogance, a sense of intellectual superiority that would grow stronger throughout his life.

"Volodia, meanwhile, with the support of his family and the encouragement of his teachers, was acquiring a solid intellectual formation. He was also developing a deep self-confidence and a sense of superiority over his fellows. He was the family's favorite, and was accustomed to being the center of attention. This is not to say that he was vain, although neither did he conceal his moral 'right' to the primacy that seemed his, and even in those early years he appears to have shown his lack of tolerance toward the viewpoints of others. One of Alexándr's schoolmates, V. V. Vodovózof, recalls that after a visit to the Ulyanovs he realized it would be impossible to forge a close friendship with Vladimir, excessively self-assured and self-satisfied, inflated by the certainty of being considered a genius within the family and an infallible authority outside it, and whose manner of arguing struck him as crude" (21).

When Vladimir was 17 years old, his older brother was arrested for having taken part in a student conspiracy to assassinate the Tsar. The event had a great impact on Russian society and left a profound mark on the family. Having refused to ask for clemency, he died by execution.

That same year Lenin enrolled at the University of Kazan, only to be expelled shortly afterward for taking part in a student demonstration. In the following years he devoted himself to the study of Marxism.

At the age of 19 he took charge of the estate his mother had acquired in Alakaievka, hoping that her now only surviving son would take responsibility for it, but it was not long before he grew tired of it and washed his hands of the property.

He enrolled as an external student at the University of Saint Petersburg, obtaining his law degree at the age of 23. He returned to Samara with his mother (his father had died shortly before) and worked as a lawyer — for a short time, with few clients and little success.

At the age of 24 he returned to Saint Petersburg and made contact with Marxist circles. He met his future wife, a socialist sympathizer and daughter of a deceased military officer who had been demoted for belonging to a secret society.

At 27 he was arrested and exiled to Siberia, where he led a comfortable life with the money his mother sent him. During his exile he devoted himself to long walks, hunting, reading, writing revolutionary articles, and corresponding with his fellow believers. It is primarily through his prolific literary activity that Lenin consolidated his prestige and influence in social-democratic circles and subsequently within the Bolshevik party. He developed a categorical style that systematically resorted to insults and the discrediting of anyone who did not share his ideas.

"Lenin had no mercy on Kerensky. In his so-called Complete Works he mentions him no fewer than two hundred times, inventing a contemptuous epithet each time: he calls him a 'charlatan' and associates him with the 'stupid Romanov,' making them bear the weight of responsibility for the ruin and disorder prevailing in Russia. Lenin was never tolerant of his political opponents. In 1911, in Paris, he snarled: 'Those people should be put up against the wall, and if even then they won't give up, they should be driven into the mud.' Expressions like this were frequent substitutes for political arguments. Kerensky refrained from responding to him in that tone" (21).

The following year, his future wife and future mother-in-law traveled to Siberia to celebrate the wedding, which, at the insistence of the latter, took on a religious character. The relationship between Lenin and his wife was never a passionate one. For many years she served as his secretary and close collaborator, remaining faithful to her husband despite the relationship he maintained with another woman. They had no children.

From his earliest university encounters with Marxism, Lenin showed a great fascination with the most violent historical revolutionaries, as well as a predilection for the most drastic and bloodthirsty methods. In particular, he admired Nechayev, leader of the group 'Secret Reprisal' and repudiated in revolutionary circles for his violent attitudes. To the question of which members of the tsar's family should die, his blunt and well-known answer had been: "The entire Romanov house!" When in the summer of 1918 Lenin ordered the execution of the entire family, including the 13-year-old prince and his four sisters, as well as any relatives who might have succeeded him, in a single act he definitively erased the monarchy from Russian territory, carried out the slogan of his violent predecessor, and avenged his brother's death.

In 1900, at the age of 30 and already a prominent socialist leader, he went into exile in Europe, living the idle life befitting a member of the Russian aristocracy: "… I continue with my summer life, walking, swimming and doing nothing." He traveled comfortably as any nobleman might, with the money his mother sent him, the party's salary, and the support of some wealthy sympathizers of the socialist cause. He devoted himself primarily to political activism, establishing frequent contacts with Russian and European socialist leaders and writing tirelessly. He would not return to Russia until 1917.

During his exile he became the most prominent leader of Russian socialism, being the one who controlled its funds (coming from membership dues, donations, and minor criminal activities or "expropriations") and directing a small army of professionals on the Party's payroll.

In those years of intense activity he adopted an idea that would become the guiding thread of his entire future political line: that the period of imperialism was the final stage in the evolution of capitalism, and that the moment for the proletarian revolution that would establish socialist society had arrived. Said revolution (contrary to the prevailing attitude in the Second International and in keeping with the intellectual fashion of that historical period which favored the use of force) would necessarily be violent, and the opportune moment would be the end of the great war that was approaching. Lenin was absolutely convinced that the chaos produced by the confrontation between industrialized nations should be seized upon to transform the "bourgeois" war into a supranational clash between social classes, the outcome of which could be none other than the triumph of the proletariat. But to achieve this it was necessary to organize a strongly cohesive party, with clear leadership, more oriented toward insurrectional methods and even toward war than toward parliamentarism. Hence his pacifism was radically false. Lenin firmly believed in war, only in a different war.

His personally intransigent style permeated his leadership. Over time, the Bolsheviks he captained would move from insults to pistols. And when the Party's own militants showed inclinations toward dialogue and peaceful solutions, it would always be Lenin himself who would push them to change their attitude.

Mention must also be made of his extraordinary oratorical ability, which would prove enormously useful to him after his return from exile.

The Bolsheviks

Russia had begun its industrialization very late, but by the end of the nineteenth century there was already a working class that, although it represented no more than 3% of the population, was concentrated in very few cities and in large factories, which favored its rapid politicization and the implantation of socialist ideology.

In any case, the first significant Russian egalitarianism was that of the narodniks, born in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Even though it was led by intellectuals and middle-class individuals, the narodnik movement was fundamentally directed at the peasantry, the majority sector of the Russian population (85%). It was not a homogeneous movement but rather included everything from groups prone to terror and close to anarchism to others that were clearly reformist. The narodnik movement differed profoundly from the Marxism of the Second International in having a markedly agrarian connotation. It aspired to create a society of village-peasants, owners of their plots of land, without feudal lords and founded on cooperation and equality. Its hostility was directed equally toward the nobility, whose lands it sought to redistribute, and toward the cities and the State, whose interference in the rural world it could not fully accept. It was also wary of industrialization, which it considered dehumanizing. At the beginning of the twentieth century they formed the Socialist Revolutionary Party (also known as the eserist party).

For its part, the seed of Russian social democracy was the "Workers' Emancipation Group," founded in Switzerland in 1883, from which the Russian Social Democratic Party emerged, with a program inspired by that of the SPD and markedly differentiated from that of the narodniks. From the very first moment it oriented its interest toward industrial workers. At the same time, the first nuclei of Marxist sympathizers were formed within Russian territory during that same decade, and they would eventually converge with the socialists in exile.

Already at the very beginnings of the constitution of the Socialist Party, a debate arose in which two currents emerged. The moderate one wanted to approach the workers with a message of winning short-term economic improvements, leaving the social-democratic doctrine (which at the time was roughly equivalent to Marxist) for later. The radical current, on the contrary, advocated indoctrinating workers from the very outset in the revolutionary spirit.

The discussion would subsequently become polarized between those who believed that Russia needed to pass through a liberal-democratic period that would eradicate feudalism and allow for industrialization and the formation of a large working class (which meant "allying with bourgeois formations"), and those who believed it was preferable to fight directly for the establishment of socialism, industrializing the country under a regime of proletarian dictatorship that would spare the workers the transitional period of savage exploitation characteristic of capitalist society. The proponents of the first position wanted a broad, decentralized, and open party, modeled on the German SPD. Lenin and his followers wanted precisely the opposite: a smaller, monolithic, and cohesive party.

At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (1903), the radical theses prevailed. The withdrawal of several small groups (among them those representing Polish workers and Jewish workers) meant that the radical positions, which were in fact a minority, found themselves in the majority at the time of the vote. The Leninist faction became known as "Bolshevik" (majority, though it was not) and the moderate one as "Menshevik" (minority, though it was not that either). The reality is that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks functioned in the following years, at least de facto, completely separately. The split was consummated with the creation of the Bolshevik Party in 1912.

The Revolution of '17

The year 1902 marks the beginning of an insurrectional process led by the Russian peasantry, who aspired, above all, to the redistribution of land, and who envisioned a horizon narodnik of solidary villages with a wide margin of autonomy vis-à-vis the power of the State.

The weakness of Tsarism became visible in 1905. On the "Black Sunday of St. Petersburg," a crowd, led by the clergyman Gapon, was making its way respectfully toward the Winter Palace with a series of petitions for social and political improvements that they wished to deliver to the Tsar, confident that the "father" of the Russias would heed their requests. But they were received with bullets and several hundred of them died. The St. Petersburg massacre precipitated a wave of demonstrations and revolutionary strikes, and a repressive spiral that momentarily contained the protests.

Russia's entry into World War I had devastating effects on a country that was clearly backward when compared to the European powers; it was plain to see that Russia was in no condition to face them. The human bloodletting, the tax increases, the shortages and the inflation caused by the collapse of imports and the breakdown of the railway system (itself driven by the lack of spare parts that occurred following the German occupation of Poland), as well as the reorientation of industrial activity toward the war effort, produced hunger and despair and led to the reactivation of the peasant uprising.

To this were added two other factors that also contributed in a decisive manner to the February 1917 revolution and to the proclamation of the Republic.

The first of these was the collapse of the Russian army, not only because of its defeats but, above all, because of the indiscipline and mass desertions among its ten million soldier-peasants, mobilized for the occasion, whose worldview barely extended beyond their rural community, who still lacked even the slightest sense of patriotism and who desired, above all else, to return to their villages.

The second factor was the revolutionary movement, which had already gained a certain strength.

In the midst of the conflict, and with a State completely paralyzed and in crisis, people organized autonomously to resolve the most pressing problems while discontent and opposition to the war grew in parallel. On December 31, 1916, the monk Rasputin was assassinated, and in February 1917 the Petrograd garrison mutinied, with the General Staff refusing to intervene.

Negotiations were immediately established between the Duma (elected by restricted suffrage) and the left-wing opposition parties, which, despite having had little or no role in the popular uprisings of recent years, arrogated to themselves the representation of the poorest sectors of society excluded from the Duma. From these negotiations emerged a bicephalous power structure: on one hand a provisional Government, elected by the Duma, and on the other the Petrograd Soviet, made up of left-wing militants who claimed to represent the working masses. The agreement established that the provisional government would call elections by universal suffrage in the autumn to form a constituent parliament. The Tsar abdicated on the second of March.

The three provisional republican governments that succeeded one another until the October revolution (the first two liberal, and the third composed of a coalition of Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks) promoted a gradual democratization of Russian society and the dismantling of the web of privileges and particularisms that characterized traditional society. As for the question of the war, the provisional governments refused to sign peace with Germany, fearful of the consequences that the loss of territories would entail, as well as those that would follow from breaking their commitments to the allies. They also preferred to leave the question of land distribution for later, once Russia had a republican constitution and a government elected by universal suffrage.

At the same time, the country was experiencing an explosion of "direct democracy." Workers, peasants, soldiers, Cossacks… organized themselves into a multitude of committees, while workers armed themselves and formed militias, and the Soviets (formed by ad hoc alliances of Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and anarchists) proliferated, taking charge of supplying the population and the functioning of public services.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere radicalized week by week and the demands grew unstoppably in scope. The workers' committees, which at first had aspired to no more than controlling hiring and dismissals and preventing factory closures, ended up advocating the appropriation of industries and the occupation of factory floors.

The soldiers, whom the provisional republican government had granted minimal rights, went far beyond such concessions: dismissing and electing their commanders as well as making decisions relating to the conduct of the war. In the month of June, following several military failures, the chaos worsened; officers were arrested, even executed, and the hungry soldier-peasants fled en masse in order to be present at the land distributions that were expected to take place in the coming months.

The countryside experienced the same polarization. With the tsar gone, the peasant assemblies had clearly formulated their demands regarding the distribution of land, defended principally by Socialist-Revolutionary SRrepresentatives. But the government's refusal to undertake a reform of such magnitude, combined with the progressive worsening of the economic situation, brought about, from the month of June onward, a wave of occupations, lootings, murders and burnings of the homes of the noble landowners and of the wealthy plebeian peasants (the kulaks who had emerged under the protection of the agrarian reforms carried out by tsarism itself).

On June 3rd, the First Congress of the Soviets of the Russias was held, which demonstrated the importance of the soviets as a second power, parallel to that of the republican government.

Meanwhile, the legalism of the third republican government, composed of right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, trapped between the danger of a regression to tsarism and the risks of complete anarchy, did nothing but deepen the gulf between the multifaceted revolutionary movement and the two left-wing parties integrated into Kerensky's government. Only two political parties (the left-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks), with their slogan "all power to the soviets," unequivocally supported the popular uprisings.

The coup d'état

Lenin's analysis of the Russian Revolution differed radically, in some respects, from that of the other protagonists. Indeed, while the latter thought mainly in national terms, seeking an alternative to Tsarism that would be viable and, ultimately, better for the Russians, Lenin, who had spent many years abroad, had nothing on his mind but the imminent world revolution that would pit the forces of the proletariat against those of the bourgeoisie. Russia would be just one more of the stages on which the apocalyptic confrontation was to be fought, and by no means the most important one; that role necessarily fell to Germany.

The agitating activity that Bolshevik agents carried out within the army in the midst of the war, encouraging desertion, disobedience, and self-governance among the soldiers, could only serve to favor the defeat and consequent annexation of important and wealthy portions of the Russian empire by the Germans, with the resulting economic harm. But Lenin, obsessed with his worldwide workers' revolution, cared little about this. Nor did he hesitate to accept the financing of his party by the Germans, who knew that the Bolsheviks would act in favor of their own country's defeat. Lenin was convinced that the Russian territories would be returned by the German proletariat once it had established itself in power.

Nor was he troubled by the possibility of a definitive collapse of the republic, which had inherited the Tsarist administration and army. After all, the Bolshevik program sought to liquidate that State in its entirety (army, police, bureaucracy…) and erect a new one createdex nihiloby the proletariat. It should come as no surprise that, from his exile, Lenin opposed the February 1917 agreement between the Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government, a stance that left the majority of Bolshevik intellectuals and leaders dumbfounded — those who, evenhaving played no role in the February Revolution, showed their sympathies for the republic that had emerged from it. Lenin's anti-republican position, however, would eventually become the majority stance within the party, thanks to his leadership and to the massive incorporation of soldier-peasants,with alesser degree of political culture, heirs to the tradition of violence of the Russian countryside, and radicalized by hunger and participation in the war. This last wave of militants, referred to — by Trotsky — as the "praktiki," was oriented more toward the seizure of power than toward theory.

While new Soviets were being formed throughout Russian territory, the defeats at the front — humiliating and causing great loss of life — meant that Lenin's pacifist discourse, the only one advocating a unilateral cessation of hostilities, was gaining acceptance at an accelerating pace as the months went by. Although at first the Bolshevik presence in the Soviets was minority (compared to that of the Mensheviks and theSocialist-Revolutionaries), their radical pacifism steadily earned them sympathy, so that by the time the October Revolution arrived, the Bolsheviks were already a majority in some of the Soviets of the major cities.

The number of militants also increased exponentially in the months that elapsed between the February and October revolutions.

As for the countryside, although the Bolshevik presence was practically nonexistent, echoes were reaching them that they were the only major force supporting the occupations and the attacks on landowners and kulaks (support that was merely strategic, since the Bolsheviks were in favor of the collectivization and industrialization of the land, not of its distribution and division into small, unproductive plots). Deserting soldiers were also returning to their villages, many of them converted to the cause of the Bolshevik party, which was the only one that had supported them in their rebellious stance.

The German funds, which the other political forces lacked, gave the Bolsheviks a greater capacity for maneuver. Otherwise, for example, it would not have been possible for them to put out forty-one daily newspapers in different languages of the empire, with a print run exceeding three hundred thousand copies.

Despite the fact that the illegal practices of the Bolsheviks and their coup objectives were known to all, the republican government showed tolerance, until in the month of July, following a series of violent demonstrations in Petrograd, the party was banned, and its cadres went underground. Lenin went into hiding in Finland.

At the end of August, amid growing chaos, General Kornikoff, minister of war of the third republican cabinet, attempted a coup d'état to restore the Romanovs. The Bolsheviks invited soldiers to rebel, and the attempt was stopped by the soviets, who had abundant weaponry.

September. The war continued, hunger and poverty were growing, the provisional government could barely govern, and the people continued to make up for its absence through a multitude of committees, soviets, and other popular organizations. Faced with governmental paralysis, it was expected that at their second congress, scheduled for October 20, the soviets would decide to seize the government of the republic.

But Lenin was not prepared to support a plan that would oblige him to share power with the other left-wing forces present in the soviets. On October 10, having returned incognito, he finally managed to convince a group of prominent leaders of the need to get ahead of the soviets' coup by means of a Bolshevik coup d'état. Despite their initial opposition, the majority allowed themselves to be swept along by Lenin's drive and changed their minds.

The strategy was going to be closer to a military coup than to a popular and mass insurrection. A small number of activists, coordinated by a "Revolutionary Military Committee of Petrograd", would seize the nerve centers of the then-capital while soldiers from several garrisons mutinied. The RMCP included, as fellow travelers, Socialist-Revolutionaries of the left and anarchists, but it was completely controlled by the Bolsheviks. The coup was a success and did not have to face any resistance.

A few days later, the Second Congress of Soviets was held — from which the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries of the moderate wing withdrew — and it had no choice but to endorse the Bolshevik coup d'état.

The widespread desire to put an end once and for all to the war led the population to accept the new rulers with a certain sense of relief and without much resistance, despite not sharing or being unaware of the Bolshevik objectives. The place of the traditional government was taken by a "Council of People's Commissars" presided over by Lenin himself.

The Council chose not to wait for the calling of elections or for a new Constitution to be in place before addressing the two most pressing issues facing the country: peace and land. With regard to the latter, they limited themselves to recognizing the occupations and redistributions that had already taken place during the summer. With the Germans, a humiliating treaty was eventually signed — a surrender, more accurately — by which Russia lost vast territories, populations, and a large part of its industrial wealth, while also committing to pay heavy economic reparations.

On the twelfth of November 1917, elections were called for the formation of a Constituent Assembly — elections that had already been scheduled in the February agreement between the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet and that the Bolsheviks themselves had demanded. These were the first elections held by universal suffrage in Russia. The results were as follows: right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries: 370 deputies (an absolute majority); left-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries: 40 deputies; nationalist groups: 86 seats; Cadets (liberals): 17; Mensheviks: 16; and Bolsheviks: 175. For the Bolsheviks, these were results that would have been completely unthinkable just a year earlier; even so, they fell well short of a majority.

Lenin's reaction to the electoral defeat consisted in delegitimizing the parliamentary path, giving precedence to the Soviets (duly purged) over "bourgeois" parliamentarism. The new parliament was not permitted to meet more than a single day. On January 7, 1918, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved by decree on the pretext that it had refused to accept the "Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People," which had been approved shortly before by the Second Congress of Soviets.

In this way, Lenin's radicalism, which a year earlier had been relatively minority within an also minority party, placed itself at the head of the country. His obstination in seizing power at any cost, as well as his leadership qualities, had allowed him to secretly accept German aid, drag his colleagues toward anti-parliamentary positions, and, skillfully riding a process of revolutionary chaos that was advancing unstoppably toward an unknown destination, definitively take hold of the leadership of the State. From that position, Leninism would not take long to betray a large part of its promises and commitments and most of the social sectors upon which it had relied. In this way:

Although it initially supported the redistribution of land, barely a decade later it would violently force peasants into the collectivization of that same land.

Despite having criticized the institution of the army, advocating its replacement by a people's militia, Leninism hastened to transform the workers' militias into a formidable regular army, the Red Army.

Although the workers had imagined they would take control of the factories, as the socialist ideal suggested, in reality their employers were replaced by party officials, the great majority of whom came from a higher social background.

Although the communists had at all times defended civic liberties and had opposed arbitrariness in the exercise of power, they established a regime of terror that operated outside of any law and that far exceeded the abuses of the Tsarist autocracy.

"In a few weeks, the Cheka alone had executed two to three times more people than the Tsarist Empire had sentenced to death in ninety-two years and who, having been condemned through legal proceedings, had not all been executed, a good portion of the sentences having been commuted to forced labor" (3).

Although they based their legitimacy on the Soviets, in reality they transformed them into a plaything in their hands, dissolving some and expelling Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks from the ranks of others.

Although they had defended the idea of a constituent parliament elected by universal suffrage, and said elections were in fact held, they did not take long to dissolve it.

Despite their program defending the right to self-determination of peoples, in reality they did nothing but create a simulacrum of sovereign republics, in the most fortunate cases; some of the peoples who aspired to exercise sovereignty found nothing but extermination or mass deportation.

It is not my aim to provide a detailed description of the characteristics of the Leninist state, given that those which interest us most will be presented throughout the fourth part of this book. However, it is worthwhile to make some comments on certain specific facets: state terrorism, the transformation of Leninism into a cult and a doctrine, and the Third International.

The terror

"We must encourage energy and mass terror against the counterrevolutionaries..." (21).

Said and done. As soon as he had installed himself in government, Lenin began to practice "mass terror," even before any serious threat to Bolshevik power had emerged. A terror that not only appeared in response to specific situations but responded to a long-term strategy that sought the annihilation of the adversary as well as the creation of a climate of generalized intimidation that would discourage the population as a whole from organizing or participating in activities contrary to the Bolshevik regime, or even from expressing any critical idea.

"In September 1918, one of the leading Bolshevik leaders, Gregory Zinoviev, declared: 'To rid ourselves of our enemies, we must have our own socialist terror. We must win over to our side, let us say, ninety of the hundred million inhabitants of Soviet Russia. As for the others, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated'" (3).

"A dictatorial 'troika' must be formed immediately (yourself, Markin and another) to impose mass terror, to shoot or deport the hundreds of prostitutes who make soldiers drink, all former officers, etc. There is not a minute to lose… The point is to act with resolve: mass requisitions. Executions for carrying weapons. Mass deportations of Mensheviks and other suspicious elements.' The following day, August 10, Lenin sent another telegram in the same vein to the executive committee of the Penza soviet:

'Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without mercy. The interests of the revolution demand it, because everywhere the 'final struggle' against the kulaks has been joined. An example must be made. 1. Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see it) at least a hundred kulaks, rich men and known bloodsuckers. 2. Publish their names. 3. Seize their grain. 4. Identify the hostages as we indicated in yesterday's telegram. Do this in such a way that for hundreds of miles around the people will see, tremble, know and say: they are killing and will continue to kill the bloodthirsty kulaks. Telegraph that you have received and carried out these instructions. Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find harder people" (3).

It must be taken into account that any form of opposition or protest — even those that responded solely to specific and immediate material interests — was interpreted by Lenin as collaboration in a conspiracy against the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, by way of introduction to these ferocious instructions, Lenin stated the following:

"It is evident that a White Guard uprising is being prepared in Nizhni-Novgorod, Lenin telegraphed on August 9, 1918, to the president of the executive committee of the soviet of that city, who had just informed him of some incidents involving peasants protesting against the requisitions" (3).

Convinced that civil war was inevitable, any opposition to his program, any dissidence, was understood as an alignment with the enemy camp.

"During the summer of 1918, nearly one hundred and forty revolts and large-scale insurrections broke out in the regions more or less controlled by the Bolsheviks. The most frequent were caused by peasant communities opposed to the brutally conducted requisitions carried out by supply detachments, to the restrictions imposed on private trade, and to the new conscription drives carried out by the Red Army. The enraged peasants would march en masse to the nearest town and besiege the soviet, sometimes attempting to set it on fire. Generally, the incidents would degenerate: the troops, the militias responsible for maintaining order, and, with increasing frequency, the Cheka detachments did not hesitate to fire on the demonstrators. In these confrontations, growing ever more numerous as the days passed, the Bolshevik leaders saw a vast counter-revolutionary conspiracy directed against their power by 'kulaks disguised as White Guards.'

[...] In fact, as a careful reading of the Cheka reports on the revolts of the summer of 1918 makes clear, only the uprisings in Yaroslavl appeared to have been prepared in advance, Rybinsk and Murom, organized by the Union for the Defense of the Fatherland under the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Boris Savinkov, and that of the armament workers of Izhevsk, inspired by the local Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. All other insurrections developed spontaneously and locally from incidents involving peasant communities that refused requisitions or conscription. They were ferociously suppressed within a few days by reliable detachments of the Red Army or the Cheka" (3).

For Lenin, terror was an unavoidable necessity during that crucial historical period of class confrontation. Only terror could paralyze counterrevolutionary activity. In keeping with such postulates, he encouraged indiscriminate violence by the mob, had the Red Army prepared to act implacably, promoted the creation of a body specialized in repression (the cheka), and approved and ordered numerous assassinations, although, mindful of his good name and international prestige, he was careful not to do so publicly.

"It is true that in many of the articles he published, and in the numerous public speeches he delivered during that period, he rarely called for counterrevolutionaries and traitors to be shot. He preferred to give his radical instructions in coded telegrams, confidential notes, or anonymous decrees in the name of the Sovnarkon. He was concerned about his good reputation and did not want to tarnish it with the stigma of being an executioner" (21).

The policy of terror was rooted in Lenin's profound admiration for the French Revolution and, more specifically, for the Jacobin Terror. The Bolshevik leader was absolutely convinced that, just as the French Revolution — in which, according to Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie and the nobility had clashed — had been violent in character, the final confrontation between the emerging proletariat and the bourgeoisie would also be violent and would require a phase of implementing State terror. A terror that was applied to ideological rivals, to those who opposed the dictates of the moment for other types of reasons, and even to common criminals.

What concrete forms did it take? In the early stages of the new regime, numerous expulsions abroad were carried out, particularly of intellectuals. The confiscation of grain from peasants, as well as of vehicles, apartments, etc. from the wealthy, equally constituted another form of aggression.

However, the two most characteristic methods of intimidation were executions and confinement in concentration camps.

"Those who engaged in black market activities would be shot. He likewise incited the masses to act autonomously, meaning that they should organize their own expropriations: 'If we do not use terror — that is, shooting hoarders on the spot — we will get nowhere'" (21).

The executions were carried out by firing squads that enforced the sentences of people's tribunals that offered no legal guarantees whatsoever. On August 5, 1918, the right to do away with any counterrevolutionary in situ and without further consideration was officially decreed. Even more numerous were the executions carried out by the cheka, typically by a shot to the back of the neck, following their dreaded nighttime arrests and the torture of their detainees.

The concentration camps merely repurposed the encampments in which the large numbers of prisoners of war had been held. They soon filled with "counterrevolutionaries," and it became necessary to build more, and in great numbers.

As if being implacable toward those deemed opponents of the regime were not enough, two new legal categories were created: that of "suspects," who were preventively imprisoned in concentration camps, and that of "hostages," innocent individuals who answered with their own lives for compliance with the instructions of the revolutionary authority.

"A month before the decree on the Red Terror came into effect, Lenin recommended to A. D. Tsuriupa, People's Commissar of Food Production, that he draft a decree according to which 'in each grain-producing district, twenty-five hostages shall be chosen from among the wealthy, and they shall answer with their lives for the collection and transport of the surpluses'" (21).

Among the main victims of Leninist terror, we can highlight:

The peasants, and most particularly the kulaks, the most productive of all. As early as January–February 1918, detachments began setting out from the major cities with the aim of demanding that peasants hand over all their surpluses (that is, all the grain they did not need to survive) in exchange for a receipt. Wealthy peasants (that is, those who did not live at subsistence level) were stigmatized as petit-bourgeois, enemies of the proletariat, lacking in solidarity, and declared enemies in the revolutionary civil war. Up to eighty thousand workers came to be integrated into the detachments tasked with requisitioning grain, with the collaboration of the poorest peasants and in exchange for a wage and a percentage of the requisitioned material. Peasant uprisings, numbering in the hundreds, were not long in coming. Uprisings that would be suppressed without mercy.

Political opponents. The persecution began with high-ranking tsarist officials (supposedly loyal to the former regime) and liberals, extended to Mensheviks and moderate Social Revolutionaries, and finally also affected the left-wing Social Revolutionaries who had accompanied them in the coup d'état and the first months of government. The persecution fell with particular ferocity on anarchist splinter groups.

The repression of worker protests and strikes triggered by factory closures and the reduction of subsistence rations was equally drastic.

The soldiers of the White Army and the Cossacks, many of them adolescents.

The ethnic groups that stood against Bolshevik power.

To whom would the execution of repressive policy fall? Lacking both a police force and an army, it was the MRPC — which had refused to dissolve itself once the coup d'état had been carried out — that played the role of "armed wing of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Its organizational model consisted of a central structure of some sixty people, the great majority of them Bolsheviks, and a network of thousands of "commissars" who represented it in each of the social institutions. Within days of the revolution, while the most prominent Bolshevik leaders were occupied with forming the government, the MRPC was seizing control of the media, requisitioning automobiles, and creating the figure of the "enemy of the people," publicizing lists bearing the names of supposed enemies (liberals, high-ranking officials, military officers…). Utterly bereft of provisions, the Committee sent its first expeditions into the countryside with the aim of requisitioning grain to supply the city, which gave rise to the first conflicts with the rural world.

However, the excesses in Petrograd, with continuous riots and looting—especially of liquor stores—and the prolonged strike of civil servants, made it advisable to establish a more professional and effective political police force in the fight against any opposition to the regime. The "Pan-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage" (cheka, which would later be identified by other names such as NKVD or KGB) was established in early December and set to work operating outside any legal constraints. 'It is life itself that dictates its path to the cheka'. In reality it was a well-funded secret police whose primary mission was to suppress any dissent. The cheka answered only to Lenin and had full powers to spread terror and to summarily execute suspects. It operated outside the bounds even of that sham of impartial justice that the people's courts represented.

A single piece of data: by 1921, the number of cheka agents had already reached two hundred and eighty thousand.

Another interesting practice of Leninism, initially justified as a necessity imposed by the civil war and the extreme situation in which the revolution found itself, was the use of coercion taken to its most inconceivable extremes—in a European country—in order to secure the allegiance to the regime of those suspects whose collaboration it was deemed unwise to forgo.

"Trotsky's orders were invariably abrupt and blunt [...]: 'In the case of unreliable officers, place them under the orders of commissars with their finger on the trigger'" (21).

"Hippius notes that in the mobilizations organized almost every month of 1918, former tsarist officers were arrested along with their families, 'including their uncles and aunts.' The entire family remained in prison until the authorities determined that the officer could be a 'subdued hero,' at which point they were released—the officer to be reinstated, while the others remained under surveillance. 'It was enough for a commissar to file an unfavorable report about the "military specialist" for his uncles and aunts, to say nothing of his wife and children, to be sent to forced labor or returned to prison'" (21).

Allow me an additional comment on the question of Leninist terror. The recent fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the numerous secret KGB archives have given rise to a new cycle of interest in communism. Numerous pieces of information have become accessible, providing details about the macabre conduct of the CPSU, and the aura of sanctity surrounding the good man Lenin has been shattered. Chilling revisions have been made regarding the death toll produced by the Soviet regime, and all of this has contributed to the spread of a vision of communism that insists above all on the central role of terror in the functioning of the system.

But this approach that resorts to terror as the core explanation for what occurred in the totalitarian regimes is perhaps biased. Coercion alone is not sufficient to explain the profound transformation that Bolshevism produced in Russian society, and even less so the transformation that communist militancy produced in so many individuals. The absolute devotion — often at the expense of their own personal interests — of so many militants in service of a utopian dream that, despite its fantastical nature, was held with unshakeable conviction; the strange propensity to see behind any setback, if not behind every setback, the sinister activity of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, into which — incomprehensibly — all those who did not share the Bolshevik ideology would be incorporated; the miraculous metamorphosis of so many people — more or less ordinary and with no criminal record — into unscrupulous killers… and so many other mutations, become somewhat more comprehensible, and even predictable, bearing in mind that they are connected to a psychological process of collective paranoidization. The difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks lay not solely in their theoretical positions, or in their organizational model, or in their preference for certain specific leaders, but in the way of living politics.

Terror is a symptom, one among many, of paranoid activation, and not a simple consequence of the ruthless character of certain leaders who drag some followers along in their violent drift. On a smaller scale, the sowing of terror through recourse to threats and violence also occurs in some sectarian groups, and in the families of domestic tyrants.

Marxism-Leninism

Marxism-Leninism is, above all, a doctrine based on the written work of Lenin, with its subsequent exegeses. It constitutes a development of Marxism that adds principally organizational and strategic elements, without questioning in the slightest the theoretical foundations established by Marx.

"Parliamentary democracy, embraced by the sectors of the Second International and catalogued in Moscow as bourgeois democracy, was thus opposed by proletarian democracy, understood as the dictatorship of the proletariat — that of the soviets — over the counterrevolutionary classes. And so the great schism of the socialist, political, and trade union labor movement was consummated, which henceforth would pit the Marxism of the Second International, based on a reformist, democratic, parliamentary, and trade union strategy, against the revolutionary strategy of the Third, oriented toward armed insurrections and civil wars that characterize the official ideology of the Soviet State which, following Lenin's death in 1924, would become known as Marxism-Leninism"19).

But Leninism, beyond being a doctrine, was also a hierarchical organization, in which the militant was subordinate to the party, the party to the Comintern, and the Comintern to the CPSU — an organization that was itself strongly pyramidal. For their part, the communist parties aspired to establish a (hierarchical) relationship of absolute dominion over their respective countries and citizens, eliminating in the process any hint of opposition. And all of this with the aim of rapidly building a society free of inequalities.

It is certainly true that the unity of leadership of Marxism-Leninism broke down at the very moment of Lenin's death, when two of its prominent leaders each claimed to be his "true" successor and the "true" interpreter of his theoretical legacy.Trotskyism, however, never managed to take hold anywhere, and was not even close to doing so. Subsequently, a few more fractures occurred, the most significant being Mao's break with the Soviet Union, which he accused of having renounced the basic revolutionary principles.

For its militants, Leninism was also an identity, a restricted solidarity, the sense of belonging to a community of people who share ideals, a worldview, a jargon, and even the same enemies. A good militant placed his communist affiliation above any other — religious, national, or of whatever kind.

And Marxism-Leninism was, finally, a cult — a political religion — with its chants, its flags, its ceremonies, and its glorified leaders. The cult of the founder, a phenomenon incompatible with egalitarian ideals, began to become evident within months of the Bolsheviks' rise to power.

"A certainYemelmanPavlov wrote [to Lenin] that the commissars, 'all those people in leather coats whovenerate you,do everything possible to put you on a pedestal, so high that from there you will no longer see anything and the people will see you as an inaccessible god'"21).

The Lenin cult did not begin after his death, as has been said on repeated occasions — although with his death, it was indeed exacerbated and taken to grotesque extremes — since already during the Bolshevik leader's lifetime the Soviet Union became populated with portraits and statues of Lenin (which replaced those of the tsars) and the press began to idolize him, endowing him with the most exalted virtues. Lenin was not transformed into a god, but he was transformed into a unique man, the supreme model of revolutionary perfection.

The Third International

The term communism is owed to Cabet, a late utopian socialist who brought fifteen hundred followers in his wake to the United States to found his legendary Icaria, which was short-lived.

"In 1842, Eugène Cabet brought together somewhat different theories under the label 'communism'…" (5).

Very shortly afterward, the leaders in exile of the Federation of the Just (a German workers' organization) decided to change their name and identify themselves as communists.

"[...] Marx, already a member of the League of Communists, worked intensively on the organization of the workers' movement and organized in Brussels, during the summer, the 'School of German Workers,' with a group of outlawed workers and intellectuals, devoted through their meetings every Wednesday and Saturday to the maturation of a scientific explanation for the causes and effects of the workers' problem at a global level.

It is in this climate that the idea of a manifesto arises as the launching point of the new group, the Communist Federation…" (19).

But the term "communism" fell into disuse and during the second half of the nineteenth century the Marxist-oriented parties recognized themselves simply as socialist or social-democratic.

When in March 1918 the Bolshevik party changed its own name to the Communist Party, it clearly signaled the split that had occurred between those who believed that the end of capitalism was not imminent, that socialism could also be reached in a gradual manner and that the authority of parliaments constituted by universal suffrage had to be accepted, and those who believed that the end of capitalism was indeed near, that parliaments were an obsolete institution and that the hour of the proletarian Revolution had come.

"Lenin had previously advanced the idea that the Second International had died and that it was necessary to create a new International" (19).

"The October revolution was nothing but the beginning of the 'world revolution,' which also required an equally world-scale party and the corresponding revolutionary International" (19).

Now, although it was a peripheral country from the point of view of industrial development and the weight of its proletariat, the fact that the Russian revolution was the only one of those that had taken place after 1917 to achieve success gave the Russian Communist Party a natural leadership in the direction of this new International.

"[...] the German revolution of 1918, the transformation of the Spartacist League into the German Communist Party, imitated by revolutionary socialist groups from other countries that were thus breaking with social democracy. Thus, in the final months of 1918, communist parties were formed in Finland, Latvia, Hungary, Austria, Poland and Holland" (19).

To the communist parties of the European countries, organizations from every corner of the globe were gradually added, including organizations fromEuropean overseas colonies, which merged the nationalist discourse of the sovereignty of peoples with the ideology of the Third International.

This Third International differed profoundly from the previous one in at least two respects: iron discipline, and a monolithic doctrine that admitted no dissent.

"The aim was thus to ensure the alignment of the Communist International with the Bolshevik party model and the Soviet model of revolution that was to make the World Revolution feasible. The Bolshevik Party, which conceived of itself as the supreme expression of the unity of the working class, demanded these semi-military traits and this exemplary disciplinary functionalism learned in the midst of the civil war. And this was bound to influence the generalization of the forms of the Russian revolution to the world revolution, which was to be achieved through a revolutionary world war against the capitalist states [...]

Organized as a world party, the Communist International was to count on the communist parties of the various countries as national sections, deprived of autonomy and obliged to carry out the decisions of the Executive Committee of the CI, whose supreme leadership held full powers of admission and expulsion of militants, groups, and sections, which were to internally reproduce the same pyramidal and centralized structure of the world party" (19).

The militarist spirit of the Comintern required an intense, conscious, and drastic effort to impose itself.

"When the 2nd Congress of the CI convened in July 1920, now attended by 200 delegates representing 67 organizations from 27 countries, the political and ideological heterogeneity of these representatives led the leaders to fear for the ideological and organizational consistency of the International. For this reason, they chose to require of candidate members and organizations wishing to participate in it the fulfillment of 21 conditions, among which the following stand out: the elimination of reformists and centrists in favor of 'secured and proven communists,' the immediate and total break with all centrist and reformist political and trade union organizations, which were accused of being strikebreakers, a daily propaganda and agitation of a communist character, the combination of legal and illegal actions, the dissemination of communist ideas within the army, the denunciation of social-patriotism and social-pacifism, the rupture with and struggle against the 'yellow' Trade Union International; periodic purges within the communist parties themselves, and so forth" (19).

A colossal war-ready machine, strongly hierarchical, sincerely and firmly believed itself to be the bearer of the destiny of building an egalitarian and benevolent society. For several decades, the Soviet Union would train, generously fund (even as Russian peasants were dying of hunger), and provide shelter to the leaders of hundreds of organizations bent on seizing power, alone and in their respective countries, through war or terror, and equally prepared to use parliaments to take hold of government and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The combined effect of local communist parties absolutely determined to seize power at any price, possessing an enthusiastic and obedient militant base, well funded, and the willingness of the two main Leninist powers to extend their political model manu militari whenever the opportunity presented itself, meant that fifty years after the founding of the Comintern, a more than notable portion of the planet's surface and population found itself governed by communist parties. The momentum of the movement seemed unstoppable (with the exception of the most industrialized countries, those which, according to Marx's predictions, were to be the nucleus of the Revolution). In the part of the world not governed by communism, Leninist organizations and guerrillas proliferated everywhere. To this unstoppable advance of Leninism, one had to add the observation that once communist parties had installed themselves in power they became impregnable, with any semblance of internal opposition disappearing.

However, and towards the end of the century, the discontent of those called upon to enjoy the new utopia — the "popular masses" — meant that the experiment ended up disintegrating, as had already happened — at greater speed — with the factory-egalitarian experiments of the old utopian socialists. A fairly swift and complete dissolution, for all that remain are a couple of personalist tyrannies in two small countries and scattered groups, with a dwindling militant base.

Along the way, Leninism has left a trail of entire populations condemned to material poverty and stripped of elementary political rights, of millions of deaths in famines caused by senseless economic planning, of millions murdered and tortured, of concentration camps, of mass deportations, and of the persecution of political ideologies, religions, and ethnic and cultural identities.