The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (Walzer, Michael)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Walzer, Michael. The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions. Yale University Press, 2015.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Preface
My project in this book is to describe a recurrent and, to my mind, disturbing pattern in the history of national liberation. I will discuss a small set of cases: the creation of three independent states in the years after World War II – India and Israel in 1947 -48 and Algeria in 1962 – and I will focus on the secular political movements that achieved statehood and the religious movements that challenged the achievement roughly a quarter century later.
One difference is central to my analysis, and I will keep coming back to it: all three movements were secular, committed, indeed, to an explicitly secular project, and yet in the states that they created a politics rooted in what we can loosely call fundamentalist religion is today very powerful. In three different countries, with three different religions, the timetable was remarkably similar: roughly twenty to thirty years after independence, the secular state was challenged by a militant religious movement. This unexpected outcome is a central feature of the paradox of national liberation.
All three of the national liberation movements considered here have been attacked as “Westernizing” by their religious (and also by their postcolonial) critics. The charge is undoubtedly true.
Another aspect of the paradox of national liberation: the militants go to school with the very people whose imperial rule they are fighting, and they have a view of their own nation that is remarkably close to what Edward Said called “orientalism.”
One The Paradox of National Liberation
internal domination of traditional elites, the mediators of foreign rule—
But another, even more important effect of this double oppression has to be overcome, and that is the passivity, the quietude, the deep lethargy of the dominated people.
Fundamentalism and ultra-Orthodoxy are both modernist reactions to attempts at modernist transformation. The slogan of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, “Everything new is forbidden by the Torah,” is itself a new idea; it would have made the historic accommodation to exile impossible.
Putting women forward in the FLN was not an affront to the French oppressors; it was directed against the internal oppression of Algeria’s religious tradition.
Moses in Egypt is the classic example; he was raised in the palace of the Pharaoh and was certainly more at ease with the Egyptian elite than with the people he came to lead. Sigmund Freud claimed that Moses was actually an Egyptian; whatever he was by birth, he was culturally a man of Egypt.
Still, the liberators do win;
“The only thing the colonial elite was not and, a few ambiguous cases aside, could not become,” writes Geertz, “was Muslim.”
Their immediate successors were often opportunists, more interested in power and its rewards than in liberation. Indeed, corruption seems to set in on roughly the same time schedule as religious revival
“The assumption that the Jewish religion … was destined to pass from the scene sooner or later, because it contradicted the needs of modern life, was accepted by practically all the Zionist intelligentsia.”
The liberators did generate a set of holidays, a set of heroes, a set of commemorative rituals; they made up songs and dances; they wrote novels and poems (compare the French Revolution with its new calendar,
Like the ancient Israelites, the modern militants thought they had reached the promised land, only to discover that they carried Egypt in their baggage.
Two The Paradox Illustrated: Zionism vs. Judaism
The first generation of Zionist leaders proposed a solution to the “Jewish question” that to just about every realistic Jew and non-Jew in the world seemed impossible to realize, and the next generation realized it.
Everything after independence is “post-Zionist.” What we should talk about now is Palestinian national liberation.
The state as it is today would not match their vision;
Palestine already, even before statehood, has its own history of secular nationalism and religious revival.
Exilic politics had only two aspects. First, Jews submitted to gentile rule; they practiced a politics of deference. Second, they patiently waited for divine redemption; they practiced a politics of deferred hope.
Zionism was, and could only be, the creation of people who were hostile to Judaism. If pressed, I would qualify that statement in all sorts of ways, but in its naked form, unqualified, it helps to explain a centrally important Zionist goal: “negation of the exile.”
secularists’ surprise at the strength of the religious forces
But many of the earliest leaders of the Palestinian movement, because they were Christians and then because they were Marxists, did look at their own people from a significant critical distance.
Many successful national liberation movements produce, without intending to, an underground culture, a secret traditionalism nourished by memory, carried by the family,
post-1967 Jewish messianism, despite the ardor of its militants, has already faded.
double failure of cultural negation. On the one hand, the old religious culture was not overcome; on the other hand, the new secular culture isn’t thick or robust enough to sustain itself by itself.
line in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice resonates with recent Israeli experience: “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
Three The Paradox Denied: Marxist Perspectives
They want to help their people by transforming them, by overcoming or modernizing their traditional religious beliefs and practices
they didn’t acknowledge the substantive seriousness and strength of their traditionalist opponents
Religious passion remains latent and unchallenged in their nationalist project.
“Creating a just state by just means,” he said, and then, “perhaps, too, creating a secular state in a religious country.”
Bauer’s is another attractive vision. Looking at eastern Europe today, I find it hard to deny that a democratized Austro-Hungarian Empire, with cultural autonomy for all the subject nations, would have been a better political outcome than the one that national liberation militants (or, better, nationalist militants) produced. Similarly, a democratized version of imperial India, with cultural autonomy for Muslims and Hindus, as well as other groups, might have avoided the disaster of partition—which would certainly have been better than what national liberation produced. The only problem is that these better outcomes did not have anything like the necessary political support. They didn’t appeal to the traditionalists, although autonomy might have served them well. And they didn’t appeal to the liberationists,
elections of 1990 and the national elections of 1991, when the Islamists swept the country, Kabylia remained a secular stronghold and voted strongly for the FFS.
Four The Future of National Liberation
Whatever the revivalist Hindu may seek to revive, it is not Hinduism.
“numerous women participants argued … from within an Islamic paradigm, quoting verse after verse from the Qur’an and citing traditions attributed to the Prophet to [make] their case for gender justice.” These women were a new force, says the Janata reporter; they had the “moral authority that feminists who are seen as alienated from their societies and traditions lack.”
Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML)
would be dangerous for feminists … to attempt to challenge prevailing views of “religion” and “religious tradition” purely by resort to “secularism.” Many religious traditions are in fact more capacious than fundamentalist adherents allow. Insisting on humane and inclusive interpretations of religious traditions might in many contexts be crucial … in countering the deployment of religious discourses [for] problematic nationalist ends.
There are pragmatic, political reasons for such an engagement: refusing it will “marginalize progressive and feminist voices whose … political interventions into the discourse of nationalism seem increasingly crucial.” But there are also democratic reasons. Narayan quotes Virginia Woolf’s antinationalist lines from 1938: “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” (Woolf must have been reading Marx on the working class.) Narayan argues that on the contrary, women do have a country; they share a fate with their fellow citizens, who need to hear their voices.
Traditionalist worldviews can’t be negated, abolished, or banned; they have to be engaged.
The adoption of the Family Code in 1982 was not so much a negotiation as it was a surrender by the FLN, or at least by the FLN of memory, which only whetted the appetite of its opponents. “This is a front because it confronts,” said a leader of the FIS, who promised that if his party won the elections of 1991, there would be no more elections. At that point in the religious revival, negotiation was probably futile; one might well begin to look again for an “Archimedean point.”
Although few of Gramsci’s followers have noticed, hegemony as he describes it is not “hegemonic” in the usual strong sense of the word; it suggests dominance, but a compromised dominance,
Postscript
Wasn’t there an American struggle for national liberation (against the same imperial rulers as in India and Israel), and wasn’t it followed some thirty years later by an extraordinary religious revival—the Second Great Awakening? And yet the secular state established by the Constitution and its first amendments was never really challenged.
(When Alexander Hamilton was asked why there was no mention of God in the preamble to the Constitution, he reportedly replied: “We forgot.”)
Arendt attributes that anger, or what she calls revolutionary rage (in the French Revolution, for example), to the politics of “needs and wants.” She argues that rage is the “only form in which misfortune can become active.”
It is evident here in the United States, as in India, Israel and Algeria, that something is wrong with the theory of inevitable secularization. But liberation doesn’t depend on secularization – or, at least it doesn’t depend on secularization in its most radical version. Today, religious feminists, advocates of gender equality, are at work in all or almost all of America’s denominations, and defenders of the secular state and opponents of the idea of a “Christian republic” are active and fairly successful within as well as outside the religious world. Liberation is an ongoing project.