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Concept
Anarchism and nationalism
Summary
Anarchism and nationalism both emerged in Europe following the French Revolution of 1789 and have a long and durable relationship going back at least to Mikhail Bakunin and his involvement with the pan-Slavic movement prior to his conversion to anarchism. There has been a long history of anarchist involvement with nationalism all over the world as well as with internationalism.
During the early 20th century, anarchism was very supportive of anationalism and Esperanto. After the Spanish Civil War, Francoist Spain persecuted anarchists and Catalan nationalists, among whom the use of Esperanto was extensive.
Irish anarchist Andrew Flood argues that anarchists are not nationalists and are completely opposed to it, but rather they are anti-imperialists. Similarly, the Anarchist Federation in Britain and Ireland views nationalism as an ideology totally bound up with the development of capitalism and unable to go beyond it.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist in a positive sense, opposed nationalism, arguing that the "end of militarism is the mission of the nineteenth century, under pain of indefinite decadence". Proudhon argued that under his proposed mutualism "[t]here will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth. Man, of whatever race or colour he may be, is an inhabitant of the universe; citizenship is everywhere an acquired right". Anarchism has supported both anationalism and the Esperanto language.
A critique of nationalism from an anarchist point of view is Rudolf Rocker's 1937 book Nationalism and Culture. American anarchist Fredy Perlman wrote a number of pamphlets that were strongly critical of all forms of nationalism, including Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom (a critique of Zionism) and The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism in which Perlman argues that nationalism is a process of state formation inspired by imperialism which capitalists, fascists and Leninists use as a mean of controlling their subjects.
Official source
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