Hegemony and the Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectics of Political Identity in the Middle East

Ian S. Lustick

Browne Center for International Politics

July 1997

What is the Riddle of Nationalism?

It is a commonplace to view nationalism as the greatest, the most powerful single force in the modern world. It is indeed remarkable to consider how resilient are nationalist movements and how capable they have been of sustaining loyalties, eliciting sacrifice, and surviving prolonged failure. Leaving aside the question of when nationalism arose in Europe, we may agree that beginning with the disintegration or contraction of the empires which these European national states created, both inside and outside of Europe, much of human history for the last century and a half can be told in terms of five imperial disintegrations followed by five waves of nationalist or ethnic mobilizations.

The first of these waves was the struggle of Latin American nationalist movements against the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. After World War I a second wave of Eastern European, Balkan, and Middle Eastern movements crystallized in response to the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist, and Ottoman Empires. With the relatively rapid, though often tumultuous, move toward decolonization by Britain, France, and the Netherlands after World War II, an even larger number of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations arose to fill the independent state frameworks left behind by the colonial powers. A fourth wave of national mobilization began in various Western European and other OECD countries in the 1970s as ethnic minorities in regions such as the Basque country, Catalonia, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, Quebec, and Corsica, whose political significance as such had long since been presumed to have disappeared, expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of their political incorporation into larger state frameworks. A fifth wave of new and renewed nationalist movements has appeared on the scene in response to the attenuation and the collapse of the Soviet empire--in Central Asia, the Baltic states, Eastern and Central Europe, and in many regions of Russia itself.

However, if nationalism, that is to say appeals to the ethnic heritage, cultural history, and/or linguistic distinctiveness of groups, is so potent and irresistible a political force, so natural and intrinsic or "primordial" a factor in human affairs, then:

Why did human history take so long to produce it, and to displace other identities (imperial, monarchical, tribal, feudal, class, religious)?

Why are "religious" identities supplanting, or rivaling nationalism in many areas of the world, including, especially, the Middle East?

Why are borders of states, which do not at all match nations, so stable?

Why are there so few nation-states, when there are so many ethnically identifiable nations, or groups claiming to be nations and having all the right signs?

How could the US be so successful without anything that can seriously be considered as "American nationalism"?

Why can the same group of people (Arabs in Israel, for example) experience a change in their national identity so rapidly and so many times?

Why do nations, born in struggle against others, so often emulate their antagonists?

Each of these questions arises from frustration with the ability of primordialist theory to account for the flexibility, timing, rapid transformation, and chameleon-like aspect of contemporary nationalist movements. A truly impressive amount of research has been done during the last decade to address these questions. The result of this research has been to replace the old conventional wisdom with a new version. The old conventional wisdom, whose loci classici are the famous 1963 essay by Clifford Geertz, "The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States" and several articles published in the 1970s by Walker Connor, was that ethnic and other "ascriptive" identities were mobilized in the modern era because of the incompleteness of modernization, the psychological and other strains of the transition from "tradition," to "modernity," and the refuge available in old, bedrock, "real" communities of homogeneous peoples. ₁ The new conventional wisdom, whose most often cited source is Benedict Anderson's 1983 book Imagined Communities, is that identities are not "given," that they were not stamped upon a discoverable set of groups in a "primordial," pre-political period of human history. Rather they are artifacts, changeable constructions of kindredness elicited under particular circumstances and discarded, adjusted, or traded for others under other circumstances.

It is worth taking a closer look at this new conventional wisdom. Its fundamental claim, reflected in hundreds of articles, dissertations, books, and grant proposals over the last fifteen years, is that identites of groups or of individuals do not have a status more fundamental than the choices individuals make about who they are. Cultural identities, in other words, whether politicized or not, do not exist independent of political processes which, consciously or accidentally, make them publicly relevant as norms that give some temporary order to a fluctuating array of practices, images of selfhood, and sensations of solidarity. From this constructivist perspective there is no "primordial identity"--no elemental, indestructible, authentic self which survives once all artificial and essentially false or inauthentic identities are abandoned or stripped away. Multiple identities there may be, but not organized in an ontological hierarchy which explains the emergence of putatively ancient, ascriptive, and especially kinship-oriented sentiments of attachment in response to the psychological and other strains of social mobilization.

This school of thought has been strengthened by the types of deconstructionist, post-modernist, and post-structuralist theorizing that have gripped literary and cultural studies since at least the early 1980s. These approaches challenged, indeed denied, any attempts to identify the "essential" meaning of a text by discovering its real code or the real intent of the author. Instead, the goal of scholarship is to show the variety of meanings that can be elicited from any text or work of art depending on the frame of reference constructed around it and depending on the proclivities, skills, and cultural orientation of the observer. For social scientists, first anthropologists and then sociologists, historians, and political scientists, this theoretical disposition suggested that it was incorrect to seek explanations for changes in identity, for the reappearance of faded and seemingly non-modern affinities, or for a puzzling stability in cleavage patterns despite the onslaught of modernity, by seeking the "real," primordial, or "authentic" stratum of collective self-identification. By stressing instead the constituted character of identities, social scientists could adopt an approach to peoples similar to that adopted toward texts in literary criticism, asking questions about the path taken to arrive at beliefs in particular identities, about the strategies and practices which promoted these and not other possible identities, about the interests they served, and about the implications of change in economic, political, or international spheres, for the stability of particular identities as frames of reference for elites or publics.

These assumptions and insights opened up significant new opportunities for studying relationships among cultural change, political interest, ethnicity, nationalism, and national conflict. They suggested the inadequacy of imagining conflicts between culture groups as boxing matches between antagonists with separate identities permanently engraved on the map of the world. Instead questions could be asked about the conditions under which the identities which separated antagonists in the past have been, or could be, traded for identities within a new "national" or other type of political community. This constructivist approach to national identity suggests that instead of viewing nationalism as the natural result of a modernization process which brings peoples into the final act of history, we can appreciate the never-ending-story aspect of identity formation and the likelihood that other substantive bases for political mobilization (including race, gender, religion, and class) will, under discoverable circumstances, displace the "national" as that identity for which people will sacrifice the most. These concepts and assumptions also encouraged a focus on links between intra-state or intra-communal political competition and conflict between states or communities, and on political entrepreneurship, e.g. the way particular kinds of elites, positioned to benefit from virulent forms of nationalism, contribute to chauvinism and conflict.

All these approaches promised, and to an important degree delivered, a more nuanced understanding of political dangers and opportunities latent in different situations than more traditional approaches which attributed national or ethnic conflict to the unfathomable eruption of primordial hatreds. The constructivist or instrumentalist approach to the formation and transformation of political identity therefore led to work on the role of political elites as entrepreneurs able to invest their energies and enthusiasm in alternative identities attuned to changing circumstances and more likely, if adopted by their constituencies, to favor their own political prospects. ₂ Such work often goes hand in hand with accounts demonstrating that a given political community, crystallized around one identity, was organized in the past and could be reorganized in the future according to a different identity, including an identity that now counted as "other."

But these conclusions--that identities are constructed, that individuals have repertoires of identities, and that elites can produce different groups by shaping which identities within these repertoires are elicited and made effective--are themselves not entirely satisfying and in some ways raise as many questions as they answer. For example, if identities, including national identities, are so fluid and fundamentally artifactual:

Why has nationalism been so consistent a response to the break-up of empire?

If there is nothing real behind national identities, no "real" anchor in social, economic, or cultural reality, and if elite interests are as changeable and elite manipulation as potent as this perspective encourages us to believe, then why have nationalist solidarities been so potent and long-lasting?

What accounts for the stability we observe in political identities, including national identities?

Why has nationalism in particular been so powerful, and so regular in its contradiction of the expectations of social theory (e.g. Marxism, but also modernization theory)?

What explains why culturally based identities, including nationalism, are sometimes stable despite shifting circumstances and efforts by ambitious elites to change them?

What explains the rapidity with which identities which seem well established can disappear when the conditions said to affect those identities change so much more slowly?

These questions baffle constructivists, who generally prefer not to address them. But along with the questions listed previously, challenging the primordialist view, these are the questions we must be able to effectively address. Contemporary scholarship on collective identities, and the political authority structures those identities support and are sustained by, is now at a point where we must either satisfy ourselves with new, and somewhat inconsistent bits of conventional wisdom--about the irrelevance or non-existence of primordialism, the infinite malleability of identity, the threat of bad "ethnonationalism" as opposed to the promise of good "civic nationalism," the inevitability of nationalism as a political basis for modern life, and the surprising but deeply-rooted renasence of religious appeals--or search for a new, coherent theoretical position. It is from this position that we may then proceed to salvage truths attached to the primordialist ideas many have discarded and link them to the constructivist insights that so easily lead beyond the bounds of disciplined observation.

For the purposes of this paper, the position I have in mind would help accomplish three tasks.

--help clarify exactly what we mean by nationalism, as opposed to other formulas of political mobilization;

--probe particular relationships between nationalism and historically specific cultural, political, social, and economic transformations;

--assess the extent to which political elites can and cannot manipulatethe content of politically relevant identities to suit their parochial and changing interests.

We can accomplish these tasks by applying a theory of the institutionalization of norms capable of facilitating the consolidation and exercise of political power. I devise this theory by binding a coherent concept and partial theory of ideological hegemony to the traditional approach to political compliance based on coercive, utilitarian, and normative mechanisms. ₃

To Solve the Riddle: A Theory of Hegemonic Compliance

To build the necessary conceptual apparatus, let us begin with simple definitions of two basic but commonly confused terms: state and nation. A state is an institution that enforces property rights. ₄ Where there are no property rights, no stable expectations about what is mine and what is not, there is no state. Where there are vague or uncertain property rights, the presence of a state is vague or uncertain. Where systems of property rights conflict, there is a battle over which institution, if any, will be able to assert itself as the state in a particular area or over a particular group of people. ₅ For my purpose here the important thing to note about the concept of "state," so defined, is that it is an organized apparatus, an entity which to one extent or another is bureaucratic and hierarchical.

A nation is a large community whose members are full members simply by virtue of their mutual recognition of one another as sharing ascriptive cultural bonds more important than any other. By "large" I mean sufficiently populous so that no one member can personally know all the other members of the nation. By "ascriptive" I mean characteristics that are impossible or extremely difficult to change, there being no a priori reason to exclude religion, language, territory, ethnicity, or race as identity features which may emerge as the markers of national membership in any particular case. This definition emphasizes the democratic aspect distinguishing national and ethnic solidarities from other kinds (such as many religious, tribal, or kinship, or corporate identities) since membership in the community designates equal status within it and does not entail a position within a hierarchy of personal valuation.

With these two basic terms defined we can move toward a theory of compliance and institutionalized political rule to help answer the questions about nationalism and collective identity posed above. In 1961 Amitai Etzioni suggested a list of what we may think of as three mechanisms capable of producing compliance to the decisions of organizations (including states): coercive, utilitarian, and normative. ₆ While I will here go well beyond and in some ways contradict the theoretical propositions Etzioni advanced in connection with this typology, the list is still a valuable starting point.

The crudest of these mechanisms is simple coercion or the direct threat of coercion. For states this means that taxes and soldiers (the two most fundamental needs of any state) are elicited from target populations by force or the direct threat of force--grain taken from recalcitrant peasants at bayonet point, sailors impressed into the navy, conscripts drawn from a population by threat of incarceration, and so forth. A more efficient means of eliciting compliance is utilitarian--bribes, trades of services (including the enhanced protection of property rights or the grant of more property rights), for higher or more dependable flows of taxes and recruits. In Etzioni's classic formulation the most efficient means of eliciting compliance is via normative mechanisms--beliefs among the target populations that it is right to comply, that it is one's duty to so so, regardless of whether fear of punishment for refusal to comply is present, and regardless of calculations that may be made about the balance of costs and benefits entailed in compliance. This kind of belief, a normative basis for compliance, is what is almost always meant by, but seldom specified to be, the meaning of legitimacy. In other words, what separates a legitimate from an illegitimate state is the presence of beliefs in the minds of those within the purview of that state that they should, for reasons of right and duty, comply with its orders. ₇

In Etzioni's formulation a major source of strain in an organization (such as a state) is "incongruence" between the type of mechanism actually used (e.g. coercion) and the type formally appealed to (e.g. normative). In my formulation, however, a Guttman scale relationship exists among the different compliance mechanisms such that 1) utilitarian techniques of rule can only work efficiently if coercive control is believed to be available should utilitarian mechanisms fail, and 2) normative appeals cannot work in the long run to stabilize political rule unless those from whom compliance is elicited can reckon it to be in their interest to comply. In other words, just as latent coercion undergirds effective rule via utilitarian mechanisms, so do positive utilitarian calculations enable emphasis to be shifted to normative appeals.

It is here, however, that I must make an even more important departure from Etzioni's model. Etzioni argued that his was an exhaustive list of types of power or types of compliance mechanisms. There are three, he claimed, and only three. I add a fourth--ideological hegemony. I consider presumptively true beliefs about contingent socio-economic arrangements or about the absolute truth, value, or relevance of different kinds of interventions in the public domain, as fundamentally important sources of power to some, and of disempowerment to others. When they can be constructed and when they are maintained, ideologically hegemonic beliefs provide states with an even more efficient mechanism for eliciting compliance than normative appeals to the legitimacy of state laws and decrees.

This is not a new idea. Presenting it I follow in a tradition going back to the "noble lie" in Plato's Republic, but with twentieth century roots in the work of Antonio Gramsci. The basic claim is that beliefs can be held by masses of people who do not experience them as beliefs. That is to say these beliefs are not entertained as contingent on the presence or availability of supporting evidence. Nor can such beliefs they be discarded when presented with evidence in contradiction of them. Ideologically hegemonic beliefs, as I use the term, are beliefs which have no corollary attached to them, implicitly or explicitly, stipulating the conditions under which they could be abandoned. Such beliefs constitute a part of the framework within which, and the lense through which, events are perceived and judgments made. Hegemonic beliefs are what serve as the "givens" of a political community, even if they are not, and especially if "they" are not, understood as such. While normative appeals work to elicit compliance from individuals who judge that demands by the state are consistent with the formula of legitimacy that they accept as linking them to the state, ideological hegemony elicits compliance by burying it beneath the surface of calculated decision. Habits, culture, and treatment of dissent as evidence of insanity or criminality rather than contrary opinion--these are the stuff of hegemonic politics. Hegemonic beliefs, as Gramsci put it, appear not as claims about the world but as "common sense." Hegemony is politics naturalized to be experienced as culture.

To recapitulate by way of two illustrations: Coercive compliance produces tax revenue by pointing bayonets at citizens who do not wish to pay. Utilitarian compliance produces tax revenue by trading services appreciated as valuable by tax-payers for the payment of their taxes. Normative compliance produces tax revenue by eliciting judgments that, despite the possibility and even attraction of doing otherwise, paying taxes is one's duty, the right thing to do. Ideological hegemongy produces tax revenue by transforming payment into a natural part of life, an habitual, routine activity which tax-payers cannot imagine avoiding and which they do not experience as the result of a choice or decision on their part. In a very different sphere one might ask, why did Germans slaughter Jewish children during the Holocaust? An explanation based on coercive compliance would contend that einsatzgruppen soldiers and concentration camp guards acted out of fear of punishment if they did not. An explanation based on utilitarian compliance would attribute murderous behavior to acceptance of rewards and privileges for doing so that more than compensated for the effort involved. An explanation based on normative compliance would stress the strong commitment to Nazi ideology of those personnel recruited for performance of their duty to kill Jews. An explanation based on ideological hegemony, similar to that advanced by Daniel Goldhagen, would be that those involved in the mass slaughter were operating within an "eliminationist" frame of reference with respect to Jews within which it could not occur to them that Jews could be human beings or that the systematic eradication of Jewish children could be considered anything but the natural behavior of responsible members of the German volk. ₈

One more adjustment is needed in Etzioni's compliance theory. Instead of simply observing the results of different choices by states to employ different compliance mechanisms, analysis can be based on the expectation that states or those who control states, whether out of competition with rival states or competition with rival elites within a state, will try to develop increasingly efficient compliance mechanisms. This will entail shifting the compliance mechanisms they rely on from coercive, to utilitarian, to normative, toward hegemonic. On the basis of this theoretical expectation we may proceed to consider nationalism as a formula for legitimacy. It is a particular kind of appeal designed to elicit compliance. Nationalist appeals arise and succeed under particular conditions. Within some communities, regions, or periods, nationalism has such spectacular success as a political formula that it becomes ideologically hegemonic, i.e. is rendered invisible as a political resource and transformed instead into a sentiment and mode of political association experienced as natural and permanent.

Questions that then become crucial pertain to the conditions under which beliefs attain hegemonic status, can be maintained and defended as hegemonic, or lose that status once it has been attained. Ideologically hegemonic conceptions provide stabilizing distortions and rationalizations of complex realities, inconsistent desires, and arbitrary distributions of valued resources. They are presumptions which exclude outcomes, options, or questions, from public consideration. Thus they advantage those elites well-positioned to profit from prevailing cleavage patterns and issue definitions. That hegemonic beliefs do not shift fluidly with changing realities and marginal interests is what makes them important. That they require some correspondence to "objective" realities and interests is what limits their life and the conditions under which they can be established and maintained.

Hegemonic beliefs achieve and lose their status as such as a result of struggles over discursive formations--"wars of position" in Gramscian terms. This kind of struggle entails political competition over what ideas and values will be accepted by leading strata as the givens, the commonsense categories, identities, exclusions, and irrelevancies that can naturalize otherwise parochial and ultimately contingent beliefs. Though subtle, non-violent, and conducted as much in the press and in educational and religious institutions as in the political arena, these struggles are of far-reaching political importance. For whatever particular interpretation of reality is contained in the set of conceptions enshrined as hegemonic will decisively advantage certain groups by privileging their particular preferences and attitudes as unassailable assumptions of community life. By linking particular conceptions and preferences to commonsensically established myths, symbols, and categories, hegemonic ideas camouflage particular distributions of power.

In The Modern Prince Gramsci discussed the patterns such struggles display, and the factors that determine the outcome of competition among hegemonic projects. The result of his effort, though limited, is suggestive of a partial theory explaining the conditions under which beliefs are more or less likely to gain, retain, or lose their status as hegemonic. The first of three elements in this theory is the effect of what he called "incurable contradictions" and what I have called "gross discrepancies" between prevailing conceptions and "stubborn realities." Although the central tenet of Gramscian thinking is the susceptibility of people to accept contingent, or even false and counterproductive beliefs as commonsensically valid, Gramsci also emphasized the difficulty of sustaining beliefs which too explicitly, directly, and systematically are contradicted by immediate perceptions. This may be thought of as an hypothesis about the impossibility of "absolute distortion" in the achievement and maintenance of hegemonic status for particular beliefs. Implicit here is the notion that only by arranging at least a modicum of satisfaction for the groups from whom consent is required and a minimum correspondence between objective conditions and ideological pictures, can hegemonic conceptions fulfill their primary function, viz. the containment and political neutralization of latent tensions which, if unleashed, would threaten the power of those whose interests the conceptions serve. ₉

In this regard, Gramsci suggests that counter-hegemonic ideas (the second factor in this theory) offering a more comforting and "parsimonious" mystification of both "stubborn reality" and elements of irreducible self-interest, will be a necessary component in the overthrow of an existing hegemonic conception or an important factor in the failure of some other contender for that status. ₁₀ The point is that no politician, confronted with beliefs honored or advanced as hegemonic, is likely to treat them as problematic unless some other schema has been made available in terms of which the belief can be understood or articulated as an interpretation of reality and the imperatives of national life, rather than as the direct and unavoidable expression of immutable facts and ultimate values. It is thus reasonable to expect that change in the status of hegemonic beliefs, and the outcome of struggles to establish beliefs as hegemonic, will be linked to the availability and mobilization of new ways of thinking, and not simply to the accumulation of evidence.

The third factor in this theory of hegemonic construction and deconstruction is political and ideological entrepreneurship, seen as the transmission belt carrying ideas with hegemonic potential forward into the political arena, challenging other rivals or established hegemonic beliefs, superseding them, replacing them, or failing to do so. This kind of politics is practiced by imaginative leaders who are not risk averse, by intellectuals, and by the organizations they build or control. Of course most people who challenge basic assumptions of their community`s political life fail. Whether because of their own shortcomings, the solidity of prevailing beliefs, or the ineffectiveness of their ideas, their likely fate is to be dismissed as either cranks or criminals. Still, the inventors and promoters of hegemonic projects are people who understand the decisive importance of "reclothing political questions in cultural forms." ₁₁ By shaping the cognitions and values of elites and masses these entrepreneurs seek to (re)define, for their own purposes, the allowable boundaries and the appropriate stakes of political competition. ₁₂

Following on Gramsci, then, I suggest a preliminary and partial theory of the establishment or breakdown of hegemonic constructions based on a combination of three elements. To overthrow an established ideologically hegemonic conception or explain its breakdown requires the presence of all three of the following:

• a severe contradiction between the conception advanced as hegemonic and the stubborn realities it purports to describe;

• an appropriately fashioned alternative interpretation of political reality capable of reorganizing competition to the advantage of particular groups;

• dedicated political-ideological entrepreneurs who can operate successfully where fundamental assumptions of political life have been thrown open to question, and who see better opportunities in competition over basic "rules of the game" than in competition for marginal advantage according to existing rules.

Obversely, to establish a belief as hegemonic, or successfully defend its status as such, requires at least substantial correspondence between the claims of the belief and the political realities it purports to describe; the absence of a widely accepted basis for an alternative interpretation; or the absence of political entrepreneurs capable of profiting from its overthrow or breakdown.

Nationalism and Struggles for Hegemony in the Twentieth Century Middle East

Hegemony operates in scholarly circles as it does in political systems. In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century historians and social scientists concerned with nationalism tended overwhelmingly to frame their research as investigations of a force or sentiment that seemed to be so pervasive and natural a feature of modern life as to be interesting only as an explanans, not as an explanandum. ₁₃ Born at Valmy, nationalism appears in these interlocking literatures as both the solvent that would eliminate old and inefficient "ascriptive" affinities, and the "glue" that would produce or help peoples discover a more satisfying and/or more efficient basis for political solidarity. As a feature of the Enlightenment it is depicted, along with state expansion and industrialization, as an integral part of the overarching transformation of life from tradition to modernity. The interlocking consequences of these processes served as the master narrative for what was happening and would happen to humankind in this epoch.

Among scholars of the post-Ottoman Middle East, this disposition carried over, and lasted somewhat longer than elsewhere. Even those, such as Elie Kedourie, who bore a certain nostalgia or reverence for the ancien regime, considered that Islam had faded or would soon vanish as a political basis for organizing Middle Eastern peoples. Whether for good or for bad, American, European, and Middle Eastern scholars believed, and often took it for granted, that nationalism would prevail in the region. Social scientists, and especially and most explicitly political scientists, asked not whether nationalism would prevail as a dominant normative basis for eliciting compliance and establishing political stability in the Middle East, but rather what form of nationalism would prevail, when, and how. ₁₄ How early, could one say, did "real" nationalism emerge in the Middle East? ₁₅ Would the future belong to the nationalism of the Turanist movement in Turkey, the extravagant, racialist versions of Persian nationalism associated with the Pahlavis, and the quamiyeh pan-Arabism of Baathists and Nasserists; or would the Middle East produce its own territorially based nationalist movements, organized around communities fitting within large but not continental size states--Anatolian centered nationalism in Turkey and wataniyeh nationalisms in the Arab world? ₁₆ Would these national states, regardless of their geographic scope, be Islamic, liberal, or socialist in tone and coloration? ₁₇ Questions were asked about how and when "national independence" and then "national integration" would be accomplished and under whose auspices, not about whether nationalism was the only available framework for advancing the Middle East toward effective government.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran, however, and the rise of powerful, impossible-to-ignore Islamist movements in almost every Middle Eastern country, helped trigger a dramatic shift in scholarly frames of reference. Nationalism in the Middle East, or at least in Middle East oriented scholarship, was transformed. From an unproblematic background assumption about the type of political formula that would legitimize political authority in the region, nationalism became a highly problematic type of appeal whose future was in doubt--a political formula of dubious strength and of decreasing interest to ambitious elites. Research agendas changed acordingly, albeit years or even decades behind events on the ground. Instead of investigations of the prognosis for different versions of nationalism, scholars evaluated the viability of any nationalist basis for political authority against Islamic or (taking Israel and Lebanon into account) religious solidarities. In the cultural context of most of the Middle East Islam was transfigured, from one element determining the tone and substantive content of nationalism in different countries, periods, or regions, or among different groups, to an alternative which itself could rival or even supplant nationalism as a basis for political community and as a formula for the stabilization of state power.

Using the conceptual and theoretical apparatus presented above, the currently dominant account--an account that I find more satisfying than any other--can be expressed as follows. In the centuries following the Islamic conquests the political formula of Islamic empire became hegemonic in Southwest Asia, Egypt, and the Maghreb. Islam surrounded and afforded a legitimizing resource to a series of imperial states, the last of which was the Ottoman Empire. Over a long period of decline, however, the hegemonic status of Islam as a political formula was undermined. Losing Islam as a hegemonic resource, Imperial rulers and reformers shifted to various normative (Ottomanism, Pan-Islamism, pan-Turanism), utilitarian (the Dual Kingdom formula, new patron-client ties with rural and urban notables), and coercive techniques, none of which succeeded in producing the efficient extraction of resources necessary to survive in a world of competitive powers on the scale of Britain, France, the United States, Germany, and Russia. The demise of the Ottoman project as an ideologically hegemonic order, and then as a real state, can be attributed to its gross inability to respond to the external challenge of European imperialism, the ambitious efforts by intellectual, military, professional, and other (secularly oriented) entrepreneurial elites to fashion alternative visions of the Ottoman/Turkish political community, the struggles by these elites to build and command their own state projects, and the intrusion of new "nationalist" ideas that these elites in the Arab lands, the Balkans, and in Anatolia itself could use to achieve state power on the ruins of, or with the disappearance of, the Ottoman Empire.

Though their own hegemonic theories of nationalism and modernization encouraged Western observers to believe that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire signaled the very end of Islam as a serious political force and its replacement by nationalism, these judgments were false. Beliefs about Islam as the framework of the polity had lost their hegemonic status, but they survived nonetheless, along with elites who could, under changed circumstances, present one version of Islam or another as an attractive alternative to socialist, nationalist, or liberal formulas. Nor did nationalism, however popular it became as an idiom of anti-imperialist mobilization and as an internationally sanctioned and attractive formula for intellectuals, military men, and political leaders, become established throughout the area as hegemonic--naturalized as the basis of political community in the way that Islam had been for centuries. To be sure, within certain groups and for certain periods, nationalism can be said to have achieved ideologically hegemonic status. Within Republican and especially military circles in Turkey, among dedicated Nasserists and Baathists, within the mid- to upper echelons of the FLN and the neo-Destour, within the Jewish state created by Zionism, and even among the rank-and-file of some of the Palestinian organizations, no politically ambitious person could speak publicly as if he thought his audience had any doubts about the authentic and permanent national character of the political community.®FN1This latter formula can be treated as an operational definition of ideological hegemony, applied to discrete beliefs within a particular political community. ₁₈

The analytic cost of these misjudgments is well reflected in one of the most effective schemas developed for the organization and comparison of national movements in the Middle East. I refer to Clement Henry Moore's theory of nationalist consciousness, presented in his Politics in North Africa book. ₁₉ Moore treats the dialectical relationship between European colonial control and mobilization within each colony by Middle Eastern elites opposed to that control as the primary determinant of the character of post-independence national regimes and their capacity to meet successfully the multiple challenges associated with modernization. In this "colonial dialectic" Moore identifies three stages, or "moments," of "nationalist consciousness" each typified by a particular kind of elite. The first "liberal assimilationist" moment is expressed by scions of the upper class whose access to European education leads to nationalism as an emblem of modernity and civilizational equality. While planting the nationalist seed, these elites reject their own uneducated masses, ape European ways, and suffer isolation and disillusionment when both the masses and the Europeans reject them. Second moment elites are nationalists whose consciousness is shaped by their resentment of the colonial presence and of European culture, and their embrace of the traditional symbols and forms of authority of the masses. But their relationship to tradition (to Islam in most of the Middle East) is instrumental--exploiting old solidarities to achieve cultural and political independence from Europe, but without reorganizing power to include the masses in an egalitarian nationalist movement. The third (and final) moment of nationalist consciousness is achieved by the intellectuals, army officers, and professionals of lower middle class origin. They reject the presence of colonial power as the second moment did but as the first moment did not. They reject the traditional symbols, identities, and prejudices of the masses as the first moment did and the second moment did not, but they also accept, as neither the first nor second moments did, modern (European) organizational forms and fundamentally egalitarian principles of nationalism to achieve a broad-based mobilization of the nation and genuine participation in politics for the masses.

Although few cases display each moment in discrete and regular sequence, and although often independence comes before the completion of the dialectic, Moore suggests a kind of ideal typical process leading from the failure of pre-nationalist "primary resistance" (Emir Abd-el-Kader in Algeria, Umar Mukhtar in Libya) to the consolidation of a nation-state under the leadership of a third moment mass nationalist party benefiting from the legitimacy of having freed the nation from colonial domination and founded its independent state. Variation in outcomes (e.g. coherent Tunisian and Turkish national states vs. a patron-client based Islamic monarchy in Morocco vs. a brittle and unstable Algerian republic) are explained by the character of pre-existing social structures, the amount of political space permitted by colonialism for organized political opposition, and the timing of decolonization.

In Moore's account all outcomes are considered as breakdowns on the path to, or forms of, a genuine (third moment) "nationalist" consciousness taken as the only sort of political identity open to Middle Easterners over the long run. In this sense the national aspect of the region's future was (without Moore having specified or acknowledged it as such) hegemonic for him as a researcher. The hegemonic status of his belief in nationalism as natural and inevitable, while giving his work clarity and elegance, also places a stringent limitation upon it. His model of the colonial dialectic and three moments of nationalist consciousness, presented as an explanation of the most likely historical path from European colony to national state, takes the national state form as the terminal condition of Middle Eastern political life. Such an approach rules out the possibility of a continuing dialectic involving Islamic, or otherwise non-nationalist moments of political consciousness.

It is of course true that in most of these states nationalist appeals did predominate, and that in each case appeals to national identities and values provided some measure of normative assistance to coercive and utilitarian techniques of governance. Yet in the region as a whole nationalism was not embedded in the culture and discourse of public life so deeply as to make alternative appeals seem absurd to the masses or irrelevant to potential counter-elites. In any event, regardless of the status of nationalism as the taken-for-granted formula for political legitimacy in the region after World War I, it is a separate matter to ask about the status of specific nationalist projects in specific countries or about the relative success or prospects for success of different versions of nationalism. These are, indeed, the questions about which Moore's theory has the most to say.

But if one is to use the theory to focus on the variable political success of different formulas for stabilizing states and for making their rule more efficient, then what is needed is a category of political technique beyond the ability of elites to explicitly elicit sacrifices and compliance using national appeals. One needs, indeed, a concept and theory of hegemony. As I have noted, among certain ruling groups and wider strata in Middle Eastern states nationalist ideas did achieve hegemonic status--in Turkey, for example, under Attaturk, Tunisia under Bourguiba, arguably Egypt under Nasser, and Israel, under Ben-Gurion. In these systems discourses of nationalism were so well institutionalized that culture as well as ideology protected these regimes from the consequences of their policy failures and rising levels of dissatisfaction--maintaining the political ostracism of elites representing potential counter-hegemonic projects who might otherwise have been able, more quickly, to mount effective challenges.

Yet even in those countries, and within those circles, where nationalism was hegemonic, its status as such could not be maintained. The triple conjunction of gross disparities between what the nationalists (of all stripes) promised and what they delivered, the availability of widely understood religious notions of political identity, and the presence of ambitious and talented Islamist (and Jewish fundamentalist) elites able to use those ideas to explain nationalist failures and advance their own solutions, opened "wars of position" over the meaning of political identity in polities throughout the Middle East. Among the results were revolution in Iran, a culture war and assassination of the Prime Minister in Israel, civil war in Algeria, harsh repression in Tunisia, an Islamist Prime Minister in Turkey, and assassination, violence, and an anti-Islamist slowdown in democratization in Egypt. Thus only a theory pertaining to the conditions under which a formula for political legitimacy is more or less likely to become hegemonic, or be maintained in that status, can explain some of the most interesting patterns of Middle Eastern political life in the last two decades.

It is partly because nationalism as the future was hegemonic for the theorist, partly because Moore's theory itself lacked a concept of hegemony, and despite a dialectical aspect which could straight-forwardly have been extended to explain subsequent, non-nationalist moments of political consciousness, that Moore failed to anticipate Islamist and Jewish religious mobilization based on a non-nationalist or anti-nationalist consciousness and a rather sudden and rapid decline of nationalist projects throughout the region. Accordingly, the full value of Moore's schema can be appreciated only if his terminology is recast to incorporate distinctions among:

1. conditions for the hegemony of a type of political formula, of which nationalist and religious fundamentalist are both examples, which can support and be supported by what Gellner called the "entropizing" aspects of social mobilization, industrialization, and mass political participation;

2. conditions for the hegemony of the national type of political consciousness within a particular epoch or under very general economic, international, and political circumstances;

3. conditions for the hegemony of a type of nationalist consciousness within a particular political system.

Distinguishing between questions concerning (1) and (2) is crucial for scholars such as Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Greenfeld, in their investigations of the logic, timing, or prerequisites of nationalism from a long-term historical perspective. ₂₀ On the other hand, distinguishing between questions (2) and (3) is what preoccupies most contemporary analysts of Middle Eastern affairs. Their task has been to map and explain competing strains of nationalist mobilization within particular political communities and religion-based rivals to nationalist mobilization. The usefulness, indeed the necessity, of hegemonic analysis for accomplishing this kind of task is nicely illustrated by patterns of political conflict and change within Israel. ₂₁

In 1949 the State of Israel could lay convincing claim to having achieved the central objectives of classical Zionism. Jewish independence in the Land of Israel had been attained and enjoyed wide recognition in the international community. Distinctive social, scientific, cultural, and economic achievements were a source of both pride and reassurance. Zionism had created, or revived, a new Jewish personality and, perhaps, a model society. Enough of "Jerusalem" lay under the state's control for the Israeli government proudly to declare the city as the capital of the country. All Jews, anywhere in the world, enjoyed rights to citizenship upon arrival within the borders of the Jewish state. Nor did any power enforce limits on Jewish immigration.

In the first two decades of independent statehood, Israeli politics was dominated by competition among rival leaders and factions within the Labor Zionist movement--the political force that had been largely responsible for Zionist achievements. In order to share opportunities with Mapai to govern the country, the "activist," or militantly irredentist wing of Labor Zionism abandoned its espousal of territorial maximalism. The religious parties, prefering political spoils to political messianism, became Labor's junior partner. Herut and other "Land of Israel" oriented groups were marginalized within a "State of Israel" whose politics revolved around issues of security, economic progress, immigrant absorption, and attendant processes of social adjustment. The liberation or redemption of Biblically promised territories, or religious commitments to advance the coming of the Messiah through political action, were ideas that virtually no one discussed as politically significant.

A crucial feature of this political landscape was the hegemonic status achieved by the Armistice Lines of 1949--the "Green Line." Not only the vast majority of Israeli citizens (both Jewish and Arab), but virtually the entire non-Arab world accepted Israel's 1949 boundaries--bigger than the United Nations' Partition Plan borders, but considerably smaller than any historically based description of the Land of Israel--as the Israeli state's permanent and legitimate frontiers. Although the anthems and the official documents of Menachem Begin's Herut Party (forerunner to the Likud) proclaimed loyalty to the Revisionist dream of a Jewish state throughout the entire Land of Israel (including both banks of the Jordan River), by 1965 the party responded to the disinterest and skepticism of Israeli voters by paying only lip service to its traditional irredentist demands. ₂₂

The crucial point here is that the hegemonic status of the 1949 Armistice Lines as Israel's legitimate and permanent borders was a key structural support for the Ben-Gurionist state-centered, secularly oriented, Israeli-Jewish national project--a project epitomized by Ben-Gurion's concept of "mamlachtiut" (Jewish (or Hebrew) etatisme).

Only by taking into account both passionate ideological attachments to the idea of the Whole Land of Israel present within every major segment of the pre-1948 Zionist movement, as well as the military superiority enjoyed by Israel over both Jordan (in the West Bank) and Egypt (in the Gaza Strip), and the ideological transformation of Israeli politics after 1967, can one appreciate how great a political achievement was the pre-1967 exclusion of the territorial issue from the Israeli national agenda. As exaltation and amazement after the June victory replaced the fear and depression that had preceded it, the limits Ben-Gurion and his allies had placed on the state's geographic shape (and on the state's metaphysical significance) lost their hegemonic status. The dramatic expansion of Jewish control over the very heart of Biblical Israel brought the question of Israel's rightful size and shape, and its potential world historical or cosmic significance, back to the center of its political life. Mythologies of the Land of Israel and the emotions, appeals, and symbols associated with "geulat haaretz ("redemption of the Land"), Eretz Yisrael haShlema ("the completed Land of Israel"), and "atchalta d'geula" ("dawn of redemption") were once again mobilizable on behalf of expansionist political programs.

These myths and beliefs (alternative interpretations of political reality) afforded unprecedented opportunities for Revisionist and Religious Zionist elites to deprive the Labor Party of its forty-year domination of Zionist and Israeli politics. Nor did it take very long for these politicians to realize how fundamentally the Six-Day-War had changed the contours of the political terrain. By emphasizing instead of suppressing irredentist sentiments they could launch a war of position over the proper conception of the State of Israel--a struggle whose outcome promised opportunities to remove the chiefs of the Labor Party from the commanding heights of the polity and replace them with Revisionist, religious, and Activist candidates for leadership.

Revisionists were extremely well-positioned to launch such a struggle. They had always celebrated a Jewish state whose territorial expanse would correspond to the world-historic destiny and regional if not global power potential they ascribed to the Jewish people. The results of the 1967 war seemed to confirm that the path to national greatness lay in territorial expansion and the elevation of those who had been most faithful to this principle (i.e. the Revisionists) to national leadership. With the expansion of the territory controlled by the Jewish state an accomplished fact, Menachem Begin`s record of espousing this expansion could no longer be used as convincing evidence that he was too reckless to be trusted with the Premiership. Using his impeccable credentials as a whole Land of Israel loyalist and his substantial oratorical talents, Begin donned a yarmulka (orthodox Jewish head covering) and made religiously traditionalist, populist, and hardline anti-Arab appeals to Israel's emergent Oriental Jewish majority.

Leaders of the militant "young guard" faction of the National Religious Party also found in the territories issue a road to national prominence. They envisioned a geographically "completed" State of Israel acting as the instrument and sign of a culminating Messianic-Redemptive process. The results of the war were interpreted as a giant step forward in the process, a process which could be facilitated by political leaders sensitive to the cosmic implications of policies to be implemented in and toward the territories. Exploiting their intimate links to Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook and their instrumental role in establishing and supporting Gush Emunim, these men tapped a painful sense of inferiority and unfulfilled mission experienced by a generation of religious Zionist youth. They represented young orthodox Israelis who were proud to have served in the Army for the first time in substantial numbers during the 1973 war and who were anxious to prove their worthiness by winning the whole Land of Israel for the Jewish people, as the previous secular-sabra generation had won Jewish statehood.

The third group of political entrepreneurs to raise the banner of the whole Land of Israel were hundreds of second echelon personalities within the Labor Zionist apparatus--"Activists" who had been forced to lay aside their territorial maximalism in order to participate in governing the country and who had, even so, never achieved positions of supreme leadership in the military or civilian branches of the State. They saw in the post-1967 resumption of settlement and pioneering activities in the West Bank and Gaza an opportunity to revive the slumbering national genius of the Jewish people and trigger new waves of immigration, making Zionist ideology and "pioneering" commitment again respectable, instead of a favorite subject for satire. They explained the powerful emotional response of Israeli Jews visiting East Jerusalem and other portions of the territories as an expression of the normalness of the Jewish people`s existential attachment to its patrimony and as a mystical but organic bond that would build and redeem the Jewish people while the people itself built and redeemed the land. <sub>23</sub> This group was the animating force behind the "Movement for the Whole Land of Israel" (established in August 1967). After its demise, the ascendancy of the Likud, and the latter`s alliance with the National Religious Party, they either joined Gush Emunim as non-religious fellow travellers, supported Moshe Dayan in his alliance with the Likud, or formed small ultranationalist parties such as Tehiya (1979), Tzomet (1983), and Moledet (1988). These latter parties have seen themselves as candidates for national leadership and hoped to achieve it by an uncompromising commitment to the whole Land of Israel, a sharpening conflict with the Arab world (including the "transfer" of large numbers of Palestinians out of the country), and the need, eventually, to establish a "pur et dur" regime capable of protecting Israel`s sovereignty and security within its enlarged borders.

The Six Day War thus set the stage for a war of position over the shape of the state, the fundamental meaning to be attached to the state's existence, and the normative basis for the Israeli-Jewish political community. From 1967 to 1977 ideological and political entrepreneurs from each of the various streams of Zionist political life refashioned available ideational resources to develop hegemonic projects centered on the substantial expansion of the boundaries of the state. Then, following the May 1977 elections, an annexationist alliance among these groups, led by the Likud, took power and embarked upon a wide-ranging effort hegemonically to institutionalize beliefs that the size and shape of the State of Israel corresponded to a conception of the whole Land of Israel that included as its irreducible core all the territory of Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Begin's objective was nothing less than the hegemonic establishment of a new Zionist paradigm, supported by a new history of the independence struggle, a new relationship between religion and politics, and a new emphasis on the Land, people, and Bible of Israel, rather than on the boundaries, citizens, and laws of the State of Israel. If in the first decade following the 1967 war a set of hegemonic conceptions which had protected the power of the Labor establishment for two decades was displaced, after 1977, those whose ideas had been trivialized by formerly hegemonic notions sought to do the same to their anti-annexationist opponents. The heroes and honored myths of one Zionist subculture represented the villains, falsehoods, jealousies, and bombast of the other. ₂₄

Nonetheless Likud leaders were aware that the hegemonic project of their main ally--the religious/Messianists grouped within Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful)--was enormously more ambitious than their own. Gush's ambition was to eliminate nationalist, secular Zionism (including Revisionism) as a candidate for hegemonic status in Israel and to replace it with their own militantly religious conception of Zionism's nature and purpose. In the meantime Gush Emunim shared with Revisionist Zionism, and with the Activist school of Labor Zionism, a primary commitment to the expansion of the geographical contours of the state. For Gush Emunim territorial expansion was was crucial as the decisive stage in a world-historic and divinely ordained "process of Redemption" (taalich hageula). ₂₅ But although the Likud understood the divergence between its integral nationalist vision and the religious fundamentalism of Gush Emunim, it needed the latter to implement its annexationist policies, the cornerstone of which was the massive settlement of Jews in the occupied territories.

From 1977 to the end of the second Likud government in 1984, and during the third Likud government (1990-1992), the beginning and end of government policy was to create conditions that would incapacitate any future government's effort to disengage from these territories. Abandoning the relatively small scale policies of settlement implemented by previous Labor-led governments, Begin's governments undertook a wide-ranging, multi-faceted campaign to encourage Jews to settle in all parts of the territories, encourage Arabs to emigrate from them, and strip as many legal, administrative, and psychological meanings as possible from the pre-1967 Green Line. ₂₆ Although economic and military rationales were commonly invoked for settlement construction, its ultimate purpose was to set in motion more fundamental demographic, ideological, cultural, and psychological processes. Accordingly, drastic increases in expenditures on settlements were accompanied by policies in the educational, broadcasting, judicial, and administrative spheres designed to accelerate the disappearance of the Green Line from the practical life and ordinary language of all Israelis. ₂₇ After coming to power the Likud changed the government's terminology for settlement in the occupied territories, substituting the term "hitnachlut" (evoking Biblical injunctions and promises to "inherit" the land through settlement) for "hityashvut," an emotionally neutral term. ₂₈ The terms "occupied territory" or "West Bank" were forbidden in news reports. Television and radio journalists were effectively banned from initiating interviews with Arabs who recognized the PLO as their representative. ₂₉ Early in 1983 the Television Board ruled that settling the the West Bank and Gaza strip no longer constituted a "subject of public controversy," thereby permitting advertisements for settlements to be broadcast as "public service announcements." It also began enforcing a ban on generic terms (such as "personalities"--ishim) to refer to PLO members unless the terms employed clearly labeled them as terrorists. ₃₀ In 1980 and 1986 laws were passed outlawing any non-scholarly meetings between Israelis and PLO affiliated Palestinians, whether in Israel or abroad, banning expressions of support for the PLO, including representations of the Palestinian flag, and declaring as ineligible for participation in parliamentary elections any political party not recognizing Israel's character as "the state of the Jewish people."

This effort to establish its own ideological position as bounding what would be considered legitimate was reflected in the rhetoric of Likud politicians and in the party's tactics in the 1984 election campaign. During the 1984 and subsequent campaigns the Likud and its allies began promoting themselves as comprising "hamachane haleumi" (the national camp). By so doing they reversed Ben-Gurion's campaign of hegemonic ostracism against the right by suggesting that those who questioned the principle of Eretz Yisrael hashlema, including the Labor Party, were no longer fit to be considered members of the national community. ₃₁

The long run purpose of these policies was to transform Israeli beliefs, allegiances, and interests--to re-shape the cognitive map of Israelis to conform with an image of the country which included the territories as no different from other regions of the state. If this were accomplished all future governments would be prevented from publicly entertaining "land for peace" options with respect to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As I have shown elsewhere, and as is readily apparent from the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish fundamentalist, the state expansion project advanced by the Likud-religious-Labor Activist alliance did institutionalize Israeli rule of those areas so deeply that Israeli democracy is put at risk by government policies to achieve territorial compromise. ₃₂ But the annexationist project, and the radical version of Jewish nationalism associated with it, did not succeed in establishing themselves as hegemonic within Israel itself. Presumptions about the greater significance of the "Land of Israel" as opposed to the "State of Israel," about the future of the territories as integral parts of the State of Israel, and about the divinely or historically chosen destiny of the Jewish people to stand against the world in its struggle for the whole Land of Israel, never replaced arguments about these topics within the discourse of leading politicians or most ordinary Israeli Jews. This failure of hegemonic construction was due in part to the vigorous struggle of anti-annexationist Israelis against the political and cultural policies sponsored by successive right-wing governments, due in part to international forces which, if they did not impose a territorial compromise on recalcitrant Israeli governments, did force them to explicitly defend and justify every move they made, and of course due to the fierce and prolonged struggle of Palestinians to destroy--via the intifada--the notion that Israelis could feel as comfortable in the West Bank and Gaza as within Israel proper.

The kulturkampf continues in Israel. It will continue until either an anti-annexationist coalition risks democratic breakdown by permanently disengaging Israel from the West Bank, and thereby from the Revisionist/fundamentalist hegemonic project within Zionism, or until time, the settlers' untiring efforts, and, probably, the "transfer" of most Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, remove political compromise with the Palestinians as a "discussable" option within Israeli politics. In these respects Israel strongly resembles many of its Muslim-Arab neighbors. In Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and elsewhere, Islamist projects, representing an array of pietistic, fundamentalist, and chiliastic appeals, have helped unseat nationalisms as potent hegemonic formulas, have made it extremely risky for non-Islamist governments to remove them from the scene, but have not succeeded in supplanting national and secular definitions of the political community as the natural and unchangeable order of things. Instead, no political formulas reign, in Israel and in most of the Middle East, on a hegemonic basis, forcing governments to employ less efficient techniques for eliciting compliance (including widespread coercion and crippling economic policies) and affording significant opportunities to radical political and cultural entrepreneurs who may reasonably seek to turn their dreams and fantasies into political realities.

Solving the Riddle

The conundrum identified at the beginning of this essay juxtaposed two seemingly contradictory claims about nationalism. One claim, or belief, is that national identities are real, perhaps primordially so, that nationalism is so pervasive, so regularly a feature of our world, and so liable to take precedence over class identities that when it fades we should expect it to return and when it returns we should normally expect it to prevail. The second, opposing claim, is that national identities, as other identities, are artifacts of political choices made by individuals or groups. Interests are real, at least perceived interests, and choices made among these interests produce identities which may or may not be national and, if national, will have a substantive content reflecting the parochial interests of those who foster particular versions of the nationalist message rather than the "authentic" nature of the nation as history or God produced it.

In the 19th and 20th century Middle East we have seen that Islam and nationalism, in their various guises, are not themselves "real," in the sense that any one of them is the authentic identity of a discernible group. We have seen how, as the constructivists would have it, identities come and go in response to political circumstances, the efforts of elites to survive and exploit those changing circumstances, and the empathic capacities of masses of Middle Easterners to respond to their alternative visions. In many countries, including Israel, we see ongoing political (and often violent) struggles over just which identity, which vision, within the community's repertoire is to be honored.

But all is not fluid. Amid the melange of appeals and discursive maneuvers real identities do exist--two kinds of real identities. One is a certain overlap in the repertoire of available tropes that makes certain kinds of appeals possible. Arabic speakers, for example, living in the Middle East, can see themselves as members of an Arab national community, of individual homeland national communities, or as members of an Islam-based community. Buddhist, Puerto Rican, or Russian identities, on the other hand, are not available. In another sense, some identities have, among certain groups and for some periods of time, been established as hegemonic and thus experienced as "real" by substantial numbers of Middle Easterners. The reality that hegemony can create, the sense of something as given and permanent and immanently real (even though it is not), is the political fruit of the practice of hegemonic politics. Explaining how some identities and the institutions associated with them last much longer than the power structures that fostered them, understanding why identities can seem to lose their potency so suddenly, and clarifying the particular dynamics of struggles over community boundaries and community identity--these are the analytic payoffs of a theory of ideological hegemony.

Footnotes

Note 1: Clifford Geertz, "The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States," in Old Societies and New States, Clifford Geertz, ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1963) pp. 105-157; Walker Connor "Self-Determination: The New Phase," World Politics (1967) Vol. 20, no. 1 pp. 30-53; and "National-Building or Nation-Destroying?" World Politics (1972) Vol. 24, no. 3 pp. 319-55; and "The Politics of Ethno-Nationalism," Journal of International Affairs, (1973), vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 1-21. Back.

Note 2: Arthur N. Waldron, "Theories of Nationalism and Historical Explanation," World Politics, Vol. 37, no. 3 (April 1985) pp. 416-433. Back.

Note 3: I frame the problem here in ways that are closely related to David D. Laitin's approach to the relationship between sociological and economic treatments of culture, though I have sought to go well beyond his use of the concept of hegemony to solve the puzzle that he poses. See David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1986). Back.

Note 4: For an explication and defense of this definition see Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank/Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) pp. 3-4 and 37. Back.

Note 5: For more on this definition see Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands, op. cit., pp. 3-4 and 37. Back.

Note 6: Amitai Etzioni, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations: On Power, Involvement, and Their Correlates (New York: The Free press, 1961) pp. 4-22. Back.

Note 7: For an apt characterization of political legitimacy as the premium placed on compliance by individuals who would otherwise prefer not to obey, see Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981) p. 11. Back.

Note 8: Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) Back.

Note 9: Antonio Gramsci, "The Modern Prince" in The Modern Prince and Other Writings, ed. Louis Marks (New York: International Publishers, 1957) pp. 154-5. For a fascinating attempt to establish the extent of "exploitation" which can, or cannot, be contained by hegemonic conceptions, see Adam Przeworski, "Material Bases of Consent: Economics and Politics in a Hegemonic System., in Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual, Maurice Zeitlin (ed.) Vol. I (Grenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1980) pp. 21-65. Back.

Note 10: For a similar characterization of Gramsci on this point, applied to the deveolopment of an Irish nationalist counter-hegemonic project see David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) especially pp. 13-21. Back.

Note 11: Gramsci, The Modern Prince, p. 147 and 183. Back.

Note 12: In this they show their understanding of Gramsci`s primary dictum: "Whatever one does, one always plays somebody`s game, the important thing is to seek in every way to play one`s own game, i.e. to win completely." Gramsci, The Modern Prince, p. 152. Back.

Note 13: Gale Stokes, "The Undeveloped Theory of Nationalism," World Politics vol. 31, no. 1 (October 1978) pp. 150-60. Back.

Note 14: See Majid Khadduri, Political Trends in the Arab World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970) pp. 255-56. Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) pp. 196-213; Leonard Binder, The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East (New York: John Wiley, 1964) pp. 14-17; and Elie Chalala, "Arab Nationalism: A Bibliographic Essay," in Pan-Arabism and Arab Nationalism: The Continuing Debate, Tawfic E. Farah, ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987) pp. 18-56. Back.

Note 15: For this genre see George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1946) and Sylvia Haim, Arab Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). Back.

Note 16: Tibi, Bassam, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey Back.

Note 17: Khadduri, Political Trends in the Arab World, op. cit.; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) pp. 159-69. Back.

Note 18: This latter formula can be treated as an operational definition of ideological hegemony, applied to discrete beliefs within a particular political community. Back.

Note 19: Clement Henry Moore, Politics in North Africa (Boston: Little Brown, 1970). Back.

Note 20: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Liah Greenfled, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Back.

Note 21: The following section is distilled from my presentation of the Israeli case in Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) pp. 352-395. Back.

Note 22: Ofira Seliktar, New Zionism and the Foreign Policy System of Israel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986) p. 92; and Rael Jean Isaac, Israel Divided: Ideological Politics in the Jewish State (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 41. Back.

Note 23: "Livnot ulehivanotba," "to build and to be built by," was a pre-state Labor Zionist slogan. Back.

Note 24: In a 1963 letter to the Israeli author Haim Guri David Ben-Gurion called Begin "a thoroughly Hitlerite type" who, if raised to power, would "put his thugs into the army and police headquarters and will rule just like Hitler ruled Germany..." See the Hebrew version of Michael Bar-Zohar's biography Ben-Gurion (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1975-77) Volume 3, p. 1547. See also Myron J. Aronoff, "Establishing Authority: The Memorialization of Jabotinsky and the Burial of the Bar-Kochba Bones in Israel under the Likud," in The Frailty of Authority, Political Anthropology, Vol. 5, Myron J. Aronoff, ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1986) pp. 105-130. Back.

Note 25: Both the Likud and Gush Emunim have considered themselves to be in the position of exploiting the other for the sake of different long-term objectives. What has allowed them to work together has been that on the decisive political question of the geographical shape of the state Gush Emunim and the dominant Herut core of Likud have shared a fundamentally similar "state idea." On the ideology of Gush Emunim and its complex relationship between Gush Emunim and the Likud see Ian S. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988), especially pp. 37-52. For the notion of the Likud/Gush Emunim hegemonic project as a "competing state idea" see Saul Cohen, The Geopolitics of Israel's Border Question, Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, Tel-Aviv University, Study No. 7 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986) p. 46; Baruch Kimmerling, "Between the Primordial and the Civil Definitions of the Collective Identity: Eretz Israel or the State of Israel," in Comparative Social Dynamics, Erik Cohen, Moshe Lissak, and Uri Almagor (eds.) (Boulder: Westview, 1983) pp. 262-283. Back.

Note 26: On the objectives and mechanics of the Likud's annexationist progam see Ann Mosely Lesch and Mark Tessler, Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinians: From Camp David to Intifada (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) pp. 194-222; Ian Lustick, "Israel and the West Bank after Elon Moreh: The Mechanics of De Facto Annexation," The Middle East Journal 35 (Autumn 1981) pp. 557-577; Meron Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Project: A Survey of Israel's Policies (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1984) pp. 19-63; Geoffrey Aronson, Creating Facts: Israel, Palestinians and the West Bank (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987) pp. 59-116; Ilan Peleg, Begin's Foreign Policy, 1977-1983: Israel's Move to the Right (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987) pp. 95-142; Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985) pp. 311-13. Back.

Note 27: Concerning the energetic efforts of Likud governments to promote the larger "map image" of the state in Israeli schools and atlases, see "David Levy's geography lesson," The Jerusalem Post editorial, August 20, 1986; David Arnow, "Maps Matter," The Forum, Vol. 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1990) pp. 17-18; Davar, May 31, 1988. For the concept of "map image" and its role in the construction of a hegemonic image of the shape of a state see John Bowman, De Valera and the Ulster Question 1917-1973 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) pp. 11-25." Back.

Note 28: Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1983) Research Series no. 51. p. 174. Back.

Note 29: "Witch Hunt," editorial, Jerusalem Post, April 5, 1982 and Jerusalem Post, April 20, 1982. Report by Agence France Presse, Oct. 27 1981, JPRS, 79364, November 3, 1981, p. 37. Back.

Note 30: The Jerusalem Post, January 18, 1983 and March 7, 1983. Back.

Note 31: Concerning this and related shifts in Israeli political discourse see Hanna Herzog, Contest of Symbols: The Sociology of Election Camp[aigns through Israeli Ephemera (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Library, 1987) pp. 84-85; and Kimmerling, "Between the Primordial and the Civil Defninitions of the Collective Identity: Eretz Yisrael or the State of Israel," op. cit., pp. 262-83. Back.

Note 32: Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands, op. cit., pp. 366-438. Back.