INTRODUCTION

In 1873 the socialist workers of Breslavia (Wroclaw), which was then in Germany, ten yearsafter the death of the pioneer workers' leader Lassalle, dedicated a new red flag. On the front it bore ... an inscription to ... Lassalle, surmounted by the motto Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ... During Bismarck's antisocialist law the flag was smuggled into Switzerland. Under Hitler, between 1933 and 1945, it wascarefully kept, first buried in an allotment garden, later in the cellar of a plumber, who refused to give it up to the Red Army officers who came to salute it in 1945. When Breslavia became Polish and was renamed Wroclaw, the keeper of the flag transported it to West Germany to hand it over to the Social-Democratic Party, which, presumably, still has it ...

(Hobsbawm: 1984b: 67)

The increasing prominence of ethnic and national movements at a global level over the last 20 years has led to a phenomenal growth in research, and the resulting studies have generated a sense of intellectual excitement and challenge which has permeated a range of intellectual disciplines, from literary studies to international relations. Two books, both published in 1983, have achieved canonical status. Gellner's Nations and Nationalism opened up the relationship between nationalist movements and modernity, the question of historical continuity in group identity, and the relative salience of different cultural elements in group definition. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities directed attention to the importance of experience, memory and imagination, the emotional power of these movements and their actual or potential recourse to violence. This is a rich research agenda, but also significantly different from the one that has dominated research on other kinds of politics. Why should this be? And where are the distinctive features of ethnic or national politics located?

The inevitable comparison here is with the analysis of class politics. In the first part of the twentieth century it had been class rather than ethnicity which had acted as the purported motor of European political history, and had been the dominant subject of intellectual inquiry. The celebrated death of class as a 'master narrative' has often in practice meant the death of class as any kind of narrative, and this makes it harder to get the issues back into perspective. There is growing amnesia about both the range of class movements and their political scope; they are remembered chiefly as struggles around economic interests, generated in the workplace, in a now largely superseded system of industrial production. Their death, for some analysts (Escobar 1992; Touraine 1985), allowed for the birth of 'new social movements', the release of energies into more complex and differentiated forms of political struggle, particularly around questions of identity.

Yet, as the best studies have shown, class politics was always more complex than that. Even the short quotation from Hobsbawm above is a reminder of the bitter divisions within class politics, the jealous guarding of symbols, and political allegiances which were more enduring than national boundaries. The kinds of explanation and interpretation which emerged as paradigmatic in the study of ethnicity and nationalism can be, and have been, deployed in the study of class. In this terrain we are also faced with all the dimensions of modernity, with the dislocation and concentration of economic and cultural capitals, with the mass movements of people and rapid cultural evolution. Here too we find complex historical narratives which shape class identity and future aspirations, we find 'imagined communities' and the transmission of memories. Here too we encounter the same interpretative issues about how identity is 'constructed', and how specific experiences become class experiences. Above all, we also find passion. It is astonishing that the point has to be made, but such is the mesmeric hold of the canonical texts that it is worth repeating: passion is not an ingredient unique to the politics of nationalism.

The first purpose of this book is to re-examine the ways in which class and ethnic or nationalist politics have been analysed, and to open up issues which are of general importance in political anthropology. In suggesting that the wide-ranging research agenda which has illuminated our understanding of nationalism can also be applied to class movements, and vice versa, I am not suggesting that these movements are indistinguishable. The problem lies elsewhere, in the use of different paradigms for the study of political process. These have made the two kinds of politics incommensurable, in terms of the type of person who acts, and the kind of world they inhabit. Put simply, in one world we find economic categories of people driven by material interests, in the other cultural subjects consumed by passions.

This introductory chapter will start by exploring some of the theoretical texts which have contributed to this view of a qualitative difference between the politics of nationalism and all other struggles. Out of it will emerge a more open and less reified view of what 'economics' or 'culture' is about, and suggestions about how we can develop a common approach to political movements. The next sections examine some of the key issues in the analysis of nationalist and class politics, and explore the implications of adopting a more unified approach, one which keeps the richness of insight which can be found in both fields of study. Demonstrating the value of this approach cannot be done through comparative surveys or generalising overviews: it requires a depth of ethnographic and historical information which reveals the interaction of multiple processes. For that reason I decided to build up the argument through case studies, all taken from the southern parts of Europe, and all dealing with large-scale political action which made a sustained impact on society and the state. The first group of case studies deals with class-based mobilisation, the second with nationalism, followed by shorter examples of movements which combine elements of both. The cases are grouped together, but each chapter covers similar ground, examining the broad historical context within which these movements emerged, the construction of collective identities, and their characteristic forms of organisation and political action. In intermediate sections and in the conclusion I will draw out the comparative dimensions and explore their relevance for theoretical work in this field.

TWO CLASSIC TEXTS AND THEIR JOKES

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) opens up stimulating questions about the changing representations of time in political action, and on the role of history, memory and the imagination in the formation of identity. The focus is also on political passion: in numerous reviews of the book (starting with Kitching 1985), Anderson's superiority to...