States, Peace, and Birds
Terence Sweeney reflects on two works by William Cavanaugh and Louis de Bernières respectively.
When you explore the paths to modernity, one route that can be traced is the rise of the secular nation-state. For someone like Steven Pinker, this is part of the shift from the violence of the premodern to the increasing peace of the modern. For Pinker and other contemporary advocates of the Enlightenment, the development of modern peace is through the nation-state and the decline of religion, the supposed source of violence. Here are a few texts that might make this story a bit more complicated than Pinker and others make it out to be. Read together, they provide a more complicated vision of the nation-state, the secular, the religious, and their connections to violence.
William Cavanaugh’s book The Myth of Religious Violence and his essay “Religious Violence as Modern Myth,” have proven to be transformative texts in religious studies and political theology. Cavanaugh writes in response to a standard narrative, summarized by Charles Kimball: “more wars have been waged, more people killed, and… more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than any other institutional force in human history.” Cavanaugh questions several features of this claim. First is the idea of “religion” itself as a category. His contention is that “religion” is a modern formulation unique to Western Europe. There just isn’t a sufficient category of religion for the claim to work. The distinction of the religious and the secular is a modern construction largely fabricated so that the State could sideline the Church. As Cavanaugh writes, “The myth of religious violence is not a response to empirical reality but a… tale told to justify secularizing arrangements” (490). For more on this topic see Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions, Daniel Dubuisson’s The Western Construction of Religion, Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof’s The Invention of Religion, and Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life.
This is significant for the question of the nation-state and the violence needed to found it. In standard accounts, the “Wars of Religion” were fought over, well, religion. Except they weren’t. Or at least it’s hard to explain why the French fought the Austrians when both were, well, Catholic. What arose in the Thirty Years’ War was the nation-state along with the convenient story that religion was the cause of those wars. Cavanaugh pushes his readers to question the sources of violence, thereby disrupting the standard narratives told to justify secularity.
The Greek town formerly known as Livissi in Turkey as it looks today, more than a century after being abandoned through a relocation and removal of its former residents. From Wikicommons.
I recommend pairing Cavanaugh with Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières. His novel is a poignant epic about dozens of characters in a small town in southwestern Anatolia in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. The book is one of the best genealogies of modernity. Bernières portrays the lives lost to what Hegel called the “slaughter-bench of history.” Such lives were destroyed due to the supposedly necessary development of the nation-state. The novel takes place in the decades during which the old empires of Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire were torn apart to make the modern nation-state. The book is dedicated to the millions who “became victims of the numerous death marches, movements of refugees, campaigns of persecution and extermination, and exchanges of populations.” The heart of the book is the diverse world that existed in the pre-modern Ottoman Empire and how the world was destroyed to make Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria.
The nation-state requires that differences be partitioned. The violence Bernières describes is the violence of insisting that certain lines have more reality than people, that lines between Greek and Turk, Christians and Muslims, have essential reality, and that ultimately the lines that mark the borders between states are worth the death of millions. Bernières indicates that part of what is lost is the diversity of the older world. His character Iskandar the Potter notes that after the Christians were forced to leave “our life has less variety, and we are forgetting how to look at others and see ourselves.” Can this not be said of us all?
Modernity’s supposed peace was forged through death marches. Writers like Cavanaugh and Bernières challenge us to rethink this originary violence. Has that violence really disappeared? Why did the founding of the nation-state need so much violence? How does that violence endure? Why does the secular require a founding act of violence and a founding myth of religious violence? In what way is modern religion a part of these founding acts? Cavanaugh and Bernières challenge us to ask these and other questions. Read them both. They provide a way to travel the bloody paths that lead to the present.
