This issue of the Journal takes up the problematic relationship between gender and nationalism. The ambiguity of this relationship derives mainly from the two-sided character of nationalism. The feminist struggle is one for liberation from gender oppression; to the extent that it stands aside from other struggles against oppression (bourgeois feminists who ignore class oppression, white feminists who ignore racism), it becomes limited and partial: that is, it fails to recognise the gendered ways in which racial and class oppression operate, and thereby accepts the oppression of some women. Similarly, foreign domination and ethnic oppression also affect women in specific ways, and a feminism which stands for the liberation of all women cannot be neutral: it has to take a stand against oppression and for liberation.
However, nationalism is not simply about liberation from foreign domination or ethnic oppression; indeed, this dimension is not even present in most forms of nationalism (British nationalism being an obvious example), whereas all forms of nationalism are about the establishment and perpetuation of state power – an inherently authoritarian and hierarchical institution – over a certain area of the earth’s surface. Where this is the only dimension in nationalism (where it is imperialist and racist, for example), there is no dilemma for feminists: they can unambiguously be opposed to it. It is when the liberationist element is also present that the problems arise. This is the grey area where a struggle may be against foreign domination or ethnic oppression but also may be fundamentalist or otherwise oppressive to women, or stand for its own form of ethnic oppression, or in other ways seek to establish a totalitarian state power. Where should feminists stand when the goals of nationalism diverge from those of feminism?
Many contributions to this issue of the Journal point to the need for feminists to retain their autonomy, so that while we can fight alongside nationalists for the liberatory goals of the struggle, we can also fight separately when those goals diverge. It is important to be clear that the nature of the two struggles is entirely different. There is nothing natural or eternal about the division of the earth into blocks of territory ruled over by distinct state powers; the arbitrary character of even the oldest historically established national boundaries is shown by the fact that they can cut across the closest emotional and biological relationships – for example that between a mother and her children where mother and father have different nationalities and the children are assigned the nationality of their father. The vast majority of people in the world have nothing to lose and a great deal to gain from the abolition of national boundaries, with their oppressive paraphernalia of emigration and immigration controls, and the establishment of a worldwide commonwealth of free peoples. So the struggle to establish a nation can be seen as a historically limited one which can be superseded at a more advanced stage of social development.
The struggle for liberation, on the other hand, is universal and total, because freedom is indivisible: no one is truly free while some people are not, and conversely, the liberation of some people contributes to the freedom of all. Many contributions in this issue make the point that societies which are oppressive to women are also oppressive in other ways, and vice versa. The interest of most people in any national struggle derives not from a desire to establish state power (from which only a small elite benefits) over some territory, but from the desire to establish a society which is freer and more self-determining, one based more on mutual cooperation and less on domination and subordination. That this is a point spontaneously grasped by most women is shown by the role they play in national liberation movements, which is predominantly one of building and sustaining communities of resistance, as in South Africa and Palestine, rather than participating in the military struggle. If men are slower to grasp this point, it is not because the majority of them have any greater stake in the state they seek to establish, but because they are more easily duped by the ideology of masculinity and bribed by their access to male power.
For socialist feminists, then, where the goals of the two struggles diverge, the struggle for women’s liberation takes priority. The argument for this is not merely that if women don’t fight for their own interests no one else will, and they will remain subordinated once the national struggle is over. That may well be true, but it is not our main argument because it subscribes to the myth that the struggle for gender justice is in the interest of women alone and is therefore more limited and partial than the national struggle, whereas the truth is the very opposite. Socialist feminism is also in the interests of the majority of men and above all of children; the struggle for justice and liberation for women is an essential component of the struggle for greater justice and freedom for all. If it is argued that giving women’s liberation priority may delay the achievement of an independent state, the answer is, maybe it will; but if so, it is worth waging a harder and more protracted liberation struggle in order to establish a more democratic nation, rather than allying with reactionary forces in order to create a nation that is fundamentalist, ethnic-supremacist, militaristic, or in some other way totalitarian.
The question, then, is not whether feminists should participate in a national liberation movement or not, but what kind of nation they seek to establish. The hidden agenda in stagist formulations (first the national struggle and only then women’s liberation, or first national liberation and only then the class struggle) is that dominant groups in the nationalist movement (men, the bourgeoisie) wish to consolidate their power before oppressed groups in the same movement (women, the proletariat) can establish their rights; their definition of ‘self-determination’ includes the freedom to crush the rights of others. For urban and rural workers, as for women, this strategy has had disastrous consequences, with working-class leaders being massacred and the whole movement set back by decades when reactionary regimes come to power as a result of a nationalist struggle.
For the working class, as for socialist feminists, what is important is not the establishment and maintenance of a nation-state as such – which is the be-all and end-all of nationalism – but the establishment of the best possible conditions for their own struggle to progress. This means that where the struggle is against ethnic oppression, it is more appropriate to fight for equal rights and opportunities within a multi-ethnic nation rather than join an ethnic nationalist struggle which seeks merely to replace one oppression with another, as new persecuted minorities are created in the new nation or former minorities become even more oppressed than they were before, as in Israel, Tamil Eelam and Croatia.
Whether the struggle is against foreign domination or ethnic oppression, it is vital that socialist feminists should preserve their autonomy so that they can, if and when it is necessary, oppose reactionary and oppressive policies carried out by nationalist leaders. This does not mean, as some nationalists allege, remaining separate from the struggle against foreign domination or ethnic oppression; it means waging that struggle in our own way and not under the leadership of a small elite which wishes to gain and retain state power for their own benefit; it means that oppressed groups retain their capacity to fight for their own definition of ‘the nation’ rather than leaving that definition entirely to dominant groups whose main interest is to consolidate and strengthen their own power. If this turns out to be ‘divisive’, then surely the onus is not on the oppressed groups to abandon the struggle for their rights, but on the dominant groups to abandon their oppressive practices in the interests of ‘unity’! It is those who put their allegiance to bourgeois and male domination above their duty to ally with oppressed groups to create a democratic nation who can most justly be accused of endangering a genuine, broad-based national liberation movement. Socialist feminists have no need to be defensive on this score but could, on the contrary, go on the offensive in challenging nationalist male leaders to demonstrate the genuineness of their commitment to liberation by supporting the struggles of oppressed groups in order to broaden and strengthen the national movement as a whole.
(This was my Introduction, as Guest Editor, to a special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies on Gender and Nationalism, Volume 1, Number 4, November 1992, pp. 443–446.)