Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Decolonization I 23
such a freighted word attests to the overriding force of nationalism,
conceptually locking nation to state. The devil's
in the hyphen.
Is it possible then to conceptualize the liberation
of nation from state, along with the liberation of people
from occupation and exploitation? This is what classical
anarchist thinkers such as Mikhail Bakunin and Gustav
Landauer attempted to do during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, respectively. It's also something
contemporary solidarity activists may need to think about.
Bakunin saw Pan-Slavism as a vehicle of liberation
against dynastic autocracy, imbuing a transnational
identity with certain values that could resist tyranny and
subjugation. Poland was then the democratic-republican
battleground, and Russia's village terrain the spiritual
heartland. In the same way, radical democrats and antiauthoritarians
were Francophiles in the 17905 and 1871, and
Hispanophiles in the 1930s. In all these cases devotees of a
principle embraced the people who were fighting for that
principle, acknowledging their location on the shifting
front line of an ongoing global struggle, while also imputing
to them inherent ethnocultural traits that made them
fit bearers of the struggle. But this would be to miss the
moon for the finger pointing at the moon: a people could
betray an ideal as well as defend it, and others, when their
turn came, would then become the defenders.
For Bakunin, while rejecting the state, nationality remained
an essential trait, both a "natural and social fact:'
given that "every people and the smallest folk-unit has its
O\vn character, its own specific mode of existence, its own