Abstract
During the first half of the twentieth century, Ireland and Israel struggled to establish themselves as sovereign nations. Both countries turned to their diaspora in the United States to contribute financially to their national struggle. And both diaspora communities had in place strong organizational structures with long histories of fundraising on behalf of their respective national causes. But as each country approached state and nationhood, crises emerged within their national movements due to conflict between native-based fundraising organizations and their American counterparts, conflicts largely over rights and obligations associated with the money raised.
In Sinews of the Nation, Dan Lainer-Vos compares the two cases to understand a major question in the study of nationalism: how are diverse, fragmented and often contentious groups integrated and consolidated within the nation? The conditions of his two cases are more extreme than most studies of national formation: in both Ireland and Israel, the two conflicting groups that Lainer-Vos examines—Irish in Ireland and Irish Americans, Israelis and Jewish Americans—were separated by oceans and citizenship. Yet, both Ireland and Israel desired their American diaspora to act for the national cause, and many Irish Americans and American Jews wanted to be part of the national effort in Ireland and Israel, respectively. Thus Ireland and Israel were faced with one of the major challenges confronting every nation-building project—to create and maintain relations between the disparate groups that are potential members of the nation.
Lainer-Vos argues this challenge is met when national movements, specifically their leaders and organizations, develop and employ concrete mechanisms to contain and accommodate the heterogeneous interests and preferences of disparate groups so that they can cooperate and develop national attachments. In the case of Ireland and Israel and their diaspora communities in America, the mechanism was transnational fundraising, initially through donations, and then through the sale of bonds. Of course, the manifest function of fundraising in America was to secure the flow of desperately needed financial resources for the national projects. Lainer-Vos persuasively argues that donating money to the national cause is also a symbolically meaningful practice in terms of nationalist identification, or “attachment” (Lainer-Vos’ preferred concept), and a key mechanism that, if successful, enrolls members in the nation, binds together diverse groups and creates a sense of belonging to the nation.
For Lainer-Vos, success is not so much measured by the money raised as it is by the creation of attachment to the nation. The latter, as Lainer-Vos recognizes, is fraught with problems. The giving of money, whether through pure donation or an investment vehicle, may be subject to differing interpretations by both the donor and the receiver. The organizations in the United States representing the diaspora communities and heading the fundraising efforts, Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) and the United Jewish Appeal for Refugee and Overseas Needs (UJA), saw the donations as gifts, acts of generosity, entitling them to certain rights—specifically, to retain a significant portion of the funds for use in the United States and to maintain some control over how monies raised were used for the national struggle. Leaders in Ireland and Israel saw the donations as inadequate contributions to the national cause, given the retention of funds for use in American domestic operations, and believed their diaspora’s demand for a voice in determining the use of donations was an affront to national independence. By shifting the means of fundraising from gifts to market exchange transactions in the form of bonds, Irish and Israeli leaders expected they could keep more money, completely control how funds were used, and still maintain the attachment of diaspora communities to the nation.
The comparative puzzle is: why did the National Bond program prove successful in attaching American Jews to Israel, but fail in the Irish case? Lainer-Vos examines the technical details to explain the different outcomes. In the Irish case, a “primitive” bond design and technical glitches in bond sales led to continuing and intense inter-organizational arguments over rights and obligations. In contrast, largely through unique provisos of their bonds, leaders of the Israeli fundraising effort managed to suspend the issue of rights and obligations by creating a “zone of indeterminacy,” which allowed American Jews and Israelis to maintain their different interpretation of what the bonds meant (gift, investment, or something in between) and align these interpretations with differential interests and preferences of bond buyers. The outcomes in terms of national attachment could not be more different. In the case of Ireland, deepening disagreements led to a collapse of the Irish bond program, a fragmentation of Irish-American organizations, and the disengagement of Irish Americans from the Irish nation. Conversely, the Israeli bond program accommodated differences and disagreements and became a key institution linking American Jews to Israel.
Throughout his study of the two cases, Lainer-Vos challenges various prevalent assumptions and theories, from comparative methods to the cultural constructionist conceptions of the nation and nation building. For example, he dismisses examining and comparing initial conditions to explain why the bond programs succeeded in one case but failed in the other; instead he focuses on the parallel processes of fundraising in the two cases to understand how national movements weave diverse groups into the national struggle. Hence, his insistence that concrete mechanisms are the key to explaining specific outcomes. That the mechanism identified in the Irish and Zionist cases was a market transaction might seem an attempt to refute dominant cultural explanations of nation building. On the contrary, Lainer-Vos carefully demonstrates both theoretically and empirically the complex nature of the selling and buying of bonds, especially to diaspora communities, for a national cause. While the buyers may certainly have had economic, self, and rational interests in purchasing national bonds, they also had symbolic, disinterested, and often emotional interests for doing so. Irish and Jewish Americans felt a strong connection to their homelands, wanted to sacrifice for and thus be part of the nation, and often desired the honor accorded to those who contribute to the national struggle. According to Lainer-Vos, when a mechanism meets, aligns and coordinates the varied interests of a potential national member group with the often different interests of other national groups, the chances of broad attachment to the nation significantly increase.
Sinews of the Nation is well written, concise, and easily digestible. At the same time, it provides a sophisticated and theoretically innovative comparative analysis of how a crucial process of movements—resource mobilization in its widest sense—in two of the major nationalist struggles of the twentieth century, is achieved or fails. Scholars interested in nationalism, social mechanisms, and cultural analysis should take note.