CRISIS OF THE CIVIC NATION?

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MIAMI, Mar 1 2005 (IPS) - For US historian Samuel Huntington the greatest threat to the national cohesion and identity of the US is Hispanic immigration. For Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, demands for autonomy for the Bolivian region of Santa Cruz presents a danger that must be promptly nipped in the bud. For some, the greatest threat to the cohesion of the Spanish government is the possible approval of a proposal for a new Basque state, writes Joaquin Roy, Jean Monnet professor and Director of the Centre of the University of Miami. What these three cases have in common, Roy writes in this article, is the failure of, or the perception of disappointment with, the civic nation, and irritation at persistent intransigency, the marginalisation of the different, and irresponsible centralism. In any case, they are the product of a globalisation that pressures each to conserve his particular signs of identity, whether beneath the various configurations of the nation-state or the more varied experiments in international integration and cooperation. The United States may have reached the exhaustion of its model and doubts about its cohesion, and as a result is trying to invent for itself an identity-based nation (based on a race and an ethnicity, when not on a denomination of Christianity as well) that never existed. In Latin America the failure of the civic model is more scandalous because it is easier to adopt but is more expensive.

For US historian Samuel Huntington the greatest threat to the national cohesion and identity of the United States is Hispanic immigration. For Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, demands for autonomy for the Bolivian region of Santa Cruz presents a danger that must be promptly nipped in the bud. According to various catastrophic scenarios, the greatest threat to the cohesion of the Spanish government is the possible approval of a proposal for a new Basque state. In addition to terrorism and poverty, autonomy and individual, sub-state identity are what are now feared.

Huntington’s focus represents a notable departure from the general consensus that US nationality, and therefore national identity, is the option of choice: a civil, political, liberal nation which people choose to belong to of their own initiative. It is the most extreme sublimation of the French model.

There are those who, in contrast, think that there is an ethnic, cultural, and historical base in the US, and that therefore, this paradise of America is in danger of being invaded from without by groups that conserve their identities and stick to their own common project. Huntington is nostalgic for an historically non-existent American nation modelled on German culture and identity.

In the South, the civil political model was adopted practically at the same time as the independence movements. Instead of reviving the Inca or Aztec empires, the Latin American project was, by reason of population, the nation of choice. Gallegos, Turks, Orientals of all origins, and Europeans of various lineage could be Argentine, Peruvian, and Cuban in less than a generation. Even in countries with significant indigenous populations and high rates of intermarriage, the universally-adopted model in Latin America, at least constitutionally and theoretically, was that of the civic nation.

In Spain, the Basque question now presents a new twist. The proposed new Basque autonomy statute contains too many juridical and legal issues that render it a priori unconstitutional, since it is in direct conflict with fundamental structures of the Spanish political order in which the Basque territory is located, for today. Thus the dilemma is a double one: political and juridical.

Debated prematurely in 2003 by the Basque government, the text was approved by the Basque parliament in Victoria on December 30, 2004, because of a crucial fact: the Socialista Abertzaleak group, heir to the outlawed Herri Batasuna (considered the political arm of ETA) contributed the votes necessary to win an absolute majority.

The central problem is that the spirit and letter of the bill clash with the Spanish constitution and present so many innovations that they render unviable simple reform of the existing autonomy statute. Among the drastic new elements, it proposes a bi-lateral relation between the Spanish state and Euskadi, in free association with hints of a confederation. Not only would the autonomy statute need to be retooled; the Spanish constitution of 1978 would have to be fundamentally changed, something that has no hope of happening either through a referendum or in parliament. Moreover it introduces a confused (though compatible) duality between Basque nationality (ethnic) and Spanish citizenship (for the rest of Spain and the residents of Euskadi).

What do these three cases have in common? Simply the failure of, or the perception of disappointment with, the civic nation, and irritation at persistent intransigency, the marginalisation of the different, and irresponsible centralism. In any case, they are the product of a globalisation that pressures each to conserve his particular signs of identity, whether beneath the various configurations of the nation-state or the more varied experiments in international integration and cooperation.

The United States may have reached the exhaustion of its model and doubts about its cohesion, and as a result is trying to invent for itself an identity-based nation (based on a race and an ethnicity, when not on a denomination of Christianity as well) that never existed. In Latin America the failure of the civic model is more scandalous because it is easier to adopt but is more expensive.

And in Spain? Unable to impose ethnic nationalism on one of the most ethnically diverse populations of the planet, and disdainful of the method of adoption, belonging to a nation was chosen, because there was no other solution. On a peninsula limited by the Pyrenees, the Portuguese, Gibraltar, and water, the Spanish are Spanish because they can be nothing else, as Canovas de Castillo declared in cynical desperation in the last days of the 19th century. Neither civic nor ethnic, Spain remains without a definition. It is not at all surprising that some people are trying, violently and rationally, to build their own identity.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)